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The Populist’s reading list

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  1: Saint Bede, The Complete Works of Venerable Bede, 8 vols. [1843]

  Saint Bede, The Complete Works of Venerable Bede, in the original Latin, collated with the Manuscripts, and various printed editions, and accompanied by a new English translation of the Historical Works, and a Life of the Author. By the Rev. J.A. Giles (London: Whittaker and Co., 1843). 8 vols.

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1911 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  2: Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North in Ten Volumes [1579]

  Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North in Ten Volumes (London: J.M. Dent, 1910).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1802 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  3: Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars [120 AD]

  Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, to which are added his Lives of the Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Poets. The translation of Alexander Thomson, M.D. Revised by T. Forester, M.A. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1888 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

  ---

  [Reprinted from Stereotype plates.]

  PREFACE.

  C. Suetonius Tranquillus was the son of a Roman knight who commanded a legion, on the side of Otho, at the battle which decided the fate of the empire in favour of Vitellius. From incidental notices in the following History, we learn that he was born towards the close of the reign of Vespasian, who died in the year 79 of the Christian era. He lived till the time of Hadrian, under whose administration he filled the office of secretary; until, with several others, he was dismissed for presuming on familiarities with the empress Sabina, of which we have no further account than that they were unbecoming his position in the imperial court. How long he survived this disgrace, which appears to have befallen him in the year 121, we are not informed; but we find that the leisure afforded him by his retirement, was employed in the composition of numerous works, of which the only portions now extant are collected in the present volume.

  Several of the younger Pliny’s letters are addressed to Suetonius, with whom he lived in the closest friendship. They afford some brief, but generally pleasant, glimpses of his habits and career; and in a letter, in which Pliny makes application on behalf of his friend to the emperor Trajan, for a mark of favour, he speaks of him as “a most excellent, honourable, and learned man, whom he had the pleasure of entertaining under his own roof, and with whom the nearer he was brought into communion, the more he loved him.”1

  The plan adopted by Suetonius in his Lives of the Twelve Cæsars, led him to be more diffuse on their personal conduct and habits than on public events. He writes Memoirs rather than History. He neither dwells on the civil wars which sealed the fall of the Republic, nor on the military expeditions which extended the frontiers of the empire; nor does he attempt to develope the causes of the great political changes which marked the period of which he treats.

  When we stop to gaze in a museum or gallery on the antique busts of the Cæsars, we perhaps endeavour to trace in their sculptured physiognomy the characteristics of those princes, who, for good or evil, were in their times masters of the destinies of a large portion of the human race. The pages of Suetonius will amply gratify this natural curiosity. In them we find a series of individual portraits sketched to the life, with perfect truth and rigorous impartiality. La Harpe remarks of Suetonius, “He is scrupulously exact, and strictly methodical. He omits nothing which concerns the person whose life he is writing; he relates everything, but paints nothing. His work is, in some sense, a collection of ancedotes, but it is very curious to read and consult.”2

  Combining as it does amusement and information, Suetonius’s “Lives of the Cæsars” was held in such estimation, that, so soon after the invention of printing as the year 1500, no fewer than eighteen editions had been published, and nearly one hundred have since been added to the number. Critics of the highest rank have devoted themselves to the task of correcting and commenting on the text, and the work has been translated into most European languages. Of the English translations, that of Dr. Alexander Thomson, published in 1796, has been made the basis of the present. He informs us in his Preface, that a version of Suetonius was with him only a secondary object, his principal design being to form a just estimate of Roman literature, and to elucidate the state of government, and the manners of the times; for which the work of Suetonius seemed a fitting vehicle. Dr. Thomson’s remarks appended to each successive reign, are reprinted nearly verbatim in the present edition. His translation, however, was very diffuse, and retained most of the inaccuracies of that of Clarke, on which it was founded; considerable care therefore has been bestowed in correcting it, with the view of producing, as far as possible, a literal and faithful version.

  To render the works of Suetonius, as far as they are extant, complete, his Lives of eminent Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Poets, of which a translation has not before appeared in English, are added. These Lives abound with anecdote and curious information connected with learning and literary men during the period of which the author treats.

  T. F.

  THE TWELVE CÆSARS.

  CAIUS JULIUS CÆSAR.

  Julius Cæsar, the Divine,1 lost his father2 when he was in the sixteenth year of his age;3 and the year following, being nominated to the office of high-priest of Jupiter,4 he repudiated Cossutia, who was very wealthy, although her family belonged only to the equestrian order, and to whom he had been contracted when he was a mere boy. He then married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, who was four times consul; and had by her, shortly afterwards, a daughter named Julia. Resisting all the efforts of the dictator Sylla to induce him to divorce Cornelia, he suffered the penalty of being stripped of his sacerdotal office, his wife’s dowry, and his own patrimonial estates; and, being identified with the adverse faction,1 was compelled to withdraw from Rome. After changing his place of concealment nearly every night,2 although he was suffering from a quartan ague, and having effected his release by bribing the officers who had tracked his footsteps, he at length obtained a pardon through the intercession of the vestal virgins, and of Mamercus Æmilius and Aurelius Cotta, his near relatives. We are assured that when Sylla, having withstood for a while the entreaties of his own best friends, persons of distinguished rank, at last yielded to their importunity, he exclaimed—either by a divine impulse, or from a shrewd conjecture: “Your suit is granted, and you may take him among you; but know,” he added, “that this man, for whose safety you are so extremely anxious, will, some day or other, be the ruin of the party of the nobles, in defence of which you are leagued with me; for in this one Cæsar, you will find many a Marius.”

  II. His first campaign was served in Asia, on the staff of the prætor, M. Thermus; and being dispatched into Bithynia,3 to bring thence a fleet, he loitered so long at the court of Nicomedes, as to give occasion to reports of a criminal intercourse between him and that prince; which received additional credit from his hasty return to Bithynia, under the pretext of recovering a debt due to a freed-man, his client. The rest of his service was more favourable to his reputation; and when Mitylene1 was taken by storm, he was presented by Thermus with the civic crown.2

  III. He served also in Cilicia,3 under Servilius Isauricus, but only for a short time; as upon receiving intelligence of Sylla’s death, he returned with all speed to Rome, in expectation of what might follow from a fresh agitation set on foot by Marcus Lepidus. Distrusting, however, the abilities of this leader, and finding the times less favourable for the execution of this project than he had at first imagined, he abandoned all thoughts of joining Lepidus, although he received the most tempting offers.

  IV. Soon after this civil discord was composed, he preferred a charge of extortion against Cornelius Dolabella, a man of consular dignity, who had obtained the honour of a triumph. On the acquittal of the accused, he resolved to retire to Rhodes,4 with the view not only of avoiding the public odium which he had incurred, but of prosecuting his studies with leisure and tranquillity, under Apollonius, the son of Molon, at that time the most celebrated master of rhetoric. While on his voyage thither, in the winter season, he was taken by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa,1 and detained by them, burning with indignation, for nearly forty days; his only attendants being a physician and two chamberlains. For he had instantly dispatched his other servants and the friends who accompanied him, to raise money for his ransom.2 Fifty talents having been paid down, he was landed on the coast, when, having collected some ships,3 he lost no time in putting to sea in pursuit of the pirates, and having captured them, inflicted upon them the punishment with which he had often threatened them in jest. At that time Mithridates was ravaging the neighbouring districts, and on Cæsar’s arrival at Rhodes, that he might not appear to lie idle while danger threatened the allies of Rome, he passed over into Asia, and having collected some auxiliary forces, and driven the king’s governor out of the province, retained in their allegiance the cities which were wavering, and ready to revolt.

  V. Having been elected military tribune, the first honour he received from the suffrages of the people after his return to Rome, he zealously assisted those who took measures for restoring the tribunitian authority, which had been greatly diminished during the usurpation of Sylla. He likewise, by an act, which Plotius at his suggestion propounded to the people, obtained the recal of Lucius Cinna, his wife’s brother, and others with him, who having been the adherents of Lepidus in the civil disturbances, had after that consul’s death fled to Sertorius;4 which law he supported by a speech.

  VI. During his quæstorship he pronounced funeral orations from the rostra, according to custom, in praise of his aunt Julia, and his wife Cornelia. In the panegyric on his aunt, he gives the following account of her own and his father’s genealogy, on both sides: “My aunt Julia derived her descent, by the mother, from a race of kings, and by her father, from the Immortal Gods. For the Marcii Reges,1 her mother’s family, deduce their pedigree from Ancus Marcius, and the Julii, her father’s, from Venus; of which stock we are a branch. We therefore unite in our descent the sacred majesty of kings, the chiefest among men, and the divine majesty of Gods, to whom kings themselves are subject.” To supply the place of Cornelia, he married Pompeia, the daughter of Quintus Pompeius, and grand-daughter of Lucius Sylla; but he afterwards divorced her, upon suspicion of her having been debauched by Publius Clodius. For so current was the report, that Clodius had found access to her disguised as a woman, during the celebration of a religious solemnity,2 that the senate instituted an enquiry respecting the profanation of the sacred rites.

  VII. Farther-Spain3 fell to his lot as quæstor; when there, as he was going the circuit of the province, by commission from the prætor, for the administration of justice, and had reached Gades, seeing a statue of Alexander the Great in the temple of Hercules, he sighed deeply, as if weary of his sluggish life, for having performed no memorable actions at an age4 at which Alexander had already conquered the world. He, therefore, immediately sued for his discharge, with the view of embracing the first opportunity, which might present itself in The City, of entering upon a more exalted career. In the stillness of the night following, he dreamt that he lay with his own mother; but his confusion was relieved, and his hopes were raised to the highest pitch, by the interpreters of his dream, who expounded it as an omen that he should possess universal empire; for that the mother who in his sleep he had found submissive to his embraces, was no other than the earth, the common parent of all mankind.

  VIII. Quitting therefore the province before the expiration of the usual term, he betook himself to the Latin colonies, which were then eagerly agitating the design of obtaining the freedom of Rome; and he would have stirred them up to some bold attempt, had not the consuls, to prevent any commotion, detained for some time the legions which had been raised for service in Cilicia. But this did not deter him from making, soon afterwards, a still greater effort within the precincts of the city itself.

  IX. For, only a few days before he entered upon the edileship, he incurred a suspicion of having engaged in a conspiracy with Marcus Crassus, a man of consular rank; to whom were joined Publius Sylla and Lucius Autronius, who, after they had been chosen consuls, were convicted of bribery. The plan of the conspirators was to fall upon the senate at the opening of the new year, and murder as many of them as should be thought necessary; upon which, Crassus was to assume the office of dictator, and appoint Cæsar his master of the horse.1 When the commonwealth had been thus ordered according to their pleasure, the consulship was to have been restored to Sylla and Autonius. Mention is made of this plot by Tanusius Geminus2 in his history, by Marcus Bibulus in his edicts,3 and by Curio, the father, in his orations.4 Cicero likewise seems to hint at this in a letter to Axius, where he says, that Cæsar had in his consulship secured to himself that arbitrary power1 to which he had aspired when he was edile. Tanusius adds, that Crassus, from remorse or fear, did not appear upon the day appointed for the massacre of the senate; for which reason Cæsar omitted to give the signal, which, according to the plan concerted between them, he was to have made. The agreement, Curio says, was that he should shake off the toga from his shoulder. We have the authority of the same Curio, and of M. Actorius Naso, for his having been likewise concerned in another conspiracy with young Cneius Piso; to whom, upon a suspicion of some mischief being meditated in the city, the province of Spain was decreed out of the regular course.2 It is said to have been agreed between them, that Piso should head a revolt in the provinces, whilst the other should attempt to stir up an insurrection at Rome, using as their instruments the Lambrani, and the tribes beyond the Po. But the execution of this design was frustrated in both quarters by the death of Piso.

  3X. In his edileship, he not only embellished the Comitium, and the rest of the Forum, with the adjoining halls,4 but adorned the Capitol also, with temporary piazzas, constructed for the purpose of displaying some part of the superabundant collections he had made for the amusement of the people.1 He entertained them with the hunting of wild beasts, and with games, both alone and in conjunction with his colleague. On this account, he obtained the whole credit of the expense to which they had jointly contributed; insomuch that his colleague, Marcus Bibulus, could not forbear remarking, that he was served in the manner of Pollux. For as the temple2 erected in the Forum to the two brothers, went by the name of Castor alone, so his and Cæsar’s joint munificence was imputed to the latter only. To the other public spectacles exhibited to the people, Cæsar added a fight of gladiators, but with fewer pairs of combatants than he had intended. For he had collected from all parts so great a company of them, that his enemies became alarmed; and a decree was made, restricting the number of gladiators which any one was allowed to retain at Rome.

  XI. Having thus conciliated popular favour, he endeavoured, through his interest with some of the tribunes, to get Egypt assigned to him as a province, by an act of the people. The pretext alleged for the creation of this extraordinary government, was, that the Alexandrians had violently expelled their king,3 whom the senate had complimented with the title of an ally and friend of the Roman people. This was generally resented; but, notwithstanding, there was so much opposition from the faction of the nobles, that he could not carry his point. In order, therefore, to diminish their influence by every means in his power, he restored the trophies erected in honour of Caius Marius, on account of his victories over Jugurtha, the Cimbri, and the Teutoni, which had been demolished by Sylla; and when sitting in judgment upon murderers, he treated those as assassins, who, in the late proscription, had received money from the treasury, for bringing in the heads of Roman citizens, although they were expressly excepted in the Cornelian laws.

  XII. He likewise suborned some one to prefer an impeachment for treason against Caius Rabirius, by whose especial assistance the senate had, a few years before, put down Lucius Saturninus, the seditious tribune; and being drawn by lot a judge on the trial, he condemned him with so much ammosity, that upon his appealing to the people, no circumstance availed him so much as the extraordinary bitterness of his judge.

  XIII. Having renounced all hope of obtaining Egypt for his province, he stood candidate for the office of chief pontiff, to secure which, he had recourse to the most profuse bribery. Calculating, on this occasion, the enormous amount of the debts he had contracted, he is reported to have said to his mother, when she kissed him at his going out in the morning to the assembly of the people, “I will never return home unless I am elected pontiff.” In effect, he left so far behind him two most powerful competitors, who were much his superiors both in age and rank, that he had more votes in their own tribes, than they both had in all the tribes together.

  XIV. After he was chosen prætor, the conspiracy of Catiline was discovered; and while every other member of the senate voted for inflicting capital punishment on the accomplices in that crime.1 he alone proposed that the delinquents should be distributed for safe custody among the towns of Italy, their property being confiscated. He even struck such terror into those who were advocates for greater severity, by representing to them what universal odium would be attached to their memories by the Roman people, that Decius Silanus, consulelect, did not hesitate to qualify his proposal, it not being very honourable to change it, by a lement interpretation; as if it had been understood in a harsher sense than he intended, and Cæsar would certainly have carried his point, having brought over to his side a great number of the senators, among whom was Cicero, the consul’s brother, had not a speech by Marcus Cato infused new vigour into the resolutions of the senate. He persisted, however, in obstructing the measure, until a body of the Roman knights, who stood under arms as a guard, threatened him with instant death, if he continued his determined opposition They even thrust at him with their drawn swords, so that those who sat next him moved away; and a few friends, with no small difficulty, protected him, by throwing their arms round him, and covering him with their togas. At last, deterred by this violence, he not only gave way, but absented himself from the senate-house during the remainder of that year.

  XV. Upon the first day of his prætorship, he summoned Quintus Catulus to render an account to the people respecting the repairs of the Capitol;1 proposing a decree for transferring the office of curator to another person.2 But being unable to withstand the strong opposition made by the aristocratical party, whom he perceived quitting, in great numbers, their attendance upon the new consuls,3 and fully resolved to resist his proposal, he dropped the design.

  XVI. He afterwards approved himself a most resolute supporter of Cæcilius Metullus, tribune of the people, who, in spite of all opposition from his colleagues, had proposed some laws of a violent tendency,4 until they were both dismissed from office by a vote of the senate. He ventured, notwithstanding, to retain his post and continue in the administration of justice; but finding that preparations were made to obstruct him by force of arms, he dismissed the lictors, threw off his gown, and betook himself privately to his own house, with the resolution of being quiet, in a time so unfavourable to his interests. He likewise pacified the mob, which two days afterwards flocked about him, and in a riotous manner made a voluntary tender of their assistance in the vindication of his honour. This happening contrary to expectation, the senate, who met in haste, on account of the tumult, gave him their thanks by some of the leading members of the house, and sending for him, after high commendation of his conduct, cancelled their former vote, and restored him to his office.

  XVII. But he soon got into fresh trouble, being named amongst the accomplices of Catiline, both before Novius Niger the quæstor, by Lucius Vettius the informer, and in the senate by Quintus Curius; to whom a reward had been voted, for having first discovered the designs of the conspirators. Curius affirmed that he had received his information from Catiline. Vettius even engaged to produce in evidence against him his own hand-writing, given to Catiline. Cæsar, feeling that this treatment was not to be borne, appealed to Cicero himself, whether he had not voluntarily made a discovery to him of some particulars of the conspiracy; and so baulked Curius of his expected reward. He, therefore, obliged Vettius to give pledges for his behaviour, seized his goods, and after heavily fining him, and seeing him almost torn in pieces before the rostra, threw him into prison; to which he likewise sent Novius the quæstor, for having presumed to take an information against a magistrate of superior authority.

  XVIII. At the expiration of his prætorship he obtained by lot the Farther-Spain,1 and pacified his creditors, who were for detaining him, by finding sureties for his debts.2 Contrary, however, to both law and custom, he took his departure before the usual equipage and outfit were prepared. It is uncertain whether this precipitancy arose from the apprehension of an impeachment, with which he was threatened on the expiration of his former office, or from his anxiety to lose no time in relieving the allies, who implored him to come to their aid. He had no sooner established tranquillity in the province, than, without waiting for the arrival of his successor, he returned to Rome, with equal haste, to sue for a triumph,1 and the consulship. The day of election, however, being already fixed by proclamation, he could not legally be admitted a candidate, unless he entered the city as a private person.2 On this emergency he solicited a suspension of the laws in his favour; but such an indulgence being strongly opposed, he found himself under the necessity of abandoning all thoughts of a triumph, lest he should be disappointed of the consulship.

  XIX. Of the two other competitors for the consulship, Lucius Luceius and Marcus Bibulus, he joined with the former, upon condition that Luceius, being a man of less interest but greater affluence, should promise money to the electors, in their joint names. Upon which the party of the nobles, dreading how far he might carry matters in that high office, with a colleague disposed to concur in and second his measures, advised Bibulus to promise the voters as much as the other; and most of them contributed towards the expense, Cato himself admitting that bribery, under such circumstances, was for the public good.3 He was accordingly elected consul jointly with Bibulus. Actuated still by the same motives, the prevailing party took care to assign provinces of small importance to the new consuls, such as the care of the woods and roads. Cæsar, incensed at this indignity, endeavoured by the most assiduous and flattering attentions to gain to his side Cneius Pompey, at that time dissatisfied with the senate for the backwardness they shewed to confirm his acts, after his victories over Mithridates. He likewise brought about a reconciliation between Pompey and Marcus Crassus, who had been at variance from the time of their joint consulship, in which office they were continually clashing; and he entered into an agreement with both, that nothing should be transacted in the government, which was displeasing to any of the three.

  XX. Having entered upon his office,1 he introduced a new regulation, that the daily acts both of the senate and people should be committed to writing, and published.2 He also revived an old custom, that an officer3 should precede him, and his lictors follow him, on the alternate months when the fasces were not carried before him. Upon preferring a bill to the people for the division of some public lands, he was opposed by his colleague, whom he violently drove out of the forum. Next day the insulted consul made a complaint in the senate of this treatment; but such was the consternation, that no one having the courage to bring the matter forward or move a censure, which had been often done under outrages of less importance, he was so much dispirited, that until the expiration of his office he never stirred from home, and did nothing but issue edicts to obstruct his colleague’s proceedings. From that time, therefore, Cæsar had the sole management of public affairs; insomuch that some wags, when they signed any instrument as witnesses, did not add “in the consulship of Cæsar and Bibulus,” but, “of Julius and Cæsar;” putting the same person down twice, under his name and surname. The following verses likewise were currently repeated on this occasion:

  • • Non Bibulo quidquam nuper, sed Cæsare factum est;
    • Nam Bibulo fieri consule nil memini.
  • • Nothing was done in Bibulus’s year:
    • No; Cæsar only then was consul here

  The land of Stellas, consecrated by our ancestors to the gods, with some other lands in Campania left subject to tribate, for the support of the expenses of the government, he divided, but not by lot, among upwards of twenty thousand freemen, who had each of them three or more children. He eased the publicans, upon their petition, of a third part of the sum which they had engaged to pay into the public treasury: and openly admonished them not to bid so extravagantly upon the next occasion. He made various profuse grants to meet the wishes of others, no one opposing him; or if any such attempt was made, it was soon suppressed. Marcus Cato, who interrupted him in his proceedings, he ordered to be dragged out of the senate-house by a lictor, and carried to prison. Lucius Lucullus, likewise, for opposing him with some warmth, he so terrified with the apprehension of being criminated, that, to deprecate the consul’s resentment, he fell on his knees. And upon Cicero’s lamenting in some trial the miserable condition of the times, he the very same day, by nine o’clock, transferred his enemy, Publius Clodius, from a patrician to a plebeian family; a change which he had long solicited in vain.1 At last, effectually to intimidate all those of the opposite party, he by great rewards prevailed upon Vettius to declare, that he had been solicited by certain persons to assassinate Pompey; and when he was brought before the rostra to name those who had been concerted between them, after naming one or two to no purpose, not without great suspicion of subornation, Cæsar, despairing of success in this rash stratagem, is supposed to have taken off his informer by poison.

  XXI. About the same time he married Calpurnia, the daughter of Lucius Piso, who was to succeed him in the consulship, and gave his own daughter Julia to Cneius Pompey; rejecting Servilius Cæpio, to whom she had been contracted, and by whose means chiefly he had but a little before baffled Bibulus. After this new alliance, he began, upon any debates in the senate, to ask Pompey’s opinion first, whereas he used before to give that distinction to Marcus Crassus; and it was the usual practice for the consul to observe throughout the year the method of consulting the senate which he had adopted on the calends (the first) of January.

  XXII. Being, therefore, now supported by the interest of his father-in-law and son-in-law, of all the provinces he made choice of Gaul, as most likely to furnish him with matter and occasion for triumphs. At first indeed he received only Cisalpine-Gaul, with the addition of Illyricum, by a decree proposed by Vatinius to the people: but soon afterwards obtained from the senate Gallia-Comata1 also, the senators being apprehensive, that if they should refuse it him, that province, also, would be granted him by the people. Elated now with his success, he could not refrain from boasting, a few days afterwards, in a full senate-house, that he had, in spite of his enemies, and to their great mortification, obtained all he desired, and that for the future he would make them, to their shame, submissive to his pleasure. One of the senators observing, sarcastically: “That will not be very easy for a woman2 to do,” he jocosely replied, “Semiramis formerly reigned in Assyria, and the Amazons possessed great part of Asia.”

  XXIII. When the term of his consulship had expired, upon a motion being made in the senate by Caius Memmius and Lucius Domitius, the prætors, respecting the transactions of the year past, he offered to refer himself to the house; but they declining the business, after three days spent in vain altercation, he set out for his province. Immediately, however, his quæstor was charged with several misdemeanors, for the purpose of implicating Cæsar himself. Indeed, an accusation was soon after preferred against him by Lucius Antistius, tribune of the people; but by making an appeal to the tribune’s colleagues, he succeeded in having the prosecution suspended during his absence in the service of the state. To secure himself, therefore, for the time to come, he was particularly careful to secure the good-will of the magistrates at the annual elections, assisting none of the candidates with his interest, nor suffering any persons to be advanced to any office, who would not positively undertake to defend him in his absence: for which purpose he made no scruple to require of some of them an oath, and even a written obligation.

  XXIV. But when Lucius Domitius became a candidate for the consulship, and openly threatened that, upon his being elected consul, he would effect that which he could not accomplish when he was prætor, and divest him of the command of the armies, he sent for Crassus and Pompey to Lucca, a city in his province, and pressed them, for the purpose of disappointing Domitius, to sue again for the consulship, and to continue him in his command for five years longer; with both which reqursitions they complied. Presumptuous now from his success, he added, at his own private charge, more legions to those which he had received from the republic; among the former of which was one levied in Transalpine Gaul, and called by a Gallic name, Alauda,1 which he trained and armed in the Roman fashion, and afterwards conferred on it the freedom of the city. From this period he declined no occasion of war, however unjust and dangerous; attacking, without any provocation, as well the allies of Rome as the barbarous nations which were its enemies: insomuch, that the senate passed a decree for sending commissioners to examine into the condition of Gaul; and some members even proposed that he should be delivered up to the enemy. But so great had been the success of his enterprises, that he had the honour of obtaining more days2 of supplication, and those more frequently, than had ever before been decreed to any commander.

  XXV. During nine years in which he held the government of the province, his achievements were as follows: he reduced all Gaul, bounded by the Pyrenean forest, the Alps, mount Gebenna, and the two rivers, the Rhine and the Rhone, and being about three thousand two hundred miles in compass, into the form of a province, excepting only the nations in alliance with the republic, and such as had merited his favour; imposing upon this new acquisition an annual tribute of forty millions of sesterces. He was the first of the Romans who, crossing the Rhine by a bridge, attacked the Germanic tribes inhabiting the country beyond that river, whom he defeated in several engagements. He also invaded the Britons, a people formerly unknown, and having vanquished them, exacted from them contributions and hostages. Amidst such a series of successes, he experienced thrice only any signal disaster; once in Britain, when his fleet was nearly wrecked in a storm; in Gaul, at Gergovia, where one of his legions was put to the rout; and in the territory of the Germans, his lieutenants Titurius and Aurunculeius were cut off by an ambuscade.

  XXVI. During this period1 he lost his mother,2 whose death was followed by that of his daughter,3 and, not long afterwards, of his granddaughter. Meanwhile, the republic being in consternation at the murder of Publius Clodius, and the senate passing a vote that only one consul, namely, Cneius Pompeius, should be chosen for the ensuing year, he prevailed with the tribunes of the people, who intended joining him in nomination with Pompey, to propose to the people a bill, enabling him, though absent, to become a candidate for his second consulship, when the term of his command should be near expiring, that he might not be obliged on that account to quit his province too soon, and before the conclusion of the war. Having attained this object, carrying his views still higher, and animated with the hopes of success, he omitted no opportunity of gaining universal favour, by acts of liberality and kindness to individuals, both in public and private. With money raised from the spoils of the war, he began to construct a new forum, the ground-plot of which cost him above a hundred millions of sesterces.1 He promised the people a public entertainment of gladiators, and a feast in memory of his daughter, such as no one before him had ever given. The more to raise their expectations on this occasion, although he had agreed with victuallers of all denominations for his feast, he made yet farther preparations in private houses. He issued an order, that the most celebrated gladiators, if at any time during the combat they incurred the displeasure of the public, should be immediately carried off by force, and reserved for some future occasion. Young gladiators he trained up, not in the school, and by the masters, of defence, but in the houses of Roman knights, and even senators, skilled in the use of arms, earnestly requesting them, as appears from his letters, to undertake the discipline of those novitiates, and to give them the word during their exercises. He doubled the pay of the legions in perpetuity; allowing them likewise corn, when it was in plenty, without any restriction; and sometimes distributing to every soldier in his army a slave, and a portion of land.

  XXVII. To maintain his alliance and good understanding with Pompey, he offered him in marriage his sister’s granddaughter Octavia, who had been married to Caius Marcellus; and requested for himself his daughter, lately contracted to Faustus Sylla. Every person about him, and a great part likewise of the senate, he secured by loans of money at low interest, or none at all; and to all others who came to wait upon him, either by invitation or of their own accord, he made liberal presents; not neglecting even the freed-men and slaves, who were favourites with their masters and patrons. He offered also singular and ready aid to all who were under prosecution, or in debt, and to prodigal youths; excluding from his bounty those only who were so deeply plunged in guilt, poverty, or luxury, that it was impossible effectually to relieve them. These, he openly declared, could derive no benefit from any other means than a civil war.

  XXVIII. He endeavoured with equal assiduity to engage in his interest princes and provinces in every part of the world; presenting some with thousands of captives, and sending to others the assistance of troops, at whatever time and place they desired, without any authority from either the senate or people of Rome. He likewise embellished with magnificent public buildings the most powerful cities not only of Italy, Gaul, and Spain, but of Greece and Asia; until all people being now astonished, and speculating on the obvious tendency of these proceedings, Claudius Marcellus, the consul, declaring first by proclamation, that he intended to propose a measure of the utmost importance to the state, made a motion in the senate that some person should be appointed to succeed Cæsar in his province, before the term of his command was expired; because the war being brought to a conclusion, peace was restored, and the victorious army ought to be disbanded. He further moved, that Cæsar being absent, his claims to be a candidate at the next election of consuls should not be admitted, as Pompey himself had afterwards abrogated that privilege by a decree of the people. The fact was, that Pompey, in his law relating to the choice of chief magistrates, had forgot to except Cæsar, in the article in which he declared all such as were not present incapable of being candidates for any office; but soon afterwards, when the law was inscribed on brass, and deposited in the treasury, he corrected his mistake. Marcellus, not content with depriving Cæsar of his provinces, and the privilege intended him by Pompey, likewise moved the senate, that the freedom of the city should be taken from those colonists whom, by the Vatinian law, he had settled at New Como;1 because it had been conferred upon them with ambitious views, and by a stretch of the laws.

  XXIX. Roused by these proceedings, and thinking, as he was often heard to say, that it would be a more difficult enterprise to reduce him, now that he was the chief man in the state, from the first rank of citizens to the second, than from the second to the lowest of all, Cæsar made a vigorous opposition to the measure, partly by means of the tribunes, who interposed in his behalf, and partly through Servius Sulpicius, the other consul. The following year likewise, when Caius Marcellus, who succeeded his cousin Marcus in the consulship, pursued the same course, Cæsar, by means of an immense bribe, engaged in his defense Æmilius Paulus, the other consul, and Caius Curio, the most violent of the tribunes. But finding the opposition obstinately bent against him, and that the consuls-elect were also of that party, he wrote a letter to the senate, requesting that they would not deprive him of the privilege kindly granted him by the people; or else that the other generals should resign the command of their armies as well as himself; fully persuaded, as it is thought, that he could more easily collect his veteran soldiers, whenever he pleased, than Pompey could his new-raised troops. At the same time, he made his adversaries an offer to disband eight of his legions and give up Transalpine-Gaul, upon condition that he might retain two legions, with the Cisalpine province, or but one legion with Illyricum, until he should be elected consul.

  XXX. But as the senate declined to interpose in the business, and his enemies declared that they would enter into no compromise where the safety of the republic was at stake, he advanced into Hither-Gaul,1 and, having gone the circuit for the administration of justice, made a halt at Ravenna, resolved to have recourse to arms if the senate should proceed to extremity against the tribunes of the people who had espoused his cause. This was indeed his pretext for the civil war; but it is supposed that there were other motives for his conduct. Cneius Pompey used frequently to say, that he sought to throw every thing into confusion, because he was unable, with all his private wealth, to complete the works he had begun, and answer, at his return, the vast expectations which he had excited in the people. Others pretend that he was apprehensive of being ealled to account for what he had done in his first consulship, contrary to the auspices, laws, and the protests of the tribunes; Marcus Cato having sometimes declared, and that, too, with an oath, that he would prefer an impeachment against him, as soon as he disbanded his army. A report likewise prevailed, that if he returned as a private person, he would, like Milo, have to plead his cause before the judges, surrounded by armed men. This conjecture is rendered highly probable by Asinius Pollio, who informs us that Cæsar, upon viewing the vanquished and slaughtered enemy in the field of Pharsalia, expressed himself in these very words: “This was their intention: I, Caius Cæsar, after all the great achievements I had performed, must have been condemned, had I not summoned the army to my aid!” Some think, that having contracted from long habit an extraordinary love of power, and having weighed his own and his enemies’ strength, he embraced that occasion of usurping the supreme power; which indeed he had coveted from the time of his youth. This seems to have been the opinion entertained by Cicero, who tells us, in the third book of his Offices, that Cæsar used to have frequently in his mouth two verses of Euripides, which he thus translates:

  • • Nam si violandum est jus. regnandi gratia
    • Violandum est: aliis rebus pietatem colas.
  • • Be just, unless a kingdom tempts to break the laws,
    • For sovereign power alone can justify the cause.1

  XXXI. When intelligence, therefore, was received, that the interposition of the tribunes in his favour had been utterly rejected, and that they themselves had fled from the city, he immediately sent forward some cohorts, but privately, to prevent any suspicion of his design; and, to keep up appearances, attended at a public spectacle, examined the model of a fencing-school which he proposed to build, and, as usual, sat down to table with a numerous party of his friends. But after sun-set, mules being put to his carriage from a neighbouring mill, be set forward on his journey with all possible privacy, and a small retinue. The lights going out, he lost his way, and wandered about a long time, until at length, by the help of a guide, whom he found towards day-break, he proceeded on foot through some narrow paths, and again reached the road. Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, which was the boundary of his province,1 he halted for a while, and, revolving in his mind the importance of the step he was on the point of taking, he turned to those about him, and said: “We may still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge, nothing is left for us but to fight it out in arms.”

  XXXII. While he was thus hesitating, the following incident occurred. A person remarkable for his noble mien and graceful aspect, appeared close at hand, sitting and playing upon a pipe. When, not only the shepherds, but a number of soldiers also flocked from their posts to listen to him, and some trumpeters among them, he snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the river with it, and sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the other side. Upon this, Cæsar exclaimed, “Let us go whither the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast.”

  XXXIII. Accordingly, having marched his army over the river, he shewed them the tribunes of the people, who, upon their being driven from the city, had come to meet him; and, in the presence of that assembly, called upon the troops to pledge him their fidelity, with tears in his eyes, and his garment rent from his bosom. It has been supposed, that upon this occasion he promised to every soldier a knight’s estate; but that opinion is founded on a mistake. For when, in his harangue to them, he frequently held out a finger of his left hand,2 and declared, that to recompense those who should support him in the defence of his honour, he would willingly part even with his ring; the soldiers at a distance, who could more easily see than hear him while he spoke, formed their conception of what he said, by the eye, not by the ear; and accordingly gave out, that he had promised to each of them the privilege of wearing the gold ring, and an estate of four hundred thousand sesterces.1

  XXXIV. Of his subsequent proceedings I shall give a cursory detail, in the order in which they occurred.2 He took possession of Picenum, Umbria, and Etruria; and having obliged Lucius Domitius, who had been tumultuously nominated his successor, and held Corsinium with a garrison, to surrender, and dismissed him, he marched along the coast of the Upper Sea, to Brundusium, to which place the consuls and Pompey were fled with the intention of crossing the sea as soon as possible. After vain attempts, by all the obstacles he could oppose, to prevent their leaving the harbour, he turned his steps towards Rome, where he appealed to the senate on the present state of public affairs; and then set out for Spain, in which province Pompey had a numerous army, under the command of three lieutenants, Marcus Petreius, Lucius Afranius, and Marcus Varro; declaring amongst his friends, before he set forward, “That he was going against an army without a general, and should return thence against a general without an army.” Though his progress was retarded both by the siege of Marseilles, which shut her gates against him, and a very great scarcity of corn, yet in a short time he bore down all before him.

  XXXV. Thence he returned to Rome, and crossing the sea to Macedonia, blocked up Pompey during almost four months, within a line of ramparts of prodigious extent; and at last defeated him in the battle of Pharsalia. Pursuing him in his flight to Alexandria, where he was informed of his murder, he presently found himself also engaged, under all the disadvantages of time and place, in a very dangerous war, with king Ptolemy, who, he saw, had treacherous designs upon his life. It was winter, and he, within the walls of a well-provided and subtle enemy, was destitute of every thing, and wholly unprepared for such a conflict. He succeeded, however, in his enterprise, and put the kingdom of Egypt into the hands of Cleopatra and her younger brother; being afraid to make it a province, lest, under an aspiring prefect, it might become the centre of revolt. From Alexandria he went into Syria, and thence to Pontus, induced by intelligence which he had received respecting Pharnaces. This prince, who was son of the great Mithridates, had seized the opportunity which the distraction of the times offered for making war upon his neighbours, and his insolence and fierceness had grown with his success. Cæsar, however, within five days after entering his country, and four hours after coming in sight of him, overthrew him in one decisive battle. Upon which, he frequently remarked to those about him the good fortune of Pompey, who had obtained his military reputation, chiefly, by victory over so feeble an enemy. He afterwards defeated Scipio and Juba, who were rallying the remains of the party in Africa, and Pompey’s sons in Spain.

  XXXVI. During the whole course of the civil war, he never once suffered any defeat, except in the case of his lieutenants; of whom Caius Curio fell in Africa, Caius Antonius was made prisoner in Illyricum, Publius Dolabella lost a fleet in the same Illyricum, and Cneius Domitius Calvinus, an army in Pontus. In every encounter with the enemy where he himself commanded, he came off with complete success; nor was the issue ever doubtful, except on two occasions: once at Dyrrachium, when, being obliged to give ground, and Pompey not pursuing his advantage, he said that “Pompey knew not how to conquer;” the other instance occurred in his last battle in Spain, when, despairing of the event, he even had thoughts of killing himself.

  XXXVII. For the victories obtained in the several wars, he triumphed five different times; after the defeat of Scipio four times in one month, each triumph succeeding the former by an interval of a few days; and once again after the conquest of Pompey’s sons. His first and most glorious triumph was for the victories he gained in Gaul; the next for that of Alexandria, the third for the reduction of Pontus, the fourth for his African victory, and the last for that in Spain; and they all differed from each other in their varied pomp and pageantry. On the day of the Gallic triumph, as he was proceeding along the street called Velabrum, after narrowly escaping a fall from his chariot by the breaking of the axle-tree, he ascended the Capitol by torch-light, forty elephants1 carrying torches on his right and left. Amongst the pageantry of the Pontic triumph, a tablet with this inscription was carried before him: I came, I saw, I conquered;2 not signifying, as other mottos on the like occasion, what was done, so much as the dispatch with which it was done.

  XXXVIII. To every foot-soldier in his veteran legions, besides the two thousand sesterces paid him in the beginning of the civil war, he gave twenty thousand more, in the shape of prize-money. He likewise allotted them lands, but not in contiguity, that the former owners might not be entirely dispossessed. To the people of Rome, besides ten modii of corn, and as many pounds of oil, he gave three hundred sesterces a man, which he had formerly promised them, and a hundred more to each for the delay in fulfilling his engagement. He likewise remitted a year’s rent due to the treasury, for such houses in Rome as did not pay above two thousand sesterces a year; and through the rest of Italy, for all such as did not exceed in yearly rent five hundred sesterces. To all this he added a public entertainment, and a distribution of meat, and, after his Spanish victory,3 two public dinners. For, considering the first he had given as too sparing, and unsuited to his profuse liberality, he, five days afterwards, added another, which was most plentiful.

  XXXIX. The spectacles he exhibited to the people were of various kinds; namely, a combat of gladiators,4 and stage-plays, in the several wards of the city, and in different languages; likewise Circensian games,1 wrestlers, and the representation of a sea-fight. In the conflict of gladiators presented in the Forum, Furius Leptinus, a man of prætorian family, entered the lists as a combatant, as did also Quintus Calpenus, formerly a senator, and a pleader of causes. The Pyrrhic dance was performed by some youths, who were sons to persons of the first distinction in Asia and Bithynia. In the plays, Decimus Laberius, who had been a Roman knight, acted in his own piece; and being presented on the spot with five hundred thousand sesterces, and a gold ring, he went from the stage, through the orchestra, and resumed his place in the seats allotted for the equestrian order. In the Circensian games, the circus being enlarged at each end, and a canal sunk round it, several of the young nobility drove chariots, drawn, some by four, and others by two horses, and likewise rode races on single horses. The Trojan game was acted by two distinct companies of boys, one differing from the other in age and rank. The hunting of wild beasts was presented for five days successively: and on the last day a battle was fought by five hundred foot, twenty elephants, and thirty horse on each side. To afford room for this engagement, the goals were removed, and in their space two camps were pitched, directly opposite to each other. Wrestlers likewise performed for three days successively, in a stadium provided for the purpose in the Campus Martius. A lake having been dug in the little Codeta,1 ships of the Tyrian and Egyptian fleets, containing two, three, and four banks of oars, with a number of men on board, afforded an animated representation of a sea-fight. To these various diversions there flocked such crowds of spectators from all parts, that most of the strangers were obliged to lodge in tents erected in the streets, or along the roads near the city. Several in the throng were squeezed to death, amongst whom were two senators.

  XL. Turning afterwards his attention to the regulation of the commonwealth, he corrected the calendar,2 which had for some time become extremely confused, through the unwarrantable liberty which the pontiffs had taken in the article of intercalation. To such a height had this abuse proceeded, that neither the festivals designed for the harvest fell in summer, nor those for the vintage in autumn. He accommodated the year to the course of the sun, ordaining that in future it should consist of three hundred and sixty-five days without any intercalary month; and that every fourth year an intercalary day should be inserted. That the year might thenceforth commence regularly with the calends, or first of January, he inserted two months between November and December; so that the year in which this regulation was made consisted of fifteen months, including the month of intercalation, which, according to the division of time then in use, happened that year.

  XLI. He filled up the vacancies in the senate, by advancing several plebeians to the rank of patricians, and also increased the number of prætors, ædiles, quæstors, and inferior magistrates; restoring, at the same time, such as had been degraded by the censors, or convicted of bribery at elections. The choice of magistrates he so divided with the people, that, excepting only the candidates for the consulship, they nominated one half of them, and he the other. The method which he practised in those cases was, to recommend such persons as he had pitched upon, by bills dispersed through the several tribes to this effect: “Cæsar the dictator to such a tribe (naming it). I recommend to you — (naming likewise the persons), that by the favour of your votes they may attain to the honours for which they sue.” He likewise admitted to offices the sons of those who had been proscribed. The trial of causes he restricted to two orders of judges, the equestrian and senatorial; excluding the tribunes of the treasury who had before made a third class. The revised census of the people he ordered to be taken neither in the usual manner or place, but street by street, by the principal inhabitants of the several quarters of the city: and he reduced the number of those who received corn at the public cost, from three hundred and twenty, to a hundred and fifty, thousand. To prevent any tumults on account of the census, he ordered that the prætor should every year fill up by lot the vacancies occasioned by death, from those who were not enrolled for the receipt of corn.

  XLII. Eighty thousand citizens having been distributed into foreign colonies,1 he enacted, in order to stop the drain on the population, that no freeman of the city above twenty, and under forty, years of age, who was not in the military service, should absent himself from Italy for more than three years at a time; that no senator’s son should go abroad, unless in the retinue of some high officer; and as to those whose pursuit was tending flocks and herds, that no less than a third of the number of their shepherds free-born should be youths. He likewise made all those who practised physic in Rome, and all teachers of the liberal arts, free of the city, in order to fix them in it, and induce others to settle there. With respect to debts, he disappointed the expectation which was generally entertained, that they would be totally cancelled; and ordered that the debtors should satisfy their creditors, according to the valuation of their estates, at the rate at which they were purchased before the commencement of the civil war; deducting from the debt what had been paid for interest either in money or by bonds; by virtue of which provision about a fourth part of the debt was lost. He dissolved all the guilds, except such as were of ancient foundation. Crimes were punished with greater severity: and the rich being more easily induced to commit them because they were only liable to banishment, without the forfeiture of their property, he stripped murderers, as Cicero observes, of their whole estates, and other offenders of one half.

  XLIII. He was extremely assiduous and strict in the administration of justice. He expelled from the senate such members as were convicted of bribery; and he dissolved the marriage of a man of prætorian rank, who had married a lady two days after her divorce from a former husband, although there was no suspicion that they had been guilty of any illicit connection. He imposed duties on the importation of foreign goods. The use of litters for travelling, purple robes, and jewels, he permitted only to persons of a certain age and station, and on particular days. He enforced a rigid execution of the sumptuary laws; placing officers about the markets, to seize upon all meats exposed to sale contrary to the rules, and bring them to him; sometimes sending his lictors and soldiers to carry away such victuals as had escaped the notice of the officers, even when they were upon the table.

  XLIV. His thoughts were now fully employed from day to day on a variety of great projects for the embellishment and improvement of the city, as well as for guarding and extending the bounds of the empire. In the first place, he meditated the construction of a temple to Mars, which should exceed in grandeur every thing of that kind in the world. For this purpose, he intended to fill up the lake on which he had entertained the people with the spectacle of a sea-fight. He also projected a most spacious theatre adjacent to the Tarpeian mount; and also proposed to reduce the civil law to a reasonable compass, and out of that immense and undigested mass of statutes to extract the best and most necessary parts into a few books; to make as large a collection as possible of works in the Greek and Latin languages, for the public use; the province of providing and putting them in proper order being assigned to Marcus Varro. He intended likewise to drain the Pomptine marshes, to cut a channel for the discharge of the waters of the lake Fucinus, to form a road from the Upper Sea through the ridge of the Appenine to the Tiber; to make a cut through the isthmus of Corinth, to reduce the Dacians, who had over-run Pontus and Thrace, within their proper limits, and then to make war upon the Parthians, through the Lesser Armenia, but not to risk a general engagement with them, until he had made some trial of their prowess in war. But in the midst of all his undertakings and projects, he was carried off by death; before I speak of which, it may not be improper to give an account of his person, dress, and manners, together with what relates to his pursuits, both civil and military.

  XLV. It is said that he was tall, of a fair complexion, round limbed, rather full faced, with eyes black and piercing; and that he enjoyed excellent health, except towards the close of his life, when he was subject to sudden fainting-fits, and disturbance in his sleep. He was likewise twice seized with the falling sickness while engaged in active service. He was so nice in the care of his person, that he not only kept the hair of his head closely cut and had his face smoothly shaved, but even caused the hair on other parts of the body to be plucked out by the roots, a practice for which some persons rallied him. His baldness gave him much uneasiness, having often found himself upon that account exposed to the jibes of his enemies. He therefore used to bring forward the hair from the crown of his head; and of all the honours conferred upon him by the senate and people, there was none which he either accepted or used with greater pleasure, than the right of wearing constantly a laurel crown. It is said that he was particular in his dress. For he used the Latus Clavus1 with fringes about the wrists, and always had it girded about him, but rather loosely. This circumstance gave origin to the expression of Sylla, who often advised the nobles to beware of “the ill-girt boy.”

  XLVI. He first inhabited a small house in the Suburra,2 but after his advancement to the pontificate, he occupied a palace belonging to the state in the Via Sacra. Many writers say that he liked his residence to be elegant, and his entertainments sumptuous; and that he entirely took down a villa near the grove of Aricia, which he had built from the foundation and finished at a vast expense, because it did not exactly suit his taste, although he had at that time but slender means, and was in debt; and that he carried about in his expeditions tesselated and marble slabs for the floor of his tent.

  XLVII. They likewise report that he invaded Britain in hopes of finding pearls,3 the size of which he would compare together, and ascertain the weight by poising them in his hand; that he would purchase, at any cost, gems, carved works, statues, and pictures, executed by the eminent masters of antiquity; and that he would give for young and handy slaves a price so extravagant, that he forbad its being entered in the diary of his expenses.

  XLVIII. We are also told, that in the provinces he constantly maintained two tables, one for the officers of the army, and the gentry of the country, and the other for Romans of the highest rank, and provincials of the first distinction. He was so very exact in the management of his domestic affairs, both little and great, that he once threw a baker into prison, for serving him with a finer sort of bread than his guests; and put to death a freed-man, who was a particular favourite, for debauching the lady of a Roman knight, although no complaint had been made to him of the affair.

  XLIX. The only stain upon his chastity was his having cohabited with Nicomedes; and that indeed stuck to him all the days of his life, and exposed him to much bitter raillery. I will not dwell upon those well-known verses of Calvus Licinius:

  • Whate’er Bithynia and her lord possess’d,
  • Her lord who Cæsar in his lust caress’d.1

  I pass over the speeches of Dolabella, and Curio, the father, in which the former calls him “the queen’s rival, and the inner-side of the royal couch,” and the latter, “the brothel of Nicomedes, and the Bithynian stew.” I would likewise say nothing of the edicts of Bibulus, in which he proclaimed his colleague under the name of “the queen of Bithynia;” adding, that “he had formerly been in love with a king, but now coveted a kingdom.” At which time, as Marcus Brutus relates, one Octavius, a man of a crazy brain, and therefore the more free in his raillery, after he had in a crowded assembly saluted Pompey by the title of king, addressed Cæsar by that of queen. Caius Memmius likewise upbraided him with serving the king at table, among the rest of his catamites, in the presence of a large company, in which were some merchants from Rome, the names of whom he mentions. But Cicero was not content with writing in some of his letters, that he was conducted by the royal attendants into the king’s bed-chamber, lay upon a bed of gold with a covering of purple, and that the youthful bloom of this scion of Venus had been tainted in Bithynia — but upon Cæsar’s pleading the cause of Nysa, the daughter of Nicomedes before the senate, and recounting the king’s kindnesses to him, replied, “Pray tell us no more of that; for it is well known what he gave you, and you gave him.” To conclude, his soldiers in the Gallic triumph, amongst other verses, such as they jocularly sung on those occasions, following the general’s chariot, recited these, which since that time have become extremely common:

  • The Gauls to Cæsar yield, Cæsar to Nicomede,
  • Lo! Cæsar triumphs for his glorious deed,
  • But Cæsar’s conqueror gains no victor’s meed.1

  L. It is admitted by all that he was much addicted to women, as well as very expensive in his intrigues with them, and that he debauched many ladies of the highest quality; among whom were Posthumia, the wife of Servius Sulpicius; Lollia, the wife of Aulus Gabinius; Tertulla, the wife of Marcus Crassus; and Mucia, the wife of Cneius Pompey. For it is certain that the Curios, both father and son, and many others, made it a reproach to Pompey, “That to gratify his ambition, he married the daughter of a man, upon whose account he had divorced his wife, after having had three children by her; and whom he used, with a deep sigh, to call Ægisthus.”2 But the mistress he most loved, was Servilia, the mother of Marcus Brutus, for whom he purchased, in his first consulship after the commencement of their intrigue, a pearl which cost him six millions of sesterces; and in the civil war, besides other presents, assigned to her, for a trifling consideration, some valuable farms when they were exposed to public auction. Many persons expressing their surprise at the lowness of the price, Cicero wittily remarked, “To let you know the real value of the purchase, between ourselves, Tertia was deducted:” for Servilia was supposed to have prostituted her daughter Tertia to Cæsar.3

  LI. That he had intrigues likewise with married women in the provinces, appears from this distich, which was as much repeated in the Gallic triumph as the former:—

  • Watch well your wives, ye cits, we bring a blade,
  • A bald-pate master of the wenching trade.
  • Thy gold was spent on many a Gallic w—e;
  • Exhausted now, thou com’st to borrow more.1

  LII. In the number of his mistresses were also some queens; such as Eunoë, a Moor, the wife of Bogudes, to whom and her husband he made, as Naso reports, many large presents. But his greatest favourite was Cleopatra, with whom he often revelled all night until the dawn of day, and would have gone with her through Egypt in dalliance, as far as Æthiopia, in her luxurious yacht, had not the army refused to follow him. He afterwards invited her to Rome, whence he sent her back loaded with honours and presents, and gave her permission to call by his name a son, who, according to the testimony of some Greek historians, resembled Cæsar both in person and gait. Mark Antony declared in the senate, that Cæsar had acknowledged the child as his own; and that Caius Matias, Caius Oppius, and the rest of Cæsar’s friends knew it to be true. On which occasion, Oppius, as if it had been an imputation which he was called upon to refute, published a book to shew, “that the child which Cleopatra fathered upon Cæsar, was not his.” Helvius Cinna, tribune of the people, admitted to several persons the fact, that he had a bill ready drawn, which Cæsar had ordered him to get enacted in his absence, allowing him, with the hope of leaving issue, to take any wife he chose, and as many of them as he pleased; and to leave no room for doubt of his infamous character for unnatural lewdness and adultery, Curio, the father, says, in one of his speeches, “He was every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.”

  LIII. It is acknowledged even by his enemies, that in regard to wine, he was abstemious. A remark is ascribed to Marcus Cato, “that Cæsar was the only sober man amongst all those who were engaged in the design to subvert the government.” In the matter of diet, Caius Oppius informs us, “that he was so indifferent, that when a person in whose house he was entertained, had served him with stale, instead of fresh, oil,1 and the rest of the company would not touch it, he alone ate very heartily of it, that he might not seem to tax the master of the house with rusticity or want of attention.”

  LIV. But his abstinence did not extend to pecuniary advantages, either in his military commands, or civil offices; for we have the testimony of some writers, that he took money from the proconsul, who was his predecessor in Spain, and from the Roman allies in that quarter, for the discharge of his debts; and plundered at the point of the sword some towns of the Lusitanians, notwithstanding they attempted no resistance, and opened their gates to him upon his arrival before them. In Gaul, he rifled the chapels and temples of the gods, which were filled with rich offerings, and demolished cities oftener for the sake of their spoil, than for any ill they had done. By this means gold became so plentiful with him, that he exchanged it through Italy and the provinces of the empire for three thousand sesterces the pound. In his first consulship he purloined from the Capitol three thousand pounds’ weight of gold, and substituted for it the same quantity of gilt brass. He bartered likewise to foreign nations and princes, for gold, the titles of allies and kings; and squeezed out of Ptolemy alone near six thousand talents, in the name of himself and Pompey. He afterwards supported the expense of the civil wars, and of his triumphs and public spectacles, by the most flagrant rapine and sacrilege.

  LV. In eloquence and warlike achievements, he equalled at least, if he did not surpass, the greatest of men. After his prosecution of Dolabella, he was indisputably reckoned one of the most distinguished advocates. Cicero, in recounting to Brutus the famous orators, declares, “that he does not see that Cæsar was inferior to any one of them;” and says, “that he had an elegant, splendid, noble, and magnificent vein of eloquence.” And in a letter to Cornelius Nepos, he writes of him in the following terms: “What! Of all the orators, who, during the whole course of their lives, have done nothing else, which can you prefer to him? Which of them is more pointed or terse in his periods, or employs more polished and elegant language?” In his youth, he seems to have chosen Strabo Cæsar for his model; from whose oration in behalf of the Sardinians he has transcribed some passages literally into his Divination. In his delivery he is said to have had a shrill voice, and his action was animated, but not ungraceful. He has left behind him some speeches, among which are ranked a few that are not genuine, such as that on behalf of Quintus Metellus. These Augustus supposes, with reason, to be rather the production of blundering short-hand writers, who were not able to keep pace with him in the delivery, than publications of his own. For I find in some copies that the title is not “For Metellus,” but “What he wrote to Metellus;” whereas the speech is delivered in the name of Cæsar, vindicating Metellus and himself from the aspersions cast upon them by their common defamers. The speech addressed “To his soldiers in Spain,” Augustus considers likewise as spurious. We meet with two under this title; one made, as is pretended, in the first battle, and the other in the last; at which time, Asinius Pollio says, he had not leisure to address the soldiers, on account of the suddenness of the enemy’s attack.

  LVI. He has likewise left Commentaries of his own actions both in the war in Gaul, and in the civil war with Pompey; for the author of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish wars is not known with any certainty. Some think they are the production of Oppius, and some of Hirtius; the latter of whom composed the last book, which is imperfect, of the Gallic war. Of Cæsar’s Commentaries, Cicero, in his Brutus, speaks thus: “He wrote his Commentaries in a manner deserving of great approbation: they are plain, precise, and elegant, without any affectation of rhetorical ornament. In having thus prepared materials for others who might be inclined to write his history, he may perhaps have encouraged some silly creatures to enter upon such a work, who will needs be dressing up his actions in all the extravagance and bombast; but he has discouraged wise men from ever attempting the subject.” Hirtius delivers his opinion of these Commentaries in the following terms: “So great is the approbation with which they are universally perused, that, instead of rousing, he seems to have precluded, the efforts of any future historian. Yet, with respect to this work, we have more reason to admire him than others; for they only know how well and correctly he has written, but we know, likewise, how easily and quickly he did it.” Pollio Asinius thinks that they were not drawn up with much care, or with a due regard to truth; for he insinuates that Cæsar was too hasty of belief in regard to what was performed by others under his orders; and that, he has not given a very faithful account of his own acts, either by design, or through defect of memory; expressing at the same time an opinion that Cæsar intended a new and more correct edition. He has left behind him likewise two books on Analogy, with the same number under the title of Anti-Cato, and a poem entitled The Itinerary. Of these books, he composed the first two in his passage over the Alps, as he was returning to the army after making his circuit in Hither-Gaul; the second work about the time of the battle of Munda: and the last during the four-and-twenty days he employed in his journey from Rome to Farther-Spain. There are extant some letters of his to the senate, written in a manner never practised by any before him; for they are distinguished into pages in the form of a memorandum book: whereas the consuls and commanders till then, used constantly in their letters to continue the line quite across the sheet, without any folding or distinction of pages. There are extant likewise some letters from him to Cicero, and others to his friends, concerning his domestic affairs; in which, if there was occasion for secrecy, he wrote in cyphers; that is, he used the alphabet in such a manner, that not a single word could be made out. The way to decipher those epistles was to substitute the fourth for the first letter, as d for a, and so for the other letters respectively. Some things likewise pass under his name, said to have been written by him when a boy, or a very young man; as the Encomium of Hercules, a tragedy entitled Œdipus, and a collection of Apophthegms; all which Augustus forbad to be published, in a short and plain letter to Pompeius Macer, who was employed by him in the arrangement of his libraries.

  LVII. He was perfect in the use of arms, an accomplished rider, and able to endure fatigue beyond all belief. On a march, he used to go at the head of his troops, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, with his head bare in all kinds of weather. He would travel post in a light carriage1 without baggage, at the rate of a hundred miles a day; and if he was stopped by floods in the rivers, he swam across, or floated on skins inflated with wind, so that he often anticipated intelligence of his movements.2

  LVIII. In his expeditions, it is difficult to say whether his caution or his daring was most conspicuous. He never marched his army by roads which were exposed to ambuscades, without having previously examined the nature of the ground by his scouts. Nor did he cross over to Britain, before he had carefully examined, in person,3 the navigation, the harbours, and the most convenient point of landing in the island. When intelligence was brought to him of the siege of his camp in Germany, he made his way to his troops, through the enemy’s stations, in a Gaulish dress. He crossed the sea from Brundisium and Dyrrachium, in the winter, through the midst of the enemy’s fleets; and the troops, under orders to join him, being slow in their movements, notwithstanding repeated messages to hurry them, but to no purpose, he at last went privately, and alone, aboard a small vessel in the night time, with his head muffled up; nor did he make himself known, or suffer the master to put about, although the wind blew strong against them, until they were ready to sink.

  LIX. He was never deterred from any enterprise, nor retarded in the prosecution of it, by superstition.4 When a victim, which he was about to offer in sacrifice, made its escape, he did not therefore defer his expedition against Scipio and Juba. And happening to fall, upon stepping out of the ship, he gave a lucky turn to the omen, by exclaiming, “I hold thee fast, Africa.” To chide the prophecies which were spread abroad, that the name of the Scipios was, by the decrees of fate, fortunate and invincible in that province, he retained in the camp a profligate wretch, of the family of the Cornelii, who, on account of his scandalous life, was surnamed Salutio.

  LX. He not only fought pitched battles, but made sudden attacks when an opportunity offered; often at the end of a march, and sometimes during the most violent storms, when nobody could imagine he would stir. Nor was he ever backward in fighting, until towards the end of his life. He then was of opinion, that the oftener he had been crowned with success, the less he ought to expose himself to new hazards; and that nothing he could gain by a victory would compensate for what he might lose by a miscarriage. He never defeated the enemy without driving them from their camp; and giving them no time to rally their forces. When the issue of a battle was doubtful, he sent away all the horses, and his own first, that having no means of flight, they might be under the greater necessity of standing their ground.

  LXI. He rode a very remarkable horse, with feet almost like those of a man, the hoofs being divided in such a manner as to have some resemblance to toes. This horse he had bred himself, and the soothsayers having interpreted these circumstances into an omen that its owner would be master of the world, he brought him up with particular care, and broke him in himself, as the horse would suffer no one else to mount him. A statue of this horse was afterwards erected by Cæsar’s order before the temple of Venus Genitrix.

  LXII. He often rallied his troops, when they were giving way, by his personal efforts: stopping those who fled, keeping others in their ranks, and seizing them by their throat turned them towards the enemy; although numbers were so terrified, that an eagle-bearer,1 thus stopped, made a thrust at him with the spear-head; and another, upon a similar occasion, left the standard in his hand.

  LXIII. The following instances of his resolution are equally, and even more remarkable. After the battle of Pharsalia, having sent his troops before him into Asia, as he was passing the straits of the Hellespont in a ferry-boat, he met with Lucius Cassius, one of the opposite party, with ten ships of war; and so far from endeavouring to escape, he went alongside his ship, and calling upon him to surrender, Cassius humbly gave him his submission.

  LXIV. At Alexandria, in the attack of a bridge, being forced by a sudden sally of the enemy into a boat, and several others hurrying in with him, he leaped into the sea, and saved himself by swimming to the next ship, which lay at the distance of two hundred paces; holding up his left hand out of the water, for fear of wettin some papers which he held in it; and pulling his general’s cloak after him with his teeth, lest it should fall into the hands of the enemy.

  LXV He never valued a soldier for his moral conduct or his means, but for his courage only; and treated his troops with a mixture of severity and indulgence; for he did not always keep a strict hand over them, but only when the enemy was near. Then indeed he was so strict a disciplinarian, that he would give no notice of a march or a battle until the moment of action, in order that the troops might hold themselves in readiness for any sudden movement; and he would frequently draw them out of the camp without any necessity for it, especially in rainy weather, and upon holy-days. Sometimes, giving them orders not to lose sight of him, he would suddenly depart by day or by night, and lengthen the marches in order to tire them out, as they followed him at a distance.

  LXVI. When at any time his troops were dispirited by reports of the great force of the enemy, he rallied their courage, not by denying the truth of what was said, or by diminishing the facts, but, on the contrary, by exaggerating every particular. Accordingly, when his troops were in great alarm at the expected arrival of king Juba, he called them together, and said, “I have to inform you that in a very few days the king will be here, with ten legions, thirty thousand horse, a hundred thousand light-armed foot, and three hundred elephants. Let none of you, therefore, presume to make further enquiry, or indulge in conjectures, but take my word for what I tell you, which I have from undoubted intelligence; otherwise I shall put them aboard an old crazy vessel, and leave them exposed to the mercy of the winds, to be transported to some other country.”

  LXVII. He neither noticed all their transgressions, nor punished them according to strict rule. But for deserters and mutineers he made the most diligent enquiry, and their punishment was most severe: other delinquencies he would connive at. Sometimes, after a great battle ending in victory, he would grant them a relaxation from all kinds of duty, and leave them to revel at pleasure; being used to boast, “that his soldiers fought nothing the worse for being well oiled.” In his speeches, he never addressed them by the title of “Soldiers,” but by the kinder phrase of “Fellow-soldiers;” and kept them in such splendid order, that their arms were ornamented with silver and gold, not merely for parade, but to render the soldiers more resolute to save them in battle, and fearful of losing them. He loved his troops to such a degree, that when he heard of the defeat of those under Titurius, he neither cut his hair nor shaved his beard, until he had revenged it upon the enemy; by which means he engaged their devoted affection, and raised their valour to the highest pitch.

  LXVIII. Upon his entering on the civil war, the centurions of every legion offered, each of them, to maintain a horseman at his own expense, and the whole army agreed to serve gratis, without either corn or pay; those amongst them who were rich, charging themselves with the maintenance of the poor. No one of them, during the whole course of the war, deserted to the enemy; and many of those who were made prisoners, though they were offered their lives, upon condition of bearing arms against him, refused to accept the terms. They endured want, and other hardships, not only when they were besieged themselves, but when they besieged others, to such a degree, that Pompey, when blocked up in the neighbourhood of Dyrrachium, upon seeing a sort of bread made of an herb, which they lived upon, said, “I have to do with wild beasts,” and ordered it immediately to be taken away; because, if his troops should see it, their spirit might be broken by perceiving the endurance and determined resolution of the enemy. With what bravery they fought, one instance affords sufficient proof; which is, that after an unsuccessful engagement at Dyrrachium, they called for punishment; insomuch that their general found it more necessary to comfort than to punish them. In other battles, in different quarters, they defeated with ease immense armies of the enemy, although they were much inferior to them in number. In short, one cohort of the sixth legion held out a fort against four legions belonging to Pompey, during several hours; being almost every one of them wounded by the vast number of arrows discharged against them, and of which there were found within the ramparts a hundred and thirty thousand. This is no way surprising, when we consider the conduct of some individuals amongst them; such as that of Cassius Scæva, a centurion, or Caius Acilius, a common soldier, not to speak of others. Scæva, after having an eye struck out, being run through the thigh and the shoulder, and having his shield pierced in an hundred and twenty places, maintained obstinately the guard of the gate of a fort, with the command of which he was intrusted. Acilius, in the sea-fight at Marseilles, having seized a ship of the enemy’s with his right hand, and that being cut off, in imitation of that memorable instance of resolution in Cynægirus amongst the Greeks, boarded the enemy’s ship, bearing down all before him with the boss of his shield.

  LXIX. They never once mutinied during all the ten years of the Gallic war, but were sometimes refractory in the course of the civil war. However, they always returned quickly to their duty, and that not through the indulgence, but in submission to the authority, of their general; for he never yielded to them when they were insubordinate, but constantly resisted their demands. He disbanded the whole ninth legion with ignominy at Placentia, although Pompey was still in arms, and would not receive them again into his service, until they had not only made repeated and humble entreaties, but until the ringleaders in the mutiny were punished.

  LXX. When the soldiers of the tenth legion at Rome demanded their discharge and rewards for their service, with violent threats and no small danger to the city, although the war was then raging in Africa, he did not hesitate, contrary to the advice of his friends, to meet the legion, and disband it. But addressing them by the title of “Quirites,” instead of “Soldiers,” he by this single word so thoroughly brought them round and changed their determination, that they immediately cried out, they were his “soldiers,” and followed him to Africa, although he had refused their service. He nevertheless punished the most mutinous among them, with the loss of a third of their share in the plunder, and the land destined for them.

  LXXI. In the service of his clients, while yet a young man, he evinced great zeal and fidelity. He defended the cause of a noble youth, Masintha, against king Hiempsal, so strenuously, that in a scuffle which took place upon the occasion, he seized by the beard the son of king Juba: and upon Masintha’s being declared tributary to Hiempsal, while the friends of the adverse party were violently carrying him off, he immediately rescued him by force, kept him concealed in his house a long time, and when, at the expiration of his prætorship, he went to Spain, he took him away in his litter, in the midst of his lictors bearing the fasces, and others who had come to attend and take leave of him.

  LXXII. He always treated his friends with such kindness and good-nature, that when Caius Oppius, in travelling with him through a forest, was suddenly taken ill, he resigned to him the only place there was to shelter them at night, and lay upon the ground in the open air. When he had placed himself at the head of affairs, he advanced some of his faithful adherents, though of mean extraction, to the highest offices: and when he was censured for this partiality, he openly said, “Had I been assisted by robbers and cut-throats in the defence of my honour, I should have made them the same recompense.”

  LXXIII. The resentment he entertained against any one was never so implacable that he did not very willingly renounce it when opportunity offered. Although Caius Memmius had published some extremely virulent speeches against him, and he had answered him with equal acrimony, yet he afterwards assisted him with his vote and interest, when he stood candidate for the consulship. When C. Calvus, after publishing some scandalous epigrams upon him, endeavoured to effect a reconciliation by the intercession of friends, he wrote to him, of his own accord, the first letter. And when Valerius Catullus, who had, as he himself observed, fixed such a stain upon his character in his verses upon Mamurra as never could be obliterated, he begged his pardon, invited him to supper the same day; and continued to take up his lodging with his father occasionally, as he had been accustomed to do.

  LXXIV. His temper was also naturally averse to severity in retaliation. After he had captured the pirates, by whom he had been taken, having sworn that he would crucify them, he did so indeed; but he first ordered their throats to be cut.1 He could never bear the thought of doing any harm to Cornelius Phagitas, who had dogged him in the night when he was sick and a fugitive, with the design of carrying him to Sylla, and from whose hands he had escaped with some difficulty by giving him a bribe. Philemon, his amanuensis, who had promised his enemies to poison him, he put to death without torture. When he was summoned as a witness against Publicus Clodius, his wife Pompeia’s gallant, who was prosecuted for the profanation of religious ceremonies, he declared he knew nothing of the affair, although his mother Aurelia, and his sister Julia, gave the court an exact and full account of the circumstances. And being asked why then he had divorced his wife? “Because,” he said, “my family should not only be free from guilt, but even from the suspicion of it.”

  LXXV. Both in his administration and his conduct towards the vanquished party in the civil war, he showed a wonderful moderation and clemency. For while Pompey declared that he would consider those as enemies who did not take arms in defence of the republic, he desired it to be understood, that he should regard those who remained neuter as his friends With regard to all those to whom he had, on Pompey’s recommendation, given any command in the army, he left them at perfect liberty to go over to him, if they pleased. When some proposals were made at Ilerda1 for a surrender, which gave rise to a free communication between the two camps, and Afranius and Petreius, upon a sudden change of resolution, had put to the sword all Cæsar’s men who were found in the camp, he scorned to imitate the base treachery which they had practised against himself. On the field of Pharsalia, he called out to the soldiers “to spare their fellow-citizens,” and afterwards gave permission to every man in his army to save an enemy. None of them, so far as appears, lost their lives but in battle, excepting only Afranius, Faustus, and young Lucius Cæsar: and it is thought that even they were put to death without his consent. Afranius and Faustus had borne arms against him, after obtaining their pardon; and Lucius Cæsar had not only in the most cruel manner destroyed with fire and sword his freedmen and slaves, but cut to pieces the wild beasts which he had prepared for the entertainment of the people. And finally, a little before his death, he permitted all whom he had not before pardoned, to return into Italy, and to bear offices both civil and military. He even replaced the statues of Sylla and Pompey, which had been thrown down by the populace. And after this, whatever was devised or uttered, he chose rather to check than to punish it. Accordingly, having detected certain conspiracies and nocturnal assemblies, he went no farther than to intimate by a proclamation that he knew of them; and as to those who indulged themselves in the liberty of reflecting severely upon him, he only warned them in a public speech not to persist in their offence. He bore with great moderation a virulent libel written against him by Aulus Cæcinna, and the abusive lampoons of Pitholaüs, most highly reflecting on his reputation.

  LXXVI. His other words and actions, however, so far outweigh all his good qualities, that it is thought he abused his power, and was justly cut off. For he not only obtained excessive honours, such as the consulship every year, the dictatorship for life, and the censorship, but also the title of emperor,1 and the surname of Father of his country,2 besides having his statue amongst the kings,3 and a lofty couch in the theatre. He even suffered some honours to be decreed to him, which were unbefitting the most exalted of mankind; such as a gilded chair of state in the senate-house and on his tribunal, a consecrated chariot, and banners in the Circensian procession, temples, altars, statues among the gods, a bed of state in the temples, a priest, and a college of priests dedicated to himself, like those of Pan; and that one of the months should be called by his name. There were, indeed, no honours which he did not either assume himself, or grant to others, at his will and pleasure. In his third and fourth consulship, he used only the title of the office, being content with the power of dictator, which was conferred upon him with the consulship; and in both years he substituted other consuls in his room, during the three last months; so that in the intervals he held no assemblies of the people, for the election of magistrates, excepting only tribunes and ediles of the people; and appointed officers, under the name of præfects, instead of the prætors, to administer the affairs of the city during his absence. The office of consul having become vacant, by the sudden death of one of the consuls the day before the calends of January [the 1st Jan.], he conferred it on a person who requested it of him, for a few hours. Assuming the same licence, and regardless of the customs of his country, he appointed magistrates to hold their offices for terms of years. He granted the insignia of the consular dignity to ten persons of prætorian rank. He admitted into the senate some men who had been made free of the city, and even natives of Gaul, who were semi-barbarians. He likewise appointed to the management of the mint, and the public revenue of the state, some servants of his own household; and entrusted the command of three legions, which he left at Alexandria, to an old catamite of his, the son of his freed-man Rufinus.

  LXXVII. He was guilty of the same extravagance in the language he publicly used, as Titus Ampius informs us; according to whom he said, “The republic is nothing but a name, without substance or reality. Sylla was an ignorant fellow to abdicate the dictatorship. Men ought to consider what is becoming when they talk with me, and look upon what I say as a law.” To such a pitch of arrogance did he proceed, that when a soothsayer announced to him the unfavourable omen, that the entrails of a victim offered for sacrifice were without a heart, he said, “The entrails will be more favourable when I please; and it ought not to be regarded as a prodigy that a beast should be found wanting a heart.”

  LXXVIII. But what brought upon him the greatest odium, and was thought an unpardonable insult, was his receiving the whole body of the conscript fathers sitting, before the temple of Venus Genitrix, when they waited upon him with a number of decrees, conferring on him the highest dignities. Some say that, on his attempting to rise, he was held down by Cornelius Balbus; others, that he did not attempt to rise at all, but frowned on Caius Trebatius, who suggested to him that he should stand up to receive the senate. This behaviour appeared the more intolerable in him, because, when one of the tribunes of the people, Pontius Aquila, would not rise up to him, as he passed by the tribunes’ seat during his triumph, he was so much offended, that he cried out. “Well then, you tribune, Aquila, oust me from the government.” And for some days afterwards, he never promised a favour to any person, without this proviso, “if Pontus Aquila will give me leave.”

  LXXIX. To this extraordinary mark of contempt for the senate, he added another affront still more outrageous. For when, after the sacred rites of the Latin festival, he was returning home, amidst the immoderate and unusual acclamations of the people, a man in the crowd put a laurel crown, encircled with a white fillet,1 on one of his statues; upon which, the tribunes of the people, Epidius Marullus, and Cæsetius Flavus, ordered the fillet to be removed from the crown, and the man to be taken to prison. Cæsar, being much concerned either that the idea of royalty had been suggested to so little purpose, or, as was said, that he was thus deprived of the merit of refusing it, reprimanded the tribunes very severely, and dismissed them from their office. From that day forward, he was never able to wipe off the scandal of affecting the name of king, although he replied to the populace, when they saluted him by that title, “I am Cæsar, and no king.” And at the feast of the Lupercalia,2 when the consul Antony placed a crown upon his head in the rostra several times, he as often put it away, and sent it to the Capitol for Jupiter, the Best and the Greatest. A report was very current, that he had a design of withdrawing to Alexandria or Ilium, whither he proposed to transfer the imperial power, to drain Italy by new levies, and to leave the government of the city to be administered by his friends. To this report it was added, that in the next meeting of the senate, Lucius Cotta, one of the fifteen,3 would make a motion, that as there was in the Sibylline books a prophecy, that the Parthians would never be subdued but by a king, Cæsar should have that title conferred upon him.

  LXXX. For this reason the conspirators precipitated the execution of their design,4 that they might not be obliged to give their assent to the proposal. Instead, therefore, of caballing any longer separately, in small parties, they now united their counsels; the people themselves being dissatisfied with the present state of affairs, both privately and publicly condemning the tyranny under which they lived, and calling on patriots to assert their cause against the usurper. Upon the admission of foreigners into the senate, a hand-bill was posted up in these words: “A good deed! let no one shew a new senator the way to the house.” These verses were likewise currently repeated:

  • The Gauls he dragged in triumph through the town,
  • Cæsar has brought into the senate-house,
  • And changed their plaids1 for the patrician gown.
  • Gallos Cæsar in triumphum ducit: iidem in curiam
  • Galli braccas deposuerunt, latum clavum sumpserunt.

  When Quintus Maximus, who had been his deputy in the consulship for the last three months, entered the theatre, and the lictor, according to custom, bid the people take notice who was coming, they all cried out, “He is no consul.” After the removal of Cæsetius and Marullus from their office, they were found to have a great many votes at the next election of consuls. Some one wrote under the statue of Lucius Brutus, “Would you were now alive!” and under the statue of Cæsar himself these lines:

  • Because he drove from Rome the royal race,
  • Brutus was first made consul in their place.
  • This man, because he put the consuls down,
  • Has been rewarded with a royal crown.
  • Brutus, quia reges ejecit, consul primus factus est:
  • Hic, quia consules ejecit, rex postremo factus est.

  About sixty persons were engaged in the conspiracy against him, of whom Caius Cassius, and Marcus and Decimus Brutus were the chief. It was at first debated amongst them, whether they should attack him in the Campus Martius when he was taking the votes of the tribes, and some of them should throw him off the bridge, whilst others should be ready to stab him upon his fall; or else in the Via Sacra, or at the entrance of the theatre. But after public notice had been given by proclamation for the senate to assemble upon the ides of March [15th March], in the senate-house built by Pompey, they approved both of the time and place, as most fitting for their purpose.

  LXXXI. Cæsar had warning given him of his fate by indubitable omens. A few months before, when the colonists settled at Capua, by virtue of the Julian law, were demolishing some old sepulchres, in building country-houses, and were the more eager at the work, because they discovered certain vessels of antique workmanship, a tablet of brass was found in a tomb, in which Capys, the founder of Capua, was said to have been buried, with an inscription in the Greek language to this effect: “Whenever the bones of Capys come to be discovered, a descendant of Iulus will be slain by the hands of his kinsmen, and his death revenged by fearful disasters throughout Italy.” Lest any person should regard this anecdote as a fabulous or silly invention, it was circulated upon the authority of Caius Balbus, an intimate friend of Cæsar’s. A few days likewise before his death, he was informed that the horses, which, upon his crossing the Rubicon, he had consecrated, and turned loose to graze without a keeper, abstained entirely from eating, and shed floods of tears. The soothsayer Spurinna, observing certain ominous appearances in a sacrifice which he was offering, advised him to beware of some danger, which threatened to befall him before the ides of March were past. The day before the ides, birds of various kinds from a neighbouring grove, pursuing a wren which flew into Pompey’s senate-house,1 with a sprig of laurel in its beak, tore it in pieces. Also, in the night on which the day of his murder dawned, he dreamt at one time that he was soaring above the clouds, and, at another, that he had joined hands with Jupiter. His wife Calpurnia fancied in her sleep that the pediment of the house was falling down, and her husband stabbed on her bosom; immediately upon which the chamber doors flew open. On account of these omens, as well as his infirm health, he was in some doubt whether he should not remain at home, and defer to some other opportunity the business which he intended to propose to the senate; but Decimus Brutus advising him not to disappoint the senators, who were numerously assembled, and waited his coming, he was prevailed upon to go, and accordingly set forward about the fifth hour. In his way, some person having thrust into his hand a paper, warning him against the plot, he mixed it with some other documents which he held in his left hand, intending to read it at leisure. Victim after victim was slain, without any favourable appearances in the entrails; but still, disregarding all omens, he entered the senate-house, laughing at Spurinna as a false prophet, because the ides of March were come, without any mischief having befallen him. To which the soothsayer replied, “They are come, indeed, but not past.”

  LXXXII. When he had taken his seat, the conspirators stood round him, under colour of paying their compliments; and immediately Tullius Cimber, who had engaged to commence the assault, advancing nearer than the rest, as if he had some favour to request, Cæsar made signs that he should defer his petition to some other time. Tullius immediately seized him by the toga, on both shoulders; at which Cæsar crying out, “Violence is meant!” one of the Cassii wounded him a little below the throat. Cæsar seized him by the arm, and ran it through with his style;1 and endeavouring to rush forward was stopped by another wound. Finding himself now attacked on all hands with naked poniards, he wrapped the toga2 about his head, and at the same moment drew the skirt round his legs with his left hand, that he might fall more decently with the lower part of his body covered. He was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering a groan only, but no cry, at the first wound: although some authors relate, that when Marcus Brutus fell upon him, he exclaimed, “What! art thou, too, one of them? Thou, my son!”3 The whole assembly instantly dispersing, he lay for some time after he expired, until three of his slaves laid the body on a litter, and carried it home, with one arm hanging down over the side. Among so many wounds, there was none that was mortal, in the opinion of the surgeon Antistius, except the second, which he received in the breast. The conspirators meant to drag his body into the Tiber as soon as they had killed him; to confiscate his estate, and rescind all his enactments; but they were deterred by fear of Mark Antony, and Lepidus, Cæsar’s master of the horse, and abandoned their intentions.

  LXXXIII. At the instance of Lucius Piso, his father-in-law, his will was opened and read in Mark Antony’s house. He had made it on the ides [13th] of the preceding September, at his Lavican villa, and committed it to the custody of the chief of the Vestal Virgins. Quintus Tubero informs us, that in all the wills he had signed, from the time of his first consulship to the breaking out of the civil war, Cneius Pompey was appointed his heir, and that this had been publicly notified to the army. But in his last will, he named three heirs, the grandsons of his sisters; namely, Caius Octavius for three fourths of his estate, and Lucius Pinarius and Quintus Pedius for the remaining fourth. Other heirs [in remainder] were named at the close of the will, in which he also adopted Caius Octavius, who was to assume his name, into his family; and nominated most of those who were concerned in his death among the guardians of his son, if he should have any; as well as Decimus Brutus amongst his heirs of the second order. He bequeathed to the Roman people his gardens near the Tiber, and three hundred sesterces each man.

  LXXXIV. Notice of his funeral having been solemnly proclaimed, a pile was erected in the Campus Martius, near the tomb of his daughter Julia; and before the Rostra was placed a gilded tabernacle, on the model of the temple of Venus Gonitrix;1 within which was an ivory bed, covered with purple and cloth of gold. At the head was a trophy, with the [blood-stained] robe in which he was slain. It being considered that the whole day would not suffice for carrying the funeral oblations in solemn procession before the corpse, directions were given for every one, without regard to order, to carry them from the city into the Campus Martius, by what way they pleased. To raise pity and indignation for his murder, in the plays acted at the funeral, a passage was sung from Pacuvius’s tragedy, entitled, “The Trial for Arms:”

  • That ever I, unhappy man, should save
  • Wretches, who thus have brought me to the grave!!

  And some lines also from Attilius’s tragedy of “Electra,” to the same effect. Instead of a funeral panegyric, the consul Antony ordered a herald to proclaim to the people the decree of the senate, in which they had bestowed upon him all honours, divine and human; with the oath by which they had engaged themselves for the defence of his person; and to these he added only a few words of his own. The magistrates and others who had formerly filled the highest offices, carried the bier from the Rostra into the Forum. While some proposed that the body should be burnt in the sanctuary of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and others in Pompey’s senate-house; on a sudden, two men, with swords by their sides, and spears in their hands, set fire to the bier with lighted torches. The throng around immediately heaped upon it dry faggots, the tribunals and benches of the adjoining courts, and whatever else came to hand Then the musicians and players stripped off the dresses they wore on the present occasion, taken from the wardrobe of his triumph at spectacles, rent them, and threw them into the flames. The legionaries, also, of his veteran bands, cast in their armour, which they had put on in honour of his funeral. Most of the ladies did the same by their ornaments, with the bullæ,1 and mantles of their children. In this public mourning there joined a multitude of foreigners, expressing their sorrow according to the fashion of their respective countries; but especially the Jews,2 who for several nights together frequented the spot where the body was burnt.

  LXXXV. The populace ran from the funeral, with torches in their hands, to the houses of Brutus and Cassius, and were repelled with difficulty. Going in quest of Cornelius Cinna, who had in a speech, the day before, reflected severely upon Cæsar, and mistaking for him Helvius Cinna, who happened to fall into their hands, they murdered the latter, and carried his head about the city on the point of a spear. They afterwards erected in the Forum a column of Numidian marble, formed of one stone nearly twenty feet high, and inscribed upon it these words, To the Father of his Country. At this column they continued for a long time to offer sacrifices, make vows, and decide controversies, in which they swore by Cæsar.

  LXXXVI. Some of Cæsar’s friends entertained a suspicion, that he neither desired nor cared to live any longer, on account of his declining health; and for that reason slighted all the omens of religion, and the warnings of his friends. Others are of opinion, that thinking himself secure in the late decree of the senate, and their oaths, he dismissed his Spanish guards who attended him with drawn swords. Others again suppose, that he chose rather to face at once the dangers which threatened him on all sides, than to be for ever on the watch against them. Some tell us that he used to say, the commonwealth was more interested in the safety of his person than himself: for that he had for some time been satiated with power and glory; but that the commonwealth, if any thing should befall him, would have no rest, and, involved in another civil war, would be in a worse state than before.

  LXXXVII. This, however, was generally admitted, that his death was in many respects such as he would have chosen. For, upon reading the account delivered by Xenophon, how Cyrus in his last illness gave instructions respecting his funeral, Cæsar deprecated a lingering death, and wished that his own might be sudden and speedy. And the day before he died, the conversation at supper, in the house of Marcus Lepidus, turning upon what was the most eligible way of dying, he gave his opinion in favour of a death that is sudden and unexpected.

  LXXXVIII. He died in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and was ranked amongst the Gods, not only by a formal decree, but in the belief of the vulgar. For during the first games which Augustus, his heir, consecrated to his memory, a comet blazed for seven days together, rising always about eleven o’clock; and it was supposed to be the soul of Cæsar, now received into heaven: for which reason, likewise, he is represented on his statue with a star on his brow. The senate-house in which he was slain, was ordered to be shut up,1 and a decree made that the ides of March should be called parricidal, and the senate should never more assemble on that day.

  LXXXIX. Scarcely any of those who were accessary to his murder, survived him more than three years, or died a natural death.2 They were all condemned by the senate: some were taken off by one accident, some by another. Part of them perished at sea, others fell in battle; and some slew themselves with the same poniard with which they had stabbed Cæsar.3

  1The termination of the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey forms a new epoch in the Roman History, at which a Republic, which had subsisted with unrivalled glory during a period of about four hundred and sixty years, relapsed into a state of despotism, whence it never more could emerge. So sudden a transition from prosperity to the ruin of public freedom, without the intervention of any foreign enemy, excites a reasonable conjecture, that the constitution in which it could take place, however vigorous in appearance, must have lost that soundness of political health which had enabled it to endure through so many ages. A short view of its preceding state, and of that in which it was at the time of the revolution now mentioned, will best ascertain the foundation of such a conjecture.

  Though the Romans, upon the expulsion of Tarquin, made an essential change in the political form of the state, they did not carry their detestation of regal authority so far as to abolish the religious institutions of Numa Pompilius, the second of their kings, according to which, the priesthood, with all the influence annexed to that order, was placed in the hands of the aristocracy. By this wise policy a restraint was put upon the fickleness and violence of the people in matters of government, and a decided superiority given to the Senate both in the deliberative and executive parts of administration. This advantage was afterwards indeed diminished by the creation of Tribunes of the people; a set of men whose ambition often embroiled the Republic in civil dissensions, and who at last abused their authority to such a degree, that they became instruments of aggrandizement to any leading men in the state who could purchase their friendship. In general, however, the majority of the Tribunes being actuated by views which comprehended the interests of the multitude, rather than those of individuals, they did not so much endanger the liberty, as they interrupted the tranquillity, of the public; and when the occasional commotions subsided, there remained no permanent ground for the establishment of personal usurpation.

  In every government, an object of the last importance to the peace and welfare of society is the morals of the people; and in proportion as a community is enlarged by propagation, or the accession of a multitude of new members, a more strict attention is requisite to guard against that dissolution of manners to which a crowded and extensive capital has a natural tendency. Of this the Romans became sensible in the growing state of the Republic. In the year of the City 312, two magistrates were first created for taking an account of the number of the people, and the value of their estates; and soon after, they were invested with the authority not only of inspecting the morals of individuals, but of inflicting public censure for any licentiousness of conduct, or violation of decency. Thus both the civil and religious institutions concurred to restrain the people within the bounds of good order and obedience to the laws: at the same time that the frugal life of the ancient Romans proved a strong security against those vices which operate most effectually towards sapping the foundations of a state.

  But in the time of Julius Cæsar the barriers of public liberty were become too weak to restrain the audacious efforts of ambitious and desperate men. The veneration for the constitution, usually a powerful check to treasonable designs, had been lately violated by the usurpations of Marius and Sylla. The salutary terrors of religion no longer predominated over the consciences of men. The shame of public censure was extinguished in general depravity. An eminent historian, who lived at that time, informs us, that venality universally prevailed amongst the Romans; and a writer who flourished soon after, observes, that luxury and dissipation had encumbered almost all so much with debt, that they beheld with a degree of complacency the prospect of civil war and confusion.

  The extreme degree of profligacy at which the Romans were now arrived is in nothing more evident, than that this age gave birth to the most horrible conspiracy which occurs in the annals of human kind, viz. that of Catiline. This was not the project of a few desperate and abandoned individuals, but of a number of men of the most illustrious rank in the state; and it appears beyond doubt, that Julius Cæsar was accessary to the design, which was no less than to extirpate the Senate, divide amongst themselves both the public and private treasures, and set Rome on fire. The causes which prompted to this tremendous project, it is generally admitted, were luxury, prodigality, irreligion, a total corruption of manners, and above all, as the immediate cause, the pressing necessity in which the conspirators were involved by their extreme dissipation.

  The enormous debt in which Cæsar himself was early involved, countenances an opinion that his anxiety to procure the province of Gaul proceeded chiefly from this cause. But during nine years in which he held that province, he acquired such riches as must have rendered him, without competition, the most opulent person in the state. If nothing more, therefore, than a splendid establishment had been the object of his pursuit, he had attained to the summit of his wishes. But when we find him persevering in a plan of aggrandizement beyond this period of his fortunes, we can ascribe his conduct to no other motive than that of outrageous ambition. He projected the building of a new Forum at Rome, for the ground only of which he was to pay 800,000 pounds; he raised legions in Gaul at his own charges: he promised such entertainments to the people as had never been known at Rome from the foundation of the city. All these circumstances evince some latent design of procuring such a popularity as might give him an uncontrolled influence in the management of public affairs. Pompey, we are told, was wont to say, that Cæsar not being able, with all his riches, to fulfil the promises which he had made, wished to throw everything into confusion. There may have been some foundation for this remark: but the opinion of Cicero is more probable, that Cæsar’s mind was seduced with the temptations of chimerical glory. It is observable that neither Cicero nor Pompey intimates any suspicion that Cæsar was apprehensive of being impeached for his conduct, had he returned to Rome in a private station. Yet, that there was reason for such an apprehension, the positive declaration of L. Domitius leaves little room to doubt: especially when we consider the number of enemies that Cæsar had in the Senate, and the coolness of his former friend Pompey ever after the death of Julia. The proposed impeachment was founded upon a notorious charge of prosecuting measures destructive of the interests of the commonwealth, and tending ultimately to an object incompatible with public freedom. Indeed, considering the extreme corruption which prevailed amongst the Romans at this time, it is more than probable that Cæsar would have been acquitted of the charge, but at such an expense as must have stripped him of all his riches, and placed him again in a situation ready to attempt a disturbance of the public tranquillity. For it is said, that he purchased the friendship of Curio, at the commencement of the civil war, with a bribe little short of half a million sterling.

  Whatever Cæsar’s private motive may have been for taking arms against his country, he embarked in an enterprise of a nature the most dangerous: and had Pompey conducted himself in any degree suitable to the reputation which he had formerly acquired, the contest would in all probability have terminated in favour of public freedom. But by dilatory measures in the beginning, by imprudently withdrawing his army from Italy into a distant province, and by not pursuing the advantage he had gained by the vigorous repulse of Cæsar’s troops in their attack upon his camp, this commander lost every opportunity of extinguishing a war which was to determine the fate, and even he existence, of the Republic. It was accordingly determined on the plains of Pharsalia, where Cæsar obtained a victory which was not more decisive than unexpected. He was now no longer amenable either to the tribunal of the Senate or the power of the laws, but triumphed at once over his enemies and the constitution of his country.

  It is to the honour of Cæsar, that when he had obtained the supreme power, he exercised it with a degree of moderation beyond what was generally expected by those who had fought on the side of the Republic. Of his private life either before or after this period, little is transmitted in history. Henceforth, however, he seems to have lived chiefly at Rome, near which he had a small villa, upon an eminence, commanding a beautiful prospect. His time was almost entirely occupied with public affairs, in the management of which, though he employed many agents, he appears to have had none in the character of actual minister. He was in general easy of access: but Cicero, in a letter to a friend, complains of having been treated with the indignity of waiting a considerable time amongst a crowd in an anti-chamber, before he could have an audience. The elevation of Cæsar placed him not above discharging reciprocally the social duties in the intercourse of life. He returned the visits of those who waited upon him, and would sup at their houses. At table, and in the use of wine, he was habitually temperate. Upon the whole, he added nothing to his own happiness by all the dangers, the fatigues, and the perpetual anxiety which he had incurred in the pursuit of unlimited power. His health was greatly impaired: his former cheerfulness of temper, though not his magnanimity, appears to have forsaken him; and we behold in his fate a memorable example of illustrious talents rendered, by inordinate ambition, destructive to himself, and irretrievably pernicious to his country.

  From beholding the ruin of the Roman Republic, after intestine divisions, and the distractions of civil war, it will afford some relief to take a view of the progress of literature, which flourished even during those calamities.

  The commencement of literature in Rome is to be dated from the reduction of the Grecian States, when the conquerors imported into their own country the valuable productions of the Greek language, and the first essay of Roman genius was in dramatic composition. Livius Andronicus, who flourished about 240 years before the Christian æra, formed the Fescennine verses into a kind of regular drama, upon the model of the Greeks He was followed some time after by Ennius, who, besides dramatic and other compositions, wrote the annals of the Roman Republic in heroic verse. His style, like that of Andronicus, was rough and unpolished, in conformity to the language of those times; but for grandeur of sentiment and energy of expression, he was admired by the greatest poets in the subsequent ages. Other writers of distinguished reputation in the dramatic department were Nævius, Pacuvius, Plautus, Afranius, Cæcilius, Terence, Accius, &c. Accius and Pacuvius are mentioned by Quintilian as writers of extraordinary merit. Of twenty-five comedies written by Plautus, the number transmitted to posterity is nineteen; and of a hundred and eight which Terence is said to have translated from Menander, there now remain only six. Excepting a few inconsiderable fragments, the writings of all the other authors have perished. The early period of Roman literature was distinguished for the introduction of satire by Lucilius, an author celebrated for writing with remarkable ease, but whose compositions, in the opinion of Horace, though Quintilian thinks otherwise, were debased with a mixture of feculency. Whatever may have been their merit, they also have perished, with the works of a number of orators, who adorned the advancing state of letters in the Roman Republic. It is observable, that during this whole period, of near two centuries and a half, there appeared not one historian of eminence sufficient to preserve his name from oblivion.

  Julius Cæsar himself is one of the most eminent writers of the age in which he lived. His commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars are written with a purity, precision, and perspicuity, which command approbation. They are elegant without affectation, and beautiful without ornament. Of the two books which he composed on Analogy, and those under the title of Anti Cato, scarcely any fragment is preserved; but we may be assured of the justness of the observations on language, which were made by an author so much distinguished by the excellence of his own compositions. His poem entitled The Journey, which was probably an entertaining narrative, is likewise totally lost.

  The most illustrious prose writer of this or any other age is M. Tullius Cicero; and as his life is copiously related in biographical works, it will be sufficient to mention his writings. From his earliest years, he applied himself with unremitting assiduity to the cultivation of literature, and, whilst he was yet a boy, wrote a poem, called Glaucus Pontius, which was extant in Plutarch’s time. Amongst his juvenile productions was a translation into Latin verse, of Aratus on the Phænomena of the Heavens; of which many fragments are still extant. He also published a poem of the heroic kind, in honour of his countryman C. Marius, who was born at Arpinum, the birth-place of Cicero. This production was greatly admired by Atticus; and old Scævola was so much pleased with it, that in an epigram written on the subject, he declares that it would live as long as the Roman name and learning subsisted. From a little specimen which remains of it, describing a memorable omen given to Marius from an oak at Arpinum, there is reason to believe that his poetical genius was scarcely inferior to his oratorical, had it been cultivated with equal industry. He published another poem called Limon, of which Donatus has preserved four lines in the life of Terence, in praise of the elegance and purity of that poet’s style. He composed in the Greek language, and in the style and manner of Isocrates, a Commentary or Memoirs of the Transactions of his Consulship. This he sent to Atticus, with a desire, if he approved it, to publish it in Athens and the cities of Greece. He sent a copy of it likewise to Posidonius of Rhodes, and requested of him to undertake the same subject in a more elegant and masterly manner. But the latter returned for answer, that, instead of being encouraged to write by the perusal of his tract, he was quite deterred from attempting it.

  Upon the plan of those Memoirs, he afterwards composed a Latin poem in three books, in which he carried down the history to the end of his exile, but did not publish it for several years, from motives of delicacy. The three books were severally inscribed to the three Muses; but of this work there now remain only a few fragments, scattered in different parts of his other writings. He published, about the same time, a collection of the principal speeches which he had made in his consulship, under the title of his Consular Orations. They consisted originally of twelve; but four are entirely lost, and some of the rest are imperfect. He now published also, in Latin verse, a translation of the Prognostics of Aratus, of which work no more than two or three small fragments now remain. A few years after, he put the last hand to his Dialogues upon the Character and Idea of the perfect Orator. This admirable work remains entire; a monument both of the astonishing industry and transcendent abilities of its author. At his Cuman villa, he next began a Treatise on Politics, or on the best State of a City, and the Duties of a Citizen. He calls it a great and a laborious work, yet worthy of his pains, if he could succeed in it. This likewise was written in the form of a dialogue, in which the speakers were Scipio, Lælius, Philus, Manilius, and other great persons in the former times of the Republic. It was comprised in six books, and survived him for several ages, though it is now unfortunately lost. From the fragments which remain, it appears to have been a masterly production, in which all the important questions in politics and morality were discussed with elegance and accuracy.

  Amidst all the anxiety for the interests of the Republic, which occupied the thoughts of this celebrated personage, he yet found leisure to write several philosophical tracts, which still subsist, to the gratification of the literary world. He composed a treatise on the Nature of the Gods, in three books, containing a comprehensive view of religion, faith, oaths, ceremonies, &c. In elucidating this important subject, he not only delivers the opinions of all the philosophers who had written anything concerning it, but weighs and compares attentively all the arguments with each other; forming upon the whole such a rational and perfect system of natural religion, as never before was presented to the consideration of mankind, and approaching nearly to revelation. He now likewise composed in two books, a discourse on Divination, in which he discusses at large all the arguments that may be advanced for and against the actual existence of such a species of knowledge. Like the preceding works, it is written in the form of dialogue, and in which the chief speaker is Lælius. The same period gave birth to his treatise on Old Age, called Cato Major; and to that on Friendship, written also in dialogue, and in which the chief speaker is Lælius. This book, considered merely as an essay, is one of the most entertaining productions of ancient times; but, beheld as a picture drawn from life, exhibiting the real characters and sentiments of men of the first distinction for virtue and wisdom in the Roman Republic, it becomes doubly interesting to every reader of observation and taste. Cicero now also wrote his discourse on Fate, which was the subject of a conversation with Hirtius, in his villa near Puteoli; and he executed about the same time a translation of Plato’s celebrated Dialogue, called Timæus, on the nature and origin of the universe. He was employing himself also on a history of his own times, or rather of his own conduct; full of free and severe reflections on those who had abused their power to the oppression of the Republic. Dion Cassius says, that he delivered this book sealed up to his son, with strict orders not to read or publish it till after his death; but from this time he never saw his son, and it is probable that he left the work unfinished. Afterwards, however, some copies of it were circulated; from which his commentator, Asconius, has quoted several particulars.

  During a voyage which he undertook to Sicily, he wrote his treatise on Topics, or the Art of finding Arguments on any Question. This was an abstract from Aristotle’s treatise on the same subject; and though he had neither Aristotle nor any other book to assist him, he drew it up from his memory, and finished it as he sailed along the coast of Calabria. The last work composed by Cicero appears to have been his Offices, written for the use of his son, to whom it is addressed. This treatise contains a system of moral conduct, founded upon the noblest principles of human action, and recommended by arguments drawn from the purest sources of philosophy.

  Such are the literary productions of this extraordinary man, whose comprehensive understanding enabled him to conduct with superior ability the most abstruse disquisitions into moral and metaphysical science. Born in an age posterior to Socrates and Plato, he could not anticipate the principles inculcated by those divine philosophers, but he is justly entitled to the praise, not only of having prosecuted with unerring judgment the steps which they trod before him, but of carrying his researches to greater extent into the most difficult regions of philosophy. This too he had the merit to perform, neither in the station of a private citizen, nor in the leisure of academic retirement, but in the bustle of public life, amidst the almost constant exertions of the bar, the employment of the magistrate, the duty of the senator, and the incessant cares of the statesman; through a period likewise chequered with domestic afflictions and fatal commotions in the Republic. As a philosopher, his mind appears to have been clear, capacious, penetrating, and insatiable of knowledge. As a writer, he was endowed with every talent that could captivate either the judgment or taste. His researches were continually employed on subjects of the greatest utility to mankind, and those often such as extended beyond the narrow bounds of temporal existence. The being of a God, the immortality of the soul, a future state of rewards and punishments, and the eternal distinction of good and evil; these were in general the great objects of his philosophical enquiries, and he has placed them in a more convincing point of view than they ever were before exhibited to the pagan world. The variety and force of the arguments which he advances, the splendour of his diction, and the zeal with which he endeavours to excite the love and admiration of virtue, all conspire to place his character, as a philosophical writer, including likewise his incomparable eloquence, on the summit of human celebrity.

  The form of dialogue, so much used by Cicero, he doubtless adopted in imitation of Plato, who probably took the hint of it from the colloquial method of instruction practised by Socrates. In the early stage of philosophical enquiry, this mode of composition was well adapted, if not to the discovery, at least to the confirmation of moral truth; especially as the practice was then not uncommon, for speculative men to converse together on important subjects, for mutual information. In treating of any subject respecting which the different sects of philosophers differed from each other in point of sentiment, no kind of composition could be more happily suited than dialogue, as it gave alternately full scope to the arguments of the various disputants. It required, however, that the writer should exert his understanding with equal impartiality and acuteness on the different sides of the question; as otherwise he might betray a cause under the appearance of defending it. In all the dialogues of Cicero, he manages the arguments of the several disputants in a manner not only the most fair and interesting, but also such as leads to the most probable and rational conclusion.

  After enumerating the various tracts composed and published by Cicero, we have now to mention his Letters, which, though not written for publication, deserve to be ranked among the most interesting remains of Roman literature. The number of such as are addressed to different correspondents is considerable, but those to Atticus alone, his confidential friend, amount to upwards of four hundred; among which are many of great length. They are all written in the genuine spirit of the most approved epistolary composition; uniting familiarity with elevation, and ease with elegance. They display in a beautiful light the author’s character in the social relations of life; as a warm friend, a zealous patron, a tender husband, an affectionate brother, an indulgent father, and a kind master. Beholding them in a more extensive view, they exhibit an ardent love of liberty and the constitution of his country: they discover a mind strongly actuated with the principles of virtue and reason; and while they abound in sentiments the most judicious and philosophical, they are occasionally blended with the charms of wit, and agreeable effusions of pleasantry. What is likewise no small addition to their merit, they contain much interesting description of private life, with a variety of information relative to public transactions and characters of that age. It appears from Cicero’s correspondence, that there was at that time such a number of illustrious Romans, as never before existed in any one period of the Republic. If ever, therefore, the authority of men the most respectable for virtue, rank, and abilities, could have availed to overawe the first attempts at a violation of public liberty, it must have been at this period; for the dignity of the Roman senate was now in the zenith of its splendour.

  Cicero has been accused of excessive vanity, and of arrogating to himself an invidious superiority, from his extraordinary talents: but whoever peruses his letters to Atticus, must readily acknowledge, that this imputation appears to be destitute of truth. In those excellent productions, though he adduces the strongest arguments for and against any object of consideration, that the most penetrating understanding can suggest, weighs them with each other, and draws from them the most rational conclusions, he yet discovers such a diffidence in his own opinion, that he resigns himself implicitly to the judgment and direction of his friend; a modesty not very compatible with the disposition of the arrogant, who are commonly tenacious of their own opinion, particularly in what relates to any decision of the understanding.

  It is difficult to say, whether Cicero appears in his letters more great or amiable: but that he was regarded by his contemporaries in both these lights, and that too in the highest degree, is sufficiently evident. We may thence infer, that the great poets in the subsequent age must have done violence to their own liberality and discernment, when, in compliment to Augustus, whose sensibility would have been wounded by the praises of Cicero, and even by the mention of his name, they have so industriously avoided the subject, as not to afford the most distant intimation that this immortal orator and philosopher had ever existed. Livy however, there is reason to think, did some justice to his memory: but it was not until the race of the Cæsars had become extinct, that he received the free and unanimous applause of impartial posterity. Such was the admiration which Quintilian entertained of his writings, that he considered the circumstance or being delighted with them, as an indubitable proof of judgment and taste in literature. Ille se profecisse sciat, cui Cicero valde placebit.1

  In this period is likewise to be placed M. Terentius Varro, the celebrated Roman grammarian, and the Nestor of ancient learning. The first mention made of him is, that he was lieutenant to Pompey in his piratical wars, and obtained in that service a nava, crown. In the civil wars he joined the side of the Republic, and was taken by Cæsar; by whom he was likewise proscribed, but obtained a remission of the sentence. Of all the ancients, he has acquired the greatest fame for his extensive erudition; and we may add, that he displayed the same industry in communicating, as he had done in collecting it. His works originally amounted to no less than five hundred volumes, which have all perished, except a treatise De Lingua Latina and one De Re Rustica. Of the former of these, which is addressed to Cicero, three books at the beginning are also lost. It appears from the introduction of the fourth book, that they all related to etymology. The first contained such observations as might be made against it; the second, such as might be made in its favour; and the third, observations upon it. He next proceeds to investigate the origin or Latin words. In the fourth book, he traces those which relate to place, in the fifth, those connected with the idea of time; and in the sixth, the origin of both these classes, as they appear in the writings of the poets. The seventh book is employed on declension; in which the author enters upon a minute and extensive enquiry, comprehending a variety of acute and profound observations on the formation of Latin nouns, and their respective natural declinations from the nominative case. In the eighth, he examines the nature and limits of usage and analogy in language; and in the ninth and last book on the subject, takes a general view of what is the reverse of analogy, viz. anomaly. The precision and perspicuity which Varro displays in this work merit the highest encomiums, and justify the character given him in his own time, of being the most learned of the Latin grammarians. To the loss of the first three books, are to be added several chasms in the others; but fortunately they happen in such places as not to affect the coherency of the author’s doctrine, though they interrupt the illustration of it. It is observable that this great grammarian makes use of quom for quum, heis for his, and generally queis for quibus. This practice having become rather obsolete at the time in which he wrote, we must impute his continuance of it to his opinion of its propriety, upon its established principles of grammar, and not to any prejudice of education, or an affectation of singularity. As Varro makes no mention of Cæsar’s treatise on Analogy, and had commenced author long before him, it is probable that Cæsar’s production was of a much later date; and thence we may infer, that those two writers differed from each other, at least with respect to some particulars on that subject

  This author’s treatise De Re Rustica was undertaken at the desire of a friend, who, having purchased some lands, requested of Varro the favour of his instructions relative to farming, and the economy of a country life, in its various departments. Though Varro was at this time in his eightieth year, he writes with all the vivacity, though without the levity, of youth, and sets out with invoking, not the Muses, like Homer and Ennius, as he observes, but the twelve deities supposed to be chiefly concerned in the operations of agriculture. It appears from the account which he gives, that upwards of fifty Greek authors had treated of this subject in prose, besides Hesiod and Menecrates the Ephesian, who both wrote in verse; exclusive likewise of many Roman writers, and of Mago the Carthaginian, who wrote in the Punic language. Varro’s work is divided into three books, the first of which treats of agriculture; the second, of rearing of cattle; and the third, of feeding animals for the use of the table. In the last of these, we meet with a remarkable instance of the prevalence of habit and fashion over human sentiment, where the author delivers instructions relative to the best method of fattening rats.

  We find from Quintilian, that Varro likewise composed satires in various kinds of verse. It is impossible to behold the numerous fragments of this venerable author without feeling the strongest regret for the loss of that vast collection of information which he had compiled, and of judicious observations which he had made on a variety of subjects, during a life of eighty-eight years, almost entirely devoted to literature. The remark of St. Augustine is well founded, That it is astonishing how Varro, who read such a number of books, could find time to compose so many volumes; and how he who composed so many volumes, could be at leisure to peruse such a variety of books, and to gain so much literary information.

  Catullus is said to have been born at Verona, of respectable parents; his father and himself being in the habit of intimacy with Julius Cæsar. He was brought to Rome by Mallius, to whom several of his epigrams are addressed. The gentleness of his manners, and his application to study, we are told, recommended him to general esteem; and he had the good fortune to obtain the patronage of Cicero. When he came to be known as a poet, all these circumstances would naturally contribute to increase his reputation for ingenuity; and accordingly we find his genius applauded by several of his contemporaries. It appears that his works are not transmitted entire to posterity; but there remain sufficient specimens by which we may be enabled to appreciate his poetical talents.

  Quintilian, and Diomed the grammarian, have ranked Catullus amongst the iambic writers, while others have placed him amongst the lyric. He has properly a claim to each of these stations; but his versification being chiefly iambic, the former of the arrangements seems to be the most suitable. The principal merit of Catullus’s Iambics consists in a simplicity of thought and expression. The thoughts, however, are often frivolous, and, what is yet more reprehensible, the author gives way to gross obscenity; in vindication of which, he produces the following couplet, declaring that a good poet ought to be chaste in his own person, but that his verses need not be so.

  • Nam castum esse decet pium poëtam
  • Ipsum: versiculos nihil necesse est.

  This sentiment has been frequently cited by those who were inclined to follow the example of Catullus; but if such a practice be in any case admissible, it is only where the poet personates a profligate character; and the instances in which it is adopted by Catullus are not of that description. It had perhaps been a better apology, to have pleaded the manners of the times; for even Horace, who wrote only a few years after, has suffered his compositions to be occasionally debased by the same kind of blemish.

  Much has been said of this poet’s invective against Cæsar, which produced no other effect than an invitation to sup at the dictator’s house. It was indeed scarcely entitled to the honour of the smallest resentment. If any could be shewn, it must have been for the freedom used by the author, and not for any novelty in his lampoon. There are two poems on this subject, viz. the twenty-ninth and fifty-seventh, in each of which Cæsar is joined with Mamurra, a Roman knight, who had acquired great riches in the Gallic war. For the honour of Catullus’s gratitude, we should suppose that the latter is the one to which historians allude: but, as poetical compositions, they are equally unworthy of regard. The fifty seventh is nothing more than a broad repetition of the raillery, whether well or ill founded, with which Cæsar was attacked on various occasions, and even in the senate, after his return from Bithynia. Cæsar had been taunted with this subject for upwards of thirty years; and after so long a familiarity with reproach, his sensibility to the scandalous imputation must now have been much diminished, if not entirely extinguished. The other poem is partly in the same strain, but extended to greater length, by a mixture of common jocular ribaldry of the Roman soldiers, expressed nearly in the same terms which Cæsar’s legions, though strongly attached to his person, scrupled not to sport publicly in the streets of Rome, against their general, during the celebration of his triumph. In a word, it deserves to be regarded as an effusion of Saturnalian licentiousness, rather than of poetry. With respect to the Iambics of Catullus, we may observe in general, that the sarcasm is indebted for its force, not so much to ingenuity of sentiment, as to the indelicate nature of the subject, or coarseness of expression.

  The descriptive poems of Catullus are superior to the others, and discover a lively imagination. Amongst the best of his productions, is a translation of the celebrated ode of Sappho:

  • Ille mî par esse Deo videtur,
  • [Editor: illegible character] &c.

  This ode is executed both with spirit and elegance; it is, however, imperfect; and the last stanza seems to be spurious. Catullus’s epigrams are entitled to little praise, with regard either to sentiment or point; and on the whole, his merit, as a poet, appears to have been magnified beyond its real extent. He is said to have died about the thirtieth year of his age.

  Lucretius is the author of a celebrated poem, in six books, De Rerum Natura; a subject which had been treated many ages before by Empedocles, a philosopher and poet of Agrigentum. Lucretius was a zealous partizan of Democritus, and the sect of Epicurus, whose principles concerning the eternity of matter, the materiality of the soul, and the non-existence of a future state of rewards and punishments, he affects to maintain with a certainty equal to that of mathematical demonstration. Strongly prepossessed with the hypothetical doctrines of his master, and ignorant of the physical system of the universe, he endeavours to deduce from the phenomena of the material world conclusions not only unsupported by legitimate theory, but repugnant to the principles of the highest authority in metaphysical disquisition. But while we condemn his speculative notions as degrading to human nature, and subversive of the most important interests of mankind, we must admit that he has prosecuted his visionary hypothesis with uncommon ingenuity. Abstracting from it the rhapsodical nature of this production, and its obscurity in some parts, it has great merit as a poem. The style is elevated, and the versification in general harmonious. By the mixture of obsolete words, it possesses an air of solemnity well adapted to abstruse researches; at the same time that by the frequent resolution of diphthongs, it instils into the Latin the sonorous and melodious powers of the Greek language.

  While Lucretius was engaged in this work, he fell into a state of insanity, occasioned, as is supposed, by a philtre, or love-potion, given him by his wife Lucilia. The complaint, however, having lucid intervals, he employed them in the execution of his plan, and, soon after it was finished, laid violent hands upon himself, in the forty-third year of his age. This fatal termination of his life, which perhaps proceeded from insanity, was ascribed by his friends and admirers to his concern for the banishment of one Memmius, with whom he was intimately connected, and for the distracted state of the republic. It was, however, a catastrophe which the principles of Epicurus, equally erroneous and irreconcilable to resignation and fortitude, authorized in particular circumstances. Even Atticus, the celebrated correspondent of Cicero, a few years after this period, had recourse to the same desperate expedient, by refusing all sustenance, while he laboured under a lingering disease.

  It is said that Cicero revised the poem of Lucretius after the death of the author, and this circumstance is urged by the abettors of atheism, as a proof that the principles contained in the work had the sanction of his authority. But no inference in favour of Lucretius’s doctrine can justly be drawn from this circumstance. Cicero, though already sufficiently acquainted with the principles of the Epicurean sect, might not be averse to the perusal of a production, which collected and enforced them in a nervous strain of poetry; especially as the work was likely to prove interesting to his friend Atticus, and would perhaps afford subject for some letters or conversation between them. It can have been only with reference to composition that the poem was submitted to Cicero’s revisal: for had he been required to exercise his judgment upon its principles, he must undoubtedly have so much mutilated the work, as to destroy the coherency of the system. He might be gratified with the shew of elaborate research, and confident declamation, which it exhibited, but he must have utterly disapproved of the conclusions which the author endeavoured to establish. According to the best information, Lucretius died in the year from the building of Rome 701, when Pompey was the third time consul. Cicero lived several years beyond this period, and in the two last years of his life, he composed those valuable works which contain sentiments diametrically repugnant to the visionary system of Epicurus. The argument, therefore, drawn from Cicero’s revisal, so far from confirming the principle of Lucretius, affords the strongest tacit declaration against their validity; because a period sufficient for mature consideration had elapsed, before Cicero published his own admirable system of philosophy. The poem of Lucretius, nevertheless, has been regarded as the bulwark of atheism—of atheism, which, while it impiously arrogates the support of reason, both reason and nature disclaim.

  Many more writers flourished in this period, but their works have totally perished. Sallust was now engaged in historical productions; but as they were not yet completed, they will be noticed in the next division of the review.

  D. OCTAVIUS CÆSAR AUGUSTUS.

  I.That the family of the Octavii was of the first distinction in Velitræ,1 is rendered evident by many circumstances. For in the most frequented part of the town, there was, not long since, a street named the Octavian; and an altar was to be seen, consecrated to one Octavius, who being chosen general in a war with some neighbouring people, the enemy making a sudden attack, while he was sacrificing to Mars, he immediately snatched the entrails of the victim from off the fire, and offered them half raw upon the altar; after which, marching out to battle, he returned victorious. This incident gave rise to a law, by which it was enacted, that in all future times the entrails should be offered to Mars in the same manner; and the rest of the victim be carried to the Octavii.

  II. This family, as well as several in Rome, was admitted into the senate by Tarquinius Priscus, and soon afterwards placed by Servius Tullius among the patricians; but in process of time it transferred itself to the plebeian order, and, after the lapse of a long interval, was restored by Julius Cæsar to the rank of patricians. The first person of the family raised by the suffrages of the people to the magistracy, was Caius Rufus. He obtained the quæstorship, and had two sons, Cneius and Caius: from whom are descended the two branches of the Octavian family, which have had very different fortunes. For Cneius, and his descendants in uninterrupted succession, held all the highest offices of the state; whilst Caius and his posterity, whether from their circumstances or their choice, remained in the equestrian order until the father of Augustus. The great-grandfather of Augustus served as a military tribune in the second Punic war in Sicily, under the command of Æmilius Pappus. His grandfather contented himself with bearing the public offices of his own municipality, and grew old in the tranquil enjoyment of an ample patrimony. Such is the account given by different authors. Augustus himself, however, tells us nothing more than that he was descended of an equestrian family, both ancient and rich, of which his father was the first who obtained the rank of senator. Mark Antony upbraidingly tells him that his great-grandfather was a freedman of the territory of Thurium,1 and a rope-maker, and his grandfather a usurer. This is all the information I have any where met with, respecting the ancestors of Augustus by the father’s side.

  III. His father Caius Octavius was, from his earliest years, a person both of opulence and distinction: for which reason I am surprised at those who say that he was a money-dealer,2 and was employed in scattering bribes, and canvassing for the candidates at elections, in the Campus Martius. For being bred up in all the affluence of a great estate, he attained with ease to honourable posts, and discharged the duties of them with much distinction. After his prætorship, he obtained by lot the province of Macedonia; in his way to which he cut off some banditti, the relics of the armies of Spartacus and Catiline, who had possessed themselves of the territory of Thurium; having received from the senate an extraordinary commission for that purpose. In his government of the province, he conducted himself with equal justice and resolution; for he defeated the Bessians and Thracians in a great battle, and treated the allies of the republic in such a manner, that there are extant letters from M. Tullius Cicero, in which he advises and exhorts his brother Quintus, who then held the proconsulship of Asia with no great reputation, to imitate the example of his neighbour Octavius, in gaining the affections of the allies of Rome.

  IV. After quitting Macedonia, before he could declare himself a candidate for the consulship, he died suddenly, leaving behind him a daughter, the elder Octavia, by Ancharia; and another daughter, Octavia the younger, as well as Augustus, by Atia, who was the daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus, and Julia, sister to Caius Julius Cæsar. Balbus was, by the father’s side, of a family who were natives of Aricia,1 and many of whom had been in the senate. By the mother’s side he was nearly related to Pompey the Great; and after he had borne the office of prætor, was one of the twenty commissioners appointed by the Julian law to divide the land in Campania among the people. But Mark Antony, treating with contempt Augustus’s descent even by the mother’s side, says that his great grand-father was of African descent, and at one time kept a perfumer’s shop, and at another, a bake-house, in Aricia. And Cassius of Parma, in a letter, taxes Augustus with being the son not only of a baker, but a usurer. These are his words: “Thou art a lump of thy mother’s meal, which a money-changer of Nerulum taking from the newest bake-house of Aricia, kneaded into some shape, with his hands all discoloured by the fingering of money.”

  V. Augustus was born in the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Caius Antonius,2 upon the ninth of the calends of October [the 23rd September], a little before sunrise, in the quarter of the Palatine Hill,3 and the street called. The Ox-Heads,4 where now stands a chapel dedicated to him, and built a little after his death. For, as it is recorded in the proceedings of the senate, when Caius Lætorius, a young man of a patrician family, in pleading before the senators for a lighter sentence, upon his being convicted of adultery, alleged, besides his youth and quality, that he was the possessor, and as it were the guardian, of the ground which the Divine Augustus first touched upon his coming into the world; and entreated that he might find favour, for the sake of that deity, who was in a peculiar manner his; an act of the senate was passed, for the consecration of that part of his house in which Augustus was born.

  VI. His nursery is shewn to this day, in a villa belonging to the family, in the suburbs of Velitræ; being a very small place, and much like a pantry. An opinion prevails in the neighbourhood, that he was also born there. Into this place no person presumes to enter, unless upon necessity, and with great devotion, from a belief, for a long time prevalent, that such as rashly enter it are seized with great horror and consternation, which a short while since was confirmed by a remarkable incident. For when a new inhabitant of the house had, either by mere chance, or to try the truth of the report, taken up his lodging in that apartment, in the course of the night, a few hours afterwards, he was thrown out by some sudden violence, he knew not how, and was found in a state of stupefaction, with the coverlid of his bed, before the door of the chamber.

  VII. While he was yet an infant, the surname of Thurinus was given him, in memory of the birth-place of his family, or because, soon after he was born, his father Octavius had been successful against the fugitive slaves, in the country near Thurium. That he was surnamed Thurinus, I can affirm upon good foundation, for when a boy, I had a small bronze statue of him, with that name upon it in iron letters, nearly effaced by age, which I presented to the emperor,1 by whom it is now revered amongst the other tutelary deities in his chamber. He is also often called Thurinus contemptuously, by Mark Antony in his letters; to which he makes only this reply: “I am surprised that my former name should be made a subject of reproach.” He afterwards assumed the name of Caius Cæsar, and then of Augustus; the former in compliance with the will of his great-uncle, and the latter upon a motion of Munatius Plancus in the senate. For when some proposed to confer upon him the name of Romulus, as being, in a manner, a second founder of the city, it was resolved that he should rather be called Augustus, a surname not only new, but of more dignity, because places devoted to religion, and those in which anything is consecrated by augury, are denominated august, either from the word auctus, signifying augmentation, or ab avium gestu, gustuve, from the flight and feeding of birds; as appears from this verse of Ennius:

  When glorious Rome by august augury was built.1

  VIII. He lost his father when he was only four years of age; and, in his twelfth year, pronounced a funeral oration in praise of his grand-mother Julia. Four years afterwards, having assumed the robe of manhood, he was honoured with several military rewards by Cæsar in his African triumph, although he took no part in the war, on account of his youth. Upon his uncle’s expedition to Spain against the sons of Pompey, he was followed by his nephew, although he was scarcely recovered from a dangerous sickness; and after being ship-wrecked at sea, and travelling with very few attendants through roads that were infested with the enemy, he at last came up with him. This activity gave great satisfaction to his uncle, who soon conceived an increasing affection for him, on account of such indications of character. After the subjugation of Spain, while Cæsar was meditating an expedition against the Dacians and Parthians, he was sent before him to Apollonia, where he applied himself to his studies; until receiving intelligence that his uncle was murdered, and that he was appointed his heir, he hesitated for some time whether he should call to his aid the legions stationed in the neighbourhood; but he abandoned the design as rash and premature. However, returning to Rome, he took possession of his inheritance, although his mother was apprehensive that such a measure might be attended with danger, and his step-father, Marcius Philippus, a man of consular rank, very earnestly dissuaded him from it. From this time, collecting together a strong military force, he first held the government in conjunction with Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, then with Antony only, for nearly twelve years, and at last in his own hands during a period of four and forty.

  IX. Having thus given a very short summary of his life, I shall prosecute the several parts of it, not in order of time, but arranging his acts into distinct classes, for the sake of perspicuity. He was engaged in five civil wars, namely, those of Modena, Philippi, Perugia, Sicily, and Actium; the first and last of which were against Antony, and the second against Brutus and Cassius; the third against Lucius Antonius, the triumvir’s brother, and the fourth against Sextus Pompeius, the son of Cneius Pompeius.

  X. The motive which gave rise to all these wars was the opinion he entertained that both his honour and interest were concerned in revenging the murder of his uncle, and maintaining the state of affairs he had established. Immediately after his return from Apollonia, he formed the design of taking forcible and unexpected measures against Brutus and Cassius; but they having foreseen the danger and made their escape, he resolved to proceed against them by an appeal to the laws in their absence, and impeach them for the murder. In the mean time, those whose province it was to prepare the sports in honour of Cæsar’s last victory in the civil war, not daring to do it, he undertook it himself. And that he might carry into effect his other designs with greater authority, he declared himself a candidate in the room of a tribune of the people who happened to die at that time, although he was of a patrician family, and had not yet been in the senate. But the consul, Mark Antony, from whom he had expected the greatest assistance, opposing him in his suit, and even refusing to do him so much as common justice, unless gratified with a large bribe, he went over to the party of the nobles, to whom he perceived Sylla to be odious, chiefly for endeavouring to drive Decius Brutus, whom he besieged in the town of Modena, out of the province, which had been given him by Cæsar, and confirmed to him by the senate. At the instigation of persons about him, he engaged some ruffians to murder his antagonist; but the plot being discovered, and dreading a similar attempt upon himself, he gained over Cæsar’s veteran soldiers, by distributing among them all the money he could collect. Being now commissioned by the senate to command the troops he had gathered, with the rank of prætor, and in conjunction with Hirtius and Pansa, who had accepted the consulship, to carry assistance to Decius Brutus, he put an end to the war by two battles in three months. Antony writes, that in the former of these he ran away, and two days afterwards made his appearance without his general’s cloak and his horse. In the last battle, however, it is certain that he performed the part not only of a general, but a soldier; for, in the heat of the battle, when the standard-bearer of his legion was severely wounded, he took the eagle upon his shoulders, and carried it a long time.

  XI. In this war,1 Hirtius being slain in battle, and Pansa dying a short time afterwards of a wound, a report was circulated that they both were killed through his means, in order that, when Antony fled, the republic having lost its consuls, he might have the victorious armies entirely at his own command. The death of Pansa was so fully believed to have been caused by undue means, that Glyco, his surgeon, was placed in custody, on a suspicion of having poisoned his wound. And to this, Aquilius Niger adds, that he killed Hirtius, the other consul, in the confusion of the battle, with his own hands.

  XII. But upon intelligence that Antony, after his defeat, had been received by Marcus Lepidus, and that the rest of the generals and armies had all declared for the senate, he, without any hesitation, deserted from the party of the nobles: alleging as an excuse for his conduct, the actions and sayings of several amongst them; for some said, “he was a mere boy,” and others threw out, “that he ought to be promoted to honours, and cut off,” to avoid the making any suitable acknowledgment either to him or the veteran legions. And the more to testify his regret for having before attached himself to the other faction, he fined the Nursini in a large sum of money, which they were unable to pay, and then expelled them from the town, for having inscribed upon a monument, erected at the public charge to their countrymen who were slain in the battle of Modena, “That they fell in the cause of liberty.”

  XIII. Having entered into a confederacy with Antony and Lepidus, he brought the war at Philippi to an end in two battles, although he was at that time weak, and suffering from sickness.2 In the first battle he was driven from his camp, and with some difficulty made his escape to the wing of the army commanded by Antony. And now, intoxicated with success, he sent the head of Brutus1 to be cast at the foot of Cæsar’s statue, and treated the most illustrious of the prisoners not only with cruelty, but with abusive language: insomuch that he is said to have answered one of them who humbly intreated that at least he might not remain unburied, “That will be in the power of the birds.” Two others, father and son, who begged for their lives, he ordered to cast lots which of them should live, or settle it between themselves by the sword; and was a spectator of both their deaths: for the father offering his life to save his son, and being accordingly executed, the son likewise killed himself upon the spot. On this account, the rest of the prisoners, and amongst them Marcus Favonius, Cato’s rival, being led up in fetters, after they had saluted Antony, the general, with much respect, reviled Octavius in the foulest language. After this victory, dividing between them the offices of the state, Mark Antony2 undertook to restore order in the east, while Cæsar conducted the veteran soldiers back to Italy, and settled them in colonies on the lands belonging to the municipalities. But he had the misfortune to please neither the soldiers nor the owners of the lands; one party complaining of the injustice done them, in being violently ejected from their possessions, and the other, that they were not rewarded according to their merit.3

  XIV. At this time he obliged Lucius Antony, who, presuming upon his own authority as consul, and his brother’s power, was raising new commotions, to fly to Perugia, and forced him, by famine, to surrender at last, although not without having been exposed to great hazards, both before the war and during its continuance. For a common soldier having got into the seats of the equestrian order in the theatre, at the public spectacles, Cæsar ordered him to be removed by an officer; and a rumour being thence spread by his enemies, that he had put the man to death by torture, the soldiers flocked together so much enraged, that he narrowly escaped with his life. The only thing that saved him, was the sudden appearance of the man, safe and sound, no violence having been offered him. And whilst he was sacrificing under the walls of Perugia, he nearly fell into the hands of a body of gladiators, who sallied out of the town.

  XV. After the taking of Perugia,1 he sentenced a great number of the prisoners to death, making only one reply to all who implored pardon, or endeavoured to excuse themselves, “You must die.” Some authors write, that three hundred of the two orders, selected from the rest, were slaughtered, like victims, before an altar raised to Julius Cæsar, upon the ides of March [15th April].2 Nay, there are some who relate, that he entered upon the war with no other view, than that his secret enemies, and those whom fear more than affection kept quiet, might be detected, by declaring themselves, now they had an opportunity, with Lucius Antony at their head; and that having defeated them, and confiscated their estates, he might be enabled to fulfil his promises to the veteran soldiers.

  XVI. He soon commenced the Sicilian war, but it was protracted by various delays during a long period;3 at one time for the purpose of repairing his fleets, which he lost twice by storm, even in the summer; at another, while patching up a peace, to which he was forced by the clamours of the people, in consequence of a famine occasioned by Pompey’s cutting off the supply of corn by sea. But at last, having built a new fleet, and obtained twenty thousand manumitted slaves,4 who were given him for the oar, he formed the Julian harbour at Baiæ, by letting the sea into the Lucrine and Averman lakes; and having exercised his forces there during the whole winter, he defeated Pompey betwixt Mylæ and Naulochus; although just as the engagement commenced, he suddenly fell into such a profound sleep, that his friends were obliged to wake him to give the signal. This, I suppose, gave occasion for Antony’s reproach: “You were not able to take a clear view of the fleet, when drawn up in line of battle, but lay stupidly upon your back, gazing at the sky; nor did you get up and let your men see you, until Marcus Agrippa had forced the enemies’ ships to sheer off.” Others imputed to him both a saying and an action which were indefensible; for, upon the loss of his fleets by storm, he is reported to have said: “I will conquer in spite of Neptune;” and at the next Circensian games, he would not suffer the statue of that God to be carried in procession as usual. Indeed he scarcely ever ran more or greater risks in any of his wars than in this. Having transported part of his army to Sicily, and being on his return for the rest, he was unexpectedly attacked by Demochares and Apollophanes, Pompey’s admirals, from whom he escaped with great difficulty, and with one ship only. Likewise, as he was travelling on foot through the Locrian territory to Rhegium, seeing two of Pompey’s vessels passing by that coast, and supposing them to be his own, he went down to the shore, and was very nearly taken prisoner. On this occasion, as he was making his escape by some bye-ways, a slave belonging to Æmilius Paulus, who accompanied him, owing him a grudge for the proscription of Paulus, the father of Æmilius, and thinking he had now an opportunity of revenging it, attempted to assassinate him. After the defeat of Pompey, one of his colleagues,1 Marcus Lepidus, whom he had summoned to his aid from Africa, affecting great superiority, because he was at the head of twenty legions, and claiming for himself the principal management of affairs in a threatening manner, he divested him of his command, but, upon his humble submission, granted him his life, but banished him for life to Circeii.

  XVII. The alliance between him and Antony, which had always been precarious, often interrupted, and ill cemented by repeated reconciliations, he at last entirely dissolved.2 And to make it known to the world how far Antony had degenerated from patriotic feelings, he caused a will of his, which had been left at Rome, and in which he had nominated Cleopatra’s children, amongst others, as his heirs, to be opened and read in an assembly of the people. Yet upon his being declared an enemy, he sent to him all his relations and friends, among whom were Caius Sosius and Titus Domitius, at that time consuls. He likewise spoke favourably in public of the people of Bologna, for joining in the association with the rest of Italy to support his cause, because they had, in former times, been under the protection of the family of the Antonii. And not long afterwards he defeated him in a naval engagement near Actium, which was prolonged to so late an hour, that, after the victory, he was obliged to sleep on board his ship. From Actium he went to the isle of Samos to winter; but being alarmed with the accounts of a mutiny amongst the soldiers he had selected from the main body of his army sent to Brundisium after the victory, who insisted on their being rewarded for their service and discharged, he returned to Italy. In his passage thither, he encountered two violent storms, the first between the promontories of Peloponnesus and Ætolia, and the other about the Ceraunian mountains: in both which a part of his Liburnian squadron was sunk, the spars and rigging of his own ship carried away, and the rudder broken in pieces. He remained only twenty-seven days at Brundisium, until the demands of the soldiers were settled, and then went, by way of Asia and Syria, to Egypt, where laying siege to Alexandria, whither Antony had fled with Cleopatra, he made himself master of it in a short time. He drove Antony to kill himself, after he had used every effort to obtain conditions of peace, and he saw his corpse.1 Cleopatra he anxiously wished to save for his triumph; and when she was supposed to have been bit to death by an asp, he sent for the Psylli2 to endeavour to suck out the poison. He allowed them to be buried together in the same grave, and ordered a mausoleum, begun by themselves, to be completed. The eldest of Antony’s two sons by Fulvia he commanded to be taken by force from the statue of Julius Cæsar, to which he had fled, after many fruitless supplications for his life, and put him to death. The same fate attended Cæsario, Cleopatra’s son by Cæsar, as he pretended, who had fled for his life, but was retaken. The children which Antony had by Cleopatra he saved, and brought up and cherished in a manner suitable to their rank, just as if they had been his own relations.

  XVIII. At this time he had a desire to see the sarcophagus and body of Alexander the Great, which, for that purpose, were taken out of the cell in which they rested:1 and after viewing them for some time, he paid honours to the memory of that prince, by offering a golden crown, and scattering flowers upon the body.2 Being asked if he wished to see the tombs of the Ptolemies also; he replied, “I wish to see a king, not dead men.”3 He reduced Egypt into the form of a province; and to render it more fertile, and more capable of supplying Rome with corn, he employed his army to scour the canals, into which the Nile, upon its rise, discharges itself; but which during a long series of years had become nearly choked up with mud. To perpetuate the glory of his victory at Actium, he built the city of Nicopolis on that part of the coast, and established games to be celebrated there every five years; enlarging likewise an old temple of Apollo, he ornamented with naval crophies4 the spot on which he had pitched his camp, and consecrated it to Neptune and Mars.

  XIX. He afterwards1 quashed several tumults and insurrections, as well as several conspiracies against his life, which were discovered, by the confession of accomplices, before they were ripe for execution; and others subsequently. Such were those of the younger Lepidus, of Varro Muræna, and Fannius Cæpio; then that of Marcus Egnatius, afterwards that of Plautius Rufus, and of Lucius Paulus, his grand-daughter’s husband; and besides these, another of Lucius Audasius, an old feeble man, who was under prosecution for forgery; as also of Asinius Epicadus, a Parthinian mongrel,2 and at last that of Telephus, a lady’s prompter;3 for he was in danger of his life from the plots and conspiracies of some of the lowest of the people against him. Audasius and Epicadus had formed the design of carrying off to the armies his daughter Julia, and his grandson Agrippa, from the islands in which they were confined. Telephus, wildly dreaming that the government was destined to him by the fates, proposed to fall both upon Octavius and the senate. Nay, once, a soldier’s servant belonging to the army in Illyricum, having passed the porters unobserved, was found in the night-time standing before his chamber-door, armed with a hunting-dagger. Whether the person was really disordered in the head, or only counterfeited madness, is uncertain; for no confession was obtained from him by torture.

  XX. He conducted in person only two foreign wars; the Dalmatian, whilst he was yet but a youth; and, after Antony’s final defeat, the Cantabrian. He was wounded in the former of these wars; in one battle he received a contusion in the right knee from a stone—and in another, he was much hurt in one leg and both arms, by the fall of a bridge.1 His other wars he carried on by his lieutenants; but occasionally visited the army, in some of the wars of Pannonia and Germany, or remained at no great distance, proceeding from Rome as far as Ravenna, Milan, or Aquileia.

  XXI. He conquered, however, partly in person, and partly by his lieutenants, Cantabria,2 Aquitania and Pannonia,3 Dalmatia, with all Illyricum and Rhætia,4 besides the two Alpine nations, the Vindelici and the Salassii.5 He also checked the incursions of the Dacians, by cutting off three of their generals with vast armies, and drove the Germans beyond the river Elbe; removing two other tribes who submitted, the Ubii and Sicambri, into Gaul, and settling them in the country bordering on the Rhine. Other nations also, which broke into revolt, he reduced to submission. But he never made war upon any nation without just and necessary cause; and was so far from being ambitious either to extend the empire, or advance his own military glory, that he obliged the chiefs of some barbarous tribes to swear in the temple of Mars the Avenger,6 that they would faithfully observe their engagements, and not violate the peace which they had implored. Of some he demanded a new description of hostages, their women, having found from experience that they cared little for their men when given as hostages; but he always afforded them the means of getting back their hostages whenever they wished it. Even those who engaged most frequently and with the greatest perfidy in their rebellion, he never punished more severely than by selling their captives, on the terms of their not serving in any neighbouring country, nor being released from their slavery before the expiration of thirty years. By the character which he thus acquired, for virtue and moderation, he induced even the Indians and Scythians, nations before known to the Romans by report only, to solicit his friendship, and that of the Roman people, by ambassadors. The Parthians readily allowed his claim to Armenia; restoring at his demand, the standards which they had taken from Marcus Crassus and Mark Antony, and offering him hostages besides. Afterwards, when a contest arose between several pretenders to the crown of that kingdom, they refused to acknowledge any one who was not chosen by him.

  XXII. The temple of Janus Quirinus, which had been shut twice only, from the era of the building of the city to his own time, he closed thrice in a much shorter period, having established universal peace both by sea and land. He twice entered the city with the honours of an Ovation,1 namely, after the war of Philippi, and again after that of Sicily. He had also three curule triumphs2 for his several victories in Dalmatia, at Actium, and Alexandria; each of which lasted three days.

  XXIII. In all his wars, he never received any signal or ignominious defeat, except twice in Germany, under his lieutenants Lollius and Varus. The former indeed had in it more of dishonour than disaster; but that of Varus threatened the security of the empire itself; three legions, with the commander, his lieutenants, and all the auxiliaries, being cut off. Upon receiving intelligence of this disaster, he gave orders for keeping a strict watch over the city, to prevent any public disturbance, and prolonged the appointments of the prefects in the provinces, that the allies might be kept in order by experience of persons to whom they were used. He made a vow to celebrate the great games in honour of Jupiter, Optimus, Maximus, “if he would be pleased to restore the state to more prosperous circumstances.” This had formerly been resorted to in the Cimbrian and Marsian wars. In short, we are informed that he was in such consternation at this event, that he let the hair of his head and beard grow for several months, and sometimes knocked his head against the door-posts, crying out, “O, Quintilius Varus! Give me back my legions!” And over after, he observed the anniversary of this calamity, as a day of sorrow and mourning.

  XXIV. In military affairs he made many alterations, introducing some practices entirely now, and reviving others, which had become obsolete. He maintained the strictest discipline among the troops; and would not allow even his lieutenants the liberty to visit their wives, except reluctantly, and in the winter season only. A Roman knight having cut off the thumbs of his two young sons, to render them incapable of serving in the wars, he exposed both him and his estate to public sale. But upon observing the farmers of the revenue very greedy for the purchase, he assigned him to a freedman of his own, that he might send him into the country, and suffer him to retain his freedom. The tenth legion becoming mutinous, he disbanded it with ignominy; and did the same by some others which petulantly demanded their discharge; withholding from them the rewards usually bestowed on those who had served their stated time in the wars. The cohorts which yielded their ground in time of action, he decimated, and fed with barley. Centurions, as well as common sentinels, who deserted their posts when on guard, he punished with death. For other misdemeanors he inflicted upon them various kinds of disgrace; such as obliging them to stand all day before the prætorium, sometimes in their tunics only, and without their belts, sometimes to carry poles ten feet long, or sods of turf.

  XXV. After the conclusion of the civil wars, he never, in any of his military harangues, or proclamations, addressed them by the title of “Fellow-soldiers,” but as “Soldiers” only. Nor would he suffer them to be otherwise called by his sons or step-sons, when they were in command: judging the former epithet to convey the idea of a degree of condescension inconsistent with military discipline, the maintenance of order, and his own majesty, and that of his house. Unless at Rome, in case of incendiary fires, or under the apprehension of public disturbances during a scarcity of provisions, he never employed in his army slaves who had been made freedmen, except upon two occasions; on one, for the security of the colonies bordering upon Illyricum, and on the other, to guard the banks of the river Rhine. Although he obliged persons of fortune, both male and female, to give up their slaves, and they received their manumission at once, yet he kept them together under their own standard, unmixed with soldiers who were better born, and armed likewise after different fashion. Military rewards, such as trappings, collars, and other decorations of gold and silver, he distributed more readily than camp or mural crowns, which were reckoned more honourable than the former. These he bestowed sparingly, without partiality, and frequently even on common soldiers. He presented M. Agrippa, after the naval engagement in the Sicilian war, with a sea-green banner. Those who shared in the honours of a triumph, although they had attended him in his expeditions, and taken part in his victories, he judged it improper to distinguish by the usual rewards for service, because they had a right themselves to grant such rewards to whom they pleased. He thought nothing more derogatory to the character of an accomplished general than precipitancy and rashness; on which account he had frequently in his mouth those proverbs:

  • Σπεῦδε βραδέως,
  • Hasten slowly,

  And

  • Ἀσϕαλὴς γὰρ ἐστ’ ἀμείνων, ἠ ϑράσυς στρατηλάτης.
  • The cautious captain’s better than the bold.

  And “That is done fast enough, which is done well enough.”

  He was wont to say also, that “a battle or a war ought never to be undertaken, unless the prospect of gain overbalanced the fear of loss. For,” said he, “men who pursue small advantages with no small hazard, resemble those who fish with a golden hook, the loss of which, if the line should happen to break, could never be compensated by all the fish they might take.”

  XXVI. He was advanced to public offices before the age at which he was legally qualified for them; and to some, also, of a new kind, and for life. He seized the consulship in the twentieth year of his age, quartering his legions in a threatening manner near the city, and sending deputies to demand it for him in the name of the army. When the senate demurred, a centurion, named Cornelius, who was at the head of the chief deputation, throwing back his cloak, and shewing the hilt of his sword, had the presumption to say in the senate-house, “This will make him consul, if ye will not.” His second consulship he filled nine years afterwards; his third, after the interval of only one year, and held the same office every year successively until the eleventh. From this period, although the consulship was frequently offered him, he always declined it, until, after a long interval, not less than seventeen years, he voluntarily stood for the twelfth, and two years after that, for a thirteenth; that he might successively introduce into the forum, on their entering public life, his two sons, Caius and Lucius, while he was invested with the highest office in the state. In his five consulships from the sixth to the eleventh, he continued in office throughout the year; but in the rest, during only nine, six, four, or three months, and in his second no more than a few hours. For having sat for a short time in the morning, upon the calends of January [1st January], in his curule chair,1 before the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, he abdicated the office, and substituted another in his room. Nor did he enter upon them all at Rome, but upon the fourth in Asia, the fifth in the Isle of Samos, and the eighth and ninth at Tarragona.2

  XXVII. During ten years he acted as one of the triumvirate for settling the commonwealth, in which office he for some time opposed his colleagues in their design of a proscription; but after it was begun, he prosecuted it with more determined rigour than either of them. For whilst they were often prevailed upon, by the interest and intercession of friends, to shew mercy, he alone strongly insisted that no one should be spared, and even proscribed Caius Toranius,3 his guardian, who had been formerly the colleague of his father Octavius in the edileship. Junius Saturnius adds this farther account of him: that when, after the proscription was over, Marcus Lepidus made an apology in the senate for their past proceedings, and gave them hopes of a more mild administration for the future, because they had now sufficiently crushed their enemies; he, on the other hand, declared that the only limit he had fixed to the proscription was, that he should be free to act as he pleased. Afterwards, however, repenting of his severity, he advanced T. Vinius Philopœmen to the equestrian rank, for having concealed his patron at the time he was proscribed. In this same office he incurred great odium upon many accounts. For as he was one day making an harangue, observing among the soldiers Pinarius, a Roman knight, admit some private citizens, and engaged in taking notes, he ordered him to be stabbed before his eyes, as a busy-body and a spy upon him. He so terrified with his menaces Tedius Afer, the consul elect,1 for having reflected upon some action of his, that he threw himself from a great height, and died on the spot. And when Quintus Gallius, the prætor, came to compliment him with a double tablet under his cloak, suspecting that it was a sword he had concealed, and yet not venturing to make a search, lest it should be found to be something else, he caused him to be dragged from his tribunal by centurions and soldiers, and tortured like a slave: and although he made no confession, ordered him to be put to death, after he had, with his own hands, plucked out his eyes. His own account of the matter, however, is, that Quintus Gallius sought a private conference with him, for the purpose of assassinating him; that he therefore put him in prison, but afterwards released him, and banished him the city; when he perished either in a storm at sea, or by falling into the hands of robbers.

  He accepted of the tribunitian power for life, but more than once chose a colleague in that office for two lustra2 successively. He also had the supervision of morality and observance of the laws, for life, but without the title of censor; yet he thrice took a census of the people, the first and third time with a colleague, but the second by himself.

  XXVIII. He twice entertained thoughts of restoring the republic;1 first, immediately after he had crushed Antony, remembering that he had often charged him with being the obstacle to its restoration. The second time was in consequence of a long illness, when he sent for the magistrates and the senate to his own house, and delivered them a particular account of the state of the empire. But reflecting at the same time that it would be both hazardous to himself to return to the condition of a private person, and might be dangerous to the public to have the government placed again under the control of the people, he resolved to keep it in his own hands, whether with the better event or intention, is hard to say. His good intentions he often affirmed in private discourse, and also published an edict, in which it was declared in the following terms: “May it be permitted me to have the happiness of establishing the commonwealth on a safe and sound basis, and thus enjoy the reward of which I am ambitious, that of being celebrated for moulding it into the form best adapted to present circumstances; so that, on my leaving the world, I may carry with me the hope that the foundations which I have laid for its future government, will stand firm and stable.”

  XXIX. The city, which was not built in a manner suitable to the grandeur of the empire, and was liable to inundations of the Tiber,2 as well as to fires, was so much improved under his administration, that he boasted, not without reason, that he “found it of brick, but left it of marble.”3 He also rendered it secure for the time to come against such disasters, as far as could be effected by human foresight. A great number of public buildings were erected by him, the most considerable of which were a forum,1 containing the temple of Mars the Avenger, the temple of Apollo on the Palatine hill, and the temple of Jupiter Tonans in the capitol. The reason of his building a new forum was the vast increase in the population, and the number of causes to be tried in the courts, for which, the two already existing not affording sufficient space, it was thought necessary to have a third. It was therefore opened for public use before the temple of Mars was completely finished; and a law was passed, that causes should be tried, and judges chosen by lot, in that place. The temple of Mars was built in fulfilment of a vow made during the war of Philippi, undertaken by him to avenge his father’s murder. He ordained that the senate should always assemble there when they met to deliberate respecting wars and triumphs; that thence should be despatched all those who were sent into the provinces in the command of armies; and that in it those who returned victorious from the wars, should lodge the trophies of their triumphs. He erected the temple of Apollo2 in that part of his house on the Palatine hill which had been struck with lightning, and which, on that account, the soothsayers declared the God to have chosen. He added porticos to it, with a library of Latin and Greek authors;3 and when advanced in years, used frequently there to hold the senate, and examine the rolls of the judges.

  He dedicated the temple to Apollo Tonans,1 in acknowledgment of his escape from a great danger in his Cantabrian expedition; when, as he was travelling in the night, his litter was struck by lightning, which killed the slave who carried a torch before him. He likewise constructed some public buildings in the name of others; for instance, his grandsons, his wife, and sister. Thus he built the portico and basilica of Lucius and Caius, and the porticos of Livia and Octavia,2 and the theatre of Marcellus.3 He also often exhorted other persons of rank to embellish the city by new buildings, or repairing and improving the old, according to their means. In consequence of this recommendation, many were raised; such as the temple of Hercules and the Muses, by Marcius Philippus; a temple of Diana by Lucius Cornificius; the Court of Freedom by Asinius Pollio; a temple of Saturn by Munatius Planeus; a theatre by Cornelius Balbus;4 an amphitheatre by Statilius Taurus; and several other noble edifices by Marcus Agrippa.5

  XXX. He divided the city into regions and districts, ordaining that the annual magistrates should take by lot the charge of the former; and that the latter should be superintended by wardens chosen out of the people of each neighbourhood. He appointed a nightly watch to be on their guard against accidents from fire; and, to prevent the frequent inundations, he widened and cleansed the bed of the Tiber, which had in the course of years been almost dammed up with rubbish, and the channel narrowed by the ruins of houses.1 To render the approaches to the city more commodious, he took upon himself the charge of repairing the Flaminian way as far as Ariminum,2 and distributed the repairs of the other roads amongst several persons who had obtained the honour of a triumph; to be defrayed out of the money arising from the spoils of war. Temples decayed by time, or destroyed by fire, he either repaired or rebuilt; and enriched them, as well as many others, with splendid offerings. On a single occasion, he deposited in the cell of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, sixteen thousand pounds of gold, with jewels and pearls to the amount of fifty millions of sesterces.

  XXXI. The office of Pontifex Maximus, of which he could not decently deprive Lepidus as long as he lived,1 he assumed as soon as he was dead. He then caused all prophetical books, both in Latin and Greek, the authors of which were either unknown, or of no great authority, to be brought in; and the whole collection, amounting to upwards of two thousand volumes, he committed to the flames, preserving only the Sibylline oracles; but not even those without a strict examination, to ascertain which were genuine. This being done, he deposited them in two gilt coffers, under the pedestal of the statue of the Palatine Apollo. He restored the calendar, which had been corrected by Julius Cæsar, but through negligence was again fallen into confusion,2 to its former regularity; and upon that occasion, called the month Sextilis,3 by his own name, August, rather than September, in which he was born; because in it he had obtained his first consulship, and all his most considerable victories.4 He increased the number, dignity, and revenues of the priests, and especially those of the Vestal Virgins. And when, upon the death of one of them, a new one was to be taken,5 and many persons made interest that their daughters’ names might be omitted in the lists for election, he replied with an oath, “If either of my own grand-daughters were old enough, I would have proposed her.”

  He likewise revived some old religious customs, which had become obsolete; as the augury of public health,6 the office of high priest of Jupiter, the religious solemnity of the Lupercalia, with the Secular, and Compitalian games. He prohibited young boys from running in the Lupercalia; and in respect of the Secular games, issued an order, that no young persons of either sex should appear at any public diversions in the night-time, unless in the company of some elderly relation. He ordered the household gods to be decked twice a year with spring and summer flowers,1 in the Compitalian festival.

  Next to the immortal gods, he paid the highest honours to the memory of those generals who had raised the Roman state from its low origin to the highest pitch of grandeur. He accordingly repaired or rebuilt the public edifices erected by them; preserving the former inscriptions, and placing statues of them all, with triumphal emblems, in both the porticos of his forum, issuing an edict on the occasion, in which he made the following declaration: “My design in so doing is, that the Roman people may require from me, and all succeeding princes, a conformity to those illustrious examples.” He likewise removed the statue of Pompey from the senate-house, in which Caius Cæsar had been killed, and placed it under a marble arch, fronting the palace attached to Pompey’s theatre.

  XXXII. He corrected many ill practices, which, to the detriment of the public, had either survived the licentious habits of the late civil wars, or else originated in the long peace. Bands of robbers shewed themselves openly, completely armed, under colour of self-defence; and in different parts of the country, travellers, freemen and slaves without distinction, were forcibly carried off, and kept to work in the houses of correction.2 Several associations were formed under the specious name of a new college, which banded together for the perpetration of all kinds of villany. The banditti he quelled by establishing posts of soldiers in suitable stations for the purpose; the houses of correction were subjected to a strict superintendence; all associations, those only excepted which were of ancient standing, and recognised by the laws, were dissolved. He burnt all the notes of those who had been a long time in arrear with the treasury, as being the principal source of vexatious suits and prosecutions. Places in the city claimed by the public, where the right was doubtful, he adjudged to the actual possessors. He struck out of the list of criminals the names of those over whom prosecutions had been long impending, where nothing further was intended by the informers than to gratify their own malice, by seeing their enemies humiliated; laying it down as a rule, that if any one chose to renew a prosecution, he should incur the risk of the punishment which he sought to inflict. And that crimes might not escape punishment, nor business be neglected by delay, he ordered the courts to sit during the thirty days which were spent in celebrating honorary games. To the three classes of judges then existing, he added a fourth, consisting of persons of inferior order, who were called Ducenarii, and decided all litigations about trifling sums. He chose judges from the age of thirty years and upwards; that is five years younger than had been usual before. And a great many declining the office, he was with much difficulty prevailed upon to allow each class of judges a twelve-month’s vacation in turn; and the courts to be shut during the months of November and December.1

  XXXIII. He was himself assiduous in his functions as a judge, and would sometimes prolong his sittings even into the night:2 if he were indisposed, his litter was placed before the tribunal, or he administered justice reclining on his couch at home; displaying always not only the greatest attention, but extreme lenity. To save a culprit, who evidently appeared guilty of parricide, from the extreme penalty of being sewn up in a sack, because none were punished in that manner but such as confessed the fact, he is said to have interrogated him thus: “Surely you did not kill your father, did you?” And when, in a trial of a cause about a forged will, all those who had signed it were liable to the penalty of the Cornelian law, he ordered that his colleagues on the tribunal should not only be furnished with the two tablets by which they decided, “guilty or not guilty,” but with a third likewise, ignoring the offence of those who should appear to have given their signatures through any deception or mistake. All appeals in causes between inhabitants of Rome, he assigned every year to the prætor of the city; and where provincials were concerned, to men of consular rank, to one of whom the business of each province was referred.

  XXXIV. Some laws he abrogated, and he made some new ones; such as the sumptuary law, that relating to adultery and the violation of chastity, the law against bribery in elections, and likewise that for the encouragement of marriage. Having been more severe in his reform of this law than the rest, he found the people utterly averse to submit to it, unless the penalties were abolished or mitigated, besides allowing an interval of three years after a wife’s death, and increasing the premiums on marriage. The equestrian order clamoured loudly, at a spectacle in the theatre, for its total repeal; whereupon he sent for the children of Germanicus, and shewed them partly sitting upon his own lap, and partly on their father’s; intimating by his looks and gestures, that they ought not to think it a grievance to follow the example of that young man. But finding that the force of the law was eluded, by marrying girls under the age of puberty, and by frequent change of wives, he limited the time for consummation after espousals, and imposed restrictions on divorce.

  XXXV. By two separate scrutinies he reduced to their former number and splendour the senate, which had been swamped by a disorderly crowd; for they were now more than a thousand and some of them very mean persons, who, after Cæsar’s death, had been chosen by dint of interest and bribery, so that they had the nickname of Orcini among the people.1 The first of these scrutinies was left to themselves, each senator naming another; but the last was conducted by himself and Agrippa. On this occasion he is believed to have taken his seat as he presided, with a coat of mail under his tunic, and a sword by his side, and with ten of the stoutest men of senatorial rank, who were his friends, standing round his chair. Cordus Cremutius2 relates that no senator was suffered to approach him, except singly, and after having his bosom searched [for secreted daggers]. Some he obliged to have the grace of declining the office; these he allowed to retain the privileges of wearing the distinguishing dress, occupying the seats at the solemn spectacles, and of feasting publicly, reserved to the senatorial order.3 That those who were chosen and approved of, might perform their functions under more solemn obligations, and with less inconvenience, he ordered that every senator, before he took his seat in the house, should pay his devotions, with an offering of frankincense and wine, at the altar of that God in whose temple the senate then assembled,4 and that their stated meetings should be only twice in the month, namely, on the calends and ides; and that in the months of September and October,5 a certain number only, chosen by lot, such as the law required to give validity to a decree, should be required to attend. For himself, he resolved to choose every six months a new council, with whom he might consult previously upon such affairs as he judged proper at any time to lay before the full senate. He also took the votes of the senators upon any subject of importance, not according to custom, nor in regular order, but as he pleased; that every one might hold himself ready to give his opinion, rather than a mere vote of assent.

  XXXVI. He also made several other alterations in the management of public affairs, among which were these following: that the acts of the senate should not be published;1 that the magistrates should not be sent into the provinces immediately after the expiration of their office; that the proconsuls should have a certain sum assigned them out of the treasury for mules and tents, which used before to be contracted for by the government with private persons; that the management of the treasury should be transferred from the city-quæstors to the prætors, or those who had already served in the latter office; and that the decemviri should call together the court of One hundred, which had been formerly summoned by those who had filled the office of quæstor.

  XXXVII. To augment the number of persons employed in the administration of the state, he devised several new offices; such as surveyors of the public buildings, of the roads, the aqueducts, and the bed of the Tiber; for the distribution of corn to the people; the præfecture of the city; a triumvirate for the election of the senators; and another for inspecting the several troops of the equestrian order, as often as it was necessary. He revived the office of censor,2 which had been long disused, and increased the number of prætors. He likewise required that whenever the consulship was conferred on him, he should have two colleagues instead of one; but his proposal was rejected, all the senators declaring by acclamation that he abated his high majesty quite enough in not filling the office alone, and consenting to share it with another.

  XXXVIII. He was unsparing in the reward of military merit, having granted to above thirty generals the honour of the greater triumph; besides which, he took care to have triumphal decorations voted by the senate for more than that number. That the sons of senators might become early acquainted with the administration of affairs, he permitted them, at the age when they took the garb of manhood,1 to assume also the distinction of the senatorian robe, with its broad border, and to be present at the debates in the senate-house. When they entered the military service, he not only gave them the rank of military tribunes in the legions, but likewise the command of the auxiliary horse. And that all might have an opportunity of acquiring military experience, he commonly joined two sons of senators in command of each troop of horse. He frequently reviewed the troops of the equestrian order, reviving the ancient custom of a cavalcade,2 which had been long laid aside. But he did not suffer any one to be obliged by an accuser to dismount while he passed in review, as had formerly been the practice. As for such as were infirm with age, or any way deformed, he allowed them to send their horses before them, coming on foot to answer to their names, when the muster roll was called over soon afterwards. He permitted those who had attained the age of thirty-five years, and desired not to keep their horse any longer, to have the privilege of giving it up.

  XXXIX. With the assistance of ten senators, he obliged each of the Roman knights to give an account of his life: in regard to those who fell under his displeasure, some were punished; others had a mark of infamy set against their names. The most part he only reprimanded, but not in the same terms. The mildest mode of reproof was by delivering them tablets,1 the contents of which, confined to themselves, they were to read on the spot. Some he disgraced for borrowing money at low interest, and letting it out again upon usurious profit.

  XL. In the election of tribunes of the people, if there was not a sufficient number of senatorian candidates, he nominated others from the equestrian order; granting them the liberty, after the expiration of their office, to continue in whichsoever of the two orders they pleased. As most of the knights had been much reduced in their estates by the civil wars, and therefore durst not sit to see the public games in the theatre in the seats allotted to their order, for fear of the penalty provided by the law in that case, he enacted, that none were liable to it, who had themselves, or whose parents had ever, possessed a knight’s estate. He took the census of the Roman people street by street: and that the people might not be too often taken from their business to receive the distribution of corn, it was his intention to deliver tickets three times a year for four months respectively; but at their request, he continued the former regulation, that they should receive their share monthly. He revived the former law of elections, endeavouring, by various penalties, to suppress the practice of bribery. Upon the day of election, he distributed to the freemen of the Fabian and Scaptian tribes, in which he himself was enrolled, a thousand sesterces each, that they might look for nothing from any of the candidates. Considering it of extreme importance to preserve the Roman people pure, and untainted with a mixture of foreign or servile blood, he not only bestowed the freedom of the city with a sparing hand, but laid some restriction upon the practice of manumitting slaves. When Tiberius interceded with him for the freedom of Rome in behalf of a Greek client of his, he wrote to him for answer, “I shall not grant it, unless he comes himself, and satisfies me that he has just grounds for the application.” And when Livia begged the freedom of the city for a tributary Gaul, he refused it, but offered to release him from payment of taxes, saying, “I shall sooner suffer some loss in my exchequer, than that the citizenship of Rome be rendered too common.” Not content with interposing many obstacles to either the partial or complete emancipation of slaves, by quibbles respecting the number, condition and difference of those who were to be manumitted; he likewise enacted that none who had been put in chains or tortured, should ever obtain the freedom of the city in any degree. He endeavoured also to restore the old habit and dress of the Romans; and upon seeing once, in an assembly of the people, a crowd in grey cloaks,1 he exclaimed with indignation, “See there,

  Romanos rerum dominos, gentemque togatem.”2

  • Rome’s conquering sons, lords of the wide-spread globe
  • Stalk proudly in the toga’s graceful robe.

  And he gave orders to the ediles not to permit, in future, any Roman to be present in the forum or circus unless they took off their short coats, and wore the toga.

  XLI. He displayed his munificence to all ranks of the people on various occasions. Moreover, upon his bringing the treasure belonging to the kings of Egypt into the city, in his Alexandrian triumph, he made money so plentiful, that interest fell, and the price of land rose considerably. And afterwards, as often as large sums of money came into his possession by means of confiscations, he would lend it free of interest, for a fixed term, to such as could give security for the double of what was borrowed. The estate necessary to qualify a senator, instead of eight hundred thousand sesterces, the former standard, he ordered, for the future, to be twelve hundred thousand; and to those who had not so much, he made good the deficiency. He often made donations to the people, but generally of different sums; sometimes four hundred, sometimes three hundred, or two hundred and fifty sesterces: upon which occasions, he extended his bounty even to young boys, who before were not used to receive anything, until they arrived at eleven years of age. In a scarcity of corn, he would frequently let them have it at a very low price, or none at all; and doubled the number of the money tickets.

  XLII. But to show that he was a prince who regarded more the good of his people than their applause, he reprimanded them very severely, upon their complaining of the scarcity and dearness of wine. “My son-in law, Agrippa,” he said, “has sufficiently provided for quenching your thirst, by the great plenty of water with which he has supplied the town.” Upon their demanding a gift which he had promised them, he said. “I am a man of my word.” But upon their importuning him for one which he had not promised, he issued a proclamation ubpraiding them for their scandalous impudence; at the same time telling them, “I shall now give you nothing, whatever I may have intended to do.” With the same strict firmness, when, upon a promise he had made of a donative, he found many slaves had been emancipated and enrolled amongst the citizens, he declared that no one should receive anything who was not included in the promise, and he gave the rest less than he had promised them, in order that the amount he had set apart might hold out. On one occasion, in a season of great scarcity, which it was difficult to remedy, he ordered out of the city the troops of slaves brought for sale, the gladiators belonging to the masters of defence, and all foreigners, excepting physicians and the teachers of the liberal sciences. Part of the domestic slaves were likewise ordered to be dismissed. When, at last, plenty was restored, he writes thus: “I was much inclined to abolish for ever the practice of allowing the people corn at the public expense, because they trust so much to it, that they are too lazy to till their lands; but I did not persevere in my design, as I felt sure that the practice would some time or other be revived by some one ambitious of popular favour.” However, he so managed the affair ever afterwards, that as much account was taken of husbandmen and traders, as of the idle populace.1

  XLIII. In the number, variety, and magnificence of his public spectacles, he surpassed all former example. Four-and-twenty times, he says, he treated the people with games upon his own account, and three-and-twenty times for such magistrates as were either absent, or not able to afford the expense. The performances took place sometimes in the different streets of the city, and upon several stages, by players in all languages. The same he did not only in the forum and amphitheatre, but in the circus likewise, and in the septa:2 and sometimes he exhibited only the hunting of wild beasts. He entertained the people with wrestlers in the Campus Martius, where wooden seats were erected for the purpose; and also with a naval fight, for which he excavated the ground near the Tiber, where there is now the grove of the Cæsars. During these two entertainments he stationed guards in the city, lest, by robbers taking advantage of the small number of people left at home, it might be exposed to depredations. In the circus he exhibited chariot and foot races, and combats with wild beasts, in which the performers were often youths of the highest rank. His favourite spectacle was the Trojan game, acted by a select number of boys, in parties differing in age and station; thinking that it was a practice both excellent in itself, and sanctioned by ancient usage, that the spirit of the young nobles should be displayed in such exercises. Caius Nonius Asprenas, who was lamed by a fall in this diversion, he presented with a gold collar, and allowed him and his posterity to bear the surname of Torquati But soon afterwards he gave up the exhibition of this game, in consequence of a severe and bitter speech made in the senate by Asinius Pollio, the orator, in which he complained bitterly of the misfortune of Æserninus, his grandson, who likewise broke his leg in the same diversion.

  Sometimes he engaged Roman knights to act upon the stage, or to fight as gladiators: but only before the practice was prohibited by a decree of the senate. Thenceforth, the only exhibition he made of that kind, was that of a young man named Lucius, of a good family, who was not quite two feet in height, and weighed only seventeen pounds, but had a stentorian voice. In one of his public spectacles, he brought the hostages of the Parthians, the first ever sent to Rome from that nation, through the middle of the amphitheatre, and placed them in the second tier of seats above him. He used likewise, at times when there were no public entertainments, if any thing was brought to Rome which was uncommon, and might gratify curiosity, to expose it to public view, in any place whatever; as he did a rhinoceros in the Septa, a tiger upon a stage, and a snake fifty cubits long in the Comitium. It happened in the Circensian games, which he performed in consequence of a vow, that he was taken ill, and obliged to attend the Thensæ,1 reclining on a litter. Another time, in the games celebrated for the opening of the theatre of Marcellus, the joints of his curule chair happening to give way, he fell on his back. And in the games exhibited by his grandsons, when the people were in such consternation, by an alarm raised that the theatre was falling, that all his efforts to re-assure them and keep them quiet, failed, he moved from his place, and seated himself in that part of the theatre which was thought to be exposed to most danger.

  XLIV. He corrected the confusion and disorder with which the spectators took their seats at the public games, after an affront which was offered to a senator at Puteoli, for whom, in a crowded theatre, no one would make room. He therefore procured a decree of the senate, that in all public spectacles of any sort, and in any place whatever, the first tier of benches should be left empty for the accommodation of senators. He would not even permit the ambassadors of free nations, nor of those which were allies of Rome, to sit in the orchestra; having found that some manumitted slaves had been sent under that character. He separated the soldiery from the rest of the people, and assigned to married plebeians their particular rows of seats. To the boys he assigned their own benches, and to their tutors the seats which were nearest it; ordering that none clothed in black should sit in the centre of the circle.1 Nor would he allow any women to witness the combats of gladiators, except from the upper part of the theatre, although they formerly used to take their places promiscuously with the rest of the spectators. To the vestal virgins he granted seats in the theatre, reserved for them only, opposite the prætor’s bench. He excluded, however, the whole female sex from seeing the wrestlers: so that in the games which he exhibited upon his accession to the office of high-priest, he deferred producing a pair of combatants which the people called for, until the next morning; and intimated by proclamation, “his pleasure that no woman should appear in the theatre before five o’clock.”

  XLV. He generally viewed the Circensian games himself, from the upper rooms of the houses of his friends or freedmen; sometimes from the place appointed for the statues of the gods, and sitting in company with his wife and children. He occasionally absented himself from the spectacles for several hours, and sometimes for whole days; but not without first making an apology, and appointing substitutes to preside in his stead. When present, he never attended to anything else either to avoid the reflections which he used to say were commonly made upon his father, Cæsar, for perusing letters and memorials, and making rescripts during the spectacles; or from the real pleasure he took in attending those exhibitions; of which he made no secret, he often candidly owning it. This he manifested frequently by presenting honorary crowns and handsome rewards to the best performers, in the games exhibited by others; and he never was present at any performance of the Greeks, without rewarding the most deserving, according to their merit. He took particular pleasure in witnessing pugilistic contests, especially those of the Latins, not only between combatants who had been trained scientifically, whom he used often to match with the Greek champions; but even between mobs of the lower classes fighting in streets, and tilting at random, without any knowledge of the art. In short, he honoured with his patronage all sorts of people who contributed in any way to the success of the public entertainments. He not only maintained, but enlarged, the privileges of the wrestlers. He prohibited combats of gladiators where no quarter was given. He deprived the magistrates of the power of correcting the stage-players, which by an ancient law was allowed them at all times, and in all places; restricting their jurisdiction entirely to the time of performance and misdemeanours in the theatres. He would, however, admit, of no abatement, and exacted with the utmost rigour the greatest exertions of the wrestlers and gladiators in their several encounters. He went so far in restraining the licentiousness of stage-players, that upon discovering that Stephanio, a performer of the highest class, had a married woman with her hair cropped, and dressed in boy’s clothes, to wait upon him at table, he ordered him to be whipped through all the three theatres, and then banished him. Hylas, an actor of pantomimes, upon a complaint against him by the prætor, he commanded to be scourged in the court of his own house, which, however, was open to the public. And Pylades he not only banished from the city, but from Italy also, for pointing with his finger at a spectator by whom he was hissed, and turning the eyes of the audience upon him.

  XLVI. Having thus regulated the city and its concerns, he augmented the population of Italy by planting in it no less than twenty-eight colonies,1 and greatly improved it by public works, and a beneficial application of the revenues. In rights and privileges, he rendered it in a measure equal to the city itself, by inventing a new kind of suffrage, which the principal officers and magistrates of the colonies might take at home, and forward under seal to the city, against the time of the elections. To increase the number of persons of condition, and of children among the lower ranks, he granted the petitions of all those who requested the honour of doing military service on horseback as knights, provided their demands were seconded by the recommendation of the town in which they lived; and when he visited the several districts of Italy, he distributed a thousand sesterces a head to such of the lower class as presented him with sons or daughters.

  XLVII. The more important provinces, which could not with ease or safety be entrusted to the government of annual magistrates, he reserved for his own administration: the rest he distributed by lot amongst the proconsuls; but sometimes he made exchanges, and frequently visited most of both kinds in person. Some cities in alliance with Rome, but which by their great licentiousness were hastening to ruin, he deprived of their independence. Others, which were much in debt, he relieved, and rebuilt such as had been destroyed by earthquakes. To those that could produce any instance of their having deserved well of the Roman people, he presented the freedom of Latium, or even that of the City. There is not, I believe, a province, except Africa and Sardinia, which he did not visit. After forcing Sextus Pompeius to take refuge in those provinces, he was indeed preparing to cross over from Sicily to them, but was prevented by continual and violent storms, and afterwards there was no occasion or call for such a voyage.

  XLVIII. Kingdoms, of which he had made himself master by the right of conquest, a few only excepted, he either restored to their former possessors,2 or conferred upon aliens. Between kings in alliance with Rome, he encouraged most intimate union; being always ready to promote or favour any proposal of marriage or friendship amonst them; and, indeed, treated them all with the same consideration, as if they were members and parts of the empire. To such of them as were minors or lunatics he appointed guardians, until they arrived at age, or recovered their senses; and the sons of many of them he brought up and educated with his own.

  XLIX. With respect to the army, he distributed the legions and auxiliary troops throughout the several provinces. He stationed a fleet at Misenum, and another at Ravenna, for the protection of the Upper and Lower Seas.1 A certain number of the forces were selected, to occupy the posts in the city, and partly for his own body-guard; but he dismissed the Spanish guard, which he retained about him till the fall of Antony; and also the Germans, whom he had amongst his guards, until the defeat of Varus. Yet he never permitted a greater force than three cohorts in the city, and had no (prætorian) camps.2 The rest he quartered in the neighbourhood of the nearest towns, in winter and summer camps. All the troops throughout the empire he reduced to one fixed model with regard to their pay and their pensions; determining these according to their rank in the army, the time they had served, and their private means; so that after their discharge, they might not be tempted by age or necessities to join the agitators for a revolution. For the purpose of providing a fund always ready to meet their pay and pensions, he instituted a military exchequer, and appropriated new taxes to that object. In order to obtain the earliest intelligence of what was passing in the provinces, he established posts, consisting at first of young men stationed at moderate distances along the military roads, and afterwards of regular couriers with fast vehicles; which appeared to him the most commodious, because the persons who were the bearers of dispatches, written on the spot, might then be questioned about the business, as occasion occurred.

  L. In sealing letters-patent, rescripts, or epistles, he at first used the figure of a sphinx, afterwards the head of Alexander the Great, and at last his own, engraved by the hand of Dioscorides; which practice was retained by the succeeding emperors. He was extremely precise in dating his letters, putting down exactly the time of the day or night at which they were dispatched.

  LI. Of his clemency and moderation there are abundant and signal instances. For, not to enumerate how many and what persons of the adverse party he pardoned, received into favour, and suffered to rise to the highest eminence in the state; he thought it sufficient to punish Junius Novatus and Cassius Patavinus, who were both plebeians, one of them with a fine, and the other with an easy banishment; although the former had published, in the name of young Agrippa, a very scurrilous letter against him, and the other declared openly, at an entertainment where there was a great deal of company, “that he neither wanted inclination nor courage to stab him.” In the trial of Æmilius Ælianus, of Cordova, when, among other charges exhibited against him, it was particularly insisted upon, that he used to calumniate Cæsar, he turned round to the accuser, and said, with an air and tone of passion, “I wish you could make that appear; I shall let Ælianus know that I have a tongue too, and shall speak sharper of him than he ever did of me.” Nor did he, either then or afterwards, make any farther inquiry into the affair. And when Tiberius, in a letter, complained of the affront with great earnestness, he returned him an answer in the following terms: “Do not, my dear Tiberius, give way to the ardour of youth in this affair; nor be so indignant that any person should speak ill of me. It is enough, for us, if we can prevent any one from really doing us mischief.”

  LII. Although he knew that it had been customary to decree temples in honour of the proconsuls, yet he would not permit them to be erected in any of the provinces, unless in the joint names of himself and Rome. Within the limits of the city, he positively refused any honour of that kind. He melted down all the silver statues which had been erected to him, and converted the whole into tripods, which he consecrated to the Palatine Apollo. And when the people importuned him to accept the dictatorship, he bent down on one knee, with his toga thrown over his shoulders, and his breast exposed to view, begging to be excused.

  LIII. He always abhorred the title of Lord,1 as ill-omened and offensive. And when, in a play, performed at the theatre, at which he was present, these words were introduced, “O just and gracious lord,” and the whole company, with joyful acclamations, testified their approbation of them, as applied to him, he instantly put a stop to their indecent flattery, by waving his hand, and frowning sternly, and next day publicly declared his displeasure, in a proclamation. He never afterwards would suffer himself to be addressed in that manner, even by his own children or grand-children, either in jest or earnest and forbad them the use of all such complimentary expressions to one another. He rarely entered any city or town, or departed from it, except in the evening or the night, to avoid giving any person the trouble of complimenting him. During his consulships, he commonly walked the streets on foot; but at other times, rode in a close carriage. He admitted to court even plebeians, in common with people of the higher ranks; receiving the petitions of those who approached him with so much affability, that he once jocosely rebuked a man, by telling him, “You present your memorial with as much hesitation as if you were offering money to an elephant.” On senate days, he used to pay his respects to the Conscript Fathers only in the house, addressing them each by name as they sat, without any prompter; and on his departure, he bade each of them farewell, while they retained their seats. In the same manner, he maintained with many of them a constant intercourse of mutual civilities, giving them his company upon occasions of any particular festivity in their families; until he became advanced in years, and was incommoded by the crowd at a wedding. Being informed that Gallus Terrinius, a senator, with whom he had only a slight acquaintance, had suddenly lost his sight, and under that privation had resolved to starve himself to death, he paid him a visit, and by his consolatory admonitions diverted him from his purpose.

  LIV. On his speaking in the senate, he has been told by one of the members, “I did not understand you,” and by another, “I would contradict you, could I do it with safety.” And sometimes, upon his being so much offended at the heat with which the debates were conducted in the senate, as to quit the house in anger, some of the members have repeatedly exclaimed: “Surely, the senators ought to have liberty of speech on matters of government.” Antistius Labeo, in the election of a new senate, when each, as he was named, chose another, nominated Marcus Lepidus, who had formerly been Augustus’s enemy, and was then in banishment; and being asked by the latter, “Is there no other person more deserving?” he replied, “Every man has his own opinion.” Nor was any one ever molested for his freedom of speech, although it was carried to the extent of insolence.

  LV. Even when some infamous libels against him were dispersed in the senate-house, he was neither disturbed, nor did he give himself much trouble to refute them. He would not so much as order an enquiry to be made after the authors; but only proposed, that, for the future, those who published libels or lampoons, in a borrowed name, against any person, should be called to account.

  LVI. Being provoked by some petulant jests, which were designed to render him odious, he answered them by a proclamation; and yet he prevented the senate from passing an act, to restrain the liberties which were taken with others in people’s wills. Whenever he attended at the election of magistrates, he went round the tribes, with the candidates of his nomination, and begged the votes of the people in the usual manner. He likewise gave his own vote in his tribe, as one of the people. He suffered himself to be summoned as a witness upon trials, and not only to be questioned, but to be cross-examined, with the utmost patience. In building his Forum, he restricted himself in the site, not presuming to compel the owners of the neighbouring houses to give up their property. He never recommended his sons to the people, without adding these words, “If they deserve it.” And upon the audience rising on their entering the theatre, while they were yet minors, and giving them applause in a standing position, he made it a matter of serious complaint.

  He was desirous that his friends should be great and powerful in the state, but have no exclusive privileges, or be exempt from the laws which governed others. When Asprenas Nonius, an intimate friend of his, was tried upon a charge of administering poison at the instance of Cassius Severus, he consulted the senate for their opinion what was his duty under the circumstances: “For,” said he, “I am afraid, lest, if I should stand by him in the cause, I may be supposed to screen a guilty man; and if I do not, to desert and prejudge a friend.” With the unanimous concurrence, therefore, of the senate, he took his seat amongst his advocates for several hours, but without giving him the benefit of speaking to character, as was usual. He likewise appeared for his clients; as on behalf of Scutarius, an old soldier of his, who brought an action for slander. He never relieved any one from prosecution but in a single instance, in the case of a man who had given information of the conspiracy of Muræna; and that he did only by prevailing upon the accuser, in open court, to drop his prosecution.

  LVII. How much he was beloved for his worthy conduct in all these respects, it is easy to imagine. I say nothing of the decrees of the senate in his honour, which may seem to have resulted from compulsion or deference. The Roman knights voluntarily, and with one accord, always celebrated his birth for two days together; and all ranks of the people, yearly, in performance of a vow they had made, threw a piece of money into the Curtian lake,1 as an offering for his welfare. They likewise, on the calends [first] of January, presented for his acceptance new-year’s gifts in the capitol, though he was not present: with which donations he purchased some costly images of the Gods, which he erected in several streets of the city; as that of Apollo Sandaliarius, Jupiter Tragœdus,2 and others. When his house on the Palatine hill was accidentally destroyed by fire, the veteran soldiers, the judges, the tribes, and even the people, individually, contributed, according to the ability of each, for rebuilding it; but he would accept only of some small portion out of the several sums collected, and refused to take from any one person more than a single denarius.1 Upon his return home from any of the provinces, they attended him not only with joyful acclamations, but with songs. It is also remarked, that as often as he entered the city, the infliction of punishment was suspended for the time.

  LVIII. The whole body of the people, upon a sudden impulse, and with unanimous consent, offered him the title of Father of his Country. It was announced to him first at Antium, by a deputation from the people, and upon his declining the honour, they repeated their offer on his return to Rome, in a full theatre, when they were crowned with laurel. The senate soon afterwards adopted the proposal, not in the way of acclamation or decree, but by commissioning M. Messala, in an unanimous vote, to compliment him with it in the following terms: “With hearty wishes for the happiness and prosperity of yourself and your family, Cæsar Augustus, (for we think we thus most effectually pray for the lasting welfare of the state), the senate, in agreement with the Roman people, salute you by the title of Father of your Country.” To this compliment Augustus replied, with tears in his eyes, in these words (for I give them exactly as I have done those of Messala): “Having now arrived at the summit of my wishes, O Conscript Fathers,2 what else have I to beg of the Immortal Gods, but the continuance of this your affection for me to the last moments of my life?”

  LIX. To the physician Antonius Musa,1 who had cured him of a dangerous illness, they erected a statue near that of Æsculapius, by a general subscription. Some heads of families ordered in their wills, that their heirs should lead victims to the capitol, with a tablet carried before them, and pay their vows, “Because Augustus still survived.” Some Italian cities appointed the day upon which he first visited them, to be thenceforth the beginning of their year. And most of the provinces, besides erecting temples and altars, instituted games, to be celebrated to his honour, in most towns, every five years.

  LX. The kings, his friends and allies, built cities in their respective kingdoms, to which they gave the name of Cæsarea; and all with one consent resolved to finish, at their common expense, the temple of Jupiter Olympius, at Athens, which had been begun long before, and consecrate it to his Genius. They frequently also left their kingdoms, laid aside the badges of royalty, and assuming the toga, attended and paid their respects to him daily, in the manner of clients to their patrons; not only at Rome, but when he was travelling through the provinces.

  LXI. Having thus given an account of the manner in which he filled his public offices both civil and military, and his conduct in the government of the empire, both in peace and war; I shall now describe his private and domestic life, his habits at home and among his friends and dependents, and the fortune attending him in those scenes of retirement, from his youth to the day of his death. He lost his mother in his first consulship, and his sister Octavia, when he was in the fifty-fourth year of his age.2 He behaved towards them both with the utmost kindness whilst living, and after their decease paid the highest honours to their memory.

  LXII. He was contracted when very young to the daughter of Publius Servilius Isauricus; but upon his reconciliation with Antony after their first rupture,1 the armies on both sides insisting on a family alliance between them, he married Antony’s step-daughter Claudia, the daughter of Fulvia by Publius Claudius, although at that time she was scarcely marriageable; and upon a difference arising with his mother-in-law Fulvia, he divorced her untouched, and a pure virgin. Soon afterwards he took to wife Scribonia, who had before been twice married to men of consular rank,2 and was a mother by one of them. With her likewise he parted,3 being quite tired out, as he himself writes, with the perverseness of her temper; and immediately took Livia Drusilla, though then pregnant, from her husband Tiberius Nero; and she had never any rival in his love and esteem.

  LXIII. By Scribonia he had a daughter named Julia, but no children by Livia, although extremely desirous of issue. She, indeed, conceived once, but miscarried. He gave his daughter Julia in the first instance to Marcellus, his sister’s son, who had just completed his minority; and, after his death, to Marcus Agrippa, having prevailed with his sister to yield her son-in-law to his wishes; for at that time Agrippa was married to one of the Marcellas, and had children by her. Agrippa dying also, he for a long time thought of several matches for Julia in even the equestrian order, and at last resolved upon selecting Tiberius for his step-son; and he obliged him to part with his wife at that time pregnant, and who had already brought him a child. Mark Antony writes, “That he first contracted Julia to his son, and afterwards to Cotiso, king of the Getæ,4 demanding at the same time the king’s daughter in marriage for himself.”

  LXIV. He had three grandsons by Agrippa and Julia, namely, Caius, Lucius, and Agrippa; and two grand-daughters, Julia and Agrippina. Julia he married to Lucius Paulus, the censor’s son, and Agrippina to Germanicus, his sister’s grandson. Caius and Lucius he adopted at home, by the ceremony of purchase1 from their father, advanced them, while yet very young, to offices in the state, and when they were consuls-elect, sent them to visit the provinces and armies. In bringing up his daughter and grand-daughters, he accustomed them to domestic employments, and even spinning, and obliged them to speak and act every thing openly before the family, that it might be put down in the diary. He so strictly prohibited them from all converse with strangers, that he once wrote a letter to Lucius Vinicius, a handsome young man of a good family, in which he told him, “You have not behaved very modestly, in making a visit to my daughter at Baiæ.” He usually instructed his grandsons himself in reading, swimming, and other rudiments of knowledge; and he laboured nothing more than to perfect them in the imitation of his hand-writing. He never supped but he had them sitting at the foot of his couch; nor ever travelled but with them in a chariot before him, or riding beside him.

  LXV. But in the midst of all his joy and hopes in his numerous and well-regulated family, his fortune failed him. The two Julias, his daughter and grand-daughter, abandoned themselves to such courses of lewdness and debauchery, that he banished them both. Caius and Lucius he lost within the space of eighteen months; the former dying in Lycia, and the latter at Marscilles. His third grandson Agrippa, with his step-son Tiberius, he adopted in the forum, by a law passed for the purpose by the sections;2 but he soon afterwards discarded Agrippa for his coarse and unruly temper, and confined him at Surrentum. He bore the death of his relations with more patience than he did their disgrace; for he was not overwhelmed by the loss of Caius and Lucius; but in the case of his daughter, he stated the facts to the senate in a message read to them by the quæstor, not having the heart to be present himself; indeed, he was so much ashamed of her infamous conduct, that for some time he avoided all company, and had thoughts of putting her to death. It is certain that when one Phœbe, a freed-woman and confidant of hers, hanged herself about the same time, he said, “I had rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia.” In her banishment he would not allow her the use of wine, nor any luxury in dress; nor would he suffer her to be waited upon by any male servant, either freeman or slave, without his permission, and having received an exact account of his age, stature, complexion, and what marks or scars he had about him. At the end of five years he removed her from the island [where she was confined] to the continent,1 and treated her with less severity, but could never be prevailed upon to recall her. When the Roman people interposed on her behalf several times with much importunity, all the reply he gave was: “I wish you had all such daughters and wives as she is.” He likewise forbad a child, of which his grand-daughter Julia was delivered after sentence had passed against her, to be either owned as a relation, or brought up. Agrippa, who was equally intractable, and whose folly increased every day, he transported to an island,2 and placed a guard of soldiers about him; procuring at the same time an act of the senate for his confinement there during life. Upon any mention of him and the two Julias, he would say, with a heavy sigh,

  • “Αιϑ’ ὄϕελον ἄγαμός τ’ἔμεναι, ἄγονος τ’ ἀπολεϑαι.
  • Would I were wifeless, or had childless died!3

  nor did he usually call them by any other name than that of his “three imposthumes or cancers.”

  LXVI. He was cautious in forming friendships, but clung to them with great constancy; not only rewarding the virtues and merits of his friends according to their deserts, but bearing likewise with their faults and vices, provided that they were of a venial kind. For amongst all his friends, we scarcely find any who fell into disgrace with him, except Salvidienus Rufus, whom he raised to the consulship, and Cornelius Gallus, whom he made prefect of Egypt; both of them men of the lowest extraction. One of these, being engaged in plotting a rebellion, he delivered over to the senate, for condemnation; and the other, on account of his ungrateful and malicious temper, he forbad his house, and his living in any of the provinces When, however, Gallus, being denounced by his accusers, and sentenced by the senate, was driven to the desperate extremity of laying violent hands upon himself, he commended, indeed, the attachment to his person of those who manifested so much indignation, but he shed tears, and lamented his unhappy condition, “That I alone,” said he, “cannot be allowed to resent the misconduct of my friends in such a way only as I would wish.” The rest of his friends of all orders flourished during their whole lives, both in power and wealth, in the highest ranks of their several orders, notwithstanding some occasional lapses. For, to say nothing of others, he sometimes complained that Agrippa was hasty, and Mecænas a tattler; the former having thrown up all his employments and retired to Mitylene, on suspicion of some slight coolness, and from jealousy that Marcellus received greater marks of favour; and the latter having confidentially imparsed to his wife Terentia the discovery of Muræna’s conspiracy.

  He likewise expected from his friends, at their deaths as well as during their lives, some proofs of their reciprocal attachment. For though he was far from coveting their property, and indeed would never accept of any legacy left him by a stranger, yet he pondered in a melancholy mood over their last words; not being able to conceal his chagrin, if in their wills they made but a slight, or no very honourable mention of him, nor his joy, on the other hand, if they expressed a grateful sense of his favours, and a hearty affection for him. And whatever legacies or shares of their property were left him by such as were parents, he used to restore to their children, either immediately, or if they were under age, upon the day of their assuming the manly dress, or of their marriage; with interest.

  LXVII. As a patron and master, his behaviour in general was mild and conciliating; but when occasion required it, he could be severe. He advanced many of his freedmen to posts of honour and great importance, as Licinus, Enceladus, and others; and when his slave, Cosmus, had reflected bitterly upon him, he resented the injury no further than by putting him in fetters. When his steward, Diomedes, left him to the mercy of a wild boar, which suddenly attacked them while they were walking together, he considered it rather a cowardice than a breach of duty; and turned an occurrence of no small hazard into a jest, because there was no knavery in his steward’s conduct. He put to death Proculus, one of his most favourite freedmen, for maintaining a criminal commerce with other men’s wives. He broke the legs of his secretary, Thallus, for taking a bribe of five hundred denarii to discover the contents of one of his letters. And the tutor and other attendants of his son Caius, having taken advantage of his sickness and death, to give loose to their insolence and rapacity in the province he governed, he caused heavy weights to be tied about their necks, and had them thrown into a river.

  LXVIII. In his early youth various aspersions of an infamous character were heaped upon him. Sextus Pompey reproached him with being an effeminate fellow; and M. Antony, with earning his adoption from his uncle by prostitution. Lucius Antony, likewise Mark’s brother, charges him with pollution by Cæsar; and that, for a gratification of three hundred thousand sesterces, he had submitted to Aulus Hirtius in the same way, in Spain; adding, that he used to singe his legs with burnt nutshells, to make the hair become softer.1 Nay, the whole concourse of the people, at some public diversions in the theatre, when the following sentence was recited, alluding to the Gallic priest of the mother of the gods,2 beating a drum,3

  • Videsne ut cinædus orbem digito temperet?
  • See with his orb the wanton’s finger play!

  applied the passage to him, with great applause.

  LXIX. That he was guilty of various acts of adultery, is not denied even by his friends; but they allege in excuse for it, that he engaged in those intrigues not from lewdness, but from policy, in order to discover more easily the designs of his enemies, through their wives. Mark Antony, besides the precipitate marriage of Livia, charges him with taking the wife of a man of consular rank from table, in the presence of her husband, into a bed-chamber, and bringing her again to the entertainment, with her ears very red, and her hair in great disorder: that he had divorced Scribonia, for resenting too freely the excessive influence which one of his mistresses had gained over him: that his friends were employed to pimp for him, and accordingly obliged both matrons and ripe virgins to strip, for a complete examination of their persons, in the same manner as if Thoranius, the dealer in slaves, had them under sale. And before they came to an open rupture, he writes to him in a familiar manner, thus: “Why are you changed towards me? Because I lie with a queen? She is my wife. Is this a new thing with me, or have I not done so for these nine years? And do you take freedoms with Drusilla only? May health and happiness so attend you, as when you read this letter, you are not in dalliance with Tertulla, Terentilla, Rufilla,1 or Salvia Titiscenia, or all of them. What matters it to you where, or upon whom, you spend your manly vigour?”

  LXX. A private entertainment which he gave, commonly called the Supper of the Twelve Gods,2 and at which the guests were dressed in the habit of gods and goddesses, while he personated Apollo himself, afforded subject of much conversation, and was imputed to him not only by Antony in his letters, who likewise names all the parties concerned, but in the following well-known anonymous verses:—

  • • Cum primum istorum conduxit mensa choragum,
    • Sexque deos vidit Mallia, sexque deas:
    • Impia dum Phœbi Cæsar mendacia ludit,
    • Dum nova divorum cœnat adulteria:
    • Omnia se a terris tunc numina declinârunt:
    • Fugit et auratos Jupiter ipse thronos.
  • • When Mallia late beheld, in mingled train,
    • Twelve mortals ape twelve deities in vain;
    • Cæsar assumed what was Apollo’s due,
    • And wine and lust inflamed the motley crew.
    • At the foul sight the gods avert their eyes,
    • And from his throne great Jove indignant flies.

  What rendered this supper more obnoxious to public censure, was, that it happened at a time when there was a great scarcity, and almost a famine, in the city. The day after, there was a cry current among the people, “that the gods had eaten up all the corn; and that Cæsar was indeed Apollo, but Apollo the Tormentor;” under which title that god was worshipped in some quarter of the city.1 He was likewise charged with being excessively fond of fine furniture, and Corinthian vessels, as well as with being addicted to gaming. For, during the time of the proscription, the following line was written upon his statue:—

  • Pater argentarius, ego Corinthiarius;
  • My father was a silversmith,2 my dealings are in brass;

  because it was believed, that he had put some persons upon the list of the proscribed, only to obtain the Corinthian vessels in their possession. And afterwards, in the Sicilian war, the following epigram was published:—

  • • Postquam bis classe victus naves perdidit,
    • Aliquando ut vincat, ludit assidue aleam.
  • • Twice having lost a fleet in luckless fight,
    • To win at last, he games both day and night.

  LXXI. With respect to the charge or imputation of loathsome impurity before-mentioned, he very easily refuted it by the chastity of his life, at the very time when it was made, as well as ever afterwards. His conduct likewise gave the lie to that of luxurious extravagance in his furniture, when, upon the taking of Alexandria, he reserved for himself nothing of the royal treasures but a porcelain cup, and soon afterwards melted down all the vessels of gold, even such as were intended for common use. But his amorous propensities never left him, and, as he grew older, as is reported, he was in the habit of debauching young girls, who were procured for him, from all quarters, even by his own wife. To the observations on his gaming, he paid not the smallest regard; but played in public, but purely for his diversion, even when he was advanced in years; and not only in the month of December,1 but at other times, and upon all days, whether festivals or not. This evidently appears from a letter under his own hand, in which he says, “I supped, my dear Tiberius, with the same company. We had, besides, Vinicius, and Silvius the father. We gamed at supper like old fellows, both yesterday and today. And as any one threw upon the tali2 aces or sixes, he put down for every talus a denarius; all which was gained by him who threw a Venus”3 In another letter, he says: “We had, my dear Tiberius, a pleasant time of it during the festival of Minerva: for we played every day, and kept the gaming-board warm. Your brother uttered many exclamations at a desperate run of ill-fortune; but recovering by degrees, and unexpectedly, he in the end lost not much. I lost twenty thousand sesterces for my part; but then I was profusely generous in my play, as I commonly am; for had I insisted upon the stakes which I declined, or kept what I gave away, I should have won about fifty thousand. But this I like better: for it will raise my character for generosity to the skies.” In a letter to his daughter, he writes thus: “I have sent you two hundred and fifty denarii, which I gave to every one of my guests; in case they were inclined at supper to divert themselves with the Tali, or at the game of Even-or-Odd.”

  LXXII. In other matters, it appears that he was moderate in his habits, and free from suspicion of any kind of vice. He lived at first near the Roman Forum, above the Ring-maker’s Stairs, in a house which had once been occupied by Calvus the orator. He afterwards moved to the Palatine Hill, where he resided in a small house1 belonging to Hortensius, no way remarkable either for size or ornament; the piazzas being but small, the pillars of Alban stone,2 and the rooms without any thing of marble, or fine paving. He continued to use the same bed-chamber, both winter and summer, during forty years:3 for though he was sensible that the city did not agree with his health in the winter, he nevertheless resided constantly in it during that season. If at any time he wished to be perfectly retired, and secure from interruption, he shut himself up in an apartment at the top of his house, which he called his Syracuse or Τεχνόφυον,4 or he went to some villa belonging to his freedmen near the city. But when he was indisposed, he commonly took up his residence in the house of Mecænas.5 Of all the places of retirement from the city, he chiefly frequented those upon the sea-coast, and the islands of Campania,1 or the towns nearest the city, such as Lanuvium, Præneste, and Tibur,2 where he often used to sit for the administration of justice, in the porticos of the temple of Hercules. He had a particular aversion to large and sumptuous palaces; and some which had been raised at a vast expense by his grand-daughter, Julia, he levelled to the ground. Those of his own, which were far from being spacious, he adorned, not so much with statues and pictures, as with walks and groves, and things which were curious either for their antiquity or rarity; such as, at Capri, the huge limbs of sea-monsters and wild beasts, which some affect to call the bones of giants; and also the arms of ancient heroes.

  LXXIII. His frugality in the furniture of his house appears even at this day, from some beds and tables still remaining, most of which are scarcely elegant enough for a private family. It is reported that he never lay upon a bed, but such as was low, and meanly furnished. He seldom wore any garment but what was made by the hands of his wife, sister, daughter, and grand-daughters. His togas3 were neither scanty nor full; and the clavus was neither remarkably broad or narrow. His shoes were a little higher than common, to make him appear taller than he was. He had always clothes and shoes, fit to appear in public, ready in his bed-chamber for any sudden occasion.

  LXXIV. At his table, which was always plentiful and elegant, he constantly entertained company; but was very scrupulous in the choice of them, both as to rank and character. Valerius Messala informs us, that he never admitted any freedman to his table, except Menas, when rewarded with the privilege of citizenship, for betraying Pompey’s fleet. He writes, himself, that he invited to his table a person in whose villa he lodged, and who had formerly been employed by him as a spy. He often came late to table, and withdrew early; so that the company began supper before his arrival, and continued at table after his departure. His entertainments consisted of three entries, or at most of only six. But if his fare was moderate, his courtesy was extreme. For those who were silent, or talked in whispers, he encouraged to join in the general conversation; and introduced buffoons and stage players, or even low performers from the circus, and very often itinerant humourists, to enliven the company.

  LXXV. Festivals and holidays he usually celebrated very expensively, but sometimes only with merriment. In the Saturnalia, or at any other time when the fancy took him, he distributed to his company clothes, gold, and silver; sometimes coins of all sorts, even of the ancient kings of Rome and of foreign nations; sometimes nothing but towels, sponges, rakes, and tweezers, and other things of that kind, with tickets on them, which were enigmatical, and had a double meaning.1 He used likewise to sell by lot among his guests articles of very unequal value, and pictures with their fronts reversed; and so, by the unknown quality of the lot, disappoint or gratify the expectation of the purchasers. This sort of traffic went round the whole company, every one being obliged to buy something, and to run the chance of loss or gain with the rest.

  LXXVI. He ate sparingly (for I must not omit even this), and commonly used a plain diet. He was particularly fond of coarse bread, small fishes, new cheese made of cow’s milk,1 and green figs of the sort which bear fruit twice a year.2 He did not wait for supper, but took food at any time, and in any place, when he had an appetite. The following passages relative to this subject, I have transcribed from his letters. “I ate a little bread and some small dates, in my carriage.” Again. “In returning home from the palace in my litter, I ate an ounce of bread, and a few raisins.” Again. “No Jew, my dear Tiberius, ever keeps such strict fast upon the Sabbath,3 as I have to-day; for while in the bath, and after the first hour of the night, I only ate two biscuits, before I began to be rubbed with oil.” From this great indifference about his diet, he sometimes supped by himself, before his company began, or after they had finished, and would not touch a morsel at table with his guests.

  LXXVII. He was by nature extremely sparing in the use of wine. Cornelius Nepos says, that he used to drink only three times at supper in the camp at Modena; and when he indulged himself the most, he never exceeded a pint; or if he did, his stomach rejected it. Of all wines, he gave the preference to the Rhætian,1 but scarcely even drank any in the day-time. Instead of drinking, he used to take a piece of bread dipped in cold water, or a slice of cucumber, or some leaves of lettuce, or a green, sharp, juicy apple.

  LXXVIII. After a slight repast at noon, he used to seek repose,2 dressed as he was, and with his shoes on, his feet covered, and his hand held before his eyes. After supper he commonly withdrew to his study, a small closet, where he sat late, until he had put down in his diary all or most of the remaining transactions of the day, which he had not before registered. He would then go to bed, but never slept above seven hours at most, and that not without interruption; for he would wake three or four times during that time. If he could not again fall asleep, as sometimes happened, he called for some one to read or tell stories to him, until he became drowsy, and then his sleep was usually protracted till after day-break. He never liked to lie awake in the dark, without somebody to sit by him. Very early rising was apt to disagree with him. On which account, if he was obliged to rise betimes, for any civil or religious functions, in order to guard as much as possible against the inconvenience resulting from it, he used to lodge in some apartment near the spot, belonging to any of his attendants. If at any time a fit of drowsiness seized him in passing along the streets, his litter was set down while he snatched a few moments’ sleep.

  LXXIX. In person he was handsome and graceful, through every period of his life. But he was negligent in his dress; and so careless about dressing his hair, that he usually had it done in great haste, by several barbers at a time. His beard he sometimes clipped, and sometimes shaved; and either read or wrote during the operation. His countenance, either when discoursing or silent, was so calm and serene, that a Gaul of the first rank declared amongst his friends, that he was so softened by it, as to be restrained from throwing him down a precipice, in his passage over the Alps, when he had been admitted to approach him, under pretence of conferring with him. His eyes were bright and piercing; and he was willing it should be thought that there was something of a divine vigour in them. He was likewise not a little pleased to see people, upon his looking stedfastly at them, lower their countenances, as if the sun shone in their eyes. But in his old age, he saw very imperfectly with his left eye. His teeth were thin set, small and scaly, his hair a little curled, and inclining to a yellow colour. His eye-brows met; his ears were small, and he had an aquiline nose. His complexion was betwixt brown and fair; his stature but low; though Julius Marathus, his freedman, says he was five feet and nine inches in height. This, however, was so much concealed by the just proportion of his limbs, that it was only perceivable upon comparison with some taller person standing by him.

  LXXX. He is said to have been born with many spots upon his breast and belly, answering to the figure, order, and number of the stars in the constellation of the Bear. He had besides several callosities resembling scars, occasioned by an itching in his body, and the constant and violent use of the strigil1 in being rubbed. He had a weakness in his left hip, thigh, and leg, insomuch that he often halted on that side; but he received much benefit from the use of sand and reeds. He likewise sometimes found the fore-finger of his right hand so weak, that when it was benumbed and contracted with cold, to use it in writing, he was obliged to have recourse to a circular piece of horn. He had occasionally a complaint in the bladder; but upon voiding some stones in his urine, he was relieved from that pain.

  LXXXI. During the whole course of his life, he suffered, at times, dangerous fits of sickness, especially after the conquest of Cantabria; when his liver being injured by a defluxion upon it, he was reduced to such a condition, that he was obliged to undergo a desperate and doubtful method of cure: for warm applications having no effect, Antonius Musa1 directed the use of those which were cold. He was likewise subject to fits of sickness at stated times every year; for about his birth-day2 he was commonly a little indisposed. In the beginning of spring, he was attacked with an inflation of the midriff: and when the wind was southerly, with a cold in his head. By all these complaints, his constitution was so shattered, that he could not easily bear either heat or cold.

  LXXXII. In winter, he was protected against the inclemency of the weather by a thick toga, four tunics, a shirt, a flannel stomacher, and swathings upon his legs and thighs.3 In summer, he lay with the doors of his bedchamber open, and frequently in a piazza, refreshed by a bubbling fountain, and a person standing by to fan him. He could not bear even the winter’s sun; and at home, never walked in the open air without a broad-brimmed hat on his head. He usually travelled in a litter, and by night; and so slow, that he was two days in going to Præneste or Tibur. And if he could go to any place by sea, he preferred that mode of travelling. He carefully nourished his health against his many infirmities, avoiding chiefly the free use of the bath; but he was often rubbed with oil, and sweated in a stove; after which he was washed with tepid water, warmed either by a fire, or by being exposed to the heat of the sun. When, upon account of his nerves, he was obliged to have recourse to sea-water, or the waters of Albula,4 he was contented with sitting over a wooden tub, which he called by a Spanish name Dureta, and plunging his hands and feet in the water by turns

  LXXXIII. As soon as the civil wars were ended, he gave up riding and other military exercises in the Campus Martius, and took to playing at ball, or foot-ball; but soon afterwards used no other exercise than that of going abroad in his litter, or walking. Towards the end of his walk, he would run leaping, wrapped up in a short cloak or cape. For amusement he would sometimes angle, or play with dice, pebbles, or nuts, with little boys, collected from various countries, and particularly Moors and Syrians, for their beauty or amusing talk. But dwarfs, and such as were in any way deformed, he held in abhorrence, as lusus naturæ (nature’s abortions), and of evil omen.

  LXXXIV. From early youth he devoted himself with great diligence and application to the study of eloquence, and the other liberal arts. In the war of Modena, notwithstanding the weighty affairs in which he was engaged, he is said to have read, written, and declaimed every day. He never addressed the senate, the people, or the army, but in a premeditated speech, though he did not want the talent of speaking extempore on the spur of the occasion. And lest his memory should fail him, as well as to prevent the loss of time in getting up his speeches, it was his general practice to recite them. In his intercourse with individuals, and even with his wife Livia, upon subjects of importance he wrote on his tablets all he wished to express, lest, if he spoke extempore, he should say more or less than was proper. He delivered himself in a sweet and peculiar tone, in which he was diligently instructed by a master of elocution. But when he had a cold, he sometimes employed a herald to deliver his speeches to the people.

  LXXXV. He composed many tracts in prose on various subjects, some of which he read occasionally in the circle of his friends, as to an auditory. Among these was his “Rescript to Brutus respecting Cato” Most of the pages he read himself, although he was advanced in years, but becoming fatigued, he gave the rest to Tiberius to finish. He likewise read over to his friends his “Exhortations to Philosophy,” and the “History of his own Life,” which he continued in thirteen books, as far as the Cantabrian war, but no farther. He likewise made some attempts at poetry. There is extant one book written by him in hexameter verse, of which both the subject and title is “Sicily.” There is also a book of Epigrams, no larger than the last, which he composed almost entirely while he was in the bath. These are all his poetical compositions: for though he begun a tragedy with great zest, becoming dissatisfied with the style, he obliterated the whole; and his friends saying to him, “What is your Ajax doing?” he an swered, “My Ajax has met with a sponge.1 ”

  LXXXVI. He cultivated a style which was neat and chaste, avoiding frivolous or harsh language, as well as obsolete words, which he calls disgusting. His chief object was to deliver his thoughts with all possible perspicuity. To attain this end, and that he might nowhere perplex, or retard the reader or hearer, he made no scruple to add prepositions to his verbs, or to repeat the same conjunction several times; which, when omitted, occasion some little obscurity, but give a grace to the style. Those who used affected language, or adopted obsolete words, he despised, as equally faulty, though in different ways. He sometimes indulged himself in jesting, particularly with his friend Mecænas, whom he rallied upon all occasions for his fine phrases,2 and bantered by imitating his way of talking. Nor did he spare Tiberius, who was fond of obsolete and far-fetched expressions. He charges Mark Antony with insanity, writing rather to make men stare, than to be understood; and by way of sarcasm upon his depraved and fickle taste in the choice of words, he writes to him thus: “And are you yet in doubt, whether Cimber Annius or Veranius Flaccus be more proper for your imitation? Whether you will adopt words which Sallustius Crispus has borrowed from the ‘Origines’ of Cato? Or do you think that the verbose empty bombast of Asiatic orators is fit to be transfused into our language?” And in a letter where he commends the talent of his grand-daughter, Agrippina, he says, “But you must be particularly careful, both in writing and speaking, to avoid affectation.”

  LXXXVII. In ordinary conversation, he made use of several peculiar expressions, as appears from letters in his own hand writing; in which, now and then, when he means to intimate that some persons would never pay their debts, he says, “They will pay at the Greek Calends.” And when he advised patience in the present posture of affairs, he would say, “Let us be content with our Cato.” To describe anything in haste, he said, “It was sooner done than asparagus is cooked.” He constantly puts baceolus for stultus, pullejaceus for pullus, vacerrosus for cerritus, vapide se habere for male, and betizare for languere, which is commonly called lachanizare. Likewise simus for sumus, domos for domus in the genitive singular.1 With respect to the last two peculiarities, lest any person should imagine that they were only slips of his pen, and not customary with him, he never varies. I have likewise remarked this singularity in his hand-writing; he never divides his words, so as to carry the letters which cannot be inserted at the end of a line to the next, but puts them below the other, enclosed by a bracket.

  LXXXVIII. He did not adhere strictly to orthography as laid down by the grammarians, but seems to have been of the opinion of those who think, that we ought to write as we speak; for as to his changing and omitting not only letters but whole syllables, it is a vulgar mistake. Nor should I have taken notice of it, but that it appears strange to me, that any person should have told us, that he sent a successor to a consular lieutenant of a province, as an ignorant, illiterate fellow, upon his observing that he had written ixi for ipsi. When he had occasion to write in cypher, he put b for a, c for b, and so forth; and instead of z, aa.

  LXXXIX. He was no less fond of the Greek literature, in which he made considerable proficiency; having had Apollodorus of Pergamus, for his master in rhetoric; whom, though much advanced in years, he took with him from The City, when he was himself very young, to Apollonia. Afterwards, being instructed in philology by Sephærus, he received into his family Areus the philosopher, and his sons Dionysius and Nicanor; but he never could speak the Greek tongue readily, nor ever ventured to compose in it. For if there was occasion for him to deliver his sentiments in that language, he always expressed what he had to say in Latin, and gave it another to translate. He was evidently not unacquainted with the poetry of the Greeks, and had a great taste for the ancient comedy, which he often brought upon the stage, in his public spectacles. In reading the Greek and Latin authors, he paid particular attention to precepts and examples which might be useful in public or private life. Those he used to extract verbatim, and gave to his domestics, or send to the commanders of the armies, the governors of the provinces, or the magistrates of the city, when any of them seemed to stand in need of admonition. He likewise read whole books to the senate, and frequently made them known to the people by his edicts; such as the orations of Quintus Metellus “for the Encouragement of Marriage,” and those of Rutilius “On the Style of Building;”1 to shew the people that he was not the first who had promoted those objects, but that the ancients likewise had thought them worthy their attention. He patronised the men of genius of that age in every possible way. He would hear them read their works with a great deal of patience and good nature; and not only poetry2 and history, but orations and dialogues. He was displeased, however, that anything should be written upon himself, except in a grave manner, and by men of the most eminent abilities: and he enjoined the prætors not to suffer his name to be made too common in the contests amongst orators and poets in the theatres.

  XC. We have the following account of him respecting his belief in omens and such like. He had so great a dread of thunder and lightning that he always carried about him a seal’s skin, by way of preservation. And upon any apprehension of a violent storm, he would retire to some place of concealment in a vault under ground; having formerly been terrified by a flash of lightning, while travelling in the night, as we have already mentioned.1

  XCI. He neither slighted his own dreams nor those of other people relating to himself. At the battle of Philippi, although he had resolved not to stir out of his tent, on account of his being indisposed, yet, being warned by a dream of one of his friends, he changed his mind; and well it was that he did so, for in the enemy’s attack, his couch was pierced and cut to pieces, on the supposition of his being in it. He had many frivolous and frightful dreams during the spring; but in the other parts of the year, they were less frequent and more significative. Upon his frequently visiting a temple near the Capitol, which he had dedicated to Jupiter Tonans, he dreamt that Jupiter Capitolinus complained that his worshippers were taken from him, and that upon this he replied, he had only given him The Thunderer for his porter.2 He therefore immediately suspended little bells round the summit of the temple; because such commonly hung at the gates of great houses. In consequence of a dream, too, he always, on a certain day of the year, begged alms of the people, reaching out his hand to receive the dole which they offered him.

  XCII. Some signs and omens he regarded as infallible. If in the morning his shoe was put on wrong, the left instead of the right, that boded some disaster. If when he commenced a long journey, by sea or land, there happened to fall a mizzling rain, he held it to be a good sign of a speedy and happy return. He was much affected likewise with any thing out of the common course of nature. A palm-tree3 which chanced to grow up between some stones in the court of his house, he transplanted into a court where the images of the Household Gods were placed, and took all possible care to make it thrive. In the island of Capri, some decayed branches of an old ilex, which hung drooping to the ground, recovered themselves upon his arrival; at which he was so delighted, that he made an exchange with the Republic1 of Naples, of the island of Œnaria [Ischia], for that of Capri. He likewise observed certain days; as never to go from home the day after the Nundinæ,2 nor to begin any serious business upon the nones;3 avoiding nothing else in it, as he writes to Tiberius, than its unlucky name.

  XCIII. With regard to the religious ceremonies of foreign nations, he was a strict observer of those which had been established by ancient custom; but others he held in no esteem. For, having been initiated at Athens, and coming afterwards to hear a cause at Rome, relative to the privileges of the priests of the Attic Ceres, when some of the mysteries of their sacred rites were to be introduced in the pleadings, he dismissed those who sat upon the bench as judges with him, as well as the by-standers, and heard the argument upon those points himself. But, on the other hand, he not only declined, in his progress through Egypt, to go out of his way to pay a visit to Apis, but he likewise commended his grandson Caius for not paying his devotions at Jerusalem in his passage through Judea.1

  XCIV. Since we are upon this subject, it may not be improper to give an account of the omens, before and at his birth, as well as afterwards, which gave hopes of his future greatness, and the good fortune that constantly attended him. A part of the wall of Velletri having in former times been struck with thunder, the response of the soothsayers was, that a native of that town would some time or other arrive at supreme power; relying on which prediction, the Velletrians both then, and several times afterwards, made war upon the Roman people, to their own ruin. At last it appeared by the event, that the omen had portended the elevation of Augustus.

  Julius Marathus informs us, that a few months before his birth, there happened at Rome a prodigy, by which was signified that Nature was in travail with a king for the Roman people; and that the senate, in alarm, came to the resolution that no child born that year should be brought up; but that those amongst them, whose wives were pregnant, to secure to themselves a chance of that dignity, took care that the decree of the senate should not be registered in the treasury.

  I find in the theological books of Asclepiades the Mendesian,2 that Atia, upon attending at midnight a religious solemnity in honour of Apollo, when the rest of the matrons retired home, fell asleep on her couch in the temple, and that a serpent immediately crept to her, and soon after withdrew. She awaking upon it, purified herself, as usual after the embraces of her husband; and instantly there appeared upon her body a mark in the form of a serpent, which she never after could efface, and which obliged her, during the subsequent part of her life, to decline the use of the public baths. Augustus, it was added, was born in the tenth month after, and for that reason was thought to be the son of Apollo. The same Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched to the stars, and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven and earth. His father Octavius, likewise, dreamt that a sun-beam issued from his wife’s womb.

  Upon the day he was born, the senate being engaged in a debate on Catiline’s conspiracy, and Octavius, in consequence of his wife’s being in childbirth, coming late into the house, it is a well-known fact, that Publius Nigidius, upon hearing the occasion of his coming so late, and the hour of his wife’s delivery, declared that the world had got a master. Afterwards, when Octavius, upon marching with his army through the deserts of Thrace, consulted the oracle in the grove of father Bacchus, with barbarous rites, concerning his son, he received from the priests an answer to the same purpose; because, when they poured wine upon the altar, there burst out so prodigious a flame, that it ascended above the roof of the temple, and reached up to the heavens; a circumstance which had never happened to any one but Alexander the Great, upon his sacrificing at the same altars. And next night he dreamt that he saw his son under a more than human appearance, with thunder and a sceptre, and the other insignia of Jupiter, Optimus, Maximus, having on his head a radiant crown, mounted upon a chariot decked with laurel, and drawn by six pair of milk-white horses.

  Whilst he was yet an infant, as Caius Drusus relates, being laid in his cradle by his nurse, and in a low place, the next day he was not to be found, and after he had been sought for a long time, he was at last discovered upon a lofty tower, lying with his face towards the rising sun.1 When he first began to speak, he ordered the frogs that happened to make a troublesome noise, upon an estate belonging to the family near the town, to be silent; and there goes a report that frogs never croaked there since that time. As he was dining in a grove at the fourth mile-stone on the Campanian road, an eagle suddenly snatched a piece of bread out of his hand, and, soaring to a prodigious height, after hovering, came down most unexpectedly, and returned it to him.

  Quintus Catulus had a dream, for two nights successively after his dedication of the Capitol. The first night he dreamt that Jupiter, out of several boys of the order of the nobility who were playing about his altar, selected one, into whose bosom he put the public seal of the commonwealth, which he held in his hand; but in his vision the next night, he saw in the bosom of Jupiter Capitolinus, the same boy; whom he ordered to be removed, but it was forbidden by the God, who declared that it must be brought up to become the guardian of the state. The next day, meeting Augustus, with whom till that hour he had not the least acquaintance, and looking at him with admiration, he said he was extremely like the boy he had seen in his dream. Some give a different account of Catulus’s first dream, namely, that Jupiter, upon several noble lads requesting of him that they might have a guardian, had pointed to one amongst them, to whom they were to prefer their requests; and putting his fingers to the boy’s mouth to kiss, he afterwards applied them to his own.

  Marcus Cicero, as he was attending Caius Cæsar to the Capitol, happened to be telling some of his friends a dream which he had the preceding night, in which he saw a comely youth, let down from heaven by a golden chain, who stood at the door of the Capitol, and had a whip put into his hands by Jupiter. And immediately upon sight of Augustus, who had been sent for by his uncle Cæsar to the sacrifice, and was as yet perfectly unknown to most of the company, he affirmed that it was the very boy he had seen in his dream. When he assumed the manly toga, his senatorian tunic becoming loose in the seam on each side, fell at his feet. Some would have this to forbode, that the order, of which that was the badge of distinction, would some time or other be subject to him.

  Julius Cæsar, in cutting down a wood to make room for his camp near Munda,1 happened to light upon a palm-tree, and ordered it to be preserved as an omen of victory. From the root of this tree there put out immediately a sucker, which, in a few days, grew to such a height as not only to equal, but overshadow it, and afford room for many nests of wild pigeons which built in it, though that species of bird particularly avoids a hard and rough leaf. It is likewise reported, that Cæsar was chiefly influenced by this prodigy, to prefer his sister’s grandson before all others for his successor.

  In his retirement at Apollonia, he went with his friend Agrippa to visit Theogenes, the astrologer, in his gallery on the roof. Agrippa, who first consulted the fates, having great and almost incredible fortunes predicted of him, Augustus did not choose to make known his nativity, and persisted for some time in the refusal, from a mixture of shame and fear, lest his fortunes should be predicted as inferior to those of Agrippa. Being persuaded, however, after much importunity, to declare it, Theogenes started up from his seat, and paid him adoration. Not long afterwards, Augustus was so confident of the greatness of his destiny, that he published his horoscope, and struck a silver coin, bearing upon it the sign of Capricorn, under the influence of which he was born.

  XCV. After the death of Cæsar, upon his return from Apollonia, as he was entering the city, on a sudden, in a clear and bright sky, a circle resembling the rainbow surrounded the body of the sun; and, immediately afterwards, the tomb of Julia, Cæsar’s daughter, was struck by lightning. In his first consulship, whilst he was observing the auguries, twelve vultures presented themselves, as they had done to Romulus. And when he offered sacrifice, the livers of all the victims were folded inward in the lower part; a circumstance which was regarded by those present, who had skill in things of that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of great and wonderful fortune.

  XCVI. He certainly had a presentiment of the issue of all his wars. When the troops of the Triumviri were collected about Bolognia, an eagle, which sat upon his tent, and was attacked by two crows, beat them both, and struck them to the ground, in the view of the whole army; who thence inferred that discord would arise between the three colleagues, which would be attended with the like event: and it accordingly happened. At Philippi, he was assured of success by a Thessalian, upon the authority, as he pretended, of the Divine Cæsar himself, who had appeared to him while he was travelling in a bye-road. At Perugia, the sacrifice not presenting any favourable intimations, but the contrary, he ordered fresh victims; the enemy, however, carrying off the sacred things in a sudden sally, it was agreed amongst the augurs, that all the dangers and misfortunes which had threatened the sacriticer, would fall upon the heads of those who had got possession of the entrails. And, accordingly, so it happened. The day before the sea-fight near Sicily, as he was walking upon the shore, a fish leaped out of the sea, and laid itself at his feet. At Actium, while he was going down to his fleet to engage the enemy, he was met by an ass with a fellow driving it. The name of the man was Eutychus, and that of the animal, Nichon.1 After the victory, he erected a brazen statue to each, in a temple built upon the spot where he had encamped.

  XCVII. His death, of which I shall now speak, and his subsequent deification, were intimated by divers manifest prodigies. As he was finishing the census amidst a great crowd of people in the Campus Martius, an eagle hovered round him several times, and then directed its course to a neighbouring temple, where it settled upon the name of Agrippa, and at the first letter. Upon observing this, he ordered his colleague Tiberius to put up the vows, which it is usual to make on such occasions, for the succeeding Lustrum. For he declared he would not meddle with what it was probable he should never accomplish, though the tables were ready drawn for it. About the same time, the first letter of his name, in an inscription upon one of his statues, was struck out by lightning; which was interpreted as a presage that he would live only a hundred days longer, the letter C denoting that number; and that he would be placed amongst the Gods, as Æsar, which is the remaining part of the word Cæsar, signifies, in the Tuscan language, a God.2 Being, therefore, about dispatching Tiberius to Illyricum, and designing to go with him as far as Beneventum, but being detained by several persons who applied to him respecting causes they had depending, he cried out, (and it was afterwards regarded as an omen of his death), “Not all the business in the world, shall detain me at Rome one moment longer;” and setting out upon his journey, he went as far as Astura;1 whence, contrary to his custom, he put to sea in the night-time, as there was a favourable wind.

  XCVIII. His malady proceeded from diarrhœa; notwithstanding which, he went round the coast of Campania, and the adjacent islands, and spent four days in that of Capri; where he gave himself up entirely to repose and relaxation. Happening to sail by the bay of Puteoli, the passengers and mariners aboard a ship of Alexandria,2 just then arrived, clad all in white, with chaplets upon their heads, and offering incense, loaded him with praises and joyful acclamations, crying out, “By you we live, by you we sail securely, by you enjoy our liberty and our fortunes.” At which being greatly pleased, he distributed to each of those who attended him, forty gold pieces, requiring from them an assurance on oath, not to employ the sum given them in any other way, than the purchase of Alexandrian merchandize. And during several days afterwards, he distributed Togæ3 and Pallia, among other gifts, on condition that the Romans should use the Greek, and the Greeks the Roman dress and language. He likewise constantly attended to see the boys perform their exercises, according to an ancient custom still continued at Capri. He gave them likewise an entertainment in his presence, and not only permitted, but required from them the utmost freedom in jesting, and scrambling for fruit, victuals, and other things which he threw amongst them. In a word, he indulged himself in all the ways of amusement he could contrive.

  He called an island near Capri, Ἀπϱαγόπολις, “The City of the Do-littles,” from the indolent life which several of his party led there. A favourite of his, one Masgabas,4 he used to call Κτ.[Editor: illegible character][Editor: illegible character]ὴς as if he had been the planter of the island. And observing from his room a great company of people with torches, assembled at the tomb of this Masgabas, who died the year before, he uttered very distinctly this verse, which he made extempore.

  • Κτιστου δὲ τύμϐο[Editor: illegible character] εισορῶ πυρόυμενον.
  • Blazing with lights I see the founder’s tomb.

  Then turning to Thrasyllus, a companion of Tiberiue, who reclined on the other side of the table, he asked him, who knew nothing about the matter, what poet he thought was the author of that verse; and on his hesitating to reply, he added another:

  • Ὀρᾷς φάεσσι Μασγάϐαν τιμώμενον.
  • Honor’d with torches Masgabas you see;

  and put the same question to him concerning that likewise. The latter replying, that, whoever might be the author, they were excellent verses,1 he set up a great laugh, and fell into an extraordinary vein of jesting upon it. Soon afterwards, passing over to Naples, although at that time greatly disordered in his bowels by the frequent returns of his disease, he sat out the exhibition of the gymnastic games which were performed in his honour every five years, and proceeded with Tiberius to the place intended. But on his return, his disorder increasing, he stopped at Nola, sent for Tiberius back again, and had a long discourse with him in private; after which, he gave no further attention to business of any importance.

  XCIX. Upon the day of his death, he now and then enquired, if there was any disturbance in the town on his account; and calling for a mirror, he ordered his hair to be combed, and his shrunk cheeks to be adjusted. Then asking his friends who were admitted into the room, “Do ye think that I have acted my part on the stage of life well?” he immediately subjoined,

  • Ἐι δὲ πᾶν ἔχει ϰαλῶς, τῳ παιγνίῳ
  • Δότε ϰϱότον, ϰαὶ παντες ὑμεῖς μετὰ χαϱᾶς ϰτυπήσατε.
  • If all be right, with joy your voices raise,
  • In loud applauses to the actor’s praise.

  After which, having dismissed them all, whilst he was inquiring of some persons who were just arrived from Rome, concerning Drusus’s daughter, who was in a bad state of health, he expired suddenly, amidst the kisses of Livia, and with these words: “Livia! live mindful of our union; and now, farewell!” dying a very easy death, and such as he himself had always wished for. For as often as he heard that any person had died quickly and without pain, he wished for himself and his friends the like ἐυθανασίαν (an easy death), for that was the word he made use of. He betrayed but one symptom, before he breathed his last, of being delirious, which was this: he was all on a sudden much frightened, and complained that he was carried away by forty men. But this was rather a presage, than any delirium: for precisely that number of soldiers belonging to the prætorian cohort, carried out his corpse.

  C. He expired in the same room in which his father Octavius had died, when the two Sextus’s, Pompey and Apuleius, were consuls, upon the fourteenth of the calends of September [the 19th August], at the ninth hour of the day, being seventy-six years of age, wanting only thirty-five days.1 His remains were carried by the magistrates of the municipal2 towns and colonies, from Nola to Bovillæ,3 and in the night-time, because of the season of the year. During the intervals, the body lay in some basilica, or great temple, of each town. At Bovillæ it was met by the Equestrian Order, who carried it to the city, and deposited it in the vestibule of his own house. The senate proceeded with so much zeal in the arrangement of his funeral, and paying honour to his memory, that, amongst several other proposals, some were for having the funeral procession made through the triumphal gate, preceded by the image of Victory which is in the senate-house, and the children of highest rank and of both sexes singing the funeral dirge Others proposed, that on the day of the funeral, they should lay aside their gold rings, and wear rings of iron; and others, that his bones should be collected by the priests of the principal colleges. One likewise proposed to transfer the name of August to September, because he was born in the latter, but died in the former. Another moved, that the whole period of time, from his birth to his death, should be called the Augustan age, and be inserted in the calendar under that title. But at last it was judged proper to be moderate in the honours paid to his memory. Two funeral orations were pronounced in his praise, one before the temple of Julius, by Tiberius; and the other before the rostra, under the old shops, by Drusus, Tiberius’s son. The body was then carried upon the shoulders of senators into the Campus Martius, and there burnt. A man of prætorian rank affirmed upon oath, that he saw his spirit ascend from the funeral pile to heaven. The most distinguished persons of the equestrian order, bare-footed, and with their tunics loose, gathered up his relics,1 and deposited them in the mausoleum, which had been built in his sixth consulship between the Flaminian Way and the bank of the Tiber;2 at which time likewise he gave the groves and walks about it for the use of the people.

  CI. He had made a will a year and four months before his death, upon the third of the nones of April [the 11th of April], in the consulship of Lucius Plancus, and Caius Silius. It consisted of two skins of parchment, written partly in his own hand, and partly by his freedmen Polybius and Hilarian; and had been committed to the custody of the Vestal Virgins, by whom it was now produced, with three codicils under seal, as well as the will: all these were opened and read in the senate. He appointed as his direct heirs, Tiberius for two-thirds of his estate, and Livia for the other third, both of whom he desired to assume his name. The heirs in remainder were Drusus, Tiberius’s son, for one third, and Germanicus with his three sons for the residue. In the third place, failing them, were his relations, and several of his friends. He left in legacies to the Roman people forty millions of sesterces; to the tribes1 three millions five hundred thousand; to the prætorian troops a thousand each man; to the city cohorts five hundred; and to the legions and soldiers three hundred each; which several sums he ordered to be paid immediately after his death, having taken due care that the money should be ready in his exchequer. For the rest he ordered different times of payment. In some of his bequests he went as far as twenty thousand sesterces, for the payment of which he allowed a twelvemonth; alleging for this procrastination the scantiness of his estate; and declaring that not more than a hundred and fifty millions of sesterces would come to his heirs: notwithstanding that during the twenty preceding years, he had received, in legacies from his friends, the sum of fourteen hundred millions; almost the whole of which, with his two paternal estates,2 and others which had been left him, he had spent in the service of the state. He left orders that the two Julias, his daughter and grand-daughter, if any thing happened to them, should not be buried in his tomb.3 With regard to the three codicils before-mentioned, in one of them he gave orders about his funeral; another contained a summary of his acts, which he intended should be inscribed on brazen plates, and placed in front of his mausoleum; in the third he had drawn up a concise account of the state of the empire; the number of troops enrolled, what money there was in the treasury, the revenue, and arrears of taxes; to which were added the names of the freedmen and slaves from whom the several accounts might be taken.

  Octavius Cæsar, afterwards Augustus, had now attained to the same position in the state which had formerly been occupied by Julius Cæsar; and though he entered upon it by violence, he continued to enjoy it through life with almost uninterrupted tranquillity. By the long duration of the late civil war, with its concomitant train of public calamities, the minds of men were become less averse to the prospect of an absolute government; at the same time that the new emperor, naturally prudent and politic, had learned from the fate of Julius the art of preserving supreme power, without arrogating to himself any invidious mark of distinction. He affected to decline public honours, disclaimed every idea of personal superiority, and in all his behaviour displayed a degree of moderation which prognosticated the most happy effects, in restoring peace and prosperity to the harassed empire. The tenor of his future conduct was suitable to this auspicious commencement. While he endeavoured to conciliate the affections of the people by lending money to those who stood in need of it, at low interest, or without any at all, and by the exhibition of public shows, of which the Romans were remarkably fond; he was attentive to the preservation of a becoming dignity in the government, and to the correction of morals. The senate, which, in the time of Sylla, had increased to upwards of four hundred, and, during the civil war, to a thousand, members, by the admission of improper persons, he reduced to six hundred; and being invested with the ancient office of censor, which had for some time been disused, he exercised an arbitrary but legal authority over the conduct of every rank in the state; by which he could degrade senators and knights, and inflict upon all citizens an ignominious sentence for any immoral or indecent behaviour. But nothing contributed more to render the new form of government acceptable to the people, than the frequent distribution of corn, and sometimes largesses, amongst the commonalty: for an occasional scarcity of provisions had always been the chief cause of discontents and tumults in the capital. To the interests of the army he likewise paid particular attention. It was by the assistance of the legions that he had risen to power; and they were the men who, in the last resort, if such an emergency should ever occur, could alone enable him to preserve it.

  History relates, that after the overthrow of Antony, Augustus held a consultation with Agrippa and Mecænas about restoring the republican form of government; when Agrippa gave his opinion in favour of that measure, and Mecænas opposed it. The object of this consultation, in respect to its future consequences on society, is perhaps the most important ever agitated in any cabinet, and required, for the mature discussion of it, the whole collective wisdom of the ablest men in the empire. But this was a resource which could scarcely be adopted, either with security to the public quiet, or with unbiassed judgment in the determination of the question. The bare agitation of such a point would have excited immediate and strong anxiety for its final result; while the friends of a republican government, who were still far more numerous than those of the other party, would have strained every nerve to procure a determination in their own favour; and the prætorian guards, the surest protection of Augustus, finding their situation rendered precarious by such an unexpected occurrence, would have readily listened to the secret propositions and intrigues of the republicans for securing their acquiescence to the decision on the popular side. If, when the subject came into debate, Augustus should be sincere in the declaration to abide by the resolution of the council, it is beyond all doubt, that the restoration of a republican government would have been voted by a great majority of the assembly. If, on the contrary, he should not be sincere, which is the more probable supposition, and should incur the suspicion of practising secretly with members for a decision according to his wish, he would have rendered himself obnoxious to the public odium, and given rise to discontents which might have endangered his future security.

  But to submit this important question to the free and unbiassed decision of a numerous assembly, it is probable, neither suited the inclination of Augustus, nor perhaps, in his opinion, consisted with his personal safety. With a view to the attainment of unconstitutional power, he had formerly deserted the cause of the republic when its affairs were in a prosperous situation; and now, when his end was accomplished, there could be little ground to expect, that he should voluntarily relinquish the prize for which he had spilt the best blood of Rome, and contended for so many years. Ever since the final defeat of Antony in the battle of Actium, he had governed the Roman state with uncontrolled authority; and though there is in the nature of unlimited power an intoxicating quality, injurious both to public and private virtue, yet all history contradicts the supposition of its being endued with any which is unpalatable to the general taste of mankind.

  There were two chief motives by which Augustus would naturally be influenced in a deliberation on this important subject; namely, the love of power, and the personal danger which he might incur from relinquishing it. Either of these motives might have been a sufficient inducement for retaining his authority; but when they both concurred, as they seem to have done upon this occasion, their united force was irresistible. The argument, so far as relates to the love of power, rests upon a ground, concerning the solidity of which, little doubt can be entertained: but it may be proper to inquire, in a few words, into the foundation of that personal danger which he dreaded to incur, on returning to the station of a private citizen.

  Augustus, as has been already observed, had formerly sided with the party which had attempted to restore public liberty after the death of Julius Cæsar: but he afterwards abandoned the popular cause, and joined in the ambitious plans of Antony and Lepidus to usurp amongst themselves the entire dominion of the state. By this change of conduct, he turned his arms against the supporters of a form of government which he had virtually recognized as the legal constitution of Rome; and it involved a direct implication of treason against the sacred representatives of that government, the consuls, formally and duly elected. Upon such a charge he might be amenable to the capital laws of his country. This, however, was a danger which might be fully obviated, by procuring from the senate and people an act of oblivion, previously to his abdication of the supreme power; and this was a preliminary which doubtless they would have admitted and ratified with unanimous approbation. It therefore appears that he could be exposed to no inevitable danger on this account: but there was another quarter where his person was vulnerable, and where even the laws might not be sufficient to protect him against the efforts of private resentment. The bloody proscription of the Triumvirate no act of amnesty could ever erase from the minds of those who had been deprived by it of their nearest and dearest relations; and amidst the numerous connections of the illustrious men sacrificed on that horrible occasion, there might arise some desperate avenger, whose indelible resentment nothing less would satisfy than the blood of the surviving delinquent. Though Augustus, therefore, might not, like his great predecessor, be stabbed in the senate-house, he might perish by the sword or the poniard in a less conspicuous situation. After all, there seems to have been little danger from this quarter likewise: for Sylla, who in the preceding age had been guilty of equal enormities, was permitted, on relinquishing the place of perpetual dictator, to end his days in quiet retirement; and the undisturbed security which Augustus ever afterwards enjoyed, affords sufficient proof, that all apprehension of danger to his person was merely chimerical.

  We have hitherto considered this grand consultation as it might be influenced by the passions or prejudices of the emperor: we shall now take a short view of the subject in the light in which it is connected with considerations of a political nature and with public utility. The arguments handed down by history respecting this consultation are few, and imperfectly delivered; but they may be extended upon the general principles maintained on each side of the question.

  For the restoration of the republican government, it might be contended, that from the expulsion of the kings to the dictatorship of Julius Cæsar, through a period of upwards of four hundred and sixty years, the Roman state, with the exception only of a short interval, had flourished and increased with a degree of prosperity unexampled in the annals of human kind: that the republican form of government was not only best adapted to the improvement of national grandeur, but to the security of general freedom, the great object of all political association: that public virtue, by which alone nations could subsist in vigour, was cherished and protected by no mode of administration so much as by that which connected, in the strongest bonds of union, the private interests of individuals with those of the community: that the habits and prejudices of the Roman people were unalterably attached to the form of government established by so long a prescription, and they would never submit, for any length of time, to the rule of one person, without making every possible effort to recover their liberty: that though despotism, under a mild and wise prince, might in some respects be regarded as preferable to a constitution which was occasionally exposed to the inconvenience of faction and popular tumults, yet it was a dangerous experiment to abandon the government of the nation to the contingency of such a variety of characters as usually occurs in the succession of princes; and, upon the whole, that the interests of the people were more safely entrusted in the hands of annual magistrates elected by themselves, than in those of any individual whose power was permanent, and subject to no legal control.

  In favour of despotic government it might be urged, that though Rome had subsisted long and gloriously under a republican form of government, yet she had often experienced such violent shocks from popular tumults or the factions of the great, as had threatened her with imminent destruction: that a republican government was only accommodated to a people amongst whom the division of property gave to no class of citizens such a degree of preeminence as might prove dangerous to public freedom: that there was required in that form of political constitution, a simplicity of life and strictness of manners which are never observed to accompany a high degree of public prosperity: that in respect of all these considerations, such a form of government was utterly incompatible with the present circumstances of the Romans: that by the conquest of so many foreign nations, by the lucrative governments of provinces, the spoils of the enemy in war, and the rapine too often practised in time of peace, so great had been the aggrandizement of particular families in the preceding age, that though the form of the ancient constitution should still remain inviolate, the people would no longer live under a free republic, but an aristocratical usurpation, which was always productive of tyranny: that nothing could preserve the commonwealth from becoming a prey to some daring confederacy, but the firm and vigorous administration of one person, invested with the whole executive power of the state, unlimited and uncontrolled: in fine, that as Rome had been nursed to maturity by the government of six princes successively, so it was only by a similar form of political constitution that she could now be saved from aristocratical tyranny on one hand, or, on the other, from absolute anarchy.

  On whichever side of the question the force of argument may be thought to preponderate, there is reason to believe that Augustus was guided in his resolution more by inclination and prejudice than by reason. It is related, however, that hesitating between the opposite opinions of his two counsellors, he had recourse to that of Virgil, who joined with Mecænas in advising him to retain the imperial power, as being the form of government most suitable to the circumstances of the times.

  It is proper in this place to give some account of the two ministers above-mentioned, Agrippa and Mecænas, who composed the cabinet of Augustus at the settlement of his government, and seem to be the only persons employed by him in a ministerial capacity during his whole reign.

  M. Vipsanius Agrippa was of obscure extraction, but rendered himself conspicuous by his military talents. He obtained a victory over Sextus Pompey; and in the battles of Philippi and Actium, where he displayed great valour, he contributed not a little to establish the subsequent power of Augustus. In his expeditions afterwards into Gaul and Germany, he performed many signal achievements, for which he refused the honours of a triumph. The expenses which others would have lavished on that frivolous spectacle, he applied to the more laudable purpose of embellishing Rome with magnificent buildings, one of which, the Pantheon, still remains. In consequence of a dispute with Marcellus, the nephew of Augustus, he retired to Mitylene, whence, after an absence of two years, he was recalled by the emperor. He first married Pomponia, the daughter of the celebrated Atticus, and afterwards one of the Marcellas, the nieces of Augustus. While this lady, by whom he had children, was still living, the emperor prevailed upon his sister Octavia to resign to him her son-in-law, and gave him in marriage his own daughter Julia; so strong was the desire of Augustus to be united with him in the closest alliance. The high degree of favour in which he stood with the emperor was soon after evinced by a farther mark of esteem: for during a visit to the Roman provinces of Greece and Asia, in which Augustus was absent two years, he left the government of the empire to the care of Agrippa. While this minister enjoyed, and indeed seems to have merited, all the partiality of Augustus, he was likewise a favourite with the people. He died at Rome, in the sixty-first year of his age, universally lamented; and his remains were deposited in the tomb which Augustus had prepared for himself. Agrippa left by Julia three sons, Caius, Lucius, and Posthumus Agrippa, with two daughters, Agrippina and Julia.

  C. Cilnius Mecænas was of Tuscan extraction, and derived his descent from the ancient kings of that country. Though in the highest degree of favour with Augustus, he never aspired beyond the rank of the equestrian order; and though he might have held the government of extensive provinces by deputies, he was content with enjoying the præfecture of the city and Italy; a situation, however, which must have been attended with extensive patronage. He was of a gay and social disposition. In principle he is said to have been of the Epicurean sect, and in his dress and manners to have bordered on effeminacy. With respect to his political talents, we can only speak from conjecture; but from his being the confidential minister of a prince of so much discernment as Augustus, during the infancy of a new form of government in an extensive empire, we may presume that he was endowed with no common abilities for that important station. The liberal patronage which he displayed towards men of genius and talents, will render his name for ever celebrated in the annals of learning. It is to be regretted that history has transmitted no particulars of this extraordinary personage, of whom all we know is derived chiefly from the writings of Virgil and Horace; but from the manner in which they address him, amidst the familiarity of their intercourse, there is the strongest reason to suppose, that he was not less amiable and respectable in private life, than illustrious in public situation. “O my glory!” is the emphatic expression employed by them both.

  • O decus, O famæ merito pars maxima nostræ Vir. Georg. ii.
  • Light of my life, my glory, and my guide!
  • O et præsidium et dulce decus meum. Hor. Ode I.
  • My glory and my patron thou!

  One would be inclined to think, that there was a nicety in the sense and application of the word decus, amongst the Romans, with which we are unacquainted, and that, in the passages now adduced, it was understood to refer to the honour of the emperor’s patronage, obtained through the means of Mecænas; otherwise, such language to the minister might have excited the jealousy of Augustus. But whatever foundation there may be for this conjecture, the compliment was compensated by the superior adulation which the poets appropriated to the emperor, whose deification is more than insinuated, in sublime intimations, by Virgil.

  • Tuque adeo quem mox quæ sint habitura deorum
  • Concilia, incertum est; urbisne invisere, Cæsar,
  • Terrarumque velis curam; et te maximus orbis
  • Auctorem frugum, tempestatumque potentem
  • Accipiat, cingens materna tempora myrto:
  • An Deus immensi venias maris, ac tua nautæ
  • Numina sola colant: tibi serviat ultima Thule;
  • Teque sibi generum Tethys emat omnibus undis.

  • Geor. i. l. 25. vi.

  • Thou Cæsar, chief where’er thy voice ordain
  • To fix midst gods thy yet unchosen reign—
  • Wilt thou o’er cities fix thy guardian sway,
  • While earth and all her realms thy nod obey?
  • The world’s vast orb shall own thy genial power,
  • Giver of fruits, fair sun, and favouring shower;
  • Before thy altar grateful nations bow,
  • And with maternal myrtle wreathe thy brow;
  • O’er boundless ocean shall thy power prevail,
  • Thee her sole lord the world of waters hail,
  • Rule where the sea remotest Thule laves,
  • While Tethys dowers thy bride with all her waves.

  • Carm. IV. 5.

  • To thee he chants the sacred song,
  • To thee the rich libation pours;
  • Thee placed his household gods among,
  • With solemn daily prayer adores:
  • So Castor and great Hercules of old,
  • Were with her gods by grateful Greece enrolled.

  The panegyric bestowed upon Augustus by the great poets of that time, appears to have had a farther object than the mere gratification of vanity. It was the ambition of this emperor to reign in the hearts as well as over the persons of his subjects; and with this view he was desirous of endearing himself to their imagination. Both he and Mecænas had a delicate sensibility to the beauties of poetical composition; and judging from their own feelings, they attached a high degree of influence to the charms of poetry. Impressed with these sentiments, it became an object of importance, in their opinion, to engage the Muses in the service of the imperial authority; on which account, we find Mecænas tampering with Propertius, and we may presume, likewise with every other rising genius in poetry, to undertake an heroic poem, of which Augustus should be the hero. As the application to Propertius cannot have taken place until after Augustus had been amply celebrated by the superior abilities of Virgil and Horace, there seems to be some reason for ascribing Mecænas’s request to a political motive. Caius and Lucius, the emperor’s grandsons by his daughter Julia, were still living, and both young. As one of them, doubtless, was intended to succeed to the government of the empire, prudence justified the adoption of every expedient that might tend to secure a quiet succession to the heir, upon the demise of Augustus. As a subsidiary resource, therefore, the expedient above mentioned was judged highly plausible; and the Roman cabinet indulged the idea of endeavouring to confirm imperial authority by the support of poetical renown. Lampoons against the government were not uncommon even in the time of Augustus; and elegant panegyric on the emperor served to counteract their influence upon the minds of the people. The idea was, perhaps, novel in the time of Augustus; but the history of later ages affords examples of its having been adopted, under different forms of government, with success.

  The Roman empire, in the time of Augustus, had attained to a prodigious magnitude; and, in his testament, he recommended to his successors never to exceed the limits which he had prescribed to its extent. On the East it stretched to the Euphrates; on the South to the cataracts of the Nile, the deserts of Africa, and Mount Atlas; on the West to the Atlantic Ocean; and on the North to the Danube and the Rhine; including the best part of the then known world. The Romans, therefore, were not improperly called rerum domini,1 and Rome, pulcherrima rerum,2maxima rerum.3 Even the historians, Livy and Tacitus, actuated likewise with admiration, bestow magnificent epithets on the capital of their country. The succeeding emperors, in conformity to the advice of Augustus, made few additions to the empire. Trajan, however, subdued Mesopotamia and Armenia, east of the Euphrates, with Dacia, north of the Danube; and after this period the Roman dominion was extended over Britain, as far as the Frith of Forth and the Clyde.

  It would be an object of curiosity to ascertain the amount of the Roman revenue in the reign of Augustus; but such a problem, even with respect to contemporary nations, cannot be elucidated without access to the public registers of their governments; and in regard to an ancient monarchy, the investigation is impracticable. We can only be assured that the revenue must have been immense, which arose from the accumulated contribution of such a number of nations, that had supported their own civil establishments with great splendour, and many of which were celebrated for their extraordinary riches and commerce. The tribute paid by the Romans themselves, towards the support of the government, was very considerable during the latter ages of the republic, and it received an increase after the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa. The establishments, both civil and military, in the different provinces, were supported at their own expense; the emperor required but a small naval force, an arm which adds much to the public expenditure of maritime nations in modern times; and the state was burdened with no diplomatic charges. The vast treasure accruing from the various taxes centered in Rome, and the whole was at the disposal of the emperor, without any control. We may therefore justly conclude that, in the amount of taxes, customs, and every kind of financial resources, Augustus exceeded all sovereigns who had hitherto ever swayed the sceptre of imperial dominion; a noble acquisition, had it been judiciously employed by his successors, in promoting public happiness, with half the profusion in which it was lavished in disgracing human nature, and violating the rights of mankind.

  The reign of Augustus is distinguished by the most extraordinary event recorded in history, either sacred or profane, the nativity of the Saviour of mankind; which has since introduced a new epoch into the chronology of all Christian nations. The commencement of the new æra being the most flourishing period of the Roman empire, a general view of the state of knowledge and taste at this period, may here not be improper.

  Civilization was at this time extended farther over the world than it had ever been in any preceding period; but polytheism rather increased than diminished with the advancement of commercial intercourse between the nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and, though philosophy had been cultivated during several ages, at Athens, Cyrene, Rome, and other seats of learning, yet the morals of mankind were little improved by the diffusion of speculative knowledge. Socrates had laid an admirable foundation for the improvement of human nature, by the exertion of reason through the whole economy of life; but succeeding inquirers, forsaking the true path of ethic investigation, deviated into specious discussions, rather ingenious than useful; and some of them, by gratuitously adopting principles, which, so far from being supported by reason, were repugnant to its dictates, endeavoured to erect upon the basis of their respective doctrines a system peculiar to themselves. The doctrines of the Stoics and Epicureans were, in fact, pernicious to society; and those of the different academies, though more intimately connected with reason than the two former, were of a nature too abstract to have any immediate or useful influence on life and manners. General discussions of truth and probability, with magnificent declamations on the το καλον, and the summum bonum, constituted the chief objects of attention amongst those who cultivated moral science in the shades of academical retirement. Cicero endeavoured to bring back philosophy from speculation to practice, and clearly evinced the social duties to be founded in the unalterable dictates of virtue; but it was easier to demonstrate the truth of the principles which he maintained, than to enforce their observance, while the morals of mankind were little actuated by the exercise of reason alone.

  The science chiefly cultivated at this period was rhetoric, which appears to have differed considerably from what now passes under the same name. The object of it was not so much justness of sentiment and propriety of expression, as the art of declaiming, or speaking copiously upon any subject. It is mentioned by Varro as the reverse of logic; and they are distinguished from each other by a simile, that the former resembles the palm of the hand expanded, and the latter, contracted into the fist. It is observable that logic, though a part of education in modern times, seems not to have been cultivated amongst the Romans. Perhaps they were apprehensive, lest a science which concentered the force of argument, might obstruct the cultivation of that which was meant to dilate it. Astronomy was long before known in the eastern nations; but there is reason to believe, from a passage in Virgil,1 that it was little cultivated by the Romans; and it is certain, that in the reformation of the calendar, Julius Cæsar was chiefly indebted to the scientific knowledge of Sosigenes, a mathematician of Alexandria. The laws of the solar system were still but imperfectly known; the popular belief, that the sun moved round the earth, was universally maintained, and continued until the sixteenth century, when the contrary was proved by Copernicus. There existed many celebrated tracts on mathematics; and several of the mechanical powers, particularly that of the lever, were cultivated with success. The more necessary and useful rules of arithmetic were generally known. The use of the load-stone not being as yet discovered, navigation was conducted in the day-time by the sun, and in the night, by the observation of certain stars. Geography was cultivated during the present period by Strabo and Mela. In natural philosophy little progress was made; but a strong desire of its improvement was entertained, particularly by Virgil. Human anatomy being not yet introduced, physiology was imperfect. Chemistry, as a science, was utterly unknown. In medicine, the writings of Hippocrates, and other Greek physicians, were in general the standard of practice; but the Materia Medica contained few remedies of approved quality, and abounded with useless substances, as well as with many which stood upon no other foundation than the whimsical notions of those who first introduced them. Architecture flourished, through the elegant taste of Vitruvius, and the patronage of the emperor. Painting, statuary, and music, were cultivated, but not with that degree of perfection which they had obtained in the Grecian states. The musical instruments of this period were the flute and the lyre, to which may be added the sistrum, lately imported from Egypt. But the chief glory of the period is its literature, of which we proceed to give some account.

  At the head of the writers of this age, stands the emperor himself, with his minister Mecænas; but the works of both have almost totally perished. It appears from the historian now translated, that Augustus was the author of several productions in prose, besides some in verse. He wrote Answers to Brutus in relation to Cato, Exhortations to Philosophy, and the History of his own Life, which he continued, in thirteen books, down to the war of Cantabria. A book of his, written in hexameter verse, under the title of Sicily, was extant in the time of Suetonius, as was likewise a book of Epigrams. He began a tragedy on the subject of Ajax, but, being dissatisfied with the composition, destroyed it. Whatever the merits of Augustus may have been as an author, of which no judgment can be formed, his attachment to learning and eminent writers affords a strong presumption that he was not destitute of taste. Mecænas is said to have written two tragedies, Octavia and Prometheus; a History of Animals; a Treatise on Precious Stones; a Journal of the Life of Augustus; and other productions. Curiosity is strongly interested to discover the literary talents of a man so much distinguished for the esteem and patronage of them in others; but while we regret the impossibility of such a development, we scarcely can suppose the proficiency to have been small, where the love and admiration were so great.

  History was cultivated amongst the Romans during the present period, with uncommon success. This species of composition is calculated both for information and entertainment; but the chief design of it is to record all transactions relative to the public, for the purpose of enabling mankind to draw from past events a probable conjecture concerning the future; and, by knowing the steps which have led either to prosperity or misfortune, to ascertain the best means of promoting the former, and avoiding the latter of those objects. This useful kind of narrative was introduced about five hundred years before by Herodotus, who has thence received the appellation of the Father of History. His style, in conformity to the habits of thinking, and the simplicity of language, in an uncultivated age, is plain and unadorned; yet, by the happy modulation of the Ionic dialect, it gratified the ear, and afforded to the states of Greece a pleasing mixture of entertainment, enriched not only with various information, often indeed fabulous or unauthentic, but with the rudiments, indirectly interspersed, of political wisdom. This writer, after a long interval, was succeeded by Thucydides and Xenophon, the former of whom carried historical narrative to the highest degree of improvement it ever attained among the States of Greece. The plan of Thucydides seems to have continued to be the model of historical narrative to the writers of Rome; but the circumstances of the times, aided perhaps by the splendid exertion of genius in other departments of literature, suggested a new resource, which promised not only to animate, but embellish the future productions of the historic Muse. This innovation consisted in an attempt to penetrate the human heart, and explore in its innermost recesses the sentiments and secret motives which actuate the conduct of men. By connecting moral effects with their probable internal and external causes, it tended to establish a systematic consistency in the concatenation of transactions apparently anomalous, accidental, or totally independent of each other.

  The author of this improvement in history was Sallust, who likewise introduced the method of enlivening narrative with the occasional aid of rhetorical declamation, particularly in his account of the Catilinian conspiracy. The notorious characters and motives of the principal persons concerned in that horrible plot, afforded the most favourable opportunity for exemplifying the former; while the latter, there is reason to infer from the facts which must have been at that time publicly known, were founded upon documents of unquestionable authority. Nay, it is probable that Sallust was present in the senate during the debate respecting the punishment of the Catilinian conspirators; his detail of which is agreeable to the characters of the several speakers: but in detracting, by invidious silence, or too faint representation, from the merits of Cicero on that important occasion, he exhibits a glaring instance of the partiality which too often debases the narratives of those who record the transactions of their own time. He had married Terentia, the divorced wife of Cicero; and there subsisted between the two husbands a kind of rivalship from that cause, to which was probably added some degree of animosity, on account of their difference in politics, during the late dictatorship of Julius Cæsar, by whom Sallust was restored to the senate, whence he had been expelled for licentiousness, and was appointed governor of Numidia. Excepting the injustice with which Sallust treats Cicero, he is entitled to high commendation. In both his remaining works, the Conspiracy of Catiline, and the War of Jugurtha, there is a peculiar air of philosophical sentiment, which, joined to the elegant conciseness of style, and animated description of characters, gives to his writings a degree of interest, superior to that which is excited in any preceding work of the historical kind. In the occasional use of obsolete words, and in laboured exordiums to both his histories, he is liable to the charge of affectation; but it is an affectation of language which supports solemnity without exciting disgust; and of sentiment which not only exalts human nature, but animates to virtuous exertions. It seems to be the desire of Sallust to atone for the dissipation of his youth by a total change of conduct; and whoever peruses his exordiums with the attention which they deserve, must feel a strong persuasion of the justness of his remarks, if not the incentives of a resolution to be governed by his example. It seems to be certain, that from the first moment of his reformation, he incessantly practised the industry which he so warmly recommends. He composed a History of Rome, of which nothing remains but a few fragments. Sallust, during his administration of Numidia, is said to have exercised great oppression. On his return to Rome he built a magnificent house, and bought delightful gardens, the name of which, with his own, is to this day perpetuated on the spot which they formerly occupied. Sallust was born at Amiternum, in the country of the Sabines, and received his education at Rome. He incurred great scandal by an amour with Fausta, the daughter of Sylla, and wife of Milo; who detecting the criminal intercourse, is said to have beat him with stripes, and extorted from him a large sum of money. He died, according to tradition, in the fifty-first year of his age.—

  Cornelius Nepos was born at Hostilia, near the banks of the Po. Of his parentage we meet with no account; but from his respectable connections early in life, it is probable that he was of good extraction. Among his most intimate friends were Cicero and Atticus. Some authors relate that he composed three books of Chronicles, with a biographical account of all the most celebrated sovereigns, generals, and writers of antiquity.

  The language of Cornelius Nepos is pure, his style perspicuous, and he holds a middle and agreeable course between diffuseness and brevity. He has not observed the same rule with respect to the treatment of every subject; for the account of some of the lives is so short, that we might suspect them to be mutilated, did they not contain evident marks of their being completed in miniature. The great extent of his plan induced him, as he informs us, to adopt this expedient. “Sed plura persequi, tum magnitudo voluminis prohibet, tum festinatio, ut ea explicem, quæ exorsus sum.”1

  Of his numerous biographical works, twenty-two lives only remain, which are all of Greeks, except two Carthaginians, Hamilcar and Hannibal; and two Romans, M. Porcius Cato and T. Pomponius Atticus. Of his own life,—of him who had written the lives of so many, no account is transmitted; but from the multiplicity of his productions, we may conclude that it was devoted to literature.—

  Titus Livius may be ranked among the most celebrated historians the world has ever produced. He composed a history of Rome from the foundation of the city, to the conclusion of the German war conducted by Drusus in the time of the emperor Augustus. This great work consisted, originally, of one hundred and forty books; of which there now remain only thirty-five, viz., the first decade, and the whole from book twenty-one to book forty-five, both inclusive. Of the other hundred and five books, nothing more has survived the ravages of time and barbarians than their general contents. In a perspicuous arrangement of his subject, in a full and circumstantial account of transactions, in the delineation of characters and other objects of description, in justness and aptitude of sentiment, and in an air of majesty pervading the whole composition, this author may be regarded as one of the best models extant of historical narrative. His style is splendid without meretricious ornament, and copious without being redundant; a fluency to which Quintilian gives the expressive appellation of “lactea ubertas.” Amongst the beauties which we admire in his writings, besides the animated speeches frequently interspersed, are those concise and peculiarly applicable eulogiums, with which he characterises every eminent person mentioned, at the close of their life. Of his industry in collating, and his judgment in deciding upon the preference due to, dissentient authorities, in matters of testimony, the work affords numberless proofs Of the freedom and impartiality with which he treated even of the recent periods of history, there cannot be more convincing evidence, than that he was rallied by Augustus as a favourer of Pompey; and that, under the same emperor, he not only bestowed upon Cicero the tribute of warm approbation, but dared to ascribe, in an age when their names were obnoxious, even to Brutus and Cassius the virtues of consistency and patriotism. If in any thing the conduct of Livy violates our sentiments of historical dignity, it is the apparent complacency and reverence with which he every where mentions the popular belief in omens and prodigies; but this was the general superstition of the times; and totally to renounce the prejudices of superstitious education, is the last heroic sacrifice to philosophical scepticism. In general, however, the credulity of Livy appears to be rather affected than real; and his account of the exit of Romulus, in the following passage, may be adduced as an instance in confirmation of this remark.

  “His immortalibus editis operibus, quum ad exercitum recensendum concionem in campo ad Capræ paludem haberet, subita coorta tempestate cum magno fragore tonitribusque tam denso regem operuit nimbo, ut conspectum ejus concioni abstulerit; nec deinde in terris Romulus fuit. Romana pubes, sedato tandem pavore, postquam ex tam turbido die serena, et tranquilla lux rediit, ubi vacuam sedem regiam vidit; etsi satis credebat Patribus, qui proximi steterant, sublimem raptum procella; tamen veluti orbitatis metu icta, mæstum aliquamdiu silentium obtinuit. Deinde a paucis initio facto, Deum, Deo natum, regem parentemque urbis Romanæ, salvere universi Romulum jubent; pacem precibus exposcunt, uti volens propitius suam semper sospitet progeniem. Fuisse credo tum quoque aliquos, qui discerptum regem Patrum manibus taciti arguerent; manavit enim hæc quoque, et perobscura, fama. Illam alteram admiratio viri, et pavor præsens nobilitavit. Consilio etiam unius hominis addita rei dicitur fides; namque Proculus Julius sollicita civitate desidario regis, et infensa Patribus, gravis, ut traditur, quamvis magnæ rei auctor, in concionem prodit. ‘Romulus, inquit, Quirites, parens urbis hujus, prima hodierna luce cœlo repente delapsus, se mihi obvium dedit; quam profusus horrore venerabundusque astitissem, petens precibus, ut contra intueri fas esset; Abi, nuncia, inquit, Romanis, Cælestes ita velle, ut mea Roma caput orbis terrarum sit; proinde rem militarem colant; sciantque, et ita posteris tradant, nullas opes humanas armis Romanis resistere posse.’ Hæc, inquit, locutus, sublimis abiit. Mirum, quantum illi viro nuncianti hæc fidei fuerit; quamque desiderium Romuli apud plebem exercitumque, facta fide immortalitatis, lenitum sit.1

  Scarcely any incident in ancient history savours more of the marvellous than the account above delivered respecting the first Roman king; and amidst all the solemnity with which it is related, we may perceive that the historian was not the dupe of credulity. There is more implied than the author thought proper to avow, in the sentence, Fuisse credo, &c. In whatever light this anecdote be viewed, it is involved in perplexity. That Romulus affected a despotic power, is not only highly probable, from his aspiring disposition, but seems to be confirmed by his recent appointment of the Celeres, as a guard to his person. He might, therefore, naturally incur the odium of the patricians, whose importance was diminished, and their institution rendered abortive, by the increase of his power. But that they should choose the opportunity of a military review, for the purpose of removing the tyrant by a violent death, seems not very consistent with the dictates even of common prudence; and it is the more incredible, as the circumstance which favoured the execution of the plot is represented to have been entirely a fortuitous occurrence. The tempest which is said to have happened, is not easily reconcilable with our knowledge of that phenomenon. Such a cloud, or mist, as could have enveloped Romulus from the eyes of the assembly, is not a natural concomitant of a thunder-storm. There is some reason to suspect that both the noise and cloud, if they actually existed, were artificial; the former intended to divert the attention of the spectators, and the latter to conceal the transaction. The word fragor, a noise or crash, appears to be an unnecessary addition where thunder is expressed, though sometimes so used by the poets, and may therefore, perhaps, imply such a noise from some other cause. If Romulus was killed by any pointed or sharp-edged weapon, his blood might have been discovered on the spot; or, if by other means, still the body was equally an object for public observation. If the people suspected the patricians to be guilty of murder, why did they not endeavour to trace the fact by this evidence? And if the patricians were really innocent, why did they not urge the examination? But the body, without doubt, was secreted, to favour the imposture. The whole narrative is strongly marked with circumstances calculated to affect credulity with ideas of national importance; and, to countenance the design, there is evidently a chasm in the Roman history immediately preceding this transaction and intimately connected with it.

  Livy was born at Patavium,1 and has been charged by Asinius Pollio and others with the provincial dialect of his country. The objections to his Pativinity, as it is called, relate chiefly to the spelling of some words; in which, however, there seems to be nothing so peculiar, as either to occasion any obscurity or merit reprehension.

  Livy and Sallust being the only two existing rivals in Roman history, it may not be improper to draw a short comparison between them, in respect of their principal qualities, as writers. With regard to language, there is less apparent affectation in Livy than in Sallust. The narrative of both is distinguished by an elevation of style: the elevation of Sallust seems to be often supported by the dignity of assumed virtue; that of Livy by a majestic air of historical, and sometimes national, importance. In delineating characters, Sallust infuses more expression, and Livy more fulness, into the features. In the speeches ascribed to particular persons, these writers are equally elegant and animated.

  So great was the fame of Livy in his own life-time, that people came from the extremity of Spain and Gaul, for the purpose only of beholding so celebrated a historian, who was regarded, for his abilities, as a prodigy. This affords a strong proof, not only of the literary taste which then prevailed over the most extensive of the Roman provinces, but of the extraordinary pains with which so great a work must have been propagated, when the art of printing was unknown. In the fifteenth century, on the revival of learning in Europe, the name of this great writer recovered its ancient veneration; and Alphonso of Arragon, with a superstition characteristic of that age, requested of the people of Padua, where Livy was born, and is said to have been buried, to be favoured by them with the hand which had written so admirable a work.—

  The celebrity of Virgil has proved the means of ascertaining his birth with more exactness than is common in the biographical memoirs of ancient writers. He was born at Andes, a village in the neighbourhood of Mantua, on the 15th of October, seventy years before the Christian æra. His parents were of moderate condition; but by their industry acquired some territorial possessions, which descended to their son. The first seven years of his life was spent at Cremona, whence he went to Mediolanum, now Milan, at that time the seat of the liberal arts, denominated, as we learn from Pliny the younger, Novæ Athenæ. From this place he afterwards moved to Naples, where he applied himself with great assiduity to Greek and Roman literature, particularly to the physical and mathematical sciences; for which he expressed a strong predilection in the second book of his Georgics.

  • Me vero primum dulces ante omnia Musæ,
  • Quarum sacra fero ingenti perculsus amore,
  • Accipiant; cælique vias et sidera monstrent;
  • Defectus Solis varios. Lunæque labores:
  • Unde tremor terris: qua vi maria alta tumescant
  • Obicibus ruptis, rursusque in seipsa residant:
  • Quid tantum Oceano properent se tingere soles
  • Hiberni: vel quæ tardis mora noctibus obstet.

  • Geor. ii. l. 591, &c.

  • But most beloved, ye Muses, at whose fane,
  • Led by pure zeal, I consecrate my strain,
  • Me first accept! And to my search unfold,
  • Heaven and her host in beauteous order rolled,
  • The eclipse that dims the golden orb of day,
  • And changeful labour of the lunar ray;
  • Whence rocks the earth, by what vast force the main
  • Now bursts its barriers, now subsides again;
  • Why wintry suns in ocean swiftly fade,
  • Or what delays night’s slow-descending shade.

  • Sotheby.

  When, by a proscription of the Triumvirate, the lands of Cremona and Mantua were distributed amongst the veteran soldiers, Virgil had the good fortune to recover his possessions, through the favour of Asinius Pollio, the deputy of Augustus in those parts; to whom, as well as to the emperor, he has testified his gratitude in beautiful eclogues.

  The first production of Virgil was his Bucolics, consisting of ten eclogues, written in imitation of the Idyllia or pastoral poems of Theocritus. It may be questioned whether any language which has its provincial dialects, but is brought to perfection, can ever be well adapted, in that state, to the use of pastoral poetry. There is such an apparent incongruity between the simple ideas of the rural swain and the polished language of the courtier, that it seems impossible to reconcile them together by the utmost art of composition. The Doric dialect of Theocritus, therefore, abstractedly from all consideration of simplicity of sentiment, must ever give to the Sicilian bard a pre-eminence in this species of poetry. The greater part of the Bucolics of Virgil may be regarded as poems of a peculiar nature, into which the author has happily transfused, in elegant versification, the native manners and ideas, without any mixture of the rusticity of pastoral life. With respect to the fourth eclogue, addressed to Pollio, it is avowedly of a nature superior to that of pastoral subjects:

  • Sicelides Musæ, paullo majora canamus.
  • Sicilian Muse, be ours a loftier strain.

  Virgil engaged in bucolic poetry at the request of Asinius Pollio, whom he highly esteemed, and for one of whose sons in particular, with Cornelius Gallus, a poet likewise, he entertained the warmest affection. He has celebrated them all in these poems, which were begun, we are told, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, and completed in three years. They were held in so great esteem amongst the Romans, immediately after their publication, that it is said they were frequently recited upon the stage for the entertainment of the audience. Cicero, upon hearing some lines of them, perceived that they were written in no common strain of poetry, and desired that the whole eclogue might be recited: which being done, he exclaimed, “Magnæ spes altera Romæ.” Another hope of mighty Rome!1

  Virgil’s next work was the Georgics, the idea of which is taken from the Εργα και Ἡμεραι, the Works and Days of Hesiod, the poet of Ascra. But between the productions of the two poets, there is no other similarity than that of their common subject. The precepts of Hesiod, in respect of agriculture, are delivered with all the simplicity of an unlettered cultivator of the fields, intermixed with plain moral reflections, natural and apposite; while those of Virgil, equally precise and important, are embellished with all the dignity of sublime versification. The work is addressed to Mecænas, at whose request it appears to have been undertaken. It is divided into four books. The first treats of ploughing; the second, of planting; the third, of cattle, horses, sheep, goats, dogs, and of things which are hurtful to cattle: the fourth is employed on bees, their proper habitations, food, polity, the diseases to which they are liable, and the remedies of them, with the method of making honey, and a variety of other considerations connected with the subject. The Georgics were written at Naples, and employed the author during a period of seven years. It is said that Virgil had concluded the Georgics with a laboured eulogium on his poetical friend Gallus; but the latter incurring about this time the displeasure of Augustus, he was induced to cancel it, and substitute the charming episode of Astæus and Eurydice.

  These beautiful poems, considered merely as didactic, have the justest claim to utility. In what relates to agriculture in particular, the precepts were judiciously adapted to the climate of Italy, and must have conveyed much valuable information to those who were desirous of cultivating that important art, which was held in great honour amongst the Romans. The same remark may be made, with greater latitude of application, in respect of the other subjects. But when we examine the Georgics as poetical compositions, when we attend to the elevated style in which they are written, the beauty of the similes, the emphatic sentiments interspersed, the elegance of diction, the animated strain of the whole, and the harmony of the versification, our admiration is excited, at beholding subjects, so common in their nature, embellished with the most magnificent decorations of poetry.

  During four days which Augustus passed at Atella, to refresh himself from fatigue, in his return to Rome, after the battle of Actium, the Georgics, just then finished, were read to him by the author, who was occasionally relieved in the task by his friend Mecænas. We may easily conceive the satisfaction enjoyed by the emperor, at finding that while he himself had been gathering laurels in the achievements of war, another glorious wreath was prepared by the Muses to adorn his temples; and that an intimation was given of his being afterwards celebrated in a work more congenial to the subject of heroic renown.

  It is generally supposed that the Æneid was written at the particular desire of Augustus, who was ambitious of having the Julian family represented as lineal descendants of the Trojan Æneas. In this celebrated poem, Virgil has happily united the characteristics of the Iliad and Odyssey, and blended them so judiciously together, that they mutually contribute to the general effect of the whole. By the esteem and sympathy excited for the filial piety and misfortunes of Æneas at the catastrophe of Troy, the reader is strongly interested in his subsequent adventures; and every obstacle to the establishment of the Trojans in the promised land of Hesperia produces fresh sensations of increased admiration and attachment. The episodes, characters, and incidents, all concur to give beauty or grandeur to the poem. The picture of Troy in flames can never be sufficiently admired The incomparable portrait of Priam, in Homer, is admirably accommodated to a different situation, in the character of Anchises, in the Æneid. The prophetic rage of the Cumæan Sibyl displays in the strongest colours the enthusiasm of the poet. For sentiment, passion, and interesting description, the episode of Dido is a master-piece in poetry. But Virgil is not more conspicuous for strength of description than propriety of sentiment; and wherever he takes a hint from the Grecian bard, he prosecutes the idea with a judgment peculiar to himself. It may be sufficient to mention one instance. In the sixth book of the Iliad, while the Greeks are making great slaughter amongst the Trojans, Hector, by the advice of Helenus, retires into the city, to desire that his mother would offer up prayers to the goddess Pallas, and vow to her a noble sacrifice, if she would drive Diomede from the walls of Troy. Immediately before his return to the field of battle, he has his last interview with Andromache, whom he meets with his infant son Astyanax, carried by a nurse. There occurs, upon this occasion, one of the most beautiful scenes in the Iliad, where Hector dandles the boy in his arms, and pours forth a prayer, that he may one day be superior in fame to his father. In the same manner, Æneas, having armed himself for the decisive combat with Turnus, addresses his son Ascanius in a beautiful speech, which, while expressive of the strongest paternal affection, contains, instead of a prayer, a noble and emphatic admonition, suitable to a youth who had nearly attained the period of adult age. It is as follows:

  • Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem;
  • Fortunam ex aliis; nunc te mea dextera bello
  • Defensum dabit, et magna inter præmia ducet.
  • Tu facito, mox cum matura adoleverit ætas,
  • Sis memor: et te animo repetentem exempla tuorum,
  • Et pater Æneas, et avunculus excitet Hector.

  • — Æneid, xii.

  • My son! from my example learn the war
  • In camps to suffer, and in feuds to dare,
  • But happier chance than mine attend thy care!
  • This day my hand thy tender age shall shield,
  • And crown with honours of the conquered field:
  • Thou when thy riper years shall send thee forth
  • To toils of war, be mindful of my worth;
  • Assert thy birthright, and in arms be known,
  • For Hector’s nephew and Æneas’ son.

  Virgil, though born to shine by his own intrinsic powers, certainly owed much of his excellence to the wonderful merits of Homer. His susceptible imagination, vivid and correct, was impregnated by the Odyssey, and warmed with the fire of the Iliad. Rivalling, or rather on some occasions surpassing his glorious predecessor in the characters of heroes and of gods, he sustains their dignity with so uniform a lustre, that they seem indeed more than mortal.

  Whether the Iliad or the Æneid be the more perfect composition, is a question which has often been agitated, but perhaps will never be determined to general satisfaction. In comparing the genius of the two poets, however, allowance ought to be made for the difference of circumstances under which they composed their respective works. Homer wrote in an age when mankind had not as yet made any great progress in the exertion of either intellect or imagination, and he was therefore indebted for his resources to the vast capacity of his own mind. To this we must add, that he composed both his poems in a situation of life extremely unfavourable to the cultivation of poetry. Virgil, on the contrary, lived at a period when literature had attained to a high state of improvement. He had likewise not only the advantage of finding a model in the works of Homer, but of perusing the laws of epic poetry, which had been digested by Aristotle, and the various observations made on the writings of the Greek bard by critics of acuteness and taste; amongst the chief of whom was his friend Horace, who remarks that

  — quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.

  —De Arte Poet.

  E’en sometimes the good Homer naps.

  Virgil, besides, composed his poem in a state remote from indigence, where he was roused to exertion by the example of several contemporary poets; and what must have animated him beyond every other consideration, he wrote both at the desire, and under the patronage of the emperor and his minister Mecænas. In what time Homer composed either of his poems, we know not; but the Æneid, we are informed, was the employment of Virgil during eleven years. For some years, the repeated entreaties of Augustus could not extort from him the smallest specimen of the work; but at length, when considerably advanced in it, he condescended to recite three books—the second, the fourth, and the sixth—in the presence of the emperor and his sister Octavia, to gratify the latter of whom, in particular, the recital of the last book now mentioned, was intended When the poet came to the words, Tu Marcellus eris, alluding to Octavia’s son, a youth of great hopes, who had lately died, the mother fainted. After she had recovered from this fit, by the care of her attendants, she ordered ten sesterces to be given to Virgil for every line relating to that subject; a gratuity which amounted to about two thousand pounds sterling.

  In the composition of the Æneid, Virgil scrupled not to introduce whole lines of Homer, and of the Latin poet Ennius; many of whose sentences he admired. In a few instances he has borrowed from Lucretius. He is said to have been at extraordinary pains in polishing his numbers; and when he was doubtful of any passage, he would read it to some of his friends, that he might have their opinion. On such occasions, it was usual with him to consult in particular his freedman and librarian Erotes, an old domestic, who, it is related, supplied extempore a deficiency in two lines, and was desired by his master to write them in the manuscript.

  When this immortal work was completed, Virgil resolved on retiring into Greece and Asia for three years, that he might devote himself entirely to polishing it, and have leisure afterwards to pass the remainder of his life in the cultivation of philosophy. But meeting at Athens with Augustus, who was on his return from the East, he determined on accompanying the emperor back to Rome. Upon a visit to Megara, a town in the neighbourhood of Athens, he was seized with a languor, which increased during the ensuing voyage; and he expired a few days after landing at Brundisium, on the 22nd of September, in the fifty-second year of his age. He desired that his body might be carried to Naples, where he had passed many happy years; and that the following distich, written in his last sickness, should be inscribed upon his tomb:

  • Mantua me genuit: Calabri rapuere: tenet nunc
  • Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.1

  He was accordingly interred, by the order of Augustus, with great funeral pomp, within two miles of Naples near the road to Puteoli, where his tomb still exists. Of his estate, which was very considerable by the liberality of his friends, he left the greater part to Valerius Proculus and his brother, a fourth to Augustus, a twelfth to Mecænas, besides legacies to L. Varius and Plotius Tucca, who, in consequence of his own request, and the command of Augustus, revised and corrected the Æneid after his death. Their instructions from the emperor were, to expunge whatever they thought improper, but upon no account to make any addition. This restriction is supposed to be the cause that many lines in the Æneid are imperfect.

  Virgil was of large stature, had a dark complexion, and his features are said to have been such as expressed no uncommon abilities. He was subject to complaints of the stomaca and throat, as well as to head-ache, and had frequent discharges of blood upwards: but from what part, we are not informed. He was very temperate both in food and wine. His modesty was so great, that at Naples they commonly gave him the name of Parthenias, “the modest man.” On the subject of his modesty, the following anecdote is related.

  Having written a distich, in which he compared Augustus to Jupiter, he placed it in the night-time over the gate of the emperor’s palace. It was in these words:

  • • Nocte pluit totâ, redeunt spectacula mane:
    • Divisum imperium cum Jove Cæsar habet.
  • • All night it rained, with morn the sports appear,
    • Cæsar and Jove between them rule the year.

  By order of Augustus, an inquiry was made after the author; and Virgil not declaring himself, the verses were claimed by Bathyllus, a contemptible poet, but who was liberally rewarded on the occasion. Virgil, provoked at the falsehood of the impostor, again wrote the verses on some conspicuous part of the palace, and under them the following line:

  • Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores;
  • I wrote the verse, another filched the praise;

  with the beginning of another line in these words:

  • Sic vos, non nobis,
  • Not for yourselves, you—

  repeated four times. Augustus expressing a desire that the lines should be finished, and Bathyllus proving unequal to the task, Virgil at last filled up the blanks in this manner:

  • • Sic vos, non vobis, nidificatis, aves;
    • Sic vos, non vobis, vellera fertis, oves;
    • Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis apes;
    • Sic vos, non vobis, fertis aratra, boves.
  • • Not for yourselves, ye birds, your nests ye build,
    • Not for yourselves, ye sheep, your fleece ye yield;
    • Not for yourselves, ye bees, your cells ye fill;
    • Not for yourselves, ye beeves, ye plough and till.

  The expedient immediately evinced him to be the author of the distich, and Bathyllus became the theme of public ridicule.

  When at any time Virgil came to Rome, if the people, as was commonly the case, crowded to gaze upon him, or pointed at him with the finger in admiration, he blushed, and stole away from them; frequently taking refuge in some shop. When he went to the theatre, the audience universally rose up at his entrance, as they did to Augustus, and received him with the loudest plaudits; a compliment which, however highly honourable, he would gladly have declined. When such was the just respect which they paid to the author of the Bucolics and Georgics, how would they have expressed their esteem, had they beheld him in the effulgence of epic renown! In the beautiful episode of the Elysian fields, in the Æneid, where he dexterously introduced a glorious display of their country, he had touched the most elastic springs of Roman enthusiasm. The passion would have rebounded upon himself, and they would, in the heat of admiration, have idolized him.—

  Horace was born at Venusia, on the tenth of December, in the consulship of L. Cotta and L. Torquatus. According to his own acknowledgment, his father was a freedman; by some it is said that he was a collector of the revenue, and by others, a fishmonger, or a dealer in salted meat. Whatever he was, he paid particular attention to the education of his son, for, after receiving instruction from the best masters in Rome, he sent him to Athens to study philosophy. From this place, Horace followed Brutus, in the quality of a military tribune, to the battle of Philippi, where, by his own confession, being seized with timidity, he abandoned the profession of a soldier, and returning to Rome, applied himself to the cultivation of poetry. In a short time he acquired the friendship of Virgil and Valerius, whom he mentions in his Satires, in terms of the most tender affection.

  • • Postera lux oritur multo gratissima namque
    • Plotius et Varius Sinuessæ, Virgiliusque,
    • Occurrunt; ammæ, quales neque candidiores
    • Terra tulit, neque queis me sit devinctior alter.
    • O qui complexus, et gaudia quanta fuerunt!
    • Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico.

    • —Sat. I. 5.

  • • Next rising morn with double joy we greet,
    • For Plotius, Varius, Virgil, here we meet:
    • Pure spirits these; the world no purer knows,
    • For none my heart with more affection glows
    • How oft did we embrace, our joys how great!
    • For sure no blessing in the power of fate
    • Can be compared, in sanity of mind,
    • To friends of such companionable kind.

    • —Francis.

  By the two friends above mentioned, he was recommended to the patronage not only of Mecænas, but of Augustus, with whom he, as well as Virgil, lived on a footing of the greatest intimacy. Satisfied with the luxury which he enjoyed at the first tables in Rome, he was so unambitious of any public employment, that when the emperor offered him the place of his secretary, he declined it. But as he lived in an elegant manner, having, besides his house in town, a cottage on his Sabine farm, and a villa at Tibur, near the falls of the Anio, he enjoyed, beyond all doubt a handsome establishment, from the liberality of Augustus. He indulged himself in indolence and social pleasure, but was at the same much devoted to reading; and enjoyed a tolerable good state of health, although often incommoded with a fluxion of rheum upon the eyes.

  Horace, in the ardour of youth, and when his bosom beat high with the raptures of fancy, had, in the pursuit of Grecian literature, drunk largely, at the source, of the delicious springs of Castalia; and it seems to have been ever after his chief ambition, to transplant into the plains of Latium the palm of lyric poetry. Nor did he fail of success:

  Exegi monumentum ære perennius.

  —Carm. iii. 30.

  More durable than brass a monument I’ve raised.

  In Greece, and other countries, the Ode appears to have been the most ancient, as well as the most popular species of literary production. Warm in expression, and short in extent, it concentrates in narrow bounds the fire of poetical transport: on which account, it has been generally employed to celebrate the fervours of piety, the raptures of love, the enthusiasm of praise; and to animate warriors to glorious exertions of valour:

  • Musa dedit fidibus Divos, puerosque Deorum,
  • Et pugilem victorem, et equum certamine primum,
  • Et juvenum curas, et libera vina referre.

  • —Hor. De Arte Poet

  • The Muse to nobler subjects tunes her lyre;
  • Gods, and the sons of Gods, her song inspire;
  • Wrestler and steed, who gained the Olympic prize,
  • Love’s pleasing cares, and wine’s unbounded joys.—Francis.
  • Misenum Æoliden, quo non præstantior alter
  • Ære ciere viros, Martemque accendere cnatu.1

  • Virgil, Æneid, vi.

  • • * * * * * *
    • Sed tum forte cavâ dum personat æquora conchâ
    • Demens, et cantu vocat in certamina Divos.

    • —Ibid.

  • • Misenus, son of Œolus, renowned
    • The warrior trumpet in the field to sound;
    • With breathing brass to kindle fierce alarms,
    • And rouse to dare their fate in honourable arms
    • * * * * * *
    • Swollen with applause, and aiming still at more,
    • He now provokes the sea-gods from the shore

    • —Dryden

  There arose in this department, among the Greeks, nine eminent poets, viz. Alcæus, Alcman, Anacreon, Bacchylides, Ibicus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, and Pindar. The greater number of this distinguished class are now known only by name. They seem all to have differed from one another, no less in the kind of measure which they chiefly or solely employed, than in the strength or softness, the beauty or grandeur, the animated rapidity or the graceful ease of their various compositions. Of the amorous effusions of the lyre, we yet have examples in the odes of Anacreon, and the incomparable ode of Sappho: the lyric strains which animated to battle, have sunk into oblivion; but the victors in the public games of Greece have their fame perpetuated in the admirable productions of Pindar.

  Horace, by adopting, in the multiplicity of his subjects, almost all the various measures of the different Greek poets, and frequently combining different measures in the same composition, has compensated for the dialects of that tongue, so happily suited to poetry, and given to a language less distinguished for soft inflexions, all the tender and delicate modulations of the Eastern song. While he moves in the measures of the Greeks with an case and gracefulness which rivals their own acknowledged excellence, he has enriched the fund of lyric harmony with a stanza peculiar to himself. In the artificial construction of the Ode, he may justly be regarded as the first of lyric poets. In beautiful imagery, he is inferior to none: in variety of sentiment and felicity of expression, superior to every existing competitor in Greek or Roman poetry. He is elegant without affectation; and what is more remarkable, in the midst of gaiety he is moral. We seldom meet in his Odes with the abrupt apostrophes of passionate excursion; but his transitions are conducted with ease, and every subject introduced with propriety.

  The Carmen Seculare was written at the express desire of Augustus, for the celebration of the Secular Games, performed once in a hundred years, and which continued during three days and three nights, whilst all Rome resounded with the mingled effusions of choral addresses to gods and goddesses, and of festive joy. An occasion which so much interested the ambition of the poet, called into exertion the most vigorous efforts of his genius. More concise in mythological attributes than the hymns ascribed to Homer, this beautiful production, in variety and grandeur of invocation, and in pomp of numbers, surpasses all that Greece, melodious but simple in the service of the altar, ever poured forth from her vocal groves in solemn adoration. By the force of native genius, the ancients elevated their heroes to a pitch of sublimity that excites admiration, but to soar beyond which they could derive no aid from mythology; and it was reserved for a bard, inspired with nobler sentiments than the Muses could supply, to sing the praises of that Being whose ineffable perfections transcend all human imagination. Of the praises of gods and heroes, there is not now extant a more beautiful composition, than the 12th Ode of the first book of Horace:

  • • Quem virum aut heroa lyrâ vel acri
    • Tibià sumes celebrare, Clio?
    • Quem Deum? cujus recinet jocosa
    • Nomen imago.
    • Aut in umbrosis Heliconis oris, &c.
  • • What man, what hero, on the tuneful lyre,
    • Or sharp-toned flute, will Clio choose to raise,
    • Deathless, to fame? What God? whose hallowed name:
    • The sportive image of the voice
    • Shall in the shades of Helicon repeat, &c.

  The Satires of Horace are far from being remarkable for poet ical harmony, as he himself acknowledges. Indeed, according to the plan upon which several of them are written, it could scarcely be otherwise. They are frequently colloquial, sometimes interrogatory, the transitions quick, and the apostrophes abrupt. It was not his object in those compositions, to soothe the ear with the melody of polished numbers, but to rally the frailties of the heart, to convince the understanding by argument, and thence to put to shame both the vices and follies of mankind. Satire is a species of composition, of which the Greeks furnished no model; and the preceding Roman writers of this class, though they had much improved it from its original rudeness and licentiousness, had still not brought it to that degree of perfection which might answer the purpose of moral reform in a polished state of society. It received the most essential improvement from Horace, who has dexterously combined wit and argument, raillery and sarcasm, on the side of morality and virtue, of happiness and truth.

  The Epistles of this author may be reckoned amongst the most valuable productions of antiquity. Except those of the second book, and one or two in the first, they are in general of the familiar kind; abounding in moral sentiments, and judicious observations on life and manners.

  The poem De Arte Poëticâ comprises a system of criticism, in justness of principle and extent of application, correspondent to the various exertions of genius on subjects of invention and taste That in composing this excellent production, he availed himself of the most approved works of Grecian original, we may conclude from the advice which he there recommends:

  • — Vos exemplaria Græca
  • Nocturnâ versate manû, versate díurnâ.
  • Make the Greek authors your supreme delight;
  • Read them by day, and study them by night.

  • Francis.

  In the writings of Horace there appears a fund of good sense, enlivened with pleasantry, and refined by philosophical reflection. He had cultivated his judgment with great application, and his taste was guided by intuitive perception of moral beauty, aptitude, and propriety. The few instances of indelicacy which occur in his compositions, we may ascribe rather to the manners of the times, than to any blameable propensity in the author. Horace died in the fifty-seventh year of his age, surviving his beloved Mecænas only three weeks; a circumstance which, added to the declaration in an ode1 to that personage, supposed to have been written in Mecænas’s last illness, has given rise to a conjecture, that Horace ended his days by a violent death, to accompany his friend. But it is more natural to conclude that he died of excessive grief, as, had he literally adhered to the affirmation contained in the ode, he would have followed his patron more closely. This seems to be confirmed by a fact immediately preceding his death; for though he declared Augustus heir to his whole estate, he was not able, on account of weakness, to put his signature to the will; a failure which it is probable that he would have taken care to obviate, had his death been premeditated. He was interred, at his own desire, near the tomb of Mecænas.—

  Ovid was born of an equestrian family, at Sulmo, a town of the Peligni, on the 21st of March, in the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa. His father intended him for the bar; and after passing him through the usual course of instruction at Rome, he was sent to Athens, the emporium of learning, to complete his education. On his return to Rome, in obedience to the desire of his father, he entered upon the offices of public life in the forum, and declaimed with great applause. But this was the effect of paternal authority, not of choice: for, from his earliest years, he discovered an extreme attachment to poetry; and no sooner was his father dead, than, renouncing the bar, he devoted himself entirely to the cultivation of that fascinating art, his propensity to which was invincible. His productions, all written either in heroic or pentameter verse, are numerous, and on various subjects. It will be sufficient to mention them briefly.

  The Heroides consist of twenty-one Epistles, all which, except three, are feigned to be written from celebrated women of antiquity, to their husbands or lovers: such as Penelope to Ulysses, Dido to Æneas, Sappho to Phaon, &c. These compositions are nervous, animated and elegant: they discover a high degree of poetic enthusiasm, but blended with that lascivious turn of thought, which pervades all the amorous productions of this celebrated author.

  The elegies on subjects of love, particularly the Ars Amandi, or Ars Amatoria, though not all uniform in versification, possess the same general character, of warmth of passion, and luscious description, as the epistles.

  The Fasti were divided into twelve books, of which only the first six now remain. The design of them was to deliver an account of the Roman festivals in every month of the year, with a description of the rites and ceremonies, as well as the sacrifices on those occasions. It is to be regretted, that, on a subject so interesting, this valuable work should not have been transmitted entire: but in the part which remains, we are furnished with a beautiful description of the ceremonial transactions in the Roman calendar, from the first of January to the end of June. The versification, as in all the compositions of this author, is easy and harmonious.

  The most popular production of this poet is his Metamorphoses, not less extraordinary for the nature of the subject, than for the admirable art with which the whole is conducted. The work is founded upon the traditions and theogony of the ancients, which consisted of various detached fables. Those Ovid has not only so happily arranged, that they form a coherent series of narratives, one rising out of another; but he describes the different changes with such an imposing plausibility, as to give a natural appearance to the most incredible fictions. This ingenious production, however perfect it may appear, we are told by himself, had not received his last corrections when he was ordered into banishment.

  In the Ibis, the author imitates a poem of the same name, written by Callimachus. It is an invective against some person who publicly traduced his character at Rome, after his banishment. A strong sensibility, indignation, and implacable resentment, are conspicuous through the whole.

  The Tristia were composed in his exile, in which, though his vivacity forsook him, he still retained a genius prolific in versification. In these poems, as well as in many epistles to different persons, he bewails his unhappy situation, and deprecates in the strongest terms the inexorable displeasure of Augustus.

  Several other productions written by Ovid are now lost, and amongst them a tragedy called Medea, of which Quintilian expresses a high opinion. Ovidii Medea videtur mihi ostenders quantum vir ille præstare potuerit, si ingenio suo temperare quam indulgere maluisset.1 Lib. x. c. 1.

  It is a peculiarity in the productions of this author, that, on whatever he employs his pen, he exhausts the subject; not with any prolixity that fatigues the attention, but by a quick succession of new ideas, equally brilliant and apposite, often expressed in antitheses. Void of obscenity in expression, but lascivious in sentiment, he may be said rather to stimulate immorally the natural passions, than to corrupt the imagination. No poet is more guided in versification by the nature of his subject than Ovid. In common narrative, his ideas are expressed with almost colloquial simplicity; but when his fancy glows with sentiment, or is animated by objects of grandeur, his style is proportionably elevated, and he rises to a pitch of sublimity.

  No point in ancient history has excited more variety of conjectures than the banishment of Ovid; but after all the efforts of different writers to elucidate the subject, the cause of this extraordinary transaction remains involved in obscurity. It may therefore not be improper, in this place, to examine the foundation of the several conjectures which have been formed, and if they appear to be utterly imadmissible, to attempt a solution of the question upon principles more conformable to probability, and countenanced by historical evidence.

  The ostensible reason assigned by Augustus for banishing Ovid, was his corrupting the Roman youth by lascivious publications; but it is evident, from various passages in the poet’s productions after this period, that there was, besides, some secret reason, which would not admit of being divulged. He says in his Tristia, Lib. ii. 1—

  Perdiderent cum me duo crimina, carmen et error.²

  It appears from another passage in the same work, that this inviolable arcanum was something which Ovid had seen, and, as he insinuates, through his own ignorance and mistake.

  • Cur aliquid vidi? cur conscia lumina feci?
  • Cur imprudenti cognita culpa mihi est?

  • —Ibid.

  * * * * * *

  • Inscia quod crimen viderunt lumina, plector:
  • Peccatumque ocuios est habuisse meum.1

  • De Trist. iii. 5.

  It seems, therefore, to be a fact sufficiently established, that Ovid had seen something of a very indecent nature, in which Augustus was concerned. What this was, is the question. Some authors, conceiving it to have been of a kind extremely atrocious, have gone so far as to suppose, that it must have been an act of criminality between Augustus and his own daughter Julia, who, notwithstanding the strict attention paid to her education by her father, became a woman of the most infamous character; suspected of incontinence during her marriage with Agrippa, and openly profligate after her union with her next husband, Tiberius. This supposition, however, rests entirely upon conjecture, and is not only discredited by its own improbability, but by a yet more forcible argument. It is certain that Julia was at this time in banishment for her scandalous life. She was about the same age with Tiberius, who was now fortyseven, and they had not cohabited for many years. We know not exactly the year in which Augustus sent her into exile, but we may conclude with confidence, that it happened soon after her separation from Tiberius; whose own interest with the emperor, as well as that of his mother Livia, could not fail of being exerted, if any such application was necessary, towards removing from the capital a woman, who, by the notoriety of her prostitution, reflected disgrace upon all with whom she was connected, either by blood or alliance. But no application from Tiberius or his mother could be necessary, when we are assured that Augustus even presented to the senate a narrative respecting the infamous behaviour of his daughter, which was read by the quæstor. He was so much ashamed of her profligacy, that he for a long time declined all company, and had thoughts of putting her to death. She was banished to an island on the coast of Campania for five years; at the expiration of which period, she was removed to the continent, and the severity of her treatment a little mitigated; but though frequent applications were made in her behalf by the people, Augustus never could be prevailed upon to permit her return.

  Other writers have conjectured, that, instead of Julia, the daughter of Augustus, the person seen with him by Ovid may have been Julia his grand-daughter, who inherited the vicious disposition of her mother, and was on that account likewise banished by Augustus. The epoch of this lady’s banishment it is impossible to ascertain; and therefore no argument can be drawn from that source to invalidate the present conjecture. But Augustus had shown the same solicitude for her being trained up in virtuous habits, as he had done in respect of her mother, though in both cases unsuccessfully; and this consideration, joined to the enormity of the supposed crime, and the great sensibility which Augustus had discovered with regard to the infamy of his daughter, seems sufficient to exonerate his memory from so odious a charge. Besides, is it possible that he could have sent her into banishment for the infamy of her prostitution, while (upon the supposition of incest) she was mistress of so important a secret, as that he himself had been more criminal with her than any other man in the empire?

  Some writers, giving a wider scope to conjecture, have supposed the transaction to be of a nature still more detestable, and have even dragged Mecænas, the minister, into a participation of the crime. Fortunately, however, for the reputation of the illustrious patron of polite learning, as well as for that of the emperor, this crude conjecture may be refuted upon the evidence of chronology. The commencement of Ovid’s exile happened in the ninth year of the Christian æra, and the death of Mecænas, eight years before that period. Between this and other calculations, we find a difference of three or four years; but allowing the utmost latitude of variation, there intervened, from the death of Mecænas to the banishment of Ovid, a period of eleven years; an observation which fully invalidates the conjecture above-mentioned.

  Having now refuted, as it is presumed, the opinions of the different commentators on this subject, we shall proceed to offer a new conjecture, which seems to have a greater claim to probability than any that has hitherto been suggested.

  Suetonius informs us, that Augustus, in the latter part of his life, contracted a vicious inclination for the enjoyment of young virgins, who were procured for him from all parts, not only with the connivance, but by the clandestine management of his consort Livia. It was therefore probably with one of those victims that he was discovered by Ovid. Augustus had for many years affected a decency of behaviour, and he would, therefore, naturally be not a little disconcerted at the unseasonable intrusion of the poet. That Ovid knew not of Augustus’s being in the place, is beyond all doubt: and Augustus’s consciousness of this circumstance, together with the character of Ovid, would suggest an unfavourable suspicion of the motive which had brought the latter thither. Abstracted from the immorality of the emperor’s own conduct, the incident might be regarded as ludicrous, and certainly was more fit to excite the shame than the indignation of Augustus. But the purpose of Ovid’s visit appears, from his own acknowledgment, to have been not entirely free from blame, though of what nature we know not:

  • Non equidem totam possum defendere culpam:
  • Sed partem nostri criminis error habet.

  • De Trist. Lib. iii. Eleg. 5.

  • I know I cannot wholly be defended,
  • Yet plead ’twas chance, no ill was then intended.

  • —Catlin.

  Ovid was at this time turned of fifty, and though by a much younger man he would not have been regarded as any object of jealousy in love, yet by Augustus, now in his sixty-ninth year, he might be deemed a formidable rival. This passion, therefore, concurring with that which arose from the interruption or disappointment of gratification, inflamed the emperor’s resentment, and he resolved on banishing to a distant country a man whom he considered as his rival, and whose presence, from what had happened, he never more could endure.

  Augustus having determined on the banishment of Ovid, could find little difficulty in accommodating the ostensible to the secret and real cause of this resolution.

  No argument to establish the date of publication, can be drawn from the order in which the various productions of Ovid are placed in the collection of his works: but reasoning from probability, we should suppose that the Ars Amandi was written during the period of his youth; and this seems to be confirmed by the following passage in the second book of the Fasti:

  • Certe ego vos habui faciles in amore ministros;
  • Cum lusit numeris prima juventa suis.2

  That many years must have elapsed since its original publication is evident from the subsequent lines in the second book of the Tristia:

  • Nos quoque jam pridem scripto pecavimus uno.
  • Supplicium patitur non nova culpa novum.
  • Carminaque edideram, cum te delicta notantem
  • Præterii toties jure quietus eques.
  • Ergo, quæ juveni mihi non nocitura putavi
  • Scripta parum prudens, nunc nocuere seni?1

  With what show, then, of justice, it may be asked, could Augustus now punish a fault, which, in his solemn capacity of censor, he had so long and repeatedly overlooked? The answer is obvious: in a production so popular as we may be assured the Ars Amandi was amongst the Roman youth, it must have passed through several editions in the course of some years: and one of those coinciding with the fatal discovery, afforded the emperor a specious pretext for the execution of his purpose. The severity exercised on this occasion, however, when the poet was suddenly driven into exile, unaccompanied even by the partner of his bed, who had been his companion for many years, was an act so inconsistent with the usual moderation of Augustus, that we cannot justly ascribe it to any other motive than personal resentment; especially as this arbitrary punishment of the author could answer no end of public utility, while the obnoxious production remained to affect, if it really ever did essentially affect, the morals of society. If the sensibility of Augustus could not thenceforth admit of any personal intercourse with Ovid, or even of his living within the limits of Italy, there would have been little danger from the example, in sending into honourable exile, with every indulgence which could alleviate so distressful a necessity, a man of respectable rank in the state, who was charged with no actual offence against the laws, and whose genius, with all its indiscretion, did immortal honour to his country. It may perhaps be urged, that, considering the predicament in which Augustus stood, he discovered a forbearance greater than might have been expected from an absolute prince, in sparing the life of Ovid. It will readily be granted, that Ovid, in the same circumstances, under any one of the four subsequent emperors, would have expiated the incident with his blood. Augustus, upon a late occasion, had shown himself equally sanguinary, for he put to death, by the hand of Varus, a poet of Parma, named Cassius, on account of his having written some satirical verses against him. By that recent example, therefore, and the power of pardoning which the emperor still retained, there was sufficient hold of the poet’s secresy respecting the fatal transaction, which, if divulged to the world, Augustus would reprobate as a false and infamous libel, and punish the author accordingly. Ovid, on his part, was sensible, that, should he dare to violate the important but tacit injunction, the imperial vengeance would reach him even on the shores of the Euxine. It appears, however, from a passage in the Ibis, which can apply to no other than Augustus, that Ovid was not sent into banishment destitute of pecuniary provision:

  • Di melius! quorum longe mihi maximus ille,
  • Qui nostras inopes noluit esse vias.
  • Huic igitur meritas grates, ubicumque licebit,
  • Pro tam mansueto pectore semper agam.1
  • The gods defend! of whom he’s far the chief,
  • Who lets me not, though banished, want relief.
  • For this his favour therefore whilst I live,
  • Where’er I am, deserved thanks I’ll give.

  What sum the emperor bestowed, for the support of a banishment which he was resolved should be perpetual, it is impossible to ascertain; but he had formerly been liberal to Ovid, as well as to other poets.

  If we might hazard a conjecture respecting the scene of the intrigue which occasioned the banishment of Ovid, we should place it in some recess in the emperor’s gardens. His house, though called Palatium, the palace, as being built on the Palatine hill, and inhabited by the sovereign, was only a small mansion, which had formerly belonged to Hortensius, the orator. Adjoining to this place Augustus had built the temple of Apollo, which he endowed with a public library, and allotted for the use of poets, to recite their compositions to each other. Ovid was particularly intimate with Hyginus, one of Augustus’s freedmen, who was librarian of the temple. He might therefore have been in the library, and spying from the window a young female secreting herself in the gardens, he had the curiosity to follow her.

  The place of Ovid’s banishment was Tomi,1 now said to be Baba, a town of Bulgaria, towards the mouth of the Ister, where is a lake still called by the natives Ouvidouve Jesero, the lake of Ovid. In this retirement, and the Euxine Pontus, he passed the remainder of his life, a melancholy period of seven years. Notwithstanding the lascivious writings of Ovid, it does not appear that he was in his conduct a libertine. He was three times married: his first wife, who was of mean extraction, and whom he had married when he was very young, he divorced; the second he dismissed on account of her immodest behaviour; and the third appears to have survived him. He had a number of respectable friends, and seems to have been much beloved by them.—

  Tibullus was descended of an equestrian family, and is said, but erroneously, as will afterwards appear, to have been born on the same day with Ovid. His amiable accomplishments procured him the friendship of Messala Corvinus, whom he accompanied in a military expedition to the island of Corcyra. But an indisposition with which he was seized, and a natural aversion to the toils of war, induced him to return to Rome, where he seems to have resigned himself to a life of indolence and pleasure, amidst which he devoted a part of his time to the composition of elegies. Elegiac poetry had been cultivated by several Greek writers, particularly Callimachus, Mimnermus, and Philetas; but, so far as we can find, had, until the present age, been unknown to the Romans in their own tongue. It consisted of a heroic and pentameter line alternately, and was not, like the elegy of the moderns, usually appropriated to the lamentation of the deceased, but employed chiefly in compositions relative to love or friendship, and might, indeed, be used upon almost any subject; though, from the limp in the pentameter line, it is not suitable to sublime subjects, which require a fulness of expression, and an expansion of sound. To this species of poetry Tibullus restricted his application, by which he cultivated that simplicity and tenderness, and agreeable ease of sentiment, which constitute the characteristic perfections of the elegiac muse.

  In the description of rural scenes, the peaceful occupations of the field, the charms of domestic happiness, and the joys of reciprocal love, scarcely any poet surpasses Tibullus. His luxuriant imagination collects the most beautiful flowers of nature, and he displays them with all the delicate attraction of soft and harmonious numbers. With a dexterity peculiar to himself, in whatever subject he engages, he leads his readers imperceptibly through devious paths of pleasure, of which, at the outset of the poem, they could form no conception. He seems to have often written without any previous meditation or design. Several of his elegies may be said to have neither middle nor end: yet the transitions are so natural, and the gradations so easy, that though we wander through Elysian scenes of fancy, the most heterogeneous in their nature, we are sensible of no defect in the concatenation which has joined them together. It is, however, to be regretted that, in some instances, Tibullus betrays that licentiousness of manners which formed too general a characteristic even of this refined age. His elegies addressed to Messala contain a beautiful amplification of sentiments founded in friendship and esteem, in which it is difficult to say, whether the virtues of the patron or the genius of the poet be more conspicuous.

  Valerius Messala Corvinus, whom he celebrates, was descended of a very ancient family. In the civil wars which followed the death of Julius Cæsar he joined the republican party, and made himself master of the camp of Octavius at Philippi; but he was afterwards reconciled to his opponent, and lived to an advanced age in favour and esteem with Augustus. He was distinguished not only by his military talents, but by his eloquence, integrity, and patriotism.

  From the following passage in the writings of Tibullus, commentators have conjectured that he was deprived of his lands by the same proscription in which those of Virgil had been involved:

  • Cui fuerant flavi ditantes ordine sulci
  • Horrea, fæcundas ad deficientia messes,
  • Cuique pecus denso pascebant agmine colles,
  • Et domino satis, et nimium furique lupoque.
  • Nunc desiderium superest: nam cura novatur,
  • Cum memor anteactos semper dolor admovet annos.

  • Lib. iv. El. 1.

  But this seems not very probable, when we consider that Horace, several years after that period, represents him as opulent.

  Dî tibi divitias dederant, artemque fruendi.

  Epist. Lib. i. 4.

  • To thee the gods a fair estate
  • In bounty gave, with heart to know
  • How to enjoy what they bestow.

  • —Francis.

  We know not the age of Tibullus at the time of his death; but in an elegy written by Ovid upon that occasion, he is spoken of as a young man. Were it true, as is said by biographers, that he was born the same day with Ovid, we must indeed assign the event to an early period: for Ovid cannot have written the elegy after the forty-third year of his own life, and how long before is uncertain. In the tenth elegy of the fourth book, De Tristibus, he observes, that the fates had allowed little time for the cultivation of his friendship with Tibullus.

  • Virgilium vidi tantum; nec avara Tibullo
  • Tempus amicitiæ fata dedere meæ.
  • Successor fuit hic tibi, Galle; Propertius illi:
  • Quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui.
  • Utque ego majores, sic me coluere minores.
  • Virgil I only saw, and envious fate
  • Did soon my friend Tibullus hence translate.
  • He followed Gallus, and Propertius him,
  • And I myself was fourth in course of time.

  • —Catlin.

  As both Ovid and Tibullus lived at Rome, were both of the equestrian order, and of congenial dispositions, it is natural to suppose that their acquaintance commenced at an early period; and if, after all, it was of short duration, there would be no improbability in concluding, that Tibullus died at the age of some years under thirty. It is evident, however, that biographers have committed a mistake with regard to the birth of this poet; for in the passage above cited of the Tristia, Ovid mentions Tibullus as a writer, who, though his contemporary, was much older than himself. From this passage we should be justified in placing the death of Tibullus between the fortieth and fiftieth year of his age, and rather nearer to the latter period; for, otherwise, Horace would scarcely have mentioned him in the manner he does in one of his epistles.

  • Albi, nostrorum sermonum candide judex,
  • Quid nunc te dicam facere in regione Pedanâ?
  • Scribere quod Cassî Parmensis opuscula vincat;
  • An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
  • Curantem quicquid dignum sapiente bonoque est?

  • —Epist. i. 4

  • Albius, in whom my satires find
  • A critic, candid, just, and kind,
  • Do you, while at your country seat,
  • Some rhyming labours meditate,
  • That shall in volumed bulk arise,
  • And e’en from Cassius bear the prize;
  • Or saunter through the silent wood,
  • Musing on what befits the good.

  • —Francis.

  This supposition is in no degree inconsistent with the authority of Ovid, where he mentions him as a young man; for the Romans extended the period of youth to the fiftieth year.—

  Propertius was born at Mevania, a town of Umbria, seated at the confluence of the Tina and Clitumnus. This place was famous for its herds of white cattle, brought up there for sacrifice, and supposed to be impregnated with that colour by the waters of the river last mentioned.

  • Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges, et maxima taurus
  • Victima, sæpe tuo perfusi flumine sacro,
  • Romanos ad templa Deum duxere triumphos

  • — Georg ii.

  • And where thy sacred streams, Clitumnus! flow,
  • White herds, and stateliest bulls that oft have led
  • Triumphant Rome, and on her altars bled

  • — Sotheby.

  His father is said by some to have been a Roman knight, and they add, that he was one of those who, when L. Antony was starved out of Perusia, were, by the order of Octavius, led to the altar of Julius Cæsar, and there slain. Nothing more is known with certainty, than that Propertius lost his father at an early age, and being deprived of a great part of his patrimony, betook himself to Rome, where his genius soon recommended him to public notice, and he obtained the patronage of Mecænas. From his frequent introduction of historical and mythological subjects into his poems, he received the appellation of “the learned.”

  Of all the Latin elegiac poets, Propertius has the justest claim to purity of thought and expression. He often draws his imagery from reading, more than from the imagination, and abounds less in description than sentiment. For warmth of passion he is not conspicuous, and his tenderness is seldom marked with a great degree of sensibility; but, without rapture, he is animated, and, like Horace, in the midst of gaiety, he is moral. The stores with which learning supplies him diversify as well as illustrate his subject, while delicacy every where discovers a taste refined by the habit of reflection. His versification, in general, is elegant, but not uniformly harmonious.

  Tibullus and Propertius have each written four books of Elegies; and it has been disputed which of them is superior in this department of poetry. Quintilian has given his suffrage in favour of Tibullus, who, so far as poetical merit alone is the object of consideration, seems entitled to the preference.—

  Gallus was a Roman knight, distinguished not only for poetical, but military talents. Of his poetry we have only six elegies, written, in the person of an old man, on the subject of old age, but which, there is reason to think, were composed at an earlier part of the author’s life. Except the fifth elegy, which is tainted with immodesty, the others, particularly the first, are highly beautiful, and may be placed in competition with any other productions of the elegiac kind. Gallus was, for some time, in great favour with Augustus, who appointed him governor of Egypt. It is said, however, that he not only oppressed the province by extortion, but entered into a conspiracy against his benefactor, for which he was banished. Unable to sustain such a reverse of fortune, he fell into despair, and laid violent hands on himself. This is the Gallus in honour of whom Virgil composed his tenth eclogue.

  Such are the celebrated productions of the Augustan age, which have been happily preserved, for the delight and admiration of mankind, and will survive to the latest posterity. Many more once existed, of various merit, and of different authors, which have left few or no memorials behind them, but have perished promiscuously amidst the indiscriminate ravages of time, of accidents, and of barbarians. Amongst the principal authors whose works are lost, are Varius and Valgius; the former of whom, besides a panegyric upon Augustus, composed some tragedies. According to Quintilian, his Thyestes was equal to any composition of the Greek tragic poets.

  The great number of eminent writers, poets in particular, who adorned this age, has excited general admiration, and the phenomenon is usually ascribed to a fortuitous occurrence, which baffles all inquiry: but we shall endeavour to develope the various causes which seem to have produced this effect; and should the explanation appear satisfactory, it may favour an opinion, that under similar circumstances, if ever they should again be combined, a period of equal glory might arise in other ages and nations.

  The Romans, whether from the influence of climate, or their mode of living, which in general was temperate, were endowed with a lively imagination, and, as we before observed, a spirit of enterprise. Upon the final termination of the Punic war, and the conquest of Greece, their ardour, which had hitherto been exercised in military achievements, was diverted into the channel of literature; and the civil commotions which followed, having now ceased, a fresh impulse was given to activity in the ambitious pursuit of the laurel, which was now only to be obtained by glorious exertions of intellect. The beautiful productions of Greece, operating strongly upon their minds, excited them to imitation; imitation, when roused amongst a number, produced emulation; and emulation cherished an extraordinary thirst of fame, which, in every exertion of the human mind, is the parent of excellence. This liberal contention was not a little promoted by the fashion introduced at Rome, for poets to recite their compositions in public; a practice which seems to have been carried even to a ridiculous excess.—Such was now the rage for poetical composition in the Roman capital, that Horace describes it in the following terms:

  • Mutavit mentem populus levis, et calet uno
  • Scribendi studio: pueri patresque severi
  • Fronde comas vincti cœnant, et carmina dictant.

  • —Epist. ii. 1.

  • * * * * * *
  • Now the light people bend to other aims;
  • A lust of scribbling every breast inflames;
  • Our youth, our senators, with bays are crowned,
  • And rhymes eternal as our feasts go round.

  Scribimus indocti doctique poëmata passim.

  —Hor. Epist ii. 1.

  • But every desperate blockhead dares to write,
  • Verse is the trade of every living wight.

  • —Francis.

  The thirst of fame above mentioned, was a powerful incentive, and is avowed both by Virgil and Horace. The former, in the third book of his Georgics, announces a resolution of rendering himself celebrated, if possible.

  • — tentanda via est quâ me quoque possim
  • Tollere humo, victorque virûm volitare per ora.
  • I, too, will strive o’er earth my flight to raise,
  • And wing’d by victory, catch the gale of praise.

  • —Sotheby.

  And Horace, in the conclusion of his first Ode, expresses himself in terms which indicate a similar purpose.

  • Quod si me lyricis vatibis inseres,
  • Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.
  • But if you rank me with the choir,
  • Who tuned with art the Grecian lyre;
  • Swift to the noblest heights of fame,
  • Shall rise thy poet’s deathless name.

  • —Francis.

  Even Sallust, a historian, in his introduction to Catiline’s Conspiracy, scruples not to insinuate the same kind of ambition. Quo mihi rectius videtur ingenii quam virium opibus gloriam quærere; et quoniam vita ipsa, quâ fruimur, brevis est, memoriam nostri quam maxume longam efficere.1

  Another circumstance of great importance, towards the production of such poetry as might live through every age, was the extreme attention which the great poets of this period displayed, both in the composition, and the polishing of their works. Virgil, when employed upon the Georgics, usually wrote in the morning, and applied much of the subsequent part of the day to correction and improvement. He compared himself to a bear, that licks her cub into form. If this was his regular practice in the Georgics, we may justly suppose that it was the same in the Æneid. Yet, after all this labour, he intended to devote three years entirely to its farther amendment. Horace has gone so far in recommending careful correction, that he figuratively mentions nine years as an adequate period for that purpose. But whatever may be the time, there is no precept which he urges either oftener or more forcibly, than a due attention to this important subject.

  • Sæpe stylum vertas, iterum quæ digna legi sint
  • Scripturus.
  • * * * Sat. i. x.
  • Would you a reader’s just esteem engage?
  • Correct with frequent care the blotted page.

  • —Francis.

  • —————————————— Vos, O
  • Pompilius sanguis, carmen reprehendite, quod non
  • Multa dies et multa litura coërcuit, atque
  • Perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.

  • —Francis.

  To the several causes above enumerated, as concurring to form the great superiority of the Augustan age, as respects the productions of literature, one more is to be subjoined, of a nature the most essential: the liberal and unparalleled encouragement given to distinguished talents by the emperor and his minister. This was a principle of the most powerful energy: it fanned the flame of genius, invigorated every exertion; and the poets who basked in the rays of imperial favour, and the animating patronage of Mecænas, experienced a poetic enthusiasm which approached to real inspiration.

  Having now finished the proposed explanation, relative to the celebrity of the Augustan age, we shall conclude with recapitulating in a few words the causes of this extraordinary occurrence.

  The models, then, which the Romans derived from Grecian poetry, were the finest productions of human genius; their incentives to emulation were the strongest that could actuate the heart. With ardour, therefore, and industry in composing, and with unwearied patience in polishing their compositions, they attained to that glorious distinction in literature, which no succeeding age has ever rivalled.

  TIBERIUS NERO CÆSAR.

  I.The patrician family of the Claudii (for there was a plebeian family of the same name, no way inferior to the other either in power or dignity) came originally from Regilli, a town of the Sabines. They removed thence to Rome soon after the building of the city, with a great body of their dependants, under Titus Tatius, who reigned jointly with Romulus in the kingdom; or, perhaps, what is related upon better authority, under Atta Claudius, the head of the family, who was admitted by the senate into the patrician order six years after the expulsion of the Tarquins. They likewise received from the state, lands beyond the Anio for their followers, and a burying-place for themselves near the capitol.1 After this period, in process of time, the family had the honour of twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, seven triumphs, and two ovations. Their descendants were distinguished by various prænomina and cognomina,2 but rejected by common consent the prænomen of Lucius, when, of the two races who bore it, one individual had been convicted of robbery, and another of murder. Amongst other cognomina, they assumed that of Nero, which in the Sabine language signifies strong and valiant.

  II. It appears from record, that many of the Claudii have performed signal services to the state, as well as committed acts of delinquency. To mention the most remarkable only, Appius Cæcus dissuaded the senate from agreeing to an alliance with Pyrrhus, as prejudicial to the republic.1 Claudius Candex first passed the straits of Sicily with a fleet, and drove the Carthaginians out of the island.2 Claudius Nero cut off Asdrubal with a vast army upon his arrival in Italy from Spain, before he could form a junction with his brother Annibal.3 On the other hand, Claudius Appius Regillanus, one of the Decemvirs, made a violent attempt to have a free virgin, of whom he was enamoured, adjudged a slave; which caused the people to secede a second time from the senate.4 Claudius Drusus erected a statue of himself wearing a crown at Appii Forum,5 and endeavoured, by means of his dependants, to make himself master of Italy. Claudius Pulcher, when, off the coast of Sicily,6 the pullets used for taking augury would not eat, in contempt of the omen threw them overboard, as if they should drink at least, if they would not eat; and then engaging the enemy, was routed. After his defeat, when he was ordered by the senate to name a dictator, making a sort of jest of the public disaster, he named Glycias, his apparitor.

  The women of this family, likewise, exhibited characters equally opposed to each other. For both the Claudias belonged to it; she, who, when the ship freighted with things sacred to the Idæan Mother of the Gods,1 stuck fast in the shallows of the Tiber, got it off, by praying to the Goddess with a loud voice, “Follow me, if I am chaste;” and she also, who, contrary to the usual practice in the case of women, was brought to trial by the people for treason; because, when her litter was stopped by a great crowd in the streets, she openly exclaimed, “I wish my brother Pulcher was alive now, to lose another fleet, that Rome might be less thronged.” Besides, it is well known, that all the Claudii, except Publius Claudius, who, to effect the banishment of Cicero, procured himself to be adopted by a plebeian,2 and one younger than himself, were always of the patrician party, as well as great sticklers for the honour and power of that order; and so violent and obstinate in their opposition to the plebeians, that not one of them, even in the case of a trial for life by the people, would ever condescend to put on mourning, according to custom, or make any supplication to them for favour; and some of them in their contests, have even proceeded to lay hands on the tribunes of the people. A Vestal Virgin likewise of the family, when her brother was resolved to have the honour of a triumph contrary to the will of the people, mounted the chariot with him, and attended him into the capitol, that it might not be lawful for any of the tribunes to interfere and forbid it.3

  III. From this family Tiberius Cæsar is descended; indeed both by the father and mother’s side; by the former from Tiberius Nero, and by the latter from Appius Pulcher, who were both sons of Appius Cæcus. He likewise belonged to the family of the Livii, by the adoption of his mother’s grandfather into it; which family, although plebeian, made a distinguished figure, having had the honour of eight consulships, two censorships, three triumphs, one dictatorship, and the office of master of the horse; and was famous for eminent men, particularly, Salinator and the Drusi. Salinator, in his censorship,1 branded all the tribes, for their inconstancy in having made him consul a second time, as well as censor, although they had condemned him to a heavy fine after his first consulship. Drusus procured for himself and his posterity a new surname, by killing in single combat Drausus, the enemy’s chief. He is likewise said to have recovered, when pro-prætor in the province of Gaul, the gold which was formerly given to the Senones, at the siege of the capitol, and had not, as is reported, been forced from them by Camillus. His great-great-grandson, who, for his extraordinary services against the Gracchi, was styled the “Patron of the Senate,” left a son, who, while plotting in a sedition of the same description, was treacherously murdered by the opposite party.2

  IV. But the father of Tiberius Cæsar, being quæstor to Caius Cæsar, and commander of his fleet in the war of Alexandria, contributed greatly to its success. He was therefore made one of the high-priests in the room of Publius Scipio;3 and was sent to settle some colonies in Gaul, and amongst the rest, those of Narbonne and Arles.4 After the assassination of Cæsar, however, when the rest of the senators, for fear of public disturbances, were for having the affair buried in oblivion, he proposed a resolution for rewarding those who had killed the tyrant. Having filled the office of prætor,5 and at the end of the year a disturbance breaking out amongst the triumviri, he kept the badges of his office beyond the legal time; and following Lucius Antonius the consul, brother of the triumvir, to Perusia,6 though the rest submitted, yet he himself continued firm to the party, and escaped first to Præneste, and then to Naples; whence, having in vain invited the slaves to liberty, he fled over to Sicily. But resenting his not being immediately admitted into the presence of Sextus Pompey, and being also prohibited the use of the fasces, he went over into Achaia to Mark Antony; with whom, upon a reconciliation soon after brought about amongst the several contending parties, he returned to Rome; and, at the request of Augustus, gave up to him his wife Livia Drusilla, although she was then big with child, and had before borne him a son. He died not long after; leaving behind him two sons, Tiberius and Drusus Nero.

  V. Some have imagined that Tiberius was born at Fundi, but there is only this trifling foundation for the conjecture, that his mother’s grandmother was of Fundi, and that the image of Good Fortune was, by a decree of the senate, erected in a public place in that town. But according to the greatest number of writers, and those too of the best authority, he was born at Rome, in the Palatine quarter, upon the sixteenth of the calends of December [16th Nov.], when Marcus Æmilius Lepidus was second time consul, with Lucius Munatius Plancus,1 after the battle of Philippi; for so it is registered in the calendar, and the public acts. According to some, however, he was born the preceding year, in the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa; and others say, in the year following, during the consulship of Servilius Isauricus and Antony.

  VI. His infancy and childhood were spent in the midst of danger and trouble; for he accompanied his parents everywhere in their flight, and twice at Naples nearly betrayed them by his crying, when they were privately hastening to a ship, as the enemy rushed into the town; once, when he was snatched from his nurse’s breast, and again, from his mother’s bosom, by some of the company, who on the sudden emergency wished to relieve the women of their burden. Being carried through Sicily and Achaia, and entrusted for some time to the care of the Lacedæmonians, who were under the protection of the Claudian family, upon his departure thence when travelling by night, he ran the hazard of his life, by a fire which, suddenly bursting out of a wood on all sides, surrounded the whole party so closely, that part of Livia’s dress and hair was burnt. The presents which were made him by Pompeia, sister to Sextus Pompey, in Sicily, namely, a cloak, with a clasp, and bullæ of gold, are still in existence, and shewn at Baiæ to this day. After his return to the city, being adopted by Marcus Gallius, a senator, in his will, he took possession of the estate; but soon afterwards declined the use of his name, because Gallius had been of the party opposed to Augustus. When only nine years of age, he pronounced a funeral oration in praise of his father upon the rostra; and afterwards, when he had nearly attained the age of manhood, he attended the chariot of Augustus, in his triumph for the victory at Actium, riding on the left-hand horse, whilst Marcellus, Octavia’s son, rode that on the right. He likewise presided at the games celebrated on account of that victory; and in the Trojan games intermixed with the Circensian, he commanded a troop of the biggest boys.

  VII. After assuming the manly habit, he spent his youth, and the rest of his life until he succeeded to the government, in the following manner: he gave the people an entertainment of gladiators, in memory of his father, and another for his grandfather Drusus, at different times and in different places: the first in the forum, the second in the amphitheatre; some gladiators who had been honourably discharged, being induced to engage again, by a reward of a hundred thousand sesterces. He likewise exhibited public sports, at which he was not present himself. All these he performed with great magnificence, at the expense of his mother and father-in-law. He married Agrippina, the daughter of Marcus Agrippa, and grand-daughter of Cæcilius Atticus, a Roman knight, the same person to whom Cicero has addressed so many epistles. After having by her his son Drusus, he was obliged to part with her,1 though she retained his affection, and was again pregnant, to make way for marrying Augustus’s daughter Julia. But this he did with extreme reluctance; for, besides having the warmest attachment to Agrippina, he was disgusted with the conduct of Julia, who had made indecent advances to him during the lifetime of her former husband; and that she was a woman of loose character, was the general opinion. At divorcing Agrippina he felt the deepest regret; and upon meeting her afterwards, he looked after her with eyes so passionately expressive of affection, that care was taken she should never again come in his sight. At first, however, he lived quietly and happily with Julia; but a rupture soon ensued, which became so violent, that after the loss of their son, the pledge of their union, who was born at Aquileia and died in infancy,1 he never would sleep with her more. He lost his brother Drusus in Germany, and brought his body to Rome, travelling all the way on foot before it.

  VIII. When he first applied himself to civil affairs, he defended the several causes of king Archelaus, the Trallians, and the Thessalians, before Augustus, who sat as judge at the trials. He addressed the senate on behalf of the Laodiceans, the Thyatireans, and Chians, who had suffered greatly by an earthquake, and implored relief from Rome. He prosecuted Fannius Cæpio, who had been engaged in a conspiracy with Varro Muræna against Augustus, and procured sentence of condemnation against him. Amidst all this, he had besides to superintend two departments of the administration, that of supplying the city with corn, which was then very scarce, and that of clearing the houses of correction2 throughout Italy, the masters of which had fallen under the odious suspicion of seizing and keeping confined, not only travellers, but those whom the fear of being obliged to serve in the army had driven to seek refuge in such places.

  IX. He made his first campaign, as a military tribune, in the Cantabrian war.3 Afterwards he led an army into the East,4 where he restored the kingdom of Armenia to Tigranes; and seated on a tribunal, put a crown upon his head. He likewise recovered from the Parthians the standards which they had taken from Crassus. He next governed, for nearly a year, the province of Gallia Comata, which was then in great disorder, on account of the incursions of the barbarians, and the feuds of the chiefs. He afterwards commanded in the several wars against the Rhætians, Vindelicians, Pannonians, and Germans. In the Rhætian and Vindelician wars, he subdued the nations in the Alps; and in the Pannonian wars the Bruci, and the Dalmatians In the German war, he transplanted into Gaul forty thousand of the enemy who had submitted, and assigned them lands near the banks of the Rhine. For these actions, he entered the city with an ovation, but riding in a chariot, and is said by some to have been the first that ever was honoured with this distinction. He filled early the principal offices of state; and passed through the quæstorship,1 prætorship,2 and consulate3 almost successively. After some interval, he was chosen consul a second time, and held the tribunitian authority during five years.

  X. Surrounded by all this prosperity, in the prime of life and in excellent health, he suddenly formed the resolution of withdrawing to a greater distance from Rome.4 It is uncertain whether this was the result of disgust for his wife, whom he neither durst accuse nor divorce, and the connection with whom became every day more intolerable; or to prevent that indifference towards him, which his constant residence in the city might produce; or in the hope of supporting and improving by absence his authority in the state, if the public should have occasion for his service. Some are of opinion, that as Augustus’s sons were now grown up to years of maturity, he voluntarily relinquished the possession he had long enjoyed of the second place in the government, as Agrippa had done before him; who, when M. Marcellus was advanced to public offices, retired to Mitylene, that he might not seem to stand in the way of his promotion, or in any respect lessen him by his presence. The same reason likewise Tiberius gave afterwards for his retirement; but his pretext at this time was, that he was satiated with honours, and desirous of being relieved from the fatigue of business; requesting therefore that he might have leave to withdraw. And neither the earnest entreaties of his mother, nor the complaint of his father-in-law made even in the senate, that he was deserted by him, could prevail upon him to alter his resolution. Upon their persisting in the design of detaining him, he refused to take any sustenance for four days together. At last, having obtained permission, leaving his wife and son at Rome, he proceeded to Ostia,1 without exchanging a word with those who attended him, and having embraced but very few persons at parting.

  XI. From Ostia, journeying along the coast of Campania, he halted awhile on receiving intelligence of Augustus’s being taken ill, but this giving rise to a rumour that he stayed with a view to something extraordinary, he sailed with the wind almost full against him, and arrived at Rhodes, having been struck with the pleasantness and healthiness of the island at the time of his landing there in his return from Armenia. Here contenting himself with a small house, and a villa not much larger, near the town, he led entirely a private life, taking his walks sometimes about the Gymnasia,2 without any lictor or other attendant, and returning the civilities of the Greeks with almost as much complaisance as if he had been upon a level with them. One morning, in settling the course of his daily excursion, he happened to say, that he should visit all the sick people in the town. This being not rightly understood by those about him, the sick were brought into a public portico, and ranged in order, according to their several distempers. Being extremely embarrassed by this unexpected occurrence, he was for some time irresolute how he should act; but at last he determined to go round them all, and make an apology for the mistake even to the meanest amongst them, and such as were entirely unknown to him. One instance only is mentioned, in which he appeared to exercise his tribunitian authority. Being a constant attendant upon the schools and lecture-rooms of the professors of the liberal arts, on occasion of a quarrel amongst the wrangling sophists, in which he interposed to reconcile them, some person took the liberty to abuse him as an intruder, and partial in the affair. Upon this, withdrawing privately home, he suddenly returned attended by his officers, and summoning his accuser before his tribunal, by a public crier, ordered him to be taken to prison. Afterwards he received tidings that his wife Julia had been condemned for her lewdness and adultery, and that a bill of divorce had been sent to her in his name, by the authority of Augustus. Though he secretly rejoiced at this intelligence, he thought it incumbent upon him, in point of decency, to interpose in her behalf by frequent letters to Augustus, and to allow her to retain the presents which he had made her, notwithstanding the little regard she merited from him. When the period of his tribunitian authority expired,1 declaring at last that he had no other object in his retirement than to avoid all suspicion of rivalship with Caius and Lucius, he petitioned that, since he was now secure in that respect, as they were come to the age of manhood, and would easily maintain themselves in possession of the second place in the state, he might be permitted to visit his friends, whom he was very desirous of seeing. But his request was denied; and he was advised to lay aside all concern for his friends, whom he had been so eager to greet.

  XII. He therefore continued at Rhodes much against his will, obtaining, with difficulty, through his mother, the title of Augustus’s lieutenant, to cover his disgrace. He thence-forth lived, however, not only as a private person, but as one suspected and under apprehension, retiring into the interior of the country, and avoiding the visits of those who sailed that way, which were very frequent; for no one passed to take command of an army, or the government of a province, without touching at Rhodes. But there were fresh reasons for increased anxiety. For crossing over to Samos, on a visit to his step-son Caius, who had been appointed governor of the East, he found him prepossessed against him, by the insinuations of Marcus Lollius, his companion and director. He likewise fell under suspicion of sending by some centurions who had been promoted by himself, upon their return to the camp after a furlough, mysterious messages to several persons there, intended, apparently, to tamper with them for a revolt. This jealousy respecting his designs being intimated to him by Augustus, he begged repeatedly that some person of any of the three Orders might be placed as a spy upon him in every thing he either said or did.

  XIII. He laid aside likewise his usual exercises of riding and arms; and quitting the Roman habit, made use of the Pallium and Crepida.1 In this condition he continued almost two years, becoming daily an object of increasing contempt and odium; insomuch that the people of Nismes pulled down all the images and statues of him in their town; and upon mention being made of him at table one of the company said to Caius, “I will sail over to Rhodes immediately, if you desire me, and bring you the head of the exile;” for that was the appellation now given him. Thus alarmed not only by apprehensions, but real danger, he renewed his solicitations for leave to return; and, seconded by the most urgent supplications of his mother, he at last obtained his request; to which an accident somewhat contributed. Augustus had resolved to determine nothing in the affair, but with the consent of his eldest son. The latter was at that time out of humour with Marcus Lollius, and therefore easily disposed to be favourable to his father-in-law. Caius thus acquiescing, he was recalled, but upon condition that he should take no concern whatever in the administration of affairs.

  XIV. He returned to Rome after an absence of nearly eight years,2 with great and confident hopes of his future elevation, which he had entertained from his youth, in consequence of various prodigies and predictions. For Livia, when pregnant with him, being anxious to discover, by different modes of divination, whether her offspring would be a son, amongst others, took an egg from a hen that was sitting, and kept it warm with her own hands, and those of her maids, by turns, until a fine cock-chicken, with a large comb, was hatched. Scribonius, the astrologer, predicted great things of him when he was a mere child. “He will come in time,” said the prophet, “to be even a king, but without the usual badge of royal dignity;” the rule of the Cæsars being as yet unknown. When he was making his first expedition, and leading his army through Macedonia into Syria, the altars which had been formerly consecrated at Philippi by the victorious legions, blazed suddenly with spontaneous fires. Soon after, as he was marching to Illyricum, he stopped to consult the oracle of Geryon, near Padua; and having drawn a lot by which he was desired to throw golden tali into the fountain of Aponus,1 for an answer to his inquiries, he did so, and the highest numbers came up. And those very tali are still to be seen at the bottom of the fountain. A few days before his leaving Rhodes, an eagle, a bird never before seen in that island, perched on the top of his house. And the day before he received intelligence of the permission granted him to return, as he was changing his dress, his tunic appeared to be all on fire. He then likewise had a remarkable proof of the skill of Thrasyllus, the astrologer, whom, for his proficiency in philosophical researches, he had taken into his family. For, upon sight of the ship which brought the intelligence, he said, good news was coming: whereas every thing going wrong before, and quite contrary to his predictions, Tiberius had intended that very moment, when they were walking together, to throw him into the sea, as an impostor, and one to whom he had too hastily entrusted his secrets.

  XV. Upon his return to Rome, having introduced his son Drusus into the forum, he immediately removed from Pompey’s house, in the Carinæ, to the gardens of Mecænas, on the Esquiline,2 and resigned himself entirely to his ease, performing only the common offices of civility in private life, without any preferment in the government. But Caius and Lucius being both carried off in the space of three years, he was adopted by Augustus, along with their brother Agrippa; being obliged in the first place to adopt Germanicus, his brother’s son. After his adoption, he never more acted as master of a family, nor exercised, in the smallest degree, the rights which he had lost by it. For he neither disposed of anything in the way of gift, nor manumitted a slave; nor so much as received any estate left him by will, nor any legacy, without reckoning it as a part of his peculium or property held under his father. From that day forward, nothing was omitted that might contribute to the advancement of his grandeur, and much more when, upon Agrippa being discarded and banished, it was evident that the hope of succession rested upon him alone.

  XVI. The tribunitian authority was again conferred upon him for five years,1 and a commission given him to settle the affairs of Germany. The ambassadors of the Parthians, after having had an audience of Augustus, were ordered to apply to him likewise in his province. But on receiving intelligence of an insurrection in Illyricum,2 he went over to superintend the management of that new war, which proved the most serious of all the foreign wars since the Carthaginian. This he conducted during three years, with fifteen legions and an equal number of auxiliary forces, under great difficulties, and an extreme scarcity of corn. And though he was several times recalled, he nevertheless persisted; fearing lest an enemy so powerful, and so near, should-fall upon the army in their retreat. This resolution was attended with good success; for he at last reduced to complete subjection all Illyricum, lying between Italy and the kingdom of Noricum, Thrace, Macedonia, the river Danube, and the Adriatie gulf.

  XVII. The glory he acquired by these successes received an increase from the conjuncture in which they happened. For almost about that very time3 Quintilius Varus was cut off with three legions in Germany; and it was generally believed that the victorious Germans would have joined the Pannonians, had not the war of Illyricum been previously concluded. A triumph, therefore, besides many other great honours, was decreed him. Some proposed that the surname of “Pannonicus,” others that of “Invincible,” and others, of “Pius,” should be conferred on him; but Augustus interposed, engaging for him that he would be satisfied with that to which he would succeed at his death. He postponed his triumph, because the state was at that time under great affliction for the disaster of Varus and his army. Nevertheless, he entered the city in a triumphal robe, crowned with laurel, and mounting a tribunal in the Septa, sat with Augustus between the two consuls, whilst the senate gave their attendance standing; whence, after he had saluted the people, he was attended by them in procession to the several temples.

  XVIII. Next year he went again to Germany, where finding that the defeat of Varus was occasioned by the rashness and negligence of the commander, he thought proper to be guided in everything by the advice of a council of war; whereas, at other times, he used to follow the dictates of his own judgment, and considered himself alone as sufficiently qualified for the direction of affairs. He likewise used more cautions than usual. Having to pass the Rhine, he restricted the whole convoy within certain limits, and stationing himself on the bank of the river, would not suffer the waggons to cross the river, until he had searched them at the water-side, to see that they carried nothing but what was allowed or necessary. Beyond the Rhine, such was his way of living, that he took his meals sitting on the bare ground,1 and often passed the night without a tent; and his regular orders for the day, as well as those upon sudden emergencies, he gave in writing, with this injunction, that in case of any doubt as to the meaning of them, they should apply to him for satisfaction, even at any hour of the night.

  XIX. He maintained the strictest discipline amongst the troops; reviving many old customs relative to punishing and degrading offenders; setting a mark of disgrace even upon the commander of a legion, for sending a few soldiers with one of his freedmen across the river for the purpose of hunting. Though it was his desire to leave as little as possible in the power of fortune or accident, yet he always engaged the enemy with more confidence when, in his night-watches, the lamp failed and went out of itself; trusting, as he said, in an omen which had never failed him and his ancestors in all their commands. But, in the midst of victory, he was very near being assassinated by some Bructerian, who mixing with those about him, and being discovered by his trepidation, was put to the torture, and confessed his intended crime.

  XX. After two years, he returned from Germany to the city, and celebrated the triumph which he had deferred, attended by his lieutenants, for whom he had procured the honour of triumphal ornaments.1 Before he turned to ascend the capitol, he alighted from his chariot, and knelt before his father, who sat by, to superintend the solemnity. Bato, the Pannonian chief, he sent to Ravenna, loaded with rich presents, in gratitude for his having suffered him and his army to retire from a position in which he had so enclosed them, that they were entirely at his mercy. He afterwards gave the people a dinner at a thousand tables, besides thirty sesterces to each man. He likewise dedicated the temple of Concord,2 and that of Castor and Pollux, which had been erected out of the spoils of the war, in his own and his brother’s name.

  XXI. A law having been not long after carried by the consuls3 for his being appointed a colleague with Augustus in the administration of the provinces, and in taking the census, when that was finished he went into Illyricum.4 But being hastily recalled during his journey, he found Augustus alive indeed, but past all hopes of recovery, and was with him in private a whole day. I know, it is generally believed, that upon Tiberius’s quitting the room, after their private conference, those who were in waiting overheard Augustus say, “Ah! unhappy Roman people, to be ground by the jaws of such a slow devourer!” Nor am I ignorant of its being reported by some, that Augustus so openly and undisguisedly condemned the sourness of his temper, that sometimes, upon his coming in, he would break off any jocular conversation in which he was engaged; and that he was only prevailed upon by the importunity of his wife to adopt him; or actuated by the ambitious view of recommending his own memory from a comparison with such a successor. Yet I must hold to this opinion, that a prince so extremely circumspect and prudent as he was, did nothing rashly, especially in an affair of so great importance; but that, upon weighing the vices and virtues of Tiberius with each other, he judged the latter to preponderate; and this the rather since he swore publicly, in an assembly of the people, that “he adopted him for the public good.” Besides, in several of his letters, he extols him as a consummate general, and the only security of the Roman people. Of such declarations I subjoin the following instances: “Farewell, my dear Tiberius, and may success attend you, whilst you are warring for me and the Muses.1 Farewell, my my most dear, and (as I hope to prosper) most gallant man, and accomplished general.” Again. “The disposition of your summer quarters? In truth, my dear Tiberius, I do not think, that amidst so many difficulties, and with an army so little disposed for action, any one could have behaved more prudently than you have done. All those likewise who were with you, acknowledge that this verse is applicable to you:”

  • Unus homo nobis vigilando restituit rem.2
  • One man by vigilance restored the state.

  “Whenever,” he says, “any thing happens that requires more than ordinary consideration, or I am out of humour upon any occasion, I still, by Hercules! long for my dear Tiberius; and those lines of Homer frequently occur to my thoughts:”

  • Τούτου δ’ ἑσπομένοιο ϰαὶ ἐϰ πυρος αἰθομένοιο
  • Αμφω νοσϛήσαιμεν, ἐπὲι πέρι οἶδε νοῇσαι.3
  • Bold from his prudence, I could ev’n aspire
  • To dare with him the burning rage of fire.

  “When I hear and read that you are much impaired by the continued fatigues you undergo, may the gods confound me if my whole frame does not tremble! So I beg you to spare yourself, lest, if we should hear of your being ill, the news prove fatal both to me and your mother, and the Roman people should be in peril for the safety of the empire. It matters nothing whether I be well or no, if you be not well. I pray heaven preserve you for us, and bless you with health both now and ever, if the gods have any regard for the Roman people.”

  XXII. He did not make the death of Augustus public, until he had taken off young Agrippa. He was slain by a tribune who commanded his guard, upon reading a written order for that purpose: respecting which order, it was then a doubt, whether Augustus left it in his last moments, to prevent any occasion of public disturbance after his decease, or Livia issued it, in the name of Augustus; and whether with the knowledge of Tiberius or not. When the tribune came to inform him that he had executed his command, he replied, “I commanded you no such thing, and you must answer for it to the senate;” avoiding, as it seems, the odium of the act for that time. And the affair was soon buried in silence.

  XXIII. Having summoned the senate to meet by virtue of his tribunitian authority, and begun a mournful speech, he drew a deep sigh, as if unable to support himself under his affliction; and wishing that not his voice only, but his very breath of life, might fail him, gave his speech to his son Drusus to read. Augustus’s will was then brought in, and read by a freedman; none of the witnesses to it being admitted, but such as were of the senatorian order, the rest owning their hand-writing without doors. The will began thus: “Since my ill-fortune has deprived me of my two sons, Caius and Lucius, let Tiberius Cæsar be heir to two-thirds of my estate.” These words countenanced the suspicion of those who were of opinion, that Tiberius was appointed successor more out of necessity than choice, since Augustus could not refrain from prefacing his will in that manner.

  XXIV. Though he made no scruple to assume and exercise immediately the imperial authority, by giving orders that he should be attended by the guards, who were the security and badge of the supreme power; yet he affected, by a most impudent piece of acting, to refuse it for a long time; one while sharply reprehending his friends who entreated him to accept it, as little knowing what a monster the government was; another while keeping in suspense the senate, when they implored him and threw themselves at his feet, by ambiguous answers, and a crafty kind of dissimulation; insomuch that some were out of patience, and one cried out, during the confusion, “Either let him accept it, or decline it at once;” and a second told him to his face, “Others are slow to perform what they promise, but you are slow to promise what you actually perform.” At last, as if forced to it, and complaining of the miserable and burdensome service imposed upon him, he accepted the government; not, however, without giving hopes of his resigning it some time or other. The exact words he used were these: “Until the time shall come, when ye may think it reasonable to give some rest to my old age.”

  XXV. The cause of his long demur was fear of the dangers which threatened him on all hands; insomuch that he said, “I have got a wolf by the ears.” For a slave of Agrippa’s, Clemens by name, had drawn together a considerable force to revenge his master’s death; Lucius Scribonius Libo, a senator of the first distinction, was secretly fomenting a rebellion; and the troops both in Illyricum and Germany were mutinous. Both armies insisted upon high demands, particularly that their pay should be made equal to that of the pretorian guards. The army in Germany absolutely refused to acknowledge a prince who was not their own choice; and urged, with all possible importunity, Germanicus,1 who commanded them, to take the government on himself, though he obstinately refused it. It was Tiberius’s apprehension from this quarter, which made him request the senate to assign him some part only in the administration, such as they should judge proper, since no man could be sufficient for the whole, without one or more to assist him. He pretended likewise to be in a bad state of health, that Germanicus might the more patiently wait in hopes of speedily succeeding him, or at least of being admitted to be a colleague in the government. When the mutinies in the armies were suppressed, he got Clemens into his hands by stratagem. That he might not begin his reign by an act of severity, he did not call Libo to an account before the senate until his second year, being content, in the mean time, with taking proper precautions for his own security. For upon Libo’s attending a sacrifice amongst the high-priests, instead of the usual knife, he ordered one of lead to be given him; and when he desired a private conference with him, he would not grant his request, but on condition that his son Drusus should be present; and as they walked together, he held him fast by the right hand, under the pretence of leaning upon him, until the conversation was over.

  XXVI. When he was delivered from his apprehensions, his behaviour at first was unassuming, and he did not carry himself much above the level of a private person; and of the many and great honours offered him, he accepted but few, and such as were very moderate. His birth-day, which happened to fall at the time of the Plebeian Circensian games, he with difficulty suffered to be honoured with the addition of only a single chariot, drawn by two horses. He forbad temples, flamens, or priests to be appointed for him, as likewise the erection of any statues or effigies for him, without his permission; and this he granted only on condition that they should not be placed amongst the images of the gods, but only amongst the ornaments of houses. He also interposed to prevent the senate from swearing to maintain his acts; and the month of September from being called Tiberius, and October being named after Livia. The prænomen likewise of Emperor, with the cognomen of Father of his country, and a civic crown in the vestibule of his house, he would not accept. He never used the name of Augustus, although he inherited it, in any of his letters, excepting those addressed to kings and princes. Nor had he more than three consulships; one for a few days, another for three months, and a third, during his absence from the city, until the ides [fifteenth] of May.

  XXVII. He had such an aversion to flattery, that he would never suffer any senator to approach his litter, as he passed the streets in it, either to pay him a civility, or upon business. And when a man of consular rank, in begging his pardon for some offence he had given him, attempted to fall at his feet, he started from him in such haste, that he stumbled and fell. If any compliment was paid him, either in conversation or a set speech, he would not scruple to interrupt and reprimand the party, and alter what he had said. Being once called “lord,”1 by some person, he desired that he might no more be affronted in that manner. When another, to excite veneration, called his occupations “sacred,” and a third had expressed himself thus: “By your authority I have waited upon the senate,” he obliged them to change their phrases; in one of them adopting persuasion, instead of “authority,” and in the other, laborious, instead of “sacred.”

  XXVIII. He remained unmoved at all the aspersions, scandalous reports, and lampoons, which were spread against him or his relations; declaring, “In a free state, both the tongue and the mind ought to be free.” Upon the senate’s desiring that some notice might be taken of those offences, and the persons charged with them, he replied, “We have not so much time upon our hands, that we ought to involve ourselves in more business. If you once make an opening2 for such proceedings, you will soon have nothing else to do. All private quarrels will be brought before you under that pretence.” There is also on record another sentence used by him in the senate, which is far from assuming: “If he speaks otherwise of me, I shall take care to behave in such a manner, as to be able to give a good account both of my words and actions; and if he persists, I shall hate him in my turn.”

  XXIX. These things were so much the more remarkable in him, because, in the respect he paid to individuals, or the whole body of the senate, he went beyond all bounds. Upon his differing with Quintus Haterius in the senate-house, “Pardon me, sir,” he said, “I beseech you, if I shall, as a senator, speak my mind very freely in opposition to you.” Afterwards, addressing the senate in general, he said: “Conscript Fathers, I have often said it both now and at other times, that a good and useful prince, whom you have invested with so great and absolute power, ought to be a slave to the senate, to the whole body of the people, and often to individuals likewise: nor am I sorry that I have said it. I have always found you good, kind, and indulgent masters, and still find you so.”

  XXX. He likewise introduced a certain show of liberty, by preserving to the senate and magistrates their former majesty and power. All affairs, whether of great or small importance, public or private, were laid before the senate. Taxes and monopolies, the erecting or repairing edifices, levying and disbanding soldiers, the disposal of the legions and auxiliary forces in the provinces, the appointment of generals for the management of extraordinary wars, and the answers to letters from foreign princes, were all submitted to the senate. He compelled the commander of a troop of horse, who was accused of robbery attended with violence, to plead his cause before the senate. He never entered the senate-house but unattended; and being once brought thither in a litter, because he was indisposed, he dismissed his attendants at the door.

  XXXI. When some decrees were made contrary to his opinion, he did not even make any complaint. And though he thought that no magistrates after their nomination should be allowed to absent themselves from the city, but reside in it constantly, to receive their honours in person, a prætor-elect obtained liberty to depart under the honorary title of a legate at large. Again, when he proposed to the senate, that the Trebians might have leave granted them to divert some money which had been left them by will for the purpose of building a new theatre, to that of making a road, he could not prevail to have the will of the testator set aside. And when, upon a division of the house, he went over to the minority, nobody followed him. All other things of a public nature were likewise transacted by the magistrates, and in the usual forms; the authority of the consuls remaining so great, that some ambassadors from Africa applied to them, and complained, that they could not have their business dispatched by Cæsar, to whom they had been sent. And no wonder; since it was observed that he used to rise up as the consuls approached, and give them the way.

  XXXII. He reprimanded some persons of consular rank in command of armies, for not writing to the senate an account of their proceedings, and for consulting him about the distribution of military rewards; as if they themselves had not a right to bestow them as they judged proper. He commended a prætor, who, on entering office, revived an old custom of celebrating the memory of his ancestors, in a speech to the people. He attended the corpses of some persons of distinction to the funeral pile. He displayed the same moderation with regard to persons and things of inferior consideration. The magistrates of Rhodes, having dispatched to him a letter on public business, which was not subscribed, he sent for them, and without giving them so much as one harsh word, desired them to subscribe it, and so dismissed them. Diogenes, the grammarian, who used to hold public disquisitions at Rhodes every sabbath-day, once refused him admittance upon his coming to hear him out of course, and sent him a message by a servant, postponing his admission until the nexth seventh day. Diogenes afterwards coming to Rome, and waiting at his door to be allowed to pay his respects to him, he sent him word to come again at the end of seven years. To some governors, who advised him to load the provinces with taxes, he answered, “It is the part of a good shepherd to shear, not flay, his sheep.”

  XXXIII. He assumed the sovereignty1 by slow degrees, and exercised it for a long time with great variety of conduct, though generally with a due regard to the public good. At first he only interposed to prevent ill management. Accordingly, he rescinded some decrees of the senate; and when the magistrates sat for the administration of justice, he frequently offered his service as assessor, either taking his place promiscuously amongst them, or seating himself in a corner of the tribunal. If a rumour prevailed, that any person under prosecution was likely to be acquitted by his interest, he would suddenly make his appearance, and from the floor of the court, of the prætor’s bench, remind the judges of the laws, and of their oaths, and the nature of the charge brought before them. He likewise took upon himself the correction of public morals, where they tended to decay, either through neglect, or evil custom.

  XXXIV. He reduced the expense of the plays and public spectacles, by diminishing the allowances to actors, and curtailing the number of gladiators. He made grievous complaints to the senate, that the price of Corinthian vessels was become enormous, and that three mullets had been sold for thirty thousand sesterces: upon which he proposed that a new sumptuary law should be enacted; that the butchers and other dealers in viands should be subject to an assize, fixed by the senate yearly; and the ædiles commissioned to restrain eating-houses and taverns, so far as not even to permit the sale of any kind of pastry. And to encourage frugality in the public by his own example, he would often, at his solemn feasts, have at his tables victuals which had been served up the day before, and were partly eaten, and half a boar, affirming, “It has all the same good bits that the whole had.” He published an edict against the practice of people’s kissing each other when they met; and would not allow new-year’s gifts1 to be presented after the calends [the first] of January was passed. He had been in the habit of returning these offerings four-fold, and making them with his own hand; but being annoyed by the continual interruption to which he was exposed during the whole month, by those who had not the opportunity of attending him on the festival, he returned none after that day.

  XXXV. Married women guilty of adultery, though not prosecuted publicly, he authorised the nearest relations to punish by agreement among themselves, according to ancient custom. He discharged a Roman knight from the obligation of an oath he had taken, never to turn away his wife; and allowed him to divorce her, upon her being caught in criminal intercourse with her son-in-law. Women of ill-fame, divesting themselves of the rights and dignity of matrons, had now begun a practice of professing themselves prostitutes, to avoid the punishment of the laws; and the most profligate young men of the senatorian and equestrian orders, to secure themselves against a decree of the senate, which prohibited their performing on the stage, or in the amphitheatre, voluntarily subjected themselves to an infamous sentence, by which they were degraded. All those he banished, that none for the future might evade by such artifices the intention and efficacy of the law. He stripped a senator of the broad stripes on his robe, upon information of his having removed to his gardens before the calends [the first] of July, in order that he might afterwards hire a house cheaper in the city. He likewise dismissed another from the office of quæstor, for repudiating, the day after he had been lucky in drawing his lot, a wife whom he had married only the day before.

  XXXVI. He suppressed all foreign religions, and the Egyptian1 and Jewish rites, obliging those who practised that kind of superstition, to burn their vestments, and all their sacred utensils. He distributed the Jewish youths, under the pretence of military service, among the provinces noted for an unhealthy climate; and dismissed from the city all the rest of that nation as well as those who were proselytes to that religion,2 under pain of slavery for life, unless they complied. He also expelled the astrologers; but upon their suing for pardon, and promising to renounce their profession, he revoked his decree.

  XXXVII. But, above all things, he was careful to keep the public peace against robbers, burglars, and those who were disaffected to the government. He therefore increased the number of military stations throughout Italy; and formed a camp at Rome for the prætorian cohorts, which, till then, had been quartered in the city. He suppressed with great severity all tumults of the people on their first breaking out; and took every precaution to prevent them. Some persons having been killed in a quarrel which happened in the theatre, he banished the leaders of the parties, and the players about whom the disturbance had arisen; nor could all the entreaties of the people afterwards prevail upon him to recall them.1 The people of Pollentia having refused to permit the removal of the corpse of a centurion of the first rank from the forum, until they had extorted from his heirs a sum of money for a public exhibition of gladiators, he detached a cohort from the city, and another from the kingdom of Cottius;2 who concealing the cause of their march, entered the town by different gates, with their arms suddenly displayed, and trumpets sounding; and having seized the greatest part of the people, and the magistrates, they were imprisoned for life. He abolished every where the privileges of all places of refuge. The Cyzicenians having committed an outrage upon some Romans, he deprived them of the liberty they had obtained for their good services in the Mithridatic war. Disturbances from foreign enemies he quelled by his lieutenants, without ever going against them in person; nor would he even employ his lieutenants, but with much reluctance, and when it was absolutely necessary. Princes who were ill-affected towards him, he kept in subjection, more by menaces and remonstrances, than by force of arms. Some whom he induced to come to him by fair words and promises, he never would permit to return home; as Maraboduus the German, Thrascypolis the Thracian, and Archelaus the Cappadocian, whose kingdom he even reduced into the form of a province.

  XXXVIII. He never set foot outside the gates of Rome, for two years together, from the time he assumed the supreme power; and after that period, went no farther from the city than to some of the neighbouring towns; his farthest excursion being to Antium,1 and that but very seldom, and for a few days; though he often gave out that he would visit the provinces and armies, and made preparations for it almost every year, by taking up carriages, and ordering provisions for his retinue in the municipia and colonies. At last he suffered vows to be put up for his good journey and safe return, insomuch that he was called jocosely by the name of Callipides, who is famous in a Greek proverb, for being in a great hurry to go forward, but without ever advancing a cubit.

  XXXIX. But after the loss of his two sons, of whom Germanicus died in Syria, and Drusus at Rome, he withdrew into Campania;2 at which time opinion and conversation were almost general, that he never would return, and would die soon. And both nearly turned out to be true. For indeed he never more came to Rome; and a few days after leaving it, when he was at a villa of his called the Cave, near Terracina,3 during supper a great many huge stones fell from above, which killed several of the guests and attendants; but he almost hopelessly escaped.

  XL. After he had gone round Campania, and dedicated the capitol at Capua, and a temple to Augustus at Nola,4 which he made the pretext of his journey, he retired to Capri; being greatly delighted with the island, because it was accessible only by a narrow beach, being on all sides surrounded with rugged cliffs, of a stupendous height, and by a deep sea. But immediately, the people of Rome being extremely clamorous for his return, on account of a disaster at Fidenæ,1 where upwards of twenty thousand persons had been killed by the fall of the amphitheatre, during a public spectacle of gladiators, he crossed over again to the continent, and gave all people free access to him; so much the more, because, at his departure from the city, he had caused it to be proclaimed that no one should address him, and had declined admitting any persons to his presence, on the journey.

  XLI. Returning to the island, he so far abandoned all care of the government, that he never filled up the decuriæ of the knights, never changed any military tribunes or prefects, or governors of provinces, and kept Spain and Syria for several years without any consular lieutenants. He likewise suffered Armenia to be seized by the Parthians, Mœsia by the Dacians and Sarmatians, and Gaul to be ravaged by the Germans; to the great disgrace, and no less danger, of the empire.

  XLII. But having now the advantage of privacy, and being remote from the observation of the people of Rome, he abandoned himself to all the vicious propensities which he had long but imperfectly concealed, and of which I shall here give a particular account from the beginning. While a young soldier in the camp, he was so remarkable for his excessive inclination to wine, that, for Tiberius, they called him Biberius; for Claudius, Caldius; and for Nero, Mero. And after he succeeded to the empire, and was invested with the office of reforming the morality of the people, he spent a whole night and two days together in feasting and drinking with Pomponius Flaccus and Lucius Piso; to one of whom he immediately gave the province of Syria, and to the other the prefecture of the city; declaring them, in his letters-patent, to be “very pleasant companions, and friends fit for all occasions.” He made an appointment to sup with Sestius Gallus, a lewd and prodigal old fellow, who had been disgraced by Augustus, and reprimanded manded by himself but a few days before in the senate-house; upon condition that he should not recede in the least from his usual method of entertainment, and that they should be attended at table by naked girls. He preferred a very obscure candidate for the quæstorship, before the most noble competitors, only for taking off, in pledging him at table, an amphora of wine at a draught.1 He presented Asellius Sabinus with two hundred thousand sesterces, for writing a dialogue, in the way of dispute, betwixt the truffle and the fig-pecker, the oyster and the thrush. He likewise instituted a new office to administer to his voluptuousness, to which he appointed Titus Cæsonius Priscus, a Roman knight.

  XLIII. In his retreat at Capri,2 he also contrived an apartment containing couches, and adapted to the secret practice of abominable lewdness, where he entertained companies of girls and catamites, and assembled from all quarters inventors of unnatural copulations, whom he called Spintriæ, who defiled one another in his presence, to inflame by the exhibition the languid appetite. He had several chambers set round with pictures and statues in the most lascivious attitudes, and furnished with the books of Elephantis, that none might want a pattern for the execution of any lewd project that was prescribed him. He likewise contrived recesses in woods and groves for the gratification of lust, where young persons of both sexes prostituted themselves in caves and hollow rocks, in the disguise of little Pans and Nymphs.3 So that he was publicly and commonly called, by an abuse of the name of the island, Caprineus.4

  XLIV. But he was still more infamous, if possible, for an abomination not fit to be mentioned or heard, much less credited.1missing text * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * When a picture, painted by Parrhasius, in which the artist had represented Atalanta in the act of submitting to Meleager’s lust in a most unnatural way, was bequeathed to him, with this proviso, that if the subject was offensive to him, he might receive in lieu of it a million of sesterces, he not only chose the picture, but hung it up in his bed-chamber. It is also reported that, during a sacrifice, he was so captivated with the form of a youth who held a censer, that, before the religious rites were well over, he took him aside and abused him; as also a brother of his who had been playing the flute; and soon afterwards broke the legs of both of them, for upbraiding one another with their shame.

  XLV. How much he was guilty of a most foul intercourse with women even of the first quality,2 appeared very plainly by the death of one Mallonia, who, being brought to his bed, but resolutely refusing to comply with his lust, he gave her up to the common informers. Even when she was upon her trial, he frequently called out to her, and asked her, “Do you repent?” until she, quitting the court, went home, and stabbed herself; openly upbraiding the vile old lecher for his gross obscenity.3 Hence there was an allusion to him in a farce, which was acted at the next public sports, and was received with great applause, and became a common topic of ridicule:4 that the old goatmissing text * * * * *

  XLVI. He was so niggardly and covetous, that he never allowed to his attendants, in his travels and expeditions, any salary, but their diet only. Once, indeed, he treated them liberally, at the instigation of his step-father, when, dividing them into three classes, according to their rank, he gave the first six, the second four, and the third two, hundred thousand sesterces, which last class he called not friends, but Greeks.

  XLVII. During the whole time of his government, he never erected any noble edifice; for the only things he did undertake, namely, building the temple of Augustus, and restoring Pompey’s Theatre, he left at last, after many years, unfinished. Nor did he ever entertain the people with public spectacles; and he was seldom present at those which were given by others, lest any thing of that kind should be requested of him; especially after he was obliged to give freedom to the comedian Actius. Having relieved the poverty of a few senators, to avoid further demands, he declared that he should for the future assist none, but those who gave the senate full satisfaction as to the cause of their necessity. Upon this, most of the needy senators, from modesty and shame, declined troubling him. Amongst these was Hortalus, grandson to the celebrated orator Quintus Hortensius, who [marrying], by the persuasion of Augustus, had brought up four children upon a very small estate.

  XLVIII. He displayed only two instances of public munificence. One was an offer to lend gratis, for three years, a hundred millions of sesterces to those who wanted to borrow; and the other, when, some large houses being burnt down upon Mount Cœlius, he indemnified the owners. To the former of these he was compelled by the clamours of the people, in a great scarcity of money, when he had ratified a decree of the senate obliging all money-lenders to advance two-thirds of their capital on land, and the debtors to pay off at once the same proportion of their debts, and it was found insufficient to remedy the grievance. The other he did to alleviate in some degree the pressure of the times. But his benefaction to the sufferers by fire, he estimated at so high a rate, that he ordered the Cœlian Hill to be called, in future, the Augustan. To the soldiery, after doubling the legacy left them by Augustus, he never gave any thing, except a thousand denarii a man to the pretorian guards, for not joining the party of Sejanus; and some presents to the legions in Syria, because they alone had not paid reverence to the effigies of Sejanus among their standards. He seldom gave discharges to the veteran soldiers, calculating on their deaths from advanced age, and on what would be saved by thus getting rid of them, in the way of rewards or pensions. Nor did he ever relieve the provinces by any act of generosity, excepting Asia, where some cities had been destroyed by an earthquake.

  XLIX. In the course of a very short time, he turned his mind to sheer robbery. It is certain that Cneius Lentulus, the augur, a man of vast estate, was so terrified and worried by his threats and importunities, that he was obliged to make him his heir; and that Lepida, a lady of a very noble family, was condemned by him, in order to gratify Quirinus, a man of consular rank, extremely rich, and childless, who had divorced her twenty years before, and now charged her with an old design to poison him. Several persons, likewise, of the first distinction in Gaul, Spain, Syria, and Greece, had their estates confiscated upon such despicably trifling and shameless pretences, that against some of them no other charge was preferred, than that they held large sums of ready money as part of their property. Old immunities, the rights of mining, and of levying tolls, were taken from several cities and private persons. And Vonones, king of the Parthians, who had been driven out of his dominions by his own subjects, and fled to Antioch with a vast treasure, claiming the protection of the Roman people, his allies, was treacherously robbed of all his money, and afterwards murdered.

  L. He first manifested hatred towards his own relations in the case of his brother Drusus, betraying him by the production of a letter to himself, in which Drusus proposed that Augustus should be forced to restore the public liberty. In course of time, he shewed the same disposition with regard to the rest of his family. So far was he from performing any office of kindness or humanity to his wife, when she was banished, and, by her father’s order, confined to one town, that he forbad her to stir out of the house, or converse with any men. He even wronged her of the dowry given her by her father, and of her yearly allowance, by a quibble of law, because Augustus had made no provision for them on her behalf in his will. Being harassed by his mother, Livia, who claimed an equal share in the government with him, he frequently avoided seeing her, and all long and private conferences with her, lest it should be thought that he was governed by her counsels, which, notwithstanding, he sometimes sought, and was in the habit of adopting. He was much offended at the senate, when they proposed to add to his other titles that of the Son of Livia, as well as Augustus. He, therefore, would not suffer her to be called “the Mother of her Country,” nor to receive any extraordinary public distinction. Nay, he frequently admonished her “not to meddle with weighty affairs, and such as did not suit her sex;” especially when he found her present at a fire which broke out near the Temple of Vesta,1 and encouraging the people and soldiers to use their utmost exertions, as she had been used to do in the time of her husband.

  LI. He afterwards proceeded to an open rupture with her, and, as is said, upon this occasion. She having frequently urged him to place among the judges a person who had been made free of the city, he refused her request, unless she would allow it to be inscribed on the roll, “That the appointment had been extorted from him by his mother.” Enraged at this, Livia brought forth from her chapel some letters from Augustus to her, complaining of the sourness and insolence of Tiberius’s temper, and these she read. So much was he offended at these letters having been kept so long, and now produced with so much bitterness against him, that some considered this incident as one of the causes of his going into seclusion, if not the principal reason for his so doing. In the whole years she lived during his retirement, he saw her but once, and that for a few hours only. When she fell sick shortly afterwards, he was quite unconcerned about visiting her in her illness; and when she died, after promising to attend her funeral, he deferred his coming for several days, so that the corpse was in a state of decay and putrefaction before the interment; and he then forbad divine honours being paid to her, pretending that he acted according to her own directions. He likewise annulled her will, and in a short time ruined all her friends and acquaintance; not even sparing those to whom, on her death-bed, she had recommended the care of her funeral, but condemning one of them, a man of equestrian rank, to the treadmill.1

  LII. He entertained no paternal affection either for his own son Drusus, or his adopted son Germanicus. Offended at the vices of the former, who was of a loose disposition and led a dissolute life, he was not much affected at his death; but, almost immediately after the funeral, resumed his attention to business, and prevented the courts from being longer closed. The ambassadors from the people of Ilium coming rather late to offer their condolence, he said to them by way of banter, as if the affair had already faded from his memory, “And I heartily condole with you on the loss of your renowned countryman, Hector.” He so much affected to depreciate Germanicus, that he spoke of his achievements as utterly insignificant, and railed at his most glorious victories as ruinous to the state; complaining of him also to the senate for going to Alexandria without his knowledge, upon occasion of a great and sudden famine at Rome. It was believed that he took care to have him dispatched by Cneius Piso, his lieutenant in Syria. This person was afterwards tried for the murder, and would, as was supposed, have produced his orders, had they not been contained in a private and confidential dispatch. The following words therefore were posted up in many places, and frequently shouted in the night: “Give us back our Germanicus.” This suspicion was afterwards confirmed by the barbarous treatment of his wife and children.

  LIII. His daughter-in-law Agrippina, after the death of her husband, complaining upon some occasion with more than ordinary freedom, he took her by the hand, and addressed her in a Greek verse to this effect: “My dear child, do you think yourself injured, because you are not empress?” Nor did he ever vouchsafe to speak to her again. Upon her refusing once at supper to taste some fruit which he presented to her, he declined inviting her to his table, pretending that she in effect charged him with a design to poison her; whereas the whole was a contrivance of his own. He was to offer the fruit, and she to be privately cautioned against eating what would infallibly cause her death. At last, having her accused of intending to flee for refuge to the statue of Augustus, or to the army, he banished her to the island of Pandataria.1 Upon her reviling him for it, he caused a centurion to beat out one of her eyes: and when she resolved to starve herself to death, he ordered her mouth to be forced open, and meat to be crammed down her throat. But she persisting in her resolution, and dying soon afterwards, he persecuted her memory with the basest aspersions, and persuaded the senate to put her birth-day amongst the number of unlucky days in the calendar. He likewise took credit for not having caused her to be strangled and her body cast upon the Gemonian Steps, and suffered a decree of the senate to pass, thanking him for his clemency, and an offering of gold to be made to Jupiter Capitolinus on the occasion.

  LIV. He had by Germanicus three grandsons, Nero, Drusus, and Caius; and by his son Drusus one, named Tiberius. Of these, after the loss of his sons, he commended Nero and Drusus, the two eldest sons of Germanicus, to the senate; and at their being solemnly introduced into the forum, distributed money among the people. But when he found that on entering upon the new year they were included in the public vows for his own welfare, he told the senate, “that such honours ought not to be conferred but upon those who had been proved, and were of more advanced years.” By thus betraying his private feelings towards them, he exposed them to all sorts of accusations; and after practising many artifices to provoke them to rail at and abuse him, that he might be furnished with a pretence to destroy them, he charged them with it in a letter to the senate; at the same time accusing them, in the bitterest terms, of the most scandalous vices. Upon their being declared enemies by the senate, he starved them to death; Nero in the island of Ponza, and Drusus in the vaults of the Palatium. It is thought by some, that Nero was driven to a voluntary death by the executioner’s shewing him some halters and hooks, as if he had been sent to him by order of the senate. Drusus, it is said, was so rabid with hunger, that he attempted to eat the chaff with which his mattress was stuffed. The relics of both were so scattered, that it was with difficulty they were collected.

  LV. Besides his old friends and intimate acquaintance, he required the assistance of twenty of the most eminent persons in the city, as counsellors in the administration of public affairs. Out of all this number, scarcely two or three escaped the fury of his savage disposition. All the rest he destroyed upon one pretence or another; and among them Ælius Sejanus, whose fall was attended with the ruin of many others. He had advanced this minister to the highest pitch of grandeur, not so much from any real regard for him, as that by his base and sinister contrivances he might ruin the children of Germanicus, and thereby secure the succession to his own grandson by Drusus.

  LVI. He treated with no greater leniency the Greeks in his family, even those with whom he was most pleased. Having asked one Zeno, upon his using some far-fetched phrases, “What uncouth dialect is that?” he replied, “The Doric.” For this answer he banished him to Cinara,1 suspecting that he taunted him with his former residence at Rhodes, where the Doric dialect is spoken. It being his custom to start questions at supper, arising out of what he had been reading in the day, and finding that Seleucus, the grammarian, used to inquire of his attendants what authors he was then studying, and so came prepared for his enquiries—he first turned him out of his family, and then drove him to the extremity of laying violent hands upon himself.

  LVII. His cruel and sullen temper appeared when he was still a boy; which Theodorus of Gadara,1 his master in rhetoric, first discovered, and expressed by a very apposite simile, calling him sometimes, when he chid him, “Mud mixed with blood.” But his disposition shewed itself still more clearly on his attaining the imperial power, and even in the beginning of his administration, when he was endeavouring to gain the popular favour, by affecting moderation. Upon a funeral passing by, a wag called out to the dead man, “Tell Augustus, that the legacies he bequeathed to the people are not yet paid.” The man being brought before him, he ordered that he should receive what was due to him, and then be led to execution, that he might deliver the message to his father himself. Not long afterwards, when one Pompey, a Roman knight, persisted in his opposition to something he proposed in the senate, he threatened to put him in prison, and told him, “Of a Pompey I shall make a Pompeian of you;” by a bitter kind of pun playing upon the man’s name, and the ill-fortune of his party.

  LVIII. About the same time, when the prætor consulted him, whether it was his pleasure that the tribunals should take cognizance of accusations of treason, he replied, “The laws ought to be put in execution;” and he did put them in execution most severely. Some person had taken off the head of Augustus from one of his statues, and replaced it by another.2 The matter was brought before the senate, and because the case was not clear, the witnesses were put to the torture. The party accused being found guilty, and condemned, this kind of proceeding was carried so far, that it became capital for a man to beat his slave, or change his clothes, near the statue of Augustus; to carry his head stamped upon the coin, or cut in the stone of a ring, into a necessary house, or the stews; or to reflect upon anything that had been either said or done by him. In fine, a person was condemned to death, for suffering some honours to be decreed to him in the colony where he lived, upon the same day on which they had formerly been decreed to Augustus.

  LIX. He was besides guilty of many barbarous actions, under the pretence of strictness and reformation of manners, but more to gratify his own savage disposition. Some verses were published, which displayed the present calamities of his reign, and anticipated the future.1

  • Asper et immitis, breviter vis omnia dicam?
  • Dispeream si te mater amare potest.
  • Non es eques, quare? non sunt tibi millia centum?
  • Omnia si quæras, et Rhodos exsilium est.
  • Aurea mutâsti Saturni sæcula, Cæsar:
  • Incolumi nam te, ferrea semper erunt.
  • Fastidit vinum, quia jam sitit iste cruorem:
  • Tam bibit hunc avide, quam bibit ante merum.
  • Adspice felicem sibi, non tibi, Romule, Sullam:
  • Et Marium, si vis, adspice, sed reducem.
  • Nec non Antonî civilia bella moventis
  • Nec semel infectas adspice cæda manus.
  • Et dic, Roma perit: regnabit sanguine multo,
  • Ad regnum quisquis venit ab exsilio.
  • Obdurate wretch! too fierce, too fell to move
  • The least kind yearnings of a mother’s love!
  • No knight thou art, as having no estate;
  • Long suffered’st thou in Rhodes an exile’s fate,
  • No more the happy Golden Age we see;
  • The Iron’s come, and sure to last with thee.
  • Instead of wine he thirsted for before,
  • He wallows now in floods of human gore.
  • Reflect, ye Romans, on the dreadful times.
  • Made such by Marius, and by Sylla’s crimes.
  • Reflect how Antony’s ambitious rage
  • Twice scar’d with horror a distracted age.
  • And say, Alas! Rome’s blood in streams will flow,
  • When banish’d miscreants rule this world below.

  At first he would have it understood, that these satirical verser were drawn forth by the resentment of those who were impatient under the discipline of reformation, rather than that they spoke their real sentiments; and he would frequently say, “Let them hate me, so long as they do but approve my conduct.”2 At length, however, his behaviour showed that he was sensible they were too well founded.

  LX. A few days after his arrival at Capri, a fisherman coming up to him unexpectedly, when he was desirous of privacy, and presenting him with a large mullet, he ordered the man’s face to be scrubbed with the fish; being terrified at the thought of his having been able to creep upon him from the back of the island, over such rugged and steep rocks. The man, while undergoing the punishment, expressing his joy that he had not likewise offered him a large crab which he had also taken, he ordered his face to be farther lacerated with its claws. He put to death one of the pretorian guards, for having stolen a peacock out of his orchard. In one of his journeys, his litter being obstructed by some bushes, he ordered the officer whose duty it was to ride on and examine the road, a centurion of the first cohorts, to be laid on his face upon the ground, and scourged almost to death.

  LXI. Soon afterwards, he abandoned himself to every species of cruelty, never wanting occasions of one kind or another, to serve as a pretext. He first fell upon the friends and acquaintance of his mother, then those of his grandsons, and his daughter-in-law, and lastly those of Sejanus; after whose death he became cruel in the extreme. From this it appeared, that he had not been so much instigated by Sejanus, as supplied with occasions of gratifying his savage temper, when he wanted them. Though in a short memoir which he composed of his own life, he had the effrontery to write, “I have punished Sejanus, because I found him bent upon the destruction of the children of my son Germanicus,” one of these he put to death, when he began to suspect Sejanus; and another, after he was taken off. It would be tedious to relate all the numerous instances of his cruelty: suffice it to give a few examples, in their different kinds. Not a day passed without the punishment of some person or other, not excepting holidays, or those appropriated to the worship of the gods. Some were tried even on New-Year’s-Day. Of many who were condemned, their wives and children shared the same fate; and for those who were sentenced to death, the relations were forbid to put on mourning. Considerable rewards were voted for the prosecutors, and sometimes for the witnesses also. The information of any person, without exception, was taken; and all offences were capital, even speaking a few words, though without any ill intention. A poet was charged with abusing Agamemnon; and a historian,1 for calling Brutus and Cassius “the last of the Romans.” The two authors were immediately called to account, and their writings suppressed; though they had been well received some years before, and read in the hearing of Augustus. Some, who were thrown into prison, were not only denied the solace of study, but debarred from all company and conversation. Many persons, when summoned to trial, stabbed themselves at home, to avoid the distress and ignominy of a public condemnation, which they were certain would ensue. Others took poison in the senate house. The wounds were bound up, and all who had not expired, were carried, half-dead, and panting for life, to prison. Those who were put to death, were thrown down the Gemonian stairs, and then dragged into the Tiber. In one day, twenty were treated in this manner; and amongst them women and boys. Because, according, to an ancient custom, it was not lawful to strangle virgins, the young girls were first deflowered by the executioner, and afterwards strangled. Those who were desirous to die, were forced to live. For he thought death so slight a punishment, that upon hearing that Carnulius, one of the accused, who was under prosecution, had killed himself, he exclaimed, “Carnulius has escaped me.” In calling over his prisoners, when one of them requested the favour of a speedy death, he replied, “You are not yet restored to favour.” A man of consular rank writes in his annals, that at table, where he himself was present with a large company, he was suddenly asked aloud by a dwarf who stood by amongst the buffoons, why Pacomus, who was under a prosecution for treason, lived so long. Tiberius immediately reprimanded him for his pertness; but wrote to the senate a few days after, to proceed without delay to the punishment of Paconius.

  LXII. Exasperated by information he received respecting the death of his son Drusus, he carried his cruelty still farther. He imagined that he had died of a disease occasioned by his intemperance; but finding that he had been poisoned by the contrivance of his wife Livilla1 and Sejanus, he spared no one from torture and death. He was so entirely occupied with the examination of this affair, for whole days together, that, upon being informed that the person in whose house he had lodged at Rhodes, and whom he had by a friendly letter invited to Rome, was arrived, he ordered him immediately to be put to the torture, as a party concerned in the enquiry. Upon finding his mistake, he commanded him to be put to death, that he might not publish the injury done him. The place of execution is still shown at Capri, where he ordered those who were condemned to die, after long and exquisite tortures, to be thrown, before his eyes, from a precipice into the sea. There a party of soldiers belonging to the fleet waited for them, and broke their bones with poles and oars, lest they should have any life left in them. Among various kinds of torture invented by him, one was, to induce people to drink a large quantity of wine, and then to tie up their members with harp-strings, thus tormenting them at once by the tightness of the ligature, and the stoppage of their urine. Had not death prevented him, and Thrasyllus, designedly, as some say, prevailed with him to defer some of his cruelties, in hopes of longer life, it is believed that he would have destroyed many more; and not have spared even the rest of his grand-children: for he was jealous of Caius, and hated Tiberius as having been conceived in adultery. This conjecture is indeed highly probable; for he used often to say, “Happy Priam, who survived all his children!”2

  LXIII. Amidst these enormities, in how much fear and apprehension, as well as odium and detestation, he lived, is evident from many indications. He forbade the soothsayers to be consulted in private, and without some witnesses being present. He attempted to suppress the oracles in the neighbourhood of the city; but being terrified by the divine authority of the Prænestine Lots,1 he abandoned the design. For though they were sealed up in a box, and carried to Rome, yet they were not to be found in it, until it was returned to the temple. More than one person of consular rank, appointed governors of provinces, he never ventured to dismiss to their respective destinations, but kept them until several years after, when he nominated their successors, while they still remained present with him. In the meantime, they bore the title of their office; and he frequently gave them orders, which they took care to have executed by their deputies and assistants.

  LXIV. He never removed his daughter-in-law, or grandsons,2 after their condemnation, to any place, but in fetters and in a covered litter, with a guard to hinder all who met them on the road, and travellers, from stopping to gaze at them.

  LXV. After Sejanus had plotted against him, though he saw that his birth-day was solemnly kept by the public, and divine honours paid to golden images of him in every quarter, yet it was with difficulty at last, and more by artifice than his imperial power, that he accomplished his death. In the first place, to remove him from about his person, under the pretext of doing him honour, he made him his colleague in his fifth consulship; which, although then absent from the city, he took upon him for that purpose, long after his preceding consulship. Then, having flattered him with the hope of an alliance by marriage with one of his own kindred, and the prospect of the tribunitian authority, he suddenly, while Sejanus little expected it, charged him with treason, in an abject and pitiful address to the senate; in which, among other things, he begged them “to send one of the consuls, to conduct himself, a poor solitary old man, with a guard of soldiers, into their presence.” Still distrustful, however, and apprehensive of an insurrection, he ordered his grandson, Drusus, whom he still kept in confinement at Rome, to be set at liberty, and if occasion required, to head the troops. He had likewise ships in readiness to transport him to any of the legions to which he might consider it expedient to make his escape. Meanwhile, he was upon the watch, from the summit of a lofty cliff, for the signals which he had ordered to be made if any thing occurred, lest the messengers should be tardy. Even when he had quite foiled the conspiracy of Sejanus, he was still haunted as much as ever with fears and apprehensions, insomuch that he never once stirred out of the Villa Jovis for nine months after.

  LXVI. To the extreme anxiety of mind which he now experienced, he had the mortification to find superadded the most poignant reproaches from all quarters. Those who were condemned to die, heaped upon him the most opprobrious language in his presence, or by hand-bills scattered in the senators’ seats in the theatre. These produced different effects: sometimes he wished, out of shame, to have all smothered and concealed; at other times he would disregard what was said, and publish it himself. To this accumulation of scandal and open sarcasm, there is to be subjoined a letter from Artabanus, king of the Parthians, in which he upbraids him with his parricides, murders, cowardice, and lewdness, and advises him to satisfy the furious rage of his own people, which he had so justly excited, by putting an end to his life without delay.

  LXVII. At last, being quite weary of himself, he acknowledged his extreme misery, in a letter to the senate, which begun thus: “What to write to you, Conscript Fathers, or how to write, or what not to write at this time, may all the gods and goddesses pour upon my head a more terrible vengeance than that under which I feel myself daily sinking, if I can tell.” Some are of opinion that he had a foreknowledge of those things, from his skill in the science of divination, and perceived long before what misery and infamy would at last come upon him; and that for this reason, at the beginning of his reign, he had absolutely refused the title of the “Father of his Country,” and the proposal of the senate to swear to his acts; lest he should afterwards, to his greater shame, be found unequal to such extraordinary honours. This, indeed, may be justly inferred from the speeches which he made upon both those occasions; as when he says, “I shall ever be the same, and shall never change my conduct, so long as I retain my senses; but to avoid giving a bad precedent to posterity, the senate ought to beware of binding themselves to the acts of any person whatever, who might by some accident or other be induced to alter them.” And again: “If ye should at any time entertain a jealousy of my conduct, and my entire affection for you, which heaven prevent by putting a period to my days, rather than I should live to see such an alteration in your opinion of me, the title of Father will add no honour to me, but be a reproach to you, for your rashness in conferring it upon me, or inconstancy in altering your opinion of me.”

  LXVIII. In person he was large and robust; of a stature somewhat above the common size; broad in the shoulders and chest, and proportionable in the rest of his frame. He used his left hand more readily and with more force than his right; and his joints were so strong, that he could bore a fresh, sound apple through with his finger, and wound the head of a boy, or even a young man, with a fillip. He was of a fair complexion, and wore his hair so long behind, that it covered his neck, which was observed to be a mark of distinction affected by the family. He had a handsome face, but it was often full of pimples. His eyes, which were large, had a wonderful faculty of seeing in the night-time, and in the dark, for a short time only, and immediately after awaking from sleep; but they soon grew dim again. He walked with his neck stiff and upright: generally with a frowning countenance, being for the most part silent: when he spoke to those about him, it was very slowly, and usually accompanied with a slight gesticulation of his fingers. All which, being repulsive habits and signs of arrogance, were remarked by Augustus, who often endeavoured to excuse them to the senate and people, declaring that “they were natural defects, which proceeded from no viciousness of mind.” He enjoyed a good state of health, without interruption, almost during the whole period of his rule; though, from the thirtieth year of his age, he treated it himself according to his own discretion, without any medical assistance.

  LXIX. In regard to the gods, and matters of religion, he discovered much indifference; being greatly addicted to astrology, and fully persuaded that all things were governed by fate. Yet he was extremely afraid of lightning, and when the sky was in a disturbed state, always wore a laurel crown on his head: because it is supposed that the leaf of that tree is never touched by the lightning.

  LXX. He applied himself with great diligence to the liberal arts, both Greek and Latin. In his Latin style, he affected to imitate Messala Corvinus,1 a venerable man, to whom he had paid much respect in his own early years. But he rendered his style obscure by excessive affectation and abstruseness, so that he was thought to speak better extempore, than in a premeditated discourse. He composed likewise a lyric ode, under the title of “A Lamentation upon the death of Lucius Cæsar;” and also some Greek poems, in imitation of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius.2 These poets he greatly admired, and placed their works and statues in the public libraries, amongst the eminent authors of antiquity. On this account, most of the learned men of the time vied with each other in publishing observations upon them, which they addressed to him. His principal study, however, was the history of the fabulous ages, inquiring even into its trifling details in a ridiculous manner; for he used to try the grammarians, a class of men which, as I have already observed, he much affected, with such questions as these: “Who was Hecuba’s mother? What name did Achilles assume among the virgins? What was it that the Sirens used to sing?” And the first day that he entered the senate-house, after the death of Augustus, as if he intended to pay respect at once to his father’s memory and to the gods, he made an offering of frankincense and wine, but without any music, in imitation of Minos, upon the death of his son.

  LXXI. Though he was ready and conversant with the Greek tongue, yet he did not use it everywhere; but chietly he avoided it in the senate-house, insomuch that having occasion to employ the word monopolium (monopoly), he first begged pardon for being obliged to adopt a foreign word. And when, in a decree of the senate, the word ἔμβλημα (emblem) was read, he proposed to have it changed, and that a Latin word should be substituted in its room; or, if no proper one could be found, to express the thing by circumlocution. A soldier who was examined as a witness upon a trial, in Greek,1 he would not allow to reply, except in Latin.

  LXXII. During the whole time of his seclusion at Capri, twice only he made an effort to visit Rome. Once he came in a galley as far as the gardens near the Naumachia, but placed guards along the banks of the Tiber, to keep off all who should offer to come to meet him. The second time he travelled on the Appian way,2 as far as the seventh mile-stone from the city, but he immediately returned, without entering it, having only taken a view of the walls at a distance. For what reason he did not disembark in his first excursion, is uncertain; but in the last, he was deterred from entering the city by a prodigy. He was in the habit of diverting himself with a snake, and upon going to feed it with his own hand, according to custom, he found it devoured by ants: from which he was advised to beware of the fury of the mob. On this account, returning in all haste to Campania, he fell ill at Astura;3 but recovering a little, went on to Circeii.4 And to obviate any suspicion of his being in a bad state of health, he was not only present at the sports in the camp, but encountered, with javelins, a wild boar, which was let loose in the arena. Being immediately seized with a pain in the side, and catching cold upon his over-heating himself in the exercise, he relapsed into a worse condition than he was before. He held out, however, for some time; and sailing as far as Misenum,5 omitted nothing in his usual mode of life, not even in his entertainments, and other gratifications, partly from an ungovernable appetite, and partly to conceal his condition. For Charicles, a physician, having obtained leave of absence, on his rising from table, took his hand to kiss it; upon which Tiberius, supposing he did it to feel his pulse, desired him to stay and resume his place, and continued the entertainment longer than usual. Nor did he omit his usual custom of taking his station in the centre of the apartment, a lictor standing by him, while he took leave of each of the party by name.

  LXXIII. Meanwhile, finding, upon looking over the acts of the senate, “that some person under prosecution had been discharged, without being brought to a hearing,” for he had only written cursorily that they had been denounced by an informer; he complained in a great rage that he was treated with contempt, and resolved at all hazards to return to Capri; not daring to attempt any thing until he found himself in a place of security. But being detained by storms, and the increasing violence of his disorder, he died shortly afterwards, at a villa formerly belonging to Lucullus, in the seventy-eighth year of his age,1 and the twenty-third of his reign, upon the seventeenth of the calends of April [16th March], in the consulship of Cneius Acerronius Proculus and Caius Pontius Niger. Some think that a slow-consuming poison was given him by Caius.2 Others say that during the interval of the intermittent fever with which he happened to be seized, upon asking for food, it was denied him. Others report, that he was stifled by a pillow thrown upon him,3 when, on his recovering from a swoon, he called for his ring, which had been taken from him in the fit. Seneca writes, “That finding himself dying, he took his signet ring off his finger, and held it a while, as if he would deliver it to somebody; but put it again upon his finger, and lay for some time, with his left hand clenched, and without stirring; when suddenly summoning his attendants, and no one answering the call, he rose; but his strength failing him, he fell down at a short distance from his bed.

  LXXIV. Upon his last birth-day, he had brought a full-sized statue of the Timenian Apollo from Syracuse, a work of exquisite art, intending to place it in the library of the new temple;1 but he dreamt that the god appeared to him in the night, and assured him “that his statue could not be erected by him.” A few days before he died, the Pharos at Capri was thrown down by an earthquake. And at Misenum, some embers and live coals, which were brought in to warm his apartment, went out, and after being quite cold, burst out into a flame again towards evening, and continued burning very brightly for several hours.

  LXXV. The people were so much elated at his death, that when they first heard the news, they ran up and down the city, some crying out, “Away with Tiberius to the Tiber;” others exclaiming, “May the earth, the common mother of mankind, and the infernal gods, allow him no abode in death, but amongst the wicked.” Others threatened his body with the hook and the Gemonian stairs, their indignation at his former cruelty being increased by a recent atrocity. It had been provided by an act of the senate, that the execution of condemned criminals should always be deferred until the tenth day after the sentence. Now this fell on the very day when the news of Tiberius’s death arrived, and in consequence of which the unhappy men implored a reprieve, for mercy’s sake; but, as Caius had not yet arrived, and there was no one else to whom application could be made on their behalf, their guards, apprehensive of violating the law, strangled them, and threw them down the Gemonian stairs. This roused the people to a still greater abhorrence of the tyrant’s memory, since his cruelty continued in use even after he was dead. As soon as his corpse was begun to be meved from Misenum, many cried out for its being carried to Atella,2 and being half burnt there in the amphitheatre. It was, however, brought to Rome, and burnt with the usual ceremony.

  LXXVI. He had made about two years before, duplicates of his will, one written by his own hand, and the other by that of one of his freedmen; and both were witnessed by some persons of very mean rank. He appointed his two grandsons, Caius by Germanicus, and Tiberius by Drusus, joint heirs to his estate; and upon the death of one of them, the other was to inherit the whole. He gave likewise many legacies; amongst which were bequests to the Vestal Virgins, to all the soldiers, and each one of the people of Rome, and to the magistrates of the several quarters of the city.

  At the death of Augustus, there had elapsed so long a period from the overthrow of the republic by Julius Cæsar, that few were now living who had been born under the ancient constitution of the Romans; and the mild and prosperous administration of Augustus, during forty-four years, had by this time reconciled the minds of the people to a despotic government. Tiberius, the adopted son of the former sovereign, was of mature age; and though he had hitherto lived, for the most part, abstracted from any concern with public affairs, yet, having been brought up in the family of Augustus, he was acquainted with his method of government, which, there was reason to expect, he would render the model of his own. Livia, too, his mother, and the relict of the late emperor, was still living, a woman venerable by years, who had long been familiar with the councils of Augustus, and from her high rank, as well as uncommon affability, possessed an extensive influence amongst all classes of the people.

  Such were the circumstances in favour of Tiberius’s succession at the demise of Augustus; but there were others of a tendency disadvantageous to his views. His temper was haughty and reserved: Augustus had often apologised for the ungraciousness of his manners. He was disobedient to his mother; and though he had not openly discovered any propensity to vice, he enjoyed none of those qualities which usually conciliate popularity. To these considerations it is to be added, that Postumus Agrippa, the grandson of Augustus by Julia, was living; and if consanguinity was to be the rule of succession, his right was indisputably preferable to that of an adopted son. Augustus had sent this youth into exile a few years before; but, towards the close of his life, had expressed a design of recalling him, with the view, as was supposed, of appointing him his successor. The father of young Agrippa had been greatly beloved by the Romans; and the fate of his mother, Julia, though she was notorious for her profligacy, had ever been regarded by them with peculiar sympathy and tenderness. Many, therefore, attached to the son the partiality entertained for his parents; which was increased not only by a strong suspicion, but a general surmise, that his elder brothers, Caius and Lucius, had been violently taken off, to make way for the succession of Tiberius. That an obstruction was apprehended to Tiberius’s succession from this quarter, is put beyond all doubt, when we find that the death of Augustus was industriously kept secret, until young Agrippa should be removed; who, it is generally agreed, was dispatched by an order from Livia and Tiberius conjointly, or at least from the former. Though, by this act, there remained no rival to Tiberius, yet the consciousness of his own want of pretensions to the Roman throne, seems to have still rendered him distrustful of the succession; and that he should have quietly obtained it, without the voice of the people, the real inclination of the senate, or the support of the army, can be imputed only to the influence of his mother, and his own dissimulation. Ardently solicitous to attain the object, yet affecting a total indifference; artfully prompting the senate to give him the charge of the government, at the time that he intimated an invincible reluctance to accept it; his absolutely declining it in perpetuity, but fixing no time for an abdication; his deceitful insinuation of bodily infirmities, with hints likewise of approaching old age, that he might allay in the senate all apprehensions of any great duration of his power, and repress in his adopted son, Germanicus, the emotions of ambition to displace him; form altogether a scene of the most insidious policy, inconsistency, and dissimulation.

  In this period died, in the eighty-sixth year of her age, Livia Drusilla, mother of the emperor, and the relict of Augustus, whom she survived fifteen years. She was the daughter of L. Drusus Calidianus and married Tiberius Claudius Nero, by whom she had two sons, Tiberius and Drusus. The conduct of this lady seems to justify the remark of Caligula, that “she was an Ulysses in a woman’s dress.” Octavius first saw her as she fled from the danger which threatened her husband, who had espoused the cause of Antony; and though she was then pregnant, he resolved to marry her; whether with her own inclination or not, is left by Tacitus undetermined. To pave the way for this union, he divorced his wife Scribonia, and with the approbation of the Augurs, which he could have no difficulty in obtaining, celebrated his nuptials with Livia. There ensued from this marriage no issue, though much desired by both parties; but Livia retained, without interruption, an unbounded ascendancy over the emperor, whose confidence she abused, while the uxorious husband little suspected that he was cherishing in his bosom a viper who was to prove the destruction of his house. She appears to have entertained a predominant ambition of giving an heir to the Roman empire; and since it could not be done by any fruit of her marriage with Augustus, she resolved on accomplishing that end in the person of Tiberius, the eldest son by her former husband. The plan which she devised for this purpose, was to exterminate all the male offspring of Augustus by his daughter Julia, who was married to Agrippa; a stratagem which, when executed, would procure for Tiberius, through the means of adoption, the eventual succession to the empire. The cool yet sanguinary policy, and the patient perseverance of resolution, with which she prosecuted her design, have seldom been equalled. While the sons of Julia were yet young, and while there was still a possibility that she herself might have issue by Augustus, she suspended her project, in the hope, perhaps, that accident or disease might operate in its favour; but when the natural term of her constitution had put a period to her hopes of progeny, and when the grandsons of the emperor were risen to the years of manhood, and had been adopted by him, she began to carry into execution what she long had meditated. The first object devoted to destruction was C. Cæsar Agrippa, the eldest of Augustus’s grandsons. This promising youth was sent to Armenia, upon an expedition against the Persians; and Lollius, who had been his governor, either accompanied him thither from Rome, or met him in the East, where he had obtained some appointment. From the hand of this traitor, perhaps under the pretext of exercising the authority of a preceptor, but in reality instigated by Livia, the young prince received a fatal blow, of which he died some time after.

  The manner of Caius’s death seems to have been carefully kept from the knowledge of Augustus, who promoted Lollius to the consulship, and made him governor of a province; but, by his rapacity in this station, he afterwards incurred the emperor’s displeasure. The true character of this person had escaped the keen discernment of Horace, as well as the sagacity of the emperor; for in two epistles addressed to Lollius, he mentions him as great and accomplished in the superlative degree; maxime Lolli, liberrime Lolli; so imposing had been the manners and address of this deceitful courtier.

  Lucius, the second son of Julia, was banished into Campania, for using, as it is said, solitious language against his grandfather. In the seventh year of his exile Augustus proposed to recall him; but Livia and Tiberius, dreading the consequences of his being restored to the emperor’s favour, put in practice the expedient of having him immediately assassinated. Postumus Agrippa, the third son, incurred the displeasure of his grandfather in the same way as Lucius, and was confined at Surrentum, where he remained a prisoner until he was put to death by the order either of Livia alone, or in conjunction with Tiberius, as was before observed.

  Such was the catastrophe, through the means of Livia, of all the grandsons of Augustus; and reason justifies the inference, that she who scrupled not to lay violent hands upon those young men, had formerly practised every artifice that could operate towards rendering them obnoxious to the emperor. We may even ascribe to her dark intrigues the dissolute conduct of Julia: for the woman who could secretly act as procuress to her own husband, would feel little restraint upon her mind against corrupting his daughter, when such an effect might contribute to answer the purpose which she had in view. But in the ingratitude of Tiberius, however undutiful and reprehensible in a son towards a parent, she at last experienced a just retribution for the crimes in which she had trained him to procure the succession to the empire. To the disgrace of her sex, she introduced amongst the Romans the horrible practice of domestic murder, little known before the times when the thirst or intoxication of unlimited power had vitiated the social affections; and she transmitted to succeeding ages a pernicious example, by which immoderate ambition might be gratified, at the expense of every moral obligation, as well as of humanity.

  One of the first victims in the sanguinary reign of the present emperor, was Germanicus, the son of Drusus, Tiberius’s own brother, and who had been adopted by his uncle himself. Under any sovereign, of a temper different from that of Tiberius, this amiable and meritorious prince would have been held in the highest esteem. At the death of his grandfather Augustus, he was employed in a war in Germany, where he greatly distinguished himself by his military achievements; and as soon as intelligence of that event arrived, the soldiers, by whom he was extremely beloved, unanimously saluted him emperor. Refusing, however, to accept this mark of their partiality, he persevered in allegiance to the government of his uncle, and prosecuted the war with success. Upon the conclusion of this expedition, he was sent, with the title of emperor in the East, to repress the seditions of the Armenians, in which he was equally successful. But the fame which he acquired, served only to render him an object of jealousy to Tiberius, by whose order he was secretly poisoned at Daphne, near Antioch, in the thirty-fourth year of his age. The news of Germanicus’s death was received at Rome with universal lamentation; and all ranks of the people entertained an opinion, that, had he survived Tiberius, he would have restored the freedom of the republic. The love and gratitude of the Romans decreed many honours to his memory. It was ordered, that his name should be sung in a solemn procession of the Salii; that crowns of oak, in allusion to his victories, should be placed upon curule chairs in the hall pertaining to the priests of Augustus; and that an effigy of him in ivory should be drawn upon a chariot, preceding the ceremonies of the Circensian games. Triumphal arches were erected, one at Rome, another on the banks of the Rhine, and a third upon Mount Amanus in Syria, with inscriptions of his achievements, and that he died for his services to the republic.1

  His obsequies were celebrated, not with the display of images and funeral pomp, but with the recital of his praises and the virtues which rendered him illustrious. From a resemblance in his personal accomplishments, his age, the manner of his death, and the vicinity of Daphne to Babylon, many compared his fate to that of Alexander the Great. He was celebrated for humanity and benevolence, as well as military talents, and amidst the toils of war, found leisure to cultivate the arts of literary genius. He composed two comedies in Greek, some epigrams, and a translation of Aratus into Latin verse. He married Agrippina, the daughter of M. Agrippa, by whom he had nine children. This lady, who had accompanied her husband into the east, carried his ashes to Italy, and accused his murderer, Piso; who, unable to bear up against the public odium incurred by that transaction, laid violent hands upon himself. Agrippina was now nearly in the same predicament with regard to Tiberius, that Ovid had formerly been in respect of Augustus. He was sensible, that when she accused Piso, she was not ignorant of the person by whom the perpetrator of the murder had been instigated; and her presence, therefore, seeming continually to reproach him with his guilt, he resolved to rid himself of a person become so obnoxious to his sight, and banished her to the island of Pandataria, where she died some time afterwards of famine.

  But it was not sufficient to gratify this sanguinary tyrant, that he had, without any cause, cut off both Germanicus and his wife Agrippina: the distinguished merits and popularity of that prince were yet to be revenged upon his children; and accordingly he set himself to invent a pretext for their destruction. After endeavouring in vain, by various artifices, to provoke the resentment of Nero and Drusus against him, he had recourse to false accusation, and not only charged them with seditious designs, to which their tender years were ill adapted, but with vices of a nature the most scandalous. By a sentence of the senate, which manifested the extreme servility of that assembly, he procured them both to be declared open enemies to their country. Nero he banished to the island of Pontia, where, like his unfortunate mother, he miserably perished by famine; and Drusus was doomed to the same fate, in the lower part of the Palatium, after suffering for nine days the violence of hunger, and having, as is related, devoured part of his bed. The remaining son, Caius, on account of his vicious disposition, he resolved to appoint his successor on the throne, that, after his own death, a comparison might be made in favour of his memory, when the Romans should be governed by a sovereign yet more vicious and more tyrannical, if possible, than himself.

  Sejanus, the minister in the present reign, imitated with success, for some time, the hypocrisy of his master; and, had his ambitious temper, impatient of attaining its object, allowed him to wear the mask for a longer period, he might have gained the imperial diadem; in the pursuit of which he was overtaken by that fate which he merited still more by his cruelties than his perfidy to Tiberius. This man was a native of Volsinium in Tuscany, and the son of a Roman knight. He had first insinuated himself into the favour of Caius Cæsar, the grandson of Augustus, after whose death he courted the friendship of Tiberius, and obtained in a short time his entire confidence, which he improved to the best advantage. The object which he next pursued, was to gain the attachment of the senate, and the officers of the army; besides whom, with a new kind of policy, he endeavoured to secure in his interest every lady of distinguished connections, by giving secretly to each of them a promise of marriage, as soon as he should arrive at the sovereignty. The chief obstacles in his way were the sons and grandsons of Tiberius; and these he soon sacrificed to his ambition, under various pretences. Drusus, the eldest of this progeny, having in a fit of passion struck the favourite, was destined by him to destruction. For this purpose, he had the presumption to seduce Livia, the wife of Drusus, to whom she had borne several children; and she consented to marry her adulterer upon the death of her husband, who was soon after poisoned, through the means of an eunuch named Lygdus, by order of her and Sejanus.

  Drusus was the son of Tiberius by Vipsania, one of Agrippa’s daughters. He displayed great intrepidity during the war in the provinces of Illyricum and Pannonia, but appears to have been dissolute in his morals. Horace is said to have written the Ode in praise of Drusus at the desire of Augustus; and while the poet celebrates the military courage of the prince, he insinuates indirectly a salutary admonition to the cultivation of the civil virtues:

  • Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam,
  • Rectique cultus pectora roborant:
  • Utcunque defecere mores,
  • Dedecorant bene nata culpæ.¹

  • —Ode iv. 4.

  • Yet sage instructions to refine the soul
  • And raise the genius, wondrous aid impart,
  • Conveying inward, as they purely roll,
  • Strength to the mind and vigour to the heart:
  • When morals fail, the stains of vice disgrace
  • The fairest honours of the noblest race.

  • —Francis.

  Upon the death of Drusus, Sejanus openly avowed a desire of marrying the widowed princess; but Tiberius opposing this measure, and at the same time recommendng Germanicus to the senate as his successor in the empire, the mind of Sejanus was more than ever inflamed by the united, and now furious, passions of love and ambition. He therefore urged his demand with increased importunity; but the emperor still refusing his consent, and things being not yet ripe for an immediate revolt, Sejanus thought nothing so favourable for the prosecution of his designs as the absence of Tiberius from the capital. With this view, under the pretence of relieving his master from the cares of government, he persuaded him to retire to a distance from Rome. The emperor, indolent and luxurious, approved of the proposal, and retired into Campania, leaving to his ambitious minister the whole direction of the empire. Had Sejanus now been governed by common prudence and moderation, he might have attained to the accomplishment of all his wishes; but a natural impetuosity of temper, and the intoxication of power, precipitated him into measures which soon effected his destruction. As if entirely emancipated from the control of a master, he publicly declared himself sovereign of the Roman empire, and that Tiberius, who had by this time retired to Capri, was only the dependent prince of that tributary island. He even went so far in degrading the emperor, as to have him introduced in a ridiculous light upon the stage. Advice of Sejanus’s proceedings was soon carried to the emperor at Capri; his indignation was immediately excited; and with a confidence founded upon an authority exercised for several years, he sent orders for accusing Sejanus before the senate. This mandate no sooner arrived, than the audacious minister was deserted by his adherents; he was in a short time after seized without resistance, and strangled in prison the same day.

  Human nature recoils with horror at the cruelties of this execrable tyrant, who, having first imbrued his hands in the blood of his own relations, proceeded to exercise them upon the public with indiscriminate fury. Neither age nor sex afforded any exemption from his insatiable thirst for blood. Innocent children were condemned to death, and butchered in the presence of their parents; virgins, without any imputed guilt, were sacrificed to a similar destiny; but there being an ancient custom of not strangling females in that situation, they were first deflowered by the executioner, and afterwards strangled, as if an atrocious addition to cruelty could sanction the exercise of it. Fathers were constrained by violence to witness the death of their own children; and even the tears of a mother, at the execution of her child, were punished as a capital offence. Some extraordinary calamities, occasioned by accident, added to the horrors of the reign. A great number of houses on Mount Cœlius were destroyed by fire; and by the fall of a temporary building at Fidenæ, erected for the purpose of exhibiting public shows, about twenty thousand persons were either greatly hurt, or crushed to death in the ruins.

  By another fire which afterwards broke out, a part of the Circus was destroyed, with the numerous buildings on Mount Aventine. The only act of munificence displayed by Tiberius during his reign, was upon the occasion of those fires, when, to qualify the severity of his government, he indemnified the most considerable sufferers for the loss they had sustained.

  Through the whole of his life, Tiberius seems to have conducted himself with a uniform repugnance to nature. Affable on a few occasions, but in general averse to society, he indulged, from his earliest years, a moroseness of disposition, which counterfeited the appearance of austere virtue; and in the decline of life, when it is common to reform from juvenile indiscretions, he launched forth into excesses, of a kind the most unnatural and most detestable. Considering the vicious passions which had ever brooded in his heart, it may seem surprising that he restrained himself within the bounds of decency during so many years after his accession; but though utterly destitute of reverence or affection for his mother, he still felt, during her life, a filial awe upon his mind: and after her death, he was actuated by a slavish fear of Sejanus, until at last political necessity absolved him likewise from this restraint. These checks being both removed, he rioted without any control, either from sentiment or authority.

  Pliny relates, that the art of making glass malleable was actually discovered under the reign of Tiberius, and that the shop and tools of the artist were destroyed, lest, by the establishment of this invention, gold and silver should lose their value. Dion adds, that the author of the discovery was put to death.

  The gloom which darkened the Roman capital during this melancholy period, shed a baleful influence on the progress of science throughout the empire, and literature languished during the present reign, in the same proportion as it had flourished in the preceding. It is doubtful whether such a change might not have happened in some degree, even had the government of Tiberius been equally mild with that of his predecessor. The prodigious fame of the writers of the Augustan age, by repressing emulation, tended to a general diminution of the efforts of genius for some time; while the banishment of Ovid, it is probable, and the capital punishment of a subsequent poet, for censuring the character of Agamemnon, operated towards the farther discouragement of poetical exertions. There now existed no circumstance to counterbalance these disadvantages. Genius no longer found a patron either in the emperor or his minister; and the gates of the palace were shut against all who cultivated the elegant pursuits of the Muses. Panders, catamites, assassins, wretches stained with every crime, were the constant attendants, as the only fit companions, of the tyrant who now occupied the throne. We are informed, however, that even this emperor had a taste for the liberal arts, and that he composed a lyric poem upon the death of Lucius Cæsar, with some Greek poems in imitation of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius. But none of these has been transmitted to posterity: and if we should form an opinion of them upon the principle of Catullus, that to be a good poet one ought to be a good man, there is little reason to regret that they have perished.

  We meet with no poetical production in this reign; and of prose writers the number is inconsiderable, as will appear from the following account of them.—

  Velleius Paterculus was born of an equestrian family in Campania, and served as a military tribune under Tiberius, in his expeditions in Gaul and Germany. He composed an Epitome of the History of Greece and Rome, with that of other nations of remote antiquity: but of this work there only remain fragments of the history of Greece and Rome, from the conquest of Perseus to the seventeenth year of the reign of Tiberius. It is written in two books, addressed to Marcus Vinicius, who held the office of consul. Rapid in the narrative, and concise as well as elegant in style, this production exhibits a pleasing epitome of ancient transactions, enlivened occasionally with anecdotes, and an expressive description of characters. In treating of the family of Augustus, Paterculus is justly liable to the imputation of partiality, which he incurs still more in the latter period of his history, by the praise which is lavished on Tiberius and his minister Sejanus. He intimates a design of giving a more full account of the civil war which followed the death of Julius Cæsar; but this, if he ever accomplished it, has not been transmitted to posterity. Candid, but decided in his judgment of motives and actions, if we except his invectives against Pompey, he shows little propensity to censure; but in awarding praise, he is not equally parsimonious, and, on some occasions, risks the imputation of hyperbole. The grace, however, and the apparent sincerity with which it is bestowed, reconcile us to the compliment. This author concludes his history with a prayer for the prosperity of the Roman empire.—

  Valerius Maximus was descended of a Patrician family; but we learn nothing more concerning him, than that for some time he followed a military life under Sextus Pompey. He afterwards betook himself to writing, and has left an account, in nine books, of the memorable apophthegms and actions of eminent persons; first of the Romans, and afterwards of foreign nations. The subjects are of various kinds, political, moral, and natural, ranged into distinct classes. His transitions from one subject to another are often performed with gracefulness; and where he offers any remarks, they generally show the author to be a man of judgment and observation. Valerius Maximus is chargeable with no affectation of style, but is sometimes deficient in that purity of language which might be expected in the age of Tiberius, to whom the work is addressed. What inducement the author had to this dedication, we know not; but as it is evident from a passage in the ninth book, that the compliment was paid after the death of Sejanus, and consequently in the most shameful period of Tiberius’s reign, we cannot entertain any high opinion of the independent spirit of Valerius Maximus, who could submit to flatter a tyrant, in the zenith of infamy and detestation. But we cannot ascribe the cause to any delicate artifice, of conveying to Tiberius, indirectly, an admonition to reform his conduct. Such an expedient would have only provoked the severest resentment from his jealousy.—

  Phædrus was a native of Thrace, and was brought to Rome as a slave. He had the good fortune to come into the service of Augustus, where, improving his talents by reading, he obtained the favour of the emperor, and was made one of his freedmen. In the reign of Tiberius, he translated into lambic verse the Fables of Æsop. They are divided into five oooks, and are not less conspicuous for precision and simplicity of thought, than for purity and elegance of style; conveying moral sentiments with unaffected ease and impressive energy. Phædrus underwent, for some time, a persecution from Sejanus, who, conscious of his own delinquency, suspected that he was obliquely satirised in the commendations bestowed on virtue by the poet. The work of Phædrus is one of the latest which have been brought to light since the revival of learning. It remained in obscurity until two hundred years ago, when it was discovered in a library at Rheims.—

  Hyginus is said to have been a native of Alexandria, or, according to others, a Spaniard. He was, like Phædrus, a freedman of Augustus; but, though industrious, he seems not to have improved himself so much as his companion, in the art of composition. He wrote, however, a mythological history, under the title of Fables, a work called Poëticon Astronomicon, with a treatise on agriculture, commentaries on Virgil, the lives of eminent men, and some other productions now lost. His remaining works are much mutilated, and, if genuine, afford an unfavourable specimen of his elegance and correctness as a writer.—

  Celsus was a physician in the time of Tiberius, and has written eight books, De Medicina, in which he has collected and digested into order all that is valuable on the subject, in the Greek and Roman authors. The professors of Medicine were at that time divided into three sects, viz., the Dogmatists, Empirics, and Methodists; the first of whom deviated less than the others from the plan of Hippocrates; but they were in general irreconcilable to each other, in respect both of their opinions and practice. Celsus, with great judgment, has occasionally adopted particular doctrines from each of them; and whatever he admits into his system, he not only establishes by the most rational observations, but confirms by its practical utility. In justness of remark, in force of argument, in precision and perspicuity, as well as in elegance of expression, he deservedly occupies the most distinguished rank amongst the medical writers of antiquity. It appears that Celsus likewise wrote on agriculture, rhetoric, and military affairs; but of those several treatises no fragments now remain.

  To the writers of this reign we must add Apicius Cœlius, who has left a book De Re Coquinaria [of Cookery]. There were three Romans of the name of Apicius, all remarkable for their gluttony. The first lived in the time of the Republic, the last in that of Trajan, and the intermediate Apicius under the emperors Augustus and Tiberius. This man, as Seneca informs us, wasted on luxurious living, sexcenties sestertium, a sum equal to £484,375 sterling. Upon examining the state of his affairs, he found that there remained no more of his estate than centies sestertium, £80,729 3s. 4d., which seeming to him too small to live upon, he ended his days by poison.

  CAIUS CÆSAR CALIGULA.

  I.Germanicus, the father of Caius Cæsar, and son of Drusus and the younger Antonia, was, after his adoption by Tiberius, his uncle, preferred to the quæstorship1 five years before he had attained the legal age, and immediately upon the expiration of that office, to the consulship.2 Having been sent to the army in Germany, he restored order among the legions, who, upon the news of Augustus’s death, obstinately refused to acknowledge Tiberius as emperor,3 and offered to place him at the head of the state. In which affair it is difficult to say, whether his regard to filial duty, or the firmness of his resolution, was most conspicuous. Soon afterwards he defeated the enemy, and obtained the honours of a triumph. Being then made consul for the second time,4 before he could enter upon his office he was obliged to set out suddenly for the east, where, after he had conquered the king of Armenia, and reduced Cappadocia into the form of a province, he died at Antioch, of a lingering distemper, in the thirty-fourth year of his age,5 not without the suspicion of being poisoned. For besides the livid spots which appeared all over his body, and a foaming at the mouth; when his corpse was burnt, the heart was found entire among the bones; its nature being such, as it is supposed, that when tainted by poison, it is indestructible by fire.6

  II. It was a prevailing opinion, that he was taken off by the contrivance of Tiberius, and through the means of Cneius Piso. This person, who was about the same time prefect of Syria, and made no secret of his position being such, that he must either offend the father or the son, loaded Germanicus, even during his sickness, with the most unbounded and scurrilous abuse, both by word and deed; for which, upon his return to Rome, he narrowly escaped being torn to pieces by the people, and was condemned to death by the senate.

  III. It is generally agreed, that Germanicus possessed all the noblest endowments of body and mind in a higher degree than had ever before fallen to the lot of any man; a handsome person, extraordinary courage, great proficiency in eloquence and other branches of learning, both Greek and Roman; besides a singular humanity, and a behaviour so engaging, as to captivate the affections of all about him. The slenderness of his legs did not correspond with the symmetry and beauty of his person in other respects; but this defect was at length corrected by his habit of riding after meals. In battle, he often engaged and slew an enemy in single combat. He pleaded causes, even after he had the honour of a triumph. Among other fruits of his studies, he left behind him some Greek comedies. Both at home and abroad he always conducted himself in a manner the most unassuming. On entering any free and confederate town, he never would be attended by his lictors. Whenever he heard, in his travels, of the tombs of illustrious men, he made offerings over them to the infernal deities. He gave a common grave, under a mound of earth, to the scattered relics of the legionaries slain under Varus, and was the first to put his hand to the work of collecting and bringing them to the place of burial. He was so extremely mild and gentle to his enemies, whoever they were, or on what account soever they bore him enmity, that, although Piso rescinded his decrees, and for a long time severely harassed his dependents, he never showed the smallest resentment, until he found himself attacked by magical charms and imprecations; and even then the only steps he took was to renounce all friendship with him, according to ancient custom, and to exhort his servants to avenge his death, if any thing untoward should befal him.

  IV. He reaped the fruit of his noble qualities in abundance, being so much esteemed and beloved by his friends, that Augustus (to say nothing of his other relations) being a long time in doubt, whether he should not appoint him his successor, at last ordered Tiberius to adopt him. He was so extremely popular, that many authors tell us, the crowds of those who went to meet him upon his coming to any place, or to attend him at his departure, were so prodigious, that he was sometimes in danger of his life; and that upon his return from Germany, after he had quelled the mutiny in the army there, all the cohorts of the pretorian guards marched out to meet him, notwithstanding the order that only two should go; and that all the people of Rome, both men and women, of every age, sex, and rank, flocked as far as the twentieth milestone to attend his entrance.

  V. At the time of his death, however, and afterwards, they displayed still greater and stronger proofs of their extraordinary attachment to him. The day on which he died, stones were thrown at the temples, the altars of the gods demolished, the household gods, in some cases, thrown into the streets, and new-born infants exposed. It is even said that barbarous nations, both those engaged in intestine wars, and those in hostilities against us, all agreed to a cessation of arms, as if they had been mourning for some very near and common friend: that some petty kings shaved their beards and their wives’ heads, in token of their extreme sorrow: and that the king of kings1 forbore his exercise of hunting and feasting with his nobles, which, amongst the Parthians, is equivalent to a cessation of all business in a time of public mourning with us.

  VI. At Rome, upon the first news of his sickness, the city was thrown into great consternation and grief, waiting impatiently for farther intelligence: when suddenly, in the evening, a report, without any certain author, was spread, that he was recovered; upon which the people flocked with torches and victims to the Capitol, and were in such haste to pay the vows they had made for his recovery, that they almost broke open the doors. Tiberius was roused from out of his sleep with the noise of the people congratulating one another, and singing about the streets,

  • Salva Roma, salva patria, salvus est Germanicus,
  • Rome is safe, our country safe, for our Germanicus is safe.

  But when certain intelligence of his death arrived, the mourning of the people could neither be assuaged by consolation, nor restrained by edicts, and it continued during the holidays in the month of December. The atrocities of the subsequent times contributed much to the glory of Germanicus, and the endearment of his memory; all people supposing, and with reason, that the fear and awe of him had laid a restraint upon the cruelty of Tiberius, which broke out soon afterwards.

  VII. Germanicus married Agrippina, the daughter of Marcus Agrippa and Julia, by whom he had nine children, two of whom died in their infancy, and another a few years after; a sprightly boy, whose effigy, in the character of a Cupid, Livia set up in the temple of Venus in the Capitol. Augustus also placed another statue of him in his bed-chamber, and used to kiss it as often as he entered the apartment. The rest survived their father; three daughters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla, who were born in three successive years; and as many sons, Nero, Drusus, and Caius Cæsar. Nero and Drusus, at the accusation of Tiberius, were declared public enemies.

  VIII. Caius Cæsar was born on the day before the calends [31st August] of September, at the time his father and Caius Fonteius Capito were consuls.1 But where he was born, is rendered uncertain from the number of places which are said to have given him birth. Cneius Lentulus Gætulicus2 says that he was born at Tibur; Pliny the younger, in the country of the Treviri, at a village called Ambiatinus, above Confluentes;3 and he alleges, as a proof of it, that altars are there shown with this inscription: “For Agrippina’s childbirth.” Some verses which were published in his reign, intimate that he was born in the winter quarters of the legions,

  • In castris natus, patriis nutritius in armis,
  • Jam designati principis omen erat.
  • Born in the camp, and train’d in every toil
  • Which taught his sire the haughtiest foes to foil;
  • Destin’d he seem’d by fate to raise his name,
  • And rule the empire with Augustan fame.

  I find in the public registers that he was born at Antium. Pliny charges Gætulicus as guilty of an arrant forgery, merely to soothe the vanity of a conceited young prince, by giving him the lustre of being born in a city sacred to Hercules; and says that he advanced this false assertion with the more assurance, because, the year before the birth of Caius, Germanicus had a son of the same name born at Tibur; concerning whose amiable childhood and premature death I have already spoken.1 Dates clearly prove that Pliny is mistaken; for the writers of Augustus’s history all agree, that Germanicus, at the expiration of his consulship, was sent into Gaul, after the birth of Caius. Nor will the inscription upon the altar serve to establish Pliny’s opinion; because Agrippina was delivered of two daughters in that country, and any child-birth, without regard to sex, is called puerperium, as the ancients were used to call girls pueræ, and boys puelli. There is also extant a letter written by Augustus, a few months before his death, to his granddaughter Agrippina, about the same Caius (for there was then no other child of hers living under that name). He writes as follows: “I gave orders yesterday for Talarius and Asellius to set out on their journey towards you, if the gods permit, with your child Caius, upon the fifteenth of the calends of June [18th May]. I also send with him a physician of mine, and I wrote to Germanicus that he may retain him if he pleases. Farewell, my dear Agrippina, and take what care you can to come safe and well to your Germanicus.” I imagine it is sufficiently evident that Caius could not be born at a place to which he was carried from The City when almost two years old. The same considerations must likewise invalidate the evidence of the verses, and the rather, because the author is unknown. The only authority, therefore, upon which we can depend in this matter, is that of the acts, and the public register; especially as he always preferred Antium to every other place of retirement, and entertained for it all that fondness which is commonly attached to one’s native soil. It is said, too, that, upon his growing weary of the city, he designed to have transferred thither the seat of empire.

  IX. It was to the jokes of the soldiers in the camp that he owed the name of Caligula,1 he having been brought up among them in the dress of a common soldier. How much his education amongst them recommended him to their favour and affection, was sufficiently apparent in the mutiny upon the death of Augustus, when the mere sight of him appeased their fury, though it had risen to a great height. For they persisted in it, until they observed that he was sent away to a neighbouring city,2 to secure him against all danger. Then, at last, they began to relent, and, stopping the chariot in which he was conveyed, earnestly deprecated the odium to which such a proceeding would expose them.

  X. He likewise attended his father in his expedition to Syria. After his return, he lived first with his mother, and, when she was banished, with his great-grandmother, Livia Augusta, in praise of whom, after her decease, though then only a boy, he pronounced a funeral oration in the Rostra. He was then transferred to the family of his grandmother, Antonia, and afterwards, in the twentieth year of his age, being called by Tiberius to Capri, he in one and the same day assumed the manly habit, and shaved his beard, but without receiving any of the honours which had been paid to his brothers on a similar occasion. While he remained in that island, many insidious artifices were practised, to extort from him complaints against Tiberius, but by his circumspection he avoided falling into the snare.1 He affected to take no more notice of the ill-treatment of his relations, than if nothing had befallen them. With regard to his own sufferings, he seemed utterly insensible of them, and behaved with such obsequiousness to his grandfather2 and all about him, that it was justly said of him, “There never was a better servant, nor a worse master.”

  XI. But he could not even then conceal his natural disposition to cruelty and lewdness. He delighted in witnessing the infliction of punishments, and frequented taverns and bawdy-houses in the night-time, disguised in a periwig and a long coat; and was passionately addicted to the theatrical arts of singing and dancing. All these levities Tiberius readily connived at, in hopes that they might perhaps correct the roughness of his temper, which the sagacious old man so well understood, that he often said, “That Caius was destined to be the ruin of himself and all mankind; and that he was rearing a hydra3 for the people of Rome, and a Phaeton for all the world.”4

  XII. Not long afterwards, he married Junia Claudilla, the daughter of Marcus Silanus, a man of the highest rank. Being then chosen augur in the room of his brother Drusus, before he could be inaugurated he was advanced to the pontificate, with no small commendation of his dutiful behaviour, and great capacity. The situation of the court likewise was at this time favourable to his fortunes, as it was now left destitute of support, Sejanus being suspected, and soon afterwards taken off; and he was by degrees flattered with the hope of succeeding Tiberius in the empire. In order more effectually to secure this object, upon Junia’s dying in child-bed, he engaged in a criminal commerce with Ennia Nævia, the wife of Macro, at that time prefect of the pretorian cohorts; promising to marry her if he became emperor, to which he bound himself, not only by an oath, but by a written obligation under his hand. Having by her means insinuated himself into Macro’s favour, some are of opinion that he attempted to poison Tiberius, and ordered his ring to be taken from him, before the breath was out of his body; and that, because he seemed to hold it fast, he caused a pillow to be thrown upon him,1 squeezing him by the throat, at the same time, with his own hand. One of his freedmen crying out at this horrid barbarity, he was immediately crucified. These circumstances are far from being improbable, as some authors relate that, afterwards, though he did not acknowledge his having a hand in the death of Tiberius, yet he frankly declared that he had formerly entertained such a design; and as a proof of his affection for his relations, he would frequently boast, “That, to revenge the death of his mother and brothers, he had entered the chamber of Tiberius, when he was asleep, with a poniard, but being seized with a fit of compassion, threw it away, and retired: and that Tiberius, though aware of his intention, durst not make any inquiries, or attempt revenge.”

  XIII. Having thus secured the imperial power, he fulfilled by his elevation the wish of the Roman people, I may venture to say, of all mankind; for he had long been the object of expectation and desire to the greater part of the provincials and soldiers, who had known him when a child; and to the whole people of Rome, from their affection for the memory of Germanicus, his father, and compassion for the family almost entirely destroyed. Upon his moving from Misenum, therefore, although he was in mourning, and following the corpse of Tiberius, he had to walk amidst altars, victims, and lighted torches, with prodigious crowds of people everywhere attending him, in transports of joy, and calling him, besides other auspicious names, by those of “their star,” “their chick,” “their pretty puppet,” and “bantling.”

  XIV. Immediately on his entering the city, by the joint acclamations of the senate, and people, who broke into the senate-house, Tiberius’s will was set aside, it having left his other grandson,1 then a minor, coheir with him, the whole government and administration of affairs was placed in his hands; so much to the joy and satisfaction of the public, that, in less than three months after, above a hundred and sixty thousand victims are said to have been offered in sacrifice. Upon his going, a few days afterwards, to the nearest islands on the coast of Campania,2 vows were made for his safe return; every person emulously testifying their care and concern for his safety. And when he fell ill, the people hung about the Palatium all night long; some vowed, in public handbills, to risk their lives in the combats of the amphitheatre, and others to lay them down, for his recovery. To this extraordinary love entertained for him by his countrymen, was added an uncommon regard by foreign nations. Even Artabanus, king of the Parthians, who had always manifested hatred and contempt for Tiberius, solicited his friendship; came to hold a conference with his consular lieutenant, and passing the Euphrates, paid the highest honours to the eagles, the Roman standards, and the images of the Cæsars.3

  XV. Caligula himself inflamed this devotion, by practising all the arts of popularity. After he had delivered, with floods of tears, a speech in praise of Tiberius, and buried him with the utmost pomp, he immediately hastened over to Pandataria and the Pontian islands,4 to bring thence the ashes of his mother and brother; and, to testify the great regard he had for their memory, he performed the voyage in a very tempestuous season. He approached their remains with profound veneration, and deposited them in the urns with his own hands. Having brought them in grand solemnity to Ostia,5 with an ensign flying in the stern of the galley, and thence up the Tiber to Rome, they were borne by persons of the first distinction in the equestrian order, on two biers, into the mausoleum,6 at noon-day. He appointed yearly offerings to be solemnly and publicly celebrated to their memory, besides Circensian games to that of his mother, and a chariot with her image to be included in the procession.1 The month of September he called Germanicus, in honour of his father. By a single decree of the senate, he heaped upon his grandmother, Antonia, all the honours which had been ever conferred on the empress Livia. His uncle, Claudius, who till then continued in the equestrian order, he took for his colleague in the consulship. He adopted his brother, Tiberius,2 on the day he took upon him the manly habit, and conferred upon him the title of “Prince of the Youths.” As for his sisters, he ordered these words to be added to the oaths of allegiance to himself: “Nor will I hold myself or my own children more dear than I do Caius and his sisters:”3 and commanded all resolutions proposed by the consuls in the senate to be prefaced thus: “May what we are going to do, prove fortunate and happy to Caius Cæsar and his sisters.” With the like popularity he restored all those who had been condemned and banished, and granted an act of indemnity against all impeachments and past offences. To relieve the informers and witnesses against his mother and brothers from all apprehension, he brought the records of their trials into the forum, and there burnt them, calling loudly on the gods to witness that he had not read or handled them. A memorial which was offered him relative to his own security, he would not receive, declaring, “that he had done nothing to make any one his enemy:” and said, at the same time, “he had no ears for informers.”

  XVI. The Spintriæ, those panderers to unnatural lusts,4 he banished from the city, being prevailed upon not to throw them into the sea, as he had intended. The writings of Titus Labienus, Cordus Cremutius and Cassius Severus, which had been suppressed by an act of the senate, he permitted to be drawn from obscurity, and universally read; observing, “that it would be for his own advantage to have the transactions of former times delivered to posterity.” He published accounts of the proceedings of the government—a practice which had been introduced by Augustus, but discontinued by Tiberius.1 He granted the magistrates a full and free jurisdiction, without any appeal to himself. He made a very strict and exact review of the Roman knights, but conducted it with moderation; publicly depriving of his horse every knight who lay under the stigma of any thing base and dishonourable; but passing over the names of those knights who were only guilty of venial faults, in calling over the list of the order. To lighten the labours of the judges, he added a fifth class to the former four. He attempted likewise to restore to the people their ancient right of voting in the choice of magistrates.2 He paid very honourably, and without any dispute, the legacies left by Tiberius in his will, though it had been set aside; as likewise those left by the will of Livia Augusta, which Tiberius had annulled. He remitted the hundredth penny, due to the government in all auctions throughout Italy. He made up to many their losses sustained by fire; and when he restored their kingdoms to any princes, he likewise allowed them all the arrears of the taxes and revenues which had accrued in the interval; as in the case of Antiochus of Comagene, where the confiscation would have amounted to a hundred millions of sesterces. To prove to the world that he was ready to encourage good examples of every kind, he gave to a freed-woman eighty thousand sesterces, for not discovering a crime committed by her patron, though she had been put to exquisite torture for that purpose. For all these acts of beneficence, amongst other honours, a golden shield was decreed to him, which the colleges of priests were to carry annually, upon a fixed day, into the Capitol, with the senate attending, and the youth of the nobility, of both sexes, celebrating the praise of his virtues in songs. It was likewise ordained, that the day on which he succeeded to the empire should be called Palilia, in token of the city’s being at that time, as it were, new founded.1

  XVII. He held the consulship four times; the first,2 from the calends [the first] of July for two months: the second,3 from the calends of January for thirty days; the third,4 until the ides [the 13th] of January; and the fourth,5 until the seventh of the same ides [7th January]. Of these, the two last he held successively. The third he assumed by his sole authority at Lyons; not, as some are of opinion, from arrogance or neglect of rules; but because, at that distance, it was impossible for him to know that his colleague had died a little before the beginning of the new year. He twice distributed to the people a bounty of three hundred sesterces a man, and as often gave a splendid feast to the senate and the equestrian order, with their wives and children. In the latter, he presented to the men forensic garments, and to the women and children purple scarfs. To make a perpetual addition to the public joy for ever, he added to the Saturnalia6 one day, which he called Juvenalis [the juvenile feast].

  XVIII. He exhibited some combats of gladiators, either in the amphitheatre of Taurus,7 or in the Septa, with which he intermingled troops of the best pugilists from Campania and Africa. He did not always preside in person upon those occasions, but sometimes gave a commission to magistrates or friends to supply his place. He frequently entertained the people with stage-plays of various kinds, and in several parts of the city, and sometimes by night, when he caused the whole city to be lighted. He likewise gave various things to be scrambled for among the people, and distributed to every man a basket of bread with other victuals. Upon this occasion, he sent his own share to a Roman knight, who was seated opposite to him, and was enjoying himself by eating heartily. To a senator, who was doing the same, he sent an appointment of prætor-extraordinary. He likewise exhibited a great number of Circensian games from morning until night; intermixed with the hunting of wild beasts from Africa, or the Trojan exhibition. Some of these games were celebrated with peculiar circumstances; the Circus being overspread with vermilion and chrysolite: and none drove in the chariot races who were not of the senatorian order. For some of these he suddenly gave the signal, when, upon his viewing from the Gelotiana1 the preparations in the Circus, he was asked to do so by a few persons in the neighbouring galleries.

  XIX. He invented besides a new kind of spectacle, such as had never been heard of before. For he made a bridge, of about three miles and a half in length, from Baiæ to the mole of Puteoli,2 collecting trading vessels from all quarters, mooring them in two rows by their anchors, and spreading earth upon them to form a viaduct, after the fashion of the Appian way.3 This bridge he crossed and recrossed for two days together; the first day mounted on a horse richly caparisoned, wearing on his head a crown of oak leaves, armed with a battle-axe, a Spanish buckler and a sword, and in a cloak made of cloth of gold; the day following, in the habit of a charioteer, standing in a chariot, drawn by two high-bred horses, having with him a young boy, Darius by name, one of the Parthian hostages, with a cohort of the pretorian guards attending him, and a party of his friends in cars of Gaulish make.1 Most people, I know, are of opinion, that this bridge was designed by Caius, in imitation of Xerxes, who, to the astonishment of the world, laid a bridge over the Hellespont, which is somewhat narrower than the distance betwixt Baiæ and Puteoli. Others, however, thought that he did it to strike terror in Germany and Britain, which he was upon the point of invading, by the fame of some prodigious work. But for myself, when I was a boy, I heard my grandfather say,2 that the reason assigned by some courtlers who were in habits of the greatest intimacy with him, was this; when Tiberius was in some anxiety about the nomination of a successor, and rather inclined to pitch upon his grandson, Thrasyllus the astrologer had assured him, “That Caius would no more be emperor, than he would ride on horseback across the gulf of Baiæ.”

  XX. He likewise exhibited public diversions in Sicily, Grecian games at Syracuse, and Attic plays at Lyons in Gaul: besides a contest for preeminence in the Grecian and Roman eloquence; in which we are told that such as were baffled bestowed rewards upon the best performers, and were obliged to compose speeches in their praise: but that those who performed the worst, were forced to blot out what they had written with a sponge or their tongue, unless they preferred to be beaten with a rod, or plunged over head and cars into the nearest river.

  XXI. He completed the works which were left unfinished by Tiberius, namely, the temple of Augustus, and the theatre of Pompey.1 He began, likewise, the aqueduct from the neighbourhood of Tibur,2 and an amphitheatre near the Septa;3 of which works, one was completed by his successor Claudius, and the other remained as he left it. The walls of Syracuse, which had fallen to decay by length of time, he repaired, as he likewise did the temples of the gods. He formed plans for rebuilding the palace of Polycrates at Samos, finishing the temple of the Didymæan Apollo at Miletus, and building a town on a ridge of the Alps; but, above all, for cutting through the isthmus in Achaia;4 and even sent a centurion of the first rank to measure out the work.

  XXII. Thus far we have spoken of him as a prince. What remains to be said of him, bespeaks him rather a monster than a man. He assumed a variety of titles, such as “Dutiful,” “The Pious,” “The Child of the Camp, the Father of the Armies,” and “The Greatest and Best Cæsar.” Upon hearing some kings, who came to the city to pay him court, conversing together at supper, about their illustrious descent, he exclaimed,

  • Εἷ ς ϰοίρανος ἔτω, εἳς βασιλεύς·
  • Let there be but one prince, one king.

  He was strongly inclined to assume the diadem, and change the form of government, from imperial to regal; but being told that he far exceeded the grandeur of kings and princes, he began to arrogate to himself a divine majesty. He ordered all the images of the gods, which were famous either for their beauty, or the veneration paid them, among which was that of Jupiter Olympius, to be brought from Greece, that he might take the heads off, and put on his own. Having continued part of the Palatium as far as the Forum, and the temple of Castor and Pollux being converted into a kind of vestibule to his house, he often stationed himself between the twin brothers, and so presented himself to be worshipped by all votaries; some of whom saluted him by the name of Jupiter Latialis. He also instituted a temple and priests, with choicest victims, in honour of his own divinity. In his temple stood a statue of gold, the exact image of himself, which was daily dressed in garments corresponding with those he wore himself. The most opulent persons in the city offered themselves as candidates for the honour of being his priests, and purchased it successively at an immense price. The victims were flamingos, peacocks, bustards, guinea-fowls, turkey and pheasant hens, each sacrificed on their respective days. On nights when the moon was full, he was in the constant habit of inviting her to his embraces and his bed. In the day-time he talked in private to Jupiter Capitolinus: one while whispering to him, and another turning his ear to him: sometimes he spoke aloud, and in railing language. For he was overheard to threaten the god thus:

  • Ἤ ἐμ’ ἀνάειρ’, ἤ ἐγώ σς;1
  • Raise thou me up, or I’ll—

  until being at last prevailed upon by the entreaties of the god, as he said, to take up his abode with him, he built a bridge over the temple of the Deified Augustus, by which he joined the Palatium to the Capitol. Afterwards, that he might be still nearer, he laid the foundations of a new palace in the very court of the Capitol.

  XXIII. He was unwilling to be thought or called the grandson of Agrippa, because of the obscurity of his birth; and he was offended if any one, either in prose or verse, ranked him amongst the Cæsars. He said that his mother was the fruit of an incestuous commerce, maintained by Augustus with his daughter Julia. And not content with this vile reflection upon the memory of Augustus, he forbad his victories at Actium, and on the coast of Sicily, to be celebrated, as usual; affirming that they had been most pernicious and fatal to the Roman people. He called his grandmother Livia Augusta “Ulysses in a woman’s dress,” and had the indecency to reflect upon her in a letter to the senate, as of mean birth, and descended, by the mother’s side, from a grandfather who was only one of the municipal magistrates of Fondi; whereas it is certain, from the public records, that Aufidius Lurco held high offices at Rome. His grandmother Antonia desiring a private conference with him, he refused to grant it, unless Macro, the prefect of the pretorian guards, were present. Indignities of this kind, and ill usage, were the cause of her death; but some think he also gave her poison. Nor did he pay the smallest respect to her memory after her death, but witnessed the burning from his private apartment. His brother Tiberius, who had no expectation of any violence, was suddenly dispatched by a military tribune sent by his order for that purpose. He forced Silanus, his father-in-law, to kill himself, by cutting his throat with a razor. The pretext he alleged for these murders was, that the latter had not followed him upon his putting to sea in stormy weather, but stayed behind with the view of seizing the city, if he should perish. The other, he said, smelt of an antidote, which he had taken to prevent his being poisoned by him; whereas Silanus was only afraid of being sea-sick, and the disagreeableness of a voyage; and Tiberius had merely taken a medicine for an habitual cough, which was continually growing worse. As for his successor Claudius, he only saved him for a laughing-stock.

  XXIV. He lived in the habit of incest with all his sisters; and at table, when much company was present, he placed each of them in turns below him, whilst his wife reclined above him. It is believed, that he deflowered one of them, Drusilla, before he had assumed the robe of manhood; and was even caught in her embraces by his grandmother Antonia, with whom they were educated together. When she was afterwards married to Cassius Longinus, a man of consular rank, he took her from him, and kept her constantly as if she were his lawful wife. In a fit of sickness, he by his will appointed her heiress both of his estate and the empire. After her death, he ordered a public mourning for her; during which it was capital for any person to laugh, use the bath, or sup with his parents, wife, or children. Being inconsolable under his affliction, he went hastily, and in the night-time, from the City; going through Campania to Syracuse, and then suddenly returned without shaving his beard, or trimming his hair. Nor did he ever afterwards, in matters of the greatest importance, not even in the assemblies of the people or before the soldiers, swear any otherwise, than “By the divinity of Drusilla.” The rest of his sisters he did not treat with so much fondness or regard; but frequently prostituted them to his catamites. He therefore the more readily condemned them in the case of Æmilius Lepidus, as guilty of adultery, and privy to that conspiracy against him. Nor did he only divulge their own hand-writing relative to the affair, which he procured by base and lewd means, but likewise consecrated to Mars the Avenger three swords which had been prepared to stab him, with an inscription, setting forth the occasion of their consecration.

  XXV. Whether in the marriage of his wives, in repudiating them, or retaining them, he acted with greater infamy, it is difficult to say. Being at the wedding of Caius Piso with Livia Orestilla, he ordered the bride to be carried to his own house, but within a few days divorced her, and two years after banished her; because it was thought, that upon her divorce she returned to the embraces of her former husband. Some say, that being invited to the wedding-supper, he sent a messenger to Piso, who sat opposite to him, in these words: “Do not be too fond with my wife,” and that he immediately carried her off. Next day he published a proclamation, importing, “That he had got a wife as Romulus and Augustus had done.”1 Lollia Paulina, who was married to a man of consular rank in command of an army, he suddenly called from the province where she was with her husband, upon mention being made that her grandmother was formerly very beautiful, and married her; but he soon afterwards parted with her, interdicting her from having ever afterwards any commerce with man. He loved with a most passionate and constant affection Cæsonia, who was neither handsome nor young, and was besides the mother of three daughters by another man; but a wanton of unbounded lasciviousness. Her he would frequently exhibit to the soldiers, dressed in a military cloak, with shield and helmet, and riding by his side. To his friends he even showed her naked. After she had a child, he honoured her with the title of wife; in one and the same day, declaring himself her husband, and father of the child of which she was delivered. He named it Julia Drusilla, and carrying it round the temples of all the goddesses, laid it on the lap of Minerva; to whom he recommended the care of bringing up and instructing her. He considered her as his own child for no better reason than her savage temper, which was such even in her infancy, that she would attack with her nails the face and eyes of the children at play with her.

  XXVI. It would be of little importance, as well as disgusting, to add to all this an account of the manner in which he treated his relations and friends; as Ptolemy, king Juba’s son, his cousin (for he was the grandson of Mark Antony by his daughter Selene),2 and especially Macro himself, and Ennia likewise,3 by whose assistance he had obtained the empire; all of whom, for their alliance and eminent services, he rewarded with violent deaths. Nor was he more mild or respectful in his behaviour towards the senate. Some who had borne the highest offices in the government, he suffered to run by his litter in their togas for several miles together, and to attend him at supper, sometimes at the head of his couch, sometimes at his feet, with napkins. Others of them, after he had privately put them to death, he nevertheless continued to send for, as if they were still alive, and after a few days pretended that they had laid violent hands upon themselves. The consuls having forgotten to give public notice of his birth-day, he displaced them; and the republic was three days without any one in that high office. A quæstor who was said to be concerned in a conspiracy against him, he scourged severely, having first stripped off his clothes, and spread them under the feet of the soldiers employed in the work, that they might stand the more firm. The other orders likewise he treated with the same insolence and violence. Being disturbed by the noise of people taking their places at midnight in the circus, as they were to have free admission, he drove them all away with clubs. In this tumult, above twenty Roman knights were squeezed to death, with as many matrons, with a great crowd besides. When stage-plays were acted, to occasion disputes between the people and the knights, he distributed the money-tickets sooner than usual, that the seats assigned to the knights might be all occupied by the mob. In the spectacles of gladiators, sometimes, when the sun was violently hot, he would order the curtains, which covered the amphitheatre, to be drawn aside,1 and forbad any person to be let out; withdrawing at the same time the usual apparatus for the entertainment, and presenting wild beasts almost pined to death, the most sorry gladiators, decrepit with age, and fit only to work the machinery, and decent house-keepers, who were remarkable for some bodily infirmity. Sometimes shutting up the public granaries, he would oblige the people to starve for a while.

  XXVII. He evinced the savage barbarity of his temper chiefly by the following indications. When flesh was only to be had at a high price for feeding his wild beasts reserved for the spectacles, he ordered that criminals should be given them to be levoured; and upon inspecting them in a row, while he stood in the middle of the portico, without troubling himself to examine their cases he ordered them to be dragged away, from “bald-pate to bald-pate.”1 Of one person who had made a vow for his recovery to combat with a gladiator, he exacted its performance; nor would he allow him to desist until he came off conqueror, and after many entreaties. Another, who had vowed to give his life for the same cause, having shrunk from the sacrifice, he delivered, adorned as a victim, with garlands and fillets, to boys, who were to drive him through the streets, calling on him to fulfil his vow, until he was thrown headlong from the ramparts. After disfiguring many persons of honourable rank, by branding them in the face with hot irons, he condemned them to the mines, to work in repairing the high-ways, or to fight with wild beasts; or tying them by the neck and heels, in the manner of beasts carried to slaughter, would shut them up in cages, or saw them asunder. Nor were these severities merely inflicted for crimes of great enormity, but for making remarks on his public games, or for not having sworn by the Genius of the emperor. He compelled parents to be present at the execution of their sons; and to one who excused himself on account of indisposition, he sent his own litter. Another he invited to his table immediately after he had witnessed the spectacle, and coolly challenged him to jest and be merry. He ordered the overseer of the spectacles and wild beasts to be scourged in fetters, during several days successively, in his own presence, and did not put him to death until he was disgusted with the stench of his putrefied brain. He burned alive, in the centre of the arena of the amphitheatre, the writer of a farce, for some witty verse, which had a double meaning. A Roman knight, who had been exposed to the wild beasts, crying out that he was innocent, he called him back, and having had his tongue cut out, remanded him to the arena.

  XXVIII. Asking a certain person, whom he recalled after a long exile, how he used to spend his time, he replied, with flattery, “I was always praying the gods for what has happened, that Tiberius might die, and you be emperor.” Concluding, therefore, that those he had himself banished also prayed for his death, he sent orders round the islands1 to have them all put to death. Being very desirous to have a senator torn to pieces, he employed some persons to call him a public enemy, fall upon him as he entered the senate-house, stab him with their styles, and deliver him to the rest to tear asunder. Nor was he satisfied, until he saw the limbs and bowels of the man, after they had been dragged through the streets, piled up in a heap before him.

  XXIX. He aggravated his barbarous actions by language equally outrageous. “There is nothing in my nature,” said he, “that I commend or approve so much, as my ἀδιατρεψία (inflexible rigour).” Upon his grandmother Antonia’s giving him some advice, as if it was a small matter to pay no regard to it, he said to her, “Remember that all things are lawful for me.” When about to murder his brother, whom he suspected of taking antidotes against poison, he said, “See then an antidote against Cæsar!” And when he banished his sisters, he told them in a menacing tone, that he had not only islands at command, but likewise swords. One of pretorian rank having sent several times from Anticyra,2 whither he had gone for his health, to have his leave of absence prolonged, he ordered him to be put to death; adding these words: “Bleeding is necessary for one that has taken hellebore so long, and found no benefit.” It was his custom every tenth day to sign the lists of prisoners appointed for execution; and this he called “clearing his accounts.” And having condemned several Gauls and Greeks at one time, he exclaimed in triumph, “I have conquered Gallogræcia.”3

  XXX. He generally prolonged the sufferings of his victims by causing them to be inflicted by slight and frequently repeated strokes; this being his well-known and constant order: “Strike so that he may feel himself die.” Having punished one person for another, by mistaking his name, he said, “he deserved it quite as much.” He had frequently in his mouth these words of the tragedian,

  • Oderint dum metuant1
  • I scorn their hatred, if they do but fear me.

  He would often inveigh against all the senators without exception, as clients of Sejanus, and informers against his mother and brothers, producing the memorials which he had pretended to burn, and excusing the cruelty of Tiberius as necessary, since it was impossible to question the veracity of such a number of accusers.2 He continually reproached the whole equestrian order, as devoting themselves to nothing but acting on the stage, and fighting as gladiators. Being incensed at the people’s applauding a party at the Circensian games in opposition to him, he exclaimed, “I wish the Roman people had but one neck.”3 When Tetrinius, the highwayman, was denounced, he said his persecutors too were all Tetrinius’s. Five Retiarii,4 in tunics, fighting in a company, yielded without a struggle to the same number of opponents; and being ordered to be slain, one of them taking up his lance again, killed all the conquerors. This he lamented in a proclamation as a most cruel butchery, and cursed all those who had borne the sight of it.

  XXXI. He used also to complain aloud of the state of the times, because it was not rendered remarkable by any public calamities; for, while the reign of Augustus had been made memorable to posterity by the disaster of Varus,1 and that of Tiberius by the fall of the theatre at Fidenæ,2 his was likely to pass into oblivion, from an uninterrupted series of prosperity. And, at times, he wished for some terrible slaughter of his troops, a famine, a pestilence, conflagrations, or an earthquake.

  XXXII. Even in the midst of his diversions, while gaming or feasting, this savage ferocity, both in his language and actions, never forsook him. Persons were often put to the torture in his presence, whilst he was dining or carousing. A soldier, who was an adept in the art of beheading, used at such times to take off the heads of prisoners, who were brought in for that purpose. At Puteoli, at the dedication of the bridge which he planned, as already mentioned,3 he invited a number of people to come to him from the shore, and then suddenly threw them headlong into the sea; thrusting down with poles and oars those who, to save themselves, had got hold of the rudders of the ships. At Rome, in a public feast, a slave having stolen some thin plates of silver with which the couches were inlaid, he delivered him immediately to an executioner, with orders to cut off his hands, and lead him round the guests, with them hanging from his neck before his breast, and a label, signifying the cause of his punishment. A gladiator who was practising with him, and voluntarily threw himself at his feet, he stabbed with a poniard, and then ran about with a palm branch in his hand, after the manner of those who are victorious in the games. When a victim was to be offered upon an altar, he, clad in the habit of the Popæ,4 and holding the axe aloft for a while, at last, instead of the animal, slaughtered an officer who attended to cut up the sacrifice. And at a sumptuous entertainment, he fell suddenly into a violent fit of laughter, and upon the consuls, who reclined next to him, respectfully asking him the occasion, “Nothing,” replied he, “but that, upon a single nod of mine, you might both have your throats cut.”

  XXXIII. Among many other jests, this was one: As he stood by the statue of Jupiter, he asked Apelles, the tragedian, which of them he thought was biggest? Upon his demurring about it, he lashed him most severely, now and then commending his voice, whilst he entreated for mercy, as being well modulated even when he was venting his grief. As often as he kissed the neck of his wife or mistress, he would say, “So beautiful a throat must be cut whenever I please,” and now and then he would threaten to put his dear Cæsonia to the torture, that he might discover why he loved her so passionately.

  XXXIV. In his behaviour towards men of almost all ages, he discovered a degree of jealousy and malignity equal to that of his cruelty and pride. He so demolished and dispersed the statues of several illustrious persons, which had been removed by Augustus, for want of room, from the court of the Capitol into the Campus Martius, that it was impossible to set them up again with their inscriptions entire. And, for the future, he forbad any statue whatever to be erected without his knowledge and leave. He had thoughts too of suppressing Homer’s poems: “For why,” said he, “may not I do what Plato has done before me, who excluded him from his commonwealth?”1 He was likewise very near banishing the writings and the busts of Virgil and Livy from all libraries; censuring one of them as “a man of no genius and very little learning;” and the other as “a verbose and careless historian.” He often talked of the lawyers as if he intended to abolish their profession. “By Hercules!” he would say, “I shall put it out of their power to answer any questions in law, otherwise than by referring to me!”

  XXXV. He took from the noblest persons in the city the ancient marks of distinction used by their families: as the collar from Torquatus;2 from Cincinnatus the curl of hair;1 and from Cneius Pompey, the surname of Great, belonging to that ancient family. Ptolemy, mentioned before, whom he invited from his kingdom, and received with great honours, he suddenly put to death, for no other reason, but because he observed that upon entering the theatre, at a public exhibition, he attracted the eyes of all the spectators, by the splendour of his purple robe. As often as he met with handsome men, who had fine heads of hair, he would order the back of their heads to be shaved, to make them appear ridiculous. There was one Esius Proculus, the son of a centurion of the first rank, who, for his great stature and fine proportions, was called the Colossal. Him he ordered to be dragged from his seat in the arena, and matched with a gladiator in light armour, and afterwards with another completely armed; and upon his worsting them both, commanded him forthwith to be bound, to be led clothed in rags up and down the streets of the city, and, after being exhibited in that plight to the women, to be then butchered. There was no man of so abject or mean condition, whose excellency in any kind he did not envy. The Rex Nemorensis2 having many years enjoyed the honour of the priesthood, he procured a still stronger antagonist to oppose him. One Porius, who fought in a chariot,3 having been victorious in an exhibition, and in his joy given feedom to a slave, was applauded so vehemently, that Caligula rose in such haste from his seat, that, treading upon the hem of his toga, he tumbled down the steps, full of indignation, and crying out, “A people who are masters of the world, pay greater respect to a gladiator for a trifle, than to princes admitted amongst the gods, or to my own majesty here present amongst them.”

  XXXVI. He never had the least regard either to the chastity of his own person, or that of others. He is said to have been inflamed with an unnatural passion for Marcus Lepidus Mnester, an actor in pantomimes, and for certain hostages; and to have engaged with them in the practice of mutual pollution. Valerius Catullus, a young man of a consular family, bawled aloud in public that he had been exhausted by him in that abominable act. Besides his incest with his sisters, and his notorious passion for Pyrallis, the prostitute, there was hardly any lady of distinction with whom he did not make free. He used commonly to invite them with their husbands to supper, and as they passed by the couch on which he reclined at table, examine them very closely, like those who traffic in slaves; and if any one from modesty held down her face, he raised it up with his hand. Afterwards, as often as he was in the humour, he would quit the room, send for her he liked best, and in a short time return with marks of recent disorder about them. He would then commend or disparage her in the presence of the company, recounting the charms or defects of her person and behaviour in private. To some he sent a divorce in the name of their absent husbands, and ordered it to be registered in the public acts.

  XXXVII. In the devices of his profuse expenditure, he surpassed all the prodigals that ever lived; inventing a new kind of bath, with strange dishes and suppers, washing in precious unguents, both warm and cold, drinking pearls of immense value dissolved in vinegar, and serving up for his guests loaves and other victuals modelled in gold; often saying, “that a man ought either to be a good economist or an emperor.” Besides, he scattered money to a prodigious amount among the people, from the top of the Julian Basilica,1 during several days successively. He built two ships with ten banks of oars, after the Liburnian fashion, the poops of which blazed with jewels, and the sails were of various parti-colours. They were fitted up with ample baths, galleries, and saloons, and supplied with a great variety of vines and other fruit-trees. In these he would sail in the day-time along the coast of Campania, feasting amidst dancing and concerts of music. In building his palaces and villas, there was nothing he desired to effect so much, in defiance of all reason, as what was considered impossible. Accordingly, moles were formed in the deep and adverse sea,1 rocks of the hardest stone cut away, plains raised to the height of mountains with a vast mass of earth, and the tops of mountains levelled by digging; and all these were to be executed with incredible speed, for the least remissness was a capital offence. Not to mention particulars, he spent enormous sums, and the whole treasures which had been amassed by Tiberius Cæsar, amounting to two thousand seven hundred millions of sesterces, within less than a year.

  XXXVIII. Having therefore quite exhausted these funds, and being in want of money, he had recourse to plundering the people, by every mode of false accusation, confiscation, and taxation, that could be invented. He declared that no one had any right to the freedom of Rome, although their ancestors had acquired it for themselves and their posterity, unless they were sons; for that none beyond that degree ought to be considered as posterity. When the grants of the Divine Julius and Augustus were produced to him, he only said, that he was very sorry they were obsolete and out of date. He also charged all those with making false returns, who, after the taking of the census, had by any means whatever increased their property. He annulled the wills of all who had been centurions of the first rank, as testimonies of their base ingratitude, if from the beginning of Tiberius’s reign they had not left either that prince or himself their heir. He also set aside the wills of all others, if any person only pretended to say, that they designed at their death to leave Cæsar their heir. The public becoming terrified at this proceeding, he was now appointed joint-heir with their friends, and in the case of parents with their children, by persons unknown to him. Those who lived any considerable time after making such a will, he said, were only making game of him; and accordingly he sent many of them poisoned cakes. He used to try such causes himself; fixing previously the sum he proposed to raise during the sitting, and, after he had secured it, quitting the tribunal. Impatient of the least delay, he condemned by a single sentence forty persons, against whom there were different charges; boasting to Cæsonia when she awoke, “how much business he had dispatched while she was taking her mid-day sleep.” He exposed to sale by auction, the remains of the apparatus used in the public spectacles; and exacted such biddings, and raised the prices so high, that some of the purchasers were ruined, and bled themselves to death. There is a well-known story told of Aponius Saturninus, who happening to fall asleep as he sat on a bench at the sale, Caius called out to the auctioneer, not to overlook the prætorian personage who nodded to him so often: and accordingly the salesman went on, pretending to take the nods for tokens of assent, until thirteen gladiators were knocked down to him at the sum of nine millions of sesterces,1 he being in total ignorance of what was doing.

  XXXIX. Having also sold in Gaul all the clothes, furniture, slaves, and even freedmen belonging to his sisters, at prodigious prices, after their condemnation, he was so much delighted with his gains, that he sent to Rome for all the furniture of the old palace;2 pressing for its conveyance all the carriages let to hire in the city, with the horses and mules belonging to the bakers, so that they often wanted bread at Rome; and many who had suits at law in progress, lost their causes, because they could not make their appearance in due time according to their recognizances. In the sale of this furniture, every artifice of fraud and imposition was employed. Sometimes he would rail at the bidders for being niggardly, and ask them “if they were not ashamed to be richer than he was?” at another, he would affect to be sorry that the property of princes should be passing into the hands of private persons. He had found out that a rich provincial had given two hundred thousand sesterces to his chamberlains for an underhand invitation to his table, and he was much pleased to find that honour valued at so high a rate. The day following, as the same person was sitting at the sale, he sent him some bauble, for which he told him he must pay two hundred thousand sesterces, and “that he should sup with Cæsar upon his own invitation.”

  XL. He levied new taxes, and such as were never before known, at first by the publicans, but afterwards, because their profit was enormous, by centurions and tribunes of the pretorian guards; no description of property or persons being exempted from some kind of tax or other. For all eatables brought into the city, a certain excise was exacted: for all law-suits or trials in whatever court, the fortieth part of the sum in dispute; and such as were convicted of compromising litigations, were made liable to a penalty. Out of the daily wages of the porters, he received an eighth, and from the gains of common prostitutes, what they received for one favour granted. There was a clause in the law, that all bawds who kept women for prostitution or sale, should be liable to pay, and that marriage itself should not be exempted.

  XLI. These taxes being imposed, but the act by which they were levied never submitted to public inspection, great grievances were experienced from the want of sufficient knowledge of the law. At length, on the urgent demands of the Roman people, he published the law, but it was written in a very small hand, and posted up in a corner, so that no one could make a copy of it. To leave no sort of gain untried, he opened brothels in the Palatium, with a number of cells, furnished suitably to the dignity of the place; in which married women and free-born youths were ready for the reception of visitors. He sent likewise his nomenclators about the forums and courts, to invite people of all ages, the old as well as the young, to his brothel, to come and satisfy their lusts; and he was ready to lend his customers money upon interest; clerks attending to take down their names in public, as persons who contributed to the emperor’s revenue. Another method of raising money, which he thought not below his notice, was gaming; which, by the help of lying and perjury, he turned to considerable account. Leaving once the management of his play to his partner in the game, he stepped into the court, and observing two rich Roman knights passing by, he ordered them immediately to be seized, and their estates confiscated. Then returning, in great glee, he boasted that he had never made a better throw in his life.

  XLII. After the birth of his daughter, complaining of his poverty, and the burdens to which he was subjected, not only as an emperor, but a father, he made a general collection for her maintenance and fortune. He likewise gave public notice, that he would receive new-year’s gifts on the calends of January following; and accordingly stood in the vestibule of his house, to clutch the presents which people of all ranks threw down before him by handfuls and lapfuls. At last, being seized with an invincible desire of feeling money, taking off his slippers, he repeatedly walked over great heaps of gold coin spread upon the spacious floor, and then laying himself down, rolled his whole body in gold over and over again.

  XLIII. Only once in his life did he take an active part in military affairs, and then not from any set purpose, but during his journey to Mevania, to see the grove and river of Clitumnus.1 Being recommended to recruit a body of Batavians, who attended him, he resolved upon an expedition into Germany. Immediately he drew together several legions, and auxiliary forces from all quarters, and made every where new levies with the utmost rigour. Collecting supplies of all kinds, such as never had been assembled upon the like occasion, he set forward on his march, and pursued it sometimes with so much haste and precipitation, that the pretorian cohorts were obliged, contrary to custom, to pack their standards on horses or mules, and so follow him. At other times, he would march so slow and luxuriously, that he was carried in a litter by eight men; ordering the roads to be swept by the people of the neighbouring towns, and sprinkled with water to lay the dust.

  XLIV. On arriving at the camp, in order to show himself an active general, and severe disciplinarian, he cashiered the lieutenants who came up late with the auxiliary forces from different quarters. In reviewing the army, he deprived of their companies most of the centurions of the first rank, who had now served their legal time in the wars, and some whose time would have expired in a few days; alleging against them their age and infirmity; and railing at the covetous disposition of the rest of them, he reduced the bounty due to those who had served out their time to the sum of six thousand sesterces. Though he only received the submission of Adminius, the son of Cunobeline, a British king, who being driven from his native country by his father, came over to him with a small body of troops,1 yet, as if the whole island had been surrendered to him, he dispatched magnificent letters to Rome, ordering the bearers to proceed in their carriages directly up to the forum and the senate-house, and not to deliver the letters but to the consuls in the temple of Mars, and in the presence of a full assembly of the senators.

  XLV. Soon after this, there being no hostilities, he ordered a few Germans of his guard to be carried over and placed in concealment on the other side of the Rhine, and word to be brought him after dinner, that an enemy was advancing with great impetuosity. This being accordingly done, he immediately threw himself, with his friends, and a party of the pretorian knights, into the adjoining wood, where lopping branches from the trees, and forming trophies of them, he returned by torch-light, upbraiding those who did not follow him, with timorousness and cowardice; but he presented the companions and sharers of his victory with crowns of a new form, and under a new name, having the sun, moon, and stars represented on them, and which he called Exploratoriæ. Again, some hostages were by his order taken from the school, and privately sent off; upon notice of which he immediately rose from table, pursued them with the cavalry, as if they had run away, and coming up with them, brought them back in fetters; proceeding to an extravagant pitch of ostentation likewise in this military comedy. Upon his again sitting down to table, it being reported to him that the troops were all reassembled, he ordered them to sit down as they were, in their armour, animating them in the words of that wellknown verse of Virgil:

  • Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis.—Æn. 1.
  • Bear up, and save yourselves for better days.

  In the mean time, he reprimanded the senate and people of Rome in a very severe proclamation, “For revelling and frequenting the diversions of the circus and theatre, and enjoying themselves at their villas, whilst their emperor was fighting, and exposing himself to the greatest dangers.”

  XLVI. At last, as if resolved to make war in earnest, he drew up his army upon the shore of the ocean, with his balistæ and other engines of war, and while no one could imagine what he intended to do, on a sudden commanded them to gather up the sea shells, and fill their helmets, and the folds of their dress with them, calling them “the spoils of the ocean due to the Capitol and the Palatium.” As a monument of his success, he raised a lofty tower, upon which, as at Pharos,1 he ordered lights to be burnt in the night-time, for the direction of ships at sea; and then promising the soldiers a donative of a hundred denarii2 a man, as if he had surpassed the most eminent examples of generosity, “Go your ways,” said he, “and be merry: go, ye are rich.”

  XLVII. In making preparations for his triumph, besides the prisoners and deserters from the barbarian armies, he picked out the men of greatest stature in all Gaul, such as he said were fittest to grace a triumph, with some of the chiefs, and reserved them to appear in the procession; obliging them not only to dye their hair yellow, and let it grow long, but to learn the German language, and assume the names commonly used in that country. He ordered likewise the gallies in which he had entered the ocean, to be conveyed to Rome a great part of the way by land, and wrote to his comptrollers in the city, “to make proper preparations for a triumph against his arrival, at as small expense as possible; but on a scels such as had never been seen before, since they had full power over the property of every one.”

  XLVIII. Before he left the province, he formed a design of the most horrid cruelty—to massacre the legions which had mutinied upon the death of Augustus, for seizing and detaining by force his father, Germanicus, their commander, and himself, then an infant, in the camp. Though he was with great difficulty dissuaded from this rash attempt, yet neither the most urgent entreaties nor representations could prevent him from persisting in the design of decimating these legions. Accordingly, he ordered them to assemble unarmed, without so much as their swords; and then surrounded them with armed horse. But finding that many of them, suspecting that violence was intended, were making off, to arm in their own defence, he quitted the assembly as fast as he could, and immediately marched for Rome; bending now all his fury against the senate, whom he publicly threatened, to divert the general attention from the clamour excited by his disgraceful conduct. Amongst other pretexts of offence, he complained that he was defrauded of a triumph, which was justly his due, though he had just before forbidden, upon pain of death, any honour to be decreed him.

  XLIX. In his march he was waited upon by deputies from the senatorian order, entreating him to hasten his return. He replied to them, “I will come, I will come, and this with me,” striking at the same time the hilt of his sword. He issued likewise this proclamation: “I am coming, but for those only who wish for me, the equestrian order and the people; for I shall no longer treat the senate as their fellow-citizen or prince.” He forbad any of the senators to come to meet him; and either abandoning or deferring his triumph, he entered the city in ovation on his birth-day. Within four months from this period he was slain, after he had perpetrated enormous crimes, and while he was meditating the execution, if possible, of still greater. He had entertained a design of removing to Antium, and afterwards to Alexandria; having first cut off the flower of the equestrian and senatorian orders. This is placed beyond all question, by two books which were found in his cabinet under different titles; one being called the sword, and the other, the dagger. They both contained private marks, and the names of those who were devoted to death. There was also found a large chest, filled with a variety of poisons which being afterwards thrown into the sea by order of Claudius, are said to have so infected the waters, that the fish were poisoned, and cast dead by the tide upon the neighbouring shores.

  L. He was tall, of a pale complexion, ill-shaped, his neck and legs very slender, his eyes and temples hollow, his brows broad and knit, his hair thin, and the crown of the head bald. The other parts of his body were much covered with hair. On this account, it was reckoned a capital crime for any person to look down from above, as he was passing by, or so much as to name a goat. His countenance, which was naturally hideous and frightful, he purposely rendered more so, forming it before a mirror into the most horrible contortions. He was crazy both in body and mind, being subject, when a boy, to the falling sickness. When he arrived at the age of manhood, he endured fatigue tolerably well; but still, occasionally, he was liable to a faintness, during which he remained incapable of any effort. He was not insensible of the disorder of his mind, and sometimes had thoughts of retiring to clear his brain.1 It is believed that his wife Cæsonia administered to him a love potion which threw him into a frenzy. What most of all disordered him, was want of sleep, for he seldom had more than three or four hours’ rest in a night; and even then his sleep was not sound, but disturbed by strange dreams; fancying, among other things, that a form representing the ocean spoke to him. Being therefore often weary with lying awake so long, sometimes he sat up in his bed, at others, walked in the longest porticos about the house, and from time to time invoked and looked out for the approach of day.

  LI. To this crazy constitution of his mind may, I think, very justly be ascribed two faults which he had, of a nature directly repugnant one to the other, namely, an excessive confidence and the most abject timidity. For he, who affected so much to despise the gods, was ready to shut his eyes, and wrap up his head in his cloak at the slightest storm of thunder and lightning; and if it was violent, he got up and hid himself under his bed. In his visit to Sicily, after ridiculing many strange objects which that country affords, he ran away suddenly in the night from Messini, terrified by the smoke and rumbling at the summit of Mount Ætna. And though in words he was very valiant against the barbarians, yet upon passing a narrow defile in Germany in his light car, surrounded by a strong body of his troops, some one happening to say, “There would be no small consternation amongst us, if an enemy were to appear,” he immediately mounted his horse, and rode towards the bridges in great haste; but finding them blocked up with camp-followers and baggage-waggons, he was in such a hurry, that he caused himself to be carried in men’s hands over the heads of the crowd. Soon afterwards, upon hearing that the Germans were again in rebellion, he prepared to quit rome, and equipped a fleet; comforting himself with this consideration, that if the enemy should prove victorious, and possess themselves of the heights of the Alps, as the Cimbri1 had done, or of the city, as the Senones2 formerly did, he should still have in reserve the transmarine provinces.3 Hence it was, I suppose, that it occurred to his assassins, to invent the story intended to pacify the troops who mutinied at his death, that he had laid violent hands upon himself, in a fit of terror occasioned by the news brought him of the defeat of his army.

  LII. In the fashion of his clothes, shoes, and all the rest of his dress, he did not wear what was either national, or properly civic, or peculiar to the male sex, or appropriate to mere mortals. He often appeared abroad in a short coat of stout cloth, richly embroidered and blazing with jewels, in a tunic with sleeves, and with bracelets upon his arms; sometimes all in silks and habited like a woman; at other times in the crepidæ or buskins; sometimes in the sort of shoes used by the light-armed soldiers, or in the sock used by women, and commonly with a golden beard fixed to his chin, holding in his hand a thunderbolt, a trident, or a caduceus, marks of distinction belonging to the gods only. Sometimes, too, he appeared in the habit of Venus. He wore very commonly the triumphal ornaments, even before his expedition, and sometimes the breast-plate of Alexander the Great, taken out of his coffin.1

  LIII. With regard to the liberal sciences, he was little conversant in philology, but applied himself with assiduity to the study of eloquence, being indeed in point of enunciation tolerably elegant and ready; and in his perorations, when he was moved to anger, there was an abundant flow of words and periods. In speaking, his action was vehement, and his voice so strong, that he was heard at a great distance. When winding up an harangue, he threatened to draw “the sword of his lucubration,” holding a loose and smooth style in such contempt, that he said Seneca, who was then much admired, “wrote only detached essays,” and that “his language was nothing but sand without lime.” He often wrote answers to the speeches of successful orators; and employed himself in composing accusations or vindications of eminent persons, who were impeached before the senate; and gave his vote for or against the party accused, according to his success in speaking, inviting the equestrian order, by proclamation, to hear him.

  LIV. He also zealously applied himself to the practice of several other arts of different kinds, such as fencing, charioteering, singing, and dancing. In the first of these, he practised with the weapons used in war; and drove the chariot in circuses built in several places. He was so extremely fond of singing and dancing, that he could not refrain in the theatre from singing with the tragedians, and imitating the gestures of the actors, either by way of applause or correction. A night exhibition which he had ordered the day he was slain, was thought to be intended for no other reason, than to take the opportunity afforded by the licentiousness of the season, to make his first appearance upon the stage. Sometimes, also, he danced in the night. Summoning once to the palatium, in the second watch of the night,1 three men of consular rank, who feared the words from the message, he placed them on the proscenium of the stage, and then suddenly came bursting out, with a loud noise of flutes and castanets,2 dressed in a mantle and tunic reaching down to his heels. Having danced out a song, he retired. Yet he who had acquired such dexterity in other exercises, never learnt to swim.

  LV. Those for whom he once conceived a regard, he favoured even to madness. He used to kiss Mnester, the pantomimic actor, publicly in the theatre; and if any person made the least noise while he was dancing, he would order him to be dragged from his seat, and scourged him with his own hand. A Roman knight once making some bustle, he sent him, by a centurion, an order to depart forthwith for Ostia,3 and carry a letter from him to king Ptolemy in Mauritania. The letter was comprised in these words: “Do neither good nor harm to the bearer.” He made some gladiators captains of his German guards. He deprived the gladiators called Mirmillones of some of their arms. One Columbus coming off with victory in a combat, but being slightly wounded, he ordered some poison to be infused in the wound, which he thence called Columbinum. For thus it was certainly named with his own hand in a list of other poisons. He was so extravagantly fond of the party of charioteers whose colours were green,4 that he supped and lodged for some time constantly in the stable where their horses were kept. At a certain revel, he made a present of two millions of sesterces to one Cythicus, a driver of a chariot. The day before the Circensian games, he used to send his soldiers to enjoin silence in the neighbourhood, that the repose of his horse Incitatus1 might not be disturbed. For this favourite animal, besides a marble stable, an ivory manger, purple housings, and a jewelled frontlet, he appointed a house, with a retinue of slaves, and fine furniture, for the reception of such as were invited in the horse’s name to sup with him. It is even said that he intended to make him consul.

  LVI. In this frantic and savage career, numbers had formed designs for cutting him off; but one or two conspiracies being discovered, and others postponed for want of opportunity, at last two men concerted a plan together, and accomplished their purpose; not without the privity of some of the greatest favourites amongst his freedmen, and the prefects of the pretorian guards; because, having been named, though falsely, as concerned in one conspiracy against him, they perceived that they were suspected and become objects of his hatred. For he had immediately endeavoured to render them obnoxious to the soldiery, drawing his sword, and declaring, “That he would kill himself if they thought him worthy of death;” and ever after he was continually accusing them to one another, and setting them all mutually at variance. The conspirators having resolved to fall upon him as he returned at noon from the Palatine games, Cassius Chærea, tribune of the pretorian guards, claimed the part of making the onset. This Chærea was now an elderly man, and had been often reproached by Caius for effeminacy. When he came for the watchword, the latter would give “Priapus,” or “Venus;” and if on any occasion he returned thanks, would offer him his hand to kiss, making with his fingers an obscene gesture.

  LVII. His approaching fate was indicated by many prodigies. The statue of Jupiter at Olympia, which he had ordered to be taken down and brought to Rome, suddenly burst out into such a violent fit of laughter, that, the machines employed in the work giving way, the workmen took to their heels. When this accident happened, there came up a man named Cassius, who said that he was commanded in a dream to sacrifice a bull to Jupiter. The Capitol at Capua was struck with lightning upon the ides of March [15th March]; as was also, at Rome, the apartment of the chief porter of the Palatium. Some construed the latter into a presage that the master of the place was in danger from his own guards; and the other they regarded as a sign, that an illustrious person would be cut off, as had happened before on that day. Sylla, the astrologer, being consulted by him respecting his nativity, assured him, “That death would unavoidably and speedily befall him.” The oracle of Fortune at Antium likewise forewarned him of Cassius: on which account he had given orders for putting to death Cassius Longinus, at that time proconsul of Asia, not considering that Chærea bore also that name. The day preceding his death he dreamt that he was standing in heaven near the throne of Jupiter, who giving him a push with the great toe of his right foot, he fell headlong upon the earth. Some things which happened the very day of his death, and only a little before it, were likewise considered as ominous presages of that event. Whilst he was at sacrifice, he was bespattered with the blood of a flamingo. And Mnester, the pantomimic actor, performed in a play, which the tragedian Neoptolemus had formerly acted at the games in which Philip, the king of Macedon, was slain. And in the piece called Laureolus, in which the principal actor, running out in a hurry, and falling, vomited blood, several of the inferior actors vying with each other to give the best specimen of their art, made the whole stage flow with blood. A spectacle had been purposed to be performed that night, in which the fables of the infernal regions were to be represented by Egyptians and Ethiopians.

  LVIII. On the ninth of the calends of February [24th January], and about the seventh hour of the day, after hesitating whether he should rise to dinner, as his stomach was disordered by what he had eaten the day before, at last, by the advice of his friends, he came forth. In the vaulted passage through which he had to pass, were some boys of noble extraction, who had been brought from Asia to act upon the stage, waiting for him in a private corridor, and he stopped to see and speak to them; and had not the leader of the party said that he was suffering from cold, he would have gone back and made them act immediately. Respecting what followed two different accounts are given. Some say, that, whilst he was speaking to the boys, Chærea came behind him, and gave him a heavy blow on the neck with his sword, first crying out, “Take this:” that then a tribune, by name Cornelius Sabinus, another of the conspirators, ran him through the breast. Others say, that the crowd being kept at a distance by some centurions who were in the plot, Sabinus came, according to custom, for the word, and that Caius gave him “Jupiter,” upon which Chærea cried out, “Be it so!” and then, on his looking round, clove one of his jaws with a blow. As he lay on the ground, crying out that he was still alive,1 the rest dispatched him with thirty wounds. For the word agreed upon among them all was, “Strike again.” Some likewise ran their swords through his privy parts. Upon the first bustle, the litter bearers came running in with their poles to his assistance, and, immediately afterwards, his German body guards, who killed some of the assassins, and also some senators who had no concern in the affair.

  LIX. He lived twenty-nine years, and reigned three years, ten months, and eight days. His body was carried privately into the Lamian Gardens,2 where it was half burnt upon a pile hastily raised, and then had some earth carelessly thrown over it. It was afterwards disinterred by his sisters, on their return from banishment, burnt to ashes, and buried. Before this was done, it is well known that the keepers of the gardens were greatly disturbed by apparitions; and that not a night passed without some terrible alarm or other in the house where he was slain, until it was destroyed by fire. His wife Cæsonia was killed with him, being stabbed by a centurion; and his daughter had her brains knocked out against a wall.

  LX. Of the miserable condition of those times, any person may easily form an estimate from the following circumstances. When his death was made public, it was not immediately credited. People entertained a suspicion that a report of his being killed had been contrived and spread by himself, with the view of discovering how they stood affected towards him. Nor had the conspirators fixed upon any one to succeed him. The senators were so unanimous in their resolution to assert the liberty of their country, that the consuls assembled them at first not in the usual place of meeting, because it was named after Julius Cæsar, but in the Capitol. Some proposed to abolish the memory of the Cæsars, and level their temples with the ground. It was particularly remarked on this occasion, that all the Cæsars, who had the prænomen of Caius, died by the sword, from the Caius Cæsar who was slain in the times of Cinna.

  Unfortunately, a great chasm in the Annals of Tacitus, at this period, precludes all information from that historian respecting the reign of Caligula; but from what he mentions towards the close of the preceding chapter, it is evident that Caligula was forward to seize the reins of government, upon the death of Tiberius, whom, though he rivalled him in his vices, he was far from imitating in his dissimulation. Amongst the people, the remembrance of Germanicus’ virtues cherished for his family an attachment which was probably increased by its misfortunes; and they were anxious to see revived in the son the popularity of the father. Considering, however, that Caligula’s vicious disposition was already known, and that it had even been an inducement with Tiberius to procure his succession, in order that it might prove a foil to his own memory; it is surprising that no effort was made at this juncture to shake off the despotism which had been so intolerable in the last reign, and restore the ancient liberty of the republic. Since the commencement of the imperial dominion, there never had been any period so favourable for a counter-revolution as the present crisis. There existed now no Livia, to influence the minds of the senate and people in respect of the government; nor was there any other person allied to the family of Germanicus, whose countenance or intrigues could promote the views of Caligula. He himself was now only in the twenty-fifth year of his age, was totally inexperienced in the administration of public affairs, had never performed even the smallest service to his country, and was generally known to be of a character which disgraced his illustrious descent. Yet, in spite of all these circumstances, such was the destiny of Rome, that his accession afforded joy to the soldiers, who had known him in his childhood, and to the populace in the capital, as well as the people in the provinces, who were flattered with the delusive expectation of receiving a prince who should adorn the throne with the amiable virtues of Germanicus.

  It is difficult to say, whether weakness of understanding, or corruption of morals, were more conspicuous in the character of Caligula. He seems to have discovered from his earliest years an innate depravity of mind, which was undoubtedly much increased by defect of education. He had lost both his parents at an early period of life; and from Tiberius’ own character, as well as his views in training the person who should succeed him on the throne, there is reason to think, that if any attention whatever was paid to the education of Caligula, it was directed to vitiate all his faculties and passions, rather than to correct and improve them. If such was really the object, it was indeed prosecuted with success.

  The commencement, however, of his reign was such as by no means prognosticated its subsequent transition. The sudden change of his conduct, the astonishing mixture of imbecility and presumption, of moral turpitude and frantic extravagance, which he afterwards evinced; such as rolling himself over heaps of gold, his treatment of his horse Incitatus, and his design of making him consul, seem to justify a suspicion that his brain had actually been affected, either by the potion, said to have been given him by his wife Cæsonia, or otherwise. Philtres, or love-potions, as they were called, were frequent in those times; and the people believed that they operated upon the mind by a mysterious and sympathetic power. It is, however, beyond a doubt, that their effects were produced entirely by the action of their physical qualities upon the organs of the body. They were usually made of the satyrion, which, according to Pliny, was a provocative. They were generally given by women to their husbands at bed-time; and it was necessary towards their successful operation, that the parties should sleep together. This circumstance explains the whole mystery. The philtres were nothing more than medicines of a stimulating quality, which, after exciting violent, but temporary effects, enfeebled the constitution, and occasioned nervous disorders, by which the mental faculties, as well as the corporeal, might be injured. That this was really the case with Caligula, seems probable, not only from the falling sickness, to which he was subject, but from the habitual wakefulness of which he complained.

  The profusion of this emperor, during his short reign of three years and ten months, is unexampled in history. In the midst of profound peace, without any extraordinary charges either civil or military, he expended, in less than one year, besides the current revenue of the empire, the sum of £21,796,875 sterling, which had been left by Tiberius at his death. To supply the extravagance of future years, new and exorbitant taxes were imposed upon the people, and those too on the necessaries of life. There existed now amongst the Romans every motive that could excite a general indignation against the government; yet such was still the dread of imperial power, though vested in the hands of so weak and despicable a sovereign, that no insurrection was attempted, nor any extensive conspiracy formed; but the obnoxious emperor fell at last a sacrifice to a few centurions of his own guard.

  This reign was of too short duration to afford any new productions in literature; but, had it been extended to a much longer period, the effects would probably have been the same. Polite learning never could flourish under an emperor who entertained a design of destroying the writings of Virgil and Livy. It is fortunate that these, and other valuable productions of antiquity, were too widely diffused over the world, and too carefully preserved, to be in danger of perishing through the frenzy of this capricious barbarian.

  TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS DRUSUS CÆSAR.1

  I.Livia, having married Augustus when she was pregnant, was within three months afterwards delivered of Drusus, the father of Claudius Cæsar, who had at first the prænomen of Decimus, but afterwards that of Nero; and it was suspected that he was begotten in adultery by his father-in-law. The following verse, however, was immediately in every one’s mouth:—

  • Τοῖς ἐυτυχοῦσι ϰὰι ϛρίμηνα παιδία.
  • Nine months for common births the fates decree;
  • But, for the great, reduce the term to three.

  This Drusus, during the time of his being quæstor and prætor, commanded in the Rhætian and German wars, and was the first of all the Roman generals who navigated the Northern Ocean.2 He made likewise some prodigious trenches beyond the Rhine,3 which to this day are called by his name. He overthrew the enemy in several battles, and drove them far back into the depths of the desert. Nor did he desist from pursuing them, until an apparition, in the form of a barbarian woman, of more than human size, appeared to him, and, in the Latin tongue, forbad him to proceed any farther. For these achievements he had the honour of an ovation, and the triumphal ornaments. After his prætorship, he immediately entered on the office of consul, and returning again to Germany, died of disease, in the summer encampment, which thence obtained the name of “The Unlucky Camp.” His corpse was carried to Rome by the principal persons of the several municipalities and colonies upon the road, being met and received by the recorders of each place, and buried in the Campus Martius. In honour of his memory, the army erected a monument, round which the soldiers used, annually, upon a certain day, to march in solemn procession, and persons deputed from the several cities of Gaul performed religious rites. The senate likewise, among various other honours, decreed for him a triumphal arch of marble, with trophies, in the Appian Way, and gave the cognomen of Germanicus to him and his posterity. In him the civil and military virtues were equally displayed; for, besides his victories, he gained from the enemy the Spolia Opima,1 and frequently marked out the German chiefs in the midst of their army, and encountered them in single combat, at the utmost hazard of his life. He likewise often declared that he would, some time or other, if possible, restore the ancient government. On this account, I suppose, some have ventured to affirm that Augustus was jealous of him, and recalled him; and because he made no haste to comply with the order, took him off by poison. This I mention, that I may not be guilty of any omission, more than because I think it either true or probable; since Augustus loved him so much when living, that he always, in his wills, made him joint-heir with his sons, as he once declared in the senate; and upon his decease, extolled him in a speech to the people, to that degree, that he prayed the gods “to make his Cæsars like him, and to grant himself as honourable an exit out of this world as they had given him.” And not satisfied with inscribing upon his tomb an epitaph in verse composed by himself, he wrote likewise the history of his life in prose. He had by the younger Antonia several children, but left behind him only three, namely, Germanicus, Livilla, and Claudius.

  II. Claudius was born at Lyons, in the consulship of Julius Antonius, and Fabius Africanus, upon the first of August,2 the very lay upon which an altar was first dedicated there to Augustus. He was named Tiberius Claudius Drusus, but soon afterwards, upon the adoption of his elder brother into the Julian family, he assumed the cognomen of Germanicus. He was left an infant by his father, and during almost the whole of his minority, and for some time after he attained the age of manhood, was afflicted with a variety of obstinate disorders, insomuch that his mind and body being greatly impaired, he was, even after his arrival at years of maturity, never thought sufficiently qualified for any public or private employment. He was, therefore, during a long time, and even after the expiration of his minority, under the direction of a pedagogue, who, he complains in a certain memoir, “was a barbarous wretch, and formerly superintendent of the mule-drivers, who was selected for his governor, on purpose to correct him severely on every trifling occasion.” On account of this crazy constitution of body and mind, at the spectacle of gladiators, which he gave the people, jointly with his brother, in honour of his father’s memory, he presided, muffled up in a pallium—a new fashion. When he assumed the manly habit, he was carried in a litter, at midnight, to the Capitol, without the usual ceremony.

  III. He applied himself, however, from an early age, with great assiduity to the study of the liberal sciences, and frequently published specimens of his skill in each of them. But never, with all his endeavours, could he attain to any public post in the government, or afford any hope of arriving at distinction thereafter. His mother, Antonia, frequently called him “an abortion of a man, that had been only begun, but never finished, by nature.” And when she would upbraid any one with dulness, she said, “He was a greater fool than her son, Claudius.” His grandmother, Augusta, always treated him with the utmost contempt, very rarely spoke to him, and when she did admonish him upon any occasion, it was in writing, very briefly and severely, or by messengers. His sister, Livilla, upon hearing that he was about to be created emperor, openly and loudly expressed her indignation that the Roman people should experience a fate so severe and so much below their grandeur. To exhibit the opinion, both favourable and otherwise, entertained concerning him by Augustus, his great-uncle, I have here subjoined some extracts from the letters of that emperor.

  IV. “I have had some conversation with Tiberius, according to your desire, my dear Livia, as to what must be done with your grandson, Tiberius, at the games of Mars. We are both agreed in this, that, once for all, we ought to determine what course to take with him. For if he be really sound and, so to speak, quite right in his intellects,1 why should we hesitate to promote him by the same steps and degrees we did his brother? But if we find him below par, and deficient both in body and mind, we must beware of giving occasion for him and ourselves to be laughed at by the world, which is ready enough to make such things the subject of mirth and derision. For we never shall be easy, if we are always to be debating upon every occasion of this kind, without settling, in the first instance, whether he be really capable of public offices or not. With regard to what you consult me about at the present moment, I am not against his superintending the feast of the priests, in the games of Mars, if he will suffer himself to be governed by his kinsman, Silanus’s son, that he may do nothing to make the people stare and laugh at him. But I do not approve of his witnessing the Circensian games from the Pulvinar. He will be there exposed to view in the very front of the theatre. Nor do I like that he should go to the Alban Mount,2 or be at Rome during the Latin festival.3 For if he be capable of attending his brother to the mount, why is he not made prefect of the city? Thus, my dear Livia, you have my thoughts upon the matter. In my opinion, we ought to settle this affair once for all, that we may not be always in suspense between hope and fear. You may, if you think proper, give your kinsman Antonia this part of my letter to read.” In another letter, he writes as follows: “I shall invite the youth, Tiberius, every day during your absence, to supper, that he may not sup alone with his friends Sulpicius and Athenodorus. I wish the poor creature was more cautious and attentive in the choice of some one, whose manners, air, and gait might be proper for his imitation:

  • Ἀτυχεῖ πάνυ ἑν τοῖς σπουδαίοις λίαν.
  • In things of consequence he sadly fails.

  Where his mind does not run astray, he discovers a noble disposition.” In a third letter, he says, “Let me die, my dear Livia, if I am not astonished, that the declamation of your grandson, Tiberius, should please me; for how he who talks so ill, should be able to declaim so clearly and properly, I cannot imagine.” There is no doubt but Augustus, after this, came to a resolution upon the subject, and, accordingly, left him invested with no other honour than that of the Augural priesthood; naming him amongst the heirs of the third degree, who were but distantly allied to his family, for a sixth part of his estate only, with a legacy of no more than eight hundred thousand sesterces.

  V. Upon his requesting some office in the state, Tiberius granted him the honorary appendages of the consulship, and when he pressed for a legitimate appointment, the emperor wrote word back, that “he sent him forty gold pieces for his expenses, during the festivals of the Saturnalia and Sigillaria.” Upon this, laying aside all hope of advancement, he resigned himself entirely to an indolent life; living in great privacy, one while in his gardens, or a villa which he had near the city; another while in Campania, where he passed his time in the lowest society; by which means, besides his former character of a dull, heavy fellow, he acquired that of a drunkard and gamester.

  VI. Notwithstanding this sort of life, much respect was shown him both in public and private. The equestrian order twice made choice of him to intercede on their behalf; once to obtain from the consuls the favour of bearing on their shoulders the corpse of Augustus to Rome, and a second time to congratulate him upon the death of Sejanus. When he entered the theatre, they used to rise, and put off their cloaks. The senate likewise decreed, that he should be added to the number of the Augustal college of priests, who were chosen by lot; and soon afterwards, when his house was burnt down, that it should be rebuilt at the public charge; and that he should have the privilege of giving his vote amongst the men of consular rank. This decree was, however, repealed; Tiberius insisting to have him excused on account of his imbecility, and promising to make good his loss at his own expense. But at his death, he named him in his will, amongst his third heirs, for a third part of his estate; leaving him besides a legacy of two millions of sesterces, and expressly recommending him to the armies, the senate and people of Rome, amongst his other relations.

  VII. At last, Caius,1 his brother’s son, upon his advancement to the empire, endeavouring to gain the affections of the public by all the arts of popularity, Claudius also was admitted to public offices, and held the consulship jointly with his nephew for two months. As he was entering the Forum for the first time with the fasces, an eagle which was flying that way, alighted upon his right shoulder. A second consulship was also allotted him, to commence at the expiration of the fourth year. He sometimes presided at the public spectacles, as the representative of Caius; being always, on those occasions, complimented with the acclamations of the people, wishing him all happiness, sometimes under the title of the emperor’s uncle, and sometimes under that of Germanicus’s brother.

  VIII. Still he was subjected to many slights. If at any time he came in late to supper, he was obliged to walk round the room some time before he could get a place at table. When he indulged himself with sleep after eating, which was a common practice with him, the company used to throw olive-stones and dates at him. And the buffoons who attended would wake him, as if it were only in jest, with a cane or a whip. Sometimes they would put slippers upon his hands, as he lay snoring, that he might, upon awaking, rub his face with them.

  IX. He was not only exposed to contempt, but sometimes likewise to considerable danger: first, in his consulship; for, having been too remiss in providing and erecting the statues of Caius’s brothers, Nero and Drusus, he was very near being deprived of his office; and afterwards he was continually harassed with informations against him by one or other, sometimes even by his own domestics. When the conspiracy of Lepidus and Gætulicus was discovered, being sent with some other deputies into Germany,1 to congratulate the emperor upon the occasion, he was in danger of his life; Caius being greatly enraged, and loudly complaining, that his uncle was sent to him, as if he was a boy who wanted a governor. Some even say, that he was thrown into a river, in his travelling dress. From this period, he voted in the senate always the last of the members of consular rank; being called upon after the rest, on purpose to disgrace him. A charge for the forgery of a will was also allowed to be prosecuted, though he had only signed it as a witness. At last, being obliged to pay eight millions of sesterces on entering upon a new office of priesthood, he was reduced to such straits in his private affairs, that in order to discharge his bond to the treasury, he was under the necessity of exposing to sale his whole estate, by an order of the prefects.

  X. Having spent the greater part of his life under these and the like circumstances, he came at last to the empire in the fiftieth year of his age,2 by a very surprising turn of fortune. Being, as well as the rest, prevented from approaching Caius by the conspirators, who dispersed the crowd, under the pretext of his desiring to be private, he retired into an apartment called the Hermæum;3 and soon afterwards, terrified by the report of Caius being slain, he crept into an adjoining balcony, where he hid himself behind the hangings of the door. A common soldier, who happened to pass that way, spying his feet, and desirous to discover who he was, pulled him out; when immediately recognizing him, he threw himself in a great fright at his feet, and saluted him by the title of emperor. He then conducted him to his fellow-soldiers, who were all in a great rage, and irresolute what they should do. They put him into a litter, and as the slaves of the palace had all fled, took their turns in carrying him on their shoulders, and brought him into the camp, sad and trembling; the people who met him lamenting his situation, as if the poor innocent was being carried to execution. Being received within the ramparts,1 he continued all night with the sentries on guard, recovered somewhat from his fright, but in no great hopes of the succession. For the consuls, with the senate and civic troops, had possessed themselves of the Forum and Capitol, with the determination to assert the public liberty; and he being sent for likewise, by a tribune of the people, to the senate-house, to give his advice upon the present juncture of affairs, returned answer, “I am under constraint, and cannot possibly come.” The day afterwards, the senate being dilatory in their proceedings, and worn out by divisions amongst themselves, while the people who surrounded the senate-house shouted that they would have one master, naming Claudius, he suffered the soldiers assembled under arms to swear allegiance to him, promising them fifteen thousand sesterces a man: he being the first of the Cæsars who purchased the submission of the soldiers with money.2

  XI. Having thus established himself in power, his first object was to abolish all remembrance of the two preceding days, in which a revolution in the state had been canvassed. Accordingly, he passed an act of perpetual oblivion and pardon for every thing said or done during that time; and this he faithfully observed, with the exception only of putting to death a few tribunes and centurions concerned in the conspiracy against Caius, both as an example, and because he understood that they had also planned his own death. He now turned his thoughts towards paying respect to the memory of his relations. His most solemn and usual oath was, “By Augustus.” He prevailed upon the senate to decree divine honours to his grandmother Livia, with a chariot in the Circensian procession drawn by elephants, as had been appointed for Augustus;1 and public offerings to the shades of his parents. Besides which, he instituted Circensian games for his father, to be celebrated every year, upon his birth-day, and, for his mother, a chariot to be drawn through the circus; with the title of Augusta, which had been refused by his grandmother.2 To the memory of his brother,3 to which, upon all occasions, he showed a great regard, he gave a Greek comedy, to be exhibited in the public diversions at Naples,4 and awarded the crown for it, according to the sentence of the judges in that solemnity. Nor did he omit to make honourable and grateful mention of Mark Antony; declaring by a proclamation, “That he the more earnestly insisted upon the observation of his father Drusus’s birth-day, because it was likewise that of his grandfather Antony.” He completed the marble arch near Pompey’s theatre, which had formerly been decreed by the senate in honour of Tiberius, but which had been neglected.5 And though he cancelled all the acts of Caius, yet he forbad the day of his assassination, notwithstanding it was that of his own accession to the empire, to be reckoned amongst the festivals.

  XII. But with regard to his own aggrandisement, he was sparing and modest, declining the title of emperor, and refusing all excessive honours. He celebrated the marriage of his daughter and the birth-day of a grandson with great privacy, at home. He recalled none of those who had been banished, without a decree of the senate: and requested of them permission for the prefect of the military tribunes and pretorian guards to attend him in the senate-house;6 and also that they would be pleased to bestow upon his procurators judicial authority in the provinces.1 He asked of the consuls likewise the privilege of holding fairs upon his private estate. He frequently assisted the magistrates in the trial of causes, as one of their assessors. And when they gave public spectacles, he would rise up with the rest of the spectators, and salute them both by words and gestures. When the tribunes of the people came to him while he was on the tribunal, he excused himself, because, on account of the crowd, he could not hear them unless they stood. In a short time, by this conduct, he wrought himself so much into the favour and affection of the public, that when, upon his going to Ostia, a report was spread in the city that he had been way-laid and slain, the people never ceased cursing the soldiers for traitors, and the senate as parricides, until one or two persons, and presently after several others, were brought by the magistrates upon the rostra, who assured them that he was alive, and not far from the city, on his way home.

  XIII. Conspiracies, however, were formed against him, not only by individuals separately, but by a faction; and at last his government was disturbed with a civil war. A low fellow was found with a poniard about him, near his chamber, at midnight. Two men of the equestrian order were discovered waiting for him in the streets, armed with a tuck and a huntsman’s dagger; one of them intending to attack him as he came out of the theatre, and the other as he was sacrificing in the temple of Mars. Gallus Asinius and Statilius Corvinus, grandsons of the two orators, Pollio and Messala,2 formed a conspiracy against him, in which they engaged many of his freedmen and slaves. Furius Camillus Scribonianus, his lieutenant in Dalmatia, broke into rebellion, but was reduced in the space of five days; the legions which he had seduced from their oath of fidelity relinquishing their purpose, upon an alarm occasioned by ill omens. For when orders were given them to march, to meet their new emperor, the eagles could not be decorated, nor the standards pulled out of the ground, whether it was by accident, or a divine interposition.

  XIV. Besides his former consulship, he held the office afterwards four times; the first two successively,1 but the following, after an interval of four years each;2 the last for six months, the others for two; and the third, upon his being chosen in the room of a consul who died; which had never been done by any of the emperors before him. Whether he was consul or out of office, he constantly attended the courts for the administration of justice, even upon such days as were solemnly observed as days of rejoicing in his family, or by his friends; and sometimes upon the public festivals of ancient institution. Nor did he always adhere strictly to the letter of the laws, but overruled the rigour or lenity of many of their enactments, according to his sentiments of justice and equity. For where persons lost their suits by insisting upon more than appeared to be their due, before the judges of private causes, he granted them the indulgence of a second trial. And with regard to such as were convicted of any great delinquency, he even exceeded the punishment appointed by law, and condemned them to be exposed to wild beasts.3

  XV. But in hearing and determining causes, he exhibited a strange inconsistency of temper, being at one time circumspect and sagacious, at another inconsiderate and rash, and sometimes frivolous, and like one out of his mind. In correcting the roll of judges, he struck off the name of one who, concealing the privilege his children gave him to be excused from serving, had answered to his name, as too eager for the office. Another who was summoned before him in a cause of his own, but alleged that the affair did not properly come under the emperor’s cognizance, but that of the ordinary judges, he ordered to plead the cause himself immediately before him, and show in a case of his own, how equitable a judge he would prove in that of other persons. A woman refusing to acknowledge her own son, and there being no clear proof on either side, he obliged her to confess the truth, by ordering her to marry the young man.1 He was much inclined to determine causes in favour of the parties who appeared, against those who did not, without inquiring whether their absence was occasioned by their own fault, or by real necessity. On proclamation of a man’s being convicted of forgery, and that he ought to have his hand cut off, he insisted that an executioner should be immediately sent for, with a Spanish sword and a block. A person being prosecuted for falsely assuming the freedom of Rome, and a frivolous dispute arising between the advocates in the cause, whether he ought to make his appearance in the Roman or Grecian dress, to show his impartiality, he commanded him to change his clothes several times according to the character he assumed in the accusation or defence. An anecdote is related of him, and believed to be true, that, in a particular cause, he delivered his sentence in writing thus: “I am in favour of those who have spoken the truth.”2 By this he so much forfeited the good opinion of the world, that he was everywhere and openly despised. A person making an excuse for the non-appearance of a witness whom he had sent for from the provinces, declared it was impossible for him to appear, concealing the reason for some time: at last, after several interrogatories were put to him on the subject, he answered, “The man is dead;” to which Claudius replied, “I think that is a sufficient excuse.” Another thanking him for suffering a person who was prosecuted to make his defence by counsel, added, “And yet it is no more than what is usual.” I have likewise heard some old men say,3 that the advocates used to abuse his patience so grossly, that they would not only call him back, as he was quitting the tribunal, but would seize him by the lap of his coat, and sometimes catch him by the heels, to make him stay. That such behaviour, however strange, is not incredible, will appear from this anecdote. Some obscure Greek, who was a litigant, had an altercation with him, in which he called out, “You are an old fool.”1 It is certain that a Roman knight, who was prosecuted by an impotent device of his enemies on a false charge of abominable obscenity with women, observing that common strumpets were summoned against him and allowed to give evidence, upbraided Claudius in very harsh and severe terms with his folly and cruelty, and threw his style, and some books which he had in his hands, in his face, with such violence as to wound him severely in the cheek.

  XVI. He likewise assumed the censorship,2 which had been discontinued since the time that Paulus and Plancus had jointly held it. But this also he administered very unequally, and with a strange variety of humour and conduct. In his review of the knights, he passed over, without any mark of disgrace, a profligate young man, only because his father spoke of him in the highest terms; “for,” said he, “his father is his proper censor.” Another, who was infamous for debauching youths and for adultery, he only admonished “to indulge his youthful inclinations more sparingly, or at least more cautiously:”3 adding, “why must I know what mistress you keep?” When, at the request of his friends, he had taken off a mark of infamy which he had set upon one knight’s name, he said, “Let the blot, however, remain.” He not only struck out of the list of judges, but likewise deprived of the freedom of Rome, an illustrious man of the highest provincial rank in Greece, only because he was ignorant of the Latin language. Nor in this review did he suffer any one to give an account of his conduct by an advocate, but obliged each man to speak for himself in the best way he could. He disgraced many, and some that little expected it, and for a reason entirely new, namely, for going out of Italy without his license; and one likewise, for having in his province been the familiar companion of a king; observing, that, in former times, Rabirius Posthumus had been prosecuted for treason, although he only went after Ptolemy to Alexandria for the purpose of securing payment of a debt.1 Having tried to brand with disgrace several others, he, to his own greater shame, found them generally innocent, through the negligence of the persons employed to inquire into their characters; those whom he charged with living in celibacy, with want of children, or estate, proving themselves to be husbands, parents, and in affluent circumstances. One of the knights who was charged with stabbing himself, laid his bosom bare, to show that there was not the least mark of violence upon his body. The following incidents were remarkable in his censorship. He ordered a car, plated with silver, and of very sumptuous workmanship, which was exposed for sale in the Sigillaria,2 to be purchased, and broken in pieces before his eyes. He published twenty proclamations in one day, in one of which he advised the people, “Since the vintage was very plentiful, to have their casks well secured at the bung with pitch:” and in another, he told them, “that nothing would sooner cure the bite of a viper, than the sap of the yew-tree.”

  XVII. He undertook only one expedition, and that was of short duration. The triumphal ornaments decreed him by the senate, he considered as beneath the imperial dignity, and was therefore resolved to have the honour of a real triumph. For this purpose, he selected Britain, which had never been attempted by any one since Julius Cæsar,3 and was then chafing with rage, because the Romans would not give up some deserters. Accordingly, he set sail from Ostia, but was twice very near being wrecked by the boisterous wind called Circius,1 upon the coast of Liguria, and near the islands called Stœchades.2 Having marched by land from Marseilles to Gessoriacum,3 he thence passed over to Britain, and part of the island submitting to him, within a few days after his arrival, without battle or bloodshed, he returned to Rome in less than six months from the time of his departure, and triumphed in the most solemn manner;4 to witness which, he not only gave leave to governors of provinces to come to Rome, but even to some of the exiles. Among the spoils taken from the enemy, he fixed upon the pediment of his house in the Palatium, a naval crown, in token of his having passed, and, as it were, conquered the Ocean, and had it suspended near the civic crown which was there before. Messalina, his wife, followed his chariot in a covered litter.1 Those who had attained the honour of triumphal ornaments in the same war, rode behind; the rest followed on foot, wearing the robe with the broad stripes. Crassus Frugi was mounted upon a horse richly caparisoned, in a robe embroidered with palm leaves, because this was the second time of his obtaining that honour.

  XVIII. He paid particular attention to the care of the city, and to have it well supplied with provisions. A dreadful fire happening in the Æmiliana,2 which lasted some time, he passed two nights in the Diribitorium,3 and the soldiers and gladiators not being in sufficient numbers to extinguish it, he caused the magistrates to summon the people out of all the streets in the city, to their assistance. Placing bags of money before him, he encouraged them to do their utmost, declaring, that he would reward every one on the spot, according to their exertions.

  XIX. During a scarcity of provisions, occasioned by bad crops for several successive years, he was stopped in the middle of the forum by the mob, who so abused him, at the same time pelting him with fragments of bread, that he had some difficulty in escaping into the palace by a back door. He therefore used all possible means to bring provisions to the city, even in the winter. He proposed to the merchants a sure profit, by indemnifying them against any loss that might befall them by storms at sea; and granted great privileges to those who built ships for that traffic. To a citizen of Rome he gave an exemption from the penalty of the Papia-Poppæan law;1 to one who had only the privilege of Latium, the freedom of the city; and to women the rights which by law belonged to those who had four children: which enactments are in force to this day.

  XX. He completed some important public works, which, though not numerous, were very useful. The principal were an aqueduct, which had been begun by Caius; an emissary for the discharge of the waters of the Fucine lake,2 and the harbour of Ostia; although he knew that Augustus had refused to comply with the repeated application of the Marsians for one of these: and that the other had been several times intended by Julius Cæsar, but as often abandoned on account of the difficulty of its execution. He brought to the city the cool and plentiful springs of the Claudian water, one of which is called Cæruleus, and the other Curtius and Albudinus, as likewise the river of the New Anio, in a stone canal; and distributed them into many magnificent reservoirs. The canal from the Fucine lake was undertaken as much for the sake of profit, as for the honour of the enterprise; for there were parties who offered to drain it at their own expense, on condition of their having a grant of the land laid dry. With great difficulty he completed a canal three miles in length, partly by cutting through, and partly by tunnelling, a mountain; thirty thousand men being constantly employed in the work for eleven years.3 He formed the harbour at Ostia, by carrying out circular piers on the right and on the left, with 1 a mole protecting, in deep water, the entrance of the port. To secure the foundation of this mole, he sunk the vessel in which the great obelisk2 had been brought from Egypt;3 and built upon piles a very lofty tower, in imitation of the Pharos at Alexandria, on which lights were burnt to direct mariners in the night.

  XXI. He often distributed largesses of corn and money among the people, and entertained them with a great variety of public magnificent spectacles, not only such as were usual, and in the accustomed places, but some of new invention, and others revived from ancient models, and exhibited in places where nothing of the kind had been ever before attempted. In the games which he presented at the dedication of Pompey’s theatre,4 which had been burnt down, and was rebuilt by him, he presided upon a tribunal erected for him in the orchestra; having first paid his devotions, in the temple above, and then coming down through the centre of the circle, while all the people kept their seats in profound silence.5 He likewise exhibited the secular games,1 giving out that Augustus had anticipated the regular period; though he himself says in his history, “That they had been omitted before the age of Augustus, who had calculated the years with great exactness, and again brought them to their regular period.”2 The crier was therefore ridiculed, when he invited people in the usual form, “to games which no person had ever before seen, nor ever would again;” when many were still living who had already seen them; and some of the performers who had formerly acted in them, were now again brought upon the stage. He likewise frequently celebrated the Circensian games in the Vatican,3 sometimes exhibiting a hunt of wild beasts, after every five courses. He embellished the Circus Maximus with marble barriers, and gilded goals, which before were of common stone4 and wood, and assigned proper places for the senators, who were used to sit promiscuously with the other spectators. Besides the chariot-races, he exhibited there the Trojan game, and wild beasts from Africa, which were encountered by a troop of pretorian knights, with their tribunes, and even the prefect at the head of them; besides Thessalian horse, who drive fierce bulls round the circus, leap upon their backs when they have exhausted their fury, and drag them by the horns to the ground. He gave exhibitions of gladiators in several places, and of various kinds; one yearly on the anniversary of his accession in the pretorian camp,5 but without any hunting, or the usual apparatus; another in the Septa as usual; and in the same place, another out of the common way, and of a few days’ continuance only, which he called Sportula; because when he was going to present it, he informed the people by proclamation, “that he invited them to a late supper, got up in haste, and without ceremony.” Nor did he lend himself to any kind of public diversion with more freedom and hilarity; insomuch that he would hold out his left hand, and joined by the common people, count upon his fingers aloud the gold pieces presented to those who came off conquerors. He would earnestly invite the company to be merry; sometimes calling them his “masters,” with a mixture of insipid, far-fetched jests. Thus, when the people called for Palumbus,1 he said, “He would give them one when he could catch it.” The following was well-intended, and well-timed: having, amidst great applause, spared a gladiator, on the intercession of his four sons, he sent a billet immediately round the theatre, to remind the people, “how much it behoved them to get children, since they had before them an example how useful they had been in procuring favour and security for a gladiator.” He likewise represented in the Campus Martius, the assault and sacking of a town, and the surrender of the British kings,2 presiding in his general’s cloak. Immediately before he drew off the waters from the Fucine lake, he exhibited upon it a naval fight. But the combatants on board the fleets crying out, “Health attend you, noble emperor! We, who are about to peril our lives, salute you;” and he replying, “Health attend you too,” they all refused to fight, as if by that response he had meant to excuse them. Upon this, he hesitated for a time, whether he should not destroy them all with fire and sword. At last, leaping from his seat, and running along the shore of the lake with tottering steps, the result of his foul excesses, he, partly by fair words, and partly by threats, persuaded them to engage. This spectacle represented an engagement between the fleets of Sicily and Rhodes; consisting each of twelve ships of war, of three banks of oars. The signal for the encounter was given by a silver Triton, raised by machinery from the middle of the lake.

  XXII. With regard to religious ceremonies, the administration of affairs both civil and military, and the condition of all orders of the people at home and abroad, some practices he corrected, others which had been laid aside he revived; and some regulations he introduced which were entirely new. In appointing new priests for the several colleges, he made no appointments without being sworn. When an earthquake happened in the city, he never failed to summon the people together by the prætor, and appoint holidays for sacred rites. And upon the sight of any ominous bird in the City or Capitol, he issued an order for a supplication, the words of which, by virtue of his office of high priest, after an exhortation from the rostra, he recited in the presence of the people, who repeated them after him; all workmen and slaves being first ordered to withdraw.

  XXIII. The courts of judicature, whose sittings had been formerly divided between the summer and winter months, he ordered, for the dispatch of business, to sit the whole year round. The jurisdiction in matters of trust, which used to be granted annually by special commission to certain magistrates, and in the city only, he made permanent, and extended to the provincial judges likewise. He altered a clause added by Tiberius to the Papia-Poppæan law,1 which inferred that men of sixty years of age were incapable of begetting children. He ordered that, out of the ordinary course of proceeding, orphans might have guardians appointed them by the consuls; and that those who were banished from any province by the chief magistrate, should be debarred from coming into the City, or any part of Italy. He inflicted on certain persons a new sort of banishment, by forbidding them to depart further than three miles from Rome. When any affair of importance came before the senate, he used to sit between the two consuls upon the seats of the tribunes. He reserved to himself the power of granting license to travel out of Italy, which before had belonged to the senate.

  XXIV. He likewise granted the consular ornaments to his Ducenarian procurators. From those who declined the senatorian dignity, he took away the equestrian. Although he had in the beginning of his reign declared, that he would admit no man into the senate who was not the great-grandson of a Roman citizen, yet he gave the “broad hem” to the son of a freedman, on condition that he should be adopted by a Roman knight. Being afraid, however, of incurring censure by such an act, he informed the public, that his ancestor Appius Cæcus, the censor, had elected the sons of freedmen into the senate; for he was ignorant, it seems, that in the times of Appius, and a long while afterwards, persons manumitted were not called freedmen, but only their sons who were free-born. Instead of the expense which the college of quæstors was obliged to incur in paving the high-ways, he ordered them to give the people an exhibition of gladiators; and relieving them of the provinces of Ostia and [Cisalpine] Gaul, he reinstated them in the charge of the treasury, which, since it was taken from them, had been managed by the prætors, or those who had formerly filled that office. He gave the triumphal ornaments to Silanus, who was betrothed to his daughter, though he was under age; and in other cases, he bestowed them on so many, and with so little reserve, that there is extant a letter unanimously addressed to him by all the legions, begging him “to grant his consular lieutenants the triumphal ornaments at the time of their appointment to commands, in order to prevent their seeking occasion to engage in unnecessary wars.” He decreed to Aulus Plautius the honour of an ovation,1 going to meet him at his entering the city, and walking with him in the procession to the Capitol, and back, in which he took the left side, giving him the post of honour. He allowed Gabinius Secundus, upon his conquest of the Chauci, a German tribe, to assume the cognomen of Chaucius.2

  XXV. His military organization of the equestrian order was this. After having the command of a cohort, they were promoted to a wing of auxiliary horse, and subsequently received the commission of tribune of a legion. He raised a body of militia, who were called Supernumeraries, who, though they were a sort of soldiers, and kept in reserve, yet received pay. He procured an act of the senate to prohibit all soldiers from attending senators at their houses, in the way of respect and compliment. He confiscated the estates of all freedmen who presumed to take upon themselves the equestrian rank. Such of them as were ungrateful to their patrons, and were complained of by them, he reduced to their former condition of slavery; and declared to their advocates, that he would always give judgment against the freedmen, in any suit at law which the masters might happen to have with them. Some persons having exposed their sick slaves, in a languishing condition, on the island of Æsculapius,1 because of the tediousness of their cure; he declared all who were so exposed perfectly free, never more to return, if they should recover, to their former servitude; and that if any one chose to kill at once, rather than expose, a slave, he should be liable for murder. He published a proclamation, forbidding all travellers to pass through the towns of Italy any otherwise than on foot, or in a litter or chair.2 He quartered a cohort of soldiers at Puteoli, and another at Ostia, to be in readiness against any accidents from fire. He prohibited foreigners from adopting Roman names, especially those which belonged to families.3 Those who falsely pretended to the freedom of Rome, he beheaded on the Esquiline. He gave up to the senate the provinces of Achaia and Macedonia, which Tiberius had transferred to his own administration. He deprived the Lycians of their liberties, as a punishment for their fatal dissensions; but restored to the Rhodians their freedom, upon their repenting of their former misdemeanors. He exonerated for ever the people of Ilium from the payment of taxes, as being the founders of the Roman race; reciting upon the occasion a letter in Greek, from the senate and people of Rome to king Seleucus,1 on which they promised him their friendship and alliance, provided that he would grant their kinsmen the Iliensians immunity from all burdens.

  He banished from Rome all the Jews, who were continually making disturbances at the instigation of one Chrestus.2 He allowed the ambassadors of the Germans to sit at the public spectacles in the seats assigned to the senators, being induced to grant them favours by their frank and honourable conduct. For, having been seated in the rows of benches which were common to the people, on observing the Parthian and Armenian ambassadors sitting among the senators, they took upon themselves to cross over into the same seats, as being, they said, no way inferior to the others, in point either of merit or rank. The religious rites of the Druids, solemnized with such horrid cruelties, which had only been forbidden the citizens of Rome during the reign of Augustus, he utterly abolished among the Gauls.3 On the other hand, he attempted to transfer the Eleusinian mysteries from Attica to Rome.1 He likewise ordered the temple of Venus Erycina in Sicily, which was old and in a ruinous condition, to be repaired at the expense of the Roman people. He concluded treaties with foreign princes in the forum, with the sacrifice of a sow, and the form of words used by the heralds in former times. But in these and other things, and indeed the greater part of his administration, he was directed not so much by his own judgment, as by the influence of his wives and freedmen; for the most part acting in conformity to what their interests or fancies dictated.

  XXVI. He was twice married at a very early age, first to Æmilia Lepida, the grand-daughter of Augustus, and afterwards to Livia Medullina, who had the cognomen of Camilla, and was descended from the old dictator Camillus. The former he divorced while still a virgin, because her parents had incurred the displeasure of Augustus; and he lost the latter by sickness on the day fixed for their nuptials. He next married Plautia Urgulanilla, whose father had enjoyed the honour of a triumph; and soon afterwards, Ælia Pætina, the daughter of a man of consular rank. But he divorced them both: Pætina, upon some trifling causes of disgust; and Urgulanilla, for scandalous lewdness, and the suspicion of murder. After them he took in marriage Valeria Messalina, the daughter of Barbatus Messala, his cousin. But finding that, besides her other shameful debaucheries, she had even gone so far as to marry in his own absence Caius Silius, the settlement of her dower being formally signed, in the presence of the augurs, he put her to death. When summoning his pretorians to his presence, he made to them this declaration: “As I have been so unhappy in my unions, I am resolved to continue in future unmarried; and if I should not, I give you leave to stab me.” He was, however, unable to persist in this resolution; for he began immediately to think of another wife; and even of taking back Pætina, whom he had formerly divorced: he thought also of Lollia Paulina, who had been married to Caius Cæsar. But being ensnared by the arts of Agrippina, the daughter of his brother Germanicus, who took advantage of the kisses and endearments which their near relationship admitted, to inflame his desires, he got some one to propose at the next meeting of the senate, that they should oblige the emperor to marry Agrippina, as a measure highly conducive to the public interest; and that in future liberty should be given for such marriages, which until that time had been considered incestuous. In less than twenty-four hours after this, he married her.1 No person was found, however, to follow the example, excepting one freedman, and a centurion of the first rank, at the solemnization of whose nuptials both he and Agrippina attended.

  XXVII. He had children by three of his wives: by Urgulanilla, Drusus and Claudia; by Pætina, Antonia; and by Messalina, Octavia, and also a son, whom at first he called Germanicus, but afterwards Britannicus. He lost Drusus at Pompeii, when he was very young; he being choked with a pear, which in his play he tossed into the air, and caught in his mouth. Only a few days before, he had betrothed him to one of Sejanus’s daughters;2 and I am therefore surprised that some authors should say he lost his life by the treachery of Sejanus. Claudia, who was, in truth, the daughter of Boter his freedman, though she was born five months before his divorce, he ordered to be thrown naked at her mother’s door. He married Antonia to Cneius Pompey the Great,3 and afterwards to Faustus Sylla,4 both youths of very noble parentage; Octavia to his step-son Nero,5 after she had been contracted to Silanus. Britannicus was born upon the twentieth day of his reign, and in his second consulship. He often earnestly commended him to the soldiers, holding him in his arms before their ranks; and would likewise show him to the people in the theatre, setting him upon his lap, or holding him out whilst he was still very young; and was sure to receive their acclamations, and good wishes on his behalf. Of his sons-in-law, he adopted Nero. He not only dismissed from his favour both Pompey and Silanus, but put them to death.

  XXVIII. Amongst his freedmen, the greatest favourite was the eunuch Posides, whom, in his British triumph, he presented with the pointless spear, classing him among the military men. Next to him, if not equal, in favour was Felix,1 whom he not only preferred to commands both of cohorts and troops, but to the government of the province of Judea; and he became, in consequence of his elevation, the husband of three queens.2 Another favourite was Harpocras, to whom he granted the privilege of being carried in a litter within the city, and of holding public spectacles for the entertainment of the people. In this class was likewise Polybius, who assisted him in his studies, and had often the honour of walking between the two consuls. But above all others, Narcissus, his secretary, and Pallas,3 the comptroller of his accounts, were in high favour with him. He not only allowed them to receive, by decree of the senate, immense presents, but also to be decorated with the quæstorian and prætorian ensigns of honour. So much did he indulge them in amassing wealth, and plundering the public, that, upon his complaining, once, of the lowness of his exchequer, some one said, with great reason, that “It would be full enough, if those two freedmen of his would but take him into partnership with them.”

  XXIX. Being entirely governed by these freedmen, and, as I have already said, by his wives, he was a tool to others, rather than a prince. He distributed offices, or the command of armies, pardoned or punished, according as it suited their interests, their passions, or their caprice; and for the most part, without knowing, or being sensible of what he did. Not to enter into minute details relative to the revocation of grants, the reversal of judicial decisions, obtaining his signature to fictitious appointments, or the bare-faced alteration of them after signing; he put to death Appius Silanus, the father of his son-in-law, and the two Julias, the daughters of Drusus and Germanicus, without any positive proof of the crimes with which they were charged, or so much as permitting them to make any defence. He also cut off Cneius Pompey, the husband of his eldest daughter; and Lucius Silanus, who was betrothed to the younger Pompey, was stabbed in the act of unnatural lewdness with a favourite paramour. Silanus was obliged to quit the office of prætor upon the fourth of the calends of January [29th Dec.], and to kill himself on new year’s day1 following, the very same on which Claudius and Agrippina were married. He condemned to death five and thirty senators, and above three hundred Roman knights, with so little attention to what he did, that when a centurion brought him word of the execution of a man of consular rank, who was one of the number, and told him that he had executed his order, he declared, “he had ordered no such thing, but that he approved of it;” because his freedmen, it seems, had said, that the soldiers did nothing more than their duty, in dispatching the emperor’s enemies without waiting for a warrant. But it is beyond all belief, that he himself, at the marriage of Messalina with the adulterous Silius, should actually sign the writings relative to her dowry; induced, as it is pretended, by the design of diverting from himself and transferring upon another the danger which some omens seemed to threaten him.

  XXX. Either standing or sitting, but especially when he lay asleep, he had a majestic and graceful appearance; for he was tall, but not slender. His grey locks became him well, and he had a full neck. But his knees were feeble, and failed him in walking, so that his gait was ungainly, both when he assumed state, and when he was taking diversion. He was outrageous in his laughter, and still more so in his wrath, for then he foamed at the mouth, and discharged from his nostrils. He also stammered in his speech, and had a tremulous motion of the head at all times, but particularly when he was engaged in any business, however trifling.

  XXXI. Though his health was very infirm during the former part of his life, yet, after he became emperor, he enjoyed a good state of health, except only that he was subject to a pain of the stomach. In a fit of this complaint, he said he had thoughts of killing himself.

  XXXII. He gave entertainments as frequent as they were splendid, and generally when there was such ample room, that very often six hundred guests sat down together. At a feast he gave on the banks of the canal for draining the Fucine Lake, he narrowly escaped being drowned, the water at its discharge rushing out with such violence, that it overflowed the conduit. At supper he had always his own children, with those of several of the nobility, who, according to an ancient custom, sat at the feet of the couches. One of his guests having been suspected of purloining a golden cup, he invited him again the next day, but served him with a porcelain jug. It is said, too, that he intended to publish an edict, “allowing to all people the liberty of giving vent at table to any distension occasioned by flatulence,” upon hearing of a person whose modesty, when under restraint, had nearly cost him his life.

  XXXIII. He was always ready to eat and drink at any time or in any place. One day, as he was hearing causes in the forum of Augustus, he smelt the dinner which was preparing for the Salii,1 in the temple of Mars adjoining, whereupon he quitted the tribunal, and went to partake of the feast with the priests. He scarcely ever left the table until he had thoroughly crammed himself and drank to intoxication; and then he would immediately fall asleep, lying upon his back with his mouth open. While in this condition, a feather was put down his throat, to make him throw up the contents of his stomach. Upon composing himself to rest, his sleep was short, and he usually awoke before midnight; but he would sometimes sleep in the daytime, and that, even, when he was upon the tribunal; so that the advocates often found it difficult to wake him, though they raised their voices for that purpose. He set no bounds to his libidinous intercourse with women, but never betrayed any unnatural desires for the other sex. He was fond of gaming, and published a book upon the subject. He even used to play as he rode in his chariot, having the tables so fitted, that the game was not disturbed by the motion of the carriage.

  XXXIV. His cruel and sanguinary disposition was exhibited upon great as well as trifling occasions. When any person was to be put to the torture, or criminal punished for parricide, he was impatient for the execution, and would have it performed in his own presence. When he was at Tibur, being desirous of seeing an example of the old way of putting malefactors to death, some were immediately bound to a stake for the purpose; but there being no executioner to be had at the place, he sent for one from Rome, and waited for his coming until night. In any exhibition of gladiators, presented either by himself or others, if any of the combatants chanced to fall, he ordered them to be butchered, especially the Retiarii, that he might see their faces in the agonies of death. Two gladiators happening to kill each other, he immediately ordered some little knives to be made of their swords for his own use. He took great pleasure in seeing men engage with wild beasts, and the combatants who appeared on the stage at noon. He would therefore come to the theatre by break of day, and at noon, dismissing the people to dinner, continued sitting himself; and besides those who were devoted to that sanguinary fate, he would match others with the beasts, upon slight or sudden occasions; as, for instance, the carpenters and their assistants, and people of that sort, if a machine, or any piece of work in which they had been employed about the theatre did not answer the purpose for which it had been intended. To this desperate kind of encounter he forced one of his nomenclators, even encumbered as he was by wearing the toga.

  XXXV. But the characteristics most predominant in him were fear and distrust. In the beginning of his reign, though he much affected a modest and humble appearance, as has been already observed, yet he durst not venture himself at an entertainment without being attended by a guard of spearmen, and made soldiers wait upon him at table instead of servants. He never visited a sick person, until the chamber had been first searched, and the bed and bedding thoroughly examined. At other times, all persons who came to pay their court to him were strictly searched by officers appointed for that purpose; nor was it until after a long time, and with much difficulty, that he was prevailed upon to excuse women, boys, and girls from such rude handling, or suffer their attendants or writing-masters to retain their cases for pens and styles. When Camillus formed his plot against him, not doubting but his timidity might be worked upon without a war, he wrote to him a scurrilous, petulant, and threatening letter, desiring him to resign the government, and betake himself to a life of privacy. Upon receiving this requisition, he had some thoughts of complying with it, and summoned together the principal men of the city, to consult with them on the subject.

  XXXVI. Having heard some loose reports of conspiracies formed against him, he was so much alarmed, that he thought of immediately abdicating the government. And when, as I have before related, a man armed with a dagger was discovered near him while he was sacrificing, he instantly ordered the heralds to convoke the senate, and with tears and dismal exclamations, lamented that such was his condition, that he was safe no where; and for a long time afterwards he abstained from appearing in public. He smothered his ardent love for Messalina, not so much on account of her infamous conduct, as from apprehension of danger; believing that she aspired to share with Silius, her partner in adultery, the imperial dignity. Upon this occasion he ran in a great fright, and a very shameful manner, to the camp, asking all the way he went, “if the empire were indeed safely his?”

  XXXVII. No suspicion was too trifling, no person on whom it rested too contemptible, to throw him into a panic, and induce him to take precautions for his safety, and meditate revenge. A man engaged in a litigation before his tribunal, having saluted him, drew him aside, and told him he had dreamt that he saw him murdered; and shortly afterwards, when his adversary came to deliver his plea to the emperor, the plaintiff, pretending to have discovered the murderer, pointed to him as the man he had seen in his dream; whereupon, as it he had been taken in the act, he was hurried away to execution. We are informed, that Appius Silanus was got rid of in the same manner, by a contrivance betwixt Messalina and Narcissus, in which they had their several parts assigned them. Narcissus therefore burst into his lord’s chamber before day-light, apparently in great fright, and told him that he had dreamt that Appius Silanus had murdered him. The empress, upon this, affecting great surprise, declared she had the like dream for several nights successively. Presently afterwards, word was brought, as it had been agreed on, that Appius was come, he having, indeed, received orders the preceding day to be there at that time; and, as if the truth of the dream was sufficiently confirmed by his appearance at that juncture, he was immediately ordered to be prosecuted and put to death. The day following, Claudius related the whole affair to the senate, and acknowledged his great obligation to his freedmen for watching over him even in his sleep.

  XXXVIII. Sensible of his being subject to passion and resentment, he excused himself in both instances by a proclamation, assuring the public that “the former should be short and harmless, and the latter never without good cause.” After severely reprimanding the people of Ostia for not sending some boats to meet him upon his entering the mouth of the Tiber, in terms which might expose them to the public resentment, he wrote to Rome that he had been treated as a private person; yet immediately afterwards he pardoned them, and that in a way which had the appearance of making them satisfaction, or begging pardon for some injury he had done them. Some people who addressed him unseasonably in public, he pushed away with his own hand. He likewise banished a person who had been secretary to a quæstor, and even a senator who had filled the office of prætor, without a hearing, and although they were innocent; the former only because he had treated him with rudeness while he was in a private station, and the other, because in his ædileship he had fined some tenants of his, for selling cooked victuals contrary to law, and ordered his steward, who interfered, to be whipped. On this account, likewise, he took from the ædiles the jurisdiction they had over cooks’-shops. He did not scruple to speak of his own absurdities, and declared in some short speeches which he published, that he had only feigned imbecility in the reign of Caius, because otherwise it would have been impossible for him to have escaped and arrived at the station he had then attained. He could not, however, gain credit for this assertion; for a short time afterwards, a book was published under the title of Μωρῶν ἀναστάσις, “The Resurrection of Fools,” the design of which was to show “that nobody ever counterfeited folly.”

  XXXIX. Amongst other things, people admired in him his indifference and unconcern; or, to express it in Greek, his μετεωϱία and ἀβλεψία. Placing himself at table a little after Messalina’s death, he enquired, “Why the empress did not come?” Many of those whom he had condemned to death, he ordered the day after to be invited to his table, and to game with him, and sent to reprimand them as sluggish fellows for not making greater haste. When he was meditating his incestuous marriage with Agrippina, he was perpetually calling her, “My daughter, my nursling, born and brought up upon my lap.” And when he was going to adopt Nero, as if there was little cause for censure in his adopting a son-in-law, when he had a son of his own arrived at years of maturity; he continually gave out in public, “that no one had ever been admitted by adoption into the Claudian family.”

  XL. He frequently appeared so careless in what he said, and so inattentive to circumstances, that it was believed he never reflected who he himself was, or amongst whom, or at what time, or in what place, he spoke. In a debate in the senate relative to the butchers and vintners, he cried out, “I ask you, who can live without a bit of meat?” And mentioned the great plenty of old taverns, from which he himself used formerly to have his wine. Among other reasons for his supporting a certain person who was candidate for the quæstorship, he gave this: “His father,” said he, “once gave me, very seasonably, a draught of cold water when I was sick.” Upon his bringing a woman as a witness in some cause before the senate, he said, “This woman was my mother’s freedwoman and dresser, but she always considered me as her master; and this I say, because there are some still in my family that do not look upon me as such.” The people of Ostia addressing him in open court with a petition, he flew into a rage at them, and said, “There is no reason why I should oblige you: if any one else is free to act as he pleases, surely I am.” The following expressions he had in his mouth every day, and at all hours and seasons: “What! do you take me for a Theogonius?”1 And in Greek λάλει ϰαὶ μὴ θίγγανε, “Speak, but do not touch me;” besides many other familiar sentences, below the dignity of a private person, much more of an emperer, who was not deficient either in eloquence or learning, as having applied himself very closely to the liberal sciences.

  XLI. By the encouragement of Titus Livius,2 and with the assistance of Sulpicius Flavus, he attempted at an early age the composition of a history; and having called together a numerous auditory, to hear and give their judgment upon it, he read it over with much difficulty, and frequently interrupting himself. For after he had begun, a great laugh was raised amongst the company, by the breaking of several benches from the weight of a very fat man; and even when order was restored, he could not forbear bursting out into violent fits of laughter, at the remembrance of the accident. After he became emperor, likewise, he wrote several things which he was careful to have recited to his friends by a reader. He commenced his history from the death of the dictator Cæsar; but afterwards he took a later period, and began at the conclusion of the civil wars; because he found he could not speak with freedom, and a due regard to truth, concerning the former period, having been often taken to task both by his mother and grandmother. Of the earlier history he left only two books, but of the latter, one and forty. He compiled likewise the “History of his Own Life,” in eight books, full of absurdities, but in no bad style; also, “A Defence of Cicero against the Books of Asinius Gallus,”1 which exhibited a considerable degree of learning. He besides invented three new letters, and added them to the former alphabet,2 as highly necessary. He published a book to recommend them while he was yet only a private person; but on his elevation to imperial power he had little difficulty in introducing them into common use; and these letters are still extant in a variety of books, registers, and inscriptions upon buildings.

  XLII. He applied himself with no less attention to the study of Grecian literature, asserting upon all occasions his love of that language, and its surpassing excellency. A stranger once holding a discourse both in Greek and Latin, he addressed him thus; “Since you are skilled in both our tongues.” And recommending Achaia to the favour of the senate, he said, “I have a particular attachment to that province, on account of our common studies.” In the senate he often made long replies to ambassadors in that language. On the tribunal he frequently quoted the verses of Homer. When at any time he had taken vengeance on an enemy or a conspirator, he scarcely ever gave to the tribune on guard, who, according to custom, came for the word, any other than this:—

  • Ἄνδρ’ ἐπαμύνασθαι ὅτε τις πϱότεϱος χαλεπηνῃ.
  • ’Tis time to strike when wrong demands the blow.

  To conclude, he wrote some histories likewise in Greek, namely, twenty books on Tuscan affairs, and eight on the Carthaginian; in consequence of which, another museum was founded at Alexandria, in addition to the old one, and called after his name; and it was ordered, that, upon certain days in every year, his Tuscan history should be read over in one of these, and his Carthaginian in the other, as in a school; each history being read through by persons who took it in turn.

  XLIII. Towards the close of his life, he gave some manifest indications that he repented of his marriage with Agrippina, and his adoption of Nero. For some of his freedmen noticing with approbation his having condemned, the day before, a woman accused of adultery, he remarked, “It has been my misfortune to have wives who have been unfaithful to my bed; but they did not escape punishment.” Often, when he happened to meet Britannicus, he would embrace him tenderly, and express a desire “that he might grow apace, and receive from him an account of all his actions:” using the Greek phrase, ὁ τρώσας ϰαὶ ῖάσεται, “He who has wounded will also heal.” And intending to give him the manly habit, while he was yet under age and a tender youth, because his stature would allow of it, he added, “I do so, that the Roman people may at last have a real Cæsar.”1

  XLIV. Soon afterwards he made his will, and had it signed by all the magistrates as witnesses. But he was prevented from proceeding further by Agrippina, accused by her own guilty conscience, as well as by informers, of a variety of crimes. It is agreed that he was taken off by poison; but where, and by whom administered, remains in uncertainty. Some authors say that it was given him as he was feasting with the priests in the Capitol, by the eunuch Halotus, his taster. Others say by Agrippina, at his own table, in mushrooms, a dish of which he was very fond.1 The accounts of what followed likewise differ. Some relate that he instantly became speechless, was racked with pain through the night, and died about day-break; others, that at first he fell into a sound sleep,—and afterwards, his food rising, he threw up the whole: but had another dose given him; whether in water-gruel, under pretence of refreshment after his exhaustion, or in a clyster, as if designed to relieve his bowels, is likewise uncertain.

  XLV. His death was kept secret until everything was settled relative to his successor. Accordingly, vows were made for his recovery, and comedians were called to amuse him, as it was pretended, by his own desire. He died upon the third of the ides of October [13th October], in the consulship of Asinius Marcellus and Acilius Aviola, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, and the fourteenth of his reign.2 His funeral was celebrated with the customary imperial pomp, and he was ranked amongst the gods. This honour was taken from him by Nero, but restored by Vespasian.

  XLVI. The chief presages of his death were, the appearance of a comet, his father Drusus’s monument being struck by lightning, and the death of most of the magistrates of all ranks that year. It appears from several circumstances, that he was sensible of his approaching dissolution, and made no secret of it. For when he nominated the consuls, he appointed no one to fill the office beyond the month in which he died. At the last assembly of the senate in which he made his appearance, he earnestly exhorted his two sons to unity with each other, and with earnest entreaties commended to the fathers the care of their tender years. And in the last cause he heard from the tribunal, he repeatedly declared in open court, “That he was now arrived at the last stage of mortal existence;” whilst all who heard it shrunk at hearing these ominous words.

  The violent death of Caligula afforded the Romans a fresh opportunity to have asserted the liberty of their country; but the conspirators had concerted no plan, by which they should proceed upon the assassination of that tyrant; and the indecision of the senate, in a debate of two days, on so sudden an emergency, gave time to the caprice of the soldiers to interpose in the settlement of the government. By an accident the most fortuitous, a man devoid of all pretensions to personal merit, so weak in understanding as to be the common sport of the emperor’s household, and an object of contempt even to his own kindred; this man, in the hour of military insolence, was nominated by the soldiers as successor to the Roman throne. Not yet in possession of the public treasury, which perhaps was exhausted, he could not immediately reward the services of his electors with a pecuniary gratification; but he promised them a largess of fifteen thousand sesterces a man, upwards of a hundred and forty pounds sterling; and as we meet with no account of any subsequent discontents in the army, we may justly conclude that the promise was soon after fulfilled. This transaction laid the foundation of that military despotism, which, through many succeeding ages, convulsed the Roman empire.

  Besides the interposition of the soldiers upon this occasion, it appears that the populace of Rome were extremely clamorous for the government of a single person, and for that of Claudius in particular. This partiality for a monarchical government proceeded from two causes. The commonalty, from their obscure situation, were always the least exposed to oppression, under a tyrannical prince. They had likewise ever been remarkably fond of stage-plays and public shows, with which, as well as with scrambles, and donations of bread and other victuals, the preceding emperor had frequently gratified them. They had therefore less to fear, and more to hope, from the government of a single person than any other class of Roman citizens. With regard to the partiality for Claudius, it may be accounted for partly from the low habits of life to which he had been addicted, in consequence of which many of them were familiarly acquainted with him; and this circumstance likewise increased their hope of deriving some advantage from his accession. Exclusive of all these considerations, it is highly probable that the populace were instigated in favour of Claudius by the artifices of his freedmen, persons of mean extraction, by whom he was afterwards entirely governed, and who, upon such an occasion, would exert their utmost efforts to procure his appointment to the throne. From the debate in the senate having continued during two days, it was evident that there was still a strong party for restoring the ancient form of government. That they were in the end overawed by the clamour of the multitude, is not surprising, when we consider that the senate was totally unprovided with resources of every kind for asserting the independence of the nation by arms; and the commonalty, who interrupted their deliberations, were the only people by whose assistance they ever could effect the restitution of public freedom. To this may be added, that the senate, by the total reduction of their political importance, ever since the overthrow of the republic, had lost both the influence and authority which they formerly enjoyed. The extreme cruelty, likewise, which had been exercised during the last two reigns, afforded a further motive for relinquishing all attempts in favour of liberty, as they might be severely revenged upon themselves by the subsequent emperor: and it was a degree of moderation in Claudius, which palliates the injustice of his cause, that he began his government with an act of amnesty respecting the public transactions which ensued upon the death of Caligula.

  Claudius, at the time of his accession, was fifty years of age; and though he had hitherto lived apparently unambitious of public honours, accompanied with great ostentation, yet he was now seized with a desire to enjoy a triumph. As there existed no war, in which he might perform some military achievement, his vanity could only be gratified by invading a foreign country, where, contrary to the advice contained in the testament of Augustus, he might attempt to extend still further the limits of the empire. Either Britain, therefore, or some nation on the continent, at a great distance from the capital, became the object of such an enterprize; and the former was chosen, not only as more convenient, from its vicinity to the maritime province of Gaul, but on account of a remonstrance lately presented by the Britons to the court of Rome, respecting the protection afforded to some persons of that nation, who had fled thither to elude the laws of their country. Considering the state of Britain at that time, divided as it was into a number of principalities, amongst which there was no general confederacy for mutual defence, and where the alarm excited by the invasion of Julius Cæsar, upwards of eighty years before, had long since been forgotten; a sudden attempt upon the island could not fail to be attended with success. Accordingly, an army was sent over, under the command of Aulus Plautius, an able general, who defeated the natives in several engagements, and penetrated a considerable way into the country. Preparations for the emperor’s voyage now being made, Claudius set sail from Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber; but meeting with a violent storm in the Mediterranean, he landed at Marseilles, and proceeding thence to Boulogne in Picardy, passed over into Britain. In what part he debarked, is uncertain, but it seems to have been at some place on the south-east coast of the island. He immediately received the submission of several British states, the Cantii, Atrebates, Regni, and Trinobantes, who inhabited those parts; and returning to Rome, after an absence of six months, celebrated with great pomp the triumph, for which he had undertaken the expedition.

  In the interior parts of Britain, the natives, under the command of Caractacus, maintained an obstinate resistance, and little progress was made by the Roman arms, until Ostorius Scapula was sent over to prosecute the war. He penetrated into the country of the Silures, a warlike tribe, who inhabited the banks of the Severn; and having defeated Caractacus in a great battle, made him prisoner, and sent him to Rome. The fame of the British prince had by this time spread over the provinces of Gaul and Italy; and upon his arrival in the Roman capital, the people flocked from all quarters to behold him. The ceremonial of his entrance was conducted with great solemnity. On a plain adjoining the Roman camp, the pretorian troops were drawn up in martial array: the emperor and his court took their station in front of the lines, and behind them was ranged the whole body of the people. The procession commenced with the different trophies which had been taken from the Britons during the progress of the war. Next followed the brothers of the vanquished prince, with his wife and daughter, in chains, expressing by their supplicating looks and gestures the fears with which they were actuated. But not so Caractacus himself. With a manly gait and an undaunted countenance, he marched up to the tribunal, where the emperor was seated, and addressed him in the following terms:—

  “If to my high birth and distinguished rank, I had added the virtues of moderation, Rome had beheld me rather as a friend than a captive; and you would not have rejected an alliance with a prince, descended from illustrious ancestors, and governing many nations. The reverse of my fortune to you is glorious, and to me humiliating. I had arms, and men, and horses; I possessed extraordinary riches; and can it be any wonder that I was unwilling to lose them? Because Rome aspires to universal dominion, must men therefore implicitly resign themselves to subjection? I opposed for a long time the progress of your arms, and had I acted otherwise, would either you have had the glory of conquest, or I of a brave resistance? I am now in your power: if you are determined to take revenge, my fate will soon be forgotten, and you will derive no honour from the transaction. Preserve my life, and I shall remain to the latest ages a monument of your clemency.”

  Immediately upon this speech, Claudius granted him his liberty, as he did likewise to the other royal captives. They all returned their thanks in a manner the most grateful to the emperor; and as soon as their chains were taken off, walking towards Agrippina, who sat upon a bench at a little distance, they repeated to her the same fervent declarations of gratitude and esteem.

  History has preserved no account of Caractacus after this period; but it is probable, that he returned in a short time to his own country, where his former valour, and the magnanimity which he had displayed at Rome, would continue to render him illustrious through life, even amidst the irretrievable ruin of his fortunes.

  The most extraordinary character in the present reign was hat of Valeria Messalina, the daughter of Valerius Messala Barbatus. She was married to Claudius, and had by him a son and a daughter. To cruelty in the prosecution of her purposes, she added the most abandoned incontinence. Not confining her licentiousness within the limits of the palace, where she committed the most shameful excesses, she prostituted her person in the common stews, and even in the public streets of the capital. As if her conduct was already not sufficiently scandalous, she obliged C. Silius, a man of consular rank, to divorce his wife, that she might procure his company entirely to herself. Not contented with this indulgence to her criminal passion, she next persuaded him to marry her; and during an excursion which the emperor made to Ostia, the ceremony of marriage was actually performed between them. The occasion was celebrated with a magnificent supper, to which she invited a large company; and lest the whole should be regarded as a frolic, not meant to be consummated, the adulterous parties ascended the nuptial couch in the presence of the astonished spectators. Great as was the facility of Claudius’s temper in respect of her former behaviour, he could not overlook so flagrant a violation both of public decency and the laws of the country. Silius was condemned to death for the adultery which he had perpetrated with reluctance; and Messalina was ordered into the emperor’s presence, to answer for her conduct. Terror now operating upon her mind in conjunction with remorse, she could not summon the resolution to support such an interview, but retired into the gardens of Lucullus, there to indulge at last the compunction which she felt for her crimes, and to meditate the entreaties by which she should endeavour to soothe the resentment of her husband. In the extremity of her distress, she attempted to lay violent hands upon herself, but her courage was not equal to the emergency. Her mother, Lepida, who had not spoken with her for some years before, was present upon the occasion, and urged her to the act which alone could put a period to her infamy and wretchedness. Again she made an effort, but again her resolution abandoned her; when a tribune burst into the gardens, and plunging his sword into her body, she instantly expired. Thus perished a woman, the scandal of whose lewdness resounded throughout the empire, and of whom a great satirist, then living, has said, perhaps without a hyperbole,

  Et lassata viris, necdum satiata, recessit.

  —Juvenal, Sat. VI.

  It has been already observed, that Claudius was entirely governed by his freedmen; a class of retainers which enjoyed a great share of favour and confidence with their patrons in those times. They had before been the slaves of their masters, and had obtained their freedom as a reward for their faithful and attentive services. Of the esteem in which they were often held, we meet with an instance in Tiro, the freedman of Cicero, to whom that illustrious Roman addresses several epistles, written in the most familiar and affectionate strain of friendship. As it was common for them to be taught the more useful parts of education in the families of their masters, they were usually well qualified for the management of domestic concerns, and might even be competent to the superior departments of the state, especially in those times when negotiations and treaties with foreign princes seldom or never occurred; and in arbitrary governments, where public affairs were directed more by the will of the sovereign or his ministers, than by refined suggestions of policy.

  From the character generally given of Claudius before his elevation to the throne, we should not readily imagine that he was endowed with any taste for literary composition; yet he seems to have exclusively enjoyed this distinction during his own reign, in which learning was at a low ebb. Besides history, Suetonius informs us that he wrote a Defence of Cicero against the Charges of Asinius Gallus. This appears to be the only tribute of esteem or approbation paid to the character of Cicero, from the time of Livy the historian, to the extinction of the race of the Cæsars. Asinius Gallus was the son of Asinius Pollio, the orator. Marrying Vipsania after she had been divorced by Tiberius, he incurred the displeasure of that emperor, and died of famine, either voluntarily, or by order of the tyrant. He wrote a comparison between his father and Cicero, in which, with more filial partiality than justice, he gave the preference to the former.

  NERO CLAUDIUS CÆSAR.

  I. Two celebrated families, the Calvini and Ænobarbi, sprung from the race of the Domitii. The Ænobarbi derive both their extraction and their cognomen from one Lucius Domitius, of whom we have this tradition:—As he was returning out of the country to Rome, he was met by two young men of a most august appearance, who desired him to announce to the senate and people a victory, of which no certain intelligence had yet reached the city. To prove that they were more than mortals, they stroked his cheeks, and thus changed his hair, which was black, to a bright colour, resembling that of brass; which mark of distinction descended to his posterity, for they had generally red beards. This family had the honour of seven consulships,1 one triumph,2 and two censorships;3 and being admitted into the patrician order, they continued the use of the same cognomen, with no other prænomina4 than those of Cneius and Lucius. These, however, they assumed with singular irregularity; three persons in succession sometimes adhering to one of them, and then they were changed alternately. For the first, second, and third of the Ænobarbi had the prænomen of Lucius, and again the three following, successively, that of Cneius, while those who came after were called, by turns, one, Lucius, and the other, Cneius. It appears to me proper to give a short account of several of the family, to show that Nero so far degenerated from the noble qualities of his ancestors, that he retained only their vices; as if those alone had been transmitted to him by his descent.

  II. To begin, therefore, at a remote period, his great-grandfather’s grandfather, Cneius Domitius, when he was tribune of the people, being offended with the high priests for electing another than himself in the room of his father, obtained the transfer of the right of election from the colleges of the priests to the people. In his consulship,1 having conquered the Allobroges and the Arverni,2 he made a progress through the province, mounted upon an elephant, with a body of soldiers attending him, in a sort of triumphal pomp. Of this person the orator Licinius Crassus said, “It was no wonder he had a brazen beard, who had a face of iron, and a heart of lead.” His son, during his prætorship,3 proposed that Cneius Cæsar, upon the expiration of his consulship, should be called to account before the senate for his administration of that office, which was supposed to be contrary both to the omens and the laws. Afterwards, when he was consul himself,4 he tried to deprive Cneius of the command of the army, and having been, by intrigue and cabal, appointed his sucessor, he was made prisoner at Corsinium, in the beginning of the civil war. Being set at liberty, he went to Marseilles, which was then besieged; where having, by his presence, animated the people to hold out, he suddenly deserted them, and at last was slain in the battle of Pharsalia. He was a man of little constancy, and of a sullen temper. In despair of his fortunes, he had recourse to poison, but was so terrified at the thoughts of death, that, immediately repenting, he took a vomit to throw it up again, and gave freedom to his physician for having, with great prudence and wisdom, given him only a gentle dose of the poison. When Cneius Pompey was consulting with his friends in what manner he should conduct himself towards those who were neuter and took no part in the contest, he was the only one who proposed that they should be treated as enemies.

  III. He left a son, who was, without doubt, the best of the family. By the Pedian law, he was condemned, although innocent, amongst others who were concerned in the death of Cæsar.5 Upon this, he went over to Brutus and Cassius, his near relations; and, after their death, not only kept together the fleet, the command of which had been given him some time before, but even increased it. At last, when the party had everywhere been defeated, he voluntarily surrendered it to Mark Antony; considering it as a piece of service for which the latter owed him no small obligations. Of all those who were condemned by the law above-mentioned, he was the only man who was restored to his country, and filled the highest offices. When the civil war again broke out, he was appointed lieutenant under the same Antony, and offered the chief command by those who were ashamed of Cleopatra; but not daring, on account of a sudden indisposition with which he was seized, either to accept or refuse it, he went over to Augustus,1 and died a few days after, not without an aspersion cast upon his memory. For Antony gave out, that he was induced to change sides by his impatience to be with his mistress, Servilia Nais.2

  IV. This Cneius had a son, named Domitius, who was afterwards well known as the nominal purchaser of the family property left by Augustus’s will;3 and no less famous in his youth for his dexterity in chariot-driving, than he was afterwards for the triumphal ornaments which he obtained in the German war. But he was a man of great arrogance, prodigality, and cruelty. When he was ædile, he obliged Lucius Plancus, the censor, to give him the way; and in his prætorship, and consulship, he made Roman knights and married women act on the stage. He gave hunts of wild beasts, both in the Circus and in all the wards of the city; as also a show of gladiators; but with such barbarity, that Augustus, after privately reprimanding him, to no purpose, was obliged to restrain him by a public edict.

  V. By the elder Antonia he had Nero’s father, a man of execrable character in every part of his life. During his attendance upon Caius Cæsar in the East, he killed a freedman of his own, for refusing to drink as much as he ordered him. Being dismissed for this from Cæsar’s society, he did not mend his habits; for, in a village upon the Appian road, he suddenly whipped his horses, and drove his chariot, on purpose, over a poor boy, crushing him to pieces. At Rome, he struck out the eye of a Roman knight in the Forum, only for some free language in a dispute between them. He was likewise so fraudulent, that he not only cheated some silversmiths1 of the price of goods he had bought of them, but, during his prætorship, defrauded the owners of chariots in the Circensian games of the prizes due to them for their victory. His sister, jeering him for the complaints made by the leaders of the several parties, he agreed to sanction a law, “That, for the future, the prizes should be immediately paid.” A little before the death of Tiberius, he was prosecuted for treason, adulteries, and incest with his sister Lepida, but escaped in the timely change of affairs, and died of a dropsy, at Pyrgi;2 leaving behind him his son, Nero, whom he had by Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus.

  VI. Nero was born at Antium, nine months after the death of Tiberius,3 upon the eighteenth of the calends of January [15th December], just as the sun rose, so that its beams touched him before they could well reach the earth. While many fearful conjectures, in respect to his future fortune, were formed by different persons, from the circumstances of his nativity, a saying of his father, Domitius, was regarded as an ill presage, who told his friends who were congratulating him upon the occasion, “That nothing but what was detestable, and pernicious to the public, could ever be produced of him and Agrippina.” Another manifest prognostic of his future infelicity occurred upon his lustration day.4 For Caius Cæsar being requested by his sister to give the child what name he thought proper—looking at his uncle, Claudius, who afterwards, when emperor, adopted Nero, he gave his: and this not seriously, but only in jest; Agrippina treating it with contempt, because Claudius at that time was a mere laughing-stock at the palace. He lost his father when he was three years old, being left heir to a third part of his estate; of which he never got possession, the whole being seized by his co-heir, Caius. His mother being soon after banished, he lived with his aunt Lepida, in a very necessitous condition, under the care of two tutors, a dancing-master and a barper. After Claudius came to the empire, he not only recovered his father’s estate, but was enriched with the additional inheritance of that of his step-father, Crispus Passienus. Upon his mother’s recall from banishment, he was advanced to such favour, through Nero’s powerful interest with the emperor, that it was reported, assassins were employed by Messalina, Claudius’s wife, to strangle him, as Britannicus’s rival, whilst he was taking his noon-day repose. In addition to the story, it was said that they were frightened by a serpent, which crept from under his cushion, and ran away. The tale was occasioned by finding on his couch, near the pillow, the skin of a snake, which, by his mother’s order, he wore for some time upon his right arm, inclosed in a bracelet of gold. This amulet, at last, he laid aside, from aversion to her memory; but he sought for it again, in vain, in the time of his extremity.

  VII. When he was yet a mere boy, before he arrived at the age of puberty, during the celebration of the Circensian games,1 he performed his part in the Trojan play with a degree of firmness which gained him great applause. In the eleventh year of his age, he was adopted by Claudius, and placed under the tuition of Annæus Seneca,2 who had been made a senator. It is said, that Seneca dreamt the night after, that he was giving a lesson to Caius Cæsar.3 Nero soon verified his dream, betraying the cruelty of his disposition in every way he could. For he attempted to persuade his father that his brother, Britannicus, was nothing but a changeling, because the latter had saluted him, notwithstanding his adoption, by the name of Ænobarbus, as usual. When his aunt, Lepida, was brought to trial, he appeared in court as a witness against her, to gratify his mother, who persecuted the accused. On his introduction into the Forum, at the age of manhood, he gave a largess to the people and a donative to the soldiers: for the pretorian cohorts, he appointed a solemn procession under arms, and marched at the head of them with a shield in his hand; after which he went to return thanks to his father in the senate. Before Claudius, likewise, at the time he was consul, he made a speech for the Bolognese, in Latin, and for the Rhodians and people of Ilium, in Greek. He had the jurisdiction of præfect of the city, for the first time, during the Latin festival; during which the most celebrated advocates brought before him, not short and trifling causes, as is usual in that case, but trials of importance, notwithstanding they had instructions from Claudius himself to the contrary. Soon afterwards, he married Octavia, and exhibited the Circensian games, and hunting of wild beasts, in honour of Claudius.

  VIII. He was seventeen years of age at the death of that prince,1 and as soon as that event was made public, he went out to the cohort on guard between the hours of six and seven; for the omens were so disastrous, that no earlier time of the day was judged proper. On the steps before the palace gate, he was unanimously saluted by the soldiers as their emperor, and then carried in a litter to the camp; thence, after making a short speech to the troops, into the senate-house, where he continued until the evening; of all the immense honours which were heaped upon him, refusing none but the title of Father of his Country, on account of his youth.

  IX. He began his reign with an ostentation of dutiful regard to the memory of Claudius, whom he buried with the utmost pomp and magnificence, pronouncing the funeral oration himself, and then had him enrolled amongst the gods. He paid likewise the highest honours to the memory of his father Domitius. He left the management of affairs, both public and private, to his mother. The word which he gave the first day of his reign to the tribune on guard, was, “The Best of Mothers,” and afterwards he frequently appeared with her in the streets of Rome in her litter. He settled a colony at Antium, in which he placed the veteran soldiers belonging to the guards; and obliged several of the richest centurions of the first rank to transfer their residence to that place: where he likewise made a noble harbour at a prodigious expense.1

  X. To establish still further his character, he declared, “that he designed to govern according to the model of Augustus;” and omitted no opportunity of showing his generosity, clemency, and complaisance. The more burthensome taxes he either entirely took off, or diminished. The rewards appointed for informers by the Papian law, he reduced to a fourth part, and distributed to the people four hundred sesterces a man. To the noblest of the senators who were much reduced in their circumstances, he granted annual allowances, in some cases as much as five hundred thousand sesterces; and to the pretorian cohorts a monthly allowance of corn gratis. When called upon to subscribe the sentence, according to custom, of a criminal condemned to die, “I wish,” said he, “I had never learnt to read and write.” He continually saluted people of the several orders by name, without a prompter. When the senate returned him their thanks for his good government, he replied to them, “It will be time enough to do so when I shall have deserved it.” He admitted the common people to see him perform his exercises in the Campus Martius. He frequently declaimed in public, and recited verses of his own composing, not only at home, but in the theatre; so much to the joy of all the people, that public prayers were appointed to be put up to the gods upon that account; and the verses which had been publicly read, were, after being written in gold letters, consecrated to Jupiter Capitolinus.

  XI. He presented the people with a great number and variety of spectacles, as the Juvenal and Circensian games, stage-plays, and an exhibition of gladiators. In the Juvenal, he even admitted senators and aged matrons to perform parts. In the Circensian games, he assigned the equestrian order seats apart from the rest of the people, and had races performed by chariots drawn each by four camels. In the games which he instituted for the eternal duration of the empire, and therefore ordered to be called Maximi, many of the senatorian and equestrian order, of both sexes, performed. A distinguished Roman knight descended on the stage by a rope, mounted on an elephant. A Roman play, likewise, composed by Afranius, was brought upon the stage. It was entitled, “The Fire;” and in it the performers were allowed to carry off, and to keep to themselves, the furniture of the house, which, as the plot of the play required, was burnt down in the theatre. Every day during the solemnity, many thousand articles of all descriptions were thrown amongst the people to scramble for; such as fowls of different kinds, tickets for corn, clothes, gold, silver, gems, pearls, pictures, slaves, beasts of burden, wild beasts that had been tamed; at last, ships, lots of houses, and lands, were offered as prizes in a lottery.

  XII. These games he beheld from the front of the proscenium. In the show of gladiators, which he exhibited in a wooden amphitheatre, built within a year in the district of the Campus Martius,1 he ordered that none should be slain, not even the condemned criminals employed in the combats. He secured four hundred senators, and six hundred Roman knights, amongst whom were some of unbroken fortunes and unblemished reputation, to act as gladiators. From the same orders, he engaged persons to encounter wild beasts, and for various other services in the theatre. He presented the public with the representation of a naval fight, upon sea-water, with huge fishes swimming in it; as also with the Pyrrhic dance, performed by certain youths, to each of whom, after the performance was over, he granted the freedom of Rome. During this diversion, a bull covered Pasiphaë, concealed within a wooden statue of a cow, as many of the spectators believed. Icarus, upon his first attempt to fly, fell on the stage close to the emperor’s pavilion, and bespattered him with blood. For he very seldom presided in the games, but used to view them reclining on a couch, at first through some narrow apertures, but afterwards with the Podium1 quite open. He was the first who instituted,2 in imitation of the Greeks, a trial of skill in the three several exercises of music, wrestling, and horse-racing, to be performed at Rome every five years, and which he called Neronia. Upon the dedication of his bath3 and gymnasium, he furnished the senate and the equestrian order with oil. He appointed as judges of the trial men of consular rank, chosen by lot, who sat with the prætors. At this time he went down into the orchestra amongst the senators, and received the crown for the best performance in Latin prose and verse, for which several persons of the greatest merit contended, but they unanimously yielded to him. The crown for the best performer on the harp, being likewise awarded to him by the judges, he devoutly saluted it, and ordered it to be carried to the statue of Augustus. In the gymnastic exercises, which he presented in the Septa, while they were preparing the great sacrifice of an ox, he shaved his beard for the first time,4 and putting it up in a casket of gold studded with pearls of great price, consecrated it to Jupiter Capitolinus. He invited the Vestal Virgins to see the wrestlers perform, because, at Olympia, the priestesses of Ceres are allowed the privilege of witnessing that exhibition.

  XIII. Amongst the spectacles presented by him, the solemn entrance of Tiridates1 into the city deserves to be mentioned. This personage, who was king of Armenia, he invited to Rome by very liberal promises. But being prevented by unfavourable weather from showing him to the people upon the day fixed by proclamation, he took the first opportunity which occurred; several cohorts being drawn up under arms, about the temples in the forum, while he was seated on a curule chair on the rostra, in a triumphal dress, amidst the military standards and ensigns. Upon Tiridates advancing towards him, on a stage made shelving for the purpose, he permitted him to throw himself at his feet, but quickly raised him with his right hand, and kissed him. The emperor then, at the king’s request, took the turban from his head, and replaced it by a crown, whilst a person of pretorian rank proclaimed in Latin the words in which the prince addressed the emperor as a suppliant. After this ceremony, the king was conducted to the theatre, where, after renewing his obeisance, Nero seated him on his right hand. Being then greeted by universal acclamation with the title of Emperor, and sending his laurel crown to the Capitol, Nero shut the temple of the two-faced Janus, as though there now existed no war throughout the Roman empire.

  XIV. He filled the consulship four times:2 the first for two months, the second and last for six, and the third for four; the two intermediate ones he held successively, but the others after an interval of some years between them.

  XV. In the administration of justice, he scarcely ever gave his decision on the pleadings before the next day, and then in writing. His manner of hearing causes was not to allow any adjournment, but to dispatch them in order as they stood. When he withdrew to consult his assessors, he did not debate the matter openly with them; but silently and privately reading over their opinions, which they gave separately in writing, he pronounced sentence from the tribunal according to his own view of the case, as if it was the opinion of the majority. For a long time he would not admit the sons of freedmen into the senate; and those who had been admitted by former princes, he excluded from all public offices. To supernumerary candidates he gave command in the legions, to comfort them under the delay of their hopes. The consulship he commonly conferred for six months; and one of the two consuls dying a little before the first of January, he substituted no one in his place; disliking what had been formerly done for Caninius Rebilus on such an occasion, who was consul for one day only. He allowed the triumphal honours only to those who were of quæstorian rank, and to some of the equestrian order; and bestowed them without regard to military service. And instead of the quæstors, whose office it properly was, he frequently ordered that the addresses, which he sent to the senate on certain occasions, should be read by the consuls.

  XVI. He devised a new style of building in the city, ordering piazzas to be erected before all houses, both in the streets and detached, to give facilities from their terraces, in case of fire, for preventing it from spreading; and these he built at his own expense. He likewise designed to extend the city walls as far as Ostia, and bring the sea from thence by a canal into the old city. Many severe regulations and new orders were made in his time. A sumptuary law was enacted. Public suppers were limited to the Sportulæ;1 and victualling-houses restrained from selling any dressed victuals, except pulse and herbs, whereas before they sold all kinds of meat. He likewise inflicted punishments on the Christians, a sort of people who held a new and impious2 superstition. He forbad the revels of the charioteers, who had long assumed a licence to stroll about, and established for themselves a kind of prescriptive right to cheat and thieve, making a jest of it. The partisans of the rival theatrical performers were banished, as well as the actors themselves.

  XVII. To prevent forgery, a method was then first invented, of having writings bored, run through three times with a thread, and then sealed. It was likewise provided that in wills, the two first pages, with only the testator’s name upon them, should be presented blank to those who were to sign them as witnesses; and that no one who wrote a will for another, should insert any legacy for himself. It was likewise ordained that clients should pay their advocates a certain reasonable fee, but nothing for the court, which was to be gratuitous, the charges for it being paid out of the public treasury; that causes, the cognizance of which before belonged to the judges of the exchequer, should be transferred to the forum, and the ordinary tribunals; and that all appeals from the judges should be made to the senate.

  XVIII. He never entertained the least ambition or hope of augmenting and extending the frontiers of the empire. On the contrary, he had thoughts of withdrawing the troops from Britain, and was only restrained from so doing by the fear of appearing to detract from the glory of his father.1 All that he did was to reduce the kingdom of Pontus, which was ceded to him by Polemon, and also the Alps,1 upon the death of Cottius, into the form of a province.

  XIX. Twice only he undertook any foreign expeditions, one to Alexandria, and the other to Achaia; but he abandoned the prosecution of the former on the very day fixed for his departure, by being deterred both by ill omens, and the hazard of the voyage. For while he was making the circuit of the temples, having seated himself in that of Vesta, when he attempted to rise, the skirt of his robe stuck fast; and he was instantly seized with such a dimness in his eyes, that he could not see a yard before him. In Achaia, he attempted to make a cut through the Isthmus;2 and, having made a speech encouraging his pretorians to set about the work, on a signal given by sound of trumpet, he first broke ground with a spade, and carried off a basket full of earth upon his shoulders. He made preparations for an expedition to the Pass of the Caspian mountains;3 forming a new legion out of his late levies in Italy, of men all six feet high, which he called the phalanx of Alexander the Great. These transactions, in part unexceptionable, and in part highly commendable, I have brought into one view, in order to separate them from the scandalous and criminal part of his conduct, of which I shall now give an account.

  XX. Among the other liberal arts which he was taught in his youth, he was instructed in music; and immediately after his advancement to the empire, he sent for Terpnus, a performer upon the harp,1 who flourished at that time with the highest reputation. Sitting with him for several days following, as he sang and played after supper, until late at night, he began by degrees to practise upon the instrument himself. Nor did he omit any of those expedients which artists in music adopt, for the preservation and improvement of their voices. He would lie upon his back with a sheet of lead upon his breast, clear his stomach and bowels by vomits and clysters, and forbear the eating of fruits, or food prejudicial to the voice. Encouraged by his proficiency, though his voice was naturally neither loud nor clear, he was desirous of appearing upon the stage, frequently repeating amongst his friends a Greek proverb to this effect: “that no one had any regard for music which they never heard.” Accordingly, he made his first public appearance at Naples; and although the theatre quivered with the sudden shock of an earthquake, he did not desist, until he had finished the piece of music he had begun. He played and sung in the same place several times, and for several days together; taking only now and then a little respite to refresh his voice. Impatient of retirement, it was his custom to go from the bath to the theatre; and after dining in the orchestra, amidst a crowded assembly of the people, he promised them in Greek,2 “that after he had drank a little, he would give them a tune which would make their ears tingle.” Being highly pleased with the songs that were sung in his praise by some Alexandrians belonging to the fleet just arrived at Naples,3 he sent for more of the like singers from Alexandria. At the same time, he chose young men of the equestrian order, and above five thousand robust young fellows from the common people, on purpose to learn various kinds of applause, called bombi, imbrices, and testæ,4 which they were to practise in his favour, whenever he performed. They were divided into several parties, and were remarkable for their fine heads of hair, and were extremely well dressed, with rings upon their left hands. The leaders of these bands had salaries of forty thousand sesterces allowed them.

  XXI. At Rome also, being extremely proud of his singing, he ordered the games called Neronia to be celebrated before the time fixed for their return. All now becoming importunate to hear “his heavenly voice,” he informed them, “that he would gratify those who desired it at the gardens.” But the soldiers then on guard seconding the voice of the people, he promised to comply with their request immediately, and with all his heart. He instantly ordered his name to be entered upon the list of musicians who proposed to contend, and having thrown his lot into the urn among the rest, took his turn, and entered, attended by the prefects of the pretorian cohorts bearing his harp, and followed by the military tribunes, and several of his intimate friends. After he had taken his station, and made the usual prelude, he commanded Cluvius Rufus, a man of consular rank, to proclaim in the theatre, that he intended to sing the story of Niobe. This he accordingly did, and continued it until nearly ten o’clock, but deferred the disposal of the crown, and the remaining part of the solemnity, until the next year; that he might have more frequent opportunities of performing. But that being too long, he could not refrain from often appearing as a public performer during the interval. He made no scruple of exhibiting on the stage, even in the spectacles presented to the people by private persons, and was offered by one of the prætors, no less than a million of sesterces for his services. He likewise sang tragedies in a mask; the visors of the heroes and gods, as also of the heroines and goddesses, being formed into a resemblance of his own face, and that of any woman he was in love with. Amongst the rest, he sung “Canace in Labour,”1 “Orestes the Murderer of his Mother,” “Œdipus Blinded,” and “Hercules Mad.” In the last tragedy, it is said that a young sentinel, posted at the entrance of the stage, seeing him in a prison dress and bound with fetters, as the fable of the play required, ran to his assistance.

  XXII. He had from his childhood an extravagant passion for horses; and his constant talk was of the Circensian races, notwithstanding it was prohibited him. Lamenting once among his fellow-pupils, the case of a charioteer of the green party, who was dragged round the circus at the tail of his chariot, and being reprimanded by his tutor for it, he pretended that he was talking of Hector. In the beginning of his reign, he used to amuse himself daily with chariots drawn by four horses, made of ivory, upon a table. He attended at all the lesser exhibitions in the circus, at first privately, but at last openly; so that nobody ever doubted of his presence on any particular day. Nor did he conceal his desire to have the number of the prizes doubled; so that the races being increased accordingly, the diversion continued until a late hour; the leaders of parties refusing now to bring out their companies for any time less than the whole day. Upon this, he took a fancy for driving the chariot himself, and that even publicly. Having made his first experiment in the gardens, amidst crowds of slaves and other rabble, he at length performed in the view of all the people, in the Circus Maximus, whilst one of his freedmen dropped the napkin in the place where the magistrates used to give the signal. Not satisfied with exhibiting various specimens of his skill in those arts at Rome, he went over to Achaia, as has been already said, principally for this purpose. The several cities, in which solemn trials of musical skill used to be publicly held, had resolved to send him the crowns belonging to those who bore away the prize. These he accepted so graciously, that he not only gave the deputies who brought them an immediate audience, but even invited them to his table. Being requested by some of them to sing at supper, and prodigiously applauded, he said, “the Greeks were the only people who had an ear for music, and were the only good judges of him and his attainments.” Without delay he commenced his journey, and on his arrival at Cassiope,1 exhibited his first musical performance before the altar of Jupiter Cassius.

  XXIII. He afterwards appeared at the celebration of all public games in Greece: for such as fell in different years, he brought within the compass of one, and some he ordered to be celebrated a second time in the same year. At Olympia, likewise, contrary to custom, he appointed a public performance in music: and that he might meet with no interruption in this employment, when he was informed by his freedman Helius, that affairs at Rome required his presence, he wrote to him in these words: “Though now all your hopes and wishes are for my speedy return, yet you ought rather to advise and hope that I may come back with a character worthy of Nero.” During the time of his musical performance, nobody was allowed to stir out of the theatre upon any account, however necessary; insomuch, that it is said some women with child were delivered there. Many of the spectators being quite wearied with hearing and applauding him, because the town gates were shut, slipped privately over the walls; or counterfeiting themselves dead, were carried out for their funeral. With what extreme anxiety he engaged in these contests, with what keen desire to bear away the prize, and with how much awe of the judges, is scarcely to be believed. As if his adversaries had been on a level with himself, he would watch them narrowly, defame them privately, and sometimes, upon meeting them, rail at them in very scurrilous language; or bribe them, if they were better performers than himself. He always addressed the judges with the most profound reverence before he began, telling them, “he had done all things that were necessary, by way of preparation, but that the issue of the approaching trial was in the hand of fortune; and that they, as wise and skilful men, ought to exclude from their judgment things merely accidental.” Upon their encouraging him to have a good heart, he went off with more assurance, but not entirely free from anxiety; interpreting the silence and modesty of some of them into sourness and ill-nature, and saying that he was suspicious of them.

  XXIV. In these contests, he adhered so strictly to the rules, that he never durst spit, nor wipe the sweat from his forehead in any other way than with his sleeve. Having, in the performance of a tragedy, dropped his sceptre, and not quickly recovering it, he was in a great fright, lest he should be set aside for the miscarriage, and could not regain his assurance, until an actor who stood by swore he was certain it had not been observed in the midst of the acclamations and exultations of the people. When the prize was adjudged to him, he always proclaimed it himself; and even entered the lists with the heralds. That no memory or the least monument might remain of any other victor in the sacred Grecian games, he ordered all their statues and pictures to be pulled down, dragged away with hooks, and thrown into the common sewers. He drove the chariot with various numbers of horses, and at the Olympic games with no fewer than ten; though, in a poem of his, he had reflected upon Mithridates for that innovation. Being thrown out of his chariot, he was again replaced, but could not retain his seat, and was obliged to give up, before he reached the goal, but was crowned notwithstanding. On his departure, he declared the whole province a free country, and conferred upon the judges in the several games the freedom of Rome, with large sums of money. All these favours he proclaimed himself with his own voice, from the middle of the Stadium, during the solemnity of the Isthmian games.

  XXV. On his return from Greece, arriving at Naples, because he had commenced his career as a public performer in that city, he made his entrance in a chariot drawn by white horses through a breach in the city-wall, according to the practice of those who were victorious in the sacred Grecian games. In the same manner he entered Antium, Alba, and Rome. He made his entry into the city riding in the same chariot in which Augustus had triumphed, in a purple tunic, and a cloak embroidered with golden stars, having on his head the crown won at Olympia, and in his right hand that which was given him at the Parthian games: the rest being carried in a procession before him, with inscriptions denoting the places where they had been won, from whom, and in what plays or musical performances; whilst a train followed him with loud acclamations, crying out, that “they were the emperor’s attendants, and the soldiers of his triumph.” Having then caused an arch of the Circus Maximus1 to be taken down, he passed through the breach, as also through the Velabrum2 and the forum, to the Palatine hill and the temple of Apollo. Every where as he marched along, victims were slain, whilst the streets were strewed with saffron, and birds, chaplets, and sweetmeats scattered abroad. He suspended the sacred crowns in his chamber, about his beds, and caused statues of himself to be erected in the attire of a harper, and had his likeness stamped upon the coin in the same dress. After this period, he was so far from abating any thing of his application to music, that, for the preservation of his voice, he never addressed the soldiers but by messages, or with some person to deliver his speeches for him, when he thought fit to make his appearance amongst them. Nor did he ever do any thing either in jest or earnest, without a voice-master standing by him to caution him against overstraining his vocal organs, and to apply a handkerchief to his mouth when he did. He offered his friendship, or avowed open enmity to many, according as they were lavish or sparing in giving him their applause.

  XXVI. Petulancy, lewdness, luxury, avarice, and cruelty, he practised at first with reserve and in private, as if prompted to them only by the folly of youth; but, even then, the world was of opinion that they were the faults of his nature, and not of his age. After it was dark, he used to enter the taverns disguised in a cap or a wig, and ramble about the streets in sport, which was not void of mischief. He used to beat those he met coming home from supper; and, if they made any resistance, would wound them, and throw them into the commonsewer. He broke open and robbed shops; establishing an auction at home for selling his booty. In the scuffles which took place on those occasions, he often ran the hazard of losing his eyes, and even his life; being beaten almost to death by a senator, for handling his wife indecently. After this adventure, he never again ventured abroad at that time of night, without some tribunes following him at a little distance. In the day-time he would be carried to the theatre incognito in a litter, placing himself upon the upper part of the proscenium, where he not only witnessed the quarrels which arose on account of the performances, but also encouraged them. When they came to blows, and stones and pieces of broken benches began to fly about, he threw them plentifully amongst the people, and once even broke a prætor’s head.

  XXVII. His vices gaining strength by degrees, he laid aside his jocular amusements, and all disguise; breaking out into enormous crimes, without the least attempt to conceal them. His revels were prolonged from mid-day to midnight, while he was frequently refreshed by warm baths, and, in the summer time, by such as were cooled with snow. He often supped in public, in the Naumachia, with the sluices shut, or in the Campus Martius, or the Circus Maximus, being waited upon at table by common prostitutes of the town, and Syrian strumpets and glee-girls. As often as he went down the Tiber to Ostia, or coasted through the gulf of Baiæ, booths furnished as brothels and eating-houses, were erected along the shore and river banks; before which stood matrons, who, like bawds and hostesses, allured him to land. It was also his custom to invite himself to supper with his friends; at one of which was expended no less than four millions of sesterces in chaplets, and at another something more in roses.

  XXVIII. Besides the abuse of free-born lads, and the debauch of married women, he committed a rape upon Rubria, a Vestal Virgin. He was upon the point of marrying Acte,1 his freedwoman, having suborned some men of consular rank to swear that she was of royal descent. He gelded the boy Sporus, and endeavoured to transform him into a woman. He even went so far as to marry him, with all the usual formalities of a marriage settlement, the rose-coloured nuptial veil, and a numerous company at the wedding. When the ceremony was over, he had him conducted like a bride to his own house, and treated him as his wife.2 It was jocularly observed by some person, “that it would have been well for mankind, had such a wife fallen to the lot of his father Domitius.” This Sporus he carried about with him in a litter round the solemn assemblies and fairs of Greece, and afterwards at Rome through the Sigillaria,3 dressed in the rich attire of an empress; kissing him from time to time as they rode together. That he entertained an incestuous passion for his mother,4 but was deterred by her enemies, for fear that this haughty and overbearing woman should, by her compliance, get him entirely into her power, and govern in every thing, was universally believed: especially after he had introduced amongst his concubines a strumpet, who was reported to have a strong resemblance to Agrippina.5missing text * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  XXIX. He prostituted his own chastity to such a degree, that after he had defiled every part of his person with some unnatural pollution, he at last invented an extraordinary kind of diversion; which was, to be let out of a den in the arena, covered with the skin of a wild beast, and then assail with violence the private parts both of men and women, while they were bound to stakes. After he had vented his furious passion upon them, he finished the play in the embraces of his freedman Doryphorus,1 to whom he was married in the same way that Sporus had been married to himself; imitating the cries and shrieks of young virgins, when they are ravished. I have been informed from numerous sources, that he firmly believed, no man in the world to be chaste, or any part of his person undefiled; but that most men concealed that vice, and were cunning enough to keep it secret. To those, therefore, who frankly owned their unnatural lewdness, he forgave all other crimes.

  XXX. He thought there was no other use of riches and money than to squander them away profusely; regarding all those as sordid wretches who kept their expenses within due bounds; and extolling those as truly noble and generous souls, who lavished away and wasted all they possessed. He praised and admired his uncle Caius,2 upon no account more, than for squandering in a short time the vast treasure left him by Tiberius. Accordingly, he was himself extravagant and profuse, beyond all bounds. He spent upon Tiridates eight hundred thousand sesterces a day, a sum almost incredible; and at his departure, presented him with upwards of a million.3 He likewise bestowed upon Menecrates the harper, and Spicillus a gladiator, the estates and houses of men who had received the honour of a triumph. He enriched the usurer Cercopithecus Panerotes with estates both in town and country; and gave him a funeral, in pomp and magnificence little inferior to that of princes. He never wore the same garment twice. He has been known to stake four hundred thousand sesterces on a throw of the dice. It was his custom to fish with a golden net, drawn by silken cords of purple and scarlet. It is said, that he never travelled with less than a thousand baggage-carts; the mules being all shod with silver, and the drivers dressed in scarlet jackets of the finest Canusian cloth,1 with a numerous train of footmen, and troops of Mazacans, with bracelets on their arms, and mounted upon horses in splendid trappings.

  2XXXI. In nothing was he more prodigal than in his buildings. He completed his palace by continuing it from the Palatine to the Esquiline hill, calling the building at first only “The Passage,” but, after it was burnt down and rebuilt, “The Golden House.”3 Of its dimensions and furniture, it may be sufficient to say thus much: the porch was so high that there stood in it a colossal statue of himself a hundred and twenty feet in height; and the space included in it was so ample, that it had triple porticos a mile in length, and a lake like a sea, surrounded with buildings which had the appearance of a city. Within its area were corn fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods, containing a vast number of animals of various kinds, both wild and tame. In other parts it was entirely over-laid with gold, and adorned with jewels and mother of pearl. The supper rooms were vaulted, and compartments of the ceilings, inlaid with ivory, were made to revolve, and scatter flowers; while they contained pipes which shed unguents upon the guests. The chief banqueting room was circular, and revolved perpetually, night and day, in imitation of the motion of the celestial bodies. The baths were supplied with water from the sea and the Albula. Upon the dedication of this magnificent house after it was finished, all he said in approval of it was, “that he had now a dwelling fit for a man.” He commenced making a pond for the reception of all the hot streams from Baiæ, which he designed to have continued from Misenum to the Avernian lake, in a conduit, enclosed in galleries; and also a canal from Avernum to Ostia, that ships might pass from one to the other, without a sea voyage. The length of the proposed canal was one hundred and sixty miles; and it was intended to be of breadth sufficient to permit ships with five banks of oars to pass each other. For the execution of these designs, he ordered all prisoners, in every part of the empire, to be brought to Italy; and that even those who were convicted of the most heinous crimes, in lieu of any other sentence, should be condemned to work at them. He was encouraged to all this wild and enormous profusion, not only by the great revenue of the empire, but by the sudden hopes given him of an immense hidden treasure, which queen Dido, upon her flight from Tyre, had brought with her to Africa. This, a Roman knight pretended to assure him, upon good grounds, was still hid there in some deep caverns, and might with a little labour be recovered.

  XXXII. But being disappointed in his expectations of this resource, and reduced to such difficulties, for want of money, that he was obliged to defer paying his troops, and the rewards due to the veterans; he resolved upon supplying his necessities by means of false accusations and plunder. In the first place, he ordered, that if any freedman, without sufficient reason, bore the name of the family to which he belonged; the half, instead of three fourths, of his estate should be brought into the exchequer at his decease: also that the estates of all such persons as had not in their wills been mindful of their prince, should be confiscated; and that the lawyers who had drawn or dictated such wills, should be liable to a fine. He ordained likewise, that all words and actions, upon which any informer could ground a prosecution, should be deemed treason. He demanded an equivalent for the crowns which the cities of Greece had at any time offered him in the solemn games. Having forbad any one to use the colours of amethyst and Tyrian purple, he privately sent a person to sell a few ounces of them upon the day of the Nundinæ, and then shut up all the merchants shops, on the pretext that his edict had been violated. It is said, that, as he was playing and singing in the theatre, observing a married lady dressed in the purple which he had prohibited, he pointed her out to his procurators; upon which she was immediately dragged out of her seat, and not only stripped of her clothes, but her property. He never nominated a person to any office without saying to him, “You know what I want; and let us take care that nobody has any thing he can call his own.” At last he rifled many temples of the rich offerings with which they were stored, and melted down all the gold and silver statues, and amongst them those of the penates,1 which Galba afterwards restored.

  XXXIII. He began the practice of parricide and murder with Claudius himself; for although he was not the contriver of his death, he was privy to the plot. Nor did he make any secret of it; but used afterwards to commend, in a Greek proverb, mushrooms as food fit for the gods, because Claudius had been poisoned with them. He traduced his memory both by word and deed in the grossest manner; one while charging him with folly, another while with cruelty. For he used to say by way of jest, that he had ceased morari2 amongst men, pronouncing the first syllable long; and treated as null many of his decrees and ordinances, as made by a doting old blockhead. He enclosed the place where his body was burnt with only a low wall of rough masonry. He attempted to poison Britannicus, as much out of envy because he had a sweeter voice, as from apprehension of what might ensue from the respect which the people entertained for his father’s memory. He employed for this purpose a woman named Locusta, who had been a witness against some persons guilty of like practices. But the poison she gave him, working more slowly than he expected, and only causing a purge, he sent for the woman, and beat her with his own hand, charging her with administering an antidote instead of poison; and upon her alleging in excuse, that she had given Britannicus but a gentle mixture in order to prevent suspicion, “Think you,” said he, “that I am afraid of the Julian law;” and obliged her to prepare, in his own chamber and before his eyes, as quick and strong a does as possible. This he tried upon a kid: but the animal lingering for five hours before it expired, he ordered her to go to work again; and when she had done, he gave the poison to a pig, which dying immediately, he commanded the potion to be brought into the eating-room and given to Britannicus, while he was at supper with him. The prince had no sooner tasted it than he sunk on the floor, Nero meanwhile, pretending to the guests, that it was only a fit of the falling sickness, to which, he said, he was subject. He buried him the following day, in a mean and hurried way, during violent storms of rain. He gave Locusta a pardon, and rewarded her with a great estate in land, placing some disciples with her, to be instructed in her trade.

  XXXIV. His mother being used to make strict inquiry into what he said or did, and to reprimand him with the freedom of a parent, he was so much offended, that he endeavoured to expose her to public resentment, by frequently pretending a resolution to quit the government, and retire to Rhodes. Soon afterwards, he deprived her of all honour and power, took from her the guard of Roman and German soldiers, banished her from the palace and from his society, and persecuted her in every way he could contrive; employing persons to harass her when at Rome with law-suits, and to disturb her in her retirement from town with the most scurrilous and abusive language, following her about by land and sea. But being terrified with her menaces and violent spirit, he resolved upon her destruction, and thrice attempted it by poison. Finding, however, that she had previously secured herself by antidotes, he contrived machinery, by which the floor over her bed-chamber might be made to fall upon her while she was asleep in the night. This design miscarrying likewise, through the little caution used by those who were in the secret, his next stratagem was to construct a ship which could be easily shivered, in hopes of destroying her either by drowing, or by the deck above her cabin crushing her in its fall. Accordingly, under colour of a pretended reconciliation, he wrote her an extremely affectionate letter, inviting her to Baiæ, to celebrate with him the festival of Minerva. He had given private orders to the captains of the galleys which were to attend her, to shatter to pieces the ship in which she had come, by falling foul of it, but in such manner that it might appear to be done accidentally. He prolonged the entertainment, for the more convenient opportunity of executing the plot in the night; and at her return for Bauli,1 instead of the old ship which had conveyed her to Baiæ, he offered that which he had contrived for her destruction. He attended her to the vessel in a very cheerful mood, and, at parting with her, kissed her breasts; after which he sat up very late in the night, waiting with great anxiety to learn the issue of his project. But receiving information that every thing had fallen out contrary to his wish, and that she had saved herself by swimming,—not knowing what course to take, upon her freedman, Lucius Agerinus bringing word, with great joy, that she was safe and well, he privately dropped a poniard by him. He then commanded the freedman to be seized and put in chains, under pretence of his having been employed by his mother to assassinate him; at the same time ordering her to be put to death, and giving out, that, to avoid punishment for her intended crime, she had laid violent hands upon herself. Other circumstances, still more horrible, are related on good authority; as that he went to view her corpse, and handling her limbs, pointed out some blemishes, and commended other points; and that, growing thirsty during the survey, he called for drink. Yet he was never afterwards able to bear the stings of his own conscience for this atrocious act, although encouraged by the congratulatory addresses of the army, the senate, and people. He frequently affirmed that he was haunted by his mother’s ghost, and persecuted with the whips and burning torches of the Furies. Nay, he attempted by magical rites to bring up her ghost from below, and soften her rage against him. When he was in Greece, he durst not attend the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, at the initiation of which, impious and wicked persons are warned by the voice of the herald from approaching the rites.1 Besides the murder of his mother, he had been guilty of that of his aunt; for, being obliged to keep her bed in consequence of a complaint in her bowels, he paid her a visit, and she, being then advanced in years, stroking his downy chin, in the tenderness of affection, said to him: “May I but live to see the day when this is shaved for the first time,2 and I shall then die contented.” He turned, however, to those about him, made a jest of it, saying, that he would have his beard immediately taken off, and ordered the physicians to give her more violent purgatives. He seized upon her estate before she had expired; suppressing her will, that he might enjoy the whole himself.

  XXXV. He had, besides Octavia, two other wives: Poppæa Sabina, whose father had borne the office of quæstor, and who had been married before to a Roman knight: and, after her, Statilia Messalina, great-grand-daughter of Taurus,3 who was twice consul, and received the honour of a triumph. To obtain possession of her, he put to death her husband, Atticus Vestinus, who was then consul. He soon became disgusted with Octavia, and ceased from having any intercourse with her; and being censured by his friends for it, he replied, “She ought to be satisfied with having the rank and appendages of his wife.” Soon afterwards, he made several attempts, but in vain, to strangle her, and then diverced her for barrenness. But the people, disapproving of the divorce, and making severe comments upon it, he also banished her.4 At last he put her to death, upon a charge of adultery, so impudent and false, that, when all those who were put to the torture positively denied their knowledge of it, he suborned his pedagogue, Anicetus, to affirm, that he had secretly intrigued with and debauched her. He married Poppæa twelve days after the divorce of Octavia,1 and entertained a great affection for her; but, nevertheless, killed her with a kick which he gave her when she was big with child, and in bad health, only because she found fault with him for returning late from driving his chariot. He had by her a daughter, Claudia Augusta, who died an infant. There was no person at all connected with him who escaped his deadly and unjust cruelty. Under pretence of her being engaged in a plot against him, he put to death Antonia, Claudius’s daughter, who refused to marry him after the death of Poppæa. In the same way, he destroyed all who were allied to him either by blood or marriage; amongst whom was young Aulus Plautinus. He first compelled him to submit to his unnatural lust, and then ordered him to be executed, crying out, “Let my mother bestow her kisses on my successor thus defiled;” pretending that he had been his mother’s paramour, and by her encouraged to aspire to the empire. His step-son, Rufinus Crispinus, Poppæa’s son, though a minor, he ordered to be drowned in the sea, while he was fishing, by his own slaves, because he was reported to act frequently amongst his play-fellows the part of a general or an emperor. He banished Tuscus, his nurse’s son, for presuming, when he was procurator of Egypt, to wash in the baths which had been constructed in expectation of his own coming. Seneca, his preceptor, he forced to kill himself,2 though, upon his desiring leave to retire, and offering to surrender his estate, he solemnly swore, “that there was no foundation for his suspicions, and that he would perish himself sooner than hurt him.” Having promised Burrhus, the pretorian prefect, a remedy for a swelling in his throat, he sent him poison. Some old rich freedmen of Claudius, who had formerly not only promoted his adoption, but were also instrumental to his advancement to the empire, and had been his governors, he took off by poison given them in their meat or drink.

  XXXVI. Nor did he proceed with less cruelty against those who were not of his family. A blazing star, which is vulgarly supposed to portend destruction to kings and princes, appeared above the horizon several nights successively.1 He felt great anxiety on account of this phenomenon, and being informed by one Babilus, an astrologer, that princes were used to expiate such omens by the sacrifice of illustrious persons, and so avert the danger foreboded to their own persons, by bringing it on the heads of their chief men, he resolved on the destruction of the principal nobility in Rome. He was the more encouraged to this, because he had some plausible pretence for carrying it into execution, from the discovery of two conspiracies against him; the former and more dangerous of which was that formed by Piso,2 and discovered at Rome; the other was that of Vinicius,3 at Beneventum. The conspirators were brought to their trials loaded with triple fetters. Some ingenuously confessed the charge; others avowed that they thought the design against his life an act of favour for which he was obliged to them, as it was impossible in any other way than by death to relieve a person rendered infamous by crimes of the greatest enormity. The children of those who had been condemned, were banished the city, and afterwards either poisoned or starved to death. It is asserted that some of them, with their tutors, and the slaves who carried their satchels, were all poisoned together at one dinner; and others not suffered to seek their daily bread.

  XXXVII. From this period he butchered, without distinction or quarter, all whom his caprice suggested as objects for his cruelty; and upon the most frivolous pretences. To mention only a few: Salvidienus Orfitus was accused of letting out three taverns attached to his house in the forum to some cities for the use of their deputies at Rome. The charge against Cassius Longinus, a lawyer who had lost his sight, was, that he kept amongst the busts of his ancestors that of Caius Cassius, who was concerned in the death of Julius Cæsar. The only charge objected against Pætus Thrasea was, that he had a melancholy cast of features, and looked like a schoolmaster. He allowed but one hour to those whom he obliged to kill themselves; and, to prevent delay, he sent them physicians “to cure them immediately, if they lingered beyond that time;” for so he called bleeding them to death. There was at that time an Egyptian of a most voracious appetite, who would digest raw flesh, or any thing else that was given him. It was credibly reported, that the emperor was extremely desirous of furnishing him with living men to tear and devour. Being elated with his great success in the perpetration of crimes, he declared, “that no prince before himself ever knew the extent of his power.” He threw out strong intimations that he would not even spare the senators who survived, but would entirely extirpate that order, and put the provinces and armies into the hands of the Roman knights and his own freedmen. It is certain that he never gave or vouchsafed to allow any one the customary kiss, either on entering or departing, or even returned a salute. And at the inauguration of a work, the cut through the Isthmus,1 he, with a loud voice, amidst the assembled multitude, uttered a prayer, that “the undertaking might prove fortunate for himself and the Roman people,” without taking the smallest notice of the senate.

  XXXVIII. He spared, moreover, neither the people of Rome, nor the capital of his country. Somebody in conversation saying—

  • Ἐμοῦ ϑανόντος γαῖα μιχϑήτω πυϱί·
  • When I am dead let fire devour the world—

  “Nay,” said he, “let it be while I am living” [ἐμοῦ ξῶντος]. And he acted accordingly: for, pretending to be disgusted with the old buildings, and the narrow and winding streets, he set the city on fire so openly, that many of consular rank caught his own household servants on their property with tow, and torches in their hands, but durst not meddle with them. There being near his Golden House some granaries, the site of which he exceedingly coveted, they were battered as if with machines of war, and set on fire, the walls being built of stone. During six days and seven nights this terrible devastation continued, the people being obliged to fly to the tombs and monuments for lodging and shelter. Meanwhile, a vast number of stately buildings, the houses of generals celebrated in former times, and even then still decorated with the spoils of war, were laid in ashes; as well as the temples of the gods, which had been vowed and dedicated by the kings of Rome, and afterwards in the Punic and Gallic wars: in short, every thing that was remarkable and worthy to be seen which time had spared.1 This fire he beheld from a tower in the house of Mecænas, and “being greatly delighted,” as he said, “with the beautiful effects of the conflagration,” he sung a poem on the ruin of Troy, in the tragic dress he used on the stage. To turn this calamity to his own advantage by plunder and rapine, he promised to remove the bodies of those who had perished in the fire, and clear the rubbish at his own expense; suffering no one to meddle with the remains of their property. But he not only received, but exacted contributions on account of the loss, until he had exhausted the means both of the provinces and private persons.

  XXXIX. To these terrible and shameful calamities brought upon the people by their prince, were added some proceeding from misfortune. Such were a pestilence, by which, within the space of one autumn, there died no less than thirty thousand persons, as appeared from the registers in the temple of Libitina; a great disaster in Britain,2 where two of the principal towns belonging to the Romans were plundered; and a dreadful havoc made both amongst our troops and allies; a shameful discomfiture of the army of the East; where, in Armenia, the legions were obliged to pass under the yoke, and it was with great difficulty that Syria was retained. Amidst all these disasters, it was strange, and, indeed, particularly remarkable, that he bore nothing more patiently than the scurrilous language and railing abuse which was in every one’s mouth; treating no class of persons with more gentleness, than those who assailed him with invective and lampoons. Many things of that kind were posted up about the city, or otherwise published, both in Greek and Latin: such as these,

  • • Νέϱων, Οϱέστης, Ἀλϰμαίων, μητϱοϰτόνοι.
    • Νεόνυμφον1 Νέρων, ἰδίαν μήτερ’ ἀπέϰτεινεν.
  • • Orestes and Alcmæon—Nero too,
    • The lustful Nero, worst of all the crew,
    • Fresh from his bridal—their own mothers slew.
  • • Quis neget Æneæ magna de stirpe Neronem?
    • Sustulit hic matrem: sustulit2 ille patrem.
  • • Sprung from Æneas, pious, wise and great,
    • Who says that Nero is degenerate?
    • Safe through the flames, one bore his sire; the other,
    • To save himself, took off his loving mother.
  • • Dum tendit citharam noster, dum cornua Parthus,
    • Noster erit Pæan, ille ἑκατηβέλετης.
    • His lyre to harmony our Nero strings;
    • His arrows o’er the plain the Parthian wings:
    • Ours call the tuneful Pæan,—famed in war,
    • The other Phœbus name, the god who shoots afar.3
    • Roma domus fiet: Vejos migrate, Quirites,
    • Si non et Vejos occupat ista domus.
    • All Rome will be one house: to Veii fly,
    • Should it not stretch to Veii, by and by.4

  But he neither made any inquiry after the authors, nor when information was laid before the senate against some of them, would he allow a severe sentence to be passed. Isidorus, the Cynic philosopher, said to him aloud, as he was passing along the streets, “You sing the misfortunes of Nauplius well, but behave badly yourself.” And Datus, a comic actor, when repeating these words in the piece, “Farewell, father! Farewell mother!” mimicked the gestures of persons drinking and swimming, significantly alluding to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina: and on uttering the last clause,

  • Orcus vobis ducit pedes;
  • You stand this moment on the brink of Orcus;

  he plainly intimated his application of it to the precarious position of the senate. Yet Nero only banished the player and philosopher from the city and Italy; either because he was insensible to shame, or from apprehension that if he discovered his vexation, still keener things might be said of him.

  XL. The world, after tolerating such an emperor for little less than fourteen years, at length forsook him; the Gauls. headed by Julius Vindex, who at that time governed the province as pro-prætor, being the first to revolt. Nero had been formerly told by astrologers, that it would be his fortune to be at last deserted by all the world; and this occasioned that celebrated saying of his, “An artist can live in any country;” by which he meant to offer as an excuse for his practice of music, that it was not only his amusement as a prince, but might be his support when reduced to a private station. Yet some of the astrologers promised him, in his forlorn state, the rule of the East, and some in express words the kingdom of Jerusalem. But the greater part of them flattered him with assurances of his being restored to his former fortune. And being most inclined to believe the latter prediction, upon losing Britain and Armenia, he imagined he had run through all the misfortunes which the fates had decreed him. But when, upon consulting the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, he was advised to beware of the seventy-third year, as if he were not to die till then, never thinking of Galba’s age, he conceived such hopes, not only of living to advanced years, but of constant and singular good fortune, that having lost some things of great value by shipwreck, he scrupled not to say amongst his friends, that “the fishes would bring them back to him.” At Naples he heard of the insurrection in Gaul, on the anniversary of the day on which he killed his mother, and bore it with so much unconcern, as to excite a suspicion that he was really glad of it, since he had now a fair opportunity of plundering those wealthy provinces by the right of war. Immediately going to the gymnasium, he witnessed the exercise of the wrestlers with the greatest delight. Being interrupted at supper with letters which brought yet worse news, he expressed no greater resentment, than only to threaten the rebels. For eight days together, he never attempted to answer any letters, nor give any orders, but buried the whole affair in profound silence.

  XLI. Being roused at last by numerous proclamations of Vindex, treating him with reproaches and contempt, he in a letter to the senate exhorted them to avenge his wrongs and those of the republic; desiring them to excuse his not appearing in the senate house, because he had got cold. But nothing so much galled him, as to find himself railed at as a pitiful harper, and, instead of Nero, styled Ænobarbus: which being his family name, since he was upbraided with it, he declared that he would resume it, and lay aside the name he had taken by adoption. Passing by the other accusations as wholly groundless, he earnestly refuted that of his want of skill in an art upon which he had bestowed so much pains, and in which he had arrived at such perfection; asking frequently those about him, “if they knew any one who was a more accomplished musician?” But being alarmed by messengers after messengers of ill news from Gaul, he returned in great consternation to Rome. On the road, his mind was somewhat relieved, by observing the frivolous omen of a Gaulish soldier defeated and dragged by the hair by a Roman knight, which was sculptured on a monument; so that he leaped for joy, and adored the heavens. Even then he made no appeal either to the senate or people, but calling together some of the leading men at his own house, he held a hasty consultation upon the present state of affairs, and then, during the remainder of the day, carried them about with him to view some musical instruments, of a new invention, which were played by water;1 exhibitin all the parts, and discoursing upon the principles and difficulties of the contrivance; which, he told them, he intended to produce in the theatre, if Vindex would give him leave.

  XLII. Soon afterwards, he received intelligence that Galba and the Spaniards had declared against him; upon which, he fainted, and losing his reason, lay a long time speechless, and apparently dead. As soon as he recovered from this state of stupefaction, he tore his clothes, and beat his head, crying out, “It is all over with me!” His nurse endeavouring to comfort him, and telling him that the like things had happened to other princes before him, he replied, “I am beyond all example wretched, for I have lost an empire whilst I am still living.” He, nevertheless, abated nothing of his usual luxury and inattention to business. Nay, on the arrival of good news from the provinces, he, at a sumptuous entertainment, sung with an air of merriment some jovial verses upon the leaders of the revolt, which were made public; and accompanied them with suitable gestures. Being carried privately to the theatre, he sent word to an actor who was applauded by the spectators, “that he had it all his own way, now that he himself did not appear on the stage.”

  XLIII. At the first breaking out of these troubles, it is believed that he had formed many designs of a monstrous nature, although conformable enough to his natural disposition. These were to send new governors and commanders to the provinces and the armies, and employ assassins to butcher all the former governors and commanders, as men unanimously engaged in a conspiracy against him; to massacre the exiles in every quarter, and all the Gaulish population in Rome; the former lest they should join the insurrection; the latter as privy to the designs of their countrymen, and ready to support them; to abandon Gaul itself, to be wasted and plundered by his armies; to poison the whole senate at a feast; to fire the city, and then let loose the wild beasts upon the people, in order to impede their stopping the progress of the flames. But being deterred from the execution of these designs, not so much by remorse of conscience, as by despair of being able to effect them; and judging an expedition into Gaul necessary, he removed the consuls from their office, before the time of its expiration was arrived; and in their room assumed the consulship himself without a colleague, as if the fates had decreed that Gaul should not be conquered, but by a consul Upon assuming the fasces, after an entertainment at the palace, as he walked out of the room leaning on the arms of some of his friends, he declared, that as soon as he arrived in the province, he would make his appearance amongst the troops, unarmed, and do nothing but weep: and that, after he had brought the mutineers to repentance, he would, the next day, in the public rejoicings, sing songs of triumph, which he must now, without loss of time, apply himself to compose.

  XLIV. In preparing for this expedition, his first care was to provide carriages for his musical instruments and machinery to be used upon the stage; to have the hair of the concubines he carried with him dressed in the fashion of men; and to supply them with battle-axes, and Amazonian bucklers. He summoned the city-tribes to enlist; but no qualified persons appearing, he ordered all masters to send a certain number of slaves, the best they had, not excepting their stewards and secretaries. He commanded the several orders of the people to bring in a fixed proportion of their estates, as they stood in the censor’s books; all tenants of houses and mansions to pay one year’s rent forth with into the exchequer; and, with unheard-of strictness, would receive only new coin of the purest silver and the finest gold; insomuch that most people refused to pay, crying out unanimously that he ought to squeeze the informers, and oblige them to surrender their gains.

  XLV. The general odium in which he was held received an increase by the great scarcity of corn, and an occurrence connected with it. For, as it happened just at that time, there arrived from Alexandria a ship, which was said to be freighted with dust for the wrestlers belonging to the emperor.1 This so much inflamed the public rage, that he was treated with the utmost abuse and scurrility. Upon the top of one of his statues was placed the figure of a chariot with a Greek inscription, that “Now indeed he had a race to run; let him be gone.” A little bag was tied about another, with a ticket containing these words; “What could I do?”—“Truly thou hast merited the sack.”2 Some person likewise wrote on the pillars in the forum, “that he had even woke the cocks3 with his singing.” And many, in the night-time, pretending to find fault with their servants, frequently called for a Vindex.4

  XLVI. He was also terrified with manifest warnings, both old and new, arising from dreams, auspices, and omens. He had never been used to dream before the murder of his mother. After that event, he fancied in his sleep that he was steering a ship, and that the rudder was forced from him: that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into a prodigiously dark place; and was at one time covered over with a vast swarm of winged ants, and at another, surrounded by the national images which were set up near Pompey’s theatre, and hindered from advancing farther; that a Spanish jennet he was fond of, had his hinder parts so changed, as to resemble those of an ape; and having his head only left unaltered, neighed very harmoniously. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus flying open of themselves, there issued from it a voice, calling on him by name. The Lares being adorned with fresh garlands on the calends (the first) of January, fell down during the preparations for sacrificing to them. While he was taking the omens, Sporus presented him with a ring, the stone of which had carved upon it the Rape of Proserpine. When a great multitude of the several orders was assembled, to attend at the solemnity of making vows to the gods, it was a long time before the keys of the Capitol could be found. And when, in a speech of his to the senate against Vindex, these words were read, “that the miscreants should be punished and soon make the end they merited,” they all cried out, “You will do it, Augustus.” It was likewise remarked, that the last tragic piece which he sung, was Œdipus in Exile, and that he fell as he was repeating this verse:

  • Θανεῖν μ’ ἄνῳγε σύγγαμος, μήτηρ, πατήρ·
  • Wife, mother, father, force me to my end.

  XLVII. Meanwhile, on the arrival of the news, that the rest of the armies had declared against him, he tore to pieces the letters which were delivered to him at dinner, overthrew the table, and dashed with violence against the ground two favourite cups, which he called Homer’s, because some of that poet’s verses were cut upon them. Then taking from Locusta a dose of poison, which he put up in a golden box, he went into the Servilian gardens, and thence dispatching a trusty freedman to Ostia, with orders to make ready a fleet, he endeavoured to prevail with some tribunes and centurions of the pretorian guards to attend him in his flight; but part of them showing no great inclination to comply, others absolutely refusing, and one of them crying out aloud,

  • Usque adeone mori miserum est?
  • Say, is it then so sad a thing to die?1

  he was in great perplexity whether he should submit himself to Galba, or apply to the Parthians for protection, or else appear before the people dressed in mourning, and, upon the rostra, in the most piteous manner, beg pardon for his past misdemeanors, and, if he could not prevail, request of them to grant him at least the government of Egypt. A speech to this purpose was afterwards found in his writing-case. But it is conjectured that he durst not venture upon this project, for fear of being torn to pieces, before he could get to the forum. Deferring, therefore, his resolution until the next day, he awoke about midnight, and finding the guards withdrawn, he leaped out of bed, and sent round for his friends. But none of them vouchsafing any message in reply, he went with a few attendants to their houses. The doors being every where shut, and no one giving him any answer, he returned to his bed-chamber; whence those who had the charge of it had all now eloped; some having gone one way, and some another, carrying off with them his bedding and box of poison. He then endeavoured to find Spicillus, the gladiator, or some one to kill him; but not being able to procure any one, “What!” said he, “have I then neither friend nor foe?” and immediately ran out, as if he would throw himself into the Tiber.

  XLVIII. But this furious impulse subsiding, he wished for some place of privacy, where he might collect his thoughts; and his freedman Phaon offering him his country-house, between the Salarian1 and Nomentan2 roads, about four miles from the city, he mounted a horse, barefoot as he was, and in his tunic, only slipping over it an old soiled cloak; with his head muffled up, and an handkerchief before his face, and four persons only to attend him, of whom Sporus was one. He was suddenly struck with horror by an earthquake, and by a flash of lightning which darted full in his face, and heard from the neighbouring camp3 the shouts of the soldiers, wishing his destruction, and prosperity to Galba. He also heard a traveller they met on the road, say, “They are in pursuit of Nero:” and another ask, “Is there any news in the city about Nero?” Uncovering his face when his horse was started by the scent of a carcase which lay in the road, he was recognized and saluted by an old soldier who had been discharged from the guards. When they came to the lane which turned up to the house, they quitted their horses, and with much difficulty he wound among bushes and briars, and along a track through a bed of rushes, over which they spread their cloaks for him to walk on. Having reached a wall at the back of the villa, Phaon advised him to hide himself awhile in a sand-pit; when he replied, “I will not go under-ground alive.” Staying there some little time, while preparations were made for bringing him privately into the villa, he took up some water out of a neighbouring tank in his hand, to drink, saying, “This is Nero’s distilled water.”1 Then his cloak having been torn by the brambles, he pulled out the thorns which stuck in it. At last, being admitted, creeping upon his hands and knees, through a hole made for him in the wall, he lay down in the first closet he came to, upon a miserable pallet, with an old coverlet thrown over it; and being both hungry and thirsty, though he refused some coarse bread that was brought him, he drank a little warm water.

  XLIX. All who surrounded him now pressing him to save himself from the indignities which were ready to befall him, he ordered a pit to be sunk before his eyes, of the size of his body, and the bottom to be covered with pieces of marble put together, if any could be found about the house; and water and wood,2 to be got ready for immediate use about his corpse; weeping at every thing that was done, and frequently saying, “What an artist is now about to perish!” Meanwhile, letters being brought in by a servant belonging to Phaon, he snatched them out of his hand, and there read, “That he had been declared an enemy by the senate, and that search was making for him, that he might be punished according to the ancient custom of the Romans.” He then inquired what kind of punishment that was; and being told, that the practice was to strip the criminal naked, and scourge him to death, while his neck was fastened within a forked stake, he was so terrified that he took up two daggers which he had brought with him, and after feeling the points of both, put them up again, saying, “The fatal hour is not yet come.” One while, he begged of Sporus to begin to wail and lament; another while, he entreated that one of them would set him an example by killing himself; and then again, he condemned his own want of resolution in these words: “I yet live to my shame and disgrace: this is not becoming for Nero: it is not becoming. Thou oughtest in such circumstances to have a good heart: Come, then: courage, man!”1 The horsemen who had received orders to bring him away alive, were now approaching the house. As soon as he heard them coming, he uttered with a trembling voice the following verse,

  • Ἵππων μ’ ὠϰυπόδων ἀμφὶ ϰτύπος οὐατα βάλλει·2
  • The noise of swift-heel’d steeds assails my ears;

  he drove a dagger into his throat, being assisted in the act by Epaphroditus, his secretary. A centurion bursting in just as he was half-dead, and applying his cloak to the wound, pretending that he was come to his assistance, he made no other reply but this, “ ’Tis too late;” and “Is this your loyalty?” Immediately after pronouncing these words, he expired, with his eyes fixed and starting out of his head, to the terror of all who beheld him. He had requested of his attendants, as the most essential favour, that they would let no one have his head, but that by all means his body might be burnt entire. And this, Icelus, Galba’s freedman, granted. He had but a little before been discharged from the prison into which he had been thrown, when the disturbances first broke out.

  L. The expenses of his funeral amounted to two hundred thousand sesterces; the bed upon which his body was carried to the pile and burnt, being covered with the white robes, interwoven with gold, which he had worn upon the calends of January preceding. His nurses, Ecloge and Alexandra, with his concubine Acte, deposited his remains in the tomb belonging to the family of the Domitii, which stands upon the top of the Hill of the Gardens,1 and is to be seen from the Campus Martius. In that monument, a coffin of porphyry, with an altar of marble of Luna over it, is enclosed by a wall built of stone brought from Thasos.2

  LI. In stature he was a little below the common height; his skin was foul and spotted; his hair inclined to yellow: his features were agreeable, rather than handsome; his eyes grey and dull, his neck was thick, his belly prominent, his legs very slender, his constitution sound. For, though excessively luxurious in his mode of living, he had, in the course of fourteen years, only three fits of sickness; which were so slight, that he neither forbore the use of wine, nor made any alteration in his usual diet. In his dress, and the care of his person, he was so careless, that he had his hair cut in rings, one above another; and when in Achaia, he let it grow long behind; and he generally appeared in public in the loose dress which he used at table, with a handkerchief about his neck, and without either a girdle or shoes.

  LII. He was instructed, when a boy, in the rudiments of almost all the liberal sciences; but his mother diverted him from the study of philosophy, as unsuited to one destined to be an emperor; and his preceptor, Seneca, discouraged him from reading the ancient orators, that he might longer secure his devotion to himself. Therefore, having a turn for poetry, he composed verses both with pleasure and case; nor did he, as some think, publish those of other writers as his own. Several little pocket-books and loose sheets have come into my possession, which contain some well-known verses in his own hand, and written in such a manner, that it was very evident, from the blotting and interlining, that they had not been transcribed from a copy, nor dictated by another, but were written by the composer of them.

  LIII. He had likewise great taste for drawing and painting, as well as for moulding statues in plaster. But, above all things, he most eagerly coveted popularity, being the rival of every man who obtained the applause of the people for any thing he did. It was the general belief, that, after the crowns he won by his performances on the stage, he would the next lustrum have taken his place among the wrestlers at the Olympic games. For he was continually practising that art; nor did he witness the gymnastic games in any part of Greece otherwise than sitting upon the ground in the stadium, as the umpires do. And if a pair of wrestlers happened to break the bounds, he would with his own hands drag them back into the centre of the circle. Because he was thought to equal Apollo in music, and the sun in chariot-driving, he resolved also to imitate the achievements of Hercules. And they say that a lion was got ready for him to kill, either with a club, or with a close hug, in view of the people in the amphitheatre; which he was to perform naked.

  LIV. Towards the end of his life, he publicly vowed, that if his power in the state was securely re-established, he would, in the spectacles which he intended to exhibit in honour of his success, include a performance upon organs,1 as well as upon flutes and bagpipes, and, on the last day of the games, would act in the play, and take the part of Turnus, as we find it in Virgil. And there are some who say, that he put to death the player Paris as a dangerous rival.

  LV. He had an insatiable desire to immortalize his name, and acquire a reputation which should last through all succeeding ages; but it was capriciously directed. He therefore took from several things and places their former appellations, and gave them new names derived from his own. He called the month of April, Neroneus, and designed changing the name of Rome into that of Neropolis.

  LVI. He held all religious rites in contempt, except those of the Syrian Goddess;1 but at last he paid her so little reverence, that he made water upon her; being now engaged in another superstition, in which only he obstinately persisted. For having received from some obscure plebeian a little image of a girl, as a preservative against plots, and discovering a conspiracy immediately after, he constantly worshipped his imaginary protectress as the greatest amongst the gods, offering to her three sacrifices daily. He was also desirous to have it supposed that he had, by revelations from this deity, a knowledge of future events. A few months before he died, he attended a sacrifice, according to the Etruscan rites, but the omens were not favourable.

  LVII. He died in the thirty-second year of his age,2 upon the same day on which he had formerly put Octavia to death; and the public joy was so great upon the occasion, that the common people ran about the city with caps upon their heads. Some, however, were not wanting, who for a long time decked his tomb with spring and summer flowers. Sometimes they placed his image upon the rostra, dressed in robes of state; at another, they published proclamations in his name, as if he were still alive, and would shortly return to Rome, and take vengeance on all his enemies. Vologesus, king of the Parthians, when he sent ambassadors to the senate to renew his alliance with the Roman people, earnestly requested that due honour should be paid to the memory of Nero; and, to conclude, when, twenty years afterwards, at which time I was a young man,3 some person of obscure birth gave himself out for Nero, that name secured him so favourable a reception from the Parthians, that he was very zealously supported, and it was with much difficulty that they were prevailed upon to give him up.

  Though no law had ever passed for regulating the transmission of the imperial power, yet the design of conveying it by lineal descent was implied in the practice of adoption. By the rule of hereditary succession, Britannicus, the son of Claudius, was the natural heir to the throne; but he was supplanted by the artifices of his stepmother, who had the address to procure it for her own son, Nero. From the time of Augustus it had been the custom of each of the new sovereigns to commence his reign in such a manner as tended to acquire popularity, however much they all afterwards degenerated from those specious beginnings. Whether this proceeded entirely from policy, or that nature was not yet vitiated by the intoxication of uncontrolled power, is uncertain; but such were the excesses into which they afterwards plunged, that we can scarcely exempt any of them except, perhaps, Claudius, from the imputation of great original depravity. The vicious temper of Tiberius was known to his own mother, Livia; that of Caligula had been obvious to those about him from his infancy; Claudius seems to have had naturally a stronger tendency to weakness than to vice; but the inherent wickedness of Nero was discovered at an early period by his preceptor, Seneca. Yet even this emperor commenced his reign in a manner which procured him approbation. Of all the Roman emperors who had hitherto reigned, he seems to have been most corrupted by profligate favourites, who flattered his follies and vices, to promote their own aggrandisement. In the number of these was Tigellinus, who met at last with the fate which he had so amply merited.

  The several reigns from the death of Augustus present us with uncommon scenes of cruelty and horror; but it was reserved for that of Nero to exhibit to the world the atrocious act of an emperor deliberately procuring the death of his mother.

  Julia Agrippina was the daughter of Germanicus, and married Domitius Ænobarbus, by whom she had Nero. At the death of Messalina she was a widow; and Claudius, her uncle, entertaining a design of entering again into the married state, she aspired to an incestuous alliance with him, in competition with Lollia Paulina, a woman of beauty and intrigue, who had been married to C. Cæsar. The two rivals were strongly supported by their respective parties; but Agrippina, by her superior interest with the emperor’s favourites, and the familiarity to which her near relation gave her a claim, obtained the preference; and the portentous nuptials of the emperor and his niece were publicly solemnized in the palace. Whether she was prompted to this flagrant indecency by personal ambition alone, or by the desire of procuring the succession to the empire for her son, is uncertain; but there remains no doubt of her having removed Claudius by poison, with a view to the object now mentioned. Besides Claudius, she projected the death of L. Silanus, and she accomplished that of his brother, Junius Silanus, by means likewise of poison. She appears to have been richly endowed with the gifts of nature, but in her disposition intriguing, violent, imperious, and ready to sacrifice every principle of virtue, in the pursuit of supreme power or sensual gratification. As she resembled Livia in the ambition of a mother, and the means by which she indulged it, so she more than equalled her in the ingratitude of an unnatural son and a parricide. She is said to have left behind her some memoirs, of which Tacitus availed himself in the composition of his Annals.

  In this reign, the conquest of the Britons still continued to be the principal object of military enterprise, and Suetonius Paulinus was invested with the command of the Roman army employed in the reduction of that people. The island of Mona, now Anglesey, being the chief seat of the Druids, he resolved to commence his operations with attacking a place which was the centre of superstition, and to which the vanquished Britons retreated as the last asylum of liberty. The inhabitants endeavoured, both by force of arms and the terrors of religion, to obstruct his landing on this sacred island. The women and Druids assembled promiscuously with the soldiers upon the shore, where running about in wild disorder, with flaming torches in their hands, and pouring forth the most hideous exclamations, they struck the Romans with consternation. But Suetonius animating his troops, they boldly attacked the inhabitants, routed them in the field, and burned the Druids in the same fires which had been prepared by those priests for the catastrophe of the invaders, destroying at the same time all the consecrated groves and altars in the island. Suetonius having thus triumphed over the religion of the Britons, flattered himself with the hopes of soon effecting the reduction of the people. But they, encouraged by his absence, had taken arms, and under the conduct of Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, who had been treated in the most ignominious manner by the Roman tribunes, had already driven the haughty invaders from their several settlements. Suetonius hastened to the protection of London, which was by this time a flourishing Roman colony; but he found upon his arrival, that any attempt to preserve it would be attended with the utmost danger to the army. London therefore was reduced to ashes; and the Romans, and all strangers, to the number of seventy thousand, were put to the sword without distinction, the Britons seeming determined to convince the enemy that they would acquiesce in no other terms than a total evacuation of the island. This massacre, however, was revenged by Suetonius in a decisive engagement, where eighty thousand of the Britons are said to have been killed; after which, Boadicea, to avoid falling into the hands of the insolent conquerors, put a period to her own life by means of poison. It being judged unadvisable that Suetonius should any longer conduct the war against a people whom he had exasperated by his severity, he was recalled, and Petronius Turpilianus appointed in his room. The command was afterwards given successively to Trebellius Maximus and Vettius Bolanus; but the plan pursued by these generals was only to retain, by a conciliatory administration, the parts of the island which had already submitted to the Roman arms.

  During these transactions in Britain, Nero himself was exhibiting, in Rome or some of the provinces, such scenes of extravagance as almost exceed credibility. In one place, entering the lists amongst the competitors in a chariot race; in another, contending for victory with the common musicians on the stage; revelling in open day in the company of the most abandoned prostitutes and the vilest of men; in the night, committing depredations on the peaceful inhabitants of the capital; polluting with detestable lust, or drenching with human blood, the streets, the palace, and the habitations of private families; and, to crown his enormities, setting fire to Rome, while he sung with delight in beholding the dreadful conflagration. In vain would history be ransacked for a parallel to this emperor, who united the most shameful vices to the most extravagant vanity, the most abject meanness to the strongest but most preposterous ambition; and the whole of whose life was one continued scene of lewdness, sensuality, rapine, cruelty, and folly. It is emphatically observed by Tacitus, “that Nero, after the murder of many illustrious personages, manifested a desire of extirpating virtue itself.”

  Among the excesses of Nero’s reign, are to be mentioned the horrible cruelties exercised against the Christians in various parts of the empire, in which inhuman transactions the natural barbarity of the emperor was inflamed by the prejudices and interested policy of the pagan priesthood.

  The tyrant scrupled not to charge them with the act of burning Rome; and he satiated his fury against them by such outrages as are unexampled in history. They were covered with the skins of wild beasts, and torn by dogs; were crucified, and set on fire, that they might serve for lights in the night-time. Nero offered his gardens for this spectacle, and exhibited the games of the Circus by this dreadful illumination. Sometimes they were covered with wax and other combustible materials, after which a sharp stake was put under their chin, to make them stand upright, and they were burnt alive, to give light to the spectators.

  In the person of Nero, it is observed by Suetonius, the race of the Cæsars became extinct; a race rendered illustrious by the first and second emperors, but which their successors no less disgraced. The despotism of Julius Cæsar, though haughty and imperious, was liberal and humane: that of Augustus, if we exclude a few instances of vindictive severity towards individuals, was mild and conciliating; but the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero (for we except Claudius from part of the censurer, while discriminated from each other by some peculiar circumstances, exhibited the most flagrant acts of licentiousness and perverted authority. The most abominable lust, the most extravagant luxury, the most shameful rapaciousness, and the most inhuman cruelty, constitute the general characteristics of those capricious and detestable tyrants. Repeated experience now clearly refuted the opinion of Augustus, that he had introduced amongst the Romans the best form of government: but while we make this observation, it is proper to remark, that, had he even restored the republic, there is reason to believe that the nation would again have been soon distracted with internal divisions, and a perpetual succession of civil wars. The manners of the people were become too dissolute to be restrained by the authority of elective and temporary magistrates; and the Romans were hastening to that fatal period when general and great corruption, with its attendant debility, would render them an easy prey to any foreign invaders.

  But the odious government of the emperors was not the only grievance under which the people laboured in those disastrous times: patrician avarice concurred with imperial rapacity to increase the sufferings of the nation. The senators, even during the commonwealth, had become openly corrupt in the dispensation of public justice; and under the government of the emperors, this pernicious abuse was practised to a yet greater extent. That class being now, equally with other Roman citizens, dependent on the sovereign power, their sentiments of duty and honour were degraded by the loss of their former dignity; and being likewise deprived of the lucrative governments of provinces, to which they had annually succeeded by an elective rotation in the times of the republic, they endeavoured to compensate the reduction of their emoluments by an unbounded venality in the judicial decisions of the forum. Every source of national happiness and prosperity was by this means destroyed. The possession of property became precarious; industry, in all its branches, was effectually discouraged, and the amor patriæ, which had formerly been the animating principle of the nation, was almost universally extinguished.

  It is a circumstance corresponding to the general singularity of the present reign, that, of the few writers who flourished in it, and whose works have been transmitted to posterity, two ended their days by the order of the emperor, and the third, from indignation at his conduct. These unfortunate victims were Seneca, Petronius Arbiter, and Lucan.

  Seneca was born about six years before the Christian æra, and gave early indication of uncommon talents. His father, who had come from Corduba to Rome, was a man of letters, particularly fond of declamation, in which he instructed his son, and placed him, for the acquisition of philosophy, under the most celebrated stoics of that age. Young Seneca, imbibing the precepts of the Pythagorean doctrine, religiously abstained from eating the flesh of animals, until Tiberius having threatened to punish some Jews and Egyptians, who abstained from certain meats, he was persuaded by his father to renounce the Pythagorean practice. Seneca displayed the talents of an eloquent speaker; but dreading the jealousy of Caligula, who aspired to the same excellence, he thought proper to abandon that pursuit, and apply himself towards suing for the honours and offices of the state. He accordingly obtained the place of quæstor, in which office incurring the imputation of a scandalous amour with Julia Livia, he removed from Rome, and was banished by the emperor Claudius to Corsica.

  Upon the marriage of Claudius with Agrippina, Seneca was recalled from his exile, in which he had remained near eight years, and was appointed to superintend the education of Nero, now destined to become the successor to the throne. In the character of preceptor he appears to have acquitted himself with ability and credit; though he has been charged by his enemies with having initiated his pupil in those detestable vices which disgraced the reign of Nero. Could he have indeed been guilty of such immoral conduct, it is probable that he would not so easily have forfeited the favour of that emperor; and it is more reasonable to suppose, that his disapprobation of Nero’s conduct was the real cause of that odium which soon after proved fatal to him. By the enemies whom distinguished merit and virtue never fail to excite at a profligate court, Seneca was accused of having maintained a criminal correspondence with Agrippina in the life-time of Claudius; but the chief author of this calumny was Suilius, who had been banished from Rome at the instance of Seneca. He was likewise charged with having amassed exorbitant riches, with having built magnificent houses, and formed beautiful gardens, during the four years in which he had acted as preceptor to Nero. This charge he considered as a prelude to his destruction; which to avoid, if possible, he requested of the emperor to accept of the riches and possessions which he had acquired in his situation at court, and to permit him to withdraw himself into a life of studious retirement. Nero, dissembling his secret intentions, refused this request; and Seneca, that he might obviate all cause of suspicion or offence, kept himself at home for some time, under the pretext of indisposition.

  Upon the breaking out of the conspiracy of Piso, in which some of the principal senators were concerned, Natalis, the discoverer of the plot, mentioned Seneca’s name, as an accessory. There is, however, no satisfactory evidence that Seneca had any knowledge of the plot. Piso, according to the declaration of Natalis, had complained that he never saw Seneca; and the latter had observed, in answer, that it was not conducive to their common interest to see each other often. Seneca likewise pleaded indisposition, and said that his own life depended upon the safety of Piso’s person. Nero, however, glad of such an occasion of sacrificing the philosopher to his secret jealousy, sent him an order to destroy himself. When the messenger arrived with this mandate, Seneca was sitting at table, with his wife Paulina and two of his friends. He heard the message not only with philosophical firmness, but even with symptoms of joy, and observed, that such an honour might long have been expected from a man who had assassinated all his friends, and even murdered his own mother. The only request which he made, was, that he might be permitted to dispose of his possessions as he pleased; but this was refused him. Immediately turning himself to his friends, who were weeping at his melancholy fate, he said to them, that, since he could not leave them what he considered as his own property, he should leave at least his own life for an example; an innocence of conduct which they might imitate, and by which they might acquire immortal fame. He remonstrated with composure against their unavailing tears and lamentations, and asked them, whether they had not learnt better to sustain the shocks of fortune, and the violence of tyranny?

  The emotions of his wife he endeavoured to allay with philosophical consolation; and when she expressed a resolution to die with him, he said, that he was glad to find his example imitated with so much fortitude. The veins of both were opened at the same time; but Nero’s command extending only to Seneca, the life of Paulina was preserved; and, according to some authors, she was not displeased at being prevented from carrying her precipitate resolution into effect. Seneca’s veins bleeding but slowly, an opportunity was offered him of displaying in his last moments a philosophical magnanimity similar to that of Socrates; and it appears that his conversation during this solemn period was maintained with dignified composure. To accelerate his lingering fate, he drank a dose of poison; but this producing no effect, he ordered his attendants to carry him into a warm bath, for the purpose of rendering the hæmorrhage from his veins more copious. This expedient proving likewise ineffectual, and the soldiers who witnessed the execution of the emperor’s order being clamorous for its accomplishment, he was removed into a stove, and suffocated by the steam. He underwent his fate on the 12th of April, in the sixty-fifth year of the Christian æra, and the fifty-third year of his age. His body was burnt, and his ashes deposited in a private manner, according to his will, which had been made during the period when he was in the highest degree of favour with Nero.

  The writings of Seneca are numerous, and on various subjects. His first composition, addressed to Novacus, is on Anger, and continued through three books. After giving a lively description of this passion, the author discusses a variety of questions concerning it: he argues strongly against its utility, in contradiction to the peripatetics, and recommends its restraint, by many just and excellent considerations. This treatise may be regarded, in its general outlines, as a philosophical amplification of the passage in Horace:—

  • Ira furor brevis est: animum rege; qui, nisi paret,
  • Imperat: hunc frænis, hunc tu compesce catenâ.

  • Epist. I. ii.

  • Anger’s a fitful madness: rein thy mind,
  • Subdue the tyrant, and in fetters bind,
  • Or be thyself the slave.

  The next treatise is on Consolation, addressed to his mother, Helvia, and was written during his exile. He there informs his mother that he bears his banishment with fortitude, and advises her to do the same. He observes, that, in respect to himself, change of place, poverty, ignominy, and contempt, are not real evils; that there may be two reasons for her anxiety on his account; first, that, by his absence, she is deprived of his protection; and in the next place, of the satisfaction arising from his company; on both which heads he suggests a variety of pertinent observations. Prefixed to this treatise, are some epigrams written on the banishment of Seneca, but whether or not by himself, is uncertain.

  Immediately subsequent to the preceding, is another treatise on Consolation, addressed to one of Claudius’s freedmen, named Polybius, perhaps after the learned historian. In this tract, which is in several parts mutilated, the author endeavours to console Polybius for the loss of a brother who had lately died. The sentiments and admonitions are well suggested for the purpose; but they are intermixed with such fulsome encomiums on the imperial domestic, as degrade the dignity of the author, and can be ascribed to no other motive than that of endeavouring to procure a recall from his exile, through the interest of Polybius.

  A fourth treatise on Consolation is addressed to Marcia, a respectable and opulent lady, the daughter of Cremutius Cordus, by whose death she was deeply affected. The author, besides many consolatory arguments, proposes for her imitation a number of examples, by attending to which she may be enabled to overcome a passion that is founded only in too great sensibility of mind. The subject is ingeniously prosecuted, not without the occasional mixture of some delicate flattery, suitable to the character of the correspondent.

  These consolatory addresses are followed by a treatise on Providence, which evinces the author to have entertained the most just and philosophical sentiments on that subject. He infers the necessary existence of a Providence from the regularity and constancy observed in the government of the universe: but his chief object is to show, why, upon the principle that a Providence exists, good men should be liable to evils. The enquiry is conducted with a variety of just observations, and great force of argument; by which the author vindicates the goodness and wisdom of the Almighty, in a strain of sentiment corresponding to the most approved suggestions of natural religion.

  The next treatise, which is on Tranquillity of Mind, appears to have been written soon after his return from exile. There is a confusion in the arrangement of this tract, but it contains a variety of just observations, and may be regarded as a valuable production.

  Then follows a discourse on the Constancy of a Wise Man. This has by some been considered as a part of the preceding treatise; but they are evidently distinct. It is one of the author’s best productions, in regard both of sentiment and composition, and contains a fund of moral observations, suited to fortify the mind under the oppression of accidental calamities.

  We next meet with a tract on Clemency, in two books, addressed to Nero. This appears to have been written in the beginning of the reign of Nero, on whom the author bestows some high encomiums, which, at that time, seem not to have been destitute of foundation. The discourse abounds with just observation, applicable to all ranks of men; and, if properly attended to by that infatuated emperor, might have prevented the perpetration of those acts of cruelty, which, with his other extravagancies, have rendered his name odious to posterity.

  The discourse which succeeds is on the Shortness of Life, addressed to Paulinus. In this excellent treatise the author endeavours to show, that the complaint of the shortness of life is not founded in truth: that it is men who make life short, either by passing it in indolence, or otherwise improperly. He inveighs against indolence, luxury, and every unprofitable avocation; observing, that the best use of time is to apply it to the study of wisdom, by which life may be rendered sufficiently long.

  Next follows a discourse on a Happy Life, addressed to Gallio. Seneca seems to have intended this as a vindication of himself, against those who calumniated him on account of his riches and manner of living. He maintained that a life can only be rendered happy by its conformity to the dictates of virtue, but that such a life is perfectly compatible with the possession of riches, where they happen to accrue. The author pleads his own cause with great ability, as well as justness of argument. His vindication is in many parts highly beautiful, and accompanied with admirable sentiments respecting the moral obligations to a virtuous life. The conclusion of this discourse bears no similarity, in point of composition, to the preceding parts, and is evidently spurious.

  The preceding discourse is followed by one upon the Retirement of a Wise Man. The beginning of this tract is wanting; but in the sequel the author discusses a question which was much agitated amongst the Stoics and Epicureans, viz., whether a wise man ought to concern himself with the affairs of the public. Both these sects of philosophers maintained that a life of retirement was most suitable to a wise man, but they differed with respect to the circumstances in which it might be proper to deviate from this conduct, one party considering the deviation as prudent, when there existed a just motive for such conduct, and the other, when there was no forcible reason against it. Seneca regards both these opinions as founded upon principles inadequate to the advancement both of public and private happiness, which ought ever to be the ultimate object of moral speculation.

  The last of the author’s discourses, addressed to Æbucius, is on Benefits, and continued through seven books. He begins with lamenting the frequency of ingratitude amongst mankind, a vice which he severely censures. After some preliminary considerations respecting the nature of benefits, he proceeds to show in what manner, and on whom, they ought to be conferred. The greater part of these books is employed on the solution of abstract questions relative to benefits, in the manner of Chrysippus; where the author states explicitly the arguments on both sides, and from the full consideration of them, deduces rational conclusions.

  The Epistles of Seneca consist of one hundred and twenty-four, all on moral subjects. His Natural Questions extend through seven books, in which he has collected the hypotheses of Aristotle and other ancient writers. These are followed by a whimsical effusion on the death of Caligula. The remainder of his works comprises seven Persuasive Discourses, five books of Controversies, and ten books containing Extracts of Declamations.

  From the multiplicity of Seneca’s productions, it is evident, that, notwithstanding the luxurious life he is said to have led, he was greatly devoted to literature, a propensity which, it is probable, was confirmed by his banishment during almost eight years in the island of Corsica, where he was in a great degree secluded from every other resource of amusement to a cultivated mind. But with whatever splendour Seneca’s domestic economy may have been supported, it seems highly improbable that he indulged himself in luxurious enjoyment to any vicious excess. His situation at the Roman court, being honourable and important, could not fail of being likewise advantageous, not only from the imperial profusion common at that time, but from many contingent emoluments which his extensive interest and patronage would naturally afford him. He was born of a respectable rank, lived in habits of familiar intercourse with persons of the first distinction, and if, in the course of his attendance upon Nero, he had acquired a large fortune, no blame could justly attach to his conduct in maintaining an elegant hospitality. The imputation of luxury was thrown upon him from two quarters, viz. by the dissolute companions of Nero, to whom the mention of such an example served as an apology for their own extreme dissipation; and by those who envied him for the affluence and dignity which he had acquired. The charge, however, is supported only by vague assertion, and is discredited by every consideration which ought to have weight in determining the reality of human characters. It seems totally inconsistent with his habits of literary industry, with the virtuous sentiments which he every where strenuously maintains, and the esteem with which he was regarded by a numerous acquaintance, as a philosopher and a moralist.

  The writings of Seneca have been traduced almost equally with his manner of living, though in both he has a claim to indulgence, from the fashion of the times. He is more studious of minute embellishments in style than the writers of the Augustan age; and the didactic strain, in which he mostly prosecutes his subjects, has a tendency to render him sententious; but the expression of his thoughts is neither enfeebled by decoration, nor involved in obscurity by conciseness. He is not more rich in artificial ornament than in moral admonition. Seneca has been charged with depreciating former writers, to render himself more conspicuous; a charge which, so far as appears from his writings, is founded rather in negative than positive testimony. He has not endeavoured to establish his fame by any affectation of singularity in doctrine; and while he passes over in silence the names of illustrious authors, he avails himself with judgment of the most valuable stores with which they had enriched philosophy. On the whole, he is an author whose principles may be adopted not only with safety, but great advantage; and his writings merit a degree of consideration, superior to what they have hitherto ever enjoyed in the literary world.

  Seneca, besides his prose works, was the author of some tragedies. The Medea, the Troas, and the Hippolytus, are ascribed to him. His father is said to have written the Hercules Furens, Thyestes, Agamemnon, and Hercules Œtæus. The three remaining tragedies, the Thebaïs, Œdipus, and Octavia, usually published in the same collection with the seven preceding, are supposed to be the productions of other authors, but of whom, is uncertain. These several pieces are written in a neat style; the plots and characters are conducted with an attention to probability and nature: but none of them is so forcible, in point of tragical distress, as to excite in the reader any great degree of emotion.—

  Petronius was a Roman knight, and apparently of considerable fortune. In his youth he seems to have given great application to polite literature, in which he acquired a justness of taste, as well as an elegance of composition. Early initiated in the gaieties of fashionable life, he contracted a habit of voluptuousness which rendered him an accommodating companion to the dissipated and the luxurious. The court of Claudius, entirely governed for some time by Messalina, was then the residence of pleasure; and here Petronius failed not of making a conspicuous appearance. More delicate, however, than sensual, he rather joined in the dissipation, than indulged in the vices of the palace. To interrupt a course of life too uniform to afford him perpetual satisfaction, he accepted of the proconsulship of Bithynia, and went to that province, where he discharged the duties of his office with great credit. Upon his return to Rome, Nero, who had succeeded Claudius, made him consul, in recompense of his services. This new dignity, by giving him frequent and easy access to the emperor, created an intimacy between them, which was increased to friendship and esteem on the side of Nero, by the elegant entertainments often given him by Petronius. In a short time, this gay voluptuary became so much a favourite at court, that nothing was agreeable but what was approved by Petronius: and the authority which he acquired, by being umpire in whatever related to the economy of gay dissipation, procured him the title of Arbiter elegantiarum. Things continued in this state whilst the emperor kept within the bounds of moderation; and Petronius acted as intendant of his pleasures, ordering him shows, games, comedies, music, feats, and all that could contribute to make the hours of relaxation pass agreeably; seasoning, at the same time, the innocent delights which he procured for the emperor with every possible charm, to prevent him from seeking after such as might prove pernicious both to morals and the republic. Nero, however, giving way to his own disposition, which was naturally vicious, at length changed his conduct, not only in regard to the government of the empire, but of himself: and listening to other counsels than those of Petronius, gave the entire reins to his passions, which afterwards plunged him in ruin. The emperor’s new favourite was Tigellinus, a man of the most profligate morals, who omitted nothing that could gratify the inordinate appetites of his prince, at the expense of all decency and virtue. During this period, Petronius gave vent to his indignation, in the satire transmitted under his name by the title of Satyricon. But his total retirement from court did not secure him from the artifices of Tigellinus, who laboured with all his power to destroy the man whom he had industriously supplanted in the emperor’s favour. With this view he insinuated to Nero, that Petronius was too intimately connected with Scevinus not to be engaged in Piso’s conspiracy; and, to support his calumny, caused the emperor to be present at the examination of one of Petronius’s slaves, whom he had secretly suborned to swear against his master. After this transaction, to deprive Petronius of all means of justifying himself, they threw into prison the greatest part of his domestics. Nero embraced with joy the opportunity of removing a man, to whom he knew the present manners of the court were utterly obnoxious, and he soon after issued orders for arresting Petronius. As it required, however, some time to deliberate whether they should put a person of his consideration to death, without more evident proofs of the charges preferred against him, such was his disgust at living in the power of so detestable and capricious a tyrant, that he resolved to die. For this purpose, making choice of the same expedient which had been adopted by Seneca, he caused his veins to be opened, but he closed them again, for a little time, that he might enjoy the conversation of his friends, who came to see him in his last moments. He desired them, it is said, to entertain him, not with discourses on the immortality of the soul, or the consolation of philosophy, but with agreeable tales and poetic gallantries. Disdaining to imitate the servility of those who, dying by the orders of Nero, yet made him their heir, and filled their wills with encomiums on the tyrant and his favourites, he broke to pieces a goblet of precious stones, out of which he had commonly drank, that Nero, who he knew would seize upon it after his death, might not have the pleasure of using it. As the only present suitable to such a prince, he sent him, under a sealed cover, his Satyricon, written purposely against him; and then broke his signet, that it might not, after his death, become the means of accusation against the person in whose custody it should be found.

  The Satyricon of Petronius is one of the most curious productions in the Latin language. Novel in its nature, and without any parallel in the works of antiquity, some have imagined it to be a spurious composition, fabricated about the time of the revival of learning in Europe. This conjecture, however, is not more destitute of support, than repugnant to the most circumstantial evidence in favour of its authenticity. Others, admitting the work to be a production of the age of Nero, have questioned the design with which it was written, and have consequently imputed to the author a most immoral intention. Some of the scenes, incidents, and characters, are of so extraordinary a nature, that the description of them, without a particular application, must have been regarded as extremely whimsical, and the work, notwithstanding its ingenuity, has been doomed to perpetual oblivion: but history justifies the belief, that in the court of Nero, the extravagancies mentioned by Petronius were realized to a degree which authenticates the representation given of them. The inimitable character of Trimalchio, which exhibits a person sunk in the most debauched effeminacy, was drawn for Nero; and we are assured, that there were formerly medals of that emperor, with these words, C. Nero August. Imp., and on the reverse, Trimalchio. The various characters are well discriminated, and supported with admirable propriety. Never was such licentiousness of description united to such delicacy of colouring. The force of the satire consists not in poignancy of sentiment, but in the ridicule which arises from the whimsical, but characteristic and faithful exhibition of the objects introduced. That Nero was struck with the justness of the representation, is evident from the displeasure which he showed, at finding Petronius so well acquainted with his infamous excesses. After levelling his suspicion on all who could possibly have betrayed him, he at last fixed on a senator’s wife, named Silia, who bore a part in his revels, and was an intimate friend of Petronius: upon which she was immediately sent into banishment. Amongst the miscellaneous materials in this work, are some pieces of poetry, written in an elegant taste. A poem on the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey, is beautiful and animated.

  Though the Muses appear to have been mostly in a quiescent state from the time of Augustus, we find from Petronius Arbiter, who exhibits the manners of the capital during the reign of Nero, that poetry still continued to be a favourite pursuit amongst the Romans, and one to which, indeed, they seem to have had a national propensity.

  • • — Ecce inter pocula quærunt
    • Romulidæ saturi, quid dia poëmata narrent.

    • —Persius. Sat. i. 30.

  • • — Nay, more! Our nobles, gorged, and swilled with wine,
    • Call o’er the banquet for a lay divine!

    • —Gifford.

  It was cultivated as a kind of fashionable exercise, in short and desultory attempts, in which the chief ambition was to produce verses extempore. They were publicly recited by their authors with great ostentation; and a favourable verdict from an audience, however partial, and frequently obtained either by intrigue or bribery, was construed by those frivolous pretenders into a real adjudication of poetical fame.

  The custom of publicly reciting poetical compositions, with the view of obtaining the opinion of the hearers concerning them, and for which purpose Augustus had built the Temple of Apollo, was well calculated for the improvement of taste and judgment, as well as the excitement of emulation; but, conducted as it now was, it led to a general degradation of poetry. Barbarism in language, and a corruption of taste, were the natural consequences of this practice, while the judgment of the multitude was either blind or venal, and while public approbation sanctioned the crudities of hasty composition. There arose, however, in this period, some candidates for the bays, who carried their efforts beyond the narrow limits which custom and inadequate genius prescribed to the poetical exertions of their contemporaries. Amongst these were Lucan and Persius.—

  Lucan was the son of Annæus Mela, the brother of Seneca, the philosopher. He was born at Corduba, the original residence of the family, but came early to Rome, where his promising talents, and the patronage of his uncle, recommended him to the favour of Nero; by whom he was raised to the dignity of an augur and quæstor before he had attained the usual age. Prompted by the desire of displaying his political abilities, he had the imprudence to engage in a competition with his imperial patron. The subject chosen by Nero was the tragical fate of Niobe; and that of Lucan was Orpheus. The ease with which the latter obtained the victory in the contest, excited the jealousy of the emperor, who resolved upon depressing his rising genius. With this view, he exposed him daily to the mortification of fresh insults, until at last the poet’s resentment was so much provoked, that he entered into the conspiracy of Piso for cutting off the tyrant. The plot being discovered, there remained for the unfortunate Lucan no hope of pardon: and choosing the same mode of death which was employed by his uncle, he had his veins opened, while he sat in a warm bath, and expired in pronouncing with great emphasis the following lines in his Pharsalia:—

  • Scinditur avulsus: nec sicut vulnere sanguis
  • Emicuit lentus: ruptis cadit undique venis;
  • Discursusque animæ diversa in membra meantis
  • Interceptus aquis, nullius, vita perempti
  • Est tantâ dimissa viâ.—Lib. iii. 638.

  • — Asunder flies the man.

  • No single wound the gaping rupture seems,
  • Where trickling crimson flows in tender streams;
  • But from an opening horrible and wide
  • A thousand vessels pour the bursting tide;
  • At once the winding channel’s course was broke,
  • Where wandering life her mazy journey took.

  • —Rowe.

  Some authors have said that he betrayed pusillanimity at the hour of death; and that, to save himself from punishment, he accused his mother of being involved in the conspiracy. This circumstance, however, is not mentioned by other writers, who relate, on the contrary, that he died with philosophical fortitude. He was then only in the twenty-sixth year of his age.

  Lucan had scarcely reached the age of puberty when he wroto a poem on the contest between Hector and Achilles. He also composed in his youth a poem on the burning of Rome: but his only surviving work is the Pharsalia, written on the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey. This poem, consisting of ten books, is unfinished, and its character has been more depreciated than that of any other production of antiquity. In the plan of the poem, the author prosecutes the different events in the civil war, beginning his narrative at the passage of the Rubicon by Cæsar. He invokes not the muses, nor engages any gods in the dispute; but endeavours to support an epic dignity by vigour of sentiment, and splendour of description. The horrors of civil war, and the importance of a contest which was to determine the fate of Rome and the empire of the world, are displayed with variety of colouring, and great energy of expression. In the description of scenes, and the recital of heroic actions, the author discovers a strong and lively imagination; while, in those parts of the work which are addressed either to the understanding or the passions, he is bold, figurative, and animated. Indulging too much in amplification, he is apt to tire with prolixity; but in all his excursions he is ardent, elevated, impressive, and often brilliant. His versification has not the smoothness which we admire in the compositions of Virgil, and his language is often involved in the intricacies of technical construction: but with all his defects, his beauties are numerous; and he discovers a greater degree of merit than is commonly found in the productions of a poet of twenty-six years of age, at which time he died.—

  Persius was born at Volaterræ, of an equestrian family, about the beginning of the Christian æra. His father dying when he was six years old, he was left to the care of his mother, for whom and for his sisters he expresses the warmest affection. At the age of twelve he came to Rome, where, after attending a course of grammar and rhetoric under the respective masters of those branches of education, he placed himself under the tuition of Annæus Cornutus, a celebrated stoic philosopher of that time. There subsisted between him and this preceptor so great a friendship, that at his death, which happened in the twenty-ninth year of his age, he bequeathed to Cornutus a handsome sum of money, and his library. The latter, however, accepting only the books, left the money to Persius’s sisters.

  Priscian, Quintilian, and other ancient writers, speak of Persius’s satires as consisting of a book without any division. They have since, however, been generally divided into six different satires, but by some only into five. The subjects of these compositions are, the vanity of the poets in his time; the backwardness of youth to the cultivation of moral science; ignorance and temerity in political administration, chiefly in allusion to the government of Nero: the fifth satire is employed in evincing that the wise man also is free; in discussing which point, the author adopts the observations used by Horace on the same subject. The last satire of Persius is directed against avarice. In the fifth, we meet with a beautiful address to Cornutus, whom the author celebrates for his amiable virtues, and peculiar talents for teaching. The following lines, at the same time that they show how diligently the preceptor and his pupil were employed through the whole day in the cultivation of moral science, afford a more agreeable picture of domestic comfort and philosophical conviviality, than might be expected in the family of a rigid stoic:

  • Tecum etenim longos memini consumere soles,
  • Et tecum primas epul’s decerpere noctes.
  • Unum opus, et requiem pariter disponimus ambo:
  • Atque verecundâ laxamus feria mensâ.

  • —Sat. v.

  • Can I forget how many a summer’s day,
  • Spent in your converse, stole, unmarked, away?
  • Or how, while listening with increased delight,
  • I snatched from feasts the earlier hours of night?

  • —Gifford.

  The satires of Persius are written in a free, expostulatory, and argumentative manner; possessing the same justness of sentiment as those of Horace, but exerted in the way of derision, and not with the admirable raillery of that facetious author. They are regarded by many as obscure; but this imputation arises more from unacquaintance with the characters and manners to which the author alludes, than from any peculiarity either in his language or composition. His versification is harmonious; and we have only to remark, in addition to similar examples in other Latin writers, that, though Persius is acknowledged to have been both virtuous and modest, there are in the fourth satire a few passages which cannot decently admit of being translated. Such was the freedom of the Romans, in the use of some expressions, which just refinement has now exploded.—

  Another poet, in this period, was Fabricius Veiento, who wrote a severe satire against the priests of his time; as also one against the senators, for corruption in their judicial capacity. Nothing remains of either of those productions; but, for the latter, the author was banished by Nero.

  There now likewise flourished a lyric poet, Cæsius Bassus, to whom Persius has addressed his sixth satire. He is said to have been, next to Horace, the best lyric poet among the Romans: but of his various compositions, only a few inconsiderable fragments are preserved.

  To the two poets now mentioned must be added Pomponius Secundus, a man of distinguished rank in the army, and who obtained the honour of a triumph for a victory over a tribe of barbarians in Germany. He wrote several tragedies, which in the judgment of Quintilian, were beautiful compositions.

  SERGIUS SULPICIUS GALBA.

  I.The race of the Cæsars became extinct in Nero; an event prognosticated by various signs, two of which were particularly significant. Formerly, when Livia, after her marriage with Augustus, was making a visit to her villa at Veii,1 an eagle flying by, let drop upon her lap a hen, with a sprig of laurel in her mouth, just as she had seized it. Livia gave orders to have the hen taken care of, and the sprig of laurel set; and the hen reared such a numerous brood of chickens, that the villa, to this day, is called the Villa of the Hens. The laurel grove2 flourished so much, that the Cæsars procured thence the boughs and crowns they bore at their triumphs. It was also their constant custom to plant others on the same spot, immediately after a triumph; and it was observed that, a little before the death of each prince, the tree which had been set by him died away. But in the last year of Nero, the whole plantation of laurels perished to the very roots, and the hens all died. About the same time, the temple of the Cæsars3 being struck with lightning, the heads of all the statues in it fell off at once; and Augustus’s sceptre was dashed from his hands.

  II. Nero was succeeded by Galba,4 who was not in the remotest degree allied to the family of the Cæsars, but, without doubt, of very noble extraction, being descended from a great and ancient family; for he always used to put amongst his other titles, upon the bases of his statues, his being great-grandson to Q. Catulus Capitolinus. And when he came to be emperor, he set up the images of his ancestors in the hall1 of the palace; according to the inscriptions on which, he carried up his pedigree on the father’s side to Jupiter; and by the mother’s to Pasiphaë, the wife of Minos.

  III. To give even a short account of the whole family, would be tedious. I shall, therefore, only slightly notice that branch of it from which he was descended. Why, or whence, the first of the Sulpicii who had the cognomen of Galba, was so called, is uncertain. Some are of opinion, that it was because he set fire to a city in Spain, after he had a long time attacked it to no purpose, with torches dipped in the gum called Galbanum: others said he was so named, because, in a lingering disease, he made use of it as a remedy, wrapped up in wool: others, on account of his being prodigiously corpulent, such a one being called, in the language of the Gauls, Galba; or, on the contrary, because he was of a slender habit of body, like those insects which breed in a sort of oak, and are called Galbæ. Sergius Galba, a person of consular rank,2 and the most eloquent man of his time, gave a lustre to the family. History relates, that, when he was pro-prætor of Spain, he perfidiously put to the sword thirty thousand Lusitanians, and by that means gave occasion to the war of Viriatus.3 His grandson being incensed against Julius Cæsar, whose lieutenant he had been in Gaul, because he was through him disappointed of the consulship,4 joined with Cassius and Brutus in the conspiracy against him, for which he was condemned by the Pedian law. From him were descended the grandfather and father of the emperor Galba. The grandfather was more celebrated for his application to study, than for any figure he made in the government. For he rose no higher than the prætorship, but published a large and not uninteresting history. His father attained to the consulship:1 he was a short man and hump-backed, but a tolerable orator, and an industrious pleader. He was twice married: the first of his wives was Mummia Achaica, daughter of Catulus, and great-grand-daughter of Lucius Mummius, who sacked Corinth;2 and the other, Livia Ocellina, a very rich and beautiful woman, by whom it is supposed he was courted for the nobleness of his descent. They say, that she was farther encouraged to persevere in her advances, by an incident which evinced the great ingenuousness of his disposition. Upon her pressing her suit, he took an opportunity, when they were alone, of stripping off his toga, and showing her the deformity of his person, that he might not be thought to impose upon her. He had by Achaica two sons, Caius and Sergius. The elder of these, Caius,3 having very much reduced his estate, retired from town, and being prohibited by Tiberius from standing for a pro-consulship in his year, put an end to his own life.

  IV. The emperor Sergius Galba was born in the consulship of M. Valerius Messala, and Cn. Lentulus, upon the ninth of the calends of January [24th December],4 in a villa standing upon a hill, near Terracina, on the left-hand side of the road to Fundi.5 Being adopted by his step-mother,6 he assumed the name of Livius, with the cognemen of Ocella, and changed his prænomen; for he afterwards used that of Lucius, instead of Sergius, until he arrived at the imperial dignity. It is well known, that when he came once, amongst other boys of his own age, to pay his respects to Augustus, the latter, pinching his cheek, said to him, “And thou, child, too, wilt taste our imperial dignity.” Tiberius, likewise, being told that he would come to be emperor, but at an advanced age, exclaimed, “Let him live, then, since that does not concern me!” When his grandfather was offering sacrifice to avert some ill omen from lightning, the entrails of the victim were snatched out of his hand by an eagle, and carried off into an oak-tree loaded with acorns. Upon this, the soothsayers said, that the family would come to be masters of the empire, but not until many years had elapsed: at which he, smiling, said, “Ay, when a mule comes to bear a foal.” When Galba first declared against Nero, nothing gave him so much confidence of success, as a mule’s happening at that time to have a foal. And whilst all others were shocked at the occurrence, as a most inauspicious prodigy, he alone regarded it as a most fortunate omen, calling to mind the sacrifice and saying of his grandfather. When he took upon him the manly habit, he dreamt that the goddess Fortune said to him, “I stand before your door weary; and unless I am speedily admitted, I shall fall into the hands of the first who comes to seize me.” On his awaking, when the door of the house was opened, he found a brazen statue of the goddess, above a cubit long, close to the threshold, which he carried with him to Tusculum, where he used to pass the summer season; and having consecrated it in an apartment of his house, he ever after worshipped it with a monthly sacrifice, and an anniversary vigil. Though but a very young man, he kept up an ancient but obsolete custom, and now nowhere observed, except in his own family, which was, to have his freedmen and slaves appear in a body before him twice a day, morning and evening, to offer him their salutations.

  V. Amongst other liberal studies, he applied himself to the law. He married Lepida,1 by whom he had two sons; but the mother and children all dying, he continued a widower; nor could he be prevailed upon to marry again, not even Agrippina herself, at that time left a widow by the death of Domitius, who had employed all her blandishments to allure him to her embraces, while he was a married man; insomuch that Lepida’s mother, when in company with several married women, rebuked her for it, and even went so far as to cuff her. Most of all, he courted the empress Livia,2 by whose favour, while she was living, he made a considerable figure, and narrowly missed being enriched by the will which she left at her death; in which she distinguished him from the rest of the legatees, by a legacy of fifty millions of sesterces. But because the sum was expressed in figures, and not in words at length, it was reduced by her heir, Tiberius, to five hundred thousand: and even this he never received.1

  VI. Filling the great offices before the age required for it by law, during his prætorship, at the celebration of games in honour of the goddess Flora, he presented the new spectacle of elephants walking upon ropes. He was then governor of the province of Aquitania for near a year, and soon afterwards took the consulship in the usual course, and held it for six months.2 It so happened that he succeeded L. Domitius, the father of Nero, and was succeeded by Salvius Otho, father to the emperor of that name; so that his holding it between the sons of these two men, looked like a presage of his future advancement to the empire. Being appointed by Caius Cæsar3 to supersede Gætulicus in his command, the day after his joining the legions, he put a stop to their plaudits in a public spectacle, by issuing an order, “That they should keep their hands under their cloaks.” Immediately upon which, the following verse became very common in the camp:

  • Disce, miles, militare: Galba est, non Gætulicus.
  • Learn, soldier, now in arms to use your hands,
  • ’Tis Galba, not Gætulicus, commands.

  With equal strictness, he would allow of no petitions for leave of absence from the camp. He hardened the soldiers, both old and young, by constant exercise; and having quickly reduced within their own limits the barbarians who had made inroads into Gaul, upon Caius’s coming into Germany, he so far recommended himself and his army to that emperor’s approbation, that, amongst the innumerable troops drawn from all the provinces of the empire, none met with higher commendation, or greater rewards from him. He likewise distinguished himself by heading an escort, with a shield in his hand,1 and running at the side of the emperor’s chariot twenty miles together.

  VII. Upon the news of Caius’s death, though many earnestly pressed him to lay hold of that opportunity of seizing the empire, he chose rather to be quiet. On this account, he was in great favour with Claudius, and being received into the number of his friends, stood so high in his good opinion, that the expedition to Britain2 was for some time suspended, because he was suddenly seized with a slight indisposition. He governed Africa, as pro-consul, for two years; being chosen out of the regular course to restore order in the province, which was in great disorder from civil dissensions, and the alarms of the barbarians. His administration was distinguished by great strictness and equity, even in matters of small importance. A soldier upon some expedition being charged with selling, in a great scarcity of corn, a bushel of wheat, which was all he had left, for a hundred denarii, he forbad him to be relieved by any body, when he came to be in want himself; and accordingly he died of famine. When sitting in judgment, a cause being brought before him about some beast of burden, the ownership of which was claimed by two persons; the evidence being slight on both sides, and it being difficult to come at the truth, he ordered the beast to be led to a pond at which he had used to be watered, with his head muffled up, and the covering being there removed, that he should be the property of the person whom he followed of his own accord, after drinking.

  VIII. For his achievements, both at this time in Africa, and formerly in Germany, he received the triumphal ornaments, and three sacerdotal appointments, one among The Fifteen, another in the college of Titius, and a third amongst the Augustals; and from that time to the middle of Nero’s reign, he lived for the most part in retirement. He never went abroad so much as to take the air, without a carriage attending him, in which there was a million of sesterces in gold, ready at hand; until at last, at the time he was living in the town of Fundi, the province of Hispania Tarraconensis was offered him. After his arrival in the province, whilst he was sacrificing in a temple, a boy who attended with a censer, became all on a sudden grey-headed. This incident was regarded by some as a token of an approaching revolution in the government, and that an old man would succeed a young one: that is, that he would succeed Nero. And not long after, a thunderbolt falling into a lake in Cantabria,1 twelve axes were found in it; a manifest sign of the supreme power.

  IX. He governed the province during eight years, his administration being of an uncertain and capricious character. At first he was active, vigorous, and indeed excessively severe, in the punishment of offenders. For, a money-dealer having committed some fraud in the way of his business, he cut off his hands, and nailed them to his counter. Another, who had poisoned an orphan, to whom he was guardian, and next heir to the estate, he crucified. On this delinquent imploring the protection of the law, and crying out that he was a Roman citizen, he affected to afford him some alleviation, and to mitigate his punishment, by a mark of honour, ordered a cross, higher than usual, and painted white, to be erected for him. But by degrees he gave himself up to a life of indolence and inactivity, from the fear of giving Nero any occasion of jealousy, and because, as he used to say, “Nobody was obliged to render an account of their leisure hours.” He was holding a court of justice on the circuit at New Carthage,2 when he received intelligence of the insurrection in Gaul;3 and while the lieutenant of Aquitania was soliciting his assistance, letters were brought from Vindex, requesting him “to assert the rights of mankind, and put himself at their head to relieve them from the tyranny of Nero.” Without any long demur, he accepted the invitation, from a mixture of fear and hope. For he had discovered that private orders had been sent by Nero to his procurators in the province to get him dispatched; and he was encouraged to the enterprise, as well by several auspices and omens, as by the prophecy of a young woman of good family. The more so, because the priest of Jupiter at Clunia,1 admonished by a dream, had discovered in the recesses of the temple some verses similar to those in which she had delivered her prophecy. These had also been uttered by a girl under divine inspiration, about two hundred years before. The import of the verses was, “That in time, Spain should give the world a lord and master.”

  X. Taking his seat on the tribunal, therefore, as if there was no other business than the manumitting of slaves, he had the effigies of a number of persons who had been condemned and put to death by Nero, set up before him, whilst a noble youth stood by, who had been banished, and whom he had purposely sent for from one of the neighbouring Balearic isles; and lamenting the condition of the times, and being thereupon unanimously saluted by the title of Emperor, he publicly declared himself “only the lieutenant of the senate and people of Rome.” Then shutting the courts, he levied legions and auxiliary troops among the provincials, besides his veteran army consisting of one legion, two wings of horse, and three cohorts. Out of the military leaders most distinguished for age and prudence, he formed a kind of senate, with whom to advise upon all matters of importance, as often as occasion should require. He likewise chose several young men of the equestrian order, who were to be allowed the privilege of wearing the gold ring, and, being called “The Reserve,” should mount guard before his bed-chamber, instead of the legionary soldiers. He likewise issued proclamations throughout the provinces of the empire, exhorting all to rise in arms unanimously, and aid the common cause, by all the ways and means in their power About the same time, in fortifying a town, which he had pitched upon for a military post, a ring was found, of antique workmanship, in the stone of which was engraved the goddess Victory with a trophy. Presently after, a ship of Alexandria arrived at Dertosa,2 loaded with arms, without any person to steer it, or so much as a single sailor or passenger on board. From this incident, nobody entertained the least doubt but the war upon which they were entering was just and honourable, and favoured likewise by the gods: when all on a sudden the whole design was exposed to failure. One of the two wings of horse, repenting of the violation of their oath to Nero, attempted to desert him upon his approach to the camp, and were with some difficulty kept in their duty. And some slaves who had been presented to him by a freedman of Nero’s, on purpose to murder him, had like to have killed him as he went through a narrow passage to the bath. Being overheard to encourage one another not to lose the opportunity, they were called to an account concerning it; and recourse being had to the torture, a confession was extorted from them.

  XI. These dangers were followed by the death of Vindex, at which being extremely discouraged, as if fortune had quite forsaken him, he had thoughts of putting an end to his own life; but receiving advice by his messengers from Rome that Nero was slain, and that all had taken an oath to him as emperor, he laid aside the title of lieutenant, and took upon him that of Cæsar. Putting himself upon his march in his general’s cloak, and a dagger hanging from his neck before his breast, he did not resume the use of the toga, until Nymphidius Sabinus, prefect of the pretorian guards at Rome, with the two lieutenants, Fonteius Capito in Germany, and Claudius Macer in Africa, who opposed his advancement, were all put down.

  XII. Rumours of his cruelty and avarice had reached the city before his arrival; such as that he had punished some cities of Spain and Gaul, for not joining him readily, by the imposition of heavy taxes, and some by levelling their walls; and had put to death the governors and procurators with their wives and children: likewise that a golden crown, of fifteen pounds weight, taken out of the temple of Jupiter, with which he was presented by the people of Tarracona, he had melted down, and had exacted from them three ounces which were wanting in the weight. This report of him was confirmed and increased, as soon as he entered the town. For some seamen who had been taken from the fleet, and enlisted among the troops by Nero, he obliged to return to their former condition; but they refusing to comply, and obstinately clinging to the more honourable service under their eagles and standards, he not only dispersed them by a body of horse, but likewise decimated them. He also disbanded a cohort of Germans, which had been formed by the preceding emperors, for their body-guard, and upon many occasions found very faithful; and sent them back into their own country, without giving them any gratuity, pretending that they were more inclined to favour the advancement of Cneius Dolabella, near whose gardens they encamped, than his own. The following ridiculous stories were also related of him; but whether with or without foundation. I know not; such as, that when a more sumptuous entertainment than usual was served up, he fetched a deep groan: that when one of the stewards presented him with an account of his expenses, he reached him a dish of legumes from his table as a reward for his care and diligence; and when Canus, the piper, had played much to his satisfaction, he presented him, with his own hand, five denarii taken out of his pocket.

  XIII. His arrival, therefore, in town was not very agreeable to the people; and this appeared at the next public spectacle For when the actors in a farce began a well-known song,

  • Venit, io, Simus1 a villa:
  • Lo! Clodpate from his village comes;

  all the spectators, with one voice, went on with the rest, repeating and acting the first verse several times over.

  XIV. He possessed himself of the imperial power with more favour and authority than he administered it, although he gave many proofs of his being an excellent prince: but these were not so grateful to the people, as his misconduct was offensive. He was governed by three favourites, who, because they lived in the palace, and were constantly about him, obtained the name of his pedagogues. These were Titus Vinius, who had been his lieutenant in Spain, a man of insatiable avarice; Cornelius Laco, who, from an assessor to the prince, was advanced to be prefect of the pretorian guards, a person of intolerable arrogance, as well as indolence; and his freedman Icelus, dignified a little before with the privilege of wearing the gold ring, and the use of the cognomen Martianus, who became a candidate for the highest honour within the reach of any person of the equestrian order.1 He resigned himself so implicitly into the power of those three favourites, who governed in every thing according to the capricious impulse of their vices and tempers, and his authority was so much abused by them, that the tenor of his conduct was not very consistent with itself. At one time, he was more rigorous and frugal, at another, more lavish and negligent, than became a prince who had been chosen by the people, and was so far advanced in years. He condemned some men of the first rank in the senatorian and equestrian orders, upon a very slight suspicion, and without trial. He rarely granted the freedom of the city to any one; and the privilege belonging to such as had three children, only to one or two; and that with great difficulty, and only for a limited time. When the judges petitioned to have a sixth decury added to their number, he not only denied them, but abolished the vacation which had been granted them by Claudius for the winter, and the beginning of the year.

  XV. It was thought that he likewise intended to reduce the offices held by senators and men of the equestrian order, to a term of two years’ continuance; and to bestow them only on those who were unwilling to accept them, and had refused them. All the grants of Nero he recalled, saving only the tenth part of them. For this purpose he gave a commission to fifty Roman knights; with orders, that if players or wrestlers had sold what had been formerly given them, it should be exacted from the purchasers, since the others, having, no doubt, spent the money, were not in a condition to pay. But on the other hand, he suffered his attendants and freedmen to sell or give away the revenue of the state, or immunities from taxes, and to punish the innocent, or pardon criminals, at pleasure. Nay, when the Roman people were very clamorous for the punishment of Halotus and Tigellinus, two of the most mischievous amongst all the emissaries of Nero, he protected them, and even bestowed on Halotus one of the best procurations in his disposal. And as to Tigellinus, he even reprimanded the people for their cruelty by a proclamation.

  XVI. By this conduct, he incurred the hatred of all orders of the people, but especially of the soldiery. For their commanders having promised them in his name a donative larger than usual, upon their taking the oath to him before his arrival at Rome; he refused to make it good, frequently bragging, “that it was his custom to choose his soldiers, not buy them.” Thus the troops became exasperated against him in all quarters. The pretorian guards he alarmed with apprehensions of danger and unworthy treatment; disbanding many of them occasionally as disaffected to his government, and favourers of Nymphidius. But most of all, the army in Upper Germany was incensed against him, as being defrauded of the rewards due to them for the service they had rendered in the insurrection of the Gauls under Vindex. They were, therefore, the first who ventured to break into open mutiny, refusing upon the calends [the 1st] of January, to take any oath of allegiance, except to the senate; and they immediately dispatched deputies to the pretorian troops, to let them know, “they did not like the emperor who had been set up in Spain,” and to desire that “they would make choice of another, who might meet with the approbation of all the armies.”

  XVII. Upon receiving intelligence of this, imagining that he was slighted not so much on account of his age, as for having no children, he immediately singled out of a company of young persons of rank, who came to pay their compliments to him, Piso Frugi Licinianus, a youth of noble descent and great talents, for whom he had before contracted such a regard, that he had appointed him in his will the heir both of his estate and name. Him he now styled his son, and taking him to the camp, adopted him in the presence of the assembled troops, but without making any mention of a donative. This circumstance afforded the better opportunity to Marcus Salvius Otho of accomplishing his object, six days after the adoption.

  XVIII. Many remarkable prodigies had happened from the very beginning of his reign, which forewarned him of his approaching fate. In every town through which he passed in his way from Spain to Rome, victims were slain on the right and left of the roads; and one of these, which was a bull, being maddened with the stroke of the axe, broke the rope with which it was tied, and running straight against his chariot, with his fore-feet elevated, bespattered him with blood. Likewise, as he was alighting, one of the guard, being pushed forward by the crowd, had very nearly wounded him with his lance. And upon his entering the city and, afterterwards, the palace, he was welcomed with an earthquake, and a noise like the bellowing of cattle. These signs of illfortune were followed by some that were still more apparently such. Out of all his treasures he had selected a necklace of pearls and jewels, to adorn his statue of Fortune at Tusculum. But it suddenly occurring to him that it deserved a more august place, he consecrated it to the Capitoline Venus; and next night, he dreamt that Fortune appeared to him, complaining that she had been defrauded of the present intended her, and threatening to resume what she had given him. Terrified at this denuneiation, at break of day he sent forward some persons to Tusculum, to make preparations for a sacrifice which might avert the displeasure of the goddess; and when he himself arrived at the place, he found nothing but some hot embers upon the altar, and an old man in black standing by, holding a little incense in a glass, and some wine in an earthern pot. It was remarked, too, that whilst he was sacrificing upon the calends of January, the chaplet fell from his head, and upon his consulting the pullets for omens, they flew away. Farther, upon the day of his adopting Piso, when he was to harangue the soldiers, the seat which he used upon those occasions, through the neglect of his attendants, was not placed, according to custom, upon his tribunal; and in the senate-house, his curule chair was set with the back forward.

  XIX. The day before he was slain, as he was sacrificing in the morning, the augur warned him from time to time to be upon his guard, for that he was in danger from assassins, and that they were near at hand. Soon after, he was informed, that Otho was in possession of the pretorian camp. And though most of his friends advised him to repair thither immediately, in hopes that he might quell the tumult by his authority and presence, he resolved to do nothing more than keep close within the palace, and secure himself by guards of the legionary soldiers, who were quartered in different parts about the city. He put on a linen coat of mail, however; remarking at the same time, that it would avail him little against the points of so many swords. But being tempted out by false reports, which the conspirators had purposely spread to induce him to venture abroad—some few of those about him too hastily assuring him that the tumult had ceased, the mutineers were apprehended, and the rest coming to congratulate him, resolved to continue firm in their obedience—he went forward to meet them with so much confidence, that upon a soldier’s boasting that he had killed Otho, he asked him, “By what authority?” and proceeded as far as the forum. There the knights, appointed to dispatch him, making their way through the crowd of citizens, upon seeing him at a distance, halted a while; after which, galloping up to him, now abandoned by all his attendants, they put him to death.

  XX. Some authors relate, that upon their first approach he cried out, “What do you mean, fellow-soldiers? I am yours, and you are mine,” and promised them a donative: but the generality of writers relate, that he offered his throat to them, saying, “Do your work, and strike, since you are resolved upon it.” It is remarkable, that not one of those who were at hand, ever made any attempt to assist the emperor; and all who were sent for, disregarded the summons, except a troop of Germans. They, in consideration of his late kindness in showing them particular attention during a sickness which prevailed in the camp, flew to his aid, but came too late; for, being not well acquainted with the town, they had taken a circuitous route. He was slain near the Curtian Lake,1 and there left, until a common soldier returning from the receipt of his allowance of corn, throwing down the load which he carried, cut off his head. There being upon it no hair, by which he might hold it, he hid it in the bosom of his dress; but afterwards thrusting his thumb into the mouth, he carried it in that manner to Otho, who gave it to the drudges and slaves who attended the soldiers; and they, fixing it upon the point of a spear, carried it in derision round the camp, crying out as they went along, “You take your fill of joy in your old age.” They were irritated to this pitch of rude banter, by a report spread a few days before, that, upon some one’s commending his person as still florid and vigorous, he replied,

  • ᾬτι μοι μένος ἔμπεδοι ἔστιν.1
  • My strength, as yet, has suffered no decay.

  A freedman of Patrobius’s, who himself had belonged to Nero’s family, purchased the head from them at the price of a hundred gold pieces, and threw it into the place where, by Galba’s order, his patron had been put to death. At last, after some time, his steward Argius buried it, with the rest of his body, in his own gardens near the Aurelian Way.

  XXI. In person he was of a good size, bald before, with blue eyes, and an aquiline nose; and his hands and feet were so distorted with the gout, that he could neither wear a shoe, nor turn over the leaves of a book, or so much as hold it. He had likewise an excrescence in his right side, which hung down to that degree, that it was with difficulty kept up by a bandage.

  XXII. He is reported to have been a great eater, and usually took his breakfast in the winter-time before day. At supper, he fed very heartily, giving the fragments which were left, by handfuls, to be distributed amongst the attendants. In his lust, he was more inclined to the male sex, and such of them too as were old. It is said of him, that in Spain, when Icelus, an old catamite of his, brought him the news of Nero’s death, he not only kissed him lovingly before company, but begged of him to remove all impediments, and then took him aside into a private apartment.

  XXIII. He perished in the seventy-third year of his age, and the seventh month of his reign.2 The senate, as soon as they could with safety, ordered a statue to be erected for him upon the naval column, in that part of the forum where he was slain. But Vespasian cancelled the decree, upon a suspicion that he had sent assassins from Spain into Judea to murder him.

  Galba was, for a private man, the most wealthy of any who had ever aspired to the imperial dignity. He valued himself upon his being descended from the family of the Servii, but still more upon his relation to Quintus Catulus Capitolinus, celebrated for integrity and virtue. He was likewise distantly related to Livia, the wife of Augustus; by whose interest he was preferred from the station which he held in the palace, to the dignity of consul; and who left him a great legacy at her death. His parsimonious way of living, and his aversion to all superfluity or excess, were construed into avarice as soon as he became emperor; whence Plutarch observes, that the pride which he took in his temperance and economy was unseasonable. While he endeavoured to reform the profusion in the public expenditure, which prevailed in the reign of Nero, he ran into the opposite extreme; and it is objected to him by some historians, that he maintained not the imperial dignity in a degree consistent even with decency. He was not sufficiently attentive either to his own security or the tranquillity of the state, when he refused to pay the soldiers the donative which he had promised them. This breach of faith seems to be the only act in his life that affects his integrity; and it contributed more to his ruin than even the odium which he incurred by the open venality and rapaciousness of his favourites, particularly Vinius.

  M. SALVIUS OTHO.

  I.The ancestors of Otho were originally of the town of Ferentum, of an ancient and honourable family, and, indeed, one of the most considerable in Etruria. His grandfather, M. Salvius Otho (whose father was a Roman knight, but his mother of mean extraction, for it is not certain whether she was free-born), by the favour of Livia Augusta, in whose house he had his education, was made a senator, but never rose higher than the prætorship. His father, Lucius Otho, was by the mother’s side nobly descended, allied to several great families, and so dearly beloved by Tiberius, and so much resembled him in his features, that most people believed Tiberius was his father. He behaved with great strictness and severity, not only in the city offices, but in the pro-consulship of Africa, and some extraordinary commands in the army. He had the courage to punish with death some soldiers in Illyricum, who, in the disturbance attempted by Camillus, upon changing their minds, had put their generals to the sword, as promoters of that insurrection against Claudius. He ordered the execution to take place in the front of the camp,1 and under his own eyes; though he knew they had been advanced to higher ranks in the army by Claudius, on that very account. By this action he acquired fame, but lessened his favour at court; which, however, he soon recovered, by discovering to Claudius a design upon his life, carried on by a Roman knight,2 and which he had learnt from some of his slaves. For the senate ordered a statue of him to be erected in the palace; an honour which had been conferred but upon very few before him. And Claudius advanced him to the dignity of a patrician, commending him, at the same time, in the highest terms, and concluding with these words: “A man, than whom I don’t so much as wish to have children that should be better.” He had two sons by a very noble woman, Albia Terentia, namely Lucius Titianus, and a younger called Marcus, who had the same cognomen as himself. He had also a daughter, whom he contracted to Drusus, Germanicus’s son, before she was of marriageable age.

  II. The emperor Otho was born upon the fourth of the calends of May [28th April], in the consulship of Camillus Aruntius and Domitius Ænobarbus.1 He was from his earliest youth so riotous and wild, that he was often severely scourged by his father. He was said to run about in the night-time, and seize upon any one he met, who was either drunk or too feeble to make resistance, and toss him in a blanket.2 After his father’s death, to make his court the more effectually to a freedwoman about the palace, who was in great favour, he pretended to be in love with her, though she was old, and almost decrepit. Having by her means got into Nero’s good graces, he soon became one of the principal favourites, by the congeniality of his disposition to that of the emperor; or, as some say, by the reciprocal practice of mutual pollution. He had so great a sway at court, that when a man of consular rank was condemned for bribery, having tampered with him for a large sum of money, to procure his pardon; before he had quite effected it, he scrupled not to introduce him into the senate, to return his thanks.

  III. Having, by means of this woman, insinuated himself into all the emperor’s secrets, he, upon the day designed for the murder of his mother, entertained them both at a very splendid feast, to prevent suspicion. Poppæa Sabina, for whom Nero entertained such a violent passion that he had taken her from her husband3 and entrusted her to him, he received, and went through the form of marrying her. And not satisfied with obtaining her favours, he loved her so extravagantly, that he could not with patience bear Nero for his rival. It is certainly believed that he not only refused admittance to those who were sent by Nero to fetch her, but that, on one occasion, he shut him out, and kept him standing before the door, mixing prayers and menaces in vain, and demanding back again what was entrusted to his keeping. His pretended marriage, therefore, being dissolved, he was sent lieutenant into Lusitania. This treatment of him was thought sufficiently severe, because harsher proceedings might have brought the whole farce to light, which, notwithstanding, at last came out, and was published to the world in the following distich:—

  • Cur Otho mentitus sit, quæritis, exul honore?
  • Uxoris mœchus cæperat esse suæ.
  • You ask why Otho’s banish’d? Know, the cause
  • Comes not within the verge of vulgar laws.
  • Against all rules of fashionable life,
  • The rogue had dared to sleep with his own wife.

  He governed the province in quality of quæstor for ten years, with singular moderation and justice.

  IV. As soon as an opportunity of revenge offered, he readily joined in Galba’s enterprises, and at the same time conceived hopes of obtaining the imperial dignity for himself. To this he was much encouraged by the state of the times, but still more by the assurances given him by Seleucus, the astrologer, who, having formerly told him that he would certainly out-live Nero, came to him at that juncture unexpectedly, promising him again that he should succeed to the empire, and that in a very short time. He, therefore, let slip no opportunity of making his court to every one about him by all manner of civilities. As often as he entertained Galba at supper, he distributed to every man of the cohort which attended the emperor on guard, a gold piece; endeavouring likewise to oblige the rest of the soldiers in one way or another. Being chosen an arbitrator by one who had a dispute with his neighbour about a piece of land, he bought it, and gave it him; so that now almost every body thought and said, that he was the only man worthy of succeeding to the empire.

  V. He entertained hopes of being adopted by Galba, and expected it every day. But finding himself disappointed, by Piso’s being preferred before him, he turned his thoughts to obtaining his purpose by the use of violence; and to this he was instigated, as well by the greatness of his debts, as by resentment at Galba’s conduct towards him. For he did not conceal his conviction, “that he could not stand his ground unless he became emperor, and that it signified nothing whether he fell by the hands of his enemies in the field, or of his creditors in the forum.” He had a few days before squeezed out of one of the emperor’s slaves a million of sesterces for procuring him a stewardship; and this was the whole fund he had for carrying on so great an enterprise. At first the design was entrusted to only five of the guard, but afterwards to ten others, each of the five naming two. They had every one ten thousand sesterces paid down, and were promised fifty thousand more. By these, others were drawn in, but not many; from a confident assurance, that when the matter came to the crisis, they should have enough to join them.

  VI. His first intention was, immediately after the departure of Piso, to seize the camp, and fall upon Galba, whilst he was at supper in the palace; but he was restrained by a regard for the cohort at that time on duty, lest he should bring too great an odium upon it; because it happened that the same cohort was on guard before, both when Caius was slain, and Nero deserted. For some time afterwards, he was restrained also by scruples about the omens, and by the advice of Seleucus. Upon the day fixed at last for the enterprise, having given his accomplices notice to wait for him in the forum near the temple of Saturn, at the gilded mile-stone,1 he went in the morning to pay his respects to Galba; and being received with a kiss as usual, he attended him at sacrifice, and heard the predictions of the augur.2 A freedman of his, then bringing him word that the architects were come, which was the signal agreed upon, he withdrew, as if it were with a design to view a house upon sale, and went out by a back-door of the palace to the place appointed. Some say he pretended to be seized with an ague fit, and ordered those about him to make that excuse for him, if he was inquired after. Being then quickly concealed in a woman’s litter, he made the best of his way for the camp. But the bearers growing tired, he got out, and began to run. His shoe becoming loose, he stopped again, but being immediately raised by his attendants upon their shoulders, and unanimously saluted by the title of Emperor, he came amidst auspicious acclamations and drawn swords into the Principia1 in the camp; all who met him joining in the cavalcade, as if they had been privy to the design. Upon this, sending some soldiers to dispatch Galba and Piso, he said nothing else in his address to the soldiery, to secure their affections, than these few words: “I shall be content with whatever ye think fit to leave me.”

  VII. Towards the close of the day, he entered the senate, and after he had made a short speech to them, pretending that he had been seized in the streets, and compelled by violence to assume the imperial authority, which he designed to exercise in conjunction with them, he retired to the palace. Besides other compliments which he received from those who flocked about him to congratulate and flatter him, he was called Nero by the mob, and manifested no intention of declining that cognomen. Nay, some authors relate, that he used it in his official acts, and the first letters he sent to the governors of provinces. He suffered all his images and statues to be replaced, and restored his procurators and freedmen to their former posts. And the first writing which he signed as emperor, was a promise of fifty millions of sesterces to finish the Golden-house.1 He is said to have been greatly frightened that night in his sleep, and to have groaned heavily; and being found, by those who came running in to see what the matter was, lying upon the floor before his bed, he endeavoured by every kind of atonement to appease the ghost of Galba, by which he had found himself violently tumbled out of bed. The next day, as he was taking the omens, a great storm arising, and sustaining a grievous fall, he muttered to himself from time to time:

  • Τί γάϱ μοι ϰαι μαϰϱοῖς αὐλοῖς;2
  • What business have I the loud trumpets to sound!

  VIII. About the same time, the armies in Germany took an oath to Vitellius as emperor. Upon receiving this intelligence, he advised the senate to send thither deputies, to inform them, that a prince had been already chosen; and to persuade them to peace and a good understanding. By letters and messages, however, he offered Vitellius to make him his colleague in the empire, and his son-in-law. But a war being now unavoidable, and the generals and troops sent forward by Vitellius, advancing, he had a proof of the attachment and fidelity of the pretorian guards, which had nearly proved fatal to the senatorian order. It had been judged proper that some arms should be given out of the stores, and conveyed to the fleet by the marine troops. While they were employed in fetching these from the camp in the night, some of the guards suspecting treachery, excited a tumult; and suddenly the whole body, without any of their officers at their head, ran to the palace, demanding that the entire senate should be put to the sword; and having repulsed some of the tribunes who endeavoured to stop them, and slain others, they broke, all bloody as they were, into the banquetting room, inquiring for the emperor; nor would they quit the place until they had seen him. He now entered upon his expedition against Vitellius with great alacrity, but too much precipitation, and without any regard to the ominous circumstances which attended it. For the Ancilia1 had been taken out of the temple of Mars, for the usual procession, but were not yet replaced; during which interval it had of old been looked upon as very unfortunate to engage in any enterprise. He likewise set forward upon the day when the worshippers of the Mother of the gods2 begin their lamentations and wailing. Besides these, other unlucky omens attended him. For, in a victim offered to Father Dis,3 he found the signs such as upon all other occasions are regarded as favourable; whereas, in that sacrifice, the contrary intimations are judged the most propitious. At his first setting forward, he was stopped by inundations of the Tiber; and at twenty miles’ distance from the city, found the road blocked up by the fall of houses.

  IX. Though it was the general opinion that it would be proper to protract the war, as the enemy were distressed by famine and the straitness of their quarters, yet he resolved with equal rashness to force them to an engagement as soon as possible; whether from impatience of prolonged anxiety, and in the hope of bringing matters to an issue before the arrival of Vitellius, or because he could not resist the ardour of the troops, who were all clamorous for battle. He was not, however, present at any of those which ensued, but stayed behind at Brixellum.1 He had the advantage in three slight engagements, near the Alps, about Placentia, and a place called Castor’s;2 but was, by a fraudulent stratagem of the enemy, defeated in the last and greatest battle, at Bedriacum.3 For, some hopes of a conference being given, and the soldiers being drawn up to hear the conditions of peace declared, very unexpectedly, and amidst their mutual salutations, they were obliged to stand to their arms. Immediately upon this he determined to put an end to his life, more, as many think, and not without reason, out of shame, at persisting in a struggle for the empire to the hazard of the public interest and so many lives, than from despair, or distrust of his troops. For he had still in reserve, and in full force, those whom he had kept about him for a second trial of his fortune, and others were coming up from Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Mœsia; nor were the troops lately defeated so far discouraged as not to be ready, even of themselves, to run all risks in order to wipe off their recent disgrace.

  X. My father, Suetonius Lenis,4 was in this battle, being at that time an angusticlavian tribune in the thirteenth legion. He used frequently to say, that Otho, before his advancement to the empire, had such an abhorrence of civil war, that once, upon hearing an account given at table of the death of Cassius and Brutus, he fell into a trembling, and that he never would have interfered with Galba, but that he was confident of succeeding in his enterprise without a war. Moreover, that he was then encouraged to despise life by the example of a common soldier, who bringing news of the defeat of the army, and finding that he met with no credit, but was railed at for a liar and a coward, as if he had run away from the field of battle, fell upon his sword at the emperor’s feet; upon the sight of which, my father said that Otho cried out, “that he would expose to no farther danger such brave men, who had deserved so well at his hands.” Advising therefore his brother, his brother’s son, and the rest of his friends, to provide for their security in the best manner they could, after he had embraced and kissed them, he sent them away; and then withdrawing into a private room by himself, he wrote a letter of consolation to his sister, containing two sheets. He likewise sent another to Messalina, Nero’s widow, whom he had intended to marry, committing to her the care of his relics and memory. He then burnt all the letters which he had by him, to prevent the danger and mischief that might otherwise befall the writers from the conqueror. What ready money he had, he distributed among his domestics.

  XI. And now being prepared, and just upon the point of dispatching himself, he was induced to suspend the execution of his purpose by a great tumult which had broken cut in the camp. Finding that some of the soldiers who were making off had been seized and detained as deserters, “Let us add,” said he, “this night to our life.” These were his very words. He then gave orders that no violence should be offered to any one; and keeping his chamber-door open until late at night, he allowed all who pleased the liberty to come and see him. At last, after quenching his thirst with a draught of cold water, he took up two poniards, and having examined the points of both, put one of them under his pillow, and shutting his chamber-door, slept very soundly, until, awaking about break of day, he stabbed himself under the left pap. Some persons bursting into the room upon his first groan, he at one time covered, and at another exposed his wound to the view of the bystanders, and thus life soon ebbed away. His funeral was hastily performed, according to his own order, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, and ninety-fifth day of his reign.1

  XII. The person and appearance of Otho no way corresponded to the great spirit he displayed on this occasion; for he is said to have been of low stature, splay-footed, and bandy-legged. He was, however, effeminately nice in the care of his person: the hair on his body he plucked out by the roots; and because he was somewhat bald, he wore a kind of peruke, so exactly fitted to his head, that nobody could have known it for such. He used to shave every day, and rub his face with soaked bread; the use of which he began when the down first appeared upon his chin, to prevent his having any beard. It is said likewise that he celebrated publicly the sacred rites of Isis,2 clad in a linen garment, such as is used by the worshippers of that goddess. These circumstances, I imagine, caused the world to wonder the more that his death was so little in character with his life. Many of the soldiers who were present, kissing and bedewing with their tears his hands and feet as he lay dead, and celebrating him as “a most gallant man, and an incomparable emperor,” immediately put an end to their own lives upon the spot, not far from his funeral pile. Many of those likewise who were at a distance, upon hearing the news of his death, in the anguish of their hearts, began fighting amongst themselves, until they dispatched one another. To conclude: the generality of mankind, though they hated him whilst living, yet highly extolled him after his death; insomuch that it was the common talk and opinion, “that Galba had been driven to destruction by his rival, not so much for the sake of reigning himself, as of restoring Rome to its ancient liberty.”

  It is remarkable, in the fortune of this emperor, that he owed both his elevation and catastrophe to the inextricable embarrassments in which he was involved; first, in respect of pecuniary circumstances, and next, of political. He was not, so far as we can learn, a follower of any of the sects of philosophers which justified, and even recommended suicide, in particular cases: yet he perpetrated that act with extraordinary coolness and resolution; and, what is no less remarkable, from the motive, as he avowed, of public expediency only. It was observed of him, for many years after his death, that “none ever died like Otho.”

  AULUS VITELLIUS.

  I.Very different accounts are given of the origin of the Vitellian family. Some describe it as ancient and noble, others as recent and obscure, nay, extremely mean. I am inclined to think, that these several representations have been made by the flatterers and detractors of Vitellius, after he became emperor, unless the fortunes of the family varied before. There is extant a memoir addressed by Quintus Eulogius to Quintus Vitellius, quæstor to the Divine Augustus, in which it is said, that the Vitellii were descended from Faunus, king of the aborigines, and Vitellia,1 who was worshipped in many places as a goddess, and that they reigned formerly over the whole of Latium: that all who were left of the family removed out of the country of the Sabines to Rome, and were enrolled among the patricians: that some monuments of the family continued a long time; as the Vitellian Way, reaching from the Janiculum to the sea, and likewise a colony of that name, which, at a very remote period of time, they desired leave from the government to defend against the Æquicolæ,2 with a force raised by their own family only: also that, in the time of the war with the Samnites, some of the Vitellii who went with the troops levied for the security of Apulia, settled at Nuceria,3 and their descendants, a long time afterwards, returned again to Rome, and were admitted into the patrician order. On the other hand, the generality of writers say that the founder of the family was a freedman. Cassius Severus1 and some others relate that he was likewise a cobbler, whose son having made a considerable fortune by agencies and dealings in confiscated property, begot, by a common strumpet, daughter of one Antiochus, a baker, a child, who afterwards became a Roman knight. Of these different accounts the reader is left to take his choice.

  II. It is certain, however, that Publius Vitellius, of Nuceria, whether of an ancient family, or of low extraction, was a Roman knight, and a procurator to Augustus. He left behind him four sons, all men of very high station, who had the same cognomen, but the different prænomina of Aulus, Quintus, Publius, and Lucius. Aulus died in the enjoyment of the consulship,2 which office he bore jointly with Domitius, the father of Nero Cæsar. He was elegant to excess in his manner of living, and notorious for the vast expense of his entertainments. Quintus was deprived of his rank of senator, when, upon a motion made by Tiberius, a resolution passed to purge the senate of those who were in any respect not duly qualified for that honour. Publius, an intimate friend and companion of Germanicus, prosecuted his enemy and murderer, Cneius Piso, and procured sentence against him. After he had been made prætor, being arrested among the accomplices of Sejanus, and delivered into the hands of his brother to be confined in his house, he opened a vein with a penknife, intending to bleed himself to death. He suffered, however, the wound to be bound up and cured, not so much from repenting the resolution he had formed, as to comply with the importunity of his relations. He died afterwards a natural death during his confinement. Lucius, after his consulship,3 was made governor of Syria,4 and by his politic management not only brought Artabanus, king of the Parthians, to give him an interview, but to worship the standards of the Roman legions. He afterwards filled two ordinary consulships,5 and also the censorship6 jointly with the emperor Claudius. Whilst that prince was absent upon his expedition into Britain,1 he care of the empire was committed to him, being a man of great integrity and industry. But he lessened his character not a little, by his passionate fondness for an abandoned freedwoman, with whose spittle, mixed with honey, he used to anoint his throat and jaws, by way of remedy for some complaint, not privately nor seldom, but daily and publicly. Being extravagantly prone to flattery, it was he who gave rise to the worship of Caius Cæsar as a god, when, upon his return from Syria, he would not presume to accost him any otherwise than with his head covered, turning himself round, and then prostrating himself upon the earth. And to leave no artifice untried to secure the favour of Claudius, who was entirely governed by his wives and freedmen, he requested as the greatest favour from Messalina, that she would be pleased to let him take off her shoes; which, when he had done, he took her right shoe, and wore it constantly betwixt his toga and his tunic, and from time to time covered it with kisses. He likewise worshipped golden images of Narcissus and Pallas among his household gods. It was he, too, who, when Claudius exhibited the secular games, in his compliments to him upon that occasion, used this expression, “May you often do the same.”

  III. He died of palsy, the day after his seizure with it, leaving behind him two sons, whom he had by a most excellent and respectable wife, Sextilia. He had lived to see them both consuls, the same year and during the whole year also; the younger succeeding the elder for the last six months.2 The senate honoured him after his decease with a funeral at the public expense, and with a statue in the Rostra, which had this inscription upon the base: “One who was stedfast in his loyalty to his prince.” The emperor Aulus Vitellius, the son of this Lucius, was born upon the eighth of the calends of October [24th September], or, as some say, upon the seventh of the ides of September [7th September], in the consulship of Drusus Cæsar and Norbanus Flaccus.3 His parents were so terrified with the predictions of astrologers upon the calculation of his nativity, that his father used his utmost endeavours to prevent his being sent governor into any of the provinces, whilst he was alive. His mother, upon his being sent to the legions,1 and also upon his being proclaimed emperor, immediately lamented him as utterly ruined. He spent his youth amongst the catamites of Tiberius at Capri, was himself constantly stigmatized with the name of Spintria,2 and was supposed to have been the occasion of his father’s advancement, by consenting to gratify the emperor’s unnatural lust.

  IV. In the subsequent part of his life, being still most scandalously vicious, he rose to great favour at court; being upon a very intimate footing with Caius [Caligula], because of his fondness for chariot-driving, and with Claudius for his love of gaming. But he was in a still higher degree acceptable to Nero, as well on the same accounts, as for a particular service which he rendered him. When Nero presided in the games instituted by himself, though he was extremely desirous to perform amongst the harpers, yet his modesty would not permit him, notwithstanding the people entreated much for it. Upon his quitting the theatre, Vitellius fetched him back again, pretending to represent the determined wishes of the people, and so afforded him the opportunity of yielding to their intreaties.

  V. By the favour of these three princes, he was not only advanced to the great offices of state, but to the highest dignities of the sacred order; after which he held the proconsulship of Africa, and had the superintendence of the public works, in which appointment his conduct, and, consequently, his reputation, were very different. For he governed the province with singular integrity during two years, in the latter of which he acted as deputy to his brother, who succeeded him. But in his office in the city, he was said to pillage the temples of their gifts and ornaments, and to have exchanged brass and tin for gold and silver.3

  VI. He took to wife Petronia, the daughter of a man of consular rank, and had by her a son named Petronius, who was blind of an eye. The mother being willing to appoint this youth her heir, upon condition that he should be released from his father’s authority, the latter discharged him accordingly; but shortly after, as was believed, murdered him, charging him with a design upon his life, and pretending that he had, from consciousness of his guilt, drank the poison he had prepared for his father. Soon afterwards, he married Galeria Fundana, the daughter of a man of pretorian rank, and had by her both sons and daughters. Among the former was one who had such a stammering in his speech, that he was little better than if he had been dumb.

  VII. He was sent by Galba into Lower Germany,1 contrary to his expectation. It is supposed that he was assisted in procuring this appointment by the interest of Titus Junius, a man of great influence at that time; whose friendship he had long before gained by favouring the same set of charioteers with him in the Circensian games. But Galba openly declared that none were less to be feared than those who only cared for their bellies, and that even his enormous appetite must be satisfied with the plenty of that province; so that it is evident he was selected for that government more out of contempt than kindness. It is certain, that when he was to set out, he had not money for the expenses of his journey; he being at that time so much straitened in his circumstances, that he was obliged to put his wife and children, whom he left at Rome, into a poor lodging which he hired for them, in order that he might let his own house for the remainder of the year; and he pawned a pearl taken from his mother’s earring, to defray his expenses on the road. A crowd of creditors who were waiting to stop him, and amongst them the people of Sineussa and Formia, whose taxes he had converted to his own use, he eluded, by alarming them with the apprehension of false accusation. He had, however, sued a certain freedman, who was clamorous in demanding a debt of him, under pretence that he had kicked him; which action he would not withdraw, until he had wrung from the freedman fifty thousand sesterces. Upon his arrival in the province, the army, which was disaffected to Galba, and ripe for insurrection, received him with open arms, as if he had been sent them from heaven. It was no small recommendation to their favour, that he was the son of a man who had been thrice consul, was in the prime of life, and of an easy, prodigal disposition. This opinion, which had been long entertained of him, Vitellius confirmed by some late practices; having kissed all the common soldiers whom he met with upon the road, and been excessively complaisant in the inns and stables to the muleteers and travellers; asking them in a morning, if they had got their breakfasts, and letting them see, by belching, that he had eaten his.

  VIII. After he had reached the camp, he denied no man any thing he asked for, and pardoned all who lay under sentence for disgraceful conduct or disorderly habits. Before a month, therefore, had passed, without regard to the day or season, he was hurried by the soldiers out of his bed-chamber, although it was evening, and he in an undress, and unanimously saluted by the title of Emperor.1 He was then carried round the most considerable towns in the neighbourhood, with the sword of the Divine Julius in his hand; which had been taken by some person out of the temple of Mars, and presented to him when he was first saluted. Nor did he return to the pretorium, until his dining-room was in flames from the chimney’s taking fire. Upon this accident, all being in consternation, and considering it as an unlucky omen, he cried out, “Courage, boys! it shines brightly upon us.” And this was all he said to the soldiers. The army of the Upper Province likewise, which had before declared against Galba for the senate, joining in the proceedings, he very eagerly accepted the cognomen of Germanicus, offered him by the unanimous consent of both armies, but deferred assuming that of Augustus, and refused for ever that of Cæsar.

  IX. Intelligence of Galba’s death arriving soon after, when he had settled his affairs in Germany he divided his troops into two bodies, intending to send one of them before him against Otho, and to follow with the other himself. The army he sent forward had a lucky omen; for, suddenly, an eagle came flying up to them on the right, and having hovered round the standards, flew gently before them on their road. But, on the other hand, when he began his own march, all the equestrian statues, which were erected for him in several places, fell suddenly down with their legs broken; and the laurel crown, which he had put on as emblematical of auspicious fortune, fell off his head into a river. Soon afterwards, at Vienne,1 as he was upon the tribunal administering justice, a cock perched upon his shoulder, and afterwards upon his head. The issue corresponded to these omens; for he was not able to keep the empire which had been secured for him by his lieutenants.

  X. He heard of the victory at Bedriacum,2 and the death of Otho, whilst he was yet in Gaul, and without the least hesitation, by a single proclamation, disbanded all the pretorian cohorts, as having, by their repeated treasons, set a dangerous example to the rest of the army; commanding them to deliver up their arms to his tribunes. A hundred and twenty of them, under whose hands he had found petitions presented to Otho, for rewards of their service in the murder of Galba, he besides ordered to be sought out and punished. So far his conduct deserved approbation, and was such as to afford hope of his becoming an excellent prince, had he not managed his other affairs in a way more corresponding with his own disposition, and his former manner of life, than to the imperial dignity. For, having begun his march, he rode through every city in his route in a triumphal procession; and sailed down the rivers in ships, fitted out with the greatest elegance, and decorated with various kinds of crowns, amidst the most extravagant entertainments. Such was the want of discipline, and the licentiousness both in his family and army, that, not satisfied with the provision every where made for them at the public expense, they committed every kind of robbery and insult upon the inhabitants, setting slaves at liberty as they pleased; and if any dared to make resistance, they dealt blows and abuse, frequently wounds, and sometimes slaughter amongst them. When he reached the plains on which the battles were fought,1 some of those around him being offended at the smell of the carcases which lay rotting upon the ground, he had the audacity to encourage them by a most detestable remark, “That a dead enemy smelt not amiss, especially if he were a fellow-citizen.” To qualify, however, the offensiveness of the stench, he quaffed in public a goblet of wine, and with equal vanity and insolence distributed a large quantity of it among his troops. On his observing a stone with an inscription upon it to the memory of Otho, he said, “It was a mausoleum good enough for such a prince.” He also sent the poniard, with which Otho killed himself, to the colony of Agrippina,2 to be dedicated to Mars. Upon the Appenine hills he celebrated a Bacchanalian feast.

  XI. At last he entered the City with trumpets sounding, in his general’s cloak, and girded with his sword, amidst a display of standards and banners: his attendants being all in the military habit, and the arms of the soldiers unsheathed. Acting more and more in open violation of all laws, both divine and human, he assumed the office of Pontifex Maximus, upon the day of the defeat at the Allia;3 ordered the magistrates to be elected for ten years of office; and made himself consul for life. To put it out of all doubt what model he intended to follow in his government of the empire, he made his offerings to the shade of Nero in the midst of the Campus Martius, and with a full assembly of the public priests attending him. And at a solemn entertainment, he desired a harper who pleased the company much, to sing something in praise of Domitius; and upon his beginning some songs of Nero’s, he started up in presence of the whole assembly, and could not refrain from applauding him, by clapping his hands.

  XII. After such a commencement of his career, he conducted his affairs, during the greater part of his reign, entirely by the advice and direction of the vilest amongst the players and charioteers, and especially his freedman Asiaticus. This fellow had, when young, been engaged with him in a course of mutual and unnatural pollution, but, being at last quite tired of the occupation, ran away. His master, some time after, caught him at Puteoli, selling a liquor called Posca,1 and put him in chains, but soon released him, and retained him in his former capacity. Growing weary, however, of his rough and stubborn temper, he sold him to a strolling fencing-master; after which, when the fellow was to have been brought up to play his part at the conclusion of an entertainment of gladiators, he suddenly carried him off, and at length, upon his being advanced to the government of a province, gave him his freedom. The first day of his reign, he presented him with the gold rings at supper, though in the morning, when all about him requested that favour in his behalf, he expressed the utmost abhorrence of putting so great a stain upon the equestrian order.

  XIII. He was chiefly addicted to the vices of luxury and cruelty. He always made three meals a day, sometimes four; breakfast, dinner, and supper, and a drunken revel after all. This load of victuals he could well enough bear, from a custom to which he had enured himself, of frequently vomiting. For these several meals he would make different appointments at the houses of his friends on the same day. None ever entertained him at less expense than four hundred thousand sesterces.2 The most famous was a set entertainment given him by his brother, at which, it is said, there were served up no less than two thousand choice fishes, and seven thousand birds. Yet even this supper he himself outdid, at a feast which he gave upon the first use of a dish which had been made for him, and which, for its extraordinary size, he called “The Shield of Minerva.” In this dish there were tossed up together the livers of char-fish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, with the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails of lampreys, which had been brought in ships of war as far as from the Carpathian Sea, and the Spanish Straits. He was not only a man of an insatiable appetite, but would gratify it likewise at unseasonable times, and with any garbage that came in his way; so that, at a sacrifice, he would snatch from the fire flesh and cakes, and eat them upon the spot. When he travelled, he did the same at the inns upon the road, whether the meat was fresh dressed and hot, or what had been left the day before, and was half-eaten.

  XIV. He delighted in the infliction of punishments, and even those which were capital, without any distinction of persons or occasions. Several noblemen, his school-fellows and companions, invited by him to court, he treated with such flattering caresses, as seemed to indicate an affection short only of admitting them to share the honours of the imperial dignity; yet he put them all to death by some base means or other. To one he gave poison with his own hand, in a cup of cold water which he called for in a fever. He scarcely spared one of all the usurers, notaries, and publicans, who had ever demanded a debt of him at Rome, or any toll or custom upon the road. One of these, while in the very act of saluting him, he ordered for execution, but immediately sent for him back; upon which all about him applauding his clemency, he commanded him to be slain in his own presence, saying, “I have a mind to feed my eyes.” Two sons who interceded for their father, he ordered to be executed with him. A Roman knight, upon his being dragged away for execution, and crying out to him, “You are my heir,” he desired to produce his will: and finding that he had made his freedman joint heir with him, he commanded that both he and the freedman should have their throats cut. He put to death some of the common people for cursing aloud the blue party in the Circensian games; supposing it to be done in contempt of himself, and the expectation of a revolution in the government. There were no persons he was more severe against than jugglers and astrologers; and as soon as any one of them was informed against, he put him to death without the formality of a trial. He was enraged against them, because, after his proclamation by which he commanded all astrologers to quit Rome, and Italy also, before the calends [the first] of October, a bill was immediately posted about the city, with the following words:—“Takenotice:1 The Chaldæans also decree that Vitellius Germanicus shall be no more, by the day of the said calends.” He was even suspected of being accessary to his mother’s death, by forbidding sustenance to be given her when she was unwell; a German witch,2 whom he held to be oracular, having told him, “That he would long reign in security if he survived his mother.” But others say, that being quite weary of the state of affairs, and apprehensive of the future, she obtained without difficulty a dose of poison from her son.

  XV. In the eighth month of his reign, the troops both in Mœsia and Pannonia revolted from him; as did likewise, of the armies beyond sea, those in Judæa and Syria, some of which swore allegiance to Vespasian as emperor in his own presence, and others in his absence. In order, therefore, to secure the favour and affection of the people, Vitellius lavished on all around whatever he had it in his power to bestow, both publicly and privately, in the most extravagant manner. He also levied soldiers in the city, and promised all who enlisted as volunteers, not only their discharge after the victory was gained, but all the rewards due to veterans who had served their full time in the wars. The enemy now pressing forward both by sea and land, on one hand he opposed against them his brother with a fleet, the new levies, and a body of gladiators, and in another quarter the troops and generals who were engaged at Bedriacum. But being beaten or betrayed in every direction, he agreed with Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s brother, to abdicate, on condition of having his life spared, and a hundred millions of sesterces granted him; and he immediately, upon the palace-steps, publicly declared to a large body of soldiers there assembled, “that he resigned the government, which he had accepted reluctantly;” but they all remonstrating against it, he deferred the conclusion of the treaty. Next day, early in the morning, he came down to the forum in a very mean habit, and with many tears repeated the declaration from a writing which he held in his hand; but the soldiers and people again interposing, and encouraging him not to give way, but to rely on their zealous support, he recovered his courage, and forced Sabinus, with the rest of the Flavian party, who now thought themselves secure, to retreat into the Capitol, where he destroyed them all by setting fire to the temple of Jupiter, whilst he beheld the contest and the fire from Tiberius’s house,1 where he was feasting. Not long after, repenting of what he had done, and throwing the blame of it upon others, he called a meeting, and swore “that nothing was dearer to him than the public peace;” which oath he also obliged the rest to take. Then drawing a dagger from his side, he presented it first to the consul, and, upon his refusing it, to the magistrates, and then to every one of the senators; but none of them being willing to accept it, he went away, as if he meant to lay it up in the temple of Concord; but some crying out to him, “You are Concord,” he came back again, and said that he would not only keep his weapon, but for the future use the cognomen of Concord.

  XVI. He advised the senate to send deputies, accompanied by the Vestal Virgins, to desire peace, or, at least, time for consultation. The day after, while he was waiting for an answer, he received intelligence by a scout, that the enemy was advancing. Immediately, therefore, throwing himself into a small litter, borne by hand, with only two attendants, a baker and a cook, he privately withdrew to his father’s house, on the Aventine hill, intending to escape thence into Campania. But a groundless report being circulated, that the enemy was willing to come to terms, he suffered himself to be carried back to the palace. Finding, however, nobody there, and those who were with him stealing away, he girded round his waist a belt full of gold pieces, and then ran into the porter’s lodge, tying the dog before the door, and piling up against it the bed and bedding.

  XVII. By this time the forerunners of the enemy’s army had broken into the palace, and meeting with nobody, searched, as was natural, every corner. Being dragged by them out of his cell, and asked “who he was?” (for they did not recognize him), “and if he knew where Vitellius was?” he deceived them by a falsehood. But at last being discovered, he begged hard to be detained in custody, even were it in a prison; pretending to have something to say which concerned Vespasian’s security. Nevertheless, he was dragged half-naked into the forum, with his hands tied behind him, a rope about his neck, and his clothes torn, amidst the most contemptuous abuse, both by word and deed, along the Via Sacra; his head being held back by the hair, in the manner of condemned criminals, and the point of a sword put under his chin, that he might hold up his face to public view; some of the mob, meanwhile, pelting him with dung and mud, whilst others called him “an incendiary and glutton.” They also upbraided him with the defects of his person, for he was monstrously tall, and had a face usually very red with hard-drinking, a large belly, and one thigh weak, occasioned by a chariot running against him, as he was attending upon Caius,1 while he was driving. At length, upon the Scalæ Gemoniæ, he was tormented and put to death in lingering tortures, and then dragged by a hook into the Tiber.

  XVIII. He perished with his brother and son,2 in the fifty-seventh year of his age,3 and verified the prediction of those who, from the omen which happened to him at Vienne, as before related,4 foretold that he would be made prisoner by some man of Gaul. For he was seized by Antoninus Primus, a general of the adverse party, who was born at Toulouse, and, when a boy, had the cognomon of Becco,5 which signifies a cock’s beak.

  After the extinction of the race of the Cæsars, the possession of the imperial power became extremely precarious; and great influence in the army was the means which now invariably led to the throne. The soldiers having arrogated to themselves the right of nomination, they either unanimously elected one and the same person, or different parties supporting the interests of their respective favourites, there arose between them a contention, which was usually determined by an appeal to arms, and followed by the assassination of the unsuccessful competitor. Vitellius, by being a parasite of all the emperors from Tiberius to Nero inclusively, had risen to a high military rank, by which, with a spirit of enterprise, and large promises to the soldiery, it was not difficult to snatch the reins of government, while they were yet fluctuating in the hands of Otho. His ambition prompted to the attempt, and his boldness was crowned with success. In the service of the four preceding emperors, Vitellius had imbibed the principal vices of them all: but what chiefly distinguished him was extreme voraciousness, which, though he usually pampered it with enormous luxury, could yet be gratified by the vilest and most offensive garbage. The pusillanimity discovered by this emperor at his death, forms a striking contrast to the heroic behaviour of Otho.

  T. FLAVIUS VESPASIANUS AUGUSTUS.

  IThe empire, which had been long thrown into a disturbed and unsetted state, by the rebellion and violent death of its three last rulers, was at length restored to peace and security by the Flavian family, whose descent was indeed obscure, and which boasted no ancestral honours; but the public had no cause to regret its elevation; though it is acknowledged that Domitian met with the just reward of his avarice and cruelty. Titus Flavius Petro, a townsman of Reate,1 whether a centurion or an evocatus2 of Pompey’s party in the civil war, is uncertain, fled out of the battle of Pharsalia and went home: where, having at last obtained his pardon and discharge, he became a collector of the money raised by public sales in the way of auction. His son, surnamed Sabinus, was never engaged in the military service, though some say he was a centurion of the first order, and others, that whilst he held that rank, he was discharged on account of his bad state of health: this Sabinus, I say, was a publican, and received the tax of the fortieth penny in Asia. And there were remaining, at the time of the advancement of the family, several statues, which had been erected to him by the cities of that province, with this inscription: “To the honest Tax-farmer.”3 He afterwards turned usurer amongst the Helvetii, and there died, leaving behind him his wife, Vespasia Polla, and two sons by her; the elder of whom, Sabinus, came to be prefect of the city, and the younger, Vespasian, to be emperor. Polla, descended of a good family, at Nursia,4 had for her father Vespasius Pollio, thrice appointed military tribune, and at last prefect of the camp; and her brother was a senator of prætorian dignity. There is to this day, about six miles from Nursia, on the road to Spoletum, a place on the summit of a hill, called Vespasiæ, where are several monuments of the Vespasii, a sufficient proof of the splendour and antiquity of the family. I will not deny that some have pretended to say, that Petro’s father was a native of Gallia Transpadana,1 whose employment was to hire work-people who used to emigrate every year from the country of the Umbria into that of the Sabines, to assist them in their husbandry;2 but who settled at last in the town of Reate, and there married. But of this I have not been able to discover the least proof, upon the strictest inquiry.

  II. Vespasian was born in the country of the Sabines, beyond Reate, in a little country-seat called Phalacrine, upon the fifth of the calends of December [27th November], in the evening, in the consulship of Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus and Caius Poppæus Sabinus, five years before the death of Augustus;3 and was educated under the care of Tertulla, his grandmother by the father’s side, upon an estate belonging to the family, at Cosa.4 After his advancement to the empire, he used frequently to visit the place where he had spent his infancy; and the villa was continued in the same condition, that he might see every thing about him just as he had been used to do. And he had so great a regard for the memory of his grandmother, that, upon solemn occasions and festival days, he constantly drank out of a silver cup which she had been accustomed to use. After assuming the manly habit, he had a long time a distaste for the senatorian toga, though his brother had obtained it; nor could he be persuaded by any one but his mother to sue for that badge of honour. She at length drove him to it, more by taunts and reproaches, than by her entreaties and authority, calling him now and then, by way of reproach, his brother’s footman. He served as military tribune in Thrace. When made quæstor, the province of Crete and Cyrene fell to him by lot. He was candidate for the ædileship, and soon after for the prætorship, but met with a repulse in the former case; though at last, with much difficulty, he came in sixth on the poll-books. But the office of prætor he carried upon his first canvass, standing amongst the highest at the poll. Being incensed against the senate, and desirous to gain, by all possible means, the good graces of Caius,1 he obtained leave to exhibit extraordinary2 games for the emperor’s victory in Germany, and advised them to increase the punishment of the conspirators against his life, by exposing their corpses unburied. He likewise gave him thanks in that august assembly for the honour of being admitted to his table.

  III. Meanwhile, he married Flavia Domitilla, who had formerly been the mistress of Statilius Capella, a Roman knight of Sabrata in Africa, who [Domitilla] enjoyed Latin rights; and was soon after declared fully and freely a citizen of Rome, on a trial before the court of Recovery, brought by her father Flavius Liberalis, a native of Ferentum, but no more than secretary to a quæstor. By her he had the following children: Titus, Domitian, and Domitilla. He outlived his wife and daughter, and lost them both before he became emperor. After the death of his wife, he renewed his union3 with his former concubine Cænis, the freedwoman of Antonia, and also her amanuensis, and treated her, even after he was emperor, almost as if she had been his lawful wife.4

  IV. In the reign of Claudius, by the interest of Narcissus, he was sent to Germany, in command of a legion; whence being removed into Britain, he engaged the enemy in thirty several battles. He reduced under subjection to the Romans two very powerful tribes, and above twenty great towns, with the Isle of Wight, which lies close to the coast of Britain; partly under the command of Aulus Plautius, the consular lieutenant, and partly under Claudius himself.1 For this success he received the triumphal ornaments, and in a short time after two priesthoods, besides the consulship, which he held during the two last months of the year.2 The interval between that and his proconsulship he spent in leisure and retirement, for fear of Agrippina, who still held great sway over her son, and hated all the friends of Narcissus, who was then dead. Afterwards he got by lot the province of Africa, which he governed with great reputation, excepting that once, in an insurrection at Adrumentum, he was pelted with turnips. It is certain that he returned thence nothing richer; for his credit was so low, that he was obliged to mortgage his whole property to his brother, and was reduced to the necessity of dealing in mules, for the support of his rank; for which reason he was commonly called “the Muleteer.” He is said likewise to have been convicted of extorting from a young man of fashion two hundred thousand sesterces for procuring him the broadstripe, contrary to the wishes of his father, and was severely reprimanded for it. While in attendance upon Nero in Achaia, he frequently withdrew from the theatre while Nero was singing, and went to sleep if he remained, which gave so much offence, that he was not only excluded from his society, but debarred the liberty of saluting him in public. Upon this, he retired to a small out-of-the-way town, where he lay skulking in constant fear of his life, until a province, with an army, was offered him.

  A firm persuasion had long prevailed through all the East,1 that it was fated for the empire of the world, at that time, to devolve on some who should go forth from Judæa. This prediction referred to a Roman emperor, as the event shewed; but the Jews, applying it to themselves, broke out into rebellion, and having defeated and slain their governor,2 routed the lieutenant of Syria,3 a man of consular rank, who was advancing to his assistance, and took an eagle, the standard of one of his legions. As the suppression of this revolt appeared to require a stronger force and an active general, who might be safely trusted in an affair of so much importance, Vespasian was chosen in preference to all others, both for his known activity, and on account of the obscurity of his origin and name, being a person of whom there could be not the least jealousy. Two legions, therefore, eight squadrons of horse, and ten cohorts, being added to the former troops in Judæa, and, taking with him his eldest son as lieutenant, as soon as he arrived in his province, he turned the eyes of the neighbouring provinces upon him, by reforming immediately the discipline of the camp, and engaging the enemy once or twice with such resolution, that, in the attack of a castle,1 he had his knee hurt by the stroke of a stone, and received several arrows in his shield.

  V. After the deaths of Nero and Galba, whilst Otho and Vitellius were contending for the sovereignty, he entertained hopes of obtaining the empire, with the prospect of which he had long before flattered himself, from the following omens. Upon an estate belonging to the Flavian family, in the neighbourhood of Rome, there was an old oak, sacred to Mars, which, at the three several deliveries of Vespasia, put out each time a new branch; evident intimations of the future fortune of each child. The first was but a slender one, which quickly withered away; and accordingly, the girl that was born did not live long. The second became vigorous, which portended great good fortune; but the third grew like a tree. His father, Sabinus, encouraged by these omens, which were confirmed by the augurs, told his mother, “that her grandson would be emperor of Rome;” at which she laughed heartily, wondering, she said, “that her son should be in his dotage whilst she continued still in full possession of her faculties.”

  Afterwards in his ædileship, when Caius Cæsar, being enraged at his not taking care to have the streets kept clean, ordered the soldiers to fill the bosom of his gown with dirt, some persons at that time construed it into a sign that the government, being trampled under foot and deserted in some civil commotion, would fall under his protection, and as it were into his lap. Once, while he was at dinner, a strange dog, that wandered about the streets, brought a man’s hand,2 and laid it under the table. And another time, while he was at supper, a plough-ox throwing the yoke off his neck, broke into the room, and after he had frightened away all the attendants, on a sudden, as if he was tired, fell down at his feet, as he lay still upon his couch, and hung down his neck. A cypress-tree likewise, in a field belonging to the family, was torn up by the roots, and laid flat upon the ground, when there was no violent wind; but next day it rose again fresher and stronger than before.

  He dreamt in Achaia that the good fortune of himself and his family would begin when Nero had a tooth drawn; and it happened that the day after, a surgeon coming into the hall, showed him a tooth which he had just extracted from Nero. In Judæa, upon his consulting the oracle of the divinity at Carmel,1 the answer was so encouraging as to assure him of success in anything he projected, however great or important it might be. And when Josephus,2 one of the noble prisoners, was put in chains, he confidently affirmed that he should be released in a very short time by the same Vespasian, but he would be emperor first.3 Some omens were likewise mentioned in the news from Rome, and among others, that Nero, towards the close of his days, was commanded in a dream to carry Jupiter’s sacred chariot out of the sanctuary where it stood, to Vespasian’s house, and conduct it thence into the circus. Also not long afterwards, as Galba was going to the election in which he was created consul for the second time, a statue of the Divine Julius4 turned towards the east. And in the field of Bedriacum,5 before the battle began, two eagles engaged in the sight of the army; and one of them being beaten, a third came from the east, and drove away the conqueror.

  VI. He made, however, no attempt upon the sovereignty, though his friends were very ready to support him, and even pressed him to the enterprise, until he was encouraged to it by the fortuitous aid of persons unknown to him and at a distance. Two thousand men, drawn out of three legions in the Mœsian army, had been sent to the assistance of Otho. While they were upon their march, news came that he had been defeated, and had put an end to his life; notwithstanding which they continued their march as far as Aquileia, pretending that they gave no credit to the report. There, tempted by the opportunity which the disorder of the times afforded them, they ravaged and plundered the country at discretion; until at length, fearing to be called to an account on their return, and punished for it, they resolved upon choosing and creating an emperor. “For they were no ways inferior,” they said, “to the army which made Galba emperor, nor to the prætorian troops which had set up Otho, nor the army in Germany, to whom Vitellius owed his elevation.” The names of all the consular lieutenants, therefore, being taken into consideration, and one objecting to one, and another to another, for various reasons; at last some of the third legion, which a little before Nero’s death had been removed out of Syria into Mœsia, extolled Vespasian in high terms; and all the rest assenting, his name was immediately inscribed on their standards. The design was nevertheless quashed for a time, the troops being brought to submit to Vitellius a little longer.

  However, the fact becoming known, Tiberius Alexander, governor of Egypt, first obliged the legions under his command to swear obedience to Vespasian as their emperor, on the calends [the 1st] of July, which was observed ever after as the day of his accession to the empire; and upon the fifth of the ides of the same month [the 28th July], the army in Judæa, where he then was, also swore allegiance to him. What contributed greatly to forward the affair, was a copy of a letter, whether real or counterfeit, which was circulated, and said to have been written by Otho before his decease to Vespasian, recommending to him in the most urgent terms to avenge his death, and entreating him to come to the aid of the commonwealth; as well as a report which was circulated, that Vitellius, after his success against Otho, proposed to change the winter-quarters of the legions, and remove those in Germany to a less hazardous station and a warmer climate Moreover, amongst the governors of provinces, Licinius Mucianus dropping the grudge arising from a jealousy of which he had hitherto made no secret, promised to join him with the Syrian army, and, among the allied kings, Volugesus, king of the Parthians, offered him a reinforcement of forty thousand archers.

  VII. Having, therefore, entered on a civil war, and sent forward his generals and forces into Italy, he himself, in the meantime, passed over to Alexandria, to obtain possession of the key of Egypt.1 Here having entered alone, without attendants, the temple of Serapis, to take the auspices respecting the establishment of his power, and having done his utmost to propitiate the deity, upon turning round, [his freedman] Basilides2 appeared before him, and seemed to offer him the sacred leaves, chaplets, and cakes, according to the usage of the place, although no one had admitted him, and he had long laboured under a muscular debility, which would hardly have allowed him to walk into the temple; besides which, it was certain that at the very time he was far away. Immediately after this, arrived letters with intelligence that Vitellius’s troops had been defeated at Cremona, and he himself slain at Rome. Vespasian, the new emperor, having been raised unexpectedly from a low estate, wanted something which might clothe him with divine majesty and authority. This, likewise, was now added. A poor man who was blind, and another who was lame, came both together before him, when he was seated on the tribunal, imploring him to heal them,3 and saying that they were admonished in a dream by the god Serapis to seek his aid, who assured them that he would restore sight to the one by anointing his eyes with his spittle, and give strength to the leg of the other, if he vouchsafed but to touch it with his heel. At first he could scarcely believe that the thing would any how succeed, and therefore hesitated to venture on making the experiment. At length, however, by the advice of his friends, he made the attempt publicly, in the presence of the assembled multitudes, and it was crowned with success in both cases.1 About the same time, at Tegea in Arcadia, by the direction of some soothsayers, several vessels of ancient workmanship were dug out of a consecrated place, on which there was an effigy resembling Vespasian.

  VIII. Returning now to Rome, under these auspices, and with a great reputation, after enjoying a triumph for victories over the Jews, he added eight consulships1 to his former one. He likewise assumed the censorship, and made it his principal concern, during the whole of his government, first to restore order in the state, which had been almost ruined, and was in a tottering condition, and then to improve it. The soldiers, one part of them emboldened by victory, and the other smarting with the disgrace of their defeat, had abandoned themselves to every species of licentiousness and insolence. Nay, the provinces, too, and free cities, and some kingdoms in alliance with Rome, were all in a disturbed state. He, therefore, disbanded many of Vitellius’s soldiers, and punished others; and so far was he from granting any extraordinary favours to the sharers of his success, that it was late before he paid the gratuities due to them by law. That he might let slip no opportunity of reforming the discipline of the army, upon a young man’s coming much perfumed to return him thanks for having appointed him to command a squadron of horse, he turned away his head in disgust, and, giving him this sharp reprimand, “I had rather you had smelt of garlic,” revoked his commission. When the men belonging to the fleet, who travelled by turns from Ostia and Puteoli to Rome, petitioned for an addition to their pay, under the name of shoe-money, thinking that it would answer little purpose to send them away without a reply, he ordered them for the future to run barefooted; and so they have done ever since. He deprived of their liberties, Achaia, Lycia, Rhodes, Byzantium, and Samos, and reduced them into the form of provinces; Thrace, also, and Cilicia, as well as Comagene, which until that time had been under the government of kings. He stationed some legions in Cappadocia on account of the frequent inroads of the barbarians, and, instead of a Roman knight, appointed as governor of it a man of consular rank. The ruins of houses which had been burnt down long before, being a great desight to the city, he gave leave to any one who would, to take possession of the void ground and build upon it, if the proprietors should hesitate to perform the work themselves. He resolved upon rebuilding the Capitol, and was the foremost to put his hand to clearing the ground of the rubbish, and removed some of it upon his own shoulder. And he undertook, likewise, to restore the three thousand tables of brass which had been destroyed in the fire which consumed the Capitol; searching in all quarters for copies of those curious and ancient records, in which were contained the decrees of the senate, almost from the building of the city, as well as the acts of the people, relative to alliances, treaties, and privileges granted to any person.

  IX. He likewise erected several new public buildings, namely, the temple of Peace1 near the forum, that of Claudius on the Cœlian mount, which had been begun by Agrippina, but almost entirely demolished by Nero;1 and an amphitheatre2 in the middle of the city, upon finding that Augustus had projected such a work. He purified the senatorian and equestrian orders, which had been much reduced by the havoc made amongst them at several times, and was fallen into disrepute by neglect. Having expelled the most unworthy, he chose in their room the most honourable persons in Italy and the provinces. And to let it be known that those two orders differed not so much in privileges as in dignity, he declared publicly, when some altercation passed between a senator and a Roman knight, “that senators ought not to be treated with scurrilous language, unless they were the aggressors, and then it was fair and lawful to return it.”

  X. The business of the courts had prodigiously accumulated, partly from old law-suits which, on account of the interruption that had been given to the course of justice, still remained undecided, and partly from the accession of new suits arising out of the disorder of the times. He, therefore, chose commissioners by lot to provide for the restitution of what had been seized by violence during the war, and others with extraordinary jurisdiction to decide causes belonging to the centumviri, and reduce them to as small a number as possible, for the dispatch of which, otherwise, the lives of the litigants could scarcely allow sufficient time.

  XI. Lust and luxury, from the licence which had long prevailed, had also grown to an enormous height. He, therefore, obtained a decree of the senate, that a woman who formed an union with the slave of another person, should be considered a bondwoman herself; and that usurers should not be allowed to take proceedings at law for the recovery of money lent to young men whilst they lived in their father’s family, not even after their fathers were dead.

  XII. In other affairs, from the beginning to the end of his government, he conducted himself with great moderation and clemency. He was so far from dissembling the obscurity of his extraction, that he frequently made mention of it himself. When some affected to trace his pedigree to the founders of Reate, and a companion of Hercules,1 whose monument is still to be seen on the Salarian road, he laughed at them for it. And he was so little fond of external and adventitious ornaments, that, on the day of his triumph,2 being quite tired of the length and tediousness of the procession, he could not forbear saying, “he was rightly served, for having in his old age been so silly as to desire a triumph; as if it was either due to his ancestors, or had ever been expected by himself.” Nor would he for a long time accept of the tribunitian authority, or the title of Father of his Country. And in regard to the custom of searching those who came to salute him, he dropped it even in the time of the civil war.

  XIII. He bore with great mildness the freedom used by his friends, the satirical allusions of advocates, and the petulance of philosophers. Licinius Mucianus, who had been guilty of notorious acts of lewdness, but, presuming upon his great services, treated him very rudely, he reproved only in private; and when complaining of his conduct to a common friend of theirs, he concluded with these words, “However, I am a man.” Salvius Liberalis, in pleading the cause of a rich man under prosecution, presuming to say, “What is it to Cæsar, if Hipparchus possesses a hundred millions of sesterces?” he commended him for it. Demetrius, the Cynic philosopher,1 who had been sentenced to banishment, meeting him on the road, and refusing to rise up or salute him, nay, snarling at him in scurrilous language, he only called him a cur.

  XIV. He was little disposed to keep up the memory of affronts or quarrels, nor did he harbour any resentment on account of them. He made a very splendid marriage for the daughter of his enemy Vitellius, and gave her, besides, a suitable fortune and equipage. Being in a great consternation after he was forbidden the court in the time of Nero, and asking those about him, what he should do? or, whither he should go? one of those whose office it was to introduce people to the emperor, thrusting him out, bid him go to Morbonia.2 But when this same person came afterwards to beg his pardon, he only vented his resentment in nearly the same words. He was so far from being influenced by suspicion or fear to seek the destruction of any one, that, when his friends advised him to beware of Metius Pomposianus, because it was commonly believed, on his nativity being cast, that he was destined by fate to the empire, he made him consul, promising for him, that he would not forget the benefit conferred.

  XV. It will scarcely be found, that so much as one innocent person suffered in his reign, unless in his absence, and without his knowledge, or, at least, contrary to his inclination, and when he was imposed upon. Although Helvidius Priscus3 was the only man who presumed to salute him on his return from Syria by his private name of Vespasian, and, when he came to be prætor, omitted any mark of honour to him, or even any mention of him in his edicts, yet he was not angry, until Helvidius proceeded to inveigh against him with the most scurrilous language. Though he did indeed banish him, and afterwards ordered him to be put to death, yet he would gladly have saved him notwithstanding, and accordingly dispatched messengers to fetch back the executioners; and he would have saved him, had he not been deceived by a false account brought, that he had already perished. He never rejoiced at the death of any man; nay he would shed tears, and sigh, at the just punishment of the guilty.

  XVI. The only thing deservedly blameable in his character was his love of money. For not satisfied with reviving the imposts which had been repealed in the time of Galba, he imposed new and onerous taxes, augmented the tribute of the provinces, and doubled that of some of them. He likewise openly engaged in a traffic, which is discreditable1 even to a private individual, buying great quantities of goods, for the purpose of retailing them again to advantage. Nay, he made no scruple of selling the great offices of the state to candidates, and pardons to persons under prosecution, whether they were innocent or guilty. It is believed, that he advanced all the most rapacious amongst the procurators to higher offices, with the view of squeezing them after they had acquired great wealth. He was commonly said, “to have used them as sponges,” because it was his practice, as we may say, to wet them when dry, and squeeze them when wet. It is said that he was naturally extremely covetous, and was upbraided with it by an old herdsman of his, who, upon the emperor’s refusing to enfranchise him gratis, which on his advancement he humbly petitioned for, cried out, “That the fox changed his hair, but not his nature.” On the other hand, some are of opinion, that he was urged to his rapacious proceedings by necessity, and the extreme poverty of the treasury and exchequer, of which he took public notice in the beginning of his reign; declaring that “no less than four hundred thousand millions of sesterces were wanting to carry on the government.” This is the more likely to be true, because he applied to the best purposes what he procured by bad means.

  XVII. His liberality, however, to all ranks of people, was excessive. He made up to several senators the estate required by law to qualify them for that dignity; relieving likewise such men of consular rank as were poor, with a yearly allowance of five hundred thousand sesterces;1 and rebuilt, in a better manner than before, several cities in different parts of the empire, which had been damaged by earthquakes or fires.

  XVIII. He was a great encourager of learning and the liberal arts. He first granted to the Latin and Greek professors of rhetoric the yearly stipend of a hundred thousand sesterces2 each out of the exchequer. He also bought the freedom of superior poets and artists,3 and gave a noble gratuity to the restorer of the Coan of Venus,4 and to another artist who repaired the Colossus.5 Some one offering to convey some immense columns into the Capitol at a small expense by a mechanical contrivance, he rewarded him very handsomely for his invention, but would not accept his service, saying, “Suffer me to find maintenance for the poor people.”6

  XIX. In the games celebrated when the stage-scenery of the theatre of Marcellus1 was repaired, he restored the old musical entertainments. He gave Apollinaris, the tragedian, four hundred thousand sesterces, and to Terpinus and Diodorus, the harpers, two hundred thousand; to some a hundred thousand; and the least he gave to any of the performers was forty thousand, besides many golden crowns. He entertained company constantly at his table, and often in great state and very sumptuously, in order to promote trade. As in the Saturnalia he made presents to the men which they were to carry away with them, so did he to the women upon the calends of March;2 notwithstanding which, he could not wipe off the disrepute of his former stinginess. The Alexandrians called him constantly Cybiosactes; a name which had been given to one of their kings who was sordidly avaricious. Nay, at his funeral, Favo, the principal mimic, personating him, and imitating, as actors do, both his manner of speaking and his gestures, asked aloud of the procurators, “how much his funeral and the procession would cost?” And being answered “ten millions of sesterces,” he cried out, “give him but a hundred thousand sesterces, and they might throw his body into the Tiber, if they would.”

  XX. He was broad-set, strong-limbed, and his features gave the idea of a man in the act of straining himself. In consequence, one of the city wits, upon the emperor’s desiring him “to say something droll respecting himself,” facetiously answered, “I will, when you have done relieving your bowels.”3 He enjoyed a good state of health, though he used no other means to preserve it, than repeated friction, as much as he could bear, on his neck and other parts of his body, in the tennis-court attached to the baths, besides fasting one day in every month.

  XXI. His method of life was commonly this. After he became emperor, he used to rise very early, often before day-break. Having read over his letters, and the briefs of all the departments of the government offices, he admitted his friends; and while they were paying him their compliments, he would put on his own shoes, and dress himself with his own hands. Then, after the dispatch of such business as was brought before him, he rode out, and afterwards retired to repose, lying on his couch with one of his mistresses, of whom he kept several after the death of Cænis.1 Coming out of his private apartments, he passed to the bath, and then entered the supper-room. They say that he was never more good-humoured and indulgent than at that time: and therefore his attendants always seized that opportunity, when they had any favour to ask.

  XXII. At supper, and, indeed, at other times, he was extremely free and jocose. For he had humour, but of a low kind, and he would sometimes use indecent language, such as is addressed to young girls about to be married. Yet there are some things related of him not void of ingenious pleasantry; amongst which are the following. Being once reminded by Mestrius Florus, that plaustra was a more proper expression than plostra, he the next day saluted him by the name of Flaurus.2 A certain lady pretending to be desperately enamoured of him, he was prevailed upon to admit her to his bed; and after he had gratified her desires, he gave her3 four hundred thousand sesterces. When his steward desired to know how he would have the sum entered in his accounts, he replied, “For Vespasian’s being seduced.”

  XXIII. He used Greek verses very wittily; speaking of a tall man, who had enormous parts:

  • Μαϰϱ[Editor: illegible character] ϐιϐὰς ϰϱαδάων δολιχόσϰιον ἔγχος;
  • Still shaking, as he strode, his vast long spear.

  And of Cerylus, a freedman, who being very rich, had begun to pass himself off as free-born, to elude the exchequer at his decease, and assumed the name of Laches, he said:

  • —Ὧ Λάχης, Λάχης,
  • Ἐπαν ἀποθάνῃς, αὐθις ἐξ ἀϱχῆς ἔση Κήρυλος·
  • Ah, Laches, Laches! when thou art no more,
  • Thou’lt Cerylus be called, just as before.

  He chiefly affected wit upon his own shameful means of raising money, in order to wipe off the odium by some joke, and turn it into ridicule. One of his ministers, who was much in his favour, requesting of him a stewardship for some person, under pretence of his being his brother, he deferred granting him his petition, and in the meantime sent for the candidate, and having squeezed out of him as much money as he had agreed to give to his friend at court, he appointed him immediately to the office. The minister soon after renewing his application, “You must,” said he, “find another brother; for the one you adopted is in truth mine.”

  Suspecting once, during a journey, that his mule-driver had alighted to shoe his mules, only in order to have an opportunity for allowing a person they met, who was engaged in a law-suit, to speak to him, he asked him, “how much he got for shoeing his mules?” and insisted on having a share of the profit. When his son Titus blamed him for even laying a tax upon urine, he applied to his nose a piece of the money he received in the first instalment, and asked him, “if it stunk?” And he replying no, “And yet,” said he, “it is derived from urine.”

  Some deputies having come to acquaint him that a large statue, which would cost a vast sum, was ordered to be erected for him at the public expense, he told them to pay it down immediately, holding out the hollow of his hand, and saying, “there was a base ready for the statue.” Not even when he was under the immediate apprehension and peril of death, could he forbear jesting. For when, among other prodigies, the mausoleum of the Cæsars suddenly flew open, and a blazing star appeared in the heavens; one of the prodigies, he said, concerned Julia Calvina, who was of the family of Augustus;1 and the other, the king of the Parthians, who wore his hair long. And when his distemper first seized him, “I suppose,” said he, “I shall soon be a god.”2

  XXIV. In his ninth consulship, being seized, while in Campania, with a slight indisposition, and immediately returning to the city, he soon afterwards went thence to Cutiliæ,3 and his estates in the country about Reate, where he used constantly to spend the summer. Here, though his disorder much increased, and he injured his bowels by too free use of the cold waters, he nevertheless attended to the dispatch of business, and even gave audience to ambassadors in bed. At last, being taken ill of a diarrhœa, to such a degree that he was ready to faint, he cried out, “An emperor ought to die standing upright.” In endeavouring to rise, he died in the hands of those who were helping him up, upon the eighth of the calends of July4 [24th June], being sixty-nine years, one month, and seven days old.

  XXV. All are agreed that he had such confidence in the calculations on his own nativity and that of his sons, that, after several conspiracies against him, he told the senate, that either his sons would succeed him, or nobody. It is said likewise, that he once saw in a dream a balance in the middle of the porch of the Palatine house exactly poised; in one scale of which stood Claudius and Nero, in the other, himself and his sons. The event corresponded to the symbol; for the reigns of the two parties were precisely of the same duration.1

  Neither consanguinity nor adoption, as formerly, but great influence in the army having now become the road to the imperial throne, no person could claim a better title to that elevation than Titus Flavius Vespasian. He had not only served with great reputation in the wars both in Britain and Judæa, but seemed as yet untainted with any vice which could pervert his conduct in the civil administration of the empire. It appears, however, that he was prompted more by the persuasion of friends, than by his own ambition, to prosecute the attainment of the imperial dignity. To render this enterprise more successful, recourse was had to a new and peculiar artifice, which, while well accommodated to the superstitious credulity of the Romans, impressed them with an idea, that Vespasian’s destiny to the throne was confirmed by supernatural indications. But, after his elevation, we hear no more of his miraculous achievements.

  The prosecution of the war in Britain, which had been suspended for some years, was resumed by Vespasian; and he sent thither Petilius Cerealis, who by his bravery extended the limits of the Roman province. Under Julius Frontinus, successor to that general, the invaders continued to make farther progress in the reduction of the island: but the commander who finally established the dominion of the Romans in Britain, was Julius Agricola, not less distinguished for his military achievements, than for his prudent regard to the civil administration of the country. He began his operations with the conquest of North Wales, whence passing over into the island of Anglesey, which had revolted since the time of Suetonius Paulinus, he again reduced it to subjection. Then proceeding northwards with his victorious army, he defeated the Britons in every engagement, took possession of all the territories in the southern parts of the island, and driving before him all who refused to submit to the Roman arms, penetrated even into the forests and mountains of Caledonia. He defeated the natives under Galgacus, their leader, in a decisive battle; and fixing a line of garrisons between the friths of Clyde and Forth, he secured the Roman province from the incursions of the people who occupied the parts of the island beyond that boundary. Wherever he established the Roman power, he introduced laws and civilization amongst the inhabitants, and employed every means of conciliating their affection, as well as of securing their obedience.

  The war in Judæa, which had been commenced under the former reign, was continued in that of Vespasian; but he left the siege of Jerusalem to be conducted by his son Titus, who displayed great valour and military talents in the prosecution of the enterprise. After an obstinate defence by the Jews, that city, so much celebrated in the sacred writings, was finally demolished, and the glorious temple itself, the admiration of the world, reduced to ashes; contrary, however, to the will of Titus, who exerted his utmost efforts to extinguish the flames.

  The manners of the Romaus had now attained to an enormous pitch of depravity, through the unbounded licentiousness of the times; and, to the honour of Vespasian, he discovered great zeal in his endeavours to effect a national reformation. Vigilant, active, and persevering, he was indefatigable in the management of public affairs, and rose in the winter before day-break, to give audience to his officers of state. But if we give credit to the whimsical imposition of a tax upon urine, we cannot entertain any high opinion, either of his talents as a financier, or of the resources of the Roman empire. By his encouragement of science, he displayed a liberality, of which there occurs no example under all the preceding emperors, since the time of Augustus. Pliny the elder was now in the height of reputation, as well as in great favour with Vespasian; and it was probably owing not a little to the advice of that minister, that the emperor showed himself so much the patron of literary men. A writer mentioned frequently by Pliny, and who lived in this reign, was Licinius Mucianus, a Roman knight: he treated of the history and geography of the eastern countries. Juvenal, who had begun his Satires several years before, continued to inveigh against the flagrant vices of the times; but the only author whose writings we have to notice in the present reign, is a poet of a different class.

  C. Valerius Flaccus wrote a poem in eight books, on the Expedition of the Argonauts; a subject which, next to the wars of Thebes and Troy, was in ancient times the most celebrated. Of the life of this author, biographers have transmitted no particulars; but we may place his birth in the reign of Tiberius, before all the writers who flourished in the Augustan age were extinct. He enjoyed the rays of the setting sun which had illumined that glorious period, and he discovers the efforts of an ambition to recall its meridian splendour. As the poem was left incomplete by the death of the author, we can only judge imperfectly of the conduct and general consistency of the fable: but the most difficult part having been executed, without any room for the censure of candid criticism, we may presume that the sequel would have been finished with an equal claim to indulgence, if not to applause. The traditional anecdotes relative to the Argonautic expedition are introduced with propriety, and embellished with the graces of poetical fiction. In describing scenes of tenderness, this author is happily pathetic, and in the heat of combat, proportionably animated. His similes present the imagination with beautiful imagery, and not only illustrate, but give additional force to the subject. We find in Flaccus a few expressions not countenanced by the authority of the most celebrated Latin writers. His language, however, in general, is pure; but his words are perhaps not always the best that might have been chosen. The versification is elevated, though not uniformly harmonious; and there pervades the whole poem an epic dignity, which renders it superior to the production ascribed to Orpheus, or to that of Apollonius, on the same subject.

  TITUS FLAVIUS VESPASIANUS AUGUSTUS.

  I.Titus, who had the same cognomen with his father, was the darling and delight of mankind; so much did the natural genius, address, or good fortune he possessed tend to conciliate the favour of all. This was, indeed, extremely difficult, after he became emperor, as before that time, and even during the reign of his father, he lay under public odium and censure. He was born upon the third of the calends of January, [30th Dec.] in the year remarkable for the death of Caius,1 near the Septizonium,2 in a mean house, and a very small and dark room, which still exists, and is shown to the curious.

  II. He was educated in the palace with Britannicus, and instructed in the same branches of learning, and under the same masters. During this time, they say, that a physiognomist being introduced by Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius, to examine the features of Britannicus,3 positively affirmed that he would never become emperor, but that Titus, who stood by, would. They were so familiar, that Titus being next him at table, is thought to have tasted of the fatal potion which put an end to Britannicus’s life, and to have contracted from it a distemper which hung about him a long time. In remembrance of all these circumstances, he afterwards erected a golden statue of him in the Palatium, and dedicated to him an equestrian statue of ivory; attending it in the Circensian procession, in which it is still carried to this day.

  III. While yet a boy, he was remarkable for his noble endowments both of body and mind; and as he advanced in years, they became still more conspicuous. He had a fine person, combining an equal mixture of majesty and grace; was very strong, though not tall, and somewhat corpulent. Gifted with an excellent memory, and a capacity for all the arts of peace and war; he was a perfect master of the use of arms and riding; very ready in the Latin and Greek tongues, both in verse and prose; and such was the facility he possessed in both, that he would harangue and versify extempore. Nor was he unacquainted with music, but could both sing and play upon the harp sweetly and scientifically. I have likewise been informed by many persons, that he was remarkably quick in writing short-hand, would in merriment and jest engage with his secretaries in the imitation of any hand-writing he saw, and often say, “that he was admirably qualified for forgery.”

  IV. He filled with distinction the rank of a military tribune both in Germany and Britain, in which he conducted himself with the utmost activity, and no less modesty and reputation; as appears evident from the great number of statues, with honourable inscriptions, erected to him in various parts of both those provinces. After serving in the wars, he frequented the courts of law, but with less assiduity than applause. About the same time, he married Arricidia, the daughter of Tertullus, who was only a knight, but had formerly been prefect of the pretorian guards. After her decease, he married Marcia Furnilla, of a very noble family, but afterwards divorced her, taking from her the daughter he had by her. Upon the expiration of his quæstorship, he was raised to the rank of commander of a legion,1 and took the two strong cities of Tarichæa and Gamala, in Judæa; and having his horse killed under him in a battle, he mounted another, whose rider he had encountered and slain.

  V. Soon afterwards, when Galba came to be emperor, he was sent to congratulate him, and turned the eyes of all people upon himself, wherever he came; it being the general opinion amongst them, that the emperor had sent for him with a design to adopt him for his son. But finding all things again in confusion, he turned back upon the road; and going to consult the oracle of Venus at Paphos about his voyage, he received assurances of obtaining the empire for himself. These hopes were speedily strengthened, and being left to finish the reduction of Judæa, in the final assault of Jerusalem, he slew seven of its defenders, with the like number of arrows, and took it upon his daughter’s birth-day.1 So great was the joy and attachment of the soldiers, that, in their congratulations, they unanimously saluted him by the title of Emperor;2 and, upon his quitting the province soon afterwards, would needs have detained him, earnestly begging him, and that not without threats, “either to stay, or take them all with him.” This occurrence gave rise to the suspicion of his being engaged in a design to rebel against his father, and claim for himself the government of the East; and the suspicion increased, when, on his way to Alexandria, he wore a diadem at the consecration of the ox Apis at Memphis; and, though he did it only in compliance with an ancient religious usage of the country, yet there was some who put a bad construction upon it. Making, therefore, what haste he could into Italy, he arrived first at Rhegium, and sailing thence in a merchant ship to Puteoli, went to Rome with all possible expedition. Presenting himself unexpectedly to his father, he said, by way of contradicting the strange reports raised concerning him, “I am come, father, I am come.”

  VI. From that time he constantly acted as colleague with his father, and, indeed, as regent of the empire. He triumphed3 with his father, bore jointly with him the office of censor,1 and was, besides his colleague not only in the tribunitian authority,2 but in seven consulships.3 Taking upon himself the care and inspection of all offices, he dictated letters, wrote proclamations in his father’s name, and pronounced his speeches in the senate in place of the quæstor. He likewise assumed the command of the pretorian guards, although no one but a Roman knight had ever before been their prefect. In this he conducted himself with great haughtiness and violence, taking off without scruple or delay all those he had most reason to suspect, after he had secretly sent his emissaries into the theatres and camp, to demand, as if by general consent, that the suspected persons should be delivered up to punishment. Among these, he invited to supper A. Cæcina, a man of consular rank, whom he ordered to be stabbed at his departure, immediately after he had gone out of the room. To this act, indeed, he was provoked by an imminent danger; for he had discovered a writing under the hand of Cæcina, containing an account of a plot hatched among the soldiers. By these acts, though he provided for his future security, yet for the present he so much incurred the hatred of the people, that scarcely ever any one came to the empire with a more odious character, or more universally disliked.

  VII. Besides his cruelty, he lay under the suspicion of giving way to habits of luxury, as he often prolonged his revels till midnight with the most riotous of his acquaintance. Nor was he unsuspected of lewdness, on account of the swarms of catamites and eunuchs about him, and his well-known attachment to queen Berenice,1 who received from him, as it is reported, a promise of marriage. He was supposed, besides, to be of a rapacious disposition; for it is certain, that, in causes which came before his father, he used to offer his interest for sale, and take bribes. In short, people publicly expressed an unfavourable opinion of him, and said he would prove another Nero. This prejudice, however, turned out in the end to his advantage, and enhanced his praises to the highest pitch when he was found to possess no vicious propensities, but, on the contrary, the noblest virtues. His entertainments were agreeable rather than extravagant; and he surrounded himself with such excellent friends, that the succeeding princes adopted them as most serviceable to themselves and the state. He immediately sent away Berenice from the city, much against both their inclinations. Some of his old eunuchs, though such accomplished dancers, that they bore an uncontrollable sway upon the stage, he was so far from treating with any extraordinary kindness, that he would not so much as witness their performances in the crowded theatre. He violated no private right; and if ever man refrained from injustice, he did; nay, he would not accept of the allowable and customary offerings. Yet, in munificence, he was inferior to none of the princes before him. Having dedicated his amphitheatre,1 and built some warm baths2 close by it with great expedition, he entertained the people with most magnificent spectacles. He likewise exhibited a naval fight in the old Naumachia, besides a combat of gladiators; and in one day brought into the theatre five thousand wild beasts of all kinds.3

  VIII. He was by nature extremely benevolent; for whereas all the emperors after Tiberius, according to the example he had set them, would not admit the grants made by former princes to be valid, unless they received their own sanction, he confirmed them all by one general edict, without waiting for any applications respecting them. Of all who petitioned for any favour, he sent none away without hopes. And when his ministers represented to him that he promised more than he could perform, he replied, “No one ought to go away downcast from an audience with his prince.” Once at supper, reflecting that he had done nothing for any that day, he broke out into that memorable and justly-admired saying, “My friends, I have lost a day.”1 More particularly, he treated the people on all occasions with so much courtesy, that, on his presenting them with a show of gladiators, he declared, “He should manage it, not according to his own fancy, but that of the spectators,” and did accordingly. He denied them nothing, and very frankly encouraged them to ask what they pleased. Espousing the cause of the Thracian party among the gladiators, he frequently joined in the popular demonstrations in their favour, but without compromising his dignity or doing injustice. To omit no opportunity of acquiring popularity, he sometimes made use himself of the baths he had erected, without excluding the common people. There happened in his reign some dreadful accidents; an eruption of mount Vesuvius,2 in Campania, and a fire in Rome, which continued during three days and three nights;3 besides a plague, such as was scarcely ever known before. Amidst these many great disasters, he not only manifested the concern which might be expected from a prince, but even the affection of a father, for his people; one while comforting them by his proclamations, and another while relieving them to the utmost of his power. He chose by lot, from amongst the men of consular rank, commissioners for repairing the losses in Campania. The estates of those who had perished by the eruption of Vesuvius, and who had left no heirs, he applied to the repair of the ruined cities. With regard to the public buildings destroyed by fire in the City, he declared that nobody should be a loser but himself. Accordingly, he applied all the ornaments of his palaces to the decoration of the temples, and purposes of public utility, and appointed several men of the equestrian order to superintend the work. For the relief of the people during the plague, he employed, in the way of sacrifice and medicine, all means both human and divine. Amongst the calamities of the times, were informers and their agents; a tribe of miscreants who had grown up under the licence of former reigns. These he frequently ordered to be scourged or beaten with sticks in the forum, and then, after he had obliged them to pass through the amphitheatre as a public spectacle, commanded them to be sold for slaves, or else banished them to some rocky islands. And to discourage such practices for the future, amongst other things, he prohibited actions to be successively brought under different laws for the same cause, or the state of affairs of deceased persons to be inquired into after a certain number of years.

  IX. Having declared that he accepted the office of Pontifex Maximus for the purpose of preserving his hands undefiled, he faithfully adhered to his promise. For after that time he was neither directly nor indirectly concerned in the death of any person, though he sometimes was justly irritated. He swore “that he would perish himself, rather than prove the destruction of any man.” Two men of patrician rank being convicted of aspiring to the empire, he only advised them to desist, saying, “that the sovereign power was disposed of by fate,” and promised them, that if there was any thing else they desired of him, he would grant it. He also immediately sent messengers to the mother of one of them, who was at a great distance, and in deep anxiety about her son, to assure her of his safety. Nay, he not only invited them to sup with him, but next day, at a show of gladiators, purposely placed them close by him; and handed to them the arms of the combatants for his inspection. It is said likewise, that having had their nativities cast, he assured them, “that a great calamity was impending on both of them, but from another hand, and not from his.” Though his brother was continually plotting against him, almost openly stirring up the armies to rebellion, and contriving to get away, yet he could not endure to put him to death, or to banish him from his presence; nor did he treat him with less respect than before. But from his first accession to the empire, he constantly declared him his partner in it, and that he should be his successor; begging of him sometimes in private, with tears in his eyes, “to return the affection he had for him.”

  X. Amidst all these favourable circumstances, he was cut off by an untimely death, more to the loss of mankind than himself. At the close of the public spectacles, he wept bitterly in the presence of the people, and then retired into the Sabine country,1 rather melancholy, because a victim had made its escape while he was sacrificing, and loud thunder had been heard while the atmosphere was serene. At the first resting-place on the road, he was seized with a fever, and being carried forward in a litter, they say that he drew back the curtains, and looked up to heaven, complaining heavily, “that his life was taken from him, though he had done nothing to deserve it; for there was no action of his that he had occasion to repent of, but one.” What that was, he neither disclosed himself, nor is it easy for us to conjecture. Some imagine that he alluded to the connection which he had formerly had with his brother’s wife. But Domitia solemnly denied it on oath; which she would never have done, had there been any truth in the report; nay, she would certainly have gloried in it, as she was forward enough to boast of all her scandalous intrigues.

  XI. He died in the same villa where his father had died before him, upon the Ides of September [the 13th of September]; two years, two months, and twenty days after he had succeeded his father; and in the one-and-fortieth year of his age.1 As soon as the news of his death was published, all people mourned for him, as for the loss of some near relative. The senate assembled in haste, before they could be summoned by proclamation, and locking the doors of their house at first, but afterwards opening them, gave him such thanks, and heaped upon him such praises, now he was dead, as they never had done whilst he was alive and present amongst them.

  Titus Flavius Vespasian, the younger, was the first prince who succeeded to the empire by hereditary right; and having constantly acted, after his return from Judæa, as colleague with his father in the administration, he seemed to be as well qualified by experience as he was by abilities, for conducting the affairs of the empire. But with respect to his natural disposition, and moral behaviour, the expectations entertained by the public were not equally flattering. He was immoderately addicted to luxury; he had betrayed a strong inclination to cruelty; and he lived in the habitual practice of lewdness, no less unnatural than intemperate. But, with a degree of virtuous resolution unexampled in history, he had no sooner taken into his hands the entire reins of government, than he renounced every vicious attachment. Instead of wallowing in luxury, as before, he became a model of temperance; instead of cruelty, he displayed the strongest proofs of humanity and benevolence; and in the room of lewdness, he exhibited a transition to the most unblemished chastity and virtue. In a word, so sudden and great a change was never known in the character of mortal; and he had the peculiar glory to receive the appellation of “the darling and delight of mankind.”

  Under a prince of such a disposition, the government of the empire could not but be conducted with the strictest regard to the public welfare. The reform, which was begun in the late reign, he prosecuted with the most ardent application; and, had he lived for a longer time, it is probable that his authority and example would have produced the most beneficial effects upon the manners of the Romans.

  During the reign of this emperor, in the seventy-ninth year of the Christian era, happened the first eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which has ever since been celebrated for its volcano. Before this time, Vesuvius is spoken of, by ancient writers, as being covered with orchards and vineyards, and of which the middle was dry and barren. The eruption was accompanied by an earthquake, which destroyed several cities of Campania, particularly Pompeii and Herculaneum; while the lava, pouring down the mountain in torrents, overwhelmed, in various directions, the adjacent plains. The burning ashes were carried not only over the neighbouring country, but as far as the shores of Egypt, Libya, and even Syria. Amongst those to whom this dreadful eruption proved fatal, was Pliny, the celebrated naturalist, whose curiosity to examine the phenomenon led him so far within the verge of danger, that he could not afterwards escape.

  Pliny, surnamed the Elder, was born at Verona, of a noble family. He distinguished himself early by his military achievements in the German war, received the dignity of an Augur, at Rome, and was afterwards appointed governor of Spain. In every public character, he acquitted himself with great reputation, and enjoyed the esteem of the several emperors under whom he lived. The assiduity with which he applied himself to the collection of information, either curious or useful, surpasses all example. From an early hour in the morning, until late at night, he was almost constantly employed in discharging the duties of his public station, in reading or hearing books read by his amanuensis, and in extracting from them whatever seemed worthy of notice. Even during his meals, and while travelling in his carriage upon business, he prosecuted with unremitting zeal and diligence his taste for enquiry and compilation. No man ever displayed so strong a persuasion of the value of time, or availed himself so industriously of it. He considered every moment as lost which was not employed in literary pursuits. The books which he wrote, in consequence of this indefatigable exertion, were, according to the account transmitted by his nephew, Pliny the younger, numerous, and on various subjects. The catalogue of them is as follows: a book on Equestrian Archery, which discovered much skill in the art; the Life of Q. Pomponius Secundus; twenty books of the Wars of Germany; a complete treatise on the Education of an Orator, in six volumes; eight books of Doubtful Discourses, written in the latter part of the reign of Nero, when every kind of moral discussion was attended with danger; with a hundred and sixty volumes of remarks on the writings of the various authors which he had perused. For the last-mentioned production only, and before it was brought near to its accomplishment, we are told, that he was offered by Largius Licinius four hundred thousand sesterces, amounting to upwards of three thousand two hundred pounds sterling; an enormous sum for the copyright of a book before the invention of printing! But the only surviving work of this voluminous author is his Natural History, in thirty-seven books, compiled from the various writers who had treated of that extensive and interesting subject.

  If we estimate this great work either by the authenticity of the information which it contains, or its utility in promoting the advancement of arts and sciences, we should not consider it as an object of any extraordinary encomiums; but when we view it as a literary monument, which displays the whole knowledge of the ancients, relative to Natural History, collected during a period of about seven hundred years, from the time of Thales the Milesian, it has a just claim to the attention of every speculative enquirer. It is not surprising, that the progress of the human mind, which, in moral science, after the first dawn of enquiry, was rapid both amongst the Greeks and Romans, should be slow in the improvement of such branches of knowledge as depended entirely on observation and facts, which were peculiarly difficult of attainment. Natural knowledge can only be brought to perfection by the prosecution of enquiries in different climates, and by a communication of discoveries amongst those by whom it is cultivated. But neither could enquiries be prosecuted, nor discoveries communicated, with success, while the greater part of the world was involved in barbarism, while navigation was slow and limited, and the art of printing unknown. The consideration of these circumstances will afford sufficient apology for the imperfect state in which natural science existed amongst the ancients. But we proceed to give an abstract of their extent, as they appear in the compilation of Pliny.

  This work is divided into thirty-seven books; the first of which contains the Preface, addressed to the emperor Vespasian, probably the father, to whom the author pays high compliments. The second book treats of the world, the elements, and the stars. In respect to the world, or rather the universe, the author’s opinion is the same with that of several ancient philosophers, that it is a Deity, uncreated, infinite, and eternal. Their notions, however, as might be expected, on a subject so incomprehensible, are vague, confused, and imperfect. In a subsequent chapter of the same book, where the nature of the Deity is more particularly considered, the author’s conceptions of infinite power are so inadequate, that, by way of consolation for the limited powers of man, he observes that there are many things even beyond the power of the Supreme Being; such, for instance, as the annihilation of his own existence; to which the author adds, the power of rendering mortals eternal, and of raising the dead. It deserves to be remarked, that, though a future state of rewards and punishments was maintained by the most eminent among the ancient philosophers, the resurrection of the body was a doctrine with which they were wholly unacquainted.

  The author next treats of the planets, and the periods of their respective revolutions; of the stars, comets, winds, thunder, lightning, and other natural phenomena, concerning all which he delivers the hypothetical notions maintained by the ancients, and mentions a variety of extraordinary incidents which had occurred in different parts of the world. The third book contains a general system of geography, which is continued through the fourth, fifth, and sixth books. The seventh treats of conception, and the generation of the human species, with a number of miscellaneous observations, unconnected with the general subject. The eighth treats of quadrupeds; the ninth, of aquatic animals; the tenth, of birds; the eleventh, of insects and reptiles; the twelfth, of trees; the thirteenth, of ointments, and of trees which grow near the sea-coast; the fourteenth, of vines; the fifteenth, of fruit-trees; the sixteenth, of forest-trees; the seventeenth, of the cultivation of trees; the eighteenth, of agriculture; the nineteenth, of the nature of lint, hemp, and similar productions; the twentieth, of the medicinal qualities of vegetables cultivated in gardens; the twenty-first, of flowers; the twenty-second, of the properties of herbs; the twenty-third, of the medicines yielded by cultivated trees; the twenty-fourth, of medicines derived from forest-trees; the twenty-fifth, of the properties of wild herbs, and the origin of their use; the twenty-sixth, of other remedies for diseases, and of some new diseases; the twenty-seventh, of different kinds of herbs; the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth, of medicines procured from animals; the thirty-first and thirty-second, of medicines obtained from aquatic animals, with some extraordinary facts relative to the subject; the thirty-third, of the nature of metals; the thirty-fourth, of brass, iron, lead, and tin; the thirty-fifth, of pictures, and observations relative to painting; the thirty-sixth, of the nature of stones and marbles; the thirty-seventh, of the origin of gems. To the contents of each book, the author subjoins a list of the writers from whom his observations have been collected.

  Of Pliny’s talents as a writer, it might be deemed presumptuous to form a decided opinion from his Natural History, which is avowedly a compilation from various authors, and executed with greater regard to the matter of the work, than to the elegance of composition. Making allowance, however, for a degree of credulity, common to the human mind in the early stage of physical researches, he is far from being deficient in the essential qualifications of a writer of Natural History. His descriptions appear to be accurate, his observations precise, his narrative is in general perspicuous, and he often illustrates his subject by a vivacity of thought, as well as by a happy turn of expression. It has been equally his endeavour to give novelty to stale disquisitions, and authority to new observations. He has both removed the rust, and dispelled the obscurity, which enveloped the doctrines of many ancient naturalists; but, with all his care and industry, he has exploded fewer errors, and sanctioned a greater number of doubtful opinions, than was consistent with the exercise of unprejudiced and severe investigation.

  Pliny was fifty-six years of age at the time of his death; the manner of which is accurately related by his nephew, the elegant Pliny the Younger, in a letter to Tacitus, who entertained a design of writing the life of the naturalist.

  TITUS FLAVIUS DOMITIANUS.

  I.Domitian was born upon the ninth of the calends of November1 [24th October], when his father was consul elect, (being to enter upon his office the month following,) in the sixth region of the city, at the Pomegranate,2 in the house which he afterwards converted into a temple of the Flavian family. He is said to have spent the time of his youth in so much want and infamy, that he had not one piece of plate belonging to him; and it is well known, that Clodius Pollio, a man of pretorian rank, against whom there is a poem of Nero’s extant, entitled Luscio, kept a note in his hand-writing, which he sometimes produced, in which Domitian made an assignation with him for the foulest purposes. Some, likewise, have said, that he prostituted himself to Nerva, who succeeded him. In the war with Vitellius, he fled into the Capitol with his uncle Sabinus, and a part of the troops they had in the city.3 But the enemy breaking in, and the temple being set on fire, he hid himself all night with the sacristan; and next morning, assuming the disguise of a worshipper of Isis, and mixing with the priests of that idle superstition, he got over the Tiber,4 with only one attendant, to the house of a woman who was the mother of one of his school-fellows, and lurked there so close, that, though the enemy, who were at his heels, searched very strictly after him, they could not discover him. At last, after the success of his party, appearing in public, and being unanimously saluted by the title of Cæsar, he assumed the office of prætor of the City, with consular authority, but in fact had nothing but the name; for the jurisdiction he transferred to his next colleague. He used, however, his absolute power so licentiously, that even then he plainly discovered what sort of prince he was likely to prove. Not to go into details, after he had made free with the wives of many men of distinction, he took Domitia Longina from her husband, Ælias Lamia, and married her; and in one day disposed of above twenty offices in the city and the provinces; upon which Vespasian said several times, “he wondered he did not send him a successor too.”

  II. He likewise designed an expedition into Gaul and Germany,1 without the least necessity for it, and contrary to the advice of all his father’s friends; and this he did only with the view of equalling his brother in military achievements and glory. But for this he was severely reprimanded, and that he might the more effectually be reminded of his age and position, was made to live with his father, and his litter had to follow his father’s and brother’s carriage, as often as they went abroad; but he attended them in their triumph for the conquest of Judæa,2 mounted on a white horse. Of the six consulships which he held, only one was ordinary; and that he obtained by the cession and interest of his brother. He greatly affected a modest behaviour, and, above all, a taste for poetry; insomuch, that he rehearsed his performances in public, though it was an art he had formerly little cultivated, and which he afterwards despised and abandoned. Devoted, however, as he was at this time to poetical pursuits, yet when Vologesus, king of the Parthians, desired succours against the Alani, with one of Vespasian’s sons to command them, he laboured hard to procure for himself that appointment. But the scheme proving abortive, he endeavoured by presents and promises to engage other kings of the East to make a similar request. After his father’s death, he was for some time in doubt, whether he should not offer the soldiers a donative double to that of his brother, and made no scruple of saying frequently, “that he had been left his partner in the empire, but that his father’s will had been fraudulently set aside.” From that time forward, he was constantly engaged in plots against his brother, both publicly and privately; until, falling dangerously ill, he ordered all his attendants to leave him, under pretence of his being dead, before he really was so; and, at his decease, paid him no other honour than that of enrolling him amongst the gods; and he often, both in speeches and edicts, carped at his memory by sneers and insinuations.

  III. In the beginning of his reign, he used to spend daily an hour by himself in private, during which time he did nothing else but catch flies, and stick them through the body with a sharp pin. When some one therefore inquired, “whether any one was with the emperor,” it was significantly answered by Vibius Crispus, “Not so much as a fly.” Soon after his advancement, his wife Domitia, by whom he had a son in his second consulship, and whom the year following he complimented with the title of Augusta, being desperately in love with Paris, the actor, he put her away; but within a short time afterwards, being unable to bear the separation, he took her again, under pretence of complying with the people’s importunity. During some time, there was in his administration a strange mixture of virtue and vice, until at last his virtues themselves degenerated into vices; being, as we may reasonably conjecture concerning his character, inclined to avarice through want, and to cruelty through fear.

  IV. He frequently entertained the people with most magnificent and costly shows, not only in the amphitheatre, but the circus; where, besides the usual races with chariots drawn by two or four horses a-breast, he exhibited the representation of an engagement between both horse and foot, and a sea-fight in the amphitheatre. The people were also entertained with the chase of wild beasts and the combat of gladiators, even in the night-time, by torch-light. Nor did men only fight in these spectacles, but women also. He constantly attended at the games given by the quæstors, which had been disused for some time, but were revived by him; and upon those occasions, always gave the people the liberty of demanding two pair of gladiators out of his own school, who appeared last in court uniforms. Whenever he attended the shows of gladiators, there stood at his feet a little boy dressed in scarlet, with a prodigiously small head, with whom he used to talk very much, and sometimes seriously. We are assured, that he was overheard asking him, “if he knew for what reason he had in the late appointment, made Metius Rufus governor of Egypt?” He presented the people with naval fights, performed by fleets almost as numerous as those usually employed in real engagements; making a vast lake near the Tiber,1 and building seats round it. And he witnessed them himself during a very heavy rain. He likewise celebrated the Secular games,2 reckoning not from the year in which they had been exhibited by Claudius, but from the time of Augustus’s celebration of them. In these, upon the day of the Circensian sports, in order to have a hundred races performed, he reduced each course from seven rounds to five. He likewise instituted, in honour of Jupiter Capitolinus, a solemn contest in music to be performed every five years; besides horse-racing and gymnastic exercises, with more prizes than are at present allowed. There was also a public performance in elocution, both Greek and Latin; and besides the musicians who sung to the harp, there were others who played concerted pieces or solos, without vocal accompaniment. Young girls also ran races in the Stadium, at which he presided in his sandals, dressed in a purple robe, made after the Grecian fashion, and wearing upon his head a golden crown bearing the effigies of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; with the flamen of Jupiter, and the college of priests sitting by his side in the same dress; excepting only that their crowns had also his own image on them. He celebrated also upon the Alban mount every year the festival of Minerva, for whom he had appointed a college of priests, out of which were chosen by lot persons to preside as governors over the college; who were obliged to entertain the people with extraordinary chases of wild-beasts, and stage-plays, besides contests for prizes in oratory and poetry. He thrice bestowed upon the people a largess of three hundred sesterces each man; and, at a public show of gladiators, a very plentiful feast. At the festival of the Seven Hills,3 he distributed large hampers of provisions to the senatorian and equestrian orders, and small baskets to the common people, and encouraged them to eat by setting them the example. The day after, he scattered among the people a variety of cakes and other delicacies to be scrambled for; and on the greater part of them falling amidst the seats of the crowd, he ordered five hundred tickets to be thrown into each range of benches belonging to the senatorian and equestrian orders.

  V. He rebuilt many noble edifices which had been destroyed by fire, and amongst them the Capitol, which had been burnt down a second time;1 but all the inscriptions were in his own name, without the least mention of the original founders.2 He likewise erected a new temple in the Capitol to Jupiter Custos, and a forum, which is now called Nerva’s, as also the temple of the Flavian family,3 a stadium,4 an odeum,5 and a naumachia;6 out of the stone dug from which, the sides of the Circus Maximus, which had been burnt down, were rebuilt.

  VI. He undertook several expeditions, some from choice, and some from necessity. That against the Catti7 was unprovoked, but that against the Sarmatians was necessary; an entire legion, with its commander, having been cut off by them. He sent two expeditions against the Dacians; the first upon the defeat of Oppius Sabinus, a man of consular rank; and the other, upon that of Cornelius Fuscus, prefect of the pretorian cohorts, to whom he had entrusted the conduct of that war. After several battles with the Catti and Daci, he celebrated a double triumph. But for his successes against the Sarmatians, he only bore in procession the laurel crown to Jupiter Capitolinus. The civil war, begun by Lucius Antonius, governor of Upper Germany, he quelled, without being obliged to be personally present at it, with remarkable good fortune. For, at the very moment of joining battle, the Rhine suddenly thawing, the troops of the barbarians which were ready to join L. Antonius, were prevented from crossing the river. Of this victory he had notice by some presages, before the messengers who brought the news of it arrived. For upon the very day the battle was fought, a splendid eagle spread its wings round his statue at Rome, making most joyful cries And shortly after, a rumour became common, that Antonius was slain; nay, many positively affirmed, that they saw his head brought to the city.

  VII. He made many innovations in common practices. He abolished the Sportula,1 and revived the old practice of regular suppers. To the four former parties in the Circensian games, he added two new, who were gold and scarlet. He prohibited the players from acting in the theatre, but permitted them the practice of their art in private houses. He forbad the castration of males; and reduced the price of the eunuchs who were still left in the hands of the dealers in slaves. On the occasion of a great abundance of wine, accompanied by a scarcity of corn, supposing that the tillage of the ground was neglected for the sake of attending too much to the cultivation of vineyards, he published a proclamation forbidding the planting of any new vines in Italy, and ordering the vines in the provinces to be cut down, nowhere permitting more than one half of them to remain.2 But he did not persist in the execution of this project. Some of the greatest offices he conferred upon his freedmen and soldiers. He forbad two legions to be quartered in the same camp, and more than a thousand sesterces to be deposited by any soldier with the standards; because it was thought that Lucius Antonius had been encouraged in his late project by the large sum deposited in the military chest by the two legions which he had in the same winter-quarters. He made an addition to the soldiers’ pay, of three gold pieces a year.

  VIII. In the administration of justice he was diligent and assiduous; and frequently sat in the forum out of course, to cancel the judgments of the court of The One Hundred, which had been procured through favour, or interest. He occasionally cautioned the judges of the court of recovery to beware of being too ready to admit claims for freedom brought before them. He set a mark of infamy upon judges who were convicted of taking bribes, as well as upon their assessors. He likewise instigated the tribunes of the people to prosecute a corrupt ædile for extortion, and to desire the senate to appoint judges for his trial. He likewise took such effectual care in punishing magistrates of the city, and governors of provinces, guilty of malversation, that they never were at any time more moderate or more just. Most of these, since his reign, we have seen prosecuted for crimes of various kinds. Having taken upon himself the reformation of the public manners, he restrained the licence of the populace in sitting promiscuously with the knights in the theatre. Scandalous libels, published to defame persons of rank, of either sex, he suppressed, and inflicted upon their authors a mark of infamy. He expelled a man of quæstorian rank from the senate, for practising mimicry and dancing. He debarred infamous women the use of litters; as also the right of receiving legacies, or inheriting estates. He struck out of the list of judges a Roman knight for taking again his wife whom he had divorced and prosecuted for adultery. He condemned several men of the senatorian and equestrian orders, upon the Scantinian law.1 The lewdness of the Vestal Virgins, which had been overlooked by his father and brother, he punished severely, but in different ways; viz. offences committed before his reign, with death, and those since its commencement, according to ancient custom. For to the two sisters called Ocellatæ, he gave liberty to choose the mode of death which they preferred, and banished their paramours But Cornelia, the president of the Vestals, who had formerly been acquitted upon a charge of incontinence, being a long time after again prosecuted and condemned, he ordered to be buried alive; and her gallants to be whipped to death with rods in the Comitium; excepting only a man of prætorian rank, to whom, because he confessed the fact, while the case was dubious, and it was not established against him, though the witnesses had been put to the torture, he granted the favour of banishment. And to preserve pure and undefiled the reverence due to the gods, he ordered the soldiers to demolish a tomb, which one of his freedmen had erected for his son out of the stones designed for the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and to sink in the sea the bones and relics buried in it.

  IX. Upon his first succeeding to power, he felt such an abhorrence for the shedding of blood, that, before his father’s arrival in Rome, calling to mind the verse of Virgil,

  • Impia quam cæsis gens est epulata juvencis,1
  • Ere impious man, restrain’d from blood in vain,
  • Began to feast on flesh of bullocks slain,—

  he designed to have published a proclamation, “to forbid the sacrifice of oxen.” Before his accession to the imperial authority, and during some time afterwards, he scarcely ever gave the least grounds for being suspected of covetousness or avarice; but, on the contrary, he often afforded proofs, not only of his justice, but his liberality. To all about him he was generous even to profusion, and recommended nothing more earnestly to them than to avoid doing anything mean. He would not accept the property left him by those who had children. He also set aside a legacy bequeathed by the will of Ruscus Cæpio, who had ordered “his heir to make a present yearly to each of the senators upon their first assembling.” He exonerated all those who had been under prosecution from the treasury for above five years before; and would not suffer suits to be renewed, unless it was done within a year, and on condition, that the prosecutor should be banished, if he could not make good his cause. The secretaries of the quæstors having engaged in trade, according to custom, but contrary to the Clodian law,1 he pardoned them for what was past. Such portions of land as had been left when it was divided amongst the veteran soldiers, he granted to the ancient possessors, as belonging to them by prescription. He put a stop to false prosecutions in the exchequer, by severely punishing the prosecutors; and this saying of his was much taken notice of: “that a prince who does not punish informers, encourages them.”

  X. But he did not long persevere in this course of clemency and justice, although he sooner fell into cruelty than into avarice. He put to death a scholar of Paris, the pantomimic,2 though a minor, and then sick, only because, both in person and the practice of his art, he resembled his master; as he did likewise Hermogenes of Tarsus for some oblique reflections in his History; crucifying, besides, the scribes who had copied the work. One who was master of a band of gladiators, happening to say, “that a Thrax was a match for a Marmillo,3 but not so for the exhibitor of the games,” he ordered him to be dragged from the benches into the arena, and exposed to the dogs, with this label upon him, “A Parmularian4 guilty of talking impiously.” He put to death many senators, and amongst them several men of consular rank. In this number were, Civica Cerealis, when he was proconsul in Africa, Salvidienus Orfitus, and Acilius Glabrio in exile, under the pretence of their planning to revolt against him. The rest he punished upon very trivial occasions; as Ælius Lamia for some jocular expressions, which were of old date, and perfectly harmless; because, upon his commending his voice after he had taken his wife from him,5 he replied, “Alas! I hold my tongue.” And when Titus advised him to take another wife, he answered him thus: “What! have you a mind to marry?” Salvius Cocceianus was condemned to death for keeping the birth day of his uncle Otho, the emperor: Metius Pomposianus, because he was commonly reported to have an imperial nativity,6 and to carry about with him a map of the world upon vellum, with the speeches of kings and generals extracted out of Titus Livius; and for giving his slaves the names of Mago and Annibal; Sallustius Lucullus, lieutenant in Britain, for suffering some lances of a new invention to be called “Lucullean;” and Junius Rusticus, for publishing a treatise in praise of Pætus Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus, and calling them both “most upright men.” Upon this occasion, he likewise banished all the philosophers from the city and Italy. He put to death the younger Helvidius, for writing a farce, in which, under the character of Paris and Œnone, he reflected upon his having divorced his wife; and also Flavius Sabinus, one of his cousins, because, upon his being chosen at the consular election to that office, the public crier had, by a blunder, proclaimed him to the people not consul, but emperor. Becoming still more savage after his success in the civil war, he employed the utmost industry to discover those of the adverse party who absconded: many of them he racked with a new-invented torture, inserting fire through their private parts; and from some he cut off their hands. It is certain, that only two of any note were pardoned, a tribune who wore the narrow stripe, and a centurion; who, to clear themselves from the charge of being concerned in any rebellious project, proved themselves to have been guilty of prostitution, and consequently incapable of exercising any influence either over the general or the soldiers.

  XI. His cruelties were not only excessive, but subtle and unexpected. The day before he crucified a collector of his rents, he sent for him into his bed-chamber, made him sit down upon the bed by him, and sent him away well pleased, and, so far as could be inferred from his treatment, in a state of perfect security; having vouchsafed him the favour of a plate of meat from his own table. When he was on the point of condemning to death Aretinus Clemens, a man of consular rank, and one of his friends and emissaries, he retained him about his person in the same or greater favour than ever; until at last, as they were riding together in the same litter, upon seeing the man who had informed against him, he said, “Are you willingg that we should hear this base slave tomorrow?” Contemptuously abusing the patience of men, he never pronounced a severe sentence without prefacing it with words which gave hopes of mercy; so that, at last, there was not a more certain token of a fatal conclusion, than a mild commencement. He brought before the senate some persons accused of treason, declaring, “that he should prove that day how dear he was to the senate;” and so influenced them, that they condemned the accused to be punished according to the ancient usage.1 Then, as if alarmed at the extreme severity of their punishment, to lessen the odiousness of the proceeding, he interposed in these words; for it is not foreign to the purpose to give them precisely as they were delivered: “Permit me, Conscript Fathers, so far to prevail upon your affection for me, however extraordinary the request may seem, as to grant the condemned criminals the favour of dying in the manner they choose. For by so doing, ye will spare your own eyes, and the world will understand that I interceded with the senate on their behalf.”

  XII. Having exhausted the exchequer by the expense of his buildings and public spectacles, with the augmentation of pay lately granted to the troops, he made an attempt at the reduction of the army, in order to lessen the military charges. But reflecting, that he should, by this measure, expose himself to the insults of the barbarians, while it would not suffice to extricate him from his embarrassments, he had recourse to plundering his subjects by every mode of exaction. The estates of the living and the dead were sequestered upon any accusation, by whomsoever preferred. The unsupported allegation of any one person, relative to a word or action construed to affect the dignity of the emperor, was sufficient. Inheritances, to which he had not the slightest pretension, were confiscated, if there was found so much as one person to say, he had heard from the deceased when living, “that he had made the emperor his heir.” Besides the exactions from others, the poll-tax on the Jews was levied with extreme rigour, both on those who lived after the manner of Jews in the city, without publicly professing themselves to be such,2 and on those who, by concealing their origin, avoided paying the tribute imposed upon that people. I remember, when I was a youth, to have been present,1 when an old man, ninety years of age, had his person exposed to view in a very crowded court, in order that, on inspection, the procurator might satisfy himself whether he was circumcised.2

  From his earliest years Domitian was any thing but courteous, of a forward, assuming disposition, and extravagant both in his words and actions. When Cænis, his father’s concubine, upon her return from Istria, offered him a kiss, as she had been used to do, he presented her his hand to kiss. Being indignant, that his brother’s son-in-law should be waited on by servants dressed in white,3 he exclaimed,

  • οὐϰ ἀγαθὸν πολυϰοιρανίη.4
  • Too many princes are not good.

  XIII After he became emperor, he had the assurance to boast in the senate, “that he had bestowed the empire on his rather and brother, and they had restored it to him.” And upon taking his wife again, after the divorce, he declared by proclamation, “that he had recalled her to his pulvinar.”5 He was not a little pleased too, at hearing the acclamations of the people in the amphitheatre on a day of festival, “All happiness to our lord and lady.” But when, during the celebration of the Capitoline trial of skill, the whole concourse of people entreated him with one voice to restore Palfurius Sura to his place in the senate, from which he had been long before expelled—he having then carried away the prize of eloquence from all the orators who had contended for it,—he did not vouchsafe to give them any answer, but only commanded silence to be proclaimed by the voice of the crier. With equal arrogance, when he dictated the form of a letter to be used by his procurators, he began it thus: “Our lord and god commands so and so;” whence it became a rule that no one should style him otherwise either in writing or speaking. He suffered no statues to be erected for him in the Capitol, unless they were of gold and silver, and of a certain weight. He erected so many magnificent gates and arches, surmounted by representations of chariots drawn by four horses, and other triumphal ornaments, in different quarters of the city, that a wag inscribed on one of the arches the Greek word Ἀξϰει, “It is enough.”1 He filled the office of consul seventeen times, which no one had ever done before him, and for the seven middle occasions in successive years; but in scarcely any of them had he more than the title; for he never continued in office beyond the calends of May [the 1st May], and for the most part only till the ides of January [13th January]. After his two triumphs, when he assumed the cognomen of Germanicus, he called the months of September and October, Germanicus and Domitian, after his own names, because he commenced his reign in the one, and was born in the other.

  XIV. Becoming by these means universally feared and odious, he was at last taken off by a conspiracy of his friends and favourite freedmen, in concert with his wife.2 He had long entertained a suspicion of the year and day when he should die, and even of the very hour and manner of his death; all which he had learned from the Chaldæans, when he was a very young man. His father once at supper laughed at him for refusing to eat some mushrooms, saying, that if he knew his fate, he would rather be afraid of the sword. Being, therefore, in perpetual apprehension and anxiety, he was keenly alive to the slightest suspicions, insomuch that he is thought to have withdrawn the edict ordering the destruction of the vines, chiefly because the copies of it which were dispersed had the following lines written upon them:

  • Κᾔν με φάγῃς ἐπὶ ῤίζαν ὅμως ἔτι ϰαρτοφορήσω,
  • Ὅσσον ἐπισπεῖσαι Καίσαϱι ϑυόμενῳ.3
  • Gnaw thou my root, yet shall my juice suffice
  • To pour on Cæsar’s head in sacrifice.

  It was from the same principle of fear, that he refused a new honour, devised and offered him by the senate, though he was greedy of all such compliments. It was this: “that as often as he held the consulship, Roman knights, chosen by lot, should walk before him, clad in the Trabea, with lances in their hands, amongst his lictors and apparitors.” As the time of the danger which he apprehended drew near, he became daily more and more disturbed in mind; insomuch that he lined the walls of the porticos in which he used to walk, with the stone called Phengites,1 by the reflection of which he could see every object behind him. He seldom gave an audience to persons in custody, unless in private, being alone, and he himself holding their chains in his hand. To convince his domestics that the life of a master was not to be attempted upon any pretext, however plausible, he condemned to death Epaphroditus his secretary, because it was believed that he had assisted Nero, in his extremity, to kill himself.

  XV. His last victim was Flavius Clemens,2 his cousin-german, a man below contempt for his want of energy, whose sons, then of very tender age, he had avowedly destined for his successors, and, discarding their former names, had ordered one to be called Vespasian, and the other Domitian. Nevertheless, he suddenly put him to death upon some very slight suspicion,3 almost before he was well out of his consulship. By this violent act he very much hastened his own destruction. During eight months together there was so much lightning at Rome, and such accounts of the phænomenon were brought from other parts, that at last he cried out, “Let him now strike whom he will.” The Capitol was struck by lightning, as well as the temple of the Flavian family, with the Palatine-house, and his own bed-chamber. The tablet also, inscribed upon the base of his triumphal statue was carried away by the violence of the storm, and fell upon a neighbouring monument. The tree which just before the advancement of Vespasian had been prostrated, and rose again,1 suddenly fell to the ground. The goddess Fortune of Præneste, to whom it was his custom on new year’s day to commend the empire for the ensuing year, and who had always given him a favourable reply, at last returned him a melancholy answer, not without mention of blood. He dreamt that Minerva, whom he worshipped even to a superstitious excess, was withdrawing from her sanctuary, declaring she could protect him no longer, because she was disarmed by Jupiter. Nothing, however, so much affected him as an answer given by Ascletario, the astrologer, and his subsequent fate. This person had been informed against, and did not deny his having predicted some future events, of which, from the principles of his art, he confessed he had a foreknowledge. Domitian asked him, what end he thought he should come to himself? To which replying, “I shall in a short time be torn to pieces by dogs,” he ordered him immediately to be slain, and, in order to demonstrate the vanity of his art, to be carefully buried. But during the preparations for executing this order, it happened that the funeral pile was blown down by a sudden storm, and the body, half-burnt, was torn to pieces by dogs; which being observed by Latinus, the comic actor, as he chanced to pass that way, he told it, amongst the other news of the day, to the emperor at supper.

  XVI. The day before his death, he ordered some dates,2 served up at table, to be kept till the next day, adding, “If I have the luck to use them.” And turning to those who were nearest him, he said, “To-morrow the moon in Aquarius will be bloody instead of watery, and an event will happen, which will be much talked of all the world over.” About midnight, he was so terrified that he leaped out of bed. That morning he tried and passed sentence on a soothsayer sent from Germany, who being consulted about the lightning that had lately happened, predicted from it a change of government. The blood running down his face as he scratched an ulcerous tumour on his forehead, he said, “Would this were all that is to befall me!” Then, upon his asking the time of the day, instead of five o’clock, which was the hour he dreaded, they purposely told him it was six. Overjoyed at this information, as if all danger were now passed, and hastening to the bath, Parthenius, his chamberlain, stopped him, by saying that there was a person come to wait upon him about a matter of great importance, which would admit of no delay. Upon this, ordering all persons to withdraw, he retired into his chamber, and was there slain.

  XVII. Concerning the contrivance and mode of his death, the common account is this. The conspirators being in some doubt when and where they should attack him, whether while he was in the bath, or at supper, Stephanus, a steward of Domitilla’s,1 then under prosecution for defrauding his mistress, offered them his advice and assistance; and wrapping up his left arm, as if it was hurt, in wool and bandages for some days, to prevent suspicion, at the hour appointed, he secreted a dagger in them. Pretending then to make a discovery of a conspiracy, and being for that reason admitted, he presented to the emperor a memorial, and while he was reading it in great astonishment, stabbed him in the groin. But Domitian, though wounded, making resistance, Clodianus, one of his guards, Maximus, a freedman of Parthenius’s, Saturius, his principal chamberlain, with some gladiators, fell upon him, and stabbed him in seven places. A boy who had the charge of the Lares in his bed-chamber, and was then in attendance as usual, gave these further particulars: that he was ordered by Domitian, upon receiving his first wound, to reach him a dagger which lay under his pillow, and call in his domestics; but that he found nothing at the head of the bed, excepting the hilt of a poniard, and that all the doors were fastened: that the emperor in the mean time got hold of Stephanus, and throwing him upon the ground, struggled a long time with him; one while endeavouring to wrench the dagger from him, another while, though his fingers were miserably mangled, to tear out his eyes. He was slain upon the fourteenth of the calends of October [18th Sept.], in the forty-fifth year of his age, and the fifteenth of his reign.1 His corpse was carried out upon a common bier by the public bearers, and buried by his nurse Phyllis, at his suburban villa on the Latin Way. But she afterwards privately conveyed his remains to the temple of the Flavian family,2 and mingled them with the ashes of Julia, the daughter of Titus, whom she had also nursed.

  XVIII. He was tall in stature, his face modest, and very ruddy; he had large eyes, but was dim-sighted; naturally graceful in his person, particularly in his youth, excepting only that his toes were bent somewhat inward, he was at last disfigured by baldness, corpulence, and the slenderness of his legs, which were reduced by a long illness. He was so sensible how much the modesty of his countenance recommended him, that he once made this boast to the senate, “Thus far you have approved both of my disposition and my countenance.” His baldness so much annoyed him, that he considered it an affront to himself, if any other person was reproached with it, either in jest or in earnest; though in a small tract he published, addressed to a friend, “concerning the preservation of the hair,” he uses for their mutual consolation the words following:

  • Ὀυχ ὁράας οἷος κάγὼ καλός τε μέγας τε;
  • Seest thou my graceful mien, my stately form?

  “and yet the fate of my hair awaits me; however, I bear with fortitude this loss of my hair while I am still young. Remember that nothing is more fascinating than beauty, but nothing of shorter duration.”

  XIX. He so shrunk from undergoing fatigue, that he scarcely ever walked through the city on foot. In his expeditions and on a march, he seldom rode on horse-back, but was generally carried in a litter. He had no inclination for the exercise of arms, but was very expert in the use of the bow. Many persons have seen him often kill a hundred wild animals, of various kinds, at his Alban retreat, and fix his arrows in their heads with such dexterity, that he could, in two shots, plant them, like a pair of horns, in each. He would sometimes direct his arrows against the hand of a boy standing at a distance, and expanded as a mark, with such precision, that they all passed between the boy’s fingers, without hurting him.

  XX. In the beginning of his reign, he gave up the study of the liberal sciences, though he took care to restore, at a vast expense, the libraries which had been burnt down; collecting manuscripts from all parts, and sending scribes to Alexandria,1 either to copy or correct them. Yet he never gave himself the trouble of reading history or poetry, or of employing his pen even for his private purposes. He perused nothing but the Commentaries and Acts of Tiberius Cæsar. His letters, speeches, and edicts, were all drawn up for him by others; though he could converse with elegance, and sometimes expressed himself in memorable sentiments. “I could wish,” said he once, “that I was but as handsome as Metius fancies himself to be.” And of the head of some one whose hair was partly reddish, and partly grey, he said, “that it was snow sprinkled with mead.”

  XXI. “The lot of princes,” he remarked, “was very miserable, for no one believed them when they discovered a conspiracy, until they were murdered.” When he had leisure, he amused himself with dice, even on days that were not festivals, and in the morning. He went to the bath early, and made a plentiful dinner, insomuch that he seldom ate more at supper than a Matian apple,2 to which he added a draught of wine, out of a small flask. He gave frequent and splendid entertainments, but they were soon over, for he never prolonged them after sun-set, and indulged in no revel after. For, till bed-time, he did nothing else but walk by himself in private.

  XXII. He was insatiable in his lusts, calling frequent commerce with women, as if it was a sort of exercise, ϰλινοπάλην, bed-wrestling; and it was reported that he plucked the hair from his concubines, and swam about in company with the lowest prostitutes. His brother’s daughter1 was offered him in marriage when she was a virgin; but being at that time enamoured of Domitia, he obstinately refused her. Yet not long afterwards, when she was given to another, he was ready enough to debauch her, and that even while Titus was living. But after she had lost both her father and her husband, he loved her most passionately, and without disguise; insomuch that he was the occasion of her death, by obliging her to procure a miscarriage when she was with child by him.

  XXIII. The people shewed little concern at his death, but the soldiers were roused by it to great indignation, and immediately endeavoured to have him ranked among the gods. They were also ready to revenge his loss, if there had been any to take the lead. However, they soon after effected it, by resolutely demanding the punishment of all those who had been concerned in his assassination. On the other hand, the senate was so overjoyed, that they met in all haste, and in a full assembly reviled his memory in the most bitter terms; ordering ladders to be brought in, and his shields and images to be pulled down before their eyes, and dashed in pieces upon the floor of the senate-house; passing at the same time a decree to obliterate his titles every where, and abolish all memory of him. A few months before he was slain, a raven on the Capitol uttered these words: “All will be well.” Some person gave the following interpretation of this prodigy:

  • Nuper Tarpeio quæ sedit culmine cornix,
  • “Est bene,” non potuit dicere; dixit, “Erit.”
  • Late croaked a raven from Tarpeia’s height,
  • “All is not yet, but shortly will be, right.”

  They say likewise that Domitian dreamed that a golden hump grew out of the back of his neck, which he considered as a certain sign of happy days for the empire after him. Such an auspicious change indeed shortly afterwards took place, through the justice and moderation of the succeeding emperors.

  If we view Domitian in the different lights in which he is represented, during his lifetime and after his decease, his character and conduct discover a greater diversity than is commonly observed in the objects of historical detail. But as posthumous character is always the most just, its decisive verdict affords the surest criterion by which this variegated emperor must be estimated by impartial posterity. According to this rule, it is beyond a doubt that his vices were more predominant than his virtues: and when we follow him into his closet, for some time after his accession, when he was thirty years of age, the frivolity of his daily employment, in the killing of flies, exhibits an instance of dissipation, which surpasses all that has been recorded of his imperial predecessors. The encouragement, however, which the first Vespasian had shown to literature, continued to operate during the present reign; and we behold the first fruits of its auspicious influence in the valuable treatise of Quintilian.

  Of the life of this celebrated writer, little is known upon any authority that has a title to much credit. We learn, however, that he was the son of a lawyer in the service of some of the preceding emperors, and was born at Rome, though in what consulship, or under what emperor, it is impossible to determine. He married a woman of a noble family, by whom he had two sons. The mother died in the flower of her age, and the sons, at the distance of some time from each other, when their father was advanced in years. The precise time of Quintilian’s own death is equally inauthenticated with that of his birth; nor can we rely upon an author of suspicious veracity, who says that he passed the latter part of his life in a state of indigence, which was alleviated by the liberality of his pupil, Pliny the Younger. Quintilian opened a school of rhetoric at Rome, where he not only discharged that laborious employment with great applause, during more than twenty years, but pleaded at the bar, and was the first who obtained a salary from the state, for executing the office of a public teacher. He was also appointed by Domitian preceptor to the two young princes who were intended to succeed him on the throne.

  After his retirement from the situation of a teacher, Quintilian devoted his attention to the study of literature, and composed a treatise on the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence. At the earnest solicitation of his friends, he was afterwards induced to undertake his Institutiones Oratoriæ, the most elaborate system of oratory extant in any language. This work is divided into twelve books, in which the author treats with great precision of the qualities of a perfect orator; explaining not only the fundamental principles of eloquence, as connected with the constitution of the human mind, but pointing out, both by argument and observation, the most successful method of exercising that admirable art, for the accomplishment of its purpose. So minutely, and upon so extensive a plan, has he prosecuted the subject, that he delineates the education suitable to a perfect orator, from the stage of infancy in the cradle, to the consummation of rhetorical fame, in the pursuits of the bar, or those, in general, of any public assembly. It is sufficient to say, that in the execution of this elaborate work, Quintilian has called to the assistance of his own acute and comprehensive understanding, the profound penetration of Aristotle, the exquisite graces of Cicero; all the stores of observation, experience, and practice; and in a word, the whole accumulated exertions of ancient genius on the subject of oratory.

  It may justly be regarded as an extraordinary circumstance in the progress of scientific improvement, that the endowments of a perfect orator were never fully exhibited to the world, until it had become dangerous to exercise them for the important purposes for which they were originally cultivated. And it is no less remarkable, that, under all the violence and caprice of imperial despotism which the Romans had now experienced, their sensibility to the enjoyment of poetical compositions remained still unabated; as if it served to console the nation for the irretrievable loss of public liberty. From this source of entertainment, they reaped more pleasure during the present reign, than they had done since the time of Augustus. The poets of this period were Juvenal, Statius, and Martial.

  Juvenal was born at Aquinum, but in what year is uncertain; though, from some circumstances, it seems to have been in the reign of Augustus. Some say that he was the son of a freedman, while others, without specifying the condition of his father, relate only that he was brought up by a freedman. He came at an early age to Rome, where he declaimed for many years, and pleaded causes in the forum with great applause; but at last he betook himself to the writing of satires, in which he acquired great fame. One of the first, and the most constant object of his satire, was the pantomime Paris, the great favourite of the emperor Nero, and afterwards of Domitian. During the reign of the former of these emperors, no resentment was shown towards the poet; but he experienced not the same impunity after the accession of the latter; when, to remove him from the capital, he was sent as governor to the frontiers of Egypt, but in reality, into an honourable exile. According to some authors, he died of chagrin in that province: but this is not authenticated, and seems to be a mistake: for in some of Martial’s epigrams, which appear to have been written after the death of Domitian, Juvenal is spoken of as residing at Rome. It is said that he lived to upwards of eighty years of age.

  The remaining compositions of this author are sixteen satires, all written against the dissipation and enormous vices which prevailed at Rome in his time. The various objects of animadversion are painted in the strongest colours, and placed in the most conspicuous points of view. Giving loose reins to just and moral indignation, Juvenal is every where animated, vehement, petulant, and incessantly acrimonious. Disdaining the more lenient modes of correction, or despairing of their success, he neither adopts the raillery of Horace, nor the derision of Persius, but prosecutes vice and folly with all the severity of sentiment, passion, and expression. He sometimes exhibits a mixture of humour with his invectives; but it is a humour which partakes more of virulent rage than of pleasantry; broad, hostile, but coarse, and rivalling in indelicacy the profligate manners which it assails. The satires of Juvenal abound in philosophical apophthegms; and, where they are not sullied by obscene description, are supported with a uniform air of virtuous elevation. Amidst all the intemperance of sarcasm, his numbers are harmonious. Had his zeal permitted him to direct the current of his impetuous genius into the channel of ridicule, and endeavour to put to shame the vices and follies of those licentious times, as much as he perhaps exasperated conviction rather than excited contrition, he would have carried satire to the highest possible pitch, both of literary excellence and moral utility. With every abatement of attainable perfection, we hesitate not to place him at the head of this arduous department of poetry.

  Of Statius no farther particulars are preserved than that he was born at Naples; that his father’s name was Statius of Epirus, and his mother’s Agelina, and that he died about the end of the first century of the Christian era. Some have conjectured that he maintained himself by writing for the stage, but of this there is no sufficient evidence; and if ever he composed dramatic productions, they have perished. The works of Statius now extant, are two poems, viz. the Thebaïs and the Achilleïs, besides a collection, named Silvæ.

  The Thebaïs consists of twelve books, and the subject of it is the Theban war, which happened 1236 years before the Christian era, in consequence of a dispute between Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of Œdipus and Jocasta. These brothers had entered into an agreement with each other to reign alternately for a year at a time; and Eteocles being the elder, got first possession of the throne. This prince refusing to abdicate at the expiration of the year, Polynices fled to Argos, where marrying Argia, the daughter of Adrastus, king of that country, he procured the assistance of his father-in-law, to enforce the engagement stipulated with his brother Eteocles. The Argives marched under the command of seven able generals, who were to attack separately the seven gates of Thebes. After much blood had been spilt without any effect, it was at last agreed between the two parties, that the brothers should determine the dispute by single combat. In the desperate engagement which ensued, they both fell; and being burnt together upon the funeral pile, it is said that their ashes separated, as if actuated by the implacable resentment which they had borne to each other.

  If we except the Æneid, this is the only Latin production extant which is epic in its form; and it likewise approaches nearest in merit to that celebrated poem, which Statius appears to have been ambitious of emulating. In unity and greatness of action, the Thebaïs corresponds to the laws of the Epopea; but the fable may be regarded as defective in some particulars, which, however, arise more from the nature of the subject, than from any fault of the poet. The distinction of the hero is not sufficiently prominent; and the poem possesses not those circumstances which are requisite towards interesting the reader’s affections in the issue of the contest. To this it may be added, that the unnatural complexion of the incestuous progeny diffuses a kind of gloom which obscures the splendour of thought, and restrains the sympathetic indulgence of fancy to some of the boldest excursions of the poet. For grandeur, however, and animation of sentiment and description, as well as for harmony of numbers, the Thebaïs is eminently conspicuous, and deserves to be held in a much higher degree of estimation than it has generally obtained. In the contrivance of some of the episodes, and frequently in the modes of expression, Statius keeps an attentive eye to the style of Virgil. It is said that he was twelve years employed in the composition of this poem; and we have his own authority for affirming, that he polished it with all the care and assiduity practised by the poets in the Augustan age:

  • Quippe, te fido monitore, nostra
  • Thebaïs, multâ cruciata limâ,
  • Tentat audaci fide Mantuanæ
  • Gaudia famæ.

  • —Silvar. lib. iv. 7.

  • For, taught by you, with stedfast care
  • I trim my “Song of Thebes,” and dare
  • With generous rivalry to share
  • The glories of the Mantuan bard.

  The Achillëis relates to the same hero who is celebrated by Homer in the Iliad; but it is the previous history of Achilles, not his conduct in the Trojan war, which forms the subject of the poem of Statius. While the young hero is under the care of the Centaur Chiron, Thetis makes a visit to the preceptor’s sequestered habitation, where, to save her son from the fate which, it was predicted, would befall him at Troy, if he should go to the siege of that place, she orders him to be dressed in the disguise of a girl, and sent to live in the family of Lycomedes, king of Scyros. But as Troy could not be taken without the aid of Achilles, Ulysses, accompanied by Diomed, is deputed by the Greeks to go to Scyros, and bring him thence to the Grecian camp. The artifice by which the sagacious ambassador detected Achilles amongst his female companions, was by placing before them various articles of merchandise, amongst which was some armour. Achilles no sooner perceived the latter, than he eagerly seized a sword and shield, and manifesting the strongest emotions of heroic enthusiasm, discovered his sex. After an affectionate parting with Lycomedes’ daughter, Deïdamia, whom he left pregnant of a son, he set sail with the Grecian chiefs, and, during the voyage, gives them an account of the manner of his education with Chiron.

  This poem consists of two books, in heroic measure, and is written with taste and fancy. Commentators are of opinion, that the Achilleïs was left incomplete by the death of the author; but this is extremely improbable, from various circumstances, and appears to be founded only upon the word Hactenus, in the conclusion of the poem:

  • • Hactenus annorum, comites, elementa meorum
    • Et memini, et meminisse juvat: scit cætera mater.
  • • Thus far, companions dear, with mindful joy I’ve told
    • My youthful deeds; the rest my mother can unfold.

  That any consequential reference was intended by hactenus, seems to me plainly contradicted by the words which immediately follow, scit cætera mater. Statius could not propose the giving any further account of Achilles’s life, because a general narrative of it had been given in the first book. The voyage from Scyros to the Trojan coast, conducted with the celerity which suited the purpose of the poet, admitted of no incidents which required description or recital: and after the voyagers had reached the Grecian camp, it is reasonable to suppose, that the action of the Iliad immediately commenced. But that Statius had no design of extending the plan of the Achilleïs beyond this period, is expressly declared in the exordium of the poem:

  • Magnanimum Æaciden, formidatamque Tonanti
  • Progeniem, et patrio vetitam succedere cœlo,
  • Diva, refer; quanquam acta viri multum inclyta cantu
  • Mæonio; sed plura vacant. Nos ire per omnem
  • (Sic amor est) heroa velis, Scyroque latentem
  • Dulichiâ proferre tubâ: nec in Hectore tracto
  • Sistere, sed totâ juvenem deducere Trojâ.
  • Aid me, O goddess! while I sing of him,
  • Who shook the Thunderer’s throne, and, for his crime,
  • Was doomed to lose his birthright in the skies;
  • The great Æacides. Mæonian strains
  • Have made his mighty deeds their glorious theme;
  • Still much remains: be mine the pleasing task
  • To trace the future hero’s young career,
  • Not dragging Hector at his chariot wheels,
  • But while disguised in Scyros yet he lurked,
  • Till trumpet-stirred, he sprung to manly arms,
  • And sage Ulysses led him to the Trojan coast.

  The Silvæ is a collection of poems almost entirely in heroic verse, divided into five books, and for the most part written extempore. Statius himself affirms, in his Dedication to Stella, that the production of none of them employed him more than two days; yet many of them consist of between one hundred and two hundred hexameter lines. We meet with one of two hundred and sixteen lines; one, of two hundred and thirty-four; one, of two hundred and sixty-two; and one of two hundred and seventy-seven; a rapidity of composition approaching to what Horace mentions of the poet Lucilius. It is no small encomium to observe, that, considered as extemporaneous productions, the meanest in the collection is far from meriting censure, either in point of sentiment or expression; and many of them contain passages which command our applause.

  The poet Martial, surnamed likewise Coquus, was born at Bilbilis, in Spain, of obscure parents. At the age of twenty-one, he came to Rome, where he lived during five-and-thirty years under the emperors Galba, Otho, Vitellius, the two Vespasians, Domitian, Nerva, and the beginning of the reign of Trajan. He was the panegyrist of several of those emperors, by whom he was liberally rewarded, raised to the Equestrian order, and promoted by Domitian to the tribuneship; but being treated with coldness and neglect by Trajan, he returned to his native country, and, a few years after, ended his days, at the age of seventy-five He had lived at Rome in great splendour and affluence, as well as in high esteem for his poetical talents; but upon his return to Bilbilis, it is said that he experienced a great reverse of fortune, and was chiefly indebted for his support to the gratuitous benefactions of Pliny the Younger, whom he had extolled in some epigrams.

  The poems of Martial consist of fourteen books, all written in the epigrammatic form, to which species of composition, introduced by the Greeks, he had a peculiar propensity. Amidst such a multitude of verses, on a variety of subjects, often composed extempore, and many of them, probably, in the moments of fashionable dissipation, it is not surprising that we find a large number unworthy the genius of the author. Delicacy, and even decency, is often violated in the productions of Martial. Grasping at every thought which afforded even the shadow of ingenuity, he gave unlimited scope to the exercise of an active and fruitful imagination. In respect to composition, he is likewise liable to censure. At one time he wearies, and at another tantalises the reader, with the prolixity or ambiguity of his preambles. His prelusive sentiments are sometimes far-fetched, and converge not with a natural declination into the focus of epigram. In dispensing praise and censure, he often seems to be governed more by prejudice or policy, than by justice and truth; and he is more constantly attentive to the production of wit, than to the improvement of morality.

  But while we remark the blemishes and imperfections of this poet, we must acknowledge his extraordinary merits. In composition he is, in general, elegant and correct; and where the subject is capable of connection with sentiment, his inventive ingenuity never fails to extract from it the essence of delight and surprise. His fancy is prolific of beautiful images, and his judgment expert in arranging them to the greatest advantage. He bestows panegyric with inimitable grace, and satirises with equal dexterity. In a fund of Attic salt, he surpasses every other writer; and though he seems to have at command all the varied stores of gall, he is not destitute of candour. With almost every kind of versification he appears to be familiar; and notwithstanding a facility of temper, too accommodating, perhaps, on many occasions, to the licentiousness of the times, we may venture from strong indications to pronounce, that, as a moralist, his principles were virtuous. It is observed of this author, by Pliny the Younger, that, though his compositions might, perhaps, not obtain immortality, he wrote as if they would. [Æterna, quæ scripsit, non erunt fortasse: ille tamen scripsit tanquam futura.] The character which Martial gives of his epigrams, is just and comprehensive:

  • Sunt bona, sunt quædam mediocria, sunt mala plura,
  • Quæ legis: hic aliter non fit, Avite, liber.
  • Some are good, some indifferent, and some again still worse;
  • Such, Avitus, you will find is a common case with verse.

  the end of the twelve cæsars.

  LIVES OF EMINENT GRAMMARIANS.

  I.The science of grammar1 was in ancient times far from being in vogue at Rome; indeed, it was of little use in a rude state of society, when the people were engaged in constant wars, and had not much time to bestow on the cultivation of the liberal arts.2 At the outset, its pretensions were very slender, for the earliest men of learning, who were both poets and orators, may be considered as half-Greek: I speak of Livius3 and Ennius,4 who are acknowledged to have taught both languages as well at Rome as in foreign parts.5 But they only translated from the Greek, and if they composed anything of their own in Latin, it was only from what they had before read. For although there are those who say that this Ennius published two books, one on “Letters and Syllables,” and the other on “Metres,” Lucius Cotta has satisfactorily proved that they are not the works of the poet Ennius, but of another writer of the same name, to whom also the treatise on the “Rules of Augury” is attributed.

  II. Crates of Mallos,1 then, was, in our opinion, the first who introduced the study of grammar at Rome. He was cotemporary with Aristarchus,2 and having been sent by king Attalus as envoy to the senate in the interval between the second and third Punic wars,3 soon after the death of Ennius,4 he had the misfortune to fall into an open sewer in the Palatine quarter of the city, and broke his leg. After which, during the whole period of his embassy and convalescence, he gave frequent lectures, taking much pains to instruct his hearers, and he has left us an example well worthy of imitation. It was so far followed, that poems hitherto little known, the works either of deceased friends or other approved writers, were brought to light, and being read and commented on, were explained to others. Thus, Caius Octavius Lampadio edited the Punic War of Nævius,5 which having been written in one volume without any break in the manuscript, he divided into seven books. After that, Quintus Vargonteius undertook the Annals of Ennius, which he read on certain fixed days to crowded audiences. So Lælius Archelaus, and Vectius Philocomus, read and commented on the Satires of their friend Lucilius,6 which Lenæus Pompeius, a freedman, tells us he studied under Archelaus; and Valerius Cato, under Philocomus. Two others also taught and promoted grammar in various branches, namely, Lucius Ælius Lanuvinus, the son-in-law of Quintus Ælius, and Servius Claudius, both of whom were Roman knights, and men who rendered great services both to learning and the republic.

  III. Lucius Ælius had a double cognomen, for he was called Præconius, because his father was a herald; Stilo, because he was in the habit of composing orations for most of the speakers of highest rank; indeed, he was so strong a partisan of the nobles, that he accompanied Quintus Metellus Numidicus1 in his exile. Servius2 having clandestinely obtained his father-in-law’s book before it was published, was disowned for the fraud, which he took so much to heart, that, overwhelmed with shame and distress, he retired from Rome; and being seized with a fit of the gout, in his impatience, he applied a poisonous ointment to his feet, which half-killed him, so that his lower limbs mortified while he was still alive. After this, more attention was paid to the science of letters, and it grew in public estimation, insomuch, that men of the highest rank did not hesitate in undertaking to write something on the subject; and it is related that sometimes there were no less than twenty celebrated scholars in Rome. So high was the value, and so great were the rewards, of grammarians, that Lutatius Daphnides, jocularly called “Pan’s herd”3 by Lenæus Melissus, was purchased by Quintus Catullus for two hundred thousand sesterces, and shortly afterwards made a freedman; and that Lucius Apuleius, who was taken into the pay of Epicius Calvinus, a wealthy Roman knight, at the annual salary of ten thousand crowns, had many scholars. Grammar also penetrated into the provinces, and some of the most eminent amongst the learned taught it in foreign parts, particularly in Gallia Togata. In the number of these, we may reckon Octavius Teucer, Siscennius Jacchus, and Oppius Cares,1 who persisted in teaching to a most advanced period of his life, at a time when he was not only unable to walk, but his sight failed.

  IV. The appellation of grammarian was borrowed from the Greeks; but at first, the Latins called such persons literati. Cornelius Nopos, also, in his book, where he draws a distinction between a literate and a philologist, says that in common phrase, those are properly called literati who are skilled in speaking or writing with care or accuracy, and those more especially deserve the name who translated the poets, and were called grammarians by the Greeks. It appears that they were named literators by Messala Corvinus, in one of his letters, when he says, “that it does not refer to Furius Bibaculus, nor even to Sigida, nor to Cato, the literator,”2 meaning, doubtless, that Valerius Cato was both a poet and an eminent grammarian. Some there are who draw a distinction between a literati and a literator, as the Greeks do between a grammarian and a grammatist, applying the former term to men of real erudition, the latter to those whose pretensions to learning are moderate; and this opinion Orbilius supports by examples. For he says that in old times, when a company of slaves was offered for sale by any person, it was not customary, without good reason, to describe either of them in the catalogue as a literate, but only as a literator, meaning that he was not a proficient in letters, but had a smattering of knowledge.

  The early grammarians taught rhetoric also, and we have many of their treatises which include both sciences; whence it arose, I think, that in later times, although the two professions had then become distinct, the old custom was retained, or the grammarians introduced into their teaching some of the elements required for public speaking, such as the problem, the periphrasis, the choice of words, description of character, and the like; in order that they might not transfer their pupils to the rhetoricians no better than ill-taught boys But I perceive that these lessons are now given up in some cases, on account of the want of application, or the tender years, of the scholar, for I do not believe that it arises from any dislike in the master. I recollect that when I was a boy it was the custom of one of these, whose name was Princeps, to take alternate days for declaiming and disputing; and sometimes he would lecture in the morning, and declaim in the afternoon, when he had his pulpit removed. I heard, also, that even within the memories of our own fathers, some of the pupils of the grammarians passed directly from the schools to the courts, and at once took a high place in the ranks of the most distinguished advocates. The professors at that time were, indeed, men of great eminence, of some of whom I may be able to give an account in the following chapters.

  V.Sævius1Nicanor first acquired fame and reputation by his teaching: and, besides, he made commentaries, the greater part of which, however, are said to have been borrowed. He also wrote a satire, in which he informs us that he was a freedman, and had a double cognomen, in the following verses;

  • Sævius Nicanor Marci libertus negabit,
  • Sævius Posthumius idem, sed Marcus, docebit.
  • What Sævius Nicanor, the freedman of Marcus, will deny,
  • The same Sævius, called also Posthumius Marcus, will assert.

  It is reported, that in consequence of some infamy attached to his character, he retired to Sardinia, and there ended his days.

  VI.Aurelius Opilius,2 the freedman of some Epicurean, first taught philosophy, then rhetoric, and last of all, grammar. Having closed his school, he followed Rutilius Rufus, when he was banished to Asia, and there the two friends grew old together. He also wrote several volumes on a variety of learned topics, nine books of which he distinguished by the number and names of the nine Muses; as he says, not without reason, they being the patrons of authors and poets. I observe that its title is given in several indexes by a single letter, but he uses two in the heading of a book called Finax.

  VII.Marcus Antonius Gnipho,1 a free-born native of Gaul, was exposed in his infancy, and afterwards received his freedom from his foster-father; and, as some say, was educated at Alexandria, where Dionysius Scytobrachion2 was his fellow pupil. This, however, I am not very ready to believe, as the times at which they flourished scarcely agree. He is said to have been a man of great genius, of singular memory, well read in Greek as well as Latin, and of a most obliging and agreeable temper, who never haggled about remuneration, but generally left it to the liberality of his scholars. He first taught in the house of Julius Cæsar,3 when the latter was yet but a boy, and, afterwards, in his own private house. He gave instruction in rhetoric also, teaching the rules of eloquence every day, but declaiming only on festivals. It is said that some very celebrated men frequented his school,—and, among others, Marcus Cicero, during the time he held the prætorship.4 He wrote a number of works, although he did not live beyond his fiftieth year; but Atteius, the philologist,5 says, that he left only two volumes, “De Latino Sermone;” and, that the other works ascribed to him, were composed by his disciples, and were not his, although his name is sometimes to be found in them.

  VIII. M. Pompilius Andronicus, a native of Syria, while he professed to be a grammarian, was considered an idle follower of the Epicurean sect, and little qualified to be a master of a school. Finding, therefore, that, at Rome, not only Antonius Gnipho, but even other teachers of less note were preferred to him, he retired to Cumæ, where he lived at his ease; and, though he wrote several books, he was so needy, and reduced to such straits, as to be compelled to sell that excellent little work of his, “The Index to the Annals,” for sixteen thousand sesterces. Orbilius has informed us, that he redeemed this work from the oblivion into which it had fallen, and took care to have it published with the author’s name.

  IX.Orbilius Pupillus, of Beneventum, being left an orphan, by the death of his parents, who both fell a sacrifice to the plots of their enemies on the same day, acted, at first, as apparitor to the magistrates. He then joined the troops in Macedonia, when he was first decorated with the plumed helmet,1 and, afterwards, promoted to serve on horseback. Having completed his military service, he resumed his studies, which he had pursued with no small diligence from his youth upwards: and, having been a professor for a long period in his own country, at last, during the consulship of Cicero, made his way to Rome, where he taught with more reputation than profit. For in one of his works he says, that “he was then very old, and lived in a garret.” He also published a book with the title of Perialogos; containing complaints of the injurious treatment to which professors submitted, without seeking redress at the hands of parents. His sour temper betrayed itself, not only in his disputes with the sophists opposed to him, whom he lashed on every occasion, but also towards his scholars, as Horace tells us, who calls him “a flogger;”2 and Domitius Marsus,3 who says of him:—

  • Si quos Orbilius ferulâ scuticâque cecidit.
  • If those Orbilius with rod or ferule thrashed.

  And not even men of rank escaped his sarcasms: for, before he became noticed, happening to be examined as a witness in a crowded court, Varro, the advocate on the other side, put the question to him, “What he did, and by what profession he gained his livelihood?” He replied, “That he lived by removing hunchbacks from the sunshine into the shade,” alluding to Muræna’s deformity. He lived till he was near a hundred years old; but he had long lost his memory, as the verse of Bibaculus informs us:—

  • Orbilius ubinam est, literarum oblivio?
  • Where is Orbilius now, that wreck of learning lost?

  His statue is shown in the Capitol at Beneventum. It stands on the left hand, and is sculptured in marble,1 representing him in a sitting posture, wearing the pallium, with two writing-cases in his hand. He left a son, named also Orbilius, who, like his father, was a professor of grammar.

  X.Atteius, the Philologist, a freedman, was born at Athens. Of him, Capito Atteius,2 the well-known jurisconsult, says that he was a rhetorician among the grammarians, and a grammarian among the rhetoricians. Asinius Pollio,3 in the book in which he finds fault with the writings of Sallust for his great affectation of obsolete words, speaks thus: “In this work his chief assistant was a certain Atteius, a man of rank, a splendid Latin grammarian, the aider and preceptor of those who studied the practice of declamation; in short, one who claimed for himself the cognomen of Philologus.” Writing to Lucius Hermas, he says, “that he had made great proficiency in Greek literature, and some in Latin; that he had been a hearer of Antonius Gnipho, and his Hermas,4 and afterwards began to teach others. Moreover, that he had for pupils many illustrious youths, among whom were the two brothers, Appius and Pulcher Claudius; and that he even accompanied them to their province.” He appears to have assumed the name of Philologus, because, like Eratosthenes,1 who first adopted that cognomen, he was in high repute for his rich and varied stores of learning; which, indeed, is evident from his commentaries, though but few of them are extant. Another letter, however, to the same Hermas, shews that they were very numerous: “Remember,” it says, “to recommend generally our Extracts, which we have collected, as you know, of all kinds, into eight hundred books.” He afterwards formed an intimate acquaintance with Caius Sallustius, and, on his death, with Asinius Pollio; and when they undertook to write a history, he supplied the one with short annals of all Roman affairs, from which he could select at pleasure; and the other, with rules on the art of composition. I am, therefore, surprised that Asinius Pollio should have supposed that he was in the habit of collecting old words and figures of speech for Sallust, when he must have known that his own advice was, that none but well known, and common and appropriate expressions should be made use of; and that, above all things, the obscurity of the style of Sallust, and his bold freedom in translations, should be avoided.

  XI.Valerius Cato was, as some have informed us, the freedman of one Bursenus, a native of Gaul. He himself tells us, in his little work called “Indignatio,” that he was born free, and being left an orphan, was exposed to be easily stripped of his patrimony during the licence of Sylla’s administrations. He had a great number of distinguished pupils, and was highly esteemed as a preceptor suited to those who had a poetical turn, as appears from these short lines:

  • Cato grammaticus, Latina Siren,
  • Qui solus legit ac facit poetas.
  • Cato, the Latin Siren, grammar taught and verse,
  • To form the poet skilled, and poetry rehearse.

  Besides his Treatise on Grammar, he composed some poems, of which, his Lydia and Diana are most admired. Ticida mentions his “Lydia.”

  • Lydia, doctorum maxima cura liber.
  • “Lydia,” a work to men of learning dear.

  Cinna1 thus notices the “Diana.”

  • Secula permaneat nostri Diana Catonis.
  • Immortal be our Cato’s song of Dian.

  He lived to extreme old age, but in the lowest state of penury, and almost in actual want; having retired to a small cottage when he gave up his Tusculan villa to his creditors; as Bibaculus tells us:

  • Si quis forte mei domum Catonis,
  • Depictas minio assulas, et illos
  • Custodis vidit hortulos Priapi,
  • Miratur, quibus ille disciplinis,
  • Tantam sit sapientiam assecutus,
  • Quem tres cauliculi et selibra farris;
  • Racemi duo, tegulâ sub unâ,
  • Ad summam prope nutriant senectam.

  “If, perchance, any one has seen the house of my Cato, with marble slabs of the richest hues, and his gardens worthy of having Priapus2 for their guardian, he may well wonder by what philosophy he has gained so much wisdom, that a daily allowance of three coleworts, half-a-pound of meal, and two bunches of grapes, under a narrow roof, should serve for his subsistence to extreme old age.”

  And he says in another place:

  • Catonis modo, Galle, Tusculanum
  • Tota creditor urbe venditabat.
  • Mirati sumus unicum magistrum,
  • Summum grammaticum, optimum poetam,
  • Omnes solvere posse quæstiones,
  • Unum difficile expedire nomen.
  • En cor Zenodoti, en jecur Cratetis!³

  “We lately saw, my Gallus, Cato’s Tusculan villa exposed to public sale by his creditors; and wondered that such an unrivalled master of the schools, most eminent grammarian, and accomplished poet, could solve all propositions and yet found one question too difficult for him to settle,—how to pay his debts. We find in him the genius of Zenodotus,1 the wisdom of Crates.”2

  XII.Cornelius Epicadius, a freedman of Lucius Cornelius Sylla, the dictator, was his apparitor in the Augural priesthood, and much beloved by his son Faustus; so that he was proud to call himself the freedman of both. He completed the last book of Sylla’s Commentaries, which his patron had left unfinished.3

  XIII.Laberius Hiera was bought by his master out of a slave-dealer’s cage, and obtained his freedom on account of his devotion to learning. It is reported that his disinterestedness was such, that he gave gratuitous instruction to the children of those who were proscribed in the time of Sylla.

  XIV.Curtius Nicia was the intimate friend of Cneius Pompeius and Caius Memmius; but having carried notes from Memmius to Pompey’s wife,4 when she was debauched by Memmius, Pompey was indignant, and forbad him his house. He was also on familiar terms with Marcus Cicero, who thus speaks of him in his epistle to Dolabella:5 “I have more need of receiving letters from you, than you have of desiring them from me. For there is nothing going on at Rome in which I think you would take any interest, except, perhaps, that you may like to know that I am appointed umpire between our friends Nicias and Vidius. The one, it appears, alleges in two short verses that Nicias owes him money; the other, like an Aristarchus, cavils at them. I, like an old critic, am to decide whether they are Nicias’s or spurious.”

  Again, in a letter to Atticus,1 he says: “As to what you write about Nicias, nothing could give me greater pleasure than to have him with me, if I was in a position to enjoy his society; but my province is to me a place of retirement and solitude. Sicca easily reconciled himself to this state of things, and, therefore, I would prefer having him. Besides, you are well aware of the feebleness, and the nice and luxurious habits, of our friend Nicias. Why should I be the means of making him uncomfortable, when he can afford me no pleasure? At the same time, I value his goodwill.”

  XV.Lenæus was a freedman of Pompey the Great, and attended him in most of his expeditions. On the death of his patron and his sons, he supported himself by teaching in a school which he opened near the temple of Tellus, in the Carinæ, in the quarter of the city where the house of the Pompeys stood.2 Such was his regard for his patron’s memory, that when Sallust described him as having a brazen face, and a shameless mind, he lashed the historian in a most bitter satire,3 as “a bull’s-pizzle, a gormandizer, a braggart, and a tippler, a man whose life and writings were equally monstrous;” besides charging him with being “a most unskilful plagiarist, who borrowed the language of Cato and other old writers.” It is related, that, in his youth, having escaped from slavery by the contrivance of some of his friends, he took refuge in his own country; and, that after he had applied himself to the liberal arts, he brought the price of his freedom to his former master, who, however, struck by his talents and learning, gave him manumission gratuitously.

  XVI.Quintus Cæcilius, an Epirot by descent, but born at Tusculum, was a freedman of Atticus Satrius, a Roman knight, to whom Cicero addressed his Epistles.1 He became the tutor of his patron’s daughter,2 who was contracted to Marcus Agrippa, but being suspected of an illicit intercourse with her, and sent away on that account, he betook himself to Cornelius Gallus, and lived with him on terms of the greatest intimacy, which, indeed, was imputed to Gallus as one of his heaviest offences, by Augustus. Then, after the condemnation and death of Gallus,3 he opened a school, but had few pupils, and those very young, nor any belonging to the higher orders, excepting the children of those he could not refuse to admit. He was the first, it is said, who held disputations in Latin, and who began to lecture on Virgil and the other modern poets; which the verse of Domitius Marcus4 points out.

  • Epirota tenellorum nutricula vatum.
  • The Epirot who,
  • With tender care, our unfledged poets nursed.

  XVII.Verrius Flaccus,5 a freedman, distinguished himself by a new mode of teaching; for it was his practice to exercise the wits of his scholars, by encouraging emulation among them; not only proposing the subjects on which they were to write, but offering rewards for those who were successful in the contest. These consisted of some ancient, handsome, or rare book. Being, in consequence, selected by Augustus, as preceptor to his grandsons, he transferred his entire school to the Palatium, but with the understanding that he should admit no fresh scholars. The hall in Catiline’s house, which had then been added to the palace, was assigned him for his school, with a yearly allowance of one hundred thousand sesterces. He died of old age, in the reign of Tiberius. There is a statue of him at Præneste, in the semi-circle at the lower side of the forum, where he had set up calendars arranged by himself, and inscribed on slabs of marble.

  XVIII.Lucius Crassitius, a native of Tarentum, and in rank a freedman, had the cognomen of Pasides, which he afterwards changed for Pansa. His first employment was connected with the stage, and his business was to assist the writers of farces. After that, he took to giving lessons in a gallery attached to a house, until his commentary on “The Smyrna”1 so brought him into notice, that the following lines were written on him:

  • • Uni Crassitio se credere Smyrna probavit:
    • Desinite indocti, conjugio hanc petere.
    • Soli Crassitio se dixit nubere velle:
    • Intima cui soli nota sua exstiterint.
  • • Crassitius only counts on Smyrna’s love,
    • Fruitless the wooings of the unlettered prove;
    • Crassitius she receives with loving arms,
    • For he alone unveiled her hidden charms.

  However, after having taught many scholars, some of whom were of high rank, and amongst others, Julius Antonius, the triumvir’s son, so that he might be even compared with Verrius Flaccus; he suddenly closed his school, and joined the sect of Quintus Septimius, the philosopher.

  XIX.Scribonius Aphrodisius, the slave and disciple of Orbilius, who was afterwards redeemed and presented with his freedom by Scribonia,2 the daughter of Libo who had been the wife of Augustus, taught in the time of Verrius; whose books on Orthography he also revised, not without some severe remarks on his pursuits and conduct.

  XX.C. Julius Hyginus, a freedman of Augustus, was a native of Spain, although some say he was born at Alexandria, and that when that city was taken, Cæsar brought him, then a boy, to Rome. He closely and carefully imitated Cornelius Alexander,1 a Greek grammarian, who, for his antiquarian knowledge, was called by many Polyhistor, and by some History. He had the charge of the Palatine library, but that did not prevent him from having many scholars; and he was one of the most intimate friends of the poet Ovid, and of Caius Licinius, the historian, a man of consular rank,2 who has related that Hyginus died very poor, and was supported by his liberality as long as he lived. Julius Modestus,3 who was a freedman of Hyginus, followed the footsteps of his patron in his studies and learning.

  XXI.Caius Melissus,4 a native of Spoletum, was free-born, but having been exposed by his parents in consequence of quarrels between them, he received a good education from his foster-father, by whose care and industry he was brought up, and was made a present of to Mecænas, as a grammarian. Finding himself valued and treated as a friend, he preferred to continue in his state of servitude, although he was claimed by his mother, choosing rather his present condition than that which his real origin entitled him to. In consequence, his freedom was speedily given him, and he even became a favourite with Augustus. By his appointment he was made curator of the library in the portico of Octavia;5 and, as he himself informs us, undertook to compose, when he was a sexagenarian, his books of “Witticisms,” which are now called “The Book of Jests.” Of these he accomplished one hundred and fifty, to which he afterwards added several more. He also composed a new kind of story about those who wore the toga, and called it “Trabeat.”1

  XXII.Marcus Pomponius Marcellus, a very severe critic of the Latin tongue, who sometimes pleaded causes, in a certain address on the plaintiff’s behalf, persisted in charging his adversary with making a solecism, until Cassius Severus appealed to the judges to grant an adjournment until his client should produce another grammarian, as he was not prepared to enter into a controversy respecting a solecism, instead of defending his client’s rights. On another occasion, when he had found fault with some expression in a speech made by Tiberius, Atteius Capito2 affirmed, “that if it was not Latin, at least it would be so in time to come;” “Capito is wrong,” cried Marcellus; “it is certainly in your power, Cæsar, to confer the freedom of the city on whom you please, but you cannot make words for us.” Asinius Gallus3 tells us that he was formerly a pugilist, in the following epigram.

  • • Qui caput ad lævam deicit, glossemata nobis
    • Præcipit; os nullum, vel potius pugilis.
  • • Who ducked his head, to shun another’s fist,
    • Though he expound old saws,—yet, well I wist,
    • With pummelled nose and face, he’s but a pugilist.

  XXIII.Remmius Palæmon,4 of Vicentia,5 the offspring of a bond-woman, acquired the rudiments of learning, first as the companion of a weaver’s, and then of his master’s, son, at school. Being afterwards made free, he taught at Rome, where he stood highest in the rank of the grammarians; but he was so infamous for every sort of vice, that Tiberius and his successor Claudius publicly denounced him as an improper person to have the education of boys and young men entrusted to him. Still, his powers of narrative and agreeable style of speaking made him very popular; besides which, he had the gift of making extempore verses. He also wrote a great many in various and uncommon metres. His insolence was such, that he called Marcus Varro “a hog;” and bragged that “letters were born and would perish with him;” and that “his name was not introduced inadvertently in the Bucolics,1 as Virgil divined that a Palæmon would some day be the judge of all poets and poems.” He also boasted, that having once fallen into the hands of robbers, they spared him on account of the celebrity his name had acquired.

  He was so luxurious, that he took the bath many times in a day; nor did his means suffice for his extravagance, although his school brought him in forty thousand sesterces yearly, and he received not much less from his private estate, which he managed with great care. He also kept a broker’s shop for the sale of old clothes; and it is well known that a vine,2 he planted himself, yielded three hundred and fifty bottles of wine. But the greatest of all his vices was his unbridled licentiousness in his commerce with women, which he carried to the utmost pitch of foul indecency.3 They tell a droll story of some one who met him in a crowd, and upon his offering to kiss him, could not escape the salute. “Master,” said he, “do you want to mouth every one you meet with in a hurry?”

  XXIV.Marcus Valerius Probus, of Berytus,4 after long aspiring to the rank of centurion, being at last tired of waiting, devoted himself to study. He had met with some old authors at a bookseller’s shop in the provinces, where the memory of ancient times still lingers, and is not quite forgotten, as it is at Rome. Being anxious carefully to reperuse these, and afterwards to make acquaintance with other works of the same kind, he found himself an object of contempt, and was laughed at for his lectures, instead of their gaining him fame or profit. Still, however, he persisted in his purpose, and employed himself in correcting, illustrating, and adding notes to many works which he had collected, his labours being confined to the province of a grammarian, and nothing more. He had, properly speaking, no scholars, but some few followers. For he never taught in such a way as to maintain the character of a master; but was in the habit of admitting one or two, perhaps at most three or four, disciples in the afternoon; and while he lay at case and chatted freely on ordinary topics, he occasionally read some book to them, but that did not often happen. He published a few slight treatises on some subtle questions, besides which, he left a large collection of observations on the language of the ancients.

  LIVES OF EMINENT RHETORICIANS.

  I.Rhetoric, also, as well as Grammar, was not introduced amongst us till a late period, and with still more difficulty, inasmuch as we find that, at times, the practice of it was even prohibited. In order to leave no doubt of this, I will subjoin an ancient decree of the senate, as well as an edict of the censors:—“In the consulship of Caius Fannius Strabo, and Marcus Valerius Messala:1 the prætor Marcus Pomponius moved the senate, that an act be passed respecting Philosophers and Rhetoricians. In this matter, they have decreed as follows: ‘It shall be lawful for M. Pomponius, the prætor, to take such measures, and make such provisions, as the good of the Republic, and the duty of his office, require, that no Philosophers or Rhetoricians be suffered at Rome.’ ”

  After some interval, the censor Cnæus Domitius Ænobarbus and Lucius Licinius Crassus issued the following edict upon the same subject: “It is reported to us that certain persons have instituted a new kind of discipline; that our youth resort to their schools; that they have assumed the title of Latin Rhetoricians; and that young men waste their time there for whole days together. Our ancestors have ordained what instruction it is fitting their children should receive, and what schools they should attend. These novelties, contrary to the customs and instructions of our ancestors, we neither approve, nor do they appear to us good. Wherefore it appears to be our duty that we should notify our judgment both to those who keep such schools, and those who are in the practice of frequenting them, that they meet our disapprobation.”

  However, by slow degrees, rhetoric manifested itself to be a useful and honourable study, and many persons devoted themselves to it, both as a means of defence and of acquiring reputation. Cicero declaimed in Greek until his prætorship, but afterwards, as he grew older, in Latin also; and even in the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa,1 whom he calls “his great and noble disciples.” Some historians state that Cneius Pompey resumed the practice of declaiming even during the civil war, in order to be better prepared to argue against Caius Curio, a young man of great talents, to whom the defence of Cæsar was entrusted. They say, likewise, that it was not forgotten by Mark Antony, nor by Augustus, even during the war of Modena. Nero also declaimed2 even after he became emperor, in the first year of his reign, which he had done before in public but twice. Many speeches of orators were also published. In consequence, public favour was so much attracted to the study of rhetoric, that a vast number of professors and learned men devoted themselves to it; and it flourished to such a degree, that some of them raised themselves by it to the rank of senators and the highest offices.

  But the same mode of teaching was not adopted by all, nor, indeed, did individuals always confine themselves to the same system, but each varied his plan of teaching according to circumstances. For they were accustomed, in stating their argument with the utmost clearness, to use figures and apologies, to put cases, as circumstances required, and to relate facts, sometimes briefly and succinctly, and, at other times, more at large and with greater feeling. Nor did they omit, on occasion, to resort to translations from the Greek, and to expatiate in the praise, or to launch their censures on the faults, of illustrious men. They also dealt with matters connected with every-day life, pointing out such as are useful and necessary, and such as are hurtful and needless. They had occasion often to support the authority of fabulous accounts, and to detract from that of historical narratives, which sort the Greeks call “Propositions,” “Refutations” and “Corroborations,” until by a gradual process they have exhausted these topics, and arrive at the gist of the argument.

  Among the ancients, subjects of controversy were drawn either from history, as indeed some are even now, or from actual facts, of recent occurrence. It was, therefore, the custom to state them precisely, with details of the names of places. We certainly so find them collected and published, and it may be well to give one or two of them literally, by way of example:

  “A company of young men from the city, having made an excursion to Ostia in the summer season, and going down to the beach, fell in with some fishermen who were casting their nets in the sea. Having bargained with them for the haul, whatever it might turn out to be, for a certain sum, they paid down the money. They waited a long time while the nets were being drawn, and when at last they were dragged on shore, there was no fish in them, but some gold sewn up in a basket. The buyers claim the haul as theirs, the fishermen assert that it belongs to them.”

  Again: “Some dealers having to land from a ship at Brundusium a cargo of slaves, among which there was a handsome boy of great value, they, in order to deceive the collectors of the customs, smuggled him ashore in the dress of a freeborn youth, with the bullum1 hung about his neck. The fraud easily escaped detection. They proceed to Rome; the affair becomes the subject of judicial inquiry; it is alleged that the boy was entitled to his freedom, because his master had voluntarily treated him as free.”

  Formerly, they called these by a Greek term, συντάξεις, but of late “controversies;” but they may be either fictitious cases, or those which come under trial in the courts. Of the eminent professors of this science, of whom any memorials are extant, it would not be easy to find many others than those of whom I shall now proceed to give an account.

  II.Lucius Plotius Gallus. Of him Marcus Tullius Cicero thus writes to Marcus Titinnius:2 “I remember well that when we were boys, one Lucius Plotius first began to teach Latin; and as great numbers flocked to his school, so that all who were most devoted to study were eager to take lessons from him, it was a great trouble to me that I too was not allowed to do so. I was prevented, however, by the decided opinion of men of the greatest learning, who considered that it was best to cultivate the genius by the study of Greek.” This same Gallus, for he lived to a great age, was pointed at by M. Cælius, in a speech which he was forced to make in his own cause, as having supplied his accuser, Atracinus,1 with materials for his charge. Suppressing his name, he says that such a rhetorician was like barley bread2 compared to a wheaten loaf,—windy, chaffy, and coarse.

  III.Lucius Octacilius Pilitus is said to have been a slave, and, according to the old custom, chained to the door like a watch-dog;3 until, having been presented with his freedom for his genius and devotion to learning, he drew up for his patron the act of accusation in a cause he was prosecuting. After that, becoming a professor of rhetoric, he gave instructions to Cneius Pompey the Great, and composed an account of his actions, as well as of those of his father, being the first freedman, according to the opinion of Cornelius Nepos,4 who ventured to write history, which before his time had not been done by any one who was not of the highest ranks in society.

  IV. About this time, Epidius5 having fallen into disgrace for bringing a false accusation, opened a school of instruction, in which he taught, among others, Mark Antony and Augustus. On one occasion Caius Canutius jeered them for presuming to belong to the party of the consul Isauricus6 in his administration of the republic; upon which he replied, that he would rather be the disciple of Isauricus, than of Epidius, the false accuser. This Epidius claimed to be descended from Epidius Nuncio, who, as ancient traditions assert, fell into the fountain of the river Sarnus1 when the streams were overflown, and not being afterwards found, was reckoned among the number of the gods.

  V.Sextus Clodius, a native of Sicily, a professor both of Greek and Latin eloquence, had bad eyes and a facetious tongue. It was a saying of his, that he lost a pair of eyes from his intimacy with Mark Antony, the triumvir.2 Of his wife, Fulvia, when there was a swelling in one of her cheeks, he said that “she tempted the point of his style;”3 nor did Antony think any the worse of him for the joke, but quite enjoyed it; and soon afterwards, when Antony was consul,4 he even made him a large grant of land, which Cicero charges him with in his Philippics.5 “You patronize,” he said, “a master of the schools for the sake of his buffoonery, and make a rhetorician one of your pot-companions; allowing him to cut his jokes on any one he pleased; a witty man, no doubt, but it was an easy matter to say smart things of such as you and your companions. But listen, Conscript Fathers, while I tell you what reward was given to this rhetorician, and let the wounds of the republic be laid bare to view. You assigned two thousand acres of the Leontine territory6 to Sextus Clodius, the rhetorician, and not content with that, exonerated the estate from all taxes. Hear this, and learn from the extravagance of the grant, how little wisdom is displayed in your acts.”

  VI.Caius Albutius Silus, of Novara,7 while, in the execution of the office of edile in his native place, he was sitting for the administration of justice, was dragged by the feet from the tribunal by some persons against whom he was pronouncing a decree. In great indignation at this usage, he made straight for the gate of the town, and proceeded to Rome. There he was admitted to fellowship, and lodged, with Plancus the orator,1 whose practice it was, before he made a speech in public, to set up some one to take the contrary side in the argument. The office was undertaken by Albutius with such success, that he silenced Plancus, who did not venture to put himself in competition with him. This bringing him into notice, he collected an audience of his own, and it was his custom to open the question proposed for debate, sitting; but as he warmed with the subject, he stood up, and made his peroration in that posture. His declamations were of different kinds; sometimes brilliant and polished, at others, that they might not be thought to savour too much of the schools, he curtailed them of all ornament, and used only familiar phrases. He also pleaded causes, but rarely, being employed in such as were of the highest importance, and in every case undertaking the peroration only.

  In the end, he gave up practising in the forum, partly from shame, partly from fear. For, in a certain trial before the court of the One Hundred,2 having lashed the defendant as a man void of natural affection for his parents, he called upon him by a bold figure of speech, “to swear by the ashes of his father and mother which lay unburied;” his adversary taking him up for the suggestion, and the judges frowning upon it, he lost his cause, and was much blamed. At another time, on a trial for murder at Milan, before Lucius Piso, the proconsul, having to defend the culprit, he worked himself up to such a pitch of vehemence, that in a crowded court, who loudly applauded him, notwithstanding all the efforts of the lictor to maintain order, he broke out into a lamentation on the miserable state of Italy,3 then in danger of being again reduced, he said, into the form of a province, and turning to the statue of Marcus Brutus, which stood in the forum, he invoked him as “the founder and vindicator of the liberties of the people.” For this he narrowly escaped a prosecution. Suffering, at an advanced period of life, from an ulcerated tumour, he returned to Novara, and calling the people together in a public assembly, addressed them in a set speech, of considerable length, explaining the reasons which induced him to put an end to existence: and this he did by abstaining from food.

  end of the lives of grammarians and rhetoricians

  LIVES OF THE POETS.

  THE LIFE OF TERENCE.

  Publius Terentius Afer, a native of Carthage, was a slave, at Rome, of the senator Terentius Lucanus, who, struck by his abilities and handsome person, gave him not only a liberal education in his youth, but his freedom when he arrived at years of maturity. Some say that he was a captive taken in war, but this, as Fenestella1 informs us, could by no means have been the case, since both his birth and death took place in the interval between the termination of the second Punic war and the commoncement of the third;2 nor, even supposing that he had been taken prisoner by the Numidian or Getulian tribes, could he have fallen into the hands of a Roman general, as there was no commercial intercourse between the Italians and Africans until after the fall of Carthage.3 Terence lived in great familiarity with many persons of high station, and especially with Scipio Africanus, and Caius Lælius, whose favour he is even supposed to have purchased by the foulest means. But Fenestella reverses the charge, contending that Terence was older than either of them. Cornelius Nepos, however, informs us that they were all of nearly equal age; and Porcius intimates a suspicion of this criminal commerce in the following passage:—

  “While Terence plays the wanton with the great, and recommends himself to them by the meretricious ornaments of his person; while, with greedy ears, he drinks in the divine melody of Africanus’s voice; while he thinks of being a constant guest at the table of Furius, and the handsome Lælius; while he thinks that he is fondly loved by them, and often invited to Albanum for his youthful beauty, he finds himself stripped of his property, and reduced to the lowest state of indigence. Then, withdrawing from the world, he betook himself to Greece, where he met his end, dying at Strymphalos, a town in Arcadia. What availed him the friendship of Scipio, of Lælius, or of Furius, three of the most affluent nobles of that age? They did not even minister to his necessities so much as to provide him a hired house, to which his slave might return with the intelligence of his master’s death.”

  He wrote comedies, the earliest of which, The Andria, having to be performed at the public spectacles given by the ædiles,1 he was commanded to read it first before Cæcilius.2 Having been introduced while Cæcilius was at supper, and being meanly dressed, he is reported to have read the beginning of the play seated on a low stool near the great man’s couch. But after reciting a few verses, he was invited to take his place at table, and, having supped with his host, went through the rest to his great delight. This play and five others were received by the public with similar applause, although Volcatius, in his enumeration of them, says that “The Hecyra3 must not be reckoned among these.”

  The Eunuch was even acted twice the same day,4 and earned more money than any comedy, whoever was the writer, had ever done before, namely, eight thousand sesterces:1 besides which, a certain sum accrued to the author for the title. But Varro prefers the opening of The Adelphi2 to that of Menander. It is very commonly reported that Terence was assisted in his works by Lælius and Scipio,3 with whom he lived in such great intimacy. He gave some currency to this report himself, nor did he ever attempt to defend himself against it, except in a light way; as in the prologue to The Adelphi:

  • Nam quod isti dicunt malevoli, homines nobiles
  • Hunc adjutare, assidueque una scribere;
  • Quod illi maledictum vehemens existimant,
  • Eam laudem hic ducit maximam: cum illis placet,
  • Qui vobis universis et populo placent;
  • Quorum opera in bello, in otio, in negotio,
  • Suo quisque tempore usus est sine superbiâ.
  • — For this,
  • Which malice tells that certain noble persons
  • Assist the bard, and write in concert with him,
  • That which they deem a heavy slander, he
  • Esteems his greatest praise: that he can please
  • Those who in war, in peace, as counsellors,
  • Have rendered you the dearest services,
  • And ever borne their faculties so meekly.

  • Colman.

  He appears to have protested against this imputation with less earnestness, because the notion was far from being disagreeable to Lælius and Scipio. It therefore gained ground, and prevailed in after-times.

  Quintus Memmius, in his speech in his own defence, says: “Publius Africanus, who borrowed from Terence a character which he had acted in private, brought it on the stage in his name.” Nepos tells us he found in some book that C. Lælius, when he was on some occasion at Puteoli, on the calends [the first] of March,4 being requested by his wife to rise early, begged her not to suffer him to be disturbed, as he had gone to bed late, having been engaged in writing with more than usual success. On her asking him to tell her what he had been writing, he repeated the verses which are found in the Heautontimoroumenos:

  • Satis pol proterve me Syri promessa—Heauton. IV. iv. 1.
  • I’faith! the rogue Syrus’s impudent pretences—

  Santra1 is of opinion that if Terence required any assistance in his compositions,2 he would not have had recourse to Scipio and Lælius, who were then very young men, but rather to Sulpicius Gallus,3 an accomplished scholar, who had been the first to introduce his plays at the games given by the consuls; or to Q. Fabius Labeo, or Marcus Popilius,4 both men of consular rank, as well as poets. It was for this reason that, in alluding to the assistance he had received, he did not speak of his coadjutors as very young men, but as persons of whose services the people had full experience in peace, in war, and in the administration of affairs.

  After he had given his comedies to the world, at a time when he had not passed his thirty-fifth year, in order to avoid suspicion, as he found others publishing their works under his name, or else to make himself acquainted with the modes of life and habits of the Greeks, for the purpose of exhibiting them in his plays, he withdrew from Rome, to which he never returned. Volcatius gives this account of his death:

  • Sed ut Afer sei populo dedit comædias,
  • Iter hic in Asiam fecit. Navem cum semel
  • Conscendit, visus nunquam est. Sic vita vacat.
  • When Afer had produced six plays for the entertainment of the people,
  • He embarked for Asia; but from the time he went on board ship
  • He was never seen again. Thus he ended his life.

  Q. Consentius reports that he perished at sea on his voyage back from Greece, and that one hundred and eight plays, of which he had made a version from Menander,1 were lost with him. Others say that he died at Stymphalos, in Arcadia, or in Leucadia, during the consulship of Cn. Cornelius Dolabella and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior,2 worn out with a severe illness, and with grief and regret for the loss of his baggage, which he had sent forward in a ship that was wrecked, and contained the last new plays he had written.

  In person, Terence is reported to have been rather short and slender, with a dark complexion. He had an only daughter, who was afterwards married to a Roman knight; and he left also twenty acres of garden ground,3 on the Appian Way, at the Villa of Mars. I, therefore, wonder the more how Porcius could have written the verses,

  • — nihil Publius
  • Scipio profuit, nihil ei Lælius, nihil Furius,
  • Tres per idem tempus qui agitabant nobiles facillime.
  • Eorum ille opera ne domum quidem habuit conductitiam
  • Saltem ut esset, quo referret obitum domini servulus.4

  Afranius places him at the head of all the comic writers, declaring, in his Compitalia,

  • Terentio non similem dices quempiam.
  • Terence’s equal cannot soon be found.

  On the other hand, Volcatius reckons him inferior not only to Nævius, Plautus, and Cæcilius, but also to Licinius Cicero pays him this high compliment, in his Limo—

  • Tu quoque, qui solus lecto sermone, Terenti,
  • Conversum expressumque Latina voce Menandrum
  • In medio populi sedatis vocibus offers,
  • Quidquid come loquens, ac omnia dulcia dicens.

  “You, only, Terence, translated into Latin, and clothed in choice language the plays of Menander, and brought them before the public, who, in crowded audiences, hung upon hushed applause—

  Grace marked each line, and every period charmed.”

  So also Caius Cæsar:

  • Tu quoque tu in summis, O dimidiate Menander,
  • Poneris, et merito, puri sermonis amator,
  • Lenibus atque utinam scriptis adjuncta foret vis
  • Comica, ut æquato virtus polleret honore
  • Cum Græcis, neque in hoc despectus parte jaceres!
  • Unum hoc maceror, et doleo tibi deesse, Terenti.

  “You, too, who divide your honours with Menander, will take your place among poets of the highest order, and justly too, such is the purity of your style. Would only that to your graceful diction was added more comic force, that your works might equal in merit the Greek masterpieces, and your inferiority in this particular should not expose you to censure. This is my only regret; in this, Terence, I grieve to say you are wanting.”

  THE LIFE OF JUVENAL.

  D. Junius Juvenalis, who was either the son1 of a wealthy freedman, or brought up by him, it is not known which, declaimed till the middle of life,2 more from the bent of his inclination, than from any desire to prepare himself either for the schools or the forum. But having composed a short satire,3 which was clever enough, on Paris,4 the actor of pantomimes, and also on the poet of Claudius Nero, who was puffed up by having held some inferior military rank for six months only: he afterwards devoted himself with much zeal to that style of writing. For a while indeed, he had not the courage to read them even to a small circle of auditors, but it was not long before he recited his satires to crowded audiences, and with entire success; and this he did twice or thrice, inserting new lines among those which he had originally composed.

  • Quod non dant proceres, dabit histrio, tu Camerinos,
  • Et Bareas, tu nobilium magna atria curas.
  • Præfectos Pelopea facit, Philomela tribunos.
  • Behold an actor’s patronage affords
  • A surer means of rising than a lord’s!
  • And wilt thou still the Camerino’s1 court,
  • Or to the hads of Bareas resort,
  • When tribunes Pelopea can create
  • And Philomela præfects, who shall rule the state?2

  At that time the player was in high favour at court, and many of those who fawned upon him were daily raised to posts of honour. Juvenal therefore incurred the suspicion of having covertly satirized occurrences which were then passing, and, although eighty years old at that time,3 he was immediately removed from the city, being sent into honourable banishment as præfect of a cohort, which was under orders to proceed to a station at the extreme frontier of Egypt.4 That sort of punishment was selected, as it appeared severe enough for an offence which was venial, and a mere piece of drollery. However, he died very soon afterwards, worn down by grief, and weary of his life.

  THE LIFE OF PERSIUS.

  Aulus Persius Flaccus was born the day before the Nones of December [4th Dec.],1 in the consulship of Fabius Persicus and L. Vitellius. He died on the eighth of the calends of December [24th Nov.],2 in the consulship of Rubrius Marius and Asinius Gallus. Though born at Volterra, in Etruria, he was a Roman knight, allied both by blood and marriage to persons of the highest rank.3 He ended his days at an estate he had at the eighth milestone on the Appian Way. His father, Flaccus, who died when he was barely six years old, left him under the care of guardians, and his mother, Fulvia Silenna, who afterwards married Fusius, a Roman knight, buried him also in a very few years. Persius Flaccus pursued his studies at Volterra till he was twelve years old, and then continued them at Rome, under Remmius Palæmon, the grammarian, and Verginius Flaccus, the rhetorician. Arriving at the age of twenty-one, he formed a friendship with Annæus Cornutus,4 which lasted through life; and from him he learned the rudiments of philosophy. Among his earliest friends were Cæsius Bassus,5 and Calpurnius Statura; the latter of whom died while Persius himself was yet in his youth. Servilius Numanus,1 he reverenced as a father. Through Cornutus he was introduced to Annæus, as well as to Lucan, who was of his own age, and also a disciple of Cornutus. At that time Cornutus was a tragic writer; he belonged to the sect of the Stoics, and left behind him some philosophical works. Lucan was so delighted with the writings of Persius Flaccus, that he could scarcely refrain from giving loud tokens of applause while the author was reciting them, and declared that they had the true spirit of poetry. It was late before Persius made the acquaintance of Seneca, and then he was not much struck with his natural endowments. At the house of Cornutus he enjoyed the society of two very learned and excellent men, who were then zealously devoting themselves to philosophical enquiries, namely, Claudius Agaternus, a physician from Lacedæmon, and Petronius Aristocrates, of Magnesia, men whom he held in the highest esteem, and with whom he vied in their studies, as they were of his own age, being younger than Cornutus. During nearly the last ten years of his life he was much beloved by Thraseas, so that he sometimes travelled abroad in his company; and his cousin Arria was married to him.

  Persius was remarkable for gentle manners, for a modesty amounting to bashfulness, a handsome form, and an attachment to his mother, sister, and aunt, which was most exemplary. He was frugal and chaste. He left his mother and sister twenty thousand sesterces, requesting his mother, in a written codicil, to present to Cornutus, as some say, one hundred sesterces, or as others, twenty pounds of wrought silver,2 besides about seven hundred books, which, indeed, included his whole library. Cornutus, however, would only take the books, and gave up the legacy to the sisters, whom his brother had constituted his heirs.

  He wrote3 seldom, and not very fast; even the work we possess he left incomplete. Some verses are wanting at the end of the book,4 but Cornutus thoughtlessly recited it, as if it was finished; and on Cæsius Bassus requesting to be allowed to publish it, he delivered it to him for that purpose. In his younger days, Persius had written a play, as well as an Itinerary, with several copies of verses on Thraseas’ father-in-law, and Arria’s1 mother, who had made away with herself before her husband. But Cornutus used his whole influence with the mother of Persius to prevail upon her to destroy these compositions. As soon as his book of Satires was published, all the world began to admire it, and were eager to buy it up. He died of a disease in the stomach, in the thirtieth year of his age.2 But no sooner had he left school and his masters, than he set to work with great vehemence to compose satires, from having read the tenth book of Lucilius; and made the beginning of that book his model; presently launching his invectives all around with so little scruple, that he did not spare cotemporary poets and orators, and even lashed Nero himself, who was then the reigning prince. The verse ran as follows:

  • Auriculas asini Mida rex habet;
  • King Midas has an ass’s ears;

  but Cornutus altered it thus;

  • Auriculas asini quis non habet?
  • Who has not an ass’s ears?

  in order that it might not be supposed that it was meant to apply to Nero.

  THE LIFE OF HORACE.

  Horatius Flaccus was a native of Venusium,3 his father having been, by his own account,4 a freedman and collector of taxes, but, as it is generally believed, a dealer in salted provisions; for some one with whom Horace had a quarrel, jeered him, by saying; “How often have I seen your father wiping his nose with his fist?” In the battle of Philippi, he served as a military tribune,1 which post he filled at the instance of Marcus Brutus,2 the general; and having obtained a pardon, on the overthrow of his party, he purchased the office of scribe to a quæstor. Afterwards insinuating himself first, into the good graces of Mecænas, and then of Augustus, he secured no small share in the regard of both. And first, how much Mecænas loved him may be seen by the epigram in which he says:

  • Ni te visceribus meis, Horati,
  • Plus jam diligo, Titium sodalem,
  • Ginno tu videas strigosiorem.3

  But it was more strongly exhibited by Augustus, in a short sentence uttered in his last moments: “Be as mindful of Horatius Flaccus as you are of me!” Augustus offered to appoint him his secretery, signifying his wishes to Mecænas in a letter to the following effect: “Hitherto I have been able to write my own epistles to friends; but now I am too much occupied, and in an infirm state of health. I wish, therefore, to deprive you of our Horace: let him leave, therefore, your luxurious table and come to the palace, and he shall assist me in writing my letters.” And upon his refusing to accept the office, he neither exhibited the smallest displeasure, nor ceased to heap upon him tokens of his regard. Letters of his are extant, from which I will make some short extracts to establish this: “Use your influence over me with the same freedom as you would do if we were living together as friends. In so doing you will be perfectly right, and guilty of no impropriety; for I could wish that our intercourse should be on that footing, if your health admitted of it.” And again: “How I hold you in memory you may learn from our friend Septimius,1 for I happened to mention you when he was present. And if you are so proud as to scorn my friendship, that is no reason why I should lightly esteem yours, in return.” Besides this, among other drolleries, he often called him, “his most immaculate penis,” and “his charming little man,” and loaded him from time to time with proofs of his munificence. He admired his works so much, and was so convinced of their enduring fame, that he directed him to compose the Secular Poem, as well as that on the victory of his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus over the Vindelici;2 and for this purpose urged him to add, after a long interval, a fourth book of Odes to the former three. After reading his “Sermones,” in which he found no mention of himself, he complained in these terms: “You must know that I am very angry with you, because in most of your works of this description you do not choose to address yourself to me. Are you afraid that, in times to come, your reputation will suffer, in case it should appear that you lived on terms of intimate friendship with me?” And he wrung from him the eulogy which begins with,

  • Cum tot sustineas, et tanta negotia solus:
  • Res Italas armis tuteris, moribus ornes,
  • Legibus emendes: in publica commoda peccem,
  • Si longo sermone morer tua tempora, Cæsar.

  • —Epist. ii. i.

  • While you alone sustain the important weight
  • Of Rome’s affairs, so various and so great;
  • While you the public weal with arms defend,
  • Adorn with morals, and with laws amend;
  • Shall not the tedious letter prove a crime,
  • That steals one moment of our Cæsar’s time.

  • —Francis.

  In person, Horace was short and fat, as he is described by himself in his Satires,3 and by Augustus in the following letter: “Dionysius has brought me your small volume, which, little as it is, not to blame you for that, I shall judge favourably. You seem to me, however, to be afraid lest your volumes should be bigger than yourself. But if you are short in stature, you are corpulent enough. You may, therefore, if you will, write in a quart, when the size of your volume is as large round as your paunch.”

  It is reported that he was immoderately addicted to venery. [For he is said to have had obscene pictures so disposed in a bedchamber lined with mirrors, that, whichever way he looked, lascivious images might present themselves to his view.1 ] He lived for the most part in the retirement of his farm,2 on the confines of the Sabine and Tiburtine territories, and his house is shewn in the neighbourhood of a little wood not far from Tibur. Some Elegies ascribed to him, and a prose Epistle apparently written to commend himself to Mecænas, have been handed down to us; but I believe that neither of them are genuine works of his; for the Elegies are commonplace, and the Epistle is wanting in perspicuity, a fault which cannot be imputed to his style. He was born on the sixth of the ides of December [27th December], in the consulship of Lucius Cotta3 and Lucius Torquatus; and died on the fifth of the calends of December [27th November], in the consulship of Caius Marcius Censorinus and Caius Asinius Gallus;4 having completed his fifty-ninth year. He made a nuncupatory will, declaring Augustus his heir, not being able, from the violence of his disorder, to sign one in due form. He was interred and lies buried on the skirts of the Esquiline Hill, near the tomb of Mecænas.5

  THE LIFE OF LUCAN.

  M. Annœus Lucanus, a native of Corduba,1 first tried the powers of his genius in an encomium on Nero, at the Quinquennial games. He afterwards recited his poem on the Civil War carried on between Pompey and Cæsar. His vanity was so immense, and he gave such liberty to his tongue, that in some preface, comparing his age and his first efforts with those of Virgil, he had the assurance to say: “And what now remains for me is to deal with a gnat.” In his early youth, after being long informed of the sort of life his father led in the country, in consequence of an unhappy marriage,2 he was recalled from Athens by Nero, who admitted him into the circle of his friends, and even gave him the honour of the quæstorship; but he did not long remain in favour. Smarting at this, and having publicly stated that Nero had withdrawn, all of a sudden, without communicating with the senate, and without any other motive than his own recreation, after this he did not cease to assail the emperor both with foul words and with acts which are still notorious. So that on one occasion, when easing his bowels in the common privy, there being a louder explosion than usual, he gave vent to the nemistych of Nero: “One would suppose it was thundering under ground,” in the hearing of those who were sitting there for the same purpose, and who took to their heels in much consternation.3 In a poem also, which was in every one’s hands, he severely lashed both the emperor and his most powerful adherents.

  At length, he became nearly the most active leader in Piso’s conspiracy;4 and while he dwelt without reserve in many quarters on the glory of those who dipped their hands in the blood of tyrants, he launched out into open threats of violence, and carried them so far as to boast that he would cast the emperor’s head at the feet of his neighbours. When, however, the plot was discovered, he did not exhibit any firmness of mind. A confession was wrung from him without much difficulty; and, humbling himself to the most abject entreaties, he even named his innocent mother as one of the conspirators;1 hoping that his want of natural affection would give him favour in the eyes of a parricidal prince. Having obtained permission to choose his mode of death,2 he wrote notes to his father, containing corrections of some of his verses, and, having made a full meal, allowed a physician to open the veins in his arm.3 I have also heard it said that his poems were offered for sale, and commented upon, not only with care and diligence, but also in a trifling way.4

  THE LIFE OF PLINY.5

  Plinius Secundus, a native of New Como,6 having served in the wars with strict attention to his duties, in the rank of a knight, distinguished himself, also, by the great integrity with which he administered the high functions of procurator for a long period in the several provinces intrusted to his charge. But still he devoted so much attention to literary pursuits, that it would not have been an easy matter for a person who enjoyed entire leisure to have written more than he did. He comprised, in twenty volumes, an account of all the various wars carried on in successive periods with the German tribes. Besides this, he wrote a Natural History, which extended to seven books. He fell a victim to the calamitous event which occurred in Campania. For, having the command of the fleet at Misenum, when Vesuvius was throwing up a fiery eruption, he put to sea with his gallies for the purpose of exploring the causes of the phenomenon close on the spot.1 But being prevented by contrary winds from sailing back, he was suffocated in the dense cloud of dust and ashes. Some, however, think that he was killed by his slave, having implored him to put an end to his sufferings, when he was reduced to the last extremity by the fervent heat.2

  the end of lives of the poets.

  LONDON

  PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,

  DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E., AND GREAT WINDMILL STREET, W.

  [1 ]Plin. Epist. i. 18, 24, iii. 8, v. 11, ix. 34, x. 95.

  [2 ]Lycée, part I. liv. III. c. i.

  [1 ]Julius Cæsar Divus. Romulus, the founder of Rome, had the honour of an apotheosis conferred on him by the senate, under the title of Quirinus, to obviate the people’s suspicion of his having been taken off by a conspiracy of the patrician order. Political circumstances again concurred with popular superstition to revive this posthumous adulation in favour of Julius Cæsar, the founder of the empire, who also fell by the hands of conspirators. It is remarkable in the history of a nation so jealous of public liberty, that, in both instances, they bestowed the highest mark of human homage upon men who owed their fate to the introduction of arbitrary power.

  [2 ]Pliny informs us that Caius Julius, the father of Julius Cæsar, a man of prætorian rank, died suddenly at Pisa.

  [3 ]a.u.c. (in the year from the foundation of Rome) 670, a.c. (before Christ) about 92.

  [4 ]Flamen Dialis. This was an office of great dignity, but subjected the holder to many restrictions. He was not allowed to ride on horseback, nor to absent himself from the city for a single night. His wife was also under particular restraints, and could not be divorced. If she died, the flamen resigned his office, because there were certain sacred rites which he could not perform without her assistance. Besides other marks of distinction, he wore a purple robe called læna, and a conical mitre called apex.

  [1 ]Two powerful parties were contending at Rome for the supremacy; Sylla being at the head of the faction of the nobles, while Marius espoused the cause of the people. Sylla suspected Julius Cæsar of belonging to the Marian party, because Marius had married his aunt Julia.

  [2 ]He wandered about for some time in the Sabine territory.

  [3 ]Bithynia, in Asia Minor, was bounded on the south by Phrygia on the west by the Bosphorus and Propontis; and on the north by the Euxine sea. Its boundaries towards the east are not clearly ascertained, Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy differing from each other on the subject.

  [1 ]Mitylene was a city in the island of Leshos, famous for the study of philosophy and eloquence. According to Pliny, it remained a free city and in power one thousand five hundred years. It suffered much in the Peloponnesian war from the Athenians, and in the Mathridatic from the Romans, by whom it was taken and destroyed. But it soon rose again, having recovered its ancient liberty by the favour of Pompey; and was afterwards much embellished by Trajan, who added to it the splendour of his own name. This was the country of Pittacus, one of the seven wise men of Greece, as well as of Alcæus and Sappho. The natives showed a particular taste for poetry, and had, as Plutarch informs us, stated times for the celebration of poetical contests.

  [2 ]The civic crown was made of oak-leaves, and given to him who had saved the life of a citizen. The person thus decorated, wore it at public spectacles, and sat next the senators. When he entered, the audience rose up, as a mark of respect.

  [3 ]A very extensive country of Hither Asia; lying between Pamphylia to the west. Mount Taurus and Amanus to the north. Syria to the east, and the Mediterranean to the south. It was anciently famous for saffron; and hair-cloth, called by the Romans cilicium, was the manufacture of this country.

  [4 ]A city and an island, near the coast of Caria, famous for the huge statue of the Sun, called the Colossus. The Rhodians were celebrated not only for skill in naval affairs, but for learning, philosophy, and eloquence. During the latter periods of the Roman republic, and under some of the emperors, numbers resorted there to prosecute their studies; and it also became a place of retreat to discontented Romans.

  [1 ]Pharmacusa, an island lying off the coast of Asia, near Miletus. It is now called Parmosa.

  [2 ]The ransom, too large for Cæsar’s private means, was raised by the voluntary contributions of the cities in the Asiatic province, who were equally liberal from their public funds in the case of other Romans who fell into the hands of pirates at that period.

  [3 ]From Miletus, as we are informed by Plutarch.

  [4 ]Who commanded in Spain.

  [1 ]Rex, it will be easily understood, was not a title of dignity in a Roman family, but the surname of the Marcii.

  [2 ]The rites of the Bona Dea, called also Fauna, which were performed in the night, and by women only.

  [3 ]Hispania Bœtica; the Hither province being called Hispania Tarraeonensis.

  [4 ]Alexander the Great was only thirty-three years at the time of his death.

  [1 ]The proper office of the master of the horse was to command the knights, and execute the orders of the dictator. He was usually nominated from amongst persons of consular and prætorian dignity; and had the use of a horse, which the dictator had not, without the order of the people.

  [2 ]Seneca compares the annals of Tanusius to the life of a fool, which, though it may be long, is worthless; while that of a wise man, like a good book, is valuable, however short.—Epist. 94.

  [3 ]Bibulus was Cæsar’s colleague, both as edile and consul. Cicero calls his edicts “Archilochian,” that is, as full of spite as the verses of Archilochus.—Ad. Attic. b. 7. ep. 24.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 689 Cicero holds both the Curio’s, father and son, very cheap.—Brut c. 60.

  [1 ]Regnum, the kingly power, which the Roman people considered an insupportable tyranny.

  [2 ]An honourable banishment.

  [3 ]The assemblies of the people were at first held in the open Forum. Afterwards, a covered building, called the Comitium, was erected for that purpose. There are no remains of it, but Lumisden thinks that it probably stood on the south side of the Forum, on the site of the present church of The Consolation.—Antiq of Rome, p. 357.

  [4 ]Basilicas, from βασιλεὺς; a king. They were, indeed, the palaces of the sovereign people; stately and spacious buildings, with halls, which served the purpose of exchanges, council chambers, and courts of justice. Some of the Basilicæ were afterwards converted into Christian churches. “The form was oblong; the middle was an open space to walk in, called Testudo, and which we now call the nave. On each side of this were rows of pillars, which formed what we should call the side-aisles, and which the ancients called Porticus The end of the Testudo was curved, like the apse of some of our churches, and was called Tribunal, from causes being heard there. Hence the term Tribune is applied to that part of the Roman churches which is behind the high altar.”—Burton’s Antiq. of Rome, p. 204.

  [1 ]Such as statues and pictures, the works of Greek artists.

  [2 ]It appears to have stood at the foot of the Capitoline hill. Piranesi thinks that the two beautiful columns of white marble, which are commonly described as belonging to the portico of the temple of Jupiter Stator are the remains of the temple of Castor and Pollux.

  [3 ]Ptolemy Auletes, the son of Cleopatra.

  [1 ]Lentulus, Cethegus, and others

  [1 ]The temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was commenced and completed by the Tarquins, kings of Rome, but not dedicated till the year after their expulsion, when that honour devolved on M. Horatius Fulvillus, the first of the consuls. Having been burnt down during the civil wars, a.u.c. 670, Sylla restored it on the same foundations, but did not live to consecrate it.

  [2 ]Meaning Pompey; not so much for the sake of the office, as having his name inserted in the inscription recording the repairs of the Capitol, instead of Catulus. The latter, however, secured the honour, and his name is still seen inscribed in an apartment at the Capitol, as its restorer.

  [3 ]It being the calends of January, the first day of the year, on which the magistrates solemnly entered on their offices, surrounded by their friends.

  [4 ]Among others, one for recalling Pompey from Asia, under the pretext that the commonwealth was in langer. Cato was one of the colleagues who saw through the design and opposed the decree.

  [1 ]See before, p. 5. This was in a.u.c. 693.

  [2 ]Plutarch informs us, that Cæsar, before he came into office, owed his creditors 1300 talents, somewhat more than £565,000 of our money. But his debts increased so much after this period, if we may believe Appian, that upon his departure for Spain, at the expiration of his prætorship, he is reported to have said, Bis millies et quingenties centena millia sibi adesse oportere, ut nihil haberet: i. e. That he was 2,000,000 and nearly 20,000 sesterces worse than penniless. Crassus became his security for 830 talents, about £871,500.

  [1 ]For his victories in Gallicia and Lusitania, having led his army to the shores of the ocean, which had not before been reduced to submission.

  [2 ]Cæsar was placed in this dilemma, that if he aspired to a triumph, he must remain outside the walls until it took place, while as a candidate for the consulship, he must be resident in the city.

  [3 ]Even the severe censor was biassed by political expediency to sanction a system, under which what little remained of public virtue, and the love of liberty at Rome, were fast decaying. The strict laws against bribery at elections were disregarded, and it was practised openly, and accepted without a blush. Sallust says that everything was venal, and that Rome itself might be bought, if any one was rich enough to purchase it. Jugurth, viii. 20, 3.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 695.

  [2 ]The proceedings of the senate were reported in short notes taken by one of their own order, “strangers” not being admitted at their sittings. These notes included speeches as well as acts. These and the proceedings of the assemblies of the people, were daily published in journals [diurna] which contained also accounts of the trials at law, with miscellaneous intelligence of births and deaths, marriages and divorces. The practice of publishing the proceedings of the senate, introduced by Julius Cæsar, was discontinued by Augustus.

  [3 ]Within the city, the lictors walked before only one of the consuls, and that commonly for a month alternately. A public officer, called Accensus, preceded the other consul, and the lictors followed. This custom had long been disused, but was now restored by Cæsar.

  [1 ]In order that he might be a candidate for the tribuneship of the people; it was done late in the evening, at an unusual hour for public business.

  [1 ]Gaul was divided into two provinces, Transalpina, or Gallia Ulterior, and Cisalpina, or Citerior. The Citerior, having nearly the same limits as Lombardy in after times, was properly a part of Italy, occupied by colorists from Gaul, and, having the Rubicon, the ancient boundary of Italy, on the south. It was also called Gallia Togata, from the use of the Roman toga; the inhabitants being after the social war admitted to the right of citizens. The Gallia Transalpina, or Ulterior, was called Comata, from the people wearing their hair long, while the Romans wore it short; and the southern part, afterwards called Narbonensis, came to have the epithet Braccata, from the use of the braccæ, which were no part of the Roman dress. Some writers suppose the braccæ to have been breeches, but Aldus, in a short disquisition on the subject, affirms that they were a kind of upper dress. And this opinion seems to be countenanced by the name braccan being applied by the modern Celtic nations, the descendants of the Gallic Celts to signify their upper garment, or plaid.

  [2 ]Alluding, probably, to certain scandals of a gross character which were rife against Cæsar. See before, c. ii. p. 2) and see also c. xlix.

  [1 ]So called from the feathers on their helmets, resembling the crest of a lark; Alauda. Fr. Alouette.]

  [2 ]Days appointed by the senate for public thanksgiving in the temples in the name of a victorious general, who had in the decrees the title of emperor, by which they were saluted by the legions.

  [1 ]a. u. c. 702.

  [2 ]Aurelia.

  [3 ]Julia, the wife of Pompey, who died in childbirth.

  [1 ]Conquest had so multiplied business at Rome, that the Roman forum became too little for transacting it, and could not be enlarged without clearing away the buildings with which it was surrounded Hence the enormous sum which its site is said to have cost, amounting, it is calculated, to £807,291 of our money It stood near the old forum, behind the temple of Romulus and Remus but not a vestige of it remains.

  [1 ]Comum was a town of the Orobii, of ancient standing, and formerly powerful. Julius Cæsar added to it five thousand new colonists; whence it was generally called Novocomum. But in time it recovered its ancient name, Comum; Pliny the younger, who was a native of this place, calling it by no other name.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 705.

  [1 ]

  • Ειπερ γαρ ἀδικεῖν χρὴ, τυραννίδος πέρι
  • Κάλλιστον ἀδικεῖν τἄλλα δε ἐυσεβεῖν χρεὼν.

  —Eurip. Phœniss. Act II., where Eteocles aspires to become the tyrant of Thebes.

  [1 ]Now the Pisatello; near Rimini. There was a very ancient law of the republic, forbidding any general, returning from the wars, to cross the Rubicon with his troops under arms.

  [2 ]The ring was worn on the finger next to the little finger of the left hand.

  [1 ]Suetonius here accounts for the mistake of the soldiers with great probability. The class to which they imagined they were to be promoted, was that of the equites, or knights, who wore a gold ring, and were possessed of property to the amount stated in the text. Great as was the liberality of Cæsar to his legions, the performance of this imaginary promise was beyond all reasonable expectation.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 706.

  [1 ]Elephants were first introduced at Rome by Pompey the Great, in his African triumph.

  [2 ]Veni, Vidi, Vici.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 708.

  [4 ]Gladiators were first publicly exhibited at Rome by two brothers called Bruti, at the funeral of their father, a.u.c. 490, and for some time they were exhibited only on such occasions. But afterwards they were also employed by the magistrates, to entertain the people, particularly at the Saturnalia, and feasts of Minerva. These cruel spectacles were prohibited by Constantine, but not entirely suppressed until the time of Honorius.

  [1 ]The Circensian games were shews exhibited in the Circus Maximus, and consisted of various kinds: first, chariot and horse-races, of which the Romans were extravagantly fond The charioteers were distributed into four parties, distinguished by the colour of their dress. The spectators, without regarding the speed of the horses, or the skill of the men, were attracted merely by one or the other of the colours, as caprice inclined them. In the time of Justinian, no less than thirty thousand men lost their lives at Constantinople, in a tumult raised by a contention amongst the partizans of the several colours. Secondly, contests of agility and strength; of which there were five kinds, hence called Pentathlum. These were, running, leaping, boxing, wrestling, and throwing the discus or quoit. Thirdly, Ludus Trojæ, a mock-fight, performed by young noblemen on horseback, revived by Julius Cæsar, and frequently celebrated by the succeeding emperors We meet with a description of it in the fifth book of the Æneid, beginning with the following lines:

  • Incedunt pueri, pariterque ante ora parentum
  • Frænatis lucent in equis: quos omnis euntes
  • Trinacriæ mirata fremit Trojæque juventus.

  Fourthly, Venatio, which was the fighting of wild beasts with one another, or with men called Bestiarii, who were either forced to the combat by way of punishment, as the primitive Christians were, or fought voluntarily, either from a natural ferocity of disposition, or induced by hire. An incredible number of animals of various kinds were brought from all quarters, at a prodigious expense, for the entertainment of the people. Pompey, in his second consulship, exhibited at once five hundred lions, which were all dispatched in five days; also eighteen elephants. Fifthly the representation of a horse and foot battle, with that of an encampment or a siege. Sixthly, the representation of a sea-fight (Naumachia), which was at first made in the Circus Maximus, but afterwards elsewhere. The combatants were usually captives or condemned malefactors, who fought to death, unless saved by the clemency of the emperor. If any thing unlucky happened at the games, they were renewed, and often more than once.

  [1 ]A meadow beyond the Tiber, in which an excavation was made, supplied with water from the river.

  [2 ]Julius Cæsar was assisted by Sosigenes, an Egyptian philosopher, in correcting the calendar. For this purpose he introduced an additional day every fourth year, making February to consist of twenty-nine days instead of twenty-eight, and, of course, the whole year to consist of three hundred and sixty-six days. The fourth year was denominated Bissextile, or leap year, because the sixth day before the calends, or first of March, was reckoned twice.
  
  The Julian year was introduced throughout the Roman empire, and continued in general use till the year 1582. But the true correction was not six hours, but five hours, forty-nine minutes; hence the addition was too great by eleven minutes. This small fraction would amount in one hundred years to three-fourths of a day, and in a thousand years to more than seven days. It had, in fact, amounted, since the Julian correction, in 1582, to more than seven days. Pope Gregory XIII., therefore, again reformed the calendar, first bringing forward the year ten days, by reckoning the 5th of October the 15th, and then prescribing the rule which has gradually been adopted throughout Christendom, except in Russia, and the Greek church generally.

  [1 ]Principally Carthage and Corinth.

  [1 ]The Latus Clavus was a broad stripe of purple, on the front of the toga. Its width distinguished it from that of the knights, who wore it narrow.

  [2 ]The Suburra lay between the Celian and Esquiline hills. It was one of the most frequented quarters of Rome.

  [3 ]Bede quoting Solinus, we believe, says that excellent pearls were found in the British seas, and that they were of all colours, but principally white. Eccl. Hist. b. i. c. l.

  [1 ]

  • — Bithynia quicquid
  • Et prædicator Cæsaris unquam habuit.

  [1 ]

  • Gallias Cæsar subegit, Nicomedes Cæsarem;
  • Ecce Cæsar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Gallias:
  • Nicomedes non triumphat. qui subegit Cæsarem.

  [2 ]Ægisthus, who, like Cæsar, was a pontiff, debauched Clytemnestia while Agamemnon was engaged in the Trojan war, as Cæsar did Mucia, the wife of Pompey, while absent in the war against Mithridates.

  [3 ]A double entendre; Tertia signifying the third [of the value of the farm], as well as being the name of the girl, for whose favours the deduction was made.

  [1 ]

  • Urbani, servate uxores; mœchum calvum adducimus:
  • Aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum.

  [1 ]Plutarch tells us that the oil was used in a dish of asparagus. Every traveller knows that in those climates oil takes the place of butter as an ingredient in cookery, and it needs no experience to fancy what it is when rancid.

  [1 ]Meritoria rheda; a light four-wheeled carriage, apparently hired either for the journey or from town to town. They were tolerably commodious, for Cicero writes to Atticus, (v. 17.) Hanc epistolam dictavi sedens in rheda, cum in castra proficiscerer.

  [2 ]Plutarch informs us that Cæsar travelled with such expedition, that he reached the Rhone on the eighth day after he left Rome.

  [3 ]Cæsar tells us himself that he employed C. Volusenus to reconnoitre the coast of Britain, sending him forward in a long ship, with orders to return and make his report before the expedition sailed.

  [4 ]Religione; that is, the omens being unfavourable.

  [1 ]The standard of the Roman legions was an eagle fixed on the head of a spear. It was silver, small in size, with expanded wings, and clutching a golden thunderbolt in its claw.

  [1 ]To save them from the torture of a lingering death.

  [1 ]Now Lerida, in Catalonia.

  [1 ]The title of emperor was not new in Roman history; 1. It was sometimes given by the acclamations of the soldiers to those who commanded them. 2. It was synonymous with conqueror, and the troops harled him by that title after a victory. In both these cases it was merely titular, and not permanent, and was generally written after the proper name, as Cicero imperator, Lentulo imperatore. 3. It assumed a permanent and royal character first in the person of Julius Cæsar, and was then generally prefixed to the emperor’s name in inscriptions, as imp. cæsar. divi &c.

  [2 ]Cicero was the first who received the honour of being called “Pater patriæ.”

  [3 ]Statues were placed in the Capitol of each of the seven kings of Rome to which an eighth was added in honour of Brutus, who expelled the last. The statue of Julius Cæsar was afterwards raised near them.

  [1 ]The white fillet was one of the insignia of royalty. Plutarch, on this occasion, uses the expression, διαδήματι βασιλικῷ, a royal diadem.

  [2 ]The Lupercalia was a festival, celebrated in a place called the Lupercal, in the month of February, in honour of Pan. During the solemnity, the Luperci, or priests of that god, ran up and down the city naked, with only a girdle of goat’s skin round their waist, and thongs of the same in their hands; with which they struck those they met, particularly married women, who were thence supposed to be rendered prolific.

  [3 ]Persons appointed to inspect and expound the Sibylline books.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 709.

  [1 ]See before, c. xxii.

  [1 ]This senate-house stood in that part of the Campus Martius which is now the Campo di Fiore, and was attached by Pompey, “spoliis Orientis Onustus,” to the magnificent theatre, which he built a.u c 698, in his second consulship. His statue, at the foot of which Cæsar fell, as Plutarch tells us, was placed in it. We shall find that Augustus caused it to be removed.

  [1 ]The stylus, or graphium, was an iron pen, broad at one end, with a sharp point at the other, used for writing upon waxen tables, the leaves or bark of trees, plates of brass, or lead, &c. For writing upon paper or parchment, the Romans employed a reed, sharpened and split in the point like our pens, called calamus, arundo, or canna. This they dipped in the black liquor emitted by the cuttle fish, which served for ink.

  [2 ]It was customary among the ancients, in great extremities to shroud the face, in order to conceal any symptoms of horror or alarm which the countenance might express. The skirt of the toga was drawn round the lower extremities, that there might be no exposure in falling, as the Romans, at this period, wore no covering for the thighs and legs.

  [3 ]Cæsar’s dying apostrophe to Brutus is represented in all the editions of Suetonius as uttered in Greek, but with some variations. The words, as here translated, are Καὶ σὺ ἐῖ ἐκείνων; καὶ σὺ τέκνον. The Salmasian manuscript omits the latter clause. Some commentators suppose that the words “my son,” were not merely expressive of the difference of age, or former familiarity between them, but an avowal that Brutus was the fruit of the connection between Julius and Servilia, mentioned before [see p. 33]. But it appears very improbable that Cæsar, who had never before acknowledged Brutus to be his son, should make so unnecessary an avowal, at the moment of his death. Exclusively of this objection, the apostrophe seems too verbose, both for the suddenness and urgency of the occasion. But this is not all. Can we suppose that Cæsar, though a perfect master of Greek, would at such a time have expressed himself in that language, rather than in Latin, his familiar tongue, and in which he spoke with peculiar elegance? Upon the whole, the probability is, that the words uttered by Cæsar were, Et tu Brute! which, while equally expressive of astonishment with the other version, and even of tenderness, are both more natural, and more emphatic.

  [1 ]Men’ me servasse, ut essent qui me perderent?

  [1 ]The Bulla, generally made of gold, was a hollow globe, which boys wore upon their breast, pendant from a string or ribbon put round the neck. The sons of freedmen and poor citizens used globes of leather

  [2 ]Josephus frequently mentions the benefits conferred on his countrymen by Julius Cæsar. Antiq. Jud. xiv. 14, 15, 16.

  [1 ]Appian informs us that it was burnt by the people in their fury, B. c xi. p 521.

  [2 ]Suetonius particularly refers to the conspirators, who perished at the battle of Philippi, or in the three years which intervened The survivors were included in the reconciliation of Augustus, Antony, and Pompey, a.u.c. 715.

  [3 ]Suetonius alludes to Brutus and Cassius, of whom this is related by Plutarch and Dio.

  [1 ]For observations on Dr. Thomson’s Essays appended to Suetonius’. History of Julius Cæsar, and the succeeding Emperors, see the Preface to this volume.

  [1 ]He who has a devoted admiration of Cicero, may be sure that he has made no slight proficiency himself.

  [1 ]A town in the ancient Volscian territory, now called Veletri. It stands on the verge of the Pontine Marshes, on the road to Naples.

  [1 ]Thurium was a territory in Magna Græcia, on the coast, near Tarentum.

  [2 ]Argentarius; a banker, one who dealt in exchanging money, as well as lent his own funds at interest to borrowers. As a class, they possessed great wealth, and were persons of consideration in Rome at this period.

  [1 ]Now Laricia, or Riccia, a town of the Campagna di Roma, on the Appian Way, about ten miles from Rome.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 691. a.c. (before Christ) 61.

  [3 ]The Palatine hill was not only the first seat of the colony of Romulus, but gave its name to the first and principal of the four regions into which the city was divided, from the time of Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, to that of Augustus; the others being the Suburra, Esquilina, and Collina.

  [4 ]There were seven streets or quarters in the Palatine region, one of which was called “Ad Capita Bubula,” either from the butchers’ stalls at which ox-heads are hung up for sale, or from their being sculptured on some edifice. Thus the remains of a fortification near the tomb of Cecilia Metella are now called Capo di Bove, from the arms of the Gaetani family over the gate.

  [1 ]Adrian, to whom Suetonius was secretary.

  [1 ]Augusto augurio postquam inclyta condita Roma est.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 711.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 712.

  [1 ]After being defeated in the second engagement, Brutus retired to a hill, and slew himself in the night.

  [2 ]The triumvir. There were three distinguished brothers of the name of Antony; Mark, the consul; Caius, who was prætor; and Lucius, a tribune of the people.

  [3 ]Virgil was one of the fugitives, having narrowly escaped being killed by the centurion Ario; and being ejected from his farm. Eclog. i.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 714.

  [2 ]The anniversary of Julius Cæsar’s death.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 712—718.

  [4 ]The Romans employed slaves in their wars only in cases of great emergency, and with much reluctance. After the great slaughter at the battle of Cannæ, eight thousand were bought and armed by the republic. Augustus was the first who manumitted them, and employed them as rowers in his gallies.

  [1 ]In the triumvirate, consisting of Augustus, Mark Antony, and Lepidus

  [2 ]a.u.c. 723.

  [1 ]There is no other authority for Augustus having viewed Antony’s corpse. Plutarch informs us, that on hearing his death, Augustus retired into the interior of his tent, and wept over the fate of his colleague and friend, his associate in so many former struggles, both in war and the administration of affairs.

  [2 ]The poison proved fatal, as every one knows, see Velleius, ii. 27; Florus, iv. 11. The Psylli were a people of Africa, celebrated for sucking the poison from wounds inflicted by serpents, with which that country anciently abounded. They pretended to be endowed with an antidote, which rendered their bodies insensible to the virulence of that species of poison; and the ignorance of those times gave credit to the physical immunity which they arrogated. But Celsus, who flourished about fifty years after the period we speak of, has exploded the vulgar prejudice which prevailed in their favour. He justly observes, that the venom of serpents, like some other kinds of poison, proves noxious only when applied to the naked fibre; and that, provided there is no ulcer in the gums or palate, the poison may be received into the mouth with perfect safety.

  [1 ]Strabo informs us that Ptolemy caused it to be deposited in a golden sarcophagus, which was afterwards exchanged for one of glass, in which probably Augustus saw the remains.

  [2 ]A custom of all ages and of people the most remote from each other.

  [3 ]Meaning the degenerate race of the Ptolomean kings.

  [4 ]The naval trophies were formed of the prows of ships

  [1 ]a.u.c. 721.

  [2 ]Because his father was a Roman and his mother of the race of the Parthini, an Illyrian tribe.

  [3 ]It was usual at Rome, before the elections, for the candidates to endeavour to gain popularity by the usual arts. They would therefore go to the houses of the citizens, shake hands with those they met, and address them in a kindly manner. It being of great consequence, upon those occasions, to know the names of persons, they were commonly attended by a nomenclator, who whispered into their ears that information, wherever it was wanted. Though this kind of officer was generally an attendant on men, we meet with instances of their having been likewise employed in the service of ladies; either with the view of serving candidates to whom they were allied, or of gaining the affections of the people.

  [1 ]Not a bridge over a river, but a military engine used for gaining admittance into a fortress.

  [2 ]Cantabria, in the north of Spain, now the Basque province.

  [3 ]The ancient Pannonia includes Hungary and part of Austria, Styria and Carmola.

  [4 ]The Rhætian Alps are that part of the chain bordering on the Tyrol.

  [5 ]The Vindelici principally occupied the country which is now the kingdom of Bavaria; and the Salassii, that part of Piedmont which includes the valley of Aost.

  [6 ]The temple of Mars Ultor was erected by Augustus in fulfilment of a vow made by him at the battle of Philippi. It stood in the Forum which he built, mentioned in chap. xxxix. There are no remains of either.

  [1 ]“The Ovatio was an inferior land of Triumph, granted in cases where the victory was not of great importance, or had been obtained without difficulty. The general entered the city on foot or on horseback, crowned with myrtle, not with laurel; and instead of bullocks, the sacrifice was performed with a sheep, whence this procession acquired its name.”—Thomson.

  [2 ]“The greater Triumph, in which the victorious general and his army advanced in solemn procession through the city to the Capitol, was the highest military honour which could be obtained in the Roman state. Foremost in the procession went musicians of various kinds, singing and playing triumphal songs. Next were led the oxen to be sacrificed, having their horns gilt, and their heads adorned with fillets and garlands. Then in carriages were brought the spoils taken from the enemy, statues, pictures, plate, armour, gold and silver, and brass; with golden crowns, and other gifts, sent by the allied and tributary states. The captive princes and generals followed in chains, with their children and attendants. After them came the lictors, having their fasces wreathed with laurel, followed by a great company of musicians and dancers dressed like Satyrs, and wearing crowns of gold; in the midst of whom was one in a female dress, whose business it was, with his looks and gestures, to insult the vanquished. Next followed a long train of persons carrying perfumes. Then came the victorious general, dressed in purple embroidered with gold, with a crown of laurel on his head, a branch of laurel in his right hand, and in his left an ivory sceptre, with an eagle on the top; having his face painted with vermilion, in the same manner as the statue of Jupiter on festival days, and a golden Bulla hanging on his breast, and containing some amulet, or magical preservative against envy. He stood in a gilded chariot adorned with ivory, and drawn by four white horses, sometimes by elephants, attended by his relations, and a great crowd of citizens, all in white. His children used to ride in the chariot with him; and that he might not be too much elated, a slave, carrying a golden crown sparkling with gems, stood behind him, and frequently whispered in his ear, ‘Remember that thou art a man!’ After the general, followed the consuls and senators on foot, at least according to the appointment of Augustus; for they formerly used to go before him His Legats and military Tribunes commonly rode by his side. The victorious army, horse and foot, came last, crowned with laurel, and decorated with the gifts which they had received for their valour, singing their own and their general’s praises, but sometimes throwing out railleries against him; and often exclaiming, ‘Io Triumphe!’ in which they were joined by all the citizens, as they passed along. The oxen having been sacrificed, the general gave a magnificent entertainment in the Capitol to his friends and the chief men of the city; after which he was conducted home by the people, with music and a great number of lamps and torches.”—Thomson.

  [1 ]“The Sella Curulis was a chair on which the principal magistrates sat in the tribunal upon solemn occasions. It had no back, but stood on four crooked feet, fixed to the extremities of cross pieces of wood, joined by a common axis, somewhat in the form of the letter X; was covered with leather, and inlaid with ivory. From its construction, it might be occasionally folded together for the convenience of carriage, and set down where the magistrate chose to use it”—Thomson.

  [2 ]Now Saragossa.

  [3 ]A great and wise man, if he is the same person to whom Cicero’s letters on the calamities of the times were addressed. Fam. Epist c. vi. 20, 21.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 731.

  [2 ]The Lustrum was a period of five years, at the end of which the census of the people was taken. It was first made by the Roman kings, then by the consuls, but after the year 310 from the building of the city, by the censors, who were magistrates created for that purpose. It appears, however, that the census was not always held at stated periods, and sometimes long intervals intervened

  [1 ]Augustus appears to have been in earnest on these occasions, at least, in his desire to retire into private life and release himself from the cares of government, if we may believe Seneca. De Brev. Vit. c. 5 Of his two intimate advisers, Agrippa gave this counsel, while Mecænas was for continuing his career of ambition.—Eutrop. l. 53.

  [2 ]The Tiber has been always remarkable for the frequency of its inundations and the ravages they occasioned, as remarked by Pliny, iii. 5. Livy mentions several such occurrences, as well as one extensive fire, which destroyed great part of the city.

  [3 ]The well known saying of Augustus, recorded by Suetonius, that he found a city of bricks, but left it of marble, has another version given it by Dio, who applies it to his consolidation of the government, to the following effect: “That Rome, which I found built of mud, I shall leave you firm as a rock”—Dio. lvi. p. 589.

  [1 ]The same motive which engaged Julius Cæsar to build a new forum, induced Augustus to erect another. See his life c xx. It stood behind the present churches of St. Adrian and St. Luke, and was almost parallel with the public forum, but there are no traces of it remaining. The temple of Mars Ultor, adjoining, has been mentioned before, p. 84.

  [2 ]The temple of the Palatine Apollo stood, according to Bianchini, a little beyond the triumphal arch of Titus. It appears, from the reverse of a medal of Augustus, to have been a rotondo, with an open portico, something like the temple of Vesta. The statues of the fifty daughters of Danae surrounded the portico; and opposite to them were their husbands on horseback. In this temple were preserved some of the finest works of the Greek artists, both in sculpture and painting. Here, in the presence of Augustus, Horace’s Carmen Seculare was sung by twenty-seven noble youths and as many virgins. And here, as our author informs us, Augustus, towards the end of his reign, often assembled the senate.

  [3 ]The library adjoined the temple and was under the protection of Apollo. Caius Julius Hegenus, a freedman of Augustus, and an eminent grammarian, was the librarian.

  [1 ]The three fluted Corinthian columns of white marble, which stand on the declivity of the Capitoline hill, are commonly supposed to be the remains of the temple of Jupiter Tonans, erected by Augustus. Part of the frieze and cornice are attached to them, which with the capitals of the columns are finely wrought. Suetonius tells us on what occasion this temple was erected. Of all the epithets given to Jupiter, none conveyed more terror to superstitious minds than that of the Thunderer—

  • Cœlo tonantem credidimus Jovem
  • Regnare.
  • —Hor. l iii. Ode 5.

  We shall find this temple mentioned again in c xci. of the life of Augustus.

  [2 ]The Portico of Octavia stood between the Flaminian circus and the theatre of Marcellus, enclosing the temples of Jupiter and Juno, said to have been built in the time of the republic. Several remains of them exist in the Pescheria or fish-market; they were of the Corinthian order, and have been traced and engraved by Piranesi.

  [3 ]The magnificent theatre of Marcellus was built on the site where Suetonius has before informed us that Julius Cæsar intended to erect one (p. 30). It stood between the portico of Octavia and the hill of the capitol. Augustus gave it the name of his nephew Marcellus, though he was then dead. Its ruins are still to be seen in the Piazza Montanara, where the Orsini family have a palace erected on the site.

  [4 ]The theatre of Balbus was the third of the three permanent theatres of Rome. Those of Pompey and Marcellus have been already mentioned.

  [5 ]Among these were, at least, the noble portico, if not the whole, of the Pantheon, still the pride of Rome, under the name of the Rotondo, on the frieze of which may be seen the inscription,
  
  m. agrippa. l. f. cos: tertium. fecit.Agrippa also built the temple of Neptune, and the portico of the Argonauts.

  [1 ]To whatever extent Augustus may have cleared out the bed of the Tiber, the process of its being encumbered with an alluvium of ruins and mud has been constantly going on. Not many years ago, a scheme was set on foot for clearing it by private enterprise, principally for the sake of the valuable remains of art which it is supposed to contain.

  [2 ]The Via Flaminia was probably undertaken by the censor Caius Flaminius, and finished by his son of the same name, who was consul a.u.c. 566, and employed his soldiers in forming it after subduing the Ligurians. It led from the Flumentan gate, now the Porta del Popolo, through Etruria and Umbria into the Cisalpine Gaul, ending at Ariminum, the frontier town of the territories of the republic, now Rimini, on the Adriatic; and is travelled by every tourist who takes the route, north of the Appenines, through the States of the Church, to Rome. Every one knows that the great highways, not only in Italy but in the provinces, were among the most magnificent and enduring works of the Roman people.

  [1 ]It had formed a sort of honourable retirement in which Lepidus was shelved, to use a familiar expression, when Augustus got rid of him quietly from the Triumvirate. Augustus assumed it a.u.c. 740, thus centring the last of all the great offices of the state in his own person; that of Pontifex Maximus, being of high importance, from the sanctity attached to it, and the influence it gave him over the whole system of religion.

  [2 ]In the thirty-six years since the calendar was corrected by Julius Cæsar, the priests had erroneously intercalated eleven days instead of nine. See Julius, c xl

  [3 ]Sextilis, the sixth month, reckoning from March, in which the year of Romulus commenced.

  [4 ]So Cicero called the day on which he returned from exile, the day of his “nativity” and his “new birth,” παλιγεννεσίαν, a word which had afterwards a theological sense, from its use in the New Testament.

  [5 ]Capi There is a peculiar force in the word here adopted by Suetonius; the form used by the Pontifex Maximus, when he took the novice from the hand of her father being Te capio amata, “I have you, my dear,” implying the forcible breach of former ties, as in the case of a captive taken in war.

  [6 ]At times when the temple of Janus was shut, and then only, certain divinations were made, preparatory to solemn supplication for the public health, “as if,” says Dio, “even that could not be implored from the gods, unless the signs were propitious.” It would be an inquiry of some interest, now that the care of the public health is becoming a department of the state, with what sanatory measures these becoming solemnities were attended.

  [1 ]Theophrastus mentions the spring and summer flowers most suited for these chaplets. Among the former, were hyacinths, roses, and white violets; among the latter, lychinis, amaryllis, iris, and some species of lilies.

  [2 ]Ergastulis. These were subterranean strong rooms, with narrow windows, like dungeons, in the country houses, where incorrigible slaves were confined in fetters, in the intervals of the severe tasks in grinding at the hand-mills, quarrying stones, drawing water, and other hard agricultural labour in which they were employed.

  [1 ]These months were not only “the Long Vacation” of the lawyers but during them there was a general cessation of business at Rome; the calendar exhibiting a constant succession of festivals. The month of December, in particular, was devoted to pleasure and relaxation.

  [2 ]Causes are mentioned, the hearing of which was so protracted that lights were required in the court; and sometimes they lasted, we are told, as long as eleven or twelve days.

  [1 ]Orcini. They were also called Charonites, the point of the sarcasm being, that they owed their elevation to a dead man, one who was gone to Orcus, namely Julius Cæsar, after whose death Mark Antony introduced into the senate many persons of low rank who were designated for that honour in a document left by the deceased emperor

  [2 ]Cordus Cremutius wrote a History of the Civil Wars, and the Times of Augustus, as we are informed by Dio, 6, 52.

  [3 ]In front of the orchestra.

  [4 ]The senate usually assembled in one of the temples, and there was an altar consecrated to some god in the curia, where they otherwise met, as that to Victory in the Julian Curia.

  [5 ]To allow of their absence during the vintage, always an important season in rural affairs in wine-growing countries. In the middle and south of Italy, it begins in September, and, in the worst aspects, the grapes are generally cleared before the end of October. In elevated districts they hung on the trees, as we have witnessed, till the month of November.

  [1 ]Julius Cæsar had introduced the contrary practice. See Julius, c. xx.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 312, two magistrates were created, under the name of Censors, whose office, at first, was to take an account of the number of the people, and the value of their estates. Power was afterwards granted them to inspect the morals of the people; and from this period the office became of great importance. After Sylla, the election of censors was intermitted or about seventeen years. Under the emperors, the office of censor was abolished; but the chief functions of it were exercised by the emperors themselves, and frequently both with caprice and severity.

  [1 ]Young men until they were seventeen years of age, and young women until they were married, wore a white robe bordered with purple, called Toga Prætexta. The former, when they had completed this period, laid aside the dress of minority, and assumed the Toga Virilis, or manly habit. The ceremony of changing the Toga was performed with great solemnity before the images of the Lares, to whom the Bulla was consecrated. On this occasion, they went either to the Capitol, or to some temple, to pay their devotions to the Gods.

  [2 ]Transvectio: a procession of the equestrian order, which they made with great splendour through the city, every year, on the fifteenth of July. They rode on horseback from the temple of Honour, or of Mars, without the city, to the Capitol, with wreaths of olive on their heads, dressed in robes of scarlet, and bearing in their hands the military ornaments which they had received from their general, as a reward of their valour. The knights rode up to the censor, seated on his curule chair in front of the Capitol, and dismounting, led their horses in review before him. If any of the knights was corrupt in his morals, had diminished his fortune below the legal standard, or even had not taken proper care of his horse, the censor ordered him to sell his horse, by which he was considered as degraded from the equestrian order.

  [1 ]Pugillaria were a kind of pocket book, so called, because memorandums were written or impinged by the styli on their waxed surface. They appear to have been of very ancient origin, for we read of them in Homer under the name of Πίνακες.—II. ζ. 169. Γράψας ἐν πίνακι πτυκτῷ θυμοϕθόρα πολλά.Writing dire things upon his tablet’s roll.

  [1 ]Pullatorum; dusky, either from their dark colour, or their being soiled. The toga was white, and was the distinguishing costume of the sovereign people of Rome, without which, they were not to appear to public; as members of an university are forbidden to do so, without the academical dress, or officers in garrisons out of their regimentals.

  [2 ]Æn. i. 186.

  [1 ]It is hardly necessary to direct the careful reader’s attention to views of political economy so worthy of an enlightened prince. But it was easier to make the Roman people wear the toga, than to forego the cry of “Panem et Circenses.”

  [2 ]Septa were enclosures made with boards, commonly for the purpose of distributing the people into distinct classes, and erected occasionally like our hustings.

  [1 ]The Thensa was a splendid carriage with four wheels, and four horses, adorned with ivory and silver, in which, at the Circensian games, the images of the gods were drawn in solemn procession from their shrines, to a place in the circus, called the Pulvinar, where couches were prepared for their reception. It received its name from thongs (lora tensa) stretched before it; and was attended in the procession by persons of the first rank, in their most magnificent apparel. The attendants took delight in putting their hands to the traces: and if a bov happened to let go the thong which he held, it was an indispensable rule that the procession should be renewed.

  [1 ]The Cavea was the name of the whole of that part of the theatre where the spectators sat. The foremost rows were called cavea prima of cavea; the last, cavea ultima, or summa; and the middle, cavea media.]

  [1 ]a.u.c. 726.

  [2 ]As in the case of Herod. Joseph. Antiq. Jud. xv. 10.

  [1 ]The Adriatic and the Tuscan.

  [2 ]It was first established by Tiberius. See c. xxxvii.

  [1 ]Tertullian, in his Apology, c. 34, makes the same remark. The word seems to have conveyed then, as it does in its theological sense now, the idea of Divinity, for it is coupled with Deus, God; nunquum se dominum vel deum appellare voluerit.

  [1 ]An inclosure in the middle of the Forum, marking the spot where Curtius leapt into the lake, which had been long since filled up.

  [2 ]Sandalarium, Tragœdum; names of streets, in which temples of those gods stood; as we now say St. Peter, Cornhill, &c.

  [1 ]A coin, in value about 8¾d. of our money.

  [2 ]The senate, as instituted by Romulus, consisted of one hundred members, who were called Patres, i. e. Fathers, either upon account of their age, or their paternal care of the state. The number received some augmentation under Tullus Hostilius; and Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome, added a hundred more, who were called Patres minorum gentium; those created by Romulus being distinguished by the name of Patres majorum gentium. Those who were chosen into the senate by Brutus, after the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, to supply the place of those whom that king had slain, were called Conscripti, i. e. persons written or enrolled among the old senators, who alone were properly styled Patres. Hence arose the custom of summoning to the senate those who were Patres, and those who were Conscripti; and hence also was applied to the senators in general the designation of Patres Conscripti, the particle et, and, being understood to connect the two classes of senators. In the time of Julius Cæsar the number of senators was increased to nine hundred, and after his death to a thousand; many worthless persons having been admitted into the senate during the civil wars. Augustus afterwards reduced the number to six hundred.

  [1 ]Antonius Musa was a freedman, and had acquired his knowledge of medicine while a domestic slave a very common occurrence

  [2 ]a.u.c. 711

  [1 ]See cc. x. xi. xii and xiii.

  [2 ]One of them was Scipio, the father of Cornelia, whose death is lamented by Propertius, iv. 12. The other is unknown.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 715

  [4 ]He is mentioned by Horace:
  
  Occidit Daci Cotisonis agimen. Ode 8. b iii. Most probably Antony knew the imputation to be unfounded, and made it for the purpose of excusing his own marriage with Cleopatra.

  [1 ]This form of adoption consisted in a fictitious sale. See Cicero, Topic. iii.

  [2 ]Curiæ. Romulus divided the people of Rome into three tribes; and each tribe into ten Curiæ. The number of tribes was afterwards increased by degrees to thirty-five; but that of the Curiæ always remained the same.

  [1 ]She was removed to Reggio in Calabria.

  [2 ]Agrippa was first banished to the little desolate island of Planasia, now Pianosa. It is one of the group in the Tuscan sea, between Elba and Corsica

  [3 ]A quotation from the Iliad, 40. iii.; where Hector is venting his rage on Paris. The inflexion is slightly changed, the line in the original commencing, “Αιθ’ ὄφελες, &c., would thou wert, &c.

  [1 ]Women called ustriculæ, the barbers, were employed in this delicate operation. It is alluded to by Juvenal, ix. 4, and Martial, v. 61.

  [2 ]Cybele.—Gallus was either the name of a river in Phrygia, supposed to cause a certain frenzy in those who drank of its waters, or the proper name of the first priest of Cybele.

  [3 ]A small drum, beat by the finger or thumb, was used by the priests of Cybele in their lascivious rites and in other orgies of a similar description. These drums were made of inflated skin, circular in shape, so that they had some resemblance to the orb which, in the statues of the emperor, he is represented as holding in his hand. The populace, with the coarse humour which was permitted to vent itself freely at the spectacles, did not hesitate to apply what was said in the play of the lewd priest of Cybele, to Augustus, in reference to the scandals attached to his private character. The word cinædus, translated “wanton,” might have been rendered by a word in vulgar use, the coarsest in the English language, and there is probably still more in the allusion too indelicate to be dwelt upon.

  [1 ]Mark Antony makes use of fondling diminutives of the names of Tertia, Terentia, and Rufa, some of Augustus’s favourities.

  [2 ]Δωδεκάθεος; the twelve Dii Majores; they are enumerated in two verses by Ennius:—

  • Juno, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, Venus, Mars;
  • Mercurius, Jovis, Neptunus, Vulcanus, Apollo.

  [1 ]Probably in the Suburra, where Martial informs us that torturing scourges were sold:

  • Tonstrix Suburræ faucibus sed et primis,
  • Cruenta pendent qua flagella tortorum.
  • Mart xi. 15, 1.

  [2 ]Like the gold and silver-smiths of the middle ages, the Roman money-lenders united both trades. See afterwards, Nero, c. 5. It is hardly necessary to remark that vases or vessels of the compound metal which went by the name of Corinthian brass, or bronze, were esteemed even more valuable than silver plate.

  [1 ]See c. xxxii. and note.

  [2 ]The Romans, at their feasts, during the intervals of drinking, often played at dice, of which there were two kinds, the tesseræ and tali. The former had six sides, like the modern dice; the latter, four oblong sides, for the two ends were not regarded. In playing, they used three tesseræ and four tali, which were all put into a box wider below than above, and being shaken, were thrown out upon the gaming-board or table.

  [3 ]The highest cast was so called.

  [1 ]Enlarged by Tiberius and succeeding emperors. The ruins of the palace of the Cæsars are still seen on the Palatine.

  [2 ]Probably travertine, a soft limestone, from the Alban Mount, which was, therefore, cheaply procured and easily worked.

  [3 ]It was usual among the Romans to have separate sets of apartments for summer and winter use, according to their exposure to the sun.

  [4 ]This word may be interpreted the Cabinet of Arts. It was common, in the houses of the great, among the Romans, to have an apartment called the Study, or Museum. Pliny says, beautifully, “O mare! O littus! verum secretumque μουσεῖον, quam multa invenitis, quam multa dictatis?” O sea! O shore! Thou real and secluded museum; what treasures of science do you not discover to us, how much do you teach us!—Epist. i. 9.

  [5 ]Mecænas had a house and gardens on the Esquiline Hill, celebrated for their salubrity— Nunc licet Esquiliis habitore salubribus — Hor. Sat. i 8 14.

  [1 ]Such as Baiæ, and the islands of Ischia, Procida, Capri, and others; the resorts of the opulent nobles, where they had magnificent marine villas.

  [2 ]Now Tivoli, a delicious spot, where Horace had a villa, in which he hoped to spend his declining years.

  • Ver ubi longum, tepidasque præbet
  • Jupiter brumas: . . . . . .
  • . . . . . ibi, tu calentem
  • Debitâ sparges lachrymâ favillam
  • Vatis amici.
  • Odes, B. ii. 5.

  Adrian also had a magnificent villa near Tibur.

  [3 ]The Toga was a loose woollen robe, which covered the whole body, close at the bottom, but open at the top down to the girdle, and without sleeves. The right arm was thus at liberty, and the left supported a flap of the toga, which was drawn up, and thrown back over the left shoulder; forming what is called the Sinus, a fold or cavity upon the breast, in which things might be carried, and with which the face or head might be occasionally covered When a person did any work, he tucked up his toga, and girt it round him. The toga of the rich and noble was finer and larger than that of others; and a new toga was called Pexa. None but Roman citizens were permitted to wear the toga; and banished persons were prohibited the use of it. The colour of the toga was white. The clavus was a purple border, by which the senators, and other orders, with the magistrates, were distinguished; the breadth of the stripe corresponding with their rank.

  [1 ]In which the whole humour of the thing consisted either in the uses to which these articles were applied, or in their names having in Latin a double signification; matters which cannot be explained with any decency.

  [1 ]Casum bubulum manu pressum: probably soft cheese, not reduced to solid consistence in the cheese-press.

  [2 ]A species of fig tree, known in some places as Adam’s fig. We haye gathered them, in those climates, of the latter crop, as late as the month of November.

  [3 ]Sabbatis Jejunium. Augustus might have been better informed of the Jewish rites, from his familiarity with Herod and others; for it is certain that their sabbath was not a day of fasting. Justin, however, fell into the same error: he says, that Moses appointed the sabbath-day to be kept for ever by the Jews as a fast, in memory of their fasting for seven days in the deserts of Arabia, xxxvi. 2. 14. But we find that there was a weekly fast among the Jews, which is perhaps what is here meant; the Sabbatis Jejunium being equivalent to the Νηστεύω δίς τοῦ σαββάτου, ‘I fast twice in the week’ of the Pharisee, in St. Luke xviii. 12.

  [1 ]The Rhætian wines had a great reputation; Virgil says,

  • — Ex quo te carmine dicam,
  • Rhætica.
  • Georg. ii. 96.

  The vineyards lay at the foot of the Rhætian Alps; their produce, we have reason to believe, was not a very generous liquor.

  [2 ]A custom in all warm countries; the siesta of the Italians in later times.

  [1 ]The strigil was used in the baths for scraping the body when in a state of perspiration. It was sometimes made of gold or silver, and not unlike in form the instrument used by grooms about horses when profusely sweating or splashed with mud.

  [1 ]His physician, mentioned c. lix.

  [2 ]Sept. 21st, a sickly season at Rome.

  [3 ]Feminalibus et tibialibus: Neither the ancient Romans or the Greeks wore breeches, trews, or trowsers, which they despised as barbarian articles of dress. The coverings here mentioned were swathings for the legs and thighs, used mostly in cases of sickness or infirmity, and when otherwise worn, reckoned effeminate. But soon after the Romans became acquainted with the German and Celtic nations, the habit of covering the lower extremities, barbarous as it had been held, was generally adopted.

  [4 ]Albula. On the left of the road to Tivoli, near the ruins of Adrian’s villa. The waters are sulphureous, and the deposit from them causes incrustations on twigs and other matters plunged in the springs. See a curious account of this stream in Gell’s Topography, published by Bohn, p. 40.

  [1 ]In spongam incubuisse, literally has fallen upon a sponge, as Ajax is said to have perished by falling on his own sword.

  [2 ]Μυροβρεχεῖς. Suetonius often preserves expressive Greek phrases which Augustus was in the habit of using. This compound word means, literally, myrrh-scented, perfumed.

  [1 ]These are variations of language of small importance, which can only be understood in the original language.

  [1 ]It may create a smile to hear that, to prevent danger to the public, Augustus decreed that no new buildings erected in a public thoroughfare should exceed in height seventy feet Trajan reduced it to sixty.

  [2 ]Virgil is said to have recited before him the whole of the second, fourth, and sixth books of the Æneid; and Octavia, being present, when the poet came to the passage referring to her son, commencing, “Tu Marcellus eris,” was so much affected that she was carried out fainting.

  [1 ]Chap. xix.

  [2 ]Perhaps the point of the reply lay in the temple of Jupiter Tonans being placed at the approach to the Capitol from the Forum? See c. xxix. and c xv., with the note.

  [3 ]If these trees flourished at Rome in the time of Augustus, the winters there must have been much milder than they now are. There was one solitary palm standing in the garden of a convent some years ago, but it was of very stunted growth

  [1 ]The Republican forms were preserved in some of the larger towns.

  [2 ]“The Nundinæ occurred every ninth day, when a market was held at Rome, and the people came to it from the country. The practice was not then introduced amongst the Romans, of dividing their time into weeks, as we do, in imitation of the Jews. Dio, who flourished under Severus, says that it first took place a little before his time, and was derived from the Egyptians.”—Thomson. A fact, if well founded, of some importance.

  [3 ]“The Romans divided their months into calends nones, and ides. The first day of the month was the calends of that month; whence they reckoned backwards, distinguishing the time by the day before the calends, the second day before the calends, and so on, to the ides of the preceding month. In eight months of the year, the nones were the fifth day, and the ides the thirteenth: but in March, May, July, and October, the nones fell on the seventh, and the ides on the fifteenth From the nones they reckoned backwards to the calends, as they also did from the ides to the nones.”—Ib.

  [1 ]The early Christians shared with the Jews the aversion of the Romans to their religion, more than that of others, arising probably from its monotheistic and exclusive character. But we find from Josephus and Philo that Augustus was in other respects favourable to the Jews.

  [2 ]Strabo tells us that Mendes was a city of Egypt near Lycopolis. Asclepias wrote a book in Greek with the idea of θεολογουμενῶν, in defence of some very strange religious rites, of which the example in the text is a specimen.

  [1 ]Velletri stands on very high ground, commanding extensive views of the Pontine marshes and the sea.

  [1 ]Munda was a city in the Hispania Bœtica, where Julius Cœsar fought a battle. See c. lvi.

  [1 ]The good omen, in this instance, was founded upon the etymology of the names of the ass and its driver: the former of which, in Greek, signifies fortunate, and the latter, victorious.

  [2 ]Æsar is a Greek word with an Etruscan termination; ἀῖσα signifying fate.

  [1 ]Astura stood not far from Terracina, on the road to Naples. Augustus embarked there for the islands lying off that coast.

  [2 ]“Puteoli”—“A ship of Alexandria.” Words which bring to our recollection a passage in the voyage of St. Paul, Acts xxviii. 11—13. Alexandria was at that time the seat of an extensive commerce, and not only exported to Rome and other cities of Italy, vast quantities of corn and other products of Egypt, but was the mart for spices and other commodities the truits of the traffic with the east.

  [3 ]The Toga has been already described in a note to c. lxxiii. The Pallium was a cloak, generally worn by the Greeks, both men and women, freemen and slaves, but particularly by philosophers.

  [4 ]Masgabas seems, by his name, to have been of African origin.

  [1 ]A courtly answer from the Professor of Science, in which character he attended Tiberius. We shall hear more of him in the reign of that emperor.

  [1 ]Augustus was born a.u.c. 691, and died a.u.c. 766.

  [2 ]Municipia were towns which had obtained the rights of Roman citizens. Some of them had all which could be enjoyed without residing at Rome. Others had the right of serving in the Roman legions, but not that of voting, nor of holding civil offices. The municipia retained their own laws and customs; nor were they obliged to receive the Roman laws unless they chose it.

  [3 ]Bovillæ, a small place on the Appian Way, about nineteen miles from Rome, now called Frattochio.

  [1 ]Dio tells us that the devoted Livia joined with the knights in this pious office, which occupied them during five days.

  [2 ]For the Flaminian Way, see before, p. 94, note. The superb monument erected by Augustus over the sepulchre of the imperial family was of white marble, rising in stages to a great height, and crowned by a dome, on which stood a statue of Augustus. Marcellus was the first who was buried in the sepulchre beneath. It stood near the present Porta del Popolo; and the Bustum, where the bodies of the emperor and his family were burnt, is supposed to have stood on the site of the church of the Madonna of that name.

  [1 ]The distinction between the Roman people and the tribes, is also observed by Tacitus, who substitutes the word plebs, meaning, the lowest class of the populace.

  [2 ]Those of his father Octavius, and his father by adoption, Julius Cæsar.

  [3 ]See before c. 65. But he bequeathed a legacy to his daughter, Livia.

  [1 ]Virgil.

  [2 ]Ibid.

  [3 ]Ibid.

  [1 ]Geor. II.

  [1 ]I am prevented from entering into greater details, both by the size of my volume, and my anxiety to complete the undertaking.

  [1 ]After performing these immortal achievements, while he was holding an assembly of the people for reviewing his army in the plain near the lake of Capra, a storm suddenly rose, attended with great thunder and lightning, and enveloped the king in so dense a mist, that it took all sight of him from the assembly. Nor was Romulus after this seen on earth. The consternation being at length over, and fine clear weather succeeding so turbulent a day, when the Roman youth saw the royal seat empty, though they readily believed the Fathers who had stood nearest him, that he was carried aloft by the storm, yet struck with the dread as it were of orphanage, they preserved a sorrowful silence for a considerable time. Then a commencement having been made by a few, the whole multitude salute Romulus a god, son of a god, the king and parent of the Roman city; they implore his favour with prayers, that he would be pleased always propitiously to preserve his own offspring. I believe that even then there were some who silently surmised that the king had been torn in pieces by the hands of the Fathers; for this rumour also spread, but was not credited; their admiration of the man and the consternation felt at the moment, attached importance to the other report. By the contrivance also of one individual, additional credit is said to have been gained to the matter. For Proculus Julius, whilst the state was still troubled with regret for the king, and felt incensed against the senators, a person of weight, as we are told, in any matter, however important, comes forward to the assembly. “Romans,” he said, “Romulus, the father of this city, suddenly descending from heaven, appeared to me this day at day-break. While I stood covered with awe, and filled with a religious dread, beseeching him to allow me to see him face to face, he said; ‘Go tell the Romans, that the gods do will, that my Rome should become the capital of the world. Therefore let them cultivate the art of war, and let them know and hand down to posterity, that no human power shall be able to withstand the Roman arms.’ Having said this, he ascended up to heaven.” It is surprising what credit was given to the man on his making this announcement, and how much the regret of the common people and army for the loss of Romulus was assuaged upon the assurance of his immortality.

  [1 ]Padua.

  [1 ]Commentators seem to have given an erroneous and unbecoming sense to Cicero’s exclamation, when they suppose that the object understood, as connected with altera, related to himself. Hope is never applied in this signification, but to a young person of whom something good or great is expected; and accordingly, Virgil, who adopted the expression, has very properly applied it to Ascanius:
  
  Et juxta Ascanius, magnæ spes altera Romæ. Æneid, xii.

  • And by his side Ascanius took his place,
  • The second hope of Rome’s immortal race.

  Cicero, at the time when he could have heard a specimen of Virgil’s Eclogues, must have been near his grand climacteric; besides that, his virtues and talents had long been conspicuous, and were past the state of hope It is probable, therefore, that altera referred to some third person spoken of immediately before, as one who promised to do honour to his country It might refer to Octavius of whom Cicero at this time, entertained a high opinion, or it may have been spoken in an absolute manner, without reference to any person.

  [1 ]I was born at Mantua, died in Calabria and my tomb is at Parthenope, pastures, rural affairs, and heroes are the themes of my poems.

  [1 ]The last members of these two lines, from the commas to the end are said to have been supplied by Erotes, Virgil’s librarian.

  [1 ]Carm i. 17.

  [1 ]“The Medea of Ovid proves, in my opinion, how surpassing would have been his success, if he had allowed his genius free scope, instead of setting bounds to it.” Two faults have ruined me; my verse, and my mistake.

  [1 ]These lines are thus rendered in the quaint version of Zachary Catlin.

  • I suffer ’cause I chanced a fault to spy,
  • So that my crime doth in my eyesight lie.
  • Alas! why wait my luckless hap to see
  • A fault at unawares to ruin me?
  • * * * * * *

  [2 ]“I myself employed you as ready agents in love, when my early youth sported in numbers adapted to it.”—Riley’s Ovid.

  [1 ]“I long since erred by one composition; a fault that is not recent endures a punishment inflicted thus late. I had already published my poems, when, according to my privilege, I passed in review so many times unmolested as one of the equestrian order, before you the enquirer into criminal charges. Is it then possible that the writings which, in my want of confidence, I supposed would not have injured me when young, have now been my ruin in my old age?”—Riley’s Ovid.

  [1 ]This place, now called Temisvar, or Tomisvar, stands on one of the mouths of the Danube, about sixty five miles E.N.E. from Silistria. The neighbouring bay of the Black Sea is still called the Gulf of Baba.

  [1 ]This place, now called Temisvar, or Tomisvar, stands on one of the mouths of the Danube, about sixty five miles E.N.E. from Silistria. The neighbouring bay of the Black Sea is still called the Gulf of Baba.

  [1 ]“It appears to me, therefore, more reasonable to pursue glory by means of the intellect, than of bodily strength; and, since the life we enjoy is short to make the remembrance of it as lasting as possible.”

  [1 ]Intramural interments were prohibited at Rome by the laws of the Twelve Tables, notwithstanding the practice of reducing to ashes the bodies of the dead. It was only by special privilege that individuals who had deserved well of the state, and certain distinguished families were permitted to have tombs within the city.

  [2 ]Among the Romans, all the descendants from one common stock were called Gentiles, being of the same race or kindred, however remote. The Gens, as they termed this general relation or clanship, was subdivided into families, in Familias vel Stirpes; and those of the same family were called Agnati. Relations by the father’s side were also called Agnati, to distinguish them from Cognati, relations only by the mother’s side. An Agnatus might also be called Cognatus, but not the contrary.
  
  To mark the different gentes and familiæ, and to distinguish the individuals of the same family, the Romans had commonly three names, the Prænomen, Nomen, and Cognomen. The prænomen was put first, and marked the individual. It was usually written with one letter; as A. for Aulus; C. Caius; D. Decimus: sometimes with two letters; as Ap. for Appius; Cn Cneius; and sometimes with three; as Mam. for Mamercus.
  
  The Nomen was put after the Prænomen, and marked the gens. It commonly ended in ius; as Julius, Tullius, Cornelius. The Cognomen was put last, and marked the familia; as Cicero, Cæsar, &c.
  
  Some gentes appear to have had no surname, as the Marian; and gens and familia seem sometimes to be put one for the other; as the Fabia gens, or Fabia familia.
  
  Sometimes there was a fourth name, properly called the Agnomen, but sometimes likewise Cognomen, which was added on account of some illustrious action or remarkable event. Thus Scipio was named Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, from the conquest of Carthage. In the same manner, his brother was called Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus, Thus also, Quintus Fabius Maximus received the Agnomen of Cunctator, from his checking the victorious career of Hannibal by avoiding a battle.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 474.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 490.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 547.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 304.

  [5 ]An ancient Latin town on the Via Appia, the present road to Naples, mentioned by St. Paul, Acts xxviii. 15, and Horace, Sat. i. 5. 3, in giving an account of their travels.

  [6 ]a.u.c. 505.

  [1 ]Cybele; first worshipped in Phrygia, about Mount Ida, from whence a sacred stone, the symbol of her divinity, probably an aërolite, was transported to Rome, in consequence of the panic occasioned by Hannibal’s invasion, a.u.c 508.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 695.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 611

  [1 ]a.u.c. 550.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 663.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 707.

  [4 ]These, and other towns in the south of France, became, and long continued, the chief seats of Roman civilization among the Gauls; which is marked by the magnificent remains of ancient art still to be seen. Arles, in particular, is a place of great interest.

  [5 ]a.u.c. 710.

  [6 ]a.u.c. 713.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 712. Before Christ about 39

  [1 ]a.u.c. 744.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 735.

  [2 ]See before, in the reign of Augustus, c. xxxii.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 728

  [4 ]a.u.c. 734.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 737.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 741.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 747

  [4 ]a.u.c. 748.

  [1 ]Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, about thirteen miles from the city, was founded by Ancus Martius. Being the port of a city like Rome, it could not fail to become opulent; and it was a place of much resort, ornamented with fine edifices, and the environs “never failing of pasture in the summer time, and in the winter covered with roses and other flowers.” The port having been filled up with the depositions of the Tiber, it became deserted, and is now abandoned to misery and malaria. The bishopric of Ostia being the oldest in the Roman church, its bishop has always retained some peculiar privileges.

  [2 ]The Gymnasia were places of exercise, and received their name from the Greek word signifying naked, because the contending parties wore nothing but drawers.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 752.

  [1 ]The cloak and slippers, as distinguished from the Roman toga and thoes.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 755.

  [1 ]This fountain, in the Euganian hills, near Padua, famous for its mineral waters, is celebrated by Claudian in one of his elegies.

  [2 ]The street called Carinæ, at Rome, has been mentioned before; Augustus, e. v.; and also Mæcenas’ house on the Esquiline, ib c. lxxii. The gardens were formed on ground without the walls, and before used as a cemetery for malefactors, and the lower classes. Horace says—

  • Nunc licet Esquiliis habitare salubribus, atque
  • Aggere in aprico spatiari.
  • —Sat. l. i. viii. 13.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 757.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 760.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 762.

  [1 ]Reviving the simple habits of the times of the republic; “nec fortuitum cernere cespitem,” as Horace describes it.—Ode 15.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 765.

  [2 ]The portico of the temple of Concord is still standing on the side of the forum nearest the capitol. It consists of six Ionic columns, each of one piece, and of a light-coloured granite, with bases and capitals of white marble, and two columns at the angles. The temple of Castor and Pollux has been mentioned before: Jul. c. x.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 766.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 767.

  [1 ]Augustus interlards this epistle, and that subsequently quoted, with Greek sentences and phrases, of which this is one. It is so obscure, that commentators suppose that it is a mis-reading, but are not agreed on its drift.

  [2 ]A verse in which the word in italics is substituted for cunctando, noted from Ennius, who applied it to Fabius Maximus.

  [3 ]Iliad, B. x. Diomede is speaking of Ulysses, where he asks that he may accompany him as a spy into the Trojan camp.

  [1 ]Tiberius had adopted Germanicus. See before, c. xv. See also Caligula. c. i.

  [1 ]In this he imitated Augustus. See c. liii. of his life.

  [2 ]Si hane fenestram aperueritis, if you open that window, equivalent to our phrase, “if you open the door.”

  [1 ]Princeps, principatus, are the terms generally used by Suetonius to describe the supreme authority vested in the Cæsars, as before at the beginning of chap. xxiv., distinguished from any terms which conveyed an idea of kingly power, the forms of the republic, as we have lately seen, still subsisting.

  [1 ]Strenas; the French étreunes.

  [1 ]“Tiberius pulled down the temple of Isis, caused her image to be thrown into the Tiber, and crucified her priests.”—Joseph. Ant. Jud. xviii. 4.

  [2 ]Similia sectentes. We are strongly inclined to think that the words might be rendered “similar sects,” conveying an allusion to the small and obscure body of Christians, who were at this period generally confounded with the Jews, and supposed only to differ from them in some peculiarities of their institutions, which Roman historians and magistrates did not trouble themselves to distinguish. How little even the well-informed Suetonius knew of the real facts, we shall find in the only direct notice of the Christians contained in his works (Claudius c. xxv., Nero, c. xvi.); but that little confirms our conjecture. All the commentators, however, give the passage the turn retained in the text. Josephus informs us of the particular occurrence which led to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Tiberius.—Ant. xv ii. 5

  [1 ]Varro tells us that the Roman people “were more actively employed (manus movere) in the theatre and circus, than in the corn-fields and vineyards.”—De Re Rustic. ii. And Juvenal, in his satires, frequently alludes to their passion for public spectacles, particularly in the well-known lines—

  • —Atque duas tantum res serrius optat,
  • Panem et Circenses.
  • Sat. x. 80.

  [2 ]The Cottian Alps derived their name from this king. They include that part of the chain which divides Dauphiny from Piedmont, and are crossed by the pass of the Mont Cenis.

  [1 ]Antium, mentioned before, (Aug. c. lviii.) once a flourishing city of the Volscians, standing on the sea-coast, about thirty-eight miles from Rome, was a favourite resort of the emperors and persons of wealth. The Apollo Belvidere was found among the ruins of its temples and other edifices.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 779.

  [3 ]Terracina, standing at the southern extremity of the Pontine Marshes, on the shore of the Mediterranean. It is surrounded by high calcareous cliffs, in which there are caverns, affording, as Strabo informs us, cool retreats, attached to the Roman villas built round.

  [4 ]Augustus died at Nola, a city in Campania See c. lviii. of his life

  [1 ]Fidenæ stood in a bend of the Tiber, near its junction with the Anio. There are few traces of it remaining.

  [1 ]That any man could drink an amphora of wine at a draught, is beyond all credibility; for the amphora was nearly equal to nine gallons, English measure. The probability is, that the man had emptied a large vessel, which was shaped like an amphora.

  [2 ]Capri, the luxurious retreat and scene of the debaucheries of the Roman emperors, is an island off the southern point of the bay of Naples, about twelve miles in circumference.

  [3 ]Pan, the god of the shepherds, and inventor of the flute, was said to be the son of Mercury and Penelope. He was worshipped chiefly in Arcadia, and represented with the horns and feet of a goat. The Nymphs, as well as the Graces, were represented naked.

  [4 ]The name of the island having a double meaning, and signifying also a goat.

  [1 ]“Quasi pueros primæ teneritudinis, quos ‘pisciculos’ vocabat, institueret, ut natanti sibi inter femina versarentur, ac luderent: linguâ morsuque sensim appetentes; atque etiam quasi infantes firmiores, necdum tamen lacte depulsos, inguini ceu papillæ admoveret: pronior sane ad id genus libidinis, et naturâ et ætate.”

  [2 ]“Fœminarum capitibus solitus illudere.”

  [3 ]“Obscœnitate oris hirsuto atque olido.”

  [4 ]“Hircum vetulum capreis naturam ligurire”

  [1 ]The Temple of Vesta, like that dedicated to the same goddess at Tivoli, is round. There was probably one on the same site, and in the same circular form, erected by Numa Pompilius; the present edifice is far too elegant for that age, but there is no record of its erection, but it is known to have been repaired by Vespasian or Domitian after being injured by Nero’s fire. Its situation, near the Tiber, exposed it to floods, from which we find it suffered, from Horace’s lines—

  • “Vidimus flavum Tiberim, retortis
  • Littore Etrusco violenter undis,
  • Ire dejectum monumenta Regis,
  • Templaque Vestæ.”
  • —Ode, lib. i. 2. 15.

  This beautiful temple is still in good preservation. It is surrounded by twenty columns of white marble, and the wall of the cell, or interior (which is very small, its diameter being only the length of one of the columns), is also built of blocks of the same material, so nicely joined, that it seems to be formed of one solid mass.

  [1 ]Antlia; a machine for drawing up water in a series of connected buckets, which was worked by the feet, nisu pedum.

  [1 ]The elder Livia was banished to this island by Augustus. See c. lxv. of his life.

  [1 ]An island in the Archipelago.

  [1 ]This Theodore is noticed by Quintilian, Instit. iii. 1. Gadara was in Syria.

  [2 ]It mattered not that the head substituted was Tiberius’s own.

  [1 ]The verses were probably anonymous.

  [2 ]Oderint dum probent: Caligula used a similar expression; Ode Oderint dum metuant.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 778. Tacit. Annal. iv. The historian’s name was A. Cremutius Cordo. Dio has preserved the passage, xlvii. p 619. Brutus had already called Cassius “The last of the Romans,” in his lamentation over his dead body

  [1 ]She was the sister of Germanicus, and Tacitus calls her Livia; but Suetonius is in the habit of giving a fondling or diminutive term to the names of women, as Claudilla, for Claudia, Plautilla, &c.

  [2 ]Priam is said to have had no less than fifty sons and daughters; some of the latter, however, survived him, as Hecuba, Helena, Polyxena, and others

  [1 ]There were oracles at Antium and Tibur. The “Prænestine Lots” are described by Cicero, De Divin. xi 41

  [2 ]Agrippina, and Nero and Drusus.

  [1 ]He is mentioned before in the Life of Augustus, c. xc.; and also by Horace, Cicero, and Tacitus.

  [2 ]Obscure Greek poets, whose writings were either full of fabulous stories, or of an amatory kind.

  [1 ]It is suggested that the text should be amended, so that the sentence should read—“A Greek soldier;” for of what use could it have been to examine a man in Greek, and not allow him to give his replies in the same language?

  [2 ]So called from Appius Claudius, the Censor, one of Tiberius’s ancestors, who constructed it. It took a direction southward of Rome, through Campania to Brundusium, starting from what is the present Porta di San Sebastiano, from which the road to Naples takes its departure.

  [3 ]A small town on the coast of Latium, not far from Antium, and the present Nettuno. It was here that Cicero was slain by the satellites of Antony.

  [4 ]A town on a promontory of the same dreary coast, between Antium and Terracina, built on a promontory surrounded by the sea and the marsh still called Circello.

  [5 ]Misenum, a promontory to which Æneas is said to have given its name from one of his followers. (Æn. ii. 234.) It is now called Capo di Miseno, and shelters the harbour of Mola di Gaieta, belonging to Naples. This was one of the stations of the Roman fleet.

  [1 ]Tacitus agrees with Suetonius as to the age of Tiberius at the time of his death. Dio states it more precisely, as being seventy-seven years, four months, and nine days.

  [2 ]Caius Caligula, who became his successor.

  [3 ]Tacitus and Dio add that he was smothered under a heap of heavy clothes.

  [1 ]In the temple of the Palatine Apollo. See Augustus, c. xxix.

  [2 ]Atella, a town between Capua and Naples, now called San Arpino, where there was an amphitheatre. The people seemed to have raised the shout in derision, referring, perhaps, to the Atellan fables, mentioned in c. xiv.; and in their fury they proposed that his body should only be grilled, as those of malefactors were, instead of being reduced to ashes.

  [1 ]Tacit Annal. lib. ii.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 757.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 765.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 770.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 767.

  [5 ]a.u.c. 771.

  [6 ]This opinion, like some others which occur in Suetonius, may justly be considered as a vulgar error; and if the heart was found entire, it must have been owing to the weakness of the fire, rather than to any quality communicated to the organ, of resisting the power of that element.

  [1 ]The magnificent title of King of Kings has been assumed, at different times, by various potentates. The person to whom it is here applied, is the king of Parthia Under the kings of Persia, and even under the Syro-Macedonian kings, this country was of no consideration, and reckoned a part of Hyrcania But upon the revolt of the East from the Syro-Macedonians, at the instigation of Arsaces, the Parthians are said to have conquered eighteen kingdoms.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 765.

  [2 ]It does not appear that Gætulicus wrote any historical work, but Martial, Pliny, and others, describe him as a respectable poet.

  [3 ]Supra Confluentes: The German tribe here mentioned occupied the country between the Rhine and the Meuse, and gave their name to Treves (Treviri), its chief town. Coblents had its ancient name of Confluentes, from its standing at the junction of the two rivers. The exact site of the village in which Caligula was born is not known. Cluverius conjectures that it may be Capelle.

  [1 ]Chap. vii.

  [1 ]The name was derived from Caliga, a kind of boot, studded with nails, used by the common soldiers in the Roman army.

  [2 ]According to Tacitus, who gives an interesting account of these occurrences, Treves was the place of refuge to which the young Caius was conveyed.—Annal. i.

  [1 ]In c. liv. of Tiberius, we have seen that his brothers Drusus and Nero fell a sacrifice to these artifices.

  [2 ]Tiberius, who was the adopted father of Germanicus.

  [3 ]Natriceus, a water-snake, so called from nato, to swim. The allusion is probably to Caligula’s being reared in the island of Capri.

  [4 ]As Phaeton is said to have set the world on fire.

  [1 ]See the Life of Tiberius, c. lxxiii.

  [1 ]His name also was Tiberius. See before, Tiberius, c. lxxvi

  [2 ]Procida, Ischia, Capri, &c.

  [3 ]The eagle was the standard of the legion, each cohort of which had its own ensign, with different devices; and there were also little images of the emperors, to which divine honours were paid.

  [4 ]See before, cc. liii. liv.

  [5 ]See Tiberius, c. x.; and note.

  [6 ]The mausoleum built by Augustus, mentioned before in his Life, ch. 6.

  [1 ]The Carpentum was a carriage, commonly with two wheels, and an arched covering but sometimes without a covering; used chiefly by matrons, and named, according to Ovid, from Carmenta, the mother of Evander. Women were prohibited the use of it in the second Punic war, by the Oppian law, which, however, was soon after repealed. This chariot was also used to convey the images of the illustrious women to whom divine honours were paid, in solemn processions after their death, as in the present instance. It is represented on some of the sestertii.

  [2 ]See cc. xiv. and xxiii. of the present History.

  [3 ]Ib. cc. vii. and xxiv.

  [4 ]Life of Tiberius, c. xliii.

  [1 ]See the Life of Augustus, cc. xxviii. and ci.

  [2 ]Julius Cæsar had shared it with them (c. xli.). Augustus had only kept up the form (c. xl.). Tiberius deprived the Roman people of the last remains of the freedom of suffrage.

  [1 ]The city of Rome was founded on the twenty-first day of April, which was called Palilia, from Pales, the goddess of shepherds, and ever afterwards kept as a festival.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 790.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 791.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 793.

  [5 ]a.u.c. 794.

  [6 ]The Saturnalia, held in honour of Saturn, was, amongst the Romans, the most celebrated festival of the whole year, and held in the month of December. All orders of the people then devoted themselves to mirth and feasting; friends sent presents to one another; and masters treated their slaves upon a footing of equality. At first it was held only for one day, afterwards for three days, and was now prolonged by Caligula’s orders.

  [7 ]See Augustus, cc. xxix and xliii. The amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus is supposed to have stood in the Campus Martius, and the elevation now called the Monte Citorio, to have been formed by its ruins.

  [1 ]Supposed to be a house, so called, adjoining the Circus, in which some of the emperor’s attendants resided.

  [2 ]Now Puzzuoli, on the shore of the bay of Naples. Every one knows what wealth was lavished here and at Baiæ, on public works and the marine villas of the luxurious Romans, in the times of the emperors.

  [3 ]The original terminus of the Appian way was at Brundusium. This mole formed what we should call a nearer station to Rome, on the same road, the ruins of which are still to be seen. St. Paul landed there.

  [1 ]Essedis: they were light cars, on two wheels, constructed to carry only one person; invented, it is supposed, by the Belgians, and by them introduced into Britain, where they were used in war. The Romans, after their expeditions in Gaul and Britain, adopted this useful vehicle instead of their more cumbrous rheda, not only for journies where dispatch was required, but in solemn processions, and for ordinary purposes. They seem to have become the fashion, for Ovid tells us that these little carriages were driven by young ladies, themselves holding the reins, Amor. xi. 16, 49.

  [2 ]Suetonius flourished about seventy years after this, in the reign of Adrian, and derived many of the anecdotes which give interest to his history from cotemporary persons. See Claudius, c. xv. &c.

  [1 ]See Tiberius, c. xlvii. and Augustus, c. xxxi.

  [2 ]This aqueduct, commenced by Caligula and completed by Claudian, a truly imperial work, conveyed the waters of two streams to Rome, following the valley of the Anio from above Tivoli. The course of one of these rivulets was forty miles and it was carried on arches, immediately after quitting its source, for a distance of three miles. The other, the Anio Novus, also began on arches, which continued for upwards of twelve miles. After this, both were conveyed under ground; but at the distance of six miles from the city, they were united, and carried upon arches all the rest of the way. This is the most perfect of all the ancient aqueducts; and it has been repaired, so as to convey the Acqua Felice, one of the three streams which now supply Rome. See Claudius, c. xx.

  [3 ]By Septa, Suetonius here means the huts or barracks of the pretorian camp, which was a permanent and fortified station. It stood to the east of the Viminal and Quirinal hills, between the present Porta Pia and S. Lorenzo, where there is a quadrangular projection in the city walls marking the site. The remains of the Amphitheatrum Castrense stand between the Porta Maggiore and S. Giovanni, formerly without the ancient walls, but now included in the line. It is all of brick, even the Corinthian pillars, and seems to have been but a rude structure, suited to the purpose for which it was built, the amusement of the soldiers, and gymnastic exercises. For this purpose they were used to construct temporary amphitheatres near the stations in the distant provinces, which were not built of stone or brick, but hollow circular spots dug in the ground, round which the spectators sat on the declivity, on ranges of seats cut in the sod. Many vestiges of this kind have been traced in Britain.

  [4 ]The Isthmus of Corinth; an enterprize which had formerly been attempted by Demetrius, and which was also projected by Julius Cæsar, c. xliv., and Nero, c. xix.; but they all failed of accomplishing it.

  [1 ]On the authority of Dio Cassius and the Salmatian manuscript this verse from Homer is substituted for the common reading, which is,

  • Ἐἰς γαῖαν Δαναῶν περάω σε,
  • Into the land of Greece I will transport thee.

  [1 ]Alluding, in the case of Romulus, to the rape of the Sabines; and in that of Augustus to his having taken Livia from her husband.—Augustus, c. lxii.

  [2 ]Selene was the daughter of Mark Antony by Cleopatra.

  [3 ]See c xii.

  [1 ]The vast area of the Roman amphitheatres had no roof, but the audience were protected against the sun and bad weather by temporary hangings stretched over it.

  [1 ]A proverbial expression, meaning, without distinction.

  [1 ]The islands off the coast of Italy, in the Tuscan sea and in the Archipelago, were the usual places of banishment. See before, c. xv.; and in Tiberius, c. liv., &c.

  [2 ]Anticyra, an island in the Archipelago, was famous for the growth of hellebore. This plant being considered a remedy for insanity, the proverb arose—Naviga in Anticyram, as much as to say, “You are mad.”

  [3 ]Meaning the province in Asia, called Galatia, from the Gauls who conquered it, and occupied it jointly with the Greek colonists.

  [1 ]A quotation from the tragedy of Atreus, by L. Attius, mentioned by Cicero. Off. i. 28.

  [2 ]See before, Augustus, c. lxxi.

  [3 ]These celebrated words are generally attributed to Nero; but Dio and Seneca agree with Suetonius in ascribing them to Caligula.

  [4 ]Gladiators were distinguished by their armour and manner of fighting Some were called Secutores, whose arms were a helmet, a shield, a sword, or a leaden ball. Others, the usual antagonists of the former, were named Retiarii. A combatant of this class was dressed in a short tunic, but wore nothing on his head. He carried in his left hand a three-pointed lance, called Tridens or Fuscina, and in his right, a net, with which he attempted to entangle his adversary, by casting it over his head, and suddenly drawing it together; when with his trident he usually slew him. But if he missed his aim, by throwing the net either too short or too far, he instantly betook himself to flight, and endeavoured to prepare his net for a second cast. His antagonist, in the mean time, pursued, to prevent his design, by dispatching him

  [1 ]Augustus, c. xxiii.

  [2 ]Tiberius, c. xl.

  [3 ]See before, c. xix.

  [4 ]Popæ were persons who, at public sacrifices, led the victim to the altar. They had their clothes tucked up, and were naked to the waist. The victim was led with a slack rope, that it might not seem to be brought by force, which was reckoned a bad omen. For the same reason, it was allowed to stand loose before the altar, and it was thought a very unfavourable sign if it got away.

  [1 ]Plato de Repub. xi.; and Cicero and Tull. xlviii.

  [2 ]The collar of gold, taken from the gigantic Gaul who was killed in single combat by Titus Manlius, called afterwards Torquatus, was worn by the lineal male descendants of the Manlian family. But that illustrious race becoming extinct, the badge of honour, as well as the cognomen of Torquatus, was revived by Augustus, in the person of Caius Nonius Asprenas, who perhaps claimed descent by the female line from the family of Manlius.

  [1 ]Cincinnatus signifies one who has curled or crisped hair, from which Livy informs us that Lucius Quintus derived his cognomen. But of what badge of distinction Caligula deprived the family of the Cincinnati, unless the natural feature was hereditary, and he had them all shaved—a practice we find mentioned just below—history does not inform us, nor are we able to conjecture.

  [2 ]The priest of Diana Nemorensis obtained and held his office by his prowess in arms, having to slay his competitors, and offer human sacrifices, and was called Rex from his reigning paramount in the adjacent forest. The temple of this goddess of the chase stood among the deep woods which clothe the declivities of the Alban Mount, at a short distance from Rome—nemus signifying a grove. Julius Cæsar had a residence there. See his Life, c. lxxi. The venerable woods are still standing, and among them chestnut-trees, which, from their enormous girth and vast apparent age, we may suppose to have survived from the era of the Cæsars. The melancholy and sequestered lake of Nemi, deep set in a hollow of the surrounding woods, with the village on its brink, still preserve the name of Nemi.

  [3 ]An Essedarian was one who fought from an Esseda, the light carriage described in a former note, p. 264.

  [1 ]See before, Julius, c. x., and note.

  [1 ]Particularly at Baiæ, see before, c. xix. The practice of encroaching on the sea on this coast, commenced before,— Jactis in altum molibus. —Hor. Od. b. iii. i 34.

  [1 ]Most of the gladiators were slaves.

  [2 ]The part of the Palatium built or occupied by Augustus and Tiberius.

  [1 ]Mevania, a town of Umbria. Its present name is Bevagna. The Clitumnus is a river in the same country, celebrated for the breed of white cattle, which feed in the neighbouring pastures.

  [1 ]Caligula appears to have meditated an expedition to Britain at the time of his pompous ovation at Puteoli, mentioned in c. xiii.; but if Julius Cæsar could gain no permanent footing in this island, it was very improbable that a prince of Caligula’s character would ever seriously attempt it, and we shall presently see that the whole affair turned out a farce.

  [1 ]It seems generally agreed, that the point of the coast which was signalized by the ridiculous bravado of Caligula, somewhat redeemed by the erection of a lighthouse, was Itium, afterwards called Gessoriacum, and Bononia (Boulogne), a town belonging to the Gaulish tribe of the Morim: where Julius Cæsar embarked on his expedition, and which became the usual place of departure for the transit to Britain.

  [2 ]The denarius was worth at this time about seven pence or eight pence of our money.

  [1 ]Probably to Anticyra. See before, c. xxix. note

  [1 ]The Cimbri were German tribes on the Elbe, who invaded Italy a.u.c. 640, and were defeated by Metellus.

  [2 ]The Senones were a tribe of Cis-Alpine Gauls, settled in Umbria, who sacked and pillaged Rome a.u.c. 363.

  [3 ]By the transmarine provinces, Asia, Egypt, &c., are meant; so that we find Caligula entertaining visions of an eastern empire, and removing the seat of government, which were long afterwards realized in the time of Constantine.

  [1 ]See Augustus, c. xviii.

  [1 ]About midnight, the watches being divided into four.

  [2 ]Scabella: commentators are undecided as to the nature of this instrument. Some of them suppose it to have been either a sort of cymbal or castanet, but Pitiscus in his note gives a figure of an ancient statue preserved at Florence, in which a dancer is represented with cymbals in his hands, and a kind of wind instrument attached to the toe of his left foot, by which it is worked by pressure, something in the way of an accordion.

  [3 ]The port of Rome.

  [4 ]The Romans, in their passionate devotion to the amusements of the circus and the theatre, were divided into factions, who had their favourites among the racers and actors, the former being distinguished by the colours of the party to which they belonged. See before, c. xviii., and Tiberius, c. xxxvii.

  [1 ]In the slang of the turf, the name of Caligula’s celebrated horse might, perhaps, be translated “Go-a-head”

  [1 ]Josephus, who supplies us with minute details of the assassination of Caligula, says that he made no outcry, either disdaining it, or because an alarm would have been useless; but that he attempted to make his escape through a corridor which led to some baths behind the palace. Among the ruins on the Palatine hill, these baths still attract attention, some of the frescos being in good preservation. See the account in Josephus. xix. 1, 2.

  [2 ]The Lamian was an ancient family, the founders of Formiæ. They had gardens on the Esquiline mount.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 714.

  [2 ]Pliny describes Drusus as having in this voyage circumnavigated Germany, and reached the Cimbrian Chersonesc, and the Scythian shores, reeking with constant fogs.

  [3 ]Tacitus, Annal. xi. 8, 1, mentions this fosse, and says that Drusus sailed up the Meuse and the Waal. Cluverius places it between the village of Iselvort and the town of Doesborg.

  [1 ]The Spolia Opima were the spoils taken from the enemy’s king, or chief, when slain in single combat by a Roman general. They were always hung up in the Temple of Jupiter Feretrius. Those spoils had been obtained only thrice since the foundation of Rome; the first by Romulus, who slew Acron, king of the Cæninenses; the next by A Cornelius Cossus, who slew Tolumnius, king of the Veientes, a.u. 318; and the third by M. Claudius Marcellus, who slew Viridomarus, king of the Gauls, a.u. 330.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 744.

  [1 ]This epistle, as it was the habit of Augustus, is interspersed with Greek phrases.

  [2 ]The Alban Mount is the most interesting feature of the scenery of the Campagna about Rome, Monti Cavo, the summit, rising above an amphitheatre of magnificent woods, to an elevation of 2965 French feet. The view is very extensive: below is the lake of Albano, the finest of the volcanic lakes in Italy, and the modern town of the same name. Few traces remain of Alba Longa, the ancient capital of Latium.

  [3 ]On the summit of the Alban Mount, on the site of the present convent, stood the temple of Jupiter Latialis, where the Latin tribes assembled annually, and renewed their league, during the Feriæ Latinæ, instituted by Tarquinus Superbus. It was here, also, that Roman generals, who were refused the honours of a full triumph, performed the ovation, and sacrificed to Jupiter Latialis. Part of the triumphal way by which the mountain was ascended, formed of vast blocks of lava, is still in good preservation, leading through groves of chestnut trees of vast size and age. Spanning them with extended arms—none of the shortest—the operation was repeated five times in compassing their girth.

  [1 ]Caligula. See c v. of his life.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 793. Life of Caligula, cc. xliv., xlv., &c.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 794.

  [3 ]The chamber of Mercury; the names of deities being given to different apartments, as those “of Isis,” “of the Muses,” &c.

  [1 ]See the note, p. 265.

  [2 ]The attentive reader will have marked the gradual growth of the power of the pretorian guard, who now, and on so many future occasions, ruled the destinies of the empire.

  [1 ]See Augustus, cc. xliii., xlv.

  [2 ]Ib. c. ci.

  [3 ]Germanicus.

  [4 ]Naples and other cities on that coast were Greek colonies.

  [5 ]This arch was erected in memory of the standards (the eagles) lost by Varus, in Germany, having been recovered by Germanicus under the auspices of Tiberius. See his Life, c. xlvii.; and Tacit. Annal. ii. 41. It seems to have stood at the foot of the Capitol, on the side of the Forum, near the temple of Concord; but there are no remains of it.

  [6 ]Tacitus informs us that the same application had been made by Tiberius. Annal iii. The prefect of the pretorian guards, high and important as his office had now become, was not allowed to enter the senate-house, unless he belonged to the equestrian order.

  [1 ]The procurators had the administration of some of the less important provinces, with rank and authority inferior to that of the pro-consuls and prefects. Frequent mention of these officers is made by Josephus; and Pontius Pilate, who sentenced our Lord to crucifixion, held that office in Judæa, under Tiberius.

  [2 ]Pollio and Messala were distinguished orators, who flourished under the Cæsars Julius and Augustus.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 795, 796.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 800, 804.

  [3 ]“Ad bestias” had become a new and frequent sentence for male-factors. It will be recollected, that it was the most usual form of martyrdom for the primitive Christians. Polycarp was brought all the way from Smyrna to be exposed to it in the amphitheatre at Rome

  [1 ]This reminds us of the decision of Solomon in the case of the two mothers, who each claimed a child as their own, 1 Kings iii. 22—27.

  [2 ]A most absurd judicial conclusion, the business of the judge or court being to decide, on weighing the evidence, on which side the truth preponderated.

  [3 ]See the note in Caligula, c. xix; as to Suetonius’s sources of information from persons cotemporary with the occurrences he relates.

  [1 ]The insult was conveyed in Greek, which seems, from Suetonius, to have been in very common use at Rome: καὶ σὺ γέρων ε[Editor: illegible character], καὶ μωρός.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 798, or 800.

  [3 ]There was a proverb to the same effect: “Si non caste, saltem caute.”

  [1 ]Ptolemy appointed him to an office which led him to assume a foreign dress. Rabirius was defended by Cicero in one of his orations, which is extant.

  [2 ]The Sigillaria was a street in Rome, where a fair was held after the Saturnalia, which lasted seven days; and toys, consisting of little images and dolls, which gave their name to the street and festival, were sold. It appears from the text, that other articles were exposed for sale in this street. Among these were included elegant vases of silver and bronze. There appears also to have been a bookseller’s shop, for an ancient writer tells us that a friend of his showed him a copy of the Second Book of the Æneid, which he had purchased there.

  [3 ]Opposed to this statement there is a passage in Servius Georgius, iii 33, asserting that he had heard (accipimus) that Augustus, besides his victories in the east, triumphed over the Britons in the west; and Horace says:—

  • Augustus adjectis Britannis
  • Imperio gravibusque Persis.
  • —Ode iii. 5, 1.

  Strabo likewise informs us, that in his time, the petty British kings sent embassies to cultivate the alliance of Augustus, and make offerings in the Capitol: and that nearly the whole island was on terms of amity with the Romans, and, as well as the Gauls, paid a light tribute.—Strabo, B. iv. p. 138.
  
  That Augustus contemplated a descent on the island, but was prevented from attempting it by his being recalled from Gaul by the disturbances in Dalmatia, is very probable. Horace offers his vows for its success:
  
  

  • Serves iturum, Cæsarem in ultimos
  • Orbis Britannos.
  • —Ode i. 35.

  But the word sturus shews that the scheme was only projected, and the lines previously quoted are mere poetical flattery. Strabo’s statement of the communications kept up with the petty kings of Britain, who were perhaps divided by intestine wars, are, to a certain extent, probably correct, as such a policy would be a prelude to the intended expedition.

  [1 ]Circius. Aulus Gellius, Seneca, and Pliny, mention under this name the strong southerly gales which prevail in the gulf of Genoa and the neighbouring seas.

  [2 ]The Stœchades were the islands now called Hieres, off Toulon.

  [3 ]Claudius must have expended more time in his march from Marseilles to Gessoriacum, as Boulogne was then called, than in his vaunted conquest of Britain.

  [4 ]In point of fact, he was only sixteen days in the island, receiving the submission of some tribes in the south-eastern districts. But the way had been prepared for him by his able general, Aulus Plautius, who defeated Cunobeline, and made himself master of his capital, Camulodunum, or Colchester. These successes were followed up by Ostorius, who conquered Caractacus and sent him to Rome.
  
  It is singular that Suetonius has supplied us with no particulars of these events. Some account of them is given in the disquisition appended to this life of Caligula.
  
  The expedition of Plautius took place a.u.c. 796., 44.

  [1 ]Carpentum: see note in Caligula, c. xv.

  [2 ]The Æmiliana, so called because it contained the monuments of the family of that name, was a suburb of Rome, on the Via Lata, outside the gate.

  [3 ]The Diribitorium was a house in the Flaminian Circus, begun by Agrippa, and finished by Augustus, in which soldiers were mustered and their pay distributed; from whence it derived its name. When the Romans went to give their votes at the election of magistrates, they were conducted by officers named Diribitores. It is possible that one and the same building may have been used for both purposes.
  
  The Flaminian Circus was without the city walls, in the Campus Martius. The Roman college now stands on its site.

  [1 ]A law brought in by the consuls Papius Mutilus and Quintus Poppæus; respecting which, see Augustus, c. xxxiv.

  [2 ]The Fucine Lake is now called Lago di Celano, in the Farther Abruzzi It is very extensive, but shallow, so that the difficulty of constructing the Claudian emissary, can scarcely be compared to that encountered in a similar work for lowering the level of the waters in the Alban lake, completed, a.u.c. 359.

  [3 ]Respecting the Claudian aqueduct, see Caligula, c. xxi.

  [1 ]Ostia is referred to in a note, Tiberius, c xi.

  [2 ]Suetonius calls this “the great obelisk” in comparison with those which Augustus had placed in the Circus Maximus and Campus Martius. The one here mentioned was erected by Caligula in his Circus, afterwards called the Circus of Nero. It stood at Heliopolis, having been dedicated to the sun, as Herodotus informs us, by Phero, son of Sesostris, in acknowledgment of his recovery from blindness. It was removed by Pope Sixtus V. in 1586, under the celebrated architect, Fontana, to the centre of the area before St. Peter’s, in the Vatican, not far from its former position. This obelisk is a solid piece of red granite, without hieroglyphics, and, with the pedestal and ornaments at the top, is 182 feet high. The height of the obelisk itself is 113 palms, or 84 feet.

  [3 ]Pliny relates some curious particulars of this ship:—“A fir tree of prodigious size was used in the vessel which, by the command of Caligula, brought the obelisk from Egypt, which stands in the Vatican Circus, and four blocks of the same sort of stone to support it. Nothing certainly ever appeared on the sea more astonishing than this vessel; 120,000 bushels of lentiles served for its ballast; the length of it nearly equalled all the left side of the port of Ostia; for it was sent there by the emperor Claudius. The thickness of the tree was as much as four men could embrace with their arms.”—B. xvi. c. 76.

  [4 ]See Augustus, c. xxxi. It appears to have been often a prey to the flames, Tiberius, c. xli.; Caligula, c. xx.

  [5 ]Contrary to the usual custom of rising and saluting the emperor without acclamations.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 800.

  [2 ]The Secular Games had been celebrated by Augustus, a.u.c. 736. See c. xxxi. of his life, and the Epode of Horace written on the occasion.

  [3 ]In the circus which he had himself built.

  [4 ]Tophina; Tuffo, a porous stone of volcanic origin, which abounds in the neighbourhood of Rome, and, with the Travertino, is employed in all common buildings.

  [5 ]In compliment to the troops to whom he owed his elevation: see before, c. xi.

  [1 ]Palumbus was a gladiator: and Claudius condescended to pun upon his name, which signifies a wood-pigeon.

  [2 ]See before, c. xvii. Described in c. xx and note.

  [1 ]See before, Augustus, c. xxxiv.

  [1 ]To reward his able services as commander of the army in Britain. See before, c. xvii.

  [2 ]German tribes between the Elbe and the Weser, whose chief seat was at Bremen, and others about Ems or Luneburg.

  [1 ]This island in the Tiber, opposite the Campus Martius, is said to have been formed by the corn sown by Tarquin the Proud on that consecrated field, and cut down and thrown by order of the consuls into the river The water being low, it lodged in the bed of the stream, and gradual deposits of mud raising it above the level of the water, it was in course of time covered with buildings. Among these was the temple of Æsculapius, erected a.u.c. 462, to receive the serpent, the emblem of that deity which was brought to Rome in the time of a plague. There is a coin of Antoninus Pius recording this event, and Lumisdus has preserved copies of some curious votive inscriptions in acknowledgment of cures which were found in its ruins, Antiquities of Rome, p. 379.
  
  It was common for the patient after having been exposed some nights in the temple, without being cured, to depart and put an end to his life. Suetonius here informs us that slaves so exposed, at least obtained their freedom.

  [2 ]Which were carried on the shoulders of slaves. This prohibition had for its object either to save the wear and tear in the narrow streets, or to pay respect to the liberties of the town.

  [3 ]See the note in c. i. of this life of Claudius.

  [1 ]Seleucus Philopater, son of Antiochus the Great, who being conquered by the Romans, the succeeding kings of Syria acknowledged the supremacy of Rome.

  [2 ]Suetonius has already, in Tiberius, c. xxxvi., mentioned the expulsion of the Jews from Rome, and this passage confirms the conjecture, offered in the note, that the Christians were obscurely alluded to in the former notice. The antagonism between Christianity and Judaism appears to have given rise to the tumults which first led the authorities to interfere. Thus much we seem to learn from both passages: but the most enlightened men of that age were singularly ill-informed on the stupendous events which had recently occurred in Judea, and we find Suetonius, although he lived at the commencement of the first century of the Christian æra, when the memory of these occurrences was still fresh, and it might be supposed, by that time, widely diffused, transplanting Christ from Jerusalem to Rome, and placing him in the time of Claudius, although the crucifixion took place during the reign of Tiberius.
  
  St. Luke, Acts xviii. 2, mentions the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by the emperor Claudius: Dio, however, says that he did not expel them, but only forbad their religious assemblies.
  
  It was very natural for Suetonius to write Chrestus instead of Christus, as the former was a name in use among the Greeks and Romans. Among others, Cicero mentions a person of that name in his Fam. Ep. 11. 8.

  [3 ]Pliny tells us that Druidism had its origin in Gaul, and was transplanted into Britain, xxi. 1. Julius Cæsar asserts just the contrary, Bell. Gall. vi. 13, 11. The edict of Claudius was not carried into effect; at least, we find vestiges of Druidism in Gaul, during the reigns of Nero and Alexander Severus

  [1 ]The Eleusinian mysteries were never transferred from Athens to Rome, notwithstanding this attempt of Claudius, and although Aurelius Victor says that Adrian effected it.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 801.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 773.

  [3 ]It would seem from this passage, that the cognomen of “the Great,” had now been restored to the descendants of Cneius Pompey, on whom it was first conferred.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 806.

  [5 ]a.u.c. 803.

  [1 ]This is the Felix mentioned in the Acts, cc. xxiii. and xxiv., before whom St. Paul pleaded. He is mentioned by Josephus; and Tacitus, who calls him Felix Antonius, gives his character: Annal v. 9. 6.

  [2 ]It appears that two of these wives of Felix were named Drusilla. One, mentioned Acts xxiv. 24, and there called a Jewess, was the sister of king Agrippa, and had married before, Azizus, king of the Emessenes. The other Drusilla, though not a queen, was of royal birth, being the grand-daughter of Cleopatra by Mark Antony. Who the third wife of Felix was, is unknown.

  [3 ]Tacitus and Josephus mention that Pallas was the brother of Felix, and the younger Pliny ridicules the pompous inscription on his tomb.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 802

  [1 ]The Salii, the priests of Mars, twelve in number, were instituted by Numa. Their dress was an embroidered tunic, bound with a girdle ornamented with brass. They wore on their head a conical cap, of a corsiderable height; carried a sword by their side; in their right hand a spear or rod, and in their left, one of the Ancilia, or shields of Mars. On solemn occasions, they used to go to the Capitol, through the forum and other public parts of the city, dancing and singing sacred songs, said to have been composed by Numa; which, in the time of Horace, could hardly be understood by any one, even the priests themselves. The most solemn procession of the Salii was on the first of March, in commemoration of the time when the sacred shield was believed to have fallen from heaven, in the reign of Numa. After their procession, they had a splendid entertainment, the luxury of which was proverbial.

  [1 ]Scaliger and Casaubon give Teleggenius as the reading of the best manuscripts. Whoever he was, his name seems to have been a bye-word for a notorious fool.

  [2 ]Titus Livius, the prince of Roman historians, died in the fourth year of the reign of Tiberius, a.u.c. 771; at which time Claudius was about twenty-seven years old, having been born a.u.c. 744.

  [1 ]Asinius Gallus was the son of Asinius Pollio, the famous orator, and had written a book comparing his father with Cicero, and giving the former the preference.

  [2 ]Quintilian informs us, that one of the three new letters the emperor Claudius attempted to introduce, was the Æolic digamma, which had the same force as υ consonant. Priscian calls another anti-sigma, and says that the character proposed was two Greek sigmas, back to back, and that it was substituted for the Greek ψ, ps. The other letter is not known, and all three soon fell into disuse.

  [1 ]Cæsar by birth, not by adoption, as the preceding emperors had been, and as Nero would be, if he succeeded

  [1 ]Tacitus informs us, that the poison was prepared by Locusta, of whom we shall hear, Nero, c. xxxiii. &c.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 806; 54.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 593, 632, 658, 660, 700, 722, 785.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 632.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 639, 663.

  [4 ]For the distinction between the prænomen and cognomen, see note, p. 192.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 632.

  [2 ]The Allobroges were a tribe of Gauls, inhabiting Dauphiny and Savoy; the Arverni have left their name in Auvergne.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 695.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 700.

  [5 ]a.u.c. 711.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 723.

  [2 ]Nais seems to have been a freedwoman, who had been allowed to adopt the family name of her master.

  [3 ]By one of those fictions of law, which have abounded in all systems of jurisprudence, a nominal alienation of his property was made in the testator’s life-time.

  [1 ]The suggestion offered (note, p. 123), that the Argentarii, like the goldsmiths of the middle ages, combined the business of bankers, or money changers, with dealings in gold and silver plate, is confirmed by this passage. It does not, however, appear that they were artificers of the precious metals, though they dealt in old and current coins, sculptured vessels, gems, and precious stones.

  [2 ]Pyrgi was a town of the ancient Etruria, near Antium, on the sea-coast, but it has long been destroyed.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 791; 39.

  [4 ]The purification, and giving the name, took place, among the Romans, in the case of boys, on the ninth, and of girls, on the tenth lay. The customs of the Judaical law were similar. See Matt. i. 59—63 Luke in 21, 22.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 806.

  [2 ]Seneca, the celebrated philosophical writer, had been released from exile in Corsica, shortly before the death of Tiberius He afterwards fell a sacrifice to the jealousy and cruelty of his former pupil, Nero.

  [3 ]Caligula.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 809— 57.

  [1 ]Antium, the birth-place of Nero, an ancient city of the Volscians, stood on a rocky promontory of the coast, now called Capo d’ Anzo, about thirty-eight miles from Rome. Though always a place of some naval importance, it was indebted to Nero for its noble harbour. The ruins of the moles yet remain; and there are vestiges of the temples and villas of the town, which was the resort of the wealthy Romans, it being a most delightful winter residence. The Apollo Belvidere was discovered among these ruins.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 810.

  [1 ]The Podium was part of the amphitheatre, near the orchestra, allotted to the senators, and the ambassadors of foreign nations; and where also was the seat of the emperor, of the person who exhibited the games, and of the Vestal Virgins. It projected over the wall which surrounded the area of the amphitheatre, and was raised between twelve and fifteen feet above it; secured with a breast-work or parapet against the irruption of wild beasts.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 813.

  [3 ]The baths of Nero stood to the west of the Pantheon. They were, probably, incorporated with those afterwards constructed by Alexander Severus; but no vestige of them remains. That the former were magnificent, we may infer from the verses of Martial:

  • —Quid Nerone pejus?
  • Quid thermis melius Neronianis.—B. vii. ch. 34.
  • What worse than Nero?
  • What better than his baths?

  [4 ]Among the Romans, the time at which young men first shaved the beard was marked with particular ceremony. It was usually in their twenty-first year, but the period varied. Caligula (c. x.) first shaved at twenty; Augustus at twenty-five.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 819. See afterwards, c. xxx.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 808. 810. 811. 813.

  [1 ]The Sportulæ were small wicker baskets, in which victuals or money were carried. The word was in consequence applied to the public entertainments at which food was distributed, or money given in lieu of it.

  [2 ]“Superstitionis novæ et maleficæ,” are the words of Suetonius; the latter conveying the idea of witchcraft or enchantment. Suidas relates that a certain martyr cried out from his dungeon—“Ye have loaded me with fetters as a sorcerer and profane person.” Tacitus calls the Christian religion “a foreign and deadly [exitiabilis] superstition,” Annal. xiii. 32; Pliny, in his celebrated letter to Trajan, “a depraved, wicked (or prava), and outrageous superstition.” Epist. x. 97.
  
  Tacitus also describes the excruciating torments inflicted on the Roman Christians by Nero. He says that they were subjected to the derision of the people; dressed in the skins of wild beasts, and exposed to be torn to pieces by dogs in the public games, that they were crucified, or condemned to be burnt; and at night-fall served in place of lamps to lighten the darkness, Nero’s own gardens being used for the spectacle. Annal. xv. 44.
  
  Traditions of the church place the martyrdoms of SS. Peter and Paul at Rome, under the reign of Nero. The legends are given by Ordericus Vitalis. See vol. i. of the edition in the Antiq. Lib. pp. 206, &c., with the notes and reference to the apocryphal works on which they are founded.

  [1 ]Claudius had received the submission of some of the British tribes. See c. xvii. of his Life. In the reign of Nero, his general, Suetonius Paulinus, attacked Mona or Anglesey, the chief seat of the Druids, and extirpated them with great cruelty. The successes of Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, who inhabited Derbyshire, were probably the cause of Nero’s wishing to withdraw the legions; she having reduced London, Colchester, and Verulam, and put to death seventy thousand of the Romans and their British allies. She was, however, at length defeated by Suetonius Paulinus, who was recalled for his severities. See Tacit. Agric. xv. 1., xvi. 1; and Annal. xiv. 29.

  [1 ]The dominions of Cottius embraced the vallies in the chain of the Alps extending between Piedmont and Dauphiny, called by the Romans the Cottian Alps. See Tiberius, c. xxxvii.

  [2 ]It was a favourite project of the Cæsars to make a navigable canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, to avoid the circumnavigation of the southern extremity of the Morea, now Cape Matapan, which, even in our days, has its perils. See Julius Cæsar, c. xliv. and Caligula, c. xxi.

  [3 ]Caspiæ Portæ; so called from the difficulties opposed by the narrow and rocky defile to the passage of the Caucasus from the country washed by the Euxine, now called Georgia, to that lying between the Caspian and the sea of Azof. It commences a few miles north of Teflis, and is frequently the scene of contests between the Russians and the Circassian tribes.

  [1 ]Citharædus: the word signifies a vocalist, who with his singing gave an accompaniment on the harp.

  [2 ]It has been already observed that Naples was a Greek colony, and consequently Greek appears to have continued the vernacular tongue.

  [3 ]See Augustus, c. xcviii.

  [4 ]Of the strange names given to the different modes of applauding in the theatre, the first was derived from the humming of bees; the second from the rattling of rain or hail on the roofs; and the third from the tinkling of porcelain vessels when clashed together.

  [1 ]Canace was the daughter of an Etrurian king, whose incestuous intercourse with her brother having been detected, in consequence of the cries of the infant of which she was delivered, she killed herself. It was a joke at Rome, that some one asking, when Nero was performing in Canace, what the emperor was doing: a wag replied. “He is labouring in child-birth.”

  [1 ]A town in Corcyra now Corfu. There was a sea-port of the same name in Epirus

  [1 ]The Circus Maximus, frequently mentioned by Suetonius, was so called because it was the largest of all the circuses in and about Rome. Rudely constructed of timber by Tarquinius Drusus, and enlarged and improved with the growing fortunes of the republic, under the emperors it became a most superb building. Julius Cæsar (c. xxxix) extended it, and surrounded it with a canal, ten feet deep and as many broad, to protect the spectators against danger from the chariots during the races. Claudius (c. xxi.) rebuilt the carceres with marble, and gilded the metæ. This vast centre of attraction to the Roman people, in the games of which religion, politics, and amusement, were combined, was, according to Pliny, three stadia (of 625 feet) long, and one broad, and held 260,000 spectators; so that Juvenal says,
  
  “Totam hodie Roman circus capit.” —Sat. xi. 195. This poetical exaggeration is applied by Addison to the Colosseum.
  
  “That on its public shews unpeopled Rome.” —Letter to Lord Halifax.The area of the Circus Maximus occupied the hollow between the Palatine and Aventine hills, so that it was overlooked by the imperial palace, from which the emperors had so full a view of it, that they could from that height give the signals for commencing the races. Few fragments of it remain; but from the circus of Caracalla, which is better preserved, a tolerably good idea of the ancient circus may be formed. For details of its parts, and the mode in which the sports were conducted, see Burton’s Antiquities, p. 309, &c.

  [2 ]The Velabrum was a street in Rome. See Julius Cæsar, c. xxxvii.

  [1 ]Acte was a slave who had been bought in Asia, whose beauty so captivated Nero that he redeemed her, and became greatly attached to her. She is supposed to be the concubine of Nero mentioned by St. Chrysostom, as having been converted by St. Paul during his residence at Rome. The Apostle speaks of the “Saints in Cæsar’s household.”—Phil. iv. 22.

  [2 ]See Tacitus; Annal. xv. 37.

  [3 ]A much-frequented street in Rome. See Claudius, c. xvi.

  [4 ]It is said that the advances were made by Agrippina, with flagrant indecency, to secure her power over him. See Tacitus. Annal. xiv. 2, 3.

  [5 ]Olim etiam, quoties lectica cum matre veheretur, libidinatum inceste, ac maculis vestis proditum, affirmant.

  [1 ]Tacitus calls him Pythagoras, which was probably the freedman’s proper name; Doryphorus being a name of office somewhat equivalent to almoner. See Annal. b. xv.

  [2 ]The emperor Caligula, who was the brother of Nero’s mother Agrippina.

  [3 ]See before, c. xiii. Tiridates was nine months in Rome or the neighbourhood, and was entertained the whole time at the emperor’s expense

  [1 ]Canusium, now Canosa, was a town in Apulia, near the mouth of the river Aufidus, celebrated for its fine wool. It is mentioned by Pliny, and retained its reputation for the manufacture in the middle ages, as we find in Ordericus Vitalis.

  [2 ]The Mazacans were an African tribe from the deserts in the interior, famous for their spirited barbs, their powers of endurance, and their skill in throwing the dart.

  [3 ]The Palace of the Cæsars, on the Palatine hill, was enlarged by Augustus from the dimensions of a private house (see Augustus, cc. xxix., lvii.). Tiberius made some additions to it, and Caligula extended it to the forum (Caligula. c. xxxi.). Tacitus gives a similar account with that of our author of the extent and splendour of the works of Claudius. Annal. xv. c. xlii. Reaching from the Palatine to the Esquiline hill, it covered all the intermediate space, where the Colosseum now stands. We shall find that it was still further enlarged by Domitian c. xv. of his life in the present work.

  [1 ]The penates were worshipped in the innermost part of the house, which was called penetralia. There were likewise publici penates, worshipped in the Capitol, and supposed to be the guardians of the city and temples. Some have thought that the lares and penates were the same; and they appear to be sometimes confounded. They were, however, different. The penates were reputed to be of divine origin; the lares, of human. Certain persons were admitted to the worship of the lares, who were not to that of the penates. The latter, as has been already said, were worshipped only in the innermost part of the house, but the former also in the public roads, in the camp and on sea.

  [2 ]A play upon the Greek word μωρὸς, signifying a fool, while the Latin morari, from moror, means “to dwell,” or “continue.”

  [1 ]A small port between the gulf of Baiæ and cape Misenum.

  [1 ]From whence the “Procul, O procul este profani!” of the poet; a warning which was transferred to the Christian mysteries.

  [2 ]See before, c. xii.

  [3 ]Statilius Taurus, who lived in the time of Augustus, and built the amphitheatre called after his name. Augustus, c. xxiv. He is mentioned by Horace, Epist. i. v. 4.

  [4 ]Octavia was first sent away to Campania, under a guard of soldiers, and after being recalled, in consequence of the remonstrances of the people, by whom she was beloved, Nero banished her to the island of Pandataria.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 813.

  [2 ]Seneca was accused of complicity in the conspiracy of Caius Piso. Tacitus furnishes some interesting details of the circumstances under which the philosopher calmly submitted to his fate, which was announced to him when at supper with his friends, at his villa, near Rome.—Tacitus, Tacitus, b. xiv. xv.

  [1 ]This comet, as well as one which appeared the year in which Claudius died, is described by Seneca, Natural. Quæst. VII. c. xvii. and xix. and by Phny, II. c. xxv.

  [2 ]See Tacitus, Annal. xv 48—55.

  [3 ]The sixteenth book of Tacitus, which would probably have given an account of the Vinician conspiracy, is lost. It is shortly noticed by Plutarch.

  [1 ]See before. c. xix.

  [1 ]This destructive fire occurred in the end of July, or the beginning of August, a.u.c. 816, 64. It was imputed to the Christians, and drew on them the persecutions mentioned in c. xvi., and the note.

  [2 ]The revolt in Britain broke out a.u.c. 813. Xiphilinus (lxii p. 701) attributes it to the severity of the confiscations with which the repayment of large sums of money advanced to the Britons by the emperor Claudius, and also by Seneca, was exacted. Tacitus adds another cause, the insupportable tyranny and avarice of the centurions and soldiers. Prasutagus, king of the Iceni, had named the emperor his heir. His widow Boadices and her daughters were shamefully used, his kinsmen reduced to slavery, and his whole territory ravaged; upon which the Britons flew to arms. See c. xviii., and the note.

  [1 ]Νεόνυμϕον; alluding to Nero’s unnatural nuptials with Sporus or Pythagoras. See cc. xxviii. xxix. It should be νεόνυμϕος.

  [2 ]“Sustulit” has a double meaning, signifying both, to bearaway, and put out of the way.

  [3 ]The epithet applied to Apollo, as the god of music, was Pæan; as the god of war, Ἑκατηβολέτης.

  [4 ]Pliny remarks, that the Golden House of Nero was swallowing up all Rome. Veii, an ancient Etruscan city, about twelve miles from Rome, was originally little inferior to it, being, as Dionysius informs us, (lib. ii. p. 16), equal in extent to Athens. See a very accurate survey of the ruins of Veii, in Gell’s admirable Topography of Rome and its Vicinity p. 436, of Bohn’s Edition.

  [1 ]Suetonius calls them organa hydralica, and they seem to have been a musical instrument on the same principle as our present organs, only that water was the inflating power. Vitruvius (iv. ix.) mentions the instrument as the invention of Ctesibus of Alexandria. It is also well described by Tertullian, De Anima, c. xiv. The pneumatic organ appears to have been a later improvement. We have before us a contorniate medallion, of Caracalla, from the collection of Mr. W. S. Bohn, upon which one or other of these instruments figures. On the obverse is the bust of the emperor in armour, laureated, with the inscription m. aurelius antoninus pius aug. brit. (his latest title). On the reverse is the organ; an oblong chest with the pipes above, and a draped figure on each side.

  [1 ]A fine sand from the Nile, similar to puzzuolano, which was strewed on the stadium; the wrestlers also rolled in it, when their bodies were slippery with oil or perspiration.

  [2 ]The words on the ticket about the emperor’s neck, are supposed, by a prosopopea, to be spoken by him. The reply is Agrippina’s, or the people’s. It alludes to the punishment due to him for his parricide. By the Roman law, a person who had murdered a parent or any near relation, after being severely scourged, was sewed up in a sack, with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and then thrown into the sea, or a deep river.

  [3 ]Gallos, which signifies both cocks and Gauls.

  [4 ]Vindex, it need hardly be observed, was the name of the proprætor who had set up the standard of rebellion in Gaul. The word also signifies an avenger of wrongs, redresser of grievances; hence vindicate, vindictive, &c.

  [1 ]Æn. xii. 646.

  [1 ]The Via Salaria was so called from the Sabines using it to fetch salt from the coast. It led from Rome to the northward, near the gardens of Sallust, by a gate of the same name, called also Quirinalis, Agonalis, and Collina. It was here that Alaric entered.

  [2 ]The Via Nomentana, so named because it led to the Sabine town of Nomentum, joined the Via Salara at Heretum on the Tiber. It was also called Ficulnensis. It entered Rome by the Porta Viminalis, now called Porta Pia. It was by this road that Hannibal approached the walls of Rome. The country-house of Nero’s freedman, where he ended his days, stood near the Anio, beyond the present church of St. Agnese, where there was a villa of the Spada family, belonging now, we believe, to Torlonia.

  [3 ]This description is no less exact than vivid. It was easy for Nero to gain the nearest gate, the Nomentan, from the Esquiline quarter of the palace, without much observation; and on issuing from it (after midnight, it appears), the fugitives would have the pretorian camp so close on their right hand, that they might well hear the shouts of the soldiers.

  [1 ]Decocta. Pliny informs us that Nero had the water he drank, boiled, to clear it from impurities, and then cooled with ice.

  [2 ]Wood, to warm the water for washing the corpse, and for the funeral pile.

  [1 ]This burst of passion was uttered in Greek, the rest was spoken in Latin. Both were in familiar use. The mixture, perhaps, betrays the disturbed state of Nero’s mind.

  [2 ]Il. x. 535.

  [1 ]Collis Hortulorum; which was afterwards called the Pincian Hill, from a family of that name, who flourished under the lower empire. In the time of the Cæsars it was occupied by the gardens and villas of the wealthy and luxurious; among which those of Sallust are celebrated. Some of the finest statues have been found in the ruins; among others, that of the “Dying Gladiator.” The situation was airy and healthful, commanding fine views, and it is still the most agreeable neighbourhood in Rome.

  [2 ]Antiquarians suppose that some relics of the sepulchre of the Domitian family, in which the ashes of Nero were deposited, are preserved in the city wall which Aurelian, when he extended its circuit, carried across the “Collis Hortulorum.” Those ancient remains, declining from the perpendicular, are called the Muro Torto.—The Lunan marble was brought from quarries near a town of that name, in Etruria. It no longer exists, but stood on the coast of what is now called the gulf of Spezzia.—Thasos, an island in the Archipelago, was one of the Cyclades. It produced a grey marble, much veined, but not in great repute.

  [1 ]See c. xli.

  [1 ]The Syrian Goddess is supposed to have been Semiramis deified. Her rites are mentioned by Florus, Apuleius, and Lucian.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 821— 69.

  [3 ]We have here one of the incidental notices which are so valuable in an historian, as connecting him with the times of which he writes. See also just before, c. lii.

  [1 ]Veii; see the note, Nero, c. xxxix.

  [2 ]The conventional term for what is most commonly known as,

  • “The Laurel, meed of mighty conquerors,
  • And poets sage,”
  • —Spenser’s Faerie Queen.

  is retained throughout the translation. But the tree or shrub which had this distinction among the ancients, the Laurus nobilis of botany, the Daphne of the Greeks, is the bay-tree, indigenous in Italy, Greece, and the East, and introduced into England about 1562. Our laurel is a plant of a very different tribe, the Prunus lauro-cerasus, a native of the Levant and the Crimea, acclimated in England at a later period than the bay.

  [3 ]The Temple of the Cæsars is generally supposed to be that dedicated by Julius Cæsar to Venus genitrix. from whom the Julian family pretended to derive their des ent. See Julius, c. lxi.; Augustus, c. ci.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 821.

  [1 ]The Atrium, or Aula, was the court or hall of a house, the entrance to which was by the principal door It appears to have been a large oblong square, surrounded with covered or arched galleries. Three sides of the Atrium were supported by pillars, which, in later times, were marble The side opposite to the gate was called Tablinum; and the other two sides, Alæ The Tablinum contained books, and the records of what each member of the family had done in his magistracy. In the Atrium the nuptial couch was erected; and here the mistress of the family, with her maid-servants, wrought at spinning and weaving, which, in the time of the ancient Romans, was their principal employment.

  [2 ]He was consul with L. Aurelius Cotta, a.u.c. 610.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 604.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 710.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 775.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 608.

  [3 ]Caius Sulpicius Galba, the emperor’s brother, had been consul a.u.c. 774.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 751.

  [5 ]Now Fondi, which, with Terracina, still bearing its original name, lie on the road to Naples. See Tiberius, cc. v. and xxxix.

  [6 ]Livia Ocellina, mentioned just before.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 751.

  [2 ]The widow of the emperor Augustus.

  [1 ]Suetonius seems to have forgotten, that, according to his own testimony, this legacy, as well as those left by Tiberius, was paid by Caligula. “Legata ex testamento Tiberii, quamquam abolito, sed et Juliæ Augustæ, quod Tiberius suppresserat, cum fide, ac sine calumniâ repræsentate persolvit.” Calig. c. xvi.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 786.

  [3 ]Caius Cæsar Caligula. He gave the command of the legions in Germany to Galba.

  [1 ]“Scuto moderatus;” another reading in the parallel passage of Tacitus is scuto immodice oneratus, burdened with the heavy weight of a shield.

  [2 ]It would appear that Galba was to have accompanied Claudius in his expedition to Britain; which is related before, Claudius, c. xvii.

  [1 ]It has been remarked before, that the Cantabria of the ancients is now the province of Biscay.

  [2 ]Now Carthagena.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 821.

  [1 ]Now Corunna.

  [2 ]Tortosa, on the Ebro

  [1 ]“Simus,” literally, flat-nosed, was a cant word, used for a clown; Galba being jeered for his rusticity, in consequence of his long retirement. See c. viii. Indeed, they called Spain his farm.

  [1 ]The command of the pretorian guards.

  [1 ]In the Forum. See Augustus, c. lvii.

  [1 ]II. v 254.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 822.

  [1 ]On the esplanade, where the standards, objects of religious reverence, were planted. See note to c vi. Criminals were usually executed outside the Vallum, and in the presence of a centurion.

  [2 ]Probably one of the two mentioned in Claudius, c. xiii.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 784 or 785.

  [2 ]“Distento sago impositum in sublime jactare.”

  [3 ]See Nero, c. xxxv.

  [1 ]The Milliare Aureum was a pillar of stone set up at the top of the forum, from which all the great military roads throughout Italy started, the distances to the principal towns being marked upon it. Dio (lib. liv.) says that it was erected by the emperor Augustus, when he was curator of the roads.

  [2 ]Haruspex, Auspex, or Augur, denoted any person who foretold futurity, or interpreted omens. There was at Rome a body of priests, or college, under this title, whose office it was to foretell future events, chiefly from the flight, chirping, or feeding of birds, and from other appearances. They were of the greatest authority in the Roman state; for nothing of importance was done in public affairs, either at home or abroad, in peace or war, without consulting them. The Romans derived the practice of augury chiefly from the Tuscans; and anciently their youth used to be instructed as carefully in this art, as afterwards they were in the Greek literature. For this purpose, by a decree of the senate, a certain number of the sons of the leading men at Rome was sent to the twelve states of Etruria for instruction.

  [1 ]See before, note, c. i. The Principia was a broad open space, which separated the lower part of the Roman camp from the upper, and extended the whole breadth of the camp. In this place was erected the tribunal of the general, when he either administered justice or harangued the army. Here likewise the tribunes held their courts, and punishments were inflicted. The principal standards of the army, as it has been already mentioned, were deposited in the Principia; and in it also stood the altars of the gods, and the images of the emperors, by which the soldiers swore.

  [1 ]See Nero, c. xxxi. The sum estimated as requisite for its completion amounted to £2,187,500 of our money.

  [2 ]The two last words, literally translated, mean “long trumpets;” such as were used at sacrifices. The sense is, therefore, “What have I to do, my hands stained with blood, with performing religious ceremonies!”

  [1 ]The Ancile was a round shield, said to have fallen from heaven in the reign of Numa, and supposed to be the shield of Mars. It was kept with great care in the sanctuary of his temple, as a symbol of the perpetuity of the Roman empire; and that it might not be stolen, eleven others were made exactly similar to it.

  [2 ]This ideal personage, who has been mentioned before, Augustus, c. lxviii., was the goddess Cybele, the wife of Saturn, called also Rhea, Ops, Vesta, Magna, Mater, &c. She was painted as a matron, crowned with towers, sitting in a chariot drawn by lions. A statue of her, brought from Pessinus in Phrygia to Rome, in the time of the second Punic war, was much honoured there. Her priests, called the Galli and Corybantes, were castrated; and worshipped her with the sound of drums, tabors, pipes, and cymbals. The rites of this goddess were disgraced by great indecencies.

  [3 ]Otherwise called Orcus, Pluto, Jupiter Infernus, and Stygnis. He was the brother of Jupiter, and king of the infernal regions. His wife was Proserpine, the daughter of Ceres, whom he carried off as she was gathering flowers in the plains of Enna, in Sicily. The victims offered to the infernal gods were black: they were killed with their faces bent downwards; the knife was applied from below, and the blood was poured into a ditch.

  [1 ]A town between Mantua and Cremona.

  [2 ]The temple of Castor. It stood about twelve miles from Cremona. Tacitus gives some details of this action. Hist. ii. 243.

  [3 ]Both Greek and Latin authors differ in the mode of spelling the name of this place, the first syllable being written Beb, Bet, and Bret. It is now a small village called Labino, between Cremona and Verona.

  [4 ]Lenis was a name of similar signification with that of Tranquillus, borne by his son, the author of the present work. We find from Tacitus, that there was, among Otho’s generals, in this battle, another person of the name of Suetonius, whose cognomen was Paulinus; with whom our author’s father must not be confounded. Lenis was only a tribune of the thirteenth legion, the position of which in the battle is mentioned by Tacitus, Hist. xi. 24, and was angusticlavius, wearing only the narrow stripe, as not being of the senatorial order; while Paulinus was a general, commanding a legion, at least, and a consular man; having filled that office a.u.c. 818. There seems no doubt that Suetonius Paulinus was the same general who distinguished himself by his successes and cruelties in Britain. Nero, c. xviii., and note.
  
  Not to extend the present note, we may shortly refer to our author’s having already mentioned his grandfather (Caligula, c. xix.); besides other sources from which he drew his information. He tells us that he himself was then a boy. We have now arrived at the times in which his father bore a part. Such incidental notices, dropped by historical writers, have a certain value in enabling us to form a judgment on the genuineness of their narratives as to contemporaneous, or recent, events.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 823.

  [2 ]Jupiter, to prevent the discovery of his amour with Io, the daughter of the river Inachus, transformed her into a heifer, in which metamorphosis she was placed by Juno under the watchful inspection of Argus; but flying into Egypt, and her keeper being killed by Mercury, she recovered her human shape, and was married to Osiris. Her husband afterwards became a god of the Egyptians, and she a goddess, under the name of Isis. She was represented with a mural crown on her head, a cornucopia in one hand, and a sistrum (a musical instrument) in the other.

  [1 ]Faunus was supposed to be the third king who reigned over the original inhabitants of the central parts of Italy, Saturn being the first. Virgil makes his wife’s name Marica—

  • Hunc Fauna, et nymphà genitum Laurente Maricâ
  • Accipimus.
  • —Æn. vii. 47.

  Her name may have been changed after her deification; but we have no other accounts than those preserved by Suetonius, of several of the traditions handed down from the fabulous ages respecting the Vitellian family.

  [2 ]The Æquicolæ were probably a tribe inhabiting the heights in the neighbourhood of Rome. Virgil describes them, Æn. vii. 746.

  [3 ]Nuceria, now Nocera, is a town near Mantua; but Livy, in treating of the war with the Samnites, always speaks of Luceria, which Strabo calls a town in Apulia.

  [1 ]Cassius Severus is mentioned before, in Augustus, c. lvi.; Caligula, c. xvi., &c.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 785.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 787.

  [4 ]He is frequently commended by Josephus for his kindness to the Jews. See, particularly, Antiq. VI. xviii.

  [5 ]a.u.c. 796, 800

  [6 ]a.u.c. 801.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 797. See Claudius, c. xvii.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 801.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 767; being the year after the death of the emperor Augustus; from whence it appears that Vitellius was seventeen years older than Otho, both being at an advanced age when they were raised to the imperial dignity.

  [1 ]He was sent to Germany by Galba.

  [2 ]See Tiberius, c. xliii.

  [3 ]Julius Cæsar, also, was said to have exchanged brass for gold in the Capitol, Julius, c. liv. The tin which we here find in use at Rome, was probably brought from the Cassiterides, now the Scilly islands, whence it had been an article of commerce by the Phœnicians and Carthaginians from a very early period.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 821.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 822.

  [1 ]Vienne was a very ancient city of the province of Narbonne, famous in ecclesiastical history as the early seat of a bishopric in Gaul.

  [2 ]See Otho, c. ix.

  [1 ]See Otho, c. ix.

  [2 ]Agrippina, the wife of Nero and mother of Germanicus, founded a colony on the Rhine at the place of her birth. Tacit. Annal. b. xii. It became a flourishing city, and its origin may be traced in its modern name, Cologne

  [3 ]A dies non fastus, an unlucky day in the Roman calendar, being the anniversary of their great defeat by the Gauls on the river Allia, which joins the Tiber about five miles from Rome. This disaster happened on the 16th of the calends of August [17th July].

  [1 ]Posca was sour wine or vinegar mixed with water, which was used by the Roman soldiery as their common drink. It has been found beneficial in the cure of putrid diseases

  [2 ]Upwards of £4000 sterling. See note, p. 487.

  [1 ]In imitation of the form of the public edicts, which began with the words, Bonum Factum.

  [2 ]Catta muliere: The Catti were a German tribe who inhabited the present countries of Hesse or Baden. Tacitus, De Mor. Germ., informs us that the Germans placed great confidence in the prophetical inspirations which they attributed to their women.

  [1 ]Suetonius does not supply any account of the part added by Tiberius to the palace of the Cæsars on the Palatine, although, as it will be recollected, he has mentioned or described the works of Augustus, Caligula, and Nero. The banquetting-room here mentioned would easily command a view of the Capitol, across the narrow intervening valley. Flavius Sabinus, Vespasian’s brother, was prefect of the city.

  [1 ]Caligula.

  [2 ]Lucius and Germanicus, the brother and son of Vitellius, were slain near Terracina; the former was marching to his brother’s relief.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 822.

  [4 ]C. ix.

  [5 ]Becco, from whence the French bec, and English beak; with, probably, the family names of Bec or Bek. This distinguished provincial, under his Latin name of Antoninus Primus, commanded the seventh legion in Gaul. His character is well drawn by Tacitus, in his usual terse style, Hist. XI. 86. 2.

  [1 ]Reate, the original seat of the Flavian family, was a city of the Sabines. Its present name is Rieti.

  [2 ]It does not very clearly appear what rank in the Roman armies was held by the evocati. They are mentioned on three occasions by Suetonius, without affording us much assistance. Cæsar, like our author, joins them with the centurions. See, in particular, De Bell. Civil. I xvii. 4.

  [3 ]The inscription was in Greek, καλῶς τελωθήσαντι.

  [4 ]In the ancient Umbria, afterwards the duchy of Spoleto; its modern name being Norcia.

  [1 ]Gaul beyond, north of, the Po, now Lombardy.

  [2 ]We find the annual migration of labourers in husbandry a very common practice in ancient as well as in modern times. At present, several thousand industrious labourers cross over every summer from the duchies of Parma and Modena, bordering on the district mentioned by Suetonius, to the island of Corsica; returning to the continent when the harvest is got in.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 762. 10.

  [4 ]Cosa was a place in the Volscian territory; of which Anagni was probably the chief town. It lies about forty miles to the north-east of Rome.

  [1 ]Caligula.

  [2 ]These games were extraordinary, as being out of the usual course of those given by prætors.

  [3 ]“Revocavit in contubernium.” From the difference of our habits, there is no word in the English language which exactly conveys the meaning of contubernium; a word which, in a military sense, the Romans applied to the intimate fellowship between comrades in war who messed together, and lived in close fellowship in the same tent. Thence they transferred it to a union with one woman who was in a higher position than a concubine, but for some reason, could not acquire the legal rights of a wife, as in the case of slaves of either sex. A man of rank, also, could not marry a slave or a freedwoman, however much he might be attached to her.

  [4 ]Nearly the same phrases are applied by Suetonius to Drusilla, see Caligula, c. xxiv., and to Marcella, the concubine of Commodus, by Herodian, l. xvi. 9., where he says that she had all the honours of an empress, except that the incense was not offered to her. These connections resembled the left-hand marriages of the German princes.

  [1 ]This expedition to Britain has been mentioned before, Claudius, c. xvii. and note; and see ib. xxiv.
  
  Valerius Flaccus, i. 8, and Silius Italicus, iii. 598, celebrate the triumphs of Vespasian in Britain. In representing him, however, as carrying his arms among the Caledonian tribes, their flattery transferred to the emperor the glory of the victories gained by his lieutenant, Agricola. Vespasian’s own conquests, while he served in Britain, were principally in the territortes of the Brigantes, lying north of the Humber, and including the present counties of York and Durham

  [2 ]a.u.c. 804.

  [1 ]Tacitus, Hist. V. xiii. 3., mentions this ancient prediction, and its currency through the East, in nearly the same terms as Suetonius. The coming power is in both instances described in the plural number, profecti, “those shall come forth;” and Tacitus applies it to Titus as well as Vespasian. The prophecy is commonly supposed to have reference to a passage in Micah, v. 2, “Out of thee [Bethlehem-Ephrata] shall He come forth, to be ruler in Israel.” Earlier prophetic intimations of a similar character, and pointing to a more extended dominion, have been traced in the sacred records of the Jews; and there is reason to believe that these books were at this time not unknown in the heathen world, particularly at Alexandria, and through the Septuagint version. These predictions, in their literal sense, point to the establishment of a universal monarchy, which should take its rise in Judea. The Jews looked for their accomplishment in the person of one of their own nation, the expected Messiah, to which character there were many pretenders in those times. The first disciples of Christ, during the whole period of his ministry, supposed that they were to be fulfilled in him. The Romans thought that the conditions were answered by Vespasian and Titus having been called from Judea to the seat of empire. The expectations entertained by the Jews, and naturally participated in and appropriated by the first converts to Christianity, having proved groundless, the prophecies were subsequently interpreted in a spiritual sense.

  [2 ]Gessius Florus was at that time governor of Judæa, with the title and rank of prepositus, it not being a proconsular province, as the native princes still held some parts of it, under the protection and with the alliance of the Romans. Gessius succeeded Florus Albinus, the successor of Felix.

  [3 ]Cestius Gallus was consular lieutenant in Syria.

  [1 ]See note to c. vii.

  [2 ]A right hand was the sign of sovereign power, and, as every one knows, borne upon a staff among the standards of the armies.

  [1 ]Tacitus says, “Carmel is the name both of a god and a mountain; but there is neither image nor temple of the god; such are the ancient traditions; we find there only an altar and religious awe.”—Hist. xi. 78, 4. It also appears, from his account, that Vespasian offered sacrifice on Mount Carmel, where Basilides, mentioned hereafter, c. vii., predicted his success from an inspection of the entrails.

  [2 ]Josephus, the celebrated Jewish historian, who was engaged in these wars, having been taken prisoner, was confined in the dungeon at Jotapata, the castle referred to in the preceding chapter, before which Vespasian was wounded.—De Bell. cxi. 14.

  [3 ]The prediction of Josephus was founded on the Jewish prophecies mentioned in the note to c. iv., which he, like others, applied to Vespasian.

  [4 ]Julius Cæsar is always called by our author after his apotheosis, Divus Julius.

  [5 ]The battle at Bedriacum secured the empire for Vitellius. See Otho, c. ix.; Vitellius. c. x.

  [1 ]Alexandria may well be called the key, claustra, of Egypt, which was the granary of Rome. It was of the first importance that Vespasian should secure it at this juncture.

  [2 ]Tacitus describes Basilides as a man of rank among the Egyptians, and he appears also to have been a priest, as we find him officiating at Mount Carmel, c. v. This is so incompatible with his being a Roman freedman, that commentators concur in supposing that the word “libertus,” although found in all the copies now extant, has crept into the text by some inadvertence of an early transcriber. Basilides appears, like Philo Judæus, who lived about the same period, to have been half-Greek, half-Jew, and to have belonged to the celebrated Platonic school of Alexandria.

  [3 ]Tacitus informs us that Vespasian himself believed Basilides to have been at this time not only in an infirm state of health, but at the distance of several days’ journey from Alexandria. But (for his greater satisfaction) he strictly examined the priests whether Basilides had entered the temple on that day: he made inquiries of all he met, whether he had been seen in the city; nay, further, he dispatched messengers on horseback, who ascertained that at the time specified, Basilides was more than eighty miles from Alexandria. Then Vespasian comprehended that the appearance of Basilides, and the answer to his prayers given through him, were by divine interposition. Tacit. Hist. iv. 82. 2.

  [1 ]The account given by Tacitus of the miracles of Vespasian is fuller than that of Suetonius, but does not materially vary in the details, except that, in his version of the story, he describes the impotent man to be lame in the hand, instead of the leg or the knee, and adds an important circumstance in the case of the blind man, that he was “notus tabe occulorum,” notorious for the disease in his eyes He also winds up the narrative with the following statement: “They who were present, relate both these cures, even at this time, when there is nothing to be gained by lying.” Both the historians lived within a few years of the occurrence, but their works were not published until advanced periods of their lives. The closing remark of Tacitus seems to indicate that, at least, he did not entirely discredit the account; and as for Suetonius, his pages are as full of prodigies of all descriptions, related apparently in all good faith, as a monkish chronicle of the Middle Ages.
  
  The story has the more interest, as it is one of the examples of successful imposture, selected by Hume in his Essay on Miracles; with the reply to which by Paley, in his Evidences of Christianity, most readers are familiar. The commentators on Suetonius agree with Paley in considering the whole affair as a juggle between the priests, the patients, and, probably, the emperor. But what will, perhaps, strike the reader as most remarkable, is the singular coincidence of the story with the accounts given of several of the miracles of Christ; whence it has been supposed, that the scene was planned in imitation of them. It did not fall within the scope of Dr. Paley’s argument to advert to this; and our own brief illustration must be strictly confined within the limits of historical disquisition. Adhering to this principle, we may point out that if the idea of plagiarism be accepted, it receives some confirmation from the incident related by our author in a preceding paragraph, forming, it may be considered, another scene of the same drama, where we find Basilides appearing to Vespasian in the temple of Serapis, under circumstances which cannot fail to remind us of Christ’s suddenly standing in the midst of his disciples, “when the doors were shut.” This incident, also, has very much the appearance of a parody on the evangelical history. But if the striking similarity of the two narratives be thus accounted for, it is remarkable that while the priests of Alexandria, or, perhaps, Vespasian himself from his residence in Judæa, were in possession of such exact details of two of Christ’s miracles—if not of a third striking incident in his history—we should find not the most distant allusion in the works of such cotemporary writers as Tacitus and Suetonius, to any one of the still more stupendous occurrences which had recently taken place in a part of the world with which the Romans had now very intimate relations. The character of these authors induces us to hesitate in adopting the notion, that either contempt or disbelief would have led them to pass over such events, as altogether unworthy of notice; and the only other inference from their silence is, that they had never heard of them. But as this can scarcely be reconciled with the plagiarism attributed to Vespasian or the Egyptian priests, it is safer to conclude that the coincidence, however singular, was merely fortuitous. It may be added that Spartianus, who wrote the lives of Adrian and succeeding emperors, gives an account of a similar miracle performed by that prince in healing a blind man.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 823—833, excepting 826 and 831.

  [1 ]The temple of Peace, erected 71, on the conclusion of the wars with the Germans and the Jews, was the largest temple in Rome. Vespasian and Titus deposited in it the sacred vessels and other spoils which were carried in their triumph after the conquest of Jerusalem. They were consumed, and the temple much damaged, if not destroyed, by fire, towards the end of the reign of Commodus, in the year 191. It stood in the Forum, where some ruins on a prodigious scale, still remaining, were traditionally considered to be those of the Temple of Peace, until Piranesi contended that they are part of Nero’s Golden House. Others suppose that they are the remains of a Basilica. A beautiful fluted Corinthian column, forty-seven feet high, which was removed from this spot, and now stands before the church of S. Maria Maggiore, gives a great idea of the splendour of the original structure.

  [1 ]This temple, converted into a Christian church by pope Simplicius, who flourished. 464—483, preserves much of its ancient character. It is now called San Stefano in Rotondo, from its circular form; the thirty-four pillars, with arches springing from one to the other and intended to support the cupola, still remaining to prove its former magnificence.

  [2 ]This amphitheatre is the famous Colosseum begun by Trajan, and finished by Titus. It is needless to go into details respecting a building the gigantic ruins of which are so well known.

  [1 ]Hercules is said, after conquering Geryon in Spain, to have come into this part of Italy. One of his companions, the supposed founder of Reate, may have had the name of Flavus.

  [2 ]Vespasian and his son Titus had a joint triumph for the conquest of Judæa, which is described at length by Josephus, De Bell, Jud. vii. 16. The coins of Vespasian exhibiting the captive Judæa (Judæa capta), are probably familiar to the reader. See Harphrey’s Coin Collector’s Manual, p. 328.

  [1 ]Demetrius, who was born at Corinth, seems to have been a close imitator of Diogenes, the founder of the sect. Having come to Rome to study under Apollonius, he was banished to the islands, with other philosophers, by Vespasian

  [2 ]There being no such place as Morbonia, and the supposed name being derived from morbus, disease, some critics have supposed that Anticyra, the asylum of the incurables, (see Caligula, c. xxix.) is meant; but the probability is, that the expression used by the imperial chamberlain was only a courtly version of a phrase not very commonly adopted in the present day.

  [3 ]Helvidius Priscus, a person of some celebrity as a philosopher and public man, is mentioned by Tacitus, Xiphilinus, and Arrian.

  [1 ]Cicero speaks in strong terms of the sordidness of retail trade.—Off. i. 24

  [1 ]The sesterce being worth about two-pence half-penny of English money, the salary of a Roman senator was, in round numbers, five thousand pounds a year; and that of a professor, as stated in the succeeding chapter, one thousand pounds. From this scale, similar calculations may easily be made of the sums occurring in Suetonius’s statements from time to time. There appears to be some mistake in the sum stated in c. xvi. just before, as the amount seems fabulous, whether it represented the floating debt, or the annual revenue, of the empire.

  [2 ]See Augustus, c. xliii. The proscenium of the ancient theatres was a solid erection of an architectural design, not shifted and varied as our stage-scenes.

  [3 ]Many eminent writers among the Romans were originally slaves, such as Terence and Phædrus; and, still more, artists, physicians and artificers. Their talents procuring their manumission, they became the freedmen of their former masters. Vespasian, it appears from Suetonius, purchased the freedom of some persons of ability belonging to these classes.

  [4 ]The Coan Venus was the chef-d’œuvre of Apelles, a native of the island of Cos, in the Archipelago, who flourished in the time of Alexander the Great. If it was the original painting which was now restored, it must have been well preserved.

  [5 ]Probably the colossal statue of Nero (see his Life, c. xxxi.), atterwards placed in Vespasian’s amphitheatre, which derived its name from it.

  [6 ]The usual argument in all times against the introduction of machinery.

  [1 ]See Augustus, c. xxix.

  [2 ]At the men’s Saturnalia, a feast held in December attended with much revelling, the masters waited upon their slaves; and at the women’s Saturnalia, held on the first of March, the women served their female attendants, by whom also they sent presents to their friends.

  [3 ]Notwithstanding the splendour, and even, in many respects, the refinement of the imperial court, the language as well as the habits of the highest classes in Rome seem to have been but too commonly of the grossest description, and every scholar knows that many of their writers are not very delicate in their allusions. Apropos of the ludicrous account given in the text, Martial, on one occasion, uses still plainer language.

  • Utere lactucis, et mollibus utere malvis:
  • Nam faciem durum Phœbe, cacantis habes.
  • —iii. 89.

  [1 ]See c. iii. and note

  [2 ]Probably the emperor had not entirely worn off, or might even affect the rustic dialect of his Sabine countrymen; for among the peasantry the au was still pronounced o, as in plostrum for plaustrum, a waggon; and in orum for aurum, gold, &c. The emperor’s retort was very happy, Flaurus being derived from a Greek word, which signifies worthless, while the consular critic’s proper name, Florus, was connected with much more agreeable associations.

  [3 ]Some of the German critics think that the passage bears the sense of the gratuity having been given by the lady, and that so parsimonious a prince as Vespasian was not likely to have paid such a sum as is here stated for a lady’s proffered favours.

  [1 ]The Flavian family had their own tomb. See Domitian, c. v. The prodigy, therefore, did not concern Vespasian. As to the tomb of the Julian family, see Augustus, c. ci.

  [2 ]Alluding to the apotheosis of the emperors.

  [3 ]Cutiliæ was a small lake, about three-quarters of a mile from Reate, now called Lago di Contigliano. It was very deep, and being fed from springs in the neighbouring hills, the water was exceedingly clear and cold, so that it was frequented by invalids, who required invigorating. Vespasian’s paternal estates lay in the neighbourhood of Reate. See chap i.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 832

  [1 ]Each dynasty lasted twenty-eight years; Claudius and Nero both reigning fourteen; and, of the Flavius family, Vespasian reigned ten, Titus three, and Domitian fifteen.

  [1 ]Caligula. Titus was born a.u.c. 794; about 49.

  [2 ]The Septizonium was a circular building of seven stories. The remains of that of Septimus Severus, which stood on the side of the Palatine Hill, remained till the time of Pope Sixtus V., who removed it, and employed thirty-eight of its columns in ornamenting the church of St. Peter. It does not appear whether the Septizonium here mentioned as existing in the time of Titus, stood on the same spot.

  [3 ]Britannicus, the son of Claudius and Messalina.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 820

  [1 ]Jerusalem was taken, sacked, and burnt, by Titus, after a two years’ siege, on the 8th September, a.u.c. 821, 69; it being the Sabbath. It was in the second year of the reign of Vespasian, when the emperor was sixty years old, and Titus himself, as he informs us, thirty. For particulars of the siege, see Josephus, De Bell. Jud. vi. and vii.; Hegesippus, Excid. Hierosol. v.; Dio, lxvi.; Tacitus, Hist. v.; Orosius, vii. 9.

  [2 ]For the sense in which Titus was saluted with the title of Emperor by the troops, see Julius Cæsar, c. lxxvi.

  [3 ]The joint triumph of Vespasian and Titus, which was celebrated a.u.c. 824, is fully described by Josephus, De Bell. Jud. vii. 24. It is commemorated by the triumphal monument called the Arch of Titus, erected by the senate and people of Rome after his death, and still standing at the foot of the Palatine Hill, on the road leading from the Colosseum to the Forum, and is one of the most beautiful as well as the most interesting models of Roman art. It consists of four stories of the three orders of architecture, the Corinthian being repeated in the two highest. Some of the bas-reliefs, still in good preservation, represent the table of the shew-bread, the seven-branched golden candlestick, the vessel of intense, and the silver trumpets, which were taken by Titus from the Temple at Jerusalem, and, with the book of the law, the veil of the temple, and other spoils, were carried in the triumph. The fate of these sacred relics is rather interesting. Josephus says, that the veil and books of the law were deposited in the Palatium, and the rest of the spoils in the Temple of Peace. When that was burnt, in the reign of Commodus, these treasures were saved, and they were afterwards carried off by Genseric to Africa. Belisarius recovered them, and brought them to Constantinople, 520. Procopius informs us, that a Jew, who saw them, told an acquaintance of the emperor that it would not be advisable to carry them to the palace at Constantinople, as they could not remain anywhere else but where Solomon had placed them. This, he said, was the reason why Genseric had taken the Palace at Rome, and the Roman army had in turn taken that of the Vandal kings. Upon this, the emperor was so alarmed, that he sent the whole of them to the Christian churches at Jerusalem.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 825.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 824.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 823, 825, 827—830, 832

  [1 ]Berenice, whose name is written by our author and others Beronice, was daughter of Agrippa the Great, who was by Aristobulus, grandson of Herod the Great. Having been contracted to Mark, son of Alexander Lysimachus, he died before their union, and Agrippa married her to Herod, Mark’s brother, for whom he had obtained from the emperor Claudius the kingdom of Chalcis. Herod also dying, Berenice, then a widow, lived with her brother, Agrippa, and was suspected of an incestuous intercourse with him. It was at this time that, on their way to the imperial court at Rome, they paid a visit to Festus, at Cæsarea, and were present when St. Paul answered his accusers so eloquently before the tribunal of the governor. Her fascinations were so great, that, to shield herself from the charge of incest, she prevailed on Polemon, king of Cilicia, to submit to be circumcised, become a Jew, and marry her. That union also proving unfortunate, she appears to have returned to Jerusalem, and having attracted Vespasian by magnificent gifts, and the young Titus by her extraordinary beauty, she followed them to Rome, after the termination of the Jewish war, and had apartments in the palace, where she lived with Titus, “to all appearance, as his wife,” as Xiphilinus informs us; and there seems no doubt that he would have married her, but for the strong prejudices of the Romans against foreign alliances. Suetonius tells us with what pain they separated.

  [1 ]The Colosseum: it had been four years in building. See Vespas. c. ix.

  [2 ]The Baths of Titus stood on the Esquiline Hill, on part of the ground which had been the gardens of Mecænas Considerable remains of them are still found among the vineyards; vaulted chambers of vast dimensions, some of which were decorated with arabesque paintings, still in good preservation. Titus appears to have erected a palace for himself adjoining; for the Laocoon, which is mentioned by Pliny as standing in this palace, was found in the neighbouring ruins.

  [3 ]If the statements were not well attested, we might be incredulous as to the number of wild beasts collected for the spectacles to which the people of Rome were so passionately devoted. The earliest account we have of such an exhibition, was a.u.c. 502, when one hundred and forty-two elephants, taken in Sicily, were produced. Pliny, who gives this information, states that lions first appeared in any number, a.u.c. 652; but these were probably not turned loose. In 661, Sylla, when he was prætor, brought forward one hundred. In 696, besides lions, elephants, and bears, one hundred and fifty panthers were shown for the first time. At the dedication of Pompey’s Theatre, there was the greatest exhibition of beasts ever then known; including seventeen elephants, six hundred lions, which were killed in the course of five days, four hundred and ten panthers, &c. A rhinoceros also appeared for the first time. This was a.u.c. 701. The art of taming these beasts was carried to such perfection, that Mark Antony actually yoked them to his carriage. Julius Cæsar, in his third dictatorship, a.u.c. 708, showed a vast number of wild beasts, among which were four hundred lions and a cameleopard. A tiger was exhibited for the first time at the dedication of the Theatre of Marcellus, a.u.c. 743. It was kept in a cage Claudius afterwards exhibited four together. The exhibition of Titus, at the dedication of the Colosseum, here mentioned by Suetonius, seems to have been the largest ever made; Xiphilinus even adds to the number, and says, that including wild-boars, cranes, and other animals, no less than nine thousand were killed. In the reigns of succeeding emperors, a new feature was given to these spectacles, the Circus being converted into a temporary forest, by planting large trees, in which wild animals were turned loose, and the people were allowed to enter the wood and take what they pleased. In this instance, the game consisted principally of beasts of chase; and, on one occasion, one thousand stags, as many of the ibex, wild sheep (moufflons from Sardinia?), and other grazing animals, besides one thousand wild boars, and as many ostriches, were turned loose by the emperor Gordian.

  [1 ]“Diem perdidi.” This memorable speech is recorded by several other historians, and praised by Eusebius in his Chronicles.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 832, 79. It is hardly necessary to refer to the well-known Epistles of Pliny the younger, vi. 16 and 20, giving an account of the first eruption of Vesuvius, in which Pliny, the historian, perished. And see hereafter, p. 475.

  [3 ]The great fire at Rome happened in the second year of the reign of Titus. It consumed a large portion of the city, and among the public buildings destroyed were the temples of Serapis and Isis, that of Neptune, the baths of Agrippa, the Septa, the theatres of Balbus and Pompey, the buildings and library of Augustus on the Palatine, and the temple of Jupiter in the Capitol.

  [1 ]See Vespasian, cc. i. and xxiv. The love of this emperor and his son Titus for the rural retirement of their paternal acres in the Sabine country, forms a striking contrast to the vicious attachment of such tyrants as Tiberius and Caligula for the luxurious scenes of Baiæ or the libidinous orgies of Capri.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 834, 82.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 804.

  [2 ]A street, in the sixth region of Rome, so called, probably, from a remarkable specimen of this beautiful shrub which had made free growth on the spot.

  [3 ]Vitellius, c. xv.

  [4 ]Tacitus (Hist. iii.) differs from Suetonius, saying that Domitian took refuge with a client of his father’s near the Velabrum. Perhaps he found it more safe afterwards to cross the Tiber.

  [1 ]One of Domitian’s coins bears on the reverse a captive female and soldier, with germania devicta.

  [2 ]Vespasian, c. xii: Titus, c vi.

  [1 ]Such excavations had been made by Julius and by Augustus [Aug. xliii.], and the seats for the spectators fitted up with timber in a rude way. That was on the other side of the Tiber. The Naumachia of Domitian occupied the site of the present Piazza d’Espagna, and was larger and more ornamented.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 841. See Augustus, c. xxxi.

  [3 ]This feast was held in December. Plutarch informs us that it was instituted in commemoration of the seventh hill being included in the city bounds.

  [1 ]The Capitol had been burnt, for the third time, in the great fire mentioned Titus, c. viii. The first fire happened in the Marian war, after which it was rebuilt by Pompey, the second in the reign of Vitellius.

  [2 ]This forum, commenced by Domitian and completed by Nerva adjoined the Roman forum and that of Augustus, mentioned in c. xxix. of his life From its communicating with the two others, it was called Transitorium. Part of the wall which bounded it still remains, of a great height, and 144 paces long. It is composed of square masses of freestone, very large, and without any cement; and it is not carried in a straight line, but makes three or four angles, as if some buildings had interfered with its direction.

  [3 ]The residence of the Flavian family was converted into a temple. See c. i. of the present book.

  [4 ]The Stadium was in the shape of a circus, and used for races both of men and horses.

  [5 ]The Odeum was a building intended for musical performances. There were four of them at Rome.

  [6 ]See before, c. iv.

  [7 ]See Vespasian, c. xiv.

  [1 ]See Nero, c. xvi.

  [2 ]This absurd edict was speedily revoked See afterwards c. xiv.

  [1 ]This was an ancient law levelled against adultery and other pollutions, named from its author Caius Scatinius, a tribune of the people. There was a Julian law, with the same object. See Augustus, c. xxxiv.

  [1 ]Geor xi. 537.

  [1 ]See Livy, xxi. 63, and Cicero against Verres, v. 18.

  [2 ]See Vespasian, c. iii.

  [3 ]Cant names for gladiators.

  [4 ]The faction which favoured the “Thrax” party.

  [5 ]Domitian, c. i.

  [6 ]See Vespasian, c. xiv.

  [1 ]This cruel punishment is described in Nero, c. xlix.

  [2 ]Gentiles who were proselytes to the Jewish religion; or, perhaps, members of the Christian sect, who were confounded with them. See the note to Tiberius, c. xxxvi. The tax levied on the Jews was two drachmas per head. It was general throughout the empire.

  [1 ]We have had Suetonius’s reminiscences, derived through his grandfather and father successively, Caligula, c. xix.; Otho, c. x. We now come to his own, commencing from an early age.

  [2 ]This is what Martial calls, “Mentula tributis damnata.”

  [3 ]The imperial liveries were white and gold.

  [4 ]See Caligula, c. xxi., where the rest of the line is quoted, εἶς [Editor: illegible character]οιρανος ἔστω.

  [5 ]An assumption of divinity, as the puivinar was the consecrated bed, on which the images of the gods reposed.

  [1 ]The pun turns on the similar sound of the Greek word for “enough,” and the Latin word for “an arch.”

  [2 ]Domitia, who had been repudiated for an intrigue with Paris, the actor, and afterwards taken back.

  [3 ]The lines, with a slight accommodation, are borrowed from the poet Evenus, Anthol. i. vi. i., who applies them to a goat, the great enemy of vineyards. Ovid, Fasti, i. 357, thus paraphrases them:

  • Rode caper vitem, tamen hinc, cum staris ad aram,
  • In tua quod spargi cornua possit erit.

  [1 ]Pliny describes this stone as being brought from Cappadocia, and says that it was as hard as marble, white and translucent, cxxiv. c. 22.

  [2 ]See note to c. xvii.

  [3 ]The guilt imputed to them was atheism and Jewish (Christian?) manners. Dion. lxvii. 1112.

  [1 ]See Vespasian, c. v.

  [2 ]Columella (R. R. xi. 2.) enumerates dates among the foreign fruits cultivated in Italy, cherries, dates, apricots, and almonds; and Pliny, xv. 14, informs us that Sextus Papinius was the first who introduced the date tree, having brought it from Africa, in the latter days of Augustus.

  [1 ]Some suppose that Domitilla was the wife of Flavius Clemens (c. xv.), both of whom were condemned by Domitian for their “impiety,” by which it is probably meant that they were suspected of favouring Christianity. Eusebius makes Flavia Domitilla the niece of Flavius Clemens, and says that she was banished to Ponza, for having become a Christian. Clemens Romanus, the second bishop of Rome, is said to have been of this family.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 849.

  [2 ]See c. v.

  [1 ]The famous library of Alexandria collected by Ptolemy Philadelphus had been burnt by accident in the wars. But we find from this passage in Suetonius that part of it was saved, or fresh collections had been made. Seneca (de Tranquill. c. ix 7) informs us that forty thousand volumes were burnt; and Gellius states that in his time the number of volumes amounted to nearly seventy thousand.

  [2 ]This favourite apple, mentioned by Columella and Pliny, took its name from C. Matius, a Roman knight, and friend of Augustus, who first introduced it. Pliny tells us that Matius was also the first who brought into vogue the practice of clipping groves.

  [1 ]Julia, the daughter of Titus.

  [1 ]It will be understood that the terms Grammar and Grammarian have here a more extended sense than that which they convey in modern use. See the beginning of c. iv.

  [2 ]Suetonius’s account of the rude and unlettered state of society in the early times of Rome, is consistent with what we might infer, and with the accounts which have come down to us, of a community composed of the most daring and adventurous spirits thrown off by the neighbouring tribes, and whose sole occupations were rapine and war. But Cicero discovers the germs of mental cultivation among the Romans long before the period assigned to it by Suetonius, tracing them to the teaching of Pythagoras, who visited the Greek cities on the coast of Italy in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus.—Tusc. Quæst. iv. 1.

  [3 ]Livius, whose cognomen, Andronicus, intimates his extraction, was born of Greek parents. He began to teach at Rome in the consulship of Claudius Cento, the son of Appius Cæcus, and Sempronius Tuditanus, a.u.c. 514. He must not be confounded with Titus Livius, the historian, who flourished in the Augustan age.

  [4 ]Ennius was a native of Calabria. He was born the year after the consulship mentioned in the preceding note, and lived to see at least his seventy-sixth year, for Gellius informs us that at that age he wrote the twelfth book of his Annals.

  [5 ]Porcius Cato found Ennius in Sardinia, when he conquered that island during his prætorship. He learnt Greek from Ennius there, and brought him to Rome on his return. Ennius taught Greek at Rome for a long course of years, having M. Cato among his pupils.

  [1 ]Mallos was near Tarsus, in Cilicia. Crates was the son of Timocrates, a Stoic philosopher, who for his critical skill had the surname of Homericus.

  [2 ]Aristarchus flourished at Alexandria, in the reign of Ptolemy Philometer, whose son he educated.

  [3 ]a.u.c. 535—602 or 605.

  [4 ]Cicero [De Clar. Orat. c. xx., De Senect. c. v. 1] places the death of Ennius a.u.c. 584, for which there are other authorities; but this differs from the account given in a former note.

  [5 ]The History of the first Punic War by Nævius is mentioned by Cicero, De Senect. c 14.

  [6 ]Lucili is, the poet, was born about a.u.c. 605.

  [1 ]Q. Metellus obtained the surname of Numidicus, on his triumph over Jugurtha, a.u.c. 644. Ælius, who was Varro’s tutor, accompanied him to Rhodes or Smyrna, when he was unjustly banished, a.u.c. 653.

  [2 ]Servius Claudius (also called Clodius) is commended by Cicero, Fam. Epist. ix. 16, and his singular death mentioned by Pliny, xxv. 4.

  [3 ]Daphnis, a shepherd, the son of Mercury, was said to have been brought up by Pan. The humorous turn given by Lenæus to Lutatius’s cognomen is not very clear. Daphnides is the plural of Daphnis; therefore the herd or company, ἄγημα; and Pan was the god of rustics, and the inventor of the rude music of the reed.

  [1 ]Oppius Cares is said by Macrobius to have written a book on Forest Trees.

  [2 ]Quintilian enumerates Bibaculus among the Roman poets in the same line with Catullus and Horace, Institut. x. 1. Of Sigida we know nothing; even the name is supposed to be incorrectly given. Apuleius mentions a Ticida, who is also noticed by Suetonius hereafter in c. xi., where likewise he gives an account of Valerius Cato.

  [1 ]Probably Suevius of whom Macrobius informs us that he was the learned author of an Idyl, which had the title of the Mulberry Grove; observing, that “the peach which Suevius reckons as a species of the nuts, rather belongs to the tribe of apples.”

  [2 ]Aurelius Opilius is mentioned by Symmachus and Gellius. His cotemporary and friend, Rutilius Rufus, having been a military tribune under Scipio in the Numantine war, wrote a history of it. He was consul a.u.c. 648, and unjustly banished, to the general grief of the people, a.u.c. 659.

  [1 ]Quintilian mentions Gnipho, Instit. i. 6. We find that Cicero was among his pupils. The date of his prætorship, given below, fixes the time when Gnipho flourished.

  [2 ]This strange cognomen is supposed to have been derived from a cork arm, which supplied the place of one Dionysius had lost. He was a poet of Mitylene.

  [3 ]See before, Julius, c. xlvi.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 687.

  [5 ]Suetonius gives his life in c. x.

  [1 ]A grade of inferior officers in the Roman armies, of which we have no very exact idea.

  [2 ]Horace speaks feelingly on the subject:

  • Menimi quæ plagosum mihi parvo
  • Orbilium tractare.
  • —Epist. xi. i. 70.
  • I remember well when I was young,
  • How old Orbilius thwacked me at my tasks.

  [3 ]Domitius Marsus wrote epigrams He is mentioned by Ovid and Martial.

  [1 ]This is not the only instance mentioned by Suetonius of statues erected to learned men in the place of their birth or celebrity. Orbilius, as a schoolmaster, was represented in a sitting posture, and with the gown of the Greek philosophers.

  [2 ]Tacitus [Annal. cxi. 75] gives the character of Atteius Capito. He was consul a.u.c. 758

  [3 ]Asinius Pollio; see Julius, c. xxx.

  [4 ]Whether Hermas was the son or scholar of Gnipho, does not appear.

  [1 ]Eratosthenes, an Athenian philosopher, flourished in Egypt, under three of the Ptolemies successively. Strabo often mentions him. See xvii. p. 576.

  [1 ]Cornelius Helvius Cinna was an epigrammatic poet, of the same age as Catullus. Ovid mentions him, Tristia, xi. 435.

  [2 ]Priapus was worshipped as the protector of gardens.

  [1 ]Zenodotus, the grammarian, was librarian to the first Ptolemy at Alexandria, and tutor to his sons.

  [2 ]For Crates, see before, p. 507.

  [3 ]We find from Plutarch that Sylla was employed two days before his death, in completing the twenty-second book of his Commentaries; and, foreseeing his fate, entrusted them to the care of Lucullus, who, with the assistance of Epicadius, corrected and arranged them. Epicadius also wrote on Heroic verse, and Cognomina.

  [4 ]Plutarch, in his Life of Cæsar, speaks of the loose conduct of Mucia, Pompey’s wife, during her husband’s absence.

  [5 ]Fam. Epist. 9.

  [1 ]Cicero ad Att. xii. 36.

  [2 ]See before, Augustus, c. v.

  [3 ]Lenæus was not singular in his censure of Sallust. Lactantius, 11, 12, gives him an infamous character; and Horace says of him,

  • Libertinarum dico; Sallustius in quas
  • Non minus insanit quam qui mæchatur.
  • —Sat. i. 2. 48

  [1 ]The name of the well-known Roman knight, to whom Cicero addressed his Epistles, was Titus Pomponius Atticus. Although Satrius was the name of a family at Rome, no connection between it and Atticus can be found, so that the text is supposed to be corrupt. Quintus Cecilius was an uncle of Atticus, and adopted him. The freedman mentioned in this chapter probably assumed his name, he having been the property of Cæcilius; as it was the custom for freedmen to adopt the names of their patrons.

  [2 ]Suetonius, Tiberius, c. viii. Her name was Pomponia.

  [3 ]See Augustus, c. lxvi.

  [4 ]He is mentioned before, c. ix.

  [5 ]Verrius Flaccus is mentioned by St. Jerome, in conjunction with Athenodorus of Tarsus, a Stoic philosopher, to have flourished a.m.c. 2024, which is a.u.c. 759; 9. He is also praised by Gellius, Macrobius, Pliny, and Priscian.

  [1 ]Cinna wrote a poem, which he called “Smyrna,” and was nine years in composing, as Catullus informs us, 93. l.

  [2 ]See Augustus, cc. lxii. lxix.

  [1 ]Cornelius Alexander, who had also the name of Polyhistor, was born at Miletus, and being taken prisoner, and bought by Cornelius, was brought to Rome, and becoming his teacher, had his freedom given him, with the name of his patron. He flourished in the time of Sylla, and composed a great number of works; amongst which were five books on Rome. Suetonius has already told us [Augustus, xxix.] that he had the care of the Palatine Library.

  [2 ]No such consul as Caius Licinius appears in the Fasti; and it is supposed to be a mistake for C. Atinius, who was the colleague of Cn. Domitius Calvinus, a.u.c. 713, and wrote a book on the Civil War.

  [3 ]Julius Modestus, in whom the name of the Julian family was still preserved, is mentioned with approbation by Gellius, Martial, Quintilian, and others.

  [4 ]Melissus is mentioned by Ovid, De Pontif. iv 16—30.

  [5 ]See Augustus, c xxix. p 93, and note

  [1 ]The trabea was a white robe, with a purple border, of a different fashion from the toga

  [2 ]See before, c x.

  [3 ]See Claudius, c. xli. and note.

  [4 ]Remmius Palæmon appears to have been cotemporary with Pliny and Quintilian, who speak highly of him.

  [5 ]Now Vicenza.

  [1 ]“Audiat hæc tantum vel qui venit, ecce, Palæmon.”—Eccl. iii. 50.

  [2 ]All the editions have the word vitem; but we might conjecture, from the large produce, that it is a mistake for vineam, a vineyard: in which case the word vasa might be rendered, not bottles, but casks. The amphora held about nine gallons. Pliny mentions that Remmius bought a farm near the turning on the Nomentan road, at the tenth mile-stone from Rome.

  [3 ]“Usque ad infamiam oris.”—See Tiberius, p. 220, and the notes.

  [4 ]Now Beyrout, on the coast of Syria. It was one of the colonies founded by Julius Cæsar when he transported 80,000 Roman citizens to foreign parts.—Julius, xlii.

  [1 ]This senatus consultum was made a.u.c. 592.

  [1 ]Hirtius and Pansa were consuls a.u.c. 710.

  [2 ]See Nero, c. x.

  [1 ]As to the Bullum, see before, Julius, c. lxxxiv.

  [2 ]This extract given by Suetonius is all we know of any epistle addressed by Cicero to Marcus Titinnius.

  [1 ]See Cicero’s Oration, pro Cælio, where Atracinus is frequently mentioned, especially cc. i. and iii.

  [2 ]“Hordearium rhetorem.”

  [3 ]From the manner in which Suetonius speaks of the old custom of chaining one of the lowest slaves to the outer gate, to supply the place of a watch-dog, it would appear to have been disused in his time.

  [4 ]The work in which Cornelius Nepos made this statement is lost.

  [5 ]Pliny mentions with approbation C. Epidius, who wrote some treatises in which trees are represented as speaking; and the period in which he flourished, agrees with that assigned to the rhetorician here named by Suetonius.—Plin. xvii. 25.

  [6 ]Isauricus was consul with Julius Cæsar II., a.u.c. 705, and again with L. Antony, a.u.c. 712.

  [1 ]A river in the ancient Campania, now called the Sarno, which discharges itself into the bay of Naples.

  [2 ]Epidius attributes the injury received by his eyes to the corrupt habits he contracted in the society of M. Antony.

  [3 ]The direct allusion is to the “style” or probe used by surgeons in opening tumours.

  [4 ]Mark Antony was consul with Julius Cæsar, a.u.c. 709. See before, Julius, c lxxix.

  [5 ]Philipp. xi. 17.

  [6 ]Leontium, now called Lentini, was a town in Sicily, the foundation of which is related by Thucydides, vi. p. 412. Polybius describes the Leontine fields as the most fertile part of Sicily. Polyb. vii. 1 And see Cicero, contra Verrem, iii. 46, 47.

  [7 ]Novara, a town of the Milanese.

  [1 ]St. Jerom in Chron. Euseb. describes Lucius Munatius Plancus as the disciple of Cicero, and a celebrated orator. He founded Lyons during the time he governed that part of the Roman provinces in Gaul.

  [2 ]See Augustus, c. xxxvi.

  [3 ]He meant to speak of Cisalpine Gaul, which, though geographically a part of Italy, did not till a late period enjoy the privileges of the other territories united to Rome, and was administered by a prætor under the forms of a dependent province. It was admitted to equal rights by the triumvirs, after the death of Julius Cæsar. Albutius intimated that those rights were now in danger.

  [1 ]Lucius Fenestella, an historical writer, is mentioned by Lactantius, Seneca, and Pliny, who says, that he died towards the close of the reign of Tiberius.

  [2 ]The second Punic war ended a.u.c. 552, and the third began a.u.c. 605. Terence was probably born about 560.

  [3 ]Carthage was laid in ruins a.u.c. 606 or 607, six hundred and sixty-seven years after its foundation.

  [1 ]These entertainments were given by the ædiles M. Fulvius Nobilior and M. Acilius Glabrio, a.u.c. 587.

  [2 ]St. Jerom also states that Terence read the “Andria” to Cæcilius who was a comic poet at Rome; but it is clearly an anachronism, as he died two years before this period. It is proposed, therefore, to amend the text by substituting Acilius, the ædile; a correction recommended by all the circumstances, and approved by Pitiscus and Ernesti.

  [3 ]The “Hecyra,” The Mother-in-law, is one of Terence’s plays.

  [4 ]The “Eunuch” was not brought out till five years after the Andria, a.u.c. 592.

  [1 ]About £80 sterling; the price paid for the two performances. What further right of authorship is meant by the words following, is not very clear.

  [2 ]The “Adelphi” was first acted a.u.c. 593.

  [3 ]This report is mentioned by Cicero (Ad Attic. vii. 3), who applies it to the younger Lælius. The Scipio here mentioned is Scipio Africanus, who was at this time about twenty-one years of age.

  [4 ]The calends of March was the festival of married women. See before, Vespasian, c. xix.

  [1 ]Santra, who wrote biographies of celebrated characters, is mentioned as “a man of learning,” by St. Jerom, in his preface to the book on the Ecclesiastical Writers.

  [2 ]The idea seems to have prevailed that Terence, originally an African slave, could not have attained that purity of style in Latin composition which is found in his plays, without some assistance. The style of Phædrus, however, who was a slave from Thrace, and lived in the reign of Tiberius, is equally pure, although no such suspicion attaches to his work.

  [3 ]Cicero (de Clar. Orat. c. 207) gives Sulpicius Gallus a high character as a finished orator and elegant scholar. He was consul when the Andria was first produced.

  [4 ]Labeo and Popilius are also spoken of by Cicero in high terms. Ib. cc. 21 and 24. Q. Fabius Labeo was consul with M. Claudius Marcellus. a.u.c. 570 and Popilius with L. Postumius Albinus, a.u.c. 580.

  [1 ]The story of Terence’s having converted into Latin plays this large number of Menander’s Greek comedies, is beyond all probability, considering the age at which he died, and other circumstances. Indeed, Menander never wrote so many as are here stated.

  [2 ]They were consuls a.u.c. 594. Terence was, therefore, thirty-four years old at the time of his death.

  [3 ]Hortulorum, in the plural number. This term, often found in Roman authors, not inaptly describes the vast number of little inclosures, consisting of vineyards, orchards of fig-trees, peaches, &c., with patches of tillage, in which maize, legumes, melons, pumpkins, and other vegetables are cultivated for sale, still found on small properties, in the south of Europe, particularly in the neighbourhood of towns.

  [4 ]Suetonius has quoted these lines in the earlier part of his Life of Terence. See before p. 532, where they are translated.

  [1 ]Juvenal was born at Aquinum, a town of the Volscians, as appears by an ancient MS., and is intimated by himself. Sat. iii. 319.

  [2 ]He must have been therefore nearly forty years old at this time, as he lived to be eighty.

  [3 ]The seventh of Juvenal’s Satires.

  [4 ]This Paris does not appear to have been the favourite of Nero, who was put to death by that prince [see Nero, c. liv.], but another person of the same name, who was patronised by the emperor Domitian. The name of the poet joined with him is not known. Salmatius thinks it was Statius Pompilius, who sold to Paris, the actor, the play of Agave;
  
  Esurit, intactam Paridi nisi vendat Agaven,—Juv. Sat. vii. 87.

  [1 ]Sulpicius Camerinus had been proconsul in Africa; Bareas Soranus in Asia. Tacit. Annal. xiii. 52; xvi. 23. Both of them are said to have been corrupt in their administration; and the satirist introduces their names as examples of the rich and noble, whose influence was less than that of favourite actors, or whose avarice prevented them from becoming the patrons of poets.

  [2 ]The “Pelopea,” was a tragedy founded on the story of the daughter of Thyestes; the “Philomela,” a tragedy on the fate of Itys, whose remains were served to his father at a banquet by Philomela and her sister Progne.

  [3 ]This was in the time of Adrian. Juvenal, who wrote first in the reigns of Domitian and Trajan, composed his last Satire but one in the third year of Adrian, a.u.c. 872.

  [4 ]Syene is meant, the frontier station of the imperial troops in that quarter of the world.

  [1 ]a.u.c. 786. 34.

  [2 ]a.u.c. 814. 62.

  [3 ]Persius was one of the few men of rank and affluence among the Romans, who acquired distinction as writers; the greater part of them having been freedmen, as appears not only from these lives of the poets, but from our author’s notices of the grammarians and rhetoricians. A Caius Persius is mentioned with distinction by Livy in the second Punic war, Hist. xxvi. 39; and another of the same name by Cicero, de Orat. ii. 6, and by Pliny; but whether the poet was descended from either of them, we have no means of ascertaining.

  [4 ]Persius addressed his fifth satire to Annæus Cornutus. He was a native of Leptis, in Africa, and lived at Rome in the time of Nero, by whom he was banished.

  [5 ]Cæsius Bassus, a lyric poet, flourished during the reigns of Nero and Galba. Persius dedicated his sixth Satire to him.

  [1 ]“Numanus.” It should be Servilius Nonianus, who is mentioned by Pliny, xxviii. 2, and xxxvii 6.

  [2 ]Commentators are not agreed about these sums, the text varying both in the manuscripts and editions.

  [3 ]See Dr. Thomson’s remarks on Persius, before, p. 398.

  [4 ]There is no appearance of any want of finish in the sixth Satire of Persius, as it has come down to us; but it has been conjectured that it was followed by another, which was left imperfect.

  [1 ]There were two Arrias, mother and daughter, Tacit. Annal. xvi. 34, 3.

  [2 ]Persius died about nine days before he completed his twenty-ninth year.

  [3 ]Venusium stood on the confines of the Apulian, Lucanian, and Samnite territories.

  • Sequor hunc, Lucanus an Appulus anceps;
  • Nam Venusinus arat finem sub utrumque colonus.
  • Hor Sat. xi 1. 34.

  [4 ]Set. i. 6. 45.

  [1 ]Horace mentions his being in this battle, and does not scruple to admit that he made rather a precipitate retreat, “relictâ non bene parmulâ.”—Ode xi. 7—9.

  [2 ]See Ode xi. 7. 1.

  [3 ]The editors of Suetonius give different versions of this epigram. It seems to allude to some passing occurrence, and in its present form the sense is to this effect: “If I love you not, Horace, to my very heart’s core, may you see the priest of the college of Titus leaner than his mule.”

  [1 ]Probably the Septimius to whom Horace addressed the ode beginning Septimi, Gades aditure mecum. —Ode xi. b. i.

  [2 ]See Augustus, c. xxi.; and Horace, Ode iv. 4.

  [3 ]See Epist. i. iv. xv. Me pinguem et nitidum bene curatâ cute vises.

  [1 ]It is satisfactory to find that the best commentators consider the words between brackets as an interpolation in the work of Suetonius. Some, including Bentley, reject the preceding sentence also.

  [2 ]The works of Horace abound with references to his Sabine farm which must be familiar to many readers. Some remains are still shewn, consisting of a ruined wall and a tesselated pavement in a vineyard, about eight miles from Tivoli, which are supposed, with reason, to mark its site. At least, the features of the neighbouring country, as often sketched by the poet—and they are very beautiful—cannot be mistaken.

  [3 ]Aurelius Cotta and L. Manlius Torquatus were consuls a.u.c. 688. The genial Horace, in speaking of his old wine, agrees with Suetonius in fixing the date of his own birth:

  • O nata mecum consule Manlio
  • Testa.
  • —Ode iii. 21.

  And again,

  • Tu vina, Torquato, move
  • Consule pressa meo.
  • —Epod. xiii. 8.

  [4 ]a.u.c. 745. So that Horace was in his fifty-seventh, not his fifty-ninth year, at the time of his death.

  [5 ]It may be concluded that Horace died at Rome, under the hospitable roof of his patron Mecænas, whose villa and gardens stood on the Esquiline hill; which had formerly been the burial ground of the lower classes; but, as he tells us,

  • Nunc licet Esquiliis habitare salubribus, atque
  • Aggere in aprico spatiare.
  • —Sat. i. 8.

  [1 ]Cordova Lucan was the son of Annæus Mella, Seneca’s brother.

  [2 ]This sentence is very obscure, and Ernesti considers the text to be imperfect.

  [3 ]They had good reason to know that, ridiculous as the tyrant made himself, it was not safe to incur even the suspicion of being parties to a jest upon him.

  [4 ]See Nero, c. xxxvi.

  [1 ]St. Jerom (Chron. Euseb.) places Lucan’s death in the tenth year of Nero’s reign, corresponding with a.u.c. 817. This opportunity is taken of correcting an error in the press, p. 342, respecting the date of Nero’s accession. It should be a.u.c. 807, 55.

  [2 ]These circumstances are not mentioned by some other writers. See Dr. Thomson’s account of Lucan, before, p. 347, where it is said that he died with philosophical firmness.

  [3 ]We find it stated ib. p. 396, that Lucan expired while pronouncing some verses from his own Pharsalia: for which we have the authority of Tacitus, Annal. xv. 20. 1. Lucan, it appears, employed his last hours in revising his poems; on the contrary, Virgil, we are told, when his death was imminent, renewed his directions that the Æneid should be committed to the flames.

  [4 ]The text of the concluding sentence of Lucan’s life is corrupt, and neither of the modes proposed for correcting it make the sense intended very clear.

  [5 ]Although this brief memoir of Pliny is inserted in all the editions of Suetonius, it was unquestionably not written by him. The author, whoever he was, has confounded the two Plinys, the uncle and nephew, into which error Suetonius could not have fallen, as he lived on intimate terms with the younger Pliny; nor can it be supposed that he would have composed the memoir of his illustrious friend in so cursory a manner. Scaliger and other learned men consider that the life of Pliny, attributed to Suetonius, was composed more than four centuries after that historian’s death.

  [6 ]See Julius, c. xxviii. Caius Plinius Cæcilius Secundus (the younger Pliny) was born at Como, a.u.c. 814; 62.. His father’s name was Lucius Cæcilius, also of Como, who married Plinia, the sister of Caius Plinius Secundus, supposed to have been a native of Verona, the author of the Natural History, and by this marriage the uncle of Pliny the younger. It was the nephew who enjoyed the confidence of the emperors Nerva and Trajan, and was the author of the celebrated Letters.

  [1 ]The first eruption of Mount Vesuvius occurred a.u.c. 831, 79. See Titus, c viii. The younger Pliny was with his uncle at Misenum at the time, and has left an account of his disastrous enterprise in one of his letters, Epist. vi. xvi.

  [2 ]For further accounts of the elder Pliny, see the Epistles of his nephew, B. iii. 5; vi. 16. 20; and Dr. Thomson’s remarks before, pp. 475—478.

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  4: Publius Cornelius Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus, 4 vols. [120 AD]

  Publius Cornelius Tacitus, The Works of Tacitus. In Four Volumes. To which are prefixed, Political Discourses upon that Author by Thomas Gordon. The Second Edition, corrected. (London: T. Woodward and J. Peele, 1737).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1837 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  5: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 12 vols. [1776]

  Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J.B. Bury with an Introduction by W.E.H. Lecky (New York: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906), in 12 vols.

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1681 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  6: David Hume, The History of England, 6 vols. [1778]

  David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, Foreword by William B. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1983).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1868 on 2011-04-18

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

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  7: Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians [1929]

  Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians, ed. Alberto R. Coll (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/534 on 2011-04-18

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

  ---

  Foreword

  Readers should beware. This is a profoundly counter-cultural book, unabashedly and defiantly so. It takes on the prevailing truisms of our time across the entire political spectrum: the goodness of popular egalitarian democracy; the superiority of untrammelled capitalism and its consumerist, materialistic ethos; and the benefits of a welfare state that paternally provides for all. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) also strenuously challenged the notion, already widespread in his time and held even more tenaciously today, that the essence of history for the past four hundred years has been the march of progress and enlightenment.

  In this book, composed of notes and manuscript fragments for lectures he delivered at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885, Burckhardt carried on the debate against the numerous historians and commentators from Voltaire onward who insisted on judging the past against the standards of rationalism and liberalism that arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Burckhardt disagreed on many things with his former mentor Leopold von Ranke, he shared Ranke’s view that “every generation is equidistant from God.” An age may have a level of material prosperity or intellectual and artistic excellence lower than that of another, but it is not thereby inferior in its capacity for spiritual insight or nobility. Every historical epoch has its own intrinsic meaning and its own contribution to make to the collected intellectual and artistic treasures of humankind. The task of the historian, far from judging all things by virtue of their contribution to modernity, is to explore every corner of the past with an appreciative eye for the wonder and essential mystery behind the process of human creativity.

  By taking this stand, Burckhardt emerged in most refreshing contrast with his contemporaries and many of his successors. For what he developed was nothing short of a psychology of historiography. The historian is to observe, contemplate, and enjoy the incredibly glorious richness of the human experience. He is to look for human greatness and creativity everywhere, even in periods that might seem alien and distant from him. His spirit ought to be one of enquiry, wonder, and empathy. Insofar as he allows himself to make moral judgments about the past, these judgments should be based not on contemporary verities but on more universal values. Thus, we may judge Tamerlane for his hideous massacres of innocent women and children, but it makes no sense to judge Charlemagne for his authoritarianism. Beyond all this, the historian is to search everywhere for the priceless achievements of the human spirit that transcend politics and economics—those great works of artistic and literary beauty and power, and those deeds of courage, nobility, and grandeur—which grace the history of civilization and inspire later generations.

  Despite his injunction not to judge the past, Burckhardt did not hesitate to judge the present, with all of its smugness and self-confidence. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, he had deep misgivings about the advent of popular egalitarian democracy, which he believed would lead to ever higher levels of vulgarity, the simplification and corruption of culture and politics, and eventually the tyranny of demagogues. The main problem with popular democratic culture was its deification of equality as the ruling principle in all of life. It was one thing to argue that all men should be equal before the law, an idea Burckhardt did not find problematic, but quite another to argue that all men are equal, and even more pernicious to suggest that all beliefs, opinions, and ways of life are of equal worth, a reductio ad absurdum that Burckhardt believed would lead to the death of culture and the return of barbarism.

  Burckhardt was equally harsh toward another idol of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely, the spread of economic growth and development as the essence of “progress.” Sometime during the seventeenth century, many people had come to believe that the chief end of life is to acquire material possessions and live with the greatest possible comfort and material ease. This belief, coupled with the growth of capitalism, industrialization, and ever more inventive technologies for the economic exploitation of the earth’s resources, had created a culture of hectic acquisitiveness, materialism, and spiritual and aesthetic squalor. Burckhardt was appalled at the human, cultural, and environmental costs of this ever more voracious Behemoth. Late in the nineteenth century, he wondered what would have happened to the earth if capitalism, industrialization, and science had begun their joint work three or four centuries earlier. What would be left by now? he asked.

  At a time when liberals everywhere were celebrating the aristocracy’s decline, and Bismarck, with the support of the Reichstag, was busy organizing the first welfare state, Burckhardt noticed one central fact: the unrelenting growth since the sixteenth century of the power of the state. The new paternal state, despite its benevolent trappings, carried the potential for the unlimited exercise of power and despotism. With such barriers to state power as the Church and the aristocracy weakened by the advance of popular democracy, egalitarianism, and industrialization, it seemed to Burckhardt only a matter of time before state power would be put in the service of tyranny.

  On the threshold of the twenty-first century, Burckhardt’s observations appear as luminous and insightful as ever. Having barely escaped from the tyrannies of fascism and communism and the cataclysms of two world wars—all of which Burckhardt more or less predicted— many peoples are becoming as smug as Burckhardt’s contemporaries. Millions see democracy, capitalism, consumerism, and technology as unlimited boons, and have no tolerance for anyone who might raise troublesome questions about these forces. Yet our triumphalism could use some tempering.

  The mix of egalitarianism, consumerism, and the welfare state has produced widespread moral decay, political apathy, and an increasing dissonance between the requirements of a regime of ordered liberty and the capacity of that regime’s citizens to fulfill those requirements. It is inarguable that Western societies are facing serious long-term problems. The exercise of liberty requires moral and intellectual virtues that oppose those habits fostered by the reigning economic, social, and cultural elites. The virtue most essential to liberty is self-control, yet the ruling principle behind egalitarianism, Hollywood-style hedonism, and unbridled materialism is the notion that one’s appetites for pleasure and possessions should brook no limits.

  For Burckhardt, another troubling aspect of modernity that has become even more destructive during the twentieth century is the Promethean quality of modern civilization. Long before the advent of nuclear and biological weapons, genetic engineering, and widespread environmental devastation, Burckhardt worried about where science, the primacy of economics, and the state’s endless quest for power would take the West. In his own time, he despised the railroads, the ugly factories blighting Europe’s beautiful countryside, and the rise of powerful nation-states armed with ever mightier arsenals of military technology. He saw these as elements in a relentless process as destructive of higher culture and the good life as the marriage of egalitarianism, consumerism, and the welfare state. At the dawn of the twenty- first century we have even stronger grounds for apprehension about where all this might end. Armed with Burckhardt’s understanding of the dark side of human nature—itself a fruit of his intimate acquaintance with the tragic character of history—we reasonably can fear that the future will be more problematic than the optimists insist.

  In spite of his scorn for democracy and much of modernity, Burckhardt was a philosopher of freedom on several grounds. First, he was a passionate believer in the human spirit and its ability to rise to great heights in the midst of the bleakest circumstances. No historian has affirmed the weight of human freedom against historical necessity more persistently than Burckhardt. The long-term trends and powerful impersonal forces all count, but so does the lonely genius—such as Luther or Michelangelo—striving to affirm his inner vision. History is full of broken trends that at one point seemed to stretch infinitely into the future but then moved in radically new and unexpected directions; many of these great historical surprises have occurred because of the force of human personality. In other words, there is freedom in the midst of necessity.

  Secondly, Burckhardt affirmed that the highest form of freedom is inward—that is, the freedom to maintain one’s soul and mind sufficiently detached from and independent of the ruling passions and conventional wisdom of the moment. Therefore, a society that aspires to be called free must defend those institutions, such as independent wealth and centers of economic and social power free from the state, that facilitate intellectual, artistic, and spiritual freedom. This view distinguished Burckhardt from the socialists, with their hankering after centralization, as well as from the liberal egalitarians, with their obsessive desire to destroy every vestige of privilege and inequality. Lastly, Burckhardt believed that a free society needs to guard against the demagogue—the “great man”—who in the name of the people would increase his own power and that of the state, and impose uniformity.

  As uneasy as Burckhardt was with the forces shaping Western civilization in his lifetime, he was far from ready to renounce the West’s heritage or be ashamed of it. He marvelled at the achievements of Western civilization, and particularly at the spiritual and artistic ones, which he believed were far more significant than the material and technological ones. Deeply aware of the multicultural richness of his own world, he believed it was incumbent on the heirs of Western civilization to know well their own particular cultural inheritance. There was no better place to start than the culture and heritage of classical Athens, where the idea of freedom first had flowered alongside some of the most sublime artistic and literary works in all of history. (It would have been better for all humankind, he noted, if Athens, not Sparta, had been victorious in the Peloponnesian War.) Burckhardt had one name for those not interested in their past: “barbarians.” He was quick to judge Americans for their plutocratic ways, but he judged them even more harshly because he thought they did not believe they had much of value to gain from studying history. Indeed, in his opinion, Americans took pride in being “new,” that is, in having no history.

  Burckhardt found his ideal political community in the small city- states of Athens and Florence, where with varying degrees of success freedom had flourished together with high culture (literature, music, and the fine arts). The modern world, with its relentless march toward gargantuan cities in which human beings lead an alienated, lonely, stupefied existence anchored in triviality, vulgarity, and material satiety, frightened him. Yet he was too much of a skeptic to believe that there is a solution to this problem in the form of either a political ideology or a “great man” who could bring about a new renaissance. If there was a renaissance ahead, it would come about, Burckhardt surmised, as the unexpected fruit of the human spirit and the quiet work of a few individuals—“secular monks,” he called them—who did not care about power but cherished the characteristics of the culture of “old Europe,” foremost among these being the love of freedom and beauty. In the annals of Western historiography, few voices can match Burckhardt’s in his affirmation of the grandeur of the human spirit or his insistence on the irreducible nature of freedom as an end in itself.

  Alberto R. Coll

  Translator’s Preface

  I consider it a privilege to be the translator of a work about which Walter Goetz, the editor of the Propyloäen-Weltgeschichte, wrote: “It is impossible to imagine a more profound introduction to world history and its driving forces.”

  Jacob Burckhardt’s Historische Fragmente were selected by Emil Dürr from Burckhardt’s lecture notes for his history courses at the University of Basel during the period from 1865 to 1885. The Fragmente, which were first published in 1929 as Volume Seven of Burckhardt’s Collected Works, may be regarded as a companion volume to his Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (published in English as Force and Freedom) [and in 1979 as Reflections on History, by Liberty Fund—publisher’s note]. The present translation is based on the edition issued in 1942 by Benno Schwabe, Basel, and the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart. It has been checked against the virtually unchanged new edition issued by the K. F. Koehler Verlag of Stuttgart at the end of 1957.

  The very qualities that make Burckhardt’s work so unique and attractive, even exasperatingly charming—the tone of improvisation; the compressed, elliptical style, by turns professorial and colloquial; the occasional contradictions and ambiguities; the abrupt shifts—also provide a real challenge to the translator. Burckhardt wrote in the rather austere Swiss German of the nineteenth century, and his language, moreover, seems to reflect his personal willfulness, his sharp criticism of his time. Within the limits of reasonably clear and idiomatic English I have tried to reproduce some of Burckhardt’s stylistic peculiarities. His emphases and question marks as well as other evidences of his erudite musings have been faithfully retained throughout; a few factual inaccuracies have been corrected. Since this edition is intended for the general reader interested in history as well as for the specialist, it was decided to omit most of the critical and bibliographical apparatus of the German edition, which consists in large part of specific information about Burckhardt’s various manuscripts, variant readings, and passages later deleted by Burckhardt himself. Wherever possible, those footnotes of the German edition that were deemed essential have been incorporated into the text, but minutiae and bibliographical references to works not readily accessible today have generally been omitted in an effort to promote continuity and readability.

  I should like to express my appreciation to Philip Rieff, Janet Finnie, John Rackliffe, Paul Alexander, and John Wight for their helpful interest in this work. The last-named kindly supplied the translations from the Greek and Latin. Katharine McCagg was good enough to compile the Index.

  H. Z.

  Judgments on History and Historians

  I

  Antiquity

  1.

  Ancient History and Its Scope

  A general introduction to history will be omitted here; the specific introduction to ancient history can be disposed of briefly. As regards the scope of our subject, this may be observed: Only the civilized nations, not the primitive ones, are part of history in a higher sense. Ample information has been preserved even about the latter (Herodotus). For the old ιστορíα [history in Herodotus’ sense] is in itself ethnography and history in one. Primitive peoples, however, interest us only when civilized nations come into conflict with them, as in the cases of Cyrus with the Massagetae and Darius with the Scythians. The ethnographic is thus to be confined to its essentials. Of the civilized peoples, our discipline does not embrace those whose culture did not flow into European civilization, for instance Japan and China. Of India, too, only the very oldest period concerns us—first, because of the Aryan tribal type shared with the Zend peoples, and then because of the contact with the Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and others. Our subject is that past which is clearly connected with the present and with the future. Our guiding idea is the course of civilization, the succession of levels of culture in various peoples and within individual peoples themselves. Actually, one ought to stress especially those historical realities from which threads run to our own period and culture.

  There are more of them than one would think. The continuum is magnificent. The peoples around the Mediterranean and over to the Gulf of Persia are really one animate being, active humanity par excellence. In the Roman Empire, this being does attain a kind of unity. Here alone the postulates of the intellect are realized; here alone there prevails development with no absolute decline, but only a transition.

  After renewed intermingling with the Germanic peoples, after another fifteen hundred or two thousand years, this active humanity strikes out anew, assimilates America for itself and is now about to open Asia thoroughly. How long will it be before all passive existences are subjected and penetrated by it? The non-Caucasian races offer resistance, give way, and die out. Egyptians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians have by now laid the foundations for this world-conquering power. Through slow development as well as by leaps and the arousing of opposition we are intellectually connected with them. It is a great good fortune to be part of this active humanity.

  2.

  On the Intellectual Indispensability of Studying Ancient History

  Among all the fields of learning in the world there prevails, like a fundamental chord that keeps sounding through, the history of the ancient world, i.e., of all those peoples whose lives have flowed into ours.

  It would be idle to assume that after four centuries of humanism everything had been learned from the ancient world, all experiences and data had been utilized, and there were no longer anything to be gained there, so that one could content oneself with a knowledge of more modern times or, possibly, make a pitying or reluctant study of the Middle Ages and spend the time saved on more useful things.

  We shall never be rid of antiquity as long as we do not become barbarians again. Barbarians and modern American men of culture live without consciousness of history.

  In our problematical and wonderful existence we cling involuntarily to the knowledge of man as such, of mankind, empirical, as we meet it in life, and as it is revealed by history. The contemplation of Nature does not suffice us, does not console or instruct us enough.

  And here we must not seal ourselves off from anything past, we must leave no gaps; only the whole speaks to us, in all centuries that have left us records.

  Are the three great ages of the world perhaps like the three times of day in the riddle of the Sphinx? They are, rather, a continual metempsychosis of acting and suffering man through countless incarnations. A genuine inquiry will want to recognize all these mutations and abandon any partiality for specific ages (it is all right to have a predilection, for that is a matter of taste), and it will do this all the sooner the livelier the feeling for human inadequacy in general is. Once it is understood that there never were, nor ever will be, any happy, golden ages in a fanciful sense, one will remain free from the foolish overvaluation of some past, from senseless despair of the present or fatuous hope for the future, but one will recognize in the contemplation of historical ages one of the noblest undertakings. It is the story of the life and suffering of mankind viewed as a whole.

  And yet antiquity has a great specific importance for us; our concept of the state derives from it; it is the birthplace of our religions and of the most permanent part of our civilization. Of its creations in form and writing a great deal is exemplary and unequaled. Our accounting with it in affinity as well as in contrast is infinite.

  However, let us regard antiquity as merely the first act of the drama of man, to our eyes a tragedy with immeasurable exertion, guilt, and sorrow. And even though we are descended from peoples who were still slumbering in a state of childhood alongside the great civilized peoples of antiquity, yet we feel ourselves the true descendants of the latter, because their soul has passed over into us; their work, their mission, and their destiny live on in us.

  3.

  The Limits of Civilization and Barbarism

  We can no more begin our presentation of history with the earliest state formations than with the transition from barbarism to civilization. Here, also, the concepts are much too vague.

  At what point, with what discovery, what accumulation of material comforts, does civilization begin? With the solar year? The alphabet? The loom? The chemical analysis of metals? Or with what else? And where does “barbarism” end? This is especially difficult in view of the ambiguous quality of the word in German where it is used in an intellectual and a moral sense. To some the Greeks are barbarians because they kept slaves and annihilated their political opponents. The Romans are considered barbarians if only because of their sacrifice of human lives in the circuses and amphitheaters. The Middle Ages again are barbaric for other reasons, because of religious persecution and the eradication of dissenters. In the final analysis, the use or non-use of this word becomes a matter of temperament. I consider it barbarism to keep birds in cages.

  First one ought to eliminate those elements which have lived on from the infant days of mankind in petrified form in the most advanced civilization, perhaps for sacral or political reasons, such as individual human sacrifice. Then it might be asked whether such primitive peoples would not find some things in our civilization barbarism, i.e., running counter to their ethics.

  And now we come to the real distinguishing feature which essentially separates barbarism from culture; the only reason it cannot serve us as a guiding rod or for the determination of the beginning is that the documentary evidence is inadequate. It is the question: Where does mere living in the present, such as the savage does, cease, and where does life in the past and the present, i.e., differentiating comparison, begin? When does the mere present, devoid of history, end?

  A valuable possession of a people is its first heroic epic. In addition to daily life there at least exists an ideal past, such as Tacitus reports in his De Germania: “Celebrant carminibus antiquis (quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus est) Tuistonem deum terra editum et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque.” [In their ancient songs—the only means they have of remembering historical events—they celebrate Tuisto, a god born of the earth, and his son Mannus as the origin and founders of their race.] This is the way a people with a great future acts.

  To be sure, side by side with a very beautiful tribal legend like that of the Scythians utter barbarism can still live on and be preponderant, permanently drowning out the upright and noble features. It can do this in various ways: through excessive savagery (the annual communion of those who have killed enemies; the sauromatic virgins); through servitude to symbols, religious fears instilled early, and narrow views of the beyond (the killing of the court servants and an entire equitatio [funeral procession on horseback] at a king’s grave); or through the impossibility of urban life and a sentencing to nomadism (the steppe, until people may move away from there). Purest barbarism is the behavior toward the soothsayers at the sickbed of a king (the king is ill because someone took a false oath at the royal hearth), and, finally, thralldom to nature magic.

  Chronic, late wickedness which may be connected with advanced civilization may finally degenerate into pure barbarism with the decline of the people concerned.

  At any rate, historically minded Egypt, with its records and comparisons, early moves into the first rank, as far as we can know anything. Even with an absolutely much lower culture, Egypt would take top place by virtue of its fondness for making written records.

  4.

  Why Today’s “Educated Man” Can No Longer Understand Antiquity

  At our universities, the historians like to dump the Ancient History course in the lap of the philologists, and vice versa. Here and there it is treated like a poor old relation whom it would be a disgrace to let go to ruin entirely. But with the public at large antiquity is completely out of fashion, and the “culture” which is supported by this public even feels hatred for it. Various faults of antiquity serve as a pretext. The real reason is conceit about modern communication and transport and the inventions of our century; then, too, there is the inability to distinguish technical and material greatness from the intellectual and moral kinds; and finally, the prevalent views about refinement of manners, philanthropy, and the like.

  But what makes it generally impossible for the present-day average “educated” man to find anything appealing in the ancient world is the total egoism of today’s private person who wants to exist as an individual and asks of the community only the greatest possible security for himself and his property, for which he pays his taxes amid sighs, and who also likes to attach himself to the community in a specific sense as an “official.”

  On the other hand, the peoples of the ancient Orient, who lived tribally, impress us as races of which each individual is only a type, with the king as the highest type.

  And even where the individual develops, especially since the Greeks, we still deal for a long time essentially with types, e.g., the heroes, the lawgivers. They are, to be sure, depicted as great individuals, and this is borne out by feeling and tradition; but at the same time they are all the more fully types and condensations of the characteristic and the general. And last, the complete individual in antiquity is, above all, πΟλíτης [part of the state] to a degree of which we now, in the present mode of connection between the individual and the state, have no idea. Whenever one breaks with the πóλις (polis) or when it is lost, it is a tragedy every time.

  Finally, today’s “educated” men are firmly resolved to make a bargain, with whatever power, for their existence at any given time. There is an enormous veneration of life and property. There is a mass abdication, and not just on the part of rulers! And there are numerous bargaining positions and concessions against the worst—and all this with great touchiness in matters of recognition and so-called honor.

  With the ancients, on the contrary, it was all or nothing, with no fear of disaster. The fall of states, cities, and kings was considered glorious. That is something utterly alien to us.

  5.

  The Historical Significance of Egypt

  We must keep our view unaffected by the ease with which changes and new developments in state and culture now occur, and take a wide and high perspective. Then Egypt will appear in its unique greatness.

  After thousands of years must have passed with a growing civilization of which, except at the Nile, no one had any inkling; after, possibly, even these advances had involved immeasurable sacrifices; after gods, heroes, and the dead had ruled for numberless dynasties, Egypt made a tremendous new stride under Menes and United Egypt was founded. And after that time there was here a state with a superior will, a nation, a way of life, a religion; while the Egyptians were founding and recording, in the rest of the world there can have been only primitive life or the first rudiments of a civilization. In addition, due to a providence most significant for us, there appeared the strongest impulse of the monumental, of recording and tradition. Gradually the other peoples, except for desert tribes, had to be affected by all this in some way. It is idle to argue about Egypt’s priority. Chronologically it is assured, in all matters; its influence is obscured from our view, which does not make it any the less probable.

  Even though the other peoples—the Babylonians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Iranians, and others—may differ from the Egyptians in every single element of their civilizations, still they were most probably subjected to a general Egyptian impetus without which their development might have been delayed and perhaps not have occurred at all.

  The period of the Old Empire offers us a complete government with numerous officials and priests; a very rich outward life, graded into numerous occupations; a monumental will to portray all this and lend it permanence; realistically alive, quite vigorous graphic arts (Beni-Hassan; the Scribe in the Louvre) and at the same time the greatest monumentality; but side by side with this, a true separation of the spiritual from the material, attached to the idea of life after death. Here belong the ideas of the tomb system (up to the royal graves, the pyramids) and embalming. Already at that time pre-existence and metempsychosis must have existed as fully developed doctrines; but the mere subordination of the transitory to the permanent, of the individual life on earth to a colossal community of the dead would be something of giant proportions.

  Accordingly, even though life then was undoubtedly “a hard service, with many sacred customs,” still there was no mere priestly tyranny and superstition. The Prisse Papyrus with the babbling beginnings of a code of ethics dates from as early as the fifth dynasty.

  As the main feature of this epoch there stands out the will to feel and act as a united Egypt. Apart from the subjection of Ethiopia, the willingness to share glory is predominant.

  6.

  The Phoenicians as the Earliest Creators of πóλεις (Polis)

  Egypt and Old Babylon were great despotisms with sacred laws and universal obedience, Egypt, in addition, having a functioning caste system. Their outer life was spent in wars, marauding expeditions, the defection and subjugation of outlying countries.

  The Phoenician cities were the first polities, constitutional states with city areas, community life, albeit under kings; some formed self- perpetuating aristocracies which not only had to be consulted, but must have had direct control of the most important matters. All of them later became republics. Their constitution balanced the claims of many. Did perhaps the patriarchal tribal constitution of the nomads serve as a model? This polis has the power of multiplication; while despotism can only deport, forcibly transplant peoples, and at best found military states, the polis creates genuine colonies and becomes a metropolis for many. The joint founding of Tripolis by Sidon, Tyre, and Arados is a voluntary action of higher intelligence.

  To such a fatherland a real patriotism could at last attach itself, one that went beyond the dull Egyptian national arrogance and in the wide world outside was not a fish out of water, but bestirred itself all the more.

  Whether the later Greek polis owes anything to the Phoenicians as models may remain quite uncertain. Ordinarily something like the polis does not come into being merely through imitation. Nevertheless, the Phoenician influence must have been inestimable. In any case, the Phoenicians are assured of chronological priority, and this fact redounds to their eternal glory.

  To be sure, as early as Homeric times the Phoenicians were regarded by the Greeks only as land thieves, τρώχτης [greedy rascals]. Carthage, too, even before the contact with Rome appears in unpleasant political and military guise.

  7.

  On Carthage

  A little more respect for the tribe of Ham which furnished Egypt, Old Babylon, Phoenicia, and Carthage would not be amiss. The fact that it was accursed by the Jews did not make it fare any the worse in the world. A curse is, after all, only the product of violent hatred and utter impotence. The curse in Genesis IX, 25–27, was not fulfilled; Ham did not become a serf, but for thousands of years was a very great lord. We resent any demand that we base our historical standards on the hatreds of the Jews. If they make their patriarchs or their Jehovah curse in one way or another, or if they represent what happens to other peoples as the vengeance of Jehovah, it does not follow that we have to think about these peoples in any particular way.

  It is very deplorable that instead of Justin’s Epitome, XVIII and XIX, we no longer have all of Trogus Pompeius at least. It is the only halfway coherent and comprehensive piece of Carthaginian history from its founding until the fourth century

  The fair number of Carthaginians who appear among the Greek philosophers in Diogenes Laertius are evidence of a pronounced talent in this field. Of their literature the Romans salvaged only the books about agriculture, much as Jiménez did with the Arab books.

  8.

  Athens

  Throughout the seventh century Athens does not seem to stand out especially from the other Greek communities. But from the sixth century on, these words gradually come to apply to it: “Verum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.” [But this city towers above others as much as the cypresses do above the swaying viburnums. Virgil, Eclogues, I, 24–25.]

  From then on the inhabitants paid attention to the old peculiarities, to the regional myths almost wholly sundered from the Greek ones, to the old characteristic of no intermingling with absolute hospitality toward the persecuted. A unique development came about: in the political sphere, all transitions were accomplished without frightful peripeteia and reactions; Solonian legislation meant the complete victory of speculative thought and of gentle and fair customs; the tyranny of the Pisistradae was the most enlightened; the subsequent refinement of democracy from Clisthenes on was the calmest and most gradual.

  All this demonstrates, first of all, consummate political aptitude. At the same time, the Athenians rise far above all other Hellenes onto the throne of education, art, and superior social graces.

  The central location helped greatly to bring this about, but a more basic reason is the happy blend of rural and commercial life and the most favorable set of conditions ever encountered on earth. It was as if Nature had for centuries saved up all its resources to expend them at that time.

  Through the complete, and also false, unleashing of all its powers, Athens wore itself out politically rather fast. But it had salvaged its cultural position and remained the intellectual capital of the Hellenes when the sites of athletic festivals and the Oracle of Delphi had lost their central significance. It saved itself materially as well and was able to finish its life decently under the Romans.

  The great parallel to this is furnished by Florence and the Renaissance. One city desires most and accomplishes what a whole people wants and would like to accomplish, just as specific family traits may predominate most strongly in one son of a house.

  It is hard for us to give a fair judgment between Athens and Sparta, since we owe an infinitude to Athens and nothing to Sparta, and because Sparta did not hold on to any venerable primitive piety in the face of rapid Athenian progress, but from the beginning maintained a depraved rule of force over subjugated fellow Hellenes. We do not know, however, whether without such an adversary Athens would not soon have degenerated in other ways, e.g., gone in for conquests of the type of the Sicilian campaign and other adventures.

  9.

  Rome and Its Mission in World History

  Rome, which had emerged from obscure Hellenic-Trojan-Italic beginnings, became the mistress of the Mediterranean and thus realized the historic moment of Italy.

  The Orient with its attempts at world monarchies, Greece with its colonial world, Carthage with its location and its commerce, and the entire great barbaric West are fused into one Empire and one civilization; then this whole, close to collapse, is entrusted to a great new world movement, Christianity, under whose protective wing enough of it lives on to make possible a revival in the culture of the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

  Since then our horizon has been overshadowed by it. Rome is everywhere the conscious or tacit premise of our views and thought; if in the essential intellectual points we are now no longer part of a specific people and country but belong to Western civilization, this is a consequence of the fact that at one time the world was Roman, universal, and that this ancient common culture has passed over into ours.

  That East and West belong together, that they constitute a humanity, the world owes to Rome and its Imperium.

  The history of Rome is in the highest sense the second part of ancient history. The currents issuing from everywhere flowed together, not merely into serfdom, but into one transmissible civilization.

  That is why we are concerned with the ῥώμαική ἀρχριολογíα (antiquities of Rome—Dionysius of Halicarnassus) only to the extent necessary for an understanding of what was needful for the growth and development of Rome as mistress of the world; moreover, we shall gladly do without the true secret.

  Among the individual peoples this is the mightiest; its individuality, to be sure, can be described and circumscribed like that of a person, but its remote causalities remain concealed. Verum haec tantum alias inter caput extulit urbes, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

  After a semi-mythical, typical period of monarchy there begins a century and a half of struggle between two strata of the population in which a brand of politics and virtue is developed that differs from that in any Greek republic, and immediately after the end of this struggle Rome rises to the conquest of Italy as the property naturally due it. Its earlier political perseverance now reveals itself as greatness on a world scale, i.e., through a natural process Rome grows into all tasks of the management of power; it seems to have an innate talent for the proper handling of all matters concerning power, and it is equal to the greatest task. “Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, Haec tibi erunt artes, pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.” [Remember, O Roman, to rule the peoples with power. These will be your arts: to impose the habit of peace, to spare the conquered and to cast down the proud. Anchises, Virgil, Aeneid, vi, 851–853.]

  Rome shook the Gauls and the Etruscans, subdued the Samnites, and made its presence felt in lower Italy. Then the highest representative of the Diadochian war lords appears, Pyrrhus, and Rome is victorious and loses its fear of elephants.

  Then Rome wages its first war with Carthage for hegemony over Sicily, in grand style and with the clear understanding that world dominion was at stake. Japhet and Ham test their strength and pay each other calls; Rome forces itself to become a naval power and gains victories at enormous cost.

  From that point on, world history becomes σώματοεéδές (systematic— Polybius). The inner weakness of Carthage, as contrasted with Rome’s strength, is strikingly revealed in the war fought with mercenaries.

  But a kindly fate lets worthy opponents for the Romans arise. Just after the Romans have subdued the Upper Italic Celts, it appears that one Carthaginian family (a branch of the Barcas—father, sons, and a brother-in-law) has been able to rid itself of any Hamitic acquisitive spirit and devote itself to the one goal of saving their homeland and destroying Rome. It is superior to anything else that we know about Ham and Shem. And as for Hannibal, in a certain sense he ranks above all Greeks, even Alexander. Rome could have reckoned with anything but such an adversary. And this adversary it overcame, confined Carthage to a strip of Africa, and surrounded it with the envious, like Massinissa.

  After that, the Greeks and Diadochi are just a light morning snack; Philip comes closest to being a worthy opponent. But here Rome displays its initial veneration of Hellenism, considering itself the preserver and protector of the Greek tradition; the age-old Greek spirit stirs within the Romans. Rome Hellenizes itself, primarily under the leadership of Titus Quinctius Flamininus and the Scipios, who, for their part, had enforced Rome’s political and military power in Greece.

  However, with the enormous gains that were to be had from the Diadochi system, Rome grows brutish. It begins to take its percentage when it gives away whole empires, when whole flocks of kings and royal emissaries appear before the Senate, and when Egypt derives its internal peace from Roman protection.

  There is a marked change in Rome after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth. Maltreatment of subjects, exploitation of the semi-freemen, and frequently wicked warmaking go hand in hand with growing ferment in Italy, even while Spain and the Gallic provincia are being acquired.

  The City of Rome is demoralized by the optimates who have waxed rich in the provinces or want to do so. The Roman citizenry shrinks as compared to the world empire, even though nominally it is spread over all of Italy. Could all the agrarian laws in the world have helped? Or the wholesale addition of the Italici to the ruling people?

  During the incipient civil wars military personalities become decisive—individually distinguished ones, but also wicked ones who stand out from the inadequate conduct of the war by the Senate, such as Marius in the war against Jugurtha and the Cimbri. The Italici are vanquished in the Social Wars. All popular excitement is now merely urban demagoguery, designed to exploit people for the benefit of the mighty. There is no hurry about the monarchy, however. Sulla’s proscriptions restore the rule of the optimates; the dictator himself abdicates.

  On the outside, power is preserved and extended from Spain to Asia, around the entire Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and victories are gained over Mithridates, Tigranes, and the pirates, while in Rome the republic cannot die and yet must be in dread of becoming at any moment the prey of an optimate, a democrat, or of the Catilinarians. The pseudo-rule of the Senate actually leans on a succession of strong men.

  At length the First Triumvirate is formed.

  It includes Caesar, the greatest of mortals. First he saves the Empire by conquering Gaul and securing it against the Germani, then he takes possession of it through his victories at Pharsalus, Thapsus, and Munda, and gives the tormented provinces a foretaste of government instead of mere desultory plundering by optimates.

  The republicans find it a simple matter to remove him from the scene, but do not stop to consider that his veterans will still be mightier than themselves; then they console themselves with the dissension among his actual heirs, until the latter in the Second Triumvirate join in proscriptions and separate into East and West. Finally, after another terrible exhaustion of the available strength Augustus becomes sole ruler. Now it is realized that monarchy can no longer be swept away through mere attempts at assassination.

  The optimates and their mentality are eradicated by the Augustan house. Lust for the principate quickly manifests itself; the transmission of power becomes extremely uncertain. The good governments of Vespasian and Trajan and up to Marcus Aurelius seem like extraordinary gifts of the gods.

  But this is a great period in world history, independent of individuals, through the sway of practical realities. For, in the first and second centuries , there occurred the most important consequences of the world empire: the uniform organization and administration of the provinces; the catching up on things neglected (Britannia, Dacia, Mesopotamia are conquered); the smooth adjustment of Greco-Roman culture and its extension to the westernmost regions. Only now is there full intellectual intercourse in the entire ancient world. And at the same time the religions are denationalized. While Rome Romanizes the Gallic gods, it is itself orientalized.

  Then, with renewed unsteadiness of power and appalling individual governments, the deathly force begins to rise: Neo-Persians and Germani appear and make frightful incursions into the Empire. The multiplicity of imperators, such as the Thirty Tyrants, can be explained by local defense needs alone. But once more the Empire is saved and united by great generals (the Illyrians); the Illyrian triangle, now so passive, becomes the nucleus at that time. To assure the transmission of power, Diocletian tries his system of adoptions. This is overthrown by Constantine, who allies himself with the great new world religion.

  Just as Rome had once made Hellenistic culture its own and thus enabled Hellenism to live on for all time (and on this depended all knowledge and understanding of the Orient), Christianity now took over the Greco-Roman heritage, to salvage it beyond the time of the Germanic invasion.

  After a dreadful period of decline, Romanism lives on partly as the Byzantine state, partly as the Western church; gradually it gathers all heathen and Arian Germani into its fold, and from night springs the new day of the Middle Ages which finds its spiritual unity in Rome. “His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono, imperium sine fine dedi” [For them I set no limits in space or time, I have given them power without end—Virgil, Aeneid], says Jupiter to Venus.

  What would we know of the ancient world if the Germani had taken by surprise a pagan Rome and therefore had established no other relationship with it but that of crudest possession?

  Our intellect, however, no matter how independent of the past it may behave in science and technology, is ever renewed and consecrated by the consciousness of its connection with the mind of the remotest times and civilization. Indeed, it gets to know itself and value its lofty nature only through comparison with that which it, the eternally unchanging, has been in all times.

  10.

  On the Roman Empire in Its First Two Centuries

  The confluence of the ancient lands of Greek civilization with Italy, Africa, and the West into one world empire is no mere accretion of flotsam. Its significance does not lie in its size, but in the fact that it benefited so many peoples, stopped the wars among the nations, and let the ancient world come to about as favorable an end as was possible.

  The Roman Empire as such is not responsible for the general heritage of antiquity, namely, the lack of human rights, the continuation of slavery (which, however, was no worse than in the golden age of Greece with its torture of slaves and its Attic mine slaves), the bankruptcy of the independent state (the Romans saved the Greeks from their internecine rage and destruction). As for the very impure world of the gods and religion in the process of decay, these are Greek, as are the speculative thought which respects nothing, and the disdain of all existence. Astraea, the goddess of justice, has already withdrawn to heaven in the writings of the Greek poet Aratus in the third century , and Virgil’s “Iam redit et virgo” [Now, too, the virgin returns] does not bring her back.

  The complaints about evil humanity, e.g., in Pausanias, refer to the Antonine period, to be sure, but they do not prove conclusively that egoism was greater then than it had been previously.

  To what extent is Artemidorus a source as to morality in general? And what about Lucian and Apuleius? Lucian, the last genuine enlightener and utter infidel, denier of all religion, bears witness to a general heartlessness, but is himself a poisonous personality of boundless self-praise.

  Lucian’s entire future life, with its ἰσοτιμíα [equality of honor] where everything is of one color and no one is more beautiful than anyone else, is nothing but a shrill mockery, a void provided with a touch of life only to the extent that a few chosen ones may indulge in their mocking laughter and the celebrities of the ancient world may be maltreated. They are nothing but skeletons, so that a person’s identity has to be ascertained every time (one is reminded of the medieval Dances of Death). Menippus is a mocking skeleton, Charon already a half-devil. The shades favored by Lucian, such as Micyllus, rejoice even during the crossing: γελασόμεϴα οἰμώζοντας ὁρῶντες [We shall laugh when we see them grieving].

  This future life, which was so miserable for almost everyone, was in contrast with the Christian hereafter and also with the striving of the pagans to catch up in some fashion with the Christian life to come through the mysteries of that time. In this connection one should not forget the small but distinguished band of Stoics under Marcus Aurelius that represented a veritable religion, complete with father confessors and casuists (regarding this a number of passages from Aulus Gellius can be cited). The virtuous among the Romans lived on a veritable diet of the soul.

  To what extent is the general worthlessness of life also reflected in the evident readiness for death on the part of the Christians?

  Lucian still bestows high praise on Epicurus as the liberator from all this-worldly and other-worldly superstition. But in the third century Epicureanism is extinguished.

  The senescence can be admitted in a certain sense and degree.

  How much might wickedness and wretchedness have differed from the wickedness and misery of all times and of mankind generally?

  Gladiatorial combats and much else can sour us on the Romans in general, but so many things can make us dislike the Greeks of the so- called golden age!

  In any case, the first and second centuries are to be viewed separately from the subsequent ones.

  The character of the second century is determined by the Antonines.

  It is really most remarkable that there were able to succeed to the throne of the Julian dynasty and of Domitian two great rulers and then two wholly virtuous ones, of whom Marcus Aurelius quite obviously seeks to tower above his enormous imperial office through his Stoic personality.

  The influence of the Stoa makes itself felt among the jurists of the time and we get the beginnings of humane legislation; one direct consequence of this is that slaves are given some rights. But on the whole, “Roman law,” for which Justinian’s compilers were later given credit, is actually the work of the great emperors of the second century and the great jurists of the third.

  To be sure, when Marcus Aurelius, who hated the amphitheater, sent the gladiators off to war against the Marcomanni, there was almost an uprising, as though the emperor wanted to force the people to philosophize.

  He fought the war very conscientiously and efficiently, at least liberated all of Pannonia, then cleared the entire right bank of the Danube of barbarians and even penetrated far beyond the Danube. But for the revolt of Avidius Cassius he might have made Bohemia (the land of the Marcomanni) and Galicia (Sarmatia) into provinces.

  The emperors since Nerva had found it easy to make wise adoptions if they were childless. Marcus Aurelius, who had his Commodus, observed the law of inheritance again and acted according to this expectation from his son’s childhood on. As early as 176–177 he made him Imperator, Consul, Augustus. If afterwards he had wanted to disinherit him, considering the development of Commodus’ character, it would have been too late. If, for example, he had let his son-in-law Pompeianus or Pertinax succeed him, the soldiers would probably have promoted Commodus notwithstanding.

  In the third century there appear the instructive consequences of inheritability, pseudo-inheritability, and usurpation of the throne, until Diocletian introduces adoption as a complete system.

  As the restorer of the Empire’s unity, Septimius Severus is another Vespasian, but Caracalla, his campaign within his own Empire, and the emperor’s dependence on the soldiers make everything uncertain again. Finally the Empire passes into the hands of the Syrian emperors, and even the best of these, Alexander Severus, is murdered in 235.

  The Empire, which since the Augustans has been in charge of provincial officers, now comes under the control of petty officers and murderous soldiers. Prior to Commodus, the emperors who are murdered are monsters; after 235 the murdered are the efficient ones, those who want to maintain discipline. In addition, the barbarians now invade the Empire from all sides. A terrible period is the half-century from 235 to 284.

  The greatest miracle and the justification of the Roman Empire is the fact that it could be reunited at all.

  The Imperium contented itself chiefly with the maintenance of general obedience and of the taxes and boundaries; it was infinitely better than the predatory Senate government. Taxation was direct. The Empire had large tax and customs districts. The direct taxes were revised from time to time; the inland duties, a kind of indirect taxation, were high. The taxes were collected in grain, and goods were used to defray the wages of troops and officials. The rest was in large measure left to local life, the regional constitutions of the cities, pagi, and so on. The polis, the municipium, still existed, as did benevolence within it.

  For the time being, outside of the governing power there was no spiritual or material magnet that could have alienated the people’s loyalty.

  Freedom of intellect and speech was almost unlimited. Education provided by the state, where it occurs, is, after all, not a tool of power. Private life was not controlled by the police. The Empire did not harass the people, but people did harass one another.

  Of the cruel emperors of the Julian and Flavian dynasties (Domitian), only the raging wastrels were actually a menace to the entire Empire, because they had to resort to depredation on a grand scale and probably made use of a band of informers. But the Greek polis, too, had plundered its wealthy.

  Absolutism was considered a natural thing in the Roman Empire and the principle of obedience was at no time in question. That is why the absolute state was able to act unabashedly and never, theoretically, in an underhanded manner. Obedience was not a matter of a doctrine that had to be maintained laboriously and systematically. The government did not need to defend conservatism, nor did it have to organize a bureaucracy as an army of loyalty, and least of all to make education the monopoly and basis of the bureaucracy with the aid of a system of examinations. A great many offices belonged only to the municipium.

  In the whole Empire there was no political party with which the Imperium would have had to contend for power.

  Here Mommsen’s words apply: “Even today there is many a region of both East and West for which the imperial period marks the high point of good government, modest in itself, but never attained before or since. And if some day an angel of the Lord were to draw up a balance sheet as to whether the area ruled by Severus Antoninus is governed with greater understanding and humaneness today than it was then, whether morals and human happiness in general have progressed or regressed since then, it is very doubtful if the verdict would be in favor of the present.”

  The sole danger was from the military, especially from provincial armies, when they fought over installing an emperor.

  The clamor of Greek democracies for “χοεῶν ἄφεσις” and “ἀναδασμὸςτῆς χώοας” [“freedom from want” and “a distribution of land”] was decidedly at an end, although it is threatened once more in Lucian.

  But what never occurred was any attempt to restore the republic, except for a brief conspiracy after Caligula’s death.

  As regards economic conditions, we must not forget the great premise which is present in the anti-banausic thinking of early antiquity, especially that of the Greeks, the main reason for which was the presence of domestic, industrial, and agricultural slaves. After the third century one surmises at most a marked decrease of domestic slaves, because the tombstones of freedmen became far less frequent from that time on; at least the inscriptions cease. As want increased, perhaps it became more economical and more desirable to cut expenses and make shift with free servants rather than buy slaves for which there may have been no funds. Did a free domestic system begin at that time? This does not prove anything regarding the increase or decrease of field slaves. And the average condition of the factory slaves must be surmised rather than proved in any way. Their percentage was probably not great.

  The only universal right of the slaves was that their masters could not kill them or take away the peculium [small property] they had saved. Otherwise a slave was a chattel and barely had a legal marriage, which his master did not respect in practice anyway. A distinction was made between a slave’s death “after” or “in consequence of” ill-treatment; in the former case even the laws of Constantine the Great did not punish the master.

  That free labor greatly predominated in the trades is shown by the existence of the collegia or guilds. They are to be differentiated clearly from the frequently prohibited and politically suspect sodalities whose purpose was merely social enjoyment, religious worship, and burial. The craftsmen can only have been free individual masters. Did they work more with slaves or with free men? In any case, they took part in the labor themselves. Where they did collective work, e.g., for armies, they probably shared the load and the profit. They also seem to have possessed joint funds. Later on there was compulsory membership in the collegia; whoever performed certain work had to belong to the appropriate collegium. The state reimbursed itself for the taxes through the decuriones, first of all, and then through these collegia. In an emergency the state made a squeezing machine out of each corporation. At the same time, both classes jointly bore the responsibility for municipal expenses, construction, supplies, and amusement.

  In addition, the imperial factories (slave labor, because collective?) retained as a monopoly certain businesses, like armaments, purple garments, and mines; later this monopoly system was expanded still further. There, too, collegia are involved; these may be thought of as contractors. The collegia had common religious services and burying places; however, they appeared in complete form only in the larger cities.

  Must not labor have been more highly esteemed than it was with the Greeks and early Romans?

  Prosperity in general depended on whether the country in question had previously had a higher or a lower civilization.

  Sybel complains of the absence of any large industry, an activity creating new value, in addition to the purely passive trade without exports. If things were really as bad as that, it is hard to understand how the Roman Empire was able to stand it.

  As regards the cultivation of the soil, or rather, the alleged desolation and non-cultivation, we must differentiate among

  • (a) what happened through the fault of the Roman Empire;
  • (b) what had happened long ago, through the fault of the peoples themselves (Greece, as Dio Chrysostom, Pausanias, and Strabo found it, had been desolated only by Greeks); and
  • (c) what had been laid waste by enemy irruptions.

  Latifundia and desolation were not yet necessary reciprocal concepts; at any rate, there were great differences in degree among the provinces. To be sure, the complaint about latifundia is justified for Italy. They originated through patrician occupation of the ager publicus, then spread throughout Italy and the provinces. But in themselves they would not necessarily be bound up with bad, not very profitable planting and with the maltreatment of coloni and slaves.

  As reasons for the decline of agriculture Sybel cites the following: war service of the small farmers; failure of the medium ones because of their own wastefulness and the pressure of state taxes; the formation of a small number of colossal estates (latifundia) and the resultant unwholesome economic and social conditions for cultivation and yield, as well as the desolation and depopulation attendant upon them.

  Aside from the fact that Sybel’s reasons are very limited and insufficient and disregard the main causes of the decline of the Roman Empire, which do not become operative until the third century, it was Rome that put an end to collective property, the common pasture land of whole tribes, e.g., in the Celtic lands of the West, recognizing only definitely circumscribed property. Only after that did nomadic life probably give way to agriculture in many places. For Gaul it has been demonstrated clearly (Cellier) that the introduction and increase of the chief cultivated plants were due to the Romans.

  However, every state of ownership has beside it an oppressed class which under certain circumstances makes an uproar. Even what now seems to us like a very imperfect, culture-impeding institution, such as collective property, the common pasture land of whole tribes, probably fitted in with the life of the time, and when, e.g., the Romans put a stop to such things, large segments of the population were made very unhappy. A shepherd does not become a farmer, as has been thought; he dies off.

  Incidentally, apropos of latifundia, we have no right to shoot off our mouths, at a time when the whole farm-owning class is undermined by usurers, the bankrupt are in the majority, the Jews are in the saddle, and the peasants retreat to the cities.

  Nor does it behoove us to consider the Roman Empire especially unhappy because of its lack of competitive factory industries with “free” workers.

  And as far as the “desolation” is concerned, it should be noted that, e.g., the Hauran, east of the Upper Jordan, only now became a populated country and remained so until Islam. By contrast, Dio Chrysostom described Thessalia as desolate, Arcadia as a wasteland, and Pausanias traveled through long, deserted stretches. In all these cases it was the fault of the Greeks themselves among whom since the time of Polybius intentional childlessness had come into practice. In Campania the marked decline in the cultivation of the soil appears to have occurred only later, and in North Africa, whose bread Rome ate, the very large number of bishoprics, 477, is proof of a large population. Britain’s growth is evident also; there the Celtic language, now confined to Wales and Cornwall, had already given way to the Roman idiom prior to the Angles and the Saxons. In Gaul, both culture and population appear to have increased right up to the Antonines. This seems to be borne out by the long and vigorous life of the Gaulish language. The population of the agri decumates [land worked on tithes], arisen from the levissimus quisque Gallorum [every wisp of a Gaul] and the inopia audax [fierce want], appears to have been an overflow of the already Romanized Gallo-Romans. Trajan and Hadrian then drew the limes [boundary] around it.

  All that Sybel adduces is thus very one-sided and insufficient to explain the fall of the Roman Empire. The main causality, rather, is shown to be as follows: the internal disorganization of the Empire after Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, along with the attendant imperial wars; further, after Marcus Aurelius, the new movements of the Germani on all borders and their great human resources—possibly a sudden increase; also, the Sassanids. As a counterforce and in part because of the inner disorganization of the Empire, the Thirty Tyrants appear to save the situation.

  The restoration of the Empire by the Illyrian emperors had to be accompanied by force, even under the best of conditions, and the situation after that inevitably became a permanent state of emergency, even without famine and pestilence.

  The Empire of the first and second centuries must therefore be regarded as distinct from that of the third. Would the abolition of agricultural slavery and the forcible establishment of arms-bearing free farmers have availed anything in the third century? Many such, but not nearly enough, were actually created through the settling of Germani. Instead, there was a most pernicious, unalterable financial system. But in an emergency it is difficult to change such a system.

  At this point, a counterbalance should be drawn up. How much general and inevitable human misery was present and a contributing factor, as it is at any time? Misery is a relative concept and is equal to the degree of discontent within a given situation. One is not miserable until one realizes it and no longer wants to put up with things.

  In the late third century the world empire had to reconstruct itself and remain together so that it could become Christian as a unit.

  Let us have proper respect for the Roman Empire. No other dynasty of the world can boast of five rulers in succession like those from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius (mere hereditary dynasties cannot possibly achieve this), as well as a series of rescuers like that from Claudius the Goth to Diocletian.

  II

  The Middle Ages

  11.

  On the Middle Ages

  (I) [1882.] The term “Middle Ages” actually came into being as an homage to antiquity. It means “the middle period.” The Italians of the fifteenth century were already aware of this. (Is “medium aevum” a translation of “Mittelalter,” “moyen âge”?)

  In this designation there was expressed the concept of a very expendable thousand years which may have existed for the chastisement of mankind; this gave it the reputation of barbarism, and its beginnings in fact had been an overcrowding of the world with barbarians. Hence the special ill-will of the Italians, who had lost their world dominion through the barbarians, although this had actually already happened under Constantine. It seemed to them that, basically, the more modern period could have started directly with the end of Roman history. Something like impatience was felt toward the Middle Ages.

  This view was expressed first in the designation and in the meaning of the Renaissance, then, too, especially in the name of the modern “great power” (the atomization of power in the medieval state was deplored), and, finally, in the term “world civilization.”

  It was possible to misjudge the Middle Ages, to be sure, but in the long run one could not despise the period. The realization prevailed that our existence had its roots in it, even though modern culture was derived predominantly from antiquity. Gradually the specific qualities of the Middle Ages were appreciated in innumerable ways. Certain aspects even inspired veritable enthusiasm which, however, aroused hostility in completely modern-minded persons. On the whole, very strong and widespread prejudices against the Middle Ages have prevailed to this day, not to mention the more deeply entrenched ones. There is an optical illusion with regard to so-called golden ages in which great spiritual capacities come together in a society, as though “happiness” had a definite address or domicile at some time or in some place.

  Above all, at our present moment in history, under the conditions of 1882, we have no business sitting in judgment on any past age—now when from every side there are complaints about, and threats against, our general situation as well as specific matters, and the nations are pitted one against the other, armed to the teeth.

  Now that we are convinced that our knowledge of the Middle Ages belongs among our dearest possessions, that is, the great general knowledge about the continuation of the spirit which distinguishes us from the barbarians (including very modern ones), we had better omit any evaluation of the past according to our standards of happiness or unhappiness, since these are illusions.

  Very peculiar is the interest of our time in all past things and its judgment of their relative intellectual value. Of course, our time is itself undergoing such great transformations that its judgments about the past vary greatly, too. This much, however, remains certain: today’s European humanity has had at least a long youth in the shape of the Middle Ages.

  The life of mankind is a unit whose fluctuations in time or place constitute an up and down, a weal or woe, only to our weak senses, but in reality follow a higher necessity. To trace the latter in detail remains a dubious and difficult task. Not everything that may now and then appear to an investigator as a decree of world history really deserves this title.

  It is a universal human experience that the fringes of existence have always been miserable, because individuals as well as nations always push their existence to the limits of possibility; this is an existence just barely worth living.

  There is something to be said for the survival of a people as such if at least it neither consumes itself, as the ancient Greeks did, nor is destroyed by other peoples. How many peoples disappeared in the great migrations of the Germanic tribes; as soon as they had no kings of their own, they lost themselves among the others. Are we to feel sorry for them at random? If they had existed longer, would they (and so many other peoples who had already gone down in early antiquity) have done great and good things or perhaps predominantly bad ones?

  At any rate, the amount of unhappiness felt increases greatly in highly civilized, security-minded periods when conditions become completely insecure and violent, as, e.g., in the migrations of the Germanic tribes.

  But we may properly feel a certain amount of pity and need not excuse ourselves with the barren argument that what fell did so for good reasons, or that after a fall there comes a resurgence. For by no means every destruction has been followed by rejuvenation (those involved and their relatives will have none of rejuvenation through decay), and the great destroyers of life remain an enigma to us. In the face of the ambition of an Attila, who did not have enough time, or of the accomplishments of Genghis Khan and especially Tamerlane, we remain perplexed, and can, at best, stutter that these men destroyed forces which, under certain circumstances, might also have become very harmful to mankind. The capital losses of mankind are enormous. And in particular the destruction of noble and universally admired works of poetry and art fills us with lasting sadness because we are convinced that they are irreplaceable, i.e., we know that never before has there been, nor ever again will there be, a union of precisely this naive strength with this beauty. (But let us close our eyes; experience teaches us that the human race has over the ages achieved very little of supreme excellence, and will do no better in the future; therefore, for the time being, we may well mourn when things of excellence are destroyed.)

  Our only consolation—and a very uncertain one—is this: the survival of the greatest works of antiquity, now lost, would have stood in the way of the newer literature and art and made their natural appearance or at least their independence impossible.

  As a rule, however, calling past times happy or pitying them is only partisanship in favor of one untenable thing against another such; and as it is, we are subject to the prejudices of our egoism (at best, to the predilections of our time) which approves of what seems akin to it and disapproves of what it finds incomprehensible or repugnant.

  Thus, for instance, we have a powerful antipathy to Islam, with its arid religion, its art tyrannically kept poor, its forcibly restricted poetry, and its invariably tyrannical form of government. But as soon as the believers are given voice, we and our pity are sent packing. To this day, Islam gives its adherents enormously firm support, and they are proud of it and almost inaccessible to missionary efforts. But if one imagines history without Islam, one must also eliminate the at least temporary rejuvenation which, as an opponent, it brought to the Byzantine Empire and later, through the Crusades, to the West. (This great adversary quite materially kept the Byzantine Empire alive. That it finally did succumb to Islam was due to weakening from the West; remember 1204.) But the Mongols would have come nevertheless, and it is beyond all speculation in what condition they would have found a non-Islamic Near East and Europe.

  However, just as dubious as pitying is felicitation. When it is directed toward victorious peoples, their happiness, the so-called victor’s happiness, was tempered by the infinite misery of the vanquished, who were also human beings and possibly superior ones. Moreover, the joy of victory does not last long, if only because persisting in the same situation is not granted to peoples nor to individuals, and after some time there recommences, in one way or another, the struggle for existence which can grow to deadly proportions—and not by any means through arms only, but, as is the case today, through customs tariffs (because thereby one hits an activity based on free competition, namely, present-day industry, the current index of power and property).

  Aside from that, one would have to be able to determine for all peoples and all periods how strong the active, the really free, segment was; for these people alone can have had an exalted feeling of their existence. But we do not even know the proportion of slaves in the Roman Empire, let alone the percentage of the half-free (the litae, etc.) and the unfree (servi) among the victorious Germani, nor do we know how these people felt about their lack of freedom.

  Instead of any evaluation according to happiness and unhappiness, in place of any fruitless approval or disapproval, we shall confine ourselves to a consideration and understanding of the living forces, their succession, their interaction, their transmutation. To this end we need to be released from mere narration which may be given by handbooks. We have to group phenomena more according to their inner relations in which they form conditions, lasting states of affairs. The history of civilization comes into its own. Definitions of the concept vary; it will long have a subjective and dilettante appearance, as well as complicated and uncertain outlines, from the so-called antiquities to the so-called philosophy of history. Each individual will proceed according to his personal insight. However, one does not include in the history of civilization what one likes, but what one believes one should or must include.

  The designation for what we have in mind is, at any rate, too narrow insofar as it leads us to assume that we are concerned only with the rise or decline of intellectual culture and the material exploitation of the earth; what we really aim at is an understanding of all the more significant and effective forces in general, and thus of the more or less constant conditions created by them.

  The history of civilization overlaps with church history, the history of law, literary history, the history of communications, the history of morals, etc., according to its requirements, but it does not make any claim to being all these things itself. Its selection of data follows its inner principle. Its academic justification, recognized anyway, would, among other things, lie in the fact that it can compress the spiritually significant content of a period embracing many centuries into the brief scope of a lecture course more easily than can narrative presentation.

  The relationship of the history of civilization to source studies is a very natural one. Sources are of interest to it as the monument and picture of a certain period and nation, not merely as the places where single events may be found; the historian of civilization reads with different eyes than does the historian. In fact, the history of civilization can be learned usefully only from sources instead of from handbooks.

  (II) [1884.] As for the more recent enemies of the Middle Ages, they are the following:

  First, those who consider Christianity in general as wrong and a misfortune; second, those who cannot bear the interweaving of great and strongly symbolizing folk imaginations with new religions (the imagination of Islam is half-tamed, that of the Christians is not); further, those who have no understanding for stabilizing elements, or those who are in a hurry to create a situation in which a man may do anything, but so may everybody else, and logically the most insolent fellow may do these things most of all—those who are in a hurry, then, for the unrestricted development of philosophy, the rapid victory of science, untrammeled communication with the remotest as well as the closest people, and the industrial exploitation of the world, from the surface of the earth on. Finally, count among these enemies all proponents of leveling sameness.

  We may regard Renan as an adversary of the Middle Ages, with many qualifications; he repeatedly characterizes himself in his Marcus Aurelius. P. 588: Le but suprême de l’humanité est la liberté des individus [The highest goal of mankind is the liberty of the individual].—L’homme ne doit appartenir qu’à lui-même [A man must belong only to himself]; out of this, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the French Revolution made: la foi nouvelle de l’humanité [the new faith of mankind], p. 614.—“Christianity is robbery of the state,” this especially on p. 590.—Religious peoples, e.g., Indians, are open to all conquerors, according to Renan. Only by drastically modifying Christianity in the Middle Ages were cities and states able to exist with it, he says. In Renan’s view, there was no “fatherland” in the Middle Ages; people were Christians, Moslems, Buddhists.

  Then, p. 603: “La vie humaine est suspendue pour 1000 ans. La grande industrie devient impossible; par suite des fausses idées répandues sur l’usure, toute opération de banque, d’assurance, est frappée d’interdiction. Le juif seul peut manier l’argent; on le force à être riche” [Human life is suspended for 1000 years. Large industry becomes impossible. Due to distorted ideas disseminated about usury, all banking and insurance operations are prohibited. Only Jews can handle money; they are forced to be rich], and then they are reproached with their wealth. Christianity “coupa le capital par la racine” [cut off capital at the root] by prohibiting the taking of interest; wealth became unproductive. “La funeste terreur répandue sur toute la société du moyen-âge par le prétendu crime d’usure fut l’obstacle qui s’opposa, durant plus de dix siècles, au progrès de la civilisation.” [The deadly terror spread through the entire society of the Middle Ages by the alleged crime of usury was the obstacle which, for more than ten centuries, impeded the progress of civilization.] And a little before that: “La vie humaine est suspendue pour 1000 ans.” (At least now we know what it is that Renan calls “human life”!)

  A further complaint of his is that work declined so much. According to him, the poor man had in Christianity “le bonheur sans travail” [happiness without toil] and hoped “conquérir le ciel par la pauvreté” [to win heaven through poverty].

  Further, on p. 605 he says that “le perfectionnement de la société humaine, ni l’augmentation de la somme de bonheur des individus ...” [the perfecting of human society or the increase of the amount of individual happiness...] had in no wise been the purpose of Christianity. (Here, “bien-être” [well-being] would have sufficed.)

  Moreover, on p. 630: Concerning the Celtic, Italic, and other superstitions that infiltrated the Church: the world from the sixth to the tenth centuries was more pagan than ever; “jusqu’aux progrès de l’instruction primaire de nos jours, nos paysans n’avaient pas abandonné un seul de leurs petits dieux gaulois. Le culte des saints a été le couvert sous lequel s’est rétabli le polythéisme.” [until the progress of elementary education in our day, our peasants had not abandoned a single one of their little Gaulish gods. The cult of saints has been the cover under which polytheism has reestablished itself.]

  Finally, on p. 632, about the third century: “Des essais de christianisme unitaire, sans métaphysique ni mythologie, d’un christianisme peu distinct du judaïsme rationnel, comme fut la tentative de Zénobie et de Paul de Samosate, sont coupés par la base. Ces tentatives eussent produit un christianisme simple, continuation du judaïsme, quelquechose d’analogue à ceque fut l’Islam. Si elles avaient réussi, elles eussent prévenu sans doute le succès de Mahomet chez les Arabes et les Syriens. Que de fanatisme on eût ainsi évité!” [Attempts at unitarian Christianity without metaphysics or mythology, a Christianity little different from rational Judaism,* as was the attempt of Zenobia and Paul of Samosata, were nipped in the bud. These attempts could have produced a simple Christianity, a continuation of Judaism, something analogous to what Islam was. If they had succeeded, they would undoubtedly have forestalled Mohammed’s success with the Arabs and the Syrians. How much fanaticism would thus have been avoided!] (But instead, fanaticism for Mammon would early have gained control, as it did with the Jews.)

  Renan’s religious wishes may answer for themselves.

  But we will at least concede to the people of the Middle Ages that they were able to live without continual or continually threatening national wars, without forced mass industry with deadly competition, without credit and capitalism, without hatred of (albeit inevitable) poverty. If these people had mined hard coal, as is done now, where would we be?

  The Middle Ages had greatness and sorrows of a kind very different from what Renan is capable of conceiving.

  Greatness can appear at moments when mere calculation ceases and a way of thinking, a feeling, overwhelms everything. And at such moments it gives us, their posterity, the impression that it carried the feeling of happiness along with it.

  (III) In contrast to the supposition that one has to make excuses for the Middle Ages, it is our task simply to describe the realities of past life, whatever it may be. The Middle Ages were the youth of today’s world, and a long youth. Whatever to us is worth living for has its roots there. The Middle Ages are not responsible for our present decline! It was a time of natural authority. It is not its fault that we no longer have this nor can regain it, but are instead flooded by waves of majority from below.

  The great impact of past times and forces lies not in their kinship with us, but in their naive quality, i.e., their being right as a matter of course. For example, the victory of orthodoxy over Germanic Arianism was not a matter of superior intellectuality, but of a temperament which ipso facto gained control over meager rival forms of the church.

  The greatness of an epoch or a cause depends on the proportion of those capable of sacrifice, on whatever side it may be. In this respect the Middle Ages pass muster rather well. Devotion! And not a guarantee of regular pay!

  Where does greatness begin? With devotion to a cause, whatever it may be, with complete extinction of personal vanity.

  Greatness is not dependent on mental superiority, for this can be paired with a wretched character.

  Greatness is the conjunction of a certain spirit with a certain will.

  12.

  On Early Christianity

  When, where, and by whom was the decision made to collect the three synoptic Gospels separately? It could only have happened at a time when their texts were already regarded as too sacred for anyone to dare to work them into one volume. In what communities did one previously have the gospels separately? Of the Apocrypha, the Gospel of the Hebrews had an especially wide dissemination; according to Eusebius, the Ebionites read it exclusively.

  Islam immediately assumed a worldly position of power which at the same time took care not to permit any deviation from the faith. Christianity, on the other hand, set the imaginations of many in competitive motion at a time of great religious ferment, and for three centuries had to contend with heresies of all kinds, all sorts of secondary religions, magicians, Gnostics, and visionaries, who, in a body, were able to sweep many a community along, and it had to carry on this fight with no resources other than its own strength. People could be enraptured through the mere promise of the imminent Second Coming of Christ on Judgment Day, chiliasm, and the like, but notably through prophecy, as with the Montanists, and with sudden inspirations. Montanus regarded himself as the Paraclete.

  With all this, however, one probably kept before him that the most outstanding men belonged to the right-thinking center, and especially the persecutions probably strengthened this center. If any authority ever came into being with enormous dedication, it is that of the church.

  All Christendom at the time professes the faith; where there is any worldly-wise concealment, any participation in pagan rituals, etc., we are dealing with heretics, such as Basilides.

  Bar Kochba’s rebellion was, first and foremost, a bloody persecution of the Christians. A constant danger for the Christians was the pagans’ belief, which became very strong in time, that calamities of all kinds stemmed from the diffusion, or toleration, of the Christians.

  Miracles, including raising the dead, presented no problems to the Christians from the beginning, and in the community one actually thought that one saw charismata like prophecy and the healing of the sick continue, while all pagan miracles appeared as mere magic.

  The mutual support of the Christians (until Constantine placed at their disposal the benefices of the state) may, practically speaking, have come quite close to the short-lived community of property of Apostolic times. Whoever became a Christian hardly remained rich. In Rome under Commodus there were a few conversions of wealthy people and aristocrats.

  Upon martyrdom there follows immediately the worship of martyrs’ bodies. At the persecutions of Lyon (Pothinus, Blandina, etc.) the persecutors burned the corpses and threw the ashes into the Rhône—not so much in order to prevent their worship as to prevent a resurrection.

  Of the demonic, pagans and Christians held much the same views, but the pagans were here governed by a wild and colorful imagination, whereas the Christians harbored a rather uniform conviction.

  Church literature was evidently very abundant from the beginning. Undoubtedly the collections of letters to colleagues and communities constituted a prime genre; then the refutations of heresies and apologetics directed against the pagans must be considered. Hebrew must have sunk into deep obscurity once there were no longer any real converted Jews. That Origen studied Hebrew is especially emphasized. By the third century there were already many scholarly theological works and commentaries.

  After the persecution of Decius, on the occasion of the Novatian dispute, a synod of sixty bishops and numerous presbyters and deacons could already be held in Rome. They came from Italy, Africa, “and other places.” Apropos of this, Eusebius also gives the statistics of the Roman community. The Antiochean synods concerning Paul of Samosata (after 270) were very large and well attended. Now the disputes over the treatment of the lapsi [backsliders] and the rebaptism of converted heretics increased, and in addition there was a continual dispute over the nature of Christ.

  Christian influences made themselves felt at the imperial court under Commodus, Philip the Arab, Alexander Severus, and also under Valerian about whom Eusebius reports in his Historia Ecclesiastica, VII, 9: “In the beginning his entire court was full of pious people, indeed, had become a church of God, until Egyptian priests induced him to turn about completely and indulge in horrible secret sacrifices and persecutions.” Aurelian was an arbiter in Christian affairs and among other things decided against Paul of Samosata.

  13.

  Christianity as a Martyr Religion

  Among all religions Christianity may be the one that has most vividly retained its own advance in its memory through the cult of its believers and martyrs. Buddhism venerates only relics of Buddha himself and has no specific memories of his individual propagators, because none of their performances are worthy of him anyway. On the other hand, Christianity, just as it takes seriously the salvation of the individual, also greatly apotheosizes its individual evangels and virtually transfers to their relics and graves a large part of its rituals and concept of God. Where none are demonstrable, they are postulated and expected to reveal themselves; this, to be sure, means a change to the second stage in which every place must have its relics and there arises competition for, and jealousy of, such possessions. This is the strongest localization of the sacred, comparable in its way to that in Greek mythology.

  In contrast to this is the paucity of Islam’s shrines. In addition, these are not special places of grace, but only of remembrance. (But what about the graves of individual saintly marabouts, etc.?) Islam does not spread the efficacy of Allah over places and persons.

  It was highly important for the veneration of the various Christian saints that one should know something about their legends. In Troyes, St. Patroclus has a small shrine, with only one cleric (he is later called lector). Loci enim homines parvum exhibebant martyri famulatum, pro eo quod historia passionis eius non haberetur in promptu; mos namque erat hominum rusticorum, ut Sanctos Dei, quorum agones relegunt, attentius venerentur. Quidam igitur de longinquo itinere veniens, libellum huius certaminis detulit, lectori, quem in ipso loco servire diximus, prodidit ad legendum. [For the men of that place showed little interest in the martyr because there was no account of his martyrdom available; for it was the custom of the countrymen to worship more devoutly those of God’s saints whose martyrdom they could read about. So a certain man who brought back from a far journey an account of the saint’s passion gave it to the cleric who, as we have said, served at that place, to read.] The latter, highly pleased, immediately copied it and brought it to his bishop, but was severely punished as though he had thought it up himself. Yet soon afterwards a Frankish gentleman went to Italy and brought home from there the very same legend.

  There is a superiority of martyrs over the other saints; the expressions for martyrdom are passio, agon, certamen. Christianity subsists here essentially on those who died professing it. It becomes entirely a religion of martyrs, in complete contrast to the religions of antiquity which made no fuss about their believers and had only a mythical view of their original propagators. (Dionysus and others; nevertheless, with Dionysus it comes closest to persecution, profession of faith, and martyrdom.) The persecutions of the emperors bring it about that Christianity immediately and everywhere has “classical soil” under its feet. A case in point is the enormous ineffectiveness of Diocletian’s persecution in the face of a long-standing cult of martyrdom.

  In reference to the “classical soil”: In Arles, a falsely accused woman is sentenced to be drowned in the Rhône with a stone around her neck. In the water she invokes the greatest local saint, who once swam in the Rhône during a persecution: “Sancte Genesi, gloriose martyr, qui has aquas natandi pulsu sanctificasti.” [“Saint Genesius, glorious martyr, who hast sanctified these waters by swimming in them.”] She is saved, of course.

  14.

  On Asceticism and Its Position

  (I) Asceticism does not arise from justification by works (it does not become that until late), nor does it come into being as penance by proxy for others who in their lives on earth have no time to do penance (this, too, is a late concept), but it is the authentic expression of the genuine pessimism inherent in Christianity. Entirely consistent with this is celibacy—not by any means solely as a denial of sensuality, although this, too, plays a strong part in it (sensual enjoyment is a direct contradiction of Christianity which in this respect strongly sunders itself from the nature religions), but because the survival of mankind is not at all desirable. In the fourth and fifth centuries the will to extinction exists in the noblest minds quite independent of the external fate of the Empire. Side by side with this there lives a mob that in the midst of all the misery is fanatically devoted to circuses.

  Only after the migrations of the Germanic tribes did the ascetically inclined eo ipso become priests or monks, and only then was the clergy as such obliged to constitute the ascetic caste, something that was often rather badly out of keeping with its real behavior. Christianity was to be put into consistent practice in at least one definite class. This explains the demand for celibacy which appeared repeatedly and finally prevailed. The clergy was to represent that perfection which a layman could not achieve; only in this way could the clergy be worthy of dispensing the means of salvation of the church. Only in return for such renunciation could the clergy demand that show of respect which was based on its being regarded by others as holy.

  To be sure, penance by proxy and justification by works already appear here. In the meantime, the question of celibacy became involved with the entire gradually won position of power for the hierarchy, which had to possess the priests completely and safeguard church property from being squandered and used up by the priests’ families.

  How early was the intercessory prayer of an ascetic, the precursor of penance by proxy, considered valuable? How early were monasteries endowed for the sake of such prayers?

  (II) Asceticism and its complete realization in the monastic life is the New Testament taken literally; the average Christian was no longer rising to its strict observance in his life on earth. Even by the second century the great Christian community had included also those of moderate virtue, the no longer quite saintly. Side by side with the century that had turned Christian there had earlier arisen fearful ascetic heresies like Montanism; later, however, orthodox Christianity peacefully detached itself as the monastic life and in this found its wholly justified representation. The monks are the consistent Christians, and the laymen salve their consciences with the thought that in addition to themselves such Christians exist and that perfection simply is not the business of the age. In the monasteries, too, charismata which are no longer possible or admissible on the outside may continue.

  15.

  The Spread of Nicene Christianity

  It may be asked how it could come about that Christianity, with the Nicene Creed, was allowed to enter into the fifth century as an enormous social power bringing men closer together, in both languages, and furthermore, through the Greeks who were the people to understand other peoples. Alexander and the Diadochi had brought close the Near East and brought about understanding between its civilizations and their own Hellenism. Rome, which gradually subjugated this Orient, had at the same time achieved a fusion of its mind with the Greek mind. This hardest of peoples could not resist Greek culture, its only enthusiasm. Under the emperors, a homogeneous Greco-Roman world had come into being. This was the world that became the scene and the object of the spread of Christianity. The homogeneity of Christendom from Britain and the pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates and the Tigris became the new substructure under the collapsing Empire. And now the peoples could come; in time they were all overpowered by Nicene Christianity. Without this, the Middle Ages would have been a den of murderers.

  That is the way it had to happen so that the nations would not treat one another like wild animals. And all times to come will remember this.

  16.

  The Church

  Christianity as such was superior to paganism, classical and otherwise, with its unholy gods, its orientation to a no longer existent middle class, its exhausted poetry and literature, and its self-accusations concerning general wickedness and so on.

  But the greatest miracle is that from Christianity an external form of power, the church, was able to take shape and that subsequently world churches, considered as orthodox, maintained themselves; further, that a recognized canon of sacred writings was able to come into being.

  The inner characteristic of the Christian doctrine was, from the beginning, the highly personal relationship of the individual to the Christian realities and doctrines. Thus there necessarily resulted differing views, even within the earliest circle around the apostles, as evidenced by the existence of converted Jews and pagans. Many schisms arose even within the apostolic communities; this is revealed by the Pauline epistles. After the apostles had died off there was danger of there no longer being any sufficient authority. Then, too, there was the requirement of discipline, which certainly served to repel rather than attract. The symbolum apostolicum did not originate until post-apostolic times, possibly as the creed of the candidate for baptism.

  On the other hand, the charitable love in the communities and the equality before God served as uniting forces, and, above all, the persecutions were the greatest promoters of concord; without them there might have been a lot of sects which paganism could have absorbed again.

  But there was also an onrush on the part of Greek philosophy (even in the case of Paul), of Oriental theosophy and magic, in addition to asceticism which could be intensified at will. Other religions tried to gain influence; Simon Magus is a case in point. Several messiahs appeared, Bar Kochba and others.

  Under circumstances such as these there took place the transposition of primitive Christianity into the world-view and culture of the late classical world, into pagan Christianity, and later the transference to the Germanic and Slavic worlds.

  The impetus of Christianity is peculiar. It vociferously lays claim to crowding out all other religions completely. Then it makes sweeping progress as early as the first century; hence Tacitus’ words “Odium generis humani” [an object of hatred to the human race] and the increasing hatred of the masses; until finally, under Constantine, the state has to yield by amalgamating this overwhelming power within its own, willy-nilly.

  Christian doctrine had its perils, the heresies. We may leave out of consideration the entire dualistic Gnosticism with its eon theory as hardly able to form communities, despite its colorful variety and the manifold origin of its systems. We may likewise pass over the Judeo- Christian sects, the Ebionites and others (as late as the end of the second century there is the pseudo-Clementine study circle). Undoubtedly the Jews were too arrogant to bother much with this sort of thing; during persecutions of Christians they used to incite the pagans. Bar Kochba, too, murdered Christians.

  The strongest pretensions to a church of its own were made by Manichaeism which treated Christianity as merely a varnish of pagan theosophy and ignored Judaism, betraying no Platonic influence, but offering Persian dualism with an admixture of Buddhistic ideas. The re-emergence of Manichaeism in the Middle Ages is evidence of its relative vitality. The Near East at that time was a veritable vagina religionum [womb of religions]; one should also bear in mind, for later, the situation under the Sassanids prior to Mohammed.

  Finally there appeared around 150 Montanism with its ecstatic prophecies that proclaimed the beginning of the age of the Paraclete and produced a new outpouring of the spirit. Montanus regarded himself as the Paraclete (?). The sect was characterized by violent asceticism and fanaticism; it professed chiliasm. In somewhat toned-down form, Montanism had also an aftereffect on the East.

  The schisms of Hippolytus, Felicissimus, Novatian, and Meletius are to be evaluated as mere deviations and disputes over practices of penitential discipline, coupled with personal quarrels.

  More dangerous were the schisms over the Trinity, the Patripassians, a Paul of Samosata, etc.

  In the face of all this, the church managed to remain united (the main document is Cyprian’s De unitate ecclesiae); even to organize itself hierarchically; to hold synods, at first as required, later regularly; and to cultivate its universality with increasing determination. It not only sloughed off false doctrines and immorality, but also fought, as it had to, every deviation in external forms, constitution, and ritual. It achieved the complete sovereignty of the episcopate and the beginning of the Roman primateship. Irenaeus, III, 3, says: “Ad hanc enim [scil. ecclesiam Romanam] a gloriosissimis duobus Apostolis Petro et Paulo fundatam propter potiorem principalitatem necesse est omnem convenire ecclesiam, h.e. eos qui sunt undique fideles, in qua semper ab his, qui sunt undique, conservata est ea quae est ab Apostolis traditio.” [Because of its pre-eminence, the whole church, that is, the faithful everywhere, has to agree with this [i.e., the church of Rome], founded by the two most glorious apostles Peter and Paul. For within it there has always been preserved by Christians everywhere that tradition which stems from the Apostles.]

  Without the last persecutions under Decius, Valerian, and others, the spirit of contradiction, of dialectics, and of ambition would most likely have split the church into sects, and paganism would then probably have overpowered them or at least stood its ground side by side with it. The life of the church was not attached to esoteric doctrinal interpretations and ambitious personalities, but on community feeling, the common feeling of being God’s children, the brotherly helpfulness and beneficence. All this would have been dealt a mortal blow by a split-up into sects, and the specific power to conquer the pagans would thereby have vanished, regardless of the religious zeal of the individual sects.

  When, under Diocletian, Christianity got ready to gain control of the Imperium, it was caught up in those dangerous schisms over the Trinity. Diocletian’s persecutions did not, to be sure, remove these schisms, but they undoubtedly did marshal the spirit of unity which existed side by side with the schisms. And when Constantine had dealings with Christianity, he encountered a firm ecumenical organization as an established tradition. Without it he would probably not have shown Christianity any consideration.

  If good sense had some say in matters of belief and opinion, most heresies would not have been promulgated, so that the church might remain powerful. However, the same force that made the church mighty also engendered the capacity for, and disposition toward, heresy—to be sure, with the help of much personal dogmatism. There is such a thing as a born sectarian.

  17.

  Julian and the Prospect for a Restoration of Paganism

  The fact that after Julian’s death Arbogast and Eugenius virtually made this restoration their program, in which they could count on the pagans at least, proves that things were not yet decided by any means.

  If one imagines Julian without the Persian War and with a reign of about ten years, he could have achieved a great deal.

  Of course, it was impossible to organize paganism into a rival church; but the farm population and the people in many cities would have been available for great demonstrations. Presumably paganism would at least have established itself on a permanent basis, secure from any further abolition, and would then have maintained itself alongside Christianity for who knows how long as a religion inaccessible to any conversionary argument, especially through the possession of the benefice.

  On the other hand, it is conceivable that in the face of such a situation the Christian theologians would have ceased their wrangling about the Trinity; the true forces would have become paramount again; the situation would have been comparable to the later one of the orthodox under the Arian Germanic princes.

  Nevertheless, there would have been another great danger not present before or since: forsaken by the Imperium, the church could have been split asunder by countries as well as by sects, and it would subsequently have found it difficult to regain its unity. In Rome there would probably have been a real battle in which paganism would have carried the day and the diocese could easily have lost completely its beginning pristine preeminence.

  18.

  Western European Arianism and the Jews

  Renan moans in his Marcus Aurelius and is very sorry that in the third century the “essais de christianisme unitaire,” which would hardly have differed from the “judaïsme rationnel,” were defeated.

  In the future, the Jews on several occasions stick with the Arians and fear nothing more than orthodoxy, as is attested by the Jews of Ravenna and elsewhere, by those of Arles (508) and of Naples, who, in 536, in the face of Belisarius’ attack, promise to take care of the city’s needs. The Jews in Visigothic Spain were evidently very numerous; here they took revenge by agreements with the Arabs who were ready for invasion.

  The entire orthodox Middle Ages then kept the Jews down and persecuted them periodically, i.e., attempted to annihilate them. If, however, Western European Arianism had held its own, the Jews would in a century or two have become the masters of the entire property and would have made the Germanic and the Romanic peoples work for them even at that time. There would have been no Middle Ages, or they would have been quite different. If one judges according to desirability, one has this choice: either general dominion of the Jews from the seventh or eighth century, or the Middle Ages as they were.

  19.

  The Breakup of the Western Empire

  It is a general pathological fact that when a great organism comes to its end, a whole number of maladies and terrible accidents occur simultaneously or in rapid succession.

  Whether accidental or not, there was the special circumstance that the Empire was represented not by strong emperors by adoption, choice, or usurpation, but by two legitimate weaklings whose leadership in decisive moments could or had to become a matter of competition, so that instead of vigorous harmony there was disharmony, created by subordinates. Added to this was the problematic nature of the army.

  The bodies of troops seem to acquire individual wills of their own; Roman legions in Britain show mistrust of the central government and then revolt against it; invasion and Roman usurpation cross paths and the barbarian troops occasionally obey their own impulses more than the Empire’s authority. The crises within the army assume the aspect of unpredictable elemental events.

  To be added to all this is the pressure from the outside. The great barbarian world senses all at once that the day of its power has come (Radagaisus; the Germani in Gaul, 406). It need no longer be satisfied with mercenary pay, partial colonization, and so on; the dominant will of world history passes over to it. Völkerwanderung [the migration of the peoples] in a narrower sense means that parts of the Empire fall prey to Germanic peoples; the modes of this vary greatly.

  As shortcomings of tradition these are to be emphasized: we lack a circumstantial Western historian, even an exact chronology that would be capable of determining months and weeks. However, the course of events is of necessity inwardly obscure, judged by the causalities, and unavoidably burdened with false motivations. Gigantic and inevitable destinies are, after all, conceived of as the faults of individuals. With the general suffering and misery there are fancies and fictions and, especially, recriminations, and the mania for accusation grips even those who could have known the truth. And so it is that the nexus causalis [causal connection], of which we are now and then informed, either was not present at all, or had an entirely different form.

  In Claudian and Zosimus there is a garrulity which forcibly presses after the most secret intrigues and intentions. But in addition it is unfortunately true that at world-decisive moments base personal intrigues did play some part. Finally we must take into consideration the all-confusing sectarian hatred of the orthodox for Stilicho. In the Eastern as well as the Western Roman Empire, every defection of a province, every barbarian irruption is regarded as instigated by the competitor.

  20.

  The Achievement of Clovis I

  He passed from one stage of his power to another with complete assurance: 486–496–506. As lord over the largest part of Gaul he then did away with his Frankish fellow rulers, apparently with the full approval of the populations concerned. All his creations are shot through with crime. But one must not let every filthy wretch believe that when he is committing crimes, he is founding a state. At the time of his death Clovis is: (1) the leader of the entire Frankish nation in the narrower sense and of the Alamannic people, i.e., of contiguous Germanic populations; (2) lord over Romanic Gaul as a whole, with Paris as his cathedra regni [capital]. And all—the people, the ruler and the ruled—are or become Nicene-Orthodox. The addition of Burgundy had to be the next consequence.

  As a state, the Frankish kingdom is still unwieldy and provisional. But it is a viable construction as compared to the artificial jerry-building of the conquering Arian peoples who think they can rule permanently over orthodox Romanic masses. In spite of everything the dynasty lasted for two centuries and a half, while among the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Anglo-Saxons, etc., dynasties could hardly be formed. There were usurpations of the supreme power, but until Pepin no usurpation of the kingship. This state survived the most terrible blows and later brilliantly regenerated itself under Pepin’s dynasty.

  21.

  Mohammed as the Founder of a Religion, and Islam

  A brilliant people, capable of self-denial, with boundless self-reliance of individuals and tribes, was to be summoned to a new faith and to world hegemony in the name of this faith.

  There was a great variety of religions in Arabia; paganism glittered in every hue, and side by side with it there existed an old belief in Allah; Jewish tribes and Christians of diverse origin were living in the country; in front of them the Byzantines were engaged in a dispute among one another about the natures in Christ; the Sassanids had their dualistic religion; both empires were shaken to their foundations politically and militarily.

  The specific thing that Mohammed encountered was the rite of the pilgrimage to the Kaaba toward which the entire existence of Mecca had been oriented from ancient times. He did not make it an object of loathing, did not try to create a rival sanctuary; the age-old Kaaba required only “purification”; the Black Stone was retained as a necessary mystery.

  Since Mohammed could not evade the Kaaba and the pilgrimage (although they had per se no necessary connection with his faith), he had not only to incorporate them in his system, but to make them the center of his entire cult. For a while he has to flee from Mecca; then the enthusiasm of his entire following becomes all the more the desire for the Kaaba, and his decisive victory is then the capture of Mecca. That in the future all peoples would be infected with the longing for the Kaaba he can hardly have suspected. For the time being he enjoined all non-believers from the Kaaba and the pilgrimage.

  With his scanty preaching alone he would have achieved only a modest and temporary success; but from the hegira on, he constantly procured new goals for his adherents: in addition to Mecca, which he promised them, the robbing of caravans and the conquests in Arabia together with the resulting booty. To this there immediately attaches as something natural the holy war against the outside as well. World empire is a simple corollary.

  Mohammed is personally very fanatical; that is his basic strength. His fanaticism is that of a radical simplifier and to that extent is quite genuine. It is of the toughest variety, namely, doctrinaire passion, and his victory is one of the greatest victories of fanaticism and triviality. All idolatry, everything mythical, everything free in religion, all the multifarious ramifications of the hitherto existing faith, transport him into a real rage, and he hits upon a moment when large strata of his nation were evidently highly receptive to an extreme simplification of the religious; his genius lies in his divining this. And the peoples who were now attacked may also have been somewhat tired of their existing theology and mythology. From his youth on, Mohammed, with the aid of at least ten people, looks over the faiths of the Jews, Christians, and Parsis, and steals from them any scraps that he can use, shaping these elements according to his imagination. Thus everyone found in Mohammed’s sermons some echo of his accustomed faith.

  The very extraordinary thing is that with all this Mohammed achieved not merely lifetime success, the homage of Arabia, but founded a world religion that is viable to this day and has a tremendously high opinion of itself.

  In this new religion, everything had to be within the common range of the Arabs, i.e., it had to be possible. Therefore Islam has the simplest catechism, and the main elements of this simplicity are as follows:

  Oneness of God and his predicates.

  Allah is neither procreated nor procreating.

  Revelations by the prophets Adam, Noah, Moses, Christ, and Mohammed as the last of the prophets, but with intimations of a Mahdi.

  The absolute decree; fatalism (Mohammed himself calls it “submission”) which had a highly tonic effect on aspiring forces. In connection with untoward things one speaks of “Mektub.”

  Belief in angels (because Mohammed found devas, jinn, and peris).

  Immortality and Last Judgment, Heaven and Hell (“Paradise lies under the shadow of swords”).

  Moral laws, all kinds of moral precepts, among them “No lying” (for Mohammed reserved lying for himself); part of this is the civil law of the Koran which is in force to this day.

  Finally, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage.

  Aside from any absolute value, it may be assumed that this religion and Weltanschauung corresponds in large measure to the universally human on a certain level of inner development. Genuine devotion, mysticism, and philosophy can and have been able to attach themselves to this religion. But the more profound elements in Islam come to it from forces outside it.

  Islam trains its heads and hearts in such a manner that afterwards they produce only this form of state and culture and no other, whether or not Mohammed planned it that way.

  This paltry religion (did it have a better moral effect than Arabian idolatry?) destroys over wide areas two far higher and deeper religions, Christianity and dualism, because they are undergoing crises. It holds sway from the Atlantic to deep into India and China, and makes advances among the Negroes to this day. Only few countries could be wrested away again from Islam, and this only with the utmost exertion. Where Christian governments rule over Islamitic populations today, they wisely leave them their faith; the Christian religion has no effect on it whatsoever.

  Döllinger’s prediction is idle when he says that Islam contains “seeds of transitoriness.” This is his argument: “Of course, Islam contains seeds of transitoriness [and what about our Europe? Does it not also contain such seeds?* ] if only because of the fact that it is a religion of set, rigid dogmas which encompass all areas of life and impede any development [alias “progress”: does Islam live because it excludes progress?]* These dogmas, the product of a single people and a definite low level of culture, must prove inadequate and harmful upon their continuance and transfer to other nations, and finally must be shattered by the inner contradictions they arouse as well as by the requirements of life.”

  But as of now, this religion has lasted for a desperately long time, and the Islamic world at present subsists on this narrowness! For the Islamitic peoples, no matter how they fare, regard it as a vast misfortune for anyone not to belong to this religion and culture. This world religion has a high opinion of itself and considers the unbelievers unfortunate.

  It is the general tendency of our minds to deduce great causes from great effects, thus, in this case, from Mohammed’s achievement, greatness of the originator. At the very least, one wants to concede in Mohammed’s case that he was no fraud, was serious about things, etc. However, it is possible to be in error sometime with this deduction regarding greatness and to mistake mere might for greatness. In this instance it is rather the low qualities of human nature that have received a powerful presentation. Islam is a triumph of triviality, and the great majority of mankind is trivial. (Present-day admirers of Mohammed pay themselves the compliment of mediocrity.) But triviality likes to be tyrannical and is fond of imposing its yoke upon nobler spirits. Islam wanted to deprive distinguished old nations of their myths, the Persians of their Book of Kings, and for 1200 years it has actually prohibited sculpture and painting to tremendously large populations.

  Was Mohammed a soothsayer? A poet? A sorcerer? He is none of these, but rather a prophet.

  The crisis of his life and his religion begins with the alliance with Arabs living outside of Mecca. His adherents begin to emigrate. In July of 622 his own hegira takes place.

  22.

  The Despotism of Islam

  All religions are exclusive, but Islam is quite notably so, and immediately it developed into a state which seemed to be all of a piece with the religion. The Koran is its spiritual and secular book of law.

  (1) Its statutes embrace all areas of life, as Döllinger states, and remain set and rigid; the very narrow Arab mind imposes this nature on many nationalities and thus remolds them for all time (a profound, extensive spiritual bondage!). This is the power of Islam in itself.

  (2) At the same time, the form of the world empire as well as of the states gradually detaching themselves from it cannot be anything but a despotic monarchy. The very reason and excuse for existence, the holy war, and the possible world conquest do not brook any other form. But the tradition encountered is nothing but absolutism anyway (Byzantines, Sassanids, etc.). Then there quickly appears vulgar sultanism.

  Only when genuine religious strife flares up does Islam again become honorable for a time. There once more appear rulers who live only for the cause, and the Moslem community again becomes the true master of the state (although it is never allowed to vote). Then the ruler is only the treasurer of the believers, as with Nureddin; and in the battles he seeks martyrdom.

  But as soon as this stimulus is gone, ordinary despotism makes its appearance again. It tolerates and, under certain circumstances, desires material prosperity, but never and nowhere does it provide secure conditions for earning a living. Upon occasion it loves high intellectual culture, but on the other hand keeps it within definite bounds through religion. This despotism completely excludes modern Western “progress,” in both senses of this concept: first, as a constitutional state; second, as unlimited growth of profitable enterprise and commerce, and through this it keeps its strength today, in contrast to the West. This way it escapes: (1) the transformation of the Western constitutional state into a mass democracy, (2) the transformation of the people into careerists and workers bent on pleasure. To be sure, it has learned to raise a loan, but any time it casts off the credit system again and goes into bankruptcy, this happens without most of the population even noticing it.

  23.

  Islam and Its Effects

  Through the sensuous delineation of a future life, Mohammed gives his own measure.

  It is a low religion of slight inwardness, although it can combine with whatever asceticism and religious absorption it now and again finds among the nations.

  Something very peculiar and rather unparalleled in the history of religion is the enormous degree to which pride is taken in this religion, the feeling of absolute superiority over all others, the utter inaccessibility to any influences; these characteristics grow into innate arrogance and boundless presumption in general. This is in keeping, in praxi, with the lack of any deeper culture and of clear judgment in matters of everyday living.

  Further characteristics are consequences of the thoroughly despotic state form which passes over from the caliphates to all splinters thereof. Despite an occasionally very lively feeling for one’s home region which attaches to localities and customs, there is an utter lack of patriotism, i.e., enthusiasm for the totality of a people or a state (there is not even a word for “patriotism”). This is an advantage; a Moslem simply is at home in the whole Islamitic world. That is why a call to arms is not issued in the name of a political home, but only in the name of the faith, ed-Din; the war preacher concerned knows that his listeners can be stirred up only through fanaticism, even though the real purpose of the war may have nothing to do with the faith.

  Further consequences of despotism, at least in substance, are the following:

  In all activities, tortuous paths are preferred to straight ones. Everything is spun fine and dragged out.

  While openness and the citing of real reasons are considered presumption, one’s goal may be reached only through flattery and intrigue.

  Universal mutual mistrust.

  A basic theme: egoism is directed less at honors and distinctions than at money and property.

  Utter lack of gratitude to former benefactors.

  In Islam, slavery has an important source, among others, in the harem system, which is inconceivable without eunuchs and black servants. The blacks, however, are much better off here than on the former American plantations; the eunuch is the best and closest friend of his master, feared by the women who seek his favor; the black “house slaves” are treated like children of the house and are far above the rank of their Arab fellow house servants, the “chadams.”

  The strongest proof of real, extremely despotic power in Islam is the fact that it has been able to invalidate, in such large measure, the entire history (customs, religion, previous way of looking at things, earlier imagination) of the peoples converted to it. It accomplished this only by instilling into them a new religious arrogance which was stronger than everything and induced them to be ashamed of their past.

  24.

  The Two Main Realities for the Papacy of the Eighth Century

  (I) The multiplicity of Italy.

  The dismemberment of Italy had been taking place since the Lombard invasion, as yet without the participation of the papacy. Now, however, this becomes the policy of the papacy, since it must want no one to be politically very powerful in Italy, while it will never itself be able to constitute the government of all Italy, as may have been the intent of the Donation of Constantine. It has a dread of too powerful Lombard kings and Italic national emperors. But it must desire to possess at least a state of its own. To be sure, its local position for the time being is such that it must wish it would never be defined exactly. But above all it must evade close dependence upon any state and especially the fate of the Byzantine church, though it cannot always do without the aid of one secular power or force or another. Thereby it becomes, under certain circumstances, the cause of outside intervention and of the continuing multiplicity, and therefore weakness, of Italy.

  (II) The ecclesiastical unity of the West.

  Europe searches for forms and forces for the totality of life, a higher unity. One such form was found in the Roman church, another in the emperorship of Charlemagne.

  The unity of the West with all its corollaries was substantially dependent on the papacy; only ecclesiastical unity brought peoples closer together and was able to become a social bond of prime strength. The question now arises as to whether such unity could have been achieved without the papacy, or whether it could have been maintained without it. Would the Benedictine order, for example, alone have been able to save Christianity as the religion of unity?

  25.

  Charlemagne

  Our present view of the world empire and its desirability is determined by whether the viri eruditi [savants] of the individual peoples who once belonged to it regard the development of their nations since then as a good or a bad job; in this, the desirability of power is, as a rule, a principle taken for granted.

  Any empire, i.e., any dominion over a whole circle of peoples, will, through inevitable leveling, curtail or destroy many individual national features that the individuals have hitherto cared much about (cf. especially Sybel, Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich, p. 13).

  Also, it will in general move as far away as possible from popular rule and incline toward a bureaucracy in which all energies of the masses are available for the aims of the government. In proportion to the size of such a state, its purposes appear the more tyrannical the more incomprehensible they become to the individual countries within the empire. In the case under discussion the Roman Empire was the best-known prototype. Even the ruling people which supplies the dynasty will hardly be in a better position.

  But on this large scale, as on smaller ones, the real political purposes are traditionally replaced, in a greater or lesser degree, by dynastic, personal momentary interests.

  Such empires cannot be imagined as really politically alive, with independent participation of the federated peoples in the general volition and action; a centralistic empire is more suitable for aged peoples that have passed their prime. As soon as political and individual-national life of any kind asserts itself again, no matter under what name, the empire goes to pieces. And whatever remnants of the empire do survive are then permanently inconvenienced by having to drag along the former obligations.

  In recent times people have tried to tell Charlemagne that he had a legitimate and adequate task in the incorporation of the Saxons, the expansion of Germanic civilization plus classical culture, the spread of Christianity to the slave countries, and defense against the Normans, and that instead of these things he wrongfully strove for world dominion and waged world wars as a conqueror. This entire censure is actually directed only at his conquest of Italy and his relationship to the papacy.

  However, by the thoroughgoing subjection of the Saxons he made a Germany possible for the first time. He annihilated the Avars; the Normans he knew only in their primary stage, but he was quite worried about them; no one will demand that he should have sought them out in their homeland in order to nip the danger in the bud. We simply must accept as a psychological phenomenon of the first order that one and the same individual force subdued the Saxons and at the same time renewed the Roman Empire. He who was able to do the one thing merely desired the other too.

  But finally, the main complaint is Charlemagne’s use of the aid of the Roman church to realize God’s kingdom on earth and the consequent authorization to rule over all Christian countries and to conquer all non-Christian ones; a divine mission entitles the conqueror to employ any means. However, the papacy, which was invited by Charlemagne to co-rulership of the world, remained whole, whereas his empire went to pieces.

  (And this might perhaps have been the dark supreme will of world history.)

  For the time being, there remain certain the value of the memory of a great man, and, as the value of the Carolingian period, these facts: The peoples in question were powerful for about a hundred years; they were equipped for the future with a great common premise and memory, with their culture infinitely more homogeneous than it had previously been. After further intervals of barbarism, the peoples approached and understood one another again and again; a Western community feeling had come into being.

  26.

  The Normans

  After one would have thought the Völkerwanderung long since completed and while Europe believed it had only one deadly enemy, Islam, a Germanic tribe which had remained primitive and was possessed of extreme strength arose to plunder the European world whose culture was then in the ascendant. They are pirates, but no ordinary ones; their leaders want to win glory and glamor at home by taking booty. Moreover, their habitat, the North Sea, requires the utmost in boldness, strength, and sacrificial spirit. Enormous sacrifices of human life had to be expected, and this presupposes a greater wealth of vigorous manpower than Scandinavia was able to support. One can scarcely picture these predatory fellowships under their jarls as powerful and astonishing enough; breeding and elemental strength must have presented an appearance full of wonder and awe. Everything that they encountered must have seemed withered next to them.

  They were destined to do the following things: to form the mightiest, most independent dukedom in France; to construct England through one last invasion in such a way that this invasion really had to remain the last—they founded the definitive England; from Normandy, to wrest lower Italy and Sicily away from the Arabs, Byzantines, and Lombards, and to fortify this region in such a way that Arabs and Greeks had to give up all claim to it; to found the Norman state of Antioch; finally, to establish a dominion over Russia which continued even under the Mongol yoke and finally was able to shake off the latter.

  Everywhere the Normans create viable states capable of keeping willfulness and sacrilege in check and of pursuing great goals.

  27.

  The Byzantine Empire and Its Mission

  Its main test of strength came in its leadership in the contest against Islam. After huge initial losses (the entire East, Africa, Sicily) the Byzantine Empire stood its ground and kept advancing in Asia Minor, even as far as Mesopotamia. How would the multi-divided Europe, the dismembered Carolingian empire have fared without this state? There is something to be said for Nicephorus’ mockery at the troops of Otto the Great.

  It was impossible for the Byzantine Empire to come to sensible terms with the Western crusaders, to achieve a real collaboration. The Crusades did only harm in the East; they resuscitated the entire heroic fanaticism of Islam, which would not have awakened from the fight against the Eastern Empire alone; they took an ever worsening course and finally, in 1203–1204, the crusaders captured the Byzantine Empire itself, through an alliance with one of the local factions. The Latin Empire was wretched; only now did the opposition to Islam weaken fatally, and finally the Palaeologi actually succumbed to the Turks. And subsequently, at such a late stage of Islam, Europe had to tremble before the Turks for centuries, except where it had an alliance with them. However, as long as the Palaeologi had some strength left, they helped to protect Europe.

  28.

  On the Iconoclastic Controversy

  (I) The main instigators are generals, particularly generals who have become emperors, who come from heretic and Judaizing regions and proceed from a “fanaticism” which certainly had less raison d’être in the Byzantine Empire than the “fanaticism” of image-worship hitherto. It is a fanaticism of triviality similar to Mohammed’s. In addition, Islam acquainted them with a state structure which, through the identity of rulership and religion, seemed a degree stronger than the Byzantine state where these still were different things. They were military men and had very big ideas about the compulsory force by which all adversaries could be destroyed; any non-military resistance or opposition made them furious and ready to do anything. Thus they waged an internal war at a time when the Empire would have needed the utmost harmony.

  The external form of this struggle is one part of the church against the other, i.e., the patriarchs, bishops, metropolitans, etc., appointed by each against the others. The methods are partly those of Orthodoxy, namely, synods, church decrees, and so on, but also a bottomless brutality, in and by which one got to know the Empire as it looked when it was no longer restrained by any religious considerations.

  Now one had to let destruction rage until generals, like those of Empress Irene, appeared, men who had realized what influence could be gained by siding with a horribly ill-treated majority of the people. And now partisanship flared up openly among victorious regiments and the iconoclastic bodyguard was overcome.

  The second phase of the iconoclastic controversy, in the ninth century, was determined by the facts that in sections of the army the tradition still lived on and that Michael the Stammerer, a heretic general and a Judaizer to boot, ascended the throne and founded a dynasty. Leo the Armenian started in again, at first with religious indifference (cf. Leo, Mittelalter, p. 246); then Michael the Stammerer, just as indifferent in the beginning. The overall result was that the church was somewhat degraded, among other things in a main organ, the patriarchate. But image-worship and monasticism won a complete victory.

  Islamistic optimists could draw up a counter-reckoning something like this: It was the greatest good fortune that the Byzantines were so disunited, through a church persecution, under such militarily efficient emperors! Otherwise they might have overpowered us.

  In his History of the Byzantines and the Ottoman Empire (pp. 99 ff.), Hertzberg reveals that many present-day Greeks have taken a great fancy to Leo the Isaurian and give him enormous credit. Then he admits that we do not know how comprehensive Leo’s church measures were meant to be, which among them were intended as permanent and which only “as fighting aids.” Then comes the usual professorial opinion of the danger of brutish superstition, against which, he says, only an inspired religious reformer or gradual, patient counteraction could prevail. But Leo, according to Hertzberg, had had the alluring model of predecessors like Theodosius the Great who had done away with Arians and pagans alike. Whether Leo had also hoped to win Jews and Arabs is a moot point, he continues. On Leo’s side were most generals, cultured laymen in Asia Minor (not in European Greece!), officials and higher classes, and part of the clergy (but what a part!). Against him were the masses and especially the women. Hertzberg admits the hopeless position of those opposing image-worship; one is more surprised at their great perseverance than at their final failure, he states. The controversy went much deeper than the disputes over the Trinity had once gone.

  Or is it possible that under Leo the Isaurian the arrogant, appalling state began to regard itself as lovable? And perhaps to become jealous of anything that its subjects loved outside of it—the only thing they still had left?

  (II) Among the few things which had hitherto made life bearable for the sorely afflicted Byzantines and in which the state so far did not interfere was image-worship. When the most image-loving pagan people had become Christian, a certain degree of the worship of the new religion was inevitably turned upon the images themselves; as it was, there were individual ἀϰϵιρΟπΟίητα [images not made by human hands]. But it is nowhere demonstrable that magic or any other wicked superstitious practice was carried on with the images. In addition to the individually venerated images there was the colossal icon-world of the churches in fresco and mosaic. And when Islam abhorred all idolatry, people probably only became all the more fond of it; at least the Christians under Mohammedan rule were most zealously devoted to it at the time of the iconoclastic controversy.

  Closely allied with the icon-world was monasticism, if only because the images very substantially emanated from the monasteries. At the same time, imagery was the visible expression of asceticism—poor, hard-working, widely spread in cities, mountains, islands. Images and monks, it should be noted, enjoyed an old dignity not contested by any emperor since Valens. Too, monkhood, through its asceticism and its origin, was an island of freedom outside the compulsory state, and also a main source of the episcopate. This could be inconvenient, e.g., when groups of monks helped to render the decision at synods, riots, etc., but this seems to have happened but rarely in the seventh century.

  This image-cult and monasticism, like everything ecclesiastical, was the last thing people had left in the compulsory state, and this state ought to have spared it, since it reimbursed itself from the people in every other way.

  Also, the iconoclastic controversy was not started by an emperor who might have wanted to augment the state’s power once more by enslaving the church, its ceremonies, and the monkhood, but by a doctrinarian, Leo the Isaurian.

  Presumably, there grew up inside him, indoctrinated and narrow as he was, a fanaticism of semi-education or enlightenment; the strength he derived from his military reputation. Possibly there had developed in him the lordly arrogance of the victorious state which begins to consider itself lovable and then, when some real cause for jealousy appears, as the only thing worth loving. This, basically, had been the position of the ancient polis which established worship for itself.

  In this fashion one does not by any means become merely a dogmatic tyrant, but, above all, a dictatorial arbiter of taste. Such a man enrages the suffering people down to nerves and fibers which extend beyond religion.

  In the course of the controversy, to be sure, there is formed an enlightened group (intellectuals, dissenters, profane people, politicians, etc.) which comes out in favor of icon-smashing. They are those who rejoice any and every time any religion suffers a deep affliction, and also military men and officials who regard as an impediment anything that does not want to be, nor can be, army or state.

  29.

  On the Crusades

  Ekkehard of Urach said the truest and most profound thing about them: “Novitatem hanc iam senescenti et prope intereunti mundo pernecessariam.” [This novelty was essential for a senescent and almost moribund world.] The opponents of the cause he recognizes as Epicureans.

  The ideal was: “Regni sui caelestis ineuntes servitium” [To enter the service of His heavenly kingdom]. It ennobles all of Western humanity that it desires something at once human and divine. Hitherto there had been only force and individual devotion; this time the power of all is placed in the service of a common holy aim. Europe realizes that something great must be accomplished jointly in the consciousness of full strength. People had a presentiment that they were regenerating, strengthening, and exalting themselves thereby. That common cause necessarily bestows a higher consciousness of existence, different from all strength and power employed hitherto. The difference between the Crusades and the conquests of Mohammed and the caliphs consisted in the fact that this time it was not a matter of the world, but of a venerated spot. Hope is not essentially directed at worldly possessions (because the defectiveness of the land must have been known from previous crusaders), but at the safeguarding of the most sacred relic. Thus their aim exalts the crusaders, while, after a short, holy, sacrificing war, the Mohammedans are debased by greed for more gain.

  With the crusaders, the object is small, the volition great; with the Mohammedans, the object is the whole world, the volition is soon very low. The great things that happened through the crusaders could not be confiscated for base tyranny.

  Once it had set that great volition in general motion, the papacy had accomplished what was perhaps its greatest mission. Only the papacy could have done this, and afterwards it was never able to do anything as great again. Innocent III, who in his sermons proclaimed the Albigensian Crusade with the knowledge that his bands were setting out chiefly to maraud and murder, looks small compared to Urban II at Clermont.

  The Crusades completed the consciousness of a common Western life. The peoples who participated in them or completed similar tasks in a similar fashion, such as the Spaniards, have since then constituted the higher power in Europe.

  There was no question of any precalculation of what actually happened; instead of that, people fed on dream pictures. The papacy, first to be informed about the great current, at least took the helm, for reasons suited to it and its previous nature and history. The Empire took its second European fall by not providing leadership. The world had postulated a great absolving central institution and forcibly given it ideal stature. This later became a crown-bestowing institution; now it commanded the European world to go East. Since that time we have been in the West.

  30.

  The Sorrows and Sacrifices of the Crusades

  The sorrows and sacrifices of the Crusades on the part of the Christians and the Mohammedans alike were not lost and in vain. In the West, the entire higher level and culture are, in some way, directly or indirectly, determined by the Crusades, the mighty struggle and the consequent spiritual enrichment. In Islam the spirit of the old religious war and its devotion flares up again brightly, in Syria and Mesopotamia as in Spain. The Seljuks had already made Islam honorable; in the fight against the Christians there awakens in it a moral greatness.

  31.

  On the Evaluation of the Later Middle Ages

  With some moderns this period has a bad reputation as a time of dissolution, universal wickedness, and egoism. But any epoch in which new forces make way for themselves against earlier constraint must give this impression.

  These forces can never appear otherwise than in the guise of individual interests, therefore as selfishness and wickedness, since the old elements never give way willingly.

  In the series of developments which have been the task of the Occident, this, too, has a quite necessary place. It is idle to ask whether one thing or another could have been done with more moderation. Only because people were as they were did they accomplish what they did.

  Our moral criticism of past ages can easily be mistaken. It has a hard time detaching itself from the conflicts of our own day and transfers present-day desiderata to the past. Furthermore, it emanates from people who live quietly under the protection of an order guaranteed from the outside, necessary to the prevailing industrialism, and who have no conception of a violently agitated and hazardous life.

  Finally, it views personalities too deliberately and according to set principles, and makes too little allowance for the pressure of the moment and daily self-protection.

  This period is judged as one in which the ideals of the Middle Ages, church and chivalry, had gone to pieces or, rather, had been broken through on all sides. But it is a characteristic of ideals that they do not live forever (for their perpetuation they have poetry at their disposal), especially if they have such a meager life as did church and chivalry.

  From beneath their ruins there already emerge the genuine new forces, even though still in confused form. The movement of life does not always take place through diametrical, great antitheses, but also breaks through disintegration. Life itself always remains visible.

  The degree of embarrassment over issues into which narrow fanatics of the past and the present and philosophical construers of history get themselves is their business and affects us little.

  III

  History from 1450 to 1598

  32.

  The Period from 1450 to 1598 and the Nineteenth Century’s View of It

  (I) [May 10, 1859.] The chief creation of more recent history is the Great Power, the life form of the most significant peoples. The balance among them is supposedly based on the number five (later the number six). But not only the small ones feel as insecure as ever with it; even the great ones themselves have never put down their arms in forty-four years of peace and have devoured in advance the money of future generations, in order to prevent one another’s aggrandizement.

  Internally, the state has centralized all power and all law; and the small states, too, have had to reshape themselves according to this model. Wherever the unhealthy, the oppressed, the resisting elements band together, the revolution is directed at the entire state, indeed, at all of existence. But we trust ourselves to be able to suppress this every time.

  The virtues of this modern state, which lays claim to being a legal state, are as follows: equality before the law; the safeguarding of material interests through the elimination of any oppressive intermediate rule; tolerance through indifferentism and the bureaucratic mind (at least relatively speaking) and through the state’s jealous guarding of its sole power; the refinement of private life and its pleasures; but primarily, freedom of thought and research, the objective evaluation of the world and of history.

  To what extent is this favorable to the moral development of a man? As a private individual he gains; as a citizen he declines, and he accustoms himself to appealing to some state omnipotence in any danger. The finest flower of genuine philanthropy can pair itself with utter political rootlessness.

  Is the movement of Europe on the whole, therefore, a rising or a falling one? This can never be determined by mere calculation. The peoples are still unexhausted physically, and in the intellectual and moral sphere one must, in order to calculate correctly, reckon with invisible forces, with miracles. This applies here, too.

  To describe this life of the modern peoples in the last three centuries is our assignment.

  (II) [After 1869; 1872?] It is not long since the period from 1450 to 1598 was regarded in an essentially optimistic way and made the beginning of that “progress” in whose further expansion and development we thought we were living.

  This, to be sure, was true only in general, for in particular cases one admitted that the despotism of the great states, the Counter Reformation, and other phenomena had exacted considerable sacrifices (one can certainly hear those who suffered if one wants to hear them).

  But on the whole one continued to connect the supposed excellence or, at least, the great promise of the conditions under which people lived from about 1830 with the great innovations after 1450.

  In view of the imminent crises of the declining nineteenth century, these pleasant arguments have fallen to the ground, and as to the desirability of the events and developments since 1450 in relation to us, we have reason to express ourselves more cautiously—indeed, to abandon entirely the concept of the desirability of past things.

  But for all that, this period does not lose one iota of its great intellectual interest for us. For as long as our present Western culture can keep above water we shall be inwardly enriched by absorbing the colors and figures of the past and treating the intellectual conditions and transformations of earlier world epochs as a great furtherance of our own intellectual consciousness. Indeed, the ability to compare different periods of the past with one another and with the present is one of the main forces that separate us from the confused doings of the day and from barbarism, which makes no comparisons whatever. In this respect the period from 1450 to 1598 is undeniably one of the most brilliantly instructive.

  But instead of an overestimation of that period’s services to our present development, an objective appraisal is called for. Besides, we are not the ones who would be especially qualified for an absolute evaluation of past conditions, if only because we always have the criterion of material well-being before our eyes—that is, of continuing in it once it is attained. And yet the great forces, individual as well as collective, develop only in struggles, and these can be very terrible. That criterion, however, is intrinsically ridiculous, for greed and desires know no limit; one would always encounter a dissatisfied humanity.

  On the other hand, our century is very well qualified to recognize the intellectual content of the past in the full richness of its shadings.

  It must suffice us that the period in question has come down to us in great wealth of sources and in exceedingly vigorous and interesting colors and personalities.

  We resist illusions—first of all, the illusion that humanity had been eager and longing, in the highest degree, to get out of the Middle Ages as a dark, unhappy situation. In a large view, the Middle Ages may have been a time of salutary delay. If it had exploited the earth’s surface as we are doing, we would perhaps not be around at all. (Would that be a loss?) Let us assume that the period concerned was there, at least primarily, for its own sake rather than for ours.

  Further, we resist the illusion that developments since then have, generally speaking, led to happiness. The self-deception of the years 1830 to 1848 actually came close to this delusion; but in view of the clouds which hang over the end of our century one will probably have to speak more carefully.

  The earlier, very unclear and mixed concept of “progress” includes the following: extension of civil rights to larger segments of the population; moderation of the penal code; communication in the widest sense, including a global network of railroads and telegraphy; great dissemination of varied knowledge; movability of all values and properties; and other things.

  The more recent study of the world, however, has substituted an entirely different conception for this progress (or put the same conception in a new light): the struggle for existence, beginning with plant and animal life and then basically penetrating human life. From this vantage point the concept of “happiness” must then be examined anew and perhaps entirely eliminated from historical investigation. In his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Eduard von Hartmann even calls the perspective, from the eudemonic point of view, of this continual struggle while the intellect is constantly rising a horrible one.

  If Hartmann’s arguments are applied to the “History Since 1450,” this means the beginning of the subjugation of the inferior races of mankind, especially the red-skinned; according to him, this is to end with their complete eradication. (How will the victors thrive in this? The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru were intelligent devils.) A true philanthropist, he says, could only wish for the speeding up of these last throes. The faster the earth was occupied by the white race, the more quickly the struggle among the various divisions within it would have to break out and be carried on all the more fiercely because they are more evenly matched; but at the same time it would be all the more beneficial to the progressive development of the species. According to Hartmann, war is not by any means the only method of this struggle; industrial squeezing by a more highly developed people would do it, too. But with the earth having in this way become the prize of the most highly developed peoples, with the entire world population becoming more and more cultivated, the condition of the soil, the climate, and other differences would nevertheless create ever new seeds of development whose maturing again would only be possible through a joint struggle for existence. (In this process, human beings would gradually become veritable devils, and finally cripples to boot because of sheer development of the intellect.)

  (III) [November 4, 1872.] In that period there were essentially spun the threads of that fabric into which we too are now woven. Any consideration of the past must tie on there at the latest. But all that was begun at that time has experienced great metastases.

  The system of Great Powers and also the absolutism which once was the practice in smaller states, established in the spirit of the rulers, have today been transformed into a system of great nations. The will (passion as well as interest) of the peoples or of the classes that lead public opinion has replaced the will of the cabinet. Where dynasties are still in existence, they mainly serve to carry out the will of the people (confirmed: October, 1876).

  Any single principality or single state within a nation is in direct danger, because even with the best of intentions it can no longer act for the entire nation.

  And within and above the individual nations there looms as an obscure impulse universal democracy, sprung from the French Revolution with its belief in the goodness and equality of men. It arises with remarkable homogeneity; its basic feature is acknowledged by the sovereigns themselves in the form of universal suffrage which can be expanded into a general referendum on practically anything.

  The main driving force of this activity is the great social question of property and enjoyment. There is only one method for the mighty to curb it or cut it off: the peoples must be urged to become conscious again of their old differences which were already getting quite smoothed out and to test their strength with one another. This can be done, because they still have conflicting interests through accumulated tradition and exploitation of the world, e.g., England and Russia, England and America, and others; because as yet the whole earth is not occupied by the most active nations which must yet fight one another for it; then, too, because in Europe there are still small things to be swallowed up which one begrudges the other; and finally, because in spite of all homogeneity of culture there live on very strong antipathies of race. But from great national wars there arises again and again centralized military and, depending on the circumstances, monarchic power (that is, it has been so up to now).

  In this period there is an especially striking predominance of the oceanic (n.b. of all great oceans and no longer merely of the Atlantic) over the Mediterranean (which would have become a mere puddle if it did not, together with Egypt, have importance as a passageway and possibly as a battleground). Added to this is the weakness of Turkey, Greece, Austria, Italy, and Spain. But even of the oceanic nations, Spain and Portugal are deeply in the shade, as is Holland; they have their intestate heirs presumptive. The two great Anglo-Saxon nations with their immediate and colonial possessions are in the process of grandiosely exploiting the world through completely untrammeled activity. In spite of her slight coastline, Germany is forced into rivalry with them, in her merchant marine and her navy. The great destiny is based on the fact that an Anglo-Saxon colony like the Union [United States] has been able to achieve independence and remain united despite its enormous expanse. By virtue of its cast of thought it will in time brook no barriers on any ocean (unless internal barriers should be imposed on it. 1876).

  The conflict between the Catholic church and its adversaries took quite a different form from what friend or foe could possibly have foreseen in the sixteenth century.

  Protestantism came under the strongest influence of general culture. On the other hand, Catholicism as such remained stationary in the form which it assumed in the sixteenth century as the Counter Reformation. Those who do not want to go along with it and have surrendered to the modern spirit are abhorred and reciprocate with a vengeance. Catholicism has come to be in opposition to all such and to almost all Catholic governments and bureaucracies. At present it is highly remarkable as the only element of pure authority from above, something which no government is domestically any more. Its early connections with culture, worldly life, and science have largely been severed, its opposition to modern thought has sharply come to a head.

  The subjectivity of the intellect, which in the sixteenth century was so vigorously astir in all new things and produced such strong personalities, has since remained legally untrammeled or has become so again after interruptions. There is nowadays no dearth of “permissions.” It is a very different question, however, whether our time is favorable to primary, creative geniuses; whether it will impress any future generation with the same originality and profusion as did the period around 1500; whether the gathering of knowledge does not stand in the way of higher productivity; whether the acquisitive spirit and the general haste are not destroying the genuine great mood, in creative persons as well as in those who ought to appreciate; and whether present-day democracy does not bring secret mistrust and, under certain circumstances, open hatred upon the outstanding person in every form and direction. At any rate, with its program involving equality of enjoyment, democracy stands outside anything intellectual.

  However, not only in democracy but in all classes and parties people desire, above all, material enjoyment. After that, of course, they would like, for the further amelioration of life, poets, artists, and probably even thinkers of genius, provided they keep nicely in their place.

  (IV) [October 21, 1880.] The sixteenth century largely creates those great positions in the material and intellectual worlds which dominate the periods to come; it is a time of tremendous innovations. It possesses one particular advantage: it is possible here, if ever, to view history as history of the intellect and to master the debris of external facts—not only because in the movements concerned there was much idealistic, even metaphysical, drive, but because they are represented by original individuals, some of them of the highest order, in state and war, religion, art, and science. The intellect speaks to us concretely through mighty, expressive people. In particular the time around the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries altogether gives one the impression of freshness, spontaneous strength, and of a very extraordinary generation. In every activity Europe has available the most outstanding men—discoverers, conquistadors, military men, statesmen, founders of religions, scholars each of whom remodels his field, thinkers who occasionally encompass the entire horizon of the time in single words, utopians like More and Rabelais, finally poets and, especially, a group of artists of the first rank. But even people of the second and third rank participate in the general vigor to the extent that they, too, give naively whatever they have to contribute. In literature we begin to get those books that are still really read. In the second half of the sixteenth century, to be sure, there is no longer this multifarious wealth of great individuals, and those who are now powerful are no longer naive but reflective, or they serve a movement; but no matter which side they are on, they arouse the greatest participation through their tremendous strength. And we are intimately acquainted with their persons—Tasso and Camoëns, Shakespeare and Montaigne, St. Theresa and St. Carlo Borromeo, Coligny, William the Silent, Elizabeth of England, and Henry IV in his rise.

  Apart from this individually concretized aspect of world history, the great movements as such are significant, the changes in state and society which carry with them a new era.

  The concept of Western Christianity is dissolved. The West looks on almost inactively while, in the East, Christian civilization recedes before the Ottomans who crush the Mohammedan and Christian states that come into their orbit. The rise of their empire is to date the last great new formation in the Near East. The Mediterranean stagnates, Southern Europe is permanently and seriously threatened.

  At the same time, however, the great compensation is gained: the setting out for distant seas by the Portuguese and the Spaniards. Europe crowds in upon old civilized states of East India and founds great colonial lands in America. While in Asia Minor Turkish city names proliferate, America is filled with Spanish and Latin names.

  At home a shift in world power takes place, the transfer of the world accent to the Atlantic states with their Atlantic and generally oceanic interest.

  The atmosphere of the Crusades has evaporated and their late-born representative, Don Sebastian, perishes. But to compensate for that, a new tinge appears in the air: worldly conquest and commercial profit. Of course, not until the following period does there develop the full modern exploitation of the world in connection with a new concept of labor in the European mother countries; it is the cycle of colonial raw material and domestic manufacture, with forced purchase in the colonies. For the time being, in the sixteenth century, all that the Spaniards wanted was to rule and to enjoy; they were in quest of an El Dorado; the possession of great American empires had strikingly little effect on internal, domestic Spanish life and its spirit. In the year 1580 Spain gained possession of Portugal along with its colonies. The French and English colonies were only in their infancy; but here, too, people sought a golden land for the costs of European politics and wars.

  The medieval feudal state dissolved into the centralized modern state which at that time demanded primarily power (absolutism) and since then has behaved as a constitutional and equality state, as an institution of purposefulness and general welfare, with the resignation of the individual, and so on. A new concept of state power begins with the Italian tyrant state which is prefigured in France and now is put into practice in all states of Western Europe (n.b. including England), in Germany only in the smaller circles, while the whole falls apart all the more. The intermediary rulers are destroyed or reduced to mere honorary rights, the nobility are reduced to privileges; all indefinite and disputable duties are replaced by mandatory definite performances; even the most stubborn defiance is subdued. Finally, at the time of the Reformation the states which have become Protestant inherit the former political power of the church. But what did the rulers do with their power? They carried on experimental policies which soon became primarily policies of conquest or annexation (this had been the downfall of Charles the Bold). Such were the earliest joys of the cabinet and its doings.

  The support and motive of such policies were great national conflicts of interest.

  Would the nations have left one another in peace without the activities of the cabinets? We do not know today; arrogance and the clash of interests which, after all, are so very much intertwined, are unpredictable. Even the “happy ones” could not have borne their “happiness.” And then there existed in several nations a palpable satanic arrogance.

  Earlier oppositions continued to have an effect: France and England, Anjou and Aragon. Now that the major part of the middle duchy of Burgundy and all of the Spanish power had fallen to Hapsburg through inheritance, the inevitable struggle between Hapsburg and Valois ensued, and the next victim was Italy—certain parts of the land and the overlordship of the whole.

  Italy and the great transformation of the European mind that emanated from it: the Renaissance. This everywhere broke through the knowledge, thinking, and viewing of the Middle Ages. The ancients and soon the moderns completely supplanted the Middle Ages as authorities, beginning with medieval scholastic theology. The entire intellectual horizon was newly oriented; in addition, there arose an art which soon overwhelmed or cut in halves the art of all of Europe. The time of Italy’s greatest productivity coincides with periodic invasions; the so-called calm did not ensue until the rulership of Spain was decided.

  In this Italy which was enmeshed and glorified by the Renaissance, but which at the same time had fallen prey to the Italian political spirit and let itself go in the most extreme way, the papacy dwelt as the possessor of an ecclesiastic state.

  The papacy stands in a wholly irrational relationship to Italy and Europe, vis-à-vis nations that are already arguing and greedy dynasties. Oblivious of its earlier mission, the papacy had become something to be exploited and was for a considerable time in the hands of blasphemers who had obtained possession of it because it had become too desirable and was poorly guarded, as in the days of the pornocracy. Now it faces the greatest danger of all:

  The German Reformation. This produces, first of all, a tremendous intellectual change in Germany itself and then more or less shakes up all of Europe, partly in a religious sense, partly in a political or a financial one. The conflicts, far from remaining purely ecclesiastical, are colored and discolored, entangle or disentangle themselves, and a literature from a thousand pens records every shading. Added to this is the enormous effect of the press which is now for the first time active in a European sense. Knowledge of the most remote places and of the earliest antiquity coincided with the strongest religious ferment.

  And now the interests of the contending churches interweave with the antitheses of Hapsburg-Valois and of Occident-Ottomans. On one side of the scale of external destinies at that time there are the Protestants and Francis I and the Turks, on the other side there is Charles V. The popes become adversaries of Hapsburg which is fighting on the Catholic side, because it also wants to possess Italy. There are times when they wish for a Protestant victory. Especially striking was the alliance between the Catholic Henry II and the German Protestants against Charles V.

  In the Counter Reformation the old church again gains a foothold in almost the entire Romanic world and in part of the Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic worlds. Supported by its own internal power and the external forces of the governments which had remained Catholic, it seeks to subjugate mankind again. It enters into an emergency alliance with Spain, which is at the same time fighting for world monarchy. In this situation the old church remembers and returns to its original mission, and it manages to a great extent to rejuvenate itself. The Reformation had produced a rescue as well as a menace.

  All this flowed together in the great crises of 1560 to 1593. In them a new nation was born, Holland. At the same time there was also revealed the great European significance of England, of which Europe would have got a taste much sooner if it had not been for the ensuing Stuart strife. Only now does Scandinavia stand forth clearly.

  The modes of life of this latter part of the sixteenth century are highly remarkable. There is a tremendous contrast to the beginning of this century; the world has become religious again or at least sectarian. The sixteenth century which had begun with such a brilliant cultural epoch had a frightful latter part. Great historical transformations are always bought dearly, often after one has already thought that one got them at a bargain price.

  The Peace of Vervins, 1598, was inevitably only an intermission.

  Let us once more stress the especial significance of the period 1450–1598.

  In history in general there is among peoples of higher culture a wonderful juxtaposition and conglomerate of profuse mechanical forces, notably the massed might of the great state, on the one hand, and on the other, of the most delicate imponderables, like culture and religion, which in their highest manifestation depend on so few individuals and are able to carry away and shape entire nations. This is to be seen with especial clarity in the sixteenth century. The personal elements in their relation to the great mass destinies are here expressed with particular noteworthiness, precisely because the individuals concerned who stir this world are not all born princes and great men.

  We reject the eudemonic, the so-called progressive, way of thinking. The fact that our present world situation is largely linked with the decisions of that period does not mean that as a totality it was especially happy or commendable, for then our century would also have to be considered as especially happy and commendable, which was actually the view particularly in the period from 1830 to 1848. The concept of the desirability of the past ought to be abandoned altogether, if only because the individual who speaks in this vein is not alone in the world. Actually, a historical judgment should always be such that it can be endorsed at least by all nations if not by all factions.

  There is a widespread illusion that an innovation which came about once amidst the most terrible infractions of law and acts of violence is therefore justified, or that it was historically “necessary,” because later there was based on it a situation that was somehow tenable and appeared to establish new legal conditions. Humanity simply added its healthy powers to the act of violence and adapted itself to it, like it or not.

  ADDITIONAL NOTES

  On the Dissolution of the Medieval Feudal State: Such copiously graded privileges and such indifferently performed duties.

  On Experimental Policies: The more recently power has originated, the less can it remain stationary—first, because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further movement and because they are and will remain innovators per se; secondly, because the forces aroused or subdued by them can be employed only through further acts of violence.

  On the Papacy: As a state, it demanded, if it was not to be devoured, Italian politicians as rulers, i.e., people who also had the choice of being either anvil or hammer and then became hammers. In addition, however, it becomes the prey of covetous men and criminals.—Significance of the reign of Julius II.—What if Luther had encountered an Alexander VI in his path?

  On the Reformation: It created states in which the clergy no longer constituted a political class and its heritage of power and property fell into the hands of the governments.

  On the Counter Reformation: It is not merely resistance, but an inner remolding of the Catholic church under the influence of Protestantism.

  On “Necessity” in History: There are, to be sure, historians who “hear the grass of necessity grow” (Hanslick).

  The Dubiousness of the So-called Pragmatic View of History: In addition to demonstrable causalities, obscure forces come into play from all sides, and their raison d’être is established only after some time.

  The Heightening of Consciousness in modern times is probably a sort of intellectual freedom, but at the same time a heightening of suffering. The consequences of reflective thought are postulates which can set whole masses in motion, but, even when fulfilled themselves, will only produce new postulates, i.e., renewed desperate and consuming struggles.

  On the Progressive Way of Thinking: “This or that hallway would have to be the most beautiful if only because it leads to our room.” What coldness and heartlessness there is in this attitude, the ignoring of the silenced moans of all the vanquished, who, as a rule, had wanted nothing else but parta tueri [to preserve what had come into being]. How much must perish so that something new may arise!

  The Confusion of the Concepts “Concentration of Power” and “Improvement of General Conditions”: The latter is highly questionable in the material sense, as compared with the period of 1500.

  It is our task simply to observe and describe objectively the various forces as they appeared side by side or one after another.

  33.

  England in the Late Middle Ages

  Here there takes place around the turn of the century an increase in the royal power approaching complete absolutism and at the same time an approximation to the European great state. This happens through a destructive fight among all descendants of Edward III and all their adherents in which the noble families are eradicated as well— a bloodletting of the nobility comparable to that of the Romans in the civil wars, under the Augustans, and up to Domitian. Furthermore, this absolutism is made possible by a specific talent for despotism on the part of the new royal house of Tudor. Only England-Wales acts, and every time the entire country. Ireland is not consulted and Scotland stands hostilely aloof most of the time.

  Even though the political development up to that time had come about by fits and starts, it could be considered a major step forward in the parliamentary sphere.

  From the thirteenth century the House of Commons had had firm and assured possession of the power to tax, and since Edward I had acquiesced in this, it remained in a continual insolent relationship to the crown. It took terrible events to make it lose this position. For prudent kings, and especially for those successful in war, it had hitherto been an easy matter to keep on friendly terms with it.

  But on occasion the House of Lords was turbulent, as was the royal family itself (the Plantagenets) with its ambitious and mutinous princes who bore titles and had intermediate rule of large areas; but this was not hereditary and did not lead to the formation of secondary dynasties.

  Twice it happened that factions among the Lords, headed by princes, wanted to force upon the king a jointly ruling commission which would relieve him of the government (Edward II and the Duke of Lancaster, Richard II and Thomas of Gloucester, later Bolingbroke). In each case, first a prince and then the king concerned meets his doom. But Parliament remains strong.

  During all this there prevails the general assumption that in England things were done legally, and this semblance of legality was then dragged on through the bloodiest times, with tragicomic effect. Even the most palpable outrage comes with parchment and seal in its hands.

  Hitherto the regulator has been the ups and downs of success in the Anglo-French Wars, with the participation of Scotland and Flanders and the great battles of Crécy, Maupertius, and Agincourt. Finally, in 1420, the personal union between the crowns of England and France is introduced through the Treaty of Troyes.

  But after 1429 things go downhill, and Henry V has been dead since 1422, God having grown tired of being kind to the English.

  34.

  On Richard III

  (I) When King Edward IV of the house of York died in April of 1483, his widow Elizabeth Rivers would definitely have had to turn over the regency for the minor Edward V to Richard of Gloucester, no matter what manner of man he may have been. But by the way she acted, one-sidedly giving away power and offices to her family, she had to bring ruin upon her house.

  In Volume 5 of his History of England, Pauli thinks that with a calendar in his hand he can specify the day on which Gloucester was still loyal to his nephew before he started to strive for the crown himself. In vain!

  Richard was no monster, but a terrorist. He did not commit a pointless crime; later he was fair to his victims. He acted in a spirit of “expediency.”

  Richard would perhaps have an entirely different accounting sheet for us than Pauli might lead us to suspect, and in June of 1483, when he had himself proclaimed king of England, he would have spoken thus:

  “I know the forest fire which in this country simply consumes the tallest tree trunks. It will rage till it dies out. It is a matter of who will be the last to remain on the scene. When the Lancasters were in power, they persecuted one another to the death, and when we Yorks rose up, we did likewise. I for my part have always found the simplification of problems in wiping out those to whom a possible rival faction could attach itself, for it is high time that a strong kingship were preserved.

  “That is why with my own hands I killed the Prince of Wales, Henry VI, and also, as they say, my piteous brother Clarence. But I have always seen eye to eye with my brother Edward because he knew how to reign. Now, when he has hardly breathed his last, along comes my double-dealing and yet so simple-minded sister-in-law and places her relatives in all offices, probably because I am supposed to be untrustworthy. Surely I could have been trusted; I would have been the most loyal guardian of Edward V, but they would have had to obey me completely. Of course, I had to snatch those Riverses and Greys away, and it is too bad one can no longer merely keep someone in prison in England. Then those so-called friends of my brother Edward IV block my path. Who are those gentlemen, anyway? As though I didn’t know all about where they came from and how they got there. Nothing but intriguers! But I am a Plantagenet. Of course, one of them, Hastings, had to bleed, others had to sit in prison, and still others to come over to my side. Unfortunately all these affairs have so spoiled the situation that my brother’s sons, if they grew up, would never forgive me; and even now, through their very existence, because they themselves could not as yet reign anyway, they are a constant cause for the splintering of our faction of York. Thus it is a necessity for me to seize the crown, and this logically involves the disappearance of my nephews. If this should make the hearts of many good Englishmen bleed, it is just because they do not understand the least thing about the actual realities of today’s concrete English royalty. It may be that later I, too, shall perish; but my successor, whoever he may be, will justify me by giving the still extant offspring of our house, to which a faction might attach itself, a second going-over. The worst of it is that by killing my nephews I am doing that lurking Henry Richmond a huge favor, too. You good people don’t know this Tudor yet, otherwise you would have more sympathy with me. You are shuddering. But how would things be without me? The so-called friends of my brother and my sister-in-law’s relatives would now be giving battle to one another in the name of Edward V, and in the end there wouldn’t be anyone left who was authorized and qualified to hold aloft the banner of England. At least I kill only those who are in my way. Govern yourselves accordingly.”

  (II) Richard is a Robespierre of royalty—at any rate, of his York branch. Just as Robespierre kills all republicans who do not subscribe to his conception of the republic, Richard destroys all those of the house of York and its followers to whom a split-off faction could attach itself, until he stands alone and goes down.

  (III) With this crown, to be sure, the whole undiminished royal power passed from Richard to Henry VII. There was no legacy of disunion and conditionality attached to it, as was the case elsewhere after civil strife. The obscure will in Richard III had been not to let the crown fall into any powerless hands; this was now accomplished and he could die.

  35.

  On the Wars of the Roses and on Scotland

  It will never be calculable how strongly the mutual extirpation of the large and medium-sized noble houses affected England’s development. It has since been predominantly a bourgeois one, despite all the aristocracy. The Tudors do not allow any more factionalism among the nobility to arise which could have swept the state to its side; only under Edward VI was such a start made once more.

  In Scotland the succession was never disputed, but the royal power was. And the heads of the hydra—of the nobility—keep growing back again. The life process of the Scottish nobility, with the mysterious vitality of this caste which must have been very fertile, seems to have been such that people periodically killed one another off so that the active generation might always be a young one and one committed to further blood feuds, beginning with the Stuart dynasty itself, with whole retinues destroying one another.

  All the first four Jameses died violent deaths and left under-age princes whose young years were accompanied by the wildest regencies. Although no weaklings, the kings later did not attain any decisive power. Lamentation and bitterness must have been their prevailing mood. The despairing government invites great men and has them seized at the royal banquet table and beheaded; at this the young king sheds tears in vain. The great figures are almost without exception nuances of one and the same boundless despotism and intractability throughout the fifteenth century. If one of them wants to assert himself, he can do so only as the chief of his clan, that is, at the head of a platoon of plunderers. Especially the people of the Dominus ab Insulis [“Lord of the Isles”] are always ready to break into the rest of Scotland. There are momentary abject humiliations of great individuals before the kings, kneeling barefoot in their shirts and invoking the sufferings of Christ, but with secret reservations. Now and then, in moments of strength, a king traverses the country and has thousands executed. From England there spread gluttony and guzzling.

  In free moments, the crown laboriously organizes an administration and a government and becomes the support of what little culture exists—which even proved the undoing of James III. Trade and industry are periodically wrecked in the feuds.

  Within the house of Stuart conspiracies crop up—Athol against James I, Albany against James III—in which outside vantage points are sought.

  The retinue of mighty men are huge bands equitum ejus ex ditione collectorum inter quos ingens latronum vis [of horsemen collected by his power, among whom is a great force of thieves]; one either had to join a dux latronum [leader of thieves] or pay high protection.

  Scotland’s relations with England are little more than mutual devastation; the rest is intrigue. In addition, until about 1450 (?) there was in effect the military service of Scotsmen in France; Louis XI still had at least his Scottish guard.

  James II personally killed William Douglas at Stirling in 1452. There ensued several years of feuding between the royal and the Douglas factions.

  When a faction planned resistance to the king, it claimed that he was being corrupted by fawning courtiers.

  The court was musical at least under James III. His opponents then killed off his retinue. The kings thought they were bothered by their adversaries’ wicked witchcraft, among other things.

  The Parliaments hardly figure in this bit of history. The cities are insignificant and weak. After all, whoever has power can wield it directly.

  The history of Boethius, or rather, Ferrerius, closes with the catastrophe in which James III met his doom in 1488, after conspirators had seized hold of his son, the barely fourteen-year-old James IV, who, full of woe, was unable to save his father from the murderers’ hands and full well realized his predicament.

  This whole political situation continued in essence throughout the sixteenth century.

  36.

  Burgundy

  It is psychologically probable that Philip the Good’s enormous luck in expanding beguiled his son, Charles the Bold, to pursue endless acquisitions. It is a legitimate question whether a self-contained great state could have developed out of the large, rich cluster of lands that extended from the Ems to the Somme, not including the two Burgundies. It is a legitimate question because, apart from any matters of power, a great cultural question is involved, and because such a considerable part of it has actually survived. If one imagines the Burgundian lands as having stayed together instead of having been torn asunder due to Charles’s folly; if one thinks of them as the great Western European island of peace, prosperity, art, industry, undisturbed culture; if one also thinks of the possibility of a great colonial role, as was later played by Holland; and if one considers the many life forces which later come into play in the individual, separated parts, then one must conclude that these lands would in the sixteenth century presumably have been of paramount importance in the widest sense of the word. To be sure, they would have felt their oats, and from their very prosperity internal strife would have arisen.

  At any rate, Burgundy did not have an easy time of it with Louis XI, but any other prince but Charles would have known how to manage.

  37.

  Charles the Bold of Burgundy

  With the exception of his very last period (when Dieu lui avoit troublé le sens et l’entendement) [God had dimmed his mind and his reason], Charles was not a madman, but only a terribly passionate man (it was folie raisonnante) in whom notable gifts and strength (for action as well as activity) were at every moment forced to do the bidding of a brutalized, absolutely obstinate will. And in practice this almost worked out the same as if he had actually been demented. A madman one could at least have locked up, but not him.

  38.

  France and the Idea of Unification

  To what extent and in whom was this idea really alive at that time? To what extent has it been recognized as desirable only by later developments and subsequently imputed to the fifteenth century?

  Royalism in France, to the extent that it was a way of thinking, came into being through the regimes of Philip Augustus and Louis IX, and subsequently maintained itself primarily because the crown was the banner against England. After the great strife it came forward again in favor of Charles VII.

  However, very large regions of France may have remained unaffected by it, and their rulers, the great crown vassals, were permanent opponents of royalty.

  That royalty in general more nearly represented the interests of France was known to few, because as yet there was no France in the sense in question. A mere frame of mind would not have brought it into being, either. But probably everyone felt the burdensomeness of the crown.

  The significance of Louis XI consisted in his laying, through harsh compulsion (which had already been started by Charles VII), that firm foundation on which later there could be established the habituation to royalty, the firm reliance on it, and the building up of the interests which were identical with it, as well as the safeguarding of business and intercourse by the police and the courts.

  In this respect Louis XI represents modern France, much against the will and taste of the France of his time. But later Charles VIII and Louis XII had the newly formed royalism of interests and views to enjoy.

  Royalism had existed even from the thirteenth century, as had an all French way of thinking, but with the restriction of all sorts of internal intractability; it was this that was changing now.

  Large regions still regarded it as a matter of honor to have a special intermediate ruler. As Comines reports, the Normans had always believed that such a large duchy requiert bien un duc [had great need of a duke].

  With even more assurance the Dukes of Brittany and their country asserted their independence, de facto and on the basis of certain views of the rights of states.

  Louis differed from the Italian tyrants in his great national power aims. He probably studied and admired those tyrants only in regard to means of power. According to Chastelain, p. 190,* he is supposed to have secretly sent for two Venetians to inform him about the Venetian regime.

  The Italians’ worry about Louis XI was an idle one, because they did not know how greatly he was overburdening himself with things to do at home.

  39.

  Louis XI

  Although only two battles, those at Montlhéry and Guinegate, were fought under his command, his courage was more than hussar’s courage and analogous to the courage of Cardinal Richelieu. (After all, he could have become a Carthusian.) The psychic tensions which he endured in his reign do add up to a sort of greatness.

  The France of later times fully sanctioned his kind of ambition and theoretically shares the blame for what he did, although his vulgar ways must be utterly repugnant to the national sentiment. At the very least, he was better than his adversaries; only there is something highly reprehensible in the way in which he handles them (from St. Pol on).

  Through his extremely prosaic character he easily gives the impression of having foreseen and desired more than actually was the case.

  He is deserving of the profoundest pity when, in front of his son at Amboise in 1482, he has to make the traitors and semi-traitors believe that they will all keep their jobs in case of his death.

  The firmness of what he established is shown in the relatively easy suppression of the guerre folle. The general premise is already royalty and its power which soon becomes taken for granted.

  It soon looks as though Louis of Orleans would have been glad to break away from a false position through his imprisonment. The way in which he governed as King Louis XII almost makes one think that he wanted to atone for something.

  And so that all this might happen, Louis XI had to die at Plessis as his own prisoner.

  He dominates French history not through splendor, but merely through what he has been to it.

  40.

  The German Imperial Power Under Frederick III

  The German nation had a memory—the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—as of an erstwhile world dominion which had assumed its mightiest form under Charlemagne, and under the Ottonians constituted at least a European primacy over Gaul, Italy, and the Slavs. But the tribal consciousness of the individual regions and then their inclination toward separate living always worked counter to the Empire, and since the Salians and the Hohenstaufens it had been possible for the individual princes to join the popes against the emperors. After the death of Henry VI, there was only a semblance of imperial power in Germany and it was not worth abolishing.

  After the end of the Hohenstaufens royalty lived on in Germany only in very reduced form; its main value was the collecting of expired fiefs for the family. And a king had to hurry with this, for he was only an elective king, and every election was a new deal. But his power was little more than that of the territory concerned.

  The nation which had been split into more or less viable pieces was divided into individual powers, parts that were contented, i.e., grasping, and parts discontented, i.e., threatened. In the latter, the old mighty Empire appeared as a dream image, the more glittering the more impossible it was, while the king, who was present in the flesh and had been crowned emperor on an Italian tour, was regarded as a caricature and all the more decisively deprived of the last vestiges of respect and obedience.

  Friendship with the popes was a matter already fostered by the Luxemburgers, but completely inevitable in Frederick III’s situation. And the Vienna Concordat only gained for him what Brandenburg, Cleves, and others also gained for themselves. Later others, too, found the emperor dispensable as a court of appeal and went to the pope for decisions on German affairs.

  Much poison circulated about Frederick III is mere modern national liberalism. After four hundred years people trample on a man who was helpless in his time and chuckle over everything that in the remotest periods happened to the house of Austria in the way of sorrow and shame.

  41.

  The Ottomans

  The difference between them and most other Islamitic peoples and states is that the completely martial period which with the others marks the beginning of their power lasts centuries with them and is perpetuated by the institution of the fief and by the janizaries. In war the Turkish people learns to feel itself ever anew; in peacetime it tolerates an ordinary Islamitic despotism.

  All this was in contrast to the West with its state structure of graduated power and bargaining over duties. In addition, there was in the West a multiplicity of centers, smallness of the individual powers, and these remained involved in their quarrels and wars of “succession.” Under such circumstances, all that was possible was done against the Turks, especially if one takes the Franco-Turkish alliance into account.

  In the vicinity almost everyone only meditated about the advantage to him if the Turks proved his neighbors’ ruin. And yet there is no lack of vociferous prophets who continually proclaim the general danger. The Turks were very predictable; people knew rather exactly how things were in the lands trampled underfoot by them and that a transition of these countries to Western mores was permanently out of the question.

  In addition to their martial predisposition the Turks possessed the thoroughgoing arrogance of an Islamitic community. And yet heresies never amounted to anything here, with one exception under Murad II, and Shiism came to be hated all the more as a Persian faith and was persecuted. The Ottoman world is orthodox and contains its church within itself, while the West went to pieces ecclesiastically and had its universal church outside of the states.

  With the Ottomans, all “fanaticism” is immediately active as a political and military force in the service of the whole and does not go off at a tangent. Any war is a religious war. To Islam belongs eo ipso the world.

  In government everything, including the greatest horrors, takes place in order to guarantee unity and the maintenance of power. It is only one man’s turn—while in the West power and areas are still divided now and then, so that it may be the turn of several.

  The West still knows and at least nominally honors hereditary claims. The Ottomans proceed only according to the naked right of conquest.

  42.

  The Republic of Florence

  The republic expanded from the thirteenth century on and, after 1406 including Pisa, created subject cities. These were governed by commissione. The constitutions of Florence, which one could die memorizing, succeeded one another in turn. The general things that one notices here are a supreme political consciousness as well as the participation of a large proportion of the citizens in public life and in constitutional questions.

  But it does not necessarily follow that these constitutions by themselves were the basis of Florentine culture or had even created it. It is, on the contrary, something if they did not impede it, if they did not make impossible that society which was to become the substratum, the living soil of culture and art. It is a majority of tolerated forces that are the carriers of it: the will and the understanding of the Medici, the competitive zeal of other noblemen, a number of spiritual associations. In addition, there is the general ambition of the Florentines for monumental activities and the definitely highest intellectual capacity (or at least the one most diffused among the people) of all the Italians, in just the same way that the Athenians were gifted beyond the rest of the Greeks. Florence is the Italy of Italy, as Ἑλλάδος Ἑλλάδ Ἀϴᾶναι [Athens was the Greece of Greece].

  Only in this way could a general disposition be formed: if this or that were not beautiful, non s’usaria a Firenze [it would not be used in Florence]. And such a partiality can then survive even periods of decline and keep up general standards.

  43.

  On the War of 1494

  (I) For the great states which have only recently become quite powerful there now start years of indiscretion, of grand politics directed toward the outside.

  It was as though France wanted to compensate for the austere prose of Louis XI. Romanticism burgeons on every side. To the realist par préférence it had to happen that his so well guarded son must become a visionary (the daughter, Anne de Beaujeu, was a realist).

  The other side of the French mind, the imaginative, comes brilliantly to the fore. It was in this light that the Italians regarded Charles VIII. To Savonarola he is the great, exalted head of the Guelphs; to Pisa he is a liberator; to Naples a sacra corona [sacred crown]; to all a great new chance in that land of chances, Italy.

  In his History of France, (4th ed., Vol. VII, p. 282), Henri Martin says in this connection: “La portion remuante et guerrière de la population française garda, depuis la campagne de Naples, une aveugle fureur de conquêtes lointaines, une infatuation funeste de sa supériorité militaire …” [The revolutionary and warlike element in the French population retained, after the campaign of Naples, a blind passion for remote conquests, a deadly infatuation with its military superiority …].

  Basically, this campaign was pure folly. It would have been to the real French interest, at any rate, that Naples should belong to an Aragonese bastard line rather than to that Aragonese who already possessed Sicily. The greatest significance of these lands was to be the vanguard against Islam, a very difficult honorary privilege! The real France would not have had to give up Franche-Comté and Artois, but to acquire as much as possible of the rest of the Netherlands. On the other hand, Naples was at best a valueless possession for France, and Charles VIII would not have set out merely for the sake of Naples; could designs on Constantinople and Jerusalem have been the decisive factor?

  The fascination of this period lies in the naive expression of egoism and enthusiasm. Out of a need for emotion, Florence goes through its republic and its Savonarola.

  In the chronicles Comines and Guicciardini meet; and even Macchiavelli joins in (Decennale, I).

  Could this whole swindle with Constantinople and Jerusalem have been only a mask—to lend a campaign of conquest the character of a crusade? Considering the Turkish menace at that time, a mere campaign of conquest against Naples was an enormous scandal; Alexander VI (in February of 1494?) reminds Charles that such a campaign could really not be undertaken importuniori tempore [at a less favorable time]; Ferrante might in utter despair throw himself into the arms of the Turks. Then, too, 30,000 men were quite insufficient for a crusade. But the main consideration is one that is hardly ever brought up: through her invading zeal France incited the Spanish power, which was bent on increasing its might anyway, to apply itself likewise to further occupation of outside areas. The detachment of Roussillon and Cerdagne had not pacified a Ferdinand the Catholic by a long shot!

  How safe is the Sicilian theory according to which Filippo Maria Visconti actually bequeathed his state to Alfonso the Great? According to this, not only Lodovico il Moro but the entire house of Sforza would have had to worry constantly about the house of Aragon-Naples. Was perhaps the marriage of young Giovanni Galeazzo intended to eliminate this worry? And the claim of the house of Orleans was cut off entirely.

  (II) We are told, above all, that wars are necessary because the peoples stagnate in peacetime and the mightiest forces would no longer achieve representation.

  To be sure, the victor does gain a heightened feeling of life. One does not speak about the vanquished and his misery; why was he not the stronger one?

  In the case under discussion, Italy, which had been cast to the ground in an era or series of interventions, had no unity and lacked an organ of national resistance, to be sure; but it did have forces of the highest intellectual kind that were capable of creations for all peoples and all times, and the activity of these forces was certainly stunted in large measure through the misery of Italy. What the art of that time was prevented from achieving will probably never be recompensed by any future art of the white race.

  For the time being, France comes along with crude enforcement of rights of succession—in the first place, Charles VIII with his Anjou parchments, in the second, Louis of Orleans (actually Rabaudanges) who already stands by with his Milanese claim based on his grandmother.

  This arouses the Spanish beast. The scene is set for the Spanish-French struggle for existence which always takes place partly on Italian soil and has as its object parts of Italy, until finally around 1555 the French are completely expelled from Italy.

  And over this they have neglected the much closer and more important acquisition, the Low Countries. In 1493 Charles VIII sacrifices Artois and Franche-Comté in order to make sure of being able to start his Italian campaign, and subsequently France does not obtain the important French Flanders up to the mouth of the Scheldt where once French kings had won victories near Bouvines, Roosebeke, etc.

  Who will then blame Philip II for promoting and exploiting in every way the disarray of France in the religious wars?

  France appeared anew in Italy under Richelieu, under Louis XIV, at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession, then under Louis XV, the Directorate, Napoleon, etc., until finally, substantially through France’s doing, there arise in Germany and Italy great national units with which France would probably not tangle lightly in the future.

  It would be interesting to add up the sum total of that exalted feeling felt by the French nation (n.b. rather than its leaders); one would have to subtract from it not only the suffering of Italy, but also the humiliations of the French at their many retreats from Italy.

  By all appearances it would be possible to close such an account today, for the invasions of Italy are probably definitely at an end.

  But, finally, there would remain the counterquestion: what would the Italians have done to one another if Europe had left them in peace?

  44.

  On the Power of the Papacy

  It lays claim to refereeship between disputing nations and potentates; it commands (even though usually in vain) peace in the West so that it may unite against Islam; we know, for example, the commandment of Boniface VIII vis-à-vis the quarreling kings (England and France, Anjou and Aragon).

  After the Avignon period and the schism, the papacy at least reasserts this claim: Eugenius IV decides the dispute between Castile and Portugal over the possession of the Canary Islands, just as Alexander VI later draws the meridian through the Atlantic Ocean between both. Nicholas V, too, issues bulls relating to the Portuguese discoveries.

  To be sure, when Rome as an Italian territorial power was entangled with affairs of the whole world, the papacy could no longer maintain this claim; and yet Alexander VI (between Charles VIII and Ferrante) and even Leo X may have tried to do all they could. But alongside this there is Leo’s naïveté when in 1513–1514 he desired Lower and Upper Italy for Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici.

  In addition, the papacy was the supreme resort in matters of faith and of ecclesiastical punishment and pardon.

  Would the papacy have escaped the German Reformation even if it had behaved quite properly? Once the matter of payments to the pope really became a burning one?

  A dangerous thing was the habituation to the spiritual weapons— excommunication, interdict, and so on. (Pius II included going around the alum pits of Tolfa among the deadly sins for which there was no indulgence!) Once conventional fear was overcome somewhere, it was not only at an end, but the adversaries hardened and fortified themselves through counter-curses, calling the pope anti-Christ, and the like.

  45.

  Italy and the Rest of Europe

  Outside of Italy, the nobility and the middle class were separated socially and remained so for a long time. The two had different cultures, almost; and each class was incapable by itself of supplying the basis for a complete culture. Especially in Germany the nobility became brutalized and ran wild; the bourgeoisie was pressed hard from many sides, to be sure, but was already in possession of more varied enjoyments of life. All the princely courts outside Italy were at that time incapable of being social centers of their nations, something that the pompous Burgundian court had already been. In France only Francis I was to form the social center. A few courts knew only display and wild enjoyment, others had to or wanted to economize.

  Written culture outside of Italy was still substantially dominated by scholasticism which was not really research but rather support of what was already established through logical operations. Thus scholasticism and its school books predominate in the incunabula of the presses outside Italy. In place of the natural sciences, the pseudo-sciences, astrology and alchemy, flourished vigorously while in Italy they were already close to extinction.

  So-called schools for poets were just being started; there were also here and there at Northern universities Italian and, soon, Italian-trained teachers of poetry, rhetoric, and jurisprudence, occasionally under strong protest from their colleagues. Cicero and Quintilian had to be maintained by force as subjects of instruction.

  As regards emotional life, religious feeling was still very strong, varying with the countries; in addition, there were excellent small mystic communities and pious individuals. The lyric poetry of the French and Germans, to the extent that it was part of literature rather than continuing folk poetry, seems to us mannered and tedious; furthermore, there appears a wooden mockery, by turns more didactic and more cynical. Did tender feelings hide behind this? The only present value of this literature is in the field of cultural history.

  In the field of art, possibly the most vivid aspect of art outside Italy is the fading of the Gothic into a sumptuous decorative style. In sculpture and painting the former ideality of the great Gothic period is past and a harmonic synthesis has not yet been achieved. Flemish realism has stopped halfway in the shaping of the human form and in the narrative, and this lack becomes paramount precisely in its concern with the individual. But side by side with the awkward and even barbaric there appear here and there beautiful, profound, and spirited heads. From the beginning of the sixteenth century there appear in the North the great and still almost wholly independent advances.

  Thus culture outside Italy is on the whole a disharmonious one, albeit one with great incomplete and latent forces.

  Italy, however, is the country of a common culture which is at the same time one of inner harmony. The form of intercourse was a higher sociability independent of class differences, and its content was intellect.

  Toward the end of the fifteenth century, that which to other Europeans was still conjecture and fantasy was already knowledge and a free object of thought to the Italians. Imagination was beautifully channeled into poetry and art.

  The scope of the intellect, still a very close and narrow sphere among the other Europeans, is here enormously widened through the interest in an ideally conceived Greco-Roman antiquity, in a renaissance in a narrower sense, and in nature and human life; indeed, nature is expanded through a universal urge for knowledge, appreciation, and discovery that is no longer inhibited by the old scholastic system which still blanketed the rest of Europe.

  And it is not only the intellect that recognizes the world and itself, but the soul, too, speaks to and about itself in a different way, and in so doing clothes or, rather, unclothes itself in beauty.

  The despotism of most governments does little damage. There probably were other reasons why Naples (with Pontano, Sannazaro) and Sicily took but little part in the movement. Elsewhere there are enough tolerably independent positions, especially for frugal people. The tyrants themselves and even a few popes are at the head of the movement, e.g., Lodovico il Moro and others.

  The republic of Florence is at the center as a focal point and exchange center of the first rank. Apart from the Florentine states as such, there takes place here a most complicated convergence of extremely dissimilar forces to produce a supreme, harmonious culture.

  Its basis is, in addition to the favorable physical and economic conditions, the general conviction that everything could be done here and that one must possess the best. Without this conviction all the institutions in the world would have availed nothing. This was also expressed in the idea current in all Italy that if this or the other thing were not so excellent, non s’usaria a Firenze. There were the Medici, the many corporations and wealthy men who employed people and demanded works of art.

  Thus scholars, poets, artists of high order were able to come together or grow up in Florence. One must add to this the Florentine colonies and individuals abroad as commissioners or creators. Even Boniface III called the Florentines the fifth element.

  In literature, the Italian epic predominated from about 1450 as the main genre, just as lyric poetry had been the chief form of the fourteenth century. The drama ought to have become that of the sixteenth century. After Pulci the epic reaches for all tones and colors; it is high-heroic, semi-comic, topical, etc.

  Italian humanism which was gradually filtering through was already making an impression upon Europe. Many Northerners studied in Italy and brought home the picture of a new science. Of poetry, however, they took home only the neo-Latin, and around 1500 nothing of Dante was known in the North, except perhaps De Monarchia, of Petrarch and Boccaccio only the Latin writings; Battista Mantovano was known, but neither Pulci nor Boiardo. Ariosto was only in his early period.

  At the same time Italy’s modern political forms, commercial institutions, and travelers took effect.

  But what the conquerors had yet to discover was the art of the Italians, combined with the remnants of antiquity:

  An architecture which for once expressed and sheltered a majestic and comfortable worldly life, which was no longer capable merely of giving form to churches and mere castles, but shaped palaces and villas as well, according to a uniform plan, with beautiful rooms and noble, grand forms. In harmony with this there was an art of decoration which was the exact opposite of the highly refined Northern type and was completely adapted to the new building style, having grown and flourished to endless expansion with it. Its general character was grandiose serenity.

  Then there were sculpture and painting, which could already boast of the most magnificent work of Leonardo and the early works of Michelangelo, and then during the occupations and interventions continued to grow in a wonderful way at passably protected places (Luini in a sanctuary at Saronno!).

  Medieval art had achieved the full majesty of intentions, Flemish art had attained the reality of individuals in small compass. With Leonardo, this and still higher things fused into a perfect truth, that is, majesty, a stirring life on earth which appeared as a guise and expression of a life spiritually moved in the highest sense. Everything in one piece: perfect loveliness of form and nobility of intention in Raphael; perfect appearance in life, air, and light in Correggio; festive, majestic existence in Titian; finally, the realization of pre-worldly, extra-worldly, and supra-worldly figures and occurrences in the later Michelangelo—not to mention the innumerable minor masters who still appear great. And all this with almost complete independence of classical art!

  Thus there came about the uniquely fortuitous case in art history that the highest beauty and truth of sensuous appearance persistently was striven for and captured as a revelation of the highest spiritual life and that one was aware of it. Here we should remember Michelangelo’s words: “True painting is noble and pious in itself, for the very wrestling for perfection lifts the soul to reverence by approaching God and becoming one with Him; of His perfections true painting is a copy, of His brush it is a shadow.”

  And during the invasions and occupations Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Guicciardini were writing.

  46.

  Spain and Portugal

  The grandees, to be sure, remain loyal to the crown after the deaths of Isabella (1504) and Ferdinand the Catholic (1516). But inner strife appears because the supreme power as such is in dispute, and finally the uprising of the comuneros turns against the Netherlands councilors of Charles V. But royalty remains in complete and sole control and, as soon as the division into parties had ended, achieves its highest apotheosis. The Inquisition crushes everything; the head of the Medina Sidonia bears its banner. Servitude does not seem to have been felt as such. The same nation which is cut off from whole large areas of thought and knowledge by an unheard-of preventive censorship remains fresh and creative in other areas and even develops quite late its best and most lasting elements. Not until the course of the sixteenth century are there added to the existing romance and lyric poetry the sacred and the profane drama (the latter again the tragic and the comic), the novella and the realistic novel (the beggar’s novel). In art, which in the sixteenth century was still dependent on the outside, the true Spanish spirit achieves its flowering only in the seventeenth century when the nation was already dying.

  In discovery and the founding of colonies, Columbus must work with the only powerful agent which sets people into motion; it is not even the promise of enjoyment, but the mere greed for gold; he must let the whole curse hold sway. Added to the unprecedented widening of the horizon is the worst surrender to Spanish sloth over money and power. In order to attain this, people undergo any danger and effort. Until Cortes the human element is greatly inferior to the Portuguese under Manuel the Great whose entire activity is devoted to outside journeys, but who, in between, also reaches the other European monarchs with exhortations to go on crusades. Here is a more active people that does not want merely to enjoy and to rule; from the smallest to the biggest it seems to be gripped by enthusiasm for the martial-commercial voyages, so that afterwards a great poet was able to focus this feeling. Furthermore, the leaders and viceroys appear to be nothing but loyal and united servants of the great idea which is personified in kings, and they had to suffer no infamies like Columbus, Balboa, and others.

  They discovered no “New World,” as did the Spaniards, although they obtained a share of it in Brazil; rather, they encountered an age old and yet essentially unknown world. They found no mere savages and semi-civilized peoples, but a civilized world fraught with perils and warlike Moslems whom one keeps encountering as familiar, active enemies down to the farthest reaches of India. After Vasco da Gama one gateway to the Orient after another was burst open, and, after all, Portugal was at first still blameless in the war of the European peoples.

  47.

  The Beginning of the Reformation: General Considerations

  The transformation of the world through the Reformation was great in itself. First of all, the problem of “liberation” may be brought up.

  Catholicism up to that time had exerted no substantial pressure, had not impeded any idea, not even atheistic blasphemy, and had allowed reformatory elements in particular to rise. But the church was subject to change (apart from dogma) in its hierarchic form of power and its property; for both are secular. (Still, someone who overthrows and steals power and property does remain a perpetrator of violence, even though sound forces may subsequently have associated themselves with the consequences of his actions.)

  In Europe, church property was an open question for the universally needy secular class, and the church state was itself imperiled through the consequences of the activity of the popes.

  The Reformation, as a religious innovation, diverges from all traditions of the Middle Ages. The Bible, which may be variously interpreted, remains the sole authority, and reformatory theology brought the difficulty of the doctrine of justification.

  After 1520 Luther’s goal was the complete eradication of Catholicism. He was execrated; his opponents were designated as “scorners” of the gospel, and tolerance was represented as blasphemy.

  The reformers were fond of invoking the wrath of God.

  No mercy was shown those who wanted to adhere to the old religion optimo jure [as having the best right]. (But anyone who is treated that way must be destroyed; if he is not, there exists an avenger.)

  The most enormous spoliation of the institutions of a millennium took place. But a large part of Germany remained Catholic or became Catholic again, and in all the rest of Europe Catholicism stood its ground in the most important countries and considered as its duty the utmost resistance to the Reformation and absolute self-preservation.

  On account of that, with the Thirty Years’ War Germany paid as dearly for the Reformation as is at all conceivable. On the whole, things went very badly, and all desperate hatred has to date not been able to change this. The “others” are still around and are Christians, too.

  Upon the Catholic “human statutes” there follow the Protestant ones.

  The reformers and “freedom”:

  Today they are chiefly regarded as battering-rams—not on account of what they taught, but because they did their best to destroy Catholicism. Little notice is taken of their doctrines, and at bottom they are held in low esteem. Protestantism is regarded as liberal, something it became only after it was no longer Protestantism—and the state dictated it anyway.

  The reformers bewailed “spiritual freedom.” Every one of them conceived of his dogmatism as a condition of the soul’s salvation. They bitterly complain of being despised—here one suddenly does not even believe Luther himself. They shudder because with their innovation all of ethics has got out on the high seas (God as the Creator of Evil, and the like), while folk fancy and greed, now based on the Bible or even only on the spirit, rise to ever new evolutions (Anabaptists).

  Yet the force which carried the Reformation materially was the general defection from good works, from alms, tithes, indulgences, fasting—in short, the general lack of discipline. The reformed not merely rejected asceticism, but went to quite the other extreme.

  The Reformation is the faith of all those who would like not to have to do something any more. With Calvin this later changed.

  The worst and socially most dangerous elements were soon in the foreground. They brought about a general break with all historical traditions. In addition, there were active among them those carried away by the spirit of rhetoric.

  Even when the storm of the Peasants’ War was over, the general licentiousness in action and thought remained and spread to the areas of governments which had remained Catholic. In 1532 Tiepolo was afraid that in consequence of internal strife the victors or the emigrating vanquished might hurl themselves at the neighboring countries.

  On the intellectually more advanced there was an inner pressure. The absence of any mood of exaltation becomes characteristic. Higher education did not advance, as is thought, but retrogressed for decades. The humanists became silent.

  German art declined, through icon-smashing, through the atrophy of its higher tasks—it had been deprived of its myth—through the participation of the most important artists themselves in the Reformation.

  48.

  On Luther

  The initial element in him was not speculative thought, but terribly powerful basic feelings, such as occur now and then in deep natures of the old, advanced races. Such men sense the profound vanity of everything earthly and, according to predisposition, period, place, and race, feel it as an apostasy of all living creatures from God.

  In accordance with the temporal (Germanic and monastic) covering which gave the external form to his spirit, Luther perceived it as sin. However, he did not content himself with the remedy for sin customary in his environment, namely, penance, and its superficial buying off, the indulgence, did not suffice him at all.

  Luther’s personality is described by Kessler [Sabbata, I, 122] who saw him in 1522: “He was rather corpulent by nature. His carriage was erect and such that he bent forward less than backward, with his face turned toward heaven. He had dark eyes set deep under his dark brows; his eyes twinkled and flashed like stars, so that one could not well bear their glance.” (Cranach has nowhere managed to give us an idea of this.)

  The decisive thing about Luther was the fact that in addition to indulgences he also abhorred good works in the widest sense. But these will always have on their side natural feelings which he likewise trampled underfoot along with all follies of Catholic practice.

  For a Christian it is natural (but for that very reason not theologically correct?) to want to atone for his failings, to impose suffering upon himself, to give away a part of his possessions and enjoyments. Only optimists are blind to this. Real Christianity even imposes upon itself permanent penance in the form of asceticism, and Luther hated the latter most of all once he had said good-by to it.

  The reformers then were quick to realize what had been lost with the ecclesiastic practice of alms and drew up programs of public charity.

  But they would have succumbed to their own impotence unless princely and municipal governments had for good reasons safeguarded a firm ecclesiastic organism. The governments then had to take the benefice, too, under their care in large measure, even though they entrusted the clergy with it in part.

  49.

  On the German Reformation: Its Causes and Spiritual Consequences

  It is a pretension of modern Catholics that a corporation which has taken to itself as much of the secular as the medieval hierarchy had done still ought not to succumb to the laws governing all secular things, but should enjoy the privilege of eternal immutability in the midst of universal change. But earthly property and power are transitory. And yet the hierarchy had grown and constantly changed. It had attained full growth in about the way that a religion of immortality under the supervision of priests had had to mature. This religion could not and would not pretend to be Biblical any longer; hence the grudge against the Bible in the vernaculars, as it is expressed, e.g., in Jiménez’ principle that the three languages in which the “I.N.R.I.” was written were sufficient. This attitude might have been affected by the memory of the Lollards who, after all, lived on here and there into the sixteenth century.

  Now there were merely the alternatives: Would the church be shaken by the gradual defection of the subjectively cultured, modern, profane, personally examining people, or by a sudden great religious crisis— the latter in conjunction with the financial factor?

  How long would it have taken without the indulgence industry of Leo X?

  A counterquestion: What would the course have been without Luther? Undoubtedly there would soon have been changes of some sort in church property throughout all of Europe and particularly in the church state, but a large part of the dogma and the hierarchy would have remained, alongside of which the personal development of the individual could hardly have been suppressed.

  The spiritual result, apart from the religious elements, was as follows. In any event, infinitely more individuals were spiritually awakened and matured than had previously been the case. And through religion’s becoming more inward, the psychic element was developed more and in much wider circles. (?) But inevitably an equal amount of native, primitive strength was lost in favor of this common possession. This is why there was a predominantly weak literature and poetry after the Reformation. Added to this was a feeling of oppression under the princes, and, above all, under the new dogma (justification through faith) which, burdensome per se and not designed for everyone, was a more oppressive burden than Catholicism had been previously, as it really was, with its thousand accommodations and its highly liberal practices whenever one wanted them.

  Both churches, Catholic as well as Protestant (Protestantism reawakens Catholicism) became oppressively dogmatic and demanded that men should all become one-sided again, after many-sidedness and freedom had characterized the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Protestant countries later become places of “spiritual freedom,” not because they were Protestant, but to the extent that they no longer were zealously so.

  Later compensation for what was lost is imponderable; it is impossible to judge how desirable delay may have been.

  It should also be considered how the Reformation, and at the same time the Counter Reformation on the Catholic side, regulated the Renaissance and took it into their service.

  In a letter to Goethe dated September 17, 1800, in which he comments on K. L. Woltmann’s History of the Reformation, Schiller calls the history of the age of the Reformation “subject matter which by its nature tends toward a petty, miserable detail and moves along at an infinitely lagging pace.” What matters is “to organize [this material] into great, fruitful masses and to abstract its spirit with a few big strokes.”

  50.

  On the Reformation: Protestantism and Tradition—The Intolerance of the New Doctrine

  The appeal to the Bible alone was rejected by the Catholics with very eloquent reasons. Glapion, for example, said that the Bible was a book comparable to soft wax which everyone could pull and stretch at will. He offered to prove by individual passages from the Bible much stranger things yet than Luther did. One ought to pay attention to the oldest usage of the church, he said. In order to establish and maintain an edifying view of the course of the Reformation, one would have to suppress the psychological experience of all times and all men. In point of fact, it was easy to demonstrate the total separation from the earlier life form of the church, from tradition, as something unfair and foolish. Christian truth, he said, consists of both things, the Bible and tradition, the spirit and the vessel which it had created for itself in the earlier times of full religious strength.

  Later, when it had become old enough, Protestantism gradually was able to form and establish a tradition of its own. Two generations sufficed to manifest here, too, what henceforth was considered as selfevident; the accustoming of the masses took place relatively fast.

  But when its theology began to burden itself with “scholarship,” Protestantism became sick from it and showed a tendency to shift to rationalism.

  In the sixteenth century, however, mutual execration stepped between the old and the new. (Often people mistook their own rage for the wrath of God.) Anyone who was to tolerate a minority of different faith might think that he was incurring the wrath of God over himself and his country. After all, the minorities were not merely “unbelievers,” but “scorners.”

  Sebastian Franck says about the evangelical territorial churches: “Everyone believes so as to oblige the authorities and has to worship the regional God. If a prince dies and another regulator of the faith appears, God’s word soon changes as well.” From a very early time (1520), Luther had issued the most vehement calls to destruction against Catholicism and demanded complete abolition and eradication of everything old. The Catholics immediately had a life-or-death struggle, a fight for self-preservation, on their hands. As early as 1520 the pope was, to Luther, the anti-Christ who is darkly alluded to in 2 Thessalonians, II, 3. The Hussites had already applied the term “anti-Christ” to the pope.

  Soon the ecclesiastic power of the Protestant state brought on the persecution and destruction, or expulsion, of the Catholics ipso facto— a terrible hardship for those who wanted to adhere to their accustomed faith optimo jure.

  The doctrine of justification through faith in Luther’s version now has been abandoned by all prominent Protestant theologians. In 1531 Melanchthon wrote to a friend: “Believe me, the controversy over the justness of the faith is obscure and difficult.”

  Germany paid about as dearly for the Reformation as is imaginable. Whatever elements were able to save themselves from the terrible exclusiveness and militancy of the new movement never recognized this new force and felt themselves entitled to any reaction. Hence the Counter Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. The memories of reformatory compulsion were still alive in the grandchildren when the reaction came.

  The assumption of control over the church is one of the greatest steps toward omnipotence that the state has ever been able to take. In the Catholic areas this step was taken indirectly through the appointment and taxation of the clerics; with the Protestants it was done quite directly and openly. And to what extent is this state qualified to rule over souls?

  51.

  On the Reformation: The Establishment of So-Called Spiritual Freedom

  Today’s rejoicing that the Reformation established so-called spiritual freedom, to the effect that the reformers were the battering-rams against any authority in favor of any lack of restraint, was actually even then the attitude of many, but to the disgust and lament of the reformers themselves, who regarded their particular dogmatism as the sine qua non for all salvation of the soul.

  Subsequently the governments helped them to establish well-defined creeds, but not until after they had made sure of the church property and in order to maintain it. It was the governments, municipal as well as princely, that carried through and maintained the firm creeds, for the reformers by themselves would most certainly have succumbed to their disunity.

  The people, however, where they participated, in the beginning greatly enjoyed the general lack of discipline.

  Apart from that esteem of the reformers as battering-rams against the greatest and thus, by implication, any authority, few people would want to know of them today. Not even the pious strictly believe in their systems of faith any longer.

  What if someone had been able to lift the curtain of the future for the people and show them how a hundred years later they would have to pay again for what had been won so very easily?

  Forces like those of the Reformation always delude themselves into thinking, in the exultation of the moment, that they are alone in the world. Afterwards they are surprised and abandon themselves to outbursts of execration when the old elements not only have remained in significant numbers, but have grown to great, new strength, because they derive from the innermost core of mankind.

  At one time, however, people did not have the slightest scruples about immediately destroying the old faith through interdiction, persecution, exile, etc., to the extent of each government’s power. This was an abomination; it brought about the despair of millions and could not be justified on any legal grounds. Then, too, the religions occasionally do it differently. The Christendom of the fourth century took a long time before it proceeded to persecute paganism—not until it was completely harmless—because it was acting according to religious impulses. On the other hand, confiscators have to act immediately with cruel exclusiveness. To be sure, the properties and endowments of the pagan temples had been a trifle compared with the loot that the governments of the Reformation had before them. Hence the horrible compulsion to Protestant sermons and Holy Communion. Otherwise the booty would have been in danger.

  The reformers, to be sure, assisted this as much as they could with their doctrine that the wrath of God was incurred by a country that still tolerated idolatry. But without the consideration of safeguarding the confiscated items their clamor would not have been heeded.

  From the very beginning, in Germany there was danger and self-sacrifice only for those who adhered to the old church. Hutten’s “iacta est alea” [the die is cast] is ridiculous. It was different in France where the adherents of the new faith exposed themselves to mortal danger.

  52.

  On the Reformation: The Masses, Their Motives and Consequences—Luther

  A large proportion of the population certainly was quick to join. It was pleasant to skip confession and penance immediately, to break fast, to be rid of vows and indulgences, and, as was thought, not to be paying tithes any longer (of these the peasants were nowhere relieved). The Reformation must have had an enormous attraction for all those who enjoy not having to do something any longer.

  Bonnivard stresses this throughout his Advis et Devis des difformes réformateurz. The large majority of the people, he says, conceived of the Reformation as the opposite of asceticism: (“Ce monde est faict à dos d’asne” [This world is made like a donkey’s back]; if a bag hangs too far to the left and you try to center it, it falls to the right). How different was the effect of Christianity on people in its beginning: repentance, surrender of property at the feet of the apostles—and now, by contrast, “nos évangelistes de taverne”! The worst elements of the population rose to the top. In the time of transition, brutal acts of violence against priests and the like occurred. Where was the preaching of the gospel followed by an improvement of life, except “en la val d’Engroigne (Waldensians) et nostre ville de Genève”? And even there this happened only late and with an effort, for initially “peu de gentz de bien” [few people of means] took part, but rather “les plus desbordez” [the most downtrodden] in the city and within a radius of ten hours, with maltreatment of the priests and monks, plundering, and the like. This was done only out of hatred of the church, not out of love of the gospel; otherwise they would have started their reform with themselves. (The Reformation made its great strides not through its positive teachings, but as a negation of something that had existed up to that time; without this negation the masses would not have been won over.)

  On the whole, the reformers may have felt very queer in the midst of lustful masses of people, greedy governments, wretched colleagues (quickly advanced clerics of all kinds), and vis-à-vis one another: the Anabaptists, i.e., the forward-pressing essential spirit of the Reformation, a continual admonition from out of the dark. The frightful imprecations against the papacy probably were made in part because they wanted to cut off forcibly the secretly tempting way back. How gladly Melanchthon would have remained in some sort of a relationship with the old church!

  The Reformation stirred up in people the most diverse spirits: a break with all historical things; because people broke with so much history, there was, for many, no limit. Furthermore, there were remnants of all kinds of traditional heresies which had only been forced back into obscurity.

  According to Lang’s conscious or unconscious view, the Reformverein [Reform Union] actually ought to have followed immediately upon the Reformation. But without immediate, dogmatically very firm and one-sided churches, everything would have broken up into tumult, baptizing, appeal to the spirit, and so on, into general disunity (not “enlightenment,” but baptizing would have dominated the scene for the moment), and the reaction (which later set in strongly enough) would then have gained control easily and completely.

  To be sure, the religious fanatics now and then make an optimistic start at collecting themselves into a people of God with strict discipline, as did the Hussites once, but there is far too little harmony, and the attempt of Münster came much too late.

  Through the problems of justification, good works, predestination, and the like, all of ethics got out into the high seas. The idea emerged that God was the creator of evil, too (Hans Denk and also some individual reformers, e.g., Zwingli, were logical enough to attach to this the eventual salvation of the wicked, even of the fallen angels).

  Many were probably drawn into all this confusion only by their mere inborn fondness for talking. They are those who would be equally inspired to talk by the opposite.

  Who are we anyway to demand of Luther and the other reformers that they should have carried out our programs?! This particular Luther existed and no other; accept him the way he was.

  There are complaints about Luther’s “obstinacy”—but without the pig-headedness, so entirely incapable of capitulation, of this one man everything might perhaps have reverted to the status quo.

  Luther’s doctrine of justification, an innovation vis-à-vis the entire church up to that time, is currently actually abandoned by all Protestant theologians, even orthodox ones. In fact, it is explained in a way that the reformers and their authentic successors would damn as Papist or Arminian.

  53.

  On the Reformation: Governments—Confiscation of Property and Dogmatism—Church and State

  The territorial “churches” which arose at that time were essentially only districts for the seizure of property and for confiscation; within them the new clergy established itself somehow in as wretched a fashion as is conceivable.

  With its sermons, when they could be given, this clergy would only have produced ever new evolutions, i.e., a rapid disintegration through ever new dogmatic disputes; and the people, continually confused by this, would have reverted to Catholicism all the more easily. Luther complained bitterly about the impotence of the sermons and the religious spirit in general.

  With its own strength the new church would not nearly have sufficed to create an Archimedean point, a banner to rally round; it would have declined into nothing but sects.

  But the governments were interested in church property and an increase in power, and with their “quos ego” they had to create state churches which the people, and, note, their clergy as well, were not allowed to leave any more, while the nobles were granted varied participation in the looting. The governments did not care about the dogmas, but they did want a strictly defined dogma as a political and police barrier around their subjects. They had to be much more merciless toward Catholic remnants than were the reformers. (Albert of Brandenburg, Gustavus Vasa, etc., prohibited Catholicism on pain of death, and this was most certainly not due to religious fanaticism.)

  The governments aimed, first of all, at stunning the great masses who in the intoxication of their initial undisciplined behavior staggered into their arms anyway, and also at making the opposition defenseless for decades until it should be thoroughly habituated.

  The governments were in a hurry about a definite faith. The clergy would have continued disputing, and every individual would have been right by himself.

  Münzerism, the Baptist movement, etc., with their claims on state and society were in a direct and fearful competition with the governments even more than with Protestant dogma.

  The governments needed a firm dogma to safeguard their confiscations. Without this desire of theirs, Protestantism would have split up into small sects or factions.

  Firm orthodoxy was tantamount to holding on to stolen goods.

  Catholicism had been extremely tolerant in living and letting live, and had left the convictions of the people alone. The great totality was able to stand a lot.

  In Protestantism, on the other hand, the clergy cannot tolerate or ignore anything, and the governments see in every deviation a threat to their enormous confiscations.

  Highly significant is the large number of eminent men who after initial sympathy turned away from the new movement: Pirkheimer, Wicelius, and others. Even Reuchlin, although he was sentenced in Rome as late as 1520, adhered to the old faith and was completely averse to Luther’s undertaking.

  Those who suffered inwardly and yet were outwardly prudent sympathized with the moderation of the reversionists who worked toward a council.

  Thus Paul Lang wrote around 1520: “What I have said about Luther thus far, I did not say assertive [as fact], but only admirative [as admiration], and have never sworn by any magisterial words, but since I, like many others, am waiting till it shall be decided by an ecumenical, universal, and general council what shall be believed, I shall always accept instruction from those who are truly wise, and meanwhile submit all my writings to the judgment of the church of Rome.”

  Afterwards only Calvinism appears quite spontaneously and autonomously. It wants to dominate the states, above all to impose its religious will upon them, and in Scotland, e.g., it treats state and world en bagatelle. It at least seeks to approximate an organism which stands above the individual states, and has achieved a Synodus Dordracena.

  Luther, on the other hand, never organized his church, but immediately left its form and fortunes to the individual secular governments. He teaches, but the governments act. For from the beginning they stood on the sidelines and confiscated the church properties in which they were more interested than in all justification and salvation. Of course, Luther probably did not foresee what later happened and had to happen. For the time being, the princes and municipal governments were only supposed to set up the gospel and the new church, not to become the highest authorities of faith and supreme judges over religion, doctrine, and church.

  But he was no longer able to combat this rapidly adopted practice, because without the governments the Reformation after 1525 would probably have retrogressed among the people. At any rate, the clergy of the new faith were derided and abandoned by the people when the state did not assist them. In his quiet moments, however, Luther may often have been haunted by the thought that the governments offered little guarantee as to their future right thinking. On the other hand, his mind was quite at rest as far as the (enormous) increase in the governments’ power was concerned, and he congratulated himself on having contributed to it. For the present he thought that the princes would follow the advice of their theologians, but a prince chose his father-confessor himself and appointed or removed entire faculties of theology.

  In this connection we are reminded again of Döllinger who writes as follows: “The church was completely integrated into the state and regarded as a wheel in the great machine of state. He who wielded absolute power over the noblest and otherwise most inviolable things, namely, religion and conscience, necessarily could gain control gradually of every other area of life in state and nation as soon as he cared to reach for it. Accordingly, with the setting up of the consistories as the sovereign authorities governing church interests there began the development of bureaucracy, of the omnipotence of prince and state, of administrative centralization.”

  If there is anything that characterizes the modern state, it is the hatred and worry it feels when it has to tolerate a religion which has connections beyond its borders and belongs to a totality that the state does not control. Nevertheless, until the eighteenth century the state pretended at least to have the religion whose church it had admitted to its officialdom. Since then things have changed.

  It had at first been an advantage of the state that it made one batter out of Lutheran orthodoxy, possession of the church properties, and political omnipotence. But if one of these three had to be the first to go, it certainly turned out to be Lutheran orthodoxy.

  The enormous power of the state over the church in the sixteenth century suddenly was there in fact; no one was in a position to set any limits for it. Practice had to supply them in time.

  Protestantism originated as a state church, and when the state becomes indifferent, it is in a dubious position.

  It is the greatest step toward omnipotence which the state has taken in past times. Then there followed on the Catholic side Louis XIV. The subsequent completion of state omnipotence through the theories of the Revolution could not have taken place so easily without this preceding Caesaropapism.

  The brachium saeculare [secular arm], which the Catholic church had once called upon for individual action, has control over the Protestant church a priori.

  The church surely did not want it that way in the beginning. But when in the heat of battle it wiped the sweat off its brow for the first time, it had to realize that it was in the hands of the state, if only through the marriage of the clergy.

  54.

  The Origin of the Territorial Churches

  While Calvinism was creating, in Geneva, Scotland, and elsewhere, a dominion of religion over the state and a possibility of ecumenical action, such as the Synod of Dordrecht, while Zwingli in Zurich became the outright head of state and only later sects placed themselves outside the state, Luther could not or would not organize a church in Germany. He taught, wrote, and preached.

  According to unchanging laws of psychology, the princes and city governments, given the way they were constituted, could not be made edifying. Despite the new dogma their morality, such as it was, remained primarily greedy for confiscation. They now created just as many individual territorial churches as there were confiscation districts; in this they often had to share with the nobility which had hitherto lived on benefices, and all these units at the same time became dogmatic districts. The people and the clergy were no longer allowed outside, so that the confiscation would not become dubious again, something that was to be feared with every deviation.

  Hence the absolute intolerance toward the Catholics, and note that it was not out of fanaticism, although this was in keeping with the reformers. This is also true of Zwingli the politician, even more than of Zwingli the reformer. In addition, the princes and municipal governments endowed (miserably enough) the new church.

  If one imagines the reformers without the governments, they would have caused fragmentation through dogmatic dispute which would have confused the people or made them backslide. They were incapable of attaining by themselves an Archimedean point, of raising a banner round which all might join in security.

  The governments, however, were interested in stunning and habituating the masses, in decades of defenselessness. They were in a hurry to have a settled creed, and they forced the agreement of the clerics who would otherwise have continued quarreling. Their competitors, even more than the clergy’s, were Münzerism, the Baptist movement, and similar movements. This explains the even assurance with which they proceeded. The only things which kept the German Reformation alive were the confiscation and the interests attached to it; only they produced the endurance of those political forces which maintained the cause. Thus, without Luther’s wanting it, the governments became the supreme authorities of faith. He had no assurance as to the future and eternal orthodoxy of the governments and their estates, but only the hope that they would follow the advice of their theologians.

  In sum: The clergy, forsaken by the people, dependent because of their marriages, had to accommodate themselves to an organization which they could not have replaced by one of their own. Catholicism, on the other hand, salvaged its organization. The territorial churches constitute the most enormous step toward state omnipotence, toward Caesaropapism. Soon there occurred a tightening of the reins, even though the consequences did not fully develop for centuries.

  In England, too, there now occurred a tremendous increase in royal power. In Sweden this was actually made possible only by the Reformation.

  The theory prevalent in modern times claims absolute and universal power of the state as a major aim of all existence. But power usually does not make men better and scarcely ever happier, because of their inner insatiability.

  However, for the German princes, this particular increment of power (a hitherto jointly ruling class had dropped away and they had inherited its property) was a most powerful means of asserting their liberty vis-à-vis the emperor and the Empire. What if in the fifteenth century the great French vassals had possessed something like that against Louis XI? And thus Myconius is able to write Calvin from Basel in 1542 about the “pestilential dogma of the laymen: Senatus ecclesia est” [the civil government is the church].

  The Lutheran governments would have protested against joint synods and all common institutions and would have prevented such things by force as an interference with their rule. No Lutheran catholicity came into being, while Calvinism had the makings of one.

  In this context there belongs the extremely revealing letter from Luther to the Elector John, dated November 22, 1526.

  55.

  On the Reformation After 1526: The Inevitable Caesaropapism

  Myconius wrote to Calvin from Basel in 1542 a letter of the following content: The laymen are presenting a dogma “valde turbulentum et pestilens” [very confusing and pestilential], namely “Senatus ecclesia est”; they have appropriated to themselves the right to excommunicate. All the former papal power they now claim for the magistracy, asserting that Moses as a secular ruler had given orders to Aaron and that David and the other pious kings had commanded the Levites. Why should it not be the same in the new covenant? Calvin flies into a rage, e.g., when the council of Bern presumes to give the final decision on the faith. But in the early part of the Reformation the governments had simply been given free rein, without anyone protesting.

  The people did not have any higher regard for the married priests than for those living in concubinage, and this was one reason for the contempt of the clergy that was bemoaned by the reformers.

  There arose no Protestant catholicity. Even Calvinism, whose individual countries later did have a much closer religious connection with one another, achieved the Synodus Dordracena only one single time. Lutheranism, on the other hand, displays nothing but territorial churches, some of them quite minute. It lacked the means and the will to form itself into a big community, having become far too much a matter of the individual governments. But these would undoubtedly have prohibited big synods and similar organizations as an interference with their rule. The Caesaropapism of the individual governments is the enemy of everything universal.

  Since that time, it has been impossible for Protestantism as a religion to establish from within itself an authority with universal validity.

  56.

  On the Coming of the Reformation: The Reformation and the Fate of Art

  At this point we must bid farewell to German art which at that very time seemed to be in the most glorious ferment before the consummation it was destined for. The fact that all the famous artists, starting with Dürer, were for the Reformation was probably in part due to their hatred of a high clergy which spent its enormous endowments on anything rather than the commissioning of altar works.

  The Reformation deprived art not only of its main subjects, but also of true naïveté, which probably would have maintained itself merely because of the penetration of the Renaissance. It was as though one had suddenly prohibited the Greeks in the highest early flowering of their art from depicting their myths and left them only portraits, historical subjects, and genre painting (cf. Islam’s prohibition of painting). The still unbroken strength of the Germans would have succeeded entirely in assimilating the Renaissance and blending it with the great Italian art; there would have been no half-style as in the Netherlands. In addition, in many regions there was outright destruction of paintings.

  Since only very few were able to participate seriously and inwardly in the suddenly demanded sublime emphasis on ethics in religion and, at the same time, there was a general and very sharp split into parties, a feeling of inward pressure and a timid reserve became characteristic for those intellectuals on whose support art ordinarily depended. If people had no more sensible arguments against paintings, as, e.g., Zwingli and Leo Jud at the Zurich main dispute of 1523, they said that the admissibility of paintings could not be demonstrated from the Bible and that was why they had to go.

  A decisive factor was that even in the areas which had nominally remained Catholic, Protestantism for many decades actually dominated the minds of men, at least of the non-peasants. Whether it went deep is a matter of indifference. Church art came to a standstill there, too, so that later, with the Counter Reformation, Italian art immediately gained predominance.

  The change in people is very strikingly revealed through portraits. At the beginning of the sixteenth century there prevails in paintings and sepulchral sculptures the utmost openness and strength; from 1530 on everything appears dammed up and anxious.

  That, basically, artistic feeling and joy in the beautification of life had not ceased is shown by the architecture and ornamentation of the German Renaissance.

  Come to think of it, aside from some boasting about Dürer, whom probably everyone would have liked to do his portrait, German humanism had even before the Reformation been rather hostile to art, or at least completely aloof from it, as were the philosophers in antiquity. In reference to the luxurious tomb of Thomas à Becket and the marble splendor of the Certosa di Pavia, Erasmus preaches the most insipid “charity,” saying that the money ought to have been given to the poor and that flowers were sufficient adornment for a saint’s grave. (The poor of the time would soon have consumed the money concerned, and we would not possess the Certosa, etc.) Then Erasmus polemicizes against the artistic embellishment of noble graves in the churches generally.

  57.

  On the Situation of the Catholic Church: The Direct Effect of the Reformation

  Through his writings of 1520–1521 Luther had already placed an abyss between himself and the church. He no longer demanded reform of its head and limbs, but the destruction of its entire organism, the abolition of the ritual and of several sacraments; only the sermons were to remain.

  This rage of the reformers against the old church was there before the church was able to exert the slightest repression; it is not the effect of persecution, but rather, in part, of self-stifling. Actually, in the lands where the Reformation was victorious, there immediately set in the most colossal spoliation.

  Catholic princes, clergy, and peoples knew from the very outset that they faced complete suppression as soon as their adversaries were strong enough; all writings of the reformers demanded the eradication of the old church. Thus there was to be expected, on the Catholic side, a fight for self-preservation which would be just as unrestrained in its methods. As for the Protestants, in their lucid moments they must have foreseen such a future resistance, if they still knew the Catholic church at all. Hence their theory of the destruction of the Catholics later was supported by the conclusion that the Catholics for their part would take the most extreme reprisals once they regained power.

  The accomplishment of a thousand years, the vessel of a religion, the correlate of a thoroughly formed popular custom had been stolen from them and destroyed. And in Germany this had not even happened in tragic battle, but with a sudden appeal to general undisciplined action, beside which the positive new “faith” meant little.

  This explains the fearful determination to absolute repression from the start, by any means at all, in the countries not yet overrun, especially France.

  From the beginning, the purposes of the confiscating governments were served only by a complete dogmatic defection from the church. Any compromise between the new and the old would somehow have made their loot uncertain again.

  It is a ridiculous assumption that power which otherwise, in all of world history, makes men neither particularly good nor particularly happy, should have accomplished this miracle with the German governments of the sixteenth century just because they were Protestant. And to these rulers the old believers had to submit in mute surrender, because for the time being the rulers had on their side the taste of the masses for no discipline.

  But for the Catholic church it was high time for the Lutheran Reformation to come. Without it the church would of itself no longer have been capable of an inner transformation, not even with the most incisive insights of its more serious minds. Even the saintliest pope, if we imagine him surrounded by saintly cardinals and curials, would have availed no more against the general situation (entanglement with all worldliness and all superstition) than did an Adrian VI. Only the most terrible danger brought about in all countries the rise of those religious forces that were capable of starting a Counter Reformation.

  Protestantism, however, has since then consistently and at times vociferously betrayed the anxiety that, if things were at all allowed to take their natural course, Catholicism would regain the upper hand—and not by force, but for psychological reasons.

  58.

  On Zwingli’s Later Period

  The Reformation brought on a time in which people felt much closer to their coreligionists than to their compatriots.

  Even before that, headlong political action and unscrupulous methods had become general practices.

  Added to this was the opinion of Zwingli and many contemporaries that through the toleration of a situation not in keeping with their metaphysical concepts the wrath of God was incurred on the whole country. (Was this opinion genuine with Zwingli? It might have been his own wrath.)

  In this there was a basic difference from Luther, who might have been saying generally, “The world will not exist that long!” and who took no responsibility for what the mighty of this world were doing, admitting the wrath of God as a permanent scourge. Zwingli, on the contrary, considered himself religiously and politically responsible for the whole situation (or had talked his way into it).

  Our assumption of high treason through foreign partial alliances in that period is an erroneous one. The contemporaries on both sides did not feel that way.

  It was impossible in that period to operate with numbers of people; Zwingli “believed” that the poor people in the five cantons of the Catholic interior of Switzerland were suppressed only by the powerful.

  In Bern the government certainly made the decisions in the main, for the enormous mass of country folk would surely have remained Catholic and the highlands dared an insurrection because of that. Were things very different even in the common prefectures? At least in the Thurgau and in other places where later they let compulsion cease, after the second battle of Kappel, Catholicism appeared again, partly of itself.

  And when it was a question of war, Zwingli looked its conditions straight in the face and proposed the methods then in universal use, as early as in the Memorial of 1526, much like an imperial field commander.

  His political machinations, too, were essentially determined by the goal.

  He was an optimist and wanted to establish new conditions for all times. His clear intellect told him, even without specific historical knowledge, that every single founder of power who achieved something thought the same way.

  What proved to be his undoing was his imagination, which to the last deluded him into thinking that he could sweep Bern along. He had particular hopes of this because after 1528 Bern was seriously estranged from the five cantons through the participation of Unterwalden in the revolution of the highlands. But here he faced a wall. Bern wanted primarily to secure its inherited exercise of power under all circumstances, and it cared more deeply for this than for all theology. Politically it acted entirely in its interest for a long time, as it was accustomed to doing. In the wake of the Zwinglian revolution it would have lost its primacy.

  It was a good thing that Switzerland at least took care of its own disputes without the intervention of nearby foreign aid on both sides.

  It was naive of Zwingli to discountenance very sharply any more masses in the canton of Zurich, but to demand of the five cantons in their own areas tolerance for the “Word of God.” This shows that the statesman was carried away by the metaphysician.

  59.

  Charles V and Francis I

  Both started their reigns with a legacy of fearsome programs; one (Charles) reaches rock bottom financially, the other (Francis) gets into trouble through enormous indiscretions of his own or of others.

  Both confronted frequently unpaid soldiers who are capable of reaching for the first security that presents itself, including the commander-in-chief. (Even the unpaid Swiss of Charles VIII were ready, after the battle of Foronuovo, to seize him and send him off to Switzerland.) War aims and politics were constantly subject to the disturbances resulting from this.

  Charles was visibly impelled toward world monarchy in the sense that his very scattered and in many places vulnerable power forced him to keep committing hostile acts against the potential or actual center of the small powers, France. The smaller nations were in part actually threatened, in part they believed themselves to be continually threatened. Francis was a center and Charles a periphery.

  Charles and Francis had to give themselves the appearance of wanting to protect the church and yet secretly they were full of thoughts of secularization which were somewhat dispelled only by enormous partial concessions on the part of the clergy and the pope.

  The modern state in their hands is constantly insolvent and has its reason of state for every robbery.

  France’s further national development is now determined by the opposition to Hapsburg Spain, as previously by the opposition to England. This is later interrupted only by the brief period of the Ligue. The enormous inner coherence and the omnipotence of royalty as a banner is increased in the process.

  60.

  On Charles V

  (I) His power was at bottom an unhappy and chimerical one, apart from the facts that his financial means were entirely inadequate in relation to the extent and dispersal of his territories, and that the muttering Netherlands could not eternally foot the bill for everyone.

  His generally assumed striving for universal monarchy or, at any rate, for supreme command over the entire Occident had a highly irritating effect. His adversaries felt entitled to the most unnatural alliances and to attacks at will.

  France he was never able to satisfy or pacify, even though in 1540 he may have dedicated himself to this idea and had the policies of Constable Montmorency in his favor.

  For a time he had seriously thought of making great sacrifices, was about to give Milan or the Netherlands to a French prince and make him his son-in-law. But Francis was still hoping to get Milan or something else without Charles’s good will. If they had reached an understanding, they would have crushed the Reformation and would also have been able to subdue the Turks. At the same time they would have finished off all republics. (All this was roughly Montmorency’s program also.)

  Instead of this, Francis again took up with the Turks.

  Charles, however, had only become more active and belligerent as his health declined, as though he wanted to use the presumptive last years of his strength for decisive blows, so as to be able to close the account.

  He let himself be carried away to fight the Schmalkaldic war partly due to his urgent desire to finish the job, partly because of his deep repugnance for the Reformation, which was in such strong ferment in the Netherlands as well. But his alliance with Duke Maurice, who was allowed to trade upon his Protestantism, was a vital defect in the whole undertaking. For Maurice the temptation once more to make deals against Charles with Protestantism in the face of the hated interregnum was entirely too strong, and the alliance with France was too easy for a man like Maurice. The Turks were also on the march again.

  Charles later may have stuck too obstinately to the siege of Metz. And yet he acted here in an entirely imperial manner and would have put his opponents to shame if they could have been put to shame.

  At the very end, after the alternating of the two lines in the Empire had failed (did Charles give it up quite officially?), he again resorted to the idea of a division. A second son of Philip, expected by the Catholic Mary, was to receive an Anglo-Burgundian empire.

  His abdication at Brussels was the most pathos-filled scene of his life. He felt and showed more emotion than at any other moment.

  (What would have happened if the house of Hapsburg had in 1519 put Ferdinand instead of Charles on the imperial throne and then nevertheless waged a joint war against Islam? One thing would have been prevented by this: France’s sticking together with the German Protestants.)

  At Charles’s abdication at Brussels, when he said that his times of greatest happiness had been marred by so many disagreeable things that he had never felt complete contentment, the hall was still draped in mourning for Juana; there were no funds for special decorations. For the same reason Charles had to wait four months for passage to Spain.

  When Charles abdicated, the lands of the house of Savoy and the Lorraine bishoprics were in French hands; Charles, to be sure, kept Milan and Naples.

  (II) Charles’s greatest vindication always lies in his leadership against Islam. In his conscience he was always able to feel like the shield of Christendom and to refer back to this. The relationship was an actuality for him when he was king of Spain, and even more so when he was the emperor. Even if he did not get around to this task directly until about 1530, his wars before that date must be recognized as preparatory work. Of course, for the war against the Turks, the forces of the entire Occident gathered in one hand were scarcely sufficient.

  Charles’s tendency to rule over the church is reminiscent of Maximilian I’s two-time designs on the papacy.

  The two other great tasks were the ecclesiastical problem and the fight against the house of Valois and its allies.

  Italians such as Contarini emphasize his seriousness, his brand of devotion to duty, his inclination toward melancholia, and his good memory for insults.

  At Worms in 1521 he told the princes very clearly that in addition to his many other crowns he had also desired the imperial one—not out of self-interest, but for the sake of the Empire itself which was only a shadow and which he wanted to bring to the top again, devoting his body and soul to it. This alone may have sounded suspicious to those who had let themselves be bought to elect him.

  Marino Giustiniani in 1540 discussed Charles’s chances if he himself were to embrace the Reformation. Instead of that, his permanent desire was a reform of the Catholic clergy, in the Spanish rather than the German sense, which was certainly a heritage of Ferdinand and Isabella and their reform.

  Characteristic of his personality is the answer he gave when his councilors held before him the example of Caesar concerning the complete exploitation of victories: “The ancients had only one goal before their eyes, honor. We Christians have two, honor and the salvation of the soul.”

  (III) To sum up: In the end, through Charles V, Spain did become and remain the great power. And the Spaniards themselves, no matter how they might fare, considered themselves the only great power. It took the greatest effort to beat Spain to the ground long after Charles V.

  61.

  On Henry VIII

  A mixture rare among princes: Henry VIII is at once a lout and a devil.

  Yet in the face of terrible special forces which could break forth again out of the dark it can be highly desirable for the general welfare that one person wield the rod. And such a person then can behave as he pleases, circumstances permitting.

  62.

  Gustavus Vasa

  Gustavus Vasa, unlike Henry VIII, did not inherit a paternal, well-mastered empire and a treasury.

  He was simply on hand when the Swedes needed a leader in order to throw off the Danes. And when the pressure of the moment determined that such a man should most appropriately appear as a king, he knew how to act. It was very useful to him that Christian II was expelled by the Danes, which meant that he was spared a war with Denmark, and that Frederick I of Denmark recognized the identity of his interests with those of Gustavus. It was not necessary to wage war for the three crowns.

  One conclusion a posteriori about his very extraordinary personality is permissible. Above all, he did everything himself and had no Wolsey and no Thomas Cromwell.

  Suddenly he is all of Sweden. And then Sweden suddenly has a will and experiences her military and political day in world history, although the question remains whether, on the whole, this was to her fortune. But what Sweden has done since that time quite obviously goes back to Gustavus Vasa, without whom it would be unthinkable.

  He must have been the prototype of a Swede, so that his nation was able to recognize itself in him.

  His dreadful side is displayed only in connection with expediency and is not entangled with murderous matrimonial matters, as with Henry VIII.

  63.

  The Community of the Elect

  Luther had developed his doctrine according to the Bible as he understood it and had in his creed effaced everything papist. To be a Lutheran meant to be severed from the Roman Catholic church. The governments which attached themselves to his doctrine completely rooted out the papist elements in their areas. Their people then gradually became subject to a new ecclesiastical organism. We know the laments of Luther and all Lutheran reformers about their behavior otherwise: that the stopping of good works had brought about a total brutalization. But Luther considered his responsibility as fulfilled when the people remained removed from any papist influence; the rest he left to God—and he was not the governor of the electorate of Saxony. Next to the pulpit there come the secular authorities and not a controlling presbytery. Compulsion is confined chiefly to a person’s no longer being allowed to be a Catholic.

  But he knew quite well that in addition to all this there still existed a doctrine of election by divine grace, of predestination, based chiefly on Romans, IX, and Luther went into this question in his De servo arbitrio.

  But Luther at least did not concern himself more closely with the doctrine of the small number of the elect, their general proportion, which gives the doctrine of predestination its full fearfulness.

  The Anabaptists had wanted to constitute a people of the elect, but their appeal to the spirit was anarchic and their goals, where they were able to organize, were in the beginning crassly materialistic; their decline was inevitable. Nevertheless, Hans Denk had taught the eventual blessedness even of the damned, including devils, which was consistent with the vision of a world empire. It uses ἀποκατάστασις ἁπάντών [the redemption of everybody] as final decoration.

  The effect of the Reformation on Europe was, in the first decades, German, Lutheran. Its distinguishing doctrine was that of justification by faith, its distinguishing outward feature the complete abolition of good works. As for its form, wherever it could, it submitted to the state as a territorial church.

  The first Protestants in France, England, Italy, and Spain were, or were called, Lutherans. The propaganda of Zwinglianism outside of Switzerland died out with the battle of Kappel. Denmark and Sweden became strictly Lutheran states.

  However, toward the end of the 1540’s a new spirit becomes discernible in the Western countries: Calvinism. It becomes the Reformation of those countries that had an antipathy toward the Germans. Its characteristic doctrine was that of predestination, its distinguishing form the community which, if possible, was to be a community of the elect. Wherever it is able to do so it controls the state or at least does its best to impose its point of view upon it. Through their elders the communities supervise private life.

  Subsequently this doctrine proves capable, to a much greater degree than the Lutheran, of forming communities in countries where the governments maintain Catholicism by force. Moreover, a doctrine of the “few elect” is necessarily missionary, something that Lutheranism never was.

  It fights in France and is victorious in Scotland and Holland. In England it is met halfway by an old Lollard religion with its own doctrine of the small number of the elect. Furthermore, the Reformation takes this new direction after 1547, not as a free one, but with the imposition of a rigidly organized state church with royal supremacy against which the absolute spirit of predestination later has to stand its ground as a sect (later the Puritans).

  64.

  On Calvin

  (I) Here the dogma is not the sole decisive factor, but rather, in substance, the dominion of religion over the state.

  Where the state rules, as in every Lutheran country and, on the Calvinist side, in suprematist England—and in the Bern region—the people bear this without any particular inward involvement, and, conversely, because they do this, the state is able to rule.

  Lutheranism is extremely weak, even with the greatest numerical diffusion, as soon as it has to proceed without the government, merely with superintendents, synods, and the like. A case in point is the German-Austrian lands; here the needful desperation must have been wholly lacking at the time of the Counter Reformation (with the exception of Upper Austria at the time of the Peasants’ War of 1626). Here Protestantism had on its side the powerful nobility; independently it lived only in a segment of the urban population.

  One hardly notices the people who are becoming Lutheran cooperating with their North German governments in any way except by breaking fast and other things, generally negative ones.

  Calvinists, on the other hand, are able to establish communities and a church in areas under Catholic rule, from below, through the inward impetus of the doctrine of the elect which carries with it the necessary desperation and a scornful mortal hatred of Catholicism.

  From this a Presbyterian organization results naturally. In countries where the government does not cooperate or still is Catholic the community cannot possibly consist only of preachers and listeners; only where the preacher is assured of a stock of select laymen does it come into being and really exist.

  If, in addition, the Calvinist dogma encounters a highly congenial national spirit, as in Scotland and with the English Puritans, there arises a complete dominion, even over the state and the life of the citizenry. On the other hand, the zeal for predestination of the masses in Holland in 1618 has always been suspect to me. The Scots remain pessimistic and poor; the Dutch want to become rich and are oriented toward the world, acquisition, and possession. (Hm? Calvinism, with its certainty of unique chosenness is, at bottom, even more comfortable and consolatory than Lutheranism.) To what extent can present-day North America be given as an example? Frantic money-making is hardly compatible with a belief in the small number of the elect from eternity.

  Here, too, the activity against Catholicism from the very beginning is even more filled with execration and scorn than it is with Luther. The Catholic church is from the very first threatened with complete destruction because its substance is regarded as idolatry. Thus the Catholic defense is adjusted to this.

  A dubious aspect of the presbyterial organization was the fact that it was far from making the church popular. It led to distressing tyranny and provoked opposition. These moral courts were always held only in small towns and villages where everyone knew everyone else. Selected lay elders who sit in judgment on their fellow citizens are, on the one hand, subject to the temptation to give rein to personal advantage, revenge, and malevolence, and, on the other hand, are prone to the corruption that attaches to any system of informers and to general hatred and suspicion which finds them suspect, too. What one will put up with from a clergyman who is outside of daily life one will not tolerate from one’s equals.

  (II) Calvin’s goal is to “build a community standing under the discipline of God’s word and the Holy Spirit,” unlike Luther, who left it to the power of the gospel to penetrate into the masses of the people.

  Farel had already started with a reform of morals in Geneva. But only Calvin, from 1537 on, successfully insisted on its being carried out, and upon his return in 1541 he organized Geneva into a community in his spirit, with a Presbyterian organization and with discipline.

  The relationship of the community to predestination was as follows: Since the small number of the elect from eternity cannot be ascertained and only God knows His chosen, this church is not to be confused with the visible church community, which contains those who profess externally, as well as true members of the invisible church, as long as sermons and sacraments are handled properly. This is also the reason why one should not detach oneself from the visible church.

  Now Calvin arranges his visible church according to this mixture of few elect and many hypocrites. He will at least outwardly tolerate no resistance against the purity of the appearance. The godless must be kept in bounds, i.e., become dissemblers. (He does not want to win them over, nor to create faith in general, because, after all, the believers have been elected from eternity; only secondarily is the church discipline also a friendly means of punishment for fallen elect.) For this he enlisted in large measure the aid of the secular powers which, to be sure, he had inspired. His highest ecclesiastical authority, the Consistory, which at the same time administered the church discipline, had three-fifths secular members and a syndic as president. Another part of this system was the continual visiting of families and individuals.

  That is why finally everything was suspect to Calvin, and the slightest gleam of resistance, not just of the ecclesiastical but also of the political and personal kinds, was unbearable to him. He spent far too much time on those who he knew or suspected were not for him. In the end he knew that he was hated by the great majority. All actual or supposed opposition he had to take personally.

  It is a psychological fact that at any time there are a certain number of people who persistently concern themselves with the petit nombre des élus [small number of the elect]. That is a necessary consequence and development of the stricter New Testament doctrine of the beyond. These people are recognizable among the English Lollards of the fourteenth century (Knyghton). They will at any time readily renounce the earthly comforts of other people. Their view is necessarily also a wide one, since in their vicinity there might be too few élus. Thus Calvin, too, desired to attach the élus of all nations to himself. Geneva was his workshop and no more; for example, it could not be passed off as a besieged fortress. He knew that his emissaries incurred the greatest danger of destruction. It was a misfortune for France that its chances for reformation came entirely into Calvin’s hands.

  Opposed to Luther, he agrees with Zwingli in that he, too, must completely dominate a small republic as a proving ground of ecclesiastical and political life. Even later, Calvinism is complete only where it can enforce its kind of policing through a mass of people (Presbyterians and others) or through full disposition over the secular arm—e.g., in Scotland and for a time in Holland, also in England at the time of the Commonwealth. But dogmatic Calvinists are bad ones! Yet everywhere there begins a quiet inner defection as soon as the life and business of the world put individuals in an optimistic mood.

  (III) It has been necessary to erect whole bastions of palliation around Calvin’s behavior in Geneva (the downfall of Servetus and other things). In fact and truth, the real Geneva had the greatest possible antipathy toward him. The deep humiliation of the fact that people had had to put up with him nevertheless could best be masked through subsequent idealization.

  The tyranny of one single individual who makes his subjectivity the universal law and not only enslaves or expels all other convictions, including very good Protestant ones, but also every day insults everyone in the most innocent matters of taste, has never been carried farther.

  Geneva endured him, the greatest pessimist, the stranger. Afterwards she herself produced the man who, despite his plaintiveness, was the world’s greatest optimist: J. J. Rousseau, the preacher of the goodness of human nature, which is the view currently held by the masses all over the world.

  (IV) Calvin’s effect upon the West. First, he had an influence on France through his writings, his correspondence, and his emissaries. The latter he often sent to certain destruction (?), and on this one can have one’s special opinion just as in the case of Mazzini. In great matters he found the stage already occupied by the Renaissance and profane blasphemy (cf. Calvin’s revealing work De Scandalis, 1550). The subsequent movement against the court and government of Henry II found Calvinism present and made partial use of it.

  Without the participation of the French nobility after 1555, which happened for anything but dogmatic reasons, his work would have been in vain.

  However, in England, starting with Edward VI, the local Protestantism clearly had a Calvinistic complexion (a transformation of the Lollard one?).

  Scotland knew only Calvinism from the outset.

  In the Netherlands, where as late as the 1530’s the more extreme defection was Anabaptism, the Reformation was Lutheran; Calvinism comes to the fore in the 1550’s and becomes the active faction.

  65.

  On Protestantism in France

  Royalty did not need it economically, because it had already made the church property indirectly subservient to it through the concordat and its consequences. Anyway, in a confiscation it would have had to share with the nobles to a considerable extent.

  Hence the government, which in France has of old had such great scope, did not give the signal for undisciplined behavior and depredation, in contrast with Germany.

  Besides, there was this great difference between the behavior of the French and the German city populations: In France, the burghers and proletarians nowhere waxed enthusiastic about the stopping of good works, the breaking of the fast, and other things, although part of the nobility did. This aspect of Protestantism was not for a moment popular with the masses, even though in France the clergy was probably mocked no less than it was in Germany.

  Added to this there was the firm resolve of all authorities under Francis I to prevent the penetration of Lutheranism by every possible means. One absolute, namely Luther’s view of the Catholic church, was confronted with an equally strong absolute.

  When Calvin’s doctrine appeared, it did, to be sure, prove capable of driving a small minority, which was small even under the Huguenots, to the utmost resistance. But the nation as a whole was completely antipathetic toward it, because it demanded a dominion even over the innermost parts of man, and a Frenchman can stand this sort of thing less than anyone else.

  Calvinism, however, demanded not merely tolerance, i.e., its little place in the sun—far from it—but destruction of idolatry. Anne du Bourg spoke in the séance royale of “turpitude romaine.”

  66.

  German Culture Around 1555

  The Reformation had an extremely strong effect even on the areas which stayed rather aloof from it.

  There had not been much to spoil in poetry as far as is discernible in literature before 1517. And now there at least was the Protestant church hymn, and the language had been refined by Luther. But earlier there had been Catholic church hymns as well. Moreover, in all of literature in general, the intercourse, the cohesion of all German lands was extraordinarily heightened; everything, including poetry, was now much less provincial than before.

  The great sacrifice had to be made by sculpture and painting. With the fall of Catholicism both had lost nine-tenths of their occupation at a high point of their development, even before they had been able to take the step from achieved truth to life to perfect beauty. Now they were reduced to portraits, allegories, medallions, coats of arms, and the like. They were also too weak to achieve a live inward transformation of the Italian influence. No longer fructified by the best Italian art, they vacillate between affectation and unlovely realism, no longer capable of expressing with their own means the highest idealism of the nation.

  Only secular architecture was in a better state now. It displays an original transformation of the Italian Renaissance, an application to ideas which are still basically medieval, similar to what was done in France (Heidelberg, Offenbach, Mainz, Stuttgart, Bamberg, and other cities; after 1600, the castle at Munich, Aschaffenburg, and other things).

  Beside the theological squabbles within Protestantism, which were now raging insufferably, science, which was mainly in secular hands, manifested itself as one of the highest fruits of the intellect which had been awakened by the Reformation even more than by the Renaissance.

  There appeared a great and important interest in philology, with personalities like Joachim Camerarius, Hieronymus Wolf, and others, at whose disposal the Basel editions and publishers placed themselves. The study of Roman law was represented by, e.g., Gregor Haloander, medicine was advanced by Paracelsus and Vesalius, natural history by Conrad Gessner, and astronomy by Copernicus (1473–1543). In historical research and presentation there are Sleidan and the Magdeburg Centuriators in Germany, and in Switzerland, Tschudi, Stumpf, Anselm, and Pantaleon of Basel as translators and authors of historical works. In cosmography there are active such men as Sebastian Münster and Gerhard Mercator.

  67.

  On Camoëns’ Lusiads

  Camoëns was a great poet, full of passion for his cause, and was entitled to give form to the heroic story of Portugal.

  His cast of thought and enthusiasm are such and so suffuse the Lusiads from beginning to end that the colorful and curiously composed work seems all of a piece. And Camoëns wrote at a time when the whole strength that he apotheosizes was still alive.

  The entire epic is evenly permeated with the glory of Portugal and with patriotism, as a force still alive, not merely in retrospect, as with Italian epics about Scipio and the like. On the whole, everything has a purpose, something that had long since been impossible in Italy.

  It must be of great value to Portuguese families to be named in Camoëns. In Vasco da Gama’s expedition he comprises all of Portuguese history, previous and subsequent, in three great episodes: first, the kings before the lord of Melinde; then, the picture gallery of the heroes and generals on the boat; and finally, in the speech of Thetis, the discoverers, the viceroys, and others. It is an encyclopedia of glory, possessing which a real Portuguese can do without all the other literature of his country. Every poetic and universally human feature that is salvageable has been preserved in the Lusiads.

  It is a unique thing in literary history that here, in a historical rather than a semi-mythical period, there speaks a man who, in his person, is entirely a kindred spirit to his heroes and has had the amplest share in their battles, privations, and victories. Camoëns is accustomed to dealing blows to Mohammedans and Malabar Indians, probably fighting one against ten. No dust from the road whirls in his poem, but the salt of the sea; it is life on shipboard, sinewy, severely simple, fine-blooded, replete with martial fervor to the point of extreme fanaticism. It, too, is austere. Nothing but the roaring of the sea and the clangor of arms is audible.

  He repeatedly voices profound complaints about his nation’s harsh, austere insensitivity to poetry; it is still wholly caught up in acting and acquiring and is not yet ready to listen. And yet he expressed its feeling clearly and completely at a time which still tolerated true feeling. And only today, when people talk much more about poetry, would he be completely lost; the cities would either ignore him or seize upon his palpable imperfections and finish him off.

  Camoëns still satisfied the best of his times and of his nation. There is no longer any satisfying the best of our times!

  Os Lusiades, the Lusitanians! It is the whole glory of the nation, but simply more or less loosely tied onto one central point, the voyage of Vasco da Gama.

  To portray each of da Gama’s colleagues individually would have been not only superfluous but impossible, since every time the same Portuguese hero would have emerged. The composition of the epic as a whole is completely sui generis.

  Camoëns utilizes the old world of the gods, to be sure, without having any ideas of whom he is dealing with.

  About the Spaniards he is almost completely silent.

  Further, he expresses his thought not only in the actions and speeches of his heroes, but also directly, and these passages are among the most powerful. The erstwhile lyric poet becomes a Jeremiah and prophet against the mighty, the courtiers, fawners, epicureans, even against wicked priests. At the end he addresses a very earnest exhortation to Don Sebastian to seek for the tremendously brave and devoted nation more liberal laws and better ministers. He offers himself to Alexander as an adviser on the expedition to Africa.

  Camoëns is not a poet for an entire civilized world, as was Homer. The culture of all later times does depend on Greek, but not on Portuguese, culture. Also, he is not for all moods, but national, narrow, obtrusive! But he was of inestimable value to a nation sentenced to early, undeserved bondage.

  A national drama was not granted to this nation. But before the Spanish conquest Camoëns compressed all the stirring moments of its great history into his Lusiads.

  Perhaps the epic had an invisible and yet substantial share in the uprising against the Spaniards in 1640.

  68.

  On the Counter Reformation

  Its originators and further propagators had the best consciences in the world, such as one can have only when one puts an end to an enormous wrong, an unparalleled spoliation. Moreover, they were at least as confident of their Christianity as were their adversaries. Their task was not by any means merely a cancellation, but primarily the prevention of further collapse. They entered in the middle of such a process and pitted themselves against it. What must have substantially sustained the leaders among them was the vision before their inner eye of a church that was renewed, purified, and oriented toward religious forces. In personal dedication they were fully equal to their opponents. The only thing lacking was for the papacy to come substantially under their guidance, indeed, into their hands.

  German and Swiss Protestantism had from the outset indulged in those things that one can permit oneself in the certainty of being the stronger forever. Now it was to be revealed that this was by no means such an absolute thing.

  That reform within the church which Luther had made impossible after 1520 now actually came about, but under the auspices of the papacy itself. The transformation of the world that had emanated from Germany necessitated an inner restoration of the church which then received the help, albeit selfish, of powerful states. Meanwhile there broke out world wars in which the two religions became the mainspring and the battle cry. And now the old church could in many countries be saved completely again and develop its new style.

  69.

  St. Ignatius Loyola

  He was born in Guipúzcoa and was thus a Castilian, something not without value for his career. As an officer he was extraordinarily ambitious; he swept the others along in maintaining the defense of Pamplona.

  It certainly made some difference that he possessed, on the one hand, the bearing and habit of power of an officer and, on the other, the general background of a man of culture and station. In his conduct toward people of all kinds, even powerful ones, he was then not subject to the sudden changes and unpredictable behavior which commonly appear in a man who has risen from the bottom, from peasant or urban stock.

  How much did he associate with the court of the reyes católicos [Catholic kings]? He gives us no evidence of this later.

  His further career is hard to unify psychologically and presupposes a highly extraordinary, certainly iron personality. He had to complete his pilgrim’s life of contemplation and penance. With the vast majority of men there would then have remained only a mendicant or a hermit. What kept him on top must have been, apart from an iron constitution, the joys of mysticism.

  To make up for that, he was spared the doctrinal toil of the reformers, the disputes about nuances of faith and exegesis. In a highly desultory fashion he caught up on his studies as an obligation, because he had to become a priest at any price.

  His danger was an impulse toward preaching and pastoral pursuits before he was entitled to them. But the inquisitors, who examined him about five times in Spain and France, must each time have quickly convinced themselves of his complete orthodoxy.

  His power lay in the fact that he was able early to gather around him companions of subsequent significance, make them completely submissive to himself, and inspire them. He swept along Contarini and Caraffa.

  It is a very extraordinary thing that he did not found an order of penance, such as the Trappist order, but an entirely practical one, apparently with extreme intellectual effort, though directed by visions. Here there emerges the old officer. Instead of choir service there resulted a widely varied outside activity.

  But in addition he harbored a firm belief in a periodic spiritual regimen or diet: exercitia spiritualia [spiritual discipline]. Anyone who underwent it then thought like St. Ignatius. It was no cramming in of a certain mass of knowledge for an examination, because such knowledge one might later throw away with disgust.

  For the time being, this order was confirmed at a moment when one wanted to let all existing orders perish as degenerate.

  It was utterly impossible to establish a competing institution with-in Protestantism, whereas the Jesuits were able to induce precisely their most gifted pupils to remain in the order, because they felt happiest there.

  70.

  The Jesuits

  Any mere examination of the institutions and the discipline of the order, as based on the constitutiones and the exercitia spiritualia increases our understanding only moderately. Institutions were not lacking in the other orders, either; but the Jesuits lived by them in the decisive periods. Other orders, too, had in stock asseverations and precepts, especially as to obedience.

  All very powerful orders are centralistic in effect and are parallels and props of the papal system—for instance, in the thirteenth century the mendicant orders, a veritable undoing for bishops and priests. The Jesuits then made a special cult of the papacy.

  Around the middle of the sixteenth century the dangerous situation of the universal church definitely demanded a stronger, more constant activity from the center and a greater availability of ecclesiastical resources in all countries. The Jesuits and the Council of Trent achieved this.

  A half-unconscious total will, stronger than the intentions and calculations of Ignatius, his colleagues, and the popes, drove the phenomenon to the fore.

  When St. Ignatius (his physiognomy was uncanny!) arrived in Venice in 1537 with companions and good recommendations to the Spanish Embassy, he hoped for the friendship of Contarini and Caraffa. But the latter took him for a swindler and would have nothing to do with him. Contarini, on the other hand, was soon bewitched by him and became his protector. In October of 1538 he set out for Rome, with Contarini’s recommendation to the pope himself. After strong resistance Ignatius prevailed. On September 27, 1540, Paul III sanctioned the founding of the order.

  Strong influences from Ignatius’ military past might have shaped the idea of absolute subordination that is characteristic of his discipline. St. Pachomius and St. Martin of Tours had also been officers.

  The decisive thing about Jesuitism is that it established close contact between the Spanish reform and its way of thinking and the Roman papacy. Henceforth we are concerned with the universal church. Nevertheless, Charles V and Philip II might still have been of the opinion that they knew how to guard the interests of religion and church better than the popes.

  The Jesuits are the strongest idealizers of papal power, the infallible teaching office, the universal episcopate, and papal world dominion.

  To what extent did Ignatius himself realize the significance of his foundation?

  71.

  The Jesuits and the Papacy

  A founder who combined a fanatic’s devotion to the church with a mind of military obedience and a few, mostly Spanish, colleagues whom one at first encounters mainly as theologians (Salmerón, Lainez): these were the beginnings.

  Except in Portugal under John III, the dissemination of the order did not even take place very rapidly, and not without resistance even in Spain.

  However, the order unfolds a great, intensive life. It gains a disproportionately large number of members who can be put to a variety of practical uses and quickly becomes the driving element of the church.

  This church it recognizes substantially in the papacy, and therefore it raises the papal theory to the highest point. In this way it also gains an influence over the papacy, as the mendicant orders did once, and like them has a centralistic influence. In times of struggle it becomes indispensable through the absolute homogeneity of will and the availability and uniformity of its membership.

  At such times mere fanaticism does not suffice if it is bound up with fatuous self-will and passion; there must be disciplined fanaticism. The danger lay in the possibility that some day the order would regard as its purpose itself, its own existence and power, instead of the church.

  The resistance which the Jesuits encountered at the University of Paris for a time at first probably derived somewhat from Gallicanism as well as from the fear that they might monopolize the legacies, but mainly “d’aspirer à ruiner l’enseignement salarié de l’Université par leur renseignement gratuit …” [aim at ruining the paid teaching of the University by their free teaching]. However, their Collège de Clermont, Rue St. Jacques, which opened in 1564, maintained itself, but without being attached to the University.

  Regarding the power of the Jesuits: It is not so hard for firmly united, clever, and courageous men to do great things in the world. Ten such men affect 100,000, because the great mass of the people have only acquisition, enjoyment, vanity, and the like in their heads, while those ten men always work together.

  72.

  The Third Council of Trent (1562–1563)

  (I) It may have been clear to only a few people, perhaps especially to Pius IV (he kept the council from screaming for a long time) and the real church politicians, how enormously important and urgent the goal was, namely, to create a harmonious formula for the reconquest of the world and put an end to the provisional situation behind which all enemies could hide. The seeming efforts to invite Protestant governments as well were not serious.

  The major difficulty resulted from the facts that Paul IV had embittered all Catholic governments through his manners and that the papacy had to fight with their greedy special desires as well as their actual problems.

  France was at the same time going through its first religious war, and its government, which had been pushed so far to the left even in 1560–1561, at the moment desired great concessions, especially in ritual, in order to impress its Huguenots, too. At the same time it had to maintain its sham glory that everybody at Trent had to dance to its tune; hence the behavior of the pompous Cardinal Guise. Bavaria and Ferdinand I were in a real predicament because Protestantism had penetrated, and Ferdinand was still soured because of Paul IV. Philip II, however, assumed a darkly threatening mien in order to blackmail the worried papacy into further confiscations of church property, a crusade bull, and other things. But then the Spanish bishops propounded the theory, about which the king, too, might possibly have had misgivings, that the episcopate derived directly from Christ and was a divine institution. Finally, there was in reserve the always irritating question as to whether the council was not higher than the pope. And the concrete Pius IV could die durante concilio [while the council was going on]!

  But the big difference between the third Council of Trent and the first and second was that in the meantime the spirit of the Catholic reform had rapidly become stronger and no longer trembled before the velleities of a council, but dared to win through the council. The atrocious talk about the curia and the clergy had exhausted itself in the first and second councils; now people were no longer afraid of it.

  (II) The result had thus been achieved through an understanding between the papacy and the great Catholic courts which had recognized the homogeneity of the papal power and their own as well as the partial identity of their interests, and, begrudging the council any embarrassing initiative independent of themselves, desired its shortening (could Philip II alone have wished for its prolongation?).

  The most important thing was that now orthodox dynasties as well as the curia and the inquisition had a definite coercive formula by which the world could be bound. Only now were they able to pass from the long defensive to a regular offensive.

  Church discipline was renewed; the power of excommunication was strengthened; seminaries were established and subjected to every strictness; the parishes were regulated. Regular diocesan and provincial synods were at least desired, as was the visitation of churches. Definite norms were set up for sacraments and sermons. The participation of monks in ecclesiastical life was regulated. The bishops were disciplined and had to sign and swear to a special document regarding the observation of the Tridentine Decrees and complete obedience to the pope. Then the bishops’ own authority to punish was defined. In addition to the bishop’s oath, every cleric now had to make a professio fidei Tridentina [Tridentine profession of faith].

  The papal theory had hardly been touched at the council, and papal power had been expanded rather than limited. The authorization to interpret the Tridentine Decrees for all eternity became exceedingly important. The abuses lucrative for Rome had only been affected slightly, and the appeals and dispensations curtailed somewhat. On the other hand, the annates and the pope’s rights over the bishops remained unchanged.

  And now there also came into being a new church architecture and a corresponding church style; for the entire ceremonial service had been retained.

  Catholicism has since then been “stationary,” but certainly to its benefit; for now it was also secured against sinking still deeper into dull superstition and brutalization of the holiness of good works, the doctrine of indulgences, and so on. As for indulgences, trading in them at least was prohibited. To be sure, instead of scholasticism there soon appeared casuistry.

  Lutheranism was also stationary, and Calvinism became so. All the religions of the time prohibited their own further development, their “progress.” Toward the outside, stationary Catholicism began to live all the more through its forces of the Counter Reformation, which were now tremendously disciplined and applied to definite purposes.

  The effect of the Reformation upon the Catholic church had been a beneficial one. With the strict sifting of the doctrine at Trent (henceforth there are no more marginal doctrines and waverings) and the complete crystallization there takes place a rejuvenation in other ways as well.

  The permission of the lay chalice had been left at the papacy’s discretion. In 1564 Emperor Ferdinand and Albrecht of Bavaria actually requested this permission from the pope, but no longer needed to make it an actuality. The Counter Reformation was marching rapidly.

  73.

  The Popes of the Counter Reformation

  The terrible popes after Paul IV were indispensable for the curia primarily because without true terrorism it would have mocked at any reforms, as, for instance, vis-à-vis Adrian VI. As long as it could hope to get a mild pope through poisoning wine and other methods, nothing could be done.

  74.

  On the German Counter Reformation

  The wry faces with which German seminaries and Benedictines greeted the Jesuits in the beginning were unjustified. For without the effectiveness of the Jesuits they might have succumbed, one after the other, to the Protestants and to secularization.

  75.

  France in the Year 1562

  The Catholics, too, were a popular party here, just like the Huguenots.

  The great and sudden danger was that the state power, upon which everything depends in France more than anywhere else, had not been strong enough to prevent the arising of two popular masses where two distinguished parties already existed. Despite all her desire to keep above both, Catherine de Medici was forced actually to veer about between the two.

  However, for the military heads of both masses the chances were rather uneven. The Huguenots must have known that in general they would be the weaker by far, while for the Guises the civil war, i.e., the beginning of the voies de fait [assault and battery] was the most convenient means of stopping at any time mere deliberations which ended with concessions, to take control, and in the decisive moments to pull the royal house after them.

  The only question was to what extent the dissolution of the normal state power and its administration would spread.

  Added to this were the unabashed foreign alliances and the foreign recruiting of both parties.

  There are nations, religions, and parties which endure minorities and some which do not. Of the French the latter is true, no matter what is concerned.

  76.

  After St. Bartholomew’s Night

  The refugees and pamphleteers recognized only a religious intention of the action and devised an agreement with the pope and Spain for the eradication of Protestantism as a whole.

  However, the action had been aimed at the Huguenots, who were allied with the politiques, as a political party, especially at Coligny, not as Protestant, but as party head. If the intent had been merely religious, Navarre and Condé would not have been spared.

  Regarding the murders in the provinces, it may be remarked that they did not occur at all in precisely those provinces administered by the Guises and their followers—in Picardy, Champagne, Brittany, Dauphiné, Auvergne, Languedoc, Provence. Nothing happened anywhere in the open country.

  Where murders were committed, this was because people in the cities concerned had feared armed uprisings and raids by Huguenots with which religious wars had always started. Especially in Lyon people were worried about this. Following the news of the defeat of Mons, a list of the Protestant citizens and their servants was made in Lyon, and those who were not citizens were ordered to leave the city. Governor Mandelot was completely loyal to the king. After the decision of Mons the governors of the most important towns, almost all fortified ones, were commanded to provide for their safety.

  To be sure, here, too, the fanatical rabble interfered and continued even after the king had ordered a stop; thus it was in Meaux, Orleans, Bourges, and Lyon. In Rouen and Toulouse the persecution did not break out until the middle of September. In the entire country there were maybe 20,000 casualties. The number of communities decreased little; as late as 1576 there were 2000.

  Only if one does not lose sight of the essentially political character of the massacre of St. Bartholomew does one comprehend the following: that the French government did not join with Philip II; that it did not pass into the hands of the Guises whom Charles continued to hate; that Charles IX in the Declarations of August 26 and 28, in which he takes the responsibility for everything, declares that the Edict of St. Germain remains in force. But the Huguenot ritual practices were curtailed, “for the protection of the Protestants themselves from mob excesses,” as was explained for the benefit of foreign countries. The Montmorencys remained in the royal council. Philip and Alba for the time being were pacified by the court’s complete dissociation from Coligny’s Netherlands activities; but the desire for Flanders continued, with only its fulfillment postponed. Geneva, in its concern over Savoy and Spain, was hastily assured of French protection, and soon negotiations with Orange were being carried on again. The project of a marriage between Elizabeth of England and François d’Alençon, the brother of Charles IX, continued on its course. Where is it that one reads about Elizabeth receiving the French envoy in mourning? She was the first to congratulate Charles IX on the averted danger!

  In Poland the French court constantly leaned on the Protestant faction in order to accomplish the election of the Anjou. To frustrate this became a major assignment of the refugee Huguenot writers, especially in Geneva: Hotman, Donneau. They painted the conduct of the royal house and the Guises in the most horrible colors.

  That the king took everything upon himself and asserted categorically that the Guises and others had acted on his orders was a formal French practice, on account of the prevalent idea that nothing could happen except by royal order. He fabricated a four-year premeditation on top of that.

  Later, when the Huguenots had gained the upper hand again and the court had turned against the Guises (1576), Charles’s share was decreased again and the action itself disavowed. Later still, under the Bourbons, the Valois were treated with consideration and left out of the picture, and the murder plan was laid at the door of the Guises.

  The main sorrow in the period of 1572, however, did not pertain to the number of casualties or the perfidy of the proceedings, but to the frustration of the great seizure of power by the party which had been about to seize the crown, take Belgium, and push Catholicism back over the Alps and the Pyrenees. This frustration was la grande trahison [the great betrayal].

  Instead of this, the court continued with the policies of Henry II: repression of Protestantism at home and Protestant alliances abroad.

  The court thought it had by no means committed a “crime” that would have to be palliated, neither Charles nor Anjou nor Catherine de Medici nor the Guises and the fanatical citizens of Paris. No one denied his participation, except the court later, and then for political rather than moral reasons.

  77.

  Murder as an Expedient

  It stands to reason that in the absence of any legal recourse one judges one’s own cause and that a government or an individual undertakes the destruction of an adversary.

  The next nuance would be that one could arrest one’s opponent, but not judge him without dangerous currents of feeling, uprisings, and other consequences, and that as a rule one would be too late to thwart plots and the like. Here applies the saying: Salus reipublicae suprema lex esto [the safety of the state shall be the supreme law].

  Not only princes indulged in murder, especially after the latter part of the Middle Ages, but also cities, such as Augsburg and others; secret agents were kept for this sort of thing. In the sixteenth century Ferdinand I had Martinucci killed, and Philip II Escovedo. In addition, the supposed secret executions “on the black velvet” should be mentioned.

  The second side of this is the scholarly and at times also popular view that tyrannicide is permissible, even commendable.

  On this they all agree: “gentle” Melanchthon and even Luther. The former desires it against Henry VIII, after the execution of Thomas Cromwell. Later the Jesuits represented a corresponding view.

  Religious zeal unfailingly produces this phenomenon and its commendation on both sides. In 1563, when their cause was extremely hard pressed, the Huguenot preachers saw their only salvation in the murdering of François de Guise and publicly praised Poltrot as a tool of God. Later it happened likewise on the Catholic side with Jacques Clément, the murderer of King Henry III.

  78.

  The Special Character of the French Court

  It consists in the king’s always being surrounded by factions which divide favors and offices among themselves, or get everything into their hands, if possible.

  The parties at the court of Philip II, such as those of Alba and of Ruy Gomez in their contrast, are of a quite different kind, and the country need not find out about it. The Tudors, including Elizabeth, completely dominate their court, according to their own changing caprices. Here only the minority of Edward VI made a difference.

  At the French court the women are powerful, and not the queens. Catherine de Medici becomes something only as a regent. Around the court there is general and continual gossip, a general attentiveness to the chances for favor or disfavor. It was the subsequent misfortune of the royal house that the crown got into a “false position,” like anyone who is to represent right or fairness, i.e., the permanent interests of the nation among raging factions. In the face of passions, the representative of right has always been in such a position.

  On the course and the result of the French religious wars depended the religious fate of the entire West. France determined the continuation, or restoration, of Catholicism in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, even its safeguarding in Italy and Spain, at least indirectly. Things would have happened differently everywhere if France had become Huguenot.

  But in that case things could have turned out rather strikingly! The Huguenot king would have got into the hands of a fanatical Huguenot preacher faction and been forced to act toward all of Europe as an intervening and conquering Calvinist caliph—a Calvinist Louis XIV. For all around people would have had cause (n.b. toward Lutherans as well) “de venger Dieu et sa sainte église” [to avenge God and His holy church], and the preachers had within themselves the never-extinguished passion against everything that was different from the way they were. However, the French nation could, as always, have been appeased only by constant successes on the outside.

  79.

  On the Conversion of Henry IV

  Once Henry IV had, through Henry III’s death, become king not only of the Huguenots but also of the Catholic royalists, his conversion had to come as well; he was being crowded.

  He was, above all, a king and a Frenchman; the rest had to follow. After 1560 the Huguenots were an armed political party like any other.

  The possibility of a Gallican patriarchy was a mere dream at that time; Henry IV was no Henry Tudor and did not live on an island; the Tridentine Counter Reformation with its positive zeal was already flooding ’round all religious relationships.

  Added to this was the general exhaustion, including that of the Huguenots. Gabrielle d’Estrées was converted, too, and after the end of 1591 Henry’s own mind must have been made up. His ministres courtisans [courtier ministers] must intentionally defend the Huguenot faith only weakly in disputations. Even Duplessis-Mornay let himself be involved in a matter of conversion (to what extent was he really beguiled?). Sully later even boasts of having done his share for conversion. The written dissuasions of Beza, the spiritual adviser of Gabriel d’Amour and others, were in vain, as were those of d’Aubigné who wanted to make the king understand in conversation that it was “better to be king in a corner of France and to serve God and be surrounded with loyal servants than … etc.”

  Henry IV took Catholic instruction, i.e., a six-hour conversation, and on July 25, 1593, ceremoniously renounced heresy at St. Denis. Crowds of Parisians looked on, in spite of Mayenne’s order to close the gates and the declaration of nullity by the papal legate.

  Despite his best inner intentions in favor of the Huguenots, henceforth there existed in Henry an ill-feeling against them and their complaints. At the same time, however, he had to take care of them, since now there were various new attacks on them. Sully remained a Protestant, possibly out of arrogance; in general Henry IV very much desired the conversion of others.

  The absolution by Clement VIII tore apart the Spanish plans for world hegemony. This had been counseled by San Filippo Neri, Baronius, the Jesuit general Francesco Toledo (although a Spaniard), the government of Venice, and others.

  Before the Edict of Nantes there were in France over a hundred terre chiuse [closed lands] and about a thousand parrochie e monasterii [parishes and monasteries]. Catholic ritual had ceased entirely.

  The Edict of Nantes was a necessary and unavoidable confirmation of a state of truce in which all factions were to be included.

  To be sure, it marks the beginning of the decline of French Protestantism; its fruitfulness ceases. It exists notoriously as a minority and delimited, and must remain so, but at the same time it must greatly burden itself with secular, political affairs, now methodically and perpetually. In this it remains at an increasing disadvantage with the henceforth very bigoted governments and the clergy.

  A paradox: the greatest boon for the Huguenot community was not the Edict of Nantes, but its revocation.

  80.

  Holland

  (I) The northern provinces consisted of Holland, Zeeland, West Friesland, Utrecht, Overyssel, Groningen, Gelderland, also of the Lands General, a large section of Northern Brabant, and sections of Flanders. These were always treated as conquered territory, were a sort of common prefecture comparable to the Swiss subject lands. Up to the sixteenth century these regions were little noticed; after their fight against Spanish rule—detachment from Spain and Calvinism went hand in hand—their fame was great. Here was a new nation, a new culture, a new world power; in battle it always seemed to gain new strength. On its success visibly depended the whole fate of Western Europe.

  For two decades this entire development hinged on William of Orange; without him neither the rise nor its continuation would be conceivable. Spain itself acknowledged this through the high price on his head. When he was finally murdered, his people had advanced so far and England was so dependent on their salvation that the defense continued most vigorously, albeit amid great new perils, until the fate of the Armada gave the Dutch breathing space.

  They were not popular on the outside, having the reputation of being overconfident and harboring unkind feelings toward the Germans in particular (in 1582 people thought they had poisoned the herring). Charles V had practically detached the Burgundian circle from the German empire.

  Spain kept regarding them as people committing high treason and deserving of extermination, against whom any methods were permissible. However, the campaigns of Maurice of Orange liberated the northern provinces from the Spanish rule.

  Of the powers which had freed themselves from Philip II’s grasp, France had already made peace in 1598; England had desired it for a long time and made it in 1604; Holland alone continued to fight for the time being, in even greater danger since Spain’s hands were otherwise free, but actually protected by Henry IV. And yet the war had its advantages along with great sacrifices.

  Little Holland, which was constantly fighting with the sea, had what may have been the strongest “will to live” of all times.

  (II) On the federal constitution of the Netherlands. It is the epitome of nothing but practical usage which lives on because it is really alive and because people hesitate to replace it with uniform freedom and universal permissiveness whereby the real inner strength might be damaged.

  81.

  Mary Stuart

  (I) Mary Stuart is the child of a dynasty which in a poor country fought with a fearsome nobility that in the form of clan chieftains was able to sway the people.

  The first four Jameses all died violent deaths, and Mary’s father James V at least died of grief in 1542 when the nobility left him at the moment when he was supposed to fight the English. At that time the child was a few days old. James’s widow and Mary’s mother was Marie de Guise. In 1538 the Guises had succeeded in getting one of themselves onto a throne.

  From the outset, all sorts of plans were connected with the child Mary. On his mission to Scotland in 1547, Edward Seymour did not succeed in effecting an engagement with Edward VI, who was her senior by only five years, because the Scots, although at a disadvantage, did not let him extort their princess from them. And now the Guises decided to make this niece, who was already Queen of Scots, the Queen of France. Thus Mary was brought up at the French court and married to the dauphin Francis during the last part of the war of St. Quentin.

  Did the adoption of the title and coats of arms of England take place at that time or a little later, only through the will of the Guises or of Henry II? It was this deal which Paul IV wanted to decide.

  This drove Elizabeth toward Protestantism. Scotland itself, however, was the most unsteady ground for ambitious dynastic plans.

  Protestantism penetrated there, and against it the crown and the clergy certainly stuck together. But while the desire for robbing churches might already have been stirring in the Scottish nobility, it had to happen that Scotland produced one of the most ruthless Calvinists who must have made an extremely great personal impression: John Knox. Under the regent, since 1554 Marie de Guise, he had fled, returning in 1559. At the end of May of the same year, the convents were stormed. The loot from this was distributed among the congregation of the nobility, which made any Catholic royalty almost impossible. The regent, however, offered open resistance with French aid.

  And now Knox had to do what no Scottish “people’s” party had ever done: apply to England for aid. After some scruples, Elizabeth sent ships and Knox’s faction was able to maintain itself. Elizabeth made a treaty with the Scottish lords in order to drive the French from Scotland. Shortly before this the regent had died (June, 1560).

  (II) A queen in the most insecure position has been on trial to this day.

  To some she is the idolatrous Jezebel who conspired with Spain and the pope to make Scotland Catholic again by trickery and force. To others she is the object of infinite sympathy and, especially later, of boundless compassion, and this is where poetry has entered.

  In any case, the extent of Mary Stuart’s actual participation in events must be greatly limited. The really powerful elements were the Scottish chieftains with their clans, and even Knox had no power over them once they had safeguarded their church spoils. Why and according to what inner impulses these people act in each case is as uncertain as it is with savages.

  A part of this clique, in association with the expelled Murray, Mary’s illegitimate half-brother, murdered Rizzio at the royal table on March 9, 1566. Now there really is proof that Rizzio was the mediator for papal and Spanish contacts with Mary Stuart. But it is madness to speak of the possibility of a Catholic restoration in Scotland in 1566, at a time when the second religious war was approaching in France, and in the Netherlands the great Gueux uprising. The only certain things are that for some reason the clique wanted to frighten and humiliate the queen very deeply, and that Rizzio was in its way.

  The motive given for the participation of Darnley is that Rizzio withheld the matrimonial crown from him. That he had knowledge of the plot is almost a matter of indifference, considering his slight personality. The plot against Darnley himself, as it was carried out on February 10, 1567, was, according to more recent students, the doing of the same clique. The queen saw something coming, remained passive, and had to let things happen. It is quite erroneous to believe that she promoted or instigated the death of her spouse because a divorce would not have been feasible on account of the young prince. At any rate, Darnley was not killed merely for his own sake, but because he was in the way of the clique materially.

  There followed Bothwell’s divorce and marriage to Mary Stuart.

  82.

  On Elizabeth of England

  (I) After the battle of Bosworth the Tudors were able to base their power substantially on the nation’s repugnance for any further civil war. People were willing to put up with anything but a fight between heads of factions. They gave up parliamentary rights and safeguards against judicial arbitrariness, even the salvation of their souls, if only there was a strong government that steered the ship of state with a firm hand. Where it was going did not matter so much. In this sense, actually only Edward VI’s reign had been dangerous, because factious heads were fighting again; right after that, the absolutist Mary was again allowed to do anything she pleased.

  Through the question of succession Elizabeth not only gets on the side of Western European Protestantism, but also becomes its head. With the Tudors’ system of eradicating all possible claimants to the succession in the country itself, the dynasty finally devolves on one person. Besides, the Stuarts of Scotland are undeniably the nearest heirs. But Elizabeth does not want the question of succession to be dealt with at all. Mary Stuart, who has fled to England, is arrested and eventually beheaded; James VI, however, for the time being remains but a very doubtful successor.

  Then the old maid, without allies, passes the great test in the form of the Armada. To be sure, we do not know what might have happened without the helpful storm in the Channel. Now her welfare and that of the overwhelming majority of the nation were bound up together.

  (II) Elizabeth, who had inherited papal hatred from Mary, was driven to defection from Rome and to the creed of Edward VI by the pope’s foolish claims to refereeship and church property.

  It was to her advantage that in the name of the queen of Scotland, who was at the same time the dauphine of France and niece of the Guises, claims were laid to England, namely, immediate possession of the English throne, in which Henry II and the Guises played their daring game.

  After some reflection, Elizabeth found within herself the strength and the stubbornness of her father. Yet her own religiosity was highly dubious, to say nothing of her creed. She saw through the clergy and knew that it followed her. She counted on an insular and anti-Roman frame of mind, exploited the odium of the Francophile Paul IV, and ventured to decide, although she was in favor of celibacy.

  As for the religious creed, complete supremacy was enforced. Elizabeth was the sole fount of truth and every authorization. This made the Catholics who remained Roman guilty of high treason ipso facto, even if they kept perfectly quiet. The serious Calvinists, i.e., the Puritans, then realized that the noose they had helped put around the Catholics’ necks was now around their own as well. Elizabeth brooked no “deviation.” The persecutions did not stop short of the scaffold.

  Her coerced Parliament went along with her, and henceforth she had nothing but devoted parliaments, although she let go at them as at a pack of dogs, and the courts and administration were violent and at times truly depraved. England prospered materially and became a great active European power, even with meager help from abroad. Her small standing army proved that even though she was not popular, she was at least safe from internal disturbances. However, it sufficed thoughtful Englishmen to have a government that was strong enough not to become the plaything of aristocratic factions.

  Elizabeth’s personality was hardly tolerable. One simply was not allowed to laugh. But her main characteristic was a queenly one: strength of soul. When she trembled, at least no one was aware of it. In her one notices as little as in her father that she might have been emotionally dependent on anyone for support and consolation.

  Her ministers, above all Cecil and Burleigh, were in the fortunate position of knowing their interests to be generally identical with the queen’s. At the worst they would have been destroyed together with her. There existed a veritable complicity, and Elizabeth, for her part, did change favorites, but not workers.

  83.

  The Age of Elizabeth

  Between the allegory of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596) and the pastoralism of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia Shakespeare stands quite alone and also at a great distance from the other dramatists.

  His public consisted of only two poles of society: the young nobility and the lower classes. The theater was growing only moderately, considering the size of London at that time; it was already considered not respectable (while, actually, the “respectable” nation was too dull for it). The court gave it only the attention that befitted its position, so that this sort of entertainment might not be lacking. Elizabeth took scarcely any notice of Shakespeare, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, which he wrote at her command, is one of his weaker plays. In the provinces there seems to have been no theater whatever, at a time when there were theaters throughout Spain. Shakespeare is a veritable windfall for England. If he had never existed, his age would not have missed him. Soon he was completely forgotten and was not revived until much later.

  Rümelin (in his Shakespearestudien) demonstrates that Shakespeare’s knowledge of life was more divinatory, inwardly intuitive than empirical.

  In the key plays the outlook on life is profoundly melancholy. From this somber background there stand out jest, humor, and beautiful fantasy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream; especially The Tempest with its distribution of evil; King Richard III and Macbeth, too, are quite clearly shaded right into the darkest black; the comedies with melancholy background include As You Like It).

  From this outlook on life, the characters are all “justified” as long as they stand in front of us and talk.

  Shakespeare not merely disposes of the vanity of this world in contemplative verses (although he has these in profusion), like Saadi and Hafiz, but he sketches the great, detailed, multiform picture of this world. Would he also have done this as a mere published author? Fortunately he was a theater man and an actor.

  There has been endless research on Hamlet and on what Shakespeare intended and meant by this work. Every reader sees a different picture in it, and a new one at each reading. And the main thing is that he desires to read it again and again.

  Shakespeare had a different key to the nature of man from that of any poet before or after him.

  The present-day squabble over whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic is delightful. At any rate, he was not a Puritan.

  It was probably of decisive importance that here as well as in Spain the theater consisted essentially of competing private enterprises (in Italy a court theater usually set the fashion with operas, pastorals, comedies in the conventional sense, and in addition there was little more than popular farce in the form of masked comedy). The English theater fortunately was not tied to any pomp.

  Englishmen in Germany trained German actors; Jakob Ayrer and his dramas were under their influence. Perhaps one reason why they were on the Continent was that at home they could hardly profit by their art any more.

  IV

  History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

  84.

  Introduction to the History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1598–1763)

  (I) [May 4, 1869.] The preceding lectures presented the break with the Middle Ages.

  The Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times differ in great, essential ways: In the former, there is the endless division of power and the still slight contrast among the nations; in the latter we have concentration of power, the wars of conquest with national development of power at any price, and the crude beginnings of the so-called state system.

  In the Middle Ages, moreover, there is a limitation to the European West and to ecclesiastical unity. In the age which succeeded them, the European nations spread over all continents, Catholicism is divided into great ecclesiastical parties whose conflicts threaten to absorb all other conflicts and affinities.

  At one time culture was determined by the church and was homogeneous all over Europe, partly because of the church, partly because of the specific spirit of the Middle Ages, and still differentiated by race. But now culture is refashioned out of antiquity and new research into nature, and alongside all ecclesiastical influences it is nevertheless secular in essence, as well as multiform nationally and yet highly individual.

  Now there takes place a truly endless crossing and entangling of all these strands. An unprecedented variety of life becomes characteristic, and this is developed further in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  The ordinary value judgment of history is in the habit of demanding the immediate and complete victory of one element. It cannot stand variety. Clerics of all denominations, fanatics of all denominations and non-denominations, popular philosophers, dynasts, and radical politicians who in history cannot stand the sight of rival forces and their fights demand one thing, completely and immediately, too, although this would make the world dead and colorless until those concerned killed one another out of sheer boredom or produced a new conflict. For it is an illusion to expect lasting contentment with any victory, something for which man lacks the organ anyway.

  Of course, man must in this life want and represent something definite, but must reserve higher judgment.

  One thing that we need not wish for but encounter as a reality, whether we rejoice at it or deplore it, is Europe as an old and new focus of multifarious life, a place where the richest formations originate, a home of all contrasts which dissolve into the one unity that here everything intellectual is given voice and expression.

  This is European: the self-expression of all forces, in monuments, pictures and words, institutions and parties, down to the individual; the full life of the intellect in all aspects and directions; the striving of the intellect to leave behind knowledge about everything that it experiences, not to surrender mutely to world monarchies and theocracies, as did the East with its monolithic monarchies. From a high and distant vantage point, such as a historian’s ought to be, bells harmonize beautifully, regardless of whether they may be in disharmony when heard from close by: Discordia concors [discord becomes harmony].

  The old peoples could have founded in Asia still more great, powerful empires, such as Iran and Assyria, one after the other, but every one of these would have had only one kind of strength, spirit, and tone, like other Oriental empires. They, too, had to exist as the soil of certain civilizations.

  An obscure impulse may have driven a few branches of the Indo- Europeans to the West, toward the setting sun, because here there were waiting for them a different soil and a different climate, that of freedom and variety, a craggy world of promontories and islands. For it is European to love not only power and idols and money, but also the spirit. They created the Hellenic, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic civilizations, and did so in constant transformations and conflicts which in the periods concerned were always painful, but ever accompanied by the release of new forces, unlike what happened in Byzantium, quite estimable in itself, where for seven hundred years the same revolution of throne and army kept repeating itself. These civilizations are far superior to the Asiatic ones by their being multiform and by the fact that in them the individual could develop fully and render the greatest service to the whole.

  The church created a great new framework for European life. Bound and yet infinitely free and myriad-formed, the Middle Ages and finally the transitional epoch rose into modern times, the fully expressive ones.

  History should rejoice at this profusion and leave the mere victor’s desires to those with an ax to grind. It is the function of history not to deplore this struggle of the European West, but to study and present it. From its vantage point, as high and free as possible, it perceives discordia as concors. It should rejoice at all forces of the past, not merely those that happen to be congenial to a contemporary decade, and regard them as riches. Considering the great violence of the struggles at that time and the desire for the destruction of the adversaries, we humane latecomers could not keep absolute sympathy with any side, not even the one we consider ours.

  A concealed supreme power here produces epochs, nations, and individuals of endlessly rich life.

  The development of the West has the most genuine characteristic of life: out of the struggle of its opposites something really new develops; new contrasts supplant the old; it is not a mere inconsequential, almost identical repetition of military, palace, and dynastic revolutions, as happened for seven hundred years in Byzantium and even longer in Islam. At each struggle people become different and give evidence of it; we have insight into a thousand individual souls and can date the styles of the spirit by decades, while at the same time national, religious, regional, and other elements add countless spiritual nuances. These things in their time were not pleasant and enjoyable, but struggles for life or death.

  Only one thing has always appeared to be fatal to Europe: crushing mechanical power, whether it emanated from a conquering barbarian people or from accumulated local instruments of power in the service of a single state (the ambition of Louis XIV) or of a single leveling tendency, be it political, religious, or social, such as the present-day masses. Against such crushing powers Europe will always gather its last strength, and it has always found its deliverers (William III of Orange).

  At that time there were no primitive barbarian forces or invading barbarians, with the exception of the Ottomans, and even they had been at a relative standstill since Suleiman II. Modern Russia was still a relatively small state and separated from Europe by a very large Poland. But the Spanish “world monarchy” did seem dangerous. The fight of all the others against it occupies the sixteenth century and part of the seventeenth. Added to the original elements of power of this world monarchy was its alliance with the strongest old faction, the Catholic church; thus it could hope to break through all merely political opposition.

  Under Philip II, once he was involved in the quarrels of the entire West, it became a fight between Spain and its dependencies, which for a considerable period included the Roman See, and the entire heretic world, based especially on the thirty years’ powerlessness of France which Philip promoted in every way so that France, too, might fall prey to him.

  (At this point a more detailed survey should be added, as an introduction to the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and continuing up to the Treaty of Vervins.)

  The saviors of Europe were not the greatest enemies of Rome, but the most persistent enemies of Spain: the Dutch, Catholic as well as Protestant England, and Henry IV, despite his conversion. The savior of Europe is, above all, he who saves it from the danger of an imposed politico-religious-social unity and forced leveling which threaten its special character, the varied richness of its spirit. It is a banal objection that the spirit is unconquerable and will always be victorious. Actually, it may depend on the particular degree of strength of one man at one certain moment whether peoples or civilizations are to be lost or not. Great individuals are needed, and they need success. But at moments of crisis Europe frequently did find great individuals.

  As the main content of this course of lectures the following might be set forth:

  From the beginning of the seventeenth century a growing inflammation from Germany and Austria can be noticed. The greatest individuals, Henry IV and Gustavus Adolphus, fell early, by violent death, at the moment when they saw their greatest ambition within their grasp. Spain, inwardly a corpse, again becomes a world power, just strong enough to interfere everywhere, but not to determine events. In 1612, 1626, and at other times France bows to Spanish policies, and Richelieu who frees the country from this domination is able to do it only through an inhumane regime on the inside, and Mazarin has to fight Spain once more de imperio [for the first position]. Italy, politically dead, lives only through its culture and no longer derives any benefit from the decline of Spain, until then its tyrannical master. Germany collapses in the misery of the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden and France have it at their disposal. To be sure, alongside this there is the highest flowering of Holland, and the English Revolution breaks out. Even though it was only a thinly disguised military revolution, it left the English people very powerful and inwardly in a condition in which no permanent forcible rule was any longer conceivable.

  However, once more Spain arises from the grave, and in its most dangerous guise, as a Hispanicized France under Louis XIV. (? The blame for this must no longer be placed on Spain.) The Spanish program is grafted onto a nation which possesses disproportionately more real means and a central location for the gagging of Europe. Once again there arises the danger of a Catholic world monarchy, and the opponents, too, have been infected by “sultanism.” The political repulse is accomplished in part through terrible wars whose physiognomy is almost entirely military, political, financial, and commercial, without the psyche of the peoples being clearly expressed in them.

  However, culturally France was victorious. Louis XIV brought it about that in the eighteenth century French becomes tantamount to European; to him France owes her general capacity for contagion.

  In the meantime, while the heritage of Spain was being fought for, Sweden, the same great power which had once wanted to form, with part of Germany, a great German-Scandinavian empire, was blown up in the air by a mad hero. Out of and beside the powerlessness of Sweden and Poland there arises Russia, starting with Peter the Great, immediately bent on shaking up and inciting the West and on its own business in the East. And Prussia, the last great power that was emerging with an unspeakable effort from the debris of Germany, after the Seven Years’ War must acknowledge itself as the permanent and inevitable ally of this Russia. Meanwhile England puts Holland in the shade as regards colonial and commercial greatness. Finally, with the aid of France, which had been humiliated in the Seven Years’ War and was thirsting for vengeance, there arose the beginnings of a future great power, North America.

  All this is happening as the great crisis of the entire old system of what we consider authoritarian states and religions approaches perceptibly and with strangely increasing clarity—the revolution.

  (II) [May 4, 1871.] The following may be said regarding the justification for the course of lectures as regards its scope, apart from its being recognized academically.

  Any limitation is really made only out of necessity. There is always something arbitrary in detaching one sequence or view from the stormy sea of world history, beginning with the most remote past and flowing on into the most distant future, and yet even a painter of seascapes proceeds no differently.

  But it is still arbitrary and dictated only by necessity to lift out of the great intellectual continuum of all things only one thing, out of all knowledge only one branch of knowledge, and to give it special treatment.

  Actually, we ought to live constantly in the intuition of the world as a whole. But this would require a superhuman intelligence that would be above temporal succession and spatial limitation, and yet in constant contemplative communion with it, and, on top of that, in sympathy with it.

  And when the starting and finishing points of a course have been established, the most arbitrary limitation has only begun.

  To be sure, from presentation to presentation there has evolved a certain consensus of treatment, for large-scale classification, evaluation of data according to their significance or lack of it, but in the main this applies to objective facts only.

  Now there arises the question as to the nature and quantity of what is to be imparted, according to what principle the lecturer should include or omit material. There is no uniform standard; in books standards differ greatly, on the platform they are limited. A writer has no necessary limits, but a speaker has.

  And this is where arbitrariness inevitably enters into the selection. Of all scholarly disciplines history is the most unscientific, because it possesses or can possess least of all an assured, approved method of selection; that is, critical research has a very definite method, but the presentation of it has not.

  It is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

  Every historian will have a special selection, a different criterion for what is worth communicating, according to his nationality, subjectivity, training, and period.

  Nevertheless, the chronological definition of this course has at least a relative justification. The Treaty of Vervins, with which we begin, marks a real intermission for all the chief peoples of Europe, such a suitable one as would not occur in history far and wide. And to conclude before the preliminaries to the French Revolution, perhaps with the Treaty of Hubertusburg, 1763, is imperative if a finish is to be made anywhere.

  Starting with the last decades before the French Revolution, events and personalities are of a specifically new kind, even though their origin from what preceded may be quite apparent to us. The classes of men and the number of people that participate in things now become substantially different from what they were previously.

  The Peace of Vervins and the time of Henry IV are the intermission between those two great periods of the Counter Reformation which may be named, after their main phenomena, those of the French religious wars and the Thirty Years’ War.

  Today all merely political and especially military events of the past are reduced in value by the events of our times. If the quantitative differences among events are great, the qualitative ones are especially so.

  At that time there was nothing but cabinet politics and cabinet wars. Now there are operative latent or open national movements and (to be sure, technically perfectly conceived and led) national wars and race wars (and in the end perhaps religious wars again).

  About the wars of those times one has the feeling, right or wrong, that the rulers could have waged them or abstained from them. Of present-day wars we suspect that they are undertaken in order to cut off revolutions or to channel them, something that need not always be successful, of course. Hence the slight current interest in, e.g., the wars of Louis XIV, with the possible exception of those moments in which a real popular movement is discernible among his opponents or allies— Holland, and Spain in the War of Succession.

  The relative contribution of the generals we cannot judge expertly, and we seldom get the expression of a great political tie-up with the military. Therefore anything military should be given only briefly, in the form of results; of the political elements, not every single intrigue should be noted, but only those in which there is expressed an agitation arising from actual conditions, one which has a connection with the past and the future.

  It will thus be our main task here to bring world history as close to intellectual history as is possible; there is an abundance of means for this. Viewed superficially, the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deals only with power relationships, but the intellect is present as well.

  To be omitted is the mere external debris of data, especially excerpts from dispatches and counter-dispatches. A subject worthier of consideration would be the cocky humor with which diplomacy and bold strokes alternate, particularly in the first decades of the eighteenth century; those were the times of Görtz, Dubois, Alberoni, and diplomats and courtiers of a similar kidney.

  (III) This course is in the nature of an “entracte,” or, rather, an “interlude.”

  In relation to the great beginnings of the modern world epoch after 1450 it is a continuation; in relation to the age of revolution it is only the termination of an earlier age and a preparation for the coming one. At the same time, however, it retains a wealth of specific interest. Not all ages can be of primary interest; the pulse beat of world history is a very uneven one. But here the movements are still powerful enough and the evidence for the entire external and spiritual existence is plentiful and, in part, of the highest caliber.

  In relation to the sixteenth century, the seventeenth has been designated as retarding, as a reaction. There is an impatient point of view for which world history does not move rapidly enough and which holds, for instance, that as early as the sixteenth century complete modernity wanted to appear and should have done so, and that the fight against these forces was nothing but a wasted effort. People simply call something progress and then deplore its prolonged failure to appear.

  If one asks such people whether they are satisfied with the goals now attained, they have a thousand different opinions, especially about the desirability of what has already been attained or is in process of coming into being, and one could invite them to agree for the time being on one opinion in this regard at least. And along with them there are other people, those who want still more.

  But for the present, history will do well to turn its back completely on mere desiderata and devote itself to contemplating and depicting as objectively as possible past struggles, conflicts, and multiplicity.

  For the life of the West is struggle.

  As far as he is personally concerned, a historian may not be able to separate himself from the struggle of his locality. As a man existing in time he must desire and represent some definite thing, but as an historian he must maintain a loftier view.

  A great many people get beside themselves if someone else has a different opinion and want to convert the other fellow as soon as they see a corner of his coat. But if one becomes silent or continues to express different opinions, one enjoys their hate or their pity, depending on their temperament. To be sure, we admit that forces opposed to our taste are forces as well, because they are palpably in front of us, but we do this with unspeakable wailing and abuse.

  The meddling of values in world history is as if in the sea of time one wave wanted to shout insults against all the other waves.

  (IV) [May 5, 1873.] The character of the spirit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is determined by the classes which were at that time the principal participants, and by the contemporary way of life in general.

  Most important, the state, with a few exceptions, is absolutistic or administered absolutistically. It is the time of authority rather than majority. Changes are not easily conceivable. Any striving for change is considered a crime as a matter of course, even in the non-monarchic states; in this respect, aristocracies are just as inexorable. Everything is calculated to last forever. People know nothing as yet of the mutability of all conditions.

  The classes are still separated by different rights. The only thing that encompasses all classes, the religions, is even in the eighteenth century somewhat in decline among the upper classes.

  Real estate is still generally non-transferable; capital, i.e., disposable values, is still in very moderate supply and of little service to industry.

  Despite all velleities toward the mercantile system on the part of individual states, the general tenor of life is still far from being an industrial one (the consequences of what people would like are often not even thought out; e.g., customs boundaries continue to exist within the great states themselves). The biggest business at the time is the overseas trade of some few colonial powers, not yet industry as such, as an untrammeled activity, an absolute material exploitation of the world. And where it does exist it is not yet in control and cannot unleash its fearsome competitive system on the nations.

  The middle class as a political force, e.g., in the German imperial cities and elsewhere, had either died out or shrunk completely. In art, literature, and way of life it does not set the tone anywhere, with the possible exception of Holland, but receives it from the other classes, whereas in the Middle Ages it had a culture of its own. And even in Holland the life of the upper classes is not so very bourgeois, but more aristocratic than is usually assumed.

  The predominant character of society is determined by aristocratic revenues, ground rents, state and army offices which belong to the particular caste, and ecclesiastical income. In individual instances, especially in weaker states, such an aristocracy becomes subject to corruption by foreign cabinets out of a desire for display (Sweden, at times even England), and in the strongest states it is certainly highly dependent on its own potentate; almost nowhere is it an element of political freedom any more, except for the better times of the English nobility. But its social significance was still very great, greater even than it had been around 1500. For at that time there still existed a bourgeois culture in the North and an aristocratic-bourgeois one in Italy. Above all, this aristocratic society is still Western and not merely national. The aristocrats are still as close to one another throughout Europe as they are to their own states.

  Their life is made up of leisure and the activities that are considered aristocratic, like military service, individual heroism, famous love affairs. Despite the often very dissolute living, social intercourse in the eighteenth century is more refined, more generous, and intellectually livelier than it has ever been since. People still have time to read, i.e., for lively intellectual intercourse. They have not yet surrendered to business.

  Talent, no matter where it may come from, easily finds patronage, positions, and a wealth of occupations. Here all arrogance ceases, because people really want to have enjoyment.

  Scholarship is partly in the hands of secure corporations, partly in those of independent dilettantes.

  At length, to be sure, this nobility, because of all its noble leisure and abstract generosity, comes upon liberal principles and begins to take the real institutions of the state lightly. This lends it one last, exceedingly noble resplendence. Meanwhile, to be sure, other strata, together with their “public opinion,” have started to take control of matters.

  It was for this aristocratic class, in the main, and not as yet for publishers and a mass public, that artists wrote, created literature, composed, painted, and so on. Also, the whole incipient opposition in the state and the innovations in all intellectual matters are essentially in their hands.

  Our view must become accustomed to this nature of the intellectual life in those times.

  THE STATE

  The states are organized along class lines, approximating the so-called constitutional state, with safeguards for the individual in respect to life, property, and freedom of action. The class state was realized in some measure of completeness only in Holland and England, amidst great struggles. Here the opinion prevailed that the internal and external strength of the nation was substantially connected with it.

  In Germany at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were very strong revolutionary classes only in Austria. In the other states the class system was already very weakened and the princes were actually close to absolutism. In the Thirty Years’ War the class system in both regions really goes under and at best survives formally. Later the model of Louis XIV—people imitated his sultanism at least—and the princely type of the eighteenth century held full sway. Finally we see the most brilliant handling of absolutism in Frederick the Great, as the highest example of what can be achieved with a submissive and admiring people.

  Apart from Holland and England, the universal opinion is that only absolutism gives strength to the state and knows how to govern.

  In Scandinavia, Denmark becomes an absolutist state out of revulsion against the power of the nobility. In Sweden, on the other hand, the latter maintains itself and in the most depraved form, too, with Charles XI as the sole interruption. There is venality toward the outside and, after the end of Charles XII, complete impotence. In Poland, all “misfortune,” i.e., all political powerlessness, is obviously due to the aristocratic government; it is regarded as a model of the way a state should not be.

  Italy has a completely absolutist government, with the exception of Venice, which has every reason to remain quiet. Italy passively bears the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the 1730’s, and the War of the Austrian Succession, with all their consequences. Countries silently pass over into the hands of other masters (Italy in consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession, etc.).

  Spain is internally absolutist under the last Hapsburgs. In part it is already under the pressure of the approaching problem of the succession. But it is powerless against its own tools and elements; the machinery of the state stands still. Under the Bourbons there appear absolutist beginnings of reform and renewed self-assertion in European politics.

  The power of the Ottomans is clearly on the wane after the period of the Kuprili (second half of the seventeenth century) and they are incapable of making new attacks upon Europe.

  Finally, Russia before and after Peter the Great. Here there is effective an absolutism which suddenly becomes aware of its potential strength and observes a certain system toward Ottomans and Europeans. For the time being the Russian people with its hatred has been silenced completely.

  European politics and the supposed balance of power are characterized by a desire for expansion, but this is not yet done in the name of nations, but for the time being only in order to gain more subjects and revenues. From the conflicts of these absolutisms which mistake power for happiness there emerges the idea of a supposed balance of power.

  The major achievement is that France is periodically told to keep within its bounds. This is a typically European matter: against a one- sided dominance all the others rise. Europe wants to remain varied.

  Negotiations include tariff problems; in fact, here and there they are already of predominant importance.

  The rulers in general equate power with good fortune and the peoples at least equate impotence with misfortune, because it tempts powerful neighbors to invade and constantly steal land.

  All states in general, however, are still based on authority, even where decisions are actually made by majorities, for these are not yet head- count majorities.

  THE GREAT POWER AND INDUSTRY

  The first thing everywhere is the desire of the rulers themselves to get money; the merchants and industrialists are supposed to be chiefly tax channels. The Islamitic states of the Middle Ages and the Italian states from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries laid the groundwork for this; fiscal management has been developed into a science.

  Real property gradually ceases to be the sole basis for existence, although it is still enormously predominant and safeguarded. There arise great fortunes and businesses that are independent of it. Trade and commerce gradually lose their rather local character and there begins a greater concern with distant places.

  With the oceanic peoples there is added the exploitation of their colonies; these are still regarded entirely as the possession of the mother country. However, it takes a long time for the so-called normal cycle to occur: importation of colonial raw materials and forced consumption of the products of domestic industry by the colonies.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonization increases. Great French territories are created in North America and later in India; in addition to this are the Dutch occupations in the East and West Indies. Only England establishes larger English populations in distant areas, because they do not settle in tropical regions and many more Englishmen than Frenchmen emigrate.

  Spain fades away, not only because of taxes, the mortmain, the monasteries, and other things, but because of its completely unindustrial mentality in a Europe which was otherwise becoming industrial.

  France has its miseries. There rules a king who is terribly wasteful and eager for conquest and devours more than his Colbert can supply him, with the utmost overstraining of the country; and yet he is an envied model for other dynasts. The Colbert system which conceives of industry as an enriching force gains European validity. However, the industrialists are not as yet the ruling class here, nor are they in England.

  The French Revolution and its monarchic continuation by Napoleon have pointed up the model of Louis XIV and his system; before and alongside them there existed the imitating states. At the same time, after 1815 the model of England begins to be effective.

  Europe becomes the mill for all five continents; industrial and political superiority are regarded as going hand in hand. Through the confiscation of church property, the abolition of mortmain, a huge mass of energy and property as well as the people living there become available to industry.

  Machines and mass production gradually rise. The great capital needed for them is accumulated and there is a progressively smaller number of people governing their destiny. Competition and mutual throat-cutting set in.

  At the same time, however, with J.-J. Rousseau and the French Revolution ideas of equality and human rights as well as the expression “existence worthy of a human being” begin to have an influence. The greatest political freedom is combined with the largest measure of economic dependence; the middle class declines perceptibly.

  An absurdly lamentable addition to this is the fact that the state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and “progress,” thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy.

  Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in- chief.

  INTELLECTUAL LIFE

  First of all, thought and research (an intellectual situation which is enormously different from today’s, but had its raison d’être and its style): both are still impeded in many ways by the existing forces, especially narrow-minded creeds, and yet in essence they were not at all so restricted as is believed; a case in point is Leibnitz and the Théodicée. This is true if one admits that a thinker’s happiness is not yet absolutely bound up with a vociferous preaching of materialism and that the final reasons for existence are not decided by mere individual reflection, least of all with the right to coerce others.

  Actually, the study of nature was, despite the story of Galileo, completely free, even in Catholic areas. In Spain, at any rate, it did not exist. In discoveries, to be sure, the nineteenth century and even the end of the eighteenth enormously outdistanced the two preceding centuries; the latter, however, may have had a greater appreciation of the blessings of scientific pursuits, as seems to be indicated by the large number of amateurs in physics and other sciences. Newton and the law of gravitation were of basic importance. In those times people were more disposed toward leisurely contemplation.

  The history of that period is set forth in a great number of fairly well written works; it has a predominantly politico-military character and is colored by the nationality of the historian. In addition, there is a wealth of important and excellent memoirs.

  Past historical research still follows ecclesiastical or legal interest; a magnificent collector’s spirit and often a very efficient critical mind are at work here. A very weak spot is research into origins in every sense. And yet even here there is the achievement of a man like Giambattista Vico.

  Geography was still in its infancy; despite colonial life the earth was still known infinitely little as compared to present-day knowledge. But there was a good deal of interest at that time; the eighteenth century excelled in the eager reading of travel books. People were still able to master discoveries and knowledge, and in this area, too, had not yet been caught up in specialized research.

  “Man” was known as well as we know him.

  Universal knowledge was still possible at that time and in practice, too (Leibnitz). Collections and cabinets still contained, unseparated, objects of natural history, historical curios, and even works of art. The criterion of “rarity” was often decisive. Where the advancement of knowledge as such is concerned, present-day scientific methods are infinitely superior, because of the division of labor and the specialization ad infinitum. But today the faculty for all-encompassing presentation is probably found less and less frequently. And those polymaths and amateurs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have derived more joy from their knowledge than today’s specialist does from his.

  The secular basis for all scholarship was a teaching position or membership in a corporation which was usually still clerical. For bookdealers the main thing was the very great number of learned libraries, those of corporations as well as of wealthy collectors; the property in both categories was assured and indivisible, safeguarded by entail, among other things. In addition, there was the patronage of princes and important people, with the corresponding dedications.

  On the other hand, there was as yet no relationship to an “educated public,” no concessions to its sympathies. There was no “critique of the daily press” to go with such a “public,” and thus no degradation. Patronage and dedications degraded a man less than do today’s concessions to the opinions and tastes of the masses.

  Latin continued to be the language of scholarship, with its disadvantages as well as advantages; the latter are stressed especially in Schopenhauer. Think, for example, of the Latin of Francis Bacon. The desire to be effective through the vernacular does not assert itself until Thomasius and Voltaire.

  FREE CREATION: POETRY

  Here one must start from its premises. A big reading public and a mania for reading either did not yet exist or were in their infancy. Boredom was not yet fought by reading. Thus Don Quixote becomes a ridiculous figure.

  In his composition a writer nowhere had in mind his popularity or mass effectiveness, and there was no such thing as yet as a modern publisher who must count on these things. There still was no literary industry. All of Simplizius Simplizissimus is as though written for the author himself, with no thought of any reading public. The reading public was still relatively aristocratic and exclusive. Here, too, there was patronage on the part of important people and select circles. Women did little reading as yet.

  Then, too, a writer did not write for a particular moment, a political or social mood of the hour, and thus did not become subject to the transitoriness of today’s productions.

  Furthermore, the peoples were not yet being made lustful or terrorized through spiced-up depictions of the imagined life of big cities; these cities did not even exist in the present-day sense. Thus the picaresque novel was still entirely humorous and highly didactic. All of Don Quixote is set on highways and in solitary places.

  On the whole, there was no whipping up of the sluggish imaginations of such people as are receptive only to the most adventurous and coarsest things and want to be continually amused or kept in suspense. There was as yet no production of reading fodder, i.e., no consideration for empty and substandard minds.

  All in all, this is a truly refined literature, not one that merely pretends to be so; it depicts life in general the way a refined person wants it presented. It portrays people, therefore life among the people. On the other hand, it almost never gives a worm’s eye view of life among the aristocrats themselves, as does present-day literature.

  This is the literature from Shakespeare to Voltaire, who still wrote entirely for the upper classes and has been understood and appreciated by the middle classes, too, only by virtue of his malice. There are a large number of books from that period which are still at least widely known, although the interest in them is predominantly historical.

  In the field of poetry there is already a decided predominance of the theater in England, France, and Spain, with great, richly developed styles.

  On the whole, the seventeenth century and a large part of the eighteenth are still times of strong feeling. Frequently, some general moral reservation is directly emphasized, albeit more often in the case of scabrous material.

  Antiquity—essentially Roman antiquity—constitutes the general criterion of the excellent. Whoever does any writing knows and esteems it, even though he may betray it only indirectly, notably through lucidity.

  The general advantage of that period over ours lies in the fact that it has claimed the attention of perceptive and appreciative people for one or two centuries, while our time faces a future in which perhaps precious little notice will be taken of anything past.

  THE PLASTIC ARTS

  The great main difference from present-day art lies in the obviousness of the subjects and in the homogeneous way of thinking of those who commissioned works of art. This way of thinking is still completely independent of any art journals. All information about the artists during their lifetime was conveyed by word of mouth or by letter. Recommendations from court to court and place to place were the decisive thing. The church painters were almost the only ones to become publicly known through their altar paintings and frescoes, and even this happened only in the Catholic countries. Critical articles on art were completely lacking. Only patrons, independent of anything printed, decided about secular commissions. There were no exhibitions whatever before the Paris Salon of the 1760’s with Diderot’s feuilletons. The accumulation of heterogeneous objects and their mutual murder through bedazzlement were still completely unknown. There was as yet no public and no public taste. The princely collections were not accessible to any “public,” but could be used by artists for study.

  The subjects were predominantly religious, mythological-allegorical, or those of Dutch realism, especially in genre and landscape painting and allied subjects.

  Only in France was there general direction from above and a predominant concentration of art around the court. Other princes were only on a par with wealthy art lovers. But Louis XIV was not even an art lover, because what would he have loved anyway?

  To sum up: Nothing but patronage from above, and not by nouveaux riches. That way art was better off than it is with today’s support from below. There were a lot of painters who rose from the poorest classes through the help of higher-ups. Talented individuals were at least as sure of getting ahead as they are today, and were not nearly so much led astray as they are now when an artist has to devise his own subjects. In those times there occurred an ever new creation of actual given conditions.

  MUSIC

  It creates two great new forms, the oratorio and the opera. Its social significance varies greatly from nation to nation. Here and there it is no longer entirely ecclesiastical and courtly, but is fostered through associations, as yet only of select people. For on the whole it is still very much regarded as a real art.

  From the end of the seventeenth century it rises spontaneously and very mightily in Italy and in the North (here especially Handel and Bach), and in the course of the eighteenth century it becomes the highest power in all contemporary art. The stylistic laws of music which were achieved at that time will, at least in broad outline, remain in force as long as our present tonal system.

  85.

  The Character of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  To what extent can the thesis be supported that the sixteenth century was fanatical, and the seventeenth bigoted? At any rate, there is a spiritual difference between the first and the second phase of the Counter Reformation, between which stands Henry IV. The first period is more popular and lives more among the masses; that is the case especially in France. Then, too, its guiding personalities still have a shade more passion, they still experience the issues directly, while the men of the second period take them over complete and decided, and now administer them mechanically.

  For men with a Jesuit upbringing, like Ferdinand II, it was a foregone conclusion that the world must be brought back again by any methods; they never knocked their heads out or wavered about the main goal.

  On the other hand, the peoples (the middle-class elements were far less significant than in the sixteenth century) were appreciably more tired and less spontaneous, e.g., the French Huguenots and Catholics. In Germany the great danger did not produce any popular stirring any more, except in Upper Austria and Bohemia. The Thirty Years’ War remained merely a matter of the governments long after the populations had been fleeced, and on the Protestant side most of these governments were small and weak.

  Afterwards, Gustavus Adolphus with his vigor is in great contrast to all the others. That is true also of the earlier Upper Austrian Peasants’ War. Catholicism was at an enormous advantage. As long as it was united (but after Urban VIII it no longer was), it also knew what it wanted; in comparison with Protestantism, which was divided and consisted of mere governments, it had an ecumenical mentality or, at least, basis.

  But the behavior of Spain remains symptomatic of the change from one century to the other. Here there is actually a difference between fanaticism and bigotry. Philip II stands spontaneously at the head of all Catholic activity; Philip III (overthrow of the Duke of Lerma) and Philip IV (proclamation of the Netherlands armistice) let themselves be drawn into the cause again only out of “fausse honte” [false shame].

  A peculiar interlude was Lerma’s period. A pleasure-seeking parvenu has established himself in the fanatical, world-monarchical state of the Spaniards, to the grief of all those working for the cause, apparently with a very bad conscience toward the house of Austria. To be sure, the high Spanish officials act without him, too, on their own account.

  86.

  The Huguenots Under Henry IV

  Henry IV had a much harder time with them than appears at first glance. His optimistic delusion that they would be converted together with him had not been fulfilled, or at any rate, only very slightly. For the 60,000 conversions which did take place were not of much consequence. In this Henry had completely misjudged the Huguenots among the people (middle class and peasants), because he did not know their kind of religiousness despite having lived among them for a long time. But the Huguenot leaders, false and treacherous, stuck to their creed as to a political position; they now remained with it all the more, counting on unrest if the king should die suddenly. Subsequently they and their families all became converted when it was convenient to do so and Richelieu had drawn their teeth. In addition, there was the unreasonableness of the Assemblies which in 1602 and 1607 declared the pope to be the anti-Christ, merely out of theoretical stubbornness. To the parliamentary deputation Henry had said in 1599: “Il faut que les catholiques convertissent les Huguenots par l’exemple de leur bonne vie!” [The Catholics must convert the Huguenots by the example of the good lives they lead!] How long did the crown actually give the Huguenots the money for manning strategic places?

  87.

  Gomarists and Arminians

  Even Calvin himself with his eternal predestination and eternal damnation of the vast majority is a caricature. Then he much more poisoned his life by suspecting and persecuting the presumably or certainly damned than he transfigured it by guiding the elect. This had to be so and must necessarily repeat itself with all orthodox Calvinist believers in predestination in a cultural epoch which is superior to them through its imagination and irritates them.

  As long as there was armed combat in the Netherlands and the theologians receded to the second and third lines, Calvinist doctrine remained inactive. But when peaceful times came and the clergy (to the great detriment of their parties) were able to regain their voices in France, the Netherlands, and especially Scotland, they started operating with predestination again. Damnation was even much more strongly emphasized here than by the Catholics. After all, Calvin assures only the tiniest fraction even of his own adherents.

  Now the doctrine penetrates the masses in Scotland and the Netherlands. This was incomparably more disagreeable than had been the debates of the Constantinople shopkeepers over the second person of the Deity in Chrysostom’s times.

  Yet in the Dutch cities all the educated and more refined people clearly turned away from the abominable doctrine represented by the Gomarists and toward the far milder doctrine of the Arminians. This showed the Gomarists what people basically took them for; at best they were regarded by the educated Netherlanders as isolated zealots. This made them more furious; they incited the masses more and more, and Maurice came and reaped the advantage for himself.

  Oldenbarneveldt, as leader of the Estates party, desired that the religion of the individual provinces not be decided by the religion of the majority in each province and that the particular mercenary troops of the individual provinces not eo ipso be under the command of the stadholder as commander-in-chief of the whole nation. Maurice of Orange, the stadholder-general, as the alleged “representative of the whole nation,” with designs on a monarchy of his own, allies himself with an aggressive religious party, the very same Gomarists, which claims to represent the religion of the whole state against the religions of the provinces. He manages to rescind the sovereignty and arming of the provinces and to destroy the most important opposing statesmen, such as Oldenbarneveldt, while at Dordrecht a council of the vehement religious party, a veritable parody of Trent, sharpens the dogma.

  88.

  Powers and Society in Europe Before the Thirty Years’ War

  The three powers which had defended themselves against Spain in world-historic struggle were the following:

  France. It was highly problematical how long beyond Henry IV’s lifetime it would be able to maintain an independent policy.

  England. It was capable of remaining neutral in a great new contest.

  Holland. It alone would have to participate on the Protestant side if war broke out again. On the seas its opposition to Spain had already become a colossal business.

  The North was still dormant. Did anyone at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War have any inkling of the impending world position of Sweden?

  Only one thing was to be foreseen with certainty: when war among the political and religious adversaries began, Germany would be the object and the chief battleground.

  If one examines the Catholic-Spanish forces one by one, they seem scarcely adequate for a great contest. Neither in strength of inner impetus nor in resources would they have been at all equal to the opposition if the latter had stuck together. But there, too, the inner impetus had been extinguished, and there was no unity.

  A branch of the Hapsburg dynasty, allied with many Catholic individual interests and the house of Bavaria, then finds itself strong enough to risk the combat.

  To what extent were the Protestant countries principally dominated by middle-class culture and outlook, the Catholic countries mainly by aristocratic culture and mentality? The difference between the two was not as great as it seems to have been.

  The seventeenth century is substantially aristocratic on the Protestant side, too—more so than the period 1500–1550 had been.

  The more middle-class character of the sixteenth century had given way before a reaction of the privileged. Italian private life, in particular, had been Hispanicized. The middle class existed everywhere, but no longer with a culture of its own; it now adopted modes of living and ways of thinking more from the upper classes. Even in Holland the life of the upper classes was much more aristocratic than is believed.

  89.

  Italy in the Seventeenth Century

  Italy was Hispanicized and immobilized. Its sterility manifested itself in its political death and intellectual decline (the latter, however, must be taken with a grain of salt). Economically it decayed while its needs increased. Sismondi (History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages) breaks out in especially great lamentations over the general practice of married women having a lover (cicisbeo). This practice had emanated from the court and come into being as a contrast to Spanish jealousy; it was a reaction to it. In the end, no one any longer knew in any respected Italian family whose son, father, or brother he was. At the same time, it was an excellent remedy for the general depression of spirits.

  But Hispanicization also took the guise of “noble leisure.” The bankers and businessmen invested their fortunes in real property with entail (I am not shedding any tears over the banking houses that went out of business). People generally were doomed to become idle—the earlier ones because they were arrogant, those born later because they could do nothing about it. For the latter, the cicisbeo practice came to be their chief amusement.

  Two rules were in force here: No lady may appear in public unescorted; no man may escort his wife. Morals had been no better before this, but only now was adultery declared harmless. (Who said so, anyway?) For the most part, incidentally, this practice was innocuously boring. To what extent did the practice spread to the people? Sismondi says: “Ces moeurs nouvelles … imitées par la masse entière du peuple” [These new customs … imitated by the entire mass of the people].

  In any case, the ruin of commerce was caused by the disappearance of the industrialists and the withdrawal of capital. On top of this, Hispanicized Italy was steered in this direction by the monopolies and the absurd trade taxes which smacked of Alcavala.

  Something else that can be traced back to Spanish influence was the increase of pomp as a matter of social position, at the expense of real needs and the comforts of life. People began to live purely for display.

  This is true also of titles and ceremony, beginning with the wrangles over precedence at the courts (Este, Medici, Savoy, Farnese, and others), which, after all, were all in the pockets of Spain or France, and of the cardinals who only now (1630) became Eminences. This reached so far down that people wound up addressing their cobblers in writing as “molto illustre” [very illustrious]. Everyone simply became more and more discontented about the titles that were still denied him.

  The father of a family, who had originally been married off without his own consent, was not honored by his own (or other men’s) children. Half of his brothers and sisters were in convents, the other half were enjoying free board at his table. He was considered only the administrator of the family estate, while all the others were secretly bent on their own pleasure. He could no longer augment the property; on the contrary, it was decreasing through taxes, misfortune, and extravagance. (? Then there would long since have been nothing left!) He could neither mortgage nor sell it; creditors could reach only his income, not his property. (Am I not right, citoyen Sismondi? Everything should have got into the hands of the speculators even then. For it would not have got into the hands of the peasants.)

  “Pour chaque besoin imprévu il prenait sur le fonds déstiné à la culture” [For each unforeseen need he drew upon the funds earmarked for farming], which he should have spared; “il ruinait ses terres, parce qu’ il n’avait pas droit de les vendre” [he ruined his lands because he had no right to sell them]; the tenants suffered along with him.

  Added to this were the indolent or venal judiciary, the secret enemies and informers, the tribunaux arbitraires [arbitrary tribunals].

  People let themselves go and had as much fun as they could.

  This description of “Hispanicized” life actually applies also to most other European peoples of the time.

  Yet Italy lived on in its fashion without declining further. Sismondi is the mouthpiece of utilitarianism. The race did not degenerate.

  To be sure, in those days people were a long way from the present- day utilization of manpower and of the earth. Periods of so-called lying fallow, materially speaking, have a value of their own.

  90.

  Richelieu

  (I) He is the great accelerator of France’s later political development, for good as well as for bad.

  Alone with his idea of the state, which he completely identifies with his person, he confronts a world of egoism.

  He must constantly control himself in order to employ the methods necessary to deal with and subdue this mountain of malice. In this he is aided by his satisfaction in the toppling of every single traitor. He is absolutely indifferent to morality in his methods. If he catches the nobility fighting duels, so much the better, as far as he is concerned.

  His regal manner becomes manifest through the splendor of Richelieu Castle, through the city of Richelieu, through his domination, which seemed natural to him, of a literature which has become lacking in purpose, which he severs from its “Air de Spadassin” (Les Grotesques) and prepares for its future reign.

  As for his relationship with the royal house, the latter has a deadly hatred for him, yet he cannot and will not do without it or replace it. He works only for people who would like to have him poisoned or hanged, i.e., for the idea of which possibly only these people or their successors will be the bearers. He is in an infinitely less favorable position than Henry IV, who was a king and commander in battle. But Richelieu is merely the most hated of all ministers and is allowed to be present at military campaigns only because without him everything would be disjointed.

  He has to be friendly at all times to Gaston, the brother of Louis XIII, the heir presumptive to the throne or possible regent for Louis XIV if the king should die soon, and he must take all his pater peccavi’s [Father, I have sinned] as cash payment, although he knows what Gaston would do with him if he became king. He resigned himself early to Gaston’s utter infamy as well as the meanness of the two queens. He does not waste any energy on moral indignation, but goes on ruling.

  The king belongs to him only in the sense that he distrusts others even more than he distrusts Richelieu and that Richelieu supplies him with pocket money. Louis XIII gradually gets the feeling that Spain and high treason against him are one and the same thing. The constant danger to Richelieu lies only in the fact that the king feels himself over shadowed by him and must confess to Richelieu time and again that he has wanted to dismiss him.

  (II) Let us once more survey the thoroughly rotten situation out of which Richelieu had to pull France, indeed, Europe.

  His opponent was Spanish-Hapsburg politics which was, at the same time, a way of thinking, Catholic propaganda, and as such carried its compass within itself, while the French courtiers and leaders had increasingly become separate appendages to this Spain.

  Richelieu was obliged to begin by breaking one single element of French strength which was drifting along between these storms, that is, by subduing the Huguenots. It was his intention that they should henceforth be treated decently, but should no longer form a state within the state.

  From then on Richelieu was stamped as a good Catholic to the extent that now the French clergy was allowed to support him without reservation; several orders sought his protection; the Jesuits (at least the French ones, for those in Hapsburg lands thought more along Hapsburg lines, something that was winked at in the Gesὺ in Rome) took his side. Urban VIII was able to enter into an alliance with him; he called him to Italy, was privy to the Swedish-French alliance, gave no money at Wallenstein’s reactivation, and at Gustavus Adolphus’s death spoke of him in edifying terms.

  But in domestic politics Richelieu had to defend by the most fearful means the welfare and the independence of France against those who ought to have been the born protectors of the state. Thus France became subject to general pressure, and Richelieu became “le dictateur du désespoir” [the dictator of despair].

  Where independent action might still want to assert itself, it did so in a manner harmful to the community, e.g., in the case of the parliaments which wanted to debate Richelieu’s just decisions. If Richelieu had wanted to keep France free of strife, he could actually have done so only by taking the attitude “je mourrai en la peine ou je réduirai ce royaume au gouvernement d’Espagne” [I will die in agony or I will reduce this kingdom to the condition of the government of Spain]. For his king he procured pocket money, but he also lectured him, as for example after the capture of La Rochelle.

  When the German war continued, a war from which the king would never have found a way out without Richelieu, he had to keep his minister.

  (III) In France the spirit of the nation or the state is personified more than in other nations. It does not always have to be the person of the king; Joan of Arc, e.g., was the embodied spirit of the nation. In Richelieu we have the embodiment of a certain idea of the state—it is the idea since then approved of by France and almost all of modern Europe—at a moment when one may hardly ask how things would have turned out without him.

  For this it took a man who, completely against his own safety and comfort, exercised a tremendous will which appears to have been stronger than he himself.

  Richelieu’s methods were utterly unscrupulous. He was sure of his tools only if he never faltered. Typical of his tools was tricky Père Joseph. He had his spies everywhere, even in the Val de Grâce. He defended the good of his country against those who should have been its guardians. But he was not able to proceed nearly as systematically as his memoirs would have one believe.

  Richelieu enforced a system of universal obedience. Any independence, inherited from earlier times, expressed itself only harmfully; this includes the parliaments which knew nothing about affairs of state. For Richelieu the purpose of the state takes precedence over everything, unaffected by compassion or favoritism. Failure to punish appears to him to be the greatest crime against the public welfare. The state must neither forget nor forgive. For political crimes the mere probability of guilt is sufficient.

  Richelieu stands alone with his idea of the state. He constantly has to control himself in the face of scoundrels; he beats people down one by one and does not care about the methods: he catches the nobles dueling. He works for people who would like to hang him. He is no king, but only a hated minister. He acquiesces in Gaston’s explanations and the wretchedness of the two queens.

  He has no sunny disposition, like Henry IV. He wins no hearts, but conquers people by force only. He is not a king, but he is more than a king, namely, the receptacle of the conception of state which without him would perish because of the dereliction of duty on the part of all those who ought to be its promulgators, but instead commit treason against it.

  The thing that especially ennobles Richelieu and makes him invulnerable in history is the constant presence of mortal danger. This he has in common with Henry IV.

  91.

  On Germany’s Situation Before the Thirty Years’ War

  The German Empire was a community whose parts had just enough connection with, and influence upon, one another to arouse the utmost mutual indignation, but not enough to subdue one another easily. Basically, all these elements tended to diverge and desired sovereignty; but then each did try to assert a will of its own through separate alliances with one another and with foreign countries.

  The entire period of Charles V had been spent in taking advantage of the Reformation either to weaken the emperor and the Empire to the utmost or to get the central power into other hands.

  In our unenlightened judgment it would have been the most desirable thing for people to leave one another alone. However, people so much enjoy forcing their will upon other people, and the religious mentality of all factions is so bent on compulsion that this would have been inconceivable.

  Through the confiscation of church property and entire ecclesiastical sovereignties all the wrangling had the character of offended and contentious jura quaesita [vain quest for rights]; next to and above the issue of creed everywhere there was a material and political issue.

  To this must be added the insufficiency of the peace settlements of Passau and Augsburg, in fact, of any conceivable treaty. Certain struggles may be declared at a standstill for a while because of exhaustion, but nevertheless their continuation will be quite inevitable, until they end with the decisive victory of one party or the dead exhaustion of both, as happened in this case. It is fruitless to grumble that the opposition is still in existence.

  92.

  The Swedes in Germany

  It is correct that at first glance German Protestantism seems to have been saved only by the appearance of the Swedes; to be sure, one has to put up with the subsequent conduct of Sweden, its armies, and other things. (The Swedes came; Protestantism lived on. Now the two things seem to be causally inseparable.)

  However, the question is permissible whether German Protestantism would not have been helped without this horrible remedy, too. (Any miserable government had long ago become accustomed to seeking foreign intervention for whatever cause.)

  In the first place, it is scandalous for a creed, no matter whether it is Catholic or Protestant, to place its salvation above the integrity of the nation. Thus Germany could be torn to shreds for metaphysical reasons. If one approves of such behavior, one must also approve of the fact that the popes led the German princes to weaken the Empire.

  Secondly, no German government or faction helped to call Gustavus Adolphus; it was, rather, foreign countries—Richelieu and his followers, Holland, to a slight extent England as well. But it was Gustavus Adolphus himself who had the strongest desire to force himself on Germany. The Duke of Pomerania was immediately horrified at his arrival.

  Well, if one imagines things without him:

  Either Wallenstein would have remained at the helm and asserted his command over North Germany in his own spirit as we know it, involving non-observance of the Edict of Restitution, parity, even a coup d’état which would easily have been possible for him because of his army’s indifference to creed; or, as actually happened, after Wallenstein’s dismissal his army, too, would have been greatly curtailed, i.e., made incapable of continuing to enforce the Edict of Restitution even if it had wanted to.

  And finally: even assuming a completely tenacious imperial army and government, would it not have been better and more desirable for the whole future if the North German people had at least done what the Upper Austrians did with infinitely slighter prospects, namely, fight a national fight for their religion?

  But people were not prepared for this, because in the sixteenth century the Reformation had been accomplished so very easily, with people actually receiving it as a gift. In Magdeburg some real desperation finally made an appearance.

  Because of that, people now had to submit to a foreign king who stepped on imperial soil, intending to deprive the Empire of the entire Baltic coast. Scandinavia desired a slice of Germany. Christian IV, at least, was still a German prince, on account of Holstein, when he directed his greed at Hanseatic cities and ecclesiastical lands and then waged war in Germany as the head of the Lower Saxon Circle. Gustavus Adolphus had no connections whatever with Germany.

  The religious situation here was as follows:

  If Ferdinand II had quite forcibly and cruelly made all of Northern Germany Catholic only about as far as the Elbe, but had left the rest unmolested, Gustavus Adolphus would have stayed at home. If, on the other hand, a Protestant emperor, or a Wallenstein turned indifferent to creed, had subjugated, or wanted to subjugate, the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, Gustavus Adolphus would have set out against him.

  The Swedes, no less than the French, simply could not bear to see German imperial power gain strength in any way.

  93.

  On Wallenstein’s End

  The main excuse that he wanted to avoid war with France, in which the Empire was to become involved for Spain’s sake, is an empty and worthless one, for the French were already inside the Empire, and, as long as the war continued, France probably would interfere anyway.

  Then, too, there are his inordinate desires. Ferdinand II was supposed to look on while Wallenstein, with imperial resources, established within the Empire a big hostile state which he wanted to set up for himself with the aid of parity and toleration.

  Now there set in the accidental development of the crisis because of the desire of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Spain to lead German troops from Milan to the Netherlands through the Empire. To be sure, Spain wanted not only the Netherlands, but also its military road which the French had broken through in places. But if Wallenstein was against it, this was surely not due to abstract enthusiasm for the integrity of the Empire, but because he himself would have liked to have the Palatinate, among other things. Here he pitted his will against that of Spain, which had previously, including in 1632, helped to boost him. At the same time, he let the League’s interests in South Germany suffer bitter distress, so that, e.g., Regensburg became Swedish in November of 1633, and he was stationed in the emperor’s own land rather than outside. He had demonstrable immediate designs on the crown of Bohemia, with the aid of France—and for his reluctance to fight against this same France he is given so much credit. Finally, because of the sentiment in favor of the Infante he threatens to “abdicate,” i.e., he starts agitation among his officers, and this is inevitably the beginning of the contest between the emperor and the general for the army. Then comes the 12th of February, 1634, at Pilsen, the banquet and the signing of the declaration by his lieutenants; the rest is the consequence of the latter.

  For Ferdinand II it is simply a matter of outbidding Wallenstein with the generals, or at least of reassuring them as to their credit and other things. The two manifestoes contain nothing about an assassination, although the second one does mention qualified high treason. In addition, there was Piccolomini’s orally transmitted instruction to Butler to bring in Wallenstein alive or dead. When at the publication of the second manifesto not a soldier stirred in Prague, it was shown how empty the power of such a condottiere is at bottom. Wallenstein’s final machinations with Bernhard as well as his movement toward Eger were mere attempts to save himself. He no longer would have brought the Swedes an appreciable number of men.

  If Ferdinand had let him have his own way and had lost all his crowns in the process, he would have reaped, by way of thanks, the mocking laughter of half the world.

  Wallenstein’s assassination was of great benefit to the emperor. He suddenly became the master of his army which was now an imperial army, and remained so in the future. Then, too, Ferdinand got rid of a financial obligation to Wallenstein which he would hardly ever have met after a peace. The military leaders, with their prospects of Wallenstein’s estates and more, given the alternative of betraying Ferdinand or Wallenstein, were able to betray the latter with more safety and fewer pangs of conscience. Not one foreign cabinet accused Ferdinand of a wicked deed or defended Wallenstein against the charge of treason.

  Does the fondness for Wallenstein, apart from Schiller, stem from Friedrich Förster? (Later addition: No, apart from the hatred for Ferdinand it has a general reason. Wallenstein, like Magdeburg in 1631, had become a trump card in the game of the Protestant faction.)

  Why did the electorates of Saxony and Brandenburg not want to listen to him in the autumn of 1633? Was it perhaps because they already knew too much and because Ferdinand II, in the final analysis, was more agreeable to them than this Wallenstein?

  94.

  The Great Elector

  He is the great-grandfather of Frederick the Great and a sixth- generation ancestor of Emperor William. The subsequent growth of Prussian power dazzles our evaluation of its beginnings.

  His main characteristic, similar, perhaps, to that of his great-grandson Frederick the Great, is his hardness of soul, a special characteristic of rulers, which cannot be replaced by mere majority decisions of chambers or assemblies chosen by mass democracies.

  95.

  England Before the First Revolution

  The crown was not by any means so much the only support of the nation as it was in France. Its insular location was still more important to it. Unity was never disturbed through the issuing of provinces to branches of the royal house as hereditary individual fiefs to the extent that it was in France. Thus even the greatest hostility within the house of Plantagenet was not capable of splitting the kingdom apart. There are no princes of the blood, no secondary dynasties with secular possessions ruling individual regions, let alone any with the permanent custom of conspiracy with foreign countries. To be sure, from time to time there are foreign alliances. The Plantagenets and Tudors have died out, the Stuart line has almost run out. There are no princes of the blood, and certainly no mutinous ones.

  In comparison with the French Estates General, Parliament has the advantage of periodicity which is never interrupted for long, and of the compatibility of the two houses because they are aware of their mutual interests. The Lords do not declare the commoners to be beneath contempt, as did the French nobles with the Third Estate at the Estates General of 1614. Rather, the theory of the lower house that it should be exalted grew beyond the control of the upper house. The English Parliament also possesses the advantage of an old, firmly rooted tradition and conception in people’s minds according to which the crown and the people are in a contractual relationship to each other.

  England had not been unified and saved through the power of individual princes, as had repeatedly happened in France. Except for a brief period in the age of Elizabeth, it had not been obliged to stand in the breach against the Hapsburgs on behalf of all Europe; thus there had been no need for it to get accustomed internally to situations that were always violent. The middle class had long since developed more than it had done in France, although with a lesser culture; it had Protestantism within itself.

  The Puritan mentality, with its only really justified protest, that against the royal supremacy, was one that pressed onward and upward and was inevitably republican in its consequences. Even with the crown acting quite correctly it would have ventured to make its bid for control, out of its exalted view of its own importance. It cannot bear to see or tolerate alongside itself anything at all that is different from it. All such things it calls idolatry and presses for their destruction. Added to this was the horrible arrogance of belonging to the “elect.” It is this party, rather than the Anglican-royalist and Arminian, that works for the downfall of Catholicism in England, and in this quite natural way the kings are driven to protect it. This was foreseeable, however, and the royal protection of the Catholics later became the main leverage for the overthrow of the crown. This party is not an element with which a clever ruler could have governed as with an “available force.” Royalty was not to its taste because it had not emanated from it. Even the Lollards once said that populares [commoners] were allowed to corrigere [straighten out] a prince who neglected his duties.

  The true core and main moving force of this party is the Independent mind which subsequently throws aside its previous guises (Presbyterianism, etc.) with a few vigorous motions.

  The parliaments under the Tudors had put up with anything, and the genuine parliamentary tradition had been cut off. But now it is not only resuscitated, but puts forth new growth. Think of the decisions of 1621.

  Parliamentary method had never been forgotten, because it had lived on in smaller spheres (the administration of shires and cities, etc.); added to this was the Puritan element which now supplied will and strength.

  96.

  English Royalty and Its Task

  Under the first Stuart ruler the parliamentary system again raises its head and seeks to set up its boundary posts as far inside the region of royal power as possible. But it is able to do this only because it has allied itself, in large measure even become identical, with a religious-moral view of life which long ago had become powerful and at the same time has increasingly turned into a sect; this is Puritanism. But the crown had to represent the entire people and afford equal protection to all, including the Catholics, who were no longer a menace in England and existed as an excessive majority only in Ireland; but it was in England that the Puritan screams about idolatry were the loudest. Moreover, the crown had to protect the remnants of popular enjoyment and fun still left from Elizabeth and her Poor Laws (the legislation relating to paupers and mendicants), as well as the drama (Shakespeare, died 1616; period of Massinger, Beaumont, Ben Jonson), and, in general, all of higher secular culture, including the world of Francis Bacon’s thought (ousted 1621, died 1626).

  For Puritanism, at bottom, wanted to tolerate only itself and what issued from it. Everything else was “idolatry.” But the crown did not derive from it, and Puritanism more or less consciously sought its downfall through litigation.

  Subsequent English historical thought, to be sure, is not interested merely in rights, but asks: “Can you govern England?” The answer is: “Yes, indeed, and Scotland and Ireland, too.” And they tried it with the full arrogance of the elect and the awakened, until about 1644 they became aware that the helm had actually been seized by a most violent faction within them and by a powerful individual within this faction.

  The decisive moment came in 1625 when parliament denied the new, as yet completely inactive, king tonnage and poundage, i.e., the resources for any kind of government.

  It became the doctrine of the parliamentary party that everything that any parliament had ever wrung from the crown must become the permanent law of the state.

  97.

  Cromwell

  (I) How would things have happened after 1645 without Cromwell? To be sure, the Presbyterians and the classes of the people who needed peace would have sought to make a peace with Charles I. However, the question is whether they would have had a chance to do this (instead of the Independents, would not others have seized the power?), because with the exhaustion of the “good people,” the revolutionaries, the “Jacobins,” who had got the floor through these same good people, would have seized control. Because of the fact that Cromwell represented them and at the same time controlled them he is a sauveur [deliverer], after all.

  (II) In 1648 Cromwell becomes a sauveur against anarchy which, to be sure, would not have become dangerous without his actions. (? I have my doubts again; with the exhaustion of Presbyterianism a destructive kind of radicalism would have had a chance if Cromwell and the army had not been there.) He presently brings the Levelers to their senses with his sabers, and soon he thunders the loquacious Presbyterians to the ground through his enthusiasts.

  (III) Why did Cromwell and the Independents alone hit it off so well together?

  This anarchic sort of people inconvenienced him the least. They were communities which rise like water bubbles from a boiling pot and can vanish again, too. In that way he got rid of the entire previous personnel of the Revolution, those Puritan and Presbyterian notables who had been thinking that things would not work without them.

  Only in the Independents did he find that mixture of fanatics whom he could take in and scoundrels whom he could make use of. Only with the Independents was he able to be the religious leader as well; only here was he able to appeal to inspiration at all times and to choose his own texts for his sermons before battles and other great moments. The arrogance of the Independents toward all other people and the army was enormous. Of course, this could not go on forever, and it had to be Cromwell’s further task to make out of the Independent army one loyal to him personally.

  (IV) It is in England’s urgent interest to think of him as great, mythical, portentous, for it is too humiliating when the real Cromwell is recognized, a man who spoils for the other English parties their politico-liberal attitude and their ephemeral sectarian nuances of creed, and who with his army simply puts the English Revolution in his pocket as he goes. Thereupon they make out of him not only one of the most gifted Englishmen (for he was that), but a genius of the highest rank and a national hero.

  There are people who are born rulers, and he was one. But it is a nice question whether a nation that has produced such a man should abandon itself to a special feeling of exultation. His authority consists of two elements, his greatness and the baseness of the vast majority of those who obeyed him.

  The modern appraisers of Cromwell can be classified as follows: There are those who believe that they serve the English view, and even the nation, best if they elevate the whole phenomenon to unmeasured heights; then it is easy for them to proscribe as pedantry the mention of, or emphasis on, “individual shortcomings.” Once this kind of opinion gets in full stride and, through the press and other media, takes hold of large semi-educated and ignorant parts of the population, blind jubilation can take possession of the people, as with Victor Hugo’s corpse.

  There are those who regard Cromwell as a basically pious spirit, albeit one afflicted with great weaknesses, and all in all a religious, or at least pietistic, tool of God.

  There are those who have at certain moments clearly recognized in him the hypocrite and crown hunter and have taken a general dislike to him. They consider him an out-and-out dissembler. But since they do not deny his great talents and actual lordship, in their accounting the English nation of the time must appear all the more stupid and cowardly.

  Then there are those who explain him analogously to the way Mohammed is explained: From an earlier, more or less fanatical period and accustomed reverence a general style is left. In the meantime, the profession of ruler has highly developed all the specific endowments required for it, primarily a lucid intellect which necessarily and inevitably fights pious narrowness. In the course of successes there then develops a kind of secondary piety and honesty which, to be sure, deems the most horrible blows at the heads of others permissible. Then, too, Mohammed’s devotional character is less offensive than that of Cromwell the dictator in whose mouth the Puritan expressions sound truly scandalous and yet seem comical. Caesar did not have to preach to his soldiers, although he at least was Pontifex Maximus.

  But at bottom it is true that Cromwell is terrible, in this respect: he destroys what is in his way or could some day stand in his way, from Charles I to the Irishmen of Drogheda and Wexford.

  (V) The difficulty in our evaluation of Cromwell is this: Though in theory we have a very high opinion of power politicians (of whom Cromwell was one), in fact they often seem to us inadequate. For we do not see the many individual elements of power as well as of resistance which they have to take into account, but give rein to our armchair politician’s views, composed of imagination and impatience.

  Cromwell, who, above all, wanted to rule and had to rule, tried to make this clear to the nation in a great variety of ways.

  His real weak point was that everything inevitably had to stand and fall on his personality and that he could never seriously think of being succeeded by his family. He was aware of all who were waiting for his death, and death by assassination could occur at any moment. In such a mood he continued to rule at home and abroad, powerfully and often magnificently. The English state under him was more powerful than ever before and for a long time afterwards.

  One of the strongest ideas in people’s minds at that time was that valid taxes could be voted only by a parliament.

  But Cromwell’s basis still was his army which he seems to have maintained at full numerical strength despite all periods of peace. And between this army and any kind of parliament there was an inevitable antagonism.

  Had he lived longer he would probably have been obliged to use this army for foreign wars, presumably in the spirit of a Protestant- Independent crusade. For to dismiss it or to keep fattening an inactive army in England was equally dangerous. They would probably have set out against the “idolators,” i.e., gone to war and committed depredations and all sorts of acts of violence against Catholic peoples. At any rate, Cromwell’s threat concerning the pope betrays a thought of this kind.

  It is questionable whether Cromwell, as Protector with the civil power, would have waged such wars in person or have left them to admirals or generals. Toward the Catholics still in England he was and remained cruel and would not tolerate any of them in the country. His was a regime which, to be sure, for long years dealt daily and deadly insult to the convictions and especially the tastes of innumerable people, but a regime under which people were able to live and engage in business.

  98.

  The Fronde and the French Aristocracy

  In France the princes of the blood, the bigwigs, and all the other nobles after the Middle Ages were incapable of forming a true aristocracy.

  The crown, which long ago achieved a de facto absolutism (the fight with England had made French royalty a war royalty), either is strong enough to keep everyone in check or to make them take what it gives them, or it is weak, and then everything breaks down into egoistic factions. No organic form for a permanent, legal counterbalance to royal absolutism has ever been able to take shape. Out of turbulence again and again the power of the crown rises to the top, and again everyone eats at its table.

  The Fronde was noteworthy as the last clear occasion for the nobles to show themselves capable of forming a true political aristocracy which would have become a lasting force for legal freedom, a genuine organ in the life of the state. Independence here never manifested itself as law, but as the privilege of a caste and prerogative of the individual.

  However, instead of true political effectiveness as a group, every individual only wanted to create or preserve “importance” for himself. The relationship of the Fronde to the Paris parlement and especially to the peuple was a ruthless or scurrilous one. Under intelligent leadership the whole movement could have used the favoring wind which undeniably was blowing over from the English Revolution.

  99.

  The Fronde and the Parlement of Paris

  Any truly legal shaping of public affairs was hardly conceivable in those days. Between ruthless seigneurs and a dangerous city mob there was maintained the highly dubious legality of an authority like the parlement of Paris. Even if it was allied with all provincial parliaments and in all of France the noblesse de robe behaved blamelessly and harmoniously, it nevertheless was only one class against which all the others would have conspired. And it was a curious class to rule, too, what with its filling of offices through purchase and inheritance.

  The critical moment is January, 1649, when the parliaments called in the seigneurs, who, after all, were well enough known! With the seigneurs they inevitably opened the door to the old Spanish conspiracy against the French state as such.

  From that point on the entire parliamentary system along with the whole question of relief of the people is only an appendage to the struggles of the mighty, in which, oddly enough, the “people,” too, take an interest, for or against. No matter how loudly Condé, e.g., may in all phases of the Fronde voice his naive contempt for parlement and Parisians, the people and the parlement nevertheless help to demand his release.

  Although in the 1640’s the mere threatening of parliamentary councilors had caused great outbreaks, afterwards any act of violence could take place with impunity. Especially in 1651 the parlement was egged on to the most extreme and most foolish decisions only in the interest of the seigneurs. It persistently joined in the clamor that Mazarin must never be allowed inside the country again.

  Condé had become so blindly set in his arrogance and his contempt of Mazarin that gradually whatever vestiges of royalism were still within Frenchmen had to turn against him.

  French royalism of the time is described thus (in Hiob Ludolf, Schaubühne der Welt, Frankfurt, 1713, III, 395): “For this praise must be given to the French: whether their king may do them good or harm, act justly or unjustly, they still stick by him and always speak well of him.”

  A very base thing was the last union of Condé, in the spring of 1652, with Gaston, the uncle of Louis XIV, who brought with him the Duke of Lorraine.

  In the affairs of the Faubourg St. Antoine, Gaston’s daughter, Princess de Montpensier, helped to save Condé, and the parlement ruined itself for all time by “conferring” upon the two conspirators (who were now openly allied with Spain) the two highest powers of the state—and this in the face of the king who had attained his majority. All this was done only out of rage against “le Mazarin,” the foreigner, the extortionist, the tyrant, without their stopping to realize that they would hardly have acted better toward any possessor of the supreme state power.

  And now there ensued what always happens at some time in unpredictable phases of a movement: the peace-loving elements gained strength.

  Later, in February, 1653, when Condé was a fugitive, the royal uncle Gaston was semi-pardoned, and Retz was in prison, Mazarin was able to move into Paris again and manage a satiated despotism without any longer having to speak politely to the seigneurs.

  100.

  On Mazarin

  (I) After the terrorism of Richelieu who had had at his side an adult and, at least later, completely docile king, ruling was difficult for the female regent of a five-year-old child and for a minister, no matter who he might be. And in the beginning Anne of Austria, importuned from all sides, resisted Mazarin and sought to make shift with the Bishop of Beauvais. Her background is a blind predilection for her homeland, and as recently as 1637 she had carried on a dangerous correspondence. Richelieu, however, had virtually bequeathed Mazarin to the dynasty by using him for the most difficult and secret matters. Just as people would not have known how to carry on without Richelieu, now they cannot get along without Mazarin.

  (II) This remark reveals the main traits of his personality: “Je ne suis pas esclave de ma parole” [I am not a slave to my word]; this also goes for all other active participants at that time. No matter how things stood: in the Fronde, Mazarin was the standard-bearer of the French state’s strength and independence of Spain. He could not be reached by bribes from the outside, like the Russian ministers of the eighteenth century, if only because he had learned how to make France tributary directly to himself. And for the French he has that abysmal, at times scarcely concealed, contempt which in his dealings with every person makes him ask only about his price and confiscate lampoons in order to have them sold at a high price. To be sure, his opponents can apparently not be bought—but only for as long as ambition and vanity are involved. It was Mazarin’s task to find the moment at which an individual was to be had. With the individuals whom he wanted to use, he asked, in addition to their price, about their happiness, their luck—e.g., in the case of a general: “Est-il heureux?” [Is he happy?].

  101.

  Styles of Life and Art Around 1650

  The peoples with strong feeling are the Romanic ones and the Catholics. The Hollanders are the realists and the bourgeois. England does not count in this period, and Germany has, for the time being, salvaged only its scholarship from the Thirty Years’ War.

  The emotional peoples: Their style of life and fashion still follows the Spanish prototype, even in the higher Catholic circles of Germany and especially at the imperial court.

  Art and literature are shaped by the Catholic church, the old Roman culture (still without an idea of the Greek); literature is also partially influenced by Spanish literature, which was being widely translated (Corneille’s Cid).

  The baroque style of the three arts is derived from Michelangelo in architecture, in sculpture and painting mostly from Correggio and Titian, through the Caracci family. To what extent is it realistic? Its main goal is the great, stately effect. This is the time of Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, of Rubens, Van Dyck, and their school, of Velázquez and Murillo. In this art there is life and coloring, with relatively little attention to the deepest aspects of the subjects.

  For the less stirring moods, we may mention, first of all, elegiac themes, pastorales, and landscapes, then realistic secondary genres. Here, too, there are Bambocciads and the like.

  Lyric poetry is heroic-pastoral and lyric-elegiac. In Italy and Spain there is artificial lyric poetry. Representative of those two forms of poetry are Marino’s Adone, Tasso’s successors, Chapelain. In addition, epistolary literature and satire are practiced. As for the drama, in France it is either heroic or comic, in Italy only comic or non-existent, in Spain by turns sacred, heroic-tragic, intrigue, comedy.

  Finally, in Italy the opera has its start and is transplanted to all the courts; this is the beginning of the modern stature of music generally.

  The realistic and bourgeois peoples: They, too, express themselves through knowledge and feeling, and in this are indebted to antiquity and the Romanic peoples. But side by side with this there prevails Dutch realism in genre painting and the elegiac reaction in landscape painting.

  Moreover, an obeisance to the sacred element is made in the form of Biblical painting, which, of course, was in the hands of Rembrandt and his school.

  The highest level in the free treatment of Biblical material is represented by Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  102.

  Sweden Under King Charles X Gustavus

  Vivitur ex raptu [people live on stolen goods]. The inner restlessness of a nation brutalized by great successes coincides with a king from a new family who is already known to the nation as a bold general and now acquires unlimited finances. A mere domestic government is hardly conceivable with someone like Charles Gustavus. Then, too, Sweden’s artificial hegemony over its outlying lands could best be maintained fataliter [by destruction], by the conquest of further outlying lands. All of Sweden’s neighbors considered themselves at an unfair disadvantage because of extorted peace treaties. Sweden thought it would be most useful to keep powder-smoke constantly under its neighbors’ noses.

  Of these neighbors, the non-Swedish Scandinavians, namely the Danes and Norwegians, were actually the most hated. If these had been able to unite themselves with the Swedes right at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, a very large part of Germany probably would have become their permanent booty.

  The “Pyrrhus of the North” was in tune with his men in their boldness and a rapidity of movement which seems adventurous. Moreover, he appears to have been no drunkard, but rather constantly capable of diplomatic duties. At a decisive moment he was able to intone, say, a Lutheran song. But at table, where he ate a lot of butter, he always drank his first toast to all cuckolds, and that presumably put him in tune with the temper of his surroundings.

  103.

  The Age of Unlimited Princely Power

  The age of ecclesiastical dispute is definitely at an end, but appearances still deceive insofar as intolerance continues and there are isolated notable conversions.

  Within the different creeds it appears that religious ideas no longer dominate the world. A wholly secular cabinet policy has not only taken the place of spiritual motives, but, with the exception of England, overmastered worldly-constitutional class forces. The nobility has little use any more for political effectiveness and everywhere seeks only dispensation and display.

  It is of little moment that Rome, too, has again secularized itself. Since Alexander VII the popes have lacked any European stature; they are no more important than the church state is able to make them. Even against the Peace of Westphalia Rome has only a feeble protest. It is of little importance, further, that the Jesuits are now only bent on possession and power and are inclined to take the side of the individual countries in which they reside. Even if things were different, cabinet despotism and sultanism would carry the day and take into their service art, splendor, and every higher form of life, on the Protestant as well as the Catholic side. (Unfortunately this does not prevent intolerant actions in individual countries, nor the attitude that uniformity of faith is politically convenient. This is part of negative religion which essentially consists in hating the others.)

  Given this absolutist state of affairs, the primacy of one state was inevitable, in keeping with the inner necessity of despotism which in addition to power at home also demands power abroad.

  Just as surely as Spain had formerly striven for this position, France now had to do it, a country which at that time was infinitely more powerful, relatively speaking, than it is today, with by far the strongest army, conservatively estimated at 120,000 men. Russia and North America did not yet exist as far as European politics were concerned, Brandenburg was as yet no more powerful than Saxony, Austria (and for a long time England as well) had been bought by bribing the ministers, and Spain was mortally weak.

  Internally, the princes, the clergy, the nobility, and parliament had hitherto passed themselves off as the state, and the middle class, let alone the masses, could not yet pretend to be the state. Any attempts at group action, special privilege, political organization, and so on had regularly fallen before ruthless monarchs. Then Louis said, “L’état c’est moi.”

  The creed does not matter. Except for England, the Protestant rulers have become as despotic as the Catholic ones, and in matters of creed they are fully as intolerant. For the Catholic rulers’ authorization of perjury and other questionable things they have substitutes of their own.

  The Protestant nobility for its part (Sweden and elsewhere) squeezes the people dry, like their Catholic counterparts, and even more ruthlessly.

  104.

  On Louis XIV

  He engages in the enlargement of power and property if only for the sake of their preservation, but later as an admitted personal predilection. With his fearsome power of all of France’s resources at his disposal, Louis of necessity reached the point of striving for a universal monarchy.

  Characteristic of Louis is a statement which he made in his later period, in 1688, intended for Maximilian Emmanuel of Bavaria. He said that the Elector should use the opportunities presented to him by for tune for his aggrandizement, “the worthiest and most beautiful aim of a prince.”

  105.

  Louis XIV as Lord of the Church

  (This is by way of introduction to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.) There are clear manifestations of a period in which the main impulses of Catholicism no longer emanate from the papacy, but are now and then even directed against it. Thus, these impulses now originate rather from the cosmopolitan Jesuit order in its period of externalization and orientation toward power, and then from the French king. In the latter there reigns a mixture of mania for territorial power, which will no longer brook any differences, and of stupid bigotry which wants to do penance on other people’s backs and strikes out all the more blindly and fanatically because at the same time the pope is being hurt and the Turks and Hungarians are being used against Austria- Germany.

  In the Catholicism of France and other countries, more refined and more intellectual currents sought to maintain themselves and to prevail, laboriously enough, in the fact of the cold lust for power, the bad confessional morality, and the coarser piety of the Jesuits as manifested after 1675 in the cult of the “sacré coeur” [sacred heart]; cases in point are Jansenism, constantly persecuted from Richelieu’s time on, then mysticism, and quietism, as practiced by Molinos.

  The crown had the French Jesuits completely on its side, and on the subject of Molinos Innocent XI himself had to submit to a hearing before the Inquisition. There also arose a quarrel with the pope over the royal prerogatives, which was intensified up to the formulation of the Gallican Articles of 1682. Later, in 1687–1689, there was added the quarrel with Innocent XI over diplomatic immunity.

  But along with all this the dominating realities were the resumed persecution of the Huguenots and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. For this price the clergy sided with the king against the pope.

  The church of the Counter Reformation, in its form of Jesuitism, was much more sensitive to matters of dogma and hierarchy than the earlier church, which would have endured or ignored movements like Jansenism. The papacy would have let Jansenism and quietism pass unnoticed but for the French Jesuits. The Jesuits, however, feel jeopardized by any deeper view of the concepts of sin and grace.

  Even mysticism, which the earlier church tolerated to such a large extent or even placed in its service, soon became suspect.

  And the Huguenots were destroyed as soon as the state power was compliant enough to the church and great and unscrupulous enough to do this.

  For all this France was the proper soil, for the reason that it was the active country. The Jesuit church and its friend, the state, still found people to fight. Louis XIV had taken possession of a France full of self- willed minds. In the beginning, the spirit of the Fronde still lived in many. People did not realize immediately how much it would cost to want to be something special under this king.

  In this connection should be mentioned Louis’ low esteem for the members of the French clergy. Specifically, this is clearly reflected by the tone of Le Lutrin. Boileau would not have ventured such persiflage if the king had not been pleased with it.

  106.

  The French Spirit of Uniformity and the Huguenots

  The French spirit of uniformity in the monarchy and the restlessness of French Jesuitism at the slightest breath of anything different brought about an initial persecution of the Jansenists, who could certainly have been overlooked, as well as a persecution of quietism to the point of defiance of Innocent XI. The Jesuits simply have their patented mysticism in the form of the “sacré coeur.”

  Gradually this French spirit of uniformity and Jesuitism quite consciously takes its stand against the great and universal Catholicism. On the occasion of the disputes over the royal prerogatives it solidifies into the Gallican Articles; added to this are the brutal acts which Louis orders committed in the matter of the asylum of the French-curial legations, and the occupation of Avignon. Later there is contrasted with this, on the approach of the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis’ retreat, the written revocation of the Gallican Articles, and, finally, the papal bull Unigenitus.

  The Huguenots were the principal victims of the spirit of uniformity and Jesuitism. An intelligent king would have spared such useful and loyal subjects under any circumstances and let the clergy scream and the idle castes grumble.

  And if the French crown had wanted to be great and powerful by any means, it could have become the most exalted in the world if it had been the only one in all of Europe to give the example of equality for both creeds. Louis XIV could have supplied such an example simply by observing the Edict of Nantes.

  107.

  Louis XIV Prior to the War of the Spanish Succession

  [Inserted after the summer vacation, 1869.] Every situation of power is dominated by greed for more and “rounding off,” as soon as the internal situation permits it. It attacks small adjacent lands with insecure governments and may assert that annexation is necessary for their own good. In those days people claimed hereditary rights, rights to compensation, and the like. There was also this excuse: If we do not do it, someone else will. One creates an opportunity and then says that he must use it. In this sense every real power is evil.

  Louis XIV, however, had already ventured forward astonishingly far at home and abroad, in theory (in his arrogance) and practice (in his sacrilege). Everything that ran counter to his concept of power was pulverized. He found himself bound by no law. Internally, there were exploitation, bondage, and the most heinous religious persecution; on the outside, wars of conquest were undertaken on the emptiest pretexts.

  At the Peace of Nimwegen Louis had secured for himself Franche- Comté, the southern edge of Belgium, and actually almost all of Alsace; inside France no voice was allowed to be raised against the royal concept of religion, which was at the same time the royal concept of power.

  But how were things to go on like this? Holland had emerged from the war in splendid shape, and thus Louis had already failed in his main purpose in the war. Moreover, he became short of resources; unscrupulous extortions could help here for a long time, to be sure. More serious were the facts that there developed a shortage of men, that Louis himself began to work with ministers who were essentially only clerks (Louvois died in 1691), and that promotions were made increasingly on the basis of tractability (on the whole, these were made according to seniority).

  And now the problem of the Spanish succession gradually approached, already pregnant with a great war for which good alliances were needed. Instead of this, all Europe was stirred up and full of hatred. For the time being it was probably helpless, for the Great Elector was in alliance with the French, the emperor was ensnared and busy with the Turks, and the house of Stuart was on the throne in England. France with its central position was able to carry out the most ambitious projects.

  Yet against his will Louis had elevated to power an adversary, William of Orange, whom he should have known by then because he had again and again appeared on the battlefield after lost or indecisive battles and rejected all of Louis’ overtures. But Louis may have hoped to stir up sufficient opponents for him within Holland itself.

  The degree of Louis’ arrogance after the Peace of Nijmegen, apart from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, becomes clear from the political outrages from the reunions on.

  108.

  On the Second English Revolution

  (I) Concerning the lofty talk about this second English Revolution: It was enough for the conspirators to know that the nation would not stir. It was indolent and preoccupied with business. Its hatred for the king was not yet great enough for it to overthrow him, but it just sufficed for it to stand by and watch others overthrow him. Afterwards it watched what the army was doing and ran or crept behind it. Since the engineers of the Revolution were clever and lucky enough to give the whole matter the appearance of a mere change within the royal family, the people let it pass.

  The nation certainly had an antipathy toward Holland’s friendship, but its hatred for France was probably even greater. However, the active pursuit of those who were truly active was, for Whigs as well as Tories (to the extent that both participated), the saving of Anglicanism from the dissenters. And even so, most of them did not participate until William was there. But this reproach sticks with England, that it took a Dutch army to make England really reform herself.

  In addition to the well-founded concern of the ruling Anglican caste over the rise of the dissenters due to the Toleration Acts, there probably still existed as well a vestige of fear of the vestige of Catholicism. The masses, to be sure, were averse to it and alienated from it by a hundred years of disuse; but, after all, this time the masses had no say whatever. At any rate, with real and complete freedom, Catholicism would have achieved an appreciable stature along with the dissenters, though less because of court favor than in spite of it. But the dissenters, who had become even more powerful in the meantime, would then have started a war of destruction against the “idolators.”

  (II) As to the shabby course the Revolution took, the English view consoles itself with the well-known idea of how very well God finally dealt with England and how execrably with other nations.

  But the real achievement of England (which, being an island, got away with many things with impunity), something that no continental country could have achieved at that time, was to produce two aristocratic parties which not only took turns governing, but were really capable of governing, i.e., possessed the necessary credit with the rest of the nation and, through the parliamentary elections, were dependent on the people. A safeguard against destructive activities was the rather restricted electorate, numbering 200,000 for England and Wales.

  To be sure, in the beginning the Whigs were not yet completely separated from the Republicans, nor were the Tories from the Jacobites. At first a large Jacobite party survived, which, given the dubiousness of the new succession, could very well hope to rise once more. Here everything hinged on whether the new, anti-Jacobite England would prosper in the decisive decades. And it did produce a splendid prosperity, in its political influence on Europe, in acquisitions, in industry and commerce.

  Thereupon the Jacobites withdrew into ever narrower circles, became easier and easier to count, and finally became extinguished. They had had the better right on their side, but one day they were no longer there.

  109.

  England’s Defense Against Militarism

  When William III ascended the throne, public opinion was charged with hatred for Cromwell’s military despotism and the threatened military measures of Charles II and James II. Therefore Parliament stipulated for all time in the Declaration of Rights (January 22, 1689), which called William to the throne, that the sovereign must not maintain any standing army within the United Kingdom in peacetime without the permission of Parliament. In the spring of 1689 the Mutiny Act sharpened this further by making the right of the crown to hold courts- martial for mutinous soldiers dependent on the annual consent of Parliament. Parliament was authorized to fix the number of officers and soldiers subject to martial law and stationed on British soil each time it passed the budget. The army that was approved at that time numbered 10,000 men (?).

  The fact that English military institutions were not wholly dissolved is attributable only to the traditional political moderation. In almost 200 years there has been no parliament which tried either to paralyze the government completely by refusing it permission to maintain its instruments of power, or to force it to violate the constitution.

  William III had to send his Dutch guards, the companions of his glory and the saviors of England, home over the Channel. On the other hand, Parliament has always granted even the most unpopular governments enough troops, though a modest number, to maintain internal peace and external security.

  110.

  On the Characteristics of the Seventeenth Century

  Before the War of the Spanish Succession leave must be taken of this seventeenth century with its bad and good points.

  In comparison with the sixteenth century, to what extent was it a retrogression politically?

  On the basis of the many original minds which it produced we have too splendid a general conception of the sixteenth century and are too quick to believe that the world at that time wanted to merge directly into an age that was completely modern, i.e., in tune with our preconceptions, and that this was prevented only by the Counter Reformation, worldwide monarchism, and other things. The sixteenth century may well have been more “modern,” as compared with the seventeenth.

  But the seventeenth century was wholly aristocratic at least. Apart from the two great states in which the aristocracy was in direct control, Holland and England, it was substantially in control in the despotic states as well.

  Both centuries have their advantages and disadvantages as regards higher intellectual life. In both periods political and religious conditions are firmly established. At first the Catholic and Protestant churches have almost everywhere established the closest contact with the state and middle-class society. Scholarship is subordinated to the church, research is dependent on its permission. Dissenters must remain silent or leave the country.

  But in the seventeenth century individual thinkers gradually collect a following extending into the ranks of the mighty and even influence the theologians. Their influence is European, cosmopolitan, no longer national. There is a regeneration of epistemology in general (Bacon). Philosophy frees itself from religion (Descartes). Necessity is understood as causality (Spinoza). Skepticism becomes universal (Bayle). Reason appears as the mistress of religion (the English freethinkers). Applied to the state, this means that it is no longer founded on divine right, but on reason and expediency and a presumed contract. The groundwork for this way of thinking had been laid by the uprising of the Dutch in the sixteenth century and the English Revolution in the seventeenth. Gradually there comes into being an atmosphere of Western enlightenment.

  For the time being, however, the seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state’s power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.

  111.

  Russia

  Up to that time the Romanic and Germanic nations of the West had had alongside them in the East the Turks as an antithesis and archenemy. They were a purely destructive element which allied itself with the West only in time of war, and then only with the side that seemed to have the upper hand. Otherwise they maintained their exclusive Mohammedan-Tartar culture and looked down upon Western civilization. The influence of the Turks upon Europe was exerted only through conquest and external force.

  Now there arises in the East a state which appears to be most eager to attach itself to European culture, but in order to dominate Europe by any means! It utilizes foreign brainpower, but shuts out foreign ideas.

  If the nation in question had its way, it would remain racially as Oriental as possible. In addition to the culture it is forced to adopt, it has preserved its old native customs with extraordinary tenacity, so that a startling contrast between the two prevails.

  Meanwhile, however, in the hands of a “government with a definite program” it has for 150 years constituted one of the most powerful machines ever set in motion for world dominion.

  For, in addition to possessing its old traditions it is thoroughly drillable and, on top of that, from its store of healthy barbarism it continually supplies a wealth of elemental strength for the purposes of the government. The Russian element at least can flow into European civilization, because it has no Koran.

  Could the Russians have remained secluded barbarians? Certainly not in the long run. Even tyrants of moderate stature, e.g., Ivan IV, managed to develop power and culture from this talent for being drilled and to make themselves terrible to their neighbors. In the office of the czar there seems to have been a permanent temptation to do this; the world experienced its strongest and definitive outburst in Peter the Great. It has ever been thus with barbarians; their strong rulers are invariably conquerors.

  The tragic element in the subsequent destiny of Europe lies in the fact that the Western peoples, while engaged in constant transformations and revolutions from within, are at the same time affected by an almost wholly mechanical force from without which has virtually no share in their joys and sorrows, their mind and higher aspirations, yet constitutes a major weight on the scale and helps to stabilize or revolutionize, according to its convenience. (n.b. In most recent times this has become different. What has been won so far is beginning to take revenge and hit back at its master.)

  In their methods of ruling, the czars are completely unconstrained and capable of things that the West with all its Caesarism no longer has the heart to do.

  The Russians attain to one of the highest positions in world history with utter abuse of their own character and profound inward unhappiness for the greatest part of the nation.

  Whether without Peter they still would have fallen into all sorts of evil and dangerous ways, only of a different kind, we do not know.

  And even if the Russian nation does want to be great and powerful, i.e., bad, toward the outside, like other great nations, it may still have the goodness to recognize the excellence of Peter and his institutions.

  Will the fate of individualization, that is, the atomistic revolution, ever reach the Russian people, and if so, how soon? And will this render it ineffective or all the more influential for Europe?

  112.

  England After George I

  Broken forever was the crown as an absolute authority, and the royal church supremacy as well. The political advantage of the latter now devolved upon the cabinet minister of the moment. It was he who from then on had substantial control of ecclesiastical job patronage, which naturally strengthened his party.

  In the beginning the sympathies of the crown even veered toward the dissenters, as long as the high Anglican clergy still had Jacobite leanings.

  England and Scotland were now completely united; but opposed to the Anglican church in England there existed a hostile Calvinist-Presbyterian church in Scotland, which likewise was a state church.

  To England Hallam’s words apply: “The Supremacy of the legislature is like the collar of the watch-dog,” which the state puts on a church endowed and raised to a state institution by it, as the price for sustenance and shelter.

  On the other hand, in time all sects or religious associations which are already formed or are to come into being in the future govern themselves in complete freedom.

  What had been achieved was religious freedom, i.e., freedom not to belong to the state church (likewise Protestant), and this achievement was in conflict with the principles of original Protestantism. What had been won back was civil liberties, part of which had been destroyed by the Protestant state church of the sixteenth century; these were now extended, too. Protestantism in its previous official form had been a mortal enemy of civil liberties. In its later state of further fragmentation, in its secondary forms (sects), it actually had some share in their restoration.

  Not that they were tolerant willingly and themselves gave evidence of freedom. Each would have liked to suppress the others and impose its yoke of views and institutions upon the whole nation.

  The Presbyterians in England dissolved themselves completely and were supplanted by other new sects.

  Since the eighteenth century the crown has been a powerless phantom; instead, there is rule by the majority of the lower house.

  In 1715 Addison wrote that the nation had become a nation of statesmen, each age, each sex, and each profession had its own list of ministers on its lips, and “Whig” and “Tory” were the first words a babe babbled on its mother’s breast.

  113.

  Frederick the Great

  The change in his character, his final maturing, must have come about as the consequence of his attempt at escape in 1730. This marks the beginning of his inevitable contempt for people and undoubtedly his particular contempt for everything that existed in the Prussian states, while through his father he got to know the enormous fist of royalty. This time the methods of utter debasement had been applied, not in anima vili [in a spirit of wickedness], but to him as the successor to the throne, when Katte had been killed before his eyes and he had then been locked up with a Bible, a songbook, and Arndt’s True Christianity, and besides had been permitted to study the archives of Margrave Hans. In opposition to the king’s semi-Lutheran view of universal grace, Frederick took up with “Calvinist” predestination (William III of Orange had also been a vehement predestinationist). As late as 1737–1738 Voltaire most urgently remonstrates with him in behalf of human liberty as against his fatalism which, he says, hardens hearts.

  Frederick’s sojourn at Küstrin had the great value of breaking his narrow orientation toward intellectual pleasures, which would later have impeded his great political development. He learned the knack of administration and military command in miniature. Then came the forced marriage to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, with whom he lived at Rheinsberg for the sake of appearances.

  His adherence to things French is sufficient evidence of his desire to live separated from his state and people, above his people. If intellectual things had come his way in German, he would have been in danger of having to respect Germany.

  On the very first day upon receiving the news of Charles VI’s death, his decision to get control of Silesia was made.

  If he had foreseen all those with whom he would have to deal in consequence, if he had been older and more experienced, he probably would hardly have risked it.

  Through his first martial act, the necessity for a personal dictatorship to the end of his life was determined for Frederick II.

  V

  The Age of Revolution

  114.

  Introduction to the History of the Age of Revolution

  (I) [November 6, 1867.] The time at which this course of lectures is given modifies it each time, for it is unlike any other course. It concerns itself with the beginning of that which is still active and will continue to be so, with that world age whose further development we do not know as yet. At this very moment events are being shaped, and on the horizon, in the near or distant future, there is a great European war as a consequence of everything that has gone before.

  That is why in this case objectivity of presentation is even more dubious than usual. And yet the man who presents this age must give a general account from his vantage point.

  The lack of judgment which contents itself with assigning to each individual moment of the revolution its relative raison d’être as an evolutionary stage is shallow and inadequate. For, in the first place, not everything is necessary by any means, but many things are accidental and personal doings, and secondly, the worst judgment is easily substituted for the supposed absence of judgment, namely, the approval of the fait accompli, the succès.

  Above all, the revolution has had results which now completely shape us and constitute an integral part of our feeling for justice and our conscience—things, therefore, that we can no longer separate from ourselves.

  All previous situations involved states in which the nobility and clergy were organized as class forces only here and there, to be sure, but enjoyed the greatest personal privileges, tax immunity, exclusive eligibility for higher offices, and great real property which was tied up in estates subject to mortmain and entail—states in which industry was exploited by the government and frequently bureaucratized in the most senseless manner, in which state religions with exclusive rights at best tolerated those holding different beliefs, and a show of unity of faith was preserved as far as possible.

  On the other hand, these were the results of the revolution:

  Complete equality before the law, including more or less equal eligibility for offices, taxation, and inheritance.

  Complete or almost complete disposability of real property, with mortmain and entail greatly reduced.

  Freedom of industry, theoretical conviction of the harmfulness of any state interference; enormous increase of the science of economics; the necessity of industry’s counsel for the state; enormous increase of material civilization, bound up with rapid exploitation of the earth’s surface.

  Equality of religions, no longer merely of the Christian creeds, through the creation of tolerant states with a paid clergy, and state indifference; further, a tendency toward separation of church and state, with complete dominion of the latter over the former.

  Beginnings of absolute political equality; the examples of America and Switzerland as more developed democracies; universal suffrage in several places; also, general standardization.

  However, it is doubtful whether the world has on the average become happier for all this. The two components of happiness are the conditions themselves and the degree of satisfaction with them.

  The chief phenomenon of our days is the sense of the provisional. In addition to the uncertainty of each individual’s fate we are confronted with a colossal problem of existence whose elements must be viewed separately and as new consequences and tendencies arisen from the revolution. These are the following:

  THE NEW CONCEPT OF THE STATE

  This is not the philosophical concept (Hegel!) which would pass the state off as the realization of morality on earth, something that is not the business of the state but of society, whereas the state is, after all, only a protective shield. Rather, it is here a question of the new concept of the extent of the state’s power.

  In the preceding century, sultanic despotism had reigned to the extent that it was able to prevail against privilege. In the crevices there nested all sorts of special existences.

  Then came the revolution and unfettered, first, all ideals and aspirations, then all passion and selfishness. It inherited and practiced a despotism which will serve as a model for all despotisms for all eternity. Another essential feature of it was the secularization of the church. Part of this general process was a lawless centralization which had arisen in a time of “danger to the fatherland.” This centralization has existed in complete form even in the monarchies only since the revolution, having been created partly for purposes of defense, partly as an imitation.

  The concept of equality is a two-edged one here. It turns into the abdication of the individual, because the more universal any possession is, the fewer individual defenders it finds. Once people have become accustomed to the state as the sole guardian of rights and public welfare, even the will to decentralization no longer helps. Governments no longer entrust their provinces, cities, and other individual forces with any real matters of power, but turn over to them only those trials and tribulations which the governments absolutely can no longer cope with—something that the smaller units hardly desire. In general, despite all the talk about freedom, peoples and governments demand unlimited state power internally.

  The Revolution left France in a condition for which at first a cure was sought in world conquest; then, after a deep humiliation, the country was filled with nothing but demands and accusations. Coupled with the complete extinction of the awareness of constitutional and international law, this condition pressed toward periodic revolutions, in consequence of which Europe is again imperiled, up to the sudden shift of 1870. But the others have also learned how to threaten, and governments and peoples agree on the necessity of being powerful toward the outside.

  The consequences of this international situation are an immeasurable increase of militarism (since Frederick the Great there have been huge standing armies, usable at home as well as abroad) and also a colossal increase in state debts, which is in striking contrast with the general mania for money-making and the desire for high living. What is perpetrated thereby is then called cabinet and dynastic despotism, but soon also acquires the name of great national necessity.

  To what extent are the dynasties still in control, to what extent only the managers and messenger boys of mass movements? They devour or drive out their own kind, their cousins and other relatives, as soon as the moment impels them to! And dispossessed sovereigns then trade their claims for sums of money or pensions. The feeling of divine right has deserted the governments—and how should the belief in it still be present in the feelings of the people! Belief in invisible, immemorial foundations of existence, politico-religious mysticism is gone. The dynasties will come to an end, if only because only special talents will be needed. Would adopting heirs help? Our sympathy for the elective empires of past times is foolish, while all Europe is drifting toward something similar, whether it be special personalities or adoptions or something else, when people will not even be able to vote any longer!

  In the end the people believe that if the state power were completely in their hands they could fashion a new existence with it.

  But in between occurs long, voluntary servitude under individual leaders and usurpers; people no longer believe in principles, but from time to time they do believe in saviors. A new possibility of long despotism over weary people presents itself again and again.

  RELATIONSHIP TO THE NATIONALITIES

  The Revolution and its wars first summoned the French, then other nationalities as well, to activity in love and hatred, stirring them out of dismemberment and separate territorial life or at least to keener national consciousness, if the nation was already united.

  Reflective thought might reply that common nationality by descent and language was something long since outmoded. The French Enlightenment and later the French Revolution talked very big about “humanity,” and there was also a refined “cosmopolitanism.” Or it might reply that culture, which was European, and the community of experiences, interests, and aspirations were a stronger bond, and that not nationality, but a healthy state was the homeland and lord of the emotions.

  However, in unhealthy situations botched by parliaments one falls back on his descent and language as a saving solution of the intolerable, until one finally gets his way, without his being better off for it than before.

  Then, too, where power already exists, nationality is used as a further means of agglomeration. (Or a revolutionary party uses the desire for reuniting the nationality as chicanery, like the Italian irredentists.) Princes and peoples are agreed on this. Resistance is hated. Foreign elements already under one’s power are crushed. The imminent eradication of the German element in the Baltic provinces is a popular notion in Russia.

  Since the revolution, and despite the interim of thirty-three years, people have become accustomed to every conceivable change in their boundaries.

  PUBLIC OPINION

  The crusades and the Reformation are well known as earlier eras in which an intellectual atmosphere dominated an entire people, not just particular classes. But the revolution exerts such a dominance in a far different sense; since the revolution this control has been permanent, and in this there has been a European solidarity. Here the fluctuations are enormous, and they are the more contagious the greater the increase in the rapidity of all communication and in the homogeneity of European culture and the daily press. The latter is by far the predominant—indeed, almost the only—reading matter of entire classes and countries. The great experience of 1789 was that public opinion forms and transforms the world—once the traditional powers were too weak to prevent it and once they started to make deals with individual currents in the stream of public opinion.

  In all matters of high significance, division into parties and the corresponding double theory now run through all European peoples. Public opinion, i.e., the passion of entire peoples, is indeed irresistible.

  But the real success of the press today lies more in the leveling of views than in its immediate effect. What is recommended and demanded most loudly and most generally is often the last thing to happen. For, at times the press screams so loudly for the very reason that people are no longer listening. Some of the opponents may be people who do not read newspapers anyway. Then there is the public opinion fabricated by those in control and by small parties, a venal press, and the like. The rulers, on the whole, are much less uneasy, let the boldest remarks pass because they are ineffective, and completely forgo censorship in the old style, although they do reserve sudden indirect action. (Since then they have again become much more uneasy. After all, public opinion can descend to the street overnight and turn into an uproar.) Meanwhile, the rulers have discovered the true counterpoise of the press:

  BUSINESS AND COMMUNICATION

  As soon as the great wars were over, the example of England caught on. Since 1815 a progressive industrialization of the world has been taking place, beside which the great landholdings recede completely. Machine labor has far outdistanced all older techniques; capital is accumulated for the building of factories, human masses for their operation; at the same time credit is enormously expanded. Machines are also used in large-scale farming. The railroads, steamships, and telegraphy place themselves in the service of communication. All goods can travel far; a European adjustment comes about; all local character of production ceases where it is not a question of immediate consumption of the products of the area concerned. Added to this are, finally, commerce, speculation, and, later, gain from stocks and securities. Money becomes and remains the great measure of things, poverty the greatest vice. Money is the successor to birth, but it is more equitable than the latter, because it does not remain long with incompetent heirs.

  Intellect and culture are appreciated, to be sure. But literature has unfortunately become an industry as well in most cases. Alongside it, the literature of the eighteenth century appears all to be written with the heart’s blood. Today very few things are still produced out of inner necessity. The raison d’être of the vast majority of creations is the honorarium or the hope for a position. The most famous writer is the one most likely to turn manufacturer. As for scholarship, popularizing for payment overtops even the tremendous amount of research.

  Hurry and worry are spoiling life. Through universal competition everything is forced to the greatest speed and struggle for minimal differences.

  But at the same time, through the influence of big cities, there arises the mania for getting rich quick, l’amour du million, because this simply is the measure of existence. A naive concession to this may be noticed everywhere. “Respectable living” is jacked up to the point where it is hard to afford; at least the semblance of wealth is required. Cheating of all kinds is inseparable from these phenomena and conditions.

  In any time of crisis a lot of card houses collapse. But those who are unable to establish themselves and get rich, as in 1849–1853, lament pitifully [since then the crash of 1873 and its consequences]. If those times had continued, the most terrible crises would now be here because of mere cheating and overproduction; for experience teaches us that people do not restrain themselves. [This subsequently happened in 1871–1872 and was punished in 1873.]

  And all this takes place while fermentation from below penetrates over and over again, something that is currently, e.g., terrorizing all of propertied England (and since then other countries as well); while people have no scruples whatever about changes of any kind, something to which the French Revolution has accustomed mankind, particularly the malcontents. At the same time there is utter uncertainty as to the legal limits of majority decisions, while the darkest clouds move up. The great continental war which must destroy all weaker state structures would in any case entail the influx of the great social problem which would appear all by itself with the cessation of industry and credit. [This has happened, but quite differently from what we expected; France went through it with the Commune of 1871; elsewhere the illness remains in the body as a creeping one.]

  Here things depend on how well our generation can stand the test. Times of terror and profoundest misery may come. We should like to know on which wave in the ocean we are floating, but we ourselves are the wave.

  However, mankind is as yet not destined for downfall, and Nature is creating as graciously as ever.

  However, if in misfortune there is to be some fortune as well, it can only be a spiritual one, facing backward to the rescue of the culture of earlier times, facing forward to the serene and unwearied representation of the spirit in a time which could otherwise be given up entirely to things mundane.

  (III)* [November 6, 1871.] In regard to the name of this course it may be remarked that actually everything up to our day is fundamentally nothing but an age of revolution, and perhaps we are, relatively speaking, only at the beginning or in the second act. For those three apparently calm decades from 1815 to 1848 have turned out to be a mere entracte in the great drama. But this seems about to become one movement which is antithetical to all the known past of our globe.

  To be sure, in those three decades in which we were born and grew up it was possible to believe that the revolution was something completed, which therefore might be described objectively. People also believed—and the high point of these illusions was the spirit of 1830— that they possessed the bridge between the old and the new in the form of the constitutional monarchy. A few “achievements” spread more and more homogeneously throughout Europe, albeit in part only as something sought after, and were regarded as “benefits” of the French Revolution. These were: equality before the law, equality of taxes and division of inheritance, equal eligibility for offices; disposability of real property, reduction of mortmain and entail, as well as a more productive cultivation of the soil, with a quicker exhaustion to a certain extent; freedom of industry, dominance by business and communications; fixed capital overtaken by liquid capital and itself made liquid; equal rights of denominations, something that has become inevitable especially in quite mixed states; in places, state domination of the church, also a tendency toward separation of the two; a great influence of public opinion on all events; widespread currents of public opinion transcending anything national; the modern press.

  At that time appeared those books, well written even though not classic, which tried to present a general view of the years 1789 to 1815, as of a completed age—not impartial, to be sure, but trying to be fair and quietly convincing.

  Now, however, we know that the very same tempest which has shaken humanity since 1789 bears us onward, too. We can asseverate our impartiality in good faith and yet unconsciously be caught up in extreme partiality.

  But in any case, the period 1789 to 1815, with its preliminaries dating from the middle of the eighteenth century (the Enlightenment, the beginnings of reform by governments), constitutes a kind of self-contained whole for practical consideration, with at least the facts and their causes passably well established.

  If one wanted to proceed strictly, history itself, from its beginnings, would be only a very dubious source of pure knowledge, because even to its earliest reports sympathies and antipathies of the present can attach themselves every time. Even with ancient Greek and Roman history, with Egypt and Assyria, one can completely lapse into partisanship and interweave jabs at the present.

  But let us nevertheless venture the academic presentation of that first period of our present revolutionary world age. A good scholarly justification for this would lie in the facts that so many figures and events of that time have had a typical significance for subsequent developments and that the ritual and imitation of the first French Revolution are an element of the present movement and thus necessary for its understanding, if only historically.

  (II) [November 1, 1869.] First we encounter the period of reform from above, with its enlightened rulers and ministers. At that time a public opinion is coming into being, guided by an important literature and poetry, partly negative, partly imaginatively positive, which proceeded from the premise of the goodness of human nature. It is a public opinion which, for the time being, still expects everything to come from above. But a great external event, the liberation of the North American colonies from England, appears as the general prototype of all emancipation. At the same time the important constitutional fights in England itself work in this direction.

  But the great despotic reformers are at the same time revolutionaries, to the extent that they are annexers and conquerors; thus Frederick II, Joseph II, and Catherine II. The first great example of the confiscation of an entire country and people is Poland.

  Then, on the occasion of a profound financial upheaval, the French crown calls on the already fermenting nation for counsel. All ideals and desires explode in the cahiers which are unique of their kind. This is still the time of visionary hopes, which afterwards returned only for brief moments, and this mood also radiates over Europe.

  In the Assembly itself there is a quick turning against the king. Immediately all organs of the old state structure dissolve themselves; anarchie spontanée sets in. Any agreement between the old concept of power with its methods and the new attempt at a people’s government, an agreement from which the establishment of general happiness is demanded and expected, becomes utterly impossible. Human rights are the great moving force which speaks not only for France, but for the world. The two camps must be regarded not as two contending legal parties, but only as two phenomena.

  Now there appears the rift in the alleged goodness of human nature. Its engineers are J. P. Marat and suspicion, which was at first directed against the king and the royalists (émigrés), then against all who are not unqualified members of one’s own party. The most dangerous elements of Paris assume the helm of the Revolution. Paris becomes fatally significant, much more so than Rome at the time of the Civil Wars. Rage acts out of fright. The Parisian spirit takes the leadership in the existing state of anarchy; Paris prescribes not only action, but thought as well.

  The September massacres may be regarded as the real beginning of the Terror. The foreign war started and waged by France is countered by the Prussian campaign directed at the Champagne and by the subsequent Wars of the Coalition, which keep alive the feeling on which the government of terror subsists. Meanwhile, at home, the government carries out its executions against federalism. The Terror turns from the royalists to the comrades, as it turned in the Spanish Inquisition from the Jews and Moors to the Spaniards.

  The Revolution now passes through the characteristic phases with a regularity and rapidity unmatched by any other revolution. It presents by far the most complete picture of a revolution in a very cultured period with all the illustrations one could wish for from the arts and literature.

  And since foreign invasion is staved off with relative ease, due to the most vehement internal dissension among the Coalition, France has time during all the Terror to grow a new skin; after Thermidor it is plain to see.

  There is a new society, a lot of new property owners who desire no class privileges whatever, in fact, hardly any political rights, and would only be embarrassed by any sort of association; a lot of released manpower is available. All these elements desire only peace and security. The concept of property has outlasted all other principles and values. The difference is that, for the most part, it is in new hands.

  The Directory tries to keep the surviving participants of the Revolution in power and honor, without the principles of the Revolution in which hardly anyone believes any longer. Financially it makes shift by founding and plundering so-called daughter republics, and, politically, by reverting to terror in any straits. But in the meantime militarism grows, too. However, since the generals are no longer beheaded, but allowed to become ever more famous and powerful, Napoleon seizes power on the 18th Brumaire.

  His is the most instructive type of Caesarism. He is, at the same time, the savior of the new French society and a world conqueror. People would have settled for a much lesser man.

  Internally a complete taming takes place. Fourteen years of mute obedience follow; the government and the legislation become national. This Napoleonic state has a great significance as a model for other European states. The Revolution had centralized almost exclusively by destruction. This state added order and a purposeful organism.

  Abroad, Napoleon is a terrorist, of the school of 1793–1794. And yet he may be the foremost general of all time. With utter moral unscrupulousness he has at his command the greatest military ability.

  It is his mission to trample the peoples down for the time being, but at the same time to awaken in them all their future strength, in part by using and training them, in part by enraging them.

  The peace with England, which has scarcely been concluded, he breaks after one year; he gains ground in Italy, Switzerland, and Holland.

  He sets up his empire, and, after threatening England, he wages war against the Third Coalition which he encounters for the first time at Austerlitz. Then comes the move against Prussia, which has unhappily remained neutral, and against Russia; the great chapters in this conflict are Jena, Eylau, Friedland, and Tilsit. But henceforth England remains the chief adversary; Napoleon plans a stand-up battle, but after Trafalgar he has to content himself with an indirect one.

  It is impossible for Napoleon to pause in this course. The peaceful submission of other states no longer suffices him, because, as long as there is an England, they could still come under its influence; hence the Spanish war. The latter is used by Austria to break away; for this Austria is again crushed, although this time with more difficulty.

  The tragedy of Napoleon lies in the fact that the politician carries on in such a way that the military commander can no longer keep pace. Napoleon is incapable of making out of those conquered anything but subjects or vassals, of somehow gaining them as allies through reconciliation. By this he provokes a profound inner revolt of the peoples, who thereby really get to know themselves for the first time and put up with the greatest inner transformations, as, e.g., Prussia after 1808.

  The goal which is apparently beckoning from near at hand becomes the overthrow of England, with which he fights for power in such a way that his sphere and the English one are two worlds completely apart. Once he can force Russia to let French customs officers officiate in St. Petersburg, England must give way.

  Making his way over the snarling peoples of Europe, with overtaxed resources, he undertakes the Russian campaign and finally there follows the colossal three-year judgment. Its main significance is the fact that a new order of states is brought about, not, perhaps, through the sudden death of Napoleon and an agreement among the governments, but amidst the very greatest national excitement of the peoples, especially in Germany, Russia, Spain, and England. In this way peoples which have been aroused by the French Revolution and the Wars of Liberation never again go to sleep, despite all their need for rest, and henceforth have a different standard for their whole existence and will never be satisfied with the said new political order.

  From this there follows as a main consequence the spirit of eternal revision. Napoleon himself had temporarily held this spirit in check: “J’ai conjuré le terrible esprit de nouveauté qui parcourait le monde” [I have mastered the terrible spirit of novelty which was running loose in the world].

  (IV) [November 6, 1871.] During the following three relatively peaceful decades the great new storms are clearly getting ready, in accordance with the most profound principle of the revolution, one which differentiates it from all earlier such events: eternal revision, or, rather, revolution.

  The decisive new thing that has come into the world through the French Revolution is the permission and the will to change things, with public welfare as the goal. This new thing manifests itself in the equality which here places the decision for change in the hands of universal, or at least very extensive, suffrage. From this there results a change in all forms as soon as a new content makes itself felt.

  Therefore state power has since then been present either only qualifiedly, constantly endangered by the desire for revision, or as a despotic reaction with a breaking down of political forms.

  Power is theoretically nowhere a hereditary jus quaesitum [sought-after right] any more. Hence, if the moment does require its existence, it is produced temporarily through a coup d’état.

  Universal suffrage is the logical antithesis to divine right and the old authority. The revolution proclaimed it and falsified it almost from the beginning. Its limits are indefinite. Created for elections, it can be extended to all matters of state and finally any desired sphere of existence. In the end one would arrive at the communal will of a beehive or an ant heap.

  All political freedom before universal suffrage is specifically different from that after it. Even in England it was confined to a limited number of voters. Only political freedom after universal suffrage, based on the theory of equality, possesses or arrogates to itself the authority for eternal revision. Only since then have constitutions constantly been in question and the form of state been subject to constant change.

  Equality and participation in the government through universal suffrage have become equivalent ideas (until, perhaps, one day some despotism will show us that there can be equality before it as well).

  The driving force in all this is a great optimistic will which has suffused the times since the middle of the eighteenth century. The premise is the goodness of human nature, which, however, is a mixture of good and evil. That optimistic will hopes that changes will bring about an increasing and definitive well-being and in every crisis believes it to be quite close at hand, like a mountain height in a warm, dry wind. One nation, class, level of culture after another has been gripped by it and has believed that once what was desirable for it was achieved, the world could stand still for a while. People did not suspect that their own desiring gave all others, present and future, a right to want things also. People were too ready to forget how far Rousseau had already set the goal with his talk about the “genre humain” which could be made uniformly happy through a return to simple, ideal conditions. But the overwhelming majority of the desires are material in nature, no matter how they may disguise themselves as ideal, for by far the greatest number of people have no other conception of happiness. Yet material desires are in themselves absolutely insatiable, and even if they were continually gratified, then they would be all the more insatiable.

  Idealistic minds, to be sure, let their desires and fantasies batten upon a radiant vision of the future in which the spiritual would be reconciled with the material, religion, thought, and life would be one, there would be no dichotomy between duty and inclination, and an epicurean life and morality would be compatible—and all this in the highest sense, with everything being all knowledge and yet simultaneously all beautifully figured. Actually, to date only culture has increased, while human goodness has not, and happiness has certainly not. For happiness depends on two things: the conditions themselves and the degree of satisfaction with them.

  It is conceivable that a shifting of that optimism to pessimism may take place, such as already happened at the end of antiquity, and there are isolated indications of this; but the “whether” and the “how soon” remain in doubt.

  Schopenhauer adds his voice to the political pro and con and speaks of the misery of this world, which had better not exist at all.

  And Darwin’s theory of the struggle for existence in Nature is now applied more and more to human life and history as well. That struggle has always been present, but with the slowness of political, national, and industrial life it has been far less perceptible; now, however, it is terribly alive and is accelerated by national wars and deadly industrial competition.

  It is also possible that by this blind will to change (which prevalent optimism superficially terms “progress,” as well as culture, civilization, enlightenment, development, morality, and other things) there is intended something permanent (that is, relatively so), that something stronger and higher is exerting some will in and with us. Some future time, historically surveying this our century of crisis as a whole, may then realize this, while at the same time it may be as blind about its own life and actions as we are about ours.

  (It is a moot question how long our planet may still tolerate organic life and how soon its solidification, the exhaustion of carbonic acid and of water, will be coupled with the disappearance of tellurian mankind.)

  Our task, in lieu of all wishing, is to free ourselves as much as possible from foolish joys and fears and to apply ourselves above all to the understanding of historical development. To be sure, as stated above, the age of revolution makes this objective understanding the most difficult for us. As soon as we become aware of our position, we find ourselves on a more or less defective ship which is drifting along on one wave among millions. But one could also say that we ourselves are, in part, this wave.

  But with some effort a serious interest may be taken.

  These are epochs, countries, groups, movements, and individuals in which some specific spirit and a force and passion applied to it manifest themselves eloquently and by turns as instructive and as tempestuously moving. Out of the jumble and confusion we shall win a spiritual possession; in it we want to find not woe, but wealth.

  The age of revolution is particularly most instructive, in contrast to everything older and earlier, on account of the rich mutability of things, the multiformity of modern life as compared to earlier life, the strong change in the pulse beat, and, finally, through the great notoriety of everything connected with it.

  From this alone we know (certainly not by our own merits) much more about the general life of humanity than did the greatest minds of a hundred years ago. While their ancestors did not undergo much more than wars, the last three generations have experienced an infinitely greater variety of things, namely, the formulation of new principles for existence, numerous new state formations, rapid changes in all mores, culture, and literature. As a shaking up of life, the age of the Reformation and colonization, for example, is a trifle compared to ours. We even have a knowledge of earlier times which is very different from that of our forefathers, because the age of revolution has opened up to us an appreciation of historical driving forces where our ancestors knew only acting individuals. We now see in the history of all epochs to a much larger extent great waves of necessity and regard the individuals as mere tools.

  The two greatest changes are the new significance of nationalities and the new concept of the state in connection with new social programs.

  THE NATIONALITIES

  The French, as well as all other nationalities, through both resistance and contagion, became much more conscious of their own selves than they had previously been; especially those whose states were dismembered yearned for an end of their isolated territorial existence and for a communal existence and unfolding of their strength. With such prospects Napoleon I tantalized the Poles and Italians, and they believed him beyond his death. There developed the ideal of a national will which might be able to assert itself outside the country as well as in relation to one’s own ruler. To be sure, in this context belong also the subsequent national wars and their character; militarism is their consequence.

  THE STATE IN THE NEWER SENSE

  The state is to be coterminous with this nationality, i.e., expand until it encompasses all who speak the same language. Nationality is to serve it as a further means of agglomeration, or vice versa. Foreign elements already within the state are crushed; externally the nationalistic state can never be too powerful or can hardly be powerful enough.

  But this applies also internally, and here political and social interests write the most extensive programs for the state, with scarcely compatible contents. On the political side these postulates are made: the greatest freedom of all action and movement, universal voting and decision-making; the national will (no matter how it is determined) is to be the master, the ad hoc organs will turn up; all institutions are to be kept provisional and flexible. The origin of this political program is the theory of revolution, not its practice.

  On the social side an all-powerful state is postulated throughout. For it is not expected and hoped for that society will of itself realize the desires concerned, which is the way it really ought to be; that is why these tasks are passed on to the state, which has the necessary means of coercion or will create them on behalf of a pretended universal benefit and thus needs an unprecedented wealth of power. The careerists, however, want to take this omnipotent state in hand and guide it. The origin or, rather, the basis of this social program lies in Caesarism.

  The French Revolution was social from its very beginning in 1789. In the rural regions the transfer of property was immediately the driving force without which the peasants would not have participated. Moreover, the persecution or destruction of those property owners who had hitherto been at the same time the holders of official power were also effective here. Added to this was the freedom to postulate all sorts of things, as though the world were a tabula rasa (clean slate) and everything could be enforced through well-devised institutions. Those tendencies were represented theoretically by Saint-Just who, as a consistent follower of Rousseau, wanted to leave only swords and plowshares, and, finally, by Babeuf tagging along behind.

  The period after 1815 then took up that development and carried it on. Only now, through the peace, were revealed the consequences of a released colossal real property and an industry hitherto really shackled and only relatively free. With England as the model the age of absolute, ruthless acquisition and communication began (Goethe to Zelter: wealth and speed); modern industry came into being. Beside the national wars there appears national competition which is equally murderous, as well as fights along national strata and class lines—beginning with largescale wheat growing by machines, continuing with the crowding out of household industry and handicraft by large industry and the factory system, mainly producing for mass consumption, then for everything. (Hellwald, Machines and Misery, p. 783. n.b. This is true not merely of transitional periods.)

  In the most striking contrast with political equality are misery and physiological deterioration (brain formation). To be sure, misery constitutes “a component of every phase of civilization,” but formerly it was not concentrated and yet politically without a voice. Now it makes a noise; it simply wants to be misery no longer, and we are, after all, in the age of eternal revision.

  It is under such circumstances that, alongside all the other proclaimed equalities, the only kind of inequality—but the most sensitive of all—is supposed to maintain itself, namely, the inequality of property—and this precisely when it is most strongly on the increase and the entire middle class obviously on the decline.

  Thus socialism with its series of systems appears. It strives to gain control of the state, and at the same time the state tries its hand at social experiments.

  As factors intensifying the danger there are the dissolution of the smaller units of living, unrestricted settlement and business establishment, as well as overpopulation—and all this with increasing demands made by the state.

  Fortunately our consideration of history is not concerned with the future, unlike certain philosophers, e.g., Herr von Hartmann with his two kinds of prophecies. Soothsaying is dead, to be sure, but it is a fact that our time in general provokes calculations and constructions about the future.

  One prophecy (Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, pp. 348, 351 f.) speaks of the breaking up of the world into republics which together will form a republic of states with common legal protection.

  In social respects, Hartmann foresees free association, with uniform organization of production and worldwide marketing, by which the riches of the earth would also grow in much faster progression than now, provided (!) that it is not paralyzed or outdistanced here, too, by the increase in the population. (So here even philosophers can see no connection.) The final goal would be for everyone to lead a comfortable life, one worthy of a human being, with a work schedule allowing sufficient leisure for intellectual improvement. (But then who is to load garbage and perform similar chores?) Materially, man would then have the possibility of finally fulfilling his positive, real mission.

  Hartmann’s other prophecy (op. cit., p. 337, esp. 341 f.) is as follows. After colossal self-praise of philosophy and philosophers and other pretty speeches there follows (in connection with Darwin) a vision of the future which may harmonize with the above as best it may (p. 343: this is also where he admits that his perspective is horrible from the eudemonic standpoint). It is the struggle for existence. This, he says, takes place among men according to natural laws as inexorable for men as for animals and plants, i.e., eradication of the inferior races of mankind, of the savages as remnants of arrested developmental stages. To be sure, the faster the whole earth is occupied by the most highly developed races, the whites, the more quickly the fight among the various tribes within the races will break out; because these are far more evenly matched, this fight will be much more terrible, bitter, and prolonged, but all the more beneficial to the progressive “development” of the species (yes indeed! into depraved devils!). According to Hartmann, the form of the struggle does not matter, whether it be war or another form of competition, squeezing dry by commerce, or other methods. Thus the earth will become increasingly the exclusive prize of the most highly developed peoples, which will become ever more civilized. Of course, even within these peoples further development will be able to come about only through a grandiose struggle for existence. (And what about the above-mentioned comfortable life, one worthy of a human being?)

  We shall do without such historical decorative endpieces. Instead, we have a request to make of fate—a request for a feeling of duty for what lies before us each time, submission to the inevitable, and, when the great problems of existence confront us, a clear, unambiguous statement of these; finally, a request for as much sunshine in the life of an individual as is necessary to keep him alert for the fulfillment of his duty and his contemplation of the world.

  115.

  The Period of Reform from Above

  Absolutism, which had formerly lived primarily for the enjoyment of its power and its goals of greed, basing itself on divine right, begins to concern itself, as sultanism, with public benefit, or at least pretends to do so, partly in the spirit of great causes, partly as the benevolent father. For this it needs and demands another increase of its power over the privileged classes, including the church, and regional differences and special privileges.

  Public opinion had already been set in motion by a French-European, partly negative, partly imaginatively positive literature and poetry and had as its basis equality or at least uniformity. In this it aided absolutism to the extent that it, too, considered that state as the best-ordered in which the privileged classes were allowed mere advantages and had as little corporate power left as possible, where there was the smallest possible number of differences. Poland and Sweden, kingdoms ruled by the nobility, were regarded as the most unhappy countries. According to this view England constituted an exception. At the same time, public opinion increasingly espoused the “Enlightenment” in general, i.e., the abstracting of all primeval and invisible foundations of existence.

  The reform had on its side unqualified centralization; the Enlightenment included enmity to everything traditional. The enlightened, i.e., absolutist, state strove for complete inner unity and complete availability of all forces; public opinion strove for the breaking down of all barriers.

  Socially, the upper classes were still in high favor everywhere, and only they were eligible for the higher offices in the state and partly in the (Catholic) church as well, but inwardly they were no longer sure of their special privileges and were already strongly affected by the new developments.

  If the state now no longer derived its authorization to omnipotence from divine right, but from the concept of public benefit, it inevitably had to run the risk of passing from the hands of the dynasties into other hands. It just did not know yet how close this moment was. Everyone believed himself capable of governing in the spirit of public benefit.

  This double origin of the modern state from the complete centralization of power and the Enlightenment has since then been constantly apparent. Thus the political tradition in France is woven together out of the Revolution and Napoleonic despotism.

  In keeping with this general state of affairs, Frederick II’s instruction to the General Directory of 1778 reads: “Our interest is identical with that of the people.” In Frederick the Great’s view a prince had long been “le premier serviteur de l’État” [the chief servant of the state] (Testament of 1752?). To be sure, during his regime the “public benefit” is replaced by the concentration of all forces on war and readiness for war, as well as his inevitable and permanent dictatorship. Only a very small part of his nobility were true aristocrats, the overwhelming majority being Junkers.

  116.

  Absolutism in the North

  Gustavus III’s task was to save the country through the overthrow of an oligarchy very similar to the one from which Charles XI in 1681 took the usurped crown lands and rights. Gustavus’ coup d’état was a genuine royal revolution in the name of the whole country against an insolently encroaching part.

  In Denmark, on the other hand, there was royal rule in abundance, but a bureaucracy of kinsmen participated in the rule without outside support (here there were no parties of the Caps and Hats, as in Sweden), merely as a matter of custom. The arrogant, vain Struensee, a real professor, strikes into this nest of abuses in the name of Enlightenment and progress and then has to move forward step by step until he is heard panting and is overthrown. His entire story is only of pathological interest, as evidence of the prevailing fever of progress as being equal to rulership in a debased spirit. The monarchy remained about the same after him as it had been before him.

  117.

  On the North American Revolutionary War

  (I) Once the Americans truly believed that America existed for their sake and belonged to them, it did not even take the doctrine of “no taxation without representation” to bring about their revolt as soon as they were strong enough. Actually, however, the moving spirits wanted to break away from England, and the tax business was only the most welcome pretext.

  A very characteristic thing was the prolonged preservation of the semblance of legality in the rebellion.

  There was a striking disparity between the great personal freedom and political rights of the Americans and their commercial tutelage and exploitation up to that time.

  Only one thought is impossible and inconceivable in that period: that England should have given these colonies their freedom without being admonished, on its own initiative. After all, only a short time previously it had triumphantly had new territory in America transferred to it. Too, England might have had to defend these areas at a later time if some other sea power wanted to establish itself there, e.g., the same France that later sided with the colonies.

  And so the most powerful politicians and political economists of the world of that time simply had to pay dearly for experience, too.

  To be sure, without foreign aid the Americans would initially have been defeated, but hardly for long. And then, the very fact that they found and accepted such foreign aid is a characteristic of people such as they were.

  The originally so divergent backgrounds and political and social difference, as well as the non-English, Dutch, and refugee elements, had already been largely smoothed out.

  (II) Without French aid and the European naval war North America would certainly have been subjugated. Thereupon the whole political and economic life of England would have had to be oriented toward the permanent suppression of America. England would have become a sort of military state. However, the French Revolution, which would have come anyway, probably would have induced America to rebel again, but presumably so soon that England would have had to take a stand long before 1793 and join the Coalition. Anyway, in England itself the military state would have had to defend itself against a revolution. The America (United States) of 1783 had only one and a half times the population of New York today. It surely had no inkling of its future reciprocal relations with Europe, although people must have known immediately that the successful revolt had a moral meaning for Europe generally. And this state had inscribed into its founding documents the “pursuit of happiness” as an aim of the life of peoples.

  118.

  England

  Here there exist a state structure and an economic life which are able to keep completely aloof from the contemporary continental zeal for change and so-called reform through their own great political strength and the ability of individuals.

  No Montesquieu and no Rousseau could do the slightest harm to the English, and even the influence of the French Revolution was completely rejected at home. After great victorious battles England passed over into the nineteenth century the way it had been before, as the most glorious among all opponents of the Revolution and of France. It goes through its internal crises without outside countries being able to interfere through disturbance or invasion, let alone permanent conquest. Its public opinion rises above the fluctuations and reactions of the Continent’s. Everything is settled on the island.

  England had entered modern times, from 1763 on, with high splendor (Peace of Paris) and in general had been almost persistently on the ascendant since the War of the Spanish Succession.

  Its upper class possessed in the highest measure the two capacities which the French nobility lacked: through its two parties it was able to govern the kingdom, and at the same time it ran its counties as regards justice, administration, and military command, all without pay.

  119.

  On Small States

  [Regarding German conditions.] Petty princes and counts were especially numerous in the Westphalian, Upper Rhenish, and Franconian areas, and particularly in Swabia, all with little courts and a complete administration in miniature. If they had only contented themselves with being country Junkers! Instead of this there prevailed courtly and military dilettantism. Reforms almost never penetrated there. Contemporaneously with the reformers of the larger states there existed here little Nimrods and peasant baiters, surrounded by adventurers and indulging their mania for governing. The small states all exist only as long as no stronger man lets another stronger man have them.

  The small state has meaning and life only if it is a republic, a genuine one, and changes and preserves only as much as is commensurate with its active strength.

  120.

  On the Dissolution of the Jesuit Order

  A curious thing is the anonymity of the entire order in its decline. Did not a single Jesuit once more appear as a personality to face powerful personalities like Pombal and others? In this last hour of the order one misses at least a book which might have made a plea for the order from the viewpoint of power and expediency. [Later addition: Such a book would have availed nothing.] To be sure, there were no later “revelations” either.

  121.

  The Intellectual Situation Prior to 1789

  An essentially materialistic explanation of the world, an equally irreligious doctrine of man’s nature, a hatred for Christianity (and not just for its external embodiment of power, the Catholic church) combine with a growing criticism and scorn of the particular French state system, with the ideal of the constitutional state, with new views of national economy, and cross and coincide in part with a doctrine of the goodness of human nature in its supposed natural state, with the drive toward a radical change in mores as well as in the state. All this, in all its phases, is conveyed by an irresistible literature which beyond France sweeps Europe away.

  There is a general susceptibility to contagion. The need for emotion has been aroused and exists, with compassion and a feeling of virtue being especially required for it. It becomes the fashion to trace the psyche of one’s fellow men; the great document of this is Lavater’s work on physiognomy.

  The need for emotion in the direction of visionary enthusiasm and enlightenment is exploited in Europe outside of France by secret societies, in France itself by miracle-workers and charlatans.

  A general victorious and reassuring feeling predominates, one which is fed by the great travels, nature descriptions, and discoveries in the natural sciences.

  122.

  German and French Intellectual Development in the Eighteenth Century

  The French mind takes cognizance of things almost only ad probandum [for the sake of arguing], any more, in order to derive some proof of the reprehensibility of everything up to then.

  The German mind, on the other hand, exists ad narrandum [for the sake of reporting], i.e., it has an infinity of things to report from within as well as from the world viewed through new eyes. It has a decided capacity for becoming absorbed in itself and in the world.

  Conclusive evidence of this is supplied by the treatment of music in the two countries at that time. Since it has nothing to do with the probare, the sole activity of the contemporary French mind, it plays a small role in France, Grétry and Méhul notwithstanding. In poetry, too, no really great work is possible in France because of this tendentiousness.

  The German spirit, by contrast, is positive, rich, multifarious, exploring itself in all directions and enjoying its treasures, oriented toward understanding and intellectual happiness.

  Nowhere among its greatest representatives is there a trace of the general dissatisfaction or of the scornful tone with which France flies in the face of everything past and present. Individual feelings predominate, but where the general does appear, it is patriotism of the enthusiastic rather than the embittered variety. Instead of bitterness there prevails here buoyant enthusiasm in a great variety of endeavors.

  123.

  On Rousseau and His Utopia

  (I) Rousseau’s utopia had already spread widely from the educated circles down to the semi-educated. This utopia was composed of, and sustained by, the following premises. Human nature was assumed to be good once the barriers were taken down; in connection with this, virtuous feelings, compassion, and the like were extolled and the praises of primitive man were sung at the expense of civilized man; arguments or actions were advanced transcending individual nations, in the name of mankind; the assumption was made of an original contract into which things could be put at will (the more cautious spoke of a tacitly made contract); then, from the “social contract” there were derived liberty and equality, the latter assuming that all men should possess something, but none too much; finally, the volonté de tous [will of all] and the volonté générale [general will] were to be balanced, without its being stated who was to determine the latter.

  The French were familiarized with the idea of a leap into the uncertain; the general need for emotion played its part here.

  (II) It is strange that Rousseau makes no use of the real, concrete life and sorrows of the French common man whom he must have known so well, but remains a theorist, a utopian. Was this perhaps done so as not to scare away his only possible readership at the time? The new views had ample time over a period of two generations to gain acceptance.

  (III) J.-J. Rousseau remained a plebeian. His warmth of heart was only apparent. The Confessions are characterized by an effect of astonishment, a melancholy-rebellious tone, an unnerving dreaminess, and virtuous feelings rather than virtue; there is something un-French about them.

  124.

  The Political Situation in France Before the Revolution

  The pressure on the lowliest was the greatest; it made life barely livable. The manorial and clerical pressures hardly counted compared to the pressure exerted by the state. The peasants were in secret ferment.

  The budget was greatly overloaded. In addition to the expenses of bureaucracy, of debt and interest, of the tax rents and what they involved, of the army with its enormous officers’ budget, and of foreign affairs, the court and all that went with it was an especially great expense, notably the enormously endowed aristocratic court society and the pensions involved; this waste was still on the increase. It was as though the kings wanted to keep not only their relatives but every one of their retinue tremendously wealthy and had to compensate them quite disproportionately for every loss—and all this in the face of an increasing deficit. And yet this high nobility was utterly powerless politically and unaccustomed to any real contact with the people. It gave itself up to salon life and its amenities and isolating effect.

  The Third Estate had already gained so many privileges that it wanted the moon and was getting impatient. It was not satisfied with easy elevation to the nobility and the many offices open to it. Since 1614 it had been without any political contact with the nobility; in its municipal offices it was frequently abused; it was devoid of any old municipal spirit. A bourgeois was received by the nobility socially if he had talent or fame (the gens de lettres, men of letters), or if he helped to amuse people or to play host to them if he was wealthy. In business the Third Estate pushed ahead and it was acquiring wealth as well as being already greatly affected by the leveling culture.

  All classes were still strictly separated from one another, to be sure, even the city dwellers from the peasants, but there was more integration in culture and customs than elsewhere, and the theory, supported by the reading of the time, was essentially leveling.

  In this, the influence and absorptive power of Paris was of basic significance.

  All this confronted the government which was still completely caught up in the spirit of arbitrariness, even though it now had moderated its use of the lettres de cachet [warrants of arrest] and in general was modéré et faible [moderate and weak] and exerted a will to action and progress. Through its absolutely centralistic behavior it prepared the Revolution (cf. Tocqueville’s statements).

  125.

  The Destiny of the French Revolution

  What fated this Revolution was that according to old tradition the crown considered itself entitled to use any means, especially deception, for which, however, it had little talent; for instance, it would surely have taken back any pledged word, on the ground that it had been extorted from it, as soon as it could have done so. In the face of this, the revolutionaries presented a constitutionality that was entirely new, so that of necessity everything seemed like treason to them. The crown could not possibly submit or adjust itself quickly to this new morality. Besides, there was the feverish and furious attitude of the opponents from the beginning, the aspect of revenge on the existing king and nobility for a thousand years of injustice. The Revolution was unconditional in its demands. The crown, those who had been privileged up to that time, and presently all propertied and educated people no longer knew with whom they were dealing and how far Paris would go as the mistress of all conceivable assemblies.

  126.

  On Mirabeau

  (I) Mirabeau’s studies and writings were many-sided. He had a talent for always seeing in his own case the general case and France. His knowledge of foreign countries—England, Holland, Prussia—was unmatched by any contemporary Frenchman’s. Even though his genius and his gift for ascendancy were great and he was in his full maturity at that time, one nevertheless must despair of his success if one becomes acquainted with the cancer which gnawed away at the insides of the French Revolution from the outset. Misunderstood by the court at the beginning of the crisis, Mirabeau even had to participate in the disintegration.

  (II) Mirabeau’s program was such that it was almost impossible for it to succeed; at any rate, it presupposed an unparalleled capacity for hope and boldness. This explains his early moments of utter discouragement. For the program to succeed the court would have had to entrust itself completely to this apparent member of the opposition, while the Revolution, which still had ahead of it such an immeasurable amount of fuel to consume, would have had to be blind enough to let itself be beguiled by Mirabeau. If Mirabeau had not demanded action at any price, he would have been left without hope for any success. It is a fate characteristic of those times that the most highly gifted man shocked those whom he wanted to save with his notoriety so long and so profoundly that they waited till it was too late.

  In 1790 Mirabeau made enormous concessions, especially in all clerical matters, just to remain on top. (Cf., among others, Taine, La Révolution, p. 235, Note—on clerical marriages, etc.)

  He is the most interesting Frenchman of his time. Lafayette and Company look like a bunch of blockheads beside him, but he could no longer be of help after the anarchie spontanée set in in the summer of 1789.

  Even if, for example, Louis XVI had on July 11 chosen Mirabeau as his minister in place of Necker, and the Assembly had eagerly accepted him, Mirabeau would no longer have been capable of creating that quiet and order which would have been required to refashion all institutions of the state. The quick decay had already progressed too far, and Mirabeau could no longer have prevented Paris from sharing in the government; to escape it was his advice even later. For the time being he could not have changed the fact that the Assembly voted under sharp external pressure and also that its decisions remained ineffective in the face of the actual organic disintegration.

  Mirabeau wanted to save the monarchy, which in the beginning kept repulsing him, however. At the end of June, 1789, he said to Lamarck that it was not his fault “si on le forçait, pour sa sûreté personelle, à se faire le chef du parti populaire” [if they forced him for his own safety to make himself the head of the people’s party]. He had to be popular, he said, if only to benefit the monarchy—but also for his own sake. (And in time he had to join in the shouting, just to retain any influence at all.) A good thing about him was the fact that he never sided with the Orleanist party. In the midst of his actions he always realized that he was aiding in the rush toward the abyss. The 5th and 6th of October filled him with the greatest consternation.

  Mirabeau’s view of the French is expressed in a letter to Sieyès, dated June 11, 1790: “Notre nation de singes à larynx de perroquets!” [Our nation of apes with parrots’ voices!].

  127.

  The Clergy

  The new egalitarian state hated everything about the clergy: that it was a corporation and thus immune to the general pulverization; that it was opposed to equality (which at that time was abolishing the old provinces and their classes, the parliaments, and all guilds and associations); that its vows of obedience were in contradiction to the rights of man; that it had independent superiors and was completely pervaded by the principle of authority, in religion as well as in life as a whole. The philosophes regarded Christianity as an error and Catholicism as a plague.

  The Legislative Assembly abolished the communal properties, then all corporations, including the charitable and educational ones, and the National Convention, quite logically, did likewise with all academies and literary associations; then it also confiscated all properties of the hospitals and other charitable institutions.

  The tithe, whose abolition was of advantage chiefly to larger property owners, had actually amounted to one seventh of the net yield.

  The confiscation of the four billion immovable estates positively caused the greatest damage, because it gave rise to the belief that there was no bottom to this barrel. For religious worship, charity (hospitals and the like), and schools—matters that had hitherto been taken care of by the clergy—almost nothing was spent. Now the political communities were supposed to take care of this sort of thing. Everything went into the maw of the assignats. The pensions to the deprived clerics and corporations were scarcely paid after 1790.

  128.

  The Legislative Assembly and the Clubs

  Any assembly, inasmuch as it has to preserve forms and recognize principles and is inwardly heterogeneous because it is elected by an entire country, must necessarily bow to ruthless club bosses who seem to represent the matter at issue much more directly, because they are representatives of the most violent forces, i.e., the movement itself which is still progressing; besides, they are quite unscrupulous as to general means of pressure and have the organized services of the rioters of a big city.

  Despite all this one must concede to these club leaders a high degree of that ruling spirit which is not worried about the bottomless and purely temporary character of its creations (which last only as long as the Terror).

  To be sure, they were favored by the fact that (through the club’s will) they were able to rule because there was no longer any other government. Their counterparts function down to every village; and it is open to argument whether it can still be called governing when every matter is quickly and subjectively settled through the imposition of terror on entire cities by a certain number of individuals.

  Against such forces the Assembly will, with the tide rising, come off badly, because, for one thing, the former’s personnel is renewed and always suited to the moment, whereas the Assembly was chosen at a much less advanced moment. The misery of such an Assembly lies in the fact that it must give in constantly in order to keep the appearance of still being at the head of the movement.

  The club leaders, on the other hand—Camille Desmoulins saw in the clubs “l’aristocratie du poumon” [the aristocracy of the lungs]—only needed to give themselves up to the spirit of the rising passion to be certain of acting correctly for the moment. The way in which they gained control of the Paris sections in the summer of 1792 was fundamentally an obvious one. They frightened them into silence, as they did with the Assembly on a large scale, until nobody but their own men could stand it there any longer.

  In time the terrorists gained important experience and style in their task of producing power through terror at any cost.

  The Terror here was substantially tantamount to controlling the Assembly by the negative forces of Paris.

  The significant fact is that the latter were able to unite with an identical mode of action in specific things, a homogeneous procedure. To be sure, this was the only thing they could do and had to do, but others might not have been able to unite and would thus have collapsed right at the start.

  An infamous thing is the attitude of Jacobin historiography toward Louis XVI who wanted only to be rescued, and not even that unconditionally. The Jacobin historians are an echo of the Jacobins of that time who had an interest in painting Louis as guilty and dangerous, making murderous threats against him in the papers, and passing off the handful of royalist rowdies for an army of chevaliers du poignard [knights of the dagger]. Louis had already been obliged to bring the request for war before the Assembly. On May 25 they took away his Garde Constitutionelle.

  129.

  On the 10th of August, 1792

  A great deal still depended on the personal conduct of the king. If he had had the expected sanguine courage and furnished an example of defiance of death, he would have found a great many more defenders, or those he did find would have been better able to help him. If he had only inspired the still loyal National Guard through word and deed and given the Swiss precise orders instead of having them defend the Tuileries only when he was no longer inside! But why risk everything for a sovereign who will risk nothing himself? Barbaroux, too, thinks the king could still have won. If there had been even a little of Henry IV in him (apart from his bonhomie), if he had mounted a horse, he could have turned the blow planned against him to his advantage.

  Napoleon was in Paris as a captain of artillery on the 20th of June, the 10th of August, and then also during the September massacres.

  130.

  On the September Massacres

  (I) The main connecting force was Marat’s thirst for blood and the need to cover depredations and irregularities by a great deed of terror and by exerting the greatest possible influence on the Convention elections.

  When some saw that something horrible was about to happen, they joined in and put themselves at the head, so that it would not happen without them. Thus Danton placed himself beside Marat.

  Only those who participated now could have hopes of continuing in control once terror had been grafted onto the Revolution.

  Paris has three dates of this kind: 1418, 1572, and 1792, not counting 1357–1358 and 1381–1382.

  However, the murdering of numerous common criminals and accused indicates that this time, except for a number of aristocrats, Swiss officers, and the insermentés [the unsworn]—those to whom Danton made the cross at the edge—no specific vengeance was sought, but bloodshed per se, in order to give the Revolution its true temper. On the other hand, that moral indignation was not involved here is borne out by the fact that prisons were opened and rogues were released, so that for a week nobody was safe from robbery in the streets. Both things were done so as to have prison space available for new victims.

  Once more the scepter was to be secured for the Commune of Paris through the Terror, and, if possible, permanently. Since they were and remained a small minority and knew it, they had to stick together.

  What is desired is murder per se, which from now on is to become the temper of the Revolution.

  (II) Regarding the elections to the Convention: The Commune of Paris wants the new Assembly to be elected in its spirit and to have a Paris complexion.

  The disclaimers of premeditation (Villiaumé, Louis Blanc) do not realize the inner barbarism they betray in exculpating the secret committee and accusing Paris as such, and in forcibly welding together the murders with the defense of the fatherland. Paris had to do these things, so that Marat, Robespierre, Billaud, Danton, Manuel, and others may come off passably well. The September massacres inspire the Revolution with the murderous temperament.

  The September massacres simply mark the beginning of the Terror, i.e., the general aplatissement [crushing], and no matter how political things may appear at times in the Convention, actually the fear of the Commune and its henchmen is always there.

  The September days, just like the 31st of May later, are another Parisization of the Revolution. Paris brings the Terror into the Revolution, first of all in order to produce elections of this complexion in the entire country.

  The main effect was in the direction of the evil development of the Revolution. The guilty ones had to destroy those (the Girondists) who made accusations against them because of it.

  131.

  Before and After the Dissolution of the Convention

  [January 3, 1868.—January 4, 1870.—January 4, 1876.] With the current unprecedented increase in militarism and industrial crises another look back to the origins of the Revolution is indicated, especially in view of the uncertainty of all rights and existences in face of the power of threatening governments from above and mass ferment from below. Our task is not to prophesy, but to show the harmonies from the beginning of the Revolution on. We want to know on which wave of the great storm-tossed sea we are drifting.

  The Revolution was prepared by an enormous literary movement which, optimistic about the future, questioned everything, and by a situation of property and power in France which was in more or less conscious disharmony with this movement. Besides this was the premise of the goodness of the human heart and people as such.

  The financial distress of the moment exerted pressure for the Estates General, and the cahiers acted as a great sheaf for the fire. Instead of constitutional ideas, for which they had relied on the Estates General, they demanded the rights of man and substituted the concept of “man” for that of “Frenchman.” The magnitude of the idea caught on, and thus we make the acquaintance of the “political” man of Europe as of 1868. Then, too, many abolitions and equalizations were demanded.

  Since the Estates General could not become an assembly of humanity as yet, they became, for the time being, a National Assembly. Their great moment was the 20th of June, on which day the Third Estate took an oath on the Tennis Court to give the country a constitution. But in those days tumultuous Paris took the helm of the Revolution, and the National Assembly was in a royalist mood as early as the 23rd of June. Upon the coup d’état on the 11th of June there followed the storming of the Bastille on July 14th, the first major action of the Parisians. In the provinces the old state came crashing down; the cities suffered from a shortage of wheat; in the country the castles were burned. The 4th of August put the seal on it, when the nobles renounced all feudal rights and the clergy gave up the tithe. While Paris and the provinces were preparing the realm of violence for decades to come, the National Assembly occupied itself with the rights of man; even Mirabeau’s requests had not been able to prevent this. Then the constitution was deliberated in a spirit of mistrust of the legal power to be set up and with a limited right of veto for the king. This took place while illegal force merrily throve in Paris and elsewhere, the National Guard barely maintained external order, and artificial bread-prices and jobs were supposed to help the situation.

  Finally, on the 5th and 6th of October, the king and the Assembly were taken to Paris as prisoners. People wanted to take revenge on the current representatives of everything past, far beyond its mere abolition. The new départements were now introduced and the elections from below were carried through. Actually the impotence of the government was replaced by the superior power of a homogeneous club mentality. Next the church properties were gobbled up, which is customary in all modern crises, and soon the new ecclesiastical constitution came into force. This brought about a collision of the Revolution with the age-old sacramental foundations of existence which had been riveted fast in the Middle Ages. The nobility was abolished; the army disintegrated because aristocratic officers became an impossibility, while a general hostility to foreign countries became increasingly apparent. The new France made constant threats and in the main tried to spread the Revolution. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy revealed the decided incompatibility of the king with the Revolution; hence his attempted flight and his subsequent treatment as a hostage while they openly sought to overthrow royalty.

  The other countries, which had become reactionary but were most disinclined to go to war, were wantonly provoked. The émigrés had to serve as bogy men. A universal rage against them sprang up, stimulated by their foolish acts. Like the Assemblies generally, the Legislative Assembly and the Gironde were used up quickly and purposely. The Gironde wanted to eliminate the crown by war, while Narbonne wanted to save it by war and military dictatorship. In those days Dumouriez was the first to represent the view of the natural boundaries of France.

  Meanwhile, internal conditions grew worse. There were rumblings in the South; Avignon fell prey to a reign of terror; there was strife because of the continued decline of the assignats; the problem of the clergy kept unrest alive; club rule expanded. On April 20, 1792, war was declared on Austria, and fighting began in Belgium and Savoy. In the interior the battle increased in fierceness. Louis protested against the banishment of the réfractaires [intractables] and the summoning of the fédérés [federates]. Danton, who wanted only loot out of the Revolution, and the Cordeliers destroyed the Girondists’ support through the test day of June 20th. This meant that Paris once more took control of things. It won over the arriving fédérés who were completely wrested away from the Girondists; and thus in this witches’ caldron France was made Parisian over and over again. In the Assembly there began, in connection with the war situation, those debates which finally declared the country to be in danger. In the midst of this fearsome ferment there came the Duke of Brunswick’s manifestoes with their calamitous effect. The demand for a third assembly was raised.

  During the night of the 9th of August the new Paris Commune was formed out of the Paris sections. A corollary of this is the storming of the Tuileries and the imprisoning of Louis. All this the Legislative Assembly watched inactively and decreed a new Assembly, the National Convention. It had been intended to serve merely as a drop curtain.

  Would the National Convention now fare much better? It never did govern as a true national representation, but only as an organ of forces outside it.

  After it had judged the king, Paris wrested its real political component, the Girondists, away from it; the remainder degenerates into mutual execration of the extreme parties.

  The Revolution as a whole kept sacred none of the legal forms it created. This is its worst legacy: the authority to improve things by constantly changing the forms—indeed, by the mere desire to get different individuals to the top.

  Its driving force for the time being was still volcanic, determined by the mob of Paris, by lust for loot, and other passions of leaders and parties for the enormous properties that had become liquid, and also by the peasants, who were afraid that the real owners might return.

  Meanwhile, in the fight against the European Coalition, there rose anew from the bottom those armies and generals who soon had to pass over from defense to rule of the country. Because in the meantime the political minds had guillotined one another.

  A frightful exhaustion had come over the nation which nevertheless was still there and grew into a strange new condition: without respect, but without will power, the way modern nations often are now.

  Militarism was pushed to the highest point by Napoleon, and an artificial will was put into the nation’s soul.

  And when, after his overthrow, the economic-industrial forces which had become available only through the Revolution were unfettered and Europe, following England, turned into the general industrial mill, there arose the fourth estate, whose inner ferment has had a hand in determining everything since the 1840’s. It and militarism from above are now the two clamps of the vise. There is a profound distrust of all forms and, along with it, a readiness for any change, while industries chase one another from country to country to the point of dead exhaustion for the sake of minimal differences in production prices and tariffs. (And things have certainly not improved since 1868.)

  132.

  On the Trial of Louis XVI

  [Based in part on Edgar Quinet’s La Révolution, I, 425 ff.] Like Charles I, Louis was engaged in the crime of laesa revolutio [treason against the Revolution]. And like Charles, Louis had also grown up with the idea of a different law according to which he was infallible and not accountable; this was the only law of which he was conscious. Therefore he was punished according to a law that was alien to him.

  The trial was highly characteristic as a measure of the revolutionary quality of the parties. The Girondists proved that they were not the truest personification of the Revolution. Only the most violent could be this, at a time when audacity was identical with power.

  When was it that Billaud-Varenne proposed taking the king across the border “under sufficient escort”? And would there still have been sufficient escort? At any rate, it would have had to take place long before December 26, 1792.

  No dynasty has ever been overthrown through the execution of one king. The decapitated return,with the aid of vast sympathy, in the shape of their successors.

  The monarch was beheaded by the Jacobins; but the monarchy slipped away from them, and the rest of Europe felt more revulsion than fear. The consequence was an endless, irreconcilable struggle, to wage which “on se redonna un maître” [they gave themselves another master].

  A Louis XVI roaming about abroad would have been a hundred times less dangerous than the beheaded Louis with the martyrdom of his family. The perpetrators are supposed to have assumed that no versatilité [fickleness] need be feared among the people, that it had broken with royalty forever. (No, worthy Quinet, they did not imagine that.)

  The Napoleonic Count Sieyès and the Duke of Otranto must be counted among the small majority which decided in favor of unconditional death.

  Louis’ death was inevitable, because alive and in a French prison he could always have been used by a more moderate party or by reaction; his death really was part of the complete rule of the Jacobins.

  If he said on the scaffold, “Je pardonne à mes ennemis” [I forgive my enemies], he was the last one to speak thus; later ones usually died avec les passions et les fureurs de la terre [with the passion and violence of this world].

  The next consequence was war with England, Spain, and Holland. Finally there arose a new royalism and the longing for some master.

  For the time being, to be sure, the alternative was victory or downfall. The enemies sharpened their methods with their hatred, and the French did likewise.

  What would have happened if the plebiscite had pardoned Louis? He would probably have been murdered in the Temple. Those who dared the September massacres would have forced this murder through as well.

  The spiritual survival of the monarchy is comparable to the sensation in an amputated limb.

  The parties, which were now wrangling over power rather than principles, each gave themselves up to a special savage suspicion; each charges the other with monarchist ideas and conspiracy against the republic. And force and tyranny were indeed elements in all of them. No one seriously believed the republic to be established, and this drove them to frenzy and despair, so that all compassion ceased.

  133.

  Girondists and Jacobins

  Earlier presentations of the French Revolution have followed more closely the history of the great state assemblies, the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the National Convention.

  But since Taine we have known that through the rapid decay of the old state, starting in 1789, the country had in large measure escaped any central direction and that the social revolution had everywhere followed the political one. But the major part of the nation, the losers as well as the winners, wanted to retain monarchy.

  However, the Legislative Assembly and its chief orators, the Girondists, press toward the republic out of abstract hatred and declare war on foreign countries, mainly in order to topple the crown—from April 20 to August 10, 1792.

  And only now, particularly between the 2nd and the 4th of September, does it begin to surprise the Girondists that right beside them there has come into being a far superior new power, one that mocks at their enthusiasm, a true power: the will of Paris clubs in their connection and close correspondence with the club members in the provinces. Its components are the sections and the Commune of Paris, the hired thugs, the Jacobins and Cordeliers, and, as a bureau d’enregistrement [registry], the Convention under the pressure of the tribunes, as well as the local clubs in all of France.

  This force deprives the Girondists particularly of the exploitation of the foreign war as an instrument of internal rule; it forces them to vote in favor of the king’s death; it simply outdoes them in everything that looks bold and wicked, and brilliantly masters the now recognized terror, after the Girondists, too, had formerly threatened with the sanctity of the people’s wrath.

  With the extremely faulty conduct of the war and the intentional disorganization of the army these Jacobins are able to appear as the saviors of France from foreign countries, especially since the people do not know how deeply disunited the cabinets of the Coalition and their conduct of the war really are. And the Jacobins do govern internally, albeit dreadfully, i.e., the old resources of existence are consumed, the assignats run into the billions, the actual and potential adversaries of each class are driven out or imprisoned.

  This sort of thing does not last long, but it does last needlessly long enough to extinguish the light of the beaux diseurs et gens à procédés [fine talkers and people with programs]. But the Girondists still do their deadly enemies the favor of participating, until the end of May, 1793, in a lot of decisions devised for their own perdition.

  134.

  The Omnipotence of Utterly Unscrupulous Parties

  [Concerning the Jacobins and Their Army.] A party which is not afraid of letting culture, business, and welfare go to ruin completely can be omnipotent for a while.

  135.

  How a Government Becomes Exceedingly Strong

  [Concerning the Period of the Committee of Public Safety and the Terror.] A government which abandons business prosperity together with all the culture connected with it can be exceedingly strong and unconstrained.

  136.

  Socialism? Communism?

  (I) In those days people wanted to be neither communists nor socialists, but new owners of stolen goods.

  (II) Of course, people were as far away from communism as could be, if only because the peasants wanted above all to preserve their new “property.” Nothing but individual property is involved, but there is a total change in the distribution of it.

  (III) In any case, it is not a question of communism and socialism, but only of new individual property which has been won by depredation or is to be created, regardless of whether Robespierre and Company realized this.

  137.

  The Innermost Core of the Revolution

  In his book on the Revolution (Vol. 2, The Jacobin Conquest, p. 69, note), Taine discusses the social views of the terrorists. Antonelle thought that in order to consolidate the Revolution there was needed “égalité approximative des propriétés” [approximate equality of property] and for this it was necessary “supprimer un tiers de la population” [to suppress one third of the population]. The fanatics, according to Taine, were all of this opinion; Jean-Bon Saint-André even speaks of over one half. Guffroy even wanted to leave France only five million inhabitants.

  Here the new France is clearly revealed. Not communism or socialism is intended, which would only lead to an average general misery and equality of enjoyment (whereas equality of rights is desired, with the secret reservation of becoming master over the others), but people want only new private property, approximately equal, but available in plenty. And so that this elite may be well off, great masses have to die. It is the modern French gracious living as a goal.

  138.

  Rousseau’s Concept of Music and the Destruction of Churches

  J.-J. Rousseau said about music that all contrapuntal combinations, particularly fugues, were only sottises difficiles [difficult nonsense] which hurt the ears and could not be justified rationally, remnants of barbarism and corrupt taste, just as the portals of our Gothic churches deserve to be preserved only to the shame of their patient builders.

  From this to the destruction of churches was not a big step.

  139.

  On Robespierre

  (I) What makes Robespierre’s figure so insufferable is his utter impotence in trying to seize the dictatorship; he presumably took this impotence for virtuousness. To be sure, he can no longer see anyone above him or beside him without feeling an envious destructive rage. But he does not even himself desire to rule because he has no positive program and his agrarian project is not even meant seriously.

  (II) Camille Desmoulins wrote (around the autumn of 1793): “On a dit qu’en tout pays absolu c’ était un grand moyen pour réussir que d’être médiocre. Je vois que cela peut être υrai des pays républicains.” [It has been said that in every absolutist country a great way to be successful was to be mediocre. I see that this can be true of republican countries.] (This would fit Robespierre and also apply strikingly to certain republics.)

  (III) Periods which face the alternative between anarchy and some government, no matter how wretched and violent it may be, do choose the latter.

  140.

  Before the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794)

  Under the pretext of defense of the fatherland the Revolution had rushed out enormously far beyond any reasonable goal, to the point of projected eradication of all individuals with a close connection with earlier conditions and a complete transfer of property. The Convention had long been only an appendage.

  The Revolution had become a big business matted together out of many deeds of violence, a business in which the directors and stockholders sought to give one another the air and the smallest possible number strove to remain the masters, while their guarantee would have lain in the greatest possible number of participants.

  The fallacy prevalent then as well as in subsequent Jacobin historiography is that the Revolution as a concrete-abstract thing must be “spared,” or represented historically, en bloc, otherwise reaction would be promoted.

  At that time, inherent in this fallacy was the desire to go along with the most violent and most active faction, for to stand still might be tantamount to downfall, because the capable part of the nation had been offended to its very fiber.

  At the same time, however, mutual destruction kept decreasing the number of participants, and now Robespierre rises to make vague threats against all who are left. There follows the 9th Thermidor, and subsequently the saving at any price of the compromised personalities through the sham continuation of the Revolution, until a conqueror took it on his shoulders, saved the citoyens further effort, and sent some of the worst ones packing.

  It is impossible to say how things would have gone without the guillotine, with the mere exiling of the adversaries, and without the arrest of the 200,000 to 300,000 suspects and the universal fright, especially with regard to the great change in property which would hardly have taken place the way it did if all the former owners had lived on abroad.

  But with the Terror things went about as badly for the freedom and future of France as they could have gone. (For, they had the people of 1789 and not the Terror to thank [hm?] for the emancipation of agriculture.)

  In the last days before Thermidor, while there were fifty to seventy executions each day, conditions in the committees and the Convention must have been utterly unbearable. Robespierre had made more or less indefinite threats in every direction, which made possible the incredible alliance against him between people like Collot, Billaud, and the Dantonists, and men like Durand de Maillane, Boissy d’Anglas, Champeaux, and others.

  He was really lost when on the 8th Thermidor in the Convention he was told “Nommez ceux que vous accusez” [Name those whom you are accusing], and would name no one.

  141.

  On the Mutual Destruction of the Revolutionary Factions

  If those people had had even the faintest notion of real governing and a little true ruling spirit, they would not have treated one another the way they did. But their background was that of gens de lettres and lawyers, their ambition was to orate and to write, their most rabid desire to be right exclusively, because their literary or legal backgrounds had taught them nothing different.

  Terrorism is essentially the rage of literati in its last stage, at least in the cases of Robespierre, St. Just, and others.

  142.

  On the 18th Fructidor (September 4, 1797)

  The Terror had proved useless; exile would have sufficed for the French. The absurdity of the tragic guillotining in the cities, the terrible suppression of the federalists and the Vendée in the provinces and the destruction of the best republican minds finally produced the 9th Thermidor, the overthrow of Robespierre, and the reaction which threatened to swing to royalism. So the men of the Convention were condemned to remain on top and go on ruling if they wanted to live. Thus they forced themselves upon the new Directory Constitution of 1795, and two-thirds of them had to be taken into the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. However, the counter-revolution was in some way imminent if those whose lives would be threatened by it were not left in power. A nice Convention which had successively worn all colors and now wanted to live on notwithstanding! And later, when the Parisians refused to acquiesce, there followed the 13th Vendémiaire and the first military victory in the field of politics under the command of Bonaparte.

  Thus the regicides continued to rule, arbitrarily and with proscriptions, with military campaigns designed for money-making, the furtherance of political credit, and the maintenance of internal power, and with utter assignat bankruptcy, total transfer of property, and universal insecurity.

  Then it had to happen that of all the generals one became the chief object of the nation’s imagination—Bonaparte, who was just about to conclude his Italian campaign of 1796–1797. Should people have foreseen the future dictator? But they really did want an overlord, i.e., the dead-tired nation, including the revolutionary faction, was completely disillusioned. The nation with its vast number of new property owners, who had bought church and émigré lands and discharged their debts and rents by paying in assignats at face value, wanted, on the whole, not Louis XVIII by any means, nor Louis Philippe nor a Spanish infante, but any government to safeguard peace and the enjoyment of property.

  If the Directory could accomplish this, it would be all right with the nation for a long time; otherwise it did veer toward rule by one individual. People were not royalist, but gradually, and in part unconsciously, became monarchist. The only apprehension was that for the time being the Bourbon royalists would exploit the situation in favor of Louis XVIII.

  Participation in the new elections for the councils and officials was slack. Thus the royalists would be able to secure for men of their persuasion sudden possession of the majority of offices or gradual possession, if people did not pay attention. The regicides, who were splashing about violently and uncertainly—they had to try d’être pris au sérieux [to be taken seriously]—were concerned over the new elections. For, as soon as the constitution was permitted to function in earnest, the result was bound to destroy them. The press was already substantially royalist; many émigrés had returned home; the Club de Clichy had a royalist orientation. And in the new elections of 1797 it actually happened that the majority in the Council of Five Hundred consisted of royalists in a narrow or wider sense; in Paris and in the councils there was violent ferment in the period from May to September, 1797.

  But besides those who had hitherto ruled in Paris someone else had worries: the victor of Italy who at that time was traveling among the magnificent villas around Milan. The 18th Fructidor, the 4th of September, 1797, was the wretched rescue by the soldiers of a republic which was no longer protected by the people, in favor of a man who still had to wait and was very quick to find out how little thanks people wanted to give him. On the day of the ratification of the Treaty of Campo Formio, which he had concluded rapidly so that the Directory would not make it, the Directory appointed him head of an Army of England, in order to get him away from the Italian army.

  143.

  Bonaparte and the 18th Fructidor

  There necessarily was a new Vendémiaire in the offing, if the Thermidorians, the regicides (and henchmen!) were not to face a harsh reckoning. They would have liked to avoid the coup d’état if they could have done so. Treilhard’s statement to Dumas, addressed to the Clichyites, moderates, and royalists, is characteristic for the situation: “Just declare that in January, 1793, you would have voted in favor of Louis’ death!” For them it really was not merely a matter of ruling, but of life itself.

  Despite the greatest inner excitement, Napoleon had sufficient self- control to realize that this time the fruit was not yet ripe for plucking (this is what he said to Miot at Montebello). Perhaps, too, he had an immediate desire for a campaign in distant, exotic places. He was young and for the time being had to follow his specific talent as a general.

  Although he deeply despised the Directory, for the moment he saw himself as its necessary ally. For what he loathed more than anything else was the royalist movement whose victory would have brought a lot of unpredictable people, circumstances, and privileges onto the scene. Waiting for the courts of Vienna and Turin was certainly also very repugnant to him.

  The degree of his indignation may be gauged by the methods he employed in the Italian headquarters: the club system and his series of addresses to his soldiers. He would surely not have resorted to that except in an extreme situation. It certainly did not take the Portefeuille d’Entraigues to teach him how matters stood with royalism. Rather, he must have known at first hand from Paris, and perhaps he fabricated the Portefeuille in part.

  If Hoche had saved the Directory, i.e., staged the coup d’état for it, Napoleon could probably have put up with it. In fact, he might have preferred this. Later, when the Directory was on the point of being overthrown on Brumaire, he could have said: “It was not I who saved you then.” But considering the dissension between Hoche and the Directory, he had to send his Augereau. Thus the 18th Brumaire or September 4th, 1797, took place.

  Immediately afterwards, Napoleon, who had remained just far enough behind the scenes, evinced great independence of the Directors and obviously enjoyed the odium which the pursuit of their victory netted them. He himself later became the peacemaker of Campo Formio.

  To him the Fructidor was highly valuable because it dealt a mortal blow to the Constitution of l’an III (the Year III) and the directorial government. He was now able to leave them to their further coups d’état and symptoms of mismanagement, and even to derive, for the time being, financial advantage from their further predatory wars (against Switzerland, Rome, and other states). Then, while he was in Egypt, the Second Coalition was formed.

  To appear as a rescuer now was an undertaking which promised direct control.

  144.

  How Aristocracies and Princes Succumb

  Aristocracies abdicate, but do not flee, as princes do.

  145.

  On the Invasion of Switzerland by the French

  After Paris one had to have Peter Ochs, because La Harpe was not capable of sketching the new constitution by himself. Ochs, who went to Paris only a few days after Napoleon had passed through, must have received suggestions from Napoleon in Basel.

  The only explanation for the behavior of the more gifted “levelers,”* provided that one does not want to call it wholly depraved, is this: From the spirit of the century they had worked up a veritable indignation at everything varied and different and yet had no hopes that any substantial change would ever emanate from Switzerland. This at least is the explanation for those who themselves belonged to the ruling classes. Ochs is guiltier by far than La Harpe who at least was a hardened refugee.

  What is the source of the hymn to the variety of Switzerland which Hormayr reprints in Volume 2 of his History? Is it not from Johannes von Müller’s History of Switzerland, Prefaces? To what extent is our hectic, industrially efficient nineteenth century, which everywhere insists on simplification, capable of making a judgment?

  The most terrible guilt of Ochs and La Harpe is expressed in the fact that subsequently they forced their way into the Swiss Directory instead of hiding their faces from the people.

  Nevertheless, Switzerland would hardly have escaped the fate of becoming a battleground of the Second Coalition (1799).

  (I believe less and less that Switzerland was considered at the Treaty of Campo Formio. Both signatories had all the greater interest in avoiding any mention of Switzerland as the matter surely was on the tip of their tongues. Thugut certainly foresaw, and Napoleon certainly already desired, what happened soon afterwards. But both were interested in having a respite and shuffling the cards anew, and for the time being Napoleon wanted to shine among the French as a peacemaker.)

  An astonishing thing is the crudity of the French republic at that time. In order to steal forty millions, the Treaty of Campo Formio is actually jettisoned.

  146.

  Old Bern and Why It Is Hated

  Ever since the Swiss contingents moved out as the French approached Bern on March 4, 1798, because Bern was as good as lost, part of modern Switzerland has had a bad conscience about old Bern and hates it all the more. Here there are no parties, but only people who put up a defense and people who did not. All constitutional talk is nothing compared to one spark of that temperament which at least defends itself against bands of robbers.

  147.

  On the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799) and the Consulate

  Actual military rule had of necessity arisen from the preceding exertion of force, through terrorism at home and wars abroad.

  Napoleon’s rule was at that time the least humiliating of all imaginable regimes. It really seemed as though France were rushing into the arms of a guardian angel. Napoleon had the great good fortune of soon being able to cap it with the Marengo campaign.

  It is futile to shed any tears over the Constitution of the Year III and the persons involved. They are in part the residuum of 1793, artificially maintained against the continually onrushing genuine majority by the coups d’état of Vendémiaire, 1795, Fructidor, 1797, and Floréal, 1798.

  And France wanted to be no longer dependent upon deliberating assemblies; it had had enough of them. People urgently desired concrete, permanent results of the Revolution rather than its prolongation by parliaments and clubs.

  Even without any Brumaire the Constitution of the Year III was long since doomed and could have continued to lead a semblance of an existence only through the customary violent measures.

  Property (i.e., the beginning world epoch of industry and communication) issues a call for order, and particularly the property arisen from national estates calls for a complete cessation of all further movement.

  The great problem was the monarchy without the Bourbons. In the final analysis, even Orléans was too much of a Bourbon. From all Bourbons people at bottom feared less the restoration of the burdensome past than the necessity of adopting a false position toward them after all that had happened. They had been insulted too terribly. People might have been ashamed before them and thus had to continue being emotionally brutal toward them (Enghien).

  Given the wretchedness of public affairs, there was absolutely no other possibility of forestalling the restoration of the house of Bourbon but by elevating a quite different ruler who soon would have to adopt royal prerogatives.

  148.

  On Napoleon

  (I) Any attempt to give a picture of Napoleon’s true being from contemporary sources which have recently become available (Jung, Bonaparte and His Times; the Memoirs of Madame de Rémusat; the Notebooks of Metternich) must necessarily produce one-sided results. The great and unique things about him are not made manifest here—the combination of an unparalleled magical will power with an enormous, all-mobile intelligence, both directed at the production of power and continual struggle, and finally at the entire world outside of France.

  (II) Napoleon had a sixth sense in all military matters and a seventh for everything serving for the production of power.

  His deadly enemy, like that of all such people, was impatience; it brought his later career great disaster.

  149.

  Napoleon I and His Russian Campaign

  The whole world was dreadfully disarranged, to the point of an unprecedented state of violence. But this is what Napoleon wished to complete and then leave to his son. Everything was to be so firmly established that even the son’s mediocrity would not have done any harm. In this there was at work a giant egoism, devoid of any moral scruples as soon as goals were at stake. The absolute sense of power was the decisive thing, accompanied, to be sure, by a tremendous personality, but still degenerating into a gambler’s passion. The furies of the sense of power were imagination and impatience, but not madness, certainly not Roman imperial madness, which arises from hedonism and fear of conspirators. Within the scope of his great, false goals Napoleon acts not only rationally, but with genius, to the extent that the false ends do not rub off on the means. His intelligence and energy were not on the decline; in the campaigns of 1813 to 1815 he often appears in his full stature. Nevertheless, there were moments of weakness. But the false political goal quite frequently and in decisive situations brings perdition to the field commander, and in the Russian campaign this is the case from A to Z. He feared adverse effects on the rest of Europe if he did not capture Moscow, but rather took up winter quarters in Vilna, Vitebsk, or Smolensk. And even when he had Moscow, nine-tenths of which was burned, it became his undoing all the more because he wanted to preserve the semblance of possession for as long as possible.

  The Russian campaign is the most foolish thing that Napoleon decided upon in his passion and then carried out with the most colossal intellectual and material resources. Even if one grants him his mission to rule over all of Europe, he should not have done this. To be sure, Thiers believes that if Napoleon had persistently continued the Spanish war and the Continental system instead of the Russian campaign, he would have subdued England and thus disarmed Europe, too. That way he would have gained time as well as the sense to make at the peak of his power the sacrifices necessary to make his regime bearable and therefore permanent as well.

  But it was precisely in the Spanish war that the crime was avenged. Napoleon had a distaste for this war; it no longer was a pleasant subject for his imagination. He could not get quite stubborn about such matters; he did not want to go there himself again after his brief visit in 1808–1809. Besides, what others have, or are supposed to have, already spoiled has no attraction for people such as Napoleon who like to undertake new things but not to straighten out something that has been botched. His sense of military artistry rebelled against this.

  Of course, employment and financing for the army could have been found in Spain just as well as in Russia. The marshals and the common soldiers would certainly have liked to stay at home, and the remaining, ambitious components of the army were not even a secondary cause of the Russian campaign. At any rate, this sort of thing was amply counterbalanced by the fact that every war aroused the hopes of the dissidents at home and with Napoleon’s life put everything in doubt.

  The most plausible idea may be that Napoleon was plagued by the idée fixe that after his possible early death Alexander would be at the head of a coalition against the French power. However, Napoleon could have frustrated this in another way, by humane and even friendly treatment and consolation of Prussia, Austria, and Sweden.

  It is an entirely vain question what he would have done with Russia if he had succeeded to the extent of occupying Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other places, and perhaps forcing Alexander to flee to Kazan or Astrakhan. For Alexander was much safer with flight than surrender. To be sure, Napoleon misjudged him as well as the Russians.

  He believed that he had all princes in his net, because they were afraid of the democratic inclinations of their peoples (which was the case in Austria); but he would not hear of these peoples’ despair and rage which were directed against him and which had to sweep along the princes, depending on the circumstances. In general, he no longer put up with any alternative proposals to his plans.

  This book is set in Palatino, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1948. Like all of Hermann Zapf’s many typefaces, Palatino combines beauty, legibility, and distinction without eccentricity. Palatino is an old-style face, intended as a commercial display type, yet it is equally successful in book work.

  Printed on paper that is acid-free and meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, z39.48-1992. (archival)

  Book design by Sandra Strother Hudson,

  Athens, Georgia

  Composition by Impressions Book and Journal Services, Inc.,

  Madison, Wisconsin

  Printed and bound by Worzalla Publishing Co.,

  Stevens Point, Wisconsin

  [* ]Burckhardt injects here: A good thing that Renan for once really lets it out! (Translator’s note.)

  [* ]Burckhardt’s interjection. (Translator’s note.)

  [* ]Burckhardt’s interjection. (Translator’s note.)

  [* ]No further reference in original. (Translator’s note.)

  [* ]Misnumbering of sections in the original. (Translator’s note.)

  [* ]Manuscript reading [Yenken] uncertain in original. Meaning suggested by German editor. (Translator’s note.)

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  8: Friedrich von Gentz, The Origins and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution [1800]

  Friedrich von Gentz, The Origins and Principles of the American Revolution, compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution, translated by John Quincy Adams, edited and with an introduction by Peter Koslowski (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/2376 on 2011-04-18

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

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  9: François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe [1828]

  François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe by François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, edited, with critical and supplementary notes, by George Wells Knight (New York: D Appleton and Co., 1896).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/2244 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

  ---

  PREFACE.

  The lectures which are comprised in this book were delivered by M. Guizot in 1828 before the students of the Sorbonne in Paris, where he occupied the chair of history. They were soon published in book form, both in French and in English, and attracted immediate attention for their grasp of facts, philosophical breadth, and clear generalizations. Their intrinsic merit and their value for the student is attested by the fact that, at the expiration of nearly seventy years, during which historical study has marvelously developed, historical methods greatly changed, and historical knowledge vastly increased, they are still widely read and studied by the general reader and by students in colleges and universities.

  While no extended discussion of the lectures constituting this volume is needed, a brief statement is fitting concerning the place they occupy, the class to which they belong, among historical writings. There are three sorts of written history:

  1. A mere orderly statement of facts, unconnected in the narrative save by the order of succession. This is hardly more than a catalogue of facts and events, and does not properly constitute history. Such were the annalistic writings and the chronicles of earlier ages; some of the modern “elementary histories” belong in this group, if anywhere among historical writings.

  2. A detailed recital of events and facts, so framed as to show the more immediate causes and the direct consequences and results of those events and facts. Here the causal relation between events, not widely separated in time or place, is brought into view. This is the aim of general histories, histories of individual countries, and most histories of special periods. This group includes the larger part of historical writings.

  3. A study of the growth of historical ideas, of the forces that have moved men and nations, of the causes which have been operative through long periods directing the tendencies of peoples, of the development of institutions, and of their relation to the general march of history and to the advance of civilization. Such are works which trace the history of political institutions and of the ideas and forces that have shaped them. It is obvious that the aim of this last group is really the ultimate aim of all historical inquiry—not merely to know facts, but to learn the deeper purpose and meaning which run through all history, and to which each event of history is in greater or less degree contributory.

  A historical study of the last class—and to this belongs in high degree the present work—presupposes on the part of the writer a thorough acquaintance with all essential facts in the period covered, and for its thorough comprehension by the reader and student, a good general knowledge of history.

  In the present work the author has directed his chief attention to the external forms of political society, and has sought to trace the changes in these forms and institutions back to their causes and forward to their consequences. Both the forms themselves and their changes are traceable only in the facts of history, while the causes for the changes are the forces which have moved man to political, social, and industrial action. Such a study is not, then, a recital, but an interpretation, of facts; it is an inquiry into the meaning—the result, of external events—the philosophy of history, if I may use that high-sounding and much abused expression. It is not a history of the facts of the past fourteen centuries, nor even a substitute for such history. It is an analysis and interpretation of that history so far as it has affected the development of social and political institutions.

  The lectures were originally delivered before a group of students fairly well versed in the facts of history as they were then known. In the lectures, the statements of facts are therefore brief, often hardly more than mere allusions, while the generalizations are rapid, as befitted the nature of the course.

  In this country, the lectures as published have found general use as a text-book in colleges, and often for those who have not had a wide preliminary knowledge of history. When so used, the book has usually been supplemented by lectures by the instructor, supplying, so far as possible, the underlying basis of fact necessary for the comprehension of the original work. Of late years, the more frequent use of the book in colleges has doubtless been in connection with or as a conclusion of an undergraduate course in general mediæval and modern history. While the place accorded these lectures in a historical course has thus slightly changed, there has been, at the same time, during the seventy years since they were delivered a great advance in knowledge of the period covered by the lectures. During that time the unwearied researches of scholars have brought to view many hitherto unknown or obscure facts in mediæval history and institutions; for example, touching the origin of the feudal system or the relation of the trade gilds to the mediæval cities. Some of these results have an important bearing on the verification or modification of views presented in the lectures of M. Guizot.

  The object had constantly in view in the making of the present edition and in the preparation of the notes has been twofold: (1) To furnish such brief historical data as may be helpful in recalling to the reader the fuller significance of the facts on which the lectures are based, and (2) to note the opinions of modern scholars and the results of later researches where they seem to supplement or to controvert the conclusions of the author. It will be found that the notes fall into three groups: (1) historical, (2) critical, and (3) supplementary. At the end of several of the lectures an extended note has been inserted, giving a rapid summary of events during the historical period whose institutions and tendencies are discussed in the lecture. Wherever a special point has seemed worthy of notice beyond the scope of a note, or wherever it has seemed probable that further information than that given in a note would be desired, references have been made to authorities usually accessible in reference libraries. The constant aim has been, without desecrating the lectures by a mutilation of the original form, to make the book more useful for all classes of readers. It is not intended as a revision of M. Guizot’s work. I have not presumed to rewrite, restate, or even to modernize the lectures. The work has been strictly that of annotation for the purposes mentioned. I have been increasingly surprised, as the work progressed, to find how well the lectures have stood the test of three quarters of a century, and how few of the statements are noticeably at variance with modern knowledge or opinion.

  It is assumed that those into whose hands this volume comes are familiar with the general facts of history. When that is not the case, general outlines may be used in connection with this work, such as Duruy’s History of the Middle Ages, Duruy’s History of Modern Times, and Fisher’s Outlines of Universal History.

  The present edition is based on the edition of 1842, annotated by Professor C. S. Henry. The text of that edition has been retained, save that a few errors of translation and an occasional bad English sentence have been corrected. A considerable number of Professor Henry’s notes have been retained, while several have been omitted as unnecessary or have been replaced by others. In one case, a long note of the former edition has been broken into parts which now appear as unconnected notes on separate passages. To all of Professor Henry’s notes the initial “H.” has been appended, thus distinguishing them from those which now appear for the first time. For all not so indicated the present editor is responsible. My thanks are due to my colleague, Dr. F. C. Clark, for his assistance in the annotation of the last three lectures.

  G. W. K.

  Ohio State University,May 27, 1896.

  BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

  François Pierre Guillaume Guizot was born of Protestant parentage at Nîmes, France, on October 4, 1787. His father, a prominent advocate, became a victim of the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, dying on the scaffold in 1794. Madame Guizot removed to Geneva, where her son received a classical education under Protestant influences. It is stated that before he left Geneva, at the age of eighteen, he was able to read Greek, Latin, German, Italian, and English. Spanish he learned when he was seventy-two years of age, in order that he might write a history of Spain. In 1805 he removed to Paris to enter upon the study of law. He soon obtained a position as tutor in the family of M. Stapfer, the Swiss minister to France, supporting himself in this way while pursuing his studies. The study of law he soon abandoned for literary and historical work. Within a few years he began writing for the press, his first articles appearing in Le Publiciste, then controlled by M. Suard. Through his connection with M. Suard he became acquainted with Mademoiselle Pauline de Meulan, who was also a contributor to the paper. Though she was fourteen years his senior, their common occupation and mutual tastes led to their marriage in 1812. M. Guizot published in 1809 a dictionary of French synonyms, in 1810 an essay on the Fine Arts in France, and in 1813 an annotated translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 1812 he was chosen assistant professor of history in the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne in Paris, and a little later was made professor of modern history. His professorship gave him the acquaintance of M. Royer-Collard, then professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, to whom he was indebted for his first public position under the later restored government of Louis XVIII. His writings during this period were mainly philosophical and literary. Politically he was an advocate of legitimate monarchy as against Napoleon, and desired the restoration of the Bourbons, with such constitutional limitations as would secure the rights of the people against the recurrence of prerevolutionary absolutism.

  In 1814, on the downfall of Napoleon, he was given the position of Secretary-General in the Department of the Interior under the monarchy of Louis XVIII. After the return of Napoleon, the Hundred Days, and the second restoration of Louis XVIII, he became Secretary-General of the Department of Justice, and in 1817 was made a member of the Council of State, and Director-General of the departmental and communal administration. He was identified at this time with the political party or faction known as the Doctrinaires, of which M. Royer-Collard was a prominent exponent. This group desired constitutional monarchy based on suffrage in the hands of the middle classes; they were thus opposed on the one hand to the radical democratic spirit growing out of the Revolution, and on the other to the growing absolutism of Louis XVIII and his court. During this period he wrote several political pamphlets in exposition of these general views.

  In 1820 the royalist reaction consequent upon the murder of the Duc de Berri caused the downfall of the ministry, and Guizot resigned all his offices. He immediately resumed his lectures at the Sorbonne. It was at this time that he delivered the celebrated course of lectures on the History of Representative Government. His lectures and writings did not accord with the reactionary spirit of the reign of Charles X, and in 1825 he was forbidden to continue his lectures. During the next few years he was active among the opposition to the policy of the government, but devoted himself principally to historical writing. In rapid succession he published a collection of Memoirs on the English Revolution, Memoirs relating to the History of France, and an Introduction to a revised translation of Shakespeare. The most important work was the History of the English Revolution, of which only the first two volumes were completed at this time.

  In 1825 his wife died, and in the following year he married Mademoiselle Dillon, the niece of his first wife. In 1828, upon a change of the ministry, M. Guizot was restored to his professorial chair. In that year he delivered the lectures on the History of Civilization in Europe which form the present volume; in the following year he gave a course on the History of Civilization in France. These lectures not only attracted immediate attention, but they marked an epoch in historical writing. The careful research, the profundity of reasoning, the skill and rapidity of generalization, and the breadth of view displayed take these lectures out of the rank of ordinary historical productions. The influence of the spirit in which M. Guizot undertook the consideration of historical material and of the development of political institutions was unquestionably productive of an important result upon historical method. From this time forth, in the intervals of political service and after his retirement from public life, he gave himself to historical writing in the broad, scholarly, philosophical spirit which he here displayed.

  In 1830 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and from that time until 1848 he was almost constantly engaged in public position. He took a prominent part in the protest against the arbitrary acts of Charles X which led to the July Revolution of 1830, and to the accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of the French. Under the new government M. Guizot was made Provisional Minister of the Interior, but retired after a short incumbency. In 1832, under the ministry of Marshal Soult, he became Minister of Public Instruction. He reorganized the work of public instruction in France, and originated and carried through the Chambers the law of June 28, 1833, which was the basis of the system of popular primary instruction that was rapidly extended over France. Into all the details of organizing this work the minister went with the most careful attention and interest, furnishing to the directors, subordinates, and teachers kindly instructions which show in every phase his deep concern in the work. Secondary and higher instruction also received careful attention.

  In 1836 the ministry fell, and Guizot retired from his position, retaining his seat in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1840 he was sent to England as ambassador, where he was warmly welcomed because of his literary reputation, his admiration for the British Constitution, and his friendliness for England in the then existing European situation. In the same year he was recalled, and on October 29th became Minister of Foreign Affairs. Until 1848 he was the real head of the ministry. His policy was the maintenance of constitutional government at home, against the radical tendencies of the Republicans, and peace abroad, against the war-loving spirit of the French people.

  In the latter part of his ministry he yielded more and more to the king, and was led to meet the rising spirit of democracy and the cry for electoral reform by measures that were reactionary and extraconstitutional, if not unconstitutional. His devotion to law and order were at this time transforming him into an ultra-conservative. In 1848 the ministry fell, and with it the monarchy of Louis Philippe. During the eight years of its continuance the ministry of which Guizot was the chief spirit gave peace and prosperity to France; industry and commerce flourished; popular instruction was improved; the penal code was revised, and internal improvements on a large scale undertaken. The ministry failed, largely because of Guizot’s lack of knowledge and appreciation of the practical side of political and governmental life. He was of the closet, not of the people, and in the zeal of his Doctrinaire policy he failed to appreciate the necessity of keeping in fairly close touch with popular feeling. Concession of principle he could never make, and by refusing to yield anything to the opposition, he, and the monarchy whose destinies he was seeking to guide, lost all.

  After the Revolution of 1848 he retired to England, and, with the exception of a single unsuccessful candidacy for the Chamber of Deputies, never again took part in French politics. In 1851 he returned to France, and spent the remaining twenty-three years of his life in literary pursuits on his estate at Val Richer, in Normandy. While in England, he wrote and published the History of the English Republic and the Protectorate of Cromwell, and later the History of the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell and the Restoration of the Stuarts. These two works completed the history begun in 1827. He also wrote during this period of his life the Memoirs on the History of My Own Times; Meditations on the Christian Religion; History of France for my Grandchildren (completed by his daughter, Madame Guizot De Witt), and several other historical and philosophical essays and books.

  His most celebrated and best-known works are the History of Representative Government, History of Civilization in Europe, and History of Civilization in France. He was elected in 1832 to the Academy of Moral and Political Science; in 1833, to that of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres; and in 1836, to the French Academy, the highest literary honor in France. He died at his home, September 13, 1874, at the age of eighty-six.

  The character of M. Guizot was such as to place him among the foremost men of the century. He is conspicuous among public men for the purity of his private life and for his simple, honest Christian belief. As a statesman he attained a high rank; he was a fairly consistent and unswerving advocate of constitutional monarchy, but lacked the practical force and knowledge requisite for the highest success in a field where pure theory must often yield to the attainable.

  His fame will always rest chiefly on his historical writings. His style was clear and attractive; his knowledge of facts wide and accurate; his analysis of historical forces clear and sharp; his generalizations and conclusions remarkably sound and well-founded. His early and constant devotion to the cause of constitutional monarchy colored all his political writing, and accounts in the present course of lectures for many of the positions that can hardly be accepted with the full and unqualified application with which they are stated by the author. Nevertheless, his historical works will always command the careful consideration of the student, and will hold for him a place among the foremost historical writers of modern times.

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

  The list of general works given below will be helpful in the further study of matters touched upon in this work. No attempt has been made to include works not readily accessible, and the list is merely suggestive, not exhaustive. Authorities upon special fields and subjects are not included here, but, where needed, are given in the notes.

  • Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages. New York, 1894.
  • Andrews, E. B. Brief Institutes of General History. Boston, 1887. Contains good bibliographies.
  • Bryce, James. The Holy Roman Empire. London and New York.
  • Church, R. W. The Beginnings of the Middle Ages. London, 1882.
  • Duruy, V. A History of France. Abridged and translated from the French. New York, 1889.
  • Duruy, V. The History of the Middle Ages, with notes and revisions by George B. Adams. New York, 1891.
  • Duruy, V. History of Modern Times. Translated from the French. New York, 1894.
  • Emerton, E. An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (375-814). Boston, 1888.
  • Emerton, E. Mediæval Europe (814-1300). Boston, 1895.
  • Fisher, G. P. History of the Christian Church. New York, 1887.
  • Fisher, G. P. Outlines of Universal History. New York, 1885. Contains good bibliographies.
  • Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 5 to 8 volumes. Numerous editions.
  • Guizot, F. P. G. History of Civilization in France. 4 volumes.
  • Hallam, Henry. View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages. 3 volumes. Numerous editions.
  • Henderson, E. F. Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages. 1892.
  • Hodgkin, Thomas. Italy and her Invaders. Oxford, 1880—’85.
  • Kitchin, G. W. History of France. 3 volumes. Oxford, 1873—’77.
  • Mathews, Shailer. Select Mediæval Documents illustrating the History of Church and Empire. 1892.
  • Menzel, W. History of Germany. 3 volumes. London.
  • Milman, II. II. History of Latin Christianity. 8 volumes.
  • Möller, W. History of the Christian Church. Translated from the German. 3 volumes. 1892—’94.
  • Myers, P. V. N. Outlines of Mediæval and Modern History. Boston, 1885.
  • Ploetz, Carl. Epitome of Ancient, Mediæval, and Modern History. Translated with extensive additions by William H. Tillinghast. Boston, 1883.
  • Ranke, L. History of the Popes. 3 volumes. London.
  • De Sismondi, J. C. L. Italian Republics. London, 1835.
  • Stillé, C. J. Studies in Mediæval History. Philadelphia, 1883.
  • Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History. Edited by J. H. Robinson. Philadelphia, 1895.

  GENERAL HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN MODERN EUROPE,
  
  FROM THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

  LECTURE I.

  CIVILIZATION IN GENERAL.

  Having been called upon to give a course of lectures, and having considered what subject would be most agreeable and convenient to fill up the short space allowed us from now to the close of the year, it has occurred to me that a general sketch of the History of Modern Europe, considered more especially with regard to the progress of civilization—that a general survey of the history of European civilization, of its origin, its progress, its end, its character, would be the most profitable subject upon which I could engage your attention.

  I say European civilization, because there is evidently so striking a uniformity in the civilization of the different states of Europe, as fully to warrant this appellation. Civilization has flowed to them all from sources so much alike—it is so connected in them all, notwithstanding the great differences of time, of place, and circumstances, by the same principles, and it so tends in them all to bring about the same results, that no one will doubt the fact of there being a civilization essentially European.

  At the same time it must be observed that this civilization cannot be found in—its history cannot be collected from, the history of any single state of Europe. However similar in its general appearance throughout the whole, its variety is not less remarkable, nor has it ever yet developed itself completely in any particular country. Its characteristic features are widely spread, and we shall be obliged to seek, as occasion may require in England, in France, in Germany, in Spain, for the elements of its history.

  The situation in which we are placed, as Frenchmen, affords us a great advantage for entering upon the study of European civilization; for, without intending to flatter the country to which I am bound by so many ties, I cannot but regard France as the center, as the focus, of the civilization of Europe. It would be going too far to say that she has always been, upon every occasion, in advance of other nations. Italy, at various epochs, has outstripped her in the arts; England, as regards political institutions, is by far before her; and, perhaps, at certain moments, we may find other nations of Europe superior to her in various particulars: but it must still be allowed, that whenever France has set forward in the career of civilization, she has sprung forth with new vigor, and has soon come up with, or passed by, all her rivals.

  Not only is this the case, but those ideas, those institutions which promote civilization, but whose birth must be referred to other countries, have, before they could become general, or produce fruit,—before they could be transplanted to other lands, or benefit the common stock of European civilization, been obliged to undergo in France a new preparation: it is from France, as from a second country more rich and fertile, that they have started forth to make the conquest of Europe. There is not a single great idea, not a single great principle of civilization, which, in order to become universally spread, has not first passed through France.

  There is, indeed, in the genius of the French, something of a sociableness, of a sympathy,—something which spreads itself with more facility and energy, than in the genius of any other people; it may be in the language, or the particular turn of mind of the French nation; it may be in their manners, or that their ideas, being more popular, present themselves more clearly to the masses, penetrate among them with greater ease; but, in a word, clearness, sociability, sympathy, are the particular characteristics of France, of its civilization; and these qualities render it eminently qualified to march at the head of European civilization.

  In studying, then, the history of this great fact, it is neither an arbitrary choice, nor convention, that leads us to make France the central point from which we shall study it; but it is because we feel that, in so doing, we in a manner place ourselves in the very heart of civilization itself—in the heart of the very fact which we desire to investigate.

  I say fact, and I say it advisedly: civilization is just as much a fact as any other—it is a fact which like any other may be studied, described, and have its history recounted.

  It has been the custom for some time past, and very properly, to talk of the necessity of confining history to facts; nothing can be more just; but it would be almost absurd to suppose that there are no facts but such as are material and visible: there are moral, hidden facts, which are no less real than battles, wars, and the public acts of government. Besides these individual facts, each of which has its proper name, there are others of a general nature, without a name, of which it is impossible to say that they happened in such a year, or on such a day, and which it is impossible to confine within any precise limits, but which are yet just as much facts as the battles and public acts of which we have spoken.

  That very portion, indeed, which we are accustomed to hear called the philosophy of history—which consists in showing the relation of events with each other—the chain which connects them—the causes and effects of events—this is history just as much as the description of battles, and all the other exterior events which it recounts. Facts of this kind are undoubtedly more difficult to unravel; the historian is more liable to deceive himself respecting them; it requires more skill to place them distinctly before the reader; but this difficulty does not alter their nature; they still continue not a whit the less, for all this, to form an essential part of history.

  Civilization is just one of this kind of facts; it is so general in its nature that it can scarcely be seized; so complicated that it can scarcely be unravelled; so hidden as scarcely to be discernible. The difficulty of describing it, of recounting its history, is apparent and acknowledged; but its existence, its worthiness to be described and to be recounted, is not less certain and manifest. Then, respecting civilization, what a number of problems remain to be solved! It may be asked, it is even now disputed, whether civilization be a good or an evil? One party decries it as teeming with mischief to man, while another lauds it as the means by which he will attain his highest dignity and excellence.* Again, it is asked whether this fact is universal—whether there is a general civilization of the whole human race—a course for humanity to run—a destiny for it to accomplish; whether nations have not transmitted from age to age something to their successors which is never lost, but which grows and continues as a common stock, and will thus be carried on to the end of all things. For my part, I feel assured that human nature has such a destiny; that a general civilization pervades the human race; that at every epoch it augments; and that there, consequently, is a universal history of civilization to be written. Nor have I any hesitation in asserting that this history is the most noble, the most interesting of any, and that it comprehends every other.

  Is it not indeed clear that civilization is the great fact in which all others merge; in which they all end, in which they are all condensed, in which all others find their importance? Take all the facts of which the history of a nation is composed, all the facts which we are accustomed to consider as the elements of its existence—take its institutions, its commerce, its industry, its wars, the various details of its government; and if you would form some idea of them as a whole, if you would see their various bearings on each other, if you would appreciate their value, if you would pass a judgment upon them, what is it you desire to know? Why, what they have done to forward the progress of civilization—what part they have acted in this great drama,—what influence they have exercised in aiding its advance. It is not only by this that we form a general opinion of these facts, but it is by this standard that we try them, that we estimate their true value. These are, as it were, the rivers of whom we ask how much water they have carried to the ocean. Civilization is, as it were, the grand emporium of a people, in which all its wealth—all the elements of its life—all the powers of its existence are stored up. It is so true that we judge of minor facts accordingly as they affect this greater one, that even some which are naturally detested and hated, which prove a heavy calamity to the nation upon which they fall—say, for instance, despotism, anarchy, and so forth,—even these are partly forgiven, their evil nature is partly overlooked, if they have aided in any considerable degree the march of civilization. Wherever the progress of this principle is visible, together with the facts which have urged it forward, we are tempted to forget the price it has cost—we overlook the dearness of the purchase.

  Again, there are certain facts which, properly speaking, cannot be called social—individual facts which rather concern the human intellect than public life: such are religious doctrines, philosophical opinions, literature, the sciences and arts. All these seem to offer themselves to individual man for his improvement, instruction, or amusement; and to be directed rather to his intellectual melioration and pleasure, than to his social condition. Yet still, how often do these facts come before us—how often are we compelled to consider them as influencing civilization! In all times, in all countries, it has been the boast of religion, that it has civilized the people among whom it has dwelt. Literature, the arts, and sciences, have put in their claim for a share of this glory; and mankind has been ready to laud and honor them whenever it has felt that this praise was fairly their due. In the same manner, facts the most important—facts of themselves, and independently of their exterior consequences, the most sublime in their nature, have increased in importance, have reached a higher degree of sublimity, by their connection with civilization. Such is the worth of this great principle, that it gives a value to all it touches. Not only so, but there are even cases, in which the facts of which we have spoken, in which philosophy, literature, the sciences, and the arts, are especially judged, and condemned or applauded, according to their influence upon civilization.

  Before, however, we proceed to the history of this fact, so important, so extensive, so precious, and which seems, as it were, to embody the entire life of nations, let us consider it for a moment in itself, and endeavor to discover what it really is.

  I shall be careful here not to fall into pure philosophy; I shall not lay down a certain rational principle, and then, by deduction, show the nature of civilization as a consequence; there would be too many chances of error in pursuing this method. Still, without this, we shall be able to find a fact to establish and to describe.

  For a long time past, and in many countries, the word civilization has been in use; ideas more or less clear, and of wider or more contracted signification, have been attached to it; still it has been constantly employed and generally understood. Now, it is the popular, common signification of this word that we must investigate. In the usual, general acceptation of terms, there will nearly always be found more truth than in the seemingly more precise and rigorous definitions of science. It is common sense which gives to words their popular signification, and common sense is the genius of humanity. The popular signification of a word is formed by degrees and while the facts it represents are themselves present. As often as a fact comes before us which seems to answer to the signification of a known term, this term is naturally applied to it, its signification gradually extending and enlarging itself, so that at last the various facts and ideas which, from the nature of things, ought to be brought together and embodied in this term, will be found collected and embodied in it. When, on the contrary, the signification of a word is determined by science, it is usually done by one or a very few individuals, who, at the time, are under the influence of some particular fact which has taken possession of their imagination. Thus it comes to pass that scientific definitions are, in general, much narrower, and, on that very account, much less correct, than the popular significations given to words. So, in the investigation of the meaning of the word civilization as a fact—by seeking out all the ideas it comprises, according to the common sense of mankind, we shall arrive much nearer to the knowledge of the fact itself, than by attempting to give our own scientific definition of it, though this might at first appear more clear and precise.

  I shall commence this investigation by placing before you a series of hypotheses. I shall describe society in various conditions, and shall then ask if the state in which I so describe it is, in the general opinion of mankind, the state of a people advancing in civilization—if it answers to the signification which mankind generally attaches to this word.

  First, imagine a people whose outward circumstances are easy and agreeable; few taxes, few hardships; justice is fairly administered; in a word, physical existence, taken altogether, is satisfactorily and happily regulated. But with all this the moral and intellectual energies of this people are studiously kept in a state of torpor and inertness. It can hardly be called oppression; its tendency is not of that character—it is rather compression. We are not without examples of this state of society. There have been a great number of little aristocratic republics, in which the people have been thus treated like so many flocks of sheep, carefully tended, physically happy, but without the least intellectual and moral activity. Is this civilization? Do we recognize here a people in a state of moral and social advancement?

  Let us take another hypothesis. Let us imagine a people whose outward circumstances are less favorable and agreeable; still, however, supportable. As a set-off, its intellectual and moral cravings have not here been entirely neglected. A certain range has been allowed them—some few pure and elevated sentiments have been here distributed; religious and moral notions have reached a certain degree of improvement; but the greatest care has been taken to stifle every principle of liberty. The moral and intellectual wants of this people are provided for in the way that, among some nations, the physical wants have been provided for; a certain portion of truth is doled out to each, but no one is permitted to help himself—to seek for truth on his own account. Immobility is the character of its moral life; and to this condition are fallen most of the populations of Asia, in which theocratic government restrains the advance of man: such, for example, is the state of the Hindoos. I again put the same question as before—Is this a people among whom civilization is going on?

  I will change entirely the nature of the hypothesis: suppose a people among whom there reigns a very large stretch of personal liberty, but among whom also disorder and inequality almost everywhere abound. The weak are oppressed, afflicted, destroyed; violence is the ruling character of the social condition. Every one knows that such has been the state of Europe. Is this a civilized state? It may without doubt contain germs of civilization which may progressively shoot up; but the actual state of things which prevails in this society is not, we may rest assured, what the common sense of mankind would call civilization.

  I pass on to a fourth and last hypothesis. Every individual here enjoys the widest extent of liberty; inequality is rare, or, at least, of a very slight character. Every one does as he likes, and scarcely differs in power from his neighbor. But then here scarcely such a thing is known as a general interest; here exist but few public ideas; hardly any public feeling; but little society: in short, the life and faculties of individuals are put forth and spent in an isolated state, with but little regard to society, and with scarcely a sentiment of its influence. Men here exercise no influence upon one another; they leave no traces of their existence. Generation after generation pass away, leaving society just as they found it. Such is the condition of the various tribes of savages; liberty and equality dwell among them, but no touch of civilization.

  I could easily multiply these hypotheses; but I presume that I have gone far enough to show what is the popular and natural signification of the word civilization.

  It is evident that none of the states which I have just described will correspond with the common notion of mankind respecting this term. It seems to me that the first idea comprised in the word civilization (and this may be gathered from the various examples which I have placed before you) is the notion of progress, of development. It calls up within us the notion of a people advancing, of a people in a course of improvement and melioration.

  Now what is this progress? What is this development? In this is the great difficulty. The etymology of the word seems sufficiently obvious—it points at once to the improvement of civil life. The first notion which strikes us in pronouncing it is the progress of society; the melioration of the social state; the carrying to higher perfection the relations between man and man. It awakens within us at once the notion of an increase of national prosperity, of a greater activity and better organization of the social relations. On one hand there is a manifest increase in the power and well-being of society at large; and on the other a more equitable distribution of this power and this well-being among the individuals of which society is composed.

  But the word civilization has a more extensive signification than this, which seems to confine it to the mere outward, physical organization of society. Now, if this were all, the human race would be little better than the inhabitants of an ant-hill or bee-hive; a society in which nothing was sought for beyond order and well-being—in which the highest, the sole aim, would be the production of the means of life, and their equitable distribution.

  But our nature at once rejects this definition as too narrow. It tells us that man is formed for a higher destiny than this. That this is not the full development of his character—that civilization comprehends something more extensive, something more complex, something superior to the perfection of social relations, of social power and well-being.

  That this is so, we have not merely the evidence of our nature, and that derived from the signification which the common sense of mankind has attached to the word; but we have likewise the evidence of facts.

  No one, for example, will deny that there are communities in which the social state of man is better—in which the means of life are better supplied, are more rapidly produced, are better distributed, than in others, which yet will be pronounced by the unanimous voice of mankind to be superior in point of civilization.

  Take Rome, for example, in the splendid days of the republic, at the close of the second Punic war; the moment of her greatest virtues, when she was rapidly advancing to the empire of the world—when her social condition was evidently improving. Take Rome again under Augustus, at the commencement of her decline, when, to say the least, the progressive movement of society halted, when bad principles seemed ready to prevail: but is there any person who would not say that Rome was more civilized under Augustus than in the days of Fabricius or Cincinnatus?

  Let us look further: let us look at France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a merely social point of view, as respects the quantity and the distribution of well-being among individuals, France, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was decidedly inferior to several of the other states of Europe; to Holland and England in particular. Social activity, in these countries, was greater, increased more rapidly, and distributed its fruits more equitably among individuals. Yet consult the general opinion of mankind, and it will tell you that France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the most civilized country of Europe. Europe has not hesitated to acknowledge this fact, and evidence of its truth will be found in all the great works of European literature.

  It appears evident, then, that all that we understand by this term is not comprised in the simple idea of social well-being and happiness; and, if we look a little deeper, we discover that, besides the progress and melioration of social life, another development is comprised in our notion of civilization: namely, the development of individual life, the development of the human mind and its faculties—the development of man himself.

  It is this development which so strikingly manifested itself in France and Rome at these epochs; it is this expansion of human intelligence which gave to them so great a degree of superiority in civilization. In these countries the godlike principle which distinguishes man from the brute exhibited itself with peculiar grandeur and power, and compensated in the eyes of the world for the defects of their social system. These communities had still many social conquests to make; but they had already glorified themselves by the intellectual and moral victories they had achieved. Many of the conveniences of life were here wanting; from a considerable portion of the community were still withheld their natural rights and political privileges: but see the number of illustrious individuals who lived and earned the applause and approbation of their fellow-men. Here, too, literature, science, and art, attained extraordinary perfection, and shone in more splendor than perhaps they had ever done before. Now, wherever this takes place, wherever man sees these glorious idols of his worship displayed in their full luster—wherever he sees this fund of rational and refined enjoyment for the godlike part of his nature called into existence, there he recognizes and adores civilization.*

  Two elements, then, seem to be comprised in the great fact which we call civilization;—two circumstances are necessary to its existence—it lives upon two conditions—it reveals itself by two symptoms: the progress of society, the progress of individuals; the melioration of the social system, and the expansion of the mind and faculties of man. Wherever the exterior condition of man becomes enlarged, quickened, and improved; wherever the intellectual nature of man distinguishes itself by its energy, brilliancy, and its grandeur; wherever these two signs concur, and they often do so, notwithstanding the gravest imperfections in the social system, there man proclaims and applauds civilization.

  Such, if I mistake not, would be the notion mankind in general would form of civilization, from a simple and rational inquiry into the meaning of the term. This view of it is confirmed by History. If we ask of her what has been the character of every great crisis favorable to civilization, if we examine those great events which all acknowledge to have carried it forward, we shall always find one or other of the two elements which I have just described. They have all been epochs of individual or social improvement; events which have either wrought a change in individual man, in his opinions, his manners; or in his exterior condition, his situation as regards his relations with his fellowmen. Christianity, for example: I allude not merely to the first moment of its appearance, but to the first centuries of its existence—Christianity was in no way addressed to the social condition of man; it distinctly disclaimed all interference with it. It commanded the slave to obey his master. It attacked none of the great evils, none of the gross acts of injustice, by which the social system of that day was disfigured:* yet who but will acknowledge that Christianity has been one of the greatest promoters of civilization? And wherefore? Because it has changed the interior condition of man, his opinions, his sentiments: because it has regenerated his moral, his intellectual character.†

  We have seen a crisis of an opposite nature; a crisis affecting not the intellectual, but the outward condition of man, which has changed and regenerated society. This also we may rest assured is a decisive crisis of civilization. If we search history through, we shall everywhere find the same result; we shall meet with no important event, which had a direct influence in the advancement of civilization, which has not exercised it in one of the two ways I have just mentioned.

  Having thus, as I hope, given you a clear notion of the two elements of which civilization is composed, let us now see whether one of them alone would be sufficient to constitute it: whether either the development of the social condition, or the development of the individual man taken separately, deserves to be regarded as civilization? or whethare not produced simultaneously, sooner or later, one uniformly produces the other?

  There are three ways, as it seems to me, in which we may proceed in deciding this question. First: we may investigate the nature itself of the two elements of civilization, and see whether by that they are strictly and necessarily bound together. Secondly: we may examine historically whether, in fact, they have manifested themselves separately, or whether one has always produced the other. Thirdly: we may consult common sense, i. e., the general opinion of mankind. Let us first address ourselves to the general opinion of mankind—to common sense.

  When any great change takes place in the state of a country—when any great development of social prosperity is accomplished within it—any revolution or reform in the powers and privileges of society, this new event naturally has its adversaries. It is necessarily contested and opposed. Now what are the objections which the adversaries of such revolutions bring against them?

  They assert that this progress of the social condition is attended with no advantage; that it does not improve in a corresponding degree the moral state—the intellectual powers of man; that it is a false, deceitful progress, which proves detrimental to his moral character, to the true interests of his better nature. On the other hand, this attack is repulsed with much force by the friends of the movement. They maintain that the progress of society necessarily leads to the progress of intelligence and morality; that, in proportion as the social life is better regulated, individual life becomes more refined and virtuous. Thus the question rests in abeyance between the opposers and partisans of the change.

  But reverse this hypothesis; suppose the moral development in progress. What do the men who labor for it generally hope for?—What, at the origin of societies, have the founders of religion, the sages, poets, and philosophers, who have labored to regulate and refine the manners of mankind, promised themselves? What but the melioration of the social condition: the more equitable distribution of the blessings of life? What, now, let me ask, should be inferred from this dispute and from those hopes and promises? It may, I think, be fairly inferred that it is the spontaneous, intuitive conviction of mankind, that the two elements of civilization—the social and moral development—are intimately connected; that, at the approach of one, man looks for the other. It is to this natural conviction, we appeal when, to second or combat either one or the other of the two elements, we deny or attest its union with the other. We know that if men were persuaded that the melioration of the social condition would operate against the expansion of the intellect, they would almost oppose and cry out against the advancement of society. On the other hand, when we speak to mankind of improving society by improving its individual members, we find them willing to believe us, and to adopt the principle. Hence we may affirm that it is the intuitive belief of man, that these two elements of civilization are intimately connected, and that they reciprocally produce one another.

  If we now examine the history of the world we shall have the same result. We shall find that every expansion of human intelligence has proved of advantage to society; and that all the great advances in the social condition have turned to the profit of humanity. One or other of these facts may predominate, may shine forth with greater splendor for a season, and impress upon the movement its own particular character. At times, it may not be till after the lapse of a long interval, after a thousand transformations, a thousand obstacles, that the second shows itself, and comes, as it were, to complete the civilization which the first had begun; but when we look closely we easily recognize the link by which they are connected. The movements of Providence are not restricted to narrow bounds: it is not anxious to deduce to-day the consequence of the premises it laid down yesterday. It may defer this for ages, till the fulness of time shall come. Its logic will not be less conclusive for reasoning slowly. Providence moves through time, as the gods of Homer through space—it makes a step, and ages have rolled away! How long a time, how many circumstances intervened, before the regeneration of the moral powers of man, by Christianity, exercised its great, its legitimate influence upon his social condition? Yet who can doubt or mistake its power?

  If we pass from history to the nature itself of the two facts which constitute civilization, we are infallibly led to the same result. We have all experienced this. If a man makes a mental advance, some mental discovery, if he acquires some new idea, or some new faculty, what is the desire that takes possession of him at the very moment he makes it? It is the desire to promulgate his sentiment to the exterior world—to publish and realize his thought. When a man acquires a new truth—when his being in his own eyes has made an advance, has acquired a new gift, immediately there becomes joined to this acquirement the notion of a mission. He feels obliged, impelled, as it were, by a secret interest, to extend, to carry out of himself the change, the melioration which has been accomplished within him. To what, but this, do we owe the exertions of great reformers? The exertions of those great benefactors of the human race, who have changed the face of the world, after having first been changed themselves, have been stimulated and governed by no other impulse than this.

  So much for the change which takes place in the intellectual man. Let us now consider him in a social state. A revolution is made in the condition of society. Rights and property are more equitably distributed among individuals; this is as much as to say, the appearance of the world is purer—is more beautiful. The state of things, both as respects governments, and as respects men in their relations with each other, is improved. And can there be a question whether the sight of this goodly spectacle, whether the melioration of this external condition of man, will have a corresponding influence upon his moral, his individual character—upon humanity? Such a doubt would belie all that is said of the authority of example, and of the power of habit, which is founded upon nothing but the conviction that exterior facts and circumstances, if good, reasonable, well-regulated, are followed, sooner or later, more or less completely, by intellectual results of the same nature, of the same beauty: that a world better governed, better regulated, a world in which justice more fully prevails, renders man himself more just. That the intellectual man then is instructed and improved by the superior condition of society, and his social condition, his external well-being, meliorated and refined by increase of intelligence in individuals; that the two elements of civilization are strictly connected; that ages, that obstacles of all kinds, may interpose between them—that it is possible they may undergo a thousand transformations before they meet together; but that sooner or later this union will take place is certain; for it is a law of their nature that they should do so—the great facts of history bear witness that such is really the case—the instinctive belief of man proclaims the same truth.

  Thus, though I have not by a great deal advanced all that might be said upon this subject, I trust I have given a tolerably correct and adequate notion, in the foregoing cursory account, of what civilization is, of what are its offices, and what its importance. I might here quit the subject; but I cannot part with it, without placing before you another question, which here naturally presents itself—a question not purely historical, but rather, I will not say hypothetical, but conjectural; a question which we can see here but in part; but which, however, is not less real, but presses itself upon our notice at every turn of thought.

  Of the two developments, of which we have just now spoken, and which together constitute civilization,—of the development of society on one part, and of the expansion of human intelligence on the other—which is the end? which are the means? Is it for the improvement of the social condition, for the melioration of his existence upon the earth, that man fully develops himself, his mind, his faculties, his sentiments, his ideas, his whole being? Or is the melioration of the social condition, the progress of society,—is indeed society itself merely the theatre, the occasion, the motive and excitement for the development of the individual? In a word, is society formed for the individual, or the individual for society? Upon the reply to this question depends our knowledge of whether the destiny of man is purely social, whether society exhausts and absorbs the entire man, or whether he bears within him something foreign, something superior to his existence in this world?

  One of the greatest philosophers and most distinguished men of the present age, whose words become indelibly engraved upon whatever spot they fall, has resolved this question; he has resolved it, at least, according to his own conviction. The following are his words: “Human societies are born, live, and die, upon the earth; there they accomplish their destinies. But they contain not the whole man. After his engagement to society there still remains in him the more noble part of his nature; those high faculties by which he elevates himself to God, to a future life, and to the unknown blessings of an invisible world. We, individuals, each with a separate and distinct existence, with an identical person, we, truly beings endowed with immortality, we have a higher destiny than that of states.”*

  I shall add nothing on this subject; it is not my province to handle it; it is enough for me to have placed it before you. It haunts us again at the close of the history of civilization.—Where the history of civilization ends, when there is no more to be said of the present life, man invincibly demands if all is over—if that be the end of all things? This, then, is the last problem, and the grandest, to which the history of civilization can lead us. It is sufficient that I have marked its place, and its sublime character.*

  From the foregoing remarks, it becomes evident that the history of civilization may be considered from two different points of view—may be drawn from two different sources. The historian may take up his abode during the time prescribed, say a series of centuries, in the human soul, or with some particular nation. He may study, describe, relate, all the circumstances, all the transformations, all the revolutions, which may have taken place in the intellectual man; and when he had done this he would have a history of the civilization among the people, or during the period which he had chosen. He might proceed differently: instead of entering into the interior of man, he might take his stand in the external world. He might take his station in the midst of the great theatre of life; instead of describing the change of ideas, of the sentiments of the individual being, he might describe his exterior circumstances, the events, the revolutions of his social condition. These two portions, these two histories of civilization, are strictly connected with each other; they are the counterpart, the reflected image of one another. They may, however, be separated.* Perhaps it is necessary, at least in the beginning, in order to be exposed in detail and with clearness, that they should be. For my part I have no intention, upon the present occasion, to enter upon the history of civilization in the human mind; the history of the exterior events of the visible and social world is that to which I shall call your attention. It would give me pleasure to be able to display before you the phenomenon of civilization in the way I understand it, in all its bearings, in its widest extent—to place before you all the vast questions to which it gives rise. But, for the present, I must restrain my wishes; I must confine myself to a narrower field: it is only the history of the social state that I shall attempt to narrate.

  My first object will be to seek out the elements of European civilization at the time of its birth, at the fall of the Roman empire—to examine carefully society such as it was in the midst of these famous ruins. I shall endeavor to pick out these elements, and to place them before you, side by side; I shall endeavor to put them in motion, and to follow them in their progress through the fifteen centuries which have rolled away since that epoch.

  We shall not, I think, proceed far in this study, without being convinced that civilization is still in its infancy. How distant is the human mind from the perfection to which it may attain—from the perfection for which it was created! How incapable are we of grasping the whole future destiny of man! Let any one even descend into his own mind—let him picture there the highest point of perfection to which man, to which society may attain, that he can conceive, that he can hope;—let him then contrast this picture with the present state of the world, and he will feel assured that society and civilization are still in their childhood: that however great the distance they have advanced, that which they have before them is incomparably, is infinitely greater. This, however, should not lessen the pleasure with which we contemplate our present condition. When you have run over with me the great epochs of civilization during the last fifteen centuries, you will see, up to our time, how painful, how stormy, has been the condition of man; how hard has been his lot, not only outwardly as regards society, but internally, as regards the intellectual man. For fifteen centuries the human mind has suffered as much as the human race. You will see that it is only lately that the human mind, perhaps for the first time, has arrived, imperfect though its condition still be, to a state where some peace, some harmony, some freedom is found. The same holds with regard to society—its immense progress is evident—the condition of man, compared with what it has been, is easy and just. In thinking of our ancestors we may almost apply to ourselves the verses of Lucretius:—

  “Suave, mari magno turbantibus æquora ventis, E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.”*

  Without any great degree of pride we may, as Sthenelus is made to do in Homer, ‘Ημει̑ς τοι πατὲρων μεγ’ ἀμείνονες εὐχόμεθ’ εἰ̑ναι, “Return thanks to God that we are infinitely better than our fathers.”

  We must, however, take care not to deliver ourselves up too fully to a notion of our happiness and our improved condition. It may lead us into two serious evils, pride and inactivity;—it may give us an overweening confidence in the power and success of the human mind, of its present attainments; and, at the same time, dispose us to apathy, enervated by the agreeableness of our condition. I know not if this strikes you as it does me, but in my judgment we continually oscillate between an inclination to complain without sufficient cause, and to be too easily satisfied. We have an extreme susceptibility of mind, an inordinate craving, an ambition in our thoughts, in our desires, and in the movements of our imagination; yet when we come to practical life—when trouble, when sacrifices, when efforts are required for the attainment of our object, we sink into lassitude and inactivity. We are discouraged almost as easily as we had been excited. Let us not, however, suffer ourselves to be invaded by either of these vices. Let us estimate fairly what our abilities, our knowledge, our power enable us to do lawfully; and let us aim at nothing that we cannot lawfully, justly, prudently—with a proper respect to the great principles upon which our social system, our civilization is based—attain. The age of barbarian Europe, with its brute force, its violence, its lies and deceit,—the habitual practice under which Europe groaned during four or five centuries is passed away for ever, and has given place to a better order of things. We trust that the time now approaches when man’s condition shall be progressively improved by the force of reason and truth, when the brute part of nature shall be crushed, that the godlike spirit may unfold. In the mean time let us be cautious that no vague desires, that no extravagant theories, the time for which may not yet be come, carry us beyond the bounds of prudence, or beget in us a discontent with our present state. To us much has been given, of us much will be required. Posterity will demand a strict account of our conduct—the public, the government, all is now open to discussion, to examination. Let us then attach ourselves firmly to the principles of our civilization, to justice, to law, to liberty; and never forget, that, if we have the right to demand that all things shall be laid open before us, and judged by us, we likewise are before the world, who will examine us, and judge us according to our works.

  LECTURE II.

  OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION IN PARTICULAR: ITS DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS—ITS SUPERIORITY—ITS ELEMENTS.

  In the preceding Lecture, I endeavored to give an explanation of civilization in general. Without referring to any civilization in particular, or to circumstances of time and place, I essayed to place it before you in a point of view purely philosophical. I purpose now to enter upon the History of the Civilization of Europe; but before doing so, before going into its proper history, I must make you acquainted with the peculiar character of this civilization—with its distinguishing features, so that you may be able to recognize and distinguish European civilization from every other.

  When we look at the civilizations which have preceded that of modern Europe, whether in Asia or elsewhere, including even those of Greece and Rome, it is impossible not to be struck with the unity of character which reigns among them. Each appears as though it had emanated from a single fact, from a single idea. One might almost assert that society was under the influence of one single principle, which universally prevailed and determined the character of its institutions, its manners, its opinions—in a word, all its developments.

  In Egypt, for example, it was the theocratic principle that took possession of society, and showed itself in its manners, in its monuments, and in all that has come down to us of Egyptian civilization. In India the same phenomenon occurs—it is still a repetition of the almost exclusively prevailing influence of theocracy.* In other regions a different organization may be observed—perhaps the domination of a conquering caste: and where such is the case, the principle of force takes entire possession of society, imposing upon it its laws and its character. In another place, perhaps, we discover society under the entire influence of the democratic principle; such was the case in the commercial republics which covered the coasts of Asia Minor and Syria—in Ionia and Phœnicia. In a word, whenever we contemplate the civilizations of the ancients, we find them all impressed with one ever-prevailing character of unity, visible in their institutions, their ideas, and manners—one sole, or at least one very preponderating influence, seems to govern and determine all things.

  I do not mean to aver that this overpowering influence of one single principle, of one single form, prevailed without any exception in the civilization of those states. If we go back to their earliest history, we shall find that the various powers which dwelt in the bosom of these societies frequently struggled for mastery. Thus among the Egyptians, the Etruscans, even among the Greeks and others, we may observe the warrior caste struggling against that of the priests. In other places we find the spirit of clanship struggling against the spirit of free association, the spirit of aristocracy against popular rights. These struggles, however, mostly took place in periods beyond the reach of history, and no evidence of them is left beyond a vague tradition.

  Sometimes, indeed, these early struggles broke out afresh at a later period in the history of the nations; but in almost every case they were quickly terminated by the victory of one of the powers which sought to prevail, and which then took sole possession of society. The war always ended by the domination of some special principle, which, if not exclusive, at least greatly preponderated. The co-existence and strife of various principles among these nations were no more than a passing, an accidental circumstance.

  From this cause a remarkable unity characterizes most of the civilizations of antiquity, the results of which, however, were very different. In one nation, as in Greece, the unity of the social principle led to a development of wonderful rapidity; no other people ever ran so brilliant a career in so short a time. But Greece had hardly become glorious, before she appeared worn out: her decline, if not quite so rapid as her rise, was strangely sudden. It seems as if the principle which called Greek civilization into life was exhausted. No other came to invigorate it, or supply its place.*

  In other states, say, for example, in India and Egypt, where again only one principle of civilization prevailed, the result was different. Society here became stationary; simplicity produced monotony; the country was not destroyed; society continued to exist; but there was no progression; it remained torpid and inactive.

  To this same cause must be attributed that character of tyranny which prevailed, under various names, and the most opposite forms, in all the civilizations of antiquity. Society belonged to one exclusive power, which could bear with no other. Every principle of a different tendency was proscribed. The governing principle would nowhere suffer by its side the manifestation and influence of a rival principle.

  This character of simplicity, of unity, in their civilization, is equally impressed upon their literature and intellectual productions. Who that has run over the monuments of Hindoo literature lately introduced into Europe, but has seen that they are all struck from the same die? They all seem the result of one same fact; the expression of one same idea. Religious and moral treatises, historical traditions, dramatic poetry, epics, all bear the same physiognomy. The same character of unity and monotony shines out in these works of mind and fancy, as we discover in their life and institutions. Even in Greece, notwithstanding the immense stores of knowledge and intellect which it poured forth, a wonderful unity still prevailed in all relating to literature and the arts.

  How different from all this is the case as respects the civilization of modern Europe! Take ever so rapid a glance at this, and it strikes you at once as diversified, confused, and stormy. All the principles of social organization are found existing together within it; powers temporal, powers spiritual, the theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements, all classes of society, all the social situations, are jumbled together, and visible within it; as well as infinite gradations of liberty, of wealth, and of influence. These various powers, too, are found here in a state of continual struggle among themselves, without any one having sufficient force to master the others, and take sole possession of society. Among the ancients, at every great epoch, all communities seem cast in the same mould: it was now pure monarchy, now theocracy or democracy, that became the reigning principle, each in its turn reigning absolutely. But modern Europe contains examples of all these systems, of all the attempts at social organization, pure and mixed monarchies, theocracies, republics more or less aristocratic, all live in common, side by side, at one and the same time; yet, notwithstanding their diversity, they all bear a certain resemblance to each other, a kind of family likeness which it is impossible to mistake, and which shows them to be essentially European.

  In the moral character, in the notions and sentiments of Europe, we find the same variety, the same struggle. Theocratic opinions, monarchical opinions, aristocratic opinions, democratic opinions, cross and jostle, struggle, become interwoven, limit, and modify each other. Open the boldest treatises of the middle age: in none of them is an opinion carried to its final consequences. The advocates of absolute power flinch, almost unconsciously, from the results to which their doctrine would carry them. We see that the ideas and influences around them frighten them from pushing it to its uttermost point. Democracy felt the same control. That imperturbable boldness, so striking in ancient civilizations, nowhere found a place in the European system. In sentiments we discover the same contrasts, the same variety; an indomitable taste for independence dwelling by the side of the greatest aptness for submission; a singular fidelity between man and man, and at the same time an imperious desire in each to do his own will, to shake off all restraint, to live alone, without troubling himself with the rest of the world. Minds were as much diversified as society.

  The same characteristic is observable in literature. It cannot be denied that in what relates to the form and beauty of art, modern Europe is very inferior to antiquity; but if we look at her literature as regards depth of feeling and ideas, it will be found more powerful and rich. The human mind has been employed upon a greater number of objects, its labors have been more diversified, it has gone to a greater depth. Its imperfection in form is owing to this very cause. The more plenteous and rich the materials, the greater is the difficulty of forcing them into a pure and simple form. That which gives beauty to a composition, that which in works of art we call form, is the clearness, the simplicity, the symbolical unity of the work. With the prodigious diversity of ideas and sentiments which belong to European civilization, the difficulty of attaining this grand and chaste simplicity has been increased.*

  In every part, then, we find this character of variety to prevail in modern civilization. It has undoubtedly brought with it this inconvenience, that when we consider separately any particular development of the human mind in literature, in the arts, in any of the ways in which human intelligence may go forward, we shall generally find it inferior to the corresponding development in the civilization of antiquity; but, as a set-off to this, when we regard it as a whole, European civilization appears incomparably more rich and diversified: if each particular fruit has not attained the same perfection, it has ripened an infinitely greater variety. Again, European civilization has now endured fifteen centuries, and in all that time it has been in a state of progression.* It may be true that it has not advanced so rapidly as the Greek; but, catching new impulses at every stop, it is still advancing. An unbounded career is open before it; and from day to day it presses forward to the race with increasing rapidity, because increased freedom attends upon all its movements. While in other civilizations the exclusive domination, or at least the excessive preponderance of a single principle, of a single form, led to tyranny, in modern Europe the diversity of the elements of social order, the incapability of any one to exclude the rest, gave birth to the liberty which now prevails. The inability of the various principles to exterminate one another compelled each to endure the others, made it necessary for them to live in common, for them to enter into a sort of mutual understanding. Each consented to have only that part of civilization which fell to its share. Thus, while everywhere else the predominance of one principle has produced tyranny, the variety of elements of European civilization, and the constant warfare in which they have been engaged, have given birth in Europe to that liberty which we prize so dearly.

  It is this which gives to European civilization its real, its immense superiority—it is this which forms its essential, its distinctive character. And if, carrying our views still further, we penetrate beyond the surface into the very nature of things, we shall find that this superiority is legitimate—that it is acknowledged by reason as well as proclaimed by facts. Quitting for a moment European civilization, and taking a glance at the world in general, at the common course of earthly things, what is the character we find it to bear? What do we here perceive? Why just that very same diversity, that very same variety of elements, that very same struggle which is so strikingly evinced in European civilization. It is plain enough that no single principle, no particular organization, no simple idea, no special power has ever been permitted to obtain possession of the world, to mould it into a durable form, and to drive from it every opposing tendency, so as to reign itself supreme. Various powers, principles, and systems here intermingle, modify one another, and struggle incessantly—now subduing, now subdued—never wholly conquered, never conquering. Such is apparently the general state of the world, while diversity of forms, of ideas, of principles, their struggles and their energies, all tend towards a certain unity, a certain ideal, which, though perhaps it may never be attained, mankind is constantly approaching by dint of liberty and labor. Hence European civilization is the reflected image of the world—like the course of earthly things, it is neither narrowly circumscribed, exclusive, nor stationary. For the first time, civilization appears to have divested itself of its special character: its development presents itself for the first time under as diversified, as abundant, as laborious an aspect as the great theatre of the universe itself.

  European civilization has, if I may be allowed the expression, at last penetrated into the ways of eternal truth—into the scheme of Providence;—it moves in the ways which God has prescribed. This is the rational principle of its superiority.

  Let it not, I beseech you, be forgotten—bear in mind, as we proceed with these lectures, that it is in this diversity of elements, and their constant struggle, that the essential character of our civilization consists. At present I can do no more than assert this; its proof will be found in the facts I shall bring before you. Still I think you will acknowledge it to be a confirmation of this assertion, if I can show you that the causes, and the elements of the character which I have just attributed to it, can be traced to the very cradle of our civilization. If, I say, at the very moment of her birth, at the very hour in which the Roman empire fell, I can show you, in the state of the world, the circumstances which, from the beginning, have concurred to give to European civilization that agitated and diversified, but at the same time prolific character which distinguishes it, I think I shall have a strong claim upon your assent to its truth. In order to accomplish this, I shall begin by investigating the condition of Europe at the fall of the Roman empire, so that we may discover in its institutions, in its opinions, its ideas, its sentiments, what were the elements which the ancient world bequeathed to the modern. And upon these elements you will see strongly impressed the character which I have just described.

  It is necessary that we should first see what the Roman empire was, and how it was formed.

  Rome in its origin was a mere municipality, a corporation. The Roman government was nothing more than an assemblage of institutions suitable to a population enclosed within the walls of a city; that is to say, they were municipal institutions;—this was their distinctive character.

  This was not peculiar to Rome. If we look, in this period, at the part of Italy which surrounded Rome, we find nothing but cities. What were then called nations were nothing more than confederations of cities. The Latin nation was a confederation of Latin cities. The Etrurians, the Samnites, the Sabines, the nations of Magna Græcia, were all composed in the same way.

  At this time there were no country places, no villages; at least the country was nothing like what it is in the present day. It was cultivated, no doubt, but it was not peopled. The proprietors of lands and of country estates dwelt in cities; they left these occasionally to visit their rural property, where they usually kept a certain number of slaves; but that which we now call the country, that scattered population, sometimes in lone houses, sometimes in hamlets and villages, and which everywhere dots our land with agricultural dwellings, was altogether unknown in ancient Italy.

  And what was the case when Rome extended her boundaries? If we follow her history, we shall find that she conquered or founded a host of cities. It was with cities she fought, it was with cities she treated, it was into cities she sent colonies. In short, the history of the conquest of the world by Rome is the history of the conquest and foundation of a vast number of cities. It is true that in the East the extension of the Roman dominion bore somewhat of a different character: the population was not distributed there in the same way as in the western world; it was under a social system, partaking more of the patriarchal form, and was consequently much less concentrated in cities. But, as we have only to do with the population of Europe, I shall not dwell upon what relates to that of the East.

  Confining ourselves, then, to the West, we shall find the fact to be such as I have described it. In the Gauls, in Spain, we meet with nothing but cities. At any distance from these, the country consisted of marshes and forests. Examine the character of the monuments left us of ancient Rome—the old Roman roads. We find great roads extending from city to city; but the thousands of little by-paths, which now intersect every part of the country, were then unknown. Neither do we find any traces of that immense number of lesser objects—of churches, castles, country-seats, and villages, which were spread all over the country during the middle ages. Rome has left no traces of this kind; her only bequest consists of vast monuments impressed with a municipal character, destined for a numerous population, crowded into a single spot. In whatever point of view you consider the Roman world, you meet with this almost exclusive preponderance of cities, and an absence of country populations and dwellings. This municipal character of the Roman world evidently rendered the unity, the social tie of a great state, extremely difficult to establish and maintain.

  A municipal corporation like Rome might be able to conquer the world, but it was a much more difficut task to govern it, to mould it into one compact body. Thus, when the work seemed done, when all the West, and a great part of the East, had submitted to the Roman yoke, we find an immense host of cities, of little states formed for separate existence and independence, breaking their chains, escaping on every side. This was one of the causes which made the establishment of the empire necessary; which called for a more concentrated form of government, one better able to hold together elements which had so few points of cohesion. The empire endeavored to unite and to bind together this extensive and scattered society; and to a certain point it succeeded. Between the reigns of Augustus and Diocletian, during the very time that her admirable civil legislation was being carried to perfection, that vast and despotic administration was established, which, spreading over the empire a sort of chain-work of functionaries subordinately arranged, firmly knit together the people and the imperial court, serving at the same time to convey to society the will of the government, and to bring to the government the tribute and obedience of society.*

  This system, besides rallying the forces, and holding together the elements, of the Roman world, introduced with wonderful celerity into society a taste for despotism, for central power. It is truly astonishing to see how rapidly this incoherent assemblage of little republics, this association of municipal corporations, sunk into an humble and obedient respect for the sacred name of emperor. The necessity for establishing some tie between all these parts of the Roman world must have been very apparent and powerful, otherwise we can hardly conceive how the spirit of despotism could so easily have made its way into the minds and almost into the affections of the people.

  It was with this spirit, with this administrative organization, and with the military system connected with it, that the Roman empire struggled against the dissolution which was working within it, and against the barbarians who attacked it from without. But, though it struggled long, the day at length arrived when all the skill and power of despotism, when all the pliancy of servitude, was insufficient to prolong its fate. In the fourth century, all the ties which had held this immense body together seem to have been loosened or snapped; the barbarians broke in on every side; the provinces no longer resisted, no longer troubled themselves with the general destiny. At this crisis an extraordinary idea entered the minds of one or two of the emperors: they wished to try whether the hope of general liberty, whether a confederation, a system something like what we now call the representative system, would not better defend the Roman empire than the despotic administration which already existed. There is a mandate of Honorius and the younger Theodosius, addressed, in the year 418, to the prefect of Gaul, the object of which was to establish a sort of representative government in the south of Gaul, and by its aid still to preserve the unity of empire.

  Rescript of the Emperors Honorius and Theodosius the Younger, addressed, in the year 418, to the Prefect of the Gauls, residing at Arles.

  “Honorius and Theodosius, Augusti, to Agricoli, Prefect of the Gauls.

  “In consequence of the very salutary representation which your Magnificence has made to us, as well as upon other information obviously advantageous to the republic, we decree, in order that they may have the force of a perpetual law, that the following regulations should be made, and that obedience should be paid to them by the inhabitants of our seven provinces,* and which are such as they themselves should wish for and require. Seeing that from motives, both of public and private utility, responsible persons of special deputies should be sent, not only by each province, but by each city, to your Magnificence, not only to render up accounts, but also to treat of such matters as concern the interest of landed proprietors, we have judged that it would be both convenient and highly advantageous to have annually, at a fixed period, and to date from the present year, an assembly for the inhabitants of the seven provinces held in the Metropolis, that is to say, in the city of Arles. By this institution our desire is to provide both for public and private interests. First, by the union of the most influential inhabitants in the presence of their illustrious Prefect (unless he should be absent from causes affecting public order), and by their deliberations, upon every subject brought before them, the best possible advice will be obtained. Nothing which shall have been treated of and determined upon, after a mature discussion, shall be kept from the knowledge of the rest of the provinces; and such as have not assisted at the assembly shall be bound to follow the same rules of justice and equity. Furthermore, by ordaining that an assembly should be held every year in the city of Constantine,† we believe that we are doing not only what will be advantageous to the public welfare, but what will also multiply its social relations. Indeed, this city is so favorably situated, foreigners resort to it in such large numbers, and it possesses so extensive a commerce, that all the varied productions and manufactures of the rest of the world are to be seen within it. All that the opulent East, the perfumed Arabia, the delicate Assyria, the fertile Africa, the beautiful Spain, and the courageous Gaul, produce worthy of note, abound here in such profusion, that all things admired as magnificent in the different parts of the world seem the productions of its own climate. Further, the union of the Rhone and the Tuscan sea so facilitate intercourse, that the countries which the former traverses, and the latter waters in its winding course, are made almost neighbors. Thus, as the whole earth yields up its most esteemed productions for the service of this city, as the particular commodities of each country are transported to it by land, by sea, by rivers, by ships, by rafts, by wagons, how can our Gaul fail of seeing the great benefit we confer upon it by convoking a public assembly to be held in this city, upon which, by a special gift, as it were, of Divine Providence, has been showered all the enjoyments of life, and all the facilities for commerce?

  “The illustrious Prefect Petronius* did, some time ago, with a praiseworthy and enlightened view, ordain that this custom should be observed; but as its practice was interrupted by the troubles of the times and the reign of usurpers, we have resolved to put it again in force, by the prudent exercise of our authority. Thus, then, dear and well-beloved cousin Agricoli, your Magnificence, conforming to our present ordinance and the custom established by your predecessors, will cause the following regulations to be observed in the provinces:—

  “It will be necessary to make known unto all persons honored with public functions or proprietors of domains, and to all the judges of provinces, that they must attend in council every year in the city of Arles, between the Ides of August and September, the days of convocation and of session to be fixed at pleasure.

  “Novempopulana and the second Aquitaine, being the most distant provinces, shall have the power, according to custom, to send, if their judges should be detained by indispensable duties, deputies in their stead.

  “Such persons as neglect to attend at the place appointed, and within the prescribed period, shall pay a fine: viz., judges, five pounds of gold; members of the curiæ and other dignitaries, three pounds.†

  “By this measure we conceive we are granting great advantages and favor to the inhabitants of our provinces. We have also the certainty of adding to the welfare of the city of Arles, to the fidelity of which, according to our father and countryman, we owe so much.‡

  “Given the 15th of the calends of May; received at Arles the 10th of the calends of June.”

  Notwithstanding this call, the provinces and cities refused the proffered boon; nobody would name deputies, none would go to Arles. This centralization, this unity, was opposed to the primitive nature of this society. The spirit of locality, and of municipality, everywhere reappeared; the impossibility of reconstructing a general society, of building up the whole into one general state, became evident. The cities, confining themselves to the affairs of their own corporations, shut themselves up within their own walls, and the empire fell, because none would belong to the empire; because citizens wished but to belong to their city. Thus the Roman empire, at its fall, was resolved into the elements of which it had been composed, and the preponderance of municipal rule and government was again everywhere visible. The Roman world had been formed of cities, and to cities again it returned.*

  This municipal system was the bequest of the ancient Roman civilization to modern Europe. It had no doubt become feeble, irregular, and very inferior to what it had been at an earlier period; but it was the only living principle, the only one that retained any form, the only one that survived the general destruction of the Roman world.

  When I say the only one, I mistake. There was another phenomenon, another idea, which likewise outlived it. I mean the remembrance of the empire, and the title of the emperor,—the idea of imperial majesty, and of absolute power attached to the name of emperor. It must be observed, then, that the two elements which passed from the Roman civilization into ours were, first, the system of municipal corporations, its habits, its regulations, its principle of liberty—a general civil legislation, common to all; secondly, the idea of absolute power;—the principle of order and the principle of servitude.*

  Meanwhile, within the very heart of Roman society, there had grown up another society of a very different nature, founded upon different principles, animated by different sentiments, and which has brought into European civilization elements of a widely different character: I speak of the Christian church. I say the Christian church, and not Christianity, between which a broad distinction is to be made. At the end of the fourth century, and the beginning of the fifth, Christianity was no longer a simple belief, it was an institution—it had formed itself into a corporate body. It had its government, a body of priests; a settled ecclesiastical polity for the regulation of their different functions; revenues; independent means of influence. It had the rallying points suitable to a great society, in its provincial, national, and general councils, in which were wont to be debated in common the affairs of society. In a word, the Christian religion, at this epoch, was no longer merely a religion, it was a church.

  Had it not been a church, it is hard to say what would have been its fate in the general convulsion which attended the overthrow of the Roman empire. Looking only to worldly means, putting out of the question the aids and superintending power of Divine Providence, and considering only the natural effects of natural causes, it would be difficult to say how Christianity, if it had continued what it was at first, a mere belief, an individual conviction, could have withstood the shock occasioned by the dissolution of the Roman empire and the invasion of the barbarians. At a later period, when it had even become an institution, an established Church, it fell in Asia and the north of Africa, upon an invasion of a like kind—that of the Mohammedans; and circumstances seem to point out that it was still more likely such would have been its fate at the fall of the Roman empire. At this time there existed none of those means by which in the present day moral influences become established or rejected without the aid of institutions; none of those means by which an abstract truth now makes way, gains an authority over mankind, governs their actions, and directs their movements. Nothing of this kind existed in the fourth century; nothing which could give to simple ideas, to personal opinions, so much weight and power. Hence I think it may be assumed, that only a society firmly established, under a powerful government and rules of discipline, could hope to bear up amid such disasters—could hope to weather so violent a storm. I think, then, humanly speaking, that it is not too much to aver, that in the fourth and fifth centuries it was the Christian church that saved Christianity; that it was the Christian church, with its institutions, its magistrates, its authority—the Christian church, which struggled so vigorously to prevent the interior dissolution of the empire, which struggled against the barbarian, and which, in fact, overcame the barbarian,—it was this Church, I say, that became the great connecting link—the principle of civilization between the Roman and the barbarian world. It is the state of the Church, then, rather than religion strictly understood,—rather than that pure and simple faith of the Gospel which all true believers must regard as its highest triumph,—that we must look at in the fifth century, in order to discover what influence Christianity had from this time upon modern civilization, and what are the elements it has introduced into it.

  Let us see what at this epoch the Christian church really was.

  If we look, still in an entirely worldly point of view—if we look at the changes which Christianity underwent from its first rise to the fifth century—if we examine it (still, I repeat, not in a religious, but solely in a political sense), we shall find that it passed through three essentially different states.

  In its infancy, in its very babyhood, Christian society presents itself before us as a simple association of men possessing the same faith and opinions, the same sentiments and feelings. The first Christians met to enjoy together their common emotions, their common religious convictions. At this time we find no settled form of doctrine, no settled rules of discipline, no body of magistrates.

  Still, it is perfectly obvious, that no society, however young, however feebly held together, or whatever its nature, can exist without some moral power which animates and guides it; and thus, in the various Christian congregations, there were men who preached, who taught, who morally governed the congregation. Still there was no settled magistrate, no discipline; a simple association of believers in a common faith, with common sentiments and feelings, was the first condition of Christian society.

  But the moment this society began to advance, and almost at its birth, for we find traces of them in its earliest documents, there gradually became moulded a form of doctrine, rules of discipline, a body of magistrates: of magistrates called πρεσβύτεροι, or elders who afterwards became priests; of ἐπίσκοποι, inspectors or overseers, who became bishops;* and of διάκονοι, or deacons, whose office was the care of the poor and the distribution of alms.

  It is almost impossible to determine the precise functions of these magistrates; the line of demarcation was probably very vague and wavering; yet here was the embryo of institutions. Still, however, there was one prevailing character in this second epoch: it was that the power, the authority, the preponderating influence, still remained in the hands of the general body of believers. It was they who decided in the election of magistrates, as well as in the adoption of rules of discipline and doctrine. No separation had as yet taken place between the Christian government and the Christian people; neither as yet existed apart from, or independently of, the other, and it was still the great body of Christian believers who exercised the principal influence in the society.

  In the third period all this was entirely changed. The clergy were separated from the people, and now formed a distinct body, with its own wealth, its own jurisdiction, its own constitution; in a word, it had its own government, and formed a complete society of itself,—a society, too, provided with all the means of existence, independently of the society to which it applied itself, and over which it extended its influence. This was the third state of the Christian church, and in this state it existed at the opening of the fifth century. The government was not yet completely separated from the people; for no such government as yet existed, and less so in religious matters than in any other; but, as respects the relation between the clergy and Christians in general it was the clergy who governed, and governed almost without control.†

  But, besides the influence which the clergy derived from their spiritual functions, they possessed considerable power over society, from their having become chief magistrates in the city corporations. We have already seen, that, strictly speaking, nothing had descended from the Roman empire, except its municipal system. Now it had fallen out that by the vexations of despotism, and the ruin of the cities, the curiales, or officers of the corporations, had sunk into insignificance and inanity; while the bishops and the great body of the clergy, full of vigor and zeal, were naturally prepared to guide and watch over them. It is not fair to accuse the clergy of usurpation in this matter, for it fell out according to the common course of events: the clergy alone possessed moral strength and activity, and the clergy everywhere succeeded to power—such is the common law of the universe.

  The change which had taken place in this respect shows itself in every part of the legislation of the Roman emperors at this period. In opening the Theodosian and Justinian codes,* we find innumerable enactments, which place the management of the municipal affairs in the hands of the clergy and bishops. I shall cite a few.

  Cod. Just., lib. i, tit. iv, De Episcopali audientia, § 26.—With regard to the yearly affairs of the cities (whether as respects the ordinary city revenues, the funds arising from the city estates, from legacies or particular gifts, or from any other source; whether as respects the management of the public works, of the magazines of provisions, of the aqueducts; of the maintenance of the public baths, the city gates, of the building of walls or towers, the repairing of bridges and roads, or of any lawsuit in which the city may be engaged on account of public or private interests), we ordain as follows:—The right reverend bishop, and three men of good report, from among the chiefs of the city, shall assemble together; every year they shall examine the works done; they shall take care that those who conduct, or have conducted them, measure them correctly, give a true account of them, and cause it to be seen that they have fulfilled their contracts whether in the care of the public monuments, in the moneys expended in provisions and the public baths, of all that is expended for the repairs of the roads, aqueducts, and all other matters.

  Ibid., § 30.—With respect to the guardianship of youth, of the first and second age, and of all those to whom the law gives curators, if their fortune is not more than 5,000 aurei, we ordain that the nomination of the president of the province should not be waited for, on account of the great expense it would occasion, especially if the president should not reside in the city in which it becomes necessary to provide for the guardianship. The nomination of the curators or tutors shall, in this case, be made by the magistrate of the city . . . in concert with the right reverend bishop and other persons invested with public authority, if more than one should reside in the city.

  Ibid., lib. i, tit. v, De Defensoribus, § 8.—We desire the defenders of cities, well instructed in the holy mysteries of the orthodox faith, should be chosen and instituted into their office by the reverend bishops, the clerks, notables, proprietors, and the curiales. With regard to their installation, it must be committed to the glorious power of the prefects of the prætorium, in order that their authority should have all the stability and weight which the letters of admission granted by his Magnificence are likely to give.

  I could cite numerous other laws to the same effect, and in all of them you would see this one fact very strikingly prevail: namely, that between the Roman municipal system, and that of the free cities of the middle ages, there intervened an ecclesiastical municipal system; the preponderance of the clergy in the management of the affairs of the city corporations succeeded to that of the ancient Roman municipal magistrates, and paved the way for the organization of our modern free communities.

  It will at once be seen what an amazing accession of power the Christian church gained by these means, not only in its own peculiar circle, by its increased influence on the body of Christians, but also by the part which it took in temporal matters. And it is from this period we should date its powerful co-operation in the advance of modern civilization, and the extensive influence it has had upon its character. Let us briefly run over the advantages which it introduced into it.

  And, first, it was of immense advantage to European civilization that a moral influence, a moral power—a power resting entirely upon moral convictions, upon moral opinions and sentiments—should have established itself in society, just at this period, when it seemed upon the point of being crushed by the overwhelming physical force which had taken possession of it. Had not the Christian church at this time existed, the whole world must have fallen a prey to mere brute force. The Christian church alone possessed a moral power; it maintained and promulgated the idea of a precept, of a law superior to all human authority; it proclaimed that great truth which forms the only foundation of our hope for humanity: namely, that there exists a law above all human law, which, by whatever name it may be called, whether reason, the law of God, or what not, is, in all times and in all places, the same law under different names.*

  Finally, the Church commenced an undertaking of great importance to society—I mean the separation of temporal and spiritual authority. This separation is the only true source of liberty of conscience; it was based upon no other principle than that which serves as the groundwork for the strictest and most extensive liberty of conscience. The separation of temporal and spiritual power rests solely upon the idea that physical, that brute force, has no right or authority over the mind, over convictions, over truth. It flows from the distinction established between the world of thought and the world of action, between our inward and intellectual nature and the outward world around us. So that, however paradoxical it may seem, that very principle of liberty of conscience for which Europe has so long struggled, so much suffered, which has only so lately prevailed, and that, in many instances, against the will of the clergy,—that very principle was acted upon under the name of a separation of the temporal and spiritual power, in the infancy of European civilization. It was, moreover, the Christian church itself, driven to assert it by the circumstances in which it was placed, as a means of defence against barbarism, that introduced and maintained it.

  The establishment, then, of a moral influence, the maintenance of this divine law, and the separation of temporal and spiritual power, may be enumerated as the great benefits which the Christian church extended to European society in the fifth century.

  Unfortunately, all its influences, even at this period, were not equally beneficial. Already, even before the close of the fifth century, we discover some of those vicious principles which have had so baneful an effect on the advancement of our civilization. There already prevailed in the bosom of the Church a desire to separate the governing and the governed. The attempt was thus early made to render the government entirely independent of the people under its authority—to take possession of their mind and life, without the conviction of their reason or the consent of their will. The Church, moreover, endeavored with all her might to establish the principle of theocracy, to usurp temporal authority, to obtain universal dominion. And when she failed in this, when she found she could not obtain absolute power for herself, she did what was almost as bad: to obtain a share of it, she leagued herself with temporal rulers, and enforced, with all her might, their claim to absolute power at the expense of the liberty of the subject.*

  Such, then, I think, were the principal elements of civilization which Europe derived, in the fifth century, from the Church and from the Roman empire. Such was the state of the Roman world when the barbarians came to make it their prey; and we have now only to study the barbarians themselves, in order to be acquainted with the elements which were united and mixed together in the cradle of our civilization.

  It must be here understood that we have nothing to do with the history of the barbarians. It is enough for our purpose to know, that with the exception of a few Slavonian tribes, such as the Alans, they were all of the same German origin; and that they were all in pretty nearly the same state of civilization. It is true that some little difference might exist in this respect, accordingly as these nations had more or less intercourse with the Roman world; and there is no doubt but the Goths had made a greater progress, and had become more refined than the Franks; but in a general point of view, and with regard to the matter before us, these little differences are of no consequence whatever.

  A general notion of the state of society among the barbarians, such, at least, as will enable us to judge of what they have contributed towards modern civilization, is all that we require. This information, small as it may appear, it is now almost impossible to obtain. Respecting the municipal system of the Romans and the state of the Church we may form a tolerably accurate idea. Their influence has lasted to the present times; we have vestiges of them in many of our institutions, and possess a thousand means of becoming acquainted with them; but the manners and social state of the barbarians have completely perished, and we are driven to conjecture what they were, either from a very few ancient historical remains, or by an effort of the imagination.*

  There is one sentiment, one in particular, which it is necessary to understand before we can form a true picture of a barbarian; it is the pleasure of personal independence—the pleasure of enjoying, in full force and liberty, all his powers in the various ups and downs of fortune; the foundness for activity without labor; for a life of enterprise and adventure. Such was the prevailing character and disposition of the barbarians; such were the moral wants which put these immense masses of men into motion. It is extremely difficult for us, in the regulated society in which we move, to form anything like a correct idea of this feeling, and of the influence which it exercised upon the rude barbarians of the fourth and fifth centuries. There is, however, a history of the Norman conquest of England, written by M. Thierry, in which the character and disposition of the barbarian are depicted with much life and vigor. In this admirable work, the motives, the inclinations and impulses that stir men into action in a state of life bordering on the savage, have been felt and described in a truly masterly manner. There is nowhere else to be found so correct a likeness of what a barbarian was, or of his course of life. Something of the same kind, but, in my opinion, much inferior, is found in the novels of Mr. Cooper, in which he depicts the manners of the savages of America. In these scenes, in the sentiments and social relations which these savages hold in the midst of their forests, there is unquestionably something which, to a certain point, calls up before us the manners of the ancient Germans. No doubt these pictures are a little imaginative, a little poetical; the worst features in the life and manners of the barbarians are not given in all their naked coarseness. I allude not merely to the evils which these manners forced into the social condition, but to the inward individual condition of the barbarian himself. There is in this passionate desire for personal independence something of a grosser, more material character than we should suppose from the work of M. Thierry—a degree of brutality, of headstrong passion, of apathy, which we do not discover in his details. Still, notwithstanding this alloy of brutal and stupid selfishness, there is, if we look more profoundly into the matter, something of a noble and moral character, in this taste for independence, which seems to derive its power from our moral nature. It is the pleasure of feeling one’s self a man; the sentiment of personality; of human spontaneity in its unrestricted development.

  It was the rude barbarians of Germany who introduced this sentiment of personal independence, this love of individual liberty, into European civilization; it was unknown among the Romans, it was unknown in the Christian church, it was unknown in nearly all the civilizations of antiquity. The liberty which we meet with in ancient civilizations is political liberty; it is the liberty of the citizen. It was not about his personal liberty that man troubled himself, it was about his liberty as a citizen. He formed part of an association, and to this alone he was devoted. The case was the same in the Christian church. Among its members a devoted attachment to the Christian body, a devotedness to its laws, and an earnest zeal for the extension of its empire, were everywhere conspicuous; the spirit of Christianity wrought a change in the moral character of man, opposed to this principle of independence; for under its influence his mind struggled to extinguish its own liberty, and to deliver itself up entirely to the dictates of his faith. But the feeling of personal independence, a fondness for genuine liberty displaying itself without regard to consequences, and with scarcely any other aim than its own satisfaction—this feeling, I repeat, was unknown to the Romans and to the Christians. We are indebted for it to the barbarians, who introduced it into European civilization, in which, from its first rise, it has played so considerable a part, and has produced such lasting and beneficial results, that it must be regarded as one of its fundamental principles, and could not be passed without notice.*

  There is another, a second element of civilization, which we likewise inherit from the barbarians alone: I mean military patronage, the tie which became formed between individuals, between warriors, and which, without destroying the liberty of any, without even destroying in the commencement the equality up to a certain point which existed between them, laid the foundation of a graduated subordination, and was the origin of that aristocratical organization which, at a later period, grew into the feudal system. The germ of this connection was the attachment of man to man; the fidelity which united individuals, without apparent necessity, without any obligation arising from the general principles of society. In none of the ancient republics do you see any example of individuals particularly and freely attached to other individuals. They were all attached to the city. Among the barbarians this tie was formed between man and man; first by the relationship of companion and chief, when they came in bands to overrun Europe; and at a later period, by the relationship of sovereign and vassal. This second principle, which has had so vast an influence in the civilization of modern Europe—this devotedness of man to man—came to us entirely from our German ancestors; it formed part of their social system, and was adopted into ours.*

  Let me now ask if I was not fully justified in stating, as I did at the outset, that modern civilization, even in its infancy, was diversified, agitated, and confused? Is it not true that we find at the fall of the Roman empire nearly all the elements which are met within in the progressive career of our civilization? We have found at this epoch three societies all different; first, municipal society, the last remains of the Roman empire; secondly, Christian society; and lastly, barbarian society. We find these societies very differently organized; founded upon principles totally opposite; inspiring men with sentiments altogether different. We find the love of the most absolute independence by the side of the most devoted submission; military patronage by the side of ecclesiastical domination; spiritual power and temporal power everywhere together; the canons of the Church, the learned legislation of the Romans, the almost unwritten customs of the barbarians; everywhere a mixture or rather coexistence of nations, of languages, of social situations, of manners, of ideas, of impressions, the most diversified. These, I think, afford a sufficient proof of the truth of the general character which I have endeavored to picture of our civilization.

  There is no denying that we owe to this confusion, this diversity, this tossing and jostling of elements, the slow progress of Europe, the storms by which she has been buffeted, the miseries to which ofttimes she has been a prey. But however dear these have cost us, we must not regard them with unmingled regret. In nations, as well as in individuals, the good fortune to have all the faculties called into action, so as to ensure a full and free development of the various powers both of mind and body, is an advantage not too dearly paid for by the labor and pain with which it is attended. What we might call the hard fortune of European civilization—the trouble, the toil it has undergone—the violence it has suffered in its course—have been of infinitely more service to the progress of humanity than that tranquil, smooth simplicity, in which other civilizations have run their course. I shall now halt. In the rude sketch which I have drawn, I trust you will recognize the general features of the world such as it appeared upon the fall of the Roman empire, as well as the various elements which conspired and mingled together to give birth to European civilization. Henceforward these will move and act under our notice. We shall next put these in motion, and see how they work together. In the next lecture I shall endeavor to show what they became and what they performed in the epoch which is called the Barbarous Period; that is to say, the period during which the chaos of invasion continued.*

  LECTURE III.

  OF POLITICAL LEGITIMACY—COEXISTENCE OF ALL THE SYSTEMS OF GOVERNMENT IN THE FIFTII CENTURY—ATTEMPTS TO REORGANIZE SOCIETY.

  In my last lecture, I brought you to what may be called the porch to the history of modern civilization. I briefly placed before you the primary elements of European civilization, as found when, at the dissolution of the Roman empire, it was yet in its cradle. I endeavored to give you a preliminary sketch of their diversity, their continual struggles with each other, and to show you that no one of them succeeded in obtaining the mastery in our social system; at least such a mastery as would imply the complete subjugation or expulsion of the others. We have seen that these circumstances form the distinguishing character of European civilization. We will to-day begin the history of its childhood in what is commonly called the dark or middle age, the age of barbarism.

  It is impossible for us not to be struck, at the first glance at this period, with a fact which seems quite contradictory to the statement we have just made. No sooner do we seek for information respecting the opinions that have been formed relative to the ancient condition of modern Europe, than we find that the various elements of our civilization, that is to say, monarchy, theocracy, aristocracy, and democracy, each would have us believe that, originally, European society belonged to it alone, and that it has only lost the power it then possessed by the usurpation of the other elements. Examine all that has been written, all that has been said on this subject, and you will find that every author who has attempted to build up a system which should represent or explain our origin, has asserted the exclusive predominance of one or other of these elements of European civilization.

  First, there is the school of civilians, attached to the feudal system, among whom we may mention Boulainvilliers* as the most celebrated, who boldly asserts, that, at the downfall of the Roman empire, it was the conquering nation, forming afterwards the nobility, who alone possessed authority, or right, or power. Society, it is said, was their domain, of which kings and people have since despoiled them; and hence, the aristocratic organization is affirmed to have been in Europe the primitive and genuine form.

  Next to this school we may place the advocates of monarchy, the Abbé Dubos,† for example, who maintains, on the other side, that it was to royalty that European society belonged. According to him, the German kings succeeded to all the rights of the Roman emperors; they were even invited in by the ancient nations, among others by the Gauls and Saxons; they alone possessed legitimate authority, and all the conquests of the aristocracy were only so many encroachments upon the power of the monarchs.

  The liberals, republicans, or democrats, whichever you may choose to call them, form a third school. Consult the Abbé de Mably.‡ According to this school, the government by which society was ruled in the fifth century, was composed of free institutions; of assemblies of freemen, of the nation properly so called. Kings and nobles enriched themselves by the spoils of this primitive Liberty; it has fallen under their repeated attacks, but it reigned before them.

  Another power, however, claimed the right of governing society, and upon much higher grounds than any of these. Monarchical, aristocratic, and popular pretensions were all of a worldly nature: the Church of Rome founded her pretensions upon her sacred mission and divine right. By her labors, Europe, she said, had attained the blessings of civilization and truth, and to her alone belonged the right to govern it.

  Here, then, is a difficulty which meets us at the very outset. We have stated our belief that no one of the elements of European civilization obtained an exclusive mastery over it, in the whole course of its history; that they lived in a constant state of proximity, of amalgamation, of strife, and of compromise; yet here, at our very first step, we are met by the directly opposite opinion, that one or other of these elements, even in the very infancy of civilization, even in the very heart of barbarian Europe, took entire possession of society. And it is not in one country alone, it is in every nation of Europe, that the various principles of our civilization, under forms a little varied, at epochs a little apart, have displayed these irreconcilable pretensions. The historic schools which I have enumerated are met with everywhere.

  This fact is important, not in itself, but because it reveals some other facts which make a great figure in our history. By this simultaneous advancement of claims the most opposed to the exclusive possession of power, in the first stage of modern Europe, two important facts are revealed: first, the principle, the idea of political legitimacy; an idea which has played a considerable part in the progress of European civilization. The second is the particular, the true character of the state of barbarian Europe during that period, which now more expressly demands attention.

  It is my task, then, to explain these two facts; and to show you how they may be fairly deduced from the early struggle of the pretensions which I have just called to your notice.

  Now what do these various elements of our civilization,—what do theocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy aim at, when they each endeavor to make out that it alone was the first which held possession of European society? Is it any thing beyond the desire of each to establish its sole claim to legitimacy? For what is political legitimacy? Evidently nothing more than a right founded upon antiquity, upon duration, which is obvious from the simple fact, that priority of time is pleaded as the source of right, as proof of legitimate power. But, observe again, this claim is not peculiar to one system, to one element of our civilization, but is made alike by all. The political writers of the Continent have been in the habit, for some time past, of regarding legitimacy as belonging, exclusively, to the monarchical system. This is an error; legitimacy may be found in all the systems. It has already been shown that, of the various elements of our civilization, each wished to appropriate it to itself. But advance a few steps further into the history of Europe, and you will see social forms of government, the most opposed in principles, alike in possession of this legitimacy. The Italian and Swiss aristocracies and democracies, the little republic of San Marino,* as well as the most powerful monarchies, have considered themselves legitimate, and have been acknowledged as such; all founding their claim to this title upon the antiquity of their institutions; upon the historical priority and duration of their particular system of government.

  If we leave modern Europe, and turn our attention to other times and to other countries, we shall everywhere find this same notion prevail respecting political legitimacy. It everywhere attaches itself to some portion of government; to some institution; to some form, or to some maxim. There is no country, no time, in which you may not discover some portion of the social system, some public authority, that has assumed, and been acknowledged to possess, this character of legitimacy, arising from antiquity, prescription, and duration.

  Let us for a moment see what this legitimacy is? of what it is composed? what it requires? and how it found its way into European civilization?

  You will find that all power—I say all, without distinction—owes its existence in the first place partly to force. I do not say that force alone has been, in all cases, the foundation of power, or that this, without any other title, could in every case have been established by force alone. Other claims undoubtedly are requisite. Certain powers become established in consequence of certain social expediencies, of certain relations with the state of society, with its customs or opinions. But it is impossible to close our eyes to the fact, that violence has sullied the birth of all the authorities in the world, whatever may have been their nature or their form.

  This origin, however, no one will acknowledge. All authorities, whatever their nature, disclaim it. None of them will allow themselves to be considered as the offspring of force. Governments are warned by an invincible instinct that force is no title—that might is not right—and that, while they rest upon no other foundation than violence, they are entirely destitute of right. Hence, if we go back to some distant period, in which the various systems, the various powers, are found struggling one against the other, we shall hear them each exclaiming, “I existed before you; my claim is the oldest; my claim rests upon other grounds than force; society belonged to me before this state of violence, before this strife in which you now find me. I was legitimate; I have been opposed, and my rights have been torn from me.”

  This fact alone proves that the idea of violence is not the foundation of political legitimacy,—that it rests upon some other basis. This disavowal of violence made by every system, proclaims, as plainly as facts can speak, that there is another legitimacy, the true foundation of all the others, the legitimacy of reason, of justice, of right. It is to this origin that they seek to link themselves. As they feel scandalized at the very idea of being the offspring of force, they pretend to be invested, by virtue of their antiquity, with a different title. The first characteristic, then, of political legitimacy, is to disclaim violence as the source of authority, and to associate it with a moral notion, a moral force—with the notion of justice, of right, of reason. This is the primary element from which the principle of political legitimacy has sprung forth. It has issued from it, aided by time, aided by prescription. Let us see how.

  Violence presides at the birth of governments, at the birth of societies; but time rolls on. He changes the works of violence. He corrects them. He corrects them, simply because society endures, and because it is composed of men. Man bears within himself certain notions of order, of justice, of reason, with a certain desire to bring them into play—he wishes to see them predominate in the sphere in which he moves. For this he labors unceasingly; and if the social system in which he lives, continues, his labor is not in vain. Man naturally brings reason, morality, and legitimacy into the world in which he lives.

  Independently of the labor of man, by a special law of Providence which it is impossible to mistake, a law analogous to that which rules the material world, there is a certain degree of order, of intelligence, of justice, indispensable to the duration of human society. From the simple fact of its duration we may argue, that a society is not completely irrational, savage, or iniquitous; that it is not altogether destitute of intelligence, truth, and justice, for without these, society cannot hold together. Again, as society develops itself, it becomes stronger, more powerful; if the social system is continually augmented by the increase of individuals who accept and approve its regulations, it is because the action of time gradually introduces into it more right, more intelligence, more justice; it is because a gradual approximation is made in its affairs to the principles of true legitimacy.

  Thus forces itself into the world, and from the world into the mind of man, the notion of political legitimacy. Its foundation in the first place, at least to a certain extent, is moral legitimacy—is justice, intelligence, and truth; it next obtains the sanction of time, which gives reason to believe that affairs are conducted by reason, that the true legitimacy has been introduced. At the epoch which we are about to study, you will find violence and fraud hovering over the cradle of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and even over the Church itself; you will see this violence and fraud everywhere gradually abated; and justice and truth taking their place in civilization. It is this introduction of justice and truth into our social system, that has nourished and gradually matured political legitimacy; and it is thus that it has taken firm root in modern civilization.*

  All those then who have attempted at various times to set up this idea of legitimacy as the foundation of absolute power, have wrested it from its true origin. It has nothing to do with absolute power. It is under the name of justice and righteousness that it has made its way into the world and found footing. Neither is it exclusive. It belongs to no party in particular; it springs up in all systems where truth and justice prevail. Political legitimacy is as much attached to liberty as to power; to the rights of individuals as to the forms under which are exercised the public functions. As we go on we shall find it, as I said before, in systems the most opposed; in the feudal system; in the free cities of Flanders and Germany; in the republics of Italy, as well as in monarchy. It is a quality which appertains to all the divers elements of our civilization, and which it is necessary should be well understood before entering upon its history.

  The second fact revealed to us by that simultaneous advancement of claims, of which I spoke at the beginning of this lecture, is the true character of what is called the period of barbarism. Each of the elements of European civilization pretends, that at this epoch Europe belonged to it alone; hence we may conclude that it really belonged to no one of them. When any particular kind of government prevails in the world, there is no difficulty in recognizing it. When we come to the tenth century, we acknowledge, without hesitation, the preponderance of feudalism. At the seventeenth we have no hesitation in asserting, that the monarchical principle prevails. If we turn our eyes to the free communities of Flanders, to the republics of Italy, we confess at once the predominance of democracy. Whenever, indeed, any one principle really bears sway in society, it cannot be mistaken.

  The dispute, then, that has arisen among the various systems which hold a part in European civilization, respecting which bore chief sway at its origin, proves that they all existed there together, without any one of them having prevailed so generally as to give to society its form or its name.

  This is, indeed, the character of the dark age: it was a chaos of all the elements; the childhood of all the systems; a universal jumble, in which even strife itself was neither permanent nor systematic. By an examination of the social system of this period under its various forms, I could show you that in no part of them is there to be found anything like a general principle, anything like stability. I shall, however, confine myself to two essential particulars—the state of persons, the state of institutions. This will be sufficient to give a general picture of society.

  We find at this time four classes of persons: 1. Freemen, that is to say, men who, depending upon no superior, upon no patron, held their property and life in full liberty, without being fettered by any obligation towards another individual. 2. The Luedes, Fideles, Antrustions, etc., who were connected at first by the relationship of companion and chief, and afterwards by that of vassal and lord, towards another individual to whom they owed fealty and service, in consequence of a grant of lands, or some other gifts.* 3. Freedmen. 4. Slaves.

  But were these various classes fixed? Were men once placed in a certain rank bound to it? Were the relations, in which the different classes stood towards each other, regular or permanent? Not at all. Freemen were continually changing their condition, and becoming vassals to nobles, in consideration of some gift which these might have to bestow; while others were falling into the class of slaves or serfs. Vassals were continually struggling to shake off the yoke of patronage, to regain their independence, to return to the class of freemen. Every part of society was in motion. There was a continual passing and repassing from one class to the other. No man continued long in the same rank; no rank continued long the same.

  Property was in much the same state. I need scarcely tell you, that possessions were distinguished into allodial, or entirely free, and beneficiary or such as were held by tenure, with certain obligations to be discharged towards a superior.* Some writers attempt to trace out a regular and established system with respect to the latter class of proprietors, and lay it down as a rule that benefices were at first bestowed for a determinate number of years; that they were afterwards granted for life; and finally, at a later period, became hereditary. The attempt is vain. Lands were held in all these various ways at the same time, and in the same places. Benefices for a term of years, benefices for life, hereditary benefices, are found in the same period; even the same lands, within a few years, passed through these different states.† There was nothing more settled, nothing more general, in the state of lands than in the state of persons. Everything shows the difficulties of the transition from the wandering life to the settled life; from the simple personal relations which existed among the barbarians as invading migratory hordes, to the mixed relations of persons and property. During this transition all was confused, local, and disordered.

  In institutions we observe the same unfixedness, the same chaos. We find here three different systems at once before us:—First, Monarchy; second, Aristocracy, or the proprietorship of men and lands, as lord and vassal; and, third, Free institutions, or assemblies of free men deliberating in common. No one of these systems entirely prevailed. Free institutions existed; but the men who should have formed part of these assemblies seldom troubled themselves to attend them. Baronial jurisdiction was not more regularly exercised. Monarchy, the most simple institution, the most easy to determine, here had no fixed character; at one time it was elective, at another hereditary—here the son succeeded to his father, there the election was confined to a family; in another place it was open to all, purely elective, and the choice fell on a distant relation, or perhaps a stranger. In none of these systems can we discover anything fixed; all the institutions, as well as the social conditions, dwelt together, continually confounded, continually changing.

  The same unsettledness existed with regard to states; they were created, suppressed, united, and divided; no governments, no frontiers, no nations; a general jumble of situations, principles, events, races, languages; such was barbarian Europe.

  Let us now fix the limits of this extraordinary period. Its origin is strongly defined; it began with the fall of the Roman empire. But where did it close? To settle this question, we must find out the cause of this state of society; we must see what were the causes of barbarism.

  I think I can point out two:—one material, arising from exterior circumstances, from the course of events; the other, moral, arising from the mind, from the intellects of man.

  The material, or outward cause, was the continuance of invasion; for it must not be supposed that the invasions of the barbarian hordes stopped all at once in the fifth century. Do not believe that because the Roman empire was fallen, and kingdoms of barbarians founded upon its ruins, that the movement of nations was over. There are plenty of facts to prove that this was not the case, and that this movement lasted a long time after the destruction of the empire.

  If we look to the Franks, or French, we shall find even the first race of kings continually carrying on wars beyond the Rhine. We see Clotaire, Dagobert, making expedition after expedition into Germany, and engaged in a constant struggle with the Thuringians, the Danes, and the Saxons who occupied the right bank of that river. And why was this but because these nations wished to cross the Rhine and get a share in the spoils of the empire? How came it to pass that the Franks, established in Gaul, and principally the Eastern, or Austrasian Franks, much about the same time, threw themselves in such large bodies upon Switzerland, and invaded Italy by crossing the Alps? It was because they were pushed forward by new populations from the northeast. These invasions were not mere pillaging inroads, they were not expeditions undertaken for the purpose of plunder, they were the result of necessity. The people, disturbed in their own settlements, pressed forward to better their fortune and find new abodes elsewhere. A new German nation entered upon the arena, and founded the powerful kingdom of the Lombards in Italy. In Gaul, or France, the Merovingian dynasty gave way to the Carlovingian; a change which is now generally acknowledged to have been, properly speaking, a new irruption of Franks into Gaul—a movement of nations, which substituted the Eastern Franks for the Western. Under the second race of kings, we find Charlemagne playing the same part against the Saxons, which the Merovingian princes played against the Thuringians: he carried on an unceasing war against the nations beyond the Rhine, who were precipitated upon the west by the Wiltzians, the Swabians, the Bohemians, and the various tribes of Slavonians, who trod on the heels of the German race. Throughout the northeast emigrations were going on and changing the face of affairs.

  In the south, a movement of the same nature took place. While the German and Slavonian tribes pressed along the Rhine and Danube, the Saracens began to ravage and conquer the various coasts of the Mediterranean.

  The invasion of the Saracens, however, had a character peculiarly its own. In them the spirit of conquest was united with the spirit of proselytism; the sword was drawn as well for the promulgation of a faith as the acquisition of territory. There is a vast difference between their invasion and that of the Germans. In the Christian world spiritual force and temporal force were quite distinct. The zeal for the propagation of a faith and the lust of conquest are not inmates of the same bosom.* The Germans, after their conversion, preserved the same manners, the same sentiments, the same tastes, as before; they were still guided by passions and interests of a worldly nature. They had become Christians, but not missionaries. The Saracens, on the contrary, were both conquerors and missionaries. The power of the Koran and of the sword was in the same hands. And it was this peculiarity which, I think, gave to Mohammedan civilization the wretched character which it bears. It was in this union of the temporal and spiritual powers, and the confusion which it created between moral authority and physical force, that that tyranny was born which seems inherent in their civilization. This I believe to be the principal cause of that stationary state into which it has everywhere fallen. This effect, however, did not show itself upon the first rise of Mohammedanism; the union, on the contrary, of military ardor and religious zeal, gave to the Saracen invasion a prodigious power. Its ideas and moral passions had at once a brilliancy and splendor altogether wanting in the Germanic invasions; it displayed itself with more energy and enthusiasm, and had a correspondent effect upon the minds and passions of men.

  Such was the situation of Europe from the fifth to the ninth century. Pressed on the south by the Mohammedans, and on the north by the Germans and Slavonians, it could not be otherwise than that the reaction of this double invasion should keep the interior of Europe in a state of continual ferment. Populations were incessantly displaced, crowded one upon another; there was no regularity, nothing permanent or fixed. Some differences undoubtedly prevailed between the various nations. The chaos was more general in Germany than in the other parts of Europe. Here was the focus of movement. France was more agitated than Italy. But nowhere could society become settled and regulated; barbarism everywhere continued, and from the same cause that introduced it.*

  Thus much for the material cause depending upon the course of events; let us now look to the moral cause, founded on the intellectual condition of man, which, it must be acknowledged, was not less powerful.

  For, certainly, after all is said and done, whatever may be the course of external affairs, it is man himself who makes our world. It is according to the ideas, the sentiments, the moral and intellectual dispositions of man himself, that the world is regulated, and marches onward. It is upon the intellectual state of man that the visible form of society depends.

  Now let us consider for a moment what is required to enable men to form themselves into a society somewhat durable, somewhat regular? It is evidently necessary, in the first place, that they should have a certain number of ideas sufficiently enlarged to settle upon the terms by which this society should be formed; to apply themselves to its wants, to its relations. In the second place, it is necessary that these ideas should be common to the greater part of the members of the society; and finally, that they should put some constraint upon their own inclinations and actions.

  It is clear that where men possess no ideas extending beyond their own existence, where their intellectual horizon is bounded in self, if they are still delivered up to their own passions, and their own wills,—if they have not among them a certain number of notions and sentiments common to them all, round which they may all rally, it is clear that they cannot form a society: without this each individual will be a principle of agitation and dissolution in the social system of which he forms a part.

  Wherever individualism reigns nearly absolute, wherever man considers but himself, wherever his ideas extend not beyond himself, wherever he only yields obedience to his own passions, there society—that is to say, society in any degree extended or permanent—becomes almost impossible. Now this was just the moral state of the conquerors of Europe at the epoch which engages our attention. I remarked, in the last lecture, that we owe to the Germans the powerful sentiment of personal liberty, of human individualism. Now, in a state of extreme rudeness and ignorance, this sentiment is mere selfishness, in all its brutality, with all its unsociability. Such was its character from the fifth to the eighth century, among the Germans. They cared for nothing beyond their own interest, for nothing beyond the gratification of their own passions, their own inclinations; how, then, could they accommodate themselves, in any tolerable degree, to the social condition? The attempt was made to bring them into it; they endeavored of themselves to enter into it; but an act of improvidence, a burst of passion, a lack of intelligence, soon threw them back to their old position. At every instant we see attempts made to form man into a social state, and at every instant we see them overthrown by the failings of man, by the absence of the moral conditions necessary to its existence.*

  Such were the two causes which kept our forefathers in a state of barbarism; so long as these continued, so long barbarism endured. Let us see if we can discover when and from what causes it at last ceased.

  Europe labored to emerge from this state. It is contrary to the nature of man, even when sunk into it by his own fault, to wish to remain in it. However rude, however ignorant, however selfish, however headstrong, there is yet in him a still small voice, an instinct, which tells him he was made for something better;—that he has another and higher destiny. In the midst of confusion and disorder, he is haunted and tormented by a taste for order and improvement. The claims of justice, of prudence, of development, disturb him, even under the yoke of the most brutish egotism. He feels himself impelled to improve the material world, society, and himself; he labors to do this, without attempting to account to himself for the want which urges him to the task. The barbarians aspired to civilization, while they were yet incapable of it—nay, more—while they even detested it whenever its laws restrained their selfish desires.

  There still remained, too, a considerable number of wrecks and fragments of Roman civilization. The name of the empire, the remembrance of that great and glorious society still dwelt in the memory of many, and especially among the senators of cities, bishops, priests, and all those who could trace their origin to the Roman world.

  Among the barbarians themselves, or their barbarian ancestors, many had witnessed the greatness of the Roman empire; they had served in its armies; they had conquered it. The image, the name of Roman civilization dazzled them; they felt a desire to imitate it; to bring it back again, to preserve some portion of it. This was another cause which ought to have forced them out of the state of barbarism, which I have described.

  A third cause, and one which readily presents itself to every one was the Christian church. The Christian church was a regularly constituted society, having its maxims, its rules, its discipline, together with an ardent desire to extend its influence, to conquer its conquerors. Among the Christians of this period, in the Catholic clergy, there were men of profound and varied learning; men who had thought deeply, who were versed in ethics and politics; who had formed definite opinions and vigorous notions, upon all subjects; who felt a praiseworthy zeal to propagate information, and to advance the cause of learning. No society ever made greater efforts than the Christian church did from the fifth to the tenth century, to influence the world around it, and to assimilate it to itself. When its history shall become the particular object of our examination, we shall more clearly see what it attempted—it attacked, in a manner, barbarism at every point, in order to civilize it and rule over it.

  Finally, a fourth cause of the progress of civilization, a cause which it is impossible strictly to appreciate, but which is not therefore the less real, was the appearance of great men. To say why a great man appears on the stage at a certain epoch, or what of his own individual development he imparts to the world at large, is beyond our power; it is the secret of Providence; but the fact is still certain. There are men to whom the spectacle of society, in a state of anarchy or immobility, is revolting and almost unbearable; it occasions them an intellectual shudder, as a thing that should not be; they feel an unconquerable desire to change it; to restore order; to introduce something general, regular, and permanent, into the world which is placed before them. Tremendous power! often tyrannical, committing a thousand iniquities, a thousand errors, for human weakness accompanies it. Glorious and salutary power! nevertheless, for it gives to humanity, and by the hand of man, a new and powerful impulse.

  These various causes, these various powers working together, led to several attempts, between the fifth and ninth centuries, to draw European society from the barbarous state into which it had fallen.

  The first of these was the compilation of the barbarian laws; an attempt which, though it effected but little, we cannot pass over, because it was made by the barbarians themselves. Between the sixth and eighth centuries, the laws of nearly all the barbarous nations (which, however, were nothing more than the rude customs by which they had been regulated, before their invasion of the Roman empire) were reduced to writing. Of these there are enumerated the codes of the Burgundians, the Salii, and Ripuarian Franks, the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Saxons, the Frisians, the Bavarians, the Germans, and some others. This was evidently a commencement of civilization—an attempt to bring society under the authority of general and fixed principles. Much, however, could not be expected from it. It published the laws of a society which no longer existed; the laws of the social system of the barbarians before their establishment in the Roman territory—before they had changed their wandering life for a settled one; before the nomad warriors became lost in the landed proprietors. It is true, that here and there may be found an article respecting the lands conquered by the barbarians, or respecting their relations with the ancient inhabitants of the country; some few bold attempts were made to regulate the new circumstances in which they were placed. But the far greater part of these laws were taken up with their ancient life, their ancient condition in Germany; were totally inapplicable to the new state of society, and had but a small share in its advancement.

  In Italy and the south of Gaul, another attempt of a different character was made about this time. In these places Roman society had not been so completely rooted out as elsewhere; in the cities, especially, there still remained something of order and civil life; and in these civilization seemed to make a stand. If we look, for example, at the kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy under Theodoric we shall see, even under the dominion of a barbarous nation and king, the municipal form taking breath, as it were, and exercising a considerable influence upon the general tide of events. Here Roman manners had modified the Gothic, and brought them in a great degree to assume a likeness to their own. The same thing took place in the south of Gaul. At the opening of the sixth century, Alaric, a Visigothic king of Toulouse, caused a collection of the Roman laws to be made, and published under the name of Breviarum Aniani, a code for his Roman subjects.*

  In Spain, a different power, that of the Church, endeavored to restore the work of civilization. Instead of the ancient German assemblies of warriors, the assembly that had most influence in Spain was the Council of Toledo; and in this council the bishops bore sway, although it was attended by the higher order of the laity. Open the laws of the Visigoths, and you will discover that it is not a code compiled by barbarians, but bears convincing marks of having been drawn up by the philosophers of the age—by the clergy. It abounds in general views, in theories, and in theories, indeed, altogether foreign to barbarian manners. Thus, for example, we know that the legislation of the barbarians was a personal legislation; that is to say, the same law only applied to one particular race of men. The Romans were judged by the old Roman laws, the Franks were judged by the Salian or Ripuarian code; in short, each people had its separate laws, though united under the same government, and dwelling together in the same territory. This is what is called personal legislation, in contradistinction to real legislation, which is founded upon territory. Now this is exactly the case with the legislation of the Visigoths; it is not personal, but territorial. All the inhabitants of Spain, Romans, Visigoths, or what not, were compelled to yield obedience to one law. Read a little further, and you will meet with still more striking traces of philosophy. Among the barbarians a fixed price was put upon man, according to his rank in society—the life of the barbarian, the Roman, the freeman, and vassal, were not valued at the same amount—there was a graduated scale of prices. But the principle that all men’s lives are of equal worth in the eyes of the law, was established by the code of the Visigoths. The same superiority is observable in their judicial proceedings:—instead of the ordeal, the oath of compurgators, or trial by battle, you will find the proofs established by witnesses, and a rational examination made of the fact, such as might take place in a civilized society. In short, the code of the Visigoths bore throughout evident marks of learning, system, and polity. In it we trace the hand of the same clergy that acted in the Council of Toledo, and which exercised so large and beneficial an influence upon the government of the country.*

  In Spain, then, up to the time of the great invasion of the Saracens, it was the hierarchy which made the greatest efforts to advance civilization.

  In France, the attempt was made by another power. It was the work of great men, and above all of Charlemagne. Examine his reign under its different aspects; and you will see that the darling object of his life was to civilize the nations he governed. Let us regard him first as a warrior. He was always in the field; from the south to the northeast, from the Ebro to the Elbe and Weser. Perhaps you imagine that these expeditions were the effect of choice, and sprung from a pure love of conquest? No such thing. I will not assert that he pursued any very regular system, or that there was much diplomacy or strategy in his plans; but what he did sprang from necessity, and a desire to repress barbarism. From the beginning to the end of his reign he was occupied in staying the progress of a double invasion—that of the Mohammedans in the south, and that of the Germanic and Slavonic tribes in the north. This is what gave the reign of Charlemagne its military cast. I have already said that his expeditions against the Saxons were undertaken for the same purpose. If we pass on from his wars to his government, we shall find the case much the same: his leading object was to introduce order and unity in every part of his extensive dominions. I have not said kingdom or state, because these words are too precise in their signification, and call up ideas which bear but little relation to the society of which Charlemagne stood at the head. Thus much, however, seems certain, that when he found himself master of this vast territory, it mortified and grieved him to see all within it so precarious and unsettled—to see anarchy and brutality everywhere prevailing,—and it was the first wish of his heart to better this wretched condition of society. He endeavored to do this at first by his missi regii, whom he sent into every part of his dominions to find out and correct abuses; to amend the maladministration of justice, and to render him an account of all that was wrong; and afterwards by the general assemblies or parliaments as they have been called of the Champ de Mars, which he held more regularly than any of his predecessors. These assemblies he made nearly every considerable person in his dominions to attend. They were not assemblies formed for the preservation of the liberty of the subject, there was nothing in them bearing any likeness to the deliberations of our own days. But Charlemagne found them a means by which he could become well informed of facts and circumstances, and by which he could introduce some regulation, some unity, into the restless and disorganized populations he had to govern.

  In whatever point of view, indeed, we regard the reign of Charlemagne, we always find its leading characteristic to be a desire to overcome barbarism, and to advance civilization. We see this conspicuously in his foundation of schools, in his collecting of libraries, in his gathering about him the learned of all countries; in the favor he showed towards the influence of the Church, for everything, in a word, which seemed likely to operate beneficially upon society in general, or the individual man.

  An attempt of the same nature was made very soon afterwards in England, by Alfred the Great.

  These are some of the means which were in operation, from the fifth to the ninth century, in various parts of Europe, which seemed likely to put an end to barbarism.

  None of them succeeded. Charlemagne was unable to establish his great empire, and the system of government by which he wished to rule it. The Church succeeded no better in its attempt in Spain to found a system of theocracy. And though in Italy and the south of France, Roman civilization made several attempts to raise its head, it was not till a later period, till towards the end of the tenth century, that it in reality acquired any vigor. Up to this time, every effort to put an end to barbarism failed: they supposed men more advanced than they in reality were. They all desired, under various forms, to establish a society more extensive, or better regulated, than the spirit of the age was prepared for. The attempts, however, were not lost to mankind. At the commencement of the tenth century, there was no longer any visible appearance of the great empire of Charlemagne, nor of the glorious councils of Toledo, but barbarism was drawing nigh its end. Two great results were obtained:

  1. The movement of the invading hordes had been stopped both in the north and in the south. Upon the dismemberment of the empire of Charlemagne, the states, which became formed upon the right bank of the Rhine, opposed an effectual barrier to the tribes which advanced from the east. The Danes and Normans are an incontestable proof of this. Up to this time, if we except the Saxon attacks upon England, the invasions of the German tribes by sea had not been very considerable: but in the course of the ninth century they became constant and general. And this happened, because invasions by land had become exceedingly difficult; society had acquired, on this side, frontiers more fixed and secure; and that portion of the wandering nations, which could not be pressed back, were at least turned from their ancient course, and compelled to proceed by sea. Great as undoubtedly was the misery occasioned to the west of Europe by the incursions of these pirates and marauders, they still were much less hurtful than the invasions by land, and disturbed much less generally the newly-forming society. In the south, the case was much the same. The Arabs had settled in Spain, and the struggle between them and the Christians still continued; but this occasioned no new emigration of nations. Bands of Saracens still, from time to time, infested the coasts of the Mediterranean, but the great career of Islamism was arrested.

  2. In the interior of Europe we begin at this time to see the wandering life decline; populations became fixed; estates and landed possessions became settled; the relations between man and man no longer varied from day to day under the influence of force or chance. The interior and moral condition of man himself began to undergo a change; his ideas, his sentiments, began, like his life, to assume a more fixed character. He began to feel an attachment to the place in which he dwelt; to the connections and associations which he there formed; to those domains which he now calculated upon leaving to his children; to that dwelling which hereafter became his castle; to that miserable assemblage of serfs and slaves, which was one day to become a village. Little societies everywhere began to be formed; little states to be cut out according to the measure, if I may so say, of the capacities and prudence of men. There, societies gradually became connected by a tie, the origin of which is to be found in the manners of the German barbarians: the tie of a confederation which would not destroy individual freedom. On one side we find every considerable proprietor settling himself in his domains, surrounded only by his family and retainers; on the other, a certain graduated subordination of services and rights existing among all these military proprietors scattered over the land. Here we have the feudal system oozing at last out of the bosom of barbarism. Of the various elements of our civilizations, it was natural enough that the Germanic element should first prevail. It was already in possession of power; it had conquered Europe: from it European civilization was to receive its first form—its first social organization.*

  The character of this form—the character of feudalism, and the influence it has exercised upon European civilization—will be the object of my next lecture; while in the very bosom of this system, in its meridian, we shall, at every step, meet with the other elements of our own social system, monarchy, the Church, and the communities or free cities. We shall feel pre-assured that these were not destined to fall under this feudal form, to which they adapted themselves while struggling against it; and that we may look forward to the hour when victory will declare itself for them in their turn.†

  LECTURE IV.

  THE FEUDAL SYSTEM.*

  I have thus far endeavored to give you a view of the state of Europe upon the fall of the Roman empire; of its state in the first period of modern history—in the period of barbarism. We have seen that at the end of the period, towards the beginning of the tenth century, the first principle, the first system, which took possession of European society, was the feudal system—that out of the very bosom of barbarism sprung feudalism. The investigation of this system will be the subject of the present lecture.

  I need scarcely remind you that it is not the history of events, properly so called, that we propose to consider. I shall not here recount the destinies of the feudal system. The subject which engages our attention is the history of civilization; it is that general, hidden fact, which we have to seek for, out of all the exterior facts in which its existence is contained.

  Thus the events, the social crises, the various states through which society has passed, will in no way interest us, except so far as they are connected with the growth of civilization; we have only to learn from them how they have retarded or forwarded this great work; what they have given it, and what they have withheld from it. It is only in this point of view that we shall consider the feudal system.

  In the first of these lectures we settled what civilization was; we endeavored to discover its elements; we saw that it consisted, on one side, in the development of man himself, of the individual, of humanity; on the other, of his outward or social condition. When then we come to any event, to any system, to any general condition of society, we have this two-fold question to put to it: What has it done for or against the development of man—for or against the development of society? It will, however, be at once seen that, in the investigation we have undertaken, it will be impossible for us not to come in contact with some of the grandest questions in moral philosophy. When we would, for example, know in what an event, a system, has contributed to the progress of man and of society, it is necessary that we should know what is the true development of society and of man; and be enabled to detect those developments which are deceitful, illegitimate,—which pervert instead of meliorate,—which cause them to retrograde instead of to advance. We shall not attempt to elude this task. By so doing we should mutilate and weaken our ideas, as well as the facts themselves. Besides, the present state of the world, the spirit of the age, compels us at once frankly to welcome this inevitable alliance of philosophy and history.

  This indeed forms a striking, perhaps the essential, characteristic of the present times. We are now compelled to consider—science and reality—theory and practice—right and fact—and to make them move side by side. Down to the present time these two powers have lived apart. The world has been accustomed to see theory and practice following two different routes, unknown to each other, or at least never meeting. When doctrines, when general ideas, have wished to intermeddle in affairs, to influence the world, it has only been able to effect this under the appearance and by the aid of fanaticism. Up to the present time the government of human societies, the direction of their affairs, have been divided between two sorts of influences; on one side theorists, men who would rule all according to abstract notions—enthusiasts; on the other, men ignorant of all rational principle,—experimentalists, whose only guide is expediency. This state of things is now over. The world will no longer agitate for the sake of some abstract principle, some fanciful theory—some Utopian government which can only exist in the imagination of an enthusiast; nor will it put up with practical abuses and oppressions, however favored by prescription and expediency, where they are opposed to the just principles and the legitimate end of government. To ensure respect, to obtain confidence, governing powers must now unite theory and practice; they must know and acknowledge the influence of both. They must regard as well principles as facts; must respect both truth and necessity—must shun, on one hand, the blind pride of the fanatic theorist, and, on the other, the no less blind pride of the libertine practician. To this better state of things we have been brought by the progress of the human mind and the progress of society. On one side the human mind is so elevated and enlarged that it is able to view at once, as a whole, the subject or fact which comes under its notice, with all the various circumstances and principles which affect it—these it calculates and combines—it so opposes, mixes, and arranges them—that while the everlasting principle is placed boldly and prominently forward so as not to be mistaken, care is taken that it shall not be endangered, that its progress shall not be retarded by a negligent or rash estimate of the circumstances which oppose it. On the other side, social systems are so improved as no longer to shrink from the light of truth; so improved, that facts may be brought to the test of science—practice may be placed by the side of theory, and, notwithstanding its many imperfections, the comparison will excite in us neither discouragement nor disgust.

  I shall give way, then, freely to this natural tendency—to this spirit of the age, by passing continually from the investigation of circumstances to the investigation of ideas—from an exposition of facts to the consideration of doctrines. Perhaps there is, in the present disposition of the public, another reason in favor of this method. For some time past there has existed among us a decided taste, a sort of predilection for facts, for looking at things in a practical point of view. We have been so much a prey to the despotism of abstract ideas, of theories,—they have, in some respects, cost us so dear, that we now regard them with a degree of distrust. We like better to refer to facts, to particular circumstances, and to judge and act accordingly. Let us not complain of this. It is a new advance—it is a grand step in knowledge, and towards the empire of truth; provided, however, we do not suffer ourselves to be carried too far by this disposition—provided that we do not forget that truth alone has a right to reign in the world; that facts have no merit but in proportion as they bear its stamp, and assimilate themselves more and more to its image; that all true grandeur proceeds from mind; that all expansion belongs to it. The civilization of France possesses this peculiar character; it has never been wanting in intellectual grandeur. It has always been rich in ideas. The power of mind has been great in French society—greater, perhaps, than anywhere else. It must not lose this happy privilege—it must not fall into that lower, that somewhat material condition which prevails in other societies. Intelligence, theories, must still maintain in France the same rank which they have hitherto occupied.

  I shall not then attempt to shun these general and philosophical questions: I will not go out of my way to seek them, but when circumstances bring them naturally before me, I shall attack them without hesitation or embarrassment. This will be the case more than once in considering the feudal system as connected with the history of European civilization.

  A great proof that in the tenth century the feudal system was necessary, and the only social system practicable, is the universality of its adoption. Wherever barbarism ceased, feudalism became general. This at first struck men as the triumph of chaos. All unity, all general civilization seemed gone; society on all sides seemed dismembered; a multitude of petty, obscure, isolated, incoherent societies arose. This appeared, to those who lived and saw it, universal anarchy—the dissolution of all things.* Consult the poets and historians of the day: they all believed that the end of the world was at hand. Yet this was, in truth, a new and real social system which was forming: feudal society was so necessary, so inevitable, so altogether the only consequence that could flow from the previous state of things, that all entered into it, all adopted its form. Even elements the most foreign to this system, the Church, the free communities, royalty, all were constrained to accommodate themselves to it. Churches became sovereigns and vassals; cities became lords and vassals; royalty was hidden under the feudal suzerain. All things were given in fief, not only estates, but rights and privileges: the right to cut wood in the forests, the privilege of fishing. The churches gave their surplice-fees in fief: the revenues of baptism—the fees for churching women. In the same manner, too, that all the great elements of society were drawn within the feudal enclosure, so even the smallest portions, the most trifling circumstances of common life, became subject to feudalism.

  In observing the feudal system thus taking possession of every part of society, one might be apt, at first, to believe that the essential, vital principle of feudalism everywhere prevailed. This would be a grand mistake. Although they put on the feudal form, yet the institutions, the elements of society which were not analogous to the feudal system, did not lose their nature, the principles by which they were distinguished. The feudal church, for example, never ceased for a moment to be animated and governed at bottom by the principles of theocracy, and she never for a moment relaxed her endeavors to gain for this the predominancy. Now she leagued with royalty, now with the pope, and now with the people, to destroy this system, whose livery, for the time, she was compelled to put on. It was the same with royalty and the free cities: in one the principle of monarchy, in the others the principle of democracy, continued fundamentally to prevail: and, notwithstanding their feudal appearance, these various elements of European society constantly labored to deliver themselves from a form so foreign to their nature, and to put on that which corresponded with their true and vital principle.

  Though perfectly satisfied, therefore, of the universality of the feudal form, we must take care not to conclude on that account, that the feudal principle was equally universal. We must be no less cautious not to take our ideas of feudalism indifferently from every object which bears its physiognomy. In order to know and understand this system thoroughly—to unravel and judge of its effects upon modern civilization—we must seek it where the form and spirit dwell together; we must study it in the hierarchy of the laic possessors of fiefs; in the association of the conquerors of the European territory. This was the true residence of the feudal system, and into this we will now endeavor to penetrate.

  I said a few words, just now, on the importance of questions of a moral nature; and on the danger and inconvenience of passing them by without proper attention. A matter of a totally opposite character arises here, and demands our consideration; it is one which has been, in general, too much neglected. I allude to the physical condition of society; to the changes which take place in the life and manners of a people in consequence of some. new event, some revolution, some new state into which it may be thrown. These changes have not always been sufficiently attended to. The modification which these great crises in the history of the world have wrought in the material existence of mankind—in the physical conditions of the relations of men to one another—have not been investigated with so much advantage as they might have been. These modifications have more influence upon the general body of society than is imagined. Every one knows how much has been said upon the influence of climate, and of the importance which Montesquieu attached to it. Now if we regard only the direct influence of climate upon man, perhaps it has not been so extensive as is generally supposed; it is, to say the least, vague and difficult to appreciate; but the indirect influence of climate, that, for example, which arises from the circumstance that in a hot country man lives in the open air, while in a cold one he lives shut up in his habitation—that he lives here upon one kind of food, and there upon another; these are facts of extreme importance, inasmuch as a simple change in physical life may have a powerful effect upon the course of civilization. Every great revolution leads to modifications of this nature in the social system, and consequently claims our consideration.

  The establishment of the feudal system wrought a change of this kind, which had a powerful and striking influence upon European civilization. It changed the distribution of the population. Hitherto the lords of the territory, the conquering population, had lived united in masses more or less numerous, either settled in cities, or moving about the country in bands; but by the operation of the feudal system these men were brought to live isolated, each in his own dwelling, at long distances apart. You will instantly perceive the influence which this change must have exercised upon the character and progress of civilization. The social preponderance—the government of society, passed at once from cities to the country; the baronial courts of the great landed proprietors took the place of the great national assemblies—the public body was lost in the thousand little sovereignties into which every kingdom was split. This was the first consequence—a consequence purely physical, of the triumph of the feudal system. The more closely we examine this circumstance, the more clearly and forcibly will its effects present themselves to our notice.

  Let us now examine this society in itself, and trace out its influence upon the progress of civilization. We will take feudalism, in the first place, in its most simple state, in its primitive fundamental form. We will visit a possessor of a fief in his lonely domain; we will see the course of life which he leads there, and the little society by which he is surrounded.

  Having fixed upon an elevated solitary spot, strong by nature, and which he takes care to render secure, the lordly proprietor of the domain builds his castle. Here he settles himself, with his wife and children, and perhaps some few freemen, who, not having obtained fiefs, not having themselves become proprietors, have attached themselves to his fortunes, and continued to live with him and form a part of his household. These are the inhabitants of the interior of the castle. At the foot of the hill on which this castle stands we find huddled together a little population of peasants, of serfs, who cultivate the lands of the possessor of the fief. In the midst of this group of cottages religion soon planted a church and a priest. A priest, in these early days of feudalism, was generally the chaplain of the baron, and the curate of the village; two offices which by and by became separated, and the village had its pastor dwelling by the side of his church.

  Such is the first form, the elementary principle, of feudal society. We will now examine this simple form, in order to put to it the twofold question we have to ask of every fact, namely, what it has done towards the progress—first, of man, himself; secondly, of society?

  It is with peculiar propriety that we put this twofold question to the little society I have just described, and that we should attach importance to its answers, forasmuch as this society is the type, the faithful picture, of feudal society in the aggregate; the baron, the people of his domain, and the priest, compose, whether upon a large or smaller scale, the feudal system* when separated from monarchy and cities, two distinct and foreign elements.

  The first circumstance which strikes us in looking at this little community is the great importance with which the possessor of the fief must have been regarded, not only by himself, but by all around him. A feeling of personal consequence, of individual liberty, was a prevailing feature in the character of the barbarians. The feeling here, however, was of a different nature; it was no longer simply the liberty of the man, of the warrior, it was the importance of the proprietor, of the head of the family, of the master. His situation, with regard to all around him, would naturally beget in him an idea of superiority—a superiority of a peculiar nature, and very different from that we meet with in other systems of civilization. Look, for example, at the Roman patrician, who was placed in one of the highest aristocratic situations of the ancient world. Like the feudal lord, he was head of the family, superior, master; and besides this, he was a religious magistrate, high priest over his household. But mark the difference: his importance as a religious magistrate is derived from without. It is not an importance strictly personal, attached to the individual: he receives it from on high; he is the delegate of divinity, the interpreter of religious faith. The Roman patrician, moreover, was the member of a corporation which lived united in the same place—a member of the senate—again, an importance which he derived from without, from his corporation. The greatness of these ancient aristocrats, associated with a religious and political character, belonged to the situation, to the corporation in general, rather than to the individual. That of the proprietor of a fief belonged to himself alone; he held nothing of any one;* all his rights, all his power, centered in himself. He is no religious magistrate; he forms no part of a senate; it is in the individual, in his own person, that all his importance resides—all that he is, he is of himself, in his own name alone. What a vast influence must a situation like this have exercised over him who enjoyed it! What haughtiness, what pride, must it have engendered! Above him, no superior of whom he was but the representative and interpreter; near him no equals; no general and powerful law to restrain him—no exterior force to control him; his will suffered no check but from the limits of his power, and the presence of danger. Such seems to me the moral effect that would naturally be produced upon the character or disposition of man, by the situation in which he was placed under the feudal system.

  I shall proceed to a second consequence equally important, though too little noticed; I mean the peculiar character of the feudal family.

  Let us consider for a moment the various family systems. Let us look, in the first place, at the patriarchal family, of which so beautiful a picture is given us in the Bible, and in numerous Oriental treatises. We find it composed of a great number of individuals—it was a tribe. The chief, the patriarch, in this case, lives in common with his children, with his neighbors, with the various generations assembled around him—all his relations or his servants. He not only lives with them, he has the same interests, the same occupations, he leads the same life. This was the situation of Abraham, and of the patriarchs; and is still that of the Bedouin Arabs, who, from generation to generation, continue to follow the same patriarchal mode of life.

  Let us look next at the clan—another family system, which now scarcely exists, except in Scotland and Ireland, but through which probably the greater part of the European world has passed. This is no longer the patriarchal family. A great difference is found here between the chief and the rest of the community; he leads not the same life; the greater part are employed in husbandry, and in supplying his wants, while the chief himself lives in idleness or war. Still they all descend from the same stock; they all bear the same name; and their common parentage, their ancient traditions, the same remembrances, and the same associations, create a moral tie, a sort of equality, between all the members of the clan.

  These are the two principal forms of family society as represented by history. Does either of them, let me ask you, resemble the feudal family? Certainly not. At the first glance, there may, indeed, seem some similarity between the feudal family and the clan; but the difference is marked and striking. The population which surrounds the possessor of the fief is quite foreign to him; it bears not his name. They are unconnected by relationship, or by any historical or moral tie. The same holds with respect to the patriarchal family. The feudal proprietor neither leads the same life, nor follows the same occupations as those who live around him; he is engaged in arms, or lives in idleness: the others are laborers. The feudal family is not numerous—it forms no tribe—it is confined to a single family properly so called; to the wife and children, who live separated from the rest of the people in the interior of the castle. The peasantry and serfs form no part of it; they are of another origin, and immeasurably beneath it. Five or six individuals, at a vast height above them, and at the same time foreigners, make up the feudal family. Is it not evident that the peculiarity of its situation must have given to this family a peculiar character? Confined, concentrated, called upon continually to defend itself; mistrusting, or at least shutting itself up from the rest of the world, even from its servants, in-door life, domestic manners must naturally have acquired a great preponderance. We cannot keep out of sight, that the grosser passions of the chief, the constantly passing his time in warfare or hunting, opposed a considerable obstacle to the formation of a strictly domestic society. But its progress, though slow, was certain. The chief, however violent and brutal his out-door exercises, must habitually return into the bosom of his family. He there finds his wife and children, and scarcely any but them; they alone are his constant companions; they alone divide his sorrows and soften his joys; they alone are interested in all that concerns him. It could not but happen in such circumstances, that domestic life must have acquired a vast influence; nor is there any lack of proofs that it did so. Was it not in the bosom of the feudal family that the importance of women, that the value of the wife and mother, at last made itself known? In none of the ancient communities, not merely speaking of those in which the spirit of family never existed, but in those in which it existed most powerfully—say, for example, in the patriarchal system—in none of these did women ever attain to anything like the place which they acquire in Europe under the feudal system. It is to the progress, to the preponderance of domestic manners in the feudal halls and castles, that they owe this change, this improvement in their condition. The cause of this has been sought for in the peculiar manners of the ancient Germans; in a national respect which they are said to have borne, in the midst of their forests, to the female sex.* Upon a single phrase of Tacitus, Germanic patriotism has founded a high degree of superiority—of primitive and ineffable purity of manners—in the relations between the two sexes among the Germans. Pure chimeras! Phrases like this of Tacitus—sentiments and customs analogous to those of the Germans of old, are found in the narratives of a host of writers, who have seen, or inquired into, the manners of savage and barbarous tribes. There is nothing primitive, nothing peculiar to a certain race in this matter. It was in the effects of a very decided social situation—it was in the increase and preponderance of domestic manners, that the importance of the female sex in Europe had its rise, and the preponderance of domestic manners in Europe very early became an essential characteristic in the feudal system.

  A second circumstance, a fresh proof of the influence of domestic life, forms a striking feature in the picture of a feudal family: I mean the principle of inheritance—the spirit of perpetuity which so strongly predominates in its character. This spirit of inheritance is a natural off-shoot of the spirit of family, but it nowhere took such deep root as in the feudal system, where it was nourished by the nature of the property with which the family was, as it were, incorporated. The fief differed from other possessions in this, that it constantly required a chief, or owner, who could defend it, manage it, discharge the obligations by which it was held, and thus maintain its rank in the general association of the great proprietors of the kingdom. There thus became a kind of identification of the possessor of the fief with the fief itself, and with all its future possessors.

  This circumstance powerfully tended to strengthen and knit together the ties of family, already so strong by the nature of the feudal system itself.

  Quitting the baronial dwelling, let us now descend to the little population that surrounds it. Everything here wears a different aspect. The disposition of man is so kindly and good, that it is almost impossible for a number of individuals to be placed for any length of time in a social situation without giving birth to a certain moral tie between them: sentiments of protection, of benevolence, of affection, spring up naturally. Thus it happened in the feudal system. There can be no doubt, but that after a certain time, kind and friendly feelings would grow up between the feudal lord and his serfs. This, however, took place in spite of their relative situation, and by no means through its influence. Considered in itself, this situation was radically vicious. There was nothing morally common between the holder of the fief and his serfs. They formed part of his estate; they were his property; and under this word property are comprised, not only all the rights which we delegate to the public magistrate to exercise in the name of the state, but likewise all those which we possess over private property: the right of making laws, of levying taxes, of inflicting punishment, as well as that of disposing of them—or selling them. There existed not, in fact, between the lord of the domain and its cultivators, so far as we consider the latter as men, either rights, guarantee, or society.

  From this I believe has arisen that almost universal, invincible hatred which country people have at all times borne to the feudal system, to every remnant of it—to its very name. We are not without examples of men having submitted to the heavy yoke of despotism, of their having become accustomed to it, nay more, of their having freely accepted it. Religious despotism, monarchical despotism, have more than once obtained the sanction, almost the love, of the population which they governed. But feudal despotism has always been repulsed, always hateful. It tyrannized over the destinies of men, without ruling in their hearts. Perhaps this may be partly accounted for by the fact, that, in religious and monarchical despotism, authority is always exercised by virtue of some belief or opinion common to both ruler and subjects; he is the representative, the minister, of another power superior to all human powers. He speaks or acts in the name of Divinity or of a common feeling, and not in the name of man himself, of man alone. Feudal despotism differed from this; it was the authority of man over man; the domination of the personal, capricious will of an individual. This perhaps is the only tyranny to which man, much to his honor, never will submit. Wherever in a ruler, or master, he sees but the individual man,—the moment that the authority which presses upon him is no more than an individual, a human will, one like his own, he feels mortified and indignant, and struggles against the yoke which he is compelled to bear. Such was the true, the distinctive character of the feudal power, and such was the origin of the hatred which it has never ceased to inspire.

  The religious element which was associated with the feudal power was but little calculated to alleviate its yoke. I do not see how the influence of the priest could be very great in the society which I have just described, or that he could have much success in legitimizing the connection between the enslaved people and the lordly proprietor. The Church has exercised a very powerful influence in the civilization of Europe, but then it has been by proceeding in a general manner—by changing the general dispositions of mankind. When we enter intimately into the little feudal society, properly so called, we find the influence of the priest between the baron and his serfs to have been very slight. It most frequently happened that he was as rude and nearly as much under control as the serf himself; and therefore not very well fitted, either by his position or talents, to enter into a contest with the lordly baron. We must, to be sure, naturally suppose, that, called upon as he was by his office to administer and to keep alive among these poor people the great moral truths of Christianity, he became endeared and useful to them in this respect; he consoled and instructed them; but I believe he had but little power to soften their hard condition.

  Having examined the feudal system in its rudest, its simplest form; having placed before you the principal consequences which flowed from it, as respects the possessor of the fief himself, as respects his family, and as respects the population gathered about him; let us now quit this narrow precinct. The population of the fief was not the only one in the land: there were other societies more or less like his own of which he was a member—with which he was connected. What, then, let us ask, was the influence which this general society to which he belonged might be expected to exercise upon civilization?

  One short observation before we reply: both the possessor of the fief and the priest, it is true, formed part of a general society; in the distance they had numerous and frequent connections; not so the cultivators—the serfs. Every time that, in speaking of the population of the country at this period, we make use of some general term, which seems to convey the idea of one single and same society—such for example as the word people—we speak without truth. For this population there was no general society—its existence was purely local. Beyond the estate in which they dwelt, the serfs had no relations whatever,—no connection either with persons, things, or government. For them there existed no common destiny, no common country—they formed not a nation. When we speak of the feudal association as a whole, it is only the great proprietors that are alluded to.

  Let us now see what the relations of the little feudal society were with the general society to which it held, and what consequences these relations may be expected to have led to in the progress of civilization.

  We all know what the ties were which bound together the possessors of fiefs; what conditions were attached to their possessions; what were the obligations of service on one part, and of protection on the other. I shall not enter into a detail of these obligations; it is enough for the present purpose that you have a general idea of them.* This system, however, seemed naturally to pour into the mind of every possessor of a fief a certain number of ideas and moral sentiments—ideas of duty, sentiments of affection. That the principles of fidelity, devotedness, loyalty, became developed, and maintained by the relations in which the possessors of fiefs stood towards one another, is evident. The fact speaks for itself.

  The attempt was made to change these obligations, these duties, these sentiments, and so on, into laws and institutions. It is well known that feudalism wished legally to settle what services the possessor of a fief owed to his sovereign; what services he had a right to expect from him in return; in what cases the vassal might be called upon to furnish military or pecuniary aid to his lord; in what way the lord might obtain the services of his vassals, in those affairs, in which they were not bound to yield them by the mere possession of their fiefs. The attempt was made to place all these rights under the protection of institutions founded to ensure their respect. Thus the baronial jurisdictions were erected to administer justice between the possessors of fiefs, upon complaints duly laid before their common suzerain. Thus every baron of any consideration collected his vassals in parliament, to debate in common the affairs which required their consent or concurrence. There was, in short, a combination of political, judicial, and military means, which show the attempt to organize the feudal system—to convert the relations between the possessors of fiefs into laws and institutions. But these laws, these institutions, had no stability—no guarantee.

  If it should be asked what is a political guarantee, I am compelled to look back to its fundamental character, and to state that this is the constant existence, in the bosom of society, of a will, of an authority disposed and in a condition to impose a law upon the wills and powers of private individuals—to enforce their obedience to the common rule, to make them respect the general law.

  There are only two systems of political guarantees possible; there must be either a will, a particular power, so superior to the others that none of them can resist it, but are obliged to yield to its authority whenever it is interposed; or, on the other, a public will, the result of the concurrence—of the development of the wills of individuals, and which likewise is in a condition, when once it has expressed itself, to make itself obeyed and respected by all.

  These are the only two systems of political guarantees possible; the despotism of one alone, or of a body; or free government. If we examine the various systems, we shall find that they may all be brought under one of these two.

  Well, neither of these existed, or could exist, under the feudal system.

  Without doubt the possessors of fiefs were not all equal among themselves. There were some much more powerful than others; and very many sufficiently powerful to oppress the weaker. But there was none, from the king, the first of the proprietors, downward, who was in a condition to impose law upon all the others; in a condition to make himself obeyed. Call to mind that none of the permanent means of power and influence at this time existed—no standing army—no regular taxes—no fixed tribunals. The social authorities—the institutions, had, in a manner, to be new formed every time they were wanted. A tribunal had to be formed for every trial—an army to be formed for every war—a revenue to be formed every time that money was needed. All was occasional—accidental—special; there was no central, permanent, independent means of government. It is evident that in such a system no individual had the power to enforce his will upon others; to compel all to respect and obey the general law.* On the other hand, resistance was easy, in proportion as repression was difficult. Shut up in his castle, with but a small number of enemies to cope with, and aware that other vassals in a like situation were ready to join and assist him, the possessor of a fief found but little difficulty in defending himself.

  It must then, I think, be confessed, that the first system of political guarantees—namely, that which would make all responsible to the strongest—has been shown to be impossible under the feudal system.

  The other system—that of free government, of a public power, a public authority—was just as impracticable. The reason is simple enough. When we speak now of a public power, of what we call the rights of sovereignty—that is, the right of making laws, of imposing taxes, of inflicting punishment, we know, we bear in mind, that these rights belong to nobody; that no one has, on his own account, the right to punish others, or to impose any burden or law upon them. These are rights which belong only to the great body of society, which are exercised only in its name; they are emanations from the people, and held in trust for their benefit. Thus it happens that when an individual is brought before an authority invested with these rights, the sentiment that predominates in his mind, though perhaps he himself may be unconscious of it, is, that he is in the presence of a public legitimate authority, invested with the power to command him, an authority which, beforehand, he has tacitly acknowledged. This was by no means the case under the feudal system. The possessor of a fief, within his domain, was invested with all the rights and privileges of sovereignty; he inherited them with the territory; they were a matter of private property. What are now called public rights were then private rights; what are now called public authorities were then private authorities. When the possessor of a fief, after having exercised sovereign power in his own name, as proprietor over all the population which lived around him, attended an assembly, attended a parliament held by his sovereign—a parliament not in general very numerous, and composed of men of the same grade, or nearly so, as himself—he did not carry with him any notion of a public authority. This idea was in direct contradiction to all about him—to all his notions, to all that he had done within his own domains. All he saw in these assemblies were men invested with the same rights as himself, in the same situation as himself, acting as he had done by virtue of their own personal title. Nothing led or compelled him to see or acknowledge in the very highest portion of the government, or in the institutions which we call public, that character of superiority or generality which seems to us bound up with the notion of political power. Hence, if he was dissatisfied with its decision, he refused to concur in it, and perhaps called in force to resist it.

  Force, indeed, was the true and usual guarantee of right under the feudal system, if force can be called a guarantee. Every law continually had recourse to force to make itself respected or acknowledged. No institution succeeded in doing this. This was so perfectly felt that institutions were scarcely ever applied to. If the agency of the baronial courts or parliaments of vassals had been of any importance, we should find them more generally employed than from history they appear to have been. Their rarity proves their insignificance.

  This is not astonishing. There is another reason for it more profound and decisive than any I have yet adduced.

  Of all the systems of government and political guarantee, it may be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that the most difficult to establish and render effectual is the federative system; a system which consists in leaving in each place or province, in every separate society, all that portion of government which can abide there, and in taking from it only so much of it as is indispensable to a general society, in order to carry it to the center of this larger society, and there to embody it under the form of a central government. This federative system, theoretically the most simple, is found in practice the most complex; for in order to reconcile the degree of independence, of local liberty, which is permitted to remain, with the degree of general order, of general submission, which in certain cases it supposes and exacts, evidently requires a very advanced state of civilization—requires, indeed, that the will of man, that individual liberty, should concur in the establishment and maintenance of the system much more than in any other, because it possesses less than any other the means of coercion.

  The federative system, then, is one which evidently requires the greatest maturity of reason, of morality, of civilization in the society to which it is applied. Yet we find that this was the kind of government which the feudal system attempted to establish: for feudalism, as a whole, was truly a confederation. It rested upon the same principles, for example, as those on which is based, in the present day, the federative system of the United States of America. It affected to leave in the hands of each great proprietor all that portion of the government, of sovereignty, which could be exercised there, and to carry to the suzerain, or to the general assembly of barons, the least possible portion of power, and only this in cases of absolute necessity. You will easily conceive the impossibility of establishing a system like this in a world of ignorance, of brute passions, or, in a word, where the moral condition of man was so imperfect as under the feudal system. The very nature of such a government was in opposition to the notions, the habits and manners of the very men to whom it was to be applied. How then can we be astonished at the bad success of this attempt at organization?

  We have now considered the feudal system, first, in its most simple element, in its fundamental principle; and then in its collective form, as a whole; we have examined it under these two points of view, in order to see what it did and what it might have been expected to do; what has been its influence on the progress of civilization. These investigations, I think, bring us to this twofold conclusion:—

  1. Feudalism seems to have exercised a great, and, upon the whole, a salutary influence upon the intellectual development of individuals. It gave birth to elevated ideas and feelings in the mind, to moral wants, to grand developments of character and passion.

  2. With regard to society, it was incapable of establishing either legal order or political guarantee. In the wretched state to which society had been reduced by barbarism, in which it was incapable of a more regular or enlarged form, the feudal system seemed indispensable as a step towards reassociation; still this system, in itself radically vicious, could neither regulate nor enlarge society. The only political right which the feudal system was capable of exercising in European society, was the right of resistance: I will not say legal resistance, for there can be no question of legal resistance in a society so little advanced. The progress of society consists pre-eminently in substituting, on one hand, public authority for private will; and, on the other, legal resistance for individual resistance. This is the great end, the chief perfection, of social order; a large field is left to personal liberty, but when personal liberty offends, when it becomes necessary to call it to account, our only appeal is to public reason; public reason is placed in the judge’s chair to pass sentence on the charge which is preferred against individual liberty. Such is the system of legal order and of legal resistance. You will easily perceive, that there was nothing bearing any resemblance to this in the feudal system. The right of resistance, which was maintained and practised in this system, was the right of personal resistance; a terrible and antisocial right, inasmuch as its only appeal is to brute force—to war—which is the destruction of society itself; a right, however, which ought never to be entirely erased from the mind of man, because by its abolition he puts on the fetters of servitude. The notion of the right of resistance had been banished from the Roman community, in the general disgrace and infamy into which it had fallen, and it could not be regenerated from its ruins. It could not, in my opinion, have sprung more naturally from the principles of Christian society. It is to the feudal system that we are indebted for its re-introduction among us. The glory of civilization is to render this principle for ever inactive and useless; the glory of the feudal system is its having constantly professed and defended it.

  Such, if I am not widely mistaken, is the result of our investigation of the feudal community, considered in itself, in its general principles, and independently of its historical progress. If we now turn to facts, to history, we shall find it to have fallen out, just as might have been expected, that the feudal system accomplished its task; that its destiny has been conformable to its nature. Events may be adduced in proof of all the conjectures, of all the inductions, which I have drawn from the nature and essential character of this system.

  Take a glance, for example, at the general history of feudalism, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, and say, is it not impossible to deny that it exercised a vast and salutary influence upon the progress of individual man—upon the development of his sentiments, his disposition, and his ideas? Where can we open the history of this period, without discovering a crowd of noble sentiments, of splendid achievements, of beautiful developments of humanity, evidently generated in the bosom of feudal life. Chivalry, which in reality bears scarcely the least resemblance to feudalism, was nevertheless its offspring. It was feudalism which gave birth to that romantic thirst and fondness for all that is noble, generous, and faithful—for that sentiment of honor, which still raises its voice in favor of the system by which it was nursed.*

  But turn to another side. Here we see that the first sparks of European imagination, that the first attempts of poetry, of literature, that the first intellectual gratifications which Europe tasted in emerging from barbarism, sprung up under the protection, under the wings, of feudalism. It was in the baronial hall that they were born, and cherished, and protected. It is to the feudal times that we trace back the earliest literary monuments of England, France, and Germany, the earliest intellectual enjoyments of modern Europe.

  As a set-off to this, if we question history respecting the influence of feudalism upon the social system, its reply is, though still in accordance with our conjectures, that the feudal system has everywhere opposed not only the establishment of general order, but at the same time the extension of general liberty. Under whatever point of view we consider the progress of society, the feudal system always appears as an obstacle in its way.* Hence, from the earliest existence of feudalism, the two powers which have been the prime movers in the progress of order and liberty—monarchical power on the one hand, and popular power on the other—that is to say, the king and the people—have both attacked it, and struggled against it continually. What few attempts were made at different periods to regulate it, to impart to it somewhat of a legal, a general character—as was done in England, by William the Conqueror and his sons; in France, by St. Louis; and by several of the German emperors—all these endeavors, all these attempts failed. The very nature itself of feudality is opposed to order and legality. In the last century, some writers of talent attempted to dress out feudalism as a social system; they endeavored to make it appear a legitimate, well-ordered, progressive state of society, and represented it as a golden age. Ask them, however, where it existed: summon them to assign it a locality, and a time, and they will be found wanting. It is a Utopia without date, a drama, for which we find, in the past, neither theatre nor actors. The cause of this error is noways difficult to discover; and it accounts as well for the error of the opposite class, who cannot pronounce the name of feudalism without coupling to it an absolute anathema. Both these parties have looked at it, as the two knights did at the statue of Janus, only on one side. They have not considered the two different points of view from which feudalism may be surveyed. They do not distinguish, on one hand, its influence upon the progress of the individual man, upon his feelings, his faculties, his disposition and passions; nor, on the other, its influence upon the social condition. One party could not imagine that a social system in which were to be found so many noble sentiments, so many virtues, in which were seen sprouting forth the earliest buds of literature and science; in which manners became not only more refined, but attained a certain elevation and grandeur; in such a system they could not imagine that the evil was so great or so fatal as it was made to appear. The other party, seeing but the misery which feudalism inflicted on the great body of the people—the obstacles which it opposed to the establishment of order and liberty—would not believe that it could produce noble characters, great virtues, or any improvement whatsoever. Both these parties have misunderstood the twofold principle of civilization; they have not been aware that it consists of two movements, one of which for a time may advance independently of the other, although after a lapse of centuries, and perhaps a long series of events, they must at last reciprocally recall and bring forward each other.

  To conclude, feudalism, in its character and influence, was just what its nature would lead us to expect. Individualism, the energy of personal existence, was the prevailing principle among the vanquishers of the Roman world; and the development of the individual man, of his mind, and faculties, might above all be expected to result from the social system, founded by them and for them. That which man himself carries into a social system, his intellectual moral disposition at the time he enters it, has a powerful influence upon the situation in which he establishes himself—upon all around him. This situation in its turn reacts upon his dispositions, strengthens and improves them. The individual prevailed in German society; and the influence of the feudal system, the offspring of German society, displayed itself in the improvement and advance of the individual. We shall find the same fact to recur in the other elements of our civilization: they all hold faithful to their original principle; they have advanced and pushed the world in that same road by which they first entered. The subject of the next lecture—the history of the Church, and its influence upon European civilization, from the fifth to the twelfth century—will furnish us with a new and striking example of this fact.*

  LECTURE V.

  THE CHURCH.

  Having investigated the nature and influence of the feudal system, I shall take the Christian church, from the fifth to the twelfth century, as the subject of the present lecture. I say the Christian church, because, as I have observed once before, it is not about Christianity itself, Christianity as a religious system, that I shall occupy your attention, but the Church as an ecclesiastical society—the Christian hierarchy.

  This society was almost completely organized before the close of the fifth century. Not that it has not undergone many and important changes since that period, but from this time the Church, considered as a corporation, as the government of the Christian world, may be said to have attained a complete and independent existence.*

  A single glance will be sufficient to convince us that there existed, in the fifth century, an immense difference between the state of the Church and that of the other elements of European civilization. You will remember that I have pointed out, as primary elements of our civilization, the municipal system, the feudal system, monarchy, and the Church. The municipal system, in the fifth century, was no more than a fragment of the Roman empire, a shadow without life, or definite form. The feudal system was still a chaos. Monarchy existed only in name. All the civil elements of modern society were either in their decline or infancy. The Church alone possessed youth and vigor; she alone possessed at the same time a definite form, with activity and strength; she alone possessed at once movement and order, energy and system, that is to say, the two greatest means of influence. Is it not, let me ask you, by mental vigor, by intellectual movement on one side, and by order and discipline on the other, that all institutions acquire their power and influence over society? The Church, moreover, awakened attention to, and agitated all the great questions which interest man; she busied herself with all the great problems of his nature, with all he had to hope or fear for futurity. Hence her influence upon modern civilization has been so powerful—more powerful, perhaps, than its most violent adversaries, or its most zealous defenders, have supposed. They, eager to advance or abuse her, have only regarded the Church in a contentious point of view; and with that contracted spirit which controversy engenders, how could they do her justice, or grasp the full scope of her sway?

  To us, the Church, in the fifth century, appears as an organized and independent society, interposed between the masters of the world, the sovereigns, the possessors of temporal power, and the people, serving as a connecting link between them, and exercising its influence over all.

  To know and completely understand its agency, then, we must consider it from three different points of view: we must consider it first in itself—we must see what it really was, what was its internal constitution, what the principles which there bore sway, what its nature. We must next consider it in its relations with temporal rulers—kings, lords, and others; and, finally, in its relations with the people. And when by this threefold investigation we have formed a complete picture of the Church, of its principles, its situation, and the influence which it exercised, we will verify this picture by history; we will see whether facts, whether what we properly call events, from the fifth to the twelfth century, agree with the conclusions which our threefold examination of the Church, of its own nature, of its relations with the masters of the world, and with the people, had previously led us to come to respecting it.

  Let us first consider the Church in itself, its internal condition, its own nature.

  The first, and perhaps the most important fact that demands our attention here, is its existence; the existence of a government of religion, of a priesthood, of an ecclesiastical corporation.

  In the opinion of many enlightened persons, the very notion of a religious corporation, of a priesthood, of a government of religion, is absurd. They believe that a religion, whose object is the establishment of a clerical body, of a priesthood legally constituted, in short, of a government of religion, must exercise, upon the whole, an influence more dangerous than useful. In their opinion religion is a matter purely individual betwixt man and God; and that whenever religion loses this character, whenever an exterior authority interferes between the individual and the object of his religious belief, that is, between him and God, religion is corrupted, and society in danger.

  It will not do to pass by this question without taking a deeper view of it. In order to know what has been the influence of the Christian church, we must know what ought to be, from the nature of the institution itself, the influence of a church, the influence of a priesthood. To judge of this influence we must inquire more especially whether religion is, in fact, purely individual; whether it excites and gives birth to nothing beyond this intimate relation between each individual and God; or whether it does not, in fact, necessarily become a source of new relations between man and man, and so necessarily lead to the formation of a religious society, and from that to a government of this society.

  If we reduce religion to what is properly called religious feeling—to that feeling which, though very real, is somewhat vague, somewhat uncertain in its object, and which we can scarcely characterize but by naming it—to that feeling which addresses itself at one time to exterior nature, at another to the inmost recesses of the soul; to-day to the imagination, to-morrow to the mysteries of the future; which wanders everywhere, and settles nowhere; which, in a word, exhausts both the world of matter and of fancy in search of a resting-place, and yet finds none—if we reduce religion to this feeling; then, it would seem, it may remain purely individual. Such a feeling may give rise to a passing association; it may, it will indeed, find a pleasure in sympathy; it will feed upon it, it will be strengthened by it; but its fluctuating and doubtful character will prevent its becoming the principle of permanent and extensive association; will prevent it from accommodating itself to any system of precepts, of discipline, of forms; will prevent it, in a word, from giving birth to a society, to a religious government.

  But either I have strangely deceived myself, or this religious feeling does not comprehend the whole religious nature of man. Religion, in my opinion, is quite another thing, and infinitely more comprehensive than this.

  Joined to the destinies and nature of man, there are a number of problems whose solution we cannot work out in the present life; these, though connected with an order of things strange and foreign to the world around us, and apparently beyond the reach of human faculties, do not the less invincibly torment the soul of man, part of whose nature it seems to be, anxiously to desire and struggle for the clearing up of the mystery in which they are involved. The solution of these problems,—the creeds and dogmas which contain it, or at least are supposed to contain it—such is the first object, the first source, of religion.

  Another road brings us to the same point. To those among us who have made some progress in the study of moral philosophy, it is now, I presume, become sufficiently evident, that morality may exist independently of religious ideas; that the distinction between moral good and moral evil, the obligation to avoid evil and to cleave to that which is good, are laws as much acknowledged by man, in his proper nature, as the laws of logic; and which spring as much from a principle within him, as in his actual life they find their application. But granting these truths to be proved, yielding up to morality its independence, a question naturally arises in the human mind: whence cometh morality, whither doth it lead? This obligation to do good, which exists of itself, is it a fact standing by itself, without author, without aim? Doth it not conceal, or rather doth it not reveal to man, an origin, a destiny, reaching beyond this world? By this question, which rises spontaneously and inevitably, morality, in its turn, leads man to the porch of religion, and opens to him a sphere from which he has not borrowed it.

  Thus on one side the problems of our nature, on the other, the necessity of seeking a sanction, an origin, an aim, for morality, open to us fruitful and certain sources of religion. Thus it presents itself before us under many other aspects besides that of a simple feeling such as I have described. It presents itself as an assemblage:

  First, of doctrines called into existence by the problems which man finds in himself.

  Secondly, of precepts which correspond with these doctrines, and give to natural morality a signification and sanction.

  Thirdly, and lastly, of promises which address themselves to the hopes of humanity respecting futurity.

  This is truly what constitutes religion. This is really what it is at bottom, and not a mere form of sensibility, a sally of the imagination, a species of poetry.

  Religion thus brought back to its true element, to its essence, no longer appears as an affair purely individual, but as a powerful and fruitful principle of association. Would you regard it as a system of opinions, of dogmas? The answer is, truth belongs to no one; it is universal, absolute; all men are prone to seek it, to profess it in common. Would you rest upon the precepts which are associated with the doctrines? The reply is, law obligatory upon one is obligatory upon all—man is bound to promulgate it, to bring all under its authority. It is the same with respect to the promises which religion makes as the rewards of obedience to its faith and its precepts; it is necessary they should be spread, and that these fruits of religion should be offered to all. From the essential elements of religion then is seen to spring up a religious society; and it springs from them so infallibly, that the word which expresses the social feeling with the greatest energy, which expresses our invincible desire to propagate ideas, to extend society, is proselytism—a term particularly applied to religious creeds, to which it seems almost exclusively consecrated.

  A religious society once formed, when a certain number of men are joined together by the same religious opinions and belief, yield obedience to the same law of religious precepts, and are inspired with the same religious hopes, needs a government. No society can exist a week, no, not even an hour, without a government. At the very instant in which a society is formed, by the very act of its formation it calls forth a government, which proclaims the common truth that holds them together, which promulgates and maintains the precepts that this truth may be expected to bring forth. That a religious society, like all others requires a controlling power, a government, is implied in the very fact that a society exists.

  And not only is a government necessary, but it naturally arises of itself. I cannot spare much time to show how governments rise and become established in society in general. I shall only remark that, when matters are left to take their natural course, when no exterior force is applied to drive them from their usual route, power will fall into the hands of the most capable, of the most worthy, into the hands of those who will lead society on its way. Are there thoughts of a military expedition? the bravest will have the command. Is society anxious about some discovery, some learned enterprise? the most skilful will be sought for. The same will take place in all other matters. Let but the common order of things be observed, let the natural inequality of men freely display itself, and each will find the station that he is best fitted to fill. So as regards religion, men will be found no more equal in talents, in abilities, and in power, than they are in other matters: this man has a more striking method than others in proclaiming the doctrines of religion and making converts; another has more power in enforcing religious precepts; a third may excel in exciting religious hopes and emotions, and keeping the soul in a devout and holy frame. The same inequality of faculties and of influence, which gives rise to power in civil society, will be found to exist in religious society. Missionaries, like generals, go forth to conquer. So that while, on the one hand, religious government naturally flows from the nature of religious society, it as naturally develops itself, on the other, by the simple effect of human faculties, and their unequal distribution.

  Thus the moment that religion takes possession of a man, a religious society begins to be formed; and the moment this religious society appears it gives birth to a government.

  A grave objection, however, here presents itself: in this case there is nothing to command, nothing to impose; no kind of force can here be legitimate. There is no place for government, because here the most perfect liberty ought to prevail.

  Be it so. But is it not forming a gross and degrading idea of government to suppose that it resides only, to suppose that it resides chiefly, in the force which it exercises to make itself obeyed, in its coercive element?

  Let us quit religion for a moment, and turn to civil governments. Trace with me, I beseech you, the simple march of circumstances. Society exists. Something is to be done, no matter what, in its name and for its interests; a law has to be executed, some measure to be adopted, a judgment to be pronounced. Now, certainly, there is a proper method of supplying these social wants; there is a proper law to make, a proper measure to adopt, a proper judgment to pronounce. Whatever may be the matter in hand, whatever may be the interest in question, there is, upon every occasion, a truth which must be discovered, and which ought to decide the matter, and govern the conduct to be adopted.

  The first business of government is to seek this truth, is to discover what is just, reasonable, and suitable to society. When this is found, it is proclaimed: the next business is to introduce it to the public mind; to get it approved by the men upon whom it is to act; to persuade them that it is reasonable. In all this is there anything coercive? Not at all. Suppose now that the truth which ought to decide upon the affair, no matter what; suppose, I say, that the truth being found and proclaimed, all understandings should be at once convinced; all wills at once determined; that all should acknowledge that the government was right, and obey it spontaneously. There is nothing yet of compulsion, no occasion for the employment of force. Does it follow then that a government does not exist? Is there nothing of government in all this? To be sure there is a government, and it has accomplished its task. Compulsion appears not till the resistance of individuals calls for it—till the idea, the decision which authority has adopted, fails to obtain the approbation or the voluntary submission of all. Then government employs force to make itself obeyed. This is a necessary consequence of human imperfection; an imperfection which resides as well in power as in society. There is no way of entirely avoiding this; civil governments will always be obliged to have recourse, to a certain degree, to compulsion. Still it is evident they are not made up of compulsion, because, whenever they can, they are glad to do without it, to the great blessing of all; and their highest point of perfection is to be able to discard it, and to trust to means purely moral, to their influence upon the understanding: so that, in proportion as government can dispense with compulsion and force, the more faithful it is to its true nature, and the better it fulfils the purpose for which it is sent. This is not to shrink, this is not to give way, as people commonly cry out; it is merely acting in a different manner, in a manner much more general and powerful. Those governments which employ the most compulsion perform much less than those which scarcely ever have recourse to it. Government, by addressing itself to the understanding, by engaging the free-will of its subjects, by acting by means purely intellectual, instead of contracting, expands and elevates itself; it is then that it accomplishes most, and attains to the grandest objects. On the contrary, it is when government is obliged to be constantly employing its physical arm that it becomes weak and restrained—that it does little, and does that little badly.

  The essence of government then by no means resides in compulsion, in the exercise of brute force; it consists more especially of a system of means and powers, conceived for the purpose of discovering upon all occasions what is best to be done; for the purpose of discovering the truth which by right ought to govern society, for the purpose of persuading all men to acknowledge this truth, to adopt and respect it willingly and freely. Thus I think I have shown that the necessity for, and the existence of a government, are very conceivable, even though there should be no room for compulsion, even though it should be absolutely forbidden.

  This is exactly the case in the government of religious society. There is no doubt but compulsion is here strictly forbidden; there can be no doubt, as its only territory is the conscience of man, but that every species of force must be illegal, whatever may be the end designed. But government does not exist the less on this account. It still has to perform all the duties which we have just now enumerated. It is incumbent upon it to seek out the religious doctrines which resolve the problems of human destiny; or, if a general system of faith beforehand exists, in which these problems are already resolved, it will be its duty to discover and set forth its consequences in each particular case. It will be its duty to promulgate and maintain the precepts which correspond to its doctrines. It will be its duty to preach them, to teach them, and, if society wanders from them, to bring it back again to the right path. No compulsion; but the investigation, the preaching, the teaching of religious truths; the administering to religious wants; admonishing; censuring; this is the task which religious government has to perform. Suppress all force and coercion as much as you desire, still you will see all the essential questions connected with the organization of a government present themselves before you, and demand a solution. The question, for example, whether a body of religious magistrates is necessary, or whether it is possible to trust to the religious inspiration of individuals? This question, which is a subject of debate between most religious societies and that of the Quakers, will always exist, it must always remain a matter of discussion. Again, granting a body of religious magistrates to be necessary, the question arises whether a system of equality is to be preferred, or an hierarchal constitution—a graduated series of powers? This question will not cease because you take from the ecclesiastical magistrates, whatever they may be, all means of compulsion. Instead then of dissolving religious society in order to have the right to destroy religious government, it must be acknowledged that religious society forms itself naturally, that religious government flows no less naturally from religious society, and that the problem to be solved is on what conditions this government ought to exist, on what it is based, what are its principles, what the conditions of its legitimacy? This is the investigation which the existence of religious government, as of all others, compels us to undertake.

  The conditions of legitimacy are the same in the government of a religious society as in all others. They may be reduced to two: the first is, that authority should be placed and constantly remain, as effectually at least as the imperfection of all human affairs will permit, in the hands of the best, the most capable; so that the legitimate superiority, which lies scattered in various parts of society, may be thereby drawn out, collected, and delegated to discover the social law—to exercise its authority. The second is, that the authority thus legitimately constituted should respect the legitimate liberties of those over whom it is called to govern. A good system for the formation and organization of authority, a good system of securities for liberty, are the two conditions in which the goodness of government in general resides, whether civil or religious. And it is by this standard that all governments should be judged.

  Instead, then, of reproaching the Church, the government of the Christian world, with its existence, let us examine how it was constituted, and see whether its principles correspond with the two essential conditions of all good government.

  Let us examine the Church in this twofold point of view.

  In the first place, with regard to the formation and transmission of authority in the Church, there is a word, which has often been made use of, which I wish to get rid of altogether. I mean the word caste. This word has been too frequently applied to the Christian clergy, but its application to that body is both improper and unjust. The idea of hereditary right is inherent to the idea of caste. In every part of the world, in every country in which the system of caste has prevailed—in Egypt, in India—from the earliest time to the present day—you will find that castes have been everywhere essentially hereditary: they are, in fact, the transmission of the same rank and condition, of the same power, from father to son. Now where there is no inheritance there is no caste, but a corporation. The esprit de corps, or that certain degree of love and interest which every individual of an order feels towards it as a whole, as well as towards all its members, has its inconveniences, but differs very essentially from the spirit of caste. The celibacy of the clergy of itself renders the application of this term to the Christian church altogether improper.

  The important consequences of this distinction cannot have escaped you. To the system of castes, to the circumstance of inheritance, certain peculiar privileges are necessarily attached; the very definition of caste implies this. Where the same functions, the same powers become hereditary in the same families, it is evident that they possess peculiar privileges, which none can acquire independently of birth. This is indeed exactly what has taken place wherever the religious government has fallen into the hands of a caste; it has become a matter of privilege; all were shut out from it but those who belonged to the families of the caste. Now nothing like this is found in the Christian church. Not only is the Church entirely free from this fault, but she has constantly maintained the principle, that all men, whatever their origin, are equally privileged to enter her ranks, to fill her highest offices, to enjoy her proudest dignities. The ecclesiastical career, particularly from the fifth to the twelfth century, was open to all. The Church was recruited from all ranks of society, from the lower as well as the higher, indeed, most frequently from the lower. When all around her fell under the tyranny of privilege, she alone maintained the principle of equality, of competition and emulation; she alone called the superior of all classes to the possession of power. This is the first great consequence which naturally flowed from the fact that the Church was a corporation and not a caste.

  I will show you a second. It is the inherent nature of all castes to possess a degree of immobility. This assertion requires no proof. Turn over the pages of history, and you will find that wherever the tyranny of castes has predominated, society, whether religious or political, has universally become sluggish and torpid. A dread of improvement was certainly introduced at a certain epoch, and up to a certain point, into the Christian church. But whatever regret this may cost us, it cannot be said that this feeling ever generally prevailed. It cannot be said that the Christian church ever remained inactive and stationary. For a long course of centuries she was always in motion; at one time pushed forward by her opponents without, at others driven on by an inward impulse—by the desire of reform, or of interior development. The Church, indeed, taken as a whole, has been constantly changing—constantly advancing—her history is diversified and progressive. Can it be doubted that she was indebted for this to the admission of all classes to the priestly offices, to the continual filling up of her ranks, upon a principle of equality, by which a stream of young and vigorous blood was ever flowing into her veins, keeping her unceasingly active and stirring, and defending her from the reproach of apathy and immobility which might otherwise have triumphed over her?

  But how did the Church, in admitting all classes to power, satisfy herself that they had the right to be so admitted? How did she discover and proceed in taking from the bosom of society, the legitimate superiorities who should have a share in her government? In the Church two principles were in full vigor: first, the election of the inferior by the superior, which, in fact, was nothing more than choice or nomination; secondly, the election of the superior by the subordinates, or election properly so called, and such as we conceive to be election in the present day.

  The ordination of priests, for example, the power of raising a man to the priestly office, rested solely with the superior. He alone made choice of the candidate for holy orders. The case was the same in the collation to certain ecclesiastical benefices,* such as those attached to feudal grants, and some others; it was the superior whether king, pope, or lord, who nominated to the benefice. In other cases the true principle of election prevailed. The bishops had been, for a long time, and were still, often, in the period under consideration, elected by the inferior clergy; even the people sometimes took part in them. In monasteries the abbot was elected by the monks. At Rome, the pope was elected by the college of cardinals; and, at an earlier date, even all the Roman clergy had a voice in his election. You may here clearly observe, then, the two principles, the choice of the inferior by the superior, and the election of the superior by the subordinates; which were admitted and acted upon in the Church, particularly at the period which now engages our attention. It was by one of these two means that men were appointed to the various offices in the Church, or obtained any portion of ecclesiastical authority.

  These two principles were not only in operation at the same time, but being altogether opposite in their nature, a constant struggle prevailed between them. After a strife for centuries, after many vicissitudes, the nomination of the inferior by the superior gained the day in the Christian church. Yet, from the fifth to the twelfth century, the opposite principle, the election of the superior by the subordinates, continued generally to prevail.

  We must not be astonished at the co-existence of these two opposite principles. If we look at society in general, at the common course of affairs, at the manner in which authority is there transmitted, we shall find that this transmission is sometimes effected by one of these modes, and sometimes the other. The Church did not invent them, she found them in the providential government of human things, and borrowed them from it. There is somewhat of truth, of utility, in both. Their combination would often prove the best mode of discovering legitimate power. It is a great misfortune, in my opinion, that only one of them, the choice of the inferior by the superior, should have been victorious in the Church. The second, however, was never entirely banished, but under various names, with more or less success, has reappeared in every epoch, with at least sufficient force to protest against, and interrupt, prescription.*

  The Christian church, at the period of which we are speaking, derived an immense force from its respect for equality and the various kinds of legitimate superiority. It was the most popular society of the time—the most accessible; it alone opened its arms to all the talents, to all the ambitiously noble of our race. To this, above all, it owed its greatness, at least certainly much more than to its riches, and the illegitimate means which it but too often employed.

  With regard to the second condition of a good government, namely, a respect for liberty, that of the Church leaves much to be desired.

  Two bad principles here met together. One avowed, forming part and parcel, as it were, of the doctrines of the Church; the other, in no way a legitimate consequence of her doctrines, was introduced into her bosom by human weakness.

  The first was a denial of the rights of individual reason—the claim of transmitting points of faith from the highest authority, downwards, throughout the whole religious body, without allowing to any one the right of examining them for himself.* But it was more easy to lay this down as a principle than to carry it out in practice; and the reason is obvious, for a conviction cannot enter into the human mind unless the human mind first opens the door to it; it cannot enter by force. In whatever way it may present itself, whatever name it may invoke, reason looks to it, and if it forces an entrance, it is because reason is satisfied. Thus individual reason has always continued to exist, and under whatever name it may have been disguised, has always considered and reflected upon the ideas which have been attempted to be forced upon it. Still, however, it must be admitted but as too true, that reason often becomes impaired; that she loses her power, becomes mutilated and contracted—that she may be brought not only to make a sorry use of her faculties, but to make a more limited use of them than she ought to do. Such indeed was the effect of the bad principle which crept into the Church, but with regard to the practical and complete operation of this principle, it never came into full force—it was impossible it ever should.

  The second vicious principle was the right of compulsion assumed by the Romish church; a right, however, contrary to the very nature and spirit of religious society, to the origin of the Church itself, and to its primitive maxims. A right, too, disputed by some of the most illustrious fathers of the Church—by St. Ambrose, St. Hilary, St. Martin—but which, nevertheless, prevailed and became an important feature in its history. The right it assumed of forcing belief, if these two words can stand together, or of punishing faith physically, of persecuting heresy, that is to say, a contempt for the legitimate liberty of human thought, was an error which found its way into the Romish church before the beginning of the fifth century, and has in the end cost her very dear.*

  If then we consider the state of the Church with regard to the liberty of its members, we must confess that its principles in this respect were less legitimate, less salutary, than those which presided at the rise and formation of ecclesiastical power. It must not, however, be supposed, that a bad principle radically vitiates an institution; nor even that it does it all the mischief of which it is pregnant. Nothing tortures history more than logic. No sooner does the human mind seize upon an idea, than it draws from it all its possible consequences; makes it produce, in imagination, all that it would in reality be capable of producing, and then pictures it in history with all the extravagant additions which itself has conjured up. This, however, is nothing like the truth. Events are not so prompt in their consequences, as the human mind in its deductions. There is in all things a mixture of good and evil, so profound, so inseparable, that, in whatever part you penetrate, if even you descend to the lowest elements of society, or into the soul itself, you will there find these two principles dwelling together, developing themselves side by side, perpetually struggling and quarrelling with each other, but neither of them ever obtaining a complete victory, or absolutely destroying its fellow. Human nature never reaches to the extreme either of good or evil. It passes, without ceasing, from one to the other; it recovers itself at the moment when it seems lost for ever. It slips and loses ground at the moment when it seems to have assumed the firmest position.

  We again discover here that character of discordance, of diversity, of strife, to which I formerly called your attention, as the fundamental character of European civilization. Besides this, there is another general fact which characterizes the government of the Church, which we must not pass over without notice. In the present day, when the idea of government presents itself to our mind, we know, of whatever kind it may be, that it will scarcely pretend to any authority beyond the outward actions of men, beyond the civil relations between man and man. Governments do not profess to carry their rule further than this. With regard to human thought, to the human conscience, to the intellectual powers of man; with regard to individual opinions, to private morals,—with these they do not interfere: this would be to invade the domain of liberty.

  The Christian church did, and was bent upon doing, exactly the contrary. What she undertook to govern was the human thought, human liberty, private morals, individual opinions. She did not draw up a code like ours, which took account only of those crimes that are at the same time offensive to morals and dangerous to society, punishing them only when, and because, they bore this twofold character; but prepared a catalogue of all those actions, criminal more particularly in a moral point of view, and punished them all under the name of sins. Her aim was their entire suppression. In a word, the government of the Church did not, like our modern governments, direct her attention to the outward man, or to the purely civil relations of men among themselves; she addressed herself to the inward man, to the thought, to the conscience; in fact, to that which of all things is most hidden and secure, most free, and which spurns the least restraint. The Church, then, by the very nature of its undertaking, combined with the nature of some of the principles upon which its government was founded, stood in great peril of falling into tyranny; of an illegitimate employment of force. In the mean time, this force was encountered by a resistance within the Church itself, which it could never overcome. Human thought and liberty, however fettered, however confined for room and space in which to exercise their faculties, oppose with so much energy every attempt to enslave them, that their reaction makes even despotism itself to yield, and give up something every moment. This took place in the very bosom of the Christian church. We have seen heresy proscribed—the right of free inquiry condemned; a contempt shown for individual reason, the principle of the imperative transmission of doctrines by human authority established. And yet where can we find a society in which individual reason more boldly developed itself than in the Church? What are sects and heresies, if not the fruit of individual opinions? These sects, these heresies, all these oppositions which arose in the Christian church, are the most decisive proof of the life and moral activity which reigned within her: a life stormy, painful, sown with perils, with errors and crimes—yet splendid and mighty, and which has given place to the noblest developments of intelligence and mind.* But leaving the opposition, and looking to the ecclesiastical government itself—how does the case stand here? You will find it constituted, you will find it acting, in a manner quite opposite to what you would expect from some of its principles. It denies the right of inquiry, it wishes to deprive individual reason of its liberty; yet it appeals to reason incessantly; practical liberty actually predominates in its affairs. What are its institutions, its means of action? Provincial councils, national councils, general councils;† a perpetual correspondence, a perpetual publication of letters, of admonitions, of writings. No government ever went so far in discussions and open deliberations. One might fancy one’s self in the midst of the philosophical schools of Greece. But it was not here a mere discussion, it was not a simple search after truth that here occupied the attention; it was questions of authority, of measures to be taken, of decrees to be drawn up, in short, the business of a government. Such indeed was the energy of intellectual life in the bosom of this government, that it became its predominant, universal character; to this all others gave way; and that which shone forth from all its parts, was the exercise of reason and liberty.*

  I am far, notwithstanding all this, from believing that the vicious principles, which I have endeavored to explain, and which, in my opinion, existed in the Christian church, existed there without producing any effect. In the period now under review, they already bore very bitter fruits; at a later period they bore others still more bitter; still they did not produce all the evils which might have been expected, they did not choke the good which sprang up in the same soil. Such was the Church considered in itself, in its interior, in its own nature.

  Let us now consider it in its relations with sovereigns, with the holders of temporal authority. This is the second point of view in which I have promised to consider it.

  When at the fall of the western empire, when, instead of the ancient Roman government, under which the Church had been born, under which she had grown up, with which she had common habits and old connections, she found herself surrounded by barbarian kings, by barbarian chieftains, wandering from place to place, or shut up in their castles, with whom she had nothing in common, between whom and her there was as yet no tie—neither traditions, nor creeds, nor feelings; her danger appeared great, and her fears were equally so.

  One only idea became predominant in the Church; it was to take possessions of these new-comers—to convert them. The relations of the Church with the barbarians had, at first, scarcely any other aim.*

  To gain these barbarians, the most effective means seemed to be to dazzle their senses and work upon their imagination. Thus it came to pass that the number, pomp, and variety of religious ceremonies were at this epoch wonderfully increased. The ancient chronicles particularly show, that it was principally in this way that the Church worked upon the barbarians. She converted them by grand spectacles.†

  But even when they had become settled and converted, even after the growth of some common ties between them, the danger of the Church was not over. The brutality, the unthinking, the unreflecting character of the barbarians were so great, that the new faith, the new feelings with which they had been inspired, exercised but a very slight empire over them. When every part of society fell a prey to violence, the Church could scarcely hope altogether to escape. To save herself she announced a principle, which had already been set up, though but very vaguely, under the empire; the separation of spiritual and temporal power, and their mutual independence. It was by the aid of this principle that the Church dwelt freely by the side of the barbarians; she maintained that force had no authority over religious belief, hopes, or promises, and that the spiritual and temporal worlds are completely distinct.

  You cannot fail to see at once the beneficial consequences which have resulted from this principle. Independently of the temporary service it was of to the Church, it has had the inestimable effect of founding in justice the separation of the two authorities, of preventing one from controlling the other. In addition to this, the Church, by asserting the independence of the intellectual world, in its collective form, prepared the independence of the intellectual world in individuals—the independence of thought. The Church declared that the system of religious belief could not be brought under the yoke of force, and each individual has been led to hold the same language for himself. The principle of free inquiry, the liberty of individual thought, is exactly the same as that of the independence of the spiritual authority in general, with regard to temporal power.

  The desire for liberty, unfortunately, is but a step from the desire for power. The Church soon passed from one to the other. When she had established her independence, it was in accordance with the natural course of ambition that she should attempt to raise her spiritual authority above temporal authority. We must not, however, suppose that this claim had no other origin than the weaknesses of humanity; some of these are very profound, and it is of importance that they should be known.

  When liberty prevails in the intellectual world, when the thoughts and consciences of men are not enthralled by a power which calls in question their right of deliberating, of deciding, and employs its authority against them; when there is no visible constituted spiritual government laying claim to the right of dictating opinions; in such circumstances, the idea of the domination of the spiritual order over the temporal could scarcely spring up. Such is very nearly the present state of the world. But when there exists, as there did in the tenth century, a government of the spiritual order; when the human thought and conscience are subject to certain laws, to certain institutions, to certain authorities, which have arrogated to themselves the right to govern, to constrain them; in short, when spiritual authority is established, when it has effectively taken possession, in the name of right and power, of the human reason and conscience, it is natural that it should go on to assume a domination over the temporal order; that it should argue: “What! have I a right, have I an authority over that which is most elevated, most independent in man—over his thoughts, over his interior will, over his conscience; and have I not a right over his exterior, his temporal and material interests? Am I the interpreter of divine justice and truth, and yet not able to regulate the affairs of this world according to justice and truth?”*

  The force of this reasoning shows that the spiritual order had a natural tendency to encroach on the temporal. This tendency was increased by the fact, that the spiritual order, at this time, comprised all the intelligence of the age, every possible development of the human mind. There was but one science, theology; but one spiritual order, the theological: all the other sciences, rhetoric, arithmetic, and even music, centered in theology.

  The spiritual power, finding itself thus in possession of all the intelligence of the age, at the head of all intellectual activity, was naturally enough led to arrogate to itself the general government of the world.

  A second cause, which very much favored its views, was the dreadful state of the temporal order, the violence and iniquity which prevailed in all temporal governments.

  For some centuries past men might speak, with a degree of confidence, of temporal power; but temporal power, at the epoch of which we are speaking, was mere brutal force, a system of rapine and violence. The Church, however imperfect might be her notions of morality and justice, was infinitely superior to a temporal government such as this; and the cry of the people continually urged her to take its place.

  When a pope or bishop proclaimed that a sovereign had lost his rights, that his subjects were released from their oath of fidelity, this interference, though undoubtedly liable to the greatest abuses, was often, in the particular case to which it was directed, just and salutary. It generally holds, indeed, that where liberty is wanting, religion, in a great measure, supplies its place. In the tenth century, the oppressed nations were not in a state to protect themselves, to defend their rights against civil violence—religion, in the name of Heaven, placed itself between them. This is one of the causes which most contributed to the success of the usurpations of the Church.

  There is a third cause, which, in my opinion, has not been sufficiently noticed. This is the manifold character and situation of the leaders of the Church; the variety of aspects under which they appeared in society. On one side they were prelates, members of the ecclesiastical order, a portion of the spiritual power, and as such independent: on the other, they were vassals, and by this title formed one of the links of civil feudalism. But this was not all: besides being vassals, they were also subjects. Something similar to the ancient relations in which the bishops and clergy had stood towards the Roman emperors now existed between the clergy and the barbarian sovereigns. A series of causes, which it would be tedious to detail, had brought the bishops to look upon the barbarian kings, to a certain degree, as the successors of the Roman emperors, and to attribute to them the same rights. The heads of the clergy then had a threefold character: first, they were ecclesiastics, and as such held to the performance of certain duties; secondly, they were feudal vassals, with the rights and obligations of such; thirdly, they were mere subjects, and as such bound to render obedience to an absolute sovereign. Observe the necessary consequence of this. The temporal sovereigns, no whit less covetous, no whit less ambitious than the bishops, frequently made use of their temporal power, as superiors or sovereigns, to attack the independence of the Church, to usurp the right of collating to benefices, of nominating to bishoprics, and so on. On the other side, the bishops often sheltered themselves under their spiritual independence to refuse the performance of their obligations as vassals and subjects; so that on both sides there was an inevitable tendency to trespass on the rights of the other; on the side of the sovereigns, to destroy spiritual independence; on the side of the heads of the Church, to make their spiritual independence the means of universal dominion.

  This result showed itself sufficiently plain in events well known to you all; in the quarrel respecting investitures;* in the struggle between the Holy See and the empire. The threefold character of the heads of the Church, and the difficulty of preventing them from trespassing on one another, was the real cause of the uncertainty and strife of all its pretensions.

  Finally, the Church had a third connection with the sovereigns, and it was to her the most disastrous and fatal. She laid claim to the right of coercion, to the right of restraining and punishing heresy. But she had no means by which to do this; she had no physical force at her disposal: when she had condemned the heretic, she was without the power to carry her sentence into execution. What was the consequence? She called to her aid the secular arm; she had to borrow the power of the civil authority as the means of compulsion. To what a wretched shift was she thus driven by the adoption of the wicked and detestable principles of coercion and persecution!

  I must stop here. There is not sufficient time for us to finish our investigation of the Church. We have still to consider its relation with the people, the principles which prevailed in its intercourse with them, and what consequences resulted from its bearing upon civilization in general. I shall afterwards endeavor to confirm by history, by facts, by what befell the Church from the fifth to the twelfth century, the inductions which we have drawn from the nature of her institutions and principles.*

  LECTURE VI.

  THE CHURCH.

  In the present lecture we shall conclude our inquiries respecting the state of the Church. In the last, I stated that I should place it before you in three principal points of view: first, in itself—in its interior constitution and nature, as a distinct and independent society; secondly, in its relations with sovereigns, with temporal power; thirdly, in its relations with the people. Having then been able to accomplish no more than the first two parts of my task, it remains for me to-day to place before you the Church in its relations with the people. I shall endeavor, after I have done this, to sum up this threefold examination, and to give a general judgment respecting the influence of the Church from the fifth to the twelfth century; finally, I shall close this part of my subject by verifying my statements by an appeal to facts, by an examination of the history of the Church during this period.

  You will easily understand that, in speaking of the relations of the Church with the people, I shall be obliged to confine myself to very general views. It is impossible that I should enter into a detail of the practices of the Church, or recount the daily intercourse of the clergy with their charge. It is the prevailing principles, and the great effects of the system and conduct of the Church towards the body of Christians, that I shall endeavor to bring before you.

  A striking feature, and, I am bound to say, a radical vice in the relations of the Church with the people, was the separation of the governors and the governed which left the governed without any influence upon their government, which established the independence of the clergy with respect to the general body of Christians.

  It would seem as if this evil was called forth by the state of man and society, for it was introduced into the Christian Church at a very early period. The separation of the clergy and the people was not altogether perfected at the time of which we are speaking; there were certain occasions—the election of bishops, for example—upon which the people, at least sometimes, took part in church government. This interference, however, became weaker and weaker, as well as more rare; even in the second century it had begun rapidly and visibly to decline. Indeed, the tendency of the Church to detach itself from the rest of society, the establishment of the independence of the clergy, forms, to a great extent, the history of the Church from its very cradle.

  It is impossible to disguise the fact, that from this circumstance sprang the greater number of abuses, which, from this period, cost the Church so dear; as well as many others which entered into her system in after-times. We must not, however, impute all its faults to this principle, nor must we regard this tendency to isolation as peculiar to the Christian clergy. There is in the very nature of religious society a powerful inclination to elevate the governors above the governed; to regard them as something distinct, something divine. This is the effect of the mission with which they are charged; of the character in which they appear before the people. This effect, however, is more hurtful in a religious society than in any other. For with what do they pretend to interfere? With the reason and conscience and future destiny of man: that is to say, with that which is the closest locked up; with that which is most strictly individual, with that which is most free. We can imagine how, up to a certain point, a man, whatever ill may result from it, may give up the direction of his temporal affairs to an outward authority. We can conceive a notion of that philosopher who, when one told him that his house was on fire, said, “Go and tell my wife; I never meddle with household affairs.” But when our conscience, our thoughts, our intellectual existence are at stake—to give up the government of one’s self, to deliver over one’s very soul to the authority of a stranger, is, indeed, a moral suicide: is, indeed, a thousand times worse than bodily servitude—than to become a mere appurtenance of the soil.

  Such, nevertheless, was the evil, which without ever, as I shall presently show, completely prevailing, invaded more and more the Christian church in its relations with the people. We have already seen, that even in the bosom of the Church itself, the lower orders of the clergy had no guarantee for their liberty; it was much worse, out of the Church, for the laity. Among churchmen there was at least discussion, deliberation, the display of individual faculties; the struggle, itself, supplied in some measure the place of liberty. There was nothing, however, like this between the clergy and the people. The laity had no further share in the government of the Church than as simple lookers-on. Thus we see quickly shoot up and thrive, the idea that theology, that religious questions and affairs, were the privileged territory of the clergy; that the clergy alone had the right, not only to decide upon all matters respecting it, but likewise that they alone had the right to study it, and that the laity ought not to intermeddle with it. At the period of which we are now speaking, this theory had fully established its authority, and it has required ages, and revolutions full of terror, to overcome it; to restore to the public the right of debating religious questions, and inquiring into their truths.

  In principle, then, as well as in fact, the legal separation of the clergy and the laity was nearly completed before the twelfth century.

  It must not, however, be understood, that the Christian world had no influence upon its government during this period. Of legal interference it was destitute, but not of influence. It is, indeed, almost impossible that such should be the case under any kind of government, and more particularly so of one founded upon the common opinions and belief of the governing and governed. For, wherever this community of ideas springs up and expands, wherever the same intellectual movement prevails with government and the people, there necessarily becomes formed between them a tie, which no vice in their organization can ever altogether break. To make you clearly understand what I mean, I will give you an example, familiar to us all, taken from the political world. At no period in the history of France had the French nation less power of a legal nature, I mean by way of institutions, of interfering in the government, than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the reigns of Louis XIV and XV. All the direct and official means by which the people could exercise any authority had been cut off and suppressed. Yet there cannot be a doubt but that the public, the country, exercised, at this time, more influence upon the government than at any other, more, for example, than when the states-general had been frequently convoked; than when the parliaments* intermeddled to a considerable extent in politics, than when the people had a much greater legal participation in the government.

  It must have been observed by all that there exists a power which no law can comprise or suppress, and which, in times of need, goes even further than institutions. Call it the spirit of the age, public intelligence, opinion, or what you will, you cannot doubt its existence. In France, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this public opinion was more powerful than at any other epoch; and, though it was deprived of the legal means of acting upon the government, yet it acted indirectly, by the force of ideas common to the governing and the governed, by the absolute necessity under which the governing found themselves of attending to the opinions of the governed. What took place in the Church from the fifth to the twelfth century was very similar to this. The body of the Christian world, it is true, had no legal means of expressing its desires; but there was a great advancement of mind in religious matters: this movement bore along clergy and laity together, and in this way the people acted upon the Church.

  It is of the greatest importance that these indirect influences should be kept in view in the study of history. They are much more efficacious, and often more salutary, than we take them to be. It is very natural that men should wish their influence to be prompt and apparent; that they should covet the credit of promoting success, of establishing power, of procuring triumph. But this is not always either possible or useful. There are times and situations when the indirect, unperceived influence is more beneficial, more practicable. Let me borrow another illustration from politics. We know that the English parliament more than once, and particularly in 1641, demanded, as many other popular assemblies have done in such cases, the power to nominate the ministers and great officers of the crown. The immense direct force which by this means it would exercise upon the government was regarded as a precious guarantee. But how has it turned out? Why, in the few cases in which it has been permitted to possess this power, the result has been always unfavorable. The choice has been badly concerted; affairs badly conducted. But what is the case in the present day? Is it not the influence of the two houses of parliament which determines the choice of ministers, and the nomination to all the great offices of state? And, though this influence be indirect and general, it is found to work better than the direct interference of parliament, which has always terminated badly.

  There is one reason why this should be so, which I must beg leave to lay before you, at the expense of a few minutes of your time. The direct action upon government supposes those to whom it is confided possessed of superior talents—of superior information, understanding, and prudence. As they go to the object at once, and per saltem as it were, they must be sure not to miss their mark. Indirect influences, on the contrary, pursuing a tortuous course—only arriving at their object through numerous difficulties—become rectified and adapted to their end by the very obstacles they have to encounter. Before they can succeed, they must undergo discussion, be combated and controlled; their triumph is slow, conditional, and partial. It is on this account that where society is not sufficiently advanced to make it prudent to place immediate power in the hands of the people, these indirect influences, though often insufficient, are nevertheless to be preferred. It was by such that the Christian world acted upon its government;—acted, I must allow, very inadequately—by far too little; but still it is something that it acted at all.

  There was another thing which strengthened the tie between the clergy and laity. This was the dispersion of the clergy into every part of the social system. In almost all other cases, where a church has been formed independent of the people whom it governed, the body of priests has been composed of men in nearly the same condition of life. I do not mean that the inequalities of rank were not sufficiently great among them, but that the power was lodged in the hands of colleges of priests living in common, and governing the people submitted to their laws from the innermost recess of some sacred temple. The organization of the Christian church was widely different. From the thatched cottage of the husbandman—from the miserable hut of the serf at the foot of the feudal chateau to the palace of the monarch—there was everywhere a clergyman. This diversity in the situation of the Christian priesthood, their participation in all the varied fortunes of humanity—of common life—was a great bond of union between the laity and clergy; a bond which has been wanting in most other hierarchies invested with power. Besides this, the bishops, the heads of the Christian clergy, were, as we have seen, mixed up with the feudal system: they were, at the same time, members of the civil and of the ecclesiastical governments. This naturally led to similarity of feeling, of interests, of habits, and of manners, in the clergy and laity. There has been a good deal said, and with reason, of military bishops, of priests who led secular lives; but we may be assured that this evil, however great, was not so hurtful as the system which kept priests for ever locked up in a temple, altogether separated from common life. Bishops who took a share in the cares, and, up to a certain point, in the disorders of civil life, were of more use in society than those who were altogether strangers to the people, to their wants, their affairs, and their manners. In our system there has been, in this respect, a similarity of fortune, of condition, which, if it have not altogether corrected, has, at least, softened the evil which the separation of the governing and governed must in all cases prove.

  Now, having pointed out this separation, having endeavored to determine its extent, let us see how the Christian church governed—let us see in what way it acted upon the people under its authority.

  What did it do, on one hand, for the development of man, for the intellectual progress of the individual?

  What did it do, on the other, for the melioration of the social system?

  With regard to individual development, I fear the Church, at this epoch, gave herself but little trouble about it. She endeavored to soften the rugged manners of the great, and to render them more kind and just in their conduct towards the weak. She endeavored to inculcate a life of morality among the poor, and to inspire them with higher sentiments and hopes than the lot in which they were cast would give rise to. I do not believe, however, that for individual man—for the drawing forth or advancement of his capacities—the Church did much, especially for the laity, during this period. What she did in this way was confined to the bosom of her own society. For the development of the clergy, for the instruction of the priesthood, she was anxiously alive: to promote this she had her schools, her colleges, and all other institutions which the deplorable state of society would permit. These schools and colleges, it is true, were all theological, and destined for the education of the clergy alone;* and though, from the intimacy between the civil and religious orders, they could not but have some influence upon the rest of the world, it was very slow and indirect. It cannot, indeed, be denied but the Church, too, necessarily excited and kept alive a general activity of mind, by the career which she opened to all those whom she judged worthy to enlist into her ranks, but beyond this she did little for the intellectual improvement of the laity.

  For the melioration of the social state her labors were greater and more efficacious.

  She combated with much perseverance and pertinacity the great vices of the social condition, particularly slavery. It has been frequently asserted that the abolition of slavery in the modern world must be altogether carried to the credit of Christianity. I believe this is going too far: slavery subsisted for a long time in the bosom of Christian society without much notice being taken of it—without any great outcry against it. To effect its abolition required the co-operation of several causes—a great development of new ideas, of new principles of civilization. It cannot, however, be denied that the Church employed its influence to restrain it; the clergy in general, and especially several popes, enforced the manumission of their slaves as a duty incumbent upon laymen, and loudly inveighed against the scandal of keeping Christians in bondage. Again, the greater part of the forms by which slaves were set free, at various epochs, are founded upon religious motives. It is under the impression of some religious feeling—the hopes of the future, the equality of all Christian men, and so on—that the freedom of the slave is granted.* These, it must be confessed, are rather convincing proofs of the influence of the Church, and of her desire for the abolition of this evil of evils, this iniquity of iniquities!

  The Church labored no less worthily for the improvement of civil and criminal legislation. We know how absurd and wretched this was, notwithstanding some few principles of liberty in it; we have read of the irrational and superstitious proofs to which the barbarians occasionally had recourse—their trial by battle, their ordeals, their oaths of compurgation—as the only means by which they could discover the truth. To replace these by more rational and legitimate proceedings, the Church earnestly labored, and labored not in vain.* I have already spoken of the striking difference between the laws of the Visigoths, mostly promulgated by the councils of Toledo, and the codes of the barbarians. It is impossible to compare them without at once admitting the immense superiority of the notions of the Church in matters of jurisprudence, justice, and legislation—in all relating to the discovery of truth, and a knowledge of human nature. It must certainly be admitted that the greater part of these notions were borrowed from Roman legislation; but it is not less certain that they would have perished if the Church had not preserved and defended them—if she had not labored to spread them abroad.† If the question, for example, is respecting the employment of oaths, open the laws of the Visigoths, and see with what prudence it controls their use:—

  “Let the judge, in order to come at the truth, first interrogate the witnesses, then examine the papers, and not allow of oaths too easily. The investigation of truth and justice demands, that the documents on both sides should be carefully examined, and that the necessity of the oath, suspended over the head of both parties, should only come unexpectedly. Let the oath only be adopted in causes in which the judge shall be able to discover no written documents, no proof, nor guide to the truth.”

  In criminal matters, the punishment is proportioned to the offence, according to tolerably correct notions of philosophy, morals, and justice; the efforts of an enlightened legislator struggling against the violence and caprice of barbarian manners. The chapter De cæde et morte hominum gives us a very favorable example of this, when compared with the corresponding laws of the other nations. Among the latter, it is the damage alone which seems to constitute the crime; and the punishment is sought for in the pecuniary reparation which is made in compounding for it; but in the code of the Visigoths the crime is traced to its true and moral principle—the intention of the perpetrator. Various shades of guilt—involuntary homicide, accidental homicide, justifiable homicide, unpremeditated homicide, and wilful murder—are distinguished and defined nearly as accurately as in our modern codes; the punishments likewise varying, so as to make a fair approximation to justice. The legislator, indeed, carried the principle of justice still further. He endeavored, if not to abolish, at least to lessen, that difference of legal value, which the other barbarian laws put upon the life of man. The only distinction here made was between the freeman and the slave. With regard to the freeman, the punishment did not vary either according to the perpetrator, or according to the rank of the slain, but only according to the moral guilt of the murderer. With regard to slaves, not daring entirely to deprive masters of the right of life and death, he at least endeavored to restrain it and destroy its brutal character by subjecting it to an open and regular procedure.

  The law itself is worthy of citation:

  “If no one who is culpable, or the accomplice in a crime, ought to go unpunished, how much more reasonable is it that those should be restrained who commit homicide maliciously, or from a slight cause! Thus, as masters in their pride often put their slaves to death without any cause, it is proper to extirpate altogether this license, and to decree that the present law shall be for ever binding upon all. No master or mistress shall have power to put to death any of their slaves, male or female, or any of their dependants, without public judgment. If any slave, or other servant, commits a crime which renders him subject to capital punishment, his master or his accuser shall immediately give information to the judge, or count, or duke, of the place in which the crime has been perpetrated. After the matter has been tried, if the crime is proved, let the criminal receive, either by the judge or by his own master, the sentence of death which he has merited; in such manner, however, that if the judge desires not to put the accused to death, he must draw up against him in writing, a capital sentence, and then it will remain with his master to kill him or grant him his life. But when, indeed, a slave, by a fatal audacity, in resisting his master, shall strike, or attempt to strike him with his arm, with a stone, or by any other means; and the master, in defending himself, kills the slave in his anger, the master shall in nowise be liable to the punishment of homicide. But it will be necessary to prove the fact; and that by the testimony or oath of the slaves, male or female, who witnessed it, and also by the oath of the person himself who committed the deed. Whosoever from pure malice shall himself kill a slave, or employ another to do so, without his having been publicly tried, shall be considered infamous, shall be declared incapable of giving evidence, shall be banished for life, and his property be given to his nearest heirs.—(For. Jud., lib. vi, tit. v, 1, 12.)

  There is another circumstance connected with the institutions of the Church, which has not, in general, been so much noticed as it deserves. I allude to its penitential system, which is the more interesting in the present day, because, so far as the principles and applications of moral law are concerned, it is almost completely in unison with the notions of modern philosophy. If we look closely into the nature of the punishments inflicted by the Church at public penance, which was its principal mode of punishing, we shall find that their object was, above all other things, to excite repentance in the soul of the guilty; in that of the lookers on, the moral terror of example. But there is another idea which mixes itself up with this—the idea of expiation. I know not, generally speaking, whether it be possible to separate the idea of punishment from that of expiation; and whether there be not in all punishment, independently of the desire to awaken the guilty to repentance, and to deter those from vice who might be under temptation, a secret and imperious desire to expiate the wrong committed. Putting this question, however, aside, it is sufficiently evident that repentance and example were the objects proposed by the Church in every part of its system of penance.* And is not the attainment of these very objects the end of every truly philosophical legislation? Is it not for the sake of these very principles that the most enlightened lawyers have clamored for a reform in the penal legislation of Europe? Open their books—those of Jeremy Bentham for example* —and you will be astonished at the numerous resemblances which you will everywhere find between their plans of punishment and those adopted by the Church. We may be quite sure that they have not borrowed them from her; and the Church could scarcely foresee that her example would one day be quoted in support of the system of philosophers not very remarkable for their devotion.

  Finally, she endeavored by every means in her power to suppress the frequent recourse which at this period was had to violence and the continual wars to which society was so prone. It is well known what the truce of God was, as well as a number of other similar measures by which the Church hoped to prevent the employment of physical force, and to introduce into the social system more order and gentleness. The facts under this head are so well known, that I shall not go into any detail concerning them.†

  Having now run over the principal points to which I wished to draw attention respecting the relations of the Church to the people; having now considered it under the three aspects, which I proposed to do, we know it within and without; in its interior constitution, and in its twofold relations with society. It remains for us to deduce from what we have learned by way of inference, by way of conjecture, its general influence upon European civilization. This is already partly done. The simple recital of the predominant facts and principles of the Church, both reveals and explains its influence: the results have in a manner been brought before us with the causes. If, however, we endeavor to sum them up, we shall be led, I think, to two general conclusions.

  The first is, that the Church has exercised a vast and important influence upon the moral and intellectual order of Europe; upon the notions, sentiments, and manners of society. This fact is evident; the intellectual and moral progress of Europe has been essentially theological. Look at its history from the fifth to the sixteenth century, and you will find throughout that theology has possessed and directed the human mind; every idea is impressed with theology; every question that has been started, whether philosophical, political, or historical, has been considered from a religious point of view. So powerful, indeed, has been the authority of the Church in matters of intellect, that even the mathematical and physical sciences have been obliged to submit to its doctrines. The spirit of theology has been as it were the blood which has circulated in the veins of the European world down to the time of Bacon and Descartes. Bacon in England, and Descartes in France, were the first who carried the human mind out of the pale of theology. We shall find the same fact hold if we travel through the regions of literature: the habits, the sentiments, the language of theology there show themselves at every step.

  This influence, taken altogether, has been salutary. It not only kept up and ministered to the intellectual movement in Europe, but the system of doctrines and precepts, by whose authority it stamped its impress upon that movement, was incalculably superior to any which the ancient world had known.*

  The influence of the Church, moreover, has given to the development of the human mind, in our modern world, an extent and variety which it never possessed elsewhere. In the East, intelligence was altogether religious: among the Greeks, it was almost exclusively human: in the former human culture—humanity, properly so called, its nature and destiny—actually disappeared; with the latter it was man alone, his passions, his feelings, his present interests, which occupied the field. In our world the spirit of religion mixes itself with all but excludes nothing. Human feelings, human interests, occupy a considerable space in every branch of our literature; yet the religious character of man, that portion of his being which connects him with another world, appears at every turn in them all. Could modern intelligence assume a visible shape, we should recognize at once, in its mixed character, the finger of man and the finger of God. Thus the two great sources of human development, humanity and religion, have been open at the same time and have flowed in plenteous streams. Notwithstanding all the evil, all the abuses, which may have crept into the Church—notwithstanding all the acts of tyranny of which she has been guilty, we must still acknowledge her influence upon the progress and culture of the human intellect to have been beneficial; that she has assisted in its development rather than its compression, in its extension rather than its confinement.†

  The case is widely different when we look at the Church in a political point of view. By softening the rugged manners and sentiments of the people; by raising her voice against a great number of practical barbarisms, and doing what she could to expel them, there is no doubt but the Church largely contributed to the melioration of the social condition; but with regard to politics, properly so called, with regard to all that concerns the relations between the governing and the governed—between power and liberty—I cannot conceal my opinion, that its influence has been baneful. In this respect the Church has always shown herself as the interpreter and defender of two systems, equally vicious, that is, of theocracy, and of the imperial tyranny of the Roman empire—that is to say, of despotism, both religious and civil. Examine all its institutions, all its laws; peruse its canons, look at its procedure, and you will everywhere find the maxims either of theocracy or of the empire. In her weakness, the Church sheltered herself under the absolute power of the Roman emperors; in her strength she laid claim to it herself, under the name of spiritual power. We must not here confine ourselves to a few particular facts. The Church has often, no doubt, set up and defended the rights of the people against the bad government of their rulers; often, indeed, has she approved and excited insurrection; often too has she maintained the rights and interests of the people in the face of their sovereigns. But when the question of political securities arose between power and liberty; when any step was taken to establish a system of permanent institutions, which might effectually protect liberty from the invasions of power in general; the Church always ranged herself on the side of despotism.

  This should not astonish us, neither should we be too ready to attribute it to any particular failing in the clergy, or to any particular vice in the Church. There is a more profound and powerful cause. What is the object of religion? of any religion, true or false? It is to govern the human passions, the human will. All religion is a restraint, an authority, a government. It comes in the name of a divine law, to subdue, to mortify human nature. It is then to human liberty that it directly opposes itself. It is human liberty that resists it, and that it wishes to overcome. This is the grand object of religion, its mission, its hope.

  But while it is with human liberty that all religions have to contend, while they aspire to reform the will of man, they have no means by which they can act upon him—they have no moral power over him, but through his own will, his liberty. When they make use of external means, when they resort to force, to seduction, in short, to any means opposed to the free consent of man, when they treat him as we treat water, wind, or any power entirely physical, they fail in their object; they do not attain their end, they do not reach, they cannot govern the will. Before religions can really accomplish their task, it is necessary that they should be accepted by the free-will of man: it is necessary that man should submit, but it must be willingly and freely, and that he still preserves his liberty in the midst of this submission. This is the double problem which religions are called upon to solve.

  They have too often mistaken their object. They have regarded liberty as an obstacle, and not as a means; they have forgotten the nature of the power to which they address themselves, and have conducted themselves towards the human soul as they would towards a material force. It is this error that has led them to range themselves on the side of power, on the side of despotism, against human liberty; regarding it as an adversary, they have endeavored to subjugate rather than to protect it. Had religions but fairly considered their means of operation, had they not suffered themselves to be drawn away by a natural but deceitful bias, they would have seen that liberty is a condition, without which man cannot be morally governed; that religion neither has nor ought to have any means of influence not strictly moral: they would have respected the will of man in their attempt to govern it. They have too often forgotten this, and the issue has been that religious power and liberty have suffered together.

  I will not push further this investigation of the general consequences that have followed the influence of the Church upon European civilization. I have summed them up in this double result,—a great and salutary influence upon its moral and intellectual condition; an influence rather hurtful than beneficial to its political condition. We have now to try our assertions by facts, to verify by history what we have as yet only deduced from the nature and situation of ecclesiastical society. Let us now see what was the fate of the Christian church from the fifth to the twelfth century, and whether the principles which I have laid down, the results which I have endeavored to draw from them, have really been such as I have represented them.

  Let me caution you, however, against supposing that these principles, these results, appeared all at once, and as clearly as they are here set forth by me. We are apt to fall into the great and common error, in looking at the past through centuries of distance, of forgetting moral chronology; we are apt to forget (extraordinary forgetfulness!) that history is essentially successive. Take the life of any man, of Oliver Cromwell, of Cardinal Richelieu, of Gustavus Adolphus. He enters upon his career; he pushes forward in life, and rises; great circumstances act upon him; he acts upon great circumstances. He arrives at the end of all things—and then it is we know him. But it is in his whole character; it is as a complete, a finished piece; such, in a manner, as he is turned out, after long labor, from the workshop of Providence. Now at the outset he was not what he thus became; he was not completed—not finished at any single moment of his life; he was formed progressively. Men are formed morally in the same way as they are physically. They change every day. Their existence is constantly undergoing some modification. The Cromwell of 1650 was not the Cromwell of 1640. It is true, there is always a large stock of individuality; the same man still holds on; but how many ideas, how many sentiments, how many inclinations have changed in him! What a number of things he has lost and acquired! Thus, at whatever moment of his life we may look at a man, he is never such as we see him when his course is finished.

  It is here, nevertheless, that a great number of historians have fallen into error. When they have acquired a complete idea of a man, have settled his character, they see him in this same character throughout his whole career. With them, it is the same Cromwell who enters parliament in 1628, and who dies in the palace of Whitehall thirty years afterwards. Just such mistakes as these we are apt to fall into with regard to institutions and general influences. I caution you against them. I have laid down in their complete form, as a whole, the principles of the Church, and the consequences which may be deduced from them. Be assured, however, that historically this picture is not true. All it represents has taken place disjointedly, successively; has been scattered here and there over space and time. Expect not to find, in the recital of events, a similar completeness or whole, the same prompt and systematic connection. One principle will be visible here, another there; all will be incomplete, unequal, dispersed; we must come to modern times, to the end of its career, before we can view it as a whole.

  I shall now lay before you the various states through which the Church passed from the fifth to the twelfth century. We may not find, perhaps, the complete demonstration of the statements which I have made, but we shall see enough, I apprehend, to convince us that they are founded in truth.

  The first state in which we see the Church in the fifth century, is as the Church imperial—the Church of the Roman empire. Just at the time the empire fell, the Church believed she had attained the summit of her hopes: after a long struggle, she had completely vanquished paganism. Gratian, the last emperor who assumed the pagan dignity of sovereign pontiff, died at the close of the fourth century. The Church believed herself equally victorious in her struggle against heretics, particularly against Arianism, the principal heresy of the time. Theodosius, at the end of the fourth century, put them down by his imperial edicts; and had the double merit of subduing the Arian heresy and abolishing the worship of idols throughout the Roman world. The Church, then, was in possession of the government, and had obtained the victory over her two greatest enemies. It was at this moment that the Roman empire failed her, and she stood in the presence of new pagans, of new heretics—in the presence of the barbarians, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Franks.* The fall was immense. You may easily imagine that an affectionate attachment for the empire was for a long time preserved in the Romish church. Hence we see her cherish so fondly all that was left of it—municipal government and absolute power. Hence, when she had succeeded in converting the barbarians, she endeavored to re-establish the empire; she called upon the barbarian kings, she conjured them to become Roman emperors, to assume the privilege of Roman emperors; to enter into the same relations with the Church which had existed between her and the Roman empire. This was the great object for which the bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries labored.* Such was the general state of the Church.

  The attempt could not succeed—it was impossible to make a Roman empire, to mould a Roman society out of barbarians. Like the civil world, the Church herself sunk into barbarism. This was her second state. Comparing the writings of the monkish ecclesiastical chroniclers of the eighth century with those of the preceding six, the difference is immense. All remains of Roman civilization had disappeared, even its very language—all became buried in complete barbarism. On one side the rude barbarians, entering into the Church, became bishops and priests; on the other, the bishops, adopting the barbarian life, became, without quitting their bishoprics, chiefs of bands of marauders, and wandered over the country, pillaging and destroying like so many companies of Clovis. Gregory of Tours† gives an account of several bishops who thus passed their lives, and among others Salone and Sagittarius.

  Two important facts took place while the Church continued in this state of barbarism. The first was the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers. Nothing could be more natural than the birth of this principle at this epoch. The Church would have restored the absolute power of the Roman empire that she might partake of it, but she could not; she therefore sought her safety in independence. It became necessary that she should be able in all parts to defend herself by her own power; for she was threatened in every quarter. Every bishop, every priest, saw the rude chiefs in their neighborhood interfering in the affairs of the Church, that they might obtain a part of her wealth, her territory, her power; and no other means of defence seemed left but to say, “The spiritual order is completely separated from the temporal; you have no right to interfere with it.” This principle became, at every point of attack, the defensive armor of the Church against barbarism.

  A second important fact which took place at this same period, was the establishment of the monastic orders in the West. It was at the commencement of the sixth century that St. Benedict published the rules of his order for the use of the monks of the West, then few in number, but who from this time prodigiously increased. The monks at this epoch did not yet belong to the clerical body, but were still regarded as a part of the laity. Priests and even bishops were sometimes chosen from among them; but it was not till the close of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century that monks in general were considered as belonging to the clergy, properly so called. Priests and bishops now entered the cloister, thinking by so doing they advanced a step in their religious life, and increased the sanctity of their office. The monastic life thus all at once became exceedingly popular throughout Europe. The monks had a greater power over the imagination of the barbarians than the secular clergy. The simple bishop and priest had in some measure lost their hold upon the minds of barbarians, who were accustomed to see them every day; to maltreat, perhaps to pillage them. It was a more important matter to attack a monastery, a body of holy men congregated in a holy place. Monasteries, therefore, became during this barbarous period an asylum for the Church, as the Church was for the laity. Pious men here took refuge, as others in the East had done before in the Thebaid, in order to escape the worldly life and corruption of Constantinople.*

  These, then, are the two most important facts in the history of the Church, during the period of barbarism. Eirst, the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers; and, secondly, the introduction and establishment of the monastic orders in the West.

  Towards the end of this period of barbarism, a fresh attempt was made to raise up a new Roman empire—I allude to the attempt of Charlemagne. The Church and the civil sovereign again contracted a close alliance. The Holy See was full of docility while this lasted, and greatly increased its power. The attempt, however, again failed. The empire of Charlemagne was broken up; but the advantages which the See of Rome derived from his alliance were great and permanent. The popes henceforward were decidedly the chiefs of the Christian world.

  Upon the death of Charlemagne, another period of unsettledness and confusion followed. The Church, together with civil society, again fell into a chaos; again with civil society she arose, and with it entered into the frame of the feudal system. This was the third state of the Church. The dissolution of the empire formed by Charlemagne, was followed by nearly the same results in the Church as in civil life; all unity disappeared, all became local, partial, and individual. Now began a struggle, in the situation of the clergy, such as had scarcely ever before been seen: it was the struggle of the feelings and interest of the possessor of the fief, with the feelings and interest of the priest. The chiefs of the clergy were placed in this double situation; the spirit of the priest and of the temporal baron struggled within them for mastery. The ecclesiastical spirit naturally became weakened and divided by this process—it was no longer so powerful, so universal. Individual interest began to prevail. A taste for independence, the habits of the feudal life, loosened the ties of the hierarchy. In this state of things, the Church made an attempt within its own bosom to correct the effects of the general break-up. It endeavored in several parts of its empire, by means of federation, by common assemblies and deliberations, to organize national Churches. It is during this period, during the sway of the feudal system, that we meet with the greatest number of councils, convocations, and ecclesiastical assemblies, as well provincial as national. In France especially, this endeavor at unity appeared to be followed up with much spirit. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, may be considered as the representative of this idea. He labored incessantly to organize the French Church; he sought out and employed every means of correspondence and union which he thought likely to introduce into the feudal church a little more unity. We find him on one side maintaining the independence of the Church with respect to temporal power, on the other its independence with respect to the Roman See; it was he who, learning that the pope wished to come to France, and threatened to excommunicate the bishops, said, Si excommunicaturus venerit, excommunicatus abibit,—If he shall come to excommunicate, he will go away excommunicated.

  But the attempt thus to organize a feudal church succeeded no better than the attempt to re-establish the imperial one. There were no means of reproducing any degree of unity among its members; it tended more and more towards dissolution. Each bishop, each prelate, each abbot, isolated himself more and more in his diocese or monastery. Abuses and disorders increased from the same cause. At no time was the crime of simony carried to a greater extent, at no time were ecclesiastical benefices disposed of in a more arbitrary manner, never were the morals of the clergy more loose and disorderly.

  Both the people and the better portion of the clergy were greatly scandalized at this sad state of things; and a desire for reform in the Church soon began to show itself—a desire to find some authority round which it might rally its better principles, and which might impose some wholesome restraints on the others. Several bishops, Claude of Turin, Agobard of Lyons, and others, in their respective dioceses attempted this, but in vain; they were not in a condition to accomplish so vast a work. In the whole Church there was only one power that could succeed in this, and that was the Roman See; nor was that power slow in assuming the position which it wished to attain. In the course of the eleventh century, the Church entered upon its fourth state—that of a theocracy supported by monastic institutions.

  The person who raised the Holy See to this power, so far as it can be considered the work of an individual, was Gregory VII.*

  It has been the custom to represent this great pontiff as an enemy to all improvement, as opposed to intellectual development, to the progress of society; as a man whose desire was to keep the world stationary or retrograding. Nothing is farther from the truth. Gregory, like Charlemagne and Peter the Great, was a reformer of the despotic school. The part he played in the Church was very similar to that which Charlemagne and Peter the Great, the one in France and the other in Russia, played among the laity. He wished to reform the Church first, and next civil society by the Church. He wished to introduce into the world more morality, more justice, more order and regularity; he wished to do all this through the Holy See, and to turn all to its profit.

  While Gregory was endeavoring to bring the civil world into subjection to the Church, and the Church to the See of Rome—not, as I have said before, to keep it stationary, or make it retrograde, but with a view to its reform and improvement—an attempt of the same nature, a similar movement, was made within the solitary enclosures of the monasteries. The want of order, of discipline, and of a stricter morality, was severely felt and cried out for with a zeal that would not be said nay. About this time Robert De Molême established his severe rule at Cîteaux; about the same time flourished St. Norbert, and the reform of the canons, the reform of Cluny,* and, at last, the great reform of St. Bernard. A general fermentation reigned within the monasteries: the old monks did not like this; in defending themselves, they called these reforms an attack upon their liberty; pleaded the necessity of conforming to the manners of the times, that it was impossible to return to the discipline of the primitive Church, and treated all these reformers as madmen, as enthusiasts, as tyrants. Dip into the history of Normandy, by Ordericus Vitalius, and you will meet with these complaints at almost every page.

  All this seemed greatly in favor of the Church, of its unity, and of its power. While, however, the popes of Rome sought to usurp the government of the world, while the monasteries enforced a better code of morals and a severer form of discipline, a few mighty, though solitary individuals protested in favor of human reason, and asserted its claim to be heard, its right to be consulted, in the formation of man’s opinions. The greater part of these philosophers forbore to attack commonly received opinions—I mean religious creeds; all they claimed for reason was the right to be heard—all they declared was, that she had the right to try these truths by her own tests, and that it was not enough that they should be merely affirmed by authority. John Erigena, or John Scotus, as he is more frequently called, Roscelin, Abelard, and others, became the noble interpreters of individual reason, when it now began to claim its lawful inheritance. It was the teaching and writings of these giants of their days that first put in motion that desire for intellectual liberty, which kept pace with the reform of Gregory VII and St. Bernard. If we examine the general character of this movement of mind, we shall find that it sought not a change of opinion, that it did not array itself against the received system of faith; but that it simply advocated the right of reason to work for itself—in short, the right of free inquiry.

  The scholars of Abelard, as he himself tells us, in his Introduction to Theology, requested him to give them “some philosophical arguments, such as were fit to satisfy their minds; begged that he would instruct them, not merely to repeat what he taught them, but to understand it; for no one can believe that which he does not comprehend, and it is absurd to set out to preach to others concerning things which neither those who teach nor those who learn can understand. What other end can the study of philosophy have, if not to lead us to a knowledge of God, to which all studies should be subordinate? For what purpose is the reading of profane authors, and of books which treat of worldly affairs, permitted to believers, if not to enable them to understand the truths of the Holy Scriptures, and to give them the abilities necessary to defend them? It is above all things desirable for this purpose, that we should strengthen one another with all the powers of reason; so that in questions so difficult and complicated as those which form the object of Christian faith, you may be able to hinder the subtilties of its enemies from too easily corrupting its purity.”

  The importance of this first attempt after liberty, or this rebirth of the spirit of free inquiry, was not long in making itself felt. Though busied with its own reform, the Church soon took the alarm, and at once declared war against these new reformers, whose methods gave it more reason to fear than their doctrines. This clamor of human reason was the grand circumstance which burst forth at the close of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth centuries, just at the time when the Church was establishing its theocratic and monastic form. At this epoch, a serious struggle for the first time broke out between the clergy and the advocates of free inquiry. The quarrels of Abelard and St. Bernard, the councils of Soissons and Sens, at which Abelard was condemned, were nothing more than the expression of this fact, which holds so important a place in the history of modern civilization.* It was the principal occurrence which affected the Church in the twelfth century; the point at which we will, for the present, take leave of it.

  But at this same instant another power was put in motion, which, though altogether of a different character, was perhaps one of the most interesting and important in the progress of society during the middle ages—I mean the institution of free cities and boroughs; or what is called the enfranchisement of the commons. How strange is the inconsistency of grossness and ignorance! If it had been told to these early citizens who vindicated their liberties with such enthusiasm, that there were certain men who cried out for the rights of human reason, the right of free inquiry, men whom the Church regarded as heretics, they would have stoned or burned them on the spot. Abelard and his friends more than once ran the risk of suffering this kind of martyrdom. On the other hand, these same philosophers, who were so bold in their demands for the privileges of reason, spoke of the enfranchisement of the commons as an abominable revolution, calculated to destroy civil society. Between the movement of philosophy and the movement of the commons—between political liberty and the liberty of the human mind—a war seemed to be declared; and it has required ages to reconcile these two powers, and to make them understand that their interests are the same. In the twelfth century they had nothing in common, as we shall more fully see in the next lecture, which will be devoted to the formation of free cities and municipal corporations.

  LECTURE VII.

  RISE OF FREE CITIES.

  We have already, in our previous lectures, brought down the history of the two first great elements of modern civilization, the feudal system and the Church, to the twelfth century. The third of these fundamental elements—that of the commons, or free corporate cities—will form the subject of the present, and I propose to limit it to the same period as that occupied by the other two.

  It is necessary, however, that I should notice, on entering upon this subject, a difference which exists between corporate cities and the feudal system and the Church. The two latter, although they increased in influence, and were subject to many changes, yet show themselves as completed, as having put on a definite form, between the fifth and the twelfth centuries—we see their rise, growth, and maturity. Not so the free cities. It is not till towards the close of this period—till the eleventh and twelfth centuries—that corporate cities make any figure in history. Not that I mean to assert that their previous history does not merit attention; not that there are not evident traces of their existence before this period; all I would observe is, that they did not, previously to the eleventh century, perform any important part in the great drama of the world, as connected with modern civilization. Again, with regard to the feudal system and the Church; we have seen them, between the fifth century and the twelfth, act with power upon the social system; we have seen the effects they produced; by regarding them as two great principles, we have arrived, by way of induction, by way of conjecture, at certain results which we have verified by referring to facts themselves. This, however, we cannot do with regard to corporations. We only see these in their childhood. I can scarcely go further to-day than inquire into their causes, their origin; and the few observations I shall make respecting their effects—respecting the influence of corporate cities upon modern civilization, will be rather a foretelling of what afterwards came to pass, than a recounting of what actually took place. I cannot, at this period, call in the testimony of known and contemporary events, because it was not till between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries that corporations attained any degree of perfection and influence, that these institutions bore any fruit, and that we can verify our assertions by history. I mention this difference of situation, in order to forewarn you of that which you may find incomplete and premature in the sketch I am about to give you.

  Let us suppose that in the year 1789, at the commencement of the terrible regeneration of France, a burgess of the twelfth century had risen from his grave, and made his appearance among us, and some one had put into his hands (for we will suppose he could read) one of those spirit-stirring pamphlets which caused so much excitement, for instance, that of M. Sieyes, What is the Third Estate? (“Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?”) If, in looking at this, he had met the following passage, which forms the basis of the pamphlet:—“The third estate is the French nation without the nobility and clergy:” what, let me ask, would be the impression such a sentence would make on this burgess’s mind? Is it probable that he would understand it? No: he would not be able to comprehend the meaning of the words, “the French nation,” because they remind him of no facts or circumstances with which he would be acquainted, but represent a state of things to the existence of which he is an entire stranger; but if he did understand the phrase, and had a clear apprehension that the absolute sovereignty was lodged in the third estate, it is beyond a question that he would characterize such a proposition as almost absurd and impious, so utterly at variance would it be with his feelings and his ideas of things—so contradictory to the experience and observation of his whole life.

  If we now suppose the astonished burgess to be introduced into any one of the free cities of France which had existed in his time—say Rheims, or Beauvais, or Laon, or Noyon—we shall see him still more astonished and puzzled: he enters the town, he sees no towers, ramparts, militia, or any other kind of defence; everything exposed, everything an easy spoil to the first depredator, the town ready to fall into the hands of the first assailant. The burgess is alarmed at the insecurity of this free city, which he finds in so defenceless and unprotected a condition. He then proceeds into the heart of the town; he inquires how things are going on, what is the nature of its government, and the character of its inhabitants. He learns that there is an authority not resident within its walls, which imposes whatever taxes it pleases to levy upon them without their consent; which requires them to keep up a militia, and to serve in the army without their inclination being consulted. They talk to him about the magistrates, about the mayor and aldermen, and he is obliged to hear that the burgesses have nothing to do with their nomination. He learns that the munieipal government is not conducted by the burgesses, but that a servant of the king, a steward living at a distance, has the sole management of their affairs.* In addition to this, he is informed that they are prohibited from assembling to take into consideration matters immediately concerning themselves, that the church bells have ceased to announce public meetings for such purposes. The burgess of the twelfth century is struck dumb with confusion—a moment since he was amazed at the greatness, the importance, the vast superiority which the “Third Estate” so vauntingly arrogated to itself; but now, upon examination, he finds them deprived of all civic rights, and in a state of thraldom and degradation far more intolerable than he had ever before witnessed. He passes suddenly from one extreme to the other, from the spectacle of a corporation exercising sovereign power to a corporation without any power at all: how is it possible that he should understand this, or be able to reconcile it? his head must be turned, and his faculties lost in wonder and confusion.

  Now, let us burgesses of the nineteenth century imagine, in our turn, that we are transported back into the twelfth. A twofold appearance, but exactly reversed, presents itself to us in a precisely similar manner. If we regard the affairs of the public in general—the state, the government, the country, the nation at large, we shall neither see nor hear anything of burgesses; they were mere ciphers—of no importance or consideration whatever. Not only so, but if we would know in what estimation they held themselves as a body, what weight, what influence they attached to themselves with respect to their relations towards the government of France as a nation, we shall receive a reply to our inquiry in language expressive of deep humility and timidity; while we shall find their masters, the lords, from whom they subsequently wrested their franchises, treating them, at least as far as words go, with a pride and scorn truly amazing; yet these indignities do not appear, in the slightest degree, to provoke or astonish their submissive vassals.

  But let us enter one of these free cities, and see what is going on within it. Here things take quite another turn: we find ourselves in a fortified town, defended by armed burgesses. These burgesses fix their own taxes, elect their own magistrates, have their own courts of judicature, their own public assemblies for deliberating upon public measures, from which none are excluded. They make war on their own account, even against their suzerain, and maintain their own militia. In short, they govern themselves, they are sovereigns.

  Here we have a similar contrast to that which made France, of the eighteenth century, so perplexing to the burgess of the twelfth; the parts only are changed. In the present day the burgesses, in a national point of view, are everything—municipalities nothing; formerly municipalities were everything, while the burgesses, as respects the nation, were nothing. From this it will appear evident that many things, many extraordinary events, and even many revolutions, must have happened between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, in order to bring about so great a change as that which has taken place in the social condition of this class of society. But however vast this change, there can be no doubt but that the commons, the third estate of 1789, politically speaking, are the descendants, the heirs of the free towns of the twelfth century. And the present haughty, ambitious French nation, which aspires so high, which proclaims so pompously its sovereignty, and pretends not only to have regenerated and to govern itself, but to regenerate and rule the whole world, is indisputably descended from those very free burghers who revolted in the twelfth century—with great spirit and courage it must be allowed, but with no nobler object than that of escaping to some remote corner of the land from the vexatious tyranny of a few nobles.

  It would be in vain to expect that the condition of the free towns in the twelfth century will reveal the causes of a metamorphosis such as this, which resulted from a series of events that took place between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. It is in these events that we shall discover the causes of this change as we go on. Nevertheless, the origin of the “Third Estate” has played a striking part in its history; and though we may not be able therein to trace out the whole secret of its destiny, we shall, at least, there meet with the seeds of it; that which it was at first, again occurs in that which it has become, and this to a much greater extent than might be presumed from appearances. A sketch, however imperfect, of the state of the free cities in the twelfth century, will, I think, convince you of this fact.

  In order to understand the condition of the free cities at that time properly, it is necessary to consider them from two points of view. There are two great questions to be determined: first, that of the enfranchisement of the commons, or cities—that is to say, how this revolution was brought about, what were its causes, what alteration it effected in the condition of the burgesses, what in that of society in general, and in that of all the other orders of the state. The second question relates to the government of the free cities, the internal condition of the enfranchised towns, with reference to the burgesses residing within them, the principles, forms, and customs that prevailed among them.

  From these two sources—namely, the change introduced into the social position of the burgesses, on the one hand, and from the internal government, from their municipal economy, on the other, has flowed all their influence upon modern civilization. All the circumstances that can be traced to their influence, may be referred to one of those two causes. As soon, then, as we thoroughly understand, and can satisfactorily account for, the enfranchisement of the free cities on the one hand, and the formation of their government on the other, we shall be in possession of the two keys to their history. In conclusion, I shall say a few words on the great diversity of conditions in the free cities of Europe. The facts which I am about to lay before you are not to be applied indiscriminately to all the free cities of the twelfth century—to those of Italy, Spain, England, and France alike; many of the facts were undoubtedly common to them all, but the points of difference are great and important. I shall point them out to your notice as I proceed. We shall meet with them again at a more advanced stage of our civilization, and can then examine them more closely.

  In acquainting ourselves with the history of the enfranchisement of the free towns, we must remember what was the state of those towns between the fifth and eleventh centuries—from the fall of the Roman empire to the time when municipal revolution commenced. Here, I repeat, the differences are striking: the condition of the towns varied amazingly in the different countries of Europe; still there are some facts which may be regarded as nearly common to them all, and it is to these that I shall confine my observations. When I have gone through these, I shall say a few words more particularly respecting the free towns of France, and especially those of the north, beyond the Rhone and the Loire; these will form prominent figures in the sketch I am about to make.

  After the fall of the Roman empire, between the fifth and tenth centuries, the towns were in a state neither of servitude nor of freedom. We here again run the same risk of error in the employment of words, that I spoke to you of in a previous lecture in describing the character of men and events. When a society and its language have lasted a considerable time, its words acquire a complete, a determinate, a precise, a sort of legal official signification. Time has introduced into the signification of every term a multitude of ideas, which are awakened within us every time we hear it pronounced, but which, as they do not all bear the same date, are not all suitable at the same time. The terms servitude and freedom, for example, call to our minds ideas far more precise and definite than are warranted by the facts of the eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries. If we say that the towns in the eighth century were in a state of freedom, we say by far too much; we attach now to the word freedom a signification which does not represent the fact of the eighth century. We shall fall into the same error, if we say that the towns were in a state of servitude; for this term implies a state of things very different from the circumstances of the municipal towns of those days. I say again, then, that the towns were in a state neither of freedom nor of servitude; they suffered all the evils to which weakness is liable; they were a prey to the continual depredations, rapacity, and violence of the strong; yet, notwithstanding these horrid disorders, and their impoverished and diminishing population, the towns had, and still maintained, a certain degree of importance; in most of them there was a clergyman, a bishop who exercised great authority, who possessed great influence over the people, and served as a tie between them and their conquerors, thus maintaining the city in a sort of independence, by throwing over it the protecting shield of religion. Besides this, there were still left in the towns some valuable fragments of Roman institutions. We are indebted to the careful researches of MM. de Savigny and Hullmann, Mademoiselle de Lézardière,* and others, for having furnished us with many circumstances of this nature. We hear often, at this period, of the convocation of the senate, of the curiœ,* of public assemblies, of municipal magistrates. Matters of police, wills, donations, and a multitude of civil transactions, were concluded in the curiœ by the magistrates, in the same way that they had previously been done under the Roman municipal government.

  These remains of urban activity and freedom were gradually disappearing, it is true, from day to day. Barbarism and disorder, evils always increasing, accelerated depopulation. The establishment of the lords of the country in the rural districts, and the rising preponderance of agricultural life, became added causes of the decline of the cities. The bishops themselves, after they had incorporated themselves into the feudal frame, attached much less importance to their municipal life. Finally, upon the triumph of the feudal system, the towns, without falling into the slavery of the agriculturists, were entirely subjected to the control of a lord, were included in some fief, and lost by this title, somewhat of the independence which still remained to them, and which, indeed, they had continued to possess, even in the most barbarous times—even in the first centuries of invasion. So that from the fifth century up to the time of the complete organization of the feudal system, the state of the towns was continually getting worse.†

  When once, however, the feudal system was fairly established, when every man had taken his place, and become fixed as it were to the soil, when the wandering life had entirely ceased, the towns again assumed some importance—a new activity began to display itself within them. This is not surprising. Human activity, as we all know, is like the fertility of the soil,—when the disturbing process is over, it reappears and makes all to grow and blossom; wherever there appears the least glimmering of peace and order the hopes of man are excited, and with his hopes his industry. This is what took place in the cities. No sooner was society a little settled under the feudal system, than the proprietors of fiefs began to feel new wants, and to acquire a certain degree of taste for improvement and melioration; this gave rise to some little commerce and industry in the towns of their domains; wealth and population increased within them,—slowly indeed, but still they increased. Among other circumstances which aided in bringing this about, there is one which, in my opinion, has not been sufficiently noticed,—I mean the asylum, the protection which the churches afforded to fugitives. Before the free towns were constituted, before they were in a condition by their power, their fortifications, to offer an asylum to the desolate population of the country, when there was no place of safety for them but the Church, this circumstance alone was sufficient to draw into the cities many unfortunate persons and fugitives. These sought refuge either in the Church itself or within its precincts; it was not merely the lower orders, such as serfs, villeins, and so on, that sought this protection, but frequently men of considerable rank and wealth, who might chance to be proscribed. The chronicles of the times are full of examples of this kind. We find men lately powerful, who upon being attacked by some more powerful neighbor, or by the king himself, abandon their dwellings, carrying away all the property they can secure, enter into some city, and placing themselves under the protection of a church, become citizens. Refugees of this sort had, in my opinion, a considerable influence upon the progress of the cities; they introduced into them, besides their wealth, elements of a population superior to the great mass of their inhabitants. We know, moreover, that when once an assemblage somewhat considerable is formed in any place, other persons naturally flock to it, perhaps from finding it a place of greater security, or perhaps from that sociable disposition of our nature which never abandons us.*

  By the concurrence of all these causes, the cities regained a small portion of power as soon as the feudal system was not restored to an equal extent.* The roving, wandering life had, it is true, in a great measure ceased, but to the conquerors, to the new proprietors of the soil, this roving life was one great means of gratifying their passions. When they desired to pillage, they made an excursion, they went afar to seek a better fortune, another domain. When they became more settled, when they considered it necessary to renounce their predatory expeditions, the same passions, the same gross desires, still remained in full force. But the weight of these now fell upon those whom they found ready at hand, upon the powerful of the world, upon the cities. Instead of going afar to pillage, they pillaged what was near. The exactions of the proprietors of fiefs upon the burgesses were redoubled at the end of the tenth century. Whenever the lord of the domain, by which a city was girt, felt a desire to increase his wealth, he gratified his avarice at the expense of the citizens. It was more particularly at this period that the citizens complained of the total want of commercial security. Merchants, on returning from their trading rounds, could not, with safety, return to their city. Every avenue was taken possession of by the lord of the domain and his vassals. The moment in which industry commenced its career, was precisely that in which security was most wanting. Nothing is more galling to an active spirit, than to be deprived of the long-anticipated pleasure of enjoying the fruits of his industry. When robbed of this, he is far more irritated and vexed than when made to suffer in a state that has become fixed and monotonous, than when that which is torn from him is not the fruit of his own activity, has not excited in him all the joys of hope. There is in the progressive movement, which elevates a man or a people towards a new fortune, a spirit of resistance against iniquity and violence much more energetic than in any other situation.

  Such, then, was the state of cities during the course of the tenth century. They possessed more strength, more importance, more wealth, more interests to defend. At the same time, it became more necessary than ever to defend them, for these interests, their wealth and their strength, became objects of desire to the nobles.* With the means of resistance, the danger and difficulty increased also. Besides, the feudal system gave to all connected with it a perpetual example of resistance; the idea of an organized energetic government, capable of keeping society in order and regularity by its intervention, had never presented itself to the spirits of that period. On the contrary, there was a perpetual recurrence of individual will, refusing to submit to authority. Such was the conduct of the major part of the holders of fiefs towards their suzerains, of the small proprietors of land to the greater; so that at the very time when the cities were oppressed and tormented, at the moment when they had new and greater interests to sustain, they had before their eyes a continual lesson of insurrection. The feudal system rendered this service to mankind—it constantly exhibited individual will, displaying itself in all its power and energy. The lesson was applied; in spite of their weakness, in spite of the prodigious inequality which existed between them and the great proprietors, their lords, the cities everywhere broke out into rebellion against them.

  It is difficult to fix a precise date to this great event—this general insurrection of the cities. The commencement of their enfranchisement is usually placed at the beginning of the eleventh century. But in all great events, how many unknown and disastrous efforts must have been made, before the successful one! Providence, upon all occasions, in order to accomplish its designs, is prodigal of courage, virtues, sacrifices—finally, of man; and it is only after a vast number of unknown attempts apparently lost, after a host of noble hearts have fallen into despair—convinced that their cause was lost—that it triumphs. Such, no doubt, was the case in the struggle of the free cities. Doubtless in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries there were many attempts at resistance, many efforts made for freedom:—many attempts to escape from bondage, which not only were unsuccessful, but the remembrance of which, from their ill success, has remained without glory. Still we may rest assured that these attempts had a vast influence upon succeeding events: they kept alive and maintained the spirit of liberty—they prepared the great insurrection of the eleventh century.

  I say insurrection, and I say it advisedly. The enfranchisement of the towns or communities in the eleventh century was the fruit of a real insurrection, of a real war—a war declared by the population of the cities against their lords. The first fact which we always meet with in annals of this nature, is the rising of the burgesses, who seize whatever arms they can lay their hands on;—it is the expulsion of the people of the lord, who come for the purpose of levying contributions, some extortion; it is an enterprise against the neighboring castle;—such is always the character of the war.* If the insurrection fails, what does the conqueror instantly do? He orders the destruction of the fortifications erected by the citizens, not only around their city, but also around each dwelling. We see that at the very moment of confederation, after having promised to act in common, after having taken, in common, the corporation oath, the first act of each citizen was to put his own house in a state of resistance. Some towns, the names of which are now almost forgotten, the little community of Vézelay, in Nevers, for example—sustained against their lord a long and obstinate struggle. At length victory declared for the Abbot of Vézelay; upon the spot he ordered the demolition of the fortifications of the houses of the citizens; and the names of many of the heroes, whose fortified houses were then destroyed, are still preserved.

  Let us enter the interior of these habitations of our ancestors; let us examine the form of their construction, and the mode of life which this reveals: all is devoted to war, every thing is impressed with its character.

  The construction of the house of a citizen of the twelfth century, so far, at least, as we can now obtain an idea of it, was something of this kind: it consisted usually of three stories, one room in each; that on the ground floor served as a general eating room for the family; the first story was much elevated for the sake of security, and this is the most remarkable circumstance in the construction. The room in this story was the habitation of the master of the house and his wife. The house was, in general, flanked with an angular tower, usually square: another symptom of war; another means of defence. The second story consisted again of a single room; its use is not known, but it probably served for the children and domestics. Above this in most houses, was a small platform, evidently intended as an observatory or watch-tower. Every feature of the building bore the appearance of war. This was the decided characteristic, the true name of the movement, which wrought out the freedom of the cities.

  After a war has continued a certain time, whoever may be the belligerent parties, it naturally leads to a peace. The treaties of peace between the cities and their adversaries were so many charters. These charters of the cities were so many positive treaties of peace between the burgesses and their lords.*

  The insurrection was general. When I say general, I do not mean that there was any concerted plan, that there was any coalition between all the burgesses of a country; nothing like it took place. But the situation of all the towns being nearly the same, they all were liable to the same danger; a prey to the same disasters. Having acquired similar means of resistance and defence, they made use of those means at nearly the same time. It may be possible, also, that the force of example did something; that the success of one or two communities was contagious. Sometimes the charters appear to have been drawn up from the same model; for instance, that of Noyon served as a pattern for those of Beauvais, St. Quentin,† and others; I doubt, however, whether example had so great an influence as is generally conjectured. Communication between different provinces was difficult and of rare occurrence; the intelligence conveyed and received by hearsay and general report was vague and uncertain; and there is much reason for believing that the insurrection was rather the result of a similarity of situation and of a general spontaneous movement. When I say general, I wish to be understood simply as saying that insurrections took place everywhere; they did not, I repeat, spring from any unanimous concerted movement: all was particular, local; each community rebelled on its own account, against its own lord, unconnected with any other place.

  The vicissitudes of the struggle were great. Not only did success change from one side to the other, but even after peace was in appearance concluded, after the charter had been solemnly sworn to by both parties, they violated and eluded its articles in all sorts of ways. Kings acted a prominent part in the alternations of these struggles. I shall speak of these more in detail when I come to royalty itself. Too much has probably been said of the effects of royal influence upon the struggles of the people for freedom. These effects have been often contested, sometimes exaggerated, and in my opinion, sometimes greatly underrated. I shall here confine myself to the assertion that royalty was often called upon to interfere in these contests, sometimes by the cities, sometimes by their lords; and that it played very different parts; acting now upon one principle, and soon after upon another; that it was ever changing its intentions, its designs, and its conduct;* but that, taking it altogether, it did much, and produced a greater portion of good than of evil.

  In spite of all these vicissitudes, notwithstanding the perpetual violation of charters in the twelfth century—the freedom of the cities was consummated. Europe, and particularly France, which, during a whole century, had abounded in insurrections, now abounded in charters;* cities rejoiced in them with more or less security, but still they rejoiced; the event succeeded, and the right was acknowledged.

  Let us now endeavor to ascertain the more immediate results of this great fact, and what changes it produced in the situation of the burgesses as regarded society.

  And, at first, as regards the relations of the burgesses with the general government of the country, or with what we now call the state, it effected nothing; they took no part in this more than before; all remained local, enclosed within the limits of the fief.

  One circumstance, however, renders this assertion not strictly true: a connection now began to be formed between the cities and the king. At one time the people called upon the king for support and protection, or solicited him to guaranty the charter which had been promised or sworn to. At another the barons invoked the judicial interference of the king between them and the burgesses. At the request of one or other of the two parties, from a multitude of various causes royalty was called upon to interfere in the quarrel, whence resulted a frequent and close connection between the citizens and the king. In consequence of this connection the cities became a part of the state, they began to have relations with the general government.

  Although all still remained local, yet a new general class of society became formed by the enfranchisement of the commons. No coalition of the burgesses of different cities had taken place; as yet they had as a class no public or general existence. But the country was covered with men engaged in similar pursuits, possessing the same views and interests, the same manners and customs; between whom there could not fail to be gradually formed a certain tie, from which originated the general class of burgesses. This formation of a great social class was the necessary result of the local enfranchisement of the burgesses.* It must not, however, be supposed that the class of which we are speaking was then what it has since become. Not only is its situation greatly changed, but its elements are totally different. In the twelfth century, this class was almost entirely composed of merchants or small traders, and little landed or house proprietors who had taken up their residence in the city. Three centuries afterwards there were added to this class lawyers, physicians, men of letters, and the local magistrates. The class of burgesses was formed gradually and of very different elements: history gives us no accurate account of its progress, nor of its diversity. When the body of citizens is spoken of, it is erroneously conjectured to have been, at all times, composed of the same elements. Absurd supposition! It is, perhaps, in the diversity of its composition at different periods of history that we should seek to discover the secret of its destiny; so long as it was destitute of magistrates and of men of letters, so long it remained totally unlike what it became in the sixteenth century; as regards the state, it neither possessed the same character nor the same importance. In order to form a just idea of the changes in the rank and influence of this portion of society, we must take a view of the new professions, the new moral situations, of the new intellectual state which gradually arose within it. In the twelfth century, I must repeat, the body of citizens consisted only of small merchants or traders, who, after having finished their purchases and sales, retired to their houses in the city or town; and of little proprietors of houses or lands who had there taken up their residence. Such was the European burgher class in its primary elements.

  The third great result of the enfranchisement of the cities was the struggle of classes; a struggle which constitutes the very fact of modern history, and of which it is full.

  Modern Europe, indeed, is born of this struggle between the different classes of society. I have already shown that in other places this struggle has been productive of very different consequences; in Asia, for example, one particular class has completely triumphed, and the system of castes has succeeded to that of classes, and society has there fallen into a state of immobility. Nothing of this kind, thank God! has taken place in Europe. One of the classes has not conquered, has not brought the others into subjection; no class has been able to overcome, to subjugate the others; the struggle, instead of rendering society stationary, has been a principal cause of its progress; the relations of the different classes with one another; the necessity of combating and of yielding by turns; the variety of interests, passions, and excitements; the desire to conquer without the power to do so: from all this has probably sprung the most energetic, the most productive principle of development in European civilization. This struggle of the classes has been constant; enmity has grown up between them; the infinite diversity of situation, of interests, and of manners, has produced a strong moral hostility; yet they have progressively approached, assimilated, and understood each other; every country of Europe has seen the rise and development within it of a certain public spirit, a certain community of interests, of ideas, of sentiments, which have triumphed over this diversity and war. In France, for example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the moral and social separation of classes was still very profound, yet there can be no doubt but that their fusion, even then, was far advanced; that even then there was a real French nation, not consisting of any class exclusively, but of a commixture of the whole; all animated with the same feeling, actuated by one common social principle, firmly knit together by the bond of nationality. Thus, from the bosom of variety, enmity, and discord, has issued that national unity, now become so conspicuous in modern Europe; that nationality whose tendency is to develop and purify itself more and more, and every day to increase its splendor.

  Such are the great, the important, the conspicuous social effects of the revolution which now occupies our attention. Let us now endeavor to show what were its moral effects; what changes it produced in the minds of the citizens themselves, what they became in consequence, and what they should morally become, in their new situation.

  When we take into our consideration the connection of the citizens with the state in general, with the government of the state, and with the interests of the country, as that connection existed not only in the twelfth century, but also in after ages, there is one circumstance which must strike us most forcibly: I mean the extraordinary mental timidity of the citizens; their humility; the excessive modesty of their pretensions to a right of interference in the government of their country; and the little matter that, in this respect, contented them. Nothing was to be seen in them which discovered that genuine political feeling that aspires to the possession of influence, and to the power of reforming and governing; nothing attests in them either energy of mind, or loftiness of ambition; one feels ready to exclaim, “Poor, prudent, simple-hearted citizens!”

  There are not, probably, more than two sources whence, in the political world, can flow loftiness of ambition and energy of mind. There must be either the feeling of possessing a great importance, a great power over the destiny of others, and this over a large sphere; or there must be in one’s self a powerful feeling of personal independence, the assurance of one’s own liberty, the consciousness of having a destiny with which no will can intermeddle beyond that in one’s own bosom. To one or other of these two conditions seem to be attached energy of mind, the loftiness of ambition, the desire to act in a large sphere, and to obtain corresponding results.

  Neither of these conditions is to be found in the situation of the burgesses of the middle ages. These were, as we have just seen, only important to themselves; except within the walls of their own city, their influence amounted to but little; as regarded the state, to almost nothing. Nor could they be possessed of any great feeling of personal independence; that they had conquered, that they had obtained a charter did but little in the way of promoting this noble sentiment. The burgess of a city, comparing himself with the little baron who dwelt near him, and who had just been vanquished by him, would still be sensible of his own extreme inferiority; he was ignorant of that proud sentiment of independence which animated the proprietor of a fief; the share of freedom which he possessed was not derived from himself alone, but from his association with others—from the difficult and precarious succor which they afforded. Hence that retiring disposition, that timidity of mind, that trembling shyness, that humility of speech (though perhaps coupled with firmness of purpose), which is so deeply stamped on the character of the burgesses, not only of the twelfth century, but even of their most remote descendants. They had no taste for great enterprises; if chance pushed them into such, they became vexed and embarrassed; any responsibility was a burden to them; they felt themselves out of their sphere, and endeavored to return into it; they treated upon easy terms. Thus, in running over the history of Europe, and especially of France, we find that municipal communities have been esteemed, consulted, perhaps respected, but rarely feared; they seldom impressed their adversaries with the notion that they were a great and formidable power, a power truly political. There is nothing to be astonished at in the weakness of the modern burgess; the great cause of it may be traced to his origin, in those circumstances of his enfranchisement which I have just placed before you. The loftiness of ambition, independent of social conditions, the breadth and boldness of political views, the desire to be employed in public affairs, the full consciousness of the greatness of man, considered as such, and of the power that belongs to him, if he be capable of exercising it; these sentiments, these dispositions, are of entirely modern growth in Europe, the offspring of modern civilization, and of that glorious and powerful generality which characterizes it, and which will never fail to secure to the public an influence, a weight in the government of the country, that were constantly wanting, and deservedly wanting, to the burgesses our ancestors.

  As a set-off to this, in the contests which they had to sustain respecting their local interests—in this narrow field, they acquired and displayed a degree of energy, devotedness, perseverance, and patience, which has never been surpassed. The difficulty of the enterprise was so great, they had to struggle against such perils, that a display of courage almost beyond example became necessary. Our notions of the burgess of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and of his life, are very erroneous. The picture which Sir Walter Scott has drawn in Quentin Durward of the burgomaster of Liege, fat, inactive, without experience, without daring, and caring for nothing but passing his life in ease and enjoyment, is only fitted for the stage; the real burgess of that day had a coat of mail continually on his back, a pike constantly in his hand; his life was nearly as stormy, as warlike, as rigid as that of the nobles with whom he contended. It was in these every-day perils, in combating the varied dangers of practical life, that he acquired that bold and masculine character, that determined exertion, which have become more rare in the softer activity of modern times.

  None, however, of these social and moral effects of the enfranchisement of corporations became fully developed in the twelfth century; it is only in the course of the two following centuries that they showed themselves so as to be clearly discerned. It is nevertheless certain that the seeds of these effects existed in the primary situation of the commons, in the mode of their enfranchisement, and in the position which the burgesses from that time took in society; I think, therefore, that I have done right in bringing these circumstances before you to-day.

  Let us now penetrate into the interior of one of those corporate cities of the twelfth century, that we may see how it was governed, that we may now see what principles and what facts prevailed in the relations of the burgesses with one another. It must be remembered, that in speaking of the municipal system bequeathed by the Roman empire to the modern world, I took occasion to say,* that the Roman world was a great coalition of municipalities, which had previously been as sovereign and independent as Rome itself. Each of these cities had formerly been in the same condition as Rome, a little free republic, making peace and war, and governing itself by its own will. As fast as these became incorporated into the Roman world, those rights which constitute sovereignty—the right of war and peace, of legislation, taxation, etc.—were transferred from each city to the central government at Rome. There remained then but one municipal sovereignty. Rome reigned over a vast number of municipalities, which had nothing left beyond a civic existence. The municipal system became essentially changed: it was no longer a political government, but simply a mode of administration. This was the grand revolution which was consummated under the Roman empire. The municipal system became a mode of administration; it was reduced to the government of local affairs, to the civic interests of the city. This is the state in which the Roman empire, at its fall, left the cities and their institutions. During the chaos of barbarism, notions and facts of all sorts became embroiled and confused; the various attributes of sovereignty and administration were confounded. Distinctions of this nature were no longer regarded. Affairs were suffered to run on in the course dictated by necessity. The municipalities became sovereigns or administrators in the various places, as need might require. Where cities rebelled, they reassumed the sovereignty, for the sake of security, not out of respect for any political theory, nor from any feeling of their dignity, but that they might have the means of contending with the nobles, whose yoke they had thrown off; that they might take upon themselves the right to call out the militia, to tax themselves to support the war, to name their own chiefs and magistrates; in a word, to govern themselves. The internal government of the city was their means of defence, of security. Thus, sovereignty again returned to the municipal system, which had been deprived of it by the conquests of Rome. City corporations again became sovereigns. This is the political characteristic of their enfranchisement.

  I do not, however, mean to assert, that this sovereignty was complete. Some trace of an exterior sovereignty always may be found; sometimes it was the baron who retained the right to send a magistrate into the city, with whom the municipal magistrates acted as assessors; perhaps he had the right to collect certain revenues; in some cases a fixed tribute was assured to him. Sometimes the exterior sovereignty of the community was in the hands of the king.

  The cities themselves, in their turn, entered into the feudal system; they had vassals, and became suzerains; and by this title possessed that portion of sovereignty which was inherent in the suzerainty. A great confusion arose between the rights which they held from their feudal position, and those which they had acquired by their insurrection; and by this double title they held the sovereignty.

  Let us see, as far as the very scanty sources left us will allow, how the internal government of the cities, at least in the more early times, was managed. The entire body of the inhabitants formed the communal assembly: all those who had taken the communal oath—and all who dwelt within the walls were obliged to do so—were summoned, by the tolling of the bell, to the general assembly. In this were named the magistrates. The number chosen, and the power and proceedings of the magistrates, differed very considerably. After choosing the magistrates, the assemblies dissolved; and the magistrates governed almost alone, sufficiently arbitrarily, being under no further responsibility than the new elections, or, perhaps, popular outbreaks, which were, at this time, the great guarantee for good government.*

  You will observe that the internal organization of the municipal towns is reduced to two very simple elements, the general assembly of the inhabitants, and a government invested with almost arbitrary power, under the responsibility of insurrections,—general outbreaks. It was impossible, especially while such manners prevailed, to establish anything like a regular government, with proper guarantees of order and duration. The greater part of the population of these cities were ignorant, brutal, and savage to a degree which rendered them exceedingly difficult to govern. At the end of a very short period, there was but little more security within these communities than there had been, previously, in the relations of the burgesses with the baron. There soon, however, became formed a burgess aristocracy. The causes of this are easily understood. The notions of that day, coupled with certain social relations, led to the establishment of trading companies legally constituted.* A system of privileges became introduced into the interior of the cities, and, in the end, a great inequality. There soon grew up in all of them a certain number of considerable, opulent burgesses, and a population, more or less numerous, of workmen, who, notwithstanding their inferiority, had no small influence in the affairs of the community. The free cities thus became divided into an upper class of burgesses, and a population subject to all the errors, all the vices of a mob. The superior citizens thus found themselves pressed between two great difficulties: first, the arduous one of governing this inferior turbulent population; and secondly, that of withstanding the continual attempts of the ancient master of the borough, who sought to regain his former power. Such was the situation of their affairs, not only in France, but in Europe, down to the sixteenth century. This, perhaps, is the cause which prevented these communities from taking, in several countries of Europe, and especially in France, that high political station which seemed properly to belong to them. Two spirits were unceasingly at work within them: among the inferior population, a blind, licentious, furious spirit of democracy; among the superior burgesses, a spirit of timidity, of caution, and an excessive desire to accommodate all differences, whether with the king, or with its ancient proprietors, so as to preserve peace and order in the bosom of the community. Neither of these spirits could raise the cities to a high rank in the state.

  All these effects did not become apparent in the twelfth century; still we may foresee them, even in the character of the insurrection, in the manner in which it broke out, in the state of the different elements of the city population.

  Such, if I mistake not, are the principal characteristics, the general results, both of the enfranchisement of the cities and of their internal government. I have already premised, that these facts were not so uniform, not so universal, as I have represented them. There are great diversities in the history of the European free cities. In the south of France and in Italy, for example, the Roman municipal system prevailed; the population was not nearly so divided, so unequal, as in the north. Here, also, the municipal organization was much better; perhaps the effect of Roman traditions, perhaps of the better state of the population. In the north, it was the feudal system that prevailed in the city arrangements. Here all seemed subordinate to the struggle against the barons. The cities of the south paid much more regard to their internal constitution, to the work of melioration and progress. We see, from the beginning, that they will become free republics. The career of those of the north, above all those of France, showed itself, from the first, more rude, more incomplete, destined to less perfect, less beautiful developments. If we run over those of Germany, Spain, and England, we shall find among them many other differences. I cannot particularize them, but shall notice some of them, as we advance in the history of civilization. All things at their origin are nearly confounded in one and the same physiognomy; it is only in their after-growth that their variety shows itself. Then begins a new development which urges forward societies towards that free and lofty unity, the glorious object of the efforts and wishes of mankind.*

  LECTURE VIII.

  GENERAL STATE OF EUROPE FROM THE TWELFTH TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY—THE CRUSADES.*

  I have not yet laid before you the whole plan of my course. I began by pointing out its object, and I then went straight forward, without taking any comprehensive view of European civilization, and without indicating at once its starting-point, its path, and its goal,—its beginning, middle, and end. We have now, however, arrived at a period when this comprehensive view, this general outline, of the world through which we travel, becomes necessary. The times which have hitherto been the subject of our study, are explained in some measure by themselves, or by clear and immediate results. The times into which we are about to enter can neither be understood nor excite any strong interest, unless we connect them with their most indirect and remote consequences. In an inquiry of such vast extent, a time arrives when we can no longer submit to go forward with a dark and unknown path before us; when we desire to know not only whence we have come and where we are, but whither we are going. This is now the case with us. The period which we approach cannot be understood, or its importance appreciated, unless by means of the relations which connect it with modern times. Its true spirit has been revealed only by the lapse of many subsequent ages.

  We are in possession of almost all the essential elements of European civilization. I say almost all, because I have not yet said anything on the subject of monarchy. The crisis which decidedly developed the monarchical principle, hardly took place before the twelfth or even the thirteenth century. It was then only that the institution of monarchy was really established, and began to occupy a definite place in modern society. It is on this account that I have not sooner entered on the subject. With this exception we possess, I repeat, all the great elements of European society. You have seen the origin of the feudal aristocracy, the Church, and the municipalities; you have observed the institutions which would naturally correspond with these facts; and not only the institutions, but the principles and ideas which those facts naturally give rise to. Thus, with reference to feudalism, you have watched the origin of modern domestic life; you have comprehended, in all its energy, the feeling of personal independence, and the place which it must have occupied in our civilization. With reference to the Church, you have observed the appearance of the purely religious form of society, its relations with civil society, the principle of theocracy, the separation between the spiritual and temporal powers, the first blows of persecution, the first cries of liberty of conscience. The infant municipalities have given you a view of a social union founded on principles quite different from those of feudalism; the diversity of the classes of society, their contests with each other, the first and strongly marked features of the manners of the modern inhabitants of towns; timidity of judgment combined with energy of soul, proneness to be excited by demagogues joined to a spirit of obedience to legal authority; all the elements, in short, which have concurred in the formation of European society have already come under your observation.

  Let us now transport ourselves into the heart of modern Europe; I do not mean Europe of the present day, after the prodigious metamorphoses we have witnessed, but of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What an immense difference! I have already insisted on this difference with reference to communities; I have endeavored to show you how little resemblance there is between the burgesses of the eighteenth century and those of the twelfth. Make the same experiment on feudalism and the Church, and you will be struck with a similar metamorphosis. There was no more resemblance between the nobility of the court of Louis XV and the feudal aristocracy, or between the Church in the days of Cardinal de Bernis and those of the Abbé Suger, than there is between the burgesses of the eighteenth century and the same class in the twelfth. Between these two periods, though society had already acquired all its elements, it underwent a total transformation.

  I am now desirous to trace clearly the general and essential character of this transformation.

  From the fifth century, society contained all that I have already found and described as belonging to it,—kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, burghers, husbandmen, civil and religious authorities; the germs, in short, of every thing necessary to form a nation and a government; and yet there was no government, no nation. In all the period that has occupied our attention, there was no such thing as a people, properly so called, or a government, in the modern acceptation of the word. We have fallen in with a number of particular forces, special facts, and local institutions; but nothing general, nothing public, nothing political, nothing, in short, like real nationality.

  Let us, on the other hand, survey Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: we everywhere see two great objects make their appearance on the stage of the world,—the government and the people. The influence of a general power over an entire country, and the influence of the country in the power which governs it, are the materials of history; the relations between these great forces, their alliances or their contests, are the subjects of its narration. The nobility, the clergy, the citizens, all these different classes and particular powers are thrown into the background, and effaced, as it were, by these two great objects, the people and its government.

  This, if I am not deceived, is the essential feature which distinguishes modern Europe from the Europe of the early ages; and this was the change which was accomplished between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century.

  It is, then, in the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, into which we are about to enter, that we must endeavor to find the cause of this change. It is the distinctive character of this period, that it was employed in changing Europe from its primitive to its modern state; and hence arise its importance and historical interest. If we did not consider it under this point of view, if we did not endeavor to discover the events which arose out of this period, not only we should never be able to comprehend it, but we should soon become weary of the inquiry.

  Viewed in itself and apart from its results, it is a period without character, a period in which confusion went on increasing without apparent causes, a period of movement without direction, of agitation without result; a period when monarchy, nobility, clergy, citizens, all the elements of social order, seemed to turn round in the same circle, incapable alike of progression and of rest. Experiments of all kinds were made and failed; endeavors were made to establish governments and lay the foundations of public liberty; reforms in religion were even attempted; but nothing was accomplished or came to any result. If ever the human race seemed destined to be always agitated, and yet always stationary, condemned to unceasing and yet barren labors, it was from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century that this was the complexion of its condition and history.

  I am acquainted only with one work in which this appearance of the period in question is faithfully described; I allude to M. de Barante’s History of the Dukes of Burgundy.* I do not speak of the fidelity of his pictures of manners and narratives of adventures, but of that general fidelity which renders the work an exact image, a true mirror of the whole period, of which it at the same time displays both the agitation and the monotony.

  Considered, on the contrary, in relation to what has succeeded it, as the transition from Europe in its primitive, to Europe in its modern state, this period assumes a more distinct and animated aspect; we discover in it a unity of design, a movement in one direction, a progression; and its unity and interest are found to reside in the slow and hidden labor accomplished in the course of its duration.

  The history of European civilization, then, may be thrown into three great periods: first, a period which I shall call that of origin, or formation; during which the different elements of society disengage themselves from chaos, assume an existence, and show themselves in their native forms, with the principles by which they are animated; this period lasted almost to the twelfth century. The second period is a period of experiments, attempts, groping; the different elements of society approach and enter into combination, feeling each other, as it were, but without producing anything general, regular, or durable; this state of things, to say the truth, did not terminate till the sixteenth century. Then comes the third period, or the period of development, in which human society in Europe takes a definite form, follows a determinate direction, proceeds rapidly and with a general movement, towards a clear and precise object; this is the period which began in the sixteenth century, and is now pursuing its course.*

  Such appears, on a general view, to be the aspect of European civilization. We are now about to enter into the second of the above periods; and we have to inquire what were the great and critical events which occurred during its course, and were the determining causes of the social transformation that was its result.

  The first great event which presents itself to our view, and which opened, so to speak, the period we are speaking of, was the crusades. They began at the end of the eleventh century, and lasted during the twelfth and thirteenth. It was indeed a great event; for, since its occurrence, it has never ceased to occupy the attention of philosophical historians, who have shown themselves aware of its influence in changing the conditions of nations, and of the necessity of its study in order to comprehend the general course of facts.

  The first character of the crusades is their universality; all Europe concurred in them; they were the first European event. Before the crusades, Europe had never been moved by the same sentiment, or acted in a common cause; till then, in fact, Europe did not exist. The crusades made manifest the existence of Christian Europe. The French formed the main body of the first army of crusaders; but there were also Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and English. But look at the second and third crusades, and we find all the nations of Christendom engaged in them. The world had never before witnessed a similar combination.

  But this is not all. In the same manner as the crusades were a European event, so, in each separate nation, they were a national event. In every nation, all classes of society were animated with the same impression, yielded to the same idea, and abandoned themselves to the same impulse. Kings, nobles, priests, burghers, country people, all took the same interest and the same share in the crusades. The moral unity of nations was thus made manifest; a fact as new as the unity of Europe.

  When such events take place in what may be called the youth of nations; in periods when they act spontaneously, freely, without premeditation or political design, we recognize what history calls heroic events, the heroic ages of nations. The crusades were the heroic event of modern Europe; a movement at the same time individual and general; national, and yet not under political direction.

  That this was really their primitive character is proved by every fact, and every document. Who were the first crusaders? Bands of people who set out under the conduct of Peter the Hermit, without preparations, guides, or leaders, followed rather than led by a few obscure knights, traversed Germany and the Greek empire, and were dispersed, or perished, in Asia Minor.

  The higher class, the feudal nobility, next put themselves in motion for the crusade. Under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon, the nobles and their men departed full of ardor. When they had traversed Asia Minor, the leaders of the crusaders were seized with a fit of lukewarmness and fatigue. They became indifferent about continuing their course; they were inclined rather to look to their own interest, to make conquests and possess them. The mass of the army, however, rose up, and insisted on marching to Jerusalem, the deliverance of the holy city being the object of the crusade. It was not to gain principalities for Raymond of Toulouse, or for Bohemond, or any other leader, that the crusaders had taken arms. The popular, national, European impulse overcame all the intentions of individuals; and the leaders had not sufficient ascendancy over the masses to make them yield to their personal interests.

  The sovereigns, who had been strangers to the first crusade, were now drawn into the general movement as the people had been. The great crusades of the twelfth century were commanded by kings.

  I now go at once to the end of the thirteenth century. A great deal was still said in Europe about crusades, and they were even preached with ardor. The popes excited the sovereigns and the people; councils were held to recommend the conquest of the holy land; but no expeditions of any importance were now undertaken for this purpose, and it was regarded with general indifference. Something had entered into the spirit of European society which put an end to the crusades. Some private expeditions still took place; some nobles and some bands of troops still continued to depart for Jerusalem; but the general movement was evidently arrested. Neither the necessity, however, nor the facility of continuing it, seemed to have ceased. The Moslems triumphed more and more in Asia. The Christian kingdom founded at Jerusalem had fallen into their hands. It still appeared necessary to regain it; and the means of success were greater than at the commencement of the crusades. A great number of Christians were established and still powerful in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine. The proper means of transport, and of carrying on the war, were better known. Still, nothing could revive the spirit of the crusades. It is evident that the two great forces of society—the sovereigns on the one hand, and the people on the other—no longer desired their continuance.

  It has been often said that Europe was weary of these constant inroads upon Asia. We must come to an understanding as to the meaning of the word weariness, frequently used on such occasions. It is exceedingly inexact. It is not true that generations of mankind can be weary of what has not been done by themselves; that they can be wearied by the fatigues of their fathers. Weariness is personal; it cannot be transmitted like an inheritance. The people of the thirteenth century were not weary of the crusades of the twelfth; they were influenced by a different cause. A great change had taken place in opinions, sentiments, and social relations. There were no longer the same wants, or the same desires: the people no longer believed, or wished to believe, in the same things. It is by these moral or political changes, and not by weariness, that the differences in the conduct of successive generations can be explained. The pretended weariness ascribed to them is a metaphor wholly destitute of truth.

  Two great causes, the one moral, the other social, impelled Europe into the crusades. The moral cause, as you are aware, was the impulse of religious feeling and belief. From the end of the seventh century, Christianity maintained a constant struggle against Mohammedanism. It had overcome Mohammedanism in Europe, after having been threatened with great danger from it;* and had succeeded in confining it to Spain. Even from thence the expulsion of Mohammedanism was constantly attempted. The crusades have been represented as a sort of accident, an unforeseen event, sprung from the recitals of pilgrims returned from Jerusalem, and the preaching of Peter the Hermit.† They were nothing of the kind. The crusades were the continuation, the height of the great struggle which had subsisted for four centuries between Christianity and Mohammedanism. The theatre of this contest had hitherto been in Europe; it was now transported into Asia. If I had attached any value to those comparisons, those parallels, into which historical facts are sometimes made willing or unwillingly to enter, I might show you Christianity running exactly the same course, and undergoing the same destiny in Asia, as Mohammedanism in Europe. Mohammedanism established itself in Spain, where it conquered, founded a kingdom and various principalities. The Christians did the same thing in Asia. They were there in regard to the Mohammedans, in the same situation as the Mohammedans in Spain with regard to the Christians. The kingdom of Jerusalem corresponds with the kingdom of Granada: but these similitudes, after all, are of little importance. The great fact was the struggle between the two religious and social systems: the crusades were its principal crisis. This is their historical character; the chain which connects them with the general course of events.

  Another cause, the social state of Europe in the eleventh century, equally contributed to the breaking out of the crusades. I have been careful to explain why, from the fifth to the eleventh century, there was no such thing as generality in Europe; I have endeavored to show how every thing had assumed a local character; how states, existing institutions, and opinions, were confined within very narrow bounds: it was then that the feudal system prevailed. After the lapse of some time, such a narrow horizon was no longer sufficient; human thought and activity aspired to pass beyond the narrow sphere in which they were confined. The people no longer led their former wandering life, but had not lost the taste for its movement and its adventures; they threw themselves into the crusades as into a new state of existence, in which they were more at large, and enjoyed more variety; which reminded them of the freedom of former barbarism, while it opened boundless prospects for the future.

  These were, in my opinion, the two determining causes of the crusades in the twelfth century.* At the end of the thirteenth, neither of these causes continued to exist. Mankind and society were so greatly changed, that neither the moral nor the social incitements which had impelled Europe upon Asia were felt any longer. I do not know whether many of you have read the original historians of the crusades, or have ever thought of comparing the contemporary chroniclers of the first crusades with those of the end of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; for example, Albert d’Aix, Robert the Monk, and Raynard d’Argile, who were engaged in the first crusade, with William of Tyre and James de Vitry.* When we compare these two classes of writers, it is impossible not to be struck with the distance between them. The first are animated chroniclers, whose imagination is excited, and who relate the events of the crusade with passion: but they are narrowminded in the extreme, without an idea beyond the little sphere in which they lived; ignorant of every science, full of prejudices, incapable of forming an opinion on what was passing around them, or the events which were the subject of their narratives. But open, on the other hand, the history of the crusades by William of Tyre, and you will be surprised to find almost a modern historian; a cultivated, enlarged, and liberal mind, great political intelligence, general views and opinions upon causes and effects. James de Vitry is an example of another species of cultivation; he is a man of learning, who does not confine himself to what immediately concerns the crusades, but describes the state of manners, the geography, the religion, and natural history of the country to which his history relates. There is, in short, an immense distance between the historians feature of the penitential system of the Church. The crusades were vast pilgrimages, the undertaking of which would count for the future salvation of the crusaders. See Adams, p. 264. of the first and of the last crusades; a distance which manifests an actual revolution in the state of the human mind.

  This revolution is most conspicuous in the manner in which these two classes of writers speak of the Mohammedans. To the first chroniclers,—and consequently to the first crusaders, of whose sentiments the first chroniclers are merely the organs,—the Mohammedans are only an object of hatred; it is clear that those who speak of them do not know them, form no judgment respecting them, nor consider them except from the point of view of the religious hostility which exists between them. No vestige of social relation is discoverable between them and the Mohammedans: they detest them, and fight with them; and nothing more. William of Tyre, James de Vitry, Bernard le Trésorier, speak of the Mussulmans quite differently. We see that, even while fighting with them, they no longer regard them as monsters; that they have entered to a certain extent into their ideas, that they have lived with them, and that certain social relations, and even a sort of sympathy, have arisen between them. William of Tyre pronounces a glowing eulogium on Noureddin and Bernard le Trésorier on Saladin. They sometimes even go the length of placing the manners and conduct of the Mussulmans in opposition to those of the Christians; they adopt the manners and sentiments of the Mussulmans in order to satirize the Christians, in the same manner as Tacitus delineated the manners of the Germans in contrast with those of Rome. You see, then, what an immense change must have taken place between these two periods, when you find in the latter, in regard to the very enemies of the Christians, the very people against whom the crusades were directed, an impartiality of judgment which would have filled the first crusaders with surprise and horror.

  The principal effect, then, of the crusades was a great step towards the emancipation of the mind, a great progress towards enlarged and liberal ideas. Though begun under the name and influence of religious belief, the crusades deprived religious ideas, I shall not say of their legitimate share of influence, but of their exclusive and despotic possession of the human mind. This result, though undoubtedly unforeseen, arose from various causes. The first was evidently the novelty, extent, and variety of the scene which displayed itself to the crusaders; what generally happens to travellers happened to them. It is mere common-place to say, that travelling gives freedom to the mind; that the habit of observing different nations, different manners, and different opinions, enlarges the ideas, and disengages the judgment from old prejudices. The same thing happened to those nations of travellers who have been called the crusaders; their minds were opened and raised by having seen a multitude of different things, by having become acquainted with other manners than their own. They found themselves also placed in connection with two states of civilization, not only different from their own, but more advanced—the Greek state of society on the one hand, and the Mussulman on the other. There is no doubt that the society of the Greeks, though enervated, perverted, and decaying, gave the crusaders the impression of something more advanced, polished, and enlightened than their own. The society of the Mussulmans presented them a scene of the same kind. It is curious to observe in the chronicles the impression made by the crusaders on the Mussulmans, who regarded them at first as the most brutal, ferocious, and stupid barbarians they had ever seen. The crusaders, on their part, were struck with the riches and elegance of manners which they observed among the Mussulmans. These first impressions were succeeded by frequent relations between the Mussulmans and Christians. These became more extensive and important than is commonly believed. Not only had the Christians of the East habitual relations with the Mussulmans, but the people of the East and the West became acquainted with, visited, and mingled with each other. It is but lately that one of those learned men who do honor to France in the eyes of Europe, M. Abel Rémusat, has discovered the relations which subsisted between the Mongol emperors and the Christian kings. Mongol ambassadors were sent to the kings of the Franks, and to St. Louis among others, in order to persuade them to enter into alliance, and to resume the crusades for the common interest of the Mongols and the Christians against the Turks. And not only were diplomatic and official relations thus established between the sovereigns, but there was much and various intercourse between the nations of the East and West. I shall quote the words of M. Abel Rémusat:* —

  You see, then, what a vast and unexplored world was laid open to the view of European intelligence by the consequences of the crusades. It cannot be doubted that the impulse which led to them was one of the most powerful causes of the development and freedom of mind which arose out of that great event.

  There is another circumstance which is worthy of notice. Down to the time of the crusades, the court of Rome, the center of the Church, had been very little in communication with the laity, unless through the medium of ecclesiastics; either legates sent by the court of Rome, or the whole body of the bishops and clergy. There were always some laymen in direct relation with Rome; but upon the whole, it was by means of churchmen that Rome had any communication with the people of different countries. During the crusades, on the contrary, Rome became a halting-place for a great portion of the crusaders, either in going or returning. A multitude of laymen were spectators of its policy and its manners, and were able to discover the share which personal interest had in religious disputes. There is no doubt that this newly-acquired knowledge inspired many minds with a boldness hitherto unknown.

  When we consider the state of the general mind at the termination of the crusades, especially in regard to ecclesiastical matters, we cannot fail to be struck with a singular fact: religious notions underwent no change, and were not replaced by contrary or even different opinions. Thought, notwithstanding, had become more free; religious creeds were not the only subject on which the human mind exercised its faculties; without abandoning them, it began occasionally to wander from them, and to take other directions. Thus, at the end of the thirteenth century, the moral cause which had led to the crusades, or which, at least, had been their most energetic principle, had disappeared; the moral state of Europe had undergone an essential modification.

  The social state of society had undergone an analogous change. Many inquiries have been made as to the influence of the crusades in this respect; it has been shown in what manner they had reduced a great number of feudal proprietors to the necessity of selling their fiefs to the kings, or to sell their privileges to the communities, in order to raise money for the crusades. It has been shown that, in consequence of their absence, many of the nobles lost a great portion of their power. Without entering into the details of this question, we may collect into a few general facts the influence of the crusades on the social state of Europe.

  They greatly diminished the number of petty fiefs, petty domains, and petty proprietors; they concentrated property and power in a smaller number of hands. It is from the time of the crusades that we may observe the formation and growth of great fiefs—the existence of feudal power on a large scale.*

  I have often regretted that there was not a map of France divided into fiefs, as we have a map of France divided into departments, arrondissements, cantons and communes, in which all the fiefs were marked, with their boundaries, relations with each other, and successive changes. If we could have compared, by the help of such maps, the state of France before and after the crusades, we should have seen how many small fiefs had disappeared, and to what extent the greater ones had increased. This was one of the most important results of the crusades.

  Even in those cases where small proprietors preserved their fiefs, they did not live upon them in such an isolated state as formerly. The possessors of great fiefs became so many centers around which the smaller ones were gathered, and near which they came to live. During the crusades, small proprietors found it necessary to place themselves in the train of some rich and powerful chief, from whom they received assistance and support. They lived with him, shared his fortune, and passed through the same adventures that he did. When the crusaders returned home, this social spirit, this habit of living in intercourse with superiors continued to subsist, and had its influence on the manners of the age. As we see that the great fiefs were increased after the crusades, so we see, also, that the proprietors of these fiefs held, within their castles, a much more considerable court than before, and were surrounded by a greater number of gentlemen, who preserved their little domains, but no longer kept within them.

  The extension of the great fiefs, and the creation of a number of central points in society, in place of the general dispersion which previously existed, were the two principal effects of the crusades, considered with respect to their influence upon feudalism.

  As to the inhabitants of the towns, a result of the same nature may easily be perceived. The crusades created great civic communities. Petty commerce and petty industry were not sufficient to give rise to communities such as the great cities of Italy and Flanders. It was commerce on a great scale—maritime commerce, and, especially, the commerce of the East and West, which gave them birth; now it was the crusades which gave to maritime commerce the greatest impulse it had yet received.*

  On the whole, when we survey the state of society at the end of the crusades, we find that the movement tending to dissolution and dispersion, the movement of universal localization (if I may be allowed such an expression), had ceased, and had been succeeded by a movement in the contrary direction, a movement of centralization. All things tended to mutual approximation; small things were absorbed in great ones, or gathered round them. Such was the direction then taken by the progress of society.

  You now understand why, at the end of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth century, neither nations nor sovereigns wished to have any more crusades. They neither needed nor desired them; they had been thrown into them by the impulses of religious spirit, and the exclusive dominion of religious ideas; but this dominion had now lost its energy. They had also sought in the crusades a new way of life, of a less confined and more varied description; but they began to find this in Europe itself, in the progress of the social relations. It was at this time that kings began to see the road to political aggrandizement. Why go to Asia in search of kingdoms, when there were kingdoms to conquer at their very doors? Philip Augustus embarked in the crusade very unwillingly; and what could be more natural? His desire was to make himself King of France. It was the same thing with the people. The road to wealth was open to them; and they gave up adventures for industry. Adventures were replaced, for sovereigns, by political projects; for the people, by industry on a large scale. One class only of society still had a taste for adventure; that portion of the feudal nobility, who, not being in a condition to think of political aggrandizement, and not being disposed to industry, retained their former situation and manners. This class, accordingly, continued to embark in crusades, and endeavored to renew them.

  Such, in my opinion, are the real effects of the crusades;* on the one hand the extension of ideas and the emancipation of thought; on the other, a general enlargement of the social sphere, and the opening of a wider field for every sort of activity: they produced, at the same time, more individual freedom and more political unity. They tended to the independence of man and the centralization of society. Many inquiries have been made respecting the means of civilization which were directly imported from the East. It has been said that the largest part of the great discoveries which, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contributed to the progress of European civilization—such as the compass, printing, and gunpowder—were known in the East, and that the crusaders brought them into Europe. This is true to a certain extent; though some of these assertions may be disputed. But what cannot be disputed is this influence, this general effect of the crusades upon the human mind on the one hand, and the state of society on the other. They drew society out of a very narrow road, to throw it into new and infinitely broader paths; they began that transformation of the various elements of European society into governments and nations, which is the characteristic of modern civilization. The same period witnessed the development of one of those institutions which has most powerfully contributed to this great result—monarchy; the history of which, from the birth of the modern states of Europe to the thirteenth century, will form the subject of our next lecture.*

  LECTURE IX.

  OF MONARCHY.

  I endeavored, at our last meeting, to determine the essential and distinctive character of modern society as compared with the primitive state of society in Europe; and I believed I had found it in this fact, that all the elements of the social state, at first numerous and various, were reduced to two—the government on one hand, and the people on the other. Instead of finding, in the capacity of ruling forces and chief agents in history, the clergy, kings, burghers, husbandmen, and serfs, we now find in modern Europe, only two great objects which occupy the historical stage—the government and the nation.

  If such is the fact to which European civilization has led, such, also, is the result to which our researches should conduct us. We must see the birth, the growth, the progressive establishment of this great result. We have entered upon the period to which we can trace its origin: it was, as you have seen, between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries that those slow and hidden operations took place which brought society into this new form, this definite state. We have also considered the first great event which, in my opinion, evidently had a powerful effect in impelling Europe into this road; I mean the crusades.

  About the same period, and almost at the very time when the crusades broke out, that institution began to increase, which has perhaps chiefly contributed to the formation of modern society, and to the fusion of all the social elements into two forces, the government and the people. This institution is monarchy.

  It is evident that monarchy has played a vast part in the history of European civilization. Of this we may convince ourselves by a single glance. We see the development of monarchy proceed, for a considerable time, at the same rate as that of society itself: they had a common progression. And not only had they a common progression, but with every step that society made towards its definitive and modern character, monarchy seemed to increase and prosper; so that, when the work was consummated—when there remained, in the great states of Europe, little or no important and decisive influence but that of the government and the public—it was monarchy that became the government.

  It was not only in France, where the fact is evident, that this happened, but in most of the countries of Europe. A little sooner or later, and under forms somewhat different, the history of society in England, Spain, and Germany, offers us the same result. In England, for example, it was under the Tudors that the old particular and local elements of English society were dissolved and mingled, and gave way to the system of public authorities;* this, also, was the period when monarchy had the greatest influence. It was the same thing in Germany, Spain, and all the great European states.

  If we leave Europe, and cast our eyes over the rest of the world, we shall be struck with an analogous fact. Everywhere we shall find monarchy holding a great place, and appearing as the most general and permanent, perhaps, of all institutions; as that which is the most difficult to exclude where it does not exist, and, where it does exist, the most difficult to extirpate. From time immemorial it has had possession of Asia. On the discovery of America, all the great states of that continent were found, with different combinations, under monarchical governments. When we penetrate into the interior of Africa, wherever we meet with nations of any extent, this is the government which prevails. And not only has monarchy penetrated everywhere, but it has accommodated itself to the most various situations, to civilization and barbarism: to the most peaceful manners, as in China, and to those in which a warlike spirit predominates. It has established itself not only in the midst of the system of castes, in countries whose social economy exhibits the most rigorous distinction of ranks, but also in the midst of a system of equality, in countries where society is most remote from every kind of legal and permanent classification. In some places despotic and oppressive; in others favorable to the progress of civilization and even of liberty; it is like a head that may be placed on many different bodies, a fruit that may grow from many different buds.

  In this fact we might discover many important and curious consequences. I shall take only two; the first is, that such a result cannot possibly be the offspring of mere chance, of force or usurpation only; that there must necessarily be, between the nature of monarchy considered as an institution, and the nature either of man as an individual or of human society, a strong and intimate analogy. Force, no doubt, has had its share, in both the origin and progress of the institution; but when we meet with a result like this, when we see a great event develop itself or recur during a long series of ages, and in the midst of many different situations, we should never ascribe it to force. Force performs a great and daily part in human affairs; but it is not the principle which governs their movements: there is always, superior to force, and the part which it performs, a moral cause which governs the general course of events. Force, in the history of society, resembles the body in the history of man. The body assuredly holds a great place in the life of man, but is not the principle of life. Life circulates in it, but does not emanate from it. Such is also the case in human societies; whatever part force may play in them, it does not govern them, or exercise a supreme control over their destinies; this is the province of reason, of the moral influences which are hidden under the accidents of force, and regulate the course of society. We may unhesitatingly declare that it was to a cause of this nature, and not to mere force, that monarchy was indebted for its success.

  A second fact of almost equal importance is the flexibility of monarchy, and its faculty of modifying itself and adapting itself to a variety of different circumstances. Observe the contrast which it presents; its form reveals unity, permanence, simplicity. It does not exhibit that variety of combinations which are found in other institutions; yet it accommodates itself to the most dissimilar states of society. It becomes evident then that it is susceptible of great diversity, and capable of being attached to many different elements and principles, both in man as an individual and in society.

  It is because we have not considered monarchy in all its extent; because we have not, on the one hand, discovered the principle which forms its essence and subsists under every circumstance to which it may be applied; and because, on the other hand, we have not taken into account all the variations to which it accommodates itself, and all the principles with which it can enter into alliance;—it is, I say, because we have not considered monarchy in this twofold, this enlarged point of view, that we have not thoroughly understood the part it has performed in the history of the world, and have often been mistaken as to its nature and effects.

  This is the task which I should wish to undertake with you, so as to obtain a complete and precise view of the effects of this institution in modern Europe, whether they have flowed from its intrinsic principle, or from the modifications which it has undergone.

  There is no doubt that the strength of monarchy, that moral power which is its true principle, does not reside in the personal will of the man who for the time happens to be king; there is no doubt that the people in accepting it as an institution, that philosophers in maintaining it as a system, have not meant to accept the empire of the will of an individual—a will essentially arbitrary, capricious, and ignorant.

  Monarchy is something quite different from the will of an individual, though it presents itself under that form. It is the personification of legitimate sovereignty—of the collective will and aggregate wisdom of a people—of that will which is essentially reasonable, enlightened, just, impartial,—which knows naught of individual wills, but by the title of legitimate monarchy, earned by these conditions, has the right to govern them. Such is the meaning of monarchy as understood by the people, and such is the motive of their adhesion to it.

  Is it true that there is a legitimate sovereignty, a will which has a right to govern mankind? They certainly believe that there is; for they endeavor, have always endeavored, and cannot avoid endeavoring, to place themselves under its empire. Conceive, I shall not say a people, but the smallest community of men; conceive it in subjection to a sovereign who is such only de facto, to a power which has no other right but that of force, which does not govern by the title of reason and justice; human nature instantly revolts against a sovereignty such as this. Human nature, therefore, must believe in legitimate sovereignty. It is this sovereignty alone, the sovereignty de jure, which man seeks for, and which alone he consents to obey. What is history but a demonstration of this universal fact? What are most of the struggles which harass the lives of nations but so many determined impulses towards this legitimate sovereignty, in order to place themselves under its empire? And it is not only the people, but the philosophers, who firmly believe in its existence and incessantly seek it. What are all the systems of political philosophy but attempts to discern the legitimate sovereignty? What is the object of their investigations but to discover who has the right to govern society? Take theocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy; they all boast of having discovered the seat of legitimate sovereignty; they all promise to place society under the authority of its rightful master. This, I repeat, is the object of all the labor of philosophers, as well as of all the efforts of nations.

  How can philosophers and nations do otherwise than believe in this legitimate sovereignty? How can they do otherwise than strive incessantly to discover it? Let us suppose the simplest case; for instance, some act to be performed, either affecting society in general, or some portion of its members, or even a single individual; it is evident that in such a case there must be some rule of action, some legitimate will to be followed and applied. Whether we enter into the most minute details of social life, or participate in its most momentous concerns, we shall always meet with a truth to be discovered, a law of reason to be applied to the realities of human affairs. It is this law which constitutes that legitimate sovereignty towards which both philosophers and nations have never ceased, and can never cease, to aspire.

  But how far can legitimate sovereignty be represented, generally and permanently, by an earthly power, by a human will? Is there anything necessarily false and dangerous in such an assumption? What are we to think in particular of the personification of legitimate sovereignty under the image of royalty? On what conditions, and within what limits, is this personification admissible? These are great questions, which it is not my business now to discuss, but which I cannot avoid noticing, and on which I shall say a few words in passing.

  I affirm, and the plainest common sense must admit, that legitimate sovereignty, in its complete and permanent form, cannot belong to any one; and that every attribution of legitimate sovereignty to any human power whatever is radically false and dangerous. Hence arises the necessity of the limitation of every power, whatever may be its name or form; hence arises the radical illegitimacy of every sort of absolute power, whatever may be its origin, whether conquest, inheritance, or election. We may differ as to the best means of finding the legitimate sovereignty; they vary according to the diversities of place and time; but there is no place or time at which any power can legitimately be the independent possessor of this sovereignty.

  This principle being laid down, it is equally certain that monarchy, under whatever system we consider it, presents itself as the personification of the legitimate sovereignty. Listen to the supporters of theocracy; they will tell you that kings are the image of God upon earth, which means nothing more than that they are the personification of supreme justice, truth, and goodness. Turn to the jurists; they will tell you that the king is the living law; which means, again, that the king is the personification of the legitimate sovereignty, of that law of justice which is entitled to govern society. Interrogate monarchy itself in its pure and unmixed form; it will tell you that it is the personification of the state, of the commonwealth. In whatever combination, in whatever situation, monarchy is considered, you will find that it is always held out as representing this legitimate sovereignty, this power, which alone is capable of lawfully governing society.

  We need not be surprised at this. What are the characteristics of this legitimate sovereignty, and which are derived from its very nature? In the first place, it is single; since there is but one truth, one justice, so there can be but one legitimate sovereignty. It is, moreover, permanent, and always the same, for truth is unchangeable. It stands on a high vantage-ground, beyond the reach of the vicissitudes and chances of this world, with which it is only connected in the character, as it were, of a spectator and a judge. Well, then, these being the rational and natural characteristics of the legitimate sovereignty, it is monarchy which exhibits them under the most palpable form, and seems to be their most faithful image. Consult the work in which M. Benjamin Constant* has so ingeniously represented monarchy, as a neutral and moderating power, raised far above the struggles and casualties of society, and never interfering but in great and critical conjunctures. Is not this, so to speak, the attitude of the legitimate sovereignty, in the government of human affairs? There must be something in this idea peculiarly calculated to strike the mind, for it has passed, with singular rapidity, from books into the actual conduct of affairs. A sovereign has made it, in the constitution of Brazil, the very basis of his throne. In that constitution, monarchy is represented as a moderating power, elevated above the active powers of the state, like their spectator and their judge.†

  Under whatever point of view you consider monarchy, when you compare it with the legitimate sovereignty, you will find a great outward resemblance between them—a resemblance with which the human mind must necessarily have been struck. Whenever the reflection or the imagination of men has especially turned towards the contemplation or study of legitimate sovereignty, and of its essential qualities, it has inclined towards monarchy.* Thus in the times when religious ideas preponderated, the habitual contemplation of the nature of God impelled mankind towards the monarchical system. In the same manner, when the influence of jurists prevailed in society, the habit of studying, under the name of law, the nature of the legitimate sovereignty, was favorable to the dogma of its personification in the institution of monarchy. The attentive application of the human mind to the contemplation of the nature and qualities of the legitimate sovereignty, when there were no other causes to destroy its effect, has always given strength and consideration to monarchy, as being its image.

  There are, too, certain junctures, which are particularly favorable to this personification; such, for example, as when individual forces display themselves in the world with all their uncertainties; all their waywardness; when selfishness predominates in individuals, either through ignorance and brutality, or through corruption. At such times, society, distracted by the conflict of individual wills, and unable to attain, by their free concurrence, to a general will, which might hold them in subjection, feels an ardent desire for a sovereign power, to which all individuals must submit; and, as soon as any institution presents itself which bears any of the characteristics of legitimate sovereignty, society rallies round it with eagerness; as people, under proscription, take refuge in the sanctuary of a church. This is what has taken place in the wild and disorderly youth of nations, such as those we have passed through. Monarchy is wonderfully suited to those times of strong and fruitful anarchy, if I may so speak, in which society is striving to form and regulate itself, but is unable to do so by the free concurrence of individual wills. There are other times when monarchy, though from a contrary cause, has the same merit. Why did the Roman world, so near dissolution at the end of the republic, still subsist for more than fifteen centuries, under the name of an empire, which, after all, was nothing but a lingering decay, a protracted death-struggle? Monarchy, alone, could produce such an effect; monarchy, alone, could maintain a state of society which the spirit of selfishness incessantly tended to destroy. The imperial power contended for fifteen centuries against the ruin of the Roman world.

  It thus appears that there are times when monarchy, alone, can retard the dissolution, and times when it, alone, can accelerate the formation of society. And it is, in both cases, because it represents, more clearly than any other form of government can do, the legitimate sovereignty, that it exercises this power over the course of events.

  Under whatever point of view you consider this institution, and at whatever period you take it, you will find, therefore, that its essential character, its moral principle, its true meaning, the cause of its strength, is, its being the image, the personification, the presumed interpreter, of that single, superior, and essentially legitimate will, which alone has a right to govern society.

  Let us now consider monarchy under the second point of view, that is to say, in its flexibility, the variety of parts it has performed and of effects it has produced. Let us endeavor to account for this character, and ascertain its causes.

  Here we have an advantage; we can at once return to history, and to the history of our own country. By a concurrence of singular circumstances, monarchy in modern Europe has put on every character which it has ever exhibited in the history of the world. European monarchy has been, in some sort, the result of all the possible kinds of monarchy. In running over its history, from the fifth to the twelfth century, you will see the variety of aspects under which it appears, and the extent to which we everywhere find that variety, complication, and contention, which characterize the whole course of European civilization.

  In the fifth century, at the time of the great invasion of the Germans, two monarchies were in existence—the barbarian monarchy of Clovis,* and the imperial monarchy of Constantine. They were very different from each other in principles and effects.

  The barbarian monarchy was essentially elective. The German kings were elected, though their election did not take place in the form to which we are accustomed to attach that idea. They were military chiefs, whose power was freely accepted by a great number of their companions, by whom they were obeyed as being the bravest and most competent to rule. Election was the true source of this barbarian monarchy, its primitive and essential character.

  It is true that this character, in the fifth century, was already somewhat modified, and that different elements were introduced into monarchy. Different tribes had possessed their chiefs for a certain space of time; families had arisen, more considerable and wealthier than the rest. This produced the beginning of hereditary succession; the chief being almost always chosen from these families.† This was the first principle of a different nature which became associated with the leading principle of election.

  Another element had already entered into the institution of barbarian monarchy—I mean the element of religion. We find among some of the barbarian tribes—the Goths, for example—the conviction that the families of their kings were descended from the families of their gods or of their deified heroes, such as Odin. This, too, was the case with Homer’s monarchs who were the issue of gods or demi-gods, and, by this title, objects of religious veneration, notwithstanding the limited extent of their power.

  Such was the barbarian monarchy of the fifth century, whose primitive principle still predominated, though it had itself grown diversified and wavering.

  I now take the monarchy of the Roman empire, the principle of which was totally different. It was the personification of the state, the heir of the sovereignty and majesty of the Roman people. Consider the monarchy of Augustus or Tiberius: the emperor was the representative of the senate, of the assemblies of the people, of the whole republic.*

  Was not this evident from the modest language of the first emperors—of such of them, at least, as were men of sense and understood their situation? They felt that they stood in the presence of the people, who themselves had lately possessed the sovereign power, which they had abdicated in their favor; and addressed the people as their representatives and ministers. But in reality they exercised all the power of the people, and that, too, in its most exaggerated and fearful form. Such a transformation it is easy for us to comprehend; we have witnessed it ourselves; we have seen the sovereignty transferred from the people to the person of a single individual; this was the history of Napoleon. He also was a personification of the sovereignty of the people; and constantly expressed himself to that effect. “Who has been elected,” he said, “like me, by eighteen millions of men? who is, like me, the representative of the people?” and when, upon his coins, we read on one side République Française, and on the other Napoléon Empereur, what is this but an example of the fact which I am describing, of the people having become the monarch?

  Such was the fundamental character of the imperial monarchy; it preserved this character during the three first centuries of the empire; and it was, indeed, only under Diocletian that it assumed its complete and definitive form.* It was then, however, on the eve of undergoing a great change; a new kind of monarchy was about to appear. During three centuries Christianity had been endeavoring to introduce into the empire the element of religion. It was under Constantine that Christianity succeeded, not in making religion the prevailing element, but in giving it a prominent part to perform. Monarchy here presents itself under a different aspect; it is not of earthly origin: the prince is not the representative of the sovereignty of the public; he is the image, the representative, the delegate of God. Power descends to him from on high while, in the imperial monarchy, power had ascended from below. These were totally different situations, with totally different results. The rights of freedom and political securities are difficult to combine with the principle of religious monarchy; but the principle itself is high, moral, and salutary. I shall show you the idea which was formed of the prince, in the seventh century, under the system of religious monarchy. I take it from the canons of the Council of Toledo.

  “The king is called rex because he governs with justice. If he acts justly (recte) he has a legitimate title to the name of king; if he acts unjustly, he loses all claim to it. Our fathers, therefore, said with reason, rex ejus eris si recta facis: si autem non facis, non eris. The two principal virtues of a king are justice and truth (the science of truth, reason).

  “The depositary of the royal power, no less than the whole body of the people, is bound to respect the laws. While we obey the will of heaven, we make for ourselves, as well as our subjects, wise laws, obedience to which is obligatory on ourselves and our successors, as well as upon all the population of our kingdom. * * *

  “God, the creator of all things, in constructing the human body, has raised the head aloft, and has willed that from it should proceed the nerves of all the members, and he has placed in the head the torches of the eyes, in order to throw light upon every dangerous object. In like manner he has established the power of intelligence, giving it the charge of governing all the members, and of prudently regulating their action. * * * * * *

  “It is necessary then to regulate, first of all, those things which relate to princes, to provide for their safety, and protect their life, and then those things which concern the people, in such a manner, that in properly securing the safety of kings, that of the people may be, at the same time, and so much the more effectually, secured.”*

  But, in the system of religious monarchy, there is almost always another element introduced besides monarchy itself. A new power takes its place by its side; a power nearer to God, the source whence monarchy emanates, than monarchy itself. This is the clergy, the ecclesiastical power which interposes between God and kings, and between kings and people, in such sort, that monarchy, though the image of the Divinity, runs the hazard of falling to the rank of an instrument in the hands of the human interpreters of the Divine will. This is a new cause of diversity in the destinies and effects of the institution.

  The different kinds of monarchy, then, which, in the fifth century, made their appearance on the ruins of the Roman empire, were, the barbarian monarchy, the imperial monarchy, and religious monarchy in its infancy. Their fortunes were as different as their principles.

  In France, under the first race,* barbarian monarchy prevailed. There were, indeed, some attempts on the part of the clergy to impress upon it the imperial or religious character; but the system of election, in the royal family, with some mixture of inheritance and of religious notions, remained predominant.

  In Italy, among the Ostrogoths, the imperial monarchy overcame the barbarous customs. Theodoric considered himself as successor of the emperors. It is sufficient to read Cassiodorus† to perceive that this was the character of his government.

  In Spain, monarchy appeared more religious than elsewhere. As the councils of Toledo,‡ though I shall not call them absolute, were the influencing power, the religious character predominated, if not in the government, properly so called, of the Visigothic kings, at least in the laws which the clergy suggested to them, and the language they made them speak.

  In England, among the Saxons, manners remained almost wholly barbarous. The kingdoms of the heptarchy were little else than the territories of different bands, every one having its chief. Military election appears more evidently among them than anywhere else. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy is the most faithful type of the barbarian monarchy.

  Thus, from the fifth to the seventh century, at the same time that all these three sorts of monarchy manifested themselves in general facts, one or other of them prevailed, according to circumstances, in the different states of Europe.

  Such was the prevailing confusion at this period, that nothing of a general or permanent nature could be established; and, from vicissitude to vicissitude, we arrive at the eighth century without finding that monarchy has anywhere assumed a definitive character.

  Towards the middle of the eighth century, and with the triumph of the second race of the Frank kings, events assume a more general character, and become clearer; as they were transacted on a larger scale, they can be better understood and have more evident results. The different kinds of monarchy were shortly destined to succeed and combine with one another in a very striking manner.

  At the time when the Carlovingians replaced the Merovingians, we perceive a return of the barbarian monarchy. Election reappeared; Pippin got himself elected at Soissons.* When the first Carlovingians gave kingdoms to their sons, they took care that they should be acknowledged by the chief men of the states assigned to them. When they divided a kingdom, they desired that the partition should be sanctioned in the national assemblies. In short, the elective principle, under the form of popular acceptance, again assumed a certain reality. You remember that this change of dynasty was like a new inroad of the Germans into the west of Europe, and brought back some shadow of their ancient institutions and manners.

  At the same time, we see the religious principle more clearly introducing itself into monarchy, and performing a part of greater importance. Pippin was acknowledged and consecrated by the pope. He felt that he stood in need of the sanction of religion; it was already become a great power, and he sought its assistance. Charlemagne adopted the same policy; and religious monarchy thus developed itself. Still, however, under Charlemagne, religion was not the prevailing character of his government; the imperial system of monarchy was that which he wished to revive. Although he allied himself closely with the clergy, he made use of them, and was not their instrument. The idea of a great state, of a great political combination,—the resurrection, in short, of the Roman empire, was the favorite day-dream of Charlemagne.

  He died, and was succeeded by Louis the Pious. Everybody knows the character to which the royal power was then, for a short time, reduced. The king fell into the hands of the clergy, who censured, deposed, re-instated, and governed him; a monarchy subordinate to religious authority seemed on the point of being established.

  Thus, from the middle of the eighth to the middle of the ninth century, the diversity of the three kinds of monarchy became manifested by events important, closely connected, and clear.

  After the death of Louis the Pious, during the state of disorder into which Europe fell, the three kinds of monarchy almost equally disappeared; everything became confounded. At the end of a certain time, when the feudal system had prevailed, a fourth kind of monarchy presented itself, differing from all those which had been hitherto observed: this was feudal monarchy. It is confused in its nature, and cannot easily be defined. It has been said that the king, in the feudal system of government, was the suzerain over suzerains, the lord over lords; that he was connected by firm links, from degree to degree, with the whole frame of society; and that, in calling around him his own vassals, then the vassals of his vassals, and so on in gradation, he exercised his authority over the whole mass of the people, and showed himself to be really a king. I do not deny that this is the theory of feudal monarchy: but it is a mere theory, which has never governed facts. This pretended influence of the king by means of a hierarchical organization, these links which are supposed to have united monarchy to the whole body of feudal society, are the dreams of speculative philosophers. In fact, the greatest part of the feudal chieftains at that period were completely independent of the monarchy; many of them hardly knew it even by name, and had few or no relations with it: every kind of sovereignty was local and independent. The name of king, borne by one of these feudal chiefs, expresses not so much a fact as a remembrance. Such is the state in which monarchy presents itself in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

  In the twelfth, at the accession of Louis the Fat, things began to change their aspect.* The king was more frequently spoken of; his influence penetrated into places which it had not previously reached; he assumed a more active part in society. If we inquire into this title, we recognize none of those titles of which monarchy had previously been accustomed to avail itself. It was not by inheritance from the emperors, or by the title of imperial monarchy, that this institution aggrandized itself, and assumed more consistency. Neither was it in virtue of election, or as being an emanation from divine power: every appearance of election had vanished; the principle of inheritance definitively prevailed; and notwithstanding the sanction given by religion to the accession of kings, the minds of men did not appear to be at all occupied with the religious character of the monarchy of Louis the Fat. A new element, a character hitherto unknown, was introduced into monarchy; a new species of monarchy began to exist.

  Society, I need hardly repeat, was at this period in very great disorder, and subject to constant scenes of violence. Society, in itself, was destitute of means to struggle against this situation, and to recover some degree of order and unity. The feudal institutions,—those parliaments of barons, those seignorial courts,—all those forms under which, in modern times, feudalism has been represented as a systematic and orderly state of government,—all these things were unreal and powerless; there was nothing in them which could afford the means of establishing any degree of order or justice; so that, in the midst of social anarchy, no one knew to whom recourse could be had, in order to redress a great injustice, remedy a great evil, to constitute something like a state. The name of king remained, and was borne by some chief whose authority was acknowledged by a few others. The different titles, however, under which the royal power had been formerly exercised, though they had no great influence, yet were far from being forgotten, and were recalled on various occasions. It happened that, in order to re-establish some degree of order in a place near the king’s residence, or to terminate some difference which had lasted a long time, recourse was had to him; he was called upon to intervene in affairs which were not directly his own; and he intervened as a protector of public order, as arbitrator, as redresser of wrongs. The moral authority which continued to be attached to his name gained for him, by little and little, this great accession of power.

  Such was the character which monarchy began to assume under Louis the Fat, and under the administration of Suger.* Now, for the first time, seems to have entered the minds of men the idea, though very incomplete, confused, and feeble, of a public power, unconnected with the local powers which had possession of society, called upon to render justice to those who could not obtain it by ordinary means, and capable of producing, or at least commanding, order;—the idea of a great magistracy, whose essential character was to maintain or re-establish the peace of society, to protect the weak, and to decide differences which could not be otherwise settled. Such was the entirely new character, in which, reckoning from the twelfth century, monarchy appeared in Europe, and especially in France. It was neither as barbarian monarchy, as religious monarchy, nor as imperial monarchy, that the royal power was exercised; this kind of monarchy possessed only a limited, incomplete, and fortuitous power;—a power which I cannot more precisely describe than by saying that it was, in some sort, that of the chief conservator of the public peace.

  This is the true origin of modern monarchy; this is its vital principle, if I may so speak; it is this which has been developed in the course of its career, and, I have no hesitation in saying, has ensured its success. At different periods of history we observe the reappearance of the various characters of monarchy; we see the different kinds of monarchy which I have described, endeavoring, by turns, to recover the preponderance. Thus, the clergy have always preached religious monarchy; the civilians have labored to revive the principle of imperial monarchy; the nobility would sometimes have wished to renew elective monarchy, or maintain feudal monarchy. And not only have the clergy, the civilians, and the nobility, attempted each to give their own principle a predominance in the monarchy, but monarchy itself has made them all contribute towards the aggrandizement of its own power. Kings have represented themselves sometimes as the delegates of God, sometimes as the heirs of the emperors, or as the first noblemen of the land, according to the occasion or public wish of the moment; they have illegitimately availed themselves of these various titles, but none of them has been the real title of modern monarchy, or the source of its preponderating influence. It is, I repeat, as depositary and protector of public order, of general justice, and of the common interest,—it is under the aspect of a chief magistracy,* the center and bond of society, that modern monarchy has presented itself to the people, and, in obtaining their adhesion, has made their strength its own.

  You will see, as we proceed, this characteristic of the monarchy of modern Europe, which began, I repeat, in the twelfth century, under the reign of Louis the Fat, confirm and develop itself, and become at length, if I may so speak, the political physiognomy of the institution. It is by this that monarchy has contributed to the great result which now characterizes European society, the reduction of all the social elements to two—the government and the nation.†

  Thus it appears, that, at the breaking out of the crusades, Europe entered upon the path which was to conduct her to her present state: you have just seen monarchy assume the important part which it was destined to perform in this great transformation. We shall consider, at our next meeting, the different attempts at political organization, made from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, in order to maintain, by regulating it, the order of things that was about to perish. We shall consider the efforts of feudalism, of the Church, and even of the free cities, to constitute society according to its ancient principles, and under its primitive forms, and thus to defend themselves against the general change which was preparing.

  LECTURE X.

  UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPTS AT THE UNIFICATION OF SOCIETY.

  At the commencement of this lecture I wish, at once, to determine its object with precision. It will be recollected, that one of the first facts that struck us, was the diversity, the separation, the independence, of the elements of ancient European society.* The feudal nobility, the clergy, and the commons, had each a position, laws, and manners, entirely different; they formed so many distinct socities whose mode of government was independent of each other. They were in some measure connected, and in contact, but no real union existed between them; to speak correctly, they did not form a nation—a state.

  The fusion of these distinct portions of society into one is, at length, accomplished; this is precisely the distinctive organization, the essential characteristic of modern society. The ancient social elements are now reduced to two—the government and the people; that is to say, diversity ceased and similitude introduced union. Before, however, this result took place, and even with a view to its prevention, many attempts were made to bring all these separate portions of society together, without destroying their diversity and independence. No positive attack was made on the peculiar position and privileges or on the distinctive nature of any portion, and yet there was an attempt made to form them into one state, one national body, to bring them all under one and the same government.

  All these attempts failed. The result which I have noticed above, the union of modern society, attests their want of success. Even in those parts of Europe where some traces of the ancient diversity of the social elements are still to be met with—in Germany, for instance, where a real feudal nobility and a distinct body of burghers still exist; in England, where we see an established Church enjoying its own revenues and its own peculiar jurisdiction—it is clear that this pretended distinct existence is a shadow, a falsehood; that these special societies are confounded in general society, absorbed in the state, governed by the public authorities, controlled by the same system of polity, carried away by the same current of ideas, the same manners. Again I assert, that even where the form still exists, the separation and independence of the ancient social elements have no longer any reality.

  At the same time, these attempts at rendering the ancient and social elements co-ordinate, without changing their nature, at forming them into national unity without annihilating their variety, are entitled to an important place in the history of Europe. The period which now engages our attention—that period which separates ancient from modern Europe, and in which was accomplished the metamorphosis of European society—is almost entirely filled with them. Not only do they form a principal part of the history of this period, but they had a considerable influence on after events, on the manner in which was effected the reduction of the various social elements to two—the government and the people. It is clearly, then, of great importance, that we should become well acquainted with all those endeavors at political organization which were made from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, for the purpose of creating nations and governments, without destroying the diversity of secondary societies placed by the side of each other. These attempts form the subject of the present lecture—a laborious and even painful task.

  All these attempts at political organization did not, certainly, originate from a good motive; too many of them arose from selfishness and tyranny. Yet some of them were pure and disinterested; some of them had, truly, for their object the moral and social welfare of mankind. Society at this time, was in such a state of incoherence, of violence and iniquity, as could not but be extremely offensive to men of enlarged views—to men who possessed elevated sentiments, and who labored incessantly to discover the means of improving it. Yet even the best of these noble attempts miscarried; and is not the waste of so much courage—of so many sacrifices and endeavors—of so much virtue, a melancholy spectacle? And what is still more painful, a still more poignant sorrow, not only did these attempts at social melioration fail, but an enormous mass of error and of evil was mingled with them. Notwithstanding good intention, the majority of them were absurd, and show a profound ignorance of reason, of justice, of the rights of humanity, and of the conditions of the social state; so that not only were they unsuccessful, but it was right that they should be so. We have here a spectacle, not only of the hard lot of humanity, but also of its weakness. We may here see how the smallest portion of truth suffices so to engage the whole attention of men of superior intellect, that they forget every thing else, and become blind to all that is not comprised within the narrow horizon of their ideas. We may here see how the existence of ever so small a particle of justice in a cause is sufficient to make them lose sight of all the injustice which it contains and permits. This display of the vices and follies of man is, in my opinion, still more melancholy to contemplate than the misery of his condition; his faults affect me more than his sufferings. The attempts already alluded to will bring man before us in both these situations; still we must not shun the painful retrospect; it behooves us not to flinch from doing justice to those men, to those ages that have so often erred, so miserably failed, and yet have displayed such noble virtues, made such powerful efforts, merited so much glory.

  The attempts at political organization which were formed from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries were of two kinds; one having for its object the predominance of one of the social elements—sometimes the clergy, sometimes the feudal nobility, sometimes the free cities—and making all the others subordinate to it, and in this way seeking to introduce unity; the other proposing to cause all the different societies to agree and to act together, leaving to each portion its liberty, and ensuring to each its due share of influence.

  The attempts of the former kind are much more open to suspicion of self-interest and tyranny than the latter; in fact, they were not spotless; from their very nature they were essentially tyrannical in their mode of execution; yet some of them might have been, and indeed were, conceived with a pure motive, and with a view to the welfare and advancement of mankind.

  The first attempt which presents itself, is the attempt at theocratical organization; that is to say, the design of bringing all the other societies into a state of submission to the principles and sway of ecclesiastical society.

  I must here refer to what I have already said relative to the history of the Church.* I have endeavored to show what were the principles it developed—what was the legitimate part of each—how these principles arose from the natural course of events—the good and the evil produced by them. I have characterized the different stages through which the Church passed from the eighth to the twelfth century. I have pointed out the state of the imperial Church, of the barbarian Church, of the feudal Church, and lastly, of the theocratic Church. I take it for granted that all this is present in your recollection, and I shall now endeavor to show you what the clergy did in order to obtain the government of Europe, and why they failed in obtaining it.

  The attempt at theocratic organization appeared at an early period, both in the acts of the court of Rome, and in those of the clergy in general; it naturally proceeded from the political and moral superiority of the Church; but, from the commencement, such obstacles were thrown in its way, that, even in its greatest vigor, it never had the power to overcome them.

  The first obstacle was the nature itself of Christianity. Very different, in this respect, from the greater part of religious creeds, Christianity established itself by persuasion alone, by simple moral efforts; even at its birth it was not armed with power; in its earliest years it conquered by words alone, and its only conquest was the souls of men. Even after its triumph, even when the Church was in possession of great wealth and consideration, the direct government of society was not placed in its hands. Its origin, purely moral, springing from mental influence alone, was implanted in its constitution. It possessed a vast influence, but it had no power. It gradually insinuated itself into the municipal magistracies;* it acted powerfully upon the emperors and upon all their agents; but the positive administration of public affairs—the government, properly so called—was not possessed by the Church. Now, a system of government, a theocracy, as well as any other, cannot be established in an indirect manner, by mere influence alone; it must possess the judicial and ministerial offices, the command of the forces, be in receipt of the imposts, have the disposal of the revenues, in a word, it must govern—take possession of society. Force of persuasion may do much, it may obtain great influence over a people, and even over governments its sway may be very powerful; but it cannot govern, it cannot found a system, it cannot take possession of the future. Such has been, even from its origin, the situation of the Christian church; it has always sided with government,* but never superseded it, and taken its place; a great obstacle, which the attempt at theocratic organization was never able to surmount.

  The attempt to establish a theocracy very soon met with a second obstacle. When the Roman empire was destroyed, and the barbarian states were established on its ruins, the Christian church was found among the conquered. It was necessary for it to escape from this situation; to begin by converting the conquerors, and thus to raise itself to their rank. This accomplished, when the Church aspired to dominion, it had to encounter the pride and the resistance of the feudal nobility. Europe is greatly indebted to the laic members of the feudal system in the eleventh century: the people were almost completely subjugated by the Church; sovereigns could scarcely protect themselves from its domination; the feudal nobility alone would never submit to its yoke, would never give way to the power of the clergy. We have only to recall to our recollection the general appearance of the middle ages, in order to be struck with the singular mixture of loftiness and submission, of blind faith and liberty of mind, in the connection of the lay nobility with the priests. We there find some of the remnants of their primitive situation. It may be remembered how I endeavored to describe the origin of the feudal system, its first elements, and the manner in which feudal society first formed itself around the habitation of the possessor of the fief. I remarked how in that society the priest was below the lord of the fief. Yes, and there always remained, in the hearts of the feudal nobility, a remembrance of this situation; they always considered themselves as not only independent of the Church, but as its superior,—as alone called upon to possess, and in reality to govern, the country; they were willing always to live on good terms with the clergy, at the same time insisting that each should perform his own part, the one not infringing upon the duties of the other. During many centuries it was the lay aristocracy who maintained the independence of society with regard to the Church; they boldly defended it when the sovereigns and the people were subdued. They were the first to oppose, and probably contributed more than any other power to the failure of the attempt at a theocratic organization of society.

  A third obstacle stood much in the way of this attempt, an obstacle which has been but little noticed, and the effect of which has often been misunderstood.

  In all parts of the world where a clergy made itself master of society, and forced it to submit to a theocratic organization, the government always fell into the hands of a married clergy, of a body of priests who were enabled to recruit their ranks from their own society. Examine history; look at Asia and Egypt; every powerful theocracy you will find to have been the work of a priesthood, of a society complete within itself, and which had no occasion to borrow of any other.

  But the celibacy of the clergy placed the Christian priesthood in a very different situation; it was obliged to have recourse incessantly to lay society in order to continue its existence; it was compelled to seek at a distance, among all stations, all social professions, for the means of its duration. In vain, attachment to their order induced them to labor assiduously for the purpose of assimilating these discordant elements; some of the original qualities of these new-comers ever remained; citizens or gentlemen, they always retained some vestige of their former disposition, of their early habits. Doubtless the Catholic clergy, by being placed in a lonely situation by celibacy, by being cut off, as it were, from the common life of men, became more isolated, and separate from society; but then it was forced continually to have recourse to this same lay society, to recruit, to renew itself from it, and consequently to participate in the moral revolutions which it underwent; and I have no hesitation in stating it as my opinion, that this necessity, which was always arising, did much more to prevent the success of the attempt at theocratic organization, than the esprit de corps, strongly supported as it was by celibacy, did to forward it.

  The clergy, indeed, found within its own body the most powerful opponents of this attempt. Much has been said of the unity of the Church, and it is true that it has constantly endeavored to obtain this unity, and in some particulars has had the good fortune to succeed. But we must not suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by high-sounding words, nor by partial facts. What society has offered to our view a greater number of civil dissensions, has been subject to more dismemberments than the clergy? What nation has suffered more from divisions, from agitations, from disputes than the ecclesiastical nation? The national churches of the majority of European states have been almost incessantly at variance with the Roman Court;* the Councils have been at war with the popes; heresies have been innumerable and ever springing up anew; schism always breaking out; nowhere was ever witnessed such a diversity of opinions, so much rancor in dispute, such minute parcelling out of power. The internal state of the Church, the disputations which have taken place, the revolutions by which it has been agitated, have been perhaps the greatest of all obstacles to the triumph of that theocratical organization which the Church endeavored to impose upon society.

  All these obstacles were visibly in action even so early as the fifth century, even at the commencement of the great attempt of which we are now speaking. They did not, however, prevent the continuance of its exertions, nor retard its progress during several centuries. The period of its greatest glory, its crisis, as it may be termed, was the reign of Gregory the Seventh, at the end of the eleventh century. We have already seen that the predominant wish of Gregory was to render the world subservient to the clergy, the clergy to the pope, and to form Europe into one immense and regular theocracy.* In the scheme by which this was to be effected, this great man appears, so far as one can judge of events which took place so long ago, to have committed two great faults—one as a theorist, the other as a revolutionist. The first consisted in the pompous proclamation of his plan;† in his giving a systematical detail of his principles relative to the nature and the rights of spiritual power, of drawing from them beforehand, like a severe logician, their remotest, their ultimate consequences. He thus threatened and even attacked all the lay sovereignties of Europe, without having secured the means of success: not considering that success in human affairs is not to be obtained by such absolute proceedings, or by a mere appeal to a philosophic argument. Gregory the Seventh also fell into the common error of all revolutionists—that of attempting more than they can perform, and of not fixing the measure and limits of their enterprises within the bounds of possibility. In order to hasten the predominance of his opinions, he entered into a contest against the empire, against all sovereigns, even against the great body of the clergy itself. He never temporized—he consulted no particular interests, but openly proclaimed his determination to reign over all kingdoms as well as over all intellects; and thus raised up against him, not only all temporal powers, who discovered the pressing danger of their situation, but also all those who advocated the right of free inquiry, a party which now began to show itself, and dreaded and exclaimed against all tyranny over the human mind. It seemed indeed probable, on the whole, that Gregory the Seventh injured rather than advanced the cause which he wished to serve.*

  This cause, however, still continued to prosper throughout the whole of the twelfth and down to the middle of the thirteenth century. This was the epoch of the greatest power and splendor of the Church. I do not think it can be said that during this period she made much progress; to the end of the reign of Innocent III she rather displayed her glory and power than increased them. But at this very moment of her apparently greatest success, a popular reaction seemed to declare war against her in almost every part of Europe. In the south of France broke out the heresy of the Albigenses, which carried away a numerous and powerful society. Almost at the same time similar notions and desires appeared in the north, in Flanders. Wickliffe, only a little later, attacked in England, with great talent, the power of the Church, and founded a sect which was not destined to perish. Sovereigns soon began to follow the bent of their nations. It was only at the beginning of the thirteenth century, that the emperors of the house of Hohenstaufen, who deservedly rank among the most able and powerful sovereigns of Europe, were overcome in their struggle with the Holy See;† yet before the end of the same century, Saint Louis, the most pious of monarchs, proclaimed the independence of temporal power, and published the first Pragmatic Sanction,* which has served as the basis of all the following.† At the opening of the fourteenth century began the quarrel between Philip the Fair with Boniface VIII: Edward I of England was not more obedient to the court of Rome.‡ At this epoch it is evident, that the attempt at theocratic organization had failed; the Church henceforward acted only upon the defensive; she no longer attempted to force her system upon Europe; but only considered how she might keep what she possessed. It is from the end of the thirteenth century that the emancipation of the laic society of Europe truly dates; it was then that the Church gave up her pretensions to its possession.

  A long time before this she had renounced this pretension in the very sphere in which it appeared most likely for her to be successful. Long before in Italy itself, even around the very throne of the Church, theocracy had completely failed, and given way to a system its very opposite in character: to that attempt at democratic organization, of which the Italian republics are the type, and which displayed so brilliant a career in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century.

  It will be remembered, that, when speaking of the free cities, of their history, and of the manner of their formation, I observed that their growth had been more precocious and vigorous in Italy than in any other country; they were here more numerous, as well as more wealthy, than in Gaul, England, or Spain; the Roman municipal system had been preserved with more life and regularity. Besides this, the provinces of Italy were less fitted to become the habitation of its new masters than the rest of Europe. The lands had been cleared, drained, and cultivated; it was not covered with forests, and the barbarians could not here devote their lives to the chase, or find occupations similar to what had amused them in Germany. A part of this country, moreover, did not belong to them. The south of Italy, the Campagna di Roma, and Ravenna, were still dependent on the Greek emperors. Favored by distance from the seat of government, and by the vicissitudes of war, the republican system soon took root, and grew very fast in this portion of the country. Italy, too, besides having never been entirely subdued by the barbarians, was favored by the circumstance, that the conquerors who overran it did not remain its tranquil and lasting possessors. The Ostrogoths were destroyed and driven off by Belisarius and Narses; the kingdom of the Lombards was not permanent.* The Franks overthrew it under Pippin and Charlemagne, who, without exterminating the Lombard population, found it their interest to ally themselves with the ancient Italian inhabitants, in order to contend against the Lombards with more success. The barbarians, then, never became in Italy, as in the other parts of Europe, the exclusive and quiet masters of the territory and people. And thus it happened that the feudal system never made much progress beyond the Alps, where it was but weakly established, and its members few and scattered. Neither did the great territorial proprietors ever gain that preponderance here, which they did in Gaul and other countries, but it continued to rest with the towns. When this result clearly showed itself, a great number of the possessors of fiefs, moved by choice or necessity, left their country dwellings and took up their abode within the walls of some city. The barbarian nobles made themselves burgesses. It is easy to imagine what strength and superiority the towns of Italy acquired, compared with the other communities of Europe, by this single circumstance. What we have chiefly dwelt upon, as most observable in the character of town populations, is their timidity and weakness. The burgesses appear like so many courageous freedmen, struggling with toil and care against a master always at their gates. The fate of the Italian towns was widely different; the conquering and conquered populations here mixed together within the same walls; the towns had not the trouble to defend themselves against a neighboring master; their inhabitants were citizens, who, at least for the most part, had always been free; who defended their independence and their rights against distant foreign sovereigns; at one time against the kings of the Franks, and, at a later period, against the emperors of Germany.* This will in some measure account for the immense and precocious superiority of the Italian cities: while in other countries we see poor insignificant communities arise after great trouble and exertion; we here see shoot up, almost at once, republics—states.

  Thus becomes explained, why the attempt at republican organization was so successful in this part of Europe. It repressed, almost in its childhood, the feudal system, and became the prevailing form in society. Still it was but little adapted to spread or endure; it contained but few germs of melioration, a necessary condition for the extension and duration of any form of government.

  In looking at the history of the Italian republics, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, we are struck with two facts, seemingly contradictory, yet still indisputable. We see passing before us a wonderful display of courage, of activity, and of genius; an amazing prosperity is the result: we see a movement and a liberty unknown to the rest of Europe. But if we ask what was the real state of the inhabitants, how they passed their lives, what was their real share of happiness, the scene changes; there is, perhaps, no history more sad and gloomy: no period, perhaps, during which the lot of man appears to have been more agitated, subject to more deplorable chances, and which abounds more in dissensions, crimes, and misfortunes. Another fact strikes us at the same moment; in the political life of the greater part of these republics, liberty was continuously diminishing. The want of security was so great, that the people were unavoidably driven to take shelter in a system less stormy, though less popular, than that in which the state existed. Look at the history of Florence, Venice, Genoa, Milan, or Pisa; in all of them we find the course of events, instead of aiding the progress of liberty, instead of enlarging the circle of institutions, tending to repress it; tending to concentrate power in the hands of a smaller number of individuals. In a word, we find in these republics, otherwise so energetic, so brilliant, and so rich, two things wanting—security of life, the first requisite in the social state, and the progress of institutions.*

  From these causes sprung a new evil, which prevented the attempt at republican organization from extending itself. It was from without—it was from foreign sovereigns, that the greatest danger was threatened to Italy. Still this danger never succeeded in reconciling these republics, in making them all act in concert; they were never ready to resist in common the common enemy. This has led many Italians, the most enlightened, the best of patriots, to deplore, in the present day, the republican system of Italy in the middle ages, as the true cause which hindered it from becoming a nation; it was parcelled out, they say, into a multitude of little states, not sufficiently master of their passions to confederate, to constitute themselves into one united body. They regret that their country has not, like the rest of Europe, been subject to a despotic centralization which would have formed it into a nation, and rendered it independent of the foreigner.*

  It appears, then, that republican organization, even under the most favorable circumstances, did not contain, at this period, any more than it has done since, the principle of progress, duration, and extension.† We may compare, up to a certain point, the organization of Italy, in the middle ages, to that of ancient Greece. Greece, like Italy, was a country covered with little republics, always rivals, sometimes enemies, and sometimes rallying together for a common object. In this comparison the advantage is altogether on the side of Greece. There is no doubt, notwithstanding the frequent iniquities that history makes known, but that there was much more order, security, and justice in the interior of Athens, Lacedemon, and Thebes, than in the Italian republics. See, however, notwithstanding this, how short was the political career of Greece, and what a principle of weakness is contained in this parcelling out of territory and power. No sooner did Greece come in contact with the great neighboring states, with Macedon and Rome, than she fell. These little republics, so glorious and still so flourishing, could not coalesce for defense. How much more likely was a similar result in Italy, where society and human reason had made no such strides as in Greece, and consequently possessed much less power.

  If the attempt at republican organization had so little chance of stability in Italy where it had triumphed, where the feudal system had been overcome, it may easily be supposed that it was much less likely to succeed in the other parts of Europe.

  I shall take a rapid survey of its fortunes.

  There was one portion of Europe which bore a great resemblance to Italy; the south of France, and the adjoining provinces of Spain, Catalonia, Navarre, and Biscay. In these districts the cities had made nearly the same progress, and had risen to considerable importance and wealth. Many little feudal nobles had here allied themselves with the citizens; a part of the clergy had likewise embraced their cause; in a word, the country in these respects was another Italy. So also, in the course of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth century, the towns of Provence, of Languedoc, and Aquitaine, made a political effort and formed themselves into free republics, as had been done by the towns on the other side of the Alps. But the south of France was connected with a very powerful branch of the feudal system, that of the north. The heresy of the Albigenses appeared. A war broke out between feudal France and municipal France. The history of the crusade against the Albigenses, commanded by Simon de Montfort, is well known: it was the struggle of the feudalism of the North against the attempt at democratic organization of the South.* Notwithstanding the efforts of Southern patriotism, the North gained the day; political unity was wanting in the South, and civilization was not yet sufficiently advanced there to enable men to bring it about. This attempt at republican organization was put down, and the crusade re-established the feudal system in the south of France.

  A republican attempt succeeded better a little later, among the Swiss mountains. Here, the theatre was very narrow, the struggle was only against a foreign monarch, who, although much more powerful than the Swiss, was not one of the most formidable sovereigns of Europe.† The contest was carried on with a great display of courage. The Swiss feudal nobility allied themselves, for the most part, with the cities—a powerful help, which also raised the character of the revolution it sustained, and stamped it with a more aristocratical and stationary character than it seemingly ought to have borne.

  I cross to the north of France to the free towns of Flanders, to those on the banks of the Rhine, and belonging to the Hanseatic League. Here the democratic organization completely triumphed in the internal government of the cities; but from its origin, it is evident, that it was not destined to take entire possession of society. The free towns of the North were surrounded, pressed on every side by feudalism, by barons, and sovereigns, to such an extent that they were constantly obliged to stand upon the defensive. It is scarcely necessary to say, that they did not trouble themselves to make conquests; they defended themselves sometimes well and sometimes badly. They preserved their privileges, but they remained confined to the inside of their walls. Within these, democratic organization was shut up and arrested; if we walk abroad over the face of the country, we find no semblance of it.

  Such, then, was the state of the republican attempt: triumphant in Italy, but with little hope of duration and progress; vanquished in the south of Gaul; victorious upon a small scale in the mountains of Switzerland; while in the North, in the free communities of Flanders, the Rhine, and Hanseatic League, it was condemned not to appear outside their walls. Still, even in this state, evidently inferior to the other elements of society, it inspired the feudal nobility with prodigious terror. The barons became jealous of the wealth of the cities, they feared their power; the spirit of democracy stole into the country; insurrections of the peasantry became more frequent and obstinate. In nearly every part of Europe a coalition was formed among the nobles against the free cities. The parties were not equal; the cities were isolated; there was no correspondence or intelligence between them; all was local. It may be true that there existed, between the burgesses of different countries, a certain degree of sympathy; the success or reverses of the towns of Flanders, in their struggles with the dukes of Burgundy, excited a lively sensation in the French cities; but this was very fleeting, and led to no result; no tie, no true union became established between them; the free communities lent no assistance to one another. The position of feudalism was much superior; yet divided, and without any plan of its own, it was never able to destroy them. After the struggle had lasted a considerable time, when the conviction became settled that a complete victory was impossible, concession became necessary; these petty burgher republics were acknowledged, negotiated with and admitted as members of the state. A new plan was now begun, a new attempt was made at political organization. The object of this was to conciliate, to reconcile, the various elements of society—the feudal nobility, the free cities, the clergy, and monarchs—to make them live and act together, in spite of their rooted hostility. It is to this attempt at mixed organization that I have still to ask your attention.

  I presume there is no one who is not acquainted with the nature of the States-General of France, the Cortes of Spain and Portugal, the Parliament of England, and the States of Germany. The elements of these various assemblies were much the same; that is to say, the feudal nobility, the clergy, and the cities or commons, there met together and labored to unite themselves into one sole society, into one same state, under one same law, one same authority. Whatever their various names, this was the tendency, the design of all.

  Let us take, as the type of this attempt, the fact which most interests us, as well as being best known to us—the States-General of France. I say this fact is best known, while I am still sure that the term States-General awakens in none of you more than a vague and incomplete idea. Who can say what there was in it of stability, of regularity; the number of its members, the subjects of their deliberations, the times at which they were convoked, or the length of their sessions? Of all this we know nothing, and it is impossible to obtain from history any clear, general, satisfactory information respecting it. The best accounts we can gather from the history of France, as regards the character of these assemblies, would almost lead us to consider them as pure accidents, as the last political resort both of people and kings; the last resort of kings, when they had no money and knew not how to free themselves from embarrassment; the last resort of the people, when some evil became so great that they knew not what remedy to apply to it. The nobles formed part of the States-General; so did the clergy; but they came to them with little interest, for they knew well that it was not in these assemblies that they possessed the greatest influence, that it was not there that they took a true part in the government. The burgesses themselves were not eager to attend them; it was not a right which they were anxious to exercise, but rather a necessity to which they submitted. Again, what was the character of the political proceedings of these assemblies? At one time we find them perfectly insignificant, at others terrible. If the king was the stronger, their humility and docility were extreme; if the situation of the monarch was unfortunate, if he really needed the assistance of the States, they then became factious, either the instrument of some aristocratic intrigue, or of some ambitious demagogues. Their works died almost always with them; they promised much, they attempted much,—and did nothing. No great measure which has truly had any influence upon society in France, no important reform either in the general legislation or administration, ever emanated from the States-General. It must not, however, be supposed that they have been altogether useless, or without effect; they had a moral effect, of which in general we take too little account; they served from time to time as a protestation against political servitude, a forcible proclamation of certain guardian principles,—such, for example, as that a nation has the right to vote its own taxes, to take part in its own affairs, to impose a responsibility upon the agents of power. That these maxims have never perished in France, is mainly owing to the States-General; and it is no slight service rendered to a country, to maintain among its virtues, to keep alive in its thoughts, the remembrance and claims of liberty. The States-General has done us this service, but it never became a means of government; it never entered upon political organization; it never attained the object for which it was formed, that is to say, the fusion into one only body of the various societies which divided the country.*

  The Cortes of Portugal and Spain offered the same general result, though in a thousand circumstances they differ. The importance of the Cortes varied according to the kingdoms, and times at which they were held; they were most powerful and most frequently convoked in Aragon and Biscay, during the disputes for the successions to the crown, and the struggles against the Moors. To some of the Cortes—for example, that of Castile, 1370 and 1373—neither the nobles nor the clergy were called. There were a thousand accidents which it would be necessary to notice, if we had time to look closely into events; but in the general sketch to which I am obliged to confine myself it will be enough to state that the Cortes, like the States-general of France, have been an accident in history, and never a system—never a political organization, or regular means of government.*

  The lot of England has been different. I shall not, however, enter into any detail upon this subject at present, as it is my intention to devote a future lecture to the special consideration of the political life of England. All I shall now do is to say a few words upon the causes which gave it a direction totally different from that of the continental states.

  And, first, there were no great vassals, no subjects sufficiently powerful to enter single-handed into a contest with the crown. The great barons were obliged, at a very early period, to coalesce, in order to make a common resistance. Thus the principle of association, and proceedings truly political, were forced upon the high aristocracy. Besides this, English feudalism—the little holders of fiefs—were brought by a train of circumstances, which I cannot here recount, to unite themselves with the burgher class, to sit with them in the House of Commons; and by this, the Commons obtained in England a power much superior to those on the Continent, a power really capable of influencing the government of the country. In the fourteenth century, the character of the English Parliament was already formed: the House of Lords was the great council of the king, a council effectively associated in the exercise of authority. The House of Commons, composed of deputies from the possessors of little fiefs, and from the cities, took, as yet, scarcely any part in the government, properly so called; but it asserted and established rights, it defended with great spirit private and local interests. Parliament, considered as a whole, did not yet govern; but already it was a regular institution, a means of government adopted in principle, and often indispensable in fact. Thus the attempt to bring together the various elements of society, and to form them into one body politic, one true state or commonwealth, did succeed in England while it failed in every part of the Continent.

  I shall offer but one remark upon Germany, and that only in order to indicate the prevailing character of its history. The attempts made here at political organization, to melt into one body the various elements of society, were spiritless and coldly followed up. These social elements had remained here more distinct, more independent than in the rest of Europe. Were any proof of this wanting, it might be found in its later usages. Germany is the only country of Europe (I say nothing of Poland and the Slavonian nations, which entered so very late into the European system of civilization) in which feudal election has for a long time taken part in the election of royalty; it is likewise the only country of Europe in which ecclesiastical sovereigns were continued; the only one in which were preserved free cities with a true political existence and sovereignty. It is clear, therefore, that the attempt to fuse the elements of primitive European society into one social body, must have been much less active and effective in Germany than in any other nation.

  I have now run over all the great attempts at political organization which were made in Europe, down to the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. All these failed. I have endeavored to point out, in going along, the causes of these failures; to speak truly, they may all be summed up in one: society was not yet sufficiently advanced to adapt itself to unity; all was yet too local, too special, too narrow; too many differences prevailed both in things and in minds. There were no general interests, no general opinions capable of guiding, of bearing sway over particular interests and particular opinions. The most enlightened minds, the boldest thinkers, had as yet no just idea of administration or justice truly public. It was evidently necessary that a very active, powerful civilization should first mix, assimilate, grind together, as it were, all these incoherent elements; it was necessary that there should first be a strong centralization of interests, laws, manners, ideas; it was necessary, in a word, that there should be created a public authority and a public opinion. We are now drawing near to the period in which this great work was at last consummated. Its first symptoms—the state of manners, mind, and opinions, during the fifteenth century, their tendency towards the formation of a central government and a public opinion—will be the subject of the following lecture.

  LECTURE XI.

  THE RISE OF CENTRALIZED GOVERNMENT.*

  We have now reached the threshold of modern history, in the proper sense of the term. We now approach that state of society which may be considered as our own, and the institutions, the opinions, and the manners which were those of France forty years ago, are those of Europe still, and, notwithstanding the changes produced by our revolution, continue to exercise a powerful influence upon us. It is in the sixteenth century, as I have already told you, that modern society really commences.

  Before entering into a consideration of this period, let us review the ground over which we have already passed. We have discovered among the ruins of the Roman empire, all the essential elements of modern Europe; we have seen them separate themselves and expand, each on its own account, and independently of the others. We have observed, during the first historical period, the constant tendency of these elements to separation, and to a local and special existence. But scarcely has this object appeared to be attained; scarcely have feudalism, municipal communities, and the clergy, each taken their distinct place and form, when we have seen them tend to approximate, unite, and form themselves into a general social system, into a national body, a national government. To arrive at this result, the various countries of Europe had recourse to all the different systems which existed among them: they endeavored to lay the foundations of social union, and of political and moral obligations, on the principles of theocracy, of aristocracy, of democracy, and of monarchy. Hitherto all these attempts have failed. No particular system has been able to take possession of society, and to secure it, by its sway, a destiny truly public. We have traced the cause of this failure to the absence of general interests and general ideas; we have found that everything, as yet, was too special, too individual, too local; that a long and powerful process of centralization was necessary, in order that society might become at once extensive, solid, and regular, the object which it necessarily seeks to attain. Such was the state in which we left Europe at the close of the fourteenth century.

  Europe, however, was then very far from understanding her own state, such as I have now endeavored to explain it to you. She did not know distinctly what she required, or what she was in search of. Yet she set about endeavoring to supply her wants as if she knew perfectly what they were. When the fourteenth century had expired, after the failure of every attempt at political organization, Europe entered naturally, and as if by instinct, into the path of centralization. It is the characteristic of the fifteenth century that it constantly tended to this result, that it endeavored to create general interests and general ideas, to raise the minds of men to more enlarged views, and to create, in short, what had not, till then, existed on a great scale—nations and governments.

  The actual accomplishment of this change belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it was in the fifteenth that it was prepared. It is this preparation, this silent and hidden process of centralization, both in the social relations and in the opinions of men—a process accomplished, without premeditation or design, by the natural course of events—that we have now to make the subject of our inquiry.

  It is thus that man advances in the execution of a plan which he has not conceived, and of which he is not even aware. He is the free and intelligent artificer of a work which is not his own. He does not perceive or comprehend it, till it manifests itself by external appearances and real results; and even then he comprehends it very incompletely. It is through his instrumentality, however, and by the development of his intelligence and freedom, that it is accomplished. Conceive a great machine, the design of which is centered in a single mind, though its various parts are intrusted to different workmen, separated from, and strangers to each other. No one of them understands the work as a whole, nor the general result which he concurs in producing; but every one executes, with intelligence and freedom, by rational and voluntary acts, the particular task assigned to him. It is thus, that by the hand of man, the designs of Providence are wrought out in the government of the world. It is thus that the two great facts which are apparent in the history of civilization come to coexist; on the one hand, those portions of it which may be considered as fated, or which happen without the control of human knowledge or will; on the other hand, the part played in it by the freedom and intelligence of man, and what he contributes to it by means of his own judgment and will.

  In order that we may clearly understand the fifteenth century; in order that we may give a distinct account of this prelude, if we may use the expression, to the state of society in modern times, we will separate the facts which bear upon the subject into different classes. We will first examine the political facts—the changes which have tended to the formation either of nations or of governments. Thence we will proceed to the moral facts: we will consider the changes which took place in ideas and in manners; and we shall then see what general opinions began, from that period, to be in a state of preparation.

  In regard to political facts, in order to proceed with quickness and simplicity, I shall survey all the great countries of Europe, and place before you the influence which the fifteenth century had upon them—how it found them, how it left them.

  I shall begin with France. The last half of the fourteenth, and the first half of the fifteenth century, were, as you all know, a time of great national wars against the English. This was the period of the struggle for the independence of the French territory and the French name against foreign domination.* It is sufficient to open the book of history, to see with what ardor, notwithstanding a multitude of treasons and dissensions, all classes of society in France joined in this struggle, and what patriotism animated the feudal nobility, the burghers, and even the peasantry. If we had nothing but the story of Joan of Arc to show the popular spirit of the time, it alone would suffice for that purpose. Joan of Arc sprang from among the people; it was by the sentiments, the religious belief, the passions of the people, that she was inspired and supported. She was looked upon with mistrust, with ridicule, with enmity even, by the nobles of the court and the leaders of the army; but she had always the soldiers and the people on her side. It was the peasants of Lorraine who sent her to succor the citizens of Orleans. No event could show in a stronger light the popular character of that war, and the feeling with which the whole country engaged in it.

  Thus the nationality of France began to be formed. Down to the reign of the house of Valois, the feudal character prevailed in France; a French nation, a French spirit, French patriotism, as yet had no existence. With the princes of the house of Valois begins the history of France, properly so called.* It was in the course of their wars, amid the various turns of their fortune, that, for the first time, the nobility, the citizens, the peasants, were united by a moral tie, by the tie of a comman name, a common honor, and by one burning desire to overcome the foreign invader. We must not, however, at this time, expect to find among them any real political spirit, any great design of unity in government and institutions, according to the conceptions of the present day. The unity of France, at that period, dwelt in her name, in her national honor, in the existence of a national monarchy, no matter of what character, provided that no foreigner had anything to do with it. It was in this way that the struggle against the English contributed strongly to form the French nation, and to impel it towards unity.

  At the same time that France was thus forming herself in a moral point of view, she was also extending herself physically, as it may be called, by enlarging, fixing, and consolidating her territory. This was the period of the incorporation of most of the provinces which now constitute France. Under Charles VII [1422—1461] after the expulsion of the English, almost all the provinces which they had occupied—Normandy, Angoumois, Touraine, Poitou, Saintonge, etc., became definitively French. Under Louis XI [1461—1483], ten provinces, three of which have been since lost and regained, were also united to France—Roussillon and Cerdagne, Burgundy, Franche-Comté, Picardy, Artois, Provence, Maine, Anjou, and Perche. Under Charles VIII and Louis XII [1483—1515] the successive marriages of Anne with these two kings gave France Brittany. Thus, at the same period, and during the course of the same events, France, morally as well as physically, acquired at once strength and unity.

  Let us turn from the nation to the government, and we shall see the accomplishment of events of the same nature; we shall advance towards the same result. The French government had never been more destitute of unity, of cohesion, and of strength, than under the reign of Charles VI [1380—1422], and during the first part of the reign of Charles VII.* At the end of this reign [1461], the appearance of everything was changed. There were evident marks of a power which was confirming, extending, organizing itself. All the great resources of government, taxation, military force, and administration of justice, were created on a great scale, and almost simultaneously. This was the period of the formation of a standing army and permanent militia—the compagnies-d’ordonnance, consisting of cavalry, and the free archers, the infantry. By these companies, Charles VII re-established a degree of order in the provinces, which had been desolated by the license and exactions of the soldiery, even after the war had ceased. All contemporary historians expatiate on the wonderful effects of the compagnies-d’ordonnance. It was at this period that the taille, one of the principal revenues of the crown, was made perpetual; a serious inroad on the liberty of the people, but which contributed powerfully to the regularity and strength of the government.* At the same time the great instrument of power, the administration of justice, was extended and organized; parliaments were multiplied, five new parliaments having been instituted in a short space of time:—under Louis XI, the parliaments of Grenoble (in 1451), of Bordeaux (in 1462), and of Dijon (in 1477); under Louis XII, the parliaments of Rouen (in 1499), and of Aix (in 1501).† The parliament of Paris also acquired, about the same time, much additional importance and stability, both in regard to the administration of justice, and the superintendence of the police within its jurisdiction.

  Thus, in relation to the military force, the power of taxation, and the administration of justice, that is to say, in regard to those things which form its essence, government acquired in France, in the fifteenth century, a character of unity, regularity, and permanence, previously unknown; and the feudal powers were finally superseded by the power of the state.

  At the same time, too, was accomplished a change of very different character; a change not so visible, and which has not so much attracted the notice of historians, but still more important, perhaps, than those which have been mentioned:—the change effected by Louis XI in the mode of governing.

  A great deal has been said about the struggle of Louis XI [1461—1483] against the grandees of the kingdom, of their depression, and of his partiality for the citizens and the inferior classes. There is truth in all this, though it has been much exaggerated, and though the conduct of Louis XI towards the different classes of society more frequently disturbed than benefited the state. But he did something of deeper import. Before his time the government had been carried on almost entirely by force, and by mere physical means. Persuasion, address, care in working upon men’s minds, and in bringing them over to the views of the government—in a word, what is properly called policy—a policy, indeed, of falsehood and deceit, but also of management and prudence—had hitherto been little attended to. Louis XI substituted intellectual for material means, cunning for force, Italian for feudal policy. Take the two men whose rivalry engrosses this period of our history, Charles the Bold* and Louis XI: Charles is the representative of the old mode of governing; he has recourse to no other means than violence; he constantly appeals to arms; he is unable to act with patience, or to address himself to the dispositions and tempers of men in order to make them the instruments of his designs. Louis XI, on the contrary, takes pleasure in avoiding the use of force, and in gaining an ascendancy over men, by conversation with individuals, and by skilfully bringing into play their interests and peculiarities of character. It was not the public institutions or the external system of government that he changed; it was the secret proceedings, the tactics, of power. It was reserved for modern times to attempt a still greater revolution; to endeavor to introduce into the means, as well as the objects, of public policy, justice in place of self-interest, publicity instead of cunning. Still, however, a great step was gained by renouncing the continued use of force, by calling in the aid of intellectual superiority, by governing through the understandings of men, and not by overturning everything that stood in the way of the exercise of power. This is the great change which, among all his errors and crimes, in spite of the perversity of his nature, and solely by the strength of his powerful intellect, Louis XI has the merit of having begun.†

  From France I turn to Spain; and there I find movements of the same nature. It was also in the fifteenth century that Spain was consolidated into one kingdom. At this time an end was put to the long struggle between the Christians and Moors, by the conquest of Grenada. Then, too, the Spanish territory became centralized: by the marriage of Ferdinand the Catholic, and Isabella, the two principal kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, were united under the same dominion. In the same manner as in France, the monarchy was extended and confirmed. It was supported by severer institutions, which bore more gloomy names. Instead of parliaments, it was the Inquisition* that had its origin in Spain. It contained the germ of what it afterwards became; but at first it was of a political rather than a religious nature, and was destined to maintain civil order rather than defend religious faith. The analogy between the countries extends beyond their institutions; it is observable even in the persons of the sovereigns. With less subtlety of intellect, and a less active and intriguing spirit, Ferdinand the Catholic, in his character and government, strongly resembles Louis XI. I pay no regard to arbitrary comparisons or fanciful parallels; but here the analogy is strong and observable in general facts as well as in minute details.

  A similar analogy may be discovered in Germany. It was in the middle of the fifteenth century, in 1438, that the house of Austria came to the empire;* and that the imperial power acquired a permanence which it had never before possessed. From that time election was merely a sanction given to hereditary right. At the end of the fifteenth century, Maximilian I definitively established the preponderance of his house and the regular exercise of the central authority; Charles VII was the first in France who, for the preservation of order, created a permanent militia; Maximilian, too, was the first in his hereditary dominions, who accomplished the same end by the same means. Louis XI had established in France, the post-office for the conveyance of letters; Maximilian I introduced it into Germany. In the progress of civilization the same steps were everywhere taken, in a similar way, for the advantage of central government.

  The history of England in the fifteenth century consists of two great events—the war with France abroad, and the contest of the two Roses at home.† These two wars, though different in their nature, were attended with similar results. The contest with France was maintained by the English people with a degree of ardor which went entirely to the profit of royalty. The people, already remarkable for the prudence and determination with which they defended their resources and treasures, surrendered them at that period to their monarchs, without foresight or measure. It was in the reign of Henry V that a considerable tax, consisting of custom-house duties, was granted to the king for his lifetime, almost at the beginning of his reign. The foreign war was scarcely ended, when the civil war, which had already broken out, was carried on; the houses of York and Lancaster disputed the throne. When at length these sanguinary struggles were brought to an end, the English nobility were ruined, diminished in number, and no longer able to preserve the power which they had previously exercised. The coalition of the great barons was no longer able to govern the throne. The Tudors ascended it; and with Henry VII, in 1485, begins the era of political centralization, the triumph of royalty.

  Monarchy did not establish itself in Italy, at least under that name; but this made little difference as to the result. It was in the fifteenth century that the fall of the Italian republics took place. Even where the name was retained, the power became concentrated in the hands of one, or of a few families. The spirit of republicanism was extinguished. In the north of Italy, almost all the Lombard republics merged in the Duchy of Milan. In 1434, Florence fell under the dominion of the Medicis. In 1464, Genoa became subject to Milan. The greater part of the republics, great and small, yielded to the power of sovereign houses; and soon afterwards began the pretensions of foreign sovereigns to the dominion of the north and south of Italy; to the Milanese and kingdom of Naples.

  Indeed, to whatever country of Europe we cast our eyes, whatever portion of its history we consider, whether it relates to the nations themselves or their governments, to their territories or their institutions, we everywhere see the old elements, the old forms of society, disappearing. Those liberties which were founded on tradition were lost; new powers arose, more regular and concentrated than those which previously existed. There is something deeply melancholy in this view of the fall of the ancient liberties of Europe. Even in its own time it inspired feelings of the utmost bitterness. In France, in Germany, and above all, in Italy, the patriots of the fifteenth century resisted with ardor, and lamented with despair, that revolution which everywhere produced the rise of what they were entitled to call despotism. We must admire their courage and feel for their sorrow; but at the same time we must be aware that this revolution was not only inevitable, but useful. The primitive system of Europe—the old feudal and municipal liberties—had failed in the organization of a general society. Security and progress are essential to social existence. Every system which does not provide for present order, and progressive advancement for the future, is vicious, and speedily abandoned. And this was the fate of the old political forms of society, of the ancient liberties of Europe in the fifteenth century. They could not give to society either security or progress. These objects naturally became sought for elsewhere; to obtain them, recourse was had to other principles and other means; and this is the import of all the facts to which I have just called your attention.

  To this same period may be assigned another circumstance which has had a great influence on the political history of Europe. It was in the fifteenth century that the relations of governments with each other began to be frequent, regular, and permanent. Now, for the first time, became formed those great combinations by means of alliance, for peaceful as well as warlike objects, which, at a later period, gave rise to the system of the balance of power. European diplomacy originated in the fifteenth century. In fact you may see, towards its close, the principal powers of the continent of Europe, the Popes, the Dukes of Milan, the Venetians, the German Emperors, and the Kings of France and Spain, entering into a closer correspondence with each other than had hitherto existed; negotiating, combining, and balancing their various interests. Thus at the very time when Charles VIII set on foot his expedition to conquer the kingdom of Naples,* a great league was formed against him, between Spain, the Pope, and the Venetians. The league of Cambray was formed some years later (in 1508), against the Venetians. The holy league directed against Louis XII succeeded, in 1511, to the league of Cambray. All these combinations had their rise in Italian policy; in the desire of different sovereigns to possess its territory; and in the fear lest any of them, by obtaining an exclusive possession, should acquire an excessive preponderance. This new order of things was very favorable to the career of monarchy. On the one hand, it belongs to the very nature of the external relations of states that they can be conducted only by a single person, or by a very small number, and that they require a certain degree of secrecy: on the other hand, the people were so little enlightened that the consequences of a combination of this kind quite escaped them. As it had no direct bearing on their individual or domestic life, they troubled themselves little about it; and, as usual, left such transactions to the discretion of the central government. Thus diplomacy, in its very birth, fell into the hands of kings; and the opinion, that it belongs to them exclusively; that the nation, even when free, and possessed of the right of voting its own taxes, and interfering in the management of its domestic affairs, has no right to intermeddle in foreign matters;—this opinion, I say, became established in all parts of Europe, as a settled principle, a maxim of common law.* Look into the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and you will observe the great influence of that opinion, and the obstacles it presented to the liberties of England in the reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I. It is always under the sanction of the principle, that peace and war, commercial relations, and all foreign affairs, belong to the royal prerogative, that absolute power defends itself against the rights of the country. The people are remarkably timid in disputing this portion of the prerogative; and their timidity has cost them the dearer, for this reason, that, from the commencement of the period into which we are now entering (that is to say, the sixteenth century), the history of Europe is essentially diplomatic. For nearly three centuries, foreign relations form the most important part of history. The domestic affairs of countries began to be regularly conducted; the internal government, on the Continent at least, no longer produced any violent convulsions, and no longer kept the public mind in a state of agitation and excitement. Foreign relations, wars, treaties, alliances, alone occupy the attention and fill the page of history; so that we find the destinies of nations abandoned in a great measure to the royal prerogative, to the central power of the state.

  It could scarcely have happened otherwise. Civilization must have made great progress, intelligence and political habits must be widely diffused, before the public can interfere with advantage in matters of this kind. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the people were far from being sufficiently advanced to do so. Observe what occurred in England, under James I, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, who had been elected king of Bohemia, had lost his crown, and had even been stripped of his hereditary dominions, the Palatinate. Protestantism everywhere espoused his cause; and, on this ground, England took a warm interest in it. There was a great manifestation of public opinion in order to force James to take the part of his son-in-law, and obtained for him the restoration of the Palatinate. Parliament insisted violently for war, promising ample means to carry it on. James was indifferent on the subject; he made several attempts to negotiate, and sent some troops to Germany; he then told parliament that he required £900,000 sterling, to carry on the war with any chance of success. It is not said, and indeed it does not appear, that his estimate was exaggerated. But parliament shrunk back with astonishment and terror at the sound of such a sum, and could hardly be prevailed upon to vote £70,000 sterling, to reinstate a prince, and reconquer a country three hundred leagues distant from England.* Such were the ignorance and political incapacity of the public in affairs of this nature; they acted without any knowledge of facts, or any consideration of consequences. How then could they be capable of interfering in a regular and effectual manner? This is the cause which principally contributed to make foreign relations fall into the hands of the central power; no other was in a condition to conduct them, I shall not say for the public benefit, which was very far from being always consulted, but with anything like consistency and good sense.

  It may be seen, then, that in whatever point of view we regard the political history of Europe at this period—whether we look upon the internal condition of different nations, or upon their relation with each other—whether we consider the means of warfare, the administration of justice, or the levying of taxes, we find them pervaded by the same character; we see everywhere the same tendency to centralization, to unity, to the formation and preponderance of general interests and public powers. This was the hidden working of the fifteenth century, which, at the period we are speaking of, had not yet produced any very apparent result, or any actual revolution in society, but was preparing all those consequences which afterwards took place.

  I shall now bring before you a class of facts of a different nature; moral facts, such as stand in relation to the development of the human mind and the formation of general ideas. In these again we shall discover the same phenomena, and arrive at the same result.

  I shall begin with an order of facts which has often engaged our attention, and under the most various forms, has always held an important place in the history of Europe—the facts relative to the Church. Down to the fifteenth century, the only general ideas which had a powerful influence on the masses were those connected with religion. The Church alone was invested with the power of regulating, promulgating, and prescribing them. Attempts, it is true, at independence, and even at separation, were frequently made; and the Church had much to do to overcome them. Down to this period, however, she had been successful. Creeds rejected by the Church had never taken any general or permanent hold on the minds of the people; even the Albigenses had been repressed. Dissension and strife were incessant in the Church, but without any decisive and striking result. The fifteenth century opened with the appearance of a different state of things. New ideas, and a public and avowed desire of change and reformation, began to agitate the Church herself. The end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century were marked by the great schism of the West, resulting from the removal of the papal chair to Avignon, and the creation of two popes, one at Avignon, and the other at Rome. The contest between these two papacies is what is called the great schism of the West.* It began in 1378. In 1409, the Council of Pisa endeavored to put an end to it by deposing the two rival popes and electing another. But instead of ending the schism, this step only rendered it more violent.

  There were now three popes instead of two; and disorders and abuses went on increasing. In 1414, the Council of Constance assembled, convoked by desire of the Emperor Sigismund. This council set about a matter of far more importance than the nomination of a new pope; it undertook the reformation of the Church. It began by proclaiming the indissolubility of the universal council, and its superiority over the papal power. It endeavored to establish these principles in the Church, and to reform the abuses which had crept into it, particularly the exactions by which the court of Rome obtained money. To accomplish this object the council appointed what we should call a commission of inquiry, in other words, a Reform College, composed of deputies to the council, chosen in the different Christian nations. This college was directed to inquire into the abuses which polluted the Church, and into the means of remedying them, and to make a report to the council, in order that it might deliberate on the proceedings to be adopted. But while the council was thus engaged, the question was started, whether it could proceed to the reform of abuses without the visible concurrence of the head of the Church, without the sanction of the pope. It was carried in the negative through the influence of the Roman party supported by some well-meaning but timid individuals. The council elected a new pope, Martin V, in 1417. The pope was instructed to present, on his part, a plan for the reform of the Church. This plan was rejected, and the council separated. In 1431, a new council assembled at Basel with the same design. It resumed and continued the reforming labors of the Council of Constance, but with no better success. Schism broke out in this assembly as it had done in Christendom. The pope removed the council to Ferrara, and afterwards to Florence. A portion of the prelates refused to obey the pope, and remained at Basel, and, as there had formerly been two popes, so now there were two councils. That of Basel continued its projects of reform; named as its pope, Felix V; some time afterward removed to Lausanne; and dissolved itself in 1449, without having effected anything.

  In this manner papacy gained the day, remained in possession of the field of battle, and of the government of the Church. The council could not accomplish that which it had set about; but it did something else which it had not thought of, and which survived its dissolution. Just at the time the Council of Basel failed in its attempts at reform, sovereigns were adopting the ideas which it had proclaimed, and some of the institutions which it had suggested. In France, and with the decrees of the Council of Basel, Charles VII formed the Pragmatic Sanction,* which he proclaimed at Bourges in 1438; it authorized the election of bishops, the suppression of annates (or first-fruits), and the reform of the principal abuses introduced into the Church. The pragmatic sanction was declared in France to be a law of the state. In Germany, the Diet of Mayence adopted it in 1439, and also made it a law of the German empire. What spiritual power had tried without success, temporal power seemed determined to accomplish.

  But the projects of the reformers met with a new reverse of fortune. As the council had failed, so did the pragmatic sanction. It perished very soon in Germany. It was abandoned by the Diet in 1448, in virtue of a negotiation with Nicholas V. In 1516, Francis I abandoned it also, substituting for it his concordat with Leo X.* The reform attempted by princes did not succeed better than that set on foot by the clergy. But we must not conclude that it was entirely thrown away. In like manner as the council had done things which survived it, so the pragmatic sanction had effects which survived it also, and will be found to make an important figure in modern history. The principles of the Council of Basel were strong and fruitful. Men of superior minds, and of energetic characters, had adopted and maintained them. John of Paris, D’Ailly, Gerson, and many distinguished men of the fifteenth century, had devoted themselves to their defence. It was in vain that the council was dissolved; it was in vain that the pragmatic sanction was abandoned; their general doctrines respecting the government of the Church, and the reforms which were necessary, took root in France. They were spread abroad, found their way into parliaments, took a strong hold of the public mind, and gave birth first to the Jansenists, and then to the Gallicans.† This entire series of maxims and efforts tending to the reform of the Church, which began with the Council of Constance, and terminated in the four propositions of Bossuet, emanated from the same source, and was directed to the same object.‡ It is the same fact which has undergone successive transformations. Notwithstanding the failure of the legal attempts at reform made in the fifteenth century, they indirectly had an immense influence upon the progress of civilization; and must not be left out of its history.

  The councils were right in trying for a legal reform, for it was the only way to prevent a revolution. Nearly at the time when the Council of Pisa was endeavoring to put an end to the great western schism, and the Council of Constance to reform the Church, the first attempts at popular religious reform broke out in Bohemia. The preaching of John Huss,* and his progress as a reformer, commenced in 1404, when he began to teach at Prague. Here, then, we have two reforms going on side by side; the one in the very bosom of the Church,—attempted by the ecclesiastical aristocracy itself,—cautious, embarrassed, and timid; the other originating without the Church, and directed against it,—violent, passionate, and impetuous. A contest began between these two powers, these two parties. The council enticed John Huss and Jerome of Prague to Constance, and condemned them to the flames as heretics and revolutionists. These events are perfectly intelligible to us now. We can very well understand this simultaneous existence of separate reforms, one undertaken by governments, the other by the people, hostile to each other, yet springing from the same cause, and tending to the same object, and, though opposed to each other, finally concurring in the same result. This is what happened in the fifteenth century. The popular reform of John Huss was stifled for the moment; the war of the Hussites broke out three or four years after the death of their master; it was long and violent, but at last the empire was successful in subduing it. The failure of the councils in the work of reform, their not being able to attain the object they were aiming at, only kept the public mind in a state of fermentation. The spirit of reform still existed; it waited but for an opportunity again to break out, and this it found at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Had the reform undertaken by the councils been brought to any good issue, perhaps the popular reform would have been prevented. But it was impossible that one or the other of them should not succeed, for their coincidence shows their necessity.

  Such, then, is the state, in respect to religious creeds, in which Europe was left by the fifteenth century: an aristocratic reform attempted without success, with a popular suppressed reform begun, but still ready to break out anew.

  It was not solely to religious creeds that the human mind was directed, and about which it busied itself at this period. It was in the course of the fourteenth century, as you all know, that Greek and Roman antiquity was (if I may use the expression) restored to Europe. You know with what ardor Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and all their contemporaries, sought for Greek and Latin manuscripts, published them, and spread them abroad; and what general joy was produced by the smallest discovery in this branch of learning. It was in the midst of this excitement that the classical school took its rise; a school which has performed a much more important part in the development of the human mind than has generally been ascribed to it. But we must be cautious of attaching to this term, classical school, the meaning given to it at present. It had to do, in those days, with matters very different from literary systems and disputes. The classical school of that period inspired its disciples with admiration, not only for the writings of Virgil and Homer, but for the entire frame of ancient society, for its institutions, its opinions, its philosophy, as well as its literature. Antiquity, it must be allowed, whether as regards politics, philosophy, or literature, was greatly superior to the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should have exercised so great an influence; that lofty, vigorous, elegant, and fastidious minds should have been disgusted with the coarse manners, the confused ideas, the barbarous modes of their own time, and should have devoted themselves with enthusiasm, and almost with veneration, to the study of a state of society, at once more regular and more perfect than their own. Thus was formed that school of bold thinkers which appeared at the commencement of the fifteenth century, and in which prelates, jurists, and men of learning were united by common sentiments and common pursuits.*

  In the midst of this movement happened the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, 1453, the fall of the Eastern empire, and the influx of the fugitive Greeks into Italy. These brought with them a greater knowledge of antiquity, numerous manuscripts, and a thousand new means of studying the civilization of the ancients. You may easily imagine how this must have redoubled the admiration and ardor of the classic school. This was the most brilliant period of the Church, especially in Italy, not in respect of political power, but of wealth and luxury. The Church gave herself up to all the pleasures of an indolent, elegant, licentious civilization; to a taste for letters, the arts, and social and physical enjoyments. Look at the way in which the men who played the greatest political and literary parts at that period passed their lives—Cardinal Bembo,* for example—and you will be surprised by the mixture which it exhibits of luxurious effeminacy and intellectual culture, of enervated manners and mental vigor. In surveying this period, indeed, when we look at the state of opinions and of social relations, we might imagine ourselves living among the French of the eighteenth century. There was the same desire for the progress of intelligence, and for the acquirement of new ideas; the same taste for an agreeable and easy life, the same luxury, the same licentiousness; there was the same want of political energy and of moral principles, combined with singular sincerity and activity of mind. The literati of the fifteenth century stood in the same relation to the prelates of the Church as the men of letters and philosophers of the eighteenth did to the nobility. They had the same opinions and manners, lived agreeably together, and gave themselves no uneasiness about the storms that were brewing round them. The prelates of the fifteenth century, and Cardinal Bembo among the rest, no more foresaw Luther and Calvin, than the courtiers of Louis XIV foresaw the French revolution. The analogy between the two cases is striking and instructive.

  We observe, then, three great facts in the moral order of society at this period—on one hand, an ecclesiastical reform attempted by the Church itself; on another a popular, religious reform; and lastly, an intellectual revolution, which formed a school of free-thinkers; and all these transformations were prepared in the midst of the greatest political change that has ever taken place in Europe, in the midst of the process of the centralization of nations and governments.

  But this is not all. The period in question was also one of the most remarkable for the display of physical activity among men. It was a period of voyages, travels, enterprises, discoveries, and inventions of every kind. It was the time of the great Portuguese expedition along the coast of Africa; of the discovery of the new passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, by Vasco de Gama; of the discovery of America, by Christopher Columbus; of the wonderful extension of European commerce. A thousand new inventions started up; others already known, but confined within a narrow sphere, became popular and in general use. Gunpowder changed the system of war; the compass changed the system of navigation. Painting in oil was invented, and filled Europe with masterpieces of art. Engraving on copper, invented in 1406, multiplied and diffused them. Paper made of linen became common. Finally, between 1436 and 1452, was invented printing,—printing, the theme of so many declamations and common-places, but to whose merits and effect no common-places or declamations will ever be able to do justice.

  From all this, some idea may be formed of the greatness and activity of the fifteenth century; a greatness which, at the time, was not very apparent; an activity of which the results did not immediately take place. Violent reforms seemed to fail; governments acquired stability. It might have been supposed that society was now about to enjoy the benefits of better order, and more rapid progress. The mighty revolutions of the sixteenth century were at hand; the fifteenth century prepared them.—They shall be the subject of the following lecture.

  LECTURE XII.

  THE REFORMATION.

  I have often referred to and lamented the disorder, the chaotic situation of European society; I have complained of the difficulty of comprehending and describing a state of society so loose, so scattered, and incoherent; and I have kept you waiting with impatience for the period of general interests, order, and social union. This period we have now reached; but, in treating of it, we encounter a difficulty of another kind. Hitherto, we have found it difficult to connect historical facts one with another, to class them together, to seize their common features, to discover their points of resemblance. The case is different in modern Europe; all the elements, all the incidents of social life modify, act and react upon each other; the mutual relations of men are much more numerous and complicated; so also are their relations with the government and the state, the relations of states with each other, and all the ideas and operations of the human mind. In the periods through which we have already traveled, we have found a great number of facts which were insulated, foreign to each other, and without any reciprocal influence. From this time, however, we find nothing insulated; all things press upon one another, and become modified and changed by their mutual contact and friction. What, let me ask, can be more difficult than to seize the real point of unity in the midst of such diversity, to determine the direction of such a widely spread and complicated movement, to sum up this prodigious number of various and closely connected elements, to point out at last the general and leading fact which is the sum of a long series of facts; which characterizes an era, and is the true expression of its influence, and of the part it has performed in the history of civilization? You will be able to measure at a glance the extent of this difficulty, in the great event which is now to engage our attention.

  In the twelfth century we met with an event which was religious in its origin if not in its nature; I mean the crusades. Notwithstanding the greatness of this event, its long duration, and the variety of incidents which it brought about, it was easy enough for us to discover its general character, and to determine its influence with some degree of precision.

  We have now to consider the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, which is commonly called the Reformation. Let me be permitted to say in passing, that I shall use this word reformation as a simple ordinary term, synonymous with religious revolution, and without attaching it to any opinion. You must, I am sure, foresee at once, how difficult it is to discover the real character of this great crisis, and to explain in a general manner what has been its nature and its effects.

  The period of our inquiry must extend from the beginning of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century; for this period embraces, so to speak, the life of this event from its birth to its termination. All historical events have in some sort a determinate career. Their consequences are prolonged to infinity; they are connected with all the past and all the future; but it is not the less true, on this account, that they have a definite and limited existence; that they have their origin and their increase, occupy with their development a certain portion of time, and then diminish and disappear from the scene, to make way for some new event which runs a similar course.

  The precise date which may be assigned to the Reformation is not of much importance. We may take the year 1520, when Luther publicly burnt at Wittenberg the bull of Leo X, containing his condemnation, and thus formally separated himself from the Romish church.* The interval between this period and the middle of the seventeenth century, the year 1648, when the treaty of Westphalia was concluded, comprehends the life of the Reformation. That this is the case, may be thus proved. The first and greatest effect of the religious revolution was to create in Europe two classes of states, the Catholic and the Protestant, to set them against each other and force them into hostilities. With many vicissitudes, the struggle between these two parties lasted from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. It was by the treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, that the Catholic and Protestant states reciprocally acknowledged each other, and engaged to live in amity and peace, without regard to difference of religion. After this, from 1648, difference of religion ceased to be the leading principle of the classification of states, of their external policy, their relations and alliances. Down to that time, notwithstanding great variations, Europe was essentially divided into a Catholic league and a Protestant league. After the treaty of Westphalia this distinction disappeared; and alliances or divisions among states took place from considerations altogether foreign to religious belief. At this point, therefore, the preponderance, or, in other words, the career of the Reformation came to an end, although its consequences, instead of decreasing, continued to develop themselves.

  Let us now take a rapid survey of this career, and merely mentioning names and events, point out its course. You will see from this simple indication, from this dry and incomplete outline, what must be the difficulty of summing up a series of such various and complicated facts into one general fact; of determining what is the true character of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, and of assigning to it its true part in the history of civilization.

  The moment in which the Reformation broke out is remarkable for its political importance. It was in the midst of the great struggle between Francis I and Charles V—between France and Spain; a struggle at first for the possession of Italy, but afterwards for the German empire, and finally for preponderance in Europe. It was the moment in which the house of Austria elevated itself and became predominant in Europe. It was also the moment in which England, through Henry VIII, interfered in continental politics, more regularly, permanently, and extensively than she had ever done before.

  If we follow the course of the sixteenth century in France, we shall find it entirely occupied by the great religious wars between Protestants and Catholics; wars which became the means and the occasion of a new attempt of the great nobles to repossess themselves of the power which they had lost, and to obtain an ascendancy over the sovereign. This was the political meaning of the religious wars of France, of the League,* of the struggle between the houses of Guise and Valois,—a struggle which was put an end to by the accession of Henry IV.

  In Spain, the revolution of the United Provinces broke out about the middle of the reign of Philip II. The Inquisition on one hand, and civil and religious liberty on the other, made these provinces the theatre of war under the names of the Duke of Alva and the Prince of Orange. Perseverance and prudence secured the triumph of liberty in Holland, but it perished in Spain, where absolute power, ecclesiastical and civil, reigned without control.

  In England, the circumstances to be noted are, the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth; the struggle of Elizabeth, as head of the Protestant interests, against Philip II; the accession of James Stuart to the throne of England; and the rise of the great dispute between the monarchy and the people.*

  About the same time we note the creation of new powers in the north. Sweden was raised into existence by Gustavus Vasa, in 1523. Prussia was created by the secularization of the Teutonic order. The northern powers assumed a place in the politics of Europe which they had not occupied before, and the importance of which soon afterwards showed itself in the Thirty Years’ War.

  I now come back to France, to note the reign of Louis XIII; the change in the internal administration of this country effected by Cardinal Richelieu; the relations of France with Germany, and the support which she afforded to the Protestant party.† In Germany, during the latter part of the sixteenth century, there was the war with the Turks; in the beginning of the seventeenth, the Thirty Years’ War, the greatest of modern events in eastern Europe; Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, Tilly, the Duke of Brunswick, the Duke of Weimar, are the greatest names of which Germany at this time could boast.

  At the same period, in France, took place the accession of Louis XIV and the commencement of the Fronde;‡ in England broke out the great revolution, or, as it is sometimes improperly called, the Great Rebellion, which dethroned Charles I.

  In this survey, I have only glanced at the most prominent events of history, events which everybody has heard of; you see their number, their variety, their importance. If we seek for events of another kind, events less conspicuous and less distinguished by great names, we shall find them not less abundant during this period; a period remarkable for the great changes which took place in the political institutions of almost every country; the period in which pure monarchy prevailed in most of the great states, while in Holland there arose the most powerful republic in Europe; and in England constitutional monarchy achieved, or nearly achieved, a final triumph. Then, in the Church, it was during this period that the old monastic orders lost almost all their political power, and were replaced by a new order of a different character, and whose importance, erroneously perhaps, is considered much superior to that of its precursors,—I mean the Jesuits. At the same period the Council of Trent obliterated all that remained of the influence of the Councils of Constance and Basel, and secured the definitive ascendency of the Court of Rome in ecclesiastical affairs.* Leaving the Church, and taking a passing glance at the philosophy of the age, at the unfettered career of the human mind, we observe two men, Bacon and Descartes, the authors of the greatest philosophical revolution which the modern world has undergone, the chiefs of the two schools which contended for supremacy. It was in this period too that Italian literature shone forth in its fullest splendor, while that of France and England was still in its infancy. Lastly, it was in this period that the colonial system of Europe had its origin; that great colonies were founded; and that commercial activity and enterprise were carried to an extent never before known.

  Thus, under whatever point of view we consider this era, we find its political, ecclesiastical, philosophical, and literary events, more numerous, varied, and important, than in any of the preceding ages. The activity of the human mind displayed itself in every way; in the relations of men with each other—in their relations with the governing powers—in the relations of states, and in the intellectual labors of individuals. In short, it was the age of great men and of great things. Yet, among the great events of this period, the religious revolution which now engages our attention was the greatest. It was the leading fact of the period; the fact which gives it its name, and determines its character.* Among the many powerful causes which have produced so many powerful effects, the Reformation was the most powerful; it was that to which all the others contributed; that which has modified, or been modified by, all the rest. The task which we have now to perform, then, is to review, with precision, this event; to examine this cause, which, in a period of the greatest causes, produced the greatest effects—this event, which, in this period of great events, prevailed over all the rest.

  You must, at once, perceive how difficult it is to link together facts so diversified, so immense, and so closely connected, into one great historical unity. It must, however, be done; when events are once consummated, when they have become matter of history, the most important business is then to be attempted; that which man most seeks for are general facts—the linking together of causes and effects. This is what I may call the immortal portion of history, which all generations must study, in order to understand the past as well as the present time. This desire after generalization, of obtaining rational results, is the most powerful and noblest of all our intellectual desires; but we must beware of being satisfied with hasty and incomplete generalizations. No pleasure is more seducing than that of indulging ourselves in determining on the spot, and at first sight, the general character and permanent results of an era or an event. The human intellect, like the human will, is eager to be in action, impatient of obstacles, and desirous of coming to conclusions. It willingly forgets such facts as impede and constrain its operations; but while it forgets, it cannot destroy them; they still live to convict it of error at some after period. There is only one way of escaping this danger; it is by a resolute and dogged study of facts, till their meaning is exhausted, before attempting to generalize, or coming to conclusions respecting their effects. Facts are, for the intellect, what the rules of morals are for the will. The mind must be thoroughly acquainted with facts, and must know their weight; and it is only when she has fulfilled this duty—when she has completely traversed, in every direction, the ground of investigation and inquiry—that she is permitted to spread her wings and take her flight towards that higher region, whence she may survey all things in their general bearings and results. If she endeavor to ascend prematurely, without having first acquired a thorough knowledge of the territory which she desires to contemplate from above, she incurs the most imminent risk of error and downfall. As, in a calculation of figures, an error at the outset leads to others, ad infinitum, so, in history, if we do not, in the first instance, take every fact into account—if we allow ourselves to indulge in a spirit of precipitate generalization—it is impossible to tell how far we may be led astray from the truth.

  In these observations, I am, in some measure, putting you on your guard against myself. In this course I have been able to do little more than make some attempts at generalization, and take some general views of facts which we had not studied closely and together. Having now arrived at a period where this task is much more difficult, and the chances of error greater than before, I think it necessary to make you aware of the danger, and warn you against my own speculations. Having done so, I shall now continue them, and treat the Reformation in the same way that I have other events. I shall endeavor to discover its leading fact, to describe its general character, and to show the part which this great event has performed in the process of European civilization.

  You remember the situation in which we left Europe, at the end of the fifteenth century.* We saw, in the course of it, two great attempts at religious revolution or reform; an attempt at legal reform by the councils, and an attempt at revolutionary reform, in Bohemia, by the Hussites; we saw both these stifled and rendered abortive; and yet we concluded that the event was one which could not be staved off, but that it must necessarily reappear in one shape or another; and that what the fifteenth century attempted would be inevitably accomplished by the sixteenth.† I shall not enter into any details respecting the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, which I consider as being generally known.‡ I shall confine myself solely to the consideration of its general influence on the destinies of mankind.

  In the inquiries which have been made into the causes which produced this great event, the enemies of the Reformation have imputed it to accidents and mischances, in the course of civilization; for instance, to the sale of indulgences* having been intrusted to the Dominicans, which the jealousy of the Augustines. Luther was an Augustine; and this, therefore, was the moving power which put the Reformation in action. Others have ascribed it to the ambition of sovereigns—to their rivalry with the ecclesiastical power, and to the avidity of the lay nobility, who wished to take possession of the property of the Church. In this manner the Reformation has been accounted for, by looking at the evil side of human nature and human affairs; by having recourse to the private interests and selfish passions of individuals.

  On the other hand, the friends and partisans of the Reformation have endeavored to account for it by the pure desire of effectually reforming the existing abuses of the Church. They have represented it as a redress of religious grievances, as an enterprise conceived and executed with the sole design of reconstituting the Church in its primitive purity. Neither of these explanations appears to me well founded. There is more truth in the latter than in the former; at least, the cause assigned is greater, and in better proportion to the extent and importance of the event; but, still, I do not consider it as correct. In my opinion, the Reformation neither was an accident, the result of some casual circumstance, or some personal interest, nor arose from unmingled views of religious improvement, the fruit of Utopian humanity and truth. It had a more powerful cause than all these; a general cause, to which all the others were subordinate. It was a vast effort made by the human mind to achieve its freedom; it was a new born desire which it felt to think and judge, freely and independently, of facts and opinions which, till then, Europe received, or was considered bound to receive, from the hands of authority. It was a great endeavor to emancipate human reason; and to call things by their right names, it was an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of spiritual order. Such, in my opinion, was the true character and leading principle of the Reformation.

  When we consider, on one hand, the state of the human mind, at this time, and, on the other, the state of the spiritual power of the Church, which had the government of the human mind, a double fact presents itself to our notice.

  In looking at the human mind, we observe much greater activity, and a much greater desire to develop its powers, than it had ever felt before. This new activity was the result of various causes which had been accumulating for ages. For example, there were ages in which heresies sprang up, subsisted for a time, and then gave way to others; there were other ages in which philosophical opinions ran just the same course as heresies. The labors of the human mind, whether in the sphere of religion or of philosophy, had been accumulating from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; and the time was now come when they must necessarily have a result. Besides this, the means of instruction created or favored in the bosom of the Church itself, had brought forth fruit. Schools* had been instituted; these schools had produced men of considerable knowledge, and their number had daily increased. These men began to wish to think for themselves, for they felt themselves stronger than they had ever been before. At last came that restoration of the human mind to a pristine youth and vigor, which the revival of the learning and arts of antiquity brought about, the progress and effects of which I have already described.

  These various causes combined, gave, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a new and powerful impulse to the human mind, an imperious desire to go forward.

  The situation of the spiritual power, which then had the government of the human mind, was totally different; it, on the contrary, had fallen into a state of imbecility, and remained stationary. The political influence of the Church and Court of Rome was much diminished. European society had passed from the dominion of Rome to that of temporal governments. Yet in spite of all this, the spiritual power still preserved its pretensions, splendor, and outward importance. The same thing happened to it which has so often happened to long established governments. Most of the complaints made against it were now almost groundless. It is not true, that in the sixteenth century, the Court of Rome was very tyrannical; it is not true, that its abuses were more numerous and crying than they had been at former periods. Never, perhaps, on the contrary, had the government of the Church been more indulgent, more tolerant, more disposed to let things take their course, provided it was not itself implicated, provided that the rights it had hitherto enjoyed were acknowledged even though left unexercised, and that it was assured of its usual existence, and received its usual tributes. It would willingly have left the human mind to itself, if the human mind had been as tolerant towards its offences. But it usually happens, that just when governments have begun to lose their influence and power, just when they are comparatively harmless, that they are most exposed to attack; it is then that, like the sick lion, they may be attacked with impunity, though the attempt would have been desperate when they were in the plenitude of their power.

  It is evident, therefore, simply from the consideration of the state of the human mind at this period, and of the power which then governed it, that the Reformation must have been, I repeat it, a sudden effort made by the human mind to achieve its liberty, a great insurrection of human intelligence. This, doubtless, was the leading cause of the Reformation, the cause which soared above all the rest; a cause superior to every interest either of sovereigns or of nations, superior to the need of reform properly so called, or of the redress of the grievances which were complained of at this period.

  Let us suppose, that after the first years of the Reformation had passed away, when it had made all its demands, and insisted on all its grievances,—let us suppose, I say, that the spiritual power had conceded everything, and said, “Well, be it so; I will make every reform you desire; I will return to a more legal, more truly religious order of affairs. I will suppress arbitrary exactions and tributes; even in matters of belief I will modify my doctrines, and return to the primitive standard of Christian faith. But, having thus redressed all your grievances, I must preserve my station, and retain, as formerly, the government of the human mind, with all the powers and all the rights which I have hitherto enjoyed.”—Can we believe that the religious revolution would have been satisfied with these concessions, and would have stopped short in its course? I cannot think so; I firmly believe that it would have continued its career, and that after having obtained reform, it would have demanded liberty. The crisis of the sixteenth century was not merely of a reforming character; it was essentially revolutionary. It cannot be deprived of this character, with all the good and evil that belongs to it; its nature may be traced in its effects.

  Let us take a glance at the destinies of the Reformation; let us see, more particularly, what it has produced in the different countries in which it developed itself. It can hardly escape observation that it exhibited itself in very different situations, and with very different chances of success; if then we find that, notwithstanding this diversity of situations and chances, it has always pursued a certain object, obtained a certain result, and preserved a certain character, it must be evident that this character, which has surmounted all the diversities of situation, all the inequalities of chance, must be the fundamental character of the event; and that this result must be the essential object of its pursuit.

  Well then, wherever the religious revolution of the sixteenth century prevailed, if it did not accomplish a complete emancipation of the human mind, it procured it a new and great increase of liberty. It doubtless left the mind subject to all the chances of liberty or thraldom which might arise from political institutions; but it abolished or disarmed the spiritual power, the systematic and formidable government of the mind. This was the result obtained by the Reformation, notwithstanding the infinite diversity of circumstances under which it took place. In Germany there was no political liberty; the Reformation did not introduce it; it rather strengthened than enfeebled the power of princes; it was rather opposed to the free institutions of the middle ages than favorable to their progress. Still, in spite of this, it excited and maintained in Germany a greater freedom of thought, probably, than in any other country. In Denmark, too, a country in which absolute power predominated in the municipal institutions, as well as the general institutions of the state, thought was emancipated through the influence of the Reformation, and freely exercised on every subject. In Holland, under a republic; in England, under a constitutional monarchy, and in spite of a religious tyranny which was long very severe, the emancipation of the human mind was accomplished by the same influence. And lastly, in France, which seemed from its situation the least likely of any to be affected by this religious revolution, even in this country, where it was actually overcome, it became a principle of mental independence, of intellectual freedom. Till the year 1685, that is, till the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,* the Reformation enjoyed a legal existence in France. During this long space of time, the reformers wrote, disputed, and provoked their adversaries to write and dispute with them. This single fact, this war of tracts and disputations between the old and new opinions, diffused in France a greater degree of real and active liberty than is commonly believed; a liberty which redounded to the advantage of science and morality, to the honor of the French clergy, and to the benefit of the mind in general. Look at the conferences of Bossuet with Claude,† and at all the religious controversy of that period, and ask yourselves if Louis XIV would have permitted a similar degree of freedom on any other subject. It was between the reformers and the opposite party that the greatest freedom of opinion existed in the seventeenth century. Religious questions were treated in a bolder and freer spirit of speculation than political, even by Fenelon himself in his Telemachus. This state of things lasted till the revocation of the edict of Nantes. Now, from the year 1685 to the explosion of the human mind in the eighteenth century, there was not an interval of forty years; and the influence of the religious revolution in favor of intellectual liberty had scarcely ceased when the influence of the revolution in philosophy began to operate.

  You see, then, that wherever the Reformation penetrated, wherever it acted an important part, whether conqueror or conquered, its general, leading, and constant result was an immense progress in mental activity and freedom; an immense step towards the emancipation of the human mind.

  Again, not only was this the result of the Reformation, but it was content with this result. Wherever this was obtained, no other was sought for; so entirely was it the very foundation of the event, its primitive and fundamental character! Thus, in Germany, far from demanding political liberty, the Reformation accepted, I shall not say servitude, but the absence of liberty. In England, it consented to the hierarchical constitution of the clergy, and to the existence of a Church, as full of abuses as ever the Romish church had been, and much more servile. Why did the Reformation, so ardent and rigid in certain respects, exhibit, in these instances, so much facility and suppleness? Because it had obtained the general result to which it tended, the abolition of the spiritual power, and the emancipation of the human mind. I repeat it; wherever the Reformation attained this object, it accommodated itself to every form of government, and to every situation.

  Let us now test this fact by the opposite mode of proof; let us see what happened in those countries into which the Reformation did not penetrate, or in which it was early suppressed. We learn from history that, in those countries, the human mind was not emancipated; witness two great countries, Spain and Italy. While, in those parts of Europe into which the Reformation very largely entered, the human mind, during the last three centuries, has acquired an activity and freedom previously unknown;—in those other parts, into which it was never allowed to make its way, the mind, during the same period, has become languid and inert: so that opposite sets of facts, which happened at the same time, concur in establishing the same result.*

  The impulse which was given to human thought, and the abolition of absolute power in the spiritual order, constituted, then, the essential character of the Reformation, the most general result of its influence, the ruling fact in its destiny.

  I use the word fact, and I do so designedly. The emancipation of the human mind, in the course of the Reformation, was a fact rather than a principle, a result rather than an intention.† The Reformation, I believe, has in this respect, performed more than it undertook,—more, probably, than it desired. Contrary to what has happened in many other revolutions, the effects of which have not come up to their design, the consequences of the Reformation have gone beyond the object it had in view; it is greater, considered as an event, than as a system; it never completely foresaw all that it effected, nor, if it had, would it have completely avowed it.

  What are the reproaches constantly applied to the Reformation by its enemies? Which of its results are thrown in its face, as it were, as unanswerable?

  The two principal reproaches are, first, the multiplicity of sects, the excessive license of thought, the destruction of all spiritual authority, and the entire dissolution of religious society; secondly, tyranny and persecution. “You provoke licentiousness,” it has been said to the Reformers,—“you produced it; and, after having been the cause of it, you wish to restrain and repress it. And how do you repress it? By the most harsh and violent means. You take upon yourselves, too, to punish heresy, and that by virtue of an illegitimate authority.”

  If we take a review of all the principal charges which have been made against the Reformation, we shall find, if we set aside all questions purely doctrinal, that the above are the two fundamental reproaches to which they may all be reduced.

  These charges gave great embarrassment to the reform party. When they were taxed with the multiplicity of their sects, instead of advocating the freedom of religious opinion, and maintaining the right of every sect to entire toleration, they denounced sectarianism, lamented it, and endeavored to find excuses for its existence. Were they accused of persecution? They were troubled to defend themselves; they used the plea of necessity; they had, they said, the right to repress and punish error, because they were in possession of the truth. Their articles of belief, and their institutions, they contended, were the only legitimate ones; and if the Church of Rome had not the right to punish the reformed party, it was because she was in the wrong and they in the right.

  And when the charge of persecution was applied to the ruling party in the Reformation, not by its enemies, but by its own offspring; when the sects denounced by that party said, “We are doing just what you did; we separate ourselves from you, just as you separated yourselves from the Church of Rome,” this ruling party were still more at a loss to find an answer, and frequently the only answer they had to give was an increase of severity.

  The truth is, that while laboring for the destruction of absolute power in the spiritual order, the religious revolution of the sixteenth century was not aware of the true principles of intellectual liberty. It emancipated the human mind, and yet pretended still to govern it by laws. In point of fact it produced the prevalence of free inquiry; in point of principle it believed that it was substituting a legitimate for an illegitimate power. It had not looked up to the primary motive, nor down to the ultimate consequences of its own work. It thus fell into a double error. On the one side it did not know or respect all the rights of human thought; at the very moment that it was demanding these rights for itself, it was violating them towards others.* On the other side, it was unable to estimate the rights of authority in matters of reason. I do not speak of that coercive authority which ought to have no rights at all in such matters, but of that kind of authority which is purely moral,* and acts solely by its influence upon the mind. In most reformed countries something is wanting to complete the proper organization of intellectual society, and to the regular action of old and general opinions. What is due to and required by traditional belief, has not been reconciled with what is due to and required by freedom of thinking; and the cause of this undoubtedly is, that the Reformation did not fully comprehend and accept its own principles and effects.

  Hence, too, the Reformation acquired an appearance of inconsistency and narrowness of mind, which has often given an advantage to its enemies. The latter knew very well what they were about, and what they wanted; they cited the principles of their conduct without scruple, and avowed all its consequences. There never was a government more consistent and systematic than that of the Church of Rome. In point of fact, the Court of Rome made more compromises and concessions than the Reformation; in point of principle, it adhered much more closely to its system, and maintained a more consistent line of conduct. Great strength is gained by a thorough knowledge of the nature of one’s own views and actions, by a complete and rational adoption of a certain principle and design: and a striking example of this is to be found in the course of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century. Everybody knows that the principal power instituted to contend against the Reformation was the order of the Jesuits.* Look for a moment at their history; they failed everywhere; wherever they interfered, to any extent, they brought misfortune upon the cause in which they meddled. In England they ruined kings; in Spain, whole masses of the people. The general course of events, the development of modern civilization, the freedom of the human mind, all these forces with which the Jesuits were called upon to contend, rose up against them and overcame them. And not only did they fail, but you must remember what sort of means they were constrained to employ. There was nothing great or splendid in what they did; they produced no striking events, they did not put in motion powerful masses of men. They proceeded by dark and hidden courses; courses by no means calculated to strike the imagination, or to conciliate that public interest which always attaches itself to great things, whatever may be their principle and object. The party opposed to them, on the contrary, not only overcame, but overcame signally; did great things and by great means; overspread Europe with great men; changed, in open day, the condition and form of states. Every thing, in short, was against the Jesuits, both fortune and appearances; reason, which desires success,—and imagination, which requires éclat,—were alike disappointed by their fate. Still, however, they were undoubtedly possessed of grandeur; great ideas are attached to their name, their influence, and their history. The reason is, that they knew what they did, and what they wished to accomplish; that they were fully and clearly aware of the principles upon which they acted, and of the object which they had in view. They possessed grandeur of thought and of will; and it was this that saved them from the ridicule which attends constant reverses, and the use of paltry means. Wherever, on the contrary, the event has been greater than the design, wherever there is an appearance of ignorance of the first principles and ultimate results of an action, there has always remained a degree of incompleteness, inconsistency, and narrowness of view, which has placed the very victors in a state of rational or philosophical inferiority, the influence of which has sometimes been apparent in the course of events. This, I think, in the struggle between the old and the new order of things, in matters of religion, was the weak side of the Reformation, which often embarrassed its situation, and prevented it from defending itself so well as it had a right to do.

  I might consider the religious revolution of the sixteenth century under many other aspects. I have said nothing, and have nothing to say, respecting it as a matter of doctrine—respecting its effects on religion, properly so called, or respecting the relations of the human soul with God and an eternal futurity; but I might exhibit it in its various relations with social order, everywhere producing results of immense importance. For example, it introduced religion into the midst of the laity, into the world, so to speak, of believers. Till then, religion had been the exclusive domain of the ecclesiastical order. The clergy distributed the proceeds, but reserved to themselves the disposal of the capital, and almost the exclusive right even to speak of it. The Reformation again threw matters of religious belief into general circulation, and again opened to believers the field of faith into which they had not been permitted to enter. It had, at the same time, a further result; it banished, or nearly so, religion from polities, and restored the independence of the temporal power. At the same moment that religion returned into the possession of believers, it quitted the government of society. In the reformed countries, in spite of the diversities of ecclesiastical constitutions, even in England, whose constitution is most nearly akin to the old order of things, the spiritual power has no longer any serious pretensions to the government of the temporal power.*

  I might enumerate many other consequences of the Reformation, but I must limit myself to the above general views; and I am satisfied with having placed before you its principal feature—the emancipation of the human mind, and the abolition of absolute power in the spiritual order; an abolition which, though, undoubtedly, not complete, is yet the greatest step which, down to our own times, has ever been made towards the attainment of that object.

  Before concluding, I pray you to remark, what a striking resemblance of destiny there is to be found, in the history of modern Europe, between civil and religious society, in the revolutions they have had to undergo.

  Christian society, as we have seen when I spoke of the Church, was, at first, a state of society perfectly free, formed entirely in the name of a common belief, without institutions or government, properly so called; regulated, solely, by moral and variable powers, according to the exigencies of the moment. Civil society began, in like manner, in Europe, partly, at least, by bands of barbarians; it was a state of society perfectly free, in which every one remained, because he wished to do so, without laws or powers created by institutions. In emerging from that state which was inconsistent with any great social development, religious society placed itself under a government essentially aristocratic; its governors were the clergy, the bishops, the councils, the ecclesiastical aristocracy. A fact of the same kind took place in civil society when it emerged from barbarism; it was, in like manner, the aristocracy, the feudalism of the laity, which laid hold of the power of government. Religious society quitted the aristocratic form of government to assume that of pure monarchy; this was the rationale of the triumph of the Court of Rome over the Councils and the ecclesiastical aristocracy of Europe. The same revolution was accomplished in civil society; it was, in like manner, by the destruction of the aristocratic power, that monarchy prevailed, and took possession of the European world. In the sixteenth century, in the heart of religious society, an insurrection broke out against the system of pure ecclesiastical monarchy, against absolute power in the spiritual order. This revolution produced, sanctioned, and established freedom of inquiry in Europe. In our own time we have witnessed a similar event in civil society.* Absolute temporal power, in like manner, was attacked and overcome. You see, then, that the two orders of society have undergone the same vicissitudes and revolutions; only religious society has always been the foremost in this career.

  We are now in possession of one of the great facts in the history of modern society—freedom of inquiry, the liberty of the human mind. We see, at the same time, the almost universal prevalence of political centralization. In my next lecture I shall consider the revolution in England; the event in which freedom of inquiry and a pure monarchy, both results of the progress of civilization, came, for the first time, into collision.†

  LECTURE XIII.

  THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION.

  We have seen, that during the course of the sixteenth century, all the elements, all the facts, of ancient European society had merged in two essential facts, the right of free examination, and centralization of power; one prevailing in religious society, the other in civil society. The emancipation of the human mind and absolute monarchy triumphed at the same moment over Europe in general.

  It could hardly be conceived that a struggle between these two facts—the characters of which appear so contradictory—would not, at some time, break out; for while one was the defeat of absolute power in the spiritual order, the other was the triumph of absolute power in the temporal order; one forced on the decline of the ancient ecclesiastical monarchy, the other was the consummation of the ruin of the ancient feudal and municipal liberty. Their simultaneous appearance was owing, as I have already observed, to the circumstance that the revolutions of the religious society followed more rapidly than those of the civil; one had arrived at the point in which the freedom of individual thought was secured, while the other still lingered on the spot where the concentration of all the powers in one general power took place. The coincidence of these two facts, so far from being the consequence of their similitude, did not even prevent their contradiction. They were both advances in the march of civilization, but they were advances connected with different situations; advances of a different moral date, if I may be allowed the expression, although coincident in time. From their position it seemed inevitable that they must clash and combat before a reconciliation could be effected between them.

  The first shock between them took place in England. The struggle of the right of free inquiry, the fruit of the Reformation, against the entire suppression of political liberty, the object aimed at by pure monarchy—the attempt to abolish absolute power in the temporal order, as had already been done in the spiritual order—this is the true sense of the English revolution; this is the part it took in the work of civilization.

  But how, it may be asked, came it to pass, that this struggle took place in England sooner than anywhere else? How happened it that the revolutions of a political character coincided here with those of a moral character sooner than they did on the Continent?

  In England, the royal power had undergone the same vicissitudes as it had on the Continent. Under the Tudors it had reached a degree of concentration and vigor which it had never attained to before. I do not mean to say that the practical despotism of the Tudors was more violent and vexatious than that of their predecessors; there were quite as many, perhaps more, tyrannical proceedings, vexations, and acts of injustice, under the Plantagenets, as under the Tudors. Perhaps, too, at this very period the government of pure monarchy was more severe and arbitrary on the Continent than in England. The new fact under the Tudors was, that absolute power became systematic; royalty laid claim to a primitive, independent sovereignty; it maintained a tone which it had never held before. The theoretic claims of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, are very different from those of Edward I and III, although, in point of fact, the power of the two latter monarchs was nowise less arbitrary or extensive.* I repeat, then, it was the principle, the rational system of monarchy, which changed in England, in the sixteenth century, rather than its practical power; royalty now declared itself absolute and superior to all laws, even to those which it declared itself willing to respect.

  There is another point to be considered; the religious revolution had not been accomplished in England in the same way as on the Continent; it was here the work of the monarchs themselves. It must not be supposed that the seeds had not been sown, or that even attempts had not been made at a popular reform, which would probably have soon broken out. But Henry VIII took the lead; power became revolutionary; and hence it happened, at least in its origin, that, as a redress of ecclesiastical abuses, as an emancipation of the human mind, the reform in England was much less complete than upon the Continent. It was made, as might naturally be expected, in accordance with the interests of its authors. The king and the episcopacy, which was here continued, divided between themselves the riches and the power, of which they despoiled their predecessors, the popes. The effect of this was soon felt. The Reformation, people cried out, had been closed, while the greater part of the abuses which had induced them to desire it, were still continued.

  The Reformation reappeared under a more popular form; it made the same demands of the bishops that had already been made of the Holy See; it accused them of being so many popes. As often as the general fate of the religious revolution was compromised; whenever a struggle against the ancient Church took place, the various portions of the Reformation party rallied together, and made common cause against the common enemy: but this danger over, the struggle again broke out among themselves; the popular reform again attacked the aristocratic and royal reform, denounced its abuses, complained of its tyranny, called upon it to make good its promises, and not itself usurp the power which it had just dethroned.

  At about the same time a movement for liberty took place in civil society; a desire before unknown, or at least but weakly expressed, was now felt for political freedom. In the course of the sixteenth century, the commercial prosperity of England had increased with amazing rapidity, while during the same time, much territorial wealth, much baronial property had changed hands. The numerous divisions of landed property, which took place during the sixteenth century, in consequence of the ruin of the feudal nobility, and from various other causes which I cannot now stop to enumerate,* form a fact which has not been sufficiently noticed. A variety of documents prove how greatly the number of landed properties increased; the estates going generally into the hands of the gentry, composed of the lesser nobility, and persons who had acquired property by trade. The high nobility, the House of Lords, did not, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, nearly equal, in riches, the House of Commons. There had taken place, then, at the same time in England, a great increase in wealth among the industrial classes, and a great change in landed property. While these two facts were being accomplished, there happened a third, a new march of mind.

  The reign of Queen Elizabeth must be regarded as a period of great literary and philosophical activity in England, a period remarkable for bold and pregnant thought; the Puritans followed, without hesitation, all the consequences of a narrow, but powerful creed; other intellects, with less morality, but more freedom and boldness, alike regardless of principle or system, seized with avidity upon every idea, which seemed to promise some gratification to their curiosity, some food for their mental ardor. And it may be regarded as a maxim, that wherever the progress of intelligence is a true pleasure, a desire for liberty is soon felt, nor is it long in passing from the public mind to the state.

  A feeling of the same kind, a sort of creeping desire for political liberty, almost manifested itself in some of the countries on the Continent in which the Reformation had made some way; but these countries, being without the means of success, made no progress; they knew not how to make their desire felt; they could find no support for it either in institutions, or in the habits and usages of the people; hence this desire remained vague, uncertain, and sought in vain for the means of satisfying its cravings. In England the case was widely different: the spirit of political liberty which showed itself here in the sixteenth century, as a sort of appendix to the Reformation, found both a firm support and the means of speaking and acting in the ancient institutions of the country, and indeed in the whole framework of English society.

  There is hardly anyone who does not know the origin of the free institutions of England. How, in 1215, a coalition of the great barons wrested Magna Charta from John; but it is not quite so generally known, that this charter was renewed and confirmed, from time to time, by almost every king. It was confirmed upwards of thirty times between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, besides which new statutes were passed to confirm and extend its enactments. Thus it lived, as it were, without gap or interval. In the mean time the House of Commons had been formed, and taken its place among the sovereign institutions of the country.* Under the Plantagenets it had taken deep root and become firmly established; not that at this time it played any great part or had even much influence in the government; it scarcely indeed interfered in this except when called upon to do so by the king, and then only with hesitation and regret; afraid rather of bringing itself into trouble and danger, than jealous of augmenting its power and authority. But the case was different when it was called upon to defend private rights, the house or property of the citizens, or in short the rights and privileges of individuals; this duty the House of Commons performed with wonderful energy and perseverance, putting forward and establishing all those principles which have become the basis of the English constitution. Under the Tudors the House of Commons, or rather the Parliament altogether, put on a new character. It no longer defended individual liberty so well as under the Plantagenets. Arbitrary detentions, and violations of private rights, which became much more frequent, were often passed in silence. But, as a counterbalance for this, the Parliament interfered to a much greater extent than formerly in the general affairs of government. Henry VIII, in order to change the religion of the country, and to regulate the succession, required some public support, some public instrument, and he had recourse to Parliament, and especially to the House of Commons, for this purpose.† This, which under the Plantagenets had only been a means of resistance, a guarantee of private rights, became now, under the Tudors, an instrument of government, of general policy; so that at the end of the sixteenth century, notwithstanding it had been the tool, and submitted to the will of nearly all sorts of tyrannies, its importance had greatly increased; the foundation of its power was laid, the foundation of that power upon which truly rests representative government.

  In taking a view, then, of the free institutions of England at the end of the sixteenth century, we find them to consist: first, of maxims—of principles of liberty, which had been constantly acknowledged in written documents, and of which the legislation and country had never lost sight; secondly, of precedents, of examples of liberty; these, it is true, were mixed with a great number of precedents and examples of an opposite nature; still they were quite sufficient to maintain, to give a legal character to the claims of the friends of liberty, and to support them in their struggle against arbitrary and tyrannical government; thirdly, particular and local institutions, pregnant with the seeds of liberty, the jury, the right of holding public meetings, of bearing arms, to which must be added the independence of municipal administration and jurisdiction; fourthly and finally, the parliament and its authority became more necessary now than ever to the monarchs, as these having dilapidated the greater part of their independent revenues, crown domains, feudal rights, etc., could not support even the expenses of their households, without having recourse to a vote of parliament.

  The political state of England then was very different from that of the Continent; notwithstanding the tyranny of the Tudors, notwithstanding the systematic triumph of absolute monarchy, there still remained here a firm support for the new spirit of liberty, a sure means by which it could act.

  At this epoch, two national wants were felt in England: on one hand, a want of religious liberty and of a continuation of the reformation already begun; on the other, a want of political liberty, which seemed arrested by the absolute monarchy now establishing its power. These two parties formed an alliance; the party which wished to carry forward religious reform, invoked, political liberty to the aid of its faith and conscience against the bishops and the crown. The friends of political liberty, in like manner, sought the aid of the friends of popular religious reform. The two parties joined their forces to struggle against absolute power, both spiritual and political, now concentrated in the hands of the king. Such is the origin and signification of the English revolution.

  It appears, then, to have been essentially devoted to the defence or achievement of liberty. For the religious party it was a means, for the political party it was an end; but the object of both was still liberty, and they were determined to pursue it in common. Properly speaking, there had been no true quarrel between the episcopal and Puritan party; the struggle was not about doctrines, about matters of faith, properly so called. I do not mean that these were not very positive, very important, and differences of great consequence between them; but this was not the main affair. What the Puritan party wished to obtain from the episcopal was practical liberty; this was the object for which it struggled. It must, however, be admitted that there did exist at the same time, a religious party which had a system to found; a set of doctrines, a form of discipline, an ecclesiastic constitution, which it wished to establish—I mean the Presbyterians; but though it did its best, it had not the power to obtain its object. Acting upon the defensive, oppressed by the bishops, unable to take a step without the sanction of the political reformers, its necessary allies and chieftains, liberty naturally became its predominant interest; this was the general interest, the common desire of all the parties which concurred in the movement, however different in other respects might be their views. Taking these matters then altogether, we must come to the conclusion, that the English revolution was essentially political; it was accomplished in the midst of a religious people and a religious age; religious ideas and passions often became its instruments; but its primary intention and its definite object were decidedly political, a tendency to liberty, the destruction of all absolute power.

  I shall now briefly run over the various phases of this revolution, and analyze it into the great parties that succeeded one another in its course. I shall afterwards connect it with the general career of European civilization; I shall show its place and influence therein; and you will be satisfied, from the detail of facts as well as from its first aspect, that it was truly the first collision of free inquiry and pure monarchy, the first onset that took place in the struggle between these two great and opposite powers.

  Three principal parties appeared upon the stage at this important crisis; three revolutions seem to have been contained within it, and to have successively appeared upon the scene. In each party, in each revolution, two parties moved together in alliance, a political party and a religious party; the former took the lead, the second followed, but one could not go without the other, so that a double character seems to be imprinted upon it in all its changes.

  The first party which appeared in the field,* and under whose banners at the beginning marched all the others, was the high, pure-monarchy party, advocating legal reform. When the revolution began, when the Long Parliament assembled in 1640, it was generally said, and sincerely believed by many, that a legal, a constitutional reform would suffice; that the ancient laws and practices of the country were sufficient to correct every abuse, to establish a system of government which would fully meet the wishes of the public.

  This party highly blamed and earnestly desired to put a stop to illegal imposts, to arbitrary imprisonments—to all acts, indeed, contrary to the known law and usages of the country. But under these ideas, there lay hid, as it were, a belief in the divine right of the king, and in his absolute power. A secret instinct seemed to warn it that there was something false and dangerous in this notion; and on this account it appeared always desirous to avoid the subject. Forced, however, at last to speak out, it acknowledged the divine right of kings, and admitted that they possessed a power superior to all human origin, to all human control; and as such they defended it in time of need. Still, however, they believed that this sovereignty, though absolute in principle, was bound to exercise its authority according to certain rules and forms; that it could not go beyond certain limits; and that these rules, these forms, and these limits were sufficiently established and guaranteed in Magna Charta, in the confirmatory statutes, in the ancient laws and usages of the country. Such was the political creed of this party. In religious matters, it believed that the episcopacy had greatly encroached; that the bishops possessed far too much political power; that their jurisdiction was far too extensive, that it required to be restrained, and its proceedings jealously watched. Still it held firmly to episcopacy, not merely as an ecclesiastical institution, not merely as a form of church government, but as a necessary support of the royal prerogative, and as a means of defending and maintaining the supremacy of the king in matters of religion. The absolute power of the king over the body politic, exercised according to the forms and within the limits legally acknowledged; the supremacy of the king as head of the Church, applied and sustained by the episcopacy, was the twofold system of the legal reform party. We may enumerate as its chiefs, Lord Clarendon,* Colepepper, Capel, and, though a more ardent friend of public liberty, Lord Falkland; and into their ranks were enlisted nearly all the nobility and gentry not servilely devoted to the court.

  Behind this party advanced a second, which I shall call the political-revolutionary party; it differed from the foregoing, inasmuch as it did not believe the ancient guarantees, the ancient legal barriers sufficient to secure the rights and liberties of the people. It saw that a great change, a genuine revolution was wanting, not only in the forms, but in the spirit and essence of the government; that it was necessary to deprive the king and his council of the unlimited power which they possessed, and to place the preponderance in the House of Commons; so that the government should, in fact, be in the hands of this assembly and its leaders. This party made no such open and systematic profession of its principles and intentions as I have done; but this was the real character of its opinions, and of its political tendencies. Instead of acknowledging the absolute sovereignty of the king, it contended for the sovereignty of the House of Commons as the representatives of the people. Under this principle was hid that of the sovereignty of the people; a notion which the party was as far from considering in its full extent, as it was from desiring the consequences to which it might ultimately lead, but which they nevertheless admitted when it presented itself to them in the form of the sovereignty of the House of Commons.

  The religious party most closely allied to this political-revolutionary one was that of the Presbyterians. This sect wished to bring about much the same revolution in the Church as their allies were endeavoring to effect in the state. They desired to erect a system of church government emanating from the people, and composed of a series of assemblies dovetailed, as it were, into each other; and thus to give to their national assembly the same authority in ecclesiastical matters that their allies wished to give in political to the House of Commons: only that the revolution contemplated by the Presbyterians was more complete and daring than the other, forasmuch as it aimed at changing the form as well as the principles of the government of the Church; while the views of the political party went no farther than to place the influence, the preponderance, in the body of the people, without meditating any great alteration in the form of their institutions.

  Hence the leaders of this political party were not all favorable to the Presbyterian organization of the Church. Hampden and Holles, as well as some others, it appears, would have given the preference to a moderate episcopacy, confined strictly to ecclesiastical functions, with a greater extent of liberty of conscience. They were obliged, however, to give way, as they could do nothing without the assistance of their fanatical allies.

  The third party, going much beyond these two, declared that a change was required not only in the form, but also in the foundation of the government; that its constitution was radically vicious and bad. This party paid no respect to the past life of England; it renounced her institutions, it swept away all national remembrances, it threw down the whole fabric of English government, that it might build up another founded on pure theory, or at least one that existed only in its own fancy. It aimed not merely at a revolution in the government, but at a complete revolution of the whole social system. The party of which I have just spoken, the political-revolutionary party, proposed to make a great change in the relations in which the parliament stood with the crown; it wished to extend the power of the two houses, particularly of the commons, by giving to it the nomination of the great officers of state, and the supreme direction of affairs in general; but its notions of reform scarcely went beyond this. It had no idea, for example, of changing the electoral system, the judicial system, the administrative and municipal systems of the country. The republican party contemplated all these changes, dwelt upon their necessity, wished, in a word, to reform not only the public administration, but the relations of society, and the distribution of private rights.

  Like the two preceding, this party was composed of a religious sect, and a political sect. Its political portion were the genuine republicans, the theorists, Ludlow, Harrington, Milton, and others. To these may be added the republicans of circumstance, of interest, such as the principal officers of the army, Ireton, Cromwell, Lambert, and others, who were more or less sincere at the beginning of their career, but were soon controlled and guided by personal motives and the force of circumstances. Under the banners of this party marched the religious republicans, all those religious sects which would acknowledge no power as legitimate but that of Jesus Christ, and who, awaiting his second coming, desired only the government of his elect. Finally, in the train of this party followed a mixed assemblage of subordinate free-thinkers, fanatics, and levellers, some hoping for license, some for an equal distribution of property, and others for universal suffrage.*

  In 1653, after twelve years of struggle, all these parties had successively appeared and failed; they appear at least to have thought so, and the public was sure of it. The legal reform party quickly disappeared; it saw the old constitution and laws insulted, trampled under foot, and innovations forcing their way on every side. The political-revolutionary party saw the destruction of parliamentary forms in the new use which it was proposed to make of them—it had seen the House of Commons reduced, by the successive expulsions of royalists and Presbyterians, to a few members, despised, detested by the public, and incapable of governing. The republican party appeared to have succeeded better; it seemed to be left master of the field and of power;* the House of Commons consisted of but fifty or sixty members, all republicans. They might fancy themselves, and call themselves, the rulers of the country; but the country rejected their government; they were nowhere obeyed; they had no power either over the army or the nation. No social bond, no social security was now left; justice was no longer administered, or if it was, it was controlled by passion, chance, or party. Not only was there no security in the relations of private life, but the highways were covered with robbers and companies of brigands. Anarchy in every part of the civil, as well as of the moral world, prevailed; and neither the House of Commons, nor the republican Council of State, had the power to restrain it.

  Thus, the three great parties which had brought about the revolution, and which in their turn had been called upon to conduct it—had been called upon to govern the country according to their principles and their will—had all signally failed. They could do nothing—they could settle nothing. “Now it was,” says Bossuet, “that a man was found who left nothing to fortune, which he could gain by counsel and foresight;” a remark which has no foundation whatever in truth, and which every part of history contradicts. No man ever left more to fortune than Cromwell. No one ever risked more—no one ever pushed forward more rashly, without design, without an aim, yet determined to go as far as fate would carry him. Unbounded ambition, and admirable tact for drawing from every day, from every circumstance, some new progress—the art of profiting by fortune without seeming ever to possess the desire to constrain it, formed the character of Cromwell. In one particular his career was singular, and differs from that of every individual with whom we are apt to compare him: he adapted himself to all the various changes, numerous as they were, as well as to the state of things they led to, of the revolution. He appears a prominent character in every scene, from the rise of the curtain to the close of the play. He was now the instigator of the insurrection—now the abettor of anarchy—now the most fiery of the revolutionists—now the restorer of order and social reorganization; thus playing himself all the principal parts which, in the common run of revolutions, are usually distributed among the greatest actors. He was not a Mirabeau, for he failed in eloquence, and, though very active, he made no great figure in the first years of the Long Parliament. But he was successively Danton and Bonaparte.* Cromwell did more than any one to overthrow authority; he raised it up again, because there was no other than he that could take it and manage it. The country required a ruler; all others failed, and he succeeded. This was his title. Once master of the government, Cromwell, whose boundless ambition had exerted itself so vigorously, who had so constantly pushed fortune before him, and seemed determined never to stop in his career, displayed a good sense, a prudence, a knowledge of how much was possible, which overruled his most violent passions. There can be no doubt of his extreme fondness for absolute power, nor of his desire to place the crown upon his own head and keep it in his family.* He saw the peril of this latter design and renounced it; and though, in fact, he did exercise absolute authority, he saw very well that the spirit of the times would not bear it; that the revolution which he had helped to bring about, which he had followed through all its phases, had been directed against despotism, and that the uncontrollable will of England was to be governed by a parliament and parliamentary forms. He endeavored, therefore, despot as he was, by taste and by deeds, to govern by a parliament. For this purpose he had recourse to all the various parties; he tried to form a parliament from the religious enthusiasts, from the republicans, from the Presbyterians, and from the officers of the army. He tried every means to obtain a parliament able and willing to take part with him in the government; but he tried in vain; every party, the moment it was seated in St. Stephen’s, endeavored to wrest from him the authority which he exercised, and to rule in its turn. I do not mean to deny that his personal interest, the gratification of his darling ambition was his first care; but it is no less certain that if he had abdicated his authority one day, he would have been obliged to resume it the next. Puritans or royalists, republicans or officers, there was no one but Cromwell who was in a state at this time to govern with anything like order or justice. The experiment had been made. It seemed absurd to think of leaving to parliaments, that is to say, to the faction sitting in parliament, a government which it could not maintain. Such was the extraordinary situation of Cromwell: he governed by a system which he knew very well was foreign and hateful to the country, he exercised an authority which was acknowledged necessary by all, but which was acceptable to none. No party looked upon his domination as a definitive government. Royalists, Presbyterians, republicans, even the army itself, which appears to have been the party most devoted to Cromwell, all looked upon his rule as transitory. He had no hold upon the affections of the people; he was never more than a makeshift, a last resort, a temporary necessity. The Protector, the absolute master of England, was obliged all his life to have recourse to force to preserve his power; no party could govern so well as he, but no party liked to see the government in his hands; he was repeatedly attacked by them all at once.*

  Upon Cromwell’s death, there was no party in a situation to seize upon the government except the republicans; they did seize upon it, but with no better success than before. This happened from no lack of confidence, at least, in the enthusiasts of the party. A spirited and talented tract, published at this juncture by Milton, is entitled A Ready and Easy Way to establish a free Commonwealth. You may judge of the blindness of these men, who soon fell into a state which showed that it was quite as impossible for them to carry on the government now as it had been before. Monk undertook the direction of that event which all England now seemed anxious for. The Restoration was accomplished.

  The restoration of the Stuarts was an event generally pleasing to the nation. It brought back a government which still dwelt in its memory, which was founded upon its ancient traditions, while, at the same time, it had some of the advantages of a new government, in that it had not recently been tried, in that its faults and its power had not lately been felt. The ancient monarchy was the only system of government which had not been decried, within the last twenty years, for its abuses and want of capacity in the administration of the affairs of the kingdom. From these two causes the restoration was extremely popular; it was unopposed by any but the dregs of the most violent factions, while the public rallied round it with great sincerity. All parties in the country seemed now to believe that this offered the only chance left of a stable and legal government, and this was what, above all things, the nation now desired. This also was what the restoration seemed especially to promise; it took much pains to present itself under the aspect of legal government.*

  The first royalist party, indeed, to whom, upon the return of Charles the Second, the management of affairs was intrusted, was the legal party, represented by its able leader, the Lord Chancellor Clarendon. From 1660 to 1667, Clarendon was prime minister,† and had the chief direction of affairs; he and his friends brought back with them their ancient principles of government, the absolute sovereignty of the king, kept within legal bounds, limited by the House of Commons as regards taxation, by the public tribunals, in matters of private right, or relating to individual liberty,—possessing, nevertheless, in point of government, properly so called, an almost complete independence, and the most decided preponderance, to the exclusion or even in opposition to the votes of the majorities of the two houses, but particularly to that of the House of Commons. In other matters there was not much to complain of: a tolerable degree of respect was paid to legal order; there was a tolerable degree of solicitude for the national interests; a sufficiently noble sentiment of national dignity was preserved, and a color of morality that was grave and honorable. Such was the character of Clarendon’s administration, during the seven years the government was committed to his charge.

  But the fundamental principles upon which this administration was based—the absolute sovereignty of the king, and a government beyond the preponderating control of parliament—were now become old and powerless. Notwithstanding the temporary reaction which took place at the first burst of the restoration, twenty years of parliamentary rule against royalty had destroyed them for ever. A new party soon showed itself among the royalists; libertines, profligates, wretches, who, imbued with the free opinions of the times, and seeing that power was with the commons,—caring themselves but little about legal order, or the absolute power of the king,—were only anxious for success, and to discover the means of influence and power in whatever quarter they were likely to be found. These formed a party, and allying themselves with the national, discontented party, and Clarendon was discarded.*

  A new system of government now took place under that portion of the royalists I have just described; profligates and libertines formed the administration of the Cabal, and several others which followed it. What was their character? Without inquietude respecting principles, laws, or rights, or care for justice or truth; they sought the means of success upon every occasion, whatever these means might be; if success depended on the influence of the commons, the commons were everything; if it was necessary to cajole the commons, the commons were cajoled without scruple, even though they had to apologize to them the next day. At one moment they attempted corruption, at another they flattered the national wishes; no regard was shown for the general interests of the country, for its dignity or its honor; in a word, it was a government profoundly selfish and immoral, totally unacquainted with all theory, principle, or public object; but, withal, in the practical management of affairs, showing considerable intelligence and liberality. Such was the character of the Cabal ministry,* of Earl Danby’s, and of the English government from 1667 to 1679. Yet notwithstanding its immorality, notwithstanding its disdain of all principle, and of the true interests of the country, this government was not so unpopular, not so odious to the nation as that of Clarendon; and this simply because it adapted itself better to the times, better understood the sentiments of the people, even while it derided them. It was neither foreign nor antiquated, like that of Clarendon; and though infinitely more dangerous to the country, the people accommodated themselves better to it.

  But this corruption, this servility, this contempt of public rights and public honor, were at last carried to such a pitch as to be no longer supportable. A general outcry was raised against this government of profligates. A patriotic party, supported by the nation, became gradually formed in the House of Commons, and the king was obliged to take the leaders of it into his council. Lord Essex, the son of him who had commanded the first parliamentary armies in the civil war, Lord Russell, and Lord Shaftesbury, who, without any of the virtues of the other two, was much their superior in political abilities, were now called to the management of affairs. The national party, to whom the direction of the government was now committed, proved itself unequal to the task: it could not gain possession of the moral force of the country: it could neither manage the interests, the habits, nor the prejudices of the king, of the court, nor of any with whom it had to do. It inspired no party, either king or people, with any confidence in its energy or ability; and after holding power for a short time, this national ministry completely failed. The virtues of its leaders, their generous courage, the beauty of their death, have raised them to a distinguished niche in the temple of fame, and entitled them to honorable mention in the page of history; but their political capacities in no way corresponded to their virtues: they could not wield power, though they could withstand its corrupting influence, nor could they achieve a triumph for that glorious cause, for which they could so nobly die!

  The failure of this attempt left the English restoration in rather an awkward plight; it had, like the English revolution, in a manner tried all parties without success. The legal ministry, the corrupt ministry, the national ministry, having all failed, the country and the court were nearly in the same situation as that which England had been in before, at the close of the revolutionary troubles in 1653. Recourse was had to the same expedient: what Cromwell had turned to the profit of the revolution, Charles II now turned to the profit of the crown; he entered upon a career of absolute power.

  James II succeeded his brother; and another question now became mixed up with that of despotism: the question of religion. James II wished to achieve, at the same time, a triumph for popery and for absolute power: now again, as at the commencement of the revolution, there was a religious struggle and a political struggle, and both were directed against the government. It has often been asked, what course affairs would have taken if William III had not existed, and come over to put an end to the quarrel between James and the people. My firm belief is that the same event would have taken place. All England, except a very small party, was at this time arrayed against James; and it seems very certain, that, under some form or other, the revolution of 1688 must have been accomplished. But at this crisis, causes even superior to the internal state of England conduced to this event. It was European as well as English. It is at this point that the English revolution links itself, by facts, and independently of the influence of its example, to the general course of European civilization.

  While the struggle which I have just been narrating took place in England, the struggle of absolute power against religious and civil liberty—a struggle of the same kind, however different the actors, the forms, and the theatre, took place upon the continent—a struggle which was at bottom the same, and carried on in the same cause. The pure monarchy of Louis XIV attempted to become universal monarchy, at least it gave the world every reason to fear it; and, in fact, Europe did fear it. A league was formed in Europe between various political parties to resist this attempt, and the chief of this league was the chief of the party that struggled for the civil and religious liberty of Europe—William, Prince of Orange. The Protestant republic of Holland, with William at its head, had made a stand against pure monarchy, represented and conducted by Louis XIV. The fight here was not for civil and religious liberty in the interior of states, but for the exterior independence of the states themselves. Louis XIV and his adversaries never thought of debating the questions which were debated so fiercely in England. This struggle was not one of parties, but of states; it was carried on, not by political outbreaks and revolutions, but by war and negotiation; still, at bottom, the same principle was the subject of contention.*

  It happened, then, that the strife between absolute power and liberty, which James II renewed in England, broke out at the very moment that this general struggle was going on in Europe between Louis XIV and the Prince of Orange, the representatives of these two great systems, as well in the affairs which took place on the Thames as on the Scheldt. The league against Louis was so powerful that many sovereigns entered into it, either publicly, or in an underhand, though very effective manner, who were rather opposed than not to the interests of civil and religious liberty. The Emperor of Germany and Innocent XI both supported William against France. And William crossed the channel to England less to serve the internal interests of the country, than to draw it entirely into the struggle against Louis. He laid hold of this kingdom as a new force which he wanted, but of which his adversary had had the disposal, up to this time, against him. So long as Charles II and James II reigned, England belonged to Louis XIV; he had the disposal of it, and had kept it employed against Holland.* England then was snatched from the side of absolute and universal monarchy, to become the most powerful support and instrument of civil and religious liberty. This is the view which must be taken, as regards European civilization, of the revolution of 1688; it is this which gives it a place in the assemblage of European events, independently of the influence of its example, and of the vast effect which it had upon the minds and opinions of men in the following century.

  Thus, I think, I have rendered it clear, that the true sense, the essential character of this revolution is, as I said at the outset of this lecture, an attempt to abolish absolute power in the temporal order, as had already been done in the spiritual. This fact appears in all the phases of the revolution, from its first outbreak to the restoration, and again in the crisis of 1688: and this not only as regards its interior progress, but in its relations with Europe in general.*

  It now only remains for us to study the same great event, the struggle of free inquiry and pure monarchy, upon the continent, or at least the causes and preparation of this event. This will be the object of the next and final lecture.

  LECTURE XIV.

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.*

  I endeavored, at our last meeting, to ascertain the true character and political object of the English revolution. We have seen that it was the first collision of the two great facts to which, in the course of the sixteenth century, all the civilization of primitive Europe tended,—monarchy on the one hand, and free inquiry on the other. These two powers came to blows, if I may use the expression, for the first time in England. It has been attempted, from this circumstance, to reduce a radical difference between the social state of England and that of the Continent; it has been contended that no comparison could be made between countries so differently situated; and it has been affirmed, that the English people had lived in a sort of moral separation from the rest of Europe, analogous to its physical isolation.

  It is true that between the civilization of England, and that of the continental states, there has been a material difference which it is important that we should rightly understand. You have already had a glimpse of it in the course of these lectures. The development of the different principles, the different elements of society, took place, in some measure, at the same time, at least much more simultaneously than upon the Continent. When I endeavored to determine the complexion of European civilization as compared with the civilization of ancient and Asiatic nations, I showed that the former was varied, rich, and complex, and that it had never fallen under the influence of any exclusive principle;* that, in it, the different elements of the social state had combined, contended with, and modified each other, and had continually been obliged to come to an accommodation, and to subsist together. This fact, which forms the general character of European civilization, has in an especial manner been that of the civilization of England; it is in that country that it has appeared most evidently and uninterruptedly; it is there that the civil and religious orders, aristocracy, democracy, monarchy, local and central institutions, moral and political development, have proceeded and grown up together, if not with equal rapidity, at least but at a little distance from each other. Under the reign of the Tudors, for example, in the midst of the most remarkable progress of pure monarchy, we have seen the democratic principle, the popular power, make its way and gain strength almost at the same time. The revolution of the seventeenth century broke out; it was at the same time religious and political. The feudal aristocracy appeared in it in a very enfeebled state, and with all the symptoms of decay; it was, however, still in a condition to preserve its place in this revolution, and to have some share in its results. The same thing has been the case in the whole course of English history; no ancient element has ever entirely perished, nor any new element gained a total ascendancy; no particular principle has ever obtained an exclusive influence. There has always been a simultaneous development of the different forces, and a sort of negotiation or compromise between their pretensions and interests.

  On the Continent the march of civilization had been less complex and complete. The different elements of society, the civil and religious orders, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, have developed themselves, not together, and abreast, as it were, but successively.* Every principle, every system, has in some measure had its turn. One age, for example, has belonged, I shall not say exclusively, but with a decided predominance, to the feudal aristocracy; another to the principle of monarchy; another to the principle of democracy. Compare the middle ages in France, with the middle ages in England; the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries of our history with the corresponding centuries on the other side of the channel; you will find in France, at that epoch, feudalism in a state of almost absolute sovereignty, while monarchy and the democratic principle scarcely had an existence.† But turn to England, and you will find, that although the feudal aristocracy greatly predominated, monarchy and democracy possessed, at the same time, strength and importance. Monarchy triumphed in England under Elizabeth, as in France under Louis XIV; but what precautions it was constrained to take! how many restrictions, sometimes aristocratic, sometimes democratic, it was obliged to submit to! In England every system, every principle, has had its time of strength and success; but never so completely and exclusively as on the Continent:‡ the conqueror has always been constrained to tolerate the presence of his rivals, and to leave them a certain share of influence.

  To this difference in the march of these two civilizations there are attached advantages and inconveniences which are apparent in the history of the two countries. There is no doubt, for example, that the simultaneous development of the different social elements has greatly contributed to make England arrive more quickly than any of the continental states, at the end and aim of all society, that is to say, the establishment of a government at once regular and free. It is the very nature of a government to respect all the interests, all the powers of the state, to conciliate them and make them live and prosper in common: now such was, beforehand, and by the concurrence of a multitude of causes, the despotism and mutual relation of the different elements of English society; and, therefore, a general and somewhat regular government had the less difficulty in establishing itself. In like manner the essence of liberty is the simultaneous manifestation and action of every interest, every kind of right, every force, every social element. England, therefore, had made a nearer approach to liberty than most other states. From the same causes, national good sense and intelligence of public affairs must have formed themselves more quickly than elsewhere; political good sense consists in understanding and appreciating every fact, and in assigning to each its proper part; in England it has been a necessary consequence of the state of society, a natural result of the course of civilization.

  In the states of the Continent, on the contrary, every system, every principle, having had its turn, and having had a more complete and exclusive ascendency, the development took place on a larger scale, and with more striking circumstances. Monarchy and feudal aristocracy, for example, appeared on the continental stage with more boldness, extent, and freedom. Every political experiment, so to speak, was broader and more complete.* The result was, that political ideas—I speak of general ideas, and not of good sense applied to the conduct of affairs; that political ideas and doctrines took a greater elevation, and displayed themselves with much greater rational vigor. Every system having, in some sort, presented itself singly, and having remained a long time on the stage people could contemplate it in its general aspect, ascend to its first principles, pursue it into its remotest consequences, and lay bare its entire theory. Whoever observes with some degree of attention the genius of the English nation, will be struck with a double fact; on the one hand, its steady good sense and practical ability; on the other, its want of general ideas, and of elevation of thought upon theoretical questions. Whether we open an English work on history, jurisprudence, or any other subject, we rarely find the great and fundamental reason of things.† In every subject, and especially in the political sciences, pure philosophical doctrines—science properly so called—have prospered much more on the Continent, than in England; their flights, at least, have been bolder and more vigorous. Indeed, it cannot be doubted that the different character of the development of civilization in the two countries has greatly contributed to this result.

  At all events, whatever may be thought of the inconveniences or advantages which have been produced by this difference, it is a real and incontestable fact, and that which most essentially distinguishes England from the Continent. But, though the different principles, the different social elements, have developed themselves more simultaneously there, and more successively in France, it does not follow that, at bottom, the road and the goal have not been the same. Considered generally, the Continent and England have gone through the same great phases of civilization; events have followed the same course; similar causes have led to similar effects. You may have convinced yourselves of this by the view I have given you of civilization down to the sixteenth century; you will remark it no less in studying the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The development of free inquiry, and that of pure monarchy, almost simultaneous in England, were accomplished on the Continent at pretty long intervals; but they were accomplished; and these two powers, after having successively exercised a decided predominance, came also into collision. The general march of society, then, on the whole, has been the same; and, though the differences are real, the resemblance is still greater. A rapid sketch of modern times will leave you no doubt on this subject.

  The moment we cast our eyes on the history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we cannot fail to perceive that France marches at the head of European civilization. At the beginning of this course, I strongly affirmed this fact, and endeavored to point out its cause. We shall now find it more strikingly displayed than it has ever been before.

  The principle of pure and absolute monarchy had predominated in Spain, under Charles V and Philip II, before its development in France under Louis XIV. In like manner the principle of free inquiry had reigned in England in the seventeenth century, before its development in France in the eighteenth. Pure monarchy, however, did not go forth from Spain, nor free inquiry from England,* to make the conquest of Europe. The two principles or systems remained, in some sort, confined within the countries in which they sprang up. They required to pass through France to extend their dominion; pure monarchy and liberty of inquiry were compelled to become French before they could become European.† That communicative character of French civilization, that social genius of France, which has displayed itself at every period, was peculiarly conspicuous at the period which now engages our attention. I shall not dwell upon this fact; it has been expounded to you, with equal force of argument and brilliancy, in the lectures in which your attention has been directed to the influence of the literature and philosophy of France in the eighteenth century.‡ You have seen how the philosophy of France had, in regard to liberty, more influence on Europe than the liberty of England. You have seen how French civilization showed itself much more active and contagious than that of any other country. I have no occasion, therefore, to dwell upon the details of this fact; I avail myself of it only in order to make it my ground for using French civilization as the picture of modern European civilization. There were, no doubt, between French civilization at this period, and that of the other states of Europe, differences on which I ought to lay great stress, if it were my intention at present to enter fully into this subject; but I must proceed so rapidly that I am obliged to pass over whole nations, and whole ages. I think it better to confine your attention to the course of French civilization, as being an image, though an imperfect one, of the general course of things in Europe.

  The influence of France in Europe, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appears under very different aspects. In the first of these centuries, it was the French government which acted upon Europe, and took the lead in the march of general civilization. In the second, it was no longer to the French government, but to the French society, to France herself, that the preponderance belonged. It was at first Louis XIV and his court, and then France herself, and her public opinion, that attracted the attention, and swayed the minds of the rest of Europe. There were, in the seventeenth century, nations, who, as such, made a more prominent appearance on the stage, and took a greater share in the course of events, than the French nation. Thus, during the Thirty Years’ War, the German nation, and during the revolution in England, the English nation played, within their respective spheres, a much greater part than the French nation, at that period, played within theirs. In the eighteenth century, in like manner, there were stronger, more respected, and more formidable governments than that of France. There is no doubt that Frederick II and Maria Theresa had more activity and weight in Europe than Louis XV. Still, at both of these periods, France was at the head of European civilization, first through her government, and afterwards through herself; at one time through the political action of her rulers, at another through her own intellectual development. To understand thoroughly the predominant influence on the course of civilization in France, and consequently in Europe, we must therefore study, in the seventeenth century, the French government, and in the eighteenth, the French nation. We must change our ground and our objects of view, according as time changes the scene and the actors.

  Whenever the government of Louis XIV is spoken of, whenever we attempt to appreciate the causes of his power and influence in Europe, we have little to consider beyond his splendor, his conquests, his magnificence, and the literary glory of his time. We must resort to exterior causes in order to account for the preponderance of the French government in Europe.

  But this preponderance, in my opinion, was derived from causes more deeply seated, from motives of a more serious kind. We must not believe that it was entirely by means of victories, festivals, or even master-pieces of genius, that Louis XIV and his government played, at that period, the part which no one can deny them.

  Many of you may remember, and all of you have heard of the effect which, twenty-nine years ago, was produced by the Consular government in France, and the state in which it found our country.* Abroad, foreign invasion impending, and continual disasters in our armies; at home, the elements of government and society in a state of dissolution; no revenues, no public order; in short, a people beaten, humbled, and disorganized—such was France at the accession of the consular government. Who is there that does not remember the prodigious and successful activity of that government, an activity which, in a short time, secured the independence of our territory, revived our national honor, reorganized the administration of government, remodelled our legislation, in short, gave society, as it were, a new life under the hand of power?

  Well—the government of Louis XIV, when it began, did something of the same kind for France; with great differences of times, of proceedings, and of forms, it prosecuted and attained very nearly the same results.

  Remember the state into which France had fallen after the government of Cardinal Richelieu, and during the minority of Louis XIV:* the Spanish armies always on the frontiers, and sometimes in the interior; continual danger of invasion; internal dissensions carried to the extremity of civil war, the government weak, and decried both at home and abroad. There never was a more miserable policy, more despised in Europe, or more powerless in France, than that of Cardinal Mazarin. In a word, society was in a state, less violent perhaps, but very analogous to ours before the 18th of Brumaire. It was from that state that the government of Louis XIV delivered France. His earliest victories had the effect of the victory of Marengo;* they secured the French territory and revived the national honor. I am going to consider this government under its various aspects, in its wars, its foreign relations, its administration, and its legislation; and you will see, I believe, that the comparison which I speak of, and to which I do not wish to attach a puerile importance (for I care very little about historical comparisons), you will see, I say, that this comparison has a real foundation, and that I am fully justified in making it.

  I shall first speak of the wars of Louis XIV. European wars were originally (as you know, and as I have several times had occasion to remind you) great popular movements; impelled by want, by some fancy, or any other cause, whole populations, sometimes numerous, sometimes consisting of mere bands, passed from one territory to another. This was the general character of European wars, till after the Crusades, at the end of the thirteenth century.

  After this another kind of war arose, but almost equally different from the wars of modern times: these were distant wars, undertaken, not by nations, but by their governing powers, who went, at the head of their armies, to seek, at a distance, states and adventures. They quitted their country, abandoned their own territory, and penetrated, some into Germany, others into Italy, and others into Africa, with no other motive save their individual fancy. Almost all the wars of the fifteenth, and even a part of the sixteenth century, are of this character. What interest—and I do not speak of a legitimate interest—but what motive had France for wishing that Charles VIII should possess the kingdom of Naples?* It was evidently a war dictated by no political considerations; the king thought he had personal claims on the kingdom of Naples; and, for this personal object, to satisfy his own personal desire, he undertook the conquest of a distant country, which was by no means adapted to the territorial conveniences of his kingdom, but which, on the contrary, only endangered his power abroad and his repose at home. Such, again, was the case with regard to the expedition of Charles V into Africa.† The last war of this kind was the expedition of Charles XII against Russia.

  The wars of Louis XIV were not of this description; they were the wars of a regular government—a government fixed in the center of its dominions, endeavoring to extend its conquests around, to increase or consolidate its territory; in short, they were political wars. They may have been just or unjust, they may have cost France too dear;—they may be objected to on many grounds—on the score of morality or excess; but, in fact, they were of a much more rational character than the wars which preceded them; they were no longer fanciful adventures; they were dictated by serious motives; their objects were to reach some natural boundary, some population who spoke the same language, and might be annexed to the kingdom, some point of defence against a neighboring power. Personal ambition, no doubt, had a share in them; but examine the wars of Louis XIV, one after the other, especially those of the early part of his reign, and you will find that their motives were really political; you will see that they were conceived with a view to the power and safety of France.

  This fact has been proved by results. France, at the present day, in many respects, is what the wars of Louis XIV made her. The provinces which he conquered, Franche-Comté, Flanders, and Alsace, have remained incorporated with France.* There are rational conquests as well as foolish ones: those of Louis XIV were rational; his enterprises have not that unreasonable, capricious character, till then so general; their policy was able, if not always just and prudent.

  If I pass from the wars of Louis XIV to his relations with foreign states, to his diplomacy properly so called, I find an analogous result. I have already spoken of the origin of diplomacy at the end of the fifteenth century. I have endeavored to show how the mutual relations of governments and states, previously accidental, rare, and transient, had at that period become more regular and permanent, how they had assumed a character of great public interest; how, in short, at the end of the fifteenth and during the first half of the sixteenth century, diplomacy had begun to perform a part of immense importance in the course of events. Still, however, it was not till the seventeenth century that it became really systematic; before then, it had not brought about long alliances, great combinations, and especially combinations of a durable nature, directed by fixed principles, with a steady object, and with that spirit of consistency which forms the true character of established governments. During the course of the religious revolution, the foreign relations of states had been almost completely under the influence of religious interests; the Protestant and Catholic leagues had divided Europe between them. It was in the seventeenth century, under the influence of the government of Louis XIV, that diplomacy changed its character. On the one hand, it got rid of the exclusive influence of the religious principle; alliances and political combinations took place from other considerations. At the same time it became much more systematic and regular, and was always directed towards a certain object, according to permanent principles. The regular birth of the system of the balance of power in Europe, took place at this period. It was under the government of Louis XIV that this system, with all the considerations attached to it, really took possession of the politics of Europe. When we inquire what was, on this subject, the general idea, or ruling principle of the policy of Louis XIV, the following seems to be the result.

  I have spoken of the great struggle which took place in Europe between the pure monarchy of Louis XIV, pretending to establish itself as the universal system of monarchy, and civil and religious liberty, and the independence of states, under the command of the Prince of Orange, William III.* You have seen that the great European fact, at that epoch, was the division of the powers of Europe under these two banners. But this fact was not then understood as I now explain it; it was hidden, and unknown even to those by whom it was accomplished. The repression of the system of pure monarchy, and the consecration of civil and religious liberty, was necessarily, at bottom, the result of the resistance of Holland and her allies to Louis XIV; but the question between absolute power and liberty was not then thus absolutely laid down. It has been frequently said that the propagation of absolute power was the ruling principle in the diplomacy of Louis XIV. I do not think so. It was at a late period, and in his old age, that this consideration assumed a great part in his policy. The power of France, her preponderance in Europe, the depression of rival powers,—in short, the political interest and strength of the state, was the object which Louis XIV always had in view, whether he was contending against Spain, the Emperor of Germany, or England. He was much less actuated by a wish for the propagation of absolute power than by a desire for the aggrandizement of France and his own government. Among many other proofs of this, there is one which emanates from Louis XIV himself. We find in his Memoirs, for the year 1666, if I remember rightly, a note conceived nearly in these terms:—

  “This morning I had a conversation with Mr. Sidney,* an English gentleman, who spoke to me of the possibility of reviving the republican party in England. Mr. Sidney asked me for £400,000 for this purpose. I told him I could not give him more than £200,000. He prevailed on me to send to Switzerland for another English gentleman, called Mr. Ludlow,† that I might converse with him upon the same subject.”

  We find accordingly, in Ludlow’s Memoirs, about the same date, a paragraph to the following import:—

  “I have received from the French government an invitation to go to Paris, to have some discussion on the affairs of my country; but I distrust this government.”

  And, in fact, Ludlow did remain in Switzerland.

  You see that the object of Louis XIV at that time was to weaken the royal power of England. He fomented internal dissensions, he labored to revive the republican party, in order to hinder Charles II from becoming too powerful in his own country. In the course of Barillon’s embassy to England,* the same fact is constantly apparent. As often as the authority of Charles II seems to be gaining the ascendancy, and the national party on the point of being overpowered, the French ambassador turns his influence in that direction, gives money to the leaders of the opposition, and, in short, contends against absolute power, as soon as that becomes the means of weakening a rival of France. Whenever we attentively examine the conduct of foreign relations under Louis XIV, this is the fact which we are struck with.

  We are also surprised at the capacity and ability of the French diplomacy at this period. The names of Torcy, d’Avaux, and de Bonrepos, are known to all well-informed persons. When we compare the despatches, the memorials, the skill, the management of these counsellors of Louis XIV, with those of the Spanish, Portuguese, and German negotiators, we are struck with the superiority of the French ministers; not only with their serious activity and application to business, but with their freedom of thought. These courtiers of an absolute king judge of foreign events, of parties, of the demands for freedom, and of popular revolutions, much more soundly than the greater part of the English themselves of that period. There is no diplomacy in Europe in the seventeenth century which appears equal to the diplomacy of France, except perhaps that of Holland. The ministers of John De Witt and William of Orange, those illustrious leaders of the party of civil and religious liberty, are the only ones who appear to have been in a condition to contend with the servants of the great absolute king.

  You see, that, whether we consider the wars of Louis XIV, or his diplomatic relations, we arrive at the same results. We can easily conceive how a government which conducted in such a manner its wars and negotiations, must have acquired great solidity in Europe, and assumed not only a formidable, but an able and imposing aspect.

  Let us now turn our eyes to the interior of France, and the administration and legislation of Louis XIV; we shall everywhere find new explanations of the strength and splendor of his government.

  It is difficult to determine precisely what ought to be understood by administration in the government of a state. Still, when we endeavor to come to a distinct understanding on this subject, we acknowledge, I believe, that, under the most general point of view, administration consists in an assemblage of means destined to transmit, as speedily and surely as possible, the will of the central power into all departments of society, and, under the same conditions, to make the powers of society return to the central power, either in men or money. This, if I am not mistaken, is the true object, the prevailing character, of administration. From this we may perceive that, in times where it is especially necessary to establish union and order in society, administration is the great means of accomplishing it,—of bringing together, cementing, and uniting scattered and incoherent elements. Such, in fact, was the work of the administration of Louis XIV. Till his time, nothing had been more difficult, in France as well as in the rest of Europe, than to cause the action of the central power to penetrate into all the parts of society, and to concentrate into the heart of the central power the means of strength possessed by the society at large. This was the object of Louis’s endeavors, and he succeeded in it to a certain extent, incomparably better, at least, than preceding governments had done. I cannot enter into any details; but take a survey of every kind of public service, the taxes, the highways, industry, the military administration, and the various establishments which belong to any branch of administration whatever; there is hardly any of them which you will not find to have either been originated, developed, or greatly meliorated, under the reign of Louis XIV.* It was as administrators that the greatest men of his time, such as Colbert and Louvois,† displayed their genius and exercised their ministerial functions; it was thus that his government acquired a comprehensiveness, a decision, and a consistency, which were wanting in all the European governments around him.

  The same fact holds with respect to this government, as regards its legislative capacity. I will again refer to the comparison I made in the outset to the legislative activity of the Consular government, and its prodigious labor in revising and remodelling the laws. A labor of the same kind was undertaken under Louis XIV. The great ordinances which he passed and promulgated,—the ordinances on the criminal law, on forms of procedure, on commerce, on the navy, on waters and forests,—are real codes of law, which were constructed in the same manner as our codes, having been discussed in the Council of State, sometimes under the presidency of Lamoignon. There are men whose glory it is to have taken a share in this labor and those discussions,—M. Pussort, for example. If we had to consider it simply in itself, we should have a great deal to say against the legislation of Louis XIV. It is full of faults which are now evident, and which nobody can dispute; it was not conceived in the spirit of justice and true liberty, but with a view to public order, and to give regularity and stability to the laws. But even that alone was a great progress; and it cannot be doubted that the legislative acts of Louis XIV, very superior to the previous state of legislation, powerfully contributed to the advancement of French society in the career of civilization.*

  Under whatever point of view, then, we regard this government, we can at once discover the means of its strength and influence. It was, in truth, the first government which presented itself to the eyes of Europe as a power sure of its position, which had not to dispute for its existence with domestic enemies, which was tranquil in regard to its territory and its people, and had nothing to think of but the care of governing. Till then, all the European governments had been incessantly plunged into wars which deprived them of security as well as leisure, or so assailed by parties and enemies at home, that they passed their time in fighting for their existence. The government of Louis XIV appeared to be the first that was engaged solely in managing its affairs like a power at once definitive and progressive, which was not afraid of making innovations, because it reckoned upon the future. In fact, few governents have been more given to innovation. Compare it with a government of the same nature, with the pure monarchy of Philip II in Spain, which was more absolute than that of Louis XIV, and yet was less regular and tranquil. How did Philip II succeed in establishing absolute power in Spain? By stifling every kind of activity in the country; by refusing his sanction to every kind of improvement, and thus rendering the state of Spain completely stationary.* The government of Louis XIV, on the contrary, was active in every kind of innovation, and favorable to the progress of letters, arts, riches—favorable, in a word, to civilization. These were the true causes of its preponderance in Europe—a preponderance so great, that it was, on the Continent, during the seventeenth century, not only for sovereigns, but even for nations, the type and model of governments.

  It is frequently asked, and it is impossible to avoid asking, how a power so splendid and well established—to judge from the circumstances I have pointed out to you, should have fallen so quickly into a state of decay? how, after having played so great a part in Europe, it became in the following century so inconsiderable, so weak, and so little respected? The fact is undeniable: in the seventeenth century, the French government stood at the head of European civilization. In the eighteenth century it disappeared; it was the society of France, separated from its government, and often in a hostile position towards it, which led the way and guided the progress of the European world.

  It is here that we discover the incorrigible vice and infallible effect of absolute power. I shall not enter into any detail respecting the faults of the government of Louis XIV; and there were great ones. I shall not speak either of the war of the succession in Spain,* or the revocation of the edict of Nantes, or the excessive expenditure, or many other fatal measures which affected its character. I will take the merits of the government, such as I have described them. I will admit that, probably, there never was an absolute power more completely acknowledged by its age and nation, or which has rendered more real services to the civilization of its country as well as to Europe in general. It followed, indeed, from the single circumstance, that this government had no other principle than absolute power, and rested entirely on this basis, that its decay was so sudden and deserved. What was essentially wanting to France in Louis XIV’s time were institutions, political powers, which were independent and self-existent, capable, in short, of spontaneous action and resistance. The ancient French institutions, if they deserve the name, no longer subsisted; Louis XIV completed their destruction. He took care not to replace them by new institutions; they would have constrained him, and he did not choose constraint. The will and action of the central power were all that appeared with splendor at that epoch. The government of Louis XIV is a great fact, a powerful and brilliant fact, but it was built upon sand. Free institutions are a guarantee, not only for the prudence of governments, but also for their stability. No system can endure otherwise than by institutions. Wherever absolute power has been permanent, it has been based upon, and supported by, real institutions; sometimes by the division of society into castes, distinctly separated, and sometimes by a system of religious institutions. Under the reign of Louis XIV, power, as well as liberty, needed institutions. There was nothing in France, at that time, to protect either the country from the illegitimate action of the government, or the government itself against the inevitable action of time. Thus, we behold the government assisting its own decay. It was not Louis XIV only who grew old, and became feeble, at the end of his reign; it was the whole system of absolute power. Pure monarchy was as much worn out in 1712, as the monarch himself. And the evil was so much the more serious, in that Louis XIV had destroyed political habits as well as political institutions. There can be no political habits without independence. He only who feels that he is strong in himself, is always capable either of serving the ruling power, or of contending with it. Energetic characters disappear along with independent situations, and a free and high spirit arises from the security of rights.

  We may, then, describe in the following terms the state in which the French nation and the power of the government were left by Louis XIV: in society there was a great development of wealth, strength, and intellectual activity of every kind; and, along with this progressive society, there was a government essentially stationary, and without means to adapt itself to the movement of the people; devoted, after half a century of great splendor, to immobility and weakness, and already fallen, even in the lifetime of its founder, into a decay almost resembling dissolution. Such was the situation of France at the expiration of the seventeenth century, and which impressed upon the subsequent period so different a direction and character.

  It is hardly necessary for me to remark that a great movement of the human mind, that a spirit of free inquiry, was the predominant feature, the essential fact of the eighteenth century. You have already heard from this chair a great deal on this topic; you have already heard this momentous period characterized, by the voices of a philosophic orator and an eloquent philosopher.* I cannot pretend, in the small space of time which remains to me, to follow all the phases of the great revolution which was then accomplished; neither, however, can I leave you without calling your attention to some of its features which perhaps have been too little remarked.

  The first, which occurs to me in the outset, and which, indeed, I have already pointed out, is the almost entire disappearance (so to speak) of the government in the course of the eighteenth century, and the appearance of the human mind as the principal and almost sole actor. Excepting in what concerned foreign relations, under the ministry of the Duke de Choiseul, and in some great concessions made to the general bent of the public mind, in the American war, for example;—excepting, I say, in some events of this kind, there perhaps never was a government so inactive, apathetic, and inert, as the French government of that time. In place of the ambitious and active government of Louis XIV, which was everywhere, and at the head of everything, you have a power whose only endeavor, so much did it tremble for its own safety, was to slink from public view—to hide itself from danger. It was the nation which, by its intellectual movement, interfered with everything, and alone possessed moral authority, the only real authority.

  A second characteristic which strikes me in the state of the human mind in the eighteenth century, is the universality of the spirit of free inquiry. Till then, and particularly in the sixteenth century, free inquiry had been exercised in a very limited field; its object had been sometimes religious questions, and sometimes religious and political questions conjoined; but its pretensions did not extend much further. In the eighteenth century, on the contrary, free inquiry became universal in its character and objects: religion, politics, pure philosophy, man and society, moral and physical science—everything became, at once, the subject of study, doubt, and system; the ancient sciences were overturned; new sciences sprang up. It was a movement which proceeded in every direction, though emanating from one and the same impulse.

  This movement, moreover, had one peculiarity, which perhaps can be met with at no other time in the history of the world; that of being purely speculative. Until that time, in all great human revolutions, action had promptly mingled itself with speculation. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the religious revolution had begun by ideas and discussions purely intellectual;* but it had, almost immediately, led to events. The leaders of the intellectual parties had very speedily become leaders of political parties; the realities of life had mingled with the workings of the intellect. The same thing had been the case, in the seventeenth century, in the English revolution. In France, in the eighteenth century, we see the human mind exercising itself upon all subjects,—upon ideas which, from their connection with the real interests of life, necessarily had the most prompt and powerful influence upon events. And yet the promoters of, and partakers in, these great discussions, continued to be strangers to every kind of practical activity, pure speculators, who observed, judged, and spoke without ever proceeding to practice.* There never was a period in which the government of facts, and external realities, was so completely distinct from the government of thought. The separation of spiritual from temporal affairs has never been real in Europe, except in the eighteenth century. For the first time, perhaps, the spirtual world developed itself quite separately from the temporal world; a fact of the greatest importance, and which had a great influence on the course of events. It gave a singular character of pride and inexperience to the mode of thinking of the time: philosophy was never more ambitious of governing the world, and never more completely failed in its object. This necessarily led to results; the intellectual movement necessarily gave, at last, an impulse to external events; and, as they had been totally separated, their meeting was so much the more difficult, and their collision so much the more violent.

  We can hardly now be surprised at another character of the human mind at this epoch, I mean its extreme boldness. Prior to this, its greatest activity had always been restrained by certain barriers; man had lived in the midst of facts, some of which inspired him with caution, and repressed, to a certain degree, his tendency to movement. In the eighteenth century, I should really be at a loss to say what external facts were respected by the human mind, or exercised any influence over it; it entertained nothing but hatred or contempt for the whole social system; it considered itself called upon to reform all things; it looked upon itself as a sort of creator; institutions, opinions, manners, society, even man himself,—all seemed to require to be remodelled, and human reason undertook the task. Whenever, before, had the human mind displayed such daring boldness?

  Such, then, was the power which, in the course of the eighteenth century, was confronted with what remained of the government of Louis XIV. It is clear to us all that a collision between these two unequal forces was unavoidable. The leading fact of the English revolution, the struggle between free inquiry and pure monarchy, was therefore sure to be repeated in France. The differences between the two cases, undoubtedly, were great, and necessarily perpetuated themselves in the results of each; but, at bottom, the general situation of both was similar, and the event itself must be explained in the same manner.

  I by no means intend to exhibit the infinite consequences of this collision in France. I am drawing towards the close of this course of lectures, and must hasten to conclude. I wish, however, before leaving you, to call your attention to the gravest, and, in my opinion, the most instructive fact which this great spectacle has revealed to us. It is the danger, the evil, the insurmountable vice of absolute power, wheresoever it may exist, whatsoever name it may bear, and for whatever object it may be exercised. We have seen that the government of Louis XIV perished almost from this single cause. The power which succeeded it, the human mind, the real sovereign of the eighteenth century, underwent the same fate; in its turn, it possessed almost absolute power; in its turn its confidence in itself became excessive. Its movement was noble, good, and useful; and, were it necessary for me to give a general opinion on the subject, I should readily say that the eighteenth century appears to me one of the grandest epochs in the history of the world, that perhaps which has done the greatest service to mankind, and has produced the greatest and most general improvement. If I were called upon to pass judgment upon its ministry (if I may use such an expression), I should pronounce sentence in its favor. It is not the less true, however, that the absolute power exercised at this period by the human mind corrupted it, and that it entertained an illegitimate aversion to the subsisting state of things, and to all opinions which differed from the prevailing one;—an aversion which led to error and tyranny. The proportion of error and tyranny, indeed, which mingled itself in the triumph of human reason at the end of the century—a proportion, the greatness of which cannot be dissembled, and which ought to be exposed instead of being passed over—this infusion of error and tyranny, I say, was a consequence of the delusion into which the human mind was led at that period by the extent of its power. It is the duty, and will be, I believe, the peculiar event of our time, to acknowledge that all power, whether intellectual or temporal, whether belonging to governments or people, to philosophers or ministers, in whatever cause it may be exercised—that all human power, I say, bears within itself a natural vice, a principle of feebleness and abuse, which renders it necessary that it should be limited. Now, there is nothing but the general freedom of every right, interest, and opinion, the free manifestation and legal existence of all these forces—there is nothing, I say, but a system which ensures all this, can restrain every particular force or power within its legitimate bounds, and prevent it from encroaching on the others, so as to produce the real and beneficial subsistence of free inquiry. For us, this is the great result, the great moral of the struggle which took place at the close of the eighteenth century, between what may be called temporal absolute power and spiritual absolute power.

  I have now arrived at the end of the task which I undertook. You will remember, that, in beginning this course, I stated that my object was to give you a general view of the development of European civilization, from the fall of the Roman empire to the present time. I have passed very rapidly over this long career; so rapidly that it has been quite out of my power even to touch upon everything of importance, or to bring proofs of those facts to which I have drawn your attention. I hope, however, that I have attained my end, which was to mark the great epochs of the development of modern society. Allow me to add a word more. I endeavored, at the outset, to define civilization, to describe the fact which bears that name. Civilization appeared to me to consist of two principal facts, the development of human society and that of man himself; on the one hand, his political and social, and on the other, his internal and moral, advancement. This year I have confined myself to the history of society. I have exhibited civilization only in its social point of view. I have said nothing of the development of man himself. I have made no attempt to give you the history of opinions,—of the moral progress of human nature. I intend, when we meet again here, next season, to confine myself especially to France; to study with you the history of French civilization, but to study it in detail and under its various aspects. I shall try to make you acquainted not only with the history of society in France, but also with that of man; to follow, along with you, the progress of institutions, opinions, and intellectual labors of every sort, and thus to arrive at a comprehension of what has been, in the most complete and general sense, the development of our glorious country.* In the past, as well as in the future, she has a right to our warmest affections.†

  THE END.

  [* ] This dispute turns upon the greater or less extension given to the term. Civilization may be taken to signify merely the multiplication of artificial wants, and of the means and refinements of physical enjoyment. It may also be taken to imply both a state of physical well being and a state of superior intellectual and moral culture. It is only in the former sense that it can be alleged that civilization is an evil.

  Civilization is properly a relative term. It refers to a certain state of mankind as distinguished from barbarism.

  Man is formed for society. Isolated and solitary, his reason would remain perfectly undeveloped. Against the total defeat of his destination for rational development God has provided by the domestic relations. Yet without a further extension of the social ties, man would still remain comparatively rude and uncultivated—never emerging from barbarism. In proportion as the social relations are extended, regulated and perfected, man is softened, ameliorated, cultivated. To this improvement various social conditions combine; but as the political organization of society—the state—is that which first gives security and permanence to all the others, it holds the most important place. Hence it is from the political organization of society, from the establishment of the state (in Latin civitas), that the word civilization is taken.

  Civilization, therefore, in its most general idea, is an improved condition of man resulting from the establishment of social order in place of the individual independence and lawlessness of the savage or barbarous life. It may exist in various degrees: it is susceptible of continual progress: and hence the history of civilization is the history of the progress of the human race towards realizing the idea of humanity, through the extension and perfection of the social relations, and as affected, advanced or retarded, by the character of the various political and civil institutions which have existed. II.

  The term “civilization” has two distinct meanings, signifying either a force at work upon and among mankind, or a particular condition or state of human society. In the former sense it denotes the forces by which and the process through which mankind as a whole, or in some of its branches, is uplifted and developed in its internal spirit and external relations. It sums up all the humanizing forces that have raised man and are now carrying him higher in his thoughts, his deeds, his aspirations. In its other meaning the word is used to denote an advanced condition of humanity or human society, marked by political, social, and industrial order and organization, and a high degree of knowledge and culture. In this sense we may properly compare and contrast different civilizations, meaning thereby different conditions or types of human society.

  When the author speaks of the “progress of civilization,” he is thinking of civilization as a force or group of forces. When he examines civilization as it was at the downfall of the Roman empire, he is regarding it as a particular condition or state in which European society was at that epoch, as a product of previously operative forces. When we speak of the civilization of to-day we may mean either (1) the actual state of mankind and society to-day as the product of past tendencies, or (2) the forces and tendencies themselves which are to-day operative and which will produce a different and more advanced condition of human society hereafter. It is only by keeping both ideas in mind that the student will get the full force of the author’s lectures. The history of civilization is obviously a history of the various causes and forces—intellectual, moral, political, social, industrial—which, working in the past, have made man and society what they are to-day; it is more than a mere account of the successive conditions or states in which past generations of men have lived.

  [* ] In this passage the author seems, for the moment at least, inclined to make the term “civilization” almost synonymous with “intellectual development.” Mere intellectual advancement, especially where it is found only among a limited group, or peculiarly favored class, where its effects and influence do not extend downwards through the masses, does not necessarily indicate the highest type of civilization. The progress of civilization, as the author in other passages appreciates, must always be marked not merely by the intellectual and moral advancement of the individual, but also by improvement in his environment, in his social, political, and industrial condition and possibilities.

  To-day civilization must be judged not merely by its best features and products, but by its bad features and results. The half century since these lectures were written has made it more evident than ever before that the progress of man can only be continuous when society—the social state, as M. Guizot calls it—is progressing, and that social conditions can only be permanently improved by the advancement of the individual.

  [* ] It is true that Christianity was addressed primarily not to the social condition of man, to the social class relations, but to “the interior condition of man”; yet it has from the very first, by the fundamental principle on which it is based—the law of love—demanded justice as between classes and individuals. It has ever insisted on justice and charity by the rich towards the poor, by the strong towards the weak.

  [† ] “It is impossible not to feel the incompleteness of any statement of the influence of Christianity upon civilization. Some of the more obvious and apparent results can be mentioned, but its full work cannot be traced. . . . Its operation lies in the realm of the silent and unobserved forces which act upon the individual character and the springs of action, but which can, in the nature of the case, leave no record of themselves for later time.”—Adams, Civilization during the Middle Ages, p. 64.

  [* ] Opinion de Royer Collard, sur le Projet de Loi rélatif au Sacrilége, pp. 7 et 17.

  [* ] Man can be comprehended only as a free moral being, that is, as a rational being: but as a rational being it is impossible to comprehend his existence, if it be limited to the present world. In the very nature of human reason and of the relations of the human race to it, lies the idea of the destination of the race for a supermundane and eternal sphere. Reason is the germ of a development which is not and cannot be reached here below. To doubt that it is destined for development, and that there is a corresponding sphere, is contradictory: it is to doubt whether the fruit, unfolding from the blossom, is destined by its constitution to ripen.

  Herein, while the delusion of certain philosophical theories respecting Human Perfectibility is made apparent, may be seen nevertheless the correct idea of man’s earthly life. It is that of a continual progress, a reaching towards that perfection, the notion and desire of which lies in the nature of his reason.

  Humanity in all its social efforts has always been governed by the idea of a perfection never yet attained. All human history may in one view be regarded as a series of attempts to realize this idea.

  As individual man can attain the ideal perfection of his nature only as a rational being, by the harmony of all his powers with his reason; so it is equally clear that humanity can realize the idea of social perfection only as a rational society, by the union and brotherhood of the human family, and the harmony of all individuals with the Divine reason. How far it may be in the intentions of Divine Providence that the human race shall realize this perfection, it may be impossible to determine. Certain it is, that it can never be brought about by any mere political institutions, by checks and counterchecks of interest, by any balance of international powers. Only Christianity can effect this universal brotherhood of nations, and bind the human family together in a rational, that is, a free moral society. H.

  The last half century is filled with suggestive facts and tendencies bearing on this point. If one examines merely external conditions and phenomena, he may think that classes have become more sharply defined during that time, and that the clash of supposed interests between classes and countries has become fiercer. It is, however, easy to note the prevalence as never before of a deep concern for the “common interest of humanity.” The spirit of philanthropy, the increasing effort to put an end to strife, to substitute reason for force of arms in the settlement of international disputes, to reconcile rather than set in antagonism the social and industrial classes—all these are evidences of the consciousness that the true civilization of the individual is attained only in the advance and betterment of society—the human family. The solidarity of the human race is recognized to-day. The universality of human brotherhood is more and more seen to be the only basis for that civilization which is the ultimate aim of individual and society.

  [* ] It is impossible completely to separate these two parts of the history of civilization. Political institutions and social facts and forces are always in part the product of intellectual conditions, while the intellectual development of a people, hence of individuals, is always dependent on political, social—even at times industrial—environment. Institutions and ideas are not completely separable. The subsequent lectures are conclusive evidence of this.

  [* ] “There is a pleasure in viewing from the shore the difficulties of another tossed on the sea in the tumbling waves and howling winds.”

  [* ] The theocratic form of government was common in the early days of the human race. Its characteristic principle is the superhuman or divine nature of the ruler or ruling class in the state. Usually a priestly caste held the highest rank and exercised the supreme authority, political as well as religious, though often there was a king, who was at the same time chief priest, ruling in the name of the gods, or by virtue of his descent from the gods. In Egypt, for example, the kings were held to be of divine descent, and all power was in their hands and those of a priestly caste. In Ethiopia, Persia, and India other types of theocracy existed in ancient times. The Mosaic law established a pure theocratic government over the Jews. In some of the Asiatic states theocracy still exists. The complete subordination of all other classes to the priest-king, or priestly caste, has nowhere produced marked intellectual or political advancement. For a good description of theocracy, see Bluntschli’s Theory of the State.

  [* ] The essence, the strength of Greek civilization lay in the domain of the intellect. The Greek mind was speculative, as is shown by her philosophy, and æsthetic, as is abundantly proved by her literature and her art. On the practical side the Greeks were deficient. The Greek power and the Greek state disappeared under the rising power of material, practical Rome, while the Greek civilization was taken over into and made a part of the Roman. In a word, the Greek state fell, but Greek civilization lived on.

  [* ] Modern civilization is the product of what has gone before it. Each age, each institution, each civilization preceding, has contributed some idea, force, or fact which finds place in our civilization. Greece, Rome, Christianity, the barbarian, even the Orient, has had a share in this. The varied sources explain in part the diversity so strongly emphasized by the author. The widened intellectual range of to-day also permits, in fact demands, a greatly diversified activity.

  This diversity must not be mistaken for discord. The unity of modern civilization, so far as its purpose and ideal are concerned, is not less perfect than that of the ancient. Allowance must also be made for the fact that we are so far removed in point of time from the ancient world that only the larger, the dominant ideas of that age, impress us; while of the later civilization we see and hear all of the varied movements and thoughts, and in contemplating these separate and partial phases of the life of to-day we do not always correctly note their relations to the whole movement—the civilization of the age.

  [* ] This statement may easily be misunderstood. During the middle ages, and especially during the so-called dark ages, from the sixth to the tenth century, civilization was “in a state of progression” only in the general sense that it was not absolutely stagnant. There were many changes, but little actual progress. During these centuries the chaos in which Europe was seemingly left by the barbarian inroads was becoming less chaotic, the darkness less black. Professor G. B. Adams says: “It is a transition age. Lying as it does between two ages, in each of which there is an especially rapid advance of civilization, it is not itself primarily an age of progress. As compared with either ancient or modern history, the additions which were made during the middle ages to the common stock of civilization are few and unimportant. . . . Progress, however much there may have been, is not its distinctive characteristic.”—Civilization during the Middle Ages, p. 4.

  [* ]Diocletian,a. c. 284, must be regarded as the first who attempted to substitute a regularly organized system of Oriental monarchy, with its imposing ceremonial, and its long gradation of dignities, proceeding from the throne as the center of all authority and the source of all dignity, in place of the former military despotism, supported only upon, and therefore always at the mercy of, the pretorian guards.

  This system was still further perfected by Constantine the Great,ad 306—337, who introduced several important changes into the constitution of the empire.

  He divided the empire into four great prefectures; the East; Illyricum; Italy; and Gaul.

  The four pretorian prefects created by Diocletian were retained by Constantine; but with a very material change in their powers. He deprived them of all military command, and made them merely civil governors in the four prefectures.

  He consolidated still more his monarchical system by an organization of ecclesiastical dignities corresponding with the gradations of the civil administration. This system continued substantially unchanged at the division of the empire, ad 395, and was perpetuated after that period.

  Each of the empires was divided into two prefectures, and the prefectures into dioceses, in the following manner:

  	Prefectures.		Dioceses.
  EASTERN EMPIRE.	I. THE EAST.	1.	The East.
  		2.	Egypt.
  		3.	Asia Minor.
  		4.	Pontus.
  		5.	Thrace.
  	II. ILLYRICUM.	1.	Macedonia (all Greece).
  		2.	Dacia (within the Danube).
  WESTERN EMPIRE.	I. ITALY.	1.	Italy.
  		2.	Illyria (Pannonia, etc.).
  		3.	Africa.
  	II. GAUL.	1.	Spain.
  		2.	The Gauls.
  		3.	Britain.

  Rome and Constantinople constituted each a diocese by itself.

  Each of these dioceses was divided into provinces, of which in both empires there were one hundred and twenty; and the provinces into cities.

  Imperial Administration.

  Household.—The court officers were: the Grand Chamberlain; two Captains of the Guard; Master of the Offices; Quæstor or Chancellor; Keeper of the Privy Purse (comes rerum privatarum), whose functions are to be distinguished from those of the Minister of the public treasury.

  Provincial Administration.—In each prefecture a Prefectus pretorio, at the head of the civil administration. In each diocese a Vicar of the prefect. In each province a President. The cities were governed by Duumvirs and a Defensor.

  Military Organization.—After the Guards and Household troops, ranked the legions and the auxiliaries. These were commanded in each prefecture by a Major General of the Militia; a commander of the cavalry, a commander of the infantry; military dukes and counts, legionary prefects, etc.

  Judiciary.—Cases of special importance reserved for the emperor were decided by the quæstor; ordinary matters by various magistrates, according to their relative magnitude. An appeal lay from the defensor to the duumvirs, from the duumvirs to the president, from the president to the vicar, from the vicar to the prefectus pretorio.

  Finances.—The revenues were passed, by the collectors of cities, into the hands of the provincial receivers, and thence, through a higher grade of treasurers, to the minister of the public treasury. H.

  For fuller accounts of Constantine’s innovations, consult Bury’s History of the Later Roman Empire; Gibbon’s Roman Empire, chapters xiii and xvii. Duruy’s History of the Middle Ages has also a brief account.

  [* ] Vienne, the two Aquitaines, Novempopulana, the two Narbonnes, and the province of the Maritime Alps.

  [† ] Constantine the Great was singularly partial to Arles; it was he who made it the seat of the prefecture of the Gauls; he desired also that it should bear his name; but custom was more powerful than his will.

  [* ] Petronius was Prefect of the Gauls between 402 and 408.

  [† ] The municipal corps of the Roman cities were called curiae, and the members of these bodies, who were very numerous, curiales.

  [‡ ] Constantine the Second, husband of Placidia, whom Honorius had taken for his colleague in 421.

  [* ] The researches of later scholars have brought to light some facts and views slightly at variance with those of the author. By the middle of the third century before our era (bc 266) Rome had extended her conquests over the entire Italian peninsula. The cities of Italy were not, however, made mere subject municipalities, paying tribute to a city in whose privileges they had no share. Most of them were left in control of their own local affairs, while their residents were given full or partial rights of citizens of Rome. Whenever they were present in Rome they participated as fully in the affairs of the government of Rome as did the resident. This was strictly in harmony with the prevalent idea that Rome was the mistress of Italy, and not merely the capital of a state embracing all Italy. The social war (bc 90) was a revolt of the Italian cities against Roman domination, and resulted in the granting of complete Roman citizenship to all the Italian citizens. A little later this was extended to the citizens of southern Gaul. From this time forth, while the municipalities retained their separate life and laws as hitherto, the political union of Italy was in large degree a fact, and there was at least a partial identity of interest between Rome and all the cities of Italy.

  It was manifestly more difficult to extend a system of this sort over the provinces outside of Italy with any certainty that the bond would be a strong one. The establishment of a central representative government at Rome, to which each of the provinces and cities should send representatives, was never tried—probably never thought of—by the Romans. During the period of the republic the provinces were governed for Rome by proconsuls and proprætors, over whom she herself had no real control while they were in the provinces, and whom, on the other hand, the provincial municipalities could not control. The irregularities of these governments raised the necessity for some sort of government over the cities which should stop the disintegration which was setting in. When the empire was established came a real head for the state, and a growing centralization of the provincial municipalities in the hands of officers responsible to the emperor alone. Gradually the provincial cities and towns lost more and more of their local rights, including that of choosing their own magistrates. They were all united to Rome through the prefects and other representatives of the emperor. When the empire fell the bond was broken that held them together, but the local governments were revived or continued in the municipalities. For further discussions of this subject the student may with profit consult Arnold, Roman Provincial Administration; Guizot, History of Representative Government in Europe, Lectures XXII and XXIII; Adams, Civilization in the Middle Ages, chap. ii; Woodrow Wilson, The State.

  [* ] It was something more than the mere “remembrance of the empire” that survived its downfall. The idea, the possibility of a world-empire was created by the attempts of Rome at such an empire; the influence of this idea was felt throughout the early middle ages, and there is a constant recurrence to it. It gave the motive for Charlemagne’s policy; it found expression in the later Holy Roman Empire. It sunk only when the establishment of national states instead of one world-empire became the creative idea of European statecraft. During the chaotic centuries of the early middle ages there seems little doubt that the memory of the Roman empire, and of the political unity which it at one time implied, was a conservative force in preventing the complete disintegration of political society.

  [* ] It is impossible to state with positiveness what were the differences, if any, between the functions of the πρεσβύτεροι and the ἐπίσκοποι, in this period.

  [† ] Upon almost no point connected with the history of the Christian church is there a wider difference of opinion, and a greater mass of controversial literature, than upon the form of the early Church organization. The whole subject is wrapped in mists which are rather increased than dissipated by the statements and counterstatements of various partisans who too often, upon a slender basis of known fact, build a vast superstructure of doubtful theory. The statements of the author contain one theory as to the organization of the Church. The theory most radically opposed to this—and the student will always remember that there is but one set of facts underlying all of these theories—maintains that from the very beginning there has been a definite organization of the Church, authoritatively, almost divinely, established, and consequently there has been no period of the Church without its established constitution and government. The early Christians attached themselves to this organization, which was created and ordained as to its forms as well as its beliefs by an outside, superior authority.

  The other view—that presented in the text—represents the Church organization as an evolution, growing in distinctness and completeness and definiteness of official stations and powers, as the adherents increased in numbers, and necessity demanded. All the members of the early groups of Christians had a voice in determining the forms and discipline of the Church.

  The origin of these differences of view, which no amount of argument at this day can probably reconcile, is easily explicable. Of the three periods or states of the early Church, as indicated by the author, the boundaries are shadowy. The first certainly did not extend beyond the middle of the first century, while the third had been entered upon by the close of the second century or early in the following. As to the general constitution and organization of the Church in the third period there is substantial agreement, because the facts are known. Of the status of affairs during the first two periods far less is known, hence there is room for dispute as to whether what was true in the third period was also true in the preceding, or whether the third was merely the orderly evolution from the more primitive organization of the first two. Absolutely to prove either theory is impossible unless new facts are disclosed. Many of the wide differences in the organization and polity of various branches of the modern Christian church are due to the controversy above indicated.

  Whatever may have been the organization of the primitive Church, by the time of Constantine there was a distinctly marked separation of the clergy from the laity, and a gradation of the former into various ranks and classes, while the laity possessed little, and thereafter continually less, voice in the administration of the Church or the selection of its officials. The Church had, in fact, become a vast organized system—an institution.

  It must be remembered that at the outset Christianity was the religious belief of but a few uneducated persons; that it spread quietly but rapidly throughout the empire, but hardly touched the upper and official classes; that by the second century the adherents of this faith had become so numerous as to provoke persecution at the hands of the pagan emperors. The last of these systematic persecutions was that ordered by Diocletian at the close of the third century. In 311 the Emperor Constantine became an adherent, or supporter, of Christianity, and in 312 it was given complete toleration throughout the empire, while under Theodosius (379-395) it became the only religion allowed in the state. Between the middle of the third century and the fall of the Western empire the Church was the recipient of much wealth and many favors from the empire, and the ecclesiastical officials came into many positions of power and influence in municipal affairs.

  [* ] The laws of the Roman Government, embodied in treatises and decrees running back over several centuries, were first codified in the fourth century in the Gregorian and Hermogenian codes, which were made by private individuals and were very imperfect. In 438 was published the Theodosian code, compiled under authority of the emperor by a commission of lawyers. This contained most of the statute law, or imperial decrees, down to that time.

  The last and most important of the codifications of the Roman law was the Justinian Code, made in 528-529. This was a collection, in condensed form, of all the decrees and edicts then in force. This constituted the statute law of the empire. In 533 appeared the Digest, or Pandects, which was a collection of legal opinions, not unlike in nature the decisions of modern courts and the treatises of legal writers. In the same year appeared the Institutes of Justinian, a text-book for law schools, containing a summary of the principles of Roman jurisprudence. Lastly came the Novellæ, or decrees of Justinian issued after the code had been published.

  The Justinian Code, Pandects, and Institutes, with the Novellæ, constitute the Corpus Juris Civilis, or Roman Civil Law—“the last will and testament of Roman jurisprudence.” This highly developed system of law was thus preserved during the dark ages, and forms the basis of the system of jurisprudence in most of the continental European states of to-day. It is one of the most important contributions of Rome to modern civilization. See Encyclopædia Britannica, articles on Justinian and Roman Law, and the authorities there cited.

  [* ] The student will note that the author is here discussing the influence of the ecclesiastical system, the governmental machinery of the Church as an organization.

  Christianity as a religious belief, permeating society in the closing centuries of the ancient world, gave to mediæval, and hence to modern, civilization certain ideas that have had a tremendous influence both on man and on society. A new conception of the nature of God and of man’s direct and personal relation to him; a new ideal of life as typified in Christ, the attainment to which was the supreme law of conduct; the future life as dependent upon character and conduct in this world; the equality of all men from the Divine standpoint—all these ideas, fundamental to Christianity, have been forces the power of which has not been relaxed in the subsequent ages. All took their beginning in these early centuries.

  The author’s opinion that the preservation of the Christian religion in these troublous times was due to the power of the Church as an organization in the fifth century merits a word. That the Church defended, protected, and promoted the Christian religion is of course true; that was its purpose; but that the religious belief, already in the fifth century so widespread, would have disappeared had the ecclesiastical organization been less powerful, it would be difficult to maintain.

  For an excellent statement of the additions made to civilization by Christianity, see Adams’s Civilization in the Middle Ages, chap. iii.

  [* ] In the earlier centuries of her history the Christian church labored for the separation of the spiritual and temporal authority, in order to protect herself from the control of the state. The older religions were a part of the state, and the Church now protested against the idea that the temporal rulers should control the religious and ecclesiastical affairs of Christianity. In this protest she was successful. Later, when the Church itself had become powerful and the state weaker, she attempted to assume control over the temporal affairs of Europe, and to establish her position as supreme temporal as well as ecclesiastical and spiritual ruler. These two seemingly inconsistent attitudes of the Church on the relation of the spiritual and temporal authority were separated by a considerable interval of time.

  [* ] Since these lectures were delivered, a flood of light has been poured upon early Teutonic society by the researches of scholars, especially of the Germans. Waitz, Maurer, Sohm, Arnold, and others in Germany, Stubbs and others in England, have made valuable contributions to our knowledge on this subject.

  Brief accounts, based on these researches, are given in Lewis’s History of Germany, Church’s Beginning of the Middle Ages, Emerton’s Introduction to the Middle Ages, Duruy’s History of the Middle Ages. Andrews’s Institutes of General History contains suggestive bibliographies. One of the best and most trustworthy accounts in English of both political and social institutions is in Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England, chaps. ii and iii.

  [* ] The influence of at least two of the political ideas or institutions of the Germans has been especially marked in our later civilization. These two are the elective monarchy, based on the right exercised by the freemen of the German tribes of electing their leader or king, and the public or popular assembly, in which the freemen met for legislative and judicial purposes. See Stubbs’s Constitutional History, as cited in the last note.

  [* ] The custom or institution referred to here is the comitatus. This was a band of warriors united by voluntary bonds of fidelity to a military chieftain, whom they were bound to follow to war whenever called upon. They lived with their leader and were equipped and maintained by him. The bond was purely a personal one, and might be dissolved at pleasure. The great body of the military forces of the Germans was composed of these bands. This was a forerunner of the feudal system, but is not generally regarded by the best modern authorities on feudal history as in any important sense the source or origin of feudalism.

  [* ] The fall of the Roman empire is dated in 476, when the last emperor was deposed. For five centuries the Romans and the Germans had been in conflict. At first the Romans had striven to conquer the Germans, later they struggled to defend their own borders from the inroads of the barbarians, and finally they were overcome on Roman soil by the conquering hordes.

  In the last century before our era Julius Cæsar extended the Roman boundaries to the Rhine, and expelled the Germans from Gallic territory. During the reign of Augustus expeditions were made into the territory of the Germans, until in 9 ad the German leader Hermann (Arminius) defeated the Romans and practically freed the German soil from Roman hold. In the middle of the second century the Marcomanni attempted to cross the upper Danube into Roman territory. The Roman empire was now on the defensive. The invaders were defeated, but during the next hundred years German irruptions were frequently made. The Roman troops were kept busy guarding the long stretches of the imperial frontier from the incursions of a people whom overpopulation and the lack of room for the primitive agricultural methods of the time were impelling to seek larger areas for habitation.

  At that time all of Europe north and east of the Danube and the Rhine was occupied by the German tribes, save in the northeast, where the Slavs dwelt. The Germans included the Saxons in the northwest, the Franks along the Rhine, the Alemanni in the valley of the upper Rhine, east of them the Burgundians and Marcomanni, and still farther east the Goths divided into the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the latter on the lower Danube and along the Black Sea. The Goths had set up a kingdom about the middle of the fourth century, and were the most advanced and dangerous foes of the empire.

  Towards the end of the fourth century the Teutonic peoples were forced upon the empire by the pressure of a race until then unknown in Europe—the Huns, a Mongolian or Tartar race from the north of Asia. In 376, the Huns, invading Europe, fell upon and subdued the Ostrogoths, established a kingdom of their own, and attacked the Visigoths, who begged and received admission into the Roman empire south of the Danube, where they were assigned a definite territory. Trouble soon arose, and in 378 the Visigoths revolted, and at Adrianople defeated the Roman army and killed the Emperor Valens. This German victory over Roman forces was the beginning of the end. The next emperor, Theodosius, checked the Visigoths by leaving them in possession of the Danube valley and treating them as allies. At his death, in 395, the Visigoths under Alaric again attacked the empire, ravaged Thrace, and took possession of Greece, from which they were induced by the Roman general Stilicho to withdraw to Illyria. In 400, Alaric invaded Italy, but was defeated by Stilicho in 402. The movement of the barbarians along the border was now general. In 406 the Vandals and Suevi burst into Gaul and pushed on into Spain, while the Burgundians settled in eastern Gaul. In 408 Alaric again invaded Italy, and sacked Rome (410), but died shortly after. His successor allied himself with the Romans, went north into Gaul and Spain, subdued the other German invaders except the Vandals, and founded in Spain the kingdom of the Visigoths. This ended the Roman dominion in Spain.

  In 429 the Vandals crossed from Spain into Africa, overran the northern coast, plundered the Mediterranean, and in 455, under Gaiseric, crossed into Italy, and took and sacked Rome, whence they retired again to Africa.

  The Huns north of the Danube, in 449, under the leadership of Attila, advanced into northern Gaul. There they came into contact with the combined Roman forces and German tribes, were defeated in 451 at the battle of Chalons, which freed western Europe from fear of Hunnish conquest. In 452 Alaric invaded Italy, but was turned back, and on his death, in 454, the Hunnish power, which had precipitated all the movements of the barbarians for nearly a century, disappeared.

  In 410 the Romans abandoned Britain, and in 449 the Anglo-Saxons began to take possession of the island.

  Thus by the middle of the fifth century all the provinces were lost to the empire, while Italy itself was in the hands of German mercenary troops, who were her only protectors. After the death of the Emperor Valentinian III, in 455, a series of puppets were set up and deposed by the leaders of the army. The last one, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476 by Odoacer, leader of the German mercenaries (Heruli). Odoacer decided to appoint no new emperor, but to rule himself as representative of Zeno, the Eastern emperor, though the latter declined to recognize him as such representative. In 493 Odoacer was slain by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who established the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy.

  Thus at the downfall of the Roman empire the territory was in the actual occupancy of several fairly well-defined kingdoms or groups of Germans, some of which had been in possession for many years. The Vandals were masters of Africa; the Suevi, of a part of Spain; the Visigoths of the rest, together with a large part of Gaul; the Burgundians, of that part of Gaul lying on the Rhone and Saône; the Ostrogoths of nearly all Italy; while the Franks under Clovis had begun (481-496) the career of conquest, which in the next and following centuries resulted in the overthrow of those kingdoms, the establishment of the Frankish dominion, and the formation for a time of a new center of gravity for Europe under Charlemagne.

  The dominant people everywhere were Germans. The problem of the middle ages was to settle whether all former civilization should be overturned by the German, or the German people should be Romanized and Christianized. Modern civilization is the result of the interplay of these forces.

  The best account in English of the conquest of the Roman empire by the Germans is Hodgkin’s Italy and Her Invaders. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is, of course, of great importance. Emerton’s Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages, and Adams’s Civilization in the Middle Ages, contain excellent brief accounts of the conquest.

  [* ] Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722), an eminent French historical writer.

  [† ] Jean Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742), a prominent student of politics and law, and an historical writer.

  [‡ ] Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785), a French historian.

  [* ] The oldest and smallest independent republic in the world; situated in eastern central Italy. Area thirty-three square miles; population about eight thousand. It dates from the fourth century.

  [* ] By political legitimacy is meant the right of a government to exist and to exercise the powers which it undertakes to wield. What constitutes the true source of legitimate government is a matter of contention. The prevalent American theory, for example, is, for America at least, that all government, to be legitimate, must be founded on the consent of the governed, either expressed or implied. The longer a government continues in existence, the greater the presumption of its legitimacy, no matter what may have been the actual circumstances of its establishment. Those governments which have been clearly established by force, or have been founded on a political revolution, have subsequently justified their lawfulness not by the manner of their establishment, but on the acquiescence of the governed in the acts of authority, and on their recognition as lawful by other governments.

  [* ] These terms are applied to those who, under the custom of the comitatus, already described, attached themselves to another person to whom, by virtue of their oath of attachment, they owed certain services. According to Secretan (Essai sur la Féodalité), antrustion was the name given to members of the king’s comitatus, while fideles and leudes were terms applied to members of the comitatus of a nobleman. It must be remembered that the author is here attempting to describe the society of a period five centuries in length, and his descriptions are of necessity not exactly applicable to the entire period, for society and institutions were constantly changing.

  [* ] Allodial proprietors held their lands in absolute ownership, subject to no control by a superior. The term benefice was applied to lands granted to another, to be used and enjoyed by the grantee on condition of performing certain specified services for the one granting the land. The term appears first to have come into frequent use after the Carlovingian dynasty was established over the Franks (752).

  [† ] The formal beginning of the right of inheritance as applied to benefices is usually traced to an edict of Charles the Bald in 877. It is too much to affirm, as the author does, that there was nothing like regularity in the terms for which benefices were granted. In the earliest period they were almost certainly not hereditary; in the later period they were rarely for a limited term of years. Researches made since M. Guizot wrote have overthrown several statements in this and the following chapter.

  [* ] The student will no doubt easily recall periods in mediæval history concerning which these statements seem hardly exact.

  [* ] The following chronological indications may assist in recalling a more distinct view of the invasions, conquests, and revolutions of this stormy period:

  [486.	Clovis, king of the Salian Franks, and real founder of the Frankish empire, defeats Syagrius, the Roman general, at Soissons, and extends the kingdom to the Loire, where it touches the kingdom of the Visigoths.]
  507.	Clovis adds to his former acquisitions the conquest of the Visigothic kingdom. Dies, 511. Kingdom divided between his four sons, but ultimately united under one of them, Clotaire I, 558.
  530.	Thuringia conquered and annexed to the Frankish dominions.
  534.	Conquest of Burgundy by the Franks.
  554.	Ostrogothic kingdom destroyed by Narses.—Italy becomes a province of the Eastern Empire.
  560.	Gepidæ destroyed by the Lombards and Avars.
  568.	Kingdom of the Lombards established in Upper Italy.—Southern Italy continues an exarchate of the Eastern Empire.
  628.	Dagobert I (son of Clotaire II) king of the Franks. Invasion of the Slavonians (Wendi). Mayors of the palace control the royal authority.
  687.	Pepin of Heristal, mayor of the palace [dictator of Frankish kingdom].
  711.	The Saracens appear in Europe; conquer Spain; cross the Pyrenees; checked on the Aude, 712; invade France; beaten by Eudes, duke of Aquitaine, 721; driven beyond the Aude, 725.
  715.	Charles Martel mayor of the palace.
  726.	Leo (Iconoclastes), Emperor of the East, issues an edict against image-worship; the people of Rome and Naples revolt; exarch of Ravenna murdered by the people, and the city yielded to the Lombards. A sort of republic under the authority of the Pope established at Rome; including the territory from Viterba to Terracina, and from Narni to Ostia. Commencement of the temporal power of the Popes. The Pope and the republic of Venice (founded 697) unite to drive the Lombards from Ravenna.
  732.	Saracens invade France; defeated by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.
  752-757.	Pepin the Short, mayor of the palace; deposes Childeric, the last of the Merovingian kings; recognized king by the Pope; founds the Carlovingian dynasty.
  	Exarchate of Ravenna destroyed by the Lombards; the Pope and the Romans refuse submission; invite the aid of Pepin, who invades Italy and forces the Lombards to give up the exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, which he bestows upon the Pope. Commencement of the relations between the Popes and the German princes.
  768.	Charlemagne king; conquers Aquitania, 769; overthrows the Lombard kingdom of Italy, 774; first war against the Saxons; drives them beyond the Weser, 772-774; defeats them again, 777; war against Spain, 778; second war against the Saxons, 778-785; subdues all on the south of the Elbe, compels them to receive baptism. The Lombards (of Beneventum), the Greeks, and Avari, league against him—defeated. Avari subdued and Christianized, 791-799.
  800.	Charlemagne restores the Roman Empire of the West; receives the imperial crown from the Pope; Saxons on the Elbe subdued and dispersed, 812. [The subjugation of the Saxons had cost Charlemagne thirty years war.] War with the Wiltzians and other Slavonian tribes. Maritime incursions of the Northmen on the ocean coast, and of the Saracens on the Mediterranean.
  814.	Death of Charlemagne. This event was followed by the dismemberment of his empire, and the formation of the three great states of Germany, France, and Italy; also of three secondary kingdoms, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre.

  The death of Charlemagne and the breaking up of his vast system likewise opened the barriers of the empire to the incursions of the Saracens, the Northmen, the Slavonians, and the Hungarians: it was not until the close of the tenth century that the barbarian invasions can be said to have definitely ceased.

  H.

  [* ] It must not be forgotten that “the Germans, at the time of their emergence from their original seats and their occupation of the Roman lands, were not mere wandering groups of freebooters, but well-organized nations, with a very distinct sense of political organization” (Emerton). The earlier writers have misrepresented the Germans in this regard, and even the statements and implications of the author are not entirely reconcilable with modern views.

  One great fact of mediæval history was, however, that the dominant people, the Germans, were not at the beginning of the era sufficiently civilized to appreciate, take up, and carry forward the political and social ideas which Roman civilization had produced. During the dark ages civilization was waiting while the German peoples fitted themselves to carry forward the work. Time was needed for this, and until that time had elapsed the state of Europe was not far removed from barbarism.

  [* ] Most of these codes were written out, within a century of the conquest of the Roman empire, in the Latin language. They cover civil and criminal law, and, in general, the relations of man to man. Like the Roman codes which undoubtedly inspired them, they contain little new legislation, but bring together the customs and usages and edicts which up to that time had been unwritten. The legal system which they embody was not that “of a society which no longer existed,” for many of the German legal ideas found in these codes influenced the social and legal order of Europe almost till modern times. Of these codes the Salic and the Visigothic are among the most mportant. They have all been published with annotations by German scholars during the past half century. A good brief sketch is given in Emerton’s Introduction to the Middle Ages, chap. viii, where a bibliography is also given. See also the Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. xxi, article “Salic Law and Other Barbarian Laws.”

  The later laws and proclamations of the Frankish kings were known as capitularies, and are of the highest importance in tracing the legal development of the Frankish government and customs. They have been published in Pertz, Monumenta Germanica, and elsewhere. An excellent analysis of their contents is given in Guizot’s History of Civilization in France, Lectures XXI and XXV.

  Among the peculiarities by which most of these laws are distinguished from modern legislation, the most striking is perhaps the fact that all offences were punished with fines, This is significant of the barbarian sentiment of individuality, of personal independence. The barbarian will not suffer his life or liberty to be affected by his actions.

  [* ] The code of the Visigoths, as sanctioned by the Council of Toledo in 633, was only a revision and amendment of the code of Alaric, published in 506.

  [* ] Theories as to the origin of the feudal system have been radically reconstructed since these lectures were written. While there is not yet complete agreement upon all points, it is no longer maintained by the most careful investigators that the feudal system was entirely due to the Germanic element, and “was the offspring of German society.” The forms of feudalism were essentially Roman, the spirit German. See note at the end of Lecture IV.

  [† ] In this lecture the author had in mind the entire period from the fifth to the tenth century, and his statements are based on the general character and import of the whole time. In order to an appreciation of the discussion it is essential that the events of this chaotic period be well known. The chronological suggestions already given will serve as a help to those familiar with the general outlines. The student will find excellent sketches of the period in Duruy’s History of the Middle Ages, and in Emerton’s Introduction to the Middle Ages. For the reign of Charlemagne, consult Eginhard’s Life of Charlemagne, and Mombert, History of Charles the Great.

  The important factor in Europe during this period was the Frankish kingdom. Of all the Germanic kingdoms set up during the era of the invasions and wanderings it alone developed such stability and approach to unity as made it markedly influential in both that and later periods. Established on a firmer basis by Clovis, it absorbed the Alemanni (496) and the Visigothic kingdom in Gaul (507). Clovis himself was baptized into the orthodox Catholic faith in 496, and thereby brought the kingdom into friendly relations with the pope, between whom and the other Teutonic kingdoms there was discord, owing to their adherence to Arianism, a theological heresy of this period. The Franks with far less difficulty than the other Teutons seemed able to combine the three elements, Roman, barbarian, Christian, the fusion of which has in large measure produced modern civilization. At the death of Clovis, in 511, the Frankish kingdom was a decently ordered barbarian state. Under his successors family quarrels weakened the kingdom, but in 530 Thuringia, in 534 Burgundy, and a little later certain territory east of the Rhine, was annexed. The kingdom was several times divided among sons of the rulers, but in 613 was reunited under Lothaire II, and during the reign of his son, Dagobert I (628-638), the Merovingian family attained its highest power. During all of this period there had been a division, now openly indicated by separate rulers, now nominal, between the eastern part (Austrasia) and the western part (Neustria) of the kingdom. Austrasia was more Teutonic, less centralized; Neustria more centralized and more Roman.

  Under the weak successors of Dagobert the real power in each branch of the kingdom was wielded by the chief officer of state, the mayor of the palace. In 687 the Austrasian mayor of the palace, Pippin of Heristal, leading the nobles of his country, overcame the king and mayor of the palace of Neustria and became the real dictator of the entire kingdom. His victory was in one sense the ascendancy of the Teutonic over the Roman ideas in the kingdom. The office of the mayor of the palace continued in Pippin’s family until in 752 the last of the Merovingian kings was set aside and Pippin the Short was crowned by the pope king of the Franks, thus establishing the Carlovingian dynasty.

  Under the weak Merovingian rulers the Frankish nobles had assumed a virtual independence, and the Carlovingian mayors of the palace had striven to rebuild the central power thus weakened. The alliance between Pippin the Short and the pope gave the new Frankish ruler the moral support of the papal authority.

  In 768, Charlemagne, the greatest of the Carlovingians, came to the throne. Two motives seem to have guided his acts: (1) to strengthen the central government of the kingdom, and (2) to revive the Roman empire by consolidating Christian Europe into a single government. His conquests in Germany and Italy, his coronation in 800 as the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, were the carrying out of this idea. Though his statesmanship was broad and his acts were wise, his attempt did not suit the conditions of Germanic Europe, nor did his effort at a strong central government accord with the growing independence of the landed nobility throughout the continent. With his death it became evident that only the personal force and statesmanship of a strong ruler could make headway against these disintegrating tendencies. His immediate successors were unequal to the task, and though the name of the empire continued, it was unable to maintain the position established for it by Charlemagne. The family quarrels between his descendants, sons of Louis the Pious, culminated in the treaty of Verdun in 843, by which Lothaire, with the title of emperor, received Italy and a strip along the Rhine to the North Sea, Louis the German received the territory from the Rhine to the Elbe, and Charles the Bold received France west of the strip given to Lothaire. This was the beginning of modern France as a separate kingdom, the throne of which was held by the Carlovingians till 987, when Hugh Capet, Duke of France, one of the feudal nobility, took the throne and founded the dynasty that ruled France till the present century. At this time France was hardly more than a group of separate sovereign states, under the nominal suzerainty of the king. Germany also soon became split into several large districts, each under the control of a practically independent duke, while in Italy the government rapidly disintegrated after the treaty of Verdun, already mentioned.

  Thus, in the course of two centuries after Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire had so declined that, except under Otho I (962) and a few of his successors, it represented an idea rather than a fact. At the same time lines of cleavage, linguistic and governmental, were becoming apparent, substantially those marking the later nationalities of the Germans, the French, and the Italians. A turbulent, chaotic state was again prevalent over Europe, but it was not the rude, barbarous chaos of the fifth century. Some advance had been made; but the Teutonic peoples were not yet by the tenth century fully ready for the restraint of orderly government, which meant, as they felt, a lessening of that individual liberty which was so strong a trait in the German life. The feudal system was first to have its course before political order should overcome unrestrained personal independence.

  An appreciative brief study of the real significance of Charlemagne’s reign and the first centuries of the Holy Roman Empire is contained in Adams’s Civilization during the Middle Ages, pp. 137-193. Of very great value is also Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire.

  [* ] The detailed accounts of the origin and character of feudalism given in Hallam’s Middle Ages and Guizot’s History of Civilization in France, second course, were for a long time the only ones available in English. The views of neither of these writers, especially as to the origin, are now accepted as satisfactory, though the student who desires to know the earlier theories will always consult them. Adams’s Civilization during the Middle Ages, chapter ix, is highly valuable; hardly less so are chapter xv of Emerton’s Introduction to the Middle Ages, on the origin, and chapter xiv of the same author’s Mediæval Europe, on the character of the feudal institutions. Andrews’s Institutes of General History, chapter vi, is suggestive as a summary, and contains an excellent bibliography. Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England, chapter ix, may also be profitably consulted. All of these later works are based on the researches and conclusions of the German scholars and historians, Waitz, Roth, and Brunner, whose works may perhaps be considered the ultimate authority to-day.

  [* ] Even when feudalism was at its height, and disunity in the state seemed the greatest, the theory was preserved of a central power, the king, exercising the sovereign authority to which all other elements in the feudal state were directly or indirectly subject. This idea never entirely disappeared, however faint and obscure it may seem at times to have been.

  [* ] This little group is the unit, but the “feudal system” included also the idea of a bond connecting the various units or groups. Each possessor of a fief was bound by personal and property ties to the person from whom he held his fief, and in turn often had other lesser vassals attached to himself by a similar tie. Between vassals of the same suzerain there was always much of common interest. To speak of a single group, such as is described in the lecture, as constituting or typifying the “feudal system,” is not entirely accurate.

  [* ] It must always be understood, of course, that all of the importance and power that attached to him was by virtue of his proprietorship of the fief, and disappeared with the loss of the fief.

  [* ] The primitive Germans undoubtedly had an extremely high respect for women, though it cannot be shown that they surpassed other races of the Aryan family in this regard.

  [* ] When the system became generally established these duties and obligations were definitely fixed. The vassal owed service; the lord owed protection. The vassal’s duty consisted in military service, personally and with a definite retinue, for a fixed period, not usually exceeding forty days; attendance upon the lord’s court and council; the payment to the lord for particular purposes, of certain special sums of money, known as “aids,” “fines,” and “reliefs.” Refusal or omission by the vassal to fulfil these duties rendered the fief liable to forfeiture. The obligations of the lord were to protect the vassal from outside enemies, to refrain from violence against him, and to grant him lawful justice. Failure in these obligations released the vassal permanently or temporarily from his allegiance.

  [* ] Each possessor of a fief, of course, “had the power to enforce his will upon others”—i. e., his villeins and serfs; but over these possessors themselves, who were at once vassals of those above and suzerains of those below them, there was no one powerful enough to assert and enforce his will. The weakness of this central or general power in the state was the strength of feudalism. When the central political and social force arose the feudal system fell.

  [* ] The fundamentals of chivalry are traceable to the early German ideas of personal bravery, fondness for feats of arms, and respect for woman, together with regard for the oppressed and unfortunate, inculcated by Christianity. It became a formal institution wherever feudalism existed, while the Crusades aided its development by giving opportunity for its practice. Sons of noblemen were trained in its ceremonies and ideas, and at the age of twenty-one were knighted. Its bad feature was that it fostered aristocracy, and that its external forms covered many excesses and vices. Its spirit, its ideal of life, manners, and character, have had a large subsequent influence in the development of modern manhood.

  [* ] To say that the progress of society was opposed by feudalism is but to affirm that the German peoples of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries were not ready for more advanced political and social institutions, for the establishment of any government that would materially lessen their individual liberty. The feudal system gave scope for that liberty; it was suited to the condition of the people. On the other hand, centralized government was not an original Teutonic institution. The Teutonic mind had to be made ready for it. That very process of preparation constituted social progress. The feudal system was not so much an obstacle to the progress of society as it was a necessary intermediate stage before the more evident and rapid progress toward orderly government and society that came in the following centuries.

  [* ] The feudal system as a fully organized institution was hardly found outside of the limits of the empire established by Charlemagne, which included France, Germany, and Italy; it was carried, with modifications, into England. In France and Germany it attained its fullest development, and its effects continued there longer than elsewhere. From the ninth to the twelfth century it flourished in its completest form, but the germs of the system are found several centuries earlier.

  Feudalism was a governmental and social system based upon three essential ideas, and marked by one universal peculiarity. The latter was the absence of any strong central power in the state; the former were: (1) a peculiar kind of land tenure, (2) a peculiar personal relation existing between different classes in society, and (3) special rights and powers of government and sovereignty exercised by the holders of land over those residing on it. The first two of these are separately traceable to a far earlier period; their union was the special characteristic of the feudal system.

  The disorders of the eighth and ninth centuries in the Frankish monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire gave cause for the establishment of feudalism. Royalty could not fulfill the duties which it undertook, and the protection which the nominal head of the state could not give was sought elsewhere. On the verge of complete disintegration society seized hold of certain customs that had existed for centuries, organized them into a rough system, and thus established a new kind of government. The absence of a strong central power occasioned the feudal system. Until that central power was made strong, feudalism lasted; with its upbuilding, feudalism fell. The two were incompatible.

  The real basis of the system was the form of land tenure upon which were built certain rights, duties, and powers of individuals. The origin of the fief, as an estate held by feudal tenure was called, is found in the Roman custom, by which, in the later days of the empire, the owner of a small estate surrendered it to a more powerful neighbor, and received it back without rent and for an indefinite period, on a sort of lease that was terminable at the will of the owner. This tenure was known as the precarium, and later as a benefice. Under it, while the title of the occupant was not that of an owner, he was yet more amply protected against violence in turbulent times and secured in his occupancy by the superior influence and power of the one from whom he held the land. The German conquerors, in overrunning the empire, took a large part of the soil to their own use and granted it to their followers. In doing so they applied this Roman custom of the precarium, which they found in the territory. At the outset and for a long time thereafter this land tenure carried no personal relation, and involved no obligation of personal service in return.

  The second feature in feudalism was the personal relation between different classes—the relation between lord and vassals. The vassal was bound to render fealty and personal service to the lord in return for protection on his part. This relationship, which was a voluntary one, seems also to have been traceable to a Roman institution, that of patron and client, the patrocinium. According to that custom, the wealthy and powerful patron took the weak and landless client under his protection, his patronage, in return for services rendered by the client. The relationship was purely a personal one of protection and service, not altogether unlike that of the German comitatus already described. So long as these two independent customs, traceable to Roman originals, continued separate, as they did for two or three centuries, feudalism was not established. When, however, the holder of a benefice became also a vassal; when the relationship growing from the landholding was united with that growing out of personal fealty, the feudal tenure became established.

  During the time of the Merovingians it does not appear that the two ideas were joined, so that while the factors of feudalism existed the system itself had not been produced. Under the Carlovingians many lands were granted as benefices, or fiefs, and these appear to have been made hereditary before the close of the ninth century. During the same period many of the administrative officers, such as dukes and counts, appointed by the kings, impelled thereto by the weakness of the central power, claimed their offices as hereditary, and their respective duchies and counties as fiefs, thus splitting up the state. In these same confused and anarchical times many free proprietors of allodial estates, for the sake of the protection of a stronger authority, since the central government was unequal to the task, gave up their lands to more powerful neighbors and received them back as fiefs. The Church, which had become possessed of vast estates, granted and held many of its lands and offices in this way.

  It was during the Carlovingian period, or at least while the Carlovingians were mayors of the palace, that the idea of personal service was connected with the holding of fiefs. Large armies were needed, and in the absence of state revenues the habit grew of granting benefices on condition of military service rendered in return.

  Finally, in the same period, the custom was established of granting to the holders of great fiefs complete jurisdiction or sovereignty for civil purposes over their estates. This was commonly done by grants of immunity, as they were called, by which the owner of a fief took the place of the officers of state on his own domain, and administered laws and dispensed justice as an almost independent sovereign. Probably, also, many strong feudal lords usurped the sovereignty without the formality of a grant from the nominal king. When this had become general, and when the custom of subinfeudation had been adopted, a general decentralized system of government built on land tenure had been substituted for the centralized monarchy which Charlemagne had attempted.

  It is now possible to see that the essential forms of feudalism were derived from Roman originals, but the force that applied them, modified them, and organized them into a system was the German spirit of independence, and love of individual liberty. Instead of building up a strong central government, the Germans aimed at the establishment of a social system based on the personal relation of man to man, that should permit the fullest freedom to the individual members so far as they possessed land.

  The good features of feudalism were beneficial to the feudal lords only, while, as indicated in the lecture, the villeins and entire body of the lower classes were harshly treated. Had a strong, united, central government been possible, feudalism would have been unnecessary; its merit was in keeping society from complete disintegration in theory and in fact, at a time when the tendency was all in that direction.

  It began to lose force in the eleventh century, but continued in England until the Wars of the Roses, in Spain till the fifteenth century, while many remnants were left in France till 1789, and in Germany until the present century. The causes of its downfall were the growth of royalty, and of the cities, the development of trade and commerce, and the modification in methods of warfare; in short, it disappeared when civilization advanced beyond the feudal stage. Cf. page 94, note.

  [* ] A brief sketch of the organization of the Church, and of its growth from the fifth to the twelfth century, is given in the note appended to this lecture, page 151.

  [* ] This phrase signified the conferring or bestowing by a bishop upon one of the lower order of the clergy of a position, such as the charge of a parish church, to which was attached a fixed income payable from Church funds or lands. Such a position was an ecclesiastical benefice; the act of conferring it was the collation.

  [* ] The distinction between the power of conferring the authority to exercise the spiritual functions of an ecclesiastical office, and the right of designating the person upon whom the authority shall be conferred for any particular place, should be borne in mind. The former, by the established constitution of the Church and by universal practice, always belonged exclusively to the bishops: they alone ordained the inferior clergy; they alone consecrated the bishops. In regard to the latter the practice varied: sometimes, the person designated was elected by the clergy and people, which was the primitive mode; sometimes by the clergy; sometimes by the temporal sovereign. But in no case did the people or the prince imagine themselves competent to consecrate, to confer upon the person they had selected for bishop, the spiritual powers pertaining to the functions of the see or benefice. This was always referred to the bishops, with whom it rested to confer or withhold those powers, without which the designation by people or prince was of no effect. This remark, of course, applies only to the sacred or spiritual orders; the authority of priors, abbots, etc., was derived from their election.

  H.

  [* ] The doctrinal belief or dogma of the Church had at that period to be accepted by all without question, and almost without examination. “Belief was in the middle ages not a matter of choice or of conviction, but of duty. The individual had no rights in the matter, but must submit himself without question to the dictates of the Church.”—Emerton, Mediæval Europe, p. 589.

  [* ] Many of the leaders of early Christian thought were opposed to compulsion in matters of faith. Heresy was treated and punished as a civil offense only after the Christian religion came to be the official religion of the Roman empire. St. Hilary (301-366), St. Martin (319-400), and St. Ambrose (340-397) were, as the text states, opposed to persecutions, while Augustine (383-430) was among the early advocates. Theodosius I, Emperor of the East (379-395), issued decrees against those who would not accept the orthodox faith. The usurping Emperor Maximus (383-388) was the first to put any one to death for heresy. From that time till the seventeenth century punishment for heresy was common. Noted thirteenth century instances were the persecutions of the Waldenses and Albigenses.

  [* ] The term “heresy” admits of various definitions, but its usual application is to doctrines held by nominal Christians in conflict with one of the articles of faith or fundamental doctrines of the Church. No age in Christianity has been without sects and heresies, from the Gnostics, Manichæans, Novatians, Donatists, to the Waldenses, Albigenses, and Protestant Reformers. Still, the very fact that the holders of these so-called heretical views were usually driven out of the Church, or punished, shows that there was not room in the Church for the free exercise of individual reason.

  [† ] Four grades of councils were recognized in the early and mediæval Church: Diocesan, composed of all the clergy under one bishop; provincial, consisting of all the bishops in one ecclesiastical province, under the metropolitan or archbishop; national, where all the bishops of a nation met under the patriarch or first metropolitan; general or œcumenical, at which the whole Church was regarded as represented. The famous Councils of Nicæa, Constance, and Trent are examples of the last, of which there have been but twenty to the present time, as recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.

  [* ] There are several things in the foregoing paragraphs not quite accurately put.

  The assumption of the right, or the exercise of the power to coerce faith, to punish physically for religious opinions, cannot indeed be too strongly condemned. It was a monstrous tyranny exercised by the Church at this period. The right of separating from its society such as rejected the fundamental articles of its constitution, is entirely a different thing—being a right inherent in every association, not to advert here to any grounds on which the obligation to do so was thought to rest.

  Again, in regard to the authority of the Church and the “rights of individual reason”—here undoubtedly, in the corrupt ages of the Church, monstrous abuses grew up; yet these abuses should be distinguished from the primitive principle, from the perversion of which they sprang—the principle which required implicit faith in all matters divinely revealed. . . .

  Nor, again, does the Church deserve the praise given to it in the text of acting in its councils in opposition to its principles. In the councils, the Church no doubt exercised to a certain extent the right inherent in all ordinary associations of legislating for itself. In all matters relating to rites, ceremonies, and doctrines, not considered to be definitively settled by Divine appointment, these councils exercised the power of determining by their own authority. In all such matters there was scope for “discussion, deliberation,” and arbitrary preference. But when the question was concerning any fundamental article of faith, the statement that “one might fancy one’s self in the midst of the philosophical schools of Greece,” is anything but true. They never dreamed of settling any such question by excogitation, speculation, reasoning. The appeal was to the sacred Scriptures as the ultimate and absolute authority. It was a matter of interpretation. If the sacred writings were not clear and decisive in themselves of the point in question, the next and only inquiry was, what could be historically ascertained to have been the interpretation sanctioned by the universal consent of the Church from the Apostolic age downwards,—and that was held to be decisive. Such was always the theory of the Church as to the authority of its councils: it was never imagined that the ascertained consent of the Church universal from the primitive age, in regard to a question of interpretation bearing on an article of faith, could be set aside, by any discussion or vote, by any speculation or reasoning.

  Thus, from not distinguishing things quite distinct, the author’s censure on the one hand, and his praise on the other, may convey an erroneous impression. H.

  [* ] Some of the barbarians had embraced Christianity before their invasion of the Roman empire. Among these were the Goths, converted in the fourth century by their bishops Theophilus and Ulphilas; the Heruli, the Suevi, the Vandals, and perhaps the Lombards. They were converted by Arian missionaries, and embraced that form of Christianity. In the sixth and seventh centuries the Suevi, Visigoths, and Lombards adopted the orthodox faith; the Heruli, Vandals, and Ostrogoths adhered to Arianism.

  The remarks of the text can therefore be applied literally only to the Burgundians, Franks, etc., by whom the first conquerors of the empire were swept away. Still, the Church had much to do even in bringing under her full influence the first barbarians. H.

  [† ] The introduction of the imposing ceremonial and spectacular display in the worship of the Church was not merely to attract the “barbarians” into the Church, but also due to the influence of the barbarians and their customs and ceremonials on the Church after they entered it.

  [* ] See note at the end of this lecture.

  [* ] The quarrel respecting investitures between Gregory VII and the Emperor Henry IV arose from the former’s attempt to establish the complete supremacy of the pope by destroying the control of feudal lords and princes over the lands and offices of the Church. Gregory’s decree was that no officer of the Church should do homage under the feudal system to any temporal lord for his office or estate, but that he should receive the symbols of his investiture from the pope. As these officers of the Church possessed at the time under feudal tenure more than one third the lands of Europe, the significance of the papal claim can be understood. After a long struggle the quarrel on this particular point was compromised. Stephen’s Hildebrand and His Times may be consulted with profit on this contest.

  [* ] We have seen (page 47, note) that by the fifth century the Church had become a vast institution with an organized government, constituting a regular hierarchy. The clergy had become separated from the laity; over the clergy of a city, with its outlying territory, was a bishop, elected, in the early days, by the clergy and people, the bishop in the chief city of a province ranking above the others, and known as the metropolitan (later archbishop), while in the West the Bishop of Rome and in the East the Bishop of Constantinople had come to outrank all others in the Church.

  The supremacy of the Bishop of Rome had been built up by several forces: the pre-eminence of Rome as the one time mistress of the world; the fact that the Church at Rome was the only Apostolic Church in the West; that she had sent out and planted many churches; that her bishops had maintained a neutral attitude in the doctrinal controversies of the third and fourth centuries; that by the Council of Sardica, in 343, appeals were allowed to the Bishop of Rome in certain cases.

  To reinforce these influences were the greatness of one or two of the bishops of this period (notably Leo I and Gregory the Great), and the theory by that time definitely held that the Bishop of Rome was the successor of Peter, and that, as Peter had had supremacy by divine authority over other apostles, so the Bishop of Rome had authority over other bishops and churches. After the time of the Emperor Constantine the connection between Church and state was close, and the emperors exercised considerable control over ecclesiastical affairs, although the removal of the capital to Constantinople left the Bishop of Rome a great degree of independence.

  In 445 the Emperor Valentinian III declared the Bishop of Rome the supreme judicial and administrative officer of the Church in the empire. Thus, by the time of the downfall of the Western empire not only had the organization of the Church become well established, but the supremacy of the pope was well recognized. After the fall of the empire (476) the Church alone, and the pope as its head, represented the unity for which the empire had stood.

  At this time it was that the Church and the pope, in order to protect themselves against the barbarians, as indicated by the author, set up the principle of the complete separation and independence of Church and state, of the spiritual and temporal power.

  Pope Gregory I (590-604), the foremost incumbent of the papal chair during the early dark ages, appears at the head of the ecclesiastical organization, directing its movements, extending its force, guiding its clergy. When the Lombards had conquered northern Italy, and the Exarchate of Ravenna only feebly upheld the authority of the Eastern emperor in Italy, the Bishop of Rome had, of necessity, assumed and exercised temporal powers in the city, and this power was augmented by Gregory, who ignored, or claimed superiority over, the exarch. Thus began the authority of the pope as a temporal ruler.

  During the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries the most important event in the history of the papacy and the Church was the alliance between the pope and Pippin the Short, Mayor of the Palace under the Merovingians. The pope was in danger from the Lombards; he invited the protection of the Franks under Pippin. Pippin wished to become King of the Franks by the overthrow of the Merovingians; he wished the sanction of the religious power for his usurpation. The alliance was easily struck; the Carlovingian dynasty in France was established and the position of the pope was much strengthened.

  We have seen the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne. His conquest of the Lombards freed the papacy from absorption by the Lombards, and the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by the pope established a close relationship between the two powers. Its exact nature was in doubt during the entire middle ages. On one hand it seemed to imply, by the act of coronation, the supremacy of the pope over the temporal ruler—“the bestowal of the empire by gift of the Church.” On the other hand, the imperial idea was that the emperor was the successor of the former Roman emperors to whom the pope, as Bishop of Rome, had been subject. The struggle of the middle ages was between the two ideas—the papacy and the empire—to settle which, if either, was supreme, or whether both were equal—joint rulers of God on earth, one spiritual, the other temporal. The Church had forgotten or now ignored its contention of the fourth and fifth centuries for the separation and mutually complete independence of spiritual and temporal power.

  The weakness of the empire after the death of Charlemagne, its decline until the coronation of Otho I (962), the Donation of Constantine and the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals—two remarkable documents whose genuineness was accepted for several centuries, though now proved to be baseless forgeries—and the talents of two or three strong men, who in the ninth century occupied the papal chair, established the theory of papal supremacy over the empire. During the tenth century, the squabbles of Italian politics and the corrupt characters of the popes lost the papacy power and respect, while in the last half of the century the empire was revived by Otho I and his two successors; so that the year 1000 saw the world-monarchy, represented by the Holy Roman Empire, and the world-church, the Holy Catholic Church, again claiming position as joint rulers of the earth. But a bitter struggle was again imminent, since neither power was long willing to admit the supremacy or indeed the equality of the other.

  In the eleventh century, Gregory VII sought to carry into effect his idea of the supremacy of the pope in all temporal as well as spiritual affairs (see page 181). He sought to reform the Church within and to destroy the feudal authority of laymen over ecclesiastical vassals, and thus to make the Church in all its parts independent and dominant.

  The struggle between Gregory and the Emperor Henry IV added to the papal prestige, and during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the authority of the pope reached its height, with nearly all the kings of Europe acknowledging fealty to him for their possessions. About the middle of the thirteenth century, the temporary ascendency of Frederick II was followed by the unrivaled papal domination for a time. In the fourteenth century the rise of independent states, the removal of the papal seat to Avignon, the great Schism, resulting in two popes, two capitals, and a divided Church, practically destroyed the temporal power of the pope save in central Italy, and weakened his spiritual authority.

  For an excellent detailed account of the papacy and its relation to the state, its rise and downfall as a temporal power, see Emerton, Mediæval Europe; Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire is also especially valuable.

  [* ] The legislative body of France, the States-General, was not summoned between 1614 and 1789. During that time the laws were mere royal edicts. The term “parliament” in French usage means not a legislative body, but a law court.

  [* ] In the fifth century the schools of the Roman empire, modeled on the secular schools of earlier pagan Greece and Rome, were swept away. In their place the Church established schools in connection with cathedrals and monasteries. These taught only what was needed for the clerical and monastic life. Until the eighth century there were no schools for the education of the laity, as indeed there was little opportunity for the use of education by a layman. In England and France, in the eighth and ninth centuries, there was a revival of education due largely to Alcuin and the fostering care of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great. Both monastic and cathedral schools were improved, while new schools were established. Amid the anarchy of the tenth century there was again a relapse, from which came a revival in the eleventh century leading to the establishment of the mediæval universities. Cf. West’s Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools; Mullinger’s Schools of Charles the Great.

  [* ] The rise of Christianity improved the condition of the slave by inculcating more humane ideas regarding his treatment. The Roman emperors under the influence of the Church softened many of the harsh features of the system, and the clergy at the same time advocated manumission as a religious duty. During the middle ages the attitude of the Church was pretty steadily that of opposition to slavery. It must not, however, be a matter of surprise that an institution so closely connected with the industrial life of the world was not removed until a change could be made in general economic habits. It has even been held by some that the amelioration of the condition of the slave and serf without manumission, was better for society and the slave than complete emancipation would have been during some portions of this period.

  [* ] The wager of battle was an appeal to arms to determine the truth as between two parties, in the belief that divine power would give the victory to the right man. The ordeals were of various kinds—lot, walking over hot iron, immersing the hand in hot water. If an accused person appealed to one of these and escaped injury, he was cleared. Under the oath of compurgation, the accused was freed if on oath he declared himself innocent and produced a certain number of other persons to swear that they believed his statement. All through the middle ages the Church was endeavoring to replace these and other Teutonic laws with laws and ideas drawn from the old Roman law. Consult the admirable account of the German legal ideas in Chapter VIII of Emerton’s Introduction to the Middle Ages.

  [† ] The Roman law had never entirely disappeared from use in Europe. It influenced the formation of the canon law, and some of its principles had early modified the Teutonic law. With the rise of the universities its study was renewed, and gradually it supplanted German law in continental Europe. While the Church did much to preserve and to spread the principles of Roman law, it is too much to affirm that but for the Church it would have perished. One of the two great gifts of the ancient world to the modern was the Roman law.

  [* ] Penance included sorrow for sin, reformation, and the doing of expiatory works. The sacrament of penance in the Church embraced the granting of forgiveness of sins, by the absolution of a priest, to those who repented, confessed, and performed satisfaction. In the early days public confession and penance was common, but after the time of the crusades almsdoing, fasts, and pilgrimages were usually enjoined in place of public penance.

  [* ] See especially Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation, chaps. xii-xiv.

  [† ] The Truce of God was a regulation of the Church enjoining the suspension of all private warfare from Wednesday evening to Monday morning in each week, also during the seasons of Advent and Lent, and on the great feasts. It was also binding at all times in certain places, as churches and convents, and for the protection of certain classes, as pilgrims, women, bishops, monks, clerks, merchants. This regulation appears first to have been introduced at a synod in Roussillon, in 1027, whence it spread over Aquitaine, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and England. It was enjoined by numerous councils of the Church. Excommunication and banishment were its penalties. Its greatest force was in the twelfth century. Emerton, noting that many churchmen wished to do away entirely with private warfare as a means of settling differences, adds, “The demand not to fight at all was too much for mediæval human nature.” The Truce was all that was practicable in that period.

  [* ] It must not be forgotten that true advance in knowledge and in scientific methods came only in opposition to, and by the breakdown of, the authority of the Church over the intellect. Independent thinking even in philosophy was not permitted in the middle ages. The influence of the Church and also of the scholastic system was to train and develop the intellect, but not to add to knowledge.

  [† ] What is stated in this paragraph is more exactly true of the influence of the Christian religion—of Christianity as an uplifting force than of the Church as an institution. The true spirit of Christianity and the authority and influence of the organized Church have not always pointed or moved in one and the same direction.

  [* ] These barbarians, it will be remembered, followed the Arian heresy, both those who embraced Christianity before the invasion of the empire and those who did so after that event. The Burgundians, converted by Arian missionaries in 433, adopted the Catholic faith about 517. The Franks, following the example of Clovis, embraced the orthodox faith in 497.

  H.

  [* ] It cannot be truly affirmed that the Church as a whole had any such object. This is too sweeping a generalization.

  [† ] Gregory of Tours (540-594) was the father of mediæval French history. His Historia Ecclesiastica Francorum covers the fifth and sixth centuries, and is almost the only source of information for this period. His avowed aim was to recount “the wars of kings with hostile nations, of martyrs with pagans, of churches with heretics.”

  [* ] Monasticism, or monachism—a life of religious retirement—is of pre-Christian origin, and is found in connection with most of the leading religions. St. Anthony of Egypt, born in 251, is generally regarded as the founder of Christian monachism. He lived, a hermit, in the Egyptian desert, whither many, attracted by his holiness, followed and adopted the ascetic life. Pachomius of the Thebaid built a monastery in the fourth century where the ascetics dwelt together cœnobites); he was the first to form rules for the organization, thus giving a government to the system. St. Basil in the same century spent several years in monastic life, and after he became Bishop of Cæsarea published a code of rules for the regulation of the cœnobitic monachism, substantially as they remain to-day for the Greek Church.

  Among the earliest communities of monks in Gaul was that established about 375 by St. Martin of Tours, at Marmoutiers, where he built a convent. About 415 John Cassian founded a large monastery near Marseilles, and by his writings did much to spread through the West a knowledge of Eastern monachism.

  The first regular order with monastic vows and a complete organization was established by St. Benedict of Nursia, who in 529 founded the famous convent of Monte Casino near Naples, whence went forth the order of the Benedictines. The strict rules laid down by him were adopted in all the European convents. The monks were to take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; their rules of discipline required them to devote their time to study, and to manual labor, mainly agricultural. Asceticism of a moderate type was enjoined.

  By the influence of Gregory the Great monasticism first entered upon the field of missionary work among the barbarians. During the dark period from the sixth century to the ninth the monks rendered great services to the cause of religion, letters, and civilization. By their industrious hands waste forests and barren lands were converted into rich and productive gardens; in the convents were preserved all the remains of ancient learning; there missionaries were educated.

  At first monks were laymen, but before the tenth century they formed a class of the clergy. During the earlier period the monasteries and their inhabitants had been subject to thebishop of the diocese, but by the twelfth century they had been made immediately subject to papal jurisdiction.

  Reverence for these institutions, and gratitude for the benefits they conferred, led to gifts and endowments on the part of the pious laity, until at length the monasteries became as notorious for riches, luxury, and corruption, as they were at first for simplicity, devotion, and industry.

  [* ] Gregory VII (Hildebrand) succeeded Alexander II in the papal chair in 1073. He virtually governed the Church during the time of his predecessor, and was indeed the real author of the decree of Nicholas II, 1059, by which the power of nominating and confirming the pope was taken from the German emperors and vested in the cardinals. His whole life was devoted to aggrandizing the power of the Holy See. His talents were great, and his energy indomitable. He died in 1085. For the rise and progress of the papal power, see Hallam’s Middle Ages, chap. vii; Ranke’s History of the Popes; [Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire; Duruy’s History of the Middle Ages; and Emerton’s Mediæval Europe.]

  The papal power was at its height from the time of Innocent III, 1194, to that of Boniface VIII, 1294, after which it sensibly declined. H.

  [* ] The reform of Cluny started from the establishment of a monastery at Cluny, in Aquitaine, in 910. Here the Benedictine rules were vigorously enforced, and monastic life brought back to its power form of extreme asceticism. Beyond this, however, was the idea that monasticism had a wider mission in reforming the outside world. Other monasteries in Europe caught the idea, and an association was organized known as the Congregation of Cluny, that included numbers throughout all Europe. The Abbot of Cluny was regarded as the real head of the organization. The influence of this movement was to give a purer tone to all monastic life, and to affect the religious life outside the monastery. Hildebrand (Gregory VII) was a monk at Cluny, and his reforms were in line with the “Cluny movement.” Later, but, in many respects, not greater, was the reform of St. Bernard, and the founding by him of the Cistercian community at Clairvaux (1115).

  [* ] Abelard was one of the most prominent founders of Scholasticism. The significance of the quarrel between Abelard and St. Bernard was that it exemplified the whole struggle between freedom of thought and inquiry, and the authoritative rule of the Church as enforced by the extremists.

  [* ] The centralization of the power of administering local affairs in France, begun in the thirteenth century, was completed under Louis XIV (1643-1715). An agent of the king, the intendant, was absolute ruler in each of the provinces into which France was divided; in each town or commune within the province there was a subagent of the intendant, who exercised by authority of the king all the powers of local government. In many communes the people ceased even to elect local officers, either legislative or administrative. In others they continued to elect, but the power and activity of the king’s subagent left nothing for the elected officers to do. Thus all local government was centered in the king.

  All this was swept away by the Revolution of 1780. Today, the residents of each commune and city elect a council, and the council chooses the mayor and his assistants. The local government is vested in and exercised by the council and mayor, but the latter is responsible to the central government of France and is removable by the President.

  [* ] Of these, Frederick Karl von Savigny (1779-1861) is the only one of first rank. As a university professor in Germany and a writer on Roman law and institutions he exercised a great influence. His most important work in this connection is Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter.

  [* ] In the Roman municipality the curia, or senate, whose membership was based on a land qualification, deliberated on the affairs of the city and chose the magistrates.

  [† ] These statements must be taken as only approximately exact. Conditions differed widely in different parts of Europe. In Italy and southern France the old municipalities appear to have retained during this entire period much of their old form and vitality. Further north the cities succumbed more readily to the mediæval influences, and lost power and activity; indeed, almost disappeared between the fifth and the tenth century.

  [* ] The most potent cause of the revival of the old cities and the planting and growth of new ones in the tenth, eleventh, and later centuries, was the revival of industry and of commerce. So long as the unsettled life of the dark ages continued, so long as agriculture was almost the sole occupation, there were few reasons for the existence of cities. As soon, however, as the trade and commerce which had been wiped out by the barbarian inroads began again to be demanded by the improving civilization, cities sprang into life everywhere, and not least in northern France, in Germany, and in England, where in ancient times there had been few. Some of the monasteries had been granted the right of holding annual or more frequent fairs or markets, to which merchants resorted from wide distances. Gradually around such monasteries where market rights existed arose cities of artisans and traders. Again, on the feudal domains were artisans dependent upon the lord or suzerain, to whom the product of their labor belonged. These artisans grouped themselves in communities and villages, organized themselves into industrial associations (craft or artisan gilds), which came in various ways to exercise powers over industrial matters and to protect its members. The exact relation of these gilds to the towns and cities is not entirely clear, nor was it uniform throughout Europe. It is certain, however, that whether the gilds became in time cities, or remained subordinate to the municipalities, the towns and cities were a part of the feudal system in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and were subject to feudal exactions and dues.

  Thus industry and trade account for the revival of city life, the planting of new cities, and the growth of old ones. The causes for this development were substantially the same throughout western Europe. The reasons and the methods of their enfranchisement were widely variant in different countries.

  The growth and enfranchisement of the cities, and especially the industrial organization and its connection with municipal life, have been the subject of the most scholarly investigations during recent years. Most of these studies are unavailable for English readers. The following contain brief accounts of value: Duruy, History of the Middle Ages; Emerton, Mediæval Europe; Ashley, English Economic History; Gross, The Gild Merchant; Cunningham, English Industry and Commerce; Stubbs, Constitutional History of England.

  [* ] The continuity of city life and municipal institutions from Roman time to modern was not so great, in all probability, as is assumed in the lecture. The rise of the free city was rather the rise of a new institution than the restoration of an old one, save in southern France and Italy.

  [* ] To describe the exact relations of the cities to the feudal lords would demand too much space. In general it may be said that the inhabitants were individually or collectively liable for all the services and obligations which were due from vassals to their superiors, including allegiance, tribute, and aid. The burdensome nature of these exactions, the desire for more power over their own lives and affairs, led to the insurrection, the successful outcome of which constitutes “the enfranchisement of the towns.”

  [* ] It was mainly in France that the enfranchisement of the cities was attended with great violence and war. In Germany, England, and even in Italy while the results attained were similar, the process involved more of purchase and less of war. See page 214, note.

  [* ] Like all other treaties of peace, they stood until broken by one or both parties. The charters were frequently violated by the lords, or revoked by the king, in order that, as the price of their renewal, large payments of money might be obtained from the cities.

  [† ] The first French commune was at Le Mans (1067), which was abolished after two years. After this, Cambrai (1076), Noyon, Beauvais, St. Quentin, and Laon (1106) followed in the order named, though they did not obtain charters until dates slightly later.

  [* ] The apparent vacillation in the policy of the French kings until the latter part of the twelfth century was due in large degree to their uncertainty of their own power; they hesitated to favor the enfranchisement of the cities at the risk of the hostility of the large feudal lords, including especially the Church. Later, the policy of the monarch was consistently favorable to the cities.

  [* ] There was great variety in the charters, but the privileges granted to the cities in the middle ages were in general these: the right of corporate property; a common seal; exemption from the more ignominious or oppressive tokens of feudal subjection, and the defined regulation of the rest; settled rules as to succession and private rights of property; and lastly, and of the greatest value, exemption from the royal jurisdiction, as well as from that of the territorial judges, and the right of being governed by magistrates of their own, either wholly, or (in some cases) partly chosen by themselves.

  H.

  [* ] The class here referred to is the great middle class—the bourgeoisie of France and the continent generally, the commons of England—made up of the merchants and traders, distinguished on the one hand from the nobility, on the other from the laborers and peasants.

  [* ] See p. 35 et seq.

  [* ] There were two general types of government in the cities, communal and consular. In the former, the government was vested in a select body of from twelve to one hundred citizens. This body was probably elected by the citizens. It chose from its own number the chief executive officer of the commune, who, with the select body, exercised the administrative and judicial power of the city, subject to such control as still remained in the feudal lord whose vassal the commune was. In the consular cities a board of twelve consuls wielded the executive power, assisted by a council of not more than one hundred. For special purposes a larger assembly representing the entire body of citizens was summoned. The cities of Italy and southern France were of the latter class; those of northern France and parts of Germany were of the former. Many points concerning these governments are still buried in obscurity. M. Guizot’s discussion throughout the lecture has special referrence to the French communes and cities.

  [* ] The origin of these “trading companies”—the merchant and artisan gilds—and their exact connection with municipal life is still somewhat obscure, notwithstanding recent researches. The student may with profit consult Brentano’s History and Development of Gilds, Gross’s Gild Merchant, or Lambert’s Two Thousand Years of Gild Life.

  [* ] As the population of a town or city increased, the desire for and tendency towards self-government were natural. In France, as already stated, this was obtained, as a rule, only after a struggle between the city and the feudal lord upon whose domain the city stood. Later, the cities often obtained their charters or gained additional rights by purchase or on the gift of large sums of money to the suzerain or king. Whether it came as the result of war or of bargain, the end attained was the same: the commune or city received a charter from the feudal lord, by which the future relations of the lord and the commune were determined. Usually a regular, fixed payment by the commune was substituted for the irregular feudal exactions, and the amount and character of the military service due from the commune was fixed. Thereafter the lord’s dealings were with the commune as a corporation, and not with the individual inhabitants. On the other hand, the commune gained the right of managing in great degree its own affairs. The charters varied, however, in the grant of powers. In some there was a mere substitution of corporate for individual relations to the suzerain, in others almost complete freedom from demands of the lord.

  Each communal or city charter was a grant of rights; to just the extent that the city gained power and privilege, by just so much was the authority of the lord diminished. This diminution of the power of the feudal baronage was welcomed by the king. Hence the cities often found ready aid from the monarch, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Note especially the policy of Louis VII (1137-1180). Later, however, the king, having established his own power more firmly, began to break down that of the cities by imposing upon them his own judicial and administrative officers. Thus, in France, the communes helped to break down feudalism, gained some rights of self-government, but instead of becoming and remaining entirely self-governing in their local affairs, were left in the end closely dependent on the monarch.

  In Italy, so far as the enfranchisement was involved, much the same course was run by the cities. There was, however, no strong central government in Italy, hence the cities were able to take one step further and establish their complete independence, forming the city-republics that occupy so prominent a place in the later mediæval and early modern history of Italy. By the middle of the twelfth century the cities of Lombardy, with Milan at their head, had become extremely rich and powerful; they formed a confederation among themselves—the Lombard League—and maintained an obstinate struggle for more than thirty years with Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of Germany, which terminated in 1183 by the treaty of Constance, wherein the emperor renounced all legal privileges in the interior of the cities, acknowledged the right of the confederated cities to levy armies, erect fortifications, exercise criminal and civil jurisdiction by officers of their own appointment.

  In Germany, the majority of the cities were of mediæval origin. Their development and enfranchisement resulted as in Italy. In the absence of any strong central power in Germany which could either compel their allegiance or protect their interests, they were obliged to rely on their own resources for defence.

  Among the German cities, confederations were also formed; of these the most celebrated was the Hanseatic League, which originated in 1239-1241, from a convention between Lübeck, Hamburg, and one or two other cities, by which they agreed to defend each other against all oppression and violence, particularly of the nobles. The number of towns united in this league rapidly increased; it included at one time eighty-five cities. Regular diets were held every third year at Lübeck, the chief city of the confederacy. This league was at various times confirmed by kings and princes, and in the fourteenth century exercised a powerful political as well as commercial influence. It made treaties with other states, and maintained a fleet to protect its commercial rights. The league was dissolved in the seventeenth century. The League of the Rhine was a similar confederation. During the later middle ages the majority of these cities were absorbed into the states near them.

  In England the feudal system never held so complete sway, and the cities gained rights of self-government by a more orderly process of development, through purchase from the lords of the manors and by charters from the kings, beginning with that of London.

  The influence of the crusades in all these countries facilitated the enfranchisement of the cities.

  The literature of the subject in foreign languages is abundant. In English it is mainly confined to special chapters in general works. In addition to those already cited, see Adams, Civilization during the Middle Ages, chap. xii. Hallam’s Middle Ages has been made less valuable by later researches. Zimmern, The Hansa Towns, contains some useful information.

  [* ] On the history of the crusades the following may be consulted: Cox, The Crusades; Michaud, History of the Crusades; Gray, The Children’s Crusade; Pears, The Fall of Constantinople; Von Sybel, The History and Literature of the Crusades; Mombert, A Short History of the Crusades.

  [* ] A. G. P. de Barante, Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois, 1364-1477. This work, in eight volumes, has never been translated into English. Other and later works dwell on the same facts. The turbulence noted was not mere disorder, but was in large part a struggle for the realization of better ideals and forms.

  [* ] In the third period society utilized and gave definiteness and form to what had been begun in the second. In this sense the second period did produce something “durable”; it laid the foundations of modern government and society.

  [* ] By the victory of Charles Martel at the battle of Tours (732).

  [† ] Later scholarship has proved the stories of the visions and sufferings of Peter the Hermit to have been the invention of a later age. The pope, not Peter the Hermit, was the moving influence towards the first crusade. It is doubtful if the latter was in the Holy Land before the first crusade.

  [* ] One should remember, also, as a possible additional cause, that pilgrimages were a Christian duty, and a recognized

  [* ] The chronicles of William of Tyre and James de Vitry are of the highest value for the thorough study of this period.

  [* ] Mémoires sur les Relations Politiques des Princes Chrétiens avec les Empereurs Mongols. Deuxième Mémoire, pp. 154, 157.

  “Many men of religious orders, Italians, French, and Flemings, were charged with diplomatic missions to the court of the Great Khan. Mongols of distinction came to Rome, Barcelona, Valentia, Lyons, Paris, London, and Northampton; and a Franciscan of the kingdom of Naples was archbishop of Pekin. His successor was a professor of theology in the university of Paris. But how many other people followed in the train of those personages, either as slaves, or attracted by the desire of profit, or led by curiosity into regions hitherto unknown! Chance has preserved the names of some of these. The first envoy who visited the King of Hungary on the part of the Tartars was an Englishman, who had been banished from his country for certain crimes, and who, after having wandered over Asia, at last entered into the service of the Mongols. A Flemish friar, in the heart of Tartary, fell in with a woman of Metz, called Paquette, who had been carried off into Hungary; a Parisian goldsmith and a young man from the neighborhood of Rouen, who had been at the taking of Belgrade. In the same country he fell in also with Russians, Hungarians, and Flemings. A singer, called Robert, after having travelled through Eastern Asia, returned to end his days in the cathedral of Chartres. A Tartar was a furnisher of helmets in the armies of Philip the Fair. Jean de Plancarpin fell in, near Gayouk, with a Russian gentleman whom he calls Temer, and who acted as an interpreter; and many merchants of Breslau, Poland, and Austria, accompanied him in his journey into Tartary. Others returned with him through Russia; they were Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians. Two Venetians, merchants, whom chance had brought to Bokhara, followed a Mongol ambassador, sent by Houlagou to Khoubilaī. They remained many years in China and Tartary, returned with letters from the Great Khan to the pope, and afterwards went back to the Khan, taking with them the son of one of their number, the celebrated Marco Polo, and once more left the court of Khoubilaī to return to Venice. Travels of this nature were not less frequent in the following century. Of this number are those of John Mandeville, an English physician; Oderic de Frioul, Pegoletti, Guilleaume de Bouldeselle, and several others. It may well be supposed, that those travels of which the memory is preserved, form but a small part of those which were undertaken, and there were in those days many more people who were able to perform those long journeys than to write accounts of them. Many of those adventurers must have remained and died in the countries they went to visit. Others returned home, as obscure as before, but having their imagination full of the things they had seen, relating them to their families, with much exaggeration no doubt, but leaving behind them, among many ridiculous fables, useful recollections and traditions capable of bearing fruit. Thus, in Germany, Italy, and France, in the monasteries, among the nobility, and even down to the lowest classes of society, there were deposited many precious seeds destined to bud at a somewhat later period. All these unknown travellers, carrying the arts of their own country into distant regions, brought back other pieces of knowledge not less precious, and, without being aware of it, made exchanges more advantageous than those of commerce. By these means, not only the traffic in the silks, porcelain, and other commodities of Hindostan, became more extensive and practicable, and new paths were opened to commercial industry and enterprise; but, what was more valuable still, foreign manners, unknown nations, extraordinary productions, presented themselves in abundance to the minds of the Europeans, which, since the fall of the Roman empire, had been confined within too narrow a circle. Men began to attach some importance to the most beautiful, the most populous, and the most anciently civilized of the four quarters of the world. They began to study the arts, the religions, the languages, of the nations by whom it was inhabited; and there was even an intention of establishing a professorship of the Tartar language in the university of Paris. The accounts of travellers, strange and exaggerated, indeed, but soon discussed and cleared up, diffused more correct and varied notions of those distant regions. The world seemed to open, as it were, towards the East; geography made an immense stride; and ardor for discovery became the new form assumed by European spirit of adventure. The idea of another hemisphere, when our own came to be better known, no longer seemed an improbable paradox, and it was when in search of the Zipangri of Marco Polo that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.”

  [* ] More exact would it be to say that the feudal barons as a class lost their importance as a political factor. Feudalism as a system did not long survive the crusades. The king, on the one hand, notably in France, and the people—the Third Estate—on the other, succeeded to the feudal power. The crusades re-enforced the influence of the cities in breaking down feudalism.

  [* ] Probably the greatest direct effect of the crusades was the stimulation given to commerce, through the knowledge they brought to Europe of Oriental and other products. With the knowledge came the desire to possess. The cities of Italy date their commercial importance from this time. They retained it until the discovery of oceanic routes to the Orient carried the stream of commerce away from the Mediterranean.

  [* ] One of the outgrowths of the crusades is worthy of note here. Between the first and second crusades were formed in the Holy Land three great military orders: the Knights of St. John or of the Hospital, the Knights of the Temple, and the Teutonic Knights. The first was organized to care for and defend sick and wounded pilgrims; the second, to defend the pilgrims to the Holy Land; the third, to succor German pilgrims. Their services to Christianity made them the recipients of large estates, and other wealth, to be used for the purposes of the order. After the era of the crusades they established themselves in Europe, where they obtained great wealth and influence. See Woodhouse, Military Religious Orders of the Middle Ages.

  [* ] The following chronological table may serve to put before the student’s eye a connected outline of the principal facts. Eight crusades are enumerated.

  First Crusade—ad 1096-1099. Urban II, Pope.

  1094.	Peter the Hermit, by direction of the pope, preaches a crusade throughout Europe.
  1095.	Council of Clermont in France. (A previous council had been held at Piacenza.) Attended by the pope and an immense concourse of clergy and nobles. The crusade proclaimed; great privileges, civil and ecclesiastical, granted to all who should “assume the cross”; a year allowed to prepare. Peter the Hermit, not waiting, sets out at the head of a vast rabble of undisciplined fanatics and marauders, who perish by disease, famine, and the sword, in Asia Minor.
  1096.	An army of 200,000 or 300,000 mounted and mailed warriors, and men capable of bearing arms, and a multitude of monks, women, and children, depart from Europe and assemble on the plains of Bithynia, east of Constantinople. Principal leaders of the expedition, Godfrey of Bouillon, with his brothers Baldwin and Eustach; Robert, Duke of Normandy; Robert, Count of Flanders; Raymond of Toulouse; Hugo of Vermandois; Stephen de Blois; Bohemond, Prince of Tarentum, with his nephew Tancred.
  1097.	Nicæa taken by the crusaders.
  1098.	Antioch and Edessa taken.
  1099.	Jerusalem taken; a Christian kingdom, on feudal principles, established; the crown conferred on Godfrey of Bouillon.

  Interval, 1100-1147. Baldwin I succeeds his brother Godfrey as king of Jerusalem. A new army of crusaders destroyed by the Saracens in Asia Minor, and the remnant of the first army cut to pieces at Rama. Acre (Ptolemais), Berytus, and Sidon taken. Later, the Christian army unsuccessful; Edessa taken by the Turks in 1144; continued ill success of the Christians leads to a new crusade.

  Second Crusade—1147-1149. Eugene III, Pope.

  Leaders of this expedition, Conrad III, emperor of Germany, and Louis VII, king of France, who set out separately on their march. Both armies destroyed in Asia Minor by famine and the sword. The fugitives assemble at Jerusalem. Conrad, Louis, and Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem, lay siege to Damascus; the enterprise fails; Conrad and Louis return to Europe.

  Interval, 1149-1189. Saladin takes possession of Egypt and founds a dynasty in 1175. Makes war upon the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem; defeats Guy of Lusignan at the battle of Tiberias; Guy taken prisoner; Acre and Jerusalem taken (1187). Conrad of Montferrat lays claim to the crown of Jerusalem, and rallies the remains of the Christian forces at Tyre.

  Third Crusade—1189-1192. Clement III, Pope.

  Leaders, Frederick I (Barbarossa), emperor of Germany, Philip Augustus, king of France, and Richard I, of England.

  Frederick departs first with an army of 100,000 men, which is entirely destroyed in Asia Minor. The emperor himself is drowned in Cilicia, 1190. His son Frederick of Swabia afterwards killed at Acre.

  1190.	The kings of France and England embark by sea, and pass the winter in Sicily; the armies embroiled by the artifices of Tancred, usurping king of Jerusalem, and by dissension between the kings.
  1191.	The armies of France and England, with the Christian princes of Syria, take Acre. Philip Augustus returns to France, leaving a part of his army with Richard, who displays his bravery in some useless battles, but is unable to regain Jerusalem.
  1192.	Richard concludes a truce with Saladin and returns to Europe.

  Fourth Crusade—1202-1204. Innocent III, Pope.

  Leaders, Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders; Boniface II, Marquis of Montferrat; Henry Dandolo, Doge of Venice, and others. The kings of Europe could not be aroused to engage in this crusade, notwithstanding all the urgency of the Holy See. The chief command was conferred by the crusaders on Boniface of Montferrat. This expedition, however, never reached the Holy Land, but engaged in putting down a usurpation at Constantinople, which finally led to the taking and plundering of that city by the crusaders, and the division of the empire among the conquerors, of whom Baldwin was raised to the imperial dignity. The Latin empire of Constantinople was destroyed in 1261 by Michael Paleologus.

  Interval, 1204-1217. Meantime the Christians in the East, though despoiled of most of their possessions, and weakened by divisions, bravely defended themselves against the sultans of Egypt. They continually invoked aid from Europe; but more powerful interests at home made the European princes regardless of their calls. Only those of more exalted imaginations could be influenced. There was a crusade of children in 1212.

  Fifth Crusade—1218-1221. Honorius III, Pope.

  Three kings, John de Brienne, titular king of Jerusalem, Andrew II, king of Hungary, and Hugh of Lusignan, king of Cyprus, united their forces at Acre. The king of Hungary was soon recalled by troubles at home; Hugh of Lusignan died; and John de Brienne went to attack Egypt alone. In 1221 the crusaders, after many reverses, submitted to a humiliating peace; John of Brienne, returning to Europe, gave his daughter in marriage to Frederick II, emperor of Germany, who thereby became titular king of Jerusalem.

  Sixth Crusade—1228-1229. Gregory IX, Pope.

  Leader, Frederick II. This emperor had taken the vows of the cross five years before, and, though anathematized by the pope, had failed to fulfil his engagement. At length he set out, and the Sultan Kameel yielded Jerusalem to him by treaty without battle. Frederick crowned himself king of Jerusalem. Threatened with the loss of his Italian dominions, he returned to Europe.

  Seventh Crusade—1248-1254. Innocent IV, Pope.

  Leaders, St. Louis (IX) and the French princes. The king of France engaged in this crusade in consequence of a vow made during a dangerous illness. Most of the princes of the blood and great vassals accompanied him. He turned his arms first against Egypt, and took Damietta in 1250; but his army, surprised by a sudden rising of the Nile, and carried off in great numbers by pestilence, was surrounded, and Louis himself, with 20,000 of his army, was made prisoner. He obtained his liberty, by payment of a heavy ransom and the surrender of Damietta. He remained four years in Palestine, repairing the fortifications of the towns which yet remained in the hands of the Christians (Ptolemais, Jaffa, Sidon, etc.), and mediating between the Christian and Mohammedan princes.

  Eighth Crusade—1270. Clement IV, Pope.

  Leaders, Louis IX; Charles of Anjou; Edward, prince of England, afterwards Edward I. This expedition was first directed to the coast of Africa; Louis deparked before Tunis and laid siege to that city; but the army was cut down by the plague, to which Louis himself and one of his sons fell victims. Charles of Anjou, his brother, made peace with the Mohammedans, and renounced the expedition to the Holy Land. This was the last crusade. H.

  [* ] The nobility of England had been much weakened by the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century, and with the accession of Henry VII, the first of the Tudors (1485), was begun the policy of upbuilding the power of the king by breaking down that of the nobles, and by rendering the commons subservient. This policy characterized the entire Tudor dynasty (1485-1603). Respect for the public authority was greatly increased during this period.

  [* ] Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (1757—1830), French publicist and statesman, an ardent admirer and advocate of constitutional government, and especially monarchy; the author of many political essays and pamphlets in favor of constitutionalism, which were published collectively under the title Cours de Politique Constitutionelle.

  [† ] The constitution of Brazil, sworn to by the first emperor, Dom Pedro I, March 25, 1824, was variously modified during the ensuing ten years.

  [* ] The present century has witnessed a decided tendency away from monarchy towards even extreme democracy. The necessity of a strong central administrative power in each government is admitted, but that this must take the form of monarchy is not claimed by modern political scientists. That the legislative power should be in the hands of the people is generally conceded. Possibly it may be affirmed that at present (1896) there is a slight tendency towards reaction from extreme democracy.

  [* ] See page 90, note.

  [† ] Nevertheless the right to elect whomsoever they pleased remained in the people—the tribe. The establishment of hereditary succession in a given tribe depended more upon the personal character of the descendants in a family once elected, than upon any deliberate change of custom on the part of the tribe.

  [* ] It was in form rather than in reality that even the first emperors ruled as representatives of the people. Myers, in his History of Rome (p. 119), has the following neat statement of the matter: “Octavius carefully veiled his really absolute sovereignty under the forms of the old republican state. The senate still existed, but so completely subjected were its members to the influence of the conqueror, that the only function it really exercised was the conferring of honors and titles and abject flatteries on its master. All the republican officials remained, but Octavius absorbed and exercised their chief powers and functions. He had the powers of consul, tribune, censor, and Pontifix Maximus. All the republican magistrates—the consuls, the tribunes, the prætors—were elected as usual, but they were simply the nominees and creatures of the emperor. They were the effigies and figure-heads to delude the people into believing that the republic still existed. Never did a people seem more content with the shadow after the loss of the substance.”

  [* ] See page 37, note.

  [* ] Forum judicum, i, lib. 2; tit. i, l. 2, l. 4.

  [* ] The Merovingian dynasty, 481-751.

  [† ] Marcus Aurelius Cassiodorus (468(?)-568), Roman historian and statesman, whose writings, Variarum Epistolarum Libri XII, are the principal source of information on Italy and the Ostrogothic kingdom in the sixth century.

  [‡ ] The Church Councils of Toledo constituted the legislative assembly in the Visigothic kingdom. See page 85.

  [* ] See page 60, note, and 90, note.

  [* ] Louis VI (the Fat) came to the throne in 1108.

  [* ] Suger was Abbot of St. Denis and minister of Louis VI (the Fat). His idea of monarchy is well, if not completely, expressed in his own words: “It is the duty of kings to repress, by their power and the innate right of their office, the audacity of the nobles who rend the state by ceaseless wars, desolate the poor, and destroy the churches.”

  [* ] This is true of constitutional monarchy, but hardly of such forms of monarchy as existed on the continent of Europe prior to the nineteenth century. The monarchy of Louis XIV was a revival of the fact, if not of the theory, of imperial monarchy, which centered in the rulers all powers by absorption, not by any representative functions.

  [† ] For a good account of the facts of French history underlying this lecture, consult Duruy’s History of France.

  [* ] See page 29.

  [* ] See Lectures V and VI.

  [* ] See page 49 et seq.

  [* ] See page 171.

  [* ] This was especially true of the Gallican church. The statement as it stands is too broad. For some of the more important disputes between the councils and the popes, see page 305 et seq.

  [* ] See page 181.

  [† ] The reference here is to the Dictatus Papæ, a document among the papers of Gregory, containing a brief statement of his theory of the papacy and its superiority to all other earthly powers. There is, however, no evidence that this document was ever made public in Gregory’s time, hence the statement of the lecture is not well founded. For a copy of this document, see Matthews, Select Mediæval Documents, or Emerton’s Mediæval Europe, page 244.

  [* ] There is abundant room for difference of opinion here. Certain it is that during the next century the papacy most nearly attained the supremacy which it sought. That this was due in great part to Gregory VII is generally admitted.

  [† ] The Hohenstaufens occupied the imperial throne from 1138 to 1254. Frederick I (Barbarossa), 1152-1190, and Frederick II, 1212-1250, were the most noted members. Under Pope Innocent III, 1198-1216, the papacy reached its height, and the Hohenstaufens were humbled, though the empire temporarily recovered under Frederick II.

  [* ] Louis IX (St. Louis) reigned in France from 1226 to 1270; during this time the royal power was greatly increased. The Pragmatic Sanction referred to, bearing date March, 1268, is now commonly believed to have been a later forgery. However that may be, St. Louis was strenuous and persistent in upholding the independence of the king in temporal affairs, and in its right to supervise ecclesiastical matters in France. See Guizot, History of France, chap. xviii.

  [† ] The term Pragmatic Sanction is commonly applied to four ordinanees published at a subsequent date: 1. That of Charles VII, of France, issued at Bourges, in 1438, by which the papal power was limited, and the independence of the French Church in various particulars declared—conformably to the canons of the Council of Basel. This council commenced in 1431 and closed in 1449. It passed a great many canons declaring the pope subject to the decrees of general councils, limiting his powers, and decreeing the reformation of various abuses and corruptions of discipline and practice. The history of this council, as well as that of the earlier council held at Constance in 1414-’18, is deeply interesting. 2. The decree passed by Charles VI, emperor of Germany, in 1439, confirming the canons of the Council of Basel, is also called a Pragmatic Sanction. 3. The decree of Charles VI (1713) respecting the succession to the imperial throne. 4. The law of succession proclaimed by Charles III, of Spain, in 1759. H.

  [‡ ] The attempt of Boniface VIII (1294-1303) to interfere in the government of France was met by the denial and nullification, from the French monarch (Philip the Fair) and States-General, of the pope’s supremacy over the state.

  A bull of Boniface VIII (1296), Clericis Laicos, forbade the clergy to pay taxes to the secular power. Edward I outlawed all clergy in England who undertook to obey the bull. The statute of mortmain in England (1279) was also aimed at the power of the Church.

  [* ] Ostrogothic kingdom, 493-555; Lombard kingdom, 568-774.

  [* ] The struggles with the emperors of Germany began with the reign of Otho I (936-973), who revived the Holy Roman Empire and again extended its authority over Italy.

  [* ] Professor Emerton gives the following admirable summary of Italian institutional history: “(1) Under the Carolingian system the city became in Italy the natural unit of administration. It fell under the control of the count, and most often this person was also the bishop. . . . (2) From the eleventh century on, an organized popular movement is visible and becomes more and more of a force until it displaces the episcopal government and puts in its place a democracy with elective magistrates, and a strong aristocratic element. (3) From the thirteenth century we notice the rise to power within the democracies of this aristocracy based upon certain well-marked families. (4) From the fifteenth century some one among the great families in each community forces its way to leadership, and produces a series of tyrants who carry on the business of the state, until they finally bring it out (5) into the petty ‘legitimate’ monarchy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”—Mediæval Europe, page 522. For the history of Italy during the period covered by the lecture, consult Hunt, History of Italy, or Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics.

  [* ] Since this lecture was delivered the unification of Italy has been accomplished, so far as outward form goes, and the process of actual fusion of the various states that existed in Guizot’s time into one real Italy is rapidly progressing. One of the marked characteristics of the present century has been the tendency to consolidation and unification of national states, and Italy is a conspicuous example.

  [† ] It is, of course, obvious that Guizot does less than exact justice to republican government here, as he does more than justice to monarchy in the preceding lecture. That a republic is likely to exhibit less fixedness of purpose and policy, and less firmness and force in administration, than is a monarchy, is true; but that the idea, the principle, of monarchy is essential to orderly government, the present century seems to have disproved.

  [* ] The crusade against the Albigenses was twofold in its cause and its purpose: first, religious, to put down a growing heresy or tendency against conformity to the beliefs of the Church; second, political, to destroy the power of the lords of the south, notably Raymond of Toulouse, in whose territories the Albigenses were. That there was wide diversity of interest between the north and the south of France; that the municipalities of the south were numerous, prosperous, and powerful; that the outcome of the crusade was the absorption of the southern regions into dependence on the crown—all this is true. To regard the movement, however, as primarily or fundamentally a crusade against republican institutions as typified in the municipalities of southern France, is to miss much of its meaning.

  [† ] According to the formerly accepted story—which seems to have been adopted by Guizot—the confederacy of the Swiss cantons took its origin in the united revolt (1307) of the three forest cantons, Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, against the encroachments of Albert of Austria, a Hapsburg ruler. This account, first found in documents written at least two centuries after the supposed event, is now regarded as unhistorical. The essential known facts are these: The three cantons were in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries substantially in feudal dependence on the non-resident Hapsburg counts. Throughout the thirteenth century they were seeking to release themselves from this dependence. In 1231, Canton Uri, in 1240, Schwyz, were granted charters by the emperor releasing them from Hapsburg domination, and establishing their direct feudal dependence on the empire. In 1291 these two cantons and Unterwalden formed a permanent league; in 1309 their charters were confirmed by the Emperor Henry VII; in 1316 these charters were recognized by Emperor Ludwig. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the confederation grew, and the authority of the empire weakened. After 1340 no representative of the empire remained regularly in the cantons. The establishment of the independent republican governments was thus not a sudden process, but a gradual growth.

  [* ] The first States-General of France, in the proper meaning of the word, as including the clergy, nobility, and commons or deputies from the towns, was convoked by Philip the Fair in 1302. The feudal nobility had before this time submitted to the appellant jurisdiction of the crown, exercised by the royal tribunals; they had also lost the legislative supremacy in their fiefs; and now, when the commons became a co-ordinate branch of the national legislature, they lost their last privilege of territorial independence. H.

  [* ] The eities of Castile were early invested with chartered privileges, including civil rights and extensive property, on condition of protecting their country. The deputies of the cities are not, however, mentioned as composing a branch of the Cortes or general legislative council of the nation until 1169, and then in only one case. But from the year 1189 they became a regular and essential part of that assembly. Subsequently, through the exercise of the royal prerogative in withholding the writ of summons, and through the neglect of many cities in sending deputies, the representation became extremely limited, and the privilege itself was gradually lost; so that in 1480 only seventeen cities retained the right of sending representatives. The concurrence of the Cortes of Castile was necessary to all taxation and grants of money, and also to legislation in general, as well as to the determination of all great and weighty affairs. The nobles and clergy formed the two other estates of the Cortes; but they seem to have been less regularly summoned than even the deputies of the towns.

  In the kingdom of Aragon, no law could be enacted or repealed without the consent of the Cortes; and by the “General Privilege,” a sort of Magna Charta, granted in 1283, this body was to be assembled every year at Saragossa—though it was afterwards summoned once in two years, and the place of assembling left to the discretion of the king. The Cortes of this kingdom consisted of four estates: the prelates; the commanders of military orders, who were reckoned as ecclesiastics; the barons; the knights or infanzones; and the deputies of the royal towns. This body by itself, when in session, and by a commission during its recess, exercised very considerable powers, both legislative and administrative. Valencia and Catalonia had also each its separate Cortes both before and after their union with Aragon. See Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. i, chap. iv. H.

  [* ] For the history of the period covered by this lecture, see Duruy’s Middle Ages, and special histories of the several countries.

  [* ] The Hundred Years’ War (1336-1453) between France and England was a contest due (1) to rivalry over certain feudal possessions in France and Flanders, and (2) to the claim of the English king, Edward III (1327-1377), to the French throne. The first period (1336-1360), in which the English gained victories at Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), ended in the treaty of Bretigny, by which Edward obtained feudal possession of Aquitaine and a few other provinces, and gave up all claim to the French crown. In the second period (1360-1420) Aquitaine was overrun by the French, the war renewed by Henry V (1413-1422) of England, and the French humiliated through internal quarrels and English victories, notably Agincourt (1415). By the treaty of Troyes (1420) the crowns of the two countries were to be united on the head of the English king after the death of the reigning French sovereign (Charles VI). The war was renewed (third period, 1420-1453) because the French people refused to carry out the treaty, and on the death of Charles VI (1422) recognized his son, Charles VII, as king. The French, inspired by Jeanne d’Arc, finally drove out the English, who at the end of the war, in 1453, retained on the Continent only Calais.

  [* ] Philip VI, the first king of the house of Valois, came to the throne in 1328. H.

  [* ] The insanity of Charles VI, the dissensions among the nobility, and the success of the English in the Hundred Years’ War, were all contributory causes to this.

  [* ] The general term taille, or tax, seems here appropriated to the particular tax made perpetual in the reign of Charles VII, who frequently levied money by his own authority. In general the kings did not claim the absolute prerogative of imposing taxes without the consent of the States-General; though they often in emergencies violently stretched their power. The taille was commonly assessed by respectable persons chosen by the advice of the parish priests—a privilege of importance to the tax-payers, who were allowed some voice in the repartition of the tax. This is, however, entirely distinct from that consent of the people to the tax which the theory of the French constitution made requisite. It is asserted that this perpetual taille was granted by the States-General in 1439, but this does not appear in the terms of any ordinance.

  One thing is certain, that this tax, whether at first established with or without the concurrence of the States-General, was perpetual, and managed without any check upon the crown. The two acts of the reign of Charles VII, the establishment of a standing military force, and a perpetual tax for its support, were the great events of the period, and fatal to the liberties of France. There was henceforth but little check to the increasing power of the crown. The nobles lost their political influence; the people gained nothing. The precedent was improved by succeeding monarchs, until the absolute despotism of the crown was completely established.

  H.

  The taille was a land tax, but, instead of falling uniformly on all lands, was levied only on land held by commoners.

  [† ] The parliament of Grenoble was established in 1453; that of Dijon in 1479. The term parliament in French history denotes always a judicial and not a legislative body. For a long time there was but a single parliament, that of Paris, the organization of which was defined by Philip the Fair in 1302. The first division came when the provincial parliament at Toulouse was created in 1443. The other provincial parliaments are indicated above.

  [* ] Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was defeated and slain at Nancy (1477), and Burgundy was annexed to France, thus ending a long rivalry and contest.

  [† ] For an excellent sketch of French history during the period of this chapter, see Duruy’s History of France, pages 148-283.

  [* ] The Inquisition was an organization under authority of the Church for the detection, punishment, and suppression of heresy. The idea that it was a duty of the Church to ferret out and punish heresy had been common from the early days. The outburst of heretical ideas in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—for example, the Albigenses—occasioned a more definite organization of inquisitorial processes. The name was borrowed from the duties of certain civil officers of France touching taxation. A formal tribunal was created, and by papal authority it soon became the special function of the Dominicans to carry on the work. It found strongest foothold in Spain. There it had a political function in part, but only because the unorthodox in matters of religion—the Jews, the Moors, and, later, the Protestants—were also usually independent in their political thinking, and hence were regarded as a menace to the government.

  [* ] The house of Hapsburg (Austria) occupied the throne of Austria and of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany from 1438 to 1740.

  [† ] The Hundred Years’ War, 1336-1453; the Wars of the Roses, 1455-1485.

  [* ] See page 380, note.

  [* ] The same idea is recognized in the constitutions of all free republics. The treaty-making power, and the conduct of international and diplomatic business, are placed in the hands of the executive. The attempt of the people, or even of the legislature, to dictate or guide matters in this field generally produces confusion and international discord. When, however, the question of war and its expenses is involved, modern ideas demand that the people, or their representatives, should be consulted.

  [* ] Allowance should be made for the fact that the parliament did not have full confidence in James, and that he did not give unqualified assent to their desire for war.

  [* ] The quarrel between Boniface VIII (1294-1303) and Philip IV of France resulted in the election of a Frenchman as pope in 1305 (Clement V), who transferred the papal throne to Avignon (1309), where it was under the domination of the French king until 1376, when it was restored to Rome. During this period of “Babylonian captivity” the papacy lost authority with other nations, and even, at last, with some of the clergy. In 1378, upon the death of Gregory XI, a dispute arose between the French and the Italian cardinals over the election of his successor. Each party elected a pope, one of whom sat at Rome, the other at Avignon. Two popes, two capitals, and a divided Church were fatal to papal authority.

  [* ] See page 273, note. This Pragmatic Sanction recognized the authority of general councils as superior to that of the pope, restored to churches and abbeys the right of electing their heads, forbade the payment of annates, and permitted the reception and publication in France of papal bulls only after the king’s approval.

  [* ] The Concordat increased both papal and kingly power by placing the selection of bishops and abbots in the hands of the king, by giving the pope the annates or first year’s revenue of every ecclesiastical benefice within the king’s nomination. The principle that the pope was subordinate to the general council was given up.

  [† ] The Jansenists and the Gallicans differed on points of theology, but were at one in opposing the claims of supremacy in the Church contended for and exercised by the pope.

  [‡ ] These propositions, drawn up by Bossuet, were decreed by a convocation of the French clergy assembled by Louis XIV, in 1682, and are called the Quatuor Propositiones Cleri Gallicani. They declare that power and authority are given by God to the Vicar of Christ in spiritual, but not in temporal things; that this power is limited and restrained by the laws of the Church and general councils; and that the sentence of the pope is not unchangeable unless sanctioned by the Church Catholic; [and that the rules and usages received in France and in the Gallican Church shall remain unchangeable]. These decrees are the foundation of the independence of the Gallican Church. H.

  [* ] The fundamental feature marking the views of Huss was the placing of the Scriptures above the ordinances and dogmas of the Church as a basis for theological opinion. This, carried to its logical conclusion, was necessarily a repudiation of the final authority of both Church and pope as interpreters of theological belief.

  [* ] The influence of the revival of learning on the subsequent civilization of Europe is too important to be discussed in a few words. The fact that the lecturer at the outset limited himself to “the history of the exterior events of the visible and social world” is his excuse for not tracing the development of the human mind during these momentous centuries. The revival of classical study was but one phase of the Renaissance. It is possible to trace the development of the movement. The nature and various stages in the progress of the revival are seen in (1) the Arabian schools in Spain, (2) scholasticism, (3) the growth and spread of schools and universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, (4) the rise of modern languages and literatures of Europe, (5) the humanists and the revival of classic learning, (6) the spread of Greek learning after the fall of Constantinople, (7) new scientific methods, (8) printing, and the spread of literature.

  [* ] Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), Italian scholar and cardinal; loose in his life; princely in his method of living; a devotee of literature, and a writer of pure and classic taste. See Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, ii, page 409.

  [* ] This act may be considered as the logical consequence of social forces set in motion by the posting of the ninety-five theses in 1517. For a carefully prepared translation of these theses, and of other documents connected with this period, see Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History (University of Pennsylvania), vol. ii, No. 6.

  [* ] Henry, Duke of Guise, organized the Holy League (1576), of which the ostensible purpose was to resist the Huguenots, but the real purpose was to aid the duke in gaining the crown. His death, and also that of the king, in 1589, not only dissolved the league, but made certain the accession of Henry of Navarre.

  [* ] Consult Lecture XIII.

  [† ] Richelieu’s policy in the Thirty Years’ War was dictated purely by political motives.

  [‡ ] The Fronde, a political party and insurrection whose chief aim was to stir up strife against the government, bears a superficial resemblance to the Great Rebellion in England. They were alike so far as both made absolutism the prime object of attack, but utterly different in the spirit underlying each. The religious element was entirely wanting to the Fronde.

  [* ] See page 306.

  [* ] Especially was this the case in Germany. In England and Spain, commerce and colonization are prominent facts of the period, while in France the upbuilding of the monarchy stands out in high relief.

  [* ] See pages 304, 310ff.

  [† ] The reappearance of the religious reform movement connects itself closely with the revival of learning, the two chief phenomena of which are (1) the founding of universities in Germany and (2) the multiplication of books. These factors forbade the dissolution of reform ideas. Books preserved the thoughts of Wycliffe and Huss. The printing press disseminated those of Erasmus and Luther.

  [‡ ] It is manifestly impossible within the space of a brief note to attempt any historical sketch of this great period. A good knowledge of the events is, however, essential to the appreciation of M. Guizot’s discussion. In addition to the brief accounts given in the general histories ordinarily accessible, the following works may be used with advantage by the student who desires a more comprehensive idea of the scope and meaning of the period: Seebohm, Protestant Reformation (contains a brief but good bibliography); Ranke, History of the Popes; Häusser, The Period of the Reformation; Fisher, History of the Reformation; D’Aubigne, History of the Reformation (intensely Protestant); Spalding, History of the Protestant Reformation (strongly Roman Catholic); Köstlin’s Martin Luther will also be found of value. Fisher, Outlines of Universal History, p. 450, and Andrews, Institutes of General History, p. 256, give brief bibliographies. (that is, of the confession and satisfaction which are performed under the ministry of priests).”

  “(4) The penalty thus continues as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence); namely, till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.”

  “(35) They preach no Christian doctrine who teach that contrition is not necessary for those who buy souls out of purgatory or buy confessional licenses.

  “(36) Every Christian who feels true compunction has of right plenary remission of punishment and guilt, even without letters of pardon.”

  “(81) This license in the preaching of pardons makes it no easy thing, even for learned men, to protect the reverence due to the pope against the calumnies, or, at all events, the keen questionings of the laity.” Translations and Reprints, vol. ii, No. 6.

  [* ] The sale of indulgences in general, and by Tetzel and his colleagues in particular, constitutes a most important feature of the movement. The theory of indulgences as preached by Tetzel is shown in a pattern sermon to be used by the priests in his district around Leipzig: “With these confessional letters you will be able at any time in life to obtain full indulgence for all penalties imposed upon you, in all cases except in the four reserved to the Apostolic See. Throughout your whole life, whenever you wish to make confession, you may receive the same remission, except in cases reserved to the pope, and afterwards, at the hour of death, a full indulgence as to all penalties and sins, and your share of all spiritual blessings that exist in the Church militant and all its members. . . . Are you not willing, then, for the fourth part of a florin, to obtain these letters, by virtue of which you may bring, not your money, but your divine and immortal soul, safe and sound into the land of Paradise?”

  That the practice was grossly abused at this time admits of no question. Tetzel’s appearance at Jüterbogk, but a few miles from Wittenberg, aroused Luther to action. His views (subject to revision on convicion) are expressed in the following, among the ninety-five theses: “(1) Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, in saying ‘Repent ye,’ etc., intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence.

  “(2) This word cannot be understood of sacramental penance

  [* ] With the rise of scholasticism there sprang up independent, free associations of students, after the ancient Greek order. These free associations became formal organizations afterwards, with a single recognized head, called the “rector.” Municipalities and princes, as well as the papacy, granted them charters, and they became permanent institutions equally with the monasteries and communes. Each school had its specialty, as: Paris, theology; Bologna, law; Salerno, medicine. Later, other faculties were added to each, and modern universities were born.

  [* ] The Edict of Nantes (1598) guaranteed to the Huguenots liberty of conscience; freedom of worship; right to all public offices equally with Catholics; exclusive political control for eight years over Nîmes, Montauban, La Rochelle, and a few other towns; and the right to assemble by deputies every three years in order to present to the government their complaints. The latter clause, constituting them a veritable imperium in imperio, afforded a sufficient pretext for the revocation of the entire edict by Louis XIV.

  [† ] Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), a famous French orator and Roman Catholic theologian, author of several books in exposition of Roman Catholic doctrines. Jean Claude (1619-1687), a prominent French Protestant preacher and theologian. Bossuet and Claude were engaged in frequent theological controversy; in 1678 occurred their noted conference or discussion on the authority of the Church; both claimed the victory. This freedom of discussion ceased with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

  [* ] Climatic conditions as well as political considerations must not be overlooked.

  [† ] This statement is more exact than the passage on page 328, with which it is not easily harmonized.

  No doubt the assertion of this principle of absolute independence, or the unlimited right of private judgment in religion, became and has continued to be the great characteristic result of the religious revolution. But the Reformation did not at the outset (any more than many other great revolutions) generalize itself, define and enunciate the principles on which it proceeded. It began with opposition to special abuses and corruptions. Neither Luther nor his associates comprehended at first how far they should be carried. It was only in the sequel that the right of private judgment in religion was brought out, asserted, and contended for as a principle. Luther himself and the earliest reformers did not contend for it as an absolute principle. This is evident from the continual offers of Luther to submit himself implicitly to the decision of a general council. It is evident, moreover, from the fact that the reformers, just as much as the papists, held it right to inflict coercion, physical pains, and death upon those who denied what they regarded as the essential faith.

  [* ] From the point of view of our age, the inconsistency of the Reformation is glaring, when one recalls the intolerance of the reformers.

  Now whether the principle of independence of all authority, the absolutely unlimited right of private judgment in matters of religious faith, be or be not a correct principle, it will not be disputed at the present day that absolute independence of all human authority, and so far forth the unlimited right of private judgment, is a correct principle, and that all coercion or physical punishment is a monstrous absurdity and a monstrous crime. Yet nothing is clearer from history than that the reformers did not understand, did not act upon this principle; it was a century and a half before Protestants learned definitively that they had no right to inflict death, imprisonment, stripes or fines upon heretics, and no right beyond that of simply separating from their communion.

  [* ] Intellectual authority is doubtless included, respect for which rests on the double basis (1) of recognition of equality and superiority in others, and (2) a profound regard for the truth as revealed in the experience of others.

  [* ] Rose, Ignatius Loyola and the Rise of the Jesuits, may be consulted. An excellent sketch of the rise of the Jesuits is given in Sir James Stephens’s essay on Loyola, in his Ecclesiastical Essays. The literature of the subject is abundant.

  [* ] Since the time of Henry VIII the power of the Church over legislation and administration has been gradually decreasing. Since Archbishop Laud (1645), the advisers and ministers of the sovereign have, almost without exception, been laymen.

  [* ] The French revolution of 1789.

  [† ] Perhaps there is no epoch in the world’s history where one can find more diversified interests and conflicting motives than in the Reformation. It has a separate history for each nation and a separate history for the various classes of society. To the German peasant it seemed to offer an escape from the burdens of feudalism; to the noble, an opportunity for gain; to the emperor, another force to check the the papacy; to the scholar, it meant intellectual emancipation. The Reformation cannot be separated from the period which preceded it. The new spirit, which in Italy produced its magic effects in art, literature, and culture, in Germany awoke the religious fervor of the people. As one has said, “This new spirit in Italy emancipated the human intelligence by the classics; in Germany it emancipated the human intelligence by the Bible.” The struggle was between Teutonic freedom and Latin authority, between the spirit of Saxon and Roman law. It was, in fact, the last Germanic invasion of the sacred soil of Rome. It prepared the way for the political revolutions which followed.

  [* ] A distinction may be made between the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth and those of James and Charles; the former rested on the fact of power, the latter on the pretense of prerogative. The reigns of Edward I and III, on the other hand, were based on a constitutional right. They recognized the king as a part of the nation; the Stuarts sought to be the state.

  [* ] The wholesale dissolution of monasteries and gilds restored about one fourth of the lands of England to individual ownership, while the breaking up of the three-field system and the inclosure of the commons produced a revolution in methods of agriculture. See Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce.

  [* ] The formation of the House of Commons dates from the first appearance of the third estate as a permanent factor in legislation. This was in the Model Parliament of 1295.

  [† ] The Acts of Parliament leading up to the separation of the Church of England from the Church of Rome are: (1) Act of 1533, prohibiting appeals to Rome; (2) Act of 1534, ordering all payments to Rome stopped; (3) Act of Supremacy, 1534, declaring Henry the supreme head on earth, under God, of the Church of England. By the Act of the Six Articles, 1539, Parliament sanctions the first creed of the new Church.

  [* ] The division of parties as given in the lecture is somewhat arbitrary.

  [* ] His name at this time was Edward Hyde; he was created first Earl of Clarendon by Charles II.

  [* ] The Grand Remonstrance (1641) shows, perhaps better than anything else, the formation of party lines in England. This document, drawn by Pym and Hampden, had, as its object, an appeal to the nation to support the parliament against the king. Its two hundred and six clauses may be divided into, (1) the political clauses which asserted the power and prerogative of parliament, and (2) the religious clauses which advocated, in indefinite terms, the “peace and good government of the Church.” The former were subscribed to even by Falkland and Hyde, while the contest over the latter was so fierce that it threw the Episcopalians into the ranks of the Royalists, and thus left the Presbyterians as the champions of the parliamentary principles. Later, however (1647), the Presbyterians were divided by the excesses of the radical element (Independents), and the right wing was driven to join with the Royalists.

  [* ] The cause of this success was rather the possession of military power than the promulgation of popular principles.

  [* ] Views are apt to differ widely in making comparisons. Following is that of Goldwin Smith: “The chief (Cromwell) was not a Cæsar; much less was he a Bonaparte, an unprincipled soldier of fortune, vaulting on the back of a Revolution to make himself an emperor. The relation of Cromwell to the English Revolution was not that of a Napoleon, but, if it is not blasphemy to mention the two names together, that of a Robespierre. The chief of the Rousseauists was the leader of the most religious and the deepest part of the French movement.”

  [* ] Cromwell’s fondness for power may well be admitted, but not to the extent that it was his “darling ambition.” That he desired “to place the crown on his own head and keep it in his family” is without historic proof. Although he was privately and officially pressed to take the title of king, his answer was final: “I cannot undertake this government with the title of king. And that is mine answer to this great and weighty business.” The sincerity of his refusal can be judged only by his other acts.

  [* ] Cromwell’s vigilance, as well as the success he attained, disarmed opposition and prevented the formation during his lifetime of any organized effort for his overthrow.

  [* ] The Restoration was a restoration of Parliament as well as of monarchy. The years which followed brought about a combination of the two, which culminated in the Bill of Rights (1687).

  [† ] The title Prime Minister was first applied to Robert Walpole, but was not used in any official document until the Congress of Berlin (1870).

  [* ] Two causes working together account for the fall of Clarendon: (1) The inherent weakness of his political theory; (2) his outspoken disapproval of the king’s conduct and life. The latter cause initiated his dismissal, the former made it popular.

  [* ] The Cabal ministry consisted simply of a few members of the Privy Council, whom the king chose as his advisers. They did not constitute a ministry in the modern sense, since they were responsible to the king and not to parliament. Their sole bond of agreement was religious toleration. The statements in this passage of the lecture are too sweeping to be exact.

  [* ] By the treaty of Nimwegen (1678), the integrity of Holland was practically guaranteed, and the dream of France of a boundary on the Rhine partially realized.

  But to Louis the treaty was only a truce. He continued his armies on a war footing and strengthened his fortresses. By the words of the treaty, the ceded towns were to be surrendered “with their dependencies.” Courts, called Chambers of Reunion, were organized by Louis (1679) to adjudge what territories in Alsace, Franche-Comté, and the three bishoprics were included in the term “dependencies.” These courts were well instructed. They awarded all of Alsace, Zweibrücken, and Saarbrück to France. With Alsace went Strasburg, through the influence of French arms and money. This alienated the emperor, as the occupation of Zweibrücken alienated Sweden. A quarrel with the pope turned many Catholics against Louis, as did the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) the Protestants. Poland, Spain, and the Turks were alienated. The result was the secret formation of the League of Augsburg under the leadership of William of Orange for the maintenance of the Treaty of Nimwegen. Two years later William landed in England, unhindered by France. French troops were then moved to the Rhine and the Palatinate occupied. War was now begun along the whole frontier. The expulsion of James gave William the power and support he sought to fight Louis. At first the victories were all with the French. In 1696 the tide began to turn. England regained control of the sea. France was exhausted. “Half the kingdom,” Vauban wrote, “lived on the charity of the other half.” Peace was made at Ryswick, 1697. William III was acknowledged as King of England; all conquests made by France since 1678, with but few exceptions, were restored to the empire; and the Dutch were allowed to garrison the barrier fortresses between France and Holland. Thus did Louis XIV renounce his claim to be the dictator of Europe, and the Protestant succession in England was made secure.

  [* ] Louis’s policy towards England accounts in large measure for the success of Charles II and for the failure of James. Towards Charles, Louis played a double game, furnishing money in vast sums to secure a dissolution of parliament when it seemed inclined to peace with Holland (as in 1674 and 1682), and assisting the opposition party to attack the king if he became too independent.

  Towards James his tactics were altered somewhat. James’s open avowal of Catholicism made it certain in Louis’s mind that James would not ally himself with Holland, but would find sufficient employment with parliament at home. Consequently French gold flowed less and less frequently northward, and Louis made up the lack in “moral support.” Parliament, however, which had been greatly strengthened by the conduct of Charles, saw in Catholic Louis the dictator of the royal policy and religion for England, and looked to William of Orange as their deliverer at once from Catholicism and from foreign corruption.

  [* ] The following summary of the events in this period may be helpful:

  1625.	Charles I becomes king. He married Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France, which involved him in war with Spain. This, in turn, made him dependent upon Parliament for financial support, and enabled the issue to be raised whether the granting of supplies should precede a redress of grievances. Political principles are paramount. Parliament continuously victorious. The First Parliament votes supplies for one year only, and is dissolved.
  1626.	The Second Parliament takes steps to impeach the king’s favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, thus declaring the principle of responsibility of king’s advisers to Parliament, and is dissolved without granting subsidies. War with Spain develops into war with France. Charles has recourse to forced loans and impressment of seamen, and billets soldiers on the people.
  1628.	The Third Parliament, led by Wentworth and Pym, draws up the Petition of Right, asking that certain grievances be redressed. Charles consents.
  1629.	Charles dissolves Parliament, and attempts for eleven years to rule alone, with Wentworth and Laud as his advisers in political and religious affairs respectively. Public opinion is repressed by the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission; revenue raised by levies of ship money (1634).
  1637.	The attempt to force the Prayer Book on the Scots results in the Solemn League and Covenant (1638), signed by the Scots, preserving the Presbyterian form of Church government in Scotland. War follows between Scotland and Charles, and forces the latter to call a Parliament.
  1640.	The Long Parliament summoned.
  1641.	The Triennial Act was passed, providing that more than three years should not elapse without the summoning of a Parliament. Parliament declares that it shall not be dissolved without its own consent. Parliament proceeds to undo, so far as possible, the illegal acts since 1629, impeaches the ministers, abolishes the Court of Star Chamber, and forbids ship money and other abuses. The Protestants become divided, on the Root and Branch Bill for the abolition of Episcopacy, into two hostile parties: Episcopalians and Presbyterians. The resolve of Parliament to obtain redress of all grievances results in the resistance of Charles, and his attempt to override and outmanœuvre Parliament results in an open break.
  1642.	Both Parliament and the king prepare for war, and the English nation is divided into two hostile camps: the king’s party, of Royalists, Catholics, Episcopalians, and conservative republicans; the parliamentary party, comprising all Protestant dissenters from the Church of England, and the republicans. In general, the north and east are for the king, the south and west for Parliament. The towns stood with the latter and the country with the former.
  1642-1649.	Civil war. The most important results were the defeat of the king, the attempt to establish Presbyterianism as the State religion in England, the division between the Parliament, which was largely Presbyterian, and its army, which was composed of Independents, the expulsion of the Presbyterian majority from Parliament by the army, the trial and beheading of Charles (1649) by order of the Independents, who alone, by this time, are left in the Long Parliament.
  1649-1653.	The Commonwealth. Power in the hands of the army, which is republican in politics and independent in religion. Fairfax, Iord-general, Cromwell, lieutenant-general of the army.
  1653.	The Instrument of Government is drawn—a Constitution for England, defining and describing the government in its administrative features. Cromwell is named Protector.
  1653-1659.	The Protectorate. The legislature, at first in one branch, is in 1657 made to consist of two. Cromwell is offered and refuses the title of king, but is allowed to name his successor. In all but name the monarchy is re-established.
  1658.	Cromwell dies. Richard Cromwell inaugurated Protector, but resigns after a few months.
  1659.	Movement set on foot by the leaders of both parties to restore the king. Writs issued assembling a Convention. Charles invited to return.
  1660.	The monarchy is restored, and Charles II becomes king. Appoints Clarendon his chief minister. General amnesty granted, with few exceptions.
  1662.	Final division between the Church and Dissenters marked by the passage of the Act of Uniformity.
  1664.	Clarendon’s Code passed against non-conformity.
  1667.	Clarendon’s fall. Rise of the Cabal (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, Lauderdale). Foreign policy reversed. Triple alliance between Holland, Sweden, and England.
  1669.	Secret treaty of Dover negotiated through Charles’s sister Henrietta. Chief provisions were: (1) Charles should declare himself a Catholic, and receive from Louis £ 80,000 in money and the aid of six thousand troops; (2) that Charles and Louis should make a joint war on Holland.
  1673.	The Test Act, requiring officers to take the sacrament according to the Established Church, overthrew the Cabal, and Danby becomes chief minister.
  1674.	William of Orange marries Mary, sister of the king. The Habeas Corpus Act passed.
  1685.	James II succeeds to the throne without opposition. He declares himself a Catholic. Louis sends, proof of his support, the sum of £ 67,000. The king appoints Roman Catholic officers in the army, and later to the ministry. Finding his policy unsafe, he seeks an alliance between Catholics and non-conformists by the Declaration of Indulgence (1687).
  1688.	The second Declaration of Indulgence issued. All parties invite William of Orange to come over and declare for a free Parliament. William publishes his declaration that he goes to England as the husband of Mary, to secure a free and legal Parliament by the decision of which he would abide. In September, James attempts conciliation; dismisses Catholics from office, restores charters, and dissolves the Ecclesiastical Commission. In November, William lands in the west of England. James marches with an army against him, but soon, seeing his cause lost, escapes to France. William enters London. A Convention Parliament is called, which finally drew up.
  1689.	The Declaration of Right. This is accepted by William and Mary, and they become King and Queen of England, February 18. By an act of Parliament, the Declaration of Right was turned into the Bill of Right. This closed the struggle between the king and Parliament. The effect of the revolution was fourfold: (1) It destroyed the Stuart theory of the divine right of kings; (2) it reasserted the fundamental principles of the constitution; (3) it enthroned Protestantism in England; (4) it ushered in the reign of Parliament.

  Authorities on this period are numerous and easily accessible. Ranke, Hallam, Gardiner, are standard works. The Epochs of Modern History are handy and helpful, while Montague, Elements of English Constitutional History, supplies information on many of the constitutional points. Bright, History of England, Green, Short History of the English People, and Ransome, History of England, are among the best of the shorter histories.

  [* ] This lecture might perhaps with greater appropriateness be termed either Absolute Monarchy in France or The Philosophical Revolution.

  The following works will help the student more fully to comprehend the lecture: Kitchin, History of France; Duruy, History of France; Perkins, France under Richelieu and Mazarin; Perkins, France under the Regency; Buckle, History of Civilization in England, chap. viii-xiv.

  [* ] See Lecture II.

  [* ] Such development, when clearly successive, is usually revolutionary. The contemporaneous growth of varying elements in the same general society indicates a more steady form of progress.

  [† ] One must not forget that the communes and free cities of France had, by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, made a decided break in the feudal system and an encroachment upon the sway of feudalism.

  [‡ ] This is one of the author’s sweeping statements on a point where there is room for difference of opinion.

  [* ] One notable exception to this is England’s experiment in constitutional monarchy. A liberal view would assert that this began with the reign of Edward I (1272), and, with the exception of the period of the Tudors (1485-1603), when a relapse occurred, has been continuous to our time. The more conservative view would show constitutional monarchy, broad and substantially complete, from the seventeenth century.

  [† ] It may be doubted whether such names as those of John Locke (1632-1704) in political philosophy, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in mathematics, or Edward Gibbon (1734-1794) in history (to whom M. Guizot is largely indebted), will not always be ranked with those of the great continental writers.

  [* ] Comparing the statement in the text with what the author says on page 392, one is led to think that England in the latter half of the sixteenth century had attained as influential a spirit of free inquiry as France in the early part of the seventeenth century. The influence of Locke in political and Bacon in speculative philosophy made the advance of French philosophy in Europe possible.

  [† ] The cause for this is, in part, the language. French having taken the place of Latin as the common language of courts and schools, it was but natural that it should become a medium for science and philosophy. The fact that Louis XIV was a great patron of arts and letters also accounts for much. This does not, however, necessarily denote the leadership of French thought in Europe.

  [‡ ] The lectures of M. Cousin on philosophy, and of M. Villemain on French literature, delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, at the same time with the lectures of M. Guizot, constituting the present volume.

  [* ] From 1795 to 1799 the government of the Directory was in power in France, but during its later years became weak and inefficient. On the 9th of October, 1799, Bonaparte returned unannounced from Egypt. On the 16th he was in Paris; on the 22d his brother Lucien was elected President of the Council of Five Hundred; and on the 9th of November (18th Brumaire), by a coup d’état, the execution of which was left to Bonaparte, the government of the Directory was swept away, and Bonaparte was master of the situation. A provisional government of three consuls was agreed upon. A committee, headed by Sieyès, was appointed to draw up a constitution, which, after important modification by Bonaparte, was accepted by the people of France by a vote of 3,011,107 to 1,567. The Consulate was proclaimed on the 24th of December, with Bonaparte as First Consul. The internal policy of the Consulate was (1) one of general reconciliation of all the warring elements under the Directory; (2) general amnesty and freedom for those who had emigrated during the previous years; (3) enforcement of the Constitution; (4) restoration of credit; (5) the codification of the law. The external policy was (1) war with Austria; (2) feigned friendship with Russia. The effect of both policies was magical in restoring confidence and order.

  [* ] The death of Richelieu occurred in 1642, six months before that of his sovereign, Louis XIII (1643). Louis XIV was but five years of age. His mother, Anne of Austria, became Regent, and appointed Cardinal Mazarin as her prime minister. Abroad, Mazarin showed unmistakable signs of genius; at home, his political dishonesty clouded every good he accomplished. Spain, an hereditary enemy, encouraged uprisings in the provinces and formed alliances with ambitious generals, like Prince Condé. The uprising of the Fronde disturbed the country; the Parliament of Paris, though primarily a judicial body, undertook to turn back the tide flowing towards centralized monarchy, and finally, in 1652, the king, then barely fifteen, declared he “forbade the assumption by Parliament hereafter of any cognizance of the general affairs of the state and of the direction of the finances.” Thus Louis, at the age of fifteen, was on the high road to absolutism.

  [* ] Battle of Marengo, fought against the Austrians June 14, 1800, is one of Bonaparte’s most brilliant successes. In the short space of five weeks, it is said, he transported thirty-five thousand men, with artillery and baggage, across the Alps, defeated the enemy, restored French supremacy in northern Italy, and returned to Paris.

  [* ] The states of Italy were, during the years 1494 to 1516, the prey of France and Spain. Charles VIII, as a member of the house of Anjou, revived its claims to the throne of Naples. The time was ripe. The other European powers were otherwise engaged. Turin, Genoa, Pavia, Florence, and Rome opened thir gates as if to a deliverer. Ferdinand II, king of Naples, was defeated. Charles was crowned king. Possession of the kingdom was soon lost; was regained by his son Louis XII in 1501, and again finally lost in the same year.

  [† ] Charles V’s expeditions to Africa (1535 and 1541) were rather expeditions sent against pirates in the pay of the Porte; and since Charles was at war with the Sultan, these expeditions seemed as necessary as they were unsuccessful.

  [* ] The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-’71 restored Alsace to Germany.

  [* ] See page 362.

  [* ] Algernon Sidney, beheaded for conspiracy in 1683.

  [† ] Ludlow was one of the few who were not pardoned by the Act of Grace of William III (1690).

  [* ] He was ambassador to England during the reign of James II, and was ordered to leave by William of Orange.

  [* ] “The dominating trait of the government of Louis XIV was an immense effort to bring back into the hands of the prince all the forces of the country, doubtless to dispose of them in the interest of the country, but more especially for the interest of the king. Hence, that excessive centralization which enveloped the commerce, the industry, the political life, even the moral life, of France; and the thousand bonds of a minute regulation, so that the initiation of the ministers was almost universally substituted for individual and communal action.”—Duruy, History of Modern Times, p. 330.

  [† ] Without Colbert and Louvois, Louis XIV would probably have lacked the two essential elements on which he relied, namely, money and arms. Colbert’s fame rests on his administration of finances. He created the budget, and shifted 22,000,000 francs from the shoulders of the peasantry to the privileged nobility, and increased the revenues by 27,000,000; instituted a protective system (1667), drained marshes, built roads, encouraged manufactures of wood, tin, crockery, etc.; established councils of arbitration and boards of trade; encouraged commerce by granting privileges to five great trading companies; built up a vast merchant marine and a navy; expanded the colonial power by settling old and acquiring new colonies. France to-day enjoys the fruits of Colbert’s great work. Louvois was almost equally great in military administration. He created corps of engineers, schools of artillery, cadet schools; reformed the army throughout; introduced a regular order of promotion; published new tactics; and established hospitals, notably the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris.

  [* ] “These ordinances are the greatest work of codification which was executed, from Justinian’s time to Napoleon’s. A portion of them are still in force; the ordinance of the marine composes almost all the second book of the present French code of commerce.”—Duruy, History of France, Translation, p. 429.

  [* ] Sometimes the character of a sovereign colors a reign and defines its history. The character of Philip II stands in strong contrast to that of Louis XIV. The former was phlegmatic, melancholy, and mastered by a fatalistic passivity; the latter was full of restless activity.

  [* ] In the war of the Spanish Succession (1701—1714) the aim of Louis was to secure for his grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, the throne of Spain. Charles II of Spain died without issue, leaving the throne of Spain vacant. Leopold I of Austria, cousin of Charles, claimed it; while Louis, by right of his wife, the eldest sister of Charles II, claimed it for his grandson Philip. Charles, just before he died, made a will, naming Philip as his heir. Leopold would not consent, and war was inevitable. England, the Netherlands, Prussia, and Portugal were drawn in against France for reasons connected mainly with the maintenance of the balance of power, and the Grand Alliance was formed against Louis. France was thoroughly humiliated and weakened in the war, but by the treaty of Utrecht (1713) Philip was permitted to ascend the throne of Spain.

  [* ] The lectures of Villemain and Cousin are meant.

  [* ] See page 339, note.

  [* ] Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, D’Alembert, Condillac, Helvetius, Mably, Condorcet, etc., are the great philosophic speculators of the eighteenth century in France.

  [* ] This expectation was fulfilled. Consult the author’s History of Civilization in france.

  [† ] The author stood, perhaps, too near the eighteenth century to judge correctly the relative influence of French and English civilization. Duruy, in his Modern History, takes an opposite view. He leaves the impression that the “free mind” of the period arose in England. Voltaire himself said, “I went to England to learn how to think,” and he brought back to France the ideas of Locke, Newton, and Shakespere. Diderot freely acknowledges his obligation to Bacon, as Condorcet does to Locke.

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  10: François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe [1861]

  François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, trans. Andrew R. Scoble, Introduction and notes by Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/878 on 2011-04-18

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

  ---

  The right to power is always derived from reason, never from will. The legitimacy of power rests in the conformity of its laws to eternal reason.

  guizot

  INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBERTY FUND EDITION

  “I do not think I have ever met, in all my life, a Frenchman who was a liberal,” the literary critic Émile Faguet once ironically remarked. What seems today to be a paradox was a commonplace in France a century ago; on both the left and the right, liberal society was rejected as inadequate or hypocritical, and liberalism was seen as a mere oxymoron or an exotic eccentricity. Fortunately, much had changed in Paris in the last three decades of the twentieth century when liberalism became the new reigning political ideology. Contemporary French liberals draw upon a rich tradition of nineteenth-century French liberal thinking that has been ignored or systematically distorted by unsympathetic commentators.1 How can one explain, then, this liberal Renaissance?

  To be sure, there has always been an enigmatic and mysterious quality to the liberal phenomenon in France that has puzzled English-speaking scholars over the past century. The complex legacy of the French Revolution and its internal contradictions might explain why nineteenth-century French liberals grappled with a particular set of issues and why their solutions were often found to be unorthodox and unconventional when compared to those advanced by English liberals across the Channel. The particular dilemmas faced by French liberals—how to “end” the French Revolution, and how to reconcile order and liberty in a nation torn by a long civil war—challenged them to rethink their views and made them fully aware of the complexity of their social and political world. These issues also instilled in the French a certain sense of moderation and convinced them that the struggle for new liberties and rights involved an endless series of political settlements in which contingency can be as important as human will. Thus, what emerged from the debate over the nature of post-revolutionary French society was an original type of liberal doctrine that is worth exploring as an alternative to the deontological liberalism of contemporary academic circles.

  Not surprisingly, of all the political currents in nineteenth-century France, liberalism has been the least understood by Anglo-American scholars. For a long time, French liberalism was equated with Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America had gained, almost from the moment of its publication in 1835, the status of a masterpiece in political sociology, and was seen as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for students of liberal democracy. More recently, an English translation of Benjamin Constant’s political writings2 has enriched our understanding of French liberalism. Nonetheless, any picture of French liberalism would be incomplete if we continued to ignore a third towering figure in the history of nineteenth-century French political thought, François Guizot, the most famous representative of the doctrinaires’ group.3

  François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot was born in Nîmes on October 4, 1787, to a Protestant family; his Girondist father, like many of his innocent fellow countrymen, was sentenced to death by guillotine during the Terror of 1793–94. After that tragic episode, the entire Guizot family moved to Geneva, where the young François received a solid education in history, literature, philosophy, and classical languages. In 1805, Guizot left for Paris to study law. Stimulated by the rich cultural Parisian life, his many talents flourished early; his first article, published in 1807, marked the debut of a long and prodigious intellectual career that spanned more than six decades. The young Guizot was quick to make a name for himself in Parisian circles. The proof of his success was his appointment as a (tenured) professor of history at the Sorbonne in 1812 at the age of twenty-five, a major achievement even by the standards of that romantic age. It was at the Sorbonne that Guizot met Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, a well-known professor of philosophy and a prominent member of the doctrinaires’ group. During the Bourbon Restoration, Royer-Collard became a leading politician and a master of political rhetoric whose parliamentary speeches exerted an important influence on many of his contemporaries, including his younger disciple, Alexis de Tocqueville, with whom Royer-Collard had an important correspondence.

  Guizot’s political career started in 1814, when he accepted a position in administration as general secretary of the Interior Ministry. After the fall of Napoleon and the return of Louis XVIII, Guizot held other high positions in the Ministry of Justice and the Conseil d’État that gave him unique opportunities to follow and participate in some of the most important political debates of his age. Guizot’s first major publication, On Representative Government (1816), placed him in the ranks of the supporters of constitutional monarchy and limited government. Between 1817 and 1819, Guizot and the other doctrinaires were instrumental in passing important liberal laws—first and foremost, the law of the press and the electoral law—that consolidated the civil liberties enshrined in the Charter of 1814. It was during that period (July 1817 to December 1818) that Guizot edited an important publication, Philosophical, Political, and Literary Archives. In his articles, he commented on the political writings of his contemporaries and developed an original political agenda, which was predicated on the assumption that the task of the new generation was to constitutionalize the liberties of 1789 and build new liberal institutions.

  The assassination of the heir to the throne, the Duke of Berry, in February 1820 sent the government veering toward the right; the inauguration of the ultra-conservative Villèle government meant that the “doctrinaire moment” was over. Guizot was dismissed from the Conseil d’État, and his lectures on the origins of representative government were canceled. Ousted from the political arena, Guizot did not abandon politics. In spite of a hostile political environment, he managed to publish two important books which consolidated his reputation as an original political thinker: On the Government of France (1820) and On the Means of Government and Opposition in the Current State of France (1821). During these years, he also worked on a treatise, Political Philosophy: On Sovereignty, which he never finished, an important and dense twenty-seven-chapter philosophical text that provides a new theory of representative government based on two key concepts: the sovereignty of reason and political capacity. As always, Guizot’s tone was affirmative, never purely negative, constantly searching for reasonable solutions and proposals. His interest in studying the origins of representative government and his admiration for the English constitutional monarchy began during that time. To be sure, Guizot collected a prodigious number of documents regarding the history of France and England. In 1823, he commenced the publication of an impressive thirty-volume series of documents regarding the history of France and sent to press another important book, Essays on the History of France. Three years later, Guizot published a history of the English Revolution, preceded by another impressive set of twenty-five volumes of documents regarding the events that led to the fall of Charles I in 1649.

  Guizot’s fame as a historian reached a peak in 1828, when he was finally allowed to resume his teaching. He gave a series of famous lectures on the history of civilization in Europe and France that drew a large audience of enthusiastic students; Tocqueville attended Guizot’s lectures, took extensive notes, and shared his admiration for his professor with Gustave de Beaumont, who would accompany him on his American journey three years later. Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe soon became one of the most popular books in nineteenth-century France, a true best-seller that brought him well-deserved fame as a first-rate historian and philosopher of history and civilization. A masterpiece of historical writing, this book—according to one commentator “the most intelligent general history of Europe ever written”4 —introduced a series of topics, such as the class struggle, the idea of civilization, the role of antagonism in society, and the distinction between social order and political order, several of which were subsequently borrowed by other leading figures, such as Tocqueville, Marx, and John Stuart Mill.

  Elected into the Chamber of Deputies in early 1830, Guizot hailed the July Revolution and became one of the leading political figures during the July Monarchy. Under the reign of Louis-Philippe (1830–48), he assumed various ministerial positions and proved to be a master of parliamentary management whose skills were acknowledged by close friends and fierce critics alike. As minister of education from 1832 to 1837, Guizot was the author of the Great Schools Law of June 1833, which created the French national primary-school system. In a letter sent to the teachers, he outlined his political vision: “No sectarian or party spirit in your school. The teacher must rise above the fleeting quarrels which agitate society.”5 Appointed ambassador to London in early 1840, Guizot was recalled to Paris in October of the same year to help the king form a new government whose mission was to end a long ministerial crisis. It was the beginning of the new Soult-Guizot cabinet,6 which lasted (with a few changes) until 1848, thus breaking all records for ministerial longevity in France (there had been fifteen governments between 1830 and 1840).

  The Revolution of 1848 marked the end of Guizot’s political career. After his fall from power in 1848, he went to England, from where he made a last attempt to return to political life a year later. Defeated at the polls, he decided to abandon parliamentary politics after publishing one last political book, OnDemocracy in France(1849). Guizot spent the last quarter of his life meditating on religious issues, being active in Protestant circles, writing history, and finishing his memoirs. In 1851, he sent to press The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, which contained the lectures on representative government that he had given in the early 1820s. During the last two decades of his life, Guizot remained an indefatigable writer. He published a historical study of George Washington, reflections on the legacy of the French Revolution, and eight volumes of memoirs, along with religious meditations and writings on the English Revolution. When the venerable doctrinaire passed away in 1874 at the age of eighty-seven, France lost a great liberal and a wise statesman, the last representative of a distinguished nineteenth-century liberal tradition.

  A cursory look at the particular political situation during the Bourbon Restoration explains why Guizot decided to write about the origin and principles of representative government. “For the first time after 1792,” he once claimed, “the French Revolution and the old French society had met face to face, discussed and combated against each other, in full liberty.”7 Under those circumstances, writing about representative government and defending its principles became a powerful means of advancing a particular (reformist) political agenda. Not surprisingly, during the Bourbon Restoration, historical writing underwent a true Renaissance; from a scholarly pursuit, it turned into a political tool that offered an ideal arena for disguised political battles.8 Those who cherished the noble ideals of 1789 understood that the best way to promote and legitimize the principles of the French Revolution in the face of an avenging aristocracy and zealous radicals on the left was to delve into the history of France and European civilization in order to demonstrate that both the Revolution and representative government had strong roots in the past and were the inevitable outcomes of a long political and social evolution.

  Thus, liberal historians such as Guizot resorted to a more or less selective reading of the past, one that insisted on continuities and long-term patterns. To this end, they pointed out that, in France as well as in Europe, liberty was ancient while despotism was modern. Like many of his contemporaries, Guizot, too, believed that knowledge of the past could and should be harnessed to defend present political goals and shape the future. He wrote a history of civilization in Europe which openly praised the virtues of English constitutionalism and the tradition of self-government; at the same time, Guizot described the French Revolution as being the climax of the great European revolution of liberty and as having significant antecedents in the history of Europe. The same vision undergirds Guizot’s history of the origins of representative government. In this book, he examined the ancient roots of liberty and the legitimacy of representative government by surveying the long evolution of representative institutions in Europe. “That which is now revealed,” Guizot wrote, “has been laboring for more than twelve centuries to manifest itself.”9 More important, he argued that both the spirit of the new age and the new social condition demanded representative government. Hence, the task of the historian was to search for the germs of representative institutions, however crude and imperfect they might be; determine what influences have stifled their progress; and follow their development.

  Nonetheless, the importance and originality of The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe cannot be grasped if we refer only to the historical background in which it was written. It is important to note that, while reflecting on the origins of representative government, Guizot introduced a new political vocabulary and a method of inquiry that were part of an original political philosophy. He emphasized the dependence of political institutions on social conditions and argued that, in order to understand the political institutions of a period or a country, it is necessary to explore different social conditions, the state of persons, and the nature of properties.10 Guizot’s political vision was equally bold and original. He was a proponent of the juste milieu theory that defended representative government and constitutional monarchy grounded in the notions of political capacity, publicity, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of reason. As to Guizot’s method of writing history, he sought to understand and explain the real nature and hidden springs of the institutions of representative government. In following this method, Guizot combined a taste for grand narratives with a particular gift for philosophical generalizations and a tendency toward political instruction. He enjoyed advancing broad philosophical views and general ideas on the destiny of the human race; at the same time, his conclusions always retained a strong political import while striving to achieve a sound balance between impartiality and commitment. It is worth noting that his was not a “cold and unprofitable impartiality” which is often the off-spring of in difference and lack of vision, but that “energetic and fruitful impartiality which is inspired by the vision and the admiration of truth.”11

  Indeed, a cursory look at the descriptive table of contents of The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe shows the originality of this unusual book. The History combines lengthy narrative chapters full of historical details with theoretical chapters in which Guizot reflects on the principles, goals, and institutions of representative government. The second part of the book analyzes the architecture of the English representative system that was praised and admired by all Restoration liberals from Madame de Staël to Benjamin Constant. Here, Guizot explains the different patterns followed by England and France by tracing the various alliances between the royal power, the nobles, and the commons. Guizot’s History addresses other equally important topics, such as constitutionalism and limited power, the sovereignty of reason, good government, the relationship between political capacity and political rights, the evolution of Parliament (in England), the prerequisites of a sound electoral system, and the role of religion in the progress of European civilization.

  Furthermore, while reflecting on the origin of representative government, Guizot took issue with some of the ideas of his most famous predecessors. He commented on the shortcomings of Montesquieu’s theory of the separation of powers, which failed to distinguish between the sovereignty of fact and the sovereignty of right. Guizot also discussed at length Rousseau’s most important political ideas, above all his controversial views on political representation and social contract. In a few memorable pages, Guizot refuted the social contract theory and opposed Rousseau’s emphasis on individual will by pointing out that the latter could never be the basis of political legitimacy and right.12 For Guizot, the only legitimate sources of right and sovereignty were reason, truth, and justice, which can be only imperfectly approximated on Earth.

  The core of the book is Guizot’s analysis of the “true” principles of representative government, which also contains a vigorous defense of political liberty. At the heart of Guizot’s theory of representative government are his opposition to arbitrary and absolute power and the idea that no individual (human) will is infallible. It will be recalled that, for Guizot, the debate of the Restoration was between those who wanted to bring the French Revolution to an end (by constitutionalizing the liberties of 1789 and building a viable representative government) and those who tried to turn back the clock of history or wanted to continue the revolution. Guizot started from the assumption that the doctrine of the sovereignty of reason was the only effective means of preventing tyranny and the usurpation of power by ruthless politicians. In his opinion, the main principle of representative government was precisely the destruction of all sovereignty of permanent right; de facto sovereignty is granted only on the condition that it should be continually justified by the conformity of the sovereign’s actions to the principles of reason, truth, and justice. On this view, representative government does not recognize the sovereignty of right as an intrinsic attribute of any person or collective body; on the contrary, all powers are expected to strive to discover and fulfill the principles of reason, truth, and justice that ought to govern their actions. In view of the radical imperfection of human nature and because the sovereignty of right belongs only to reason, each appropriation of the sovereignty of fact should be considered temporary and limited.

  The liberal character of this view must be duly underscored here, since it has often been neglected or even flatly denied. Guizot believed that the goal of the representative system was to provide safeguards against the existence of absolute illegitimate power by making sure that powers would be properly divided and submitted to certain trials, meet with legal obstacles, withstand public opinion, undergo opposition, and be forced to constantly prove their legitimacy in the front of the entire nation.13 Two fundamental assumptions underlie Guizot’s definition of representative government. First, since reason and political capacity are unevenly distributed in any political community, a new doctrine of “true” representation is needed that takes into account and reflects the existence of both civil equality and “legitimate” forms of political inequality. Second, Guizot defined publicity as the cornerstone of representative government and took it to be a new means of government that brings closer together power and society, opinion and government. To be sure, publicity is no substitute for elections, but without publicity there can be no “true” elections. On this view, publicity becomes both the prerequisite of and the necessary outcome of liberty; it has been rendered inevitable by the advent of a new social condition grounded in the equality of conditions.14

  The originality of Guizot’s approach becomes evident once we look at his definition of political representation and his views on “true” representation.15 He opposed the (allegedly) flawed theories of representation advanced by his predecessors and contemporaries, making a strong case for reexamining the “true” meaning of political representation. The fundamental principle of the philosophy that Guizot criticized held that every man is his own absolute master and that the only legitimate law for him is his individual will.16 Opposing Rousseau, Guizot affirmed the existence of a transcendent law that commands universal obedience regardless of man’s explicit consent. From this point of view, political representation can no longer be seen as the delegation of an individual will or as a simple relation based on mandate. It becomes a process in which the elements of reason and knowledge scattered in the bosom of society are collected through elections and publicity, and the most “capable ones” can deliberate on the interests of the nation.17 Thus, the purpose of representative government is to “constitute the government through the action of society, and society through the action of government.”18 This theme is closely related to another fundamental concern of Guizot, that is, to multiply the contact points between opinion (society) and power, a task that had been rendered possible for the first time by the institutions of representative government, above all publicity and open parliamentary debates.

  To conclude, by reading The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe we stand to discover a powerful defense of liberty and a first-rate political philosopher who speaks to us in strikingly original language about important issues that continue to concern us. Distinguished politician, historian, political philosopher, ambassador, polemicist, and pillar of faith, Guizot has remained after his death a singular character who cannot be understood in terms of black-and-white categories. While Guizot the historian acquired a worldwide reputation a century and a half ago and his words “Enrichissezvous”19 made him famous as a defender of the middle class, Guizot the political thinker has been neglected in the English-speaking world. The reissue of The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe should therefore be seen as an act of justice that is supposed to retrieve from oblivion the writings of a great liberal and statesman who remains one of the last great “virgin forests” in modern political thought.

  aurelian craiutu

  • Indiana University
    Bloomington

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  This edition reproduces the original English translation of François Guizot’s History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe by Andrew R. Scoble (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861). Guizot gave these lectures on the history of representative government in Paris in 1820–1822. They were published in French three decades later as Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe (Paris, Didier, 1851, 2 vols.). Andrew Scoble’s translation is reprinted here without any substantive changes. The only important change is the one operated in the title that was incorrectly printed in the original edition (“History of the Origin of Representative Government in Europe” instead of “History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe”). In addition to being accurate, Scoble’s translation has the unique advantage of being an elegant nineteenth-century English version of a well-written nineteenth-century French text.

  As editor, I was responsible for writing the introduction and preparing a set of explanatory notes that shed light on Guizot’s theoretical and historical background. The footnotes that appeared in the original English translation are marked with symbols and are reprinted here unchanged. The editor’s footnotes (marked with numbers) are the explanatory notes mentioned above, plus translations of the Latin phrases used by Guizot in his text. The translations were made by Christine Clarkson, to whom I would like to extend special thanks. Finally, we have created a new index for this Liberty Fund edition.

  Liberty Fund welcomed with enthusiasm my proposal and was extremely supportive of the entire project. Special thanks to the Liberty Fund staff for their dedicated work and genuine commitment to retrieving from oblivion this classic work of Guizot. Liberty Fund also sponsored a colloquium on Guizot’s political thought in which we used excerpts of this important book.

  We hope that this new edition of Guizot’s History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, that has been out of print for more than a century, will be an opportunity for many readers to rediscover a major thinker and historian whose writings are essential to understanding the evolution of liberal democracy.

  PREFACE

  In 1820, at the time when the various faculties of the Académie de Paris and the Collège de France were recommencing their courses of lectures, several persons combined to establish a Journal des Cours Publiques, in which they reproduced, from their notes, the lectures which they had attended. The course which I delivered, at this period, on the history of Representative Government, occupies a place in this collection. I did not revise the analyses of my lectures which were published. They were brief and incomplete, and frequently incorrect and confused. I have been requested to authorize a reprint of them. I could not consent to this without bestowing upon these analyses, at the present day, that labour of revision to which they were not subjected at the time of their publication. The two volumes which I now publish are the result of this labour, which has been more protracted, and has involved more considerable alterations than I at first anticipated. In order to accomplish it, I have frequently had recourse to my Essaies sur l’ Histoire de France, in which I embodied, in 1823, some of my researches on the same subject. This course of lectures on the origin of Representative Government is now as exact and complete as if my lectures in 1820–1822 had been collected and revised with the same care as I bestowed, in 1827–1830, on the publication of my courses on the General History of Civilization in Europe, and on the History of Civilization in France.

  When, in the year 1820, I devoted my energies to this course of instruction, I was taking leave of public life, after having, during six years, taken an active part in the work of establishing representative government in our own land. The political ideas and friends with whom I had been associated were, at that period, removed from the head of affairs. I connected myself with their reverses, without abandoning our common hopes and efforts. We had faith in our institutions. Whether they entailed upon us good or evil fortune, we were equally devoted to them. I was unwilling to cease to serve their cause. I endeavoured to explain the origin and principles of representative government, as I had attempted to practise it.1

  How shall I speak, at the present day, of bad fortune and reverse, in reference to 1820? What shall we say of the fate which has recently overtaken our fatherland, and of that which is perhaps in store for us? It is a shame to make use of the same words in respect to evils and dangers so prodigiously unequal. In truth, the trials of 1820 were severe and painful, yet the State was not thrown into confusion by them, and they were followed by ten years of regular and free government. In 1830, a still severer trial, the test of a revolution, was applied to our noble institutions, and they did not succumb; they shook off the revolutionary yoke, and gave us eighteen years more of order and liberty. From 1814 to 1848, notwithstanding so many violent convulsions, constitutional monarchy remained standing, and events justified the obstinacy of our hopes. But now the storm has struck every institution, and still threatens to destroy all that survive. Not merely kings and laws, but the very root of government, of all government—what do I say?—the roots of society itself have been reached, and are left bare and almost torn up. Can we again seek safety at the same source? can we still believe and hope in representative government and monarchy?

  I have not escaped, any more than other persons, from the anxiety occasioned by this doubt. Nevertheless, in proportion as the events which have weighed upon us, for the last three years, have received development and elucidation—when I beheld society pausing, by an effort of its own, on the verge of that abyss to which it had been brought by its own weakness—I felt the revival in my soul of that faith and hope which have filled my life, and which, until these last days, have constituted the faith and hope of our time. Among the infinite illusions of human vanity, we must number those of misfortune; whether as peoples or as individuals, in public or in private life, we delight to persuade ourselves that our trials are unprecedented, and that we have to endure evils and to surmount obstacles previously unheard of. How deceitful is this consolation of pride in suffering! God has made the condition of men, of all men, more severe than they are willing to believe; and he causes them, at all times, to purchase, at a dearer price than they had anticipated, the success of their labours and the progress of their destiny. Let us accept this stern law without a murmur; let us courageously pay the price which God puts upon success, instead of basely renouncing the hope of success itself. The leading idea, the national desire of France, in 1789, was the alliance of free institutions with hereditary monarchy. We have been carried far away from our design; we have immensely deceived ourselves and gone astray in our presumptuous hopes; but we should no less deceive ourselves in our sceptical despondency. God, who permits the burden of their faults to fall upon nations, does not make their own life to be to them a continuous falsehood and a fatal snare; our whole history, our entire civilization, all our glories and our greatness urged and led us onward to the union of monarchy and liberty; we have often taken the wrong road in our way towards our object; and in order to reach it, we shall still have to take many new roads and to pass over many difficult spots. But let our object remain the same; for there lies our haven.

  If I should apply, at the present day, to these historical studies of 1820, all the lessons which political life has given me since that period, I should perhaps modify some of the ideas which I have expressed in reference to some of the conditions and forms of representative government. This system of government has no unique and solely good type, in conformity to which it must necessarily and universally be instituted. Providence, which allots to nations different origins and destinies, also opens to justice and liberty more than one way of entering into governments: and it would be foolishly to reduce their chances of success if we condemned them to appear always with the same lineaments, and to develope themselves by the same means. One thing only is important, and that is, that the essential principles of order and liberty should subsist beneath the different forms which the interference of the country in its own affairs may assume amongst different peoples and at different epochs. These essential and necessary principles of all representative government are precisely those which, in our days, are ignored and outraged. I venture to believe that they will be found faithfully expounded in these lectures; and that on this account, even at the present day, my work will not be devoid either of utility or of interest.

  guizot

  PART 1

  REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS IN ENGLAND, FRANCE, AND SPAIN, FROM THE FIFTH TO THE ELEVENTH CENTURY

  LECTURE I

  Simultaneous development of history and civilization. ~ Two errors in our method of considering the past; proud disdain, or superstitious admiration. ~ Historic impartiality the vocation of the present age. ~ Divisions of the history of the political institutions of Europe into four great epochs. ~ Representative government was the general and natural aim of these institutions. ~ Object of the course; inquiry into the origin of representative government in France, Spain, and England. ~ State of mind appropriate to this inquiry.

  Gentelmen,—

  Such is the immensity of human affairs, that, so far from exhibiting superannuation and decay with the progress of time, they seem to gain new youth, and to gird themselves afresh at frequent intervals, in order to appear under aspects hitherto unknown. Not only does each age receive a vocation to devote itself especially to a particular region of inquiry; but the same studies are to each age as a mine but little explored, or as an unknown territory where objects for discovery present themselves at every step. In the study of history this truth is especially apparent. The facts about which history concerns itself neither gain nor lose anything by being handed down from age to age; whatever we have seen in these facts, and whatever we can see, has been contained in them ever since they were originally accomplished; but they never allow themselves to be fully apprehended, nor permit all their meaning to be thoroughly investigated; they have, so to speak, innumerable secrets, which slowly utter themselves after man has become prepared to recognise them. And as everything in man and around him changes, as the point of view from which he considers the facts of history, and the state of mind which he brings to the survey, continually vary, we may speak of the past as changing with the present; unperceived facts reveal themselves in ancient facts; other ideas, other feelings, are called up by the same names and the same narratives; and man thus learns that in the infinitude of space opened to his knowledge, everything remains constantly fresh and inexhaustible; in regard to his ever-active and ever-limited intelligence.

  This combined view of the greatness of events and the feebleness of the human mind, never appears so startlingly distinct as upon the occurrence of those extraordinary crises, which, so to speak, entirely delocalize man, and transport him to a different sphere. Such revolutions, it is true, do not unfold themselves in an abrupt and sudden manner. They are conceived and nurtured in the womb of society long before they emerge to the light of day. But the moment arrives beyond which their full accomplishment cannot be delayed, and they then take possession of all that exists in society, transform it, and place everything in an entirely new position; so that if, after such a shock, man looks back upon the history of the past, he can scarcely recognise it. That which he sees, he had never seen before; what he saw once, no longer exists as he saw it; facts rise up before him with unknown faces, and speak to him in a strange language. He sets himself to the examination of them under the guidance of other principles of observation and appreciation. Whether he considers their causes, their nature, or their consequences, unknown prospects open before him on all sides. The actual spectacle remains the same; but it is viewed by another spectator occupying a different place—to his eyes all is changed.

  What marvel is it, gentlemen, if, in this new state of things and of himself, man adopts, as the special objects of his study, questions and facts which connect themselves more immediately with the revolution which has just been accomplished,—if he directs his gaze precisely towards that quarter where the change has been most profound? The grand crises in the life of humanity are not all of the same nature; although they, sooner or later, influence the whole mass of society, they act upon it and approach it, in some respects, from different sides. Sometimes it is by religious ideas, sometimes by political ideas, sometimes by a simple discovery, or a mechanical invention, that the world is ruled and changed. The apparent metamorphosis which the past then undergoes is effected chiefly in that which corresponds to the essential character of the revolution that is actually going forward in the present. Let us imagine, if we can, the light in which the traditions and religious recollections of Paganism must have appeared to the Christians of the first centuries, and then we shall understand the new aspects under which old facts present themselves in those times of renovation, which Providence has invested with a peculiar importance and significance.

  Such is, gentlemen, up to a certain point, the position in which we ourselves are placed with regard to that subject which is to come before us in the present course of lectures. It is from the midst of the new political order which has commenced in Europe in our own days that we are about to consider, I do not say naturally, but necessarily, the history of the political institutions of Europe from the foundation of modern states. To descend from this point of view is not in our power. Against our will, and without our knowledge, the ideas which have occupied the present will follow us wherever we go in the study of the past. Vainly should we attempt to escape from the lights which they cast thereupon; those lights will only diffuse themselves around on all sides with more confusion and less utility. We will then frankly accept a position which, in my opinion, is favourable, and certainly inevitable. We attempt today, and with good reason, to reconnect what we now are with what we formerly were; we feel the necessity of bringing our habits into association with intelligent feeling, to connect our institutions with our recollections, and, in fine, to gather together the links in that chain of time, which never allows itself to be entirely broken, however violent may be the assaults made upon it. In accordance with the same principles, and guided by the same spirit, we shall not refuse the aid which can be derived from modern ideas and institutions, in order to guide our apprehension and judgment while studying ancient institutions, since we neither can, nor would wish to be separated from our proper selves, any more than we would attempt or desire to isolate ourselves from our forefathers.1

  This study, gentlemen, has been much neglected in our days; and when attempts have been made to revive it, it has been approached with such a strong preoccupation of mind, or with such a determined purpose, that the fruits of our labour have been damaged at the outset. Opinions which are partial and adopted before facts have been fairly examined, not only have the effect of vitiating the rectitude of judgment, but they moreover introduce a deplorable frivolity into researches which we may call material. As soon as the prejudiced mind has collected a few documents and proofs in support of its cherished notion, it is contented, and concludes its inquiry. On the one hand, it beholds in facts that which is not really contained in them; on the other hand, when it believes that the amount of information it already possesses will suffice, it does not seek further knowledge. Now, such has been the force of circumstances and passions among us, that they have disturbed even erudition itself. It has become a party weapon, an instrument of attack or defence; and facts themselves, inflexible and immutable facts, have been by turns invited or repulsed, perverted or mutilated, according to the interest or sentiment in favour of which they were summoned to appear.

  In accordance with this prevailing circumstance of our times, two opposite tendencies are observable in those opinions and writings which have passed a verdict on the ancient political institutions of Europe. On the one hand, we see minds so overpowered by the splendour of the new day which has dawned upon mankind, that they see in the generations which preceded, only darkness, disorder, and oppression,—objects either for their indignation or their contempt. Proud disdain of the past has taken possession of these minds,—a disdain which exalts itself into a system. This system has presented all the characteristics of settled impiety. Laws, sentiments, ideas, customs, everything pertaining to our forefathers, it has treated with coldness or scorn. It would seem as if reason, regard for justice, love of liberty, all that makes society dignified and secure, were a discovery of today, made by the generation which has last appeared. In thus renouncing its ancestors, this generation forgets that it will soon join them in the tomb, and that in its turn it will leave its inheritance to its children.

  This pride, gentlemen, is not less contrary to the truth of things than fatal to the society which entertains it. Providence does not so unequally deal with the generations of men, as to impoverish some in order that the rest may be lavishly endowed at their expense. It is doubtless true, that virtue and glory are not shared in a uniform degree by different ages; but there is no age which does not possess some legitimate claim upon the respect of its descendants. There is not one which has not borne its part in the grand struggle between good and evil, truth and error, liberty and oppression. And not only has each age maintained this laborious struggle on its own account, but whatever advantage it has been able to gain, it has transmitted to its successors. The superior vantage-ground on which we were born, is a gift to us from our forefathers, who died upon the territory themselves had won by conquest. It is then a blind and culpable ingratitude which affects to despise the days which are gone. We reap the fruits of their labours and sacrifices—is it too much for us to hallow the memory of those labours, and to render a just recompense for those sacrifices?

  If those men who affect, or who actually feel, this irreverent disdain or in difference for ancient times, were better acquainted with these times and their history, they would find themselves constrained to entertain a different opinion. When, in fact, we investigate the cause of this unnatural state of mind, only one explanation can be found. At the moment of grand social reforms, during epochs full of ambition and hope, when important changes are on all sides demanded and necessary, the authority of the past is the one obstacle which opposes itself to all tendency to innovation. The present time seems devoted to errors and abuses, and the wisdom of centuries is appealed to by one party in order to resist the future to which the aspirations of the other party are directed. Accordingly, a kind of blind hatred of the past takes possession of a great number of men. They regard it as making common cause with the enemies of present amelioration, and the weapons employed by these latter confirm this idea in their mind. Gentlemen, the notion is full of falsehood and misapprehension. It is not true that injustice and abuses alone can shelter themselves under the authority of antiquity, that they only are capable of appealing to precedent and experience. Truth, justice, and rectitude, are also graced by venerable titles; and at no period has man allowed them to be proscribed. Take in succession all the moral needs, all the legitimate interests of our society, arrange them in systematic order, and then traverse the history of our country;—you will find them constantly asserted and defended,—all epochs will afford you innumerable proofs of struggles endured, of victories won, of concessions obtained in this holy cause. It has been carried on with different issues, but in no time or place has it been abandoned. There is not a truth or a right which cannot bring forward, from any period of history, monuments to consecrate, and facts to vindicate it. Justice has not retired from the world, even when it finds there least support:—it has constantly sought and embraced, both with governments and in the midst of peoples, all opportunities for extending its dominion. It has struggled, protested, waited; and when it has had only glory to bestow upon those who have fought for it, it has bestowed that glory with a liberal hand.

  Let us then, gentlemen, reassure ourselves with reference to the study of the past. It contains nothing which ought to alarm the friends of all that is good and true. It is into their hands, on the contrary, and in subservience to interests which are dear to them, that it will ever deposit the authority of antiquity and the lessons of experience.

  This unjust contempt for ancient institutions, however, this wild attempt to dissever the present from its connexion with former ages and to begin society afresh, thus delivering it up to all the dangers of a position in which it is deprived of its roots and cast upon the protection of a wisdom which is yet in its infancy, is not an error of which we have been the first to give an example. In one of those ephemeral parliaments which attempted to maintain its existence under the yoke of Cromwell, it was seriously proposed to deliver up to the flames all the archives in the Tower of London, and thus to annihilate the monuments of the existence of England in former ages. These infatuated men wished to abolish the past, flattering themselves that they would then obtain an absolute control over the future. Their design was rejected, and their hope foiled; and very soon England, regaining, with new liberties, respect for all its recollections of the past, entered upon that career of development and prosperity which it has continued up to our times.

  Side by side with this infatuation which has induced men, otherwise enlightened, to neglect the study of the ancient institutions of Europe, or only to regard their history with a hasty and supercilious glance, we have seen another infatuation arise, perhaps still more unreasonable and arrogant. Here, as elsewhere, impiety has been the herald of superstition. The past, so despised, so neglected by the one party, has become to the other an object of idolatrous veneration. The former desire that society, mutilating its own being, should disown its former life; the latter would have it return to its cradle, in order to remain there immovable and powerless. And as those lords of the future would in their own wild fancy create out of it, so far as regards government and social order, the most brilliant Utopias, so these, on the other hand, find their Utopia in their dreams of the past. The work might appear more difficult; the field open to the imagination may seem less open, and facts might be expected sometimes to press inconveniently against the conclusions sought. But what will not a preoccupied mind overcome? Plato and Harrington, giving to their thoughts the widest range, had constructed their ideal of a republic; and we, with still more confidence, have constructed our ideal of feudalism, of absolute power, and even of barbarism. Fully organized societies, adorned with freedom and morality, have been conceived and fashioned at leisure, in order thence to be transported into past ages. After having attempted to resolve, according to principles opposed to modern tendencies, the great problem of the harmony between liberty and power, between order and progress, we have required that ancient facts should receive these theories and adapt themselves to them. And since, in the vast number of facts, some are to be found which lend themselves with docility and readiness to the purposes which they are required to serve, the discoverers of this pretended antiquity have not lacked either quotations or proofs which might seem to give it an ascertained and definite existence in the past. Thus, France, after having spent more than five centuries in its struggles to escape from the feudal system, has all at once discovered that it was wrong in liberating itself from this system, for that in this state it possessed true happiness and freedom; and history, which believed itself to be chargeable with so many evils, iniquities, and convulsions, is surprised to learn that it only hands down to us recollections of two or three golden ages.

  There is no necessity for me, gentlemen, to offer any very serious opposition to this fantastic and superstitious adoration of the past. It would hardly have merited even a passing allusion, were it not connected with systems and tendencies in which all society is interested. It is one of the collateral circumstances of the grand struggle which has never ceased to agitate the world. The interests and ideas which have successively taken possession of society have always wished to render it stationary in the position which has given it over to their rule; and when it has escaped from them, it has ever, in so doing, had to withstand those seductive images and influences which these interests have called to their aid. There is no fear that the world will allow itself to be thus ensnared—progress is the law of its nature; hope, and not regret, is the spring of its movement—the future alone possesses an attractive virtue. Peoples who have emerged from slavery have always endeavoured by laws to prevent enfranchised man from again falling into servitude. Providence has not been less careful with regard to humanity; and the chains which have not sufficed to confine it, are still less able to resume the grasp which they have lost. But the efforts of a retrograde system have often perverted the study of ancient times. The Emperor Julian saw in the popular fables of Greece a philosophy capable of satisfying those moral necessities which Christianity had come to satisfy, and he demanded that men should see and honour in the history of decayed paganism that which only existed in his dreams. The same demands have been made with as little reason on behalf of the ancient political institutions of Europe. Justice, and justice alone, is due to that which no longer exists, as well as to that which still remains. Respect for the past means neither approbation nor silence for that which is false, culpable, or dangerous. The past deserves no gratitude or consideration from us, except on account of the truth which it has known, and the good which it has aimed at or accomplished. Time has not been endowed with the unhallowed office of consecrating evil or error; on the contrary, it unmasks and consumes them. To spare them because they are ancient, is not to respect the past, but it is to outrage truth, which is older than the world itself.

  If I am not mistaken, gentlemen, we are at this time in an especially favourable position for avoiding both of the general errors which I have just described. Perhaps few persons think so; but impartiality, which is the duty of all times, is, in my opinion, the mission of ours—not that cold and unprofitable impartiality which is the off spring of in difference, but that energetic and fruitful impartiality which is inspired by the vision and admiration of truth. That equal and universal justice, which is now the deepest want of society, is also the ruling idea which is ever foremost in position and influence, wherever the spirit of man is found. Blind prejudices, insincere declamation, are no longer any more acceptable in the world of literature, than are iniquity and violence in the world of politics. They may still have some power to agitate society, but they are not permitted either to satisfy or to govern it. The particular state of our own country strengthens this disposition, or, if you please, this general tendency, of the European mind. We have not lived in that state of repose in which objects appear continually under almost the same aspects, in which the present is so changeless and regular as to present to man’s view an horizon that seldom varies, in which old and powerful conventionalisms govern thought as well as life, in which opinions are well nigh habits, and soon become prejudices—we have been cast not only into new tracks, but these are continually interrupted and diversified. All theories, all practices, are displayed in union or in rivalry before our eyes. Facts of all kinds have appeared to us under a multitude of aspects. Human nature has been urged impetuously onwards, and laid bare, so to speak, in all the elements of which it is constituted. Affairs and men have all passed from system to system, from combination to combination; and the observer, while himself continually changing his point of view, has been the witness of a spectacle which changed as often as he. Such times, gentlemen, offer but little tranquillity, and prepare tremendous difficulties for those which shall follow them. But they certainly give to minds capable of sustaining their pressure, an independent disposition, and an extended survey, which do not belong to more serene and fortunate periods. The large number, and the unsettled character of the facts which appear before us, widen the range of our ideas; the diversity of trials which all things undergo within so short an interval, teach us to judge them with impartiality; human nature reveals itself in its simplicity, as well as in its wealth. Experience hastens to fulfil its course, and, in some sort, hoards its treasures; in the short space of one life, man sees, experiences, and attempts that which might have sufficed to fill several centuries. This advantage is sufficiently costly, gentlemen, to act at least as an inducement to our reaping it. It does not become us to entertain narrow views and obstinate prejudices; to petrify the form of our judgments by foregone conclusions; in fine, to ignore that diffusion of truth, which has been attested by so many vissicitudes, and which imposes on us the duty of seeking it everywhere, and rendering it homage wherever we meet it, if we would have its sanction to our thoughts, and its aid to our utterance.

  In this spirit, gentlemen, we shall attempt to consider the ancient political institutions of Europe, and to sketch their history. While for this purpose we appropriate such lights as our age can furnish, we shall endeavour to carry with us none of the passions which divide it. We shall not approach past times under the guidance of such impressions belonging to the present, as those whose influence we have just deplored; we shall not address to them those questions which, by their very nature, dictate the answers which they shall receive. I have too much regard for those who listen to me, and for the truth after which I, in common with them, am seeking, to suppose that history can in any sense consent to suppress that which it has asserted, or to utter what is not affirmed by the voice of truth. We must interrogate it freely, and then leave it to full independence.

  This study, gentlemen, requires a centre to which it may stand in relation—we must find for so large a number of facts, a bond which may unite and harmonize them. This bond exists in the facts themselves—nothing can be less doubtful. Unity and consecutiveness are not lacking in the moral world, as they are not in the physical. The moral world has, like the system of celestial bodies, its laws and activity; only the secret according to which it acts is more profound, and the human mind has more difficulty in discovering it. We have entered upon this inquiry so late, that events already accomplished may serve us as guides. We have no need to ask of some philosophical hypothesis, itself perhaps uncertain and incomplete, what, in the order of political development, has been the tendency of European civilization. A system which evidently, from a general view of the subject, adheres continually to the same principles, starts from the same necessities, and tends to the same results, manifests or proclaims its presence throughout the whole of Europe. Almost everywhere the representative form of government is demanded, allowed, or established. This fact is, assuredly, neither an accident, nor the symptom of a transient madness. It has certainly its roots in the past political career of the nations, as it has its motives in their present condition. And if, warned by this, we turn our attention to the past, we shall everywhere meet with attempts, more or less successful, either made with a conscious regard to this system so as to produce it naturally, or striving to attain it by the subjugation of contrary forces. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Sweden, supply us with numerous illustrations of this. If we look to one quarter we shall see these attempts after they have lasted for some time, and assumed an historical consistency; in another, they have hardly commenced before they issue in failure; in a third, they end in a kind of federation of the governments themselves. Their forms are as diverse as their fortunes. England alone continues these struggles without intermission, and enters at last into full enjoyment of their realization. But everywhere they take their place in history, and influence the destinies of nations. And when at last, no longer finding even the shadow of a representative government on the Continent of Europe, and beholding it only in the parliament of Great Britain, a man of genius inquires into its origin, he says that “this noble system was first found in the woods of Germany,” from whence the ancestors of the whole of Europe have all equally proceeded.2

  In this opinion, as will be afterwards seen, I do not agree with Montesquieu; but it is evident, both from ancient facts and from those which we ourselves have witnessed, that the representative form of government has, so to speak, constantly hovered over Europe, ever since the founding of modern states. Its reappearance at so many times and in so many places, is not to be accounted for by the charm of any theory, or the power of any conspiracy. In the endeavour after it, men have often ignored its principles and mistaken its nature, but it has existed in European society as the basis of all its deepest wants and most enduring tendencies; sovereigns have invoked its aid in their hours of difficulty, and nations have ever returned to it during those intervals of prosperity and repose in which the march of civilization has been accelerated. Its most undeveloped efforts have left behind them indelible mementos. Indeed, ever since the birth of modern societies, their condition has been such, that in their institution, in their aspirations, and in the course of their history, the representative form of government, while hardly realized as such by the mind, has constantly loomed more or less distinctly in the distance, as the port at which they must at length arrive, in spite of the storms which scatter them, and the obstacles which confront and oppose their entrance.

  We do not then, gentlemen, make an arbitrary choice, but one perfectly natural and necessary, when we make the representative form of government the central idea and aim of our history of the political institutions of Europe. To regard them from this point of view will not only give to our study of them the highest interest, but will enable us rightly to enter into the facts themselves, and truly to appreciate them. We shall then make this form of government the principal object of our consideration. We shall seek it wherever it has been thought to be discernible, wherever it has attempted to gain for itself a footing, wherever it has fully established itself. We shall inquire if it has in reality existed at times and in places where we have been accustomed to look for its germs. Whenever we find any indications of it, however crude and imperfect they may be, we shall inquire how it has been produced, what has been the extent of its power, and what influences have stifled it and arrested its progress. Arriving at last at the country where it has never ceased to consolidate and extend itself, from the thirteenth century to our own times, we shall remain there in order to follow it in its march, to unravel its vicissitudes, to watch the development of the principles and institutions with which it is associated, penetrating into their nature and observing their action—to study, in a word, the history of the representative system in that country where it really possesses a history which identifies itself with that of the people and their government.

  Before undertaking this laborious task, it will be necessary for me, gentlemen, to exhibit before you, in a few words, the chief phases of the political condition of Europe, and the series of the principal systems of institutions through which it has passed. This anticipatory classification,—which is but a general survey of facts which will afterwards reappear before you and bring their own evidence with them,—is necessary, not only in order to clear the way before us in our study, but also to indicate the particular institutions and times which the point of view we have chosen for ourselves especially calls us to consider.

  The history of the political institutions of Europe divides itself into four general epochs, during which society has been governed according to modes and forms essentially distinct.

  The tribes of Germany, in establishing themselves on the Roman soil, carried thither with them their liberty, but none of those institutions by which its exercise is regulated and its permanence guaranteed. Individuals were free—a free society, however, was not constituted. I will say further, that a society was not then existent. It was only after the conquest, and in consequence of their territorial establishment, that a society really began to be formed either among the conquerors and the conquered, or among the victors themselves. The work was long and difficult. The positions in which they were placed were complicated and precarious, their forces scattered and irregular, the human mind little capable of extensive combinations and foresight. Different systems of institutions, or rather different tendencies, appeared and contended with each other. Individuals, for whom liberty then meant only personal independence and isolation, struggled to preserve it. Those who were strong succeeded in obtaining it, and became powerful; those who were weak lost it and fell under the yoke of the powerful. The kings, at first only the chiefs of warrior bands, and then the first of the great territorial proprietors, attempted to confirm and extend their power; but simultaneously with them an aristocracy was formed, by the local success of scattered forces and the concentration of properties, which did not allow royalty to establish itself with any vigour or to exert any wide-spread influence. The ancient liberty of the forest, the earliest attempts at monarchical system, the nascent elements of the feudal regime,—such were the powers which were then struggling for pre-eminence in society. No general political order could establish itself in the midst of this conflict. It lasted till the eleventh century. Then the feudal system had become predominant. The primitive independence and wild equality of individuals had either become merged into a condition of servitude, or had submitted to the hierarchical subordination of feudalism. All central power, whether of kings or of ancient national assemblies, had well nigh disappeared; liberty existed co-ordinately with power; the sovereignty was scattered. This is the first epoch.*

  The second epoch is that of the feudal system. Three essential characteristics belong to it; 1st. The reduction of the mass of the people to slavery or a condition bordering thereon: 2nd. The hierarchical and federative organization of the feudal aristocracy, extending in its application both to persons and lands: 3rd. The almost entire dissolution of the sovereignty, which then devolved on every feudal proprietor capable of exercising and defending it; from whence resulted the feebleness of the royal power and the destruction of monarchical unity, which disappeared almost as completely as national unity. This system prevailed until the thirteenth century.

  Then commenced a new epoch. The feudal lord, already possessed of royal power, aspired after royal dignity. A portion of the inhabitants of the territory, having regained somewhat of the power they had lost, longed to become free. The feudal aristocracy was attacked on the one hand by the enfranchisement of the townsmen and tenants, on the other hand by the extension of the royal power. Sovereignty tended to concentration, liberty to diffusion; national unity began to shape itself at the same time as monarchical unity appeared. This was at once indicated and promoted by attempts after a representative form of government, which were made and renewed during nearly three centuries, wherever the feudal system fell into decay, or the monarchical system prevailed. But soon sovereigns also began almost everywhere to distrust it in their turn. They could not behold with in difference that sovereignty, which after having been long diffused had been regained and concentrated by their efforts, now again divided at its very centre. Besides, the people were deficient alike in such strength and knowledge as would enable them to continue, on the one hand, against the feudal system, a struggle which had not yet ceased, and to sustain, on the other hand, a new struggle against the central power. It was evident that the times were not fully matured; that society, which had not thoroughly emerged from that condition of servitude which had been the successor of social chaos, was neither so firmly consolidated nor so mentally disciplined as to be able to secure at once order by the equitable administration of power, and liberty by the safeguards of large and influential public institutions. The efforts after representative government became more occasional and feeble, and at length disappeared. One country alone guarded and defended it, and advanced from one struggle to another, till it succeeded. In other places, the purely monarchical system prevailed. This result was accomplished in the sixteenth century.

  The fourth epoch has lasted from that time to our own days. It is chiefly marked in England by the progress of the representative system; on the Continent, by the development of the purely monarchical system, with which are associated local privileges, judicial institutions which exercise a powerful influence on political order, and some remnants of those assemblies which, in epochs anterior to the present, appeared under a more general form, but which now con fine themselves to certain provinces, and are almost exclusively occupied with administrative functions. Under this system, though political liberty is no longer met with, barbarism and feudalism finally disappear before absolute power; interior order, the reconciliation of different classes, civil justice, public resources and information, make rapid progress; nations become enlightened and prosperous, and their prosperity, material as well as moral, excites in them juster apprehensions of, and more earnest longings for, that representative system which they had sought in times when they possessed neither the knowledge nor the power requisite for its exercise and preservation.

  This short epitome of facts has already indicated to you, gentlemen, the epochs towards which our studies will be principally directed. The objects of our search are the political institutions of various peoples. The representative system is that around which our researches will centre. Wherever, then, we do not meet with those general institutions, under the empire of which people unite themselves, and which demand the manifestation of general society in its government—wherever we perceive no trace of the representative system, and no direct effort to produce it—there we shall not linger. All forms and conditions of society present rich and curious subjects for observation; but in this inexhaustible series of facts we must choose only those which have a strict relation to one another, and a direct interest for us. The second and the fourth epochs therefore, that is to say, feudalism and absolute power, will occupy us but little. We shall only speak of them so far as a consideration of them is necessary to connect and explain the periods which will more directly claim our attention. I purpose to study with you the first and the third epochs, and the fourth, so far as it relates to England. The first epoch, which shows us the German people establishing themselves on Roman soil—the struggle of their primitive institutions, or rather of their customs and habits, against the natural results of their new position—in fine, the throes attending the earliest formation of modern nations—has especial claims on our notice. I believe that, so far as regards political institutions, this time possessed nothing which deserves the name; but all the elements were there, in existence and commotion, as in the chaos which precedes creation. It is for us to watch this process, under which governments and peoples came into being. It is for us to ascertain whether, as has been asserted, public liberty and the representative system were actually there, whence some symptoms announced that they might one day emerge. When, in the third epoch, we see the feudal system being dissolved—when we watch the first movements towards a representative government appear at the same time with the efforts of a central power which aims at becoming general and organized—we shall recognize here, without difficulty, a subject which immediately belongs to us. We shall seek to learn what societies were then aroused, and by what means they have sought for trustworthy institutions, which might guarantee the continuance at once of order and of liberty. And when we have seen their hopes deceived by the calamities of the times, when we have detected in the vices of the social state, far more than in the influence of any disorderly or perverse desires, the causes of the ill-success of these magnanimous attempts, we shall be brought by our subject into the very midst of that people, then treated more leniently by fortune, which has paid dearly for free institutions, but which has guarded them to the last when they perished everywhere else, and which, while preserving and developing them for itself, has offered to other nations, if not a model, yet certainly an example.3

  It would be a small matter for us, gentlemen, thus to limit the field of our inquiries so far as epochs are concerned, if we did not also assign some boundaries in respect to place. The inquiry would be too large and protracted were we to follow the course of political institutions throughout the whole of Europe, according to the plan I have just indicated. Moreover, the diversity of events and conditions has been so great in Europe, that, notwithstanding certain general characteristics and certain philosophical results which the facts everywhere present, they very often resist all the attempts we may make to bring them under any uniform guiding principle. In vain do we strive to collect them together under the same horizon, or to force them into the same channel; ever do they release themselves from our grasp in order to assume elsewhere the place assigned to them by truth. We should therefore be compelled either to limit ourselves to generalities yielding but little instruction to those who have not sounded all their depths, or else continually to interrupt the course of our inquiry, in order to rove from one people to another with an attention which would be continually distracted and soon wearied. It will be more profitable for us to take a narrower range. England, France, and Spain, will supply us with abundant materials for our undertaking. In these countries we shall study political institutions under the different phases and in the various epochs which I have just exhibited before you. There we shall find that these epochs are more clearly defined, and that the chief facts which characterize them appear under more complete and simple forms. In France and Spain, moreover, the general attempts after a representative government, made in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, assumed a more definite shape. We are therefore dissuaded by a variety of considerations from carrying our steps beyond these limits. Our researches will thereby gain both in interest and in solidity.

  This interest, gentlemen, I must say at the outset, is not that merely which attaches itself to human affairs, which are ever attractive to man, however trivial may be the attention which he bestows upon them. The study of the ancient political institutions of Europe demands serious and assiduous effort. I am here to share this with you, not to undertake it for you. I shall be frequently obliged to enter into details, which may appear dry at first, but which are important because of the results to which they lead. I shall not content myself with merely presenting before you these results as a general expression of facts; I shall feel called upon to put you in possession of the facts themselves. The truths which they contain must be seen by yourselves to proceed naturally from them, and must not be allowed a final lodgment in your minds except as they are fortified by such evidence as can establish them. Gentlemen, it is to be borne in mind that truth, wheresoever we may seek it, is not easy of access. We must dig deep for it, as for precious metals, before we find it; we must not shrink from the difficulties, nor from the long duration of the enterprise. It only surrenders itself to resolute and patient endeavour. And not only on behalf of our peculiar study do I urge upon you that you should never allow yourselves to be baffed by the fatigue attendant upon some portions of the work;—a more elevated motive, a more comprehensive claim, gives you this advice. Thrasea, when dying, said to his son-in-law, Helvidius Priscus, “Observe, young man: thou art living in times when it is well that the spirit should become fortified by such a scene as this; and learn how a brave man can die.” Thankful should we be to Heaven that such lessons as these are not now required by us, and that the future does not demand such hard discipline in order that we may be prepared to meet it. But the free institutions which we are called upon to receive and maintain—these demand of us, from our earliest youth, those habits of laborious and patient application which will constitute our fittest preparation. They require that we should, among our first lessons, learn not to shrink either from the pain, or from the length and arduousness of duty. If our destiny is to be sublime, our studies must be severe. Liberty is not a treasure which can be acquired or defended by those who set a disproportionate value on personal ease and gratification; and if ever man attains it after having toiled for it under the influence merely of luxurious or impatient feelings, it denies to him those honours and advantages which he expected to gain from its possession. It was the error of the preceding age that, while it aimed at urging the minds of men into a wider and more active career, it yet fostered the impression that all was then to become easy, that study would be transformed into amusement, and that obstacles were removed from the first steps of a life that was to issue in something great and impressive. The effeminate weakness of such sentiments were relics of the feebleness of times when liberty did not exist. We who live in the present day, know that freedom requires from the man who would enjoy it a sterner exercise of his powers. We know that it allows neither indolence of soul nor fickleness of mind, and that those generations which devote their youth to laborious study can alone secure liberty for their manhood. You will find, gentlemen, as you watch the development of the political institutions of Europe, that the experience of all ages confirms this of our own. You will not find that those grand designs that have been formed for the promotion of truth, justice, and progress, have ever emanated from the abode of sloth, of frivolity, and antipathy to all that demands labour and patience. As you trace back such enterprises to their source, you will always find there, serious aspect and grave determination, existing, so to speak, in their early life. Only by men formed in this mould have public laws and liberties been defended. They have, according as the wants of their age impelled them, resisted disorder or oppression. In the gravity of their own life and thoughts they have found a true measure of their own dignity, and, in their own, of the dignity of humanity. And, gentlemen, do not doubt, in following their example, of achieving also their success. You will soon become convinced that, in spite of the tests to which it has been exposed, our age is not among the most unrestrained that have existed. You will see that patriotism, a respect for law and order, a reverence for all that is just and sacred, have often been purchased at a far heavier price, and have called for severer self-denial. You will find that there is as much feebleness as ingratitude in the disposition that is intimidated and discouraged by the sight of obstacles which still present themselves, when obstacles of a far more formidable character have not wearied the resolution of noble men of former times. And thus, while early exercising your minds in all those habits which will prepare man for the duties of an exalted destiny, you will meet with nothing that will not continually deepen your attachment to your age and to your country.4

  So far as I myself am concerned, may I be allowed, gentlemen, in entering with you today upon the study of the ancient political institutions of Europe, to congratulate myself on being able to approach the subject with the liberty that is suitable to it. It was in works of a similar character that I commenced my intellectual life. But at that time the public exposition of such facts and of the ideas related to them, was hardly permitted. Power had arrived at that condition in which it fears equally any representation of the oppression of peoples, and of their efforts to obtain liberty; as if it must necessarily meet in these two series of historical reminiscences at once the condemnation of its past acts, and the prediction of its future perils. We are no longer in this deplorable position; the institutions which France has received from its sovereign have liberated at once the present and the past. Such is the moral strength possessed by a legitimate and constitutional monarchy, that it trembles neither at the recitals of history nor at the criticisms of reason. It is based upon truth—and truth is consequently neither hostile nor dangerous to it. Wherever all the wants of society are recognised, and all its rights give each other mutual sanction and support, facts present only lessons of utility, and no longer hint at unwelcome allusions. The volume of history can now be spread out before us; and wherever we find the coincidence of legitimacy and constitutional order, we shall behold the prosperity both of governments and of peoples—the dignity of power ennobled and sustained by the dignity of obedience. In all positions, and however great may be the interval which separates them, we shall see man rendering honour to man; we shall see authority and liberty mutually regarding one another with that consideration and respect which can alone unite them in lasting connexion and guarantee their continued harmony. Let us congratulate ourselves, gentlemen, that we are living at a time in which this tutelary alliance has become a necessity—in which force without justice could only be an ephemeral power. The times to which we shall direct our attention experienced a harder lot; they more than once beheld despotism root itself deeply in its position, and at the same time saw injustice assert its claim to a lasting rule. We, gentlemen, who have seen so many and diversified forms of oppression—we have seen them all fall into decay. Neither their most furious violence, nor their most imposing lustre, have sufficed to preserve them from the corruption that is inherent in their nature; and we have at length entered upon an order of things which admits neither the oppression of force which usurps power, nor that of anarchy which destroys it. Let us, gentlemen, reap all the advantages connected with such an order:—let us show our respect for the distinguished author of this Charter by approving ourselves worthy of receiving, and capable of employing, the noble institutions which he has founded. Our gratitude can offer no purer homage.5

  LECTURE 2

  General character of political institutions in Europe, from the fourth to the eleventh century. ~ Political sterility of the Roman Empire. ~ Progress of the Germanic invasions. ~ Sketch of the history of the Anglo-Saxons.

  I have divided the history of the political institutions of modern Europe into four great epochs, the first of which extends from the fourth to the eleventh century. This long interval was required to introduce a little light and fixity into the changeful chaos of those new empires which the successive invasions of the Roman territory by the barbarians had called into being, and whence issued those mighty states whose destiny constitutes the history of modern Europe. The essential characteristics of this epoch are: the conflict and fusion of Germanic customs with Roman institutions, the attempt to establish monarchical government, and the formation of the feudal regime. No general system of political institutions then existed; no great dominant influence can be discerned; all was local, individual, confused, obscure. A multitude of principles and forces, mingling and acting (as it were) by chance, were engaged in conflict to resolve a question of which men were completely ignorant, and the secret of which God alone possessed. This question was: What form of government would issue from all these different elements, brought so violently into contact with each other. Five centuries elapsed before the question was decided, and then feudalism was the social state of Europe.

  Before entering, however, upon the history of institutions, let me say a few words upon the progress of the fall of the Roman Empire, and of the invasions of the barbarians.1

  From the accession of Augustus to the death of Theodosius the Great, the Roman Empire, in spite of its greatness, presents a general character of impotence and sterility. Its institutions, its government, its philosophy, its literature, indeed everything connected with it, bears this sad impress; even the minds of its most illustrious citizens were confined to a circle of antiquated ideas, and wasted in vain regrets for the virtues and glories of the Republic. The fermentation of new ideas produces no decadence; but when, in a great empire, society, feeling itself oppressed and diseased, can conceive no new hopes, no grand ideas,—when, instead of pressing onwards towards the future, it invokes only the recollections and images of the past—then there is a real decline; it matters not how long the state is in falling, its ruin is thenceforward continuous and inevitable. The fall of the Roman Empire occupied fifteen centuries; and for fifteen centuries it continued to decline, until its downfall was consummated by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. During this long period, no new idea, no regenerative principle, was employed to reinvigorate the life of the government; it was sustained by its own mass. Towards the end of the third century, when the universal servitude seemed to be most firmly established, imperial despotism began to feel the precariousness of its position, and the necessity for organization. Diocletian created a vast system of administration. Throughout this immense machine, he established underworks in harmony with the principle of his government; he regulated the action of the central power in the provinces, and surrounded himself with a brilliant and puissant court: but he did not rekindle the moral life of the Empire; he merely organized more perfectly a material resistance to the principles of destruction which were undermining it; and it was with this organization that, first in the West as well as in the East, and afterwards in the East alone, the Empire was able to struggle on, from the fourth to the fifteenth century. Theodosius the Great, who died in 395, was the last emperor who tightly held and skilfully managed the heterogeneous bundle of the Roman power. He was truly a great man; for great men appear in disgraceful times, as well as in times of success; and Theodosius was still the master of the Roman world. As soon as he was dead, the dissolution broke out, under his sons Honorius and Arcadius.* There was now no real unity or central force in the government; Rome gradually abandoned her provinces—Great Britain, Armorica,† and Narbonnese Gaul.‡ Honorius informed the Britons that he should govern them no longer; and directed the inhabitants of Narbonnese Gaul to elect deputies to meet at Arles, and take upon themselves the government of their country. The Empire had become a body destitute of sap and vigour; and in order to prolong the life of the trunk, it was necessary to lop off the branches. But, although despotism was withdrawn from these provinces, servitude remained. It is not easy to return at once to liberty and to political life; and these people, cast upon their own resources, were unable to defend themselves. Great Britain, though more populous than the north of Scotland, was unable to repel a few hordes of Picts and Scots, who, every month, descended from their mountainous abodes, and ravaged the British territory. The Britons besought the Emperor’s assistance, and he sent them a legion, which had no difficulty in overcoming enemies who fled before it; but it was soon withdrawn. After its departure, the incursions recommenced, and Britain again implored the Emperor’s aid. Honorius sent another legion; but told the suppliants that they must provide for themselves in future, for he would send them no more soldiers. The victorious legion left the country to return no more, and Britain, assailed on all sides by bands of barbarians, exhausted its energies in vain entreaties for deliverance. There still exists a letter, entitled Gemitus Britannum, in which the unfortunate inhabitants of that country depict their deplorable condition to Aetius, the Patrician of Gaul. “The barbarians,” they wrote, “drive us to the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians; so that, between the two, we must be either slaughtered or drowned.” With patriotic susceptibility, some English writers—among others Mr. Sharon Turner, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons,* —have cast doubts upon the authenticity of this letter, as if the honour of England were at all involved in the weaknesses of the Britons of the fourth century. However this may be, and whether his aid were besought or not, the Emperor had other matters to attend to, and left the Britons to themselves. He abandoned, in like manner, Narbonnese Gaul and Armorica. This last province, which was less corrupted by the influence of Roman civilization, displayed greater energy than the other two. It took measures for its own defence, by forming a kind of federative league against maritime invasions. Spain, which was also deserted, endeavoured to maintain itself in the same manner against attacks of the same nature; but acted with little vigour, and met with small success. In Great Britain, as well as in Gaul, the Roman government had destroyed the energy of their native independence, and had substituted in its stead nothing but its own artificial and despotic organization. When the Romans withdrew, the children of the Gauls, inhabiting Roman cities, were incapable alike of self-government or self-defence, and fell an easy prey to a few bands of foreign marauders, who had come in search of booty and adventures. Let us briefly glance at the progress of their conquests.

  No determinate epoch can be accurately assigned to the first invasions of the Germans. In all ages, their hordes were wont to descend from their forest-fastnesses into countries less wild and more cultivated than their own. Among their early irruptions, the first regarding which we have any precise historical information is that of the Cimbri and Teutones, who, three hundred thousand in number, ravaged Italy during the time of Marius.* From the age of Augustus to the fifth century, these invasions continued, but were very unequal in importance. Bands of men, unable to find means of subsistence in their own country, entered the imperial territory, and pillaged as they went; their fate was decided by the event of a battle; they were dispersed or annihilated by a defeat, or, if victorious, they took possession of some district which pleased them. Frequently, also, they settled in the country by the consent of the emperors. In the third century, Probus received three or four thousand Franks into Auvergne. A band of Alans took up their residence in the neighbourhood of Orleans; there was a colony of Goths in Thrace, and another of Vandals in Lorraine. Those of the barbarian warriors who preferred war and pillage to a fixed habitation, entered the Roman armies. Their chieftains became generals, and even supplied the imperial court with ministers of state. Thus the barbarians were everywhere settled in the country, serving in the armies, surrounding the person of the prince; formidable allies, whose assistance the weakness of the empire was forced to accept, and who were destined to increase in power and influence in proportion as the imperial power decayed.

  As soon as the Roman government, by abandoning several of its provinces, proclaimed its inability to maintain its own integrity, the question was decided—the empire passed to the Germans. During the interval which elapsed between the beginning of the fifth and the end of the sixth century, they founded eight great monarchies, some of which were established by force, whilst others received the partial assent of the emperors.

  In 409, the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi, after having ravaged Gaul, and crossed the Pyrenees, founded by armed force, in Spain, three monarchies, which were speedily incorporated into one; and this one, in its turn, was, ere long, destroyed by the Visigoths.

  In 429, the Vandals passed from Spain into Africa, and founded a monarchy, which was overthrown by Belisarius.

  In 414, the Burgundians founded a kingdom in Gaul, with the consent of the emperors.

  In 416, the Visigoths penetrated into Southern Gaul, where they founded the kingdom of Aquitaine; and entered by the north-east into Spain, where they settled, after having destroyed the monarchy of the Suevi.

  In 450, the Saxons, led by Hengist and Horsa, invaded Great Britain, and founded the Saxon Heptarchy.

  In 476, the Heruli, under the command of Odoacer, founded a monarchy in Italy.

  In 481, the Franks, with Clovis at their head, established themselves in Gaul.

  In 568, the Lombards, under the command of Alboin, conquered Italy in their turn, and founded a monarchy.

  I do not propose to write the history of these monarchies; but I shall endeavour to delineate their leading institutions and their social condition. In the first place, however, I shall say a few words on the method of their foundation. We must not suppose that there was, in every instance, a cession or complete abandonment of sovereignty by the Roman empire. The residence of a barbarian chieftain in the country was recognised as a fact. He continued to command his own warriors, but no legal authority was granted him over the old inhabitants. The cities long maintained their connexion with Rome; several of them remained municipalities, and continued to appoint their own magistrates. Several towns in Spain, while the country was under the dominion of the Visigoths, received their civic rulers from Constantinople. The emperors, though daily despoiled of some new territory, nevertheless retained, in almost every quarter, an appearance of empire. Thus we find them conferring on the Frankish kings the titles of Patrician of Gaul, and of Consul. This was their protest against the invasion. In scarcely any case was there a transference of sovereign rights. Societies, when abandoned by their government, either received a new one at the hands of the victor, or endeavoured to create one for themselves.

  Among these rising states, I shall first refer to the Anglo-Saxons; then I shall pass on to the Franks; and, finally, to the Visigoths in Spain. I have selected these three nations, because, among them, the institutions of this period are most distinctly marked. The Anglo-Saxons, especially, were placed in a position most favourable for this rapid and complete development. Not only were they more isolated than other peoples; they were also less disturbed by continual invasions of a formidable character. They soon became sole masters of the country. The Britons were almost exterminated; some of them retired into Cornwall, Wales, and Armorica; the others were dispersed, or reduced to servitude. The Anglo-Saxons, moreover, were less under the influence of the old Roman institutions. Among modern nations, they are the people who, so to speak, have lived most upon their own resources, and given birth to their own civilization. This character is discernible in their whole history, and even in their literature. The Greek and Latin classics have produced but little effect upon them; primitive and national customs have maintained their sway in England, and received an almost unmixed development. Among the Franks and Visigoths, the old Germanic national assemblies were either suspended for a long period, or entirely transformed; among the Anglo-Saxons, they never ceased; year after year, they occurred to perpetuate ancient recollections, and to exert a direct influence upon the government. It was, then, among the Anglo-Saxons, that, from the fifth to the eleventh century, institutions received the most natural and complete development. This fact has induced me to commence our studies with their history.

  Let me briefly refer to the events which occurred during the period of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. From 426 to 450, the Britons, left to themselves, struggled as they could against the inhabitants of the north of Scotland. In 449, some Saxons from the banks of the Elbe disembarked upon the island. This descent was neither novel nor unforeseen. It was a fact so ancient, that the Roman emperors had appointed a magistrate—comes littoris Saxonici2 —whose special duty it was to provide for the defence of the coast. It is affirmed, and Hume has repeated the statement, that this Saxon expedition had been summoned by Vortigern, who was then chief of the Britons, to assist him against the Picts and Scots. This appears to me neither natural nor probable; and I find in the chronicler Nennius, a passage which completely disproves the assertion: “Meanwhile,” he says, “there arrived from Germany three vessels full of Saxon exiles.”* They came therefore spontaneously, according to their custom. The Britons, reduced to extremities by their untiring enemies, the Picts and Scots, endeavoured at first to use the Saxons against them. But the newcomers quickly discovered their strength, attempted the conquest of the country which they had promised to defend, and succeeded in their attempt. The Britons resisted, and even displayed somewhat of the energy of their ancestors, under King Arthur and other leaders. A long time elapsed before they were finally subjugated or expelled. During the period from 455 to 582, the Saxons founded the seven or eight kingdoms which composed the Heptarchy, or the Octarchy, as Mr. Sharon Turner maintains.† The kingdom of Kent was the first, founded by Hengist. The others were the kingdoms of Sussex, Wessex, Essex, Northumberland (or Bernicia and Deira), East Anglia, and Mercia. This division continued until the year 800. At that time, Egbert, King of Wessex, attempted to subjugate the other kingdoms, and succeeded in reducing five under his sway; but Northumberland and Mercia continued separate, though subordinate kingdoms, until the end of the ninth century.

  It was at this period that the Danes and Normans made their way into England: they long contested the possession of the country with the Saxons; and, at the accession of Alfred, the last newcomers held sway almost all over the land. You are all acquainted with the history of this monarch, the greatest of the kings of England. In the marshes where he had been compelled to seek refuge from the pursuit of his enemies, he formed his plans for the deliverance of his country. Disguised as a harper, he entered the Danish camp for the purpose of learning the amount of their forces; and finally reconquered his kingdom, after a protracted struggle. Restored thus to his throne, Alfred laid the foundation of English institutions, or rather, he reduced them to order, and gave them authority. It is the custom, however, to date their origin from him; and his reign is an era in English legislation. Alfred is a glorious instance of a truth exemplified by Gustavus Vasa and Henry IV. of France in later times, namely, that the greatest princes are those who, though born to the throne, are nevertheless obliged to conquer its possession. To their acknowledged right they thus join ample proof of their merit. They have lived as common individuals in the midst of their people; and have thus become better men and better kings.

  After the death of Alfred, the Danes, whose conquests had been suspended only by the victories of that prince, gained possession of England. Canute the Great took possession of the throne; but he reigned with moderation, and did not change the laws of the country. This wisdom on the part of the conqueror mitigated the animosity of the vanquished; and the Danes and Saxons agreed so well together, that, not long after the death of Canute the Great, the old dynasty re-ascended the throne. Edward the Confessor collected together the old Saxon laws; on this account, he is still respected in England as a national legislator. But the collection of laws which now exists under his name was not made by him; that which he composed has unfortunately been lost.

  During the reign of Edward the Confessor, a striking exemplification was given of the power of some of the nobles, who were in fact, if not in right, rivals of their monarch. Earl Godwin was so powerful that he, so to speak, allowed Edward to ascend the throne, on condition that he should marry his daughter. At his death, his son Harold succeeded him, and increased his authority. Harold’s influence extended all over the kingdom, and he only awaited the king’s death to take possession of the crown. When Edward died, Harold naturally succeeded to throne. No one in England contested his usurpation. But William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, one of his distant relations, alleged that Edward had bequeathed the crown to him by will. He crossed the sea to maintain his pretended rights, and, on the 14th of October, 1066, he gave battle to Harold, at Hastings. Harold was left dead on the field. William the Conqueror introduced into England the feudal institutions which were then in full vigour in Normandy. The reciprocal relations of persons might have conduced, in England, to the establishment of this system, and had prepared the way for it; but the legal and hierarchical subordination of land had not taken firm hold in that country. The conquest of William of Normandy disturbed the natural course of the old Anglo-Saxon institutions, and mingled therewith foreign elements which had already been developed, among the Normans, by their position in Gaul, in the midst of Roman cities, and a Roman population. We shall presently see what decisive influence this circumstance exerted over the political development of England.

  LECTURE 3

  Subject of the lecture. ~ A knowledge of the state of persons necessary to the proper study of institutions. ~ Essential difference between antiquity and modern societies, as regards the classification of social conditions. ~ State of persons among the Anglo-Saxons. ~ Thanes and Ceorls. ~ Central and local institutions. ~ Predominance of the latter among the Anglo-Saxons. ~ Its cause.

  In my preceding lecture, I gave a general outline of the decay of the Roman empire, and of the progress of the barbarian invasions; and I enumerated the principal events in the history of the Anglo-Saxons in England. I now come to their institutions, which form the subject of my present lecture.

  When we are about to speak of the institutions of a country at any given period, we must first understand what was the state of persons in that country at that period; for words are very deceptive. History, when speaking of the English nation or the Spanish nation, comprises under that name all the individuals who inhabit the country; but when we examine into the real state of the case, we quickly discover that the facts which history applies to an entire country, actually belong only to a very small section of its inhabitants. It is the work of civilization to raise up, from time to time, a greater number of men to take an active part in the great events which agitate the society of which they are members. As civilization advances, it reaches new classes of individuals, and gives them a place in history. The different conditions of society thus tend, not to confusion, but to arrangement, under different forms and in different degrees, in that superior region of society by which history is made.

  The first question to be solved, then, is that of the state of persons; we must precisely understand which are those classes that really figure in history. Then will occur this other question: What are the institutions in accordance with which that political nation acts, which alone furnishes subject-matter for history?1

  When we address the first question to antiquity, we find, as in Modern Europe, one great classification: freemen and slaves. But there is this difference that, in antiquity, slavery continued stationary and immutable. Its unchangeableness in this particular, was one of the principal characteristics of ancient civilization. Individuals were emancipated; but the great mass of slaves remained in bondage, everlastingly condemned to the same social nonentity. In Modern Europe, social conditions have been in a state of perpetual fluctuation; numerous masses of men have fallen into slavery, while others have emerged there-from; and this alternation of liberty and servitude is a novel and important fact in the history of civilization.

  What was the condition of persons among the Anglo-Saxons? Here, as elsewhere, we at first perceive the two great divisions of freemen and slaves. The freemen, who are the only active elements in history, were divided into two classes, thanes and ceorls. The thanes were the proprietors of the soil, which was entirely at their disposal: hence the origin of freehold tenure. The ceorls were men personally free, but possessing no landed property. The thanes were subdivided into two classes; king’s thanes, and inferior thanes. This distinction is not merely a historical fact; the laws recognize these two divisions. The composition for the life of a king’s thane was twelve hundred shillings, while for that of an inferior thane it was only six hundred. Here, as in other states which came into existence at this epoch, punishment was made proportionate, not only to the gravity of the offence, but also to the rank of the person injured. By the substitution of an indemnity for retaliation, a step was taken by these peoples towards social justice. Early ideas of justice inflict evil for evil, injury for injury; but the highest point of its perfection is that decision of society which, embodying supreme reason and power, judges the actions of men accused of crimes, and acquits or condemns them in the name of the Eternal Justice. In the sixth century, society did not inflict punishment; life, like everything else, had its price; and this price was shared between the family of the dead man, the king, and the judge. The penalty of crime was as yet only the price paid for the renunciation of the right of revenge which belonged to every free man. Individuals who were injured, either in the possession of their goods, or in the life of their relatives, received a fixed composition from the guilty person.

  I have pointed out the legal distinction which subsisted between the king’s thanes and the inferior thanes; but when we seek to discover what constituted the real difference of their condition, we find that this difference was very vague, and belonged to the time when they all led a nomadic life, rather than to their settled agricultural existence. In Germany, or on leaving Germany, bands, more or less numerous, united themselves to the company of some particular chief or king. After the conquest of a country, those chiefs who were nearest the king found themselves in a most favourable position for becoming large landed proprietors. These were called king’s thanes, because they belonged to the royal band. But there was nothing to separate them essentially from the other thanes. To be a king’s thane, it was necessary to possess about forty or fifty hides of land.* Bishops and abbots were admitted into this class. The inferior thanes were proprietors possessing less land, but able to dispose just as freely of their property as the king’s thanes. Some writers have asserted that the king’s thanes were the nobles, and that the others were simple freemen. An attentive examination of Anglo-Saxon institutions will prove that there was no such difference of position and rights between the two classes. It is a great error to expect to meet with clearly defined ranks and conditions, at the origin of society. Some writers, however, pretend to discover at the outset what time alone can introduce. We meet with no nobility, constituting a superior social condition, with recognized privileges: we perceive only the causes which will progressively form a nobility, that is, will introduce inequality of power and the empire of the strong. The formation of a class of nobles has been the work of ages. An actual superiority, transmitted from father to son, has gradually assumed the form and characteristics of a right. When societies have not been long in existence, we do not find in them social conditions thus distinctly marked, and the royal family is the only one that can, with any reason, be termed noble. It generally derives its title from some religious filiation; for instance, among nearly all the peoples of the north, in Denmark, in Norway, and in England, the kings descended from Odin; and their divine origin gave high sanction to their power.

  Other writers have held that the relations which subsisted between the king’s thanes and the inferior thanes were of a different nature, corresponding to the feudal relations of lords and vassals. The king’s thanes, they say, were vassals of the king; the inferior thanes were vassals of the king’s vassals. We may certainly discover, in the connection of these two classes of men, some of the characteristics of feudalism. But feudalism, such as was established on the Continent as well as in England, after the conquest by William of Normandy, consisted essentially in the simultaneous hierarchy of lands and persons. Such were not the rudiments of feudalism discernible among the Anglo-Saxons. As yet, the only hierarchy existing among them was of persons. All the thanes held their lands in an equally free and independent manner. At a later period, feudalism received a more complete development; from the hierarchy of persons proceeded that of lands, and the latter soon predominated over the former. But this result was not manifested until after the Norman conquest. Before that period, there were no vassals properly so called, although the word vassus occurs in a biography of King Alfred. The causes which led to the subordination of persons, independently of their connection with land, are simple and may easily be conceived. When the barbarian chieftains entered the Roman territory, they possessed an influence over their companions which they endeavoured to retain after their settlement. The Saxon laws, with a view to bring this rude and floating state of society into an orderly state, provided for the maintenance of this primitive hierarchy; and compelled every freeman who had attained the age of twelve years, to enrol himself in some corporation of individuals, in a tithing or a hundred, or else to place himself under the patronage of a chieftain. This bond was so strong that the person who made the engagement could not absent himself without the permission of the captain of his corporation, or of his chieftain. A foreigner even might not remain forty days on the English soil without enrolling himself in this manner. This spirit of subordination, this obligation of discipline, is one of the principal characteristics of Anglo-Saxon legislation. All those kings who, after long-continued disorders, were desirous to reorganise society, exerted themselves to restore to vigorous operation these laws of police and classification. They have been attributed to Alfred, but he merely re-enacted them.

  In my opinion, then, there is no legitimate ground for the doctrine that the relation of the king’s thanes to the inferior thanes, was a feudal relation. It was the natural relationship which necessarily arose, at the origin of society, between the various degrees of power and wealth. The poor and the weak lived under the surveillance and protection of those who were richer and more powerful.

  As I have already observed, the freemen were divided into two classes—thanes and ceorls. I shall now speak of the second class. The ceorls were freemen who lived on the estates of the thanes, and cultivated them. Their free condition has been called in question, wrongly, as I think, for various reasons: 1st. The composition for the life of a ceorl was two hundred shillings, and the characteristic mark of his liberty is that a portion of this composition was paid to his family, and not to the proprietor of the estate on which he lived; whereas, the composition for the life of a slave was always paid to his owner. 2nd. In the early times of the Saxon monarchy, the ceorls were able to leave the land which they cultivated, whenever they pleased; by degrees, however, they lost this liberty. 3rd. They had the right of bearing arms, and might go to war; whereas, slaves did not possess this right. When Earl Godwin attacked King Edward, he armed all the ceorls on his estates; and, at the time of the Danish invasions, the ceorls fought in defence of their country. 4th. They were also capable of possessing property, and when they owned five hides of land they passed into the class of thanes, as did also merchants who had made three voyages to foreign lands. Hence the origin of the English yeomanry. The yeoman is the freeholder, who, possessing an income of forty shillings from land, votes at county elections, and may sit on juries; probus et legalis homo.2 5th. The ceorls were admitted to give evidence, only, it is true, in matters which had reference to persons of their own class: whereas slaves did not possess this right. 6th. Nearly all the ceorls were Saxons: we find in a canon of the clergy of Northumberland, that a ceorl accused of a crime, must bring forward as witnesses twelve ceorls and twelve Britons. The ceorls, then, were Saxons, and were distinguished from the ancient inhabitants of the country. It is impossible that so large a proportion of the conquerors should have fallen so quickly into servitude. We may rather feel astonished that they had no landed property in the country, which they had just conquered. But Tacitus, with the accustomed truthfulness and vigour of his pencil, makes us readily understand this circumstance. In the forests of Germany, the barbarian warriors always lived around their chieftains, who had to suggest and command expeditions in times of activity, and to lodge and support their men in times of repose. The same habits were kept up after the conquest of a country; the property acquired was not divided among all the victors. Every chieftain received a larger or smaller division of land, and his followers settled with him upon it. These men, accustomed to a wandering life, did not yet set a high value upon landed property. Being still harassed, moreover, by the ancient possessors of the soil, they found it necessary to keep together, and unite in their own defence. They formed species of camps around the dwelling of their chieftain, whose possessions, according to the ancient Saxon laws, were divided into two parts—inlands and outlands. And it is clear proof of the great difference then existing between the ceorls and the slaves, that the latter alone cultivated the land adjoining the habitation of the chief, while the ceorls, as a natural consequence of their personal freedom, tilled the outlands. This state of things, however, could not last long. A large number of the ceorls fell into servitude, and assumed the name of villeins (villani); while others acquired lands for themselves, and became the soc-men of England.

  Summing up what we have said, we perceive, in the state of persons under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, one great division into freemen and slaves: and, among the freemen, another distinction of thanes and ceorls. The thanes themselves are subdivided into king’s thanes and inferior thanes. The former are large landed proprietors, the latter hold smaller estates: but both classes possess equal rights. The ceorls are freemen, without landed property, at least originally. Most of them fall into a state of servitude. With regard to the slaves, we can say nothing except that they were very numerous, and were divided into domestic servants and rural serfs, or serfs of the glebe. The ancient inhabitants of the country did not all fall into servitude; some of them retained their possessions, and a law of King Ina authorized them to appear before courts of justice. They might even pass into the class of thanes if they possessed five hides of land.

  The thanes alone, to speak truly, played an active part in history.

  Passing now to the institutions which connected and governed these different classes, we find them to be of two kinds; central institutions, entirely in the hands of the thanes, the object of which was to secure the intervention of the nation in its own government; and local institutions, which regulated those local interests and guarantees which applied equally to all classes of the community.

  At the origin of Anglo-Saxon society, there existed none but local institutions. In these are contained the most important guarantees for men whose life never goes beyond the boundaries of their fields. At such epochs, men are as yet unacquainted with great social life; and as the scope of institutions always corresponds to the scope of the affairs and relations to which they have reference, it follows that when relations are limited, institutions are equally so. They continue local, because all interests are local; there are very few, if any, general taxes and affairs of public concern; the kings live, like their subjects, on the income derived from their estates. The proprietors care little about what is passing at a distance. The idea of those great public agencies which regulate the affairs of all men, does not belong to the origin of societies. By degrees, in the midst of the chaos of the rising society, small aggregations are formed which feel the want of alliance and union with each other. They establish amongst themselves an administration of justice, a public militia, a system of taxation and police. Soon, inequality of strength is displayed among neighbouring aggregations. The strong tend to subjugate the weak, and usurp, at first, the rights of taxation and military service. Thus, political authority leaves the aggregations which first instituted it, to take a wider range. This system of centralization is not always imposed by force: it sometimes has a more legitimate cause. In times of difficulty, a superior man appears who makes his influence first felt in the society to which he belongs. When attacked, the society intrusts him with its defence. Neighbouring societies follow this example; soon the powers granted in time of war are continued in time of peace, and remain concentrated in a single hand. This victorious power retains the right to levy men and money. These are the rights of which the movement of centralization first deprives small local societies; they retain for a longer period the rights of administering justice, and establishing police regulations; they may even retain them for a very long while, and England offers us many such examples.

  The preponderance of local institutions belongs to the infancy of societies.3 Civilization incessantly tends to carry power still higher; for power, when exercised from a greater distance, is generally more disinterested, and more capable of taking justice and reason for its sole guides. But frequently also, as it ascends, power forgets its origin and final destiny; it forgets that it was founded to maintain all rights, to respect all liberties; and meeting with no further obstacles from the energy of local liberties, it becomes transformed into despotism. This result is not, however, necessary and fatal; society, while labouring for the centralization of authority, may retain, or regain at a later period, certain principles of liberty. When central institutions have obtained too absolute a prevalence, society begins to perceive the defects inherent in an edifice which is detached, as it were, from the soil on which it stands. Society then constructs upon itself the exact opposite of what it built before; looks narrowly into the private and local interests of which it is composed; duly appreciates their necessities and rights; and, sending back to the different localities the authorities which had been withdrawn therefrom, makes an appropriate distribution of power. When we study the institutions of France, we shall be presented with the greatest and clearest example of this double history. We shall perceive the great French society formed from a multitude of little aggregations, and tending incessantly to the concentration of the different powers contained within it. One great revolution almost entirely destroyed every vestige of our ancient local institutions, and led to the centralization of all power. We now suffer from the excesses of this system; and having returned to just sentiments of practical liberty, we are desirous to restore to localities the life of which they have been deprived, and to resuscitate local institutions, with the concurrence and by the action of the central power itself. Great oscillations like these constitute the social life of humanity, and the history of civilization.

  LECTURE 4

  Local institutions among the Anglo-Saxons. ~ Divisions of territory; their origin and double object. ~ Internal police of these local associations. ~ Importance of the county-courts; their composition and attributes. ~ Complex origin of the Jury. ~ Central institutions of the Anglo-Saxons. ~ The Wittenagemot; its composition, and the principle on which it was based. ~ Increasing preponderance of the large landowners in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy.

  In my preceding lecture I pointed out the causes of the special importance of local institutions, at that epoch in the development of civilization which now occupies our attention. I now proceed to examine into those institutions.

  They were of two kinds. One class bound man to a superior, established a certain right of man over man, a personal pre-eminence and subordination, which were the source of mutual duties. On the Continent, this hierarchy of persons became the first principle of feudalism, which would perhaps have received only a very imperfect development in England, had not William the Conqueror transplanted it to that country in its complete state. The other class of local institutions bound men of equal rank to each other, regulated their mutual relations, and defined their reciprocal rights and duties. The first class marked a relationship of protection and dependence; the second summoned all the inhabitants of the same territory, possessing the same rights and the same obligations, to deliberate in common upon affairs of common interest. These were the predominant institutions of the Anglo-Saxons. Norman feudalism could not entirely abolish them.

  At this period, England was divided into tithings, hundreds, and counties. This division has been attributed to King Alfred: he seems to be the founder of all the legislation of this epoch, because it all issues in a fixed and precise form from his reign; but he found it already in existence, and did nothing more than arrange it in a written code. He did not, then, originate this division of territory, which appears to be based upon the ecclesiastical partition of the country. After their settlement in Great Britain, the Saxons did not divide it into systematically determined portions, but adopted what they found already established. The portions of territory which were under the direction of the decanus,1 the decanus ruralis,2 and the bishop, formed respectively the tithing, the hundred, and the county. We must not, however, suppose that these names correspond precisely to realities. The tithings and hundreds were not all equal in extent of soil and number of inhabitants. There were sixty-five hundreds in Sussex, twenty-six in Yorkshire, and six in Lancashire. In the north of England, the hundreds bore another name; they were called Wapentakes.* Here the ecclesiastical division ceases, and a military circumscription prevailed, which still subsists in some counties. An analogous circumscription has continued to the present day in the Grisons, in Switzerland.

  These divisions of the soil had a double object. On the one hand, they formed the most certain means of insuring order and discipline; and on the other hand, they supplied the inhabitants with the most convenient method for transacting their public business in common.

  By a police regulation which I have already mentioned, every free individual, above twelve years of age, was obliged to enrol himself in a certain association, which he could not abandon without the permission of the chief. A stranger might not remain for more than two days with a friend, unless his host gave surety for him, and at the end of forty days he was compelled to place himself under the surveillance of some association. It is remarkable that the details of these laws of classification and subordination were almost the same in all those parts of the Roman Empire occupied by the barbarians—in Gaul and Spain, as well as in England. When one of the members of a special association had committed a crime, the association was obliged to bring him to trial. This point has given rise to much discussion among learned men. Some have maintained that the association was bail for its members, not only for their appearance before the court of justice, but also for the crime which they might have committed. I think that every Anglo-Saxon association was bound only to bring the culprit to trial. If he had made his escape, the association had to prove, sometimes by twelve and sometimes by thirty witnesses, that it knew nothing of his whereabouts; and it was fined only when it could not produce witnesses to prove that it had not abetted his escape. This obligation of every local corporation to pay for its guilty and absent members, existed also in Gaul at this time. The Gallic corporation was moreover answerable for the execution of the sentence: I do not think this was the case in England, where it was bound only to bring the culprit to trial.

  The second object of this division of the land was to appoint centres of union, where the inhabitants might discuss matters of common interest. In every county, and in every subdivision of a county, the landowners held meetings, at which they deliberated upon the affairs of the local association to which they belonged. Originally, therefore, there existed not only county-courts, but also courts of hundred and courts of tithing, which frequently met. By degrees, as the circle of the interests of these little associations continually tended to become larger, the courts of tithing fell into desuetude. The courts of hundred survived for a longer period, and even now retain some shadow of existence. The Saxons, however, dispersed over the country, and busied with their warlike and agricultural labours, gradually lost the habit of attending these meetings. Having scarcely any written rights to defend, and being seldom disturbed in their dwellings, they lived without anxiety for a liberty which was never called in question. The principal guarantee of the liberty of individuals at that time was their isolation: the active surveillance which it requires, when government exercises a direct and frequent influence upon the governed, would have been to them a useless and fatiguing burden. It devolved upon the kings to compel them, as it were, to keep up their old institutions. Athelstane ordained that the county-courts should meet once in every three months. Few persons attended them, and it became necessary to grant further indulgence. The county-courts were allowed to assemble only twice a year. All holders of land were entitled to attend their meetings. The matters discussed were the internal administration of the county, the maintenance of roads and bridges, the keeping in repair of the forts which the Romans had constructed to defend the country against the invasions of the Picts and Scots, and which were still used for the same purpose. All public business was transacted in the county-court, under the presidency of the alderman. At its meetings, military forces were levied, justice was administered, and ecclesiastical affairs were treated of. All public acts, sales, manumissions, wills, were conducted before it, and the publicity of the assembly gave an authentic character to these deeds. Every act, however, was authenticated by a certain number of witnesses, and the deeds were afterwards transcribed and intercalated in the parish Bible.

  In these meetings, also, we discern the origin of the Jury. When there was a trial to be decided, the alderman sent a number of freemen belonging to the same class as the contending parties, to the place where the dispute had occurred, in order to learn the facts of the case. These men were called assessors, and when they returned to the county-court, furnished with the necessary information, they naturally became the judges in the case which they had investigated. The contending parties publicly pleaded their own cause, and were obliged to prove their right by witnesses, compurgatores. It has been a question much debated whether the institution of the jury arose from these witnesses, or from the assessors. In my opinion, it was the product of neither exclusively, but of both combined. The establishment of a great institution has nearly always something complex about it. The jury came into existence in some measure spontaneously, from the amalgamation of the different classes of persons who combined to investigate and decide the case. Under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, it was not a very clearly defined institution. It was not universally in practice, its rules were frequently infringed upon: and Alfred, who was the restorer of the ancient institutions of the country, hanged an alderman who had given judgment without the co-operation of his assessors.

  The presidents of these different territorial subdivisions, of the county-courts, the hundred-courts, and the tithing-courts, were at first elected by the landowners. I do not suppose the choice was made by individual votes, but rather by a tacit consent given to the personal influence of certain men. Sometimes, however, to repair long disorders, and destroy the injurious consequences of this influence, the central authority interfered in the appointment of these magistrates. When Alfred had vanquished the Danes, he was desirous to reform the abuses which the troubles of war had introduced into the administration of justice; he assumed the right of choosing the centenarri3 and tithing-men, and this novelty was so far from being considered an usurpation of the rights of the nation, that contemporary historians praise the monarch for having given the people such good magistrates. The systematic conflict of the rulers with the ruled had not yet commenced; the limits of their respective rights and duties were neither fixed nor recognised, and as power was not yet extravagant in its exactions, the people did not feel their rights attacked; necessity, or temporary utility, were the tests which decided the value of a measure. We do not find that the kings who succeeded Alfred retained this right of appointment. Under Edward the Confessor, the county-magistrates were chosen by the landowners. The conquest of William the Norman destroyed, in great measure, these free customs. The alderman, the centenarius, and the tithing-man, disappeared before the feudal lords, or became feudal lords themselves. The assemblies of freemen, however, still retained the right of appointing their respective officers. The sheriff was substituted for the alderman, the centenarius merged in the high-constable, and the petty-constable took the place of the tithing-man. These were the officers of the people,—the municipal officers.

  Such is a summary of the local institutions which, under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, maintained the internal order of the state, and constituted the safeguards of public liberty. Vigorous institutions were they, which feudalism could not overthrow, and which produced, at a later period, representative government in England, although they did not contain, as you will presently see, the true principle of representative government.

  Let us now pass to central institutions. Of these, there were two among the Anglo-Saxons: the national assembly, and the royal office.

  Tacitus has described to you the general assemblies of the ancient Germans. At those meetings, nothing was decided without the consent of every freeman. Each individual possessed and exercised his own personal rights and influence. The influence of the chiefs was great. The leaders of their men in war, they became, when their conquest was completed, the principal, indeed almost the sole, landed proprietors, and thus they retained among themselves, although the others were not legally excluded, the practice of forming national assemblies. Each kingdom of the Saxon Heptarchy had its own, and it is probable that the thanes, or landowners, enforced the adoption and execution of the resolutions of this assembly, among the ceorls who dwelt on their estates. When the Heptarchy was combined into a single kingdom, one general assembly alone was established; and as its meetings were held in a central locality, at a great distance from many parts of the realm, the large proprietors were the only persons who were able to attend regularly. This assembly was called the Wittenagemot, or the assembly of the wise men. From historical documents, we learn that it was composed of bishops, abbots, abbesses, dukes, and earls; but we also find these words, the vagueness of which has given rise to very different explanations: “such a decision was taken coram proceribus aliorumque fidelium infinita multitudine.”4 Some learned men, who are partisans of absolute power, have inferred from this that it existed at the very origin of society; and they assert that the name of the assembly, Wittenagemot, was in itself sufficient to prove that it was composed only of the judges and delegates of the sovereign. Other writers, who are zealous advocates of the rights of the people, have held the opinion that this multitude of persons present were the representatives of the various counties and boroughs. I think that both these systems are false. As regards the first, it is evident that there was no distinct class of judges at this period; public functionaries were not then classified as they are now, and the expression wise men would apply equally to all those whose condition raised them above the ‘vulgar herd.’ With reference to the second system, I must say that no idea of representation was entertained at that period. Whoever was entitled to attend the assembly went thither, and went in person. No proxies were allowed. No one was permitted to enter the assembly in any name but his own. When we come to treat of the principles of representative government, we shall see that the formation of the ancient Germanic assemblies was based upon the principles of individual right, and of the sovereignty of the multitude—principles from which representative government did not take its origin. Besides, the towns at this period were in so miserable a condition, that it was impossible for them to appoint representatives. York, the second city in England, contained fourteen hundred and eighteen families, and Bath sixty-four. A law of King Athelstane declares that no one entered, or could enter, the assembly, except upon his own account; every proprietor possessing five hides of land, it says, and every merchant who has made three voyages to foreign countries, shall be numbered among the thanes, and be admitted as such into the Wittenagemot. The inequality of conditions, however, continued to increase. Those national assemblies, in which, originally, all freemen were entitled to sit, soon became, as you have seen, restricted to landed proprietors. By-and-bye, as power became centralized, and predominant influences gained greater strength, the small proprietors ceased to use a right which had lost all value to them, and the large landowners remained the undisputed masters of the field. The disproportion between the two classes was so great, that a contest was impossible. As each man sat in his own name, each man brought his own personal influence and private interests with him. The general assembly became an arena for individual disputes. This was the necessary consequence of a principle, which, by summoning all persons to exercise the same right, placed inequalities in that position which was most favourable to the development of their power and egotism. It is the work of a widely different principle to seek out among the masses the persons best fitted to represent them, to send these individuals to the central assembly to provide for the safety of all rights in the name of justice, and thus to prevent the evil consequences which must result from the natural or social inequality of mankind, by creating a factitious, but just, equality among their representatives, which leaves them only the legitimate influence of their talents and character. But the foundation of such a government is the work of ages. Nations, in their infancy, cannot possess it. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy was a continual conflict of individual interests, which was carried on in the Wittenagemot, as well as elsewhere, and its general tendency was to the continually increasing preponderance of large landed property.5

  LECTURE 5

  The Wittenagemot; its business and power. ~ Method of its convocation. ~ Vicissitudes of its character and importance. ~ The kingly office among the Anglo-Saxons. ~ Extent and progress of the royal power.

  We have already considered the origin and composition of the Wittenagemot, or general assembly of the Anglo-Saxons, it now remains for us to speak of its attributes and method of convocation.

  In the infancy of society, everything is confused and uncertain; there is as yet no fixed and precise line of demarcation between the different powers in a state; and thus we find that the attributes of the Wittenagemot were rather indefinite. There was no settled boundary at which its power ceased, and that of the monarchy commenced; both united to transact all the business of the nation, and, if we would ascertain the part actually taken by the Wittenagemot in this business, we must inquire of history what were its real attributes.

  The defence of the kingdom was the chief business of the national assemblies. We must not suppose that the obligation of military service is coeval only with feudalism; independently of every feudal bond, it was an obligation imposed on every freeman in the nation, just as at the present day every French citizen is bound to present himself for conscription. The Wittenagemot ordered levies of the landowners, who, in their turn, convoked the freemen resident on their estates.

  The Wittenagemot also imposed taxes; at that period, however, there were hardly any public taxes; the first was levied in consequence of the Danish invasion, and the law which imposed it expressly states that it received the consent of all the members present in the Wittenagemot.

  The county-courts, as we have seen, provided for the maintenance of the public roads, bridges, and forts. We learn from the deliberations of the Anglo-Saxon national assembly, that such matters fell under its cognizance also.

  As the right of coining money did not belong exclusively to the king, but was also possessed by the church and by many powerful subjects, the Wittenagemot had the oversight of this matter, and prevented the debasement of the coinage.

  We also find it ratifying or annulling those acts of county-courts which had reference not to private matters, but to affairs of general importance.

  The principle of the responsibility of the agents of power was not more clearly and firmly established in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy than the other great principles of free government; but it was, nevertheless, confusedly practised. A vague feeling of justice pervaded these national assemblies; they repressed great abuses, but frequently punished injustice by injustice.

  The Wittenagemot in England possessed a power which was not generally exercised by corresponding assemblies on the Continent; it had the oversight of the royal domain. Originally, the kings lived, like other landowners, on the income derived from their own private estates. Their property was a private domain, which they managed as they pleased. As time rolled on, this domain became very largely augmented by confiscations; but the kings, compelled to defend their tottering authority from the frequent attacks to which it was subjected, were incessantly diminishing their estates by gifts to powerful and formidable chiefs. Frequently, also, when they were strong, they resumed the gifts which necessity had extorted from them. The little reliance to be placed upon these purely royal donations, unless they were ratified by the consent of the national assembly; and the knowledge that, if the king were permitted these forced dilapidations of his own domains, the Wittenagemot would one day be obliged to repair them, and compensate the monarch for the loss of his private estates—were the reasons which led to the interference of the national assembly in the administration of the royal domain. In France, this domain did not fall so soon under the influence of the national assemblies, but remained for a much longer period the private property of the kings.

  One of the most important attributes of the Wittenagemot was the direction of ecclesiastical affairs. The abbots and bishops, indeed all the high clergy, were members of this assembly. In France, although the clergy formed a part of the national assemblies, they treated of their own affairs as a separate body, and communicated directly with the king. In England, ecclesiastical matters, like all other business, were discussed in the general assembly. For instance, when missionaries from Rome came to invite the kings of the Heptarchy to embrace the Christian religion, the kings replied that they must ask the consent of the Wittenagemot. In Sweden, the king, who had already become a convert himself, proposed to the assembled Diet to adopt Christianity. The Diet sanctioned the new religion, but retained the old creed, and this simultaneous practice of the two religions lasted for a considerable time. The Wittenagemot had not always to discuss such important matters as the conversion of the nation; it appointed bishops, and ordained or sanctioned the foundation of abbeys and monasteries.1

  The last business of the Anglo-Saxon national assembly was to receive complaints and petitions in denunciation of abuses. It thus became sometimes a judicial court, adjudicating on the appeals of large landowners; but it seldom appears in this character: it was especially a political assembly, whilst, on the Continent, the national assembly frequently acted as a judicial tribunal.

  I have now pointed out the various functions of the Wittenagemot, and you have been able, from the acts of that assembly, to form a tolerably accurate idea of it. As regards its convocation, originally its meetings were frequent, but in order not to fatigue its members too much, it became necessary to reduce the meetings to two, held in spring and autumn, as on the Continent. The right of convoking the Wittenagemot became, ere long, one of the prerogatives of the crown. This abandonment of so important a privilege is very characteristic of an age in which political prudence is unknown, and distrust is manifested only at rare intervals, and then by revolt. It seemed natural that the king, the direct centre of all the interests and necessities of the nation, should convoke the assembly for exigencies with which he was better acquainted than any other person; at his death, the large landowners assembled spontaneously, to deliberate on a change of dynasty or the arrangement of the succession.

  The inviolability of the members of the Wittenagemot was recognized from the day on which they set out to attend the assembly, till the day on which they returned home again, provided they were not notorious brigands.

  Summing up what I have said, the general assembly of the Anglo-Saxons, as of most of the German nations, was, in Germany, composed of every freeman; after the conquest, it consisted only of the landowners; and, towards the end of the monarchy, it was attended by none but the most wealthy proprietors. Each man came in his own right, and on his own behalf; according to a charter of King Athelstane, he might send a proxy in his place. This irrefragable mark of individual right still exists in England. In the House of Peers, every peer may vote by proxy and in his own name. It is from the Wittenagemot, in this last phase of its existence, and from the rights of suzerainty which Norman feudalism conferred on the king over the great barons, who held their titles directly from him, that the English House of Peers, as it now exists, derives its origin. In the Wittenagemot of the last age of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, we can discern neither of the two elements which composed the House of Commons at a later period. The towns had hardly any existence, and could not, therefore, send deputies: the counties had never sent any. The Wittenagemot was only an assembly of the powerful men of the state, who came on their own account, and in their own personal right. Most other persons neglected rights which were too difficult for them to exercise, and the real impotence of which they felt; by neglecting to exercise them, they eventually lost them; and when the exigencies of liberty occurred to agitate a more advanced and less contented state of society, a new labour was necessary to restore to the citizens, rights which they had allowed to perish, through the want of necessity and capacity.

  The second of the central institutions of the Anglo-Saxons, was the kingly office. An important fact has distinguished the formation of all states of Germanic origin, and this is, the speedy establishment of hereditary monarchy—which was the dominant character of this institution at this period, whatever mixture of election may be discerned therein. The causes of this are simple. In warlike tribes, there is, in war at least, a single chieftain; the man of greatest valour and largest experience, says to his comrades, “Come with me—I will lead you where you may obtain rich booty”; his proposition is accepted, and by common consent he becomes the leader of the expedition. Thus, at the origin of society, power is not conferred; he who is able to do so, assumes it by the consent of the others. There is no election properly so called, but only a recognition of authority. The leader who has conducted one or more fortunate expeditions, obtains great importance by success; his influence increases with time, and he hands down to his family the influence and power which he has acquired. This family, thus invested with an actual superiority, gains a natural habit of command, which the others soon grow accustomed to acknowledge. Among the Germans, moreover, the idea of religious filiation contributed powerfully to the establishment of hereditary monarchy. It was almost a national duty to choose kings from the divine race; and all the royal families were descendants of Odin.2

  Thus hereditary monarchy prevailed among these peoples; but choice among the members of the royal family long existed. It was indispensably necessary that the king should be a capable man, in a state of society in which men were as yet ignorant of the artificial means which supply the deficiencies of royal incapacity. Thus Alfred himself did not simply found his right to the throne on a will of his father, and an agreement with his brother; but he based it especially upon the consent of all the large proprietors of the kingdom of Wessex. Force sometimes gave severe checks to hereditary right; but the usurpation of the throne was always associated with the idea of the violation of a right, and the usurpers invariably strove to atone for this violation, by marriage with one of the legitimate race.

  The kings, under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, were at first called Heretogs, leaders of armies; but it is a mistake to explain and limit their prerogatives by the name which they bore. The power of arms was then so great, and all other powers seemed so inferior and subject to it, that they all fell under the generic term which contained within itself nearly every idea of force and empire. The most different powers were embraced under this single denomination, and we must not suppose that the kings limited their functions to those which it seems to indicate; the Anglo-Saxon kings were not merely military leaders; they managed all the internal administration of the realm, in concert with the Wittenagemot. Their attributes were not more determinate than those of that assembly. With it, they directed all the affairs of the nation; and their surveillance, being perpetual, was more close and active. They were addressed as the highest authority, and also as possessing the most information on public affairs. Thus the right of presiding over the general assemblies and proposing the subjects for deliberation, belonged exclusively to them.

  The royal authority, however, not being sustained by a strong and regular organization, decreased in power in proportion as the great proprietors increased in influence and became firmly established in their domains. Towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, the large landowners, sole masters on their own estates, began to do everything by themselves. They coined money, administered justice, and levied soldiers. And we must not imagine that this assumption of sovereign rights by local chieftains was regarded, by the people, as an act of iniquity and violence: it was a necessity of the social condition of the country. Royalty was no more capable of wielding all the central power, than the nation was of maintaining and exercising all its liberties.

  LECTURE 6

  The true principle of representative government. ~ Error of classifying governments according to their external forms. ~ Montesquieu’s error with respect to the origin of the representative system. ~ Necessary correlation and simultaneous formation of society and government. ~ Rousseau’s mistaken hypothesis of the social contract. ~ The nature of rightful sovereignty. ~ Confused and contradictory ideas entertained on this subject. ~ Societies, as individuals, possess the right of being placed under laws of justice and reason. ~ Governments ought to be continually reminded of their obligation to inquire into and conform to these laws. ~ Classification of governments on this principle.

  I propose to examine the political institutions of modern Europe in their early infancy, and to seek what they have in common with the representative system of government. My object will be to learn whether this form of government had then attained to any degree of development, or even existed only in germ; at what times, and in what places it first appeared, where and under what circumstances it prospered or failed. I have just examined the primitive institutions of the Anglo-Saxons. Before leaving our consideration of England, it might be well for me to compare these institutions with the essential type of representative government, in order to see how they agree and in what they differ. But this type is not yet in our possession. In order to find it I shall revert to the essential principle of representative government, to the original ideas out of which it springs; and I shall compare this idea with the fundamental idea that underlies Anglo-Saxon institutions.

  The human mind is naturally led to judge of the nature of things, and to classify them according to their exterior forms; accordingly, governments have almost invariably been arranged according to distinctions which do not at all belong to their inherent character. Wherever none of those positive institutions have been immediately recognized which according to our present notions, represent and guarantee political liberty, it has been thought that no liberty could exist, and that power must be absolute. But in human affairs, various elements are mingled: nothing exists in a simple and pure state. As some traces of absolute power are to be found at the basis of free governments, so also some liberty has existed under governments to all appearance founded on absolutism. No form of society is completely devoid of reason and justice—for were all reason and justice to be withdrawn, society would perish. We may sometimes see governments of apparently the most opposite character produce the same effects. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, representative government raised England to the highest elevation of moral and material prosperity; and France, during that same period, increased in splendour, wealth, and enlightenment, under an absolute monarchy. I do not intend by this to insinuate the impression that forms of government are unimportant, and that all produce results of equal quality and value; I merely wish to hint that we should not appreciate them by only a few of their results, or by their exterior indications. In order fully to appreciate a government, we must penetrate into its essential and constituent principles. We shall then perceive that many governments which differ considerably in their forms, are referable to the same principles; and that others which appear to resemble one another in their forms, are in fundamental respects different. Wherever elections and assemblies have presented themselves to view, it has been thought that the elements of a representative system were to be found. Montesquieu, looking at representative government in England, endeavoured to trace it back to the old Germanic institutions. “This noble system,” he says, “originated in the woods.” Appearances deceived Montesquieu; he merely took into consideration the exterior characteristics of representative government, not its true principles and its true tendencies. That is a superficial and false method which classifies governments according to their exterior characteristics; making monarchy, government by one individual; aristocracy, government by several; democracy, government by the people, the sovereignty of all. This classification, which is based only upon one particular fact, and upon a certain material shape which power assumes, does not go to the heart of those questions, or rather of that question, by the solution of which the nature and tendency of governments is determined. This question is, “What is the source of the sovereign power, and what is its limit? Whence does it come, and where does it stop?” In the answer to this question is involved the real principle of government; for it is this principle whose influence, direct or indirect, latent or obvious, gives to societies their tendency and their fate.1

  Where are we to look for this principle? Is it a mere conventional arrangement by man? Is its existence anterior to that of society?

  The two facts—society and government—mutually imply one another; society without government is no more possible than government without society. The very idea of society necessarily implies that of rule, of universal law, that is to say, of government.

  What then is the first social law? I hasten to pronounce it: it is justice, reason, a rule of which every man has the germ within his own breast. If man only yields to a superior force, he does not truly submit to the law; there is no society and no government. If in his dealings with his fellows, man obeys not only force, but also a law, then society and government exist. In the abnegation of force, and obedience to law, consists the fundamental principle of society and government. In the absence of these two conditions, neither society nor government can be properly said to exist.

  This necessary coexistence of society and government shows the absurdity of the hypothesis of the social contract. Rousseau presents us with the picture of men already united together into a society, but without rule, and exerting themselves to create one; as if society did not itself presuppose the existence of a rule to which it was indebted for its existence. If there is no rule, there is no society; there are only individuals united and kept together by force. This hypothesis then, of a primitive contract, as the only legitimate source of social law, rests upon an assumption that is necessarily false and impossible.

  The opposite hypothesis, which places the origin of society in the family and in the right of the father over his children, is less objectionable, but it is incomplete. There is, certainly, a form of society among parents and their rising offspring; but it is a society in some sort unilateral, and of which one of the parties has not any true consciousness. Society, whether in the family or out of the family, is only complete when all its members, those who command as well as those who obey, recognize, more or less vaguely, a certain superior rule, which is neither the arbitrary caprice of will, nor the effect of force alone. The idea of society, therefore, implies necessarily another idea, that of government; and the idea of government contains in it two others, the idea of a collection of individuals, and that of a rule which is applicable to them,—a rule which constitutes the right of the government itself; a rule which the individuals who submit to it have not themselves created, and to which they are morally bound to submit. No government ever totally disregarded this supreme rule, none ever proclaimed force or caprice as the only law of society. In seeking the principle of government, we have found the principle of social right to be the primary source of all legitimate sovereignty. In this law of laws, in this rule of all government, resides the principle of government.

  Two important questions now present themselves. How is the law formed, and how is it applied? In this lies the distinctive character of the various forms of government; in this they differ.

  Even until modern times, the belief has prevailed that the primitive and absolute right of law-making, that is, the right of sovereignty, resides in some portion of society, whether this right be vested in a single man, in several, or in all;—an opinion which has been constantly contradicted by facts, and which cannot bear the test of reason. The right of determining and enforcing a rule, is the right to absolute power; that force which possesses this right inherently, possesses absolute power, that is to say, the right of tyranny. Take the three great forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and see if a case can be found in which the right of sovereignty was held by one, by several or by all, in which tyranny did not necessarily arise. Facts have been logically correct,—they have inferred from the principle its necessary consequence.

  Such, however, is the force of truth, that this error could not reign alone and absolutely. At the very time when men appeared to believe, and did theoretically believe, that the primitive and absolute power of giving law belonged to some one, whether monarch, senate, or people, at the same time they struggled against that principle. At all times men have endeavoured to limit the power which they regarded as perfectly legitimate. Never has a force, although invested with the right of sovereignty, been allowed to develop that right to its full extent. The janissaries in Turkey sometimes served, sometimes abrogated, the absolute power of the Sultan. In democracies, where the right of sovereignty is vested in popular assemblies, efforts have been continually made to oppose conditions, obstacles, and limits to that sovereignty. Always, in all governments which are absolute in principle, some kind of protest has been made against the principle. Whence comes this universal protest? We might, looking merely at the surface of things, be tempted to say that it is only a struggle of powers. This has existed without doubt, but another and a grander element has existed along with it; there is an instinctive sense of justice and reason dwelling in every human spirit. Tyranny has been opposed, whether it were the tyranny of individuals or of multitudes, not only by a consciousness of power, but by a sentiment of right. It is this consciousness of justice and right, that is to say, of a rule independent of human will—a consciousness often obscure but always powerful—which, sooner or later, rouses and assists men to resist all tyranny, whatever may be its name and form. The voice of humanity, then, has proclaimed that the right of sovereignty vested in men, whether in one, in many, or in all, is an iniquitous lie.

  If, then, the right of sovereignty cannot be vested in any one man, or collection of men, where does it reside, and what is the principle on which it rests?

  In his interior life—in his dealings with himself, if I may be allowed the expression, as well as in his exterior life, and in his dealings with his fellows—the man who feels himself free and capable of action, has ever a glimpse of a natural law by which his action is regulated. He recognises a something which is not his own will, and which must regulate his will. He feels himself bound by reason or morality to do certain things; he sees, or he feels that there are certain things which he ought or ought not to do. This something is the law which is superior to man, and made for him—the divine law. The true law of man is not the work of man; he receives, but does not create it; even when he submits to it, it is not his own—it is beyond and above him.

  Man does not always submit; in the exercise of his free will and imperfect nature, he does not invariably obey this law. He is influenced by other principles of action than this, and although he perceives that the motives which impel him are vicious, nevertheless he often yields to them. But whether he obey or not, the supreme law for man is always existent—in his wildest dreams he recognises it, as placed above him.

  We see, then, the individual always in presence of a law,—one which he did not create, but which asserts its claim over him, and never abandons him. If he enters into society with his fellows, or finds himself thus associated, what other rule than this will he possess? Should human society involve an abdication of human nature? No; man in society must and does remain essentially the same as in his individual capacity; and as society is nothing but a collection of individuals, the supreme law of society must be the same as that which exercises a rightful control over individuals themselves.

  Here, then, have we discovered the true law of society—the law of government—it is the same law as that which binds individuals. And as, for an individual, the true law is often obscure, and as the individual, even when he knows it thoroughly, does not always follow it implicitly; in the same manner with regard to government, whatever it may be, its true law—which must ever reach it through the medium of the human mind, which is ever biassed by passion and limited by frailty—is neither at all times apprehended nor always obeyed. It is then impossible to attribute to one man or to several the possession of an inherent right to sovereignty, since this would be to suppose that their ideas and inclinations were in all cases correspondent to the dictates of justice and of reason—a supposition which the radical imperfection of our nature will not allow us for a moment to admit.

  It is, however, owing to the same imperfection that men have accepted, or rather created for themselves, idols and tyrants. A law ready made for them has appeared more convenient than that laborious and unremitting search after reason and justice which they felt themselves obliged to undertake by the imperious voice of that conscience which they could not entirely silence. Nevertheless, men have never been able entirely to deceive their conscience, or to stifle its utterances. Conscience defeats all the arrangements of human ignorance or in difference, and forces men to fight for themselves despite their own unwillingness. Never, in fact, have men fully accepted the sovereignty, the right of which they have admitted; and the impossibility of their thus consenting to it, plainly indicates the superhuman principle which sovereignty involves. In this principle we must seek for the true distinction between governments.

  The classification which I am about to present is not, then, one that is merely arbitrary and factitious; it does not concern the exterior forms, but the essential nature of governments. I distinguish two kinds. First, there are those which attribute sovereignty as a right belonging exclusively to individuals, whether one, many, or all those composing a society; and these are, in principle, the founders of despotism, although facts always protest more or less strongly against the principle; and absolute obedience on the one hand, and absolute power on the other, never exist in full vigour. The second class of governments is founded on the truth that sovereignty belongs as a right to no individual whatever, since the perfect and continued apprehension, the fixed and inviolable application of justice and of reason, do not belong to our imperfect nature.

  Representative government rests upon this truth. I do not say that it has been founded upon the full reflective acknowledgment of the principle in the form in which I have stated it. Governments do not, any more than great poems, form themselves on an a priori model, and in accordance with defined precepts. What I affirm is, that representative government does not attribute sovereignty as inherently residing in any person,—that all its powers are directed to the discovery and faithful fulfilment of that rule which ought ever to govern their action, and that the right of sovereignty is only recognised on the condition that it should be continually justified.

  Pascal has said, “Plurality which does not reduce itself to unity, is confusion. Unity which is not the result of plurality, is tyranny.” This is the happiest expression and the most exact definition of representative government. The plurality is society; the unity is truth, is the united force of the laws of justice and reason, which ought to govern society. If society remains in the condition of plurality, if isolated wills do not combine under the guidance of common rules, if they do not all equally recognise justice and reason, if they do not reduce themselves to unity, there is no society, there is only confusion. And the unity which does not arise from plurality, which has been violently imposed upon it by one or many, whatever may be their number, in virtue of a prerogative which they appropriate as their exclusive possession, is a false and arbitrary unity; it is tyranny. The aim of representative government is to oppose a barrier at once to tyranny and to confusion, and to bring plurality to unity by presenting itself for its recognition and acceptance.2

  Let us now see, in the central fact of this method of government, by what means it arrives at its end, and under what forms its principle is developed.

  Representative government, wherever it has existed or does exist, is composed of different elements of power, equal among themselves, although one of them, the monarchical or the democratic, ordinarily retains certain peculiar rights. The number and form of these powers are not necessarily determinate or equal; in France, at the present time, there are three, the royal power, the House of Peers, and the Chamber of Deputies. These three powers emanate from different sources, and result from different social necessities. Neither of them, isolated from the rest, possesses a right of sovereignty: it is required of them that they seek the legitimate rule in common, and they are supposed to possess it only when they have found it in a united deliberation, before or after action. Society owes submission to this rule, thus discovered; but as these powers are not all fixed and immutable, so the sovereignty of right does not reside constantly among them. The elective principle, which is by its very nature changeful, can alter its idea and purpose, and exercise upon the other powers an influence that is periodically variable. If the different powers do not agree, they reduce themselves immediately to inaction. The sovereignty which exists in its own right then seems to hesitate to show itself, and government remains in suspense. In order to extricate it from this state, the right has been reserved to royalty of creating peers, and of dissolving the Chamber of Deputies. The powers then proceed afresh to seek for the true law, a work in which they ought not to rest until they have found it. Thus, no power is judged to possess fully the legitimate rule, which is rightfully the principle of sovereignty. The electors themselves are not its absolute interpreters, any more than are the peers, the deputies, or the king. The electors do not say at the outset to their deputies, “Such is our will: let that be the law.” They enjoin upon them nothing precise; they simply confer upon them the mission of examining and deciding according to their reason. They must necessarily trust in the enlightenment of those whom they elect; election is a trial imposed on those who aspire to political power, and a sovereign but limited right exercised by those who confer political power upon such of the claimants as they may select.

  From the political powers thus attributed to certain classes, let us now pass to the political rights which are vaguely distributed in the nation. These rights are among the essential conditions of representative government. The publicity of the debates in the deliberative assemblies imposes upon these powers the necessity of commending themselves to that sense of reason and justice which belongs to all, in order that every citizen may be convinced that their inquiries have been made with fidelity and intelligence, and that, knowing wherein they are deficient, he may himself have the opportunity, if he has the capacity, to indicate the remedy. Liberty opens up a career for this inquiry. In this way, every citizen may aid in the discovery of the true law. Thus does a representative government impel the whole body of society—those who exercise power, and those who possess rights—to enter upon a common search after reason and justice; it invites the multitude to reduce itself to unity, and it brings forth unity from the midst of plurality. The public powers—royalty, the deliberative houses, the electors—are bound and incessantly made to return to this work, by the essential nature of their relations, and by the laws of their action. Private citizens even can cooperate, by virtue of the publicity of the debates, and the liberty of the press.3

  I might pursue this idea, and show that all the institutions which are regarded as inherent in representative government, even those which have not been regarded as assisting in the search for those general rules which ought to preside in the conduct of government, are derived from the same principle, and tend to the same result. The publicity of judicial proceedings, and those who compose the jury, for example, supply a guarantee for the legitimate application of the law to particular cases. But our present concern is especially to determine the principle of those essential combinations by which a representative government is constituted; they all proceed evidently from this fact, that no individual is fully acquainted with and invariably consents to that reason, truth and justice, which can alone confer the right of sovereignty, and which ought to be the rule of sovereignty as actually exercised. They compel all powers to seek for this rule, and give to all citizens the right of assisting in this research, by taking cognizance of the mode in which the powers proceed to it, and in declaring themselves what they conceive to be the dictates of justice and of truth. In other words, to sum up what I have said, representative government rests in reality upon the following series of ideas. All power which exists as a fact, must, in order to become a right, act according to reason, justice, and truth, the sole sources of right. No man, and no body of men, can know and perform fully all that is required by reason, justice, and truth; but they have the faculty to discover it, and can be brought more and more to conform to it in their conduct. All the combinations of the political machine then ought to tend, on the one hand, to extract whatever of reason, justice, or truth, exists in society, in order to apply it to the practical requirements of government; and, on the other hand, to promote the progress of society in reason, justice, and truth, and constantly to embody this progress of society in the actual structure of the government.

  LECTURE 7

  Comparison of the principles of different governments with the true principle of representative government. ~ Aristocratic governments. ~ Origin and history of the word aristocracy. ~ Principle of this form of government; its consequences. ~ How the principle of representative government enters into aristocratic governments. ~ Democratic governments. ~ Origin and consequences of the principle of the sovereignty of the people. ~ This principle not identical with that of representative government. ~ In what sense representative government is the government of the majority.

  I have, in my previous lecture, shown the error of those superficial classifications which only distinguish governments according to their exterior characteristics; I have recognised and separated with precision between the two opposite principles, which are, both of them, the basis of all government; I have identified representative government with one of these principles; I have proved that it could not be deduced from the other; I wish now to compare the principle of representative government with the contrary principle, and to show the opposite condition of governments which refer to it as their starting-point. I will begin by an examination of that form of government which is usually termed aristocratic.

  There is a close connexion between the progressive changes that may be observed in language and those that belong to society. The word aristocracy originally signified the empire of the strong; Ἄρηϛ, ἀρείων, ἂριστον were, at first, terms applied to those who were physically the most powerful; then they were used to designate the most influential, the richest, and finally the best, those possessing the most ability or virtue. This is the history of the successive acceptations of the word in the language from which it is borrowed; the same terms which were first applied to force, the superiority of force, came at length to designate moral and intellectual superiority—virtue.

  Nothing can better characterise than this the progress of society, which begins with the predominance of force, and tends to pass under the empire of moral and intellectual superiority. The desire and tendency of society are in fact towards being governed by the best, by those who most thoroughly know and most heartily respond to the teachings of truth and justice; in this sense, all good governments, and pre-eminently the representative form of government, have for their object to draw forth from the bosom of society that veritable and legitimate aristocracy, by which it has a right to be governed, and which has a right to govern it.

  But such has not been the historical signification of the word aristocracy. If we take the word according as facts have interpreted it, we shall find its meaning to be, a government in which the sovereign power is placed at the disposal of a particular class of citizens, who are hereditarily invested with it, their only qualification being a certain descent, in a manner more or less exclusive, and sometimes almost completely exclusive.

  I do not inquire whence this system of government has derived its origin; how, in the infancy of society, it has sprung almost invariably from the moral superiority of its first founders; how force, which was originally due to moral superiority, was afterwards perpetuated by itself, and became a usurper; these questions, which possess the highest interest, would carry me away from my main point. I am seeking for the fundamental principle of aristocratic government, and I believe it can be summed up in the following terms; the right of sovereignty, attributed in a manner if not entirely exclusive, yet especially and chiefly to a certain class of citizens, whose only claim is that of descent in a certain line.

  This principle is no other than that of the sovereignty of the people confined to a small number of individuals,—to a minority. In both cases, the right to sovereignty is derived, not from any presumed capacity to fulfil certain conditions, nor from intellectual and moral superiority proved in any particular manner, but from the solitary fact of birth, without any condition. In the aristocratic system, an individual is born to a position of sovereignty merely because he has been born into a privileged class; according to the democratic system, an individual is born to a position of sovereignty by the circumstance that he is born into humanity. The participation in sovereignty is in each case the result of a purely material fact, independent of the worth of him who possesses it, and of the judgment of those over whom it is to be exercised. It follows evidently from this, that aristocratic governments are to be classed among those which rest on the idea that the right of sovereignty exists, full and entire, somewhere on the earth—an idea directly contrary, as we have seen, to the principle of representative government.

  If we look at the consequences of this idea—such consequences as have actually manifested themselves in the history of governments of this kind—we shall see that they are not less contrary to the consequences, historical as well as natural, of a representative government.

  In order to maintain the right of sovereignty in the class to which it is exclusively attributed, it must necessarily establish a great inequality in fact, as well as in opinion, between this class and the rest of the citizens. Hence arise all those institutions and laws which characterise aristocratic governments, and which have for their object to concentrate, into the hands of the sole possessors of the sovereignty, all wealth and enlightenment, and all the various instruments of power. It is necessary that the sovereign class should not descend, and that others should not be elevated; otherwise actual power ceasing to approximate to rightful power, the legitimacy of the latter would soon be questioned, and, after a short time, its continuance endangered.

  In the system of those governments which attribute to no individual upon earth a right of sovereignty, and which impose on the existing government the necessity of seeking continually for truth, reason, and justice, as the rule and source of rightful power, all classes of society are perpetually invited and urged to elevate and perfect themselves. Legitimate forms of supremacy are produced, and assume their position; illegitimate forms are unmasked and deposed. Factitious and violent inequalities are resisted and exhibited in their true colours; social forces are, so to speak, brought into competition, and the forces which struggle to possess them are moral.

  A second consequence of the principle of aristocratic governments is their avoidance of publicity. When each one of those who participate in the rightful sovereignty possesses it by the mere accident of birth, and exercises it on his own individual responsibility, he need not recognise any one as claiming a right to call him to account. No one has any right to inquire into the use which he makes of his power, for he acts in virtue of a right which no one can contest, because no one can deprive him of it. It is a right which needs not to justify itself, since it is connected with a fact that is palpable and permanent.

  In the other system, on the contrary, publicity follows necessarily from the principle of government; for since the right to power is derived from superiority in the knowledge and practice of reason, truth, and justice, which no one is supposed to possess fully and at all times, it is imperative that this right should justify itself both before it is assumed and all the time that it is exercised.

  It would be easy thus, proceeding continually within view of real facts, to compare the different consequences of the principle of purely aristocratic governments and those resulting from the principle of representative government, and to show that they are always opposed to one another. We should thereby demonstrate most completely the opposition of the principles themselves, and bring their true nature into clearer light; but I have already said enough on this point. And if any one asserts that I have too rigorously insisted upon inferences to be drawn from the principle of aristocratic governments, that the consequences which I have depicted do never fulfil themselves in so complete a manner, that, for example, the qualification of birth has never held exclusive possession of a right to sovereignty, that never has publicity been entirely quenched—I freely concede all this. At no time, in no place, has evil been allowed to gain exclusive possession of society and government; struggle between principles of good and evil is the permanent condition of the world. False ideas may achieve a more or less extended, a more or less durable success—they can never extirpate their godlike assailants. Truth is patient—it does not easily surrender its hold on society—it never abandons its purpose—it even exercises some sway over that region where error reigns most despotically. Providence never permits bad governments to become so bad as is logically demanded by the principle upon which they rest. So we have seen institutions of justice and liberty existing and even gaining a powerful existence, in the midst of societies ruled by the principle of hereditary right; these institutions have battled against the principle, and have modified it. When the worse principle has prevailed, then have society and government fallen into impotence and decay; this is the history of the Venetian republic. Elsewhere, the struggle has been attended with happier results: the good principle has possessed sufficient force to be able to introduce into the government elements, which have made it vital, which have protected society against the effects of the evil principle, which have even in some sort saved the evil itself, rendering it tolerable by the good with which it is associated. This is the history of England, that striking example of the mixture and struggle of good and evil principles. But their mixture, however intimate it may be, does not prove that they are confounded in their interior character. Good never springs from evil; and representative government has not sprung in England, any more than elsewhere, from the exclusive principle of aristocratic governments; it has sprung from an entirely different principle; and so far from the distinction which I established at the commencement being compromised by the facts to which I have alluded, it is on the other hand triumphantly confirmed by them.

  I have just proved, by a comparison between the principle of the aristocratic and that of the democratic form of government, that they are essentially different; I intend now to show that there is as fundamental a difference between the principle of representative government, and that of democratic government.1

  No one has ever understood the sovereignty of the people to mean, that after having consulted all opinions and all wills, the opinion and will of the greatest number constitutes the law, but that the minority would be free to disobey that which had been decided in opposition to its opinion and will. And yet this would be the necessary consequence of the pretended right attributed to each individual of being governed only by such laws as have received his individual assent. The absurdity of this consequence has not always induced its adherents to abandon the principle, but it has always obliged them to violate it. The sovereignty of the people is contradicted at the outset, by its being resolved into the empire of the majority over the minority. It is almost ridiculous to say that the minority may retire from the majority; this would be to keep society continually on the brink of dissolution. On every question the majority and the minority would disagree, and if all the successive minorities should retire, society would very soon exist no longer. The sovereignty of the people then must necessarily be reduced to the sovereignty of the majority only. When thus reduced, what does it amount to?

  Its principle is, that the majority possesses right by the mere circumstance of its being the majority. But two very different ideas are included in the one expression—the majority; the idea of an opinion which is accredited, and that of a force which is preponderant. So far as force is concerned, the majority possesses no right different from that possessed by force itself, which cannot be, upon this ground alone, the legitimate sovereignty. As to the expression of opinion, is the majority infallible?—does it always apprehend and respect the claims of reason and justice, which alone constitute true law, and confer legitimate sovereignty? Experience testifies to the contrary. The majority, by mere fact of its being a majority, that is to say, by the mere force of numbers, does not then possess legitimate sovereignty, either by virtue of power, which never does confer it, nor by virtue of infallibility, which it does not possess.

  The principle of the sovereignty of the people starts from the supposition that each man possesses as his birthright, not merely an equal right of being governed, but an equal right of governing others. Like aristocratic governments, it connects the right to govern, not with capacity, but with birth. Aristocratic government is the sovereignty of the people in the minority; the sovereignty of the people is aristocratic despotism and privilege in the hands of the majority. In both cases, the principle is the same; a principle contrary, in the first place, to the fact of the inequality established by nature, between the powers and capacities of different individuals; secondly, to the fact of the inequality in capacity, occasioned by difference of position, a difference which exists everywhere, and which has its source in the natural inequality of men; thirdly, to the experience of the world, which has always seen the timid following the brave, the incompetent obeying the competent,—in one word, those who are naturally inferior recognising and submitting themselves to their natural superiors. The principle of the sovereignty of the people, that is to say, the equal right of all individuals to exercise sovereignty, or merely the right of all individuals to concur in the exercise of sovereignty, is then radically false; for, under the pretext of maintaining legitimate equality, it violently introduces equality where none exists, and pays no regard to legitimate inequality. The consequences of this principle are the despotism of number, the domination of inferiorities over superiorities, that is, a tyranny of all others the most violent and unjust.

  At the same time, it is of all others the most transient, for the principle is impossible of application. After its force has spent itself in excesses, number necessarily submits to capacity—the inferior retire to make room for the superior—these enter again into possession of their right, and society is reestablished.

  Such cannot be the principle of representative government. No one disputes that the true law of government is that of reason, truth, and justice, which no one possesses but which certain men are more capable than others of seeking and discovering. Faithful to this aim, representative government rests upon the disposition of actual power in proportion to the capacity to act according to reason and justice, from whence power derives its right. It is the principle which, by the admission of all, and by virtue of its simple appeal to the common sense of the community, is applicable to ordinary life, and to the interest of individuals themselves. It is the principle which confers the sovereignty over persons, families, property, only to the individual who is presumed to be capable of using it reasonably, and which withdraws it from him who is seen to be positively incapable. Representative government applies to general interests, and to the government of society, the same principle which the good sense of the human race has led it to apply to individual interests and to the control of each man’s private life. It distributes sovereignty according to the capacity required for it, that is to say, it only places actual power, or any portion of actual power, where it has discovered the presence of rightful power, presumed to exist by certain symptoms, or tested by certain proofs. It is remembered, that power though legitimate is not to be conceded fully and completely to any one, and not only is it not attributed to the mere fact of birth, but it cannot be allowed to remain by itself in irresponsible isolation, which is the second characteristic of representative government, by which, not less than by the preceding, it is distinguished from the sovereignty of the people.

  It has been often said, that representative government is the government of the majority, and there is some truth in the assertion; but it must not be thought that this government of the majority is the same as that involved in the sovereignty of the people. The principle of the sovereignty of the people applies to all individuals, merely because they exist, without demanding of them anything more. Thus, it takes the majority of these individuals, and says—Here is reason, here is law. Representative government proceeds in another way: it considers what is the kind of action to which individuals are called; it examines into the amount of capacity requisite for this action; it then summons those individuals who are supposed to possess this capacity—all such, and such only. Then it seeks for a majority among those who are capable.

  It is in this way, in fact, that men have everywhere proceeded, even when they have been supposed to act according to the idea of the sovereignty of the people. Never have they been entirely faithful to it; they have always demanded for political actions certain conditions, that is to say, indications of a certain capacity. They have been mistaken, more or less, and have excluded the capable, or invited the inefficient, and the error is a serious one. But they have followed the principle which measures right by capacity, even when they have professed the principle that right is derived from the simple fact of possessing a human nature. Representative government, then, is not purely and simply the government of the numerical majority, it is government by the majority of those who are qualified to govern; sometimes assuming the existence of the qualification beforehand, sometimes requiring that it should be proved and exemplified. The peerage, the right to elect and to be elected, the royal power itself, are attached to a capacity presumed to exist, not only after certain conditions have been complied with, but by reason of the position occupied by those men in whom the capacity is presumed, in their relations to other powers, and in the limits of the functions assigned to them. No one is recognised as possessing an inherent right to an office or a function. Nor is this all; representative government does not content itself with demanding capacity before it confers power; as soon as the capacity is presumed or proved, it is placed in a position where it is open to a kind of legal suspicion, and where it must necessarily continue to legitimatize itself, in order to retain its power. According to the principle of the sovereignty of the people, absolute right resides with the majority; true sovereignty exists wherever this force is manifested; from this follows necessarily the oppression of the minority, and such has, in fact, generally been the result. The representative form of government, never forgetting that reason and justice, and consequently a right to sovereignty, do not reside fully and constantly in any part of the earth, presumes that they are to be found in the majority, but does not attribute them to it as their certain and abiding qualities. At the very moment when it presumes that the majority is right, it does not forget that it may be wrong, and its concern is to give full opportunity to the minority of proving that it is in fact right, and of becoming in its turn the majority. Electoral precautions, the debates in the deliberative assemblies, the publication of these debates, the liberty of the press, the responsibility of ministers, all these arrangements have for their object to insure that a majority shall be declared only after it has well authenticated itself, to compel it ever to legitimatize itself, in order to its own preservation, and to place the minority in such a position as that it may contest the power and right of the majority.

  Thus, the considerations we have suggested show that a representative form of government regards the individuals whom it brings into activity, and the majority which it seeks, from quite another point of view than that involved in the sovereignty of the people. The latter admits that the right of sovereignty resides somewhere upon the earth; the former denies it: this finds the right in question in a purely numerical majority; that seeks it in the majority of those qualified to pronounce on the subject: the one attributes it fully and entirely to number; the other is satisfied with the presumption that it is there, admits at the same time that it may possibly not be there, and invites the minority to substantiate its claims, securing, meanwhile, every facility for its so doing. The sovereignty of the people sees legitimate power in the multitude; representative government sees it only in unity, that is to say, in the reason to which the multitude ought to reduce itself. The sovereignty of the people makes power to come from below; representative government recognises the fact that all power comes from above, and at the same time obliges all who assume to be invested with it to substantiate the legitimacy of their pretensions before men who are capable of appreciating them. The one tends to lower those who are superior, the other to elevate those who are inferior, by bringing them into communication with those who are naturally above them. The sovereignty of the people is full at once of pride and of envy; representative government renders homage to the dignity of our nature, without ignoring its frailty, and recognises its frailty without outrage to its dignity. The principle of the sovereignty of the people is contrary to all the facts which reveal themselves in the actual origin of power, and in the progress of societies; representative government does not blink any one of these facts. Lastly, the sovereignty of the people is no sooner proclaimed, than it is compelled to abdicate its power, and to confess the impracticability of its aims; representative government moves naturally and steadily onward, and develops itself by its very existence.2

  So far, then, from deriving its existence from the principle of the sovereignty of the people, representative government disowns this principle, and rests upon an entirely different idea, and one which is attended with entirely different consequences. It matters little that this form of government has been often claimed in the name of the sovereignty of the people, and that its principal epochs of development have occurred at times when that idea predominated; the reasons of this fact are easily discovered. The sovereignty of the people is a great force which sometimes interferes to break up an inequality which has become excessive, or a power which has become absolute, when society can no longer accommodate itself to them; as despotism sometimes interferes, in the name of order, violently to restore a society on the brink of dissolution. It is only a weapon of attack and destruction, never an instrument for the foundation of liberty. It is not a principle of government, it is a terrible but transient dictatorship, exercised by the multitude—a dictatorship that ceases, and that ought to cease as soon as the multitude has accomplished its work of destruction.

  Briefly, to conclude: as the object of these lectures is to trace the course of representative government in modern Europe wherever it has found any footing, I have looked for the primal type of this government in order to compare it with the government of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, which we have already examined, and with the other primitive governments which we shall meet with in Europe. In order to distinguish precisely the character of a representative government, I have been obliged to go back to the source of all government. I think I have shown that we must classify all governments according to two different principles. The one class, allied to justice and reason, recognises these alone as their guides; and as it is not in the power of human feebleness, in this world, to follow infallibly these sacred leaders, these governments do not concede to any one the possession of an absolute right to sovereignty, and they call upon the entire body of society to aid in the discovery of the law of justice and reason, which can alone confer it. The other class, on the contrary, admitting a right inherent in man to make a law for himself, thus degrade the rightful sovereignty; which, as it belongs only to justice and reason, ought never to come under the absolute control of man, who is ever too ready to usurp sovereignty, in order to exercise it for the promotion of his private interests, or for the gratification of his passions. I have shown that a representative government alone renders homage to true principles, and that all other governments, democratic as well as aristocratic, ought to be arranged according to an entirely different scheme of classification. I have now to enter upon the examination of the exterior forms of representative government, and to compare its principle with the historical principle of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, as it is exhibited before us in its institutions.

  LECTURE 8

  The forms of a government are related to its principle, but are swayed by circumstances, and vary according to different degrees of civilization. ~ What are the forms essential to a representative government? 1st. ~ Division of powers; why absolutely essential to the principle of representative government; 2nd. ~ Election; 3rd. ~ Publicity.

  The forms of a government are immediately related to its principle: the principle determines the forms, the forms reveal the principle. It does not therefore follow that the forms correspond exactly to the principle, nor that the principle can only realize itself under a peculiar form. As the principle itself is never alone nor omnipotent in its influence upon the facts, forms are necessarily diverse and mingled. In proportion as the action of any principle extends itself, the form which is truly correspondent to it is developed; but, in the course of this work, the principle embodies itself in the different forms which correspond to the condition of those facts which, in their aggregate, constitute society, and determine the position which it occupies in the scale of civilization.

  The same principle can then be contained, and act under different forms. If the forms are the best that can be supplied for the principle, considering the existing state of society, and if, although they do not fully correspond to its nature, they insure the constant and regular progress of its action, there is no blame that can be charged upon them; each epoch, each state of society only allows of a certain development of the principle upon which its government rests. What is the measure of development possible to each epoch, and what is the form which corresponds to it in the present, which will secure for the future a more extended development, and which will bring with it new forms? This is the whole extent of the question—I mean, the question concerning the present, the only one with which political activity has to deal.

  Nevertheless there are certain forms of government which are the general conditions of the presence and action of particular principles. Wherever the principle exists, it necessarily produces these forms; where they are wanting the principle does not exist or will soon cease to exist; its action and progress imperatively demand them: so far as they gain consistency at any place, the principle which they suppose is latently present and tends to become predominant.

  What are the essential forms of the principle of representative government? By what external indications may we recognize the presence of this principle in a government? What conditions are required in order that it may act and develop itself?

  We may, if I mistake not, reduce to three the conditions necessary, and the forms essential, to the representative system; all three are perhaps not equally necessary; their simultaneous existence is not perhaps indispensable in order to indicate the existence and secure the development of the principle from which they are derived. We may, however, justly consider them as fundamental. These forms are: 1st. The division of powers; 2nd. Election; 3rd. Publicity.

  We have seen that no really existing power can be a rightful power; except in so far as it acts according to reason and truth, the only legitimate rule of action, the only source of right.

  No existing power can fully know and constantly regard the guidance of reason and truth according to which it is bound to regulate its action. No actual power then is, or can be, in itself, a power by inherent right. In other words, as no existing power can be found that is infallible, there is none that may retain its existence on the tenure of absolute right.

  Such is, however, the condition of human things that they need, as a last appeal, the intervention of a power which may declare the law to be the rule of government, and which shall impose it and cause it to be respected. In all the relations which the social state admits and to which it gives birth, from domestic order to political order, the presence of a power which may give and maintain the rule of action, is a necessary condition of the very existence of society.1

  We see then the dilemma in which society is placed. No actual power can vindicate a claim to become an absolute power; hence the necessity, in order to meet particular emergencies, of a power that is definite, that is to say, actually absolute.

  The problem of government is—how to give society a guarantee that the power, which is in operation absolute, to which all social relations must necessarily be referred, shall be but the image, the expression, the organ of that power which is rightfully absolute and alone legitimate, and which is never to be found localized in this world? This is also, as we have seen, the problem which the representative system formally proposes to itself, since all its arrangements assume the existence of this problem and are framed with a purpose to resolve it.

  To make actual power, as far as possible, identical with rightful power, by imposing upon it the abiding necessity of seeking for reason, truth, and justice—the sources of right; by investing it with practical power only when it has proved, that is to say, given a presumption of, its success in this search; and by compelling it ever to renew and confirm this presumption under penalty of losing power if it is unable to do so, this is the course of the representative system—this is the end at which it aims and according to which it directs, in their relations and their movement, all the resources which it brings into action.

  In order to attain this end, it is indispensable that the existing power should not be simple, that is to say, that it should not be suffered to con fine itself to one single instrument. As no force can possess in itself fully the right to authority, if there is one which possesses an absolute power, not only will it abuse this power, but it will very soon claim it as an inherent right. Alone it will become despotic, and in order to sustain its despotism it will call itself legitimately sovereign; and perhaps will end by believing and establishing the fiction. Such is the corrupting effect of despotism, that it destroys sooner or later, both in those who exercise it and in those who submit to it, even the feeling of its il-legitimacy. Whoever is solitary in his sovereignty has only one step in order to become accredited as infallible. Alexander was right in wishing that he should be recognized as a god; he deduced a consequence that strictly followed from the fulness of the power which he possessed: and they also are right, who, attributing sovereignty to the multitude, take for their maxim, Vox populi, vox Dei. Everywhere where sovereignty rests with a single power, whatever may be the nature of that power, there is a danger that sovereignty will immediately be claimed as a right.

  A division of the actual sovereignty is then a natural consequence of the principle, that a right to sovereignty does not belong to any person. It is necessary that there should be several powers, equal in extent and supplementary to each other in the exercise of actual sovereignty, in order that no one of them may be led to arrogate to itself the sovereignty of inherent right. The feeling of their reciprocal interdependence can alone prevent them from regarding themselves as entirely irresponsible.

  Further: it is only in this way that the ruling power can be constrained to perpetuate its search for reason, truth, and justice; that is, for the rule which should govern its action, in order that it may become legitimate. The words of Pascal apply not only to the formation of power, they extend also to its exercise. Here are beings, individual or collective, who are called upon to perform the functions of sovereignty in common, each one under the supervision of his fellows. Do they possess among them, or by the fact of their existence, the right to power? No: they must seek it, they must on every opportunity manifest the truth which they proclaim as law. Isolated and distinct, they are only a multitude; when, after having deliberated and laboured, they find a ground of agreement in a common idea, from whence can proceed one will, then alone will the true unity, which resides in reason, be evolved; then there will be a presumption that the ruling power knows accurately and is well disposed to that legitimate rule which alone confers rightful power. If this work were not enforced, if this laborious and common search for the true law were not the necessary result of the reciprocal independence of the several powers, the end of government would not be attained. All the relations of the four great political powers which constitute, with us, the government (that is, the king, the two houses of parliament, and the electors) are intended to compel them to act in harmony, that is to say, to reduce themselves to unity.

  The introduction of an elective, that is, a moveable element, into government, is as necessary as a division of forces to prevent the sovereignty from degenerating in the hands of those who exercise it into a full and permanent sovereignty of inherent right. It is therefore the necessary result of a representative government, and one of its principal characteristics. Accordingly we see that actual governments which have aimed at becoming absolute, have always endeavoured to destroy the elective principle. Venice gave a memorable illustration of this tendency, when, in 1319, it conferred an hereditary right on the grand council.* In the first age of governments, at the same time that we see power come from above, that is to say, acquire for itself by its superiority, of whatever kind that may be, either ability, riches, or courage—we see it also obliged to make its title recognised by those who can judge it. Election is the mode of this recognition—it is to be found in the infancy of all governments; but it is generally abolished after a time. It is when it reappears with sufficient energy to influence powerfully the administration of society, that a representative government is rising into being.

  Theoretically, publicity is perhaps the most essential characteristic of a representative government. We have seen that it has for its object to call upon all individuals who possess rights, as well as those who exercise powers, to seek reason and justice, the source and rule of legitimate sovereignty. In publicity consists the bond between a society and its government. Looking, however, at facts, we find that of the elements essential to a representative government, this is the last which is introduced and gains a firm footing. Its history is analogous to that of the elective principle. The Champs de Mars and Mai were held in the open air: many persons were present at them who took no part in the deliberation. The assembly of the Lombards at Pavia took place circumstante immensa multitudine.2 It is probable that the same publicity attended also the Wittenagemot of the Saxons. When absolute or aristocratic government prevails, publicity disappears. When representative government begins to be formed by election, publicity does not at first enter into its constitution. In England, the House of Commons was for a long time a secret assembly; the first step towards publicity was to cause its acts, addresses and resolutions, to be printed. This step was taken by the Long Parliament under Charles I. Under Charles II. its proceedings again became secret; some individuals demanded, but in vain, the publication of the acts passed by the House,—the demand was resisted as dangerous. It was not till the eighteenth century that visitors were allowed to be present at the sittings of the English Parliament: this is not now granted as a right, and the demand of a single member who appeals to the ancient law, is sufficient to clear the gallery. Publicity has not then been invariably attached to a representative government; but it flows naturally from its principles—it is accordingly won almost necessarily, and may now be regarded as one of its most essential features. This result is owing to the press, which has rendered publicity easy without resorting to tumultuous meetings.

  We have found the fundamental principle and the exterior and essential characteristics of a representative government; we have learnt what it is that constitutes it and distinguishes it from other government: we may now pass to its history. We shall take care to admit its existence only where we recognise the presence or the approach of its true principles; and we shall be convinced that its progress has ever been identical with the development of these principles.

  LECTURE 9

  Primitive institutions of the Franks. ~ Sketch of the history of the Frankish monarchy. ~ The Franks in Germany. ~ Their settlement in Belgium and in Gaul. ~ Character and authority of their chiefs after their establishment in the Roman Empire. ~ Early Frankish chieftains. ~ Clovis: his expeditions, wars, and conquests. ~ Decisive preponderance of the Franks in Gaul.

  In order to pursue the object of this course, I now proceed to give a sketch of the Franks similar to that which I have already given of the Anglo-Saxons. I shall study with you their primitive institutions, seek out their leading principle, and compare it with that type of representative government which we have just delineated. But before we enter upon the examination of Frankish institutions, I think it advisable briefly to refer to the leading events in the history of France. The institutions of a people cannot be thoroughly understood without a knowledge of their history. I shall devote this lecture to a view of the establishment of the Frankish monarchy; on a future occasion we will trace its progress under the first and second races of its kings.

  I shall not now delay to discuss the somewhat uncertain origin of the Franks; there is reason to believe that, in Germany, they did not constitute a separate and homogeneous nation. They were a confederation of tribes settled in the country between the Rhine, the Maine, the Weser, and the Elbe. The Romans seem to have been long ignorant of their existence even after the conquest of Gaul, and history mentions them, for the first time, during the reign of Gordian, about the middle of the third century. A song, composed in celebration of the victories of Aurelian had the following refrain:

  • Mille Francos, mille Sarmatas,
  • Semel et semel occidimus.1

  After this period, we find the different tribes of Franks advancing from East to West with rather rapid progress. At the beginning of the fourth century, we meet with the Salian Franks settled in Belgium, and the Ripuarian Franks on the two banks of the Rhine. These peoples established themselves on the frontiers of Gaul, sometimes by force, and sometimes with the consent of the emperors, who, after having defeated the barbarians, frequently assigned them lands on which to settle. This was the course pursued by Probus, Constantine, Julian, Constantius, and many others.

  The chiefs thus established in the Roman territory retained, over their barbarian comrades, their ancient and independent authority, and received at the same time, from the emperors, certain titles to which were applied certain functions, and a certain amount of authority over the Romans in their district. Thus we find them adorned with the names of Dux, Magister militae, Comes littoris, and so forth. Their position was almost identical with that of the leaders of the wandering Tartar tribes in the Russian empire, who are elected by the men of their tribe, but receive their title and a certain jurisdiction from the Emperor of Russia—retaining their independent life, but bound at the same time to render military service, and to pay a tribute of furs.

  Childeric, the chief of a Frankish tribe at Tournai, had received the title of Magister militae from the empire. When, in consequence of domestic quarrels and treason, he was forced to take refuge in Thuringia, his tribe submitted in 460 to Egidius, master of the Roman militia at Soissons. In 1653, the tomb of Childeric was discovered at Tournai, and several pieces of money were found in it, which are now deposited in the National Library, at Paris.

  At the termination of the fifth century, the epoch of the dissolution of the empire, when the provinces were left, according to the expression of Tacitus,magis sine domino quam cum libertate,2 nearly all these local chieftains, Romans as well as barbarians, became independent, and no longer recognised the sovereignty of Rome. Siagrius, the son of Egidius, was appointed King of the Romans at Soissons. He made war with Clovis, in his own name and on his own account.

  The Frankish chiefs, who had thus become petty sovereigns, penetrated still farther into the empire. Clodion, who had settled at Cambrai, carried his incursions to the banks of the Somme. Meroveus was present at the battle of Chalons-sur-Marne, at which Attila was conquered. It was, however, under the command of their chieftain Clovis, that these bands of Franks, who originally formed colonies on the frontiers, entered Gaul definitively as conquerors. Clovis was the son of Childeric, who reigned at Tournai; and he succeeded his father in 481. He probably wielded a certain amount of authority in the name of the empire. Saint Remy, in a letter, gives him the title of Magister militae. Other Frankish chiefs were, about this period, almost in the same position as Clovis: Ragnachar ruled at Cambrai, Sigebert at Cologne, and Renomer at Mans. Clovis was the most ambitious, the ablest, and the most fortunate of them all.

  His nearest neighbour was Siagrius, who governed at Soissons. In 486, Clovis sent him a defiance; Siagrius accepted it, and appointed the battlefield at Nogent, near Soissons. Siagrius was conquered, and took refuge with Alaric, king of the Visigoths, who gave him up to his conqueror. In 491, Clovis conquered the district of Tongres, now the district of Liege. In 496, he penetrated still further in the same direction; he entered the country of the Alemanni, against whom Sigebert, king of Cologne, had requested his assistance. He defeated them at Tolbiac, and became a Christian in consequence of this victory. A party of the conquered Alemanni took refuge in Rhoetia under the protection of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths: there, under the name of Suevi, they became the stem of the Suabians. Another body remained on the banks of the Rhine, and became subject to Sigebert and Clovis. Thus this chieftain extended his dominion in the vicinity of the Rhine. At the same time he overcame most of the Frankish chiefs, his neighbours, and subjected their tribes to his power. In 497, he led an expedition against the Armoricans in the West. In 500, he fell upon the Burgundians in the East, took advantage of their dissensions, and gained a victory between Dijon and Langres. In 507, he advanced into the centre of France, through Anjou and Poitou; near Poitiers, he attacked Alaric II., king of the Visigoths, and killed him. He penetrated as far as Angoulême, Bordeaux, and Toulouse; and boasted of having conquered Aquitaine. In 508, Clovis received the title of Patrician from Anastasius, the Emperor of the East. In 509, he returned to the Rhine, defeated his ancient ally, Sigebert, king of Cologne, and subjugated the Ripuarian Franks. In 511, he died, after having led his Frankish warriors, and extended his dominion, over the various parts of Gaul.

  The wars and conquests of Clovis had little resemblance to what we understand by the same words at the present day. The principal object of the Frankish expeditions was to make booty, and carry off slaves; this is what was called conquest in those days. The victor sometimes imposed a tribute; but there resulted from his victory hardly any permanent possession, and no civil settlement. Among other proofs of this assertion, I may instance the small number of the warriors who accompanied Clovis, who was never attended, on his expeditions, by more than five or six thousand men. Now, with this number, no civil settlement, not even a military occupation, was possible. When the conqueror had withdrawn, the conquered people gradually resumed their independence—a new chieftain arose. Rarely did the conquerors settle in the lands which they had subjected; thus it was necessary incessantly to make the same conquests over again.

  For a detailed narrative of these events, I refer you to the general histories of France, especially to the work of M. Sismondi.3

  Naowhere do we obtain a better picture of the manners of the Greeks in the heroic age than that supplied by the Iliad. A similar authority, with reference to the expeditions and manners of the Germanic people, exists in the poem of the Nibelungen. There you will best be able to obtain a correct knowledge and thorough comprehension of the state of society, and the nature of the wars at this epoch.

  At the death of Clovis, in 571, the Frankish monarchy was definitively established; for he had made the Frankish name and people the most formidable and least contested power in Gaul.

  LECTURE 10

  Division of territory among the sons of the Frankish kings. ~ Rapid formation and disappearance of several Frank kingdoms. ~ Neustria and Austrasia; their geographical division. ~ Early predominance of Neustria. ~ Fredegonde and Brunehaut. ~ Elevation of the Mayors of the Palace. ~ True character of their power. ~ The Pepin family. ~ Charles Martel. ~ Fall of the Merovingians.

  I have already explained to you how we must understand the historical phrase which attributes to Clovis the foundation of the French monarchy. In the sense and within the limits which I have indicated, Clovis, at his death, was king of the whole of France, excepting the kingdoms of the Burgundians and Visigoths. After his decease, each of his four sons received a portion of his dominions. Theodoric ruled at Metz, Chlodomir at Orleans, Childebert at Paris, and Clotaire at Soissons. The nature of this division has given rise to considerable dissension among learned men; but I think the question may be easily solved. In order to retain his power, it was necessary for the chieftain or king to possess large private domains; in all his warlike expeditions, he acquired for himself large tracts of territory; Clovis had thus obtained immense landed property wherever he had made a conquest. At his death, these estates were divided among his children, as were also his other possessions, flocks, herds, jewels, money, treasures of all kinds: these supplied their owners with the surest means of attaining power. Moreover, it was the custom of the Frankish kings to associate their sons with them in the government, by sending them to reside in that district or province which was afterwards to constitute their kingdom. They thus endeavoured to secure the prevalence of hereditary right over election. The sons of the king became in their turn the natural chieftains of the countries in which they actually possessed the most power. Thus we find that Clotaire II., in 622, associated with himself his son Dagobert, and sent him to Austrasia. Dagobert did the same, in 633, for his son Sigebert.

  From this division of private domains and participation in royal power, it was easy to pass to the political partition of the kingdom. It is more difficult to discover whether these partitions were made by the dying king, in his own authority, or by the national assembly. At a later period, under the second race, we find Pepin, Charlemagne and Louis the Débonnair, positively obtaining the consent of the assembly of barons to the division of their states among their children. Facts are not so clear and authentic under the Merovingians. However, as the accession of the second race was a return to old Germanic manners, it is probable that, in the time of Clovis and his successors, every heir, on receiving his portion, was obliged to gain the consent of the chiefs of the country. Five partitions of this kind occurred under the Merovingians; in 511, after the death of Clovis; in 561, after Clotaire I.; in 638, after Dagobert I.; in 656, after Clovis II. From 678 to 752, the whole monarchy was actually united under the authority of the Pepin family, who were originally Mayors of the Palace of Austrasia, and nominally under that of titular kings, the first four and the sixth of whom descended from the kings of Neustria, and the fifth and seventh from those of Austrasia. The kingdoms which were constituted by the five partitions which I have just mentioned, were those of Metz, Orleans, Paris, Soissons, Austrasia, Burgundy, Neustria, and Aquitaine.

  I shall not here speak of the vicissitudes and perpetual dismemberments of these various kingdoms at various times. I should have only to relate a long series of wars and murders. The ancient kingdom of Burgundy was conquered by the children of Clovis I.; a new kingdom of Burgundy arose, in which the kingdom of Orleans was incorporated. The new kingdom of Burgundy was invaded, sometimes by the kings of Neustria, sometimes by those of Austrasia. The kingdom of Aquitaine appears for a moment only under Childebert II., son of Clotaire II., in 628, and about 716, under Eudes, duke of Aquitaine, who declared himself an independent monarch. At length, these four kingdoms disappeared; the fundamental conflict and division was between the kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, the two largest, and last surviving.

  The geographical division of the kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia is uncertain and variable. We find the kings of Austrasia possessing countries far distant from the center of their government—countries, too, which seem to be naturally placed by their position under the sway of the kings of Neustria. Thus, they were the masters of Auvergne, and their dominion extended almost as far as Poitou. These incoherent possessions had their origin in the frequent expeditions of the two countries against each other, or into distant lands which belonged to neither of them. We can, however, obtain some few distinct boundary lines; the forest of Ardennes separated Austrasia from Neustria; Neustria comprised the country between the Meuse and the Loire; Austrasia consisted of that between the Meuse and the Rhine.

  This division had a far greater importance than that of a mere geographical division; and there is a deeper cause for the successive disappearance of the other Frankish kingdoms, and the final predominance of these two.

  The countries which composed Austrasia were the first which were inhabited by the Franks. They adjoined Germany, and were connected with those portions of the Frankish confederacy which had not crossed the Rhine. They were, therefore, the cradle, the first fatherland, of the Franks. Moreover, after their expeditions, these tribes frequently returned with their booty to their ancient settlement, instead of establishing themselves in their new conquests. Thus Theodoric, son of Clovis, in the fifth century, led a great expedition into Auvergne, and returned afterwards to Austrasia. Roman civilization and manners had been almost completely expelled from that bank of the Rhine; the ancient German manners predominated there. In the countries which composed Neustria, on the other hand, the Franks were less numerous, more scattered, more separated from their ancient fatherland and fellow-countrymen. The ancient inhabitants of the country surrounded them on every side. The Franks were there like colonies of barbarians transported into the midst of Roman civilization and a Roman people. This state of things could not but lead to a far more profound and reasonable distinction between the two kingdoms, than could be occasioned by a purely geographical division. On one side was the kingdom of the Germano-Franks, on the other that of the Romano-Franks.

  Historic testimony positively confirms this probable deduction from facts. Austrasia is termed Francia Teutonica, and Neustria, Francia Romana. The German language prevailed in the former country, and the Roman in the latter. Finally, under the first race of kings, events bear the evident impress of this fundamental distinction, or rather, they are its natural result. When considering them in a general manner, it is impossible to recognize this character. I shall now give a summary of the principal proofs.

  I. The original predominance of the kingdom of Neustria. This is an incontestable fact. Four kings, after Clovis, and before the destruction of the royal authority by the Mayors of the Palace, united the whole Frankish monarchy under one head. These were kings of Neustria; Clotaire I., from 558 to 561; Clotaire II., from 613 to 628; Dagobert I., from 631 to 638; and Clovis II., from 655 to 656. This predominance of Neustria was the natural result, 1st, Of the establishment of Clovis in Neustria; 2ndly, Of the central position of that kingdom with reference to the rest of Gaul; 3rd, Of the superior civilization and wealth which accrued to it from its Roman population; 4th, Of the rapid extension which the royal authority obtained in it, in consequence of the prevalence of Roman ideas and customs; 5th, Of the continualfluctuations occasioned in Austrasia, by the proximity of the German barbarians, by wars against the Thuringians and Saxons, and by other causes.

  II. The state of the two kingdoms, during the epoch of Fredegonde and Brunehaut, from 598 to 623. The struggle was constant between Neustria and Austrasia, under the name of these two queens. The power of Chilperic and of Fredegonde in Neustria was greater than that of the kings of Austrasia and of Brunehaut. Fredegonde acted upon a country in which the only Roman administration still prevailed; Brunehaut endeavoured in vain to overcome the rude independence of the chiefs of the German bands, who had become large landed proprietors. Her boldness and ability failed in its opposition to the Austrasian and Burgundian aristocracy. The Austrasian aristocracy formed a secret alliance with that of Neustria. The fall and death of Brunehaut were evidently a triumph of the Austrasian aristocracy, which, being stronger and more compact than that of Neustria, imposed upon Clotaire II. the execution of his queen. The remnants of Roman despotism were overcome in Austrasia by the German aristocracy, and the consequences of that event were the enfeeblement of the royal authority and the predominance of Austrasian influence.

  III. The elevation of the Mayors of the Palace, and the fall of the Merovingian race, are the third proof of the great fact which I have mentioned. The elevation of the Mayors of the Palace must be ascribed to the same causes in both kingdoms. It is an error to interpret this fact as the conflict of the victorious Franks against the Gauls and Romans. These last, more moulded to despotism, had found a ready access to the court of the barbarian kings, and it has been inferred from this, that it was in order to counteract their influence, that the German aristocracy created the Mayors of the Palace. This is an error; the Mayors of the Palace were the work and instrument of the barbarian aristocracy, whether Roman or Gallic, in opposition to the royal authority.

  It has also been said that the kings were desirous of attaching to themselves one of the most powerful members of the territorial aristocracy, in order to control or oppress the others. This might have been the case originally, but the Mayor of the Palace soon found it more advantageous to make himself the leader and instrument of the nobility. He promoted their interests, and assumed the character of a protector to the large proprietors with whom, finally, his appointment rested. From this time forth, the royal authority was almost a dead letter.

  The same phenomenon is observable in both kingdoms; but the Austrasian aristocracy was more purely German, and more compact, than that of Neustria. It was consequently more powerful, and its Mayors of the Palace became more deeply rooted in their authority. Thus we behold the family of Pepin gain the royal power by a progressive elevation, from 630 to 75. This family was descended from Carloman, the wealthy proprietor of the domain of Haspengau, situated on the Meuse, between the district of Liege and the duchy of Brabant. It was thoroughly German, and naturally placed itself at the head of the Franco-German aristocracy.

  The fall of the Merovingians was, therefore, the work of Austrasia, and, as it were, a second conquest of Roman France, by Germanic France. The kings of Roman France were unable to maintain their position, and the Neustrian Mayors of the Palace, the leaders of a mingled aristocracy of Franks and Gauls, were incompetent to take their place. It was from the banks of the Rhine and from Belgium, that is, from the ancient fatherland of the Franks, that the new conquerors came—and these conquerors were the chiefs of a purely Germanic aristocracy.

  This was, undoubtedly, the true character of the fall of the Merovingians, and of the elevation of the Carlovingians, who founded a new Frankish monarchy in that Gaul in which the Neustrian Franks had so greatly degenerated. Thus we shall perceive, at this epoch, and in consequence of this revolution, a marked return towards the primitive institutions and manners of the Franks. This is perceptible, indeed, even in the manner in which the revolution was effected. The details of this event fully con firm what we have first said regarding the general progress of affairs. The Pepin family had laboured for a century to place itself at the head of the Frankish nation. It derived its support not merely from the great landed aristocracy, but also from the patronage of the warriors employed in military expeditions. The development of the power of this family, in the first point of view, was the work of Pepin the Old and of Pepin de Heristal; under the second, it was the work of Charles Martel in particular. His continual wars against the Transrhenane Germans, against the Saracens, and against the petty tyrants of the interior, rendered him a more powerful warrior-chief than any of his ancestors. But Charles Martel employed other means also to attach his companions to his person. He seized the property of the church, and distributed it amongst them. He did not take this property, however, in so absolute a manner as is supposed. The various churches were in the habit of farming out their property for a fixed annual income, and ecclesiastical estates thus farmed out were called precaria. Frequently the kings, when desirous of rewarding one of their chiefs, ordered a chapter to farm out an estate to the favourite for a very moderate rent, under the title of a precarium. Charles Martel, at first, merely generalised this practice. A very large number of his comrades received from him favours of this kind; in the first instance, they received the ecclesiastical estates only for two or three years; but, when that term had expired, the tenants were unwilling to restore what they had appropriated to themselves by the habit of enjoyment. The conflict of the church against the usurping proprietors long perplexed the kings of the second race. As they often required the help of the clergy, they strove to appease their complaints. Pepin the Short and Charlemagne restored to them a large portion of their property which had formerly been granted to their warriors as precaria; or at least, increased the amount paid to the church by the new proprietors, who obstinately refused to consider themselves mere tenants.

  The predominance of the Pepin family had commenced before the time of Charles Martel, by their possessing the hereditary office of Mayor of the Palace. During the life of that great chieftain, there were several inter-reigns in Austrasia and Neustria, and he continued to exercise the supreme authority with the simple title of Duke of the Franks. At his death, his children, Pepin and Carloman, divided the kingdom between them, Pepin, still preserving some respect for appearances, made Childeric III. king in Neustria; and soon, by the abdication of his brother Carloman, he found himself Duke of Austrasia, as well as the all-powerful Mayor of the Palace in Neustria. Such was, however, the influence already possessed by the idea of the hereditary legitimacy of the crown, that Pepin did not venture to seize, in the name of force alone, upon the throne which was considered to belong rightfully to the descendants of Clovis. He sought to justify his employment of force by popular election, and an appeal to religion. As the head of an aristocracy, he was obliged frequently to defer to its will, and to give it a share of authority. He revived the ancient assemblies of the large landowners, and restored to them their part in public affairs. Thenceforward he might consider himself certain of his election; but even this did not suffice him. He thought that his usurpation needed a more august and sacred sanction. He gained over to his interests Boniface, bishop of Mayence, and charged him to sound Pope Zachary, who, on his side, was hard pressed by the Lombards, and needed the assistance of the Frankish chieftain. When Pepin was sure of the pontiff’s concurrence, he sent Burckhardt, bishop of Wurtzburg, and Fulrad, abbot of St. Denis, to propose to him this question, in the form of a case of conscience. “When there is a king in fact and a king by right, which is the true king?” The pope replied, that he who actually exercised the royal authority ought also to possess the royal title. In 752, Pepin convoked the national assembly at Soissons; he was there elected king, and afterwards consecrated by Bishop Boniface. In 754, Pope Stephen III. made a journey into France, and again consecrated Pepin with his two sons and his wife Bertrade. The pope ordered the Franks, on pain of excommunication, to take none as kings who did not belong to the family of Pepin, and the Franks swore an oath:Ut nunquam de alterius lumbis regem in aevo praesumant eligere.1

  A second dynasty was thus established almost in the same manner as the first had been. The principal warrior-chief, the most powerful of the large landowners, has himself elected by his companions, con fines future elections to members of his own family, and obtains the sanction of religion to his election. He holds the actual power from his fathers and from himself; he is desirous of holding the rightful power from God and from the people. German manners and institutions reappear, but in association with Christian ideas. Here is a second conquest of Gaul, accomplished by German warriors, and sanctioned, in the name of the Roman world, no longer by the Emperor, but by the Pope. The church has inherited the moral ascendancy of the empire.

  LECTURE 11

  General character of events under the Carlovingian Empire. ~ Reign of Pepin the Short. ~ Reign of Charlemagne. ~ Epoch of transition. ~ Reigns of Louis the Débonnair and Charles the Bald. ~ Norman invasions. ~ The last Carlovingians. ~ Accession of Hugh Capet.

  I have sketched the general progress of events in Frankish Gaul, under the Merovingians; I have now to give a similar outline of the reign of the Carlovingians. I shall enter neither into an examination of the institutions, nor a detailed narrative of occurrences; I shall seek to sum up the facts in the general fact which includes them all.

  The general tendency of events under the Merovingians was towards centralization; and this tendency was natural. At that period, a society and a state were labouring to form and create themselves; and societies and states can be created only by the centralization of interests and forces. The conquests and authority of Clovis, however fleeting and incomplete they may have been, indicate this need of centralization, which was then pressing upon Roman and barbarian society. After the death of Clovis, his dominions were dismembered, and formed into distinct kingdoms; but these kingdoms could not remain separate; they continually tended to reunite, and soon became reduced in number to two, which finally coalesced. A similar process took place in reference to the authority in the interior of each state. The royal power attempted at first to be the centralizing principle, but did not succeed; the aristocracy of the chiefs, the great landowners, laboured to organize itself, and to produce its own government; it produced it, at length, in the form of the Mayors of the Palace, who eventually became kings. After two hundred and seventy-one years of labour, all the Frankish kingdoms were reunited into one. The supreme power was more entirely concentrated in the hands of the king, aided by the concurrence of the national assemblies, than it had ever been previously.

  Under Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, this centralization was maintained, extended and regulated; and it appeared to gain strength. New countries, new peoples, were incorporated into the Frankish state. The relations of the sovereign with his subjects became more numerous and regular. New bonds of union were established between the supreme power, its delegates, and its subjects. A state and a government seemed likely to be formed.

  After the death of Charlemagne, affairs presented quite another aspect, and assumed a contrary direction. In proportion as a tendency to the centralization, either of the different states among themselves, or of the internal power of each state, had been visible under the rule of the Merovingian race, in just that proportion did a tendency to the dismemberment, to the dissolution, both of the states themselves and of the power in each state, become evident under the Carlovingians. Under the Merovingians, you have seen that five successive dismemberments took place, none of which was able to last; after the death of Charlemagne, the kingdoms once separated do not reunite. Louis the Débon-nair divided the empire among his children, in 838, and made vain efforts to maintain some unity therein. The treaty of Verdun, in 843, definitively separated the three monarchies. Charles the Fat, in 884, made an attempt to unite them again; but this attempt also failed—reunion was impracticable.

  In the interior of each state, and particularly in France, the same phenomenon was manifested. The supreme power which, under the Merovingians, had tended to become concentrated in the hands, either of the kings, or of the Mayors of the Palace, and which had seemed to have attained this end under Pepin and Charlemagne, took a contrary direction from the reign of Louis the Débonnair, and tended constantly to dissolution. The great landed proprietors who, under the first race, had been naturally urged to coalesce against the royal authority, now laboured only to elevate themselves, and to become sovereigns in their own domains. The hereditary succession of benefices and offices became prevalent. Royalty was nothing more than a direct lordship, or an indirect and impotent suzerainty. Sovereignty was dispersed; there no longer existed any state, or head of the state. The history of the Carlovingians is nothing but the struggle of declining royalty against that tendency which was continually robbing and contracting it more and more. This was the dominant character, the general progress of events, from Louis the Débonnair to Hugh Capet. I shall now refer to the principal facts of this epoch; in them I shall find proofs of the general fact just stated.

  I. Pepin the Short (752–768). As this monarch had risen to power by the aid of the large landowners, the clergy, and the pope, he was obliged, during the whole course of his reign, to treat with consideration those powers which had supported him. He frequently convoked national assemblies, and frequently met with opposition from them. It was not without extreme difficulty that he prevailed upon his chieftains to make war against the Lombards, at the request of Pope Stephen III. In order to retain the support of the clergy, Pepin ordered the holders of ecclesiastical benefices to perform the conditions annexed to their tenure of them; he lavished donations upon the churches, and greatly augmented the importance of the bishops. It is from Zachary’s answer to Pepin, that the popes have assumed to deduce their historic right to make and unmake kings. Pepin thus favoured the aggrandizement of the aristocracy, the clergy, and the papacy—three powers which had been very useful, and were still of great service to him, which he knew how to manage and restrain, but which, under other circumstances, would assuredly labour to render themselves independent of the royal power, and would promote the dismemberment, after having assisted in the concentration of the kingdom. The moment most favourable for the development of these powers had arrived. They placed themselves at first at the service of the king, who was useful to them, and knew how to make them serviceable to himself; and thus they became able to free themselves from dependence upon him, and henceforward to act alone and on their own account.

  II. Charlemagne (768–814). Epochs of transition, in the history of society, have this singular characteristic, that they are marked sometimes by great agitation, and sometimes by profound repose. It is well worth while to study the causes of this difference between epochs which are fundamentally similar in nature, and which do not constitute a fixed and durable state of society, but only a passage from one state to another. When the transition occurs from a state of things which has long been established and is doomed to destruction, to a new state of things which it will be necessary to create, it is generally full of agitation and violence. When, on the other hand, there exists no previous state of society, which from its long duration is difficult to overthrow, the transition is only a momentary halt of society, fatigued by the disorder of its previous chaotic state, and by the labour of creation. This was the character of the reign of Charlemagne. The whole country of the Franks, wearied by the disorders of the first dynasty, and not having yet originated the social system which was destined to issue naturally from their conquest—I mean the feudal regime—stood still for a time under the government of a great man who procured for it greater order and more regular activity, than it had ever known before. Until then, the two great powers which agitated the country—the great landowners and the clergy—had not been able to take a settled position. The royal authority was hostile to them, and they attacked it. Charlemagne knew how to restrain and satisfy them, and contrived to keep them employed without placing himself in their power. This knowledge constituted his strength, and was the cause of the temporary order which he established throughout his empire. In a future lecture, when studying the institutions of his epoch, we shall see what was the characteristic feature of his government. I am speaking now only of the fact itself—of the singular circumstance of the authority of a very powerful king being interposed between an age in which royalty was held in slight esteem, and an age in which it almost ceased to be of any importance. Charlemagne made of barbarian monarchy all that he possibly could. He possessed within himself, in the necessities of his mind and life, an activity corresponding to the general exigencies of his age, which, indeed, surpassed them. The Franks desired war and booty; Charlemagne desired conquests, in order to extend his renown and dominion; the Franks were unwilling to be without a share in their own government; Charlemagne held frequent national assemblies, and employed the principal members of the territorial aristocracy as dukes, counts, missi dominici,1 and in other offices. The clergy were anxious to possess consideration, authority, and wealth; Charlemagne held them in great respect, employed many bishops in the public service, bestowed on them rich endowments, and attached them firmly to him, by proving himself a munificent friend and patron of those studies of which they were almost the only cultivators. In every direction towards which the active and energetic minds of the time turned their attention, Charlemagne was always the first to look; and he proved himself more warlike than the warriors, more careful of the interests of the church than her most devout adherents, a greater friend of literature than the most learned men, always foremost in every career, and thus bringing everything to a kind of unity, by the single fact that his genius was everywhere in harmony with his age, because he was its most perfect representative, and that he was capable of ruling it because he was superior to it. But the men who are thus before their age, in every respect, are the only men who can gain followers; Charlemagne’s personal superiority was the indispensable condition of the transitory order which he established. Order did not at that time spring naturally from society; the victorious aristocracy had not yet attained the organization at which it aimed. Charlemagne, by keeping it employed, diverted it temporarily from its object. When Charlemagne was dead, all the social forces which he had concentrated and absorbed became in want of aliment; they resumed their natural tendencies, their intestine conflicts; they began once more to aspire to the independence of isolation, and to sovereignty in their own neighbourhood.

  III. Louis the Débonnair (814–840). As soon as Louis became emperor, he lost the success which had attended him as king of Aquitaine. Facts soon gave proof of that tendency to dissolution which pervaded the empire of Charlemagne, and which dispersed the authority which he had been able to retain entire in his own hands. Louis gave kingdoms to his sons, and they were continually in revolt against him. The great landholders, the clergy, and the pope—those three social forces which Charlemagne had so ably managed and restrained—escaped from the yoke of Louis the Débonnair, and acted sometimes in his favour, and sometimes against him. The clergy loaded him with reproaches, and forced him to do public penance at Worms, in 829. An attempt was made, in 830, to make him a monk, after the assembly at Compiègne, where he had confessed his faults; and he was deposed, in 833, by another assembly at Compiègne, in pursuance of a conspiracy into which Pope Gregory IV. had entered. During the whole course of this reign, nothing held together, everything was disjoined; both the states which constituted the empire, and the great social forces, lay and ecclesiatical, in each state. Each of these forces aspired to render itself independent. Louis the Débonnair presents a singular spectacle, in the midst of this dissolution, attempting to practise as a scholar the maxims of government laid down by Charlemagne, enacting general laws against general abuses, prescribing rules for the guidance of all those forces which had escaped from his hands, and even endeavouring to correct the particular acts of injustice which had been committed under the preceding reign. But the kings, the great landowners, the bishops—all had acquired a feeling of their own importance, and refused to obey an emperor who was no longer Charlemagne.

  IV. Charles the Bald (840–877). The dissolution which had commenced under Louis the Débonnair continued under his son Charles the Bald. His three brothers,* relying alternately upon the pretensions of the clergy and of the large landholders, disputed with him for the vast empire of Charlemagne. The bloody battle of Fontenay, fought on the 25th of June, 841, made Charles the Bald king of Neustria and Aquitaine, that is, of France. His reign is nothing but a continual alternation, a scene of futile efforts to prevent the dismemberment of his dominions and of his power. At one time, he robs the clergy in order to satisfy the avidity of the great landholders, whose support he is anxious to gain; at another time, he spoils the landholders in order to appease the clergy, of whose assistance he stands in need. His capitulars contain hardly anything but these impotent alternations. The hereditary succession of benefices and appointments became triumphant, and every chieftain laid the foundation of his own independence.

  V. The Normans. This is the generic name of the German and Scandinavian tribes, who inhabited the shores of the Baltic. Their maritime expeditions may be traced back to a very remote period. We meet with them under the first dynasty of Frankish kings; they frequently occur towards the end of the reign of Charlemagne, and under Louis the Débonnair; and they continually appear under Charles the Bald. They constituted a fresh cause of the dismemberment of the empire, and of the royal authority. In the ninth century, the Frankish Gauls present the same appearance which the Roman Gauls had offered four centuries before: that of a government incapable of defending the country, and expelled or retiring in every direction, and of barbarians pillaging, imposing tribute, withdrawing on payment of large sums of money, and continually reappearing to levy fresh contributions. Nevertheless, a notable difference is to be remarked between these two epochs. In both, the central government was equally incapable and worn out; but, in the ninth century, there existed within the Frankish territory a host of chieftains, who, though lately barbarian invaders themselves, had become independent, and were surrounded by warriors who defended themselves against the new invaders with far greater energy than the Roman magistrates had done, and who took advantage of the disturbed state of society to consolidate firmly their own individual sovereignties. Among these chieftains, we meet with Robert the Strong, the ancestor of the Capetian family, who became Duke of Neustria, in 861, and was killed in 866, while defending Neustria against the Normans. The Normans definitively established themselves in Neustria, in 912, under Charles the Simple, who yielded the province to their chief Rollo, and gave him his daughter Grisella in marriage.

  VI. Charles the Fat. In 884, Charles the Fat, son of Louis the Germanic, temporarily collected under his rule nearly all the dominions of Charlemagne. The maintenance of this new concentration of territory and power was impossible, and it was dissolved even before the death of Charles the Fat.

  VII. In 888, Eudes, and in 923, Raoul, made themselves kings. The first, a count of Paris, was the son of Robert the Strong, and assumed the title of king, at the national assembly held at Compiègne. The second was Duke of Burgundy, and husband of Emma, the grand-daughter of Robert the Strong, and sister of Hugo the Great, Duke of France. These kings were not, like the Mayors of the Palace at the termination of the first dynasty, the representatives of a powerful aristocracy. The landed aristocracy of the tenth century had no further need of representation; no power could struggle effectively against them. Every great landowner was absolute master in his own estates, and the kings were only great barons, who, having become independent, assumed the title of kings, with the aid of their vassals. A portion of the lords who had thus become independent, remained indifferent to quarrels which did not disturb their rights and their power. They cared little whether there was a king, or who was king. The descendants of Charlemagne retained for some considerable time a party of adherents, for the idea and feeling of the rightfulness of a hereditary succession to the crown, that is, of legitimacy, were already powerful; but in 987, the conflict ceased, and Hugh Capet became king.

  The general fact which characterizes this epoch,—a tendency to dismemberment and dissolution,—is frequently met with in the course of the history of the human race. At first, we see the interests, forces, and ideas which exist in society, labouring to become united, to concentrate themselves, and to produce a suitable form of government. When this concentration has been once effected, and this government has been once produced, we find that, at the end of a certain time, it becomes exhausted and incapable of maintaining it entirely; new interests, new forces, and new ideas, which do not harmonize with each other, arise and come into action; then the dissolution begins, the elements of society become separated, and the bonds of government are relaxed. A conflict commences between the forces which tend to separation, and the authority which strives to maintain union. When the dissolution shall be consummated, then will begin a new work of concentration. This occurred after the fall of the second dynasty in France. The prevalence of the feudal system had caused the dissolution of the government and the state; the government and the state laboured to reconstitute themselves, and to regain their unity and consistency. This great work was not definitively accomplished until the reign of Louis XIV.; the social forces had then become once more concentrated in the hands of royalty. Our own times have witnessed a fresh dissolution.2

  What we observe, then, during the years from 481 to 987, is a general phenomenon, characteristic of the progress of the human race. This phenomenon occurs not only in the political history of societies, but also in every occupation in which the activity of man finds exercise. In intellectual order, for example, we find at first that chaos reigns; the most divergent attempts to resolve the great questions of the nature and destiny of man, are made in the midst of the universal ignorance. By degrees, opinions become assimilated, a school is formed, founded by a superior man; it is joined by almost all men of mind. Ere long, in the midst of this very school, diverse opinions arise, contend, and become separated; dissolution begins once again in intellectual order, and will continue until a new unity is formed, and regains the empire.

  Such, also, is the course of nature herself in her great and mysterious operations. This continual alternation of formation and dissolution, of life and death, recurs in all things, and under all forms. Spirit gathers matter together and gives it animation, uses, and then abandons it. It falls a prey to some fermentation, after which it will reappear under a new aspect, to receive once more that spirit which alone can impart to it life, order, and unity.

  LECTURE 12

  Ancient institutions of the Franks. ~ They are more difficult of study than those of the Anglo-Saxons. ~ Three kinds of landed property; allodial, beneficiary, and tributary lands. ~ Origin of allodial lands. ~ Meaning of the word allodium. ~ Salic land amongst the Franks. ~ Essential characteristics of the allods.

  The primitive institutions of the Franks are much more difficult of study than those of the Anglo-Saxons.

  I. In the Frankish monarchy, the old Gallo-Roman people still subsisted; they in part retained their laws and customs; their language even predominated; Gaul was more civilised, more organised, more Romanised than Great Britain, in which nearly all the original inhabitants of the country were either destroyed or dispersed.

  II. Gaul was divided among various barbarian peoples, each of whom had its own laws, its own kingdom, its own history; the Franks, the Visigoths, the Burgundians; and the continual alternations of the Frankish monarchy between dislocation and re-union, long destroyed all unity in its history.

  III. The conquerors were dispersed over a much larger extent of territory; and central institutions were weaker, more diverse, and more complicated.

  IV. Of the two systems of social and political order, contained in the cradle of modern nations—I mean the feudal system and the representative system—the latter has long prevailed in England, while the former long maintained its sway in France. The ancient national institutions of the Franks were absorbed into the feudal system, in whose train came absolute power. Those of the Saxons, on the other hand, were more or less maintained and perpetuated, to end at length in the representative system, which rendered them clear by giving them due development.

  Perhaps, also, the difficulty of the study of the ancient Frankish institutions arises in some measure from the fact that we possess more documents respecting the Franks than respecting the Saxons. Because we are acquainted with more facts, we have greater trouble in harmonizing them. We believe we are better informed because we know less.

  Such being the case, I wish to state with precision the object of my researches, so as not to lose time in useless digressions. I do not propose that we should study together either the state of Frankish society in all its departments, or the history of all its vicissitudes. I am desirous to investigate and explain to you, first, what constituted in France, from the fifth to the tenth century, the political part of the nation, possessing political rights and liberties; and secondly, by what institutions these rights were exercised, and these liberties guaranteed. We shall frequently be obliged to make excursions beyond these limits in search of the facts necessary to the solution of the questions contained therein; but we shall not dwell long upon such extraneous matter.

  In the pursuit of this study, we shall find the works of German authors of incontestable utility. A principal cause of the errors of the leading French writers who have treated of the subject, is that they have attempted to derive all our institutions from Germany, from the condition of the Franks before the invasion, and that, at the same time, they have been unacquainted with the language, the history, and the learned researches of the purely German peoples, that is, of the nations which have most thoroughly retained the primitive elements of Frankish society, and which formed a considerable portion of the Frankish monarchy.

  Dr. Hullmann, a professor at the University of Bonn, has written a book on the origin of the various social states or conditions, the object of which is to prove that all modern social order, political as well as civil, derives its origin from the circumstance, that the peoples of modern times have been agriculturists, devoted to the possession and fixed cultivation of land. This view, although incomplete, is of much importance. It is certain that, in the history of Europe, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, the condition of persons has been closely connected with that of landed property, and that the one throws light upon the other. Though all history would not prove that this has been the case from the beginning, yet the long-continued predominance of the feudal system, which consists precisely in the intimate connection and amalgamation of the relations of lands with those of persons, would alone be sufficient to demonstrate it unquestionably.

  At the outset, the condition of persons gave rise to that of lands; according as a man was more or less free, more or less powerful, the land which he possessed or cultivated assumed a corresponding character. The condition of lands afterwards became the symbol of the condition of persons; according as a man possessed or cultivated such and such a domain, he was more or less free and more or less important in the State. Originally, the man gave its character to the estate; in the sequel, the estate gave his character to the man: and as symbols quickly become causes, the condition of persons was at length not only indicated, but determined by, and consequent upon, the condition of lands. Social conditions became in some degree incorporated with the soil: and a man found himself possessed of a certain rank and of a certain degree of liberty and social importance, corresponding to the character of the land which he occupied. In studying modern history, we must not for a moment lose sight of these vicissitudes in the condition of lands, and of the varied influence they exerted upon the condition of persons.

  There is some advantage in first studying the condition of lands, in so far as it was a symbol of the condition of persons, because the former is somewhat more determinate than the latter. It is also less complicated; the condition of persons frequently varied upon lands of the same condition; and the same persons have possessed lands of different conditions. Our information, respecting the condition of lands, is also more than exact.

  In studying the condition of landed property and its vicissitudes, I do not propose to investigate its civil condition, or to consider property in all its civil relations, such as successions, bequests, and alienations. I intend to consider it only in its relation to the condition of persons, and as a symbol or cause of the various conditions of society. In the period which we are about to study, from the fifth to the tenth century, we have this advantage: that it contains a complete system, both as regards landed property, and also with respect to the condition of persons and the political institutions of the nation.1

  At this period, we meet with three kinds of landed property: 1st. Allodial lands; 2nd. Beneficiary lands; and 3rd. Tributary lands.

  1st. Of allodial lands or Allods.—These were lands possessed in absolute right, which the proprietor held from no one, on account of which he owed nothing to any superior, and of which he had full liberty to dispose. The lands taken or received as booty by the Franks, at the time of the conquest of Gaul, or in their subsequent conquests, were originally allodial. At a later period it was said that a man held an allodium, only from God and his sword. Hugh Capet said that he held the crown of France in this manner, because he had received it from no one. Such tenures were mementos of conquest.

  The word, alode itself indicates that the first allods were lands, which fell to the conquerors either by lot or division; loos, lot; allotted, allotment; whence also came the French word, loterie. Among the Burgundians, Visigoths, Lombards, and others, we find positive traces of this division of the lands allotted to the conquerors. They took possession of two-thirds of the land, that is, not of the whole extent of the country, but of the land in any locality, where a barbarian of any importance took up his residence. The lands which thus fell to the barbarians, were called Sortes Burgundionum, Gothorum, and so on. We do not find among the Franks positive traces of such a division of the land; but we know, nevertheless, that they divided their booty by lot.

  The word alode, then, was probably applied at first only to the lands taken by the victors in virtue of their conquests. Another proof of this is that allodial property, properly so called, was long distinguished from the lands held also in absolute right, and entailing no acknowledgment of a superior, but which had been acquired by purchase or in any other way. A distinction was also made among allodial lands, of salio land, which could be inherited only by males. This was probably the original allod, the land acquired at the time of the conquest, and which thereupon became the primitive and principal establishment of the head of the family. Terra salica is the terra aviatica of the Ripuarian Franks, theterra sortis titulo adquisita of the Burgundians, the haereditas of the Saxons, and the terra paterna of the formulas of Marculf.2 Various explanations have been given of the term salic land. Montesquieu thinks that it was the land belonging to the house, from the word, sal, hall. This explanation is supported by Hull-mann. It would thus be the in-land of the Anglo-Saxons. It is probable that originally the terra salica was in fact the land connected with the house, the residence of the chieftain. The two explanations would thus coincide; but the former is more complete and historical than the latter.

  The name of allod was extended by degrees to all lands possessed in absolute right, and held from no superior, whether they were the original allods or not. The words proprium, possessio, praedium, haereditas,3 were then employed as synonymes of allodium. It was probably at this period also that the rigorous interdict which excluded females from succession to salic land, fell into desuetude. It would have been too harsh to exclude them from succession to all allo-dial property. There were some doubts entertained on this point as early as the time when the salic law was drawn up; and Marculf has transmitted to us a formula which proves that, although it was the common law to deprive females of all succession to primitive allods, a father might, nevertheless, by his will, give his daughter an equal share with his sons in the division of all his property, of whatever nature.

  The essential and primitive characteristic of the allodium, consisted in the absoluteness of the property; the right to give it away, to alienate it, to bequeath it by inheritance or will, &c. Its second characteristic was that it depended upon no superior, and involved no service or tribute of any kind to any individual. But although allodial lands were exempt from all private charges towards individuals, does it follow that they were also exempt from all public charges as regarded the state, or the king as head of the State? This question has been differently answered by learned men.

  At the period to which we allude, there were no public charges properly so called, no obligations imposed and fulfilled as regarded the State, or its head. All was limited to personal relations between individuals; and from the relations of man with man arose the mutual relations of landed property, which were not carried further than those of persons. We have already seen this; the position of the Franks after the conquest resulted from the combination of their anterior relations with their new position. The freeman, who held his land from no one, had no obligations or charges to fulfil to any one on account of his land. In such a state of civilization, liberty is the appanage of force. The Franks who possessed allodial lands, and were strong enough to be under no obligation of duty to any more powerful individual, would not have comprehended the necessity of owing service to an abstract being like the State, with which, moreover, they had no personal relation.

  However, as society cannot exist in such a state of dissolution, arising from the isolation of individuals, new relations were progressively formed between the proprietors of allodial lands, which relations imposed certain charges on them.

  1st. The gifts presented to the kings either at the holding of the Champs de Mars or Mai, or when they come to pass any time in any particular province. The kings had no fixed habitation. These gifts, though at first purely voluntary, became gradually converted into a sort of obligation, from which allodial lands were not exempt. That these gifts had become obligatory is proved by a list drawn up at Aix-la-Chapelle in 817, during the reign of Louis the Débonnair, which enumerates the monasteries which had to pay them, and those which had not.

  2nd. The supply of provisions and means of transport to the king’s ambassadors, and to the foreign envoys, on their passage through the country.

  3rd. Of the various barbarian nations which were successively incorporated into the kingdom of the Franks, several paid tribute to the Frankish kings; and of this tribute it is probable that the free or allodial lands, possessed by these nations, contributed their share. It consisted of a certain number of cows, hogs, and horses. The nature of these tributes proves that they were not distributed among the lands, but imposed upon the nation as a whole.

  4th. A more important charge, namely, military service, was imposed upon allodial lands. In our next lecture, we shall see how this charge was introduced.

  LECTURE 13

  Origin of military service; its cause and limits. ~ It was made a general obligation by Charlemagne. ~ Allodial lands were originally exempt from taxation. ~ Origin of benefices. ~ Change in the position of the German chiefs in consequence of their territorial settlement. ~ Their wealth. ~ No public treasury. ~ The aerarium and fiscus of the old Roman republic. ~ Formation of the private domain of the kings of France. ~ Character of benefices. ~ Error of Montesquieu on this subject.

  I have indicated some of the new relations which became progressively established between the proprietors of allodial lands and the services that resulted from them. I have to occupy you today with the consideration of military service and benefices.

  Originally, military service was imposed on a man by virtue of his quality, his nationality before the conquest, and not by reason of his wealth. After the conquest, there was no legal obligation to it whatever; it was a natural result of the position occupied by the Franks—who were constantly called upon to defend what they had conquered—and of their taste for warlike expeditions, and for pillage. It was, also, a kind of moral obligation which each man owed to the chief whom he had chosen. This connexion continued the same as in Germany; the chief proposed an expedition to his men, and if they approved of it, they set out. Thus, we find Theodoric proposed to the Austrasian Franks an expedition against Thuringia. Often the warriors themselves summoned their chief to conduct them on some particular expedition, threatening to forsake him, and seek another chief, in the event of his refusal. Under the Merovingians, a kind of regularity, some sort of legal obligation, was introduced into the military con-vocations, and a penalty was inflicted upon those who did not present themselves. The obligation was imposed, and the penalty inflicted, even in cases where no movement was required in defence of the country. The proprietors of allodial lands were not exempted; many, doubtless, went on their own free choice, but the feeble were constrained. This was, however, an obligation attached rather to the quality of a free man, a Frank, or an associate, than to property.

  Not until the reign of Charlemagne, do we see the obligation to military service imposed on all free men, proprietors of freeholds, as well as of benefices, and regulated by property qualifications. This service now appeared no longer as a voluntary act; it was no longer the consequence of the simple relation between a chief and his associates, but a truly public service imposed on every individual of the nation, in proportion to the nature and extent of his territorial possessions. Charlemagne was very vigilant in seeing that the system of recruiting which he had established, should be faithfully carried out; we have a proof of this in his capitulary, issued in the form of instructions to the missi dominici, in the year 812. This is an exceedingly minute account of the particulars and charges of military service. These charges remained under the same conditions during the reigns of Charlemagne’s immediate successors. Under Charles the Bald, they were restricted to the case of an invasion of the country by a foreigner (landwehr). The relation of the vassal to his lord, at that time, prevailed completely over that of the citizen to the chief ruler of the state.

  Although allodial lands were exempt from imposts, properly so called, more because there were no general imposts whatever than because of any special immunity from them possessed by allodial lands, yet we find the kings used every favourable opportunity to attempt to attach imposts to men and lands, which they believed rightfully exempt from them; complaints were made of these attempts as acts of injustice; they were resisted, and sometimes redress was sought, as under Chilperic, in 578, in Austrasia; under Theodebert, in 547; and under Clovis II., in 615. We find also, that, on the occasion of great and alarming emergencies, the kings imposed certain charges on proprietors, without distinction, requiring them to lend their assistance, either to the poor, or to the state. Thus, Charlemagne, in 779, during a famine, and Charles the Bald, in 877, in order to pay the tribute due to the Normans, made such general claims. In both these cases, the charge was adjusted to the quality of persons and properties.

  There is reason to believe that, originally, allodial lands did not exist in large numbers, especially among the Franks.

  There is no ground for supposing that the Franks took possession of, and shared the lands, wherever they made expeditions and conquests. They rather cared for the booty which they carried off, and the cattle which they took with them, instead of forming a settlement themselves. For a long time, the greater part of the Franks did not often forsake their first habitations on the banks of the Meuse and the Rhine; thither they returned after their expeditions.

  We may conclude that lands were most probably distributed in the following manner. Each chief took a portion for himself and his associates, who lived on the land of their chief. It would be absurd to suppose that each band would dissolve itself, and the separated individuals then retire each to his isolated share of land; there were no individual shares, or, certainly, but few. This is sufficiently proved by the fact that the greater number of Franks appear to have been without landed property, living as cultivators on the lands, and in thevillae of a chief, or of the king. Often, even, a man would place himself not only under the protection, but at the disposal of another, to serve him during his life, on condition of being fed and clothed, and yet without ceasing to be free. This kind of contract, the formula for which has been preserved, must have been very common, and explains the circumstance that so large a number of free men are found to have lived and served on lands not belonging to themselves. Probably, the number of Franks who became successively proprietors, by means of benefices, was greater than the number of those who were primitively allodial proprietors.

  The larger number of small allodial proprietors were gradually robbed of their possessions, or reduced to the condition of tributaries, by the usurpation of their neighbours, or of powerful chiefs. Of this, there are innumerable examples. The laws made, from the seventh to the tenth century, give evidence of the tendency of large allodial estates or benefices to absorb small freeholds. The statute of Louis the Débonnair, referring to the complaints of the Spanish refugees in the south, explains pretty accurately the system according to which properties changed hands.

  Donations to churches also tended incessantly to reduce the number of allodial estates. They would probably soon have disappeared altogether, had not a cause of an opposite character tended continually to create new ones. As allo-dial property was sure and permanent, while benefices were precarious and more dependent, the proprietors of benefices constantly sought to convert their benefices into allodial estates. The capitularies which remain to us prove this at every step. It is probable that large new allodial estates were thus created, but small ones tended to disappear.

  Finally, under Charles the Bald, a singular circumstance presents itself. This was the very time when the system of allodial property was preparing, so to speak, to merge itself in the system of Beneficiary property, which is synonymous with feudalism; and precisely at that time the name of Allods is more frequent than ever. We find it applied to properties which are evidently benefices. This name still designated a property more surely hereditary and independent, and as benefices were ordinarily hereditary and independent, they were called allods, just in order to indicate their new character; and the king himself, whose interest it especially was that his benefices should not become allods, gave them this name, as if it had become their conventional designation. Sixty years previously, Charlemagne had made the greatest efforts to prevent benefices from becoming allods.

  Having thus explained the nature and changes of allods, I pass on to the consideration of benefices.

  Benefices, which constituted the cradle of the feudal system, were a natural result of the relations anciently subsisting in Germany between a chief and his associates. As the power of these chiefs resided only in the strength of their band of associates, all their attention was directed to the means of enlarging the number of these followers. Tacitus relates how, being charged with the maintenance and preservation of their followers, they gained and kept them by means of constant warfare, by dividing to them the spoils of the empire, by gifts of arms and horses. After the conquest, when the territorial establishment took place, the position of the chiefs was altered. Hitherto, in their wandering life, they had lived solely upon rapine; then they possessed two kinds of wealth, moveable booty and lands. They made their companions other presents, which engaged them in another kind of life. These riches, both moveable and fixed, remained for the chiefs, as for all others, as their personal and private property. The Frankish society had not then arrived at any ideas of public property. It consisted only of individuals, powerful by reason of their courage and their talent for war, by the antiquity of their family, and the renown of their name, who collected around them other individuals, who passed their life in the same precarious manner. The republics of antiquity did not commence thus. Rome had soon its public treasure—its aerarium. Till nearly the close of the republic, theaerarium still remained. Augustus established the fiscus, the treasury of the prince, which was destined to absorb the aerarium. The fiscus, at first, received only private gifts to the prince, but it soon usurped all the public revenues, till it became at length the only repository for public wealth. Thus, despotism transformed a public into a private domain. The states founded on the ruins of the Roman empire have followed an opposite course. At their commencement, all property was private property. It is in consequence of the development of civilization, and free institutions, that in almost all monarchies private domains have gradually become public property.

  The private domains of the chiefs of bands, and particularly of the Frank-ish kings, were at first composed of lands taken from the inhabitants of the countries in which they established themselves. I have already stated that they did not take all the lands, but a large number of them. The share of the chief must have been considerable, as is indicated by the numerous domains of the chiefs of the first two races, in Belgium, in Flanders, and on the banks of the Rhine, where they first formed their settlements. Hullmann has given a list of a hundred and twenty-three domains beyond the Meuse belonging to the Carlovingian family.

  The private property of the chiefs of conquered peoples were, to a great extent at least, incorporated into the domain of the conquering chief. Clovis subjected to himself successively several petty monarchs in his neighbour-hood—Ragnachair at Cambray, Chararich in Belgium, and Siegbert at Cologne; and took possession of all their personal property.

  The substitution of the royalty of one family for that of another, augmented the private domain of the king; the new king would add to his own personal possessions the property of the dethroned king. Thus the large domains possessed by the family of the Pepins, in Belgium, and on the Rhine, became royal domains.

  Legal confiscations, as a punishment for crime, cases in which no legal heir was to be found for property, unjust and violent confiscations—were other sources of personal wealth to kings.

  In these ways, the private domain of the kings increased rapidly, and it was employed by them especially as a means of attaching their associates to them, and of gaining new ones. benefices, then, are as ancient as the establishment of the Franks on a fixed territory.

  The fundamental question which has divided historians, whether those who are merely scholars or the philosophers, is—were benefices given for a time and revocable at will, or were they for life and yet revertible, or were they hereditary? Montesquieu has aimed at establishing a historical progression among these different modes; he asserts that benefices were at first revocable, being given for a time, then for life, and then hereditary. I believe he is mistaken, and that his mistake arises from an attempt to systematize history, and bring its facts into regular marching order. In the giving and receiving of benefices, two tendencies have always coexisted: on the one hand, those who had received benefices wished to retain them, and even to make them hereditary; on the other hand, the kings who granted them wished to resume them, or to grant them for only a limited period. All the disputes that occurred between kings and their powerful subjects, all the treaties which arose out of these disputes, all the promises which were made with a view to appease the dissatisfaction of malcontents, prove that the kings were in the habit of taking back, by violence, the benefices they had granted, and that the nobles attempted to retain them also by violence. The Mayors of the Palace acquired their power by placing themselves at the head of the large possessors of benefices, and by seconding their pretensions. Under the administration of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, the struggle appeared to cease, because the kings had for a time great superiority in force; but, in reality, the kings were now the aggressors in their turn, who endeavoured to bring the benefices again into their own hands, and to preserve to themselves the free disposal of them. Under Charles the Bald, the kings again began to get feeble, and, in consequence the treaties and promises became again favourable to the beneficiaries. In fact, the history of benefices, from the time of Clovis till the full establishment of the feudal system, is only a perpetual struggle between these two opposing tendencies. An attentive and accurate examination of the facts will prove that the three modes of conceding benefices did not follow one another in regular chronological succession, but that they are to be found existing and operating simultaneously during the whole course of this period.

  LECTURE 14

  Proofs of the co-existence of various modes of conferring benefices, from the fifth to the tenth century. ~ Of benefices that were absolutely and arbitrarily revocable. ~ Of benefices conceded for a limited time; the precaria. ~ Of benefices granted for life. ~ Of benefices granted hereditarily. ~ General character of the concession of benefices. ~ Their tendency to become hereditary. ~ Its prevalence under Charles the Bald. ~ Military service. ~ Judicial and domestic service. ~ Origin, meaning, and vicissitudes of the fidelity due by the vassal to his lord.

  From the time of the invasion of the Gauls by the Franks up to the moment when the feudal system was definitely constituted, we find during the whole course of this epoch:

  I. That benefices were revoked, not only as a consequence of legal condemnation, but also by the arbitrary will of the donor. The power of absolute and arbitrary transference of benefices was practically in existence under the Merovingian kings. It is however very doubtful whether this has ever been recognised as the right of the donors. Such an act possessed a character of suddenness and violence which gave a shock to ideas of natural justice. Few men would consent to receive a favour of which they might legally have been deprived at the first moment of caprice. Montesquieu affirms that benefices were first held on an entirely uncertain tenure. The proofs which he gives are but of little weight. First, the clause contained in the treaty concluded at Andely, in 587, between the two monarchs, Gontran and Childebert, proves the fact but not the right. Secondly, the formula of Marculf again does not prove anything more than a common practice. Besides, the giver of the benefice presents a motive in this formula, namely, the necessity of the exchange. Thirdly, the law of the Lombards merely characterises the benefice as a precarious property, which it indubitably was. Fourthly, the Book of Fiefs compiled in the twelfth century, probably converted the fact into a right. Fifthly, the letter of the bishops to Louis the Germanic also proves merely the fact. It is evident that the right has always been contested, and that attempts have always been made to prevent the permanency of benefices is a fact also. “Charlemagne,” says Eginhard, “did not suffer that every noble should take away from his vassal the benefices which he had granted to him upon any outburst of anger.” The capitulary of Louis the Débonnair, which allows a year to the rejected incumbent whose benefice is in a bad condition before it can be finally taken from him, proves likewise that certain forms were observed with this view, and protests against a purely arbitrary disposition. That the patron had a right to take away the benefice, when the occupant had failed to discharge his obligations, is an indisputable fact. Now it would be very easy to abuse this principle of taking away benefices under a pretext of disorderly conduct or infidelity to the trust reposed; accordingly all the protestations that were made, and all the treaties that were enforced, were designed to oppose such a procedure.

  Thus we find, from the fifth to the tenth century: First, numerous examples of benefices being arbitrarily taken away; this was the practice of the giver, when his power corresponded to his desire. Secondly, benefices taken away on account of unfaithfulness, disorder, treachery; this was a right.

  II. As to benefices granted for a limited time, Montesquieu affirms, after the Book of Fiefs, that they were at first granted for one year. I have not been able to find any positive example of this. It is not however impossible that there may have been such, similar to the precaria belonging to churches. Precarium, among the Romans, signified a grant of property on the tenure of usufruct for a limited time, which was generally pretty short. Under the monarchy of the Franks, we have seen that the churches often consolidated their wealth in this way, in order to secure a permanent revenue. Charles the Bald decreed that the precaria should be held for five years and renewed every five years. The only benefices which appear to me to have been granted for a time, ostensibly so at least, are those which arose out of the ecclesiastical wealth taken by Charles Martel (about .. 720), and which were then possessed under the designation precarious. Before this period we find kings and mayors interposing their authority in order to obtain, under the title of precarious, the enjoyment of certain church wealth for certain persons. It appears that Charles Martel did more at that time than grant or cause the retention of church property, under the title of precaria—he also completely stripped the churches, in order to confer their wealth as benefices. But, after him, Pepin and Carloman, his sons, while they also took the wealth of churches in order to confer them on their vassals, only took it on the title of precaria. The ecclesiastics protested vigorously against the spoliation of Charles Martel, and it was upon their protestations that Pepin ordained that the wealth which could be restored should be actually returned, and that what could not be so restored, should be held under the title precaria, at fixed rentals, till they could again be transferred to the church. Pepin and Charlemagne used rigorous measures to secure that the holders, in precario, of church wealth should fulfil their obligations to its primitive proprietors; and we may gather, from the frequency of their orders, that these orders were often treated with contempt. It is nevertheless evident that the practice of taking the goods of the church, and placing them in other hands, whether absolutely, or under the title of precarious, continued under even the most feeble and superstitious kings. The bishops said that Charles the Bald suffered himself to be led astray, being often seduced, partly because of his youth, partly through feebleness of character, by evil counsellors, and often constrained by the threats of the occupants, who told him “that if he did not allow them to possess this consecrated property, they would abandon him immediately.” It is probable that but little of this property was restored to the churches, and that the greater part of what was held sub precario1 became, along with the other benefices, the hereditary possession of the occupants.

  We see that far from Charles Martel having any claim to be regarded as the first originator of the practice of granting benefices for life, the benefices, on the contrary, which arose either from the act by which he despoiled churches and monasteries, or from acts similar to his, were for a long time more precarious than any others, and even ought legally to have been restored to the churches; certainly at the death of the occupants, and if possible before.

  III. We find during the whole of the epoch which we are considering, and at its close as much as at its commencement, benefices conferred for life. It is evident that under Pepin and Charlemagne most benefices were given on this tenure. This was owing to the various precautions taken by the kings to prevent their being transformed into allodial estates. Louis the Débonnair took the same precautions. Mabillon quotes a charter of this king containing the formal concession of a benefice to be held for life. In 889, King Eudes conferred a benefice on Ricabod his vassal, “in Beneficiary right, and on a tenure of usufruct”; with this addition, that, if he should have a son, the benefice should pass to his son for his life. We see, under Pepin, a vassal die who had a son, and yet his benefice was given immediately to another vassal.

  IV. We find also, during the whole of this epoch, that benefices were given or held hereditarily. In 587, it was stipulated by the treaty of Andely, with regard to the concessions made by queen Clotilda, that they should be perpetual. The law of the Visigoths (of Chindasuinth, about 540) provides that the concessions made by the princes should not be revoked. Marculf gives the formulary for a hereditary concession. In 765, Charlemagne gave to an individual named Jean, who had conquered the Saracens in the province of Barcelona, a domain (says Fontaines) situated near Narbonne; “in order that he and his posterity may possess it without any fee or trouble, so long as they remain faithful to us or to our children.” The same Jean presented himself to Louis the Débonnair, with the gift of Charlemagne, and demanded his confirmation of it. Louis confirmed it, and added to it new lands. In 884, Jean being dead, his son Teutfred presented himself to Charles the Bald with the two donations just mentioned, and asked him to confirm them to him. The king granted this, as it is expressed, “in order that thou mayest possess them, thou and thy posterity, without any fee.” These successive demands of confirmation, either at the death of the original bestower, or at that of the original incumbent, prove that the hereditary character of benefices was not then considered as a right, even when it had been promised, and consequently that it rested on no general law that was recognized by the state.

  These three modes of granting benefices, of which I have just given examples, existed therefore at the same time, and I believe that we may assert from them two general facts, which however are not without exceptions: First, the usual condition of benefices, during this period, was that they should be given on a tenure of usufruct and for life; Secondly, the tendency of the time was to render the benefice a hereditary possession. This result was eventually realized when the feudal or aristocratic system triumphed over the monarchical system. We see under Charlemagne, at which time the monarchical system reached its culminating point, that most benefices were held on a tenure of usufruct for life, and not as personal property. Not only was Charlemagne unwilling that the property in benefices should be usurped, but he was especially vigilant with regard to their right administration. Under Charles the Bald, when the aristocratic system prevailed, benefices came to be held as hereditary possessions. This mode of possession partly arose out of the immense number of hereditary concessions which were made during this reign, and which were commenced under Louis the Débonnair; partly also out of some general arrangements in the capitularies of Charles the Bald, which recognized or conferred upon those who were faithful to the king the right to transmit their benefices hereditarily. We must conclude from this that the hereditary character of benefices at that time prevailed almost universally as a custom, and began to be avowed as a principle, but that it was not yet a general and recognized right. It was demanded and received in individual instances, which would not have been the case had it existed as a common right. In the monarchies consequent on the dismemberment of Charlemagne’s empire—in Germany, for example—it was not recognized as a right, and prevailed still less as a custom.

  Let us never forget—I repeat it—that all these general facts are subject to exceptional cases, and that different methods of conferring benefices have existed at all times. It would follow, from the nature of things, that the common condition of benefices was, at first, that of possession for life. The relations of the chief to his associates were all personal,—hence his benefactions were personal also. Not less did it follow from the nature of things, that when the Franks were once established and fixed, the associates of the monarch who were able to acquire an independent existence, and to become powerful in their turn, tended to separate themselves from their ancient chief, and to settle themselves in their own possessions, in order that they also might become the centre of groups of men. Hence resulted all the efforts to make benefices hereditary.

  After having determined the origin and the mode of conferring and transmitting benefices, it remains that we should learn what conditions were attached to them, and what relations were thereby formed between the giver and the incumbent.

  Mably thinks that benefices did not at first impose any particular obligation, and that those of Charles Martel were the first which were formally associated with civil and military services. This opinion is contrary to the nature of things; the origin of benefices testifies to the contrary. They were, as, in Germany, gifts of horses or of arms and banquets had been, a mode of attaching companies to the benefactor. This relation in itself involves an obligation. Mably’s idea is equally contradicted by facts. In all the disputes which arose between the incumbents and the Merovingian kings, the benefices are always vindicated in behalf of those who kept faith with their patron. No complaints were made when those were seen to be despoiled who had failed to render the fidelity that was due from them. Siggo we find losing the benefices of Chilperic in 576, because he had forsaken his allegiance and passed over to Childebert II. The law of the Ripuarians pronounced the confiscation of the goods of every man who had been unfaithful to the king. Marculf gives the formula of the act by which a man was received into the number of the faithful. Charles Martel, in giving benefices to his soldiers, only imposed upon them the obligations that had always followed on such appointments. Only these obligations became progressively more formal and explicit, precisely in the measure that the ancient relations of the chief and his associates tended to become weakened and to disappear, in consequence of the dispersion of his men and their settlement on their own properties. Originally, the associates lived with their chief, around him, in his house and at his table, in peace, as well as in war: they were his vassals, according to the original sense of the word, which signified the guest, the companion, an individual attached to the house.* When most of the vassals had dispersed themselves, in order that each might reside in his own allo-dial or Beneficiary estate, we may easily perceive the necessity that thus arose of determining the obligations that were then imposed upon them; but this was only done imperfectly and by degrees, as is generally the case where matters are at issue which have for a long time had a general and conventional adjustment. As the first race began to disappear and the second to arise in its place, the obligations attached to the conferring of benefices appear to be clearly determined. They range themselves under two principal heads. First, the obligation of military service on the requisition of the patron. Secondly, the obligation of certain judicial and domestic services of a more personal and household character. It is impossible at the present time to specify what these services were to which the incumbents were held. We see only, among a host of acts, that the kings imposed on the incumbents servilia, which obliged them to present themselves at court. These obligations were comprised under the general term fidelity. They were at first personal, and attached to the quality of liege-man,3 independently of the possession of any benefice—a connexion identical with that between the ancient German associates and their monarch. When it had become necessary for the king to give lands as a benefice, in order to insure the fidelity of his liege subjects, the obligation attached itself to the quality of Beneficiary. We constantly see benefices given under the condition of loyalty. Charlemagne, when he gave a benefice in perpetuity to Jean, annexed to it this condition. There is reason to believe that benefices were also given, conditioned by the payment of certain fees (census). I do not find, at this period, the granting of any benefice in which the imposition of a rental is expressly indicated; but the nature of things seems to show that such must have been the case, and I do find mention made of benefices conferred absque ullo censu.4 Anxiety in certain cases to obtain exemption from the fees, proves that in other cases they were imposed. It is probable that rentals were attached to benefices, granted hereditarily, and not to those which were only given for the term of an individual life.

  Loyalty was at first due only to that chief to whom it had been expressly promised, and from whom a benefice had been received. Charlemagne attempted to change this into an obligation common to all the freemen in his States. Marculf has preserved to us the formula in which he wrote to his counts, requiring from all individuals the oath of fidelity. Thus did this prince endeavour to break through the feudal hierarchy which was consolidating itself, to bring himself into a direct relation with all freemen, and to make the relation between king and subject predominant over that between lord and vassal. The oath of fidelity was universally exacted by the successors of Charlemagne, Louis the Débonnair and Charles the Bald, but without any effective results; for the tendency to hierarchical and feudal aristocracy had become prevalent. We find besides numerous examples of the maintenance of the relations between incumbent and patron, even under Charlemagne. Under Charles the Bald this relation became more positive and independent of the king. The prince even, for the repression of public crimes, allowed his authority to be exercised through the intervention of the lord; he made each lord responsible for the crimes of his own dependents. It was therefore especially in the empire of the lord over his men, that the means were then sought of sustaining order and repressing crime. This alone will sufficiently indicate the continually growing force of feudal relations and the diminishing authority of royalty.

  LECTURE 15

  Of benefices conceded by great landowners to men dependent upon them: First, benefices conceded for all kinds of services, and as a mode of paying salary; Secondly, larger proprietors usurp the lands adjoining their own, and bestow them as benefices on their subordinates; Thirdly, the conversion of a great number of allodial lands into benefices, by the practice of recommendation. ~ Origin and meaning of this practice. ~ Permanence of freeholds, especially in certain parts of the Frankish monarchy. ~ Tributary lands. ~ Their origin and nature. ~ Their rapid extension: its causes. ~ General view of the condition of territorial property, from the sixth to the eleventh century: First, different conditions of territorial property; Secondly, the individual dependence of territorial property; Thirdly, the stationary condition of territorial wealth. ~ Why the system of beneficiary property, that is to say, the feudal system, was necessary to the formation of modern society and of powerful states.

  Kings were not the sole donors of benefices; all the large proprietors gave them. Many leaders of bands of men were originally united under the conduct of the king; these chiefs became subsequently proprietors of large allodial estates. Portions of these were conceded as benefices to their immediate associates. Afterwards, they became large incumbents, and gave also as benefices portions of the benefice which they held from the king. Hence arose the practice of sub-enfeoffment. In the capitularies, we perpetually meet with the words, vassalli vassallorum nostrorum.1

  We find, during the whole of this period, even under Charlemagne, numerous examples of benefices held otherwise than from the king. Two letters of Eginhard expressly mention the concession, by way of benefice, of certain portions of royal benefices.

  It is the opinion of Mably, that other persons than the king began to give benefices only after the reign of Charles Martel. This mistake arises from his not having apprehended that the relation of the chief to his associate, which afterwards grew into that of lord to his vassal, was at first a purely personal relation, entirely independent of and anterior to any concession of benefices. It is impossible to determine at what particular time the conferring of benefices became connected with the relation of the Beneficiary to his patron. This was probably almost immediately after the territorial establishment.

  The number of benefices was soon very considerable, and became greater every day.

  I. benefices were given to free men belonging to quite an inferior order, and employed in subordinate services. The majores villae, aud the poledrarii, that is to say, the stewards of the estates, and the keepers of the horses of Charlemagne, had them. It was the policy of this prince to scatter widely his gifts, and to reward zeal and fidelity wherever he found them.

  II. The larger proprietors continually made themselves masters of the lands adjoining their own, whether these were lands belonging to the royal domain, or such as were neglected, and had no very definite owners. They had them cultivated, and often procured subsequently the privilege of adding them to their benefices. The extent of this abuse becomes manifest under Charles the Bald, by the numerous expedients adopted by this prince to remedy it.

  III. A large number of allods were converted into benefices by means of a tolerably ancient usage. Marculf has left us the formula by which this conversion was made;—its origin we must seek in the practice of recommendation. Recommendation was not primitively anything else than the choice of a chief, or a patron. A law of the Visigoths, called a lex antiqua, and which must be referred to king Euric, towards the close of the fifth century, says: “If any one have given arms, or any other thing, to a man whom he has taken under his patronage, these gifts shall remain the property of him by whom they have been received. If this latter choose another patron, he shall be free to recommend himself to whomsoever he will: this may not be forbidden to a free man, for he belongeth to himself; but he shall, in this case, return to the patron from whom he separates himself all that he has received from him.”

  These were, then, the ancient Germanic customs. The relation of the individual recommended to his patron was a purely personal one. The presents consisted in arms; his liberty remained unimpaired. The law of the Lombards left to every one the same liberty as the law of the Visigoths. Nevertheless, we see, by the same capitulary, that this liberty began to be restrained. Charlemagne defined the reasons, by which any one might be allowed to quit his lord, when he had received anything from him. We may learn from this; that the ties contracted by recommendation began to be strengthened. This practice became very frequent. By these means order was promoted, so far as the law was concerned, and protection and safety as far as concerned the person recommended. When relations of service and protection bearing a purely personal character were thus established with a patron, other more tangible relations arose in which the property of the parties was considered. The person recommended received benefices from the lord; and became a vassal of his estate; or rather he recommended his lands, as he had previously recommended his person. Recommendation thus became a part of the feudal system and it contributed most importantly to the conversion of allodial estates into benefices.

  There is, however, no reason to believe that all allods were thus converted into benefices. Originally, such a conversion, or even the mere acceptance of a benefice, was regarded by a free man as, to a certain extent, a surrender of his liberty, being an entrance upon a personal service. The large proprietors, who exercised an almost absolute sovereignty in their own domains, would not readily renounce their proud independence. Etichon, brother to Judith the wife of Louis the Débonnair, was unwilling any longer to receive his son, Henry, who had accepted, without his knowledge, from the king his uncle a benefice of four hundred acres, and thereby entered upon the service of the crown. After the triumph of the feudal system, a considerable number of allods still remained in several provinces, particularly in Languedoc.

  After speaking of freeholds and benefices, it remains that I should allude to the tributary lands, whose existence is attested by all the memorials of this period. We do not necessarily understand by this term lands on which a public impost was levied, but lands which paid a fee, a rental, to a superior, and which were not the actual and absolute property of those who cultivated them.

  This kind of property existed in Gaul before the invasion of the Franks. The conquest that resulted from this invasion contributed in various ways to augment their number. First, wherever a Barbarian possessed of some amount of power established himself, he did not take possession of all the lands, but he most probably exacted certain fees, or services equivalent to them, from almost all whose lands bordered on his own. This is certain from a priori considerations, and is proved as a fact by the example of the Lombards, who invariably contended themselves at first with rendering all the lands of the conquered country tributary to themselves. They demanded a third of the revenue, and afterwards took the property itself. This fact shows clearly the mode of procedure that was adopted by the Barbarians. Almost all the lands possessed by Roman or Gallic chiefs, who did not possess sufficient power to rank with the Barbarians, were obliged to submit to a tributary condition.

  Secondly, conquest was not the work of a single day; it continued to be carried on after the establishment of the invaders. All the documents of the period indicate that the principal officers and large proprietors continually exerted themselves, either to usurp the possessions of their less powerful neighbours, or to impose upon them rentals or other charges. These usurpations are proved by the multitude of laws that were enacted to prevent it. In the unsettled state of society that then existed, the feeble were entirely placed at the disposal of the strong; public authority had become incompetent for their protection; many lands which were at first free, and belonged either to their ancient owners, or to Barbarians of slender resources, fell into a tributary state; many of the smaller proprietors purchased for themselves the protection of the strong, by voluntarily placing their lands in this condition. The most common method of rendering lands tributary, was to give them either to churches or to powerful proprietors, and then to receive them again, on the tenure of usufruct, to be enjoyed during life, on the payment of fixed fees. This kind of contract is to be met with again and again, during this period. The same causes which tended to destroy allods, or to convert them into benefices, acted with even more energy in augmenting the number of tributary lands.

  Thirdly, many large proprietors, whether of allodial lands or of benefices, were unable themselves to cultivate the whole of their lands, and gave them up by small portions to simple cultivators, on the payment of certain fees and services. This alienation took place under a multitude of forms and a variety of circumstances; it certainly occasioned many lands to become tributary. The large number and endless variety of rentals and rights, known in a later time by the name of feudal, arose probably either from similar contracts, or from usurpations committed by the powerful proprietors. The constant recurrence in writers and laws of the period of the terms census and tributum; the multitude of arrangements which relate to them; the general course of events; lastly, the state in which most landed property was found when order began to reappear—all these circumstances render it probable that at the end of the period we are considering, the greater number of lands had fallen into a tributary condition. Property and liberty were alike devoted to be plundered. Individuals were so isolated, and their forces so unequal, that nothing could prevent the results of such a position.

  The large number of waste lands, attested by the facility with which any one who was willing to cultivate them might obtain them, bears witness in its turn also to the depopulation of the country, and the deplorable condition in which property existed. The concentration of landed property is a decisive proof of this state of things. When this kind of property is safe and prosperous, it tends to become divided, because every one desires to possess it. When, on the other hand, we see it accumulated more and more in the same hands, we may almost certainly conclude that it is in an unsound condition, that the feeble cannot sustain themselves upon it, and that the strong alone can defend it. Landed property, like moveable property, is only to be found where it can continue to exist in safety.

  There is reason to believe that most tributary lands, even those which were not originally the property of the cultivators who laboured on them, became at length by a right of occupancy in reality their possessions, though burdened by rentals and exactions of service. This is the natural course of things: it is very difficult to remove a cultivator who has with his family for a long time tilled the same soil.

  Such were the vicissitudes of landed property, from the sixth to the eleventh century. I will now give a summary view of the general characteristics of this state of things, and endeavour to estimate their influence on the progress of general civilization, and more particularly of political institutions.

  I. There was a great diversity in the conditions of property. In our days, the condition of property is uniform and everywhere the same; whoever the proprietor may be, he possesses his property, whatever may be its character, on the same tenure of right, and subject to the same laws as any other. Between properties which are the most distinct in character, there is thus far an identity. This is one of the most unequivocal symptoms and safest guarantees of the progress of legal equality. During the times of which we have been speaking, the diversified conditions under which property was held would necessarily lead to the formation of several classes in society, between which existed great, factitious, and permanent inequality. Men were not merely proprietors to a greater or less extent; besides the inequality in the amount of wealth, there was also an inequality in the nature of the wealth possessed, than which it is impossible to conceive of a more powerful instrument for oppression. Even this, however, was a step in advance out of the slavery existing among the ancients. The slave could possess nothing—was essentially incapable of owning property. In the times of which I am speaking, the mass of the population had not become full and absolute possessors of property, but was attaining to a possession that was more or less imperfect and precarious, by which it had gained the means of yet loftier ascents.

  II. Landed property was then submitted to the restraints of dependence on individuals. At present, all property is free, and is at the disposal only of its owner. General society has been formed—the State has been organized—every proprietor is united to his fellow-citizens by a multitude of ties and relations, and to the state by the protection which he receives from it, and the taxes to which he is subject in return: there is, thus, independence without isolation. From the sixth to the eleventh century, independence was necessarily accompanied by isolation: the proprietor of an allod lived upon his lands almost without buying or selling anything. He owed scarcely anything to a State which hardly existed, and which could not assure him of an efficient protection. The condition, therefore, of the allods and their proprietors was at that time a condition that was to a considerable extent anti-social. In more ancient times, in the forests of Germany, men without landed properties lived at least in common. When they became proprietors, if the allodial system had succeeded in becoming prevalent, the chiefs and their associates would have been separated, without ever being summoned to meet and recognize one another as citizens. Society would not have been at all constituted. It exists in those relations which unite men together, and in the ties out of which these relations arise. It necessarily demands a law, a condition of dependence. And when it is not so far advanced as that a sufficient number of these relations and ties have been established between the State and the individual, then individuals become dependent one upon another; and it was to this state of things that the seventh century had arrived. It was the imperfection of society which caused the allo-dial system in regard to landed property to perish, and the Beneficiary or tributary system to prevail. The independence of allods could only exist in connexion with their isolation, and isolation is anti-social. The hierarchical dependence of benefices became the tie to unite properties with one another, and society within itself.2

  III. Out of this distribution and this character of landed property, a very important fact has resulted; namely, that during several centuries scarcely any means existed by which either the state or individuals could increase their wealth. Most proprietors of any importance did not cultivate the land at all; it was for them merely a capital, the revenues of which they gathered without troubling themselves to augment it, or to render it more productive. On the other side, most of those who cultivated the land were not proprietors, or were only so in a precarious and imperfect manner; they did not seek from the earth more than means of subsistence, and did not look to it as a means of enriching or elevating them. Agricultural labour was almost unknown to the rich, and to the poor it yielded nothing beyond the bare necessities of existence. Hence, resulted the continual impoverishment of the larger proprietors, which forced them incessantly to have recourse to violence, in order to preserve their fortune and their rank. Hence, resulted also, at the same time, that stationary condition of the population of the country districts which was prolonged for so long a period. Landed property tended always to become concentrated, from the very circumstance that its products did not increase. Accordingly, it is not in the country districts and in agricultural labour, but in the towns, in their commerce and industry, that we shall find the earliest germs of the accumulation of public wealth, and of the progress of civilization. The indolence of the upper classes, and the misery of the lower classes, in the middle ages, proceeded chiefly from the nature and distribution of territorial property.

  IV. Beneficiary property was one of the most influential principles in the formation of large societies. In the absence of public assemblies and of a central despotism, it nevertheless established a bond, and formed relations between men dispersed over a vast tract of country, and thereby rendered possible a federative hierarchy, which should embrace a still wider circle. Among the nations of antiquity, the extension of the State was incompatible with the progress of civilization; either the State must be dislocated, or despotism would prevail. Modern States have presented a different spectacle, and to this result the character of Beneficiary property has powerfully contributed.3

  LECTURE 16

  Of the state of persons, from the fifth to the tenth century. ~ Impossibility of determining this, according to any fixed and general principle. ~ The condition of lands not always correspondent with that of persons. ~ Variable and unsettled character of social conditions. ~ Slavery. ~ Attempt to determine the condition of persons according to the Wehrgeld. ~ Table of twenty-one principal cases of Wehrgeld. ~ Uncertainty of this principle. ~ The true method of ascertaining the condition of persons.

  We have investigated the condition of territorial properties, from the fifth to the tenth centuries. We have recognized three kinds of territorial property.First, allodial or independent; Secondly, Beneficiary; Thirdly, tributary. If from this we should wish to deduce the state of persons, we should find three social conditions corresponding to these: First, the free men, or proprietors of allods, bound to, and dependent upon no one, excepting the general laws of the state;Secondly, vassals, or proprietors of benefices, dependent in certain respects upon the noble from whom they held their property, either during life or hereditarily; Thirdly, the proprietors of tributary lands, who were subject to certain special obligations. To which it is necessary to add a fourth class, namely, the serfs.

  We should observe further, that the first of these classes tended to disappear and become absorbed in the second, third, and even the fourth classes. This arose from facts which we have already explained.

  This classification of persons is in fact a real one, and is to be met with in history; but we must not regard it as a primitive, general, and perfectly regular classification.

  The condition of persons preceded that of lands—there were free men before there were freeholds; there were vassals and associates before benefices. The condition and relations of persons did not therefore originally depend on the condition and relations of territorial properties, and cannot be deduced from them.

  Historians have fallen into a double mistake on this point. Some have wished to see in all the Franks, before the conquest, and the establishment of the system of landed estates, which we have already explained, men altogether free and equal, whose liberty and equality for a long time resisted the formation of this system. Others have been unwilling to recognize men as free, except as they are beheld in the condition of land proprietors, whether as allods or as benefices.

  The matter is not thus simple and absolute. Social conditions were not thus framed and disposed of by a single process, to suit the convenience of subsequent antiquarians.

  What do we find to be the character of liberty in the infancy of societies? Might is its condition, and it has scarcely any other guarantee. So long as society is of small extent and firmly compacted within itself, individual liberty remains, because each individual is important to the society of which he is a member: this was the case with the German tribes in its warrior bands of men. In proportion as society extends and disperses itself, the liberty of individuals is endangered because their personal strength is insufficient for their own protection. This was illustrated by the case of the Germans who established themselves in Gaul. A large number of his associates lived in the house of the chief, without being themselves proprietors or being anxious to become so, for which in difference they were indebted to that want of foresight which is natural to un-civilized men. Property became a prominent instrument for attaining force, yet many free men did not possess any.

  The progress of civilization removes the guarantee of individual liberty from the power of the individual himself, and places it in the power of the community. But the very creation of such a public power, and the guarantee thereby of individual liberties, is a gradual and difficult process: it results from a social culture which is of slow growth and must triumph over many obstructions. Wherever there is no power belonging to the community, individual liberties have no guarantee for their continuance.

  Hence the error of those who seek for liberty in the infancy of societies. We do in fact find it there, but only when society is quite in its cradle, when each separate individual is sufficiently strong to be able to defend his own liberty in a very limited community. But as soon as society rises and extends itself, we see this liberty perish; the inequality of different forces manifests itself, and individual power becomes incapable of preserving individual liberty. This is the birth-time of oppression and disorder.1

  Such was the condition of the Franco-Roman community, at the period which we are considering. It seems somewhat puerile to inquire who was free then; no one was free, whatever his origin might be, if he was not strong. The real inquiry is, who was strong—a point which it is exceedingly difficult to determine.

  In a fully settled society which has existed for a long time, it is easy to know who is strong. There is a constant transmission of properties and of ancient influences; power has permanent forms, men are classified. We see where strength resides and who possesses it. But at the time which we are considering, the various elements of social strength were struggling into existence; they scarcely had a being, and they were not familiarly known, nor stably fixed, or in regular possession of power; the violent customs which prevailed rendered property very moveable; individual strength was a poor guarantee for liberty, indeed, it needed itself to be placed in guardianship.

  The human mind can hardly believe in disorder, because it cannot picture clearly to itself such a state of things; it does not resign itself to the idea; it desires to introduce an order of its own, in order to discover the light. We must, however, accept facts as they actually are. We may therefore understand how difficult it is to exhibit the condition of men, from the fifth to the tenth centuries; to learn what men were free, and who were not, and especially what a free man really was in his position and influence. We shall understand this difficulty still better when we have attempted to determine the condition of life belonging to certain positions, according to the different principles of classification which we may bring to the task. We shall see that no one principle can be found, by which we can deduce the state belonging to different positions in a manner exactly conformable to known facts, and which is not contradicted at every step by these same facts, or at least shown by them to be utterly insufficient and un-trustworthy.

  Let us first apply the principle which is inferred from the state of landed property.

  The proprietors of allods might seem to be incontestably free men. An allodial proprietor who had extensive estates enjoyed complete independence, and wielded an almost absolute sovereignty throughout his territory, and among his associates.

  Large allodial proprietors were sometimes able to remain for a considerable time in such a position. But it was not certainly the strongest, nor consequently the most free and fixed condition; for we have seen that allodial property degenerated and declined, until almost all the allodial proprietors became beneficiaries. We have seen how the anger of Etichon was excited. The general fact is a witness against the life of the allodial proprietor. His very independence was a cause of isolation, and therefore of feebleness. The proprietors of allods, wearied with living on their estates, shut out from all society, used to come and live with the king or some large proprietor of greater power than themselves. It was soon a practice to send their children thither, in order that they might become companions of the prince, or of some distinguished noble.

  As to the smaller allodial proprietors, they could not keep their standing long; they were not strong enough to defend their independence. The records of the period show that their property was soon alienated, and at the same time many of them became merely cultivators of the lands. The condition of the freeholder thus became merged in that of the tributary. From thence there was but one step to a total loss of liberty. This step was actually taken by a large number of allodial proprietors—wearied out or ruined, they surrendered their liberty into the hands of proprietors more wealthy and powerful than themselves.

  We come now to the beneficiaries.

  Benefices originated large individual resources—in them we find the source of the feudal aristocracy—large beneficiaries became in time powerful nobles. But we must not from this conclude that the possession of benefices was, during the period we are considering, any security for a permanent social position, to which power and liberty necessarily belonged. First, this possession was precarious, moveable, attacked, in the case of the smaller beneficiaries, by the larger ones, and in the case of the latter by the king. Beneficiary property hardly began to possess any fixity at the close of the ninth century. Secondly, a number of small benefices were conferred on individuals too weak efficiently to defend their position and their liberty. In order to secure the services of a man who was not a slave, a benefice was given to him—it was therefore a grant for the support of a retainer. The land itself was given for this purpose, as well as its productions. The benefices given to Charlemagne’s stewards and the keepers of his horse were actual benefices, and not, as M. de Montlosier thinks, tributary lands. We are not then in a position to say that the rank of a Beneficiary was the sign of a definitely marked social position, nor that it could measure the degree of importance and of freedom that belonged to individuals.

  When we have mentioned the allodial proprietors and the beneficiaries, it might be thought that the class of freemen is exhausted. Such is not, however, the case. There were different classes of possessors and farmers of tributary lands, known under various names; such as fiscalini, fiscales, tributarii, coloni, lidi, aldi, aldiones, &c. These names do not all designate different conditions, but divers shades in conditions substantially the same. There were: First, free men, at once allodial proprietors and cultivators; Secondly, free men, both proprietors of benefices and cultivators; Thirdly, free men, neither properly freeholders nor beneficiaries, and cultivators; Fourthly, men not free, to whom the hereditary possession of tributary land had been granted on the payment of certain fees and services; Fifthly, men not free, who only enjoyed the permanent occupancy of tributary land. Here again we cannot find any general and fixed social condition which shall determine what were the rank, the rights, and other qualifications of the individuals belonging to it. We are mistaken if we imagine either that every proprietor was free, or that every free man was a proprietor. We find that the cultivators of lands under the king harassed and oppressed the smaller allodial proprietors who resided in their vicinity, and were too feeble to oppose any effectual resistance, although they were Franks.

  I need only mention slaves, in order to observe that many free men fell into this state of servitude by means of violence, and through an uncertainty in property which involved a corresponding uncertainty in position. Sometimes one man would surrender himself to his more powerful neighbour, and at the same time completely abandon his liberty. The surrender, however, was sometimes not an entire renouncement of liberty, although it was alienated for life, or a sum was agreed upon to be paid if the engagement should be broken.

  It is evident that we cannot derive, from the state and the distribution of territorial properties, any true and fixed table of different social conditions, and of the importance of the rights belonging to each. These conditions were too undefined, too different, while nominally identical, and too fluctuating, to give us a standard to measure the amount of liberty possessed by each man and the place he occupied in society. The state of persons was almost individual; the measure of the importance of any individual was determined by the particular amount of strength which might belong to him, much more than by the general position which he apparently occupied. Individuals constantly passed from one condition into another, neither losing all at once every characteristic of the position which they left, nor assuming at once every characteristic of that upon which they newly entered.

  Let us apply another principle.

  Attempts have been made to determine the condition of individuals, and to classify men according to the wehrgeld; that is to say, according to the sum by which a man might compound for the commission of a murder, which was consequently the measure of the valuation of different lives. Shall we find here any more certain and unvarying principle by which social conditions may be classified?

  I have made an abstract of all the cases of wehrgeld stipulated in the Barbaric laws. I will not enumerate them all, but will bring before you twenty-one of the principal, ranging from the sum of 1800 solidi, the largest value that was legally placed on any man’s life, down to 20 solidi.

  The wehrgeld amounted to:

  1800 sol. (solidi): for the murder of a free barbarian, a companion of the king (in truste regia), attacked and killed in his house by an armed band, among the Salian Franks.

  960 sol.: 1st. the duke, among the Bavarians; 2nd, the bishop, among the Germans.

  900 sol.: 1st. the bishop, among the Ripuarian Franks; 2nd. the Roman, in truste regia, attacked and killed in his own house by an armed band, among the Salian Franks.

  640 sol.: the relatives of a duke, with the Barbarians.

  600 sol.: 1st. every man in truste regia, with the Ripuarians; 2nd. the same, with the Salian Franks; 3rd. the count, with the Ripuarians; 4th. the priest, born free, with the Ripuarians; 5th. the priest, with the Germans; 6th. the count, with the Salian Franks; 7th. the Sagibaro (a kind of judge) free, ibid.; 8th. the priest, ibid.; the free man attacked and killed in his own house by an armed band, ibid.

  500 sol.: the deacon, with the Ripuarians.

  400 sol.: 1st. the sub-deacon, with the Ripuarians; 2nd. the deacon, with the Germans; 3rd. the same, among the Salian Franks.

  300 sol.: 1st. the Roman living with the king, with the Salian Franks; 2nd. the young man brought up in the service of the king, and those who had been enfranchised by the king, and made counts, with the Ripuarians; 3rd. the priest, among the Bavarians; 4th. the Sagibaro who had been brought up in the court of the king, with the Salian Franks; 5th. the Roman killed by an armed band in his house, ibid.

  200 sol.: the free-born clerk, with the Ripuarians; 2nd. the deacon, with the Bavarians; 3rd. the free Ripuarian Frank; 4th. the German of the middle classes; 5th. the Frank or Barbarian, living under Salic law; 6th. the travelling Frank, with the Ripuarians; 7th. the man who had become enfranchised by purchase, with the Ripuarians.

  160 sol.: 1st. the free man in general, among the Germans; 2nd. the same, with the Bavarians; 3rd. the Burgundian, the German, the Bavarian, the Frison, the Saxon, with the Ripuarians; 4th. the free man cultivating ecclesiastical property, with the Germans.

  150 sol.: 1st. the optimus, or noble Burgundian, killed by the man whom he had attacked; 2nd. the steward of a royal domain, with the Burgundians; 3rd. the slave who could work well in gold, ibid.

  100 sol.: any man belonging to the middle classes (mediocris homo) with the Burgundians, killed by the person whom he had attacked; 2nd. the Roman possessing personal property, with the Salian Franks; 3rd. the Roman while travelling, with the Ripuarians; 4th. the man in the service of the king, or of a church, ibid.; 5th. the planter (lidus) by two charters of Charlemagne (an. 803 and 813); 6th. the steward (actor) of a domain belonging to any but the king, with the Burgundians; 7th. the slave, a worker in silver, ibid.

  80 sol.: those enfranchised in presence of the church, or by a special charter, with the Germans.

  75 sol.: any man of inferior condition (minor persona), with the Burgundians.

  55 sol.: the barbarian slave employed in the personal service of a master, or as a bearer of messages, with the Burgundians.

  50 sol.: the blacksmith (slave), with the Burgundians.

  45 sol.: 1st. the serf of the church and the serf of the king, with the Germans; 2nd. the tributary Roman, with the Salian Franks.

  40 sol.: 1st. one merely enfranchised, with the Bavarians; 2nd. the herdsman keeping forty swine, with the Germans; 3rd. the shepherd over eighty sheep, ibid.; 4th. the seneschal of the man who has twelve companions (vassi) in his house, ibid.; 5th. the marshal who kept twelve horses, ibid.; 6th. the cook who has an assistant (junior), ibid.;7th. the goldsmith, ibid.; 8th. the armourer, ibid.; 9th. the blacksmith, ibid.; 10th. the cartwright, with the Burgundians.

  36 sol.: 1st. the slave, with the Ripuarians; 2nd. the slave who had become a tributary planter, ibid.

  30 sol.: the keeper of swine, with the Burgundians.

  20 sol.: the slave, with the Bavarians.

  We see by this table that, notwithstanding the common opinion to the contrary, the wehrgeld is by no means an exact and certain indication of social conditions. It is not determined uniformly according to the origin, the quality, the position of individuals. The circumstances of the murder, the official character of the criminal, the greater or less usefulness or commonness of the man slain, all these variable elements enter into the determination of the wehrgeld. The simple fact of the murder having been committed at the court of the duke, while the victim is going to or returning from the house of the count, triples thewehrgeld of every man, whether he be a slave or a freeman, a Barbarian or a Roman. The elements of the wehrgeld are very numerous; it varies according to places and times. The Roman, the tributary, the slave, according to circumstances, may be valued at a greater or a less sum than a barbarian free man. We see many general indications which serve to show that the Roman was commonly less esteemed than a barbarian, the tributary or the slave less than the free man. This is very easily accounted for, and might have been anticipated. But it is not on this account less difficult to draw from such facts a positive indication of the state of individuals—a precise and complete classification of social conditions.

  There is no resource left but to renounce the idea of classifying social conditions and of determining the conditions of persons, according to any general principle, resting either on the nature of territorial properties, or in the legal appreciation of the value of different lives. We must simply inquire, by the aid of historical facts, who were the strong and powerful at the time; what common name was given to them; what share of influence and of liberty fell to the lot of those who were simply called free men. We shall thus arrive at clearer and more certain results. We shall often find that landed property is a great and principal source of strength, and that the wehrgeld is an indication of the amount of importance or of liberty possessed by individuals; but we shall not attribute to these two principles a general and decisive authority, and we shall not mutilate facts in order that they may harmonize with our hypotheses.

  LECTURE 17

  Of the Leudes or Antrustions. ~ Men, faithful to the king and to the large proprietors. ~ Different means of acquiring and retaining them. ~ Obligations of the Leudes. ~ The Leudes are the origin of the nobility. ~ Bishops and heads of monasteries were reckoned among the leudes of the king. ~ Moral and material power of the bishops. ~ Efforts of the kings to possess themselves of the right of nominating bishops. ~ Free men. ~ Did they form a distinct and numerous class? The arimanni, and rathimburgi. ~ Mistake of M. ~ de Savigny. ~ Rapid and general extension of the feudal hierarchy. ~ The freedmen. ~ Different modes of enfranchisement: First, the denariales, enfranchised with respect to the king: Second, the tabularii, enfranchised with respect to the church: Third, the chartularii, enfranchised by a charter. ~ Different consequences resulting from these different modes of enfranchisement.

  The first whom we meet with at this time occupying the highest place in the social scale are the Leudes, or Antrustions. Their name indicates their quality—trust expresses fidelity. They were men who had proved faithful, and they succeeded the associates of the German chiefs. After the conquest, each of the chiefs established himself, together with his own men, on a certain territory. The king had a larger and more considerable number of followers. Many remained with him. He had different means, which he very assiduously employed, of attaching to himself his Leudes, or of acquiring them.

  1st. This was evidently the result aimed at in conferring benefices. In 587, Gontran, giving his advice to Childebert II. on his conduct to those who were about him, points out to him “those whom he ought to honour by appointments and by gifts, and those to whom he ought to refuse them.”

  2nd. The organization of the house, the palace, the court, borrowed in part from the traditions of the Roman empire, the passing amusements and the permanent advantages which were attached to them, induced many men of influence to become Leudes, or gave importance to the original Leudes of the king. The following are names of some of their offices; “count of the palace, referendary, seneschal, mareschal, falconer, butler, chamberlain, porter, head-porter, &c.”

  3rd. Marculf has preserved to us the formula by which a man of importance, cum arimannia sua, “with his free men, his band,” was accustomed to enroll himself among the king’s Leudes. Charlemagne took various precautions in order that persons who came to him in order to become his trusty followers (de truste facienda), should meet with no obstacle.

  4th. It was to their Leudes that the kings were in the habit of giving important public occupations, such as belonged to dukes, counts, &c. There is reason for believing that these functions originally belonged to the principal chief who established himself in a territory. In the natural course of events these chiefs became themselves Leudes of the king or were supplanted by those who were such.

  5th. The number of Leudes was the principal source of strength; accordingly they were multiplied by all kinds of devices. In 587, in the treaty of Andely, between Gontran and Childebert II, “it was agreed that neither of them should attempt to draw over to himself the Leudes of the other, or receive them if they came of their own accord.” We continually find Leudes of importance threatening the king to leave his service, and enter into some other.

  The general obligation of the Leudes was fidelity, service in the palace, and military service. The price of this obligation was, for the Leudes, power and riches. They had also certain civil advantages, but of a more uncertain nature. Their wehrgeld was a larger amount, whatever might otherwise have been their origin. We see that their prerogatives accumulated in proportion as their power was consolidated by the long possession of benefices. Charlemagne desired that his vassals should be honoured, and should hold, after himself, the first place in esteem. There were however among the Leudes of the king some who were less powerful, and some who even were poor.

  Every large proprietor had his Leudes; his house was organized after the model of the king’s; the same offices existed in each.

  It is the opinion of Montesquieu, who is in this opposed by Montlosier, that the origin of the nobility is to be found in the Leudes. Neither of them has formed, in my judgment, a just and clear idea either of the condition of the Leudes or of the character of the nobility. The rank of the Leude and his advantages were purely of a personal character. The rank of a free Barbarian was hereditary, as were also his advantages: but the rank of the Leude, that is to say, the advantages and the superiority which he derived from his position, tended to become hereditary; that of the free man, on the other hand, tended, when he was isolated and left to himself, to become effaced and to lose its advantages. Most free men who did not become beneficiaries, vassals, Leudes of some importance, ceased to be free at all. The aristocracy of the Leudes tended to be constituted, the liberty of the free men tended to be destroyed—the free men were, viewed in contrast with those who were not free, an aristocracy on the decline; the Leudes were, compared with free men, an aristocracy on the increase.

  Mannert, in his treatise entitled, The liberty of the Franks, Freyheit der Franken, has very clearly explained the formation of the nobility among the Franks. There were many Roman Gauls among the Leudes of the Frankish kings: we find, for example, the names of Protadius, Claudius, Florentinianus, among the mayors of the palace towards the close of the sixth, and the commencement of the seventh century. They often changed their names into barbaric names. Thus the brother of Duke Lupus, born a Roman, called himselfMagn-Wulfus (great wolf), and his son, who was bishop of Rheims, he calledRom-Wulfus (Roman wolf). These Romans entered into the company of the Leudes because they needed the protection of the kings; because they were disposed to place what power they had in his service; because they were acquainted with the country, and knew that the king required them; because, lastly, the kings, when they embraced Christianity, became reconciled to many wealthy and influential Gauls.

  Bishops, and the principal heads of monasteries, or of large ecclesiastical corporations, were reckoned among the number of the king’s Leudes. The power of the bishops among the Gauls, before the arrival of the Germans, is proved directly by facts; their influence, their wealth, is proved indirectly by the eagerness with which the position of a bishop was sought. Their importance was greatly augmented after the establishment of the Barbarians. They protected the ancient inhabitants from the Barbarian kings, and served the latter by their power in governing the ancient inhabitants. They, and scarcely any but they, had preserved some science, some intellectual culture; the influence of religious ideas and practices over the converted barbarians was powerful; the impressions formed were strong and vivid at that stage of civilization: the clergy could excite the imagination, could tranquillize or alarm the conscience. The bishops and heads of monasteries acquired, through a large number of sources, great wealth; they in process of time became large beneficiaries; most of the property given to churches were given as benefices, and consequently involved the obligations belonging to that title; some property was conferred “with the complete right of proprietorship.” In 807, Charlemagne charged his son Pepin to prevent the dukes and counts to whom the government of the provinces had been committed, from exacting from churches all the services due in general from free men. In 816, Louis the Débonnair provided that each church should possess a farm absolutely free from all charge. Facts disclose at every step the importance of the bishops; they were employed in important transactions, and assisted in drawing up laws. Counts, dukes, large Barbarian proprietors, became bishops. The temporal consequences attached to ecclesiastical excommunication did not fail to put into their hands a powerful weapon of attack or defence. Churches obtained immunities of all kinds, from military service, rights of custom, &c.; they became asylums of refuge—a popular right which, during these times of brute violence, far more generally protected the innocent than shielded the guilty.

  The nomination of bishops was an ancient right of the priests and the faithful. The importance of these functions, and the riches of the churches, induced the king to encroach upon this prerogative. Further, they urged some kind of claim to it, as being lords of the churches on which they had conferred benefices. They used the right of confirmation in order to possess themselves of the right of nomination. At first, bishops were the most sure and devoted Leudes of the king; kings and bishops had need of one another. Very soon afterwards the bishops became so powerful as to be able to act independently of the kings.

  At this epoch convents also assumed great importance, although their heads do not seem to have played so prominent a part in France as in England.

  Upon the whole, the power of the clergy at this period was as useful as it was great. It awakened and developed moral necessities among the Barbarians—it commanded and inspired a respect for the rights and sufferings of the feeble—it gave an illustration of the reality of moral force, when everything was at the disposal of material force. That is a false notion which assumes that an institution or an influence is to be attacked by reason of the evil effects which it may produce after centuries of existence; we must consider and appreciate it in the times when it was originally formed.

  From the Leudes, let us pass to those who were simply free men.

  There are words which have, in our time, so simple and absolute a signification, that we apply them without consideration or scruple to times in which their actual significance was not recognized at all. The expression free man is an example. If by it we mean the man who is not a slave, the man who is not the property of another man, and can neither be given nor sold as an article of traffic, there were a great number of free men from the fifth to the tenth centuries. But if we attach to this expression the political sense which it possesses in our days, that is to say, the idea of a citizen dependent on no other citizen, who depends for the safety of his person and his property only upon the state, and the laws of the state, the number of free men was very inconsiderable at the period of which we speak, and was continually diminishing. Most of those who were not serfs were engaged or were binding themselves with increasing frequency, either for the security of their persons or of their properties, to the service, and to a certain amount of dependency upon some man more powerful than themselves, who employed them in his house or protected them at a distance. The independence of the citizen as it existed in the republics of antiquity, and as it exists in our public communities, became more and more rare from the fifth to the tenth centuries. Eminent publicists, M. de Savigny among others, in his Histoire du droit romain dans le moyen âge, have affirmed that always at this period a numerous class of free men existed, true citizens, exempt from all personal dependence, depending only upon the state and forming the body of the nation. This involves a complete confusion of times and a misapprehension of the natural succession of events. Doubtless at the time of the invasion, and during the period which immediately followed it, there were many free men of this kind; the independence of individuals who live a wandering and barbarian life did not suddenly and completely vanish under the influence of the new circumstances which resulted from their territorial establishment. But, so far as regards the greater number of free men, this independence was rapidly absorbed by new ties, and by the very numerous and various forms of feudal hierarchy. We may think we have found, under certain names which are frequently to be met with in documents and historical works, such as, Arimanni, Erimanni, Herimanni, Hermanni, among the Lombards, and Rachimburgi, Rathimburgi, Regimburgi, among the Franks, a class of men actually free—citizens in the sense in which we use the words at the present time. But when we investigate more closely, we soon learn that no such class is to be found, and that nearly if not quite all theArimanni or Rathimburgi, were bound in the fetters of a feudal organization and depended far more on some superior individual than on the protection of the state.

  Many learned men also think that the practice of enfranchisement which prevailed at this period created many free men—as completely so, as if they had inherited their freedom as a birthright. This also is, I think, a mistake. Enfranchisement was frequent, but it conferred complete freedom on very few; it transformed many into cultivators and tributaries, or placed them in other analogous positions, which however did not insure entire liberty. In order to be convinced of this, we have only to examine the acts of enfranchisement themselves. There were several kinds, and each was attended with different consequences. We find, First, the denariales, or enfranchised with respect to the king; although their life was valued at 200 solidi, like the life of a Frank, yet their liberty was incomplete; they could not bequeath property to others than their children; the composition for their lives was paid to the king, not to their relatives, which plainly shows that the king regarded them as homines regii. Second, those enfranchised with respect to the church, or tabularii. Those thus enfranchised became homines ecclesiastici; they could not become denariales according to the laws of the Ripuarians, and their property went to the church if they died without issue. Third, those enfranchised per chartam, chartularii. The expressions of the charter which gave them their liberty seem to be completely unambiguous; but it is doubtful whether the results were similarly unambiguous, since the denariales themselves remained, in certain respects, in an inferior condition. The statutes of Charlemagne, which provide that the terms of composition for thedenariales should be paid to the king, and that they should not possess their liberty as a heritage till after the third generation, apply the same conditions also to the chartularii, and even to those who were enfranchised to the church, thetabularii.

  The act and the consequences of enfranchisement varied in the course of the epoch on which our attention is occupied. This fact has not been observed by M. Montlosier and all those who bring together facts separated from one another by a long interval of time, in order to make a complete system. They apply to the same epoch facts belonging to different times. History presents us with instances of slaves who, after the Germanic invasion, raised themselves to the condition not only of free men, but of Leudes and large proprietors. Individual cases of these are well authenticated, and were very likely to have occurred in these times of disorder; but from these no general rule is to be inferred. In spite of the vast influence of religious ideas—and all formulas of enfranchisement are prefaced by the expression of a religious sentiment and design—the general movement of the epoch which we are considering, so far as regards the condition of persons, was much more towards the extension of servitude, under different forms and in varying degrees, than towards the maintenance or the advancement of liberty.

  LECTURE 18

  Simultaneous existence of three systems of institutions, after the settlement of the Franks in Gaul. ~ Conflict of these three systems. ~ Summary of this conflict, its vicissitudes, and results. ~ Its recurrence in local and central institutions. ~ Of local institutions under the Frankish monarchy. ~ Of the assemblies of free men. ~ Of the authority and jurisdiction of the great landowners in their estates. ~ Of the authority and jurisdiction of the dukes, counts, and other royal officers.

  From the ancient condition of the barbarians in Germany, and from their new situation after their establishment in the Roman empire, there issued three systems of institutions, of different principles and results, which, from the fifth to the tenth century, co-existed at first for some time, and afterwards commingled and conflicted with each other with alternate success and defeat.

  In their primitive state, in Germany, the Barbarians were all free; every individual was important—nothing of any moment could be undertaken or decided upon without the approbation and concurrence of the majority. Hence arose the common discussion of affairs of common interest, and the influence of election upon the choice of chiefs or judges—or in other words, the institutions of liberty.

  The second principle with which we meet is the attachment and subordination of the tribesmen to their chief. Up to a certain point they were dependent upon him, even for their subsistence. This dependence increased after their territorial establishment. The authority of the chiefs over their comrades augmented; and the liberty of the latter diminished with their importance. They became beneficiaries or vassals, colonists, or even serfs; a hierarchy was formed among the landowners. Hence arose those aristocratic and hierarchical institutions which gave birth to the feudal system.

  The power of the kings, originally very limited, became extended after conquest by the dispersion of the nation, the concession of benefices, and the predominance of the principle of hereditary succession to the throne. A conflict arose, not between the power of the king and the liberties of the citizens, but between the power of the king and that of the nobles, especially of the king’s own Leudes. The kings made attempts to found the entire government upon the monarchical principle, and, with this object, to place themselves in direct connexion with all their subjects. Under Charlemague, this attempt reached its apogee, and seemed likely to succeed. But the monarchical system succumbed beneath the feudal system.

  Thus, free institutions, aristocratic institutions, monarchical institutions—local and general assemblies of free men to deliberate on common affairs, military, judicial, or others, in presence of or in concert with the king or his delegates—the subordination of the simple free man to the lord, of the vassal to the chieftain; the nobles administering justice, making war with each other, and imposing certain charges on their vassals; the progressive organization of the royal power; dukes, counts, royal officers, missi dominici, transacting public affairs and administering justice, even in opposition to the nobles—these are the three systems of facts, the three tendencies which present themselves to our notice during the period from the fifth to the tenth century. The conflict of these three tendencies constitutes the history of the public institutions of this epoch.

  The system of free institutions rapidly declined. It succumbed beneath the system of the predominance of the great landowners, and of the hierarchy of benefices. A conflict arose between the principles of the feudal system, and the endeavours of the monarchical system. In the conflict of these two systems, however, we find remnants of the system of free institutions. These remnants were allied sometimes to the feudal, sometimes to the monarchical system—most frequently to the latter. Charlemagne attempted to render the institutions of liberty auxiliary to the triumph of the monarchical system. We observed something analogous to this in the history of the Anglo-Saxons; but there the system of free institutions never perished; the common deliberation of the free landowners, in the county-courts, always subsisted. Among the Franks, the simultaneity and conflict of the three systems were more distinct and animated; the first was the weakest and perished early.

  In treating of the Franks, as of the Anglo-Saxons, we shall first examine their local institutions, and then their general institutions; and we shall everywhere meet with the great fact to which I have just alluded. We shall follow it in its vicissitudes, and we shall see, first, how the system of free institutions perished, in localities and at the centre; secondly, how the monarchical system was for a moment really successful and strongly predominant under Charlemagne alone; and thirdly, how the feudal system, that is to say, the aristocratic and hierarchical organization of territorial properties and sovereignties, could not but prevail, as it really did in the end.

  of local institutions

  In Frankish Gaul, as among the Anglo-Saxons, the territory was divided into counties, hundreds, and tythings.* The counts were called grafen, judices; the centeniers, centgrafen; and the tything-men, tungini, thingrafen. Each of these officers held a court, placitum, mallum, at which justice was administered, and the business of the district transacted. This court was at first an assembly of all the free men of the district; they were bound to attend, and a heavy fine was imposed as the penalty for non-attendance. There, as I have said, they distributed justice, and deliberated upon matters of common interest. Civil transactions, sales, wills, enfranchisements, were carried on in public. There, also, military convocations were made. The court or plaid of the tything-man, decanus, is seldom met with, and was of little importance, as in England. The powers of the courts or assemblies of free men, held by the centenarii and vicarii were somewhat limited; judgments could not be given upon questions involving property or personal liberty, unless it were in presence of the imperial envoys or the counts.

  Such were the free institutions and the meetings for common deliberation, of separate localities. These primitive plaids correspond to the ancient assemblies of the Germans in Germany.

  Besides the plaids of freemen, appears the jurisdiction of the nobles or important landowners over the persons who dwelt on their domains. The chieftain distributed justice to his comrades, or, as they had now become, his colonists. His jurisdiction was not, however, altogether arbitrary; his comrades were his assessors in his court. The conjuratores, who attested the truth of the facts stated, almost entirely settled the affair. If we consider these institutions in their origin, we find that the seignorial courts of justice, although obscure and somewhat inactive, existed simultaneously with the assemblies of freemen, exempt from the circumscription and jurisdiction of the officers of the crown. The jurisdiction of the churches was derived from the jurisdiction of the seigneurs, and both were exercised in virtue of the proprietorship of the domain, which rendered the landlord the patron of its inhabitants.

  These are the first rudiments of that feudal organization which, by establishing the authority and jurisdiction of the seigneur over his tenants, vassals or colonists, constantly tended to destroy the authority and jurisdiction of the assemblies of free men. A conflict began between the feudal principle of hierarchical subordination, and the principle of the union of equals in common deliberation. This conflict commenced as early as the beginning of the epoch which now occupies our attention.

  Let us now examine how the royal power was exercised in separate localities during this period. The dukes, counts, centeniers, and others, were probably at the outset, as I have already observed, not mere delegates of the king, but the natural chieftains, the most powerful and extensive landowners. It is quite erroneous to believe that, originally, a county corresponded to what is now called a department, and that the king appointed and sent a count to govern it as he now sends a prefect. The king, the head of the nation, naturally directed the most important man in the district to convoke together the free men of the district for military purposes, and to collect the revenues of the royal domains; and this person thus received a sort of appointment from the king. The increasing importance of the palace and court of the kings—the influence of Roman institutions and ideas, at length made this appointment the source of a title. The counts became Leudes, and vice versa, the Leudes became counts.

  During a considerable period the hereditariness of these officers was not recognised. Some antiquaries even are of opinion that these employments were given for a fixed time only. There is more reason to believe that this point was not definitely determined, and that, in fact, these offices were long unlimited as to their duration, and always transferable; numerous instances can be brought in support of this theory. The Frankish kings frequently allowed the natural chieftains of the countries which they conquered to retain their former position and ancient rights. Thus the Bavarian dukes were hereditary. When Louis the Débonnair received the Spaniards into the south of France, he permitted their counts to retain their titles and jurisdiction.

  The title of count became an object of ambition on account of the advantages connected therewith. The count possessed great power, a share of the fines, freda, and immense facilities for acquiring property in the district under his jurisdiction. These offices also supplied the kings with means for enriching their Leudes, or obtaining new ones. Under the Merovingians, perpetual instability prevailed in respect to these offices as well as to benefices; they were obtained by presents or purchased by money. Nevertheless, the office of count was frequently transmitted from father to son; this was natural, and usage could not fail to precede right; the count or duke, being almost always an important personage in his canton or town, independently of his office, his son, who succeeded to his importance, succeeded frequently to his office also.

  Some writers have affirmed that there was a great distinction between the dukes and the counts; it has even been asserted that each duke had twelve counts under his orders. No such regularity existed in local administration. We meet with some counts equal in power to dukes; among the Burgundians, for example, some counts ruled over several provinces. We may say, however, that in general the duke was superior to the count. We may even presume that, originally, the office of duke was military, and that of the count, judicial; although the two missions frequently appear confounded. A formula of Marculf assimilates the dukes, counts, and patricians. The margraves were the counts of the marches or frontiers. The men of the court, the delegates of the king, finished by being counts everywhere.

  Thus there co-existed the three systems of institutions which I have mentioned: 1. the assemblies of freemen, having authority and jurisdiction; 2. the great landowners, whether Beneficiary or allodial, lay or ecclesiastical, proprietors—having authority and jurisdiction; 3. the administrators or delegates of the king, having authority and jurisdiction.

  In the midst of the disorders of the Merovingian race, we find that the assemblies of free men rapidly declined. Most of the free men ceased to attend. Some became powerful enough to aim at independence, others became so weak as to lose their freedom. The common deliberation of free men disappeared. The principle of the subordination of the individual to the individual, in virtue of protection, vassalage, patronage, or colonage, prevailed. Seignorial jurisdictions, both lay and ecclesiastical, became extended. Their extension and consolidation were the necessary consequence of the extension and consolidation of benefices. The diminution of the number of allodial estates, the increase of tributary lands, and the corresponding changes which were introduced into the condition of persons, necessarily removed the greater number of justiceables from the jurisdiction of the assemblies of free men and from that of the king. Even the care which was taken by the first Carlovingians to compel the seigneurs to administer justice, and to control their administration of it, proves the progress of this kind of jurisdiction.

  The liberty allowed to every man to live under any law he pleased, could not but contribute also to this result; it tended to disperse society, for it placed men under the jurisdiction of those who had their own private code of laws; and thus it opposed union, and common deliberation. It was a kind of liberty, doubtless—a liberty necessary in the state of society which then existed; but this liberty, like almost all other liberties at this period, was a principle of isolation.

  LECTURE 19

  Government of Charlemagne. ~ Apparent revival of free institutions. ~ Individual independence and social liberty. ~ Organization of monarchical power under Charlemagne. ~ His active surveillance over his vassals and agents. ~ Rapid decline of monarchical institutions after his death. ~ Definitive predominance of the feudal system. ~ Central institutions during the same epoch: royalty. ~ Causes of the progress of royalty, and of the principle of hereditary succession among the Franks. ~ Influence of the clergy.

  After the Merovingian anarchy, at the accession of the Carlovingians and especially during the reign of Charlemagne, two facts, which seem contradictory, present themselves to our notice. Free institutions appear to gain new life, and at the same time the monarchical system evidently prevails. We must closely study this singular coincidence, and endeavour thoroughly to understand its causes.

  There are two ways in which we may understand a man’s personal liberty; first, as the independence of the individual having no law but his own will; and secondly, as the enfranchisement of every individual from every other individual will, which is contrary to reason and justice.

  Liberty, if taken in the first sense, is barbarous and anti-social; it is the infancy, or rather the absence, of society. The word society itself indicates the union of individuals in one common idea, feeling, and interest. Society can exist only by the obedience of individuals to one common rule. If the liberty of each man constitutes his only law, if every restriction to the independence of individual will is considered illegitimate, society is impossible. The law which should rule society, according to truth and justice, is exterior to and independent of individual wills. The object of society is to discover this superior law, and to exact obedience to it alone; but to this law obedience must be given; society is possible only by the reign of brute force, or by the government of true law. If the independence of the individual is regarded as the condition of liberty, we may be certain that force will become the dominant power of society, for society there must be; it is an imperious necessity of human nature; and this necessity will receive its gratification from force, if it cannot obtain it from justice and reason.

  The object of government, then, is twofold; it proposes, first, to seek out and discover the true law which must decide all the questions to which social relations give rise, and to subject to this law all adverse individual wills; and secondly, to prevent individuals from being subjected to any other laws but the true law, such, for example, as the arbitrary will of other more powerful individuals. Good and true government, then, does not say to every individual: “Thou shalt be subject only to thy own caprice,” for on these terms there could be no society, and no government; but it says: “Thou shalt be subject, not to the caprice of any other individual, but only to reason and justice.” The progress of civilization consists, on the one hand, in extending the authority of reason over all individuals, and in neglecting no means to convince their individual reason and to render their obedience voluntary; and, on the other hand, in limiting the sway of the arbitrary will of individuals over one another. Where the arbitrary will of one or more individuals prevails, legitimate liberty does not exist; where the isolated independence of every individual is maintained, society is impossible.

  The importance of this distinction between moral and natural liberty, between social freedom and individual independence, is immense. It would be easy to demonstrate its intimate connexion with the true theory of liberty, considered in relation to man personally, and independently of society. It is as a reasonable being, capable of recognizing truth, that man is sublime; therein resides the divinity of his nature: liberty is in him nothing but the power of obeying the truth which he recognises, and making his actions conform thereto. On this ground, liberty is very respectable; but liberty is respectable on this ground alone.

  In the infancy of society, the liberty which almost all men desire and defend, is natural liberty—liberty to do nothing but what they please. This is caused by the imperfection of the moral development of each individual, and by the imperfection of the same development in the social powers; from which imperfection it results that these powers ill-understand the true law, never apply it, and are themselves directed by individual wills, as arbitrary as they are capricious. On this account, the state of freedom with which we meet at the outset of all societies lasts for so short a time, and is so quickly superseded by the despotism of one or several persons. Society cannot exist if natural liberty, that is, individual independence, exists in all the extent of its desire: and as society is as yet ignorant both how to govern according to the moral law, and how to respect moral liberty, force seizes upon the government.1

  When, in such a state of society, a man of superior genius and character appears, he is inevitably driven to found a despotism, that is, the empire of his own individual will. He is irritated and off ended by the collision of all these barbarous or stupid individual wills; his instinct tells him that society cannot exist in this manner, that such a state of things is not society. He is personally disgusted, moreover, at the sway which all these narrow and ignorant wills claim to exercise over all things, and even over himself. The authority of blind force over enlightened force is nothing but a despotism; and what is greater insolence than the power of a brutal multitude over a lofty individual reason? The superior man becomes indignant and seeks to free himself from this yoke, to impose some rule upon this disorder; and this rule he seeks in his own reason, in his own will. Thus is established, at such epochs, the despotism of a single person; it is not radically illegitimate, and the best proof that it is not, is afforded by the easy reception with which he meets the admiration with which he is regarded, the gratitude even which he inspires, and which lasts as long as the state of things which originated his power. In truth, the loftiest superiority, that which is most naturally called to empire by the disorder and dissolution of society, soon becomes corrupted and rude, by becoming itself a purely individual will, full of egotism and caprice: but that which constituted its force and credit, at the outset, was its better comprehension of the general wants of society; it had obtained a deeper knowledge of the true law which must govern society; and it rescued society from its losing battle with a multitude of ignorant or ferocious individual wills. It is by these means that great men triumph at first. It was thus that Charlemagne triumphed; it was thus that the first three Carlovingians, Pepin of Heristal, Charles Martel, and Pepin the Short, had prepared the way for him. Under the Merovingians, the state was falling into dissolution; every strong man was making himself independent, every weak man was falling into subjection to a stronger. Although the Pepins had sprung from the dominant aristocracy, they early struggled against its excesses. Charles Martel put down the petty tyrants who had sprung up in every direction. The tendency of Charlemagne’s policy was to establish the monarchical system, that is, to secure the universal prevalence of his will by making it felt everywhere by means of his agents. In order to understand with any exactness what was Charlemagne’s pure monarchy, we must see how he managed his own property, and in what manner he administered his palace. The activity of his surveillance was surprising; we shall find details of it in his capitulary De villis, and in the first part of one of Hincmar’s letters.2 He governed his empire in the same spirit. This was the only means he possessed for restoring order, and applying the national forces to the accomplishment of his designs. Into the despotism of a superior man, there always enters a powerful instinctive feeling of justice, and of protection to the weak. Charlemagne diligently endeavoured to check the power of the nobles by subjecting them to surveillance, and by bringing his subjects into direct relationship with the royal authority. He paid great attention to the employment and administration of his benefices, even when in the hands of beneficiaries; he was careful not to give more than one county to the same count, and this rule he rarely transgressed; he ordered the nobles to distribute strict justice to their vassals, and took most energetic measures to compel them to do so, and to judge all men according to the law. Charlemagne also kept watch over the conduct of the counts; the assemblies of free men had almost entirely perished; and they requested as a favour to be allowed to absent themselves. To supply the place of the active surveillance exercised by these ancient assemblies, Charlemagne created the missi dominici. These were inspectors of the whole state of the kingdom, and particularly of the conduct of the counts and nobles.

  The delegates of Charlemagne, the imperial judges, had assessors; and as the free men whose duty it was to fill the office of assessors seldom attended the periodical assemblies, Charlemagne superseded them by the scabini,3 who were appointed by the missi dominici, whom he enjoined to select them with the greatest care. This intervention of the delegates of the sovereign himself in judicial affairs, was a powerful means of monarchical centralization.

  In his Frankish empire, it was not against the ancient free institutions, but against public anarchy and the disorderly power of the strong, that Charlemagne directed these means of government. In his other dominions, wherever he feared the influence of liberty, his despotism was exerted to crush it rigorously; thus he interdicted all public assemblies of the Saxons.

  All this monarchical organization fell with Charlemagne. Its existence is protracted, as if by habit, in the speeches and laws of Louis the Débonnair; but the hand which sustained the edifice is no longer there. The language of Charlemagne in the mouth of Charles the Bald, is nothing but a piece of ridiculous rhodomontade. The feudal system gains the upper hand and organizes itself in every direction. The great vassals either attack the king or isolate themselves from him. The dignity of count became so considerable, that the sons of kings and emperors desire and obtain it. Hereditary succession prevails in the offices of dukes, counts, viscounts, &c. Rhegino cites as a singular fact that the sons of Duke Robert did not succeed to his dukedom, and assigns as the reason, that their tender age rendered them incapable of repulsing the Normans. The sons of two counts of Austria were not put into possession of the counties of their fathers; so their relations took arms, and drove out the usurper. The power of the counts, now they had become hereditary seigneurs, was augmented by the authority they had exercised, under that title, as delegates of the king. The feudal hierarchy, strong by its own intrinsic power, thus gained additional strength from the wreck of royal authority. Hence resulted a new order of local institutions, which I cannot now explain.

  The picture of central institutions reproduces, under another aspect, the same facts, and leads to the same results. Central institutions, as you are aware, may be reduced to two—royalty, and the general assemblies of the nation.

  To royalty among the Franks you may apply what I have said of royalty among the Anglo-Saxons; only, among the Franks, the royal family does not bear, at the outset, the character of a religious filiation. This is perhaps attributable to the fact that the Franks were a confederation of different tribes; among them, the king appears especially as a military chieftain. Under the first Merovingians, there was always a great mixture of hereditariness and election; hereditariness fluctuated among the members of the same family; election, when it was not an act of violence, was rather a recognition than an election.

  It is a grave error to expect to find in facts the basis of a primitive and exclusive law: facts may be made to demonstrate anything. The most opposite parties have fallen into the same error in this respect. Whoever has discovered, at the origin of a state, an act of violence in conformity to his preconceived opinion, takes it as the foundation of what he calls the general law. Some fancy they can discern absolute and well-regulated hereditary succession in the midst of barbarism; others transfer the troubles and violence of a barbarian election into a more advanced stage of civilization; whatever they find existing as fact in the infancy of society, they convert into law for society in its greatest extension and development. This is neither philosophy nor history. The ruling law is that which is conformable to reason and justice. There is always more or less of this law at every epoch in the life of human society; but at no epoch is it pure or complete. We must resign ourselves to the task of freeing it everywhere from all alloy.

  Let us then pass by the primitive and exclusive right of royal heredity, which existed neither among the Franks nor in other countries; all that can be said is that the principle of hereditary monarchy tended, early and constantly, to prevail. The heirship of the private domain of the kings, which was of considerable value, powerfully contributed to establish the heirship of the kingdom, just as the partition of the private domain among the sons led to the partition of the royal dominions; but the partition of the kingdom was almost always made with the consent of the nobles, whilst the heirship of the crown, in each state, does not appear to have required their formal assent.

  We have already seen what were the causes which occasioned the fall of the Merovingian race, and the accession of Carlovingians. The fall of the latter, in the tenth century presents some features of similarity to that of the Merovingians, but between the two, there was greater diversity than resemblance. The ancient companions of the Frankish kings, the Leudes, the Antrustions, and the beneficiaries, had left the court, established themselves on their lands, and become feudal lords: revolutions were no longer effected at the foot of the throne, and in the interior of the royal palace. The feudal lords were much more isolated, not only from the king, but also from one another, than the Leudes had been under the Merovingians. Pepin the Short was king in fact when Childeric III. was king in name; Pepin assumed the name belonging to his power. At the end of the tenth century, there was no king, and no powerful man in the king’s service who wielded the royal power in the name of Louis V. Hugh Capet took possession of an almost vacant place, which, at the moment, added much to his dignity, but little to his authority. After the fall of the Merovingians, Pepin and Charlemagne were able to attempt to establish the monarchical system, and to inaugurate the central authority of the king; Hugh Capet was unable to do this, nor did he attempt it; the feudal lordships had divided the kingdom amongst them. Pepin was the head of an aristocracy which had its centre in the palace of the Merovingian kings. Hugh Capet was one of the principal members of an aristocracy which had no centre; he made himself king because the crown was within his reach. If Louis V. had resided at Rouen, the Duke of Normandy would probably have seized the monarchy.

  As regards the nature and extent of the royal authority, what I have already said sufficiently indicates what it was: very limited and precarious before the settlement of the Franks on Roman territory—being nothing but the power of the chief of a warlike band, always restrained by the presence of the free men, his comrades—it became extended and strengthened after the conquest by various causes: 1. By the dispersion of the Franks. They ceased constantly to surround the king; his authority was but slight over those who left him; but those who were habitually near him depended more closely upon him; a court of barbarian servants succeeded to a court of warriors. 2. By the subjugation of neighbouring chiefs or kings. 3. By the increasing inequality of wealth: the royal property greatly augmented, and this was their principal source of power; they devoted all their energies to the amassing of treasure; it was useless to leave their children a kingdom, unless they could at the same time bequeath to them a full exchequer.4. By the influence of religious and Roman ideas. In the opinion of the Christians, the king was the successor of Saul and of David; in that of the Romans, he was the representative of the emperors. The Frankish kings were fully sensible of the advantages of this two-fold position, and they eagerly accepted the titles of Patrician and Consul. But the royal authority had no definite character; it was proportionate to the ability and energy of those who exercised it.

  Nothing can be more different than the idea of royal authority in those times and in our own day. If a village were now to disregard the king’s authority, or to refuse to obey him, it would be a serious event, the sign of a great decay of power. Such was not the case then; authority was not universally diffused over the country; remote places and interests were in some sort independent of it. It had no real supremacy, except in case of war; the rays of its influence were short, and wherever it was applied, it was matter of fact rather than of right.

  With regard to authority and liberty, right and fact are almost identical in the infancy of society. The idea of right, separate from fact, has but very little power and can scarcely be said to exist. Hence arise the eternal vicissitudes of authority and liberty; whoever ceases to possess them is never permitted to regain them. It is the work and the master-work of civilization to separate right from fact, and to constitute right a power able to maintain, defend, and vindicate itself.

  We must not, however, believe that religious ideas exercised no other influence, in regard to the royal authority, than to extend it, and to represent it as absolute and springing from divine right; they contributed powerfully to render it moral. It is true, they rendered it independent of the public liberties, which were frequently mere embodiments of arbitrary power and brute force, and thus they helped to establish absolute power; but at the same time they subordinated it to the divine laws, in which the moral laws are comprised. The limits which Frankish usages imposed on the royal authority were very different from those assigned to it by Christian ideas: “the king,” to use the expression of the Councils, “is he who governs with pity, justice, and goodness; he who does not govern thus is not a king, but a tyrant.” The restraint which this principle laid upon the royal authority was more efficacious than that which resulted from the influence of Frankish usages. This system, it is true, gave no positive and real guarantee for the observance of the rules which it imposed as duties upon royalty. But the age in which we live has taken too much pains to seek guarantees in physical force, and has neglected to seek for them in the power of moral ideas. In barbarian times, as all powers, both of kings and subjects, are almost equally unregulated, they appear bad guarantees to sensible men, who seek for purer sureties in moral ideas. When, in the epoch of which we are now speaking, the Franks or Leudes repress the abuse of royal authority, they repress it only in virtue of their own powers, and defend their liberties only out of regard to their own interests, and not in obedience to any moral idea of justice and of general right. The ecclesiastics, on the contrary, speak in the name of the general ideas of justice and humanity. They oppose morality rather than force to the abuse of authority. The clergy thus gave utterance to things which answered to the necessities of all the weak, and led them to consider them as their protectors.

  The vice of the religious system, doubtless, is that it creates no political institution, and consequently, no effectual guarantee; thus it always ends by being more favourable to power than to liberty: but, in barbarous ages, when power and liberty were almost equally brutal and anarchical, this system has rendered immense services to humanity and to civilization.

  LECTURE 20

  National assemblies of the Franks; their primitive character, and rapid decline under the Merovingians. ~ They regain importance under the Carlovingians; and are held regularly under Charlemagne. ~ Letter of Archbishop Hincmar De ordine Palatii.

  National assemblies were held among the Franks long previously to their settlement in the Roman empire, and to the establishment of monarchy amongst them. In these assemblies were discussed, in Germany, all the affairs of the confederation, tribe, or band. All the free men, that is to say, all the warriors, were present; but the authority of these assemblies, like the authority of the kings, was uncertain and precarious. They were formed, not in virtue of the principle of the sovereignty of the people, but in virtue of the right of every free man to have the sole disposal of himself. They were convoked especially to determine on military expeditions. Beyond this, every man acted independently, and was answerable for his conduct to none but the local authorities. TheChamp de Mars, or autumnal assembly, of which we find traces at the beginning of the monarchy, was habitually held for the purpose of dividing the booty which had been gained.

  The dispersion of the free men, the increasing inequality of social conditions, and the subordination of the comrades to their chief, soon caused the national assemblies of the Franks to lose their character of universality. They ceased to be attended by any but the large landowners, the Leudes, and the superior clergy. In this state, they appear to have existed under most of the Merovingian kings. Mention is sometimes made of the people in general; but evidently the great majority of the free men neither could, nor did attend these assemblies. Those who possessed power and wealth were almost the only persons who attended; and they regulated the business brought under their notice solely with a view to their own interest. The increasing disorder, and continual dislocations of the kingdom, rendered these assemblies less frequent. They reappear, however, at the establishment of the authority of the Mayors of the Palace. As leaders of the aristocracy of the great independent landowners, they had need of their support. The substitution of a new family of kings, instead of the ancient race, was favourable to the importance of the assemblies. They became, under the first Carlovingians, what they had been under the first Merovingians,—a great council of government, in which all great affairs were discussed. Pepin transferred the Champs de Mars to the month of May; and Charlemagne held these assemblies with a regularity heretofore unknown. In order to form a correct idea of what they were under his reign, you must read the text, and the entire text, of the letter written in 882, sixty-eight years after the death of Charlemagne, by the celebrated Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, in compliance with the request of some of the nobles of the kingdom who had asked his advice with regard to the government of Carloman, one of the sons of Louis the Stammerer. In this letter, Hincmar, as he himself informs us, does nothing but copy a treatise On the Order of the Palace, De ordine Palatii, written before 826 by the celebrated Adalhard, abbot of Corbia, and one of the principal advisers of Charlemagne. It is, therefore, a contemporary document, and its authority is great.

  “It was the usage at that time,” says Hincmar,

  to hold in each year two assemblies, (placita,) and no more. The first took place in the spring; at it were regulated the general affairs of the whole kingdom; no occurrence, unless it were an imperious and universal necessity, could alter what had been decreed thereat. In this assembly, met together all the great men (majores), both lay and ecclesiastic; the more influential (seniores), to discuss business and agree on decisions; the less influential (minores), to receive these decisions, and sometimes also to deliberate upon them and confirm them, not by a formal consent, but by the exercise of their opinion and the assent of their understanding.

  The other assembly, in which the general gifts of the realm were received, was composed only of the more influential members (seniores) of the first assembly, and of the principal councillors. Here the affairs of the following year were treated of, if there were any which it was necessary to deliberate upon beforehand; as also those which might have occurred during the course of the year which was about to expire, and which required provisional attention without delay. For example, if, in any part of the kingdom, the governors of the frontiers (marchisi) had concluded a truce for any time, the course to be pursued on the expiration of these truces was discussed, and it was determined whether they should be renewed or not. If, in any other quarter of the kingdom, war seemed imminent, or peace appeared likely to be established, it was examined whether the exigencies of the moment required, in the first case, that incursions should be commenced or endured, and, in the second, how tranquillity might be insured. These lords thus deliberated long beforehand on what the affairs of the future might require; and when suitable measures had been agreed upon, they were kept so secret, that before the next general assembly they were no more known than if no one had paid any attention to the matter, and no decision had been arrived at regarding it. The object of this was, that if it were necessary to take, either within or without the kingdom, any measures which certain persons, when informed thereof, might wish to prevent, or frustrate, or render difficult, by any artifice, those persons might never have the power to do so.

  In the same assembly, if any measure were necessary either to satisfy absent nobles, or to calm or excite the spirit of the people, and such measure had not previously been taken, it was discussed and adopted by the consent of those present, and it was executed in concert with them by the orders of the king. The year being thus terminated, the assembly of the following year was arranged as I have said.

  With regard to the councillors, both lay and ecclesiastic, care was taken, as far as possible, to select such persons as, from their condition and duties, were filled with the fear of God, and animated, moreover, by unalterable fidelity, so as to consider nothing superior to the interests of the king and kingdom, except eternal life. Men were sought who could be turned aside from the path of duty neither by friends, nor enemies, nor relatives, nor gifts, nor flatteries, nor reproaches; men were sought who were wise and skilful, not with that sophistical skill and worldly wisdom which are so opposed to God’s will, but with a just and true wisdom that might enable them not only to repress, but also fully to confound the men who place all their reliance in the tricks and stratagems of human policy. The maxim of the councillors thus elected, and of the king himself, was, never to confide, without their mutual consent, to their domestics or any other person, what they might have said familiarly to one another, either upon the affairs of the kingdom, or about any particular individuals. It made no difference whether the secret ought to be kept for a day or two, or more, or for a year, or even for ever.

  It invariably happens that, if the conversation held in such meetings, with regard to any individual, either by way of precaution, or in reference to any other public interest, come afterwards to the knowledge of that individual, he cannot but feel great anxiety, or be driven to despair thereby, or, which is a much more serious matter, be stimulated to in fidelity; and thus a man who might perhaps still have done service to the State, is rendered useless,—which never would have happened if he had not known what was said about him. That which is true of one man may be true of two, of a hundred, or of a greater number, or of a whole family, or of an entire province, unless the greatest caution be observed.

  The apocrisiary, that is, the chaplain or keeper of the palace, and the chamberlain, were always present at these councils; they were therefore chosen with the greatest care; or else, after having been chosen, they were furnished with such instructions as should render them worthy of being present. As to the other officers of the palace (ministeriales), if there were any one who, first by gaining instruction, and afterwards by giving advice, proved himself capable of honourably occupying the place of one of these councillors, or fit to become one, he received orders to attend the meetings, giving the greatest attention to the matters discussed thereat, correcting his erroneous ideas, learning that of which he was ignorant, and retaining in his memory that which had been ordained and determined. The object of this was, that, if any unforeseen accident occurred, either within or without the kingdom; if any unexpected news arrived, in reference to which previous provision had not been made (it rarely happened, however, that in such cases, profound deliberation was necessary, or that there was not time to convoke the councillors already mentioned); the object of this, I say, was that, under such circumstances, the officers of the palace, with the grace of God, and by their constant habit of both attending at the public councils and deliberating upon the domestic affairs of the realm, might be capable, as need was, either to advise what had best be done, or to point out how matters might be arranged without inconvenience, until the next meeting of the council. So much with regard to the principal officers of the palace.

  In reference to the inferior officers, properly called palatines, who had not to do with the general affairs of the kingdom, but only with those in which the persons specially connected with the palace were concerned, the sovereign regulated their duties with great care; in order that, not only might no evil arise therefrom, but also that if any disorder were manifested, it might at once be repressed and extirpated. If the affair were urgent, but might nevertheless without injustice or wrong to any person be deferred for decision until the meeting of the general assembly, the emperor expected the palatines to indicate the best means of delay, and to imitate the wisdom of their superiors in a manner pleasing to God and useful to the kingdom. As to the councillors whom I first mentioned, they were careful, when summoned to the palace, not to occupy themselves with private affairs, or with the disputes which might have arisen with regard to the possession of property or the application of the law, until they had arranged, with the help of God, everything that concerned the king and kingdom in general. This being done, if, in obedience to the orders of the king, there remained any affair which could not be settled either by the Count of the palace, or by the officer under whose cognizance it fell, without the assistance of the councillors, they proceeded to investigate it.

  At one or other of the two assemblies, and in order that they might not appear to be convoked without reason, there were submitted to the examination and deliberation of the great personages whom I have mentioned, as well as of the chief senators of the realm, and in virtue of the orders of the king, those articles of law namedcapitula, which the king himself had drawn up under the inspiration of God, or the necessity of which had been manifested to him in the interval between the meetings. After having received these communications, they deliberated upon them for one, two, or three days, or more, according to the importance of the matter. Messengers from the palace, going and coming, received their questions and brought back answers; and no stranger approached the place of their meeting, until the result of their deliberations was placed before the eyes of the great prince, who then, with the wisdom which he had received from God, adopted a resolution which all obeyed. This course was pursued for one, two, or more capitularies, until, by the help of God, all the necessities of the time had been duly regulated.

  Whilst these affairs were thus arranged out of the presence of the king, the prince himself, in the midst of the multitude who had come to the general assembly, was busied in receiving presents, greeting the most important individuals, conversing with those whom he saw but seldom, exhibiting an affectionate interest in the old, laughing and joking with the young, and doing these and similar things to ecclesiastics as well as laymen. However, if those who were deliberating upon the matters submitted to their judgment desired it, the king went to them, and remained with them as long as they wished; and there they reported to him, with entire familiarity, what they thought of various matters, and what were the friendly discussions which had arisen amongst them.

  I must not forget to mention that, if the weather were fine, all this went on in the open air; but if not, in several distinct buildings, by which those who had to deliberate upon the king’s propositions were separated from the multitude of persons who had come to the assembly; and then the less important men could not enter. The building intended for the meeting of the nobles was divided into two parts, so that the bishops, abbots, and superior clergy could meet together without any mixture of laymen. In the same way, the counts and other distinguished personages of the State separated themselves, in the morning, from the rest of the multitude, until the time came, when, whether the king were present or absent, they all met together; and then the nobles above-mentioned, the clergy on their side, and the laymen on theirs, proceeded to the hall which was assigned to them, and where seats had been honourably prepared for them. When the lay and ecclesiastical lords were thus separated from the multitude, it was in their power to sit either together or separately, according to the nature of the affairs which they had to discuss, whether ecclesiastical, secular, or mixed. In the same way, if they wished to send for any one, either to bring them food, or to answer any question, and to dismiss him after having obtained what they desired, it was in their power to do so. Thus proceeded the examination of the affairs which the king proposed for their deliberation.

  The second occupation of the king was to demand of each what he had to report or relate to him regarding that part of the kingdom from which he had come; not only was this permitted to all, but they were specially enjoined to make inquiries, during the interval between the assemblies, about what was going on both within and without the kingdom; and they were to seek information from foreigners as well as natives, from enemies as well as friends, sometimes by employing envoys, and without being very scrupulous as to the way in which the information was obtained. The king desired to know whether in any district or corner of his kingdom the people were murmuring or disaffected, and what was the cause of their disaffection, and whether any disorder had occurred which required the attention of the general council, and other similar details. He also sought to know whether any of the conquered nations were likely to revolt, or whether any that had revolted seemed disposed to submit, or whether those that still remained independent threatened the kingdom with any attack, and so forth. Upon all these matters, wherever disorder or danger appeared, his chief care was to learn what was the motive or occasion thereof.

  It is evident that these assemblies were considered by Charlemagne as an instrument of authority, order, and administration, much rather than as a national institution rendered necessary by the rights and free spirit of his people. The employment of this means of government, however, does not do the less honour to the genius of Charlemagne. He had perceived that the principal vice of the social system of his time, and the principal cause of the weakness of his own authority, were the absence of concentration, the isolation of individuals, and the independence of his agents. Periodical convocations gave a centre to all. The efforts of a great man in a barbarous age have as their especial object the creation of a nation, for therein lies his power; Charlemagne sought to find his nation lower than among the great land-owners and the great beneficiaries. He wished to rally together the entire mass of the people, in order to increase his own power, and to have at his disposal everywhere potent means of action. His was a skilful despotism. Despotism, in barbarous times, sometimes announces the presence of a man who is before his age, and who has necessities and views in relation to the future. Despotism, in the midst of an advanced state of civilization, indicates the presence of a man who may be great and even necessary to society, but who cares only for himself, and for the times in which he lives.

  LECTURE 21

  Decay of national assemblies under Louis the Débonnair and Charles the Bald. ~ Definitive predominance of the feudal system at the end of the tenth century. ~ Cause of this predominance. ~ Character of feudalism. ~ No trace of true representative government in France, from the fifth to the tenth century.

  After the death of Charlemagne, and under Louis the Débonnair, national assemblies were still frequently held. The movement which Charlemagne had begun, had not yet entirely ceased. Unable to create, Louis the Débonnair sought to imitate; at the spring or autumn assemblies, he passed several useful rules, amongst others the capitulary which summoned the scabini, or royal judges, to the Champs de Mai. But the government, even with this sanction, was lifeless and in efficient. The assemblies had been nothing but an instrument of the monarch, and the monarch was now no longer able to make use of them. Their decay was complete under Charles the Bald. They began again to be nothing more than meetings of the bishops and the great lay landowners. There were forty-six assemblies held under Charles the Bald; but they were almost all con fined to the negotiations of the great nobles with the king, respecting their private interests. Such was the progress made by feudalism that the central aristocracy of the great landowners, beneficiaries, and others, dissolved of itself. They isolated themselves from one another in order to exercise, each in his own domains, the almost absolute sovereignty which they had acquired. The fall of the Carlovingians was the work of Hugh Capet alone, and not of an aristocratic coalition. An assembly did not meet, as at the fall of the Merovingians, to elect a new king. Hugh Capet made himself king, and was acknowledged as such, first by the vassals whom he possessed as Duke of France, and afterwards, successively, by the great lords of the kingdom, who remained, nevertheless, almost his equals in power. Then the assemblies almost entirely disappeared, together with every national and central institution; and nearly three centuries elapsed before anything analogous to them was established.

  Thus, at the end of the tenth century, of the three systems of institutions which we characterized at the outset, viz.: free institutions, monarchical institutions, and feudal institutions, the last had completely prevailed; the first had perished early, and Charlemagne had vainly attempted to establish the second. The hierarchical organization of the proprietors of estates, and the dislocation of France into as many petty sovereignties as there were proprietors sufficiently strong to be almost independent and absolute masters in their own domains—such was the natural result of the settlement of the Franks in Gaul.

  During the five centuries which we have now briefly examined, institutions, customs, and powers appear to be in a constant state of disorder and conflict. The ancient liberties of the Franks, the primitive independence of the warriors, royal authority, the first rudiments of the feudal system—all these different elements present themselves to our view as obscure, incoherent, and in opposition. We pass incessantly from one system to another, from one tendency to another. At the end of the tenth century, the struggle has almost ceased; the mass of the population have fallen into a state of serfage, or become tributary colonists; the possession of fiefs confers a real sovereignty, more or less complete according to the power of the possessor; these petty sovereigns are hierarchically united and constituted by the bonds of suzerainty and vassalage. Nowhere is this bond weaker than between the king and his vassals; for there the pretensions to authority on the one hand, and to independence on the other, are most earnestly contested.

  The fundamental characteristics of this state of things are the destruction of all centrality, both national and monarchic; the hierarchical constitution of landed property; the distribution of sovereignty according to the various degrees of this hierarchy; and the servitude or quasi-servitude of the mass of the inhabitants of the country.

  I have said that this system was the natural result of the condition of the Franks in Gaul after the conquest; its definitive success is proof of this. Another circumstance, also, may be adduced in evidence. Before the tenth century, we witness the constant struggle and alternating success of free, monarchical, and feudal institutions. The efforts made in favour of the first two systems, although some were supported by the ancient independence of the Franks, and others by the ability of great kings, were unsuccessful,—a more powerful tendency frustrated and overcame them. When the struggle ceased, when the feudal system had fully prevailed, a new conflict almost immediately commenced; the victorious system was attacked: in the inferior classes of society, by the mass of the inhabitants, citizens, colonists, or serfs, who strove to regain some rights, some property, and some liberty; in the superior class, by royalty, which laboured to resume some general sway, and to become once more the centre of the nation. These new efforts were made, not, as during the period from the fifth to the tenth century, in the midst of the confusion arising from the conflict of opposing systems, but in the very interior of a single system, of the system which had prevailed over, and taken possession of, the whole of society. The combatants are no longer free men, uncertain of their position and their rights, who feebly defend the wreck of their ancient existence against the overpowering invasion of the feudal system; they are citizens, colonists, serfs, whose condition is clear and determined, who become in their turn aggressors, and labour to free themselves from the yoke of feudalism. We no longer behold the king uncertain of his authority, and subject to have it unceasingly attacked, not knowing whether he is king or lord, and defending his power against the Leudes, or great landowners, who attempt sometimes to infringe it, and sometimes to set it aside altogether; now it is the chief of the nobles labouring to make himself the king of all, and to convert suzerainty into sovereignty. From the fifth to the tenth century, the feudal system had been in progress, in development, and in aggression. From the eleventh century onwards, this system had to defend itself against the people and the king. The struggle was long, difficult, and terrible; but the results altered with the position of the combatants. In spite of the servitude into which the people fell in the tenth century, from that time forth the enfranchisement of the people made progress. Notwithstanding the impotence of the royal power at the same period, thenceforward the royal power gained ground. No effort was vain, no step was retrograde. That monarchical system which the genius of Charlemagne had been unable to establish, was gradually founded by kings far inferior to Charlemagne. Those ancient liberties, which neither Franks nor Gauls had been able to preserve, were regained piecemeal by the commons and the third estate. During the first period, monarchy and liberty had failed to establish their position; it was destined that monarchy should issue out of feudalism itself, and that emancipation should spring from the bosom of servitude.

  With regard to feudalism itself, it is not my intention to sketch its history. I hasten to arrive at that period at which I shall again meet with a nation and a king, and at which endeavours after a free government and a monarchical system will recommence. I will only state here what were the dominant character and general influence of the feudal system, in relation to power and liberty—those two constituent elements of social order.

  The feudal system brought the master into close connection with the subject, and the sovereign with those who depended upon him; in this sense it was a cause of oppression and servitude. It is difficult to escape from a power that is ever near, and almost present. The human will is subject to strange caprices, and never is this more frequently exemplified than when the objects on which it acts are in its power. You may breathe a little under an arbitrary power, if it be very lofty and very distant; but if it be at your elbow, you are truly a slave. Local tyranny is the worst of all; though difficult to avoid, it can easily defend itself. A handful of men have often kept the population of a large town in servitude for ages. The citizens, colonists, and serfs felt themselves so grievously oppressed by the feudal lords that they preferred to their absolute power the absolute power of the kings, even with more extensive and irresistible rights than those possessed by the lords. A certain and general despotism has neither the same interest in being tyrannical, nor the same means of oppression. This will explain the intensity of feudal oppression, and the profound hatred which it inspired.

  The feudal system placed the inferior near his superior; and, in this sense, it was a principle of dignity and liberty. Many vassals were equal in rank to each other, and on terms of familiarity; frequently the inequality between the superior and inferior was not great, so that the latter was neither humiliated thereby, nor obliged to play the courtier. Protection was a right; the suzerain had absolute need of his vassals. There was no room, in their relations to one another, for servility and baseness of soul. Moreover, the vassals had reasons and means for banding together to defend themselves against oppression; they possessed common rights and interests. The intimacy in which they lived with their lord prevented the feeling of their mutual rights from becoming effaced within them; thus feudal relations are generally full of dignity and high-spiritedness; a noble sentiment, fidelity instead of submission, guides their conduct. Now, wherever a profound moral sentiment exists, it must necessarily call others into action; hence the many splendid and honourable developments of human nature under the feudal system: these developments were concentrated, it is true, within the circle of the lords and vassals; but even that is better than the equal abasement of all under an universal despotism.

  Thus, whilst feudalism disregarded and insulted both justice and the dignity of man among the masses whom it claimed as subjects, it respected and developed both among its own hierarchy. In this hierarchy, liberty existed, with all its accompaniments. Below were servitude and its attendant evils, with all the shames that follow in their train.

  I may now fearlessly affirm that, in the institutions of the period from the fifth to the tenth century, there is no trace of the representative system. We pass from the independence of individuals, sometimes to the power of the king, sometimes to the predominance of the great landowners. But there is no political organization founded upon ideas of general law and public interest; all institutions have reference to private rights and interests. Two opposite forces are in conflict; there is nothing to reveal the division of powers, and their tendency towards one common object. There are no representatives of the rights of all; none elected in the name of the interests of all; those who have rights exercise them personally; those who do not exercise them personally do not possess them. The ecclesiastics alone preserve the idea of the general right of all men to justice and to good government; but this idea is not transfused into any institutions. Neither the philosophic principle, nor any of the true external characteristics of representative government, can anywhere be met with.1

  LECTURE 22

  Political institutions of the Visigoths. ~ Peculiar character of Visigothic legislation. ~ Its authors and its influences. ~ Destruction and disappearance of the middle class in the Roman empire, at the time of the Barbarian invasion. ~ History of the Roman municipal system. ~ Three epochs in that history.

  In conformity to the plan which I sketched out for our guidance at the commencement of these lectures, I have studied with you the political institutions of the Anglo-Saxons and Franks, from the fifth to the tenth century. I now come to those of the Visigoths, the third of the Barbarian peoples established in the Roman empire, about whom I propose to give you some information.

  On opening the collection of the laws of the Visigoths, it is impossible not to be struck with the compactness which distinguishes them. The Franks and Burgundians have laws partially anterior to their establishment upon the Roman territory; customs handed down and gathered together from age to age. The Visigoths have a code which was systematically drawn up, and promulgated on an appointed day.

  This fact alone indicates that the laws of the Visigoths were not the work of the Barbarians themselves. The influence of the clergy, indeed, was more potent among the Visigoths than among the other Barbarian conquerors; not only did the clergy take part in their government, but they acted as their civil and political legislators. The Visigothic code was their work. How did this happen?

  Before the foundation of the Barbarian States, under the dominion even of the last Roman emperors, the power of the new religion gradually placed the Christian clergy at the head of the peoples; the bishop was the defender and chief of the towns. After the conquest, the Barbarians embraced the religion of the vanquished; and as the Christian clergy were powerful in the towns, by virtue of the municipal institutions, they used every effort to preserve to the municipal system its form and efficacy. In this they succeeded to a great extent. It is therefore of essential importance to have some precise knowledge of the Roman municipal system and its vicissitudes until the period of the great Barbarian invasions, in order properly to understand the condition of the urban populations at that epoch, and the part which their clergy played in their new position, especially in the kingdom of the Visigoths.

  As I have already observed, the fall of the Roman empire in the West is a strange phenomenon. Not only did the population not support the government in its struggles against the Barbarians, but the population, when left to itself, did not attempt any resistance on its own behalf. More than this—nothing, during this protracted conflict, revealed the existence of a nation; scarce any allusion is made to what it suffered; it endured all the scourges of war, pillage, and famine, and suffered an entire change in its destiny and condition, without acting, speaking, or even appearing.

  This phenomenon is not merely strange, it is unexampled. Despotism has reigned elsewhere than in the Roman empire; more than once, foreign invasion and conquest have devastated countries that had long groaned beneath a tyrannical government. Even where the nation has not resisted, its existence has been manifested in some manner in history. It suffers, it complains, and, notwithstanding its humiliation, it struggles against its evil fate; narratives and monuments attest what it experienced, what it became, and if not what it did, at least what was done with it.

  In the fifth century, the remnants of the Roman legions disputed with hordes of Barbarians the possession of the immense territory of the empire, but it seemed as if this territory were a desert. When the soldiers of the empire had departed or been defeated, mention is made of no other person or thing. The Barbarian tribes seize upon the provinces in succession; beside them, facts exhibit to us only one other real and living existence, that of the bishops and the clergy. If the laws did not remain to inform us that a Roman population still covered the soil, history would give us good reason to doubt its existence.

  It was especially in the provinces which had long been subject to Rome, and wherein civilization was more advanced, that the people thus disappeared. We look upon the letter of the Britons, tearfully imploring the assistance of Aetius and the despatch of a legion, as a singular monument of the cowardice of the subjects of the empire. This astonishment is unjust: the Britons, being less civilized and less Romanized than the other subjects of the empire, resisted the Saxons, and their resistance has a history. At the same period, under similar circumstances, the Italians, the Gauls, and the Spaniards have no history; the empire withdrew itself from their country, and the Barbarians took possession of it, without the mass of the inhabitants taking the least part in the transaction, or giving the slightest indication of the place they occupied in the events which gave them over to so many scourges.

  Nevertheless Gaul, Italy, and Spain were covered with towns, which had lately been wealthy and populous; civilization had there received a splendid development; roads, aqueducts, circuses, and schools, were abundant. Everything that can attest wealth, or procure for a nation an animated and brilliant existence, they possessed. The invasions of the Barbarians occurred to pillage them of all their wealth, to disperse all their friendly meetings, to destroy all their pleasures. Never had the existence of a nation been more completely overthrown; never had individuals had more evils to endure and more dangers to apprehend. Whence came it that the populations were dumb and dead? How is it that so many sacked towns, so many ruined positions, so many blasted careers, so many ejected proprietors, have left so few traces, I do not say of their active resistance, but only of their sufferings?

  The despotism of the imperial government, the degraded condition of the people, the profound apathy which had seized upon both masters and subjects, have been alleged to account for this—and justly so: therein consisted the great cause of this strange phenomenon. But it is easy thus to enunciate in a general manner a cause which, though apparently in existence elsewhere, did not elsewhere produce the same results. We must penetrate more deeply into the state of Roman society, in the condition to which it had been reduced by despotism. We must inquire by what means it had been so utterly deprived of all consistency and life. Despotism can clothe itself in very different forms, and exhibit itself in proceedings which impart to its action a far higher energy, and give a far wider scope to its consequences.

  The great fact which had resulted from the system of imperial despotism, and which alone can explain the phenomenon of which I speak, is the destruction and disappearance of the middle class from the Roman world: at the arrival of the Barbarians, this class no longer existed; and for this reason also, the nation had ceased to exist. This annihilation of the middle class in the Roman empire was especially the result of a municipal system, which had rendered it completely the instrument and the victim of the imperial despotism. All the batteries of that despotism were directed against this class; and it was imprisoned within the municipal system that it might be turned to account, and made to supply the necessities of the existence of the power that crushed it.

  Such a fact renders it worth while to study, in all its parts, the machine by which it was produced. Those who are unacquainted with the organization of the municipal system at this period, and its effects upon Roman society, cannot properly understand the history of these times.

  In the constitution and existence of cities, within the Roman world, we may discern three epochs, very distinct from each other, and clearly marked out by actual revolutions. It is well known that the Romans, adopting, in their conquests, a system widely different from that of most ancient nations, were careful not to exterminate or reduce to servitude the nations which they had conquered. This difference of procedure was, I think, occasioned by the condition of most of the neighbouring nations, against which Rome first waged war. They were collected together in towns, and not dispersed throughout the country; they formed civic bodies, cultivating and governing a territory of greater or less extent. These cities were numerous and independent. A nation scattered over the land which it cultivates, may easily be destroyed or enslaved; but the task is more difficult and less profitable when that nation dwells within walls and has already assumed the consistency of a petty State. Moreover, the nations which, in ancient times, were enslaved or exterminated, received this treatment almost invariably from conquerors who were in search of a home, and who had settled in the territory they had won. When the war was ended, the Romans returned to Rome. Enslavement and extermination cannot be effected either all at once or from a distance. The victors who intend to do this must be ever present among the vanquished, ceaselessly depriving them of their wealth, their liberty, and their lands. The primitive condition of the Romans, at the commencement of their conquests, exercised a decisive influence upon the fate of nations.

  Originally, it does not appear that the Romans ventured to leave their former inhabitants in the conquered towns. It is said that violence supplied Rome with women; the same proceeding furnished her with new citizens. The vanquished, when transferred to Rome, became Romans like their victors. The conquered town was occupied, either by soldiers, or by inhabitants of Rome, belonging to the lowest class of the people, and sent thither to form a kind of colony. The town of Coere was the first which, on being united to Rome, was allowed to retain its own laws and magistrates after receiving, at least in part, the right of Roman citizenship. According to Livy, in the year of Rome 365, a decree of the Senate ordained ut cum Coeretibus publice hospitium fieret.1

  This system prevailed and received continual development. The conquered towns were united to Rome by receiving the right of citizenship. Some of them, like Coere, only received the title of Roman citizens for their inhabitants, and still retained their own Senate and laws; others were admitted into the Roman city, but without obtaining the right of suffrage in the comitia2 of Rome. With regard to others, again, their political incorporation was complete; their inhabitants enjoyed the right of suffrage at Rome like the Romans themselves. These last alone had a tribe in Rome.

  The right of suffrage was granted successively to several towns which had not received it at first. Finally, all Italy after the war of the allies, and ere long a portion of Southern Gaul received the right of Roman citizenship in all its plenitude.

  The towns thus admitted to all the rights of Roman citizenship were called municipia. When the whole of Italy was invested with these rights, those towns which had not at first fully possessed them retained for a considerable period the names of coloniae, praefecturae, and so forth, which they had originally borne; but, in fact, their condition was completely assimilated to that of the ancient municipia.

  Out of Italy, the condition of the conquered towns and districts was still very various. History tells us of coloniae, some of which were Roman, and others Latin, of populi liberi, civitates faederatae, reges amici, provinciae.3 These different denominations indicated different modes of existence under the domination of Rome, and different degrees of dependence—but these differences successively disappeared. I am referring merely to the municipia.

  Before conferring on a town the full rights of Roman citizenship, inquiry was made whether it would accept them or not. On consent being given, and, to use the legal phrase, ubi fundus ei legi factus erat,4 the concession took place. Its principal consequences were these: municipal rights, interests and offices, in that town, were then separated from political rights, interest and offices. The former remained in possession of the town, and were exercised on the spot by the inhabitants, with entire independence: the latter were transferred to Rome, and could be exercised only within its walls. Thus, the right of making peace or war, of passing laws, levying taxes, and administering justice, ceased to belong to the municipium individually; but the citizens shared these rights, and exercised them at Rome in common with the citizens who inhabited Rome; they repaired thither to vote at the comitia, both upon the laws and upon appointments to magisterial functions: they sought and might obtain all the offices of the State. The city of Rome possessed the privilege that these political rights could be exercised only within its walls. Its inhabitants possessed no privilege above those of the municipia.

  The rights, interests, and offices, which we now call municipal, and the entire disposal of which was secured to each locality, are nowhere regularly distinguished and enumerated. At this degree of civilization, neither the rulers nor the ruled feel the necessity of foreseeing, defining, and regulating everything; they trust to the good sense of mankind, and to the nature of things. History, however, indicates the principal prerogatives which continued local. 1. Worship, religious festivals, and ceremonies. Not only did each town retain its ancient usages and independent authority in this respect, but the Roman laws watched over the preservation of these rights, and even made it a duty. Each municipium, therefore, had its own priests and flamens, as well as the right of choosing them, and of regulating all matters in relation thereto. 2. Every municipium also possessed the administration of its own private property and revenues. In ceasing to be a political personage, it became a civil personage. Public edifices, whether devoted to purposes of utility or of pleasure, festivals, local and general amusements, all expenses of this kind, and all the revenues by which they were defrayed, continued to be absolutely local matters. The inhabitants appointed the magistrates who were charged with these functions. 3. The police also remained, to a certain extent at least, in the hands of the local magistrates; they had to watch over the internal security of their town, and provisionally to arrest those who disturbed its peace. 4. Although the judicial power had been withdrawn from the localities, we nevertheless meet with some traces of a jurisdiction somewhat similar to that which we call municipal police, giving judgment upon offences against the laws, with regard to public health, weights and measures, markets, and so forth.

  All these local affairs were managed either by magistrates appointed by the inhabitants, or by the curia of the town or college of decurions, that is, of all the inhabitants who possessed a fixed landed income. In general, the curia appointed the magistrates; we meet with some instances, however, of their being appointed by the general body of the inhabitants. But at this period, and by a necessary consequence of the existence of slavery, there were few free men who did not belong to the curia.

  The origin of the word decurio is uncertain. Some writers are of opinion that he was an officer placed at the head of ten families, like the tything-man, ortunginus of the German peoples. Others think that decurio simply means member of a curia. The last interpretation seems to me the more probable of the two. At a later period, the decurions were called curiales.

  Such was the constitution of the municipia at the end of the Roman republic. It presents, as results, the following general facts:—1. All political rights and interests, all political life, in short, was centralized at Rome, not merely morally and by law, but materially and in fact. Within the walls of Rome alone could be consummated all the acts of a Roman citizen. 2. No centralization of this kind had taken place in reference to what we now call administrative interests. Each town had remained isolated and distinct in this respect, regulating its own affairs, just as a private individual would do. 3. The appointment and surveillance of the magistrates who administered the local affairs of the town took place on the spot, without any intervention of the central power, and by the assembly of the principal inhabitants. 4. Into this assembly were admitted all the inhabitants who possessed a certain income. There is reason to believe that a few free men only were excluded therefrom.

  Here begins a second epoch in the history of the Roman municipal system.

  The absolute separation of political from local existence, and the impossibility of exercising political rights elsewhere than in Rome, could not fail to deprive the towns of their principal citizens, and also of a great part of their importance. Thus, during the epoch which we have just surveyed, purely local interests occupied only a small place. Rome absorbed everything. The independence left to other towns, as regarded matters that were not treated of at Rome, or did not emanate from Rome, arose from the slight importance of those matters.

  When liberty began to totter at Rome, the decadence of the political activity of the citizens necessarily diminished its concentration. The chief men of the municipia repaired to Rome to take their part in the government of the world, either by voting in the comitia, or discharging great public functions. When the comitia and the high magistracies ceased to have any perceptible influence in the government, when political life became extinct in Rome, together with the movement of liberty, this affuence of all the important men towards Rome decreased. Such a decrease was advantageous to the rising despotism, and met with no opposition. Here, as in every instance, the necessary consequences of general facts are revealed in particular and positive facts. Up to that time, no political act could be performed, and no suffrage be exercised, elsewhere than within the walls of Rome. Suetonius informs us that Augustus conferred upon the citizens of a large number of Italian municipia the right of giving their votes without leaving their town, and sending them to Rome in a sealed packet, that they might be properly scrutinized in the comitia. Thus was exhibited, at once, the progress of public in difference, and the growth of absolute power.

  This progress continued rapidly. Ere long, the comitia met with the fate of all shams, and were abolished; all free intervention of the citizens in the government disappeared, and no political acts remained to be performed, either at Rome, or at a distance therefrom; and as it is always a trick of nascent despotism to offer to all men the deceptive advantages of a shameful equality, the right of Roman citizenship was, almost at the same period, bestowed indiscriminately upon the whole Roman world. This right no longer possessed any political significance, nor did it confer any real importance upon those who received it; and yet this concession deprived those whom it levelled to the condition of the multitude, of any importance they might still have retained. There is reason to believe that this measure was rather the consequence of a financial speculation than of a clever despotic combination. But despotism, even when its conduct is least guided by scientific principles, is never deceived by its instincts. Such was, moreover, the natural course of things; and degraded peoples must inevitably suffer their fate. All the blame must not be laid on the master of the flock; and the hatred which tyranny merits cannot save from our contempt nations that are incapable of liberty.

  However, as the degradation and ruin of an empire cannot be effected in a moment, or by a single blow; as there still existed in the Roman world some habits of liberty which despotism had not had time or need to destroy, it was necessary to make some sort of compensation for this complete disappearance of political rights and life; and this compensation naturally resulted from the change which had occurred. A portion of the importance which Rome had lost, had returned to the municipia. A large number of wealthy citizens no longer left their homes. Having been excluded from the government of the State, their attention spontaneously turned to the affairs of their own city. Nothing had yet stimulated the central power to interfere in their administration. The treasures of Rome, and the ordinary contributions of the provinces, were sufficient for the imperial wants, and even for its follies. Tyranny then felt but slightly the necessity of penetrating into every quarter, and of possessing a detailed organization; and did not even know how to set about it. The municipal system, therefore, retained considerable importance; it even constituted itself with greater regularity, and according to more positive, perhaps more extensive rights, than those which it had previously possessed.

  It is during the period from the reign of Nerva to that of Diocletian, that the state of the municipia appears under this new aspect. A great many laws were passed to increase and secure the property and revenues of towns. Trajan permitted them to receive inheritances by way of fidei commissus;5 and, ere long, they were authorized to receive them directly. Hadrian granted them the right of receiving legacies, and ordained that any administrator who should misappropriate the property of a town should be considered guilty, not of simple theft, but of embezzlement. The ordinary income usually sufficed to meet the expenditure, and it was not necessary to lay fresh taxes upon the citizens. The State did not cast upon the cities any burdens which did not directly concern them; and there were but very few citizens exempt from that which was onerous in municipal duties. The common people bore their part, by hard labour, in the public works which interested each town; the dignity of the decurions was recognised and sanctioned. Hadrian freed them from the punishment of death, except in cases of parricide. The decurionate was still sought after as an honour; and lastly, the best proof of the importance and extension of the municipal system, during this period, will be found in the number of laws passed in relation to it, and the particular attention paid to it by jurisconsults. Evidently, in the absence of political rights and guarantees, the municipal system was the depository in which all the rights and securities of citizens were contained.

  But the attempt to preserve this system could not long succeed. We must, indeed, date revolutions from the day on which they break out; this is the only precise epoch which we can assign to them, but it is not that in which they originate. The convulsions which we call revolutions, are far less symptomatic of what is commencing than declaratory of what has passed away. The crisis of the municipal system under Constantine is one of many proofs of this truth.

  Ever since the reign of Septimius Severus, the central power in the Roman empire had been falling into ruin; its strength decreased in proportion as its burdens and dangers augmented. It became indispensable to cast upon others the burdens which it could no longer bear, and to seek new strength in order to confront new dangers. At the same time, there arose, in the midst of the old Roman society, a society both young and ardent, united in afirm and fruitful faith, gifted from within with principles admirably adapted to fortify its internal constitution, and also with an immense power of external expansion; I refer to Christian society. It was by the action of these two causes, at first divided and afterwards united, that the municipal system of the Roman empire was dissolved, and ended by deteriorating into a principle of ruin, and an instrument of oppression.

  It is one of the thousand vices of despotism that its exigencies increase in proportion as its means diminish; the weaker it becomes, the greater is its need of exaggeration; the more it is impoverished, the more it desires to spend. In point of strength, as of wealth, sterility and prodigality are equally imposed upon it; society, both men and things, in its hands, is but a lifeless and limited material which it expends for its own support, and into which it is compelled to penetrate more deeply as it becomes more exhausted, and as it is itself more nearly losing all.

  The despotism of the Roman emperors existed in presence of three dangers: the Barbarians, who were continually advancing, and whom it was necessary to conquer or to bribe; the populace, which was continually increasing, and which it was necessary to feed, amuse, and restrain; the soldiers, the force to be opposed to this twofold peril,—a force all the more dangerous in itself, as it was necessary to increase it, and grant it daily fresh concessions. This position imposed immense burdens on despotism. In order to obtain resources, it was compelled to create an administrative machine capable of carrying its action into every quarter, and which became itself a new burden. This system of government, which commenced under Diocletian and ended under Honorius, had no other object but to extend over society a network of functionaries, who were incessantly occupied in extracting from it wealth and strength, which they afterwards deposited in the hands of the emperors.

  The revenues of the towns, like those of private individuals, were laid under contribution by the exigencies of power, and were speedily invaded in a still more direct manner. On various occasions, amongst others under Constantine, the emperor took possession of a large number of municipal properties; but the local charges which these properties were intended to meet were, nevertheless, left undiminished. Nay, more, they were increased; as the populace everywhere became more numerous and more disposed to sedition, it became more expensive to feed and amuse them, and greater force was required to keep them in check. The central power, itself overburdened, cast a portion of its load upon the towns. Now, whenever the regular revenues of a town did not suffice to meet its expenditure, the curia, that is, the body of wealthy citizens, the decurions, were bound to supply the deficiency from their own private purse. They were, moreover, in almost every place, the collectors of the public taxes, and were responsible for this collection; their private property had to make up for the insolvency of the tax-payers, as well as to supply the deficiency of the communal revenues. The dignity of decurion thus became a cause of ruin; this condition was the most onerous of all social conditions; it was, nevertheless, that of all the well-to-do inhabitants of all the municipia in the empire.

  Nor was this all; as soon as the position of the decurions became burdensome, there was a tendency to leave it, as well as an advantage in doing so. Exemption from curial functions became a privilege; and this privilege received an ever-increasing extension. The emperors, who disposed of all public dignities and employments, conferred them upon the men and the classes whom they felt it necessary to gain. Thus arose within the State, as a necessary result of despotism, an immense class of privileged persons. In proportion as the revenues of the towns diminished, their burdens augmented, and fell upon the decurions, now fewer in number in consequence of the concession of privilege. It was, however, needful to leave enough to bear the burdens imposed on the curiae. Hence the origin of that long series of laws which make of each curia a prison-house in which the decurions were hereditarily con fined; which deprived them, in a multitude of cases, of the free disposal of their property, or even disposed of it without their consent for the benefit of the curia; which pursued them into the country, into the army, wherever they attempted to take refuge, in order to restore them to the curiae, from whence they desired to escape: laws, in fine, which bound an immense class of citizens, in property as well as in person, to the most onerous and ungrateful of public services, just as you would compel animals to perform this or that species of domestic labour.

  Such was the place which despotism finally assigned to the municipal system; such was the condition to which municipal proprietors were reduced by the laws. And whilst despotism was straining every nerve to tighten the bonds of the municipal system, and to compel the inhabitants to perform, as charges, functions which had formerly been considered as rights, the second cause to which I have alluded, Christianity, was labouring to dissolve or dismantle municipal society, in order to substitute another in its place.6

  During nearly three centuries, Christian society had been silently forming in the midst, and, so to speak, beneath the surface of the civil society of the Romans. It was at a very early period a regularly-constituted society, with its chiefs, its laws, its expenditure, and its income. Its organization, originally entirely free and founded upon purely moral ties, was by no means deficient in strength. It was at that time the only association which could procure for its members the joys of the inner life—which possessed, in the ideas and sentiments that formed its basis, matter to occupy lofty minds, to exercise active imaginations, and to satisfy the requirements of that moral and intellectual existence which neither oppression nor misfortune can completely extinguish throughout a nation. The inhabitant of a municipium, when he became a Christian, ceased to belong to his town, and entered into the Christian society, of which the bishop was chief. There alone, henceforward, was the centre of his thoughts and affections, and the abode of his masters and brethren. To the necessities of this new association were devoted, if needful, his fortune and his activity; thither, in fine, his entire moral existence was in some measure transported.

  When such a displacement has occurred in the moral order of things, it speedily becomes consummated in the material order also. The conversion of Constantine, in fact, declared the triumph of Christian society, and accelerated its progress. Thenceforward, power, jurisdiction, and wealth poured in upon the churches and bishops, as upon the only centres around which men were spontaneously disposed to group themselves, and which could exercise the virtue of attraction upon all the forces of society. It was no longer to his town, but to his church that the citizen desired to bequeath his property. It was no longer by the construction of circuses and aqueducts, but by the erection of Christian temples, that the rich man endeavoured to rest his claim to public affection. The parish took the place of the municipium; the central power itself, hurried on by the course of the events with which it had become associated, used all its efforts to swell the stream. The emperors deprived the communes of a portion of their property, and gave it to the churches; they deprived the municipal magistrates of a portion of their authority, and gave it to the bishops. When the victory had been thus avowed, interest combined with faith to increase the society of the conquerors. The clergy were exempted from the burden of municipal functions; and it became necessary to pass laws to prevent all the decurions from making themselves clerks. Without these laws, municipal society would have been entirely dissolved; its existence was protracted that it might continue to bear the burden to which it was condemned; and, strange to say, the emperors most favourable to the ecclesiastical order, and most liberal in augmenting its advantages, were compelled at the same time to struggle against the tendency which induced men to leave every other association, in order to enter into the only one in which they could find honour and protection.

  Such then, was, in truth, the state of things. Despotism, urged by its own necessities, incessantly aggravated the condition of the curia. That of the church flourished and improved as incessantly, either by the aid of the peoples, or by the action of despotism itself, which had need of the support of the clergy. It was therefore necessary continually to relegate to the curia the decurions who were ever anxious to leave it. In proportion as their number decreased, and as those who remained became ruined and unable to bear the burden, their condition became less and less endurable. Thus, evil sprang from evil; oppression rendered ruin certain by its efforts to delay it; and the municipal system which, as I have said, had become an actual gaol to one class of citizens, daily hastened onwards to its own destruction, and to that of the class which was chained to its destiny.

  Such was, with regard to the municipia, the course of events and laws from the reign of Constantine until the fall of the Western Empire. In vain did some emperors strive to raise the communes; in vain did Julian restore to them a portion of the property which they had previously lost. These changes in legislation were ineffectual; a fatal necessity weighed upon the municipia; and whenever the municipal system bordered closely upon dissolution, and it was felt necessary to support it, no other aid was given than by redoubling the energy of the causes which urged it to destruction. Thus violent is the course of decaying despotism. The municipalities were daily sacrificed in greater measure to the empire, and the decurions to the municipalities; the external forms of liberty still existed within the curiae, as regarded the election of magistrates and the administration of the affairs of the city; but these forms were vain, for the citizens who were called upon to give them life by their actions, were stricken to death in their personal independence and in their fortune. It was in this state of material ruin and moral annihilation that the Barbarians, when they established themselves in the Roman territory, found the towns, their magistrates, and their inhabitants.

  In the East, the agony of the municipia was prolonged with the duration of the empire. Here also some emperors made unsuccessful attempts to restore them to prosperity. At length, the progress of the central despotism became so great, and the forms of municipal liberty so evidently a dead letter, that, towards the end of the ninth century, the Emperor Leo, called the Philosopher, abolished the whole municipal system at once, by the following decree:—

  As, in things which serve for use in common life, we esteem those which are convenient and useful, and despise those which are of no utility, so we ought to act in reference to laws; those which are of some advantage, and which confer some benefit on the commonwealth, should be maintained and honoured; but as for those whose maintenance is troublesome and unimportant, not only should we pay no attention to them, but we should reject them from the body of the laws. Now, we say, that among the ancient laws passed in reference to curiae and decuriones, there are some which impose intolerable burdens on the decurions, and confer on the curiae the right of appointing certain magistrates, and of governing cities by their own authority. Now that civil affairs have assumed another form, and that all things depend solely upon the care and administration of the imperial majesty, these laws wander, in some sort, vainly and without object around the legal territory; we therefore abolish them by the present decree.*

  Such were, during the period of twelve centuries which elapsed between the treaty of Rome with Coere and the reign of Leo the Philosopher, the great revolutions of the municipal system in the Roman world. We may characterize them by saying that, during the first period, the municipal system was a liberty granted, in fact, to the inhabitants of the towns; during the second, it was a right legally constituted, as an indemnity for the loss of political privileges; and, during the third, it was a burden imposed upon a certain class of citizens.

  I now terminate its history. In our next lecture, we shall investigate the real state of the municipal system during the third period, and its influence upon the condition of the citizens.

  LECTURE 23

  Of the various social conditions in the Roman Empire, before the final invasion of the Barbarians. ~ The privileged classes, and curials. ~ Their obligations, functions, and immunities. ~ Attributes of the curia as a body. ~ Of the various municipal magistracies and offices. ~ Of the Defender in cities. ~ Comparison of the development of the municipal system, and its relations to the central organization of the State in the Roman Empire and in modern societies.

  At the commencement of the fifth century the subjects of the Empire were divided into three classes, forming three very distinct social conditions: 1. The privileged classes; 2. The curials; 3. The common people. I speak only of free men.

  The privileged class included: 1. The members of the Senate, and all those who were entitled to bear the name of clarissimi; 2. The officers of the palace; 3. The clergy; 4. The cohortal militia, a sort of gendarmerie employed in the maintenance of the internal order of the State, and the execution of the laws; 5. The soldiers in general, whether included in the legions, or in the troops attached to the palace, or in the corps of barbarian auxiliaries. The class of curials comprehended all the citizens inhabiting towns, whether natives or settlers therein, who possessed a certain landed income, and did not belong, by any title, to the privileged class. The common people were the mass of the inhabitants of the towns, whose almost absolute want of property excluded them from a place among the curials.

  The privileged members of the first class were numerous, of various rank, and unequally distributed among the five orders of which it was composed; but that which was, in fact, the most important and most sought after of their privileges, that which alone was more valuable than all the rest, was common to the five orders which constituted this class—I mean, exemption from municipal functions and offices.

  When we come to treat of the curials, you will learn what was the extent of these duties; but you must first understand clearly who were exempt from them. 1. The whole army, from the lowest cohortalis to the magister equitum peditumve;1 2. The entire body of the clergy, from the simple clerk to the archbishop; 3. It is an easy matter to define the two foregoing classes; but it is not so clear who were the members of the class of senators and clarissimi. The number of the senators was unlimited; the emperor appointed and dismissed them at his will, and could even raise the sons of freedmen to this rank. All those who had filled the principal magisterial offices in the Empire, or who had merely received from the prince the honorary title belonging to those magistratures, were calledclarissimi, and had the right, when occasion required, of sitting in the Senate. Thus the class of clarissimi included all the functionaries of any importance: and they were all appointed and might be dismissed by the emperor.

  The body of privileged individuals, then, was composed: 1. Of the army; 2. Of the clergy; 3. Of all the public functionaries, whether employed at the Court and in the palace, or in the provinces. Thus despotism and privilege had made a close alliance; and, in this alliance, privilege, which depended almost absolutely on despotism, possessed neither liberty nor dignity, except perhaps in the body of the clergy.

  This privilege, and especially exemption from curial functions, was not purely personal, but also hereditary. It was so, in the case of military men, on condition that the children also should embrace the profession of arms; and in the case of civilians, it was continued to those children who were born since their fathers had belonged to the class of clarissimi, or had occupied posts in the palace. Among the classes exempt from curial functions was the cohortal militia, a subaltern service to which those who entered it were hereditarily bound, and from which there was no means of passing into a superior class.

  The class of curials comprehended all the inhabitants of the towns, whether natives thereof, municipes, or settlers therein, incolae, who possessed a landed property of more than twenty-five acres, jugera, and did not belong to any privileged class. Members of the curial class became so either by origin, or by appointment. Every child of a curial was a curial also, and liable to all the charges attached to that quality. Every inhabitant who, by trade or otherwise, acquired a landed property of more than twenty-five acres, might be summoned to enter the curia, and could not refuse to do so. No curial could, by a voluntary act, pass into another condition. They were interdicted from dwelling in the country, entering the army, or engaging in employments which would have liberated them from municipal functions, until they had passed through every curial gradation, from that of a simple member of a curia to the highest civic magistracies. Then alone they might become military men, public functionaries, and senators. The children born to them before their elevation remained curials. They were not allowed to enter the clergy except by granting the enjoyment of their property to any one who agreed to be a curial in their place, or by making a present of their possessions to the curia itself. As the curials were incessantly striving to escape from their bondage, a multitude of laws were passed directing the prosecution of those who had escaped from their original condition, and succeeded in effecting their entrance furtively into the army, the clergy, public offices, or the Senate; and ordaining their restoration to the curia from which they had fled.

  The following were the functions and charges of the curials thus con fined, voluntarily or perforce, in the curia. 1. The administration of the affairs of themunicipium, with its expenditure and revenues, either by deliberating thereon in the curia, or by discharging the magisterial offices of the town. In this double position, the curials were responsible not only for their individual management, but also for the necessities of the town, for which they were bound to provide out of their own resources, in case the municipal revenues were insufficient. 2. The collection of the public taxes, also under the responsibility of their private property in case of defaulters. Lands which were subject to the land-tax and had been abandoned by their possessors, were allotted to the curia, which was bound to pay the tax thereon until it had found some one willing to take them offits hands. If it could find no one, the tax on the abandoned land was divided amongst the other estates. 3. No curial could sell the property from which he derived his qualification, without the permission of the governor of the province. 4. The heirs of curials, when not members of the curia, and the widows or daughters of curials, who married men belonging to other classes, were bound to give a fourth part of their goods to the curia. 5. The curials who had no children could not dispose, by will, of more than a fourth of their property: the other three-fourths went, by right, to the curia. 6. They were not allowed to absent themselves from their municipium, even for a limited time, without permission from the judge of the province. 7. When they had withdrawn from their curia, and could not be brought back, their property was con-fiscated to the benefit of their curia. 8. The tax known by the name of aurum coronarium, and which consisted in a sum to be paid to the prince, on the occasion of certain events, was levied on the curials alone.

  The only advantages granted to the curials in compensation for these burdens were: 1. Exemption from torture, except in very serious cases. 2. Exemption from certain affictive and dishonouring punishments which were reserved for the populace; such as being condemned to work in the mines, to be burned alive, and so forth. 3. Decurions who had fallen into indigence were supported at the expense of the municipium. These were the only advantages possessed by the curials over the common people, who, on the other hand, enjoyed the benefit that every career was open to them, and that, by entering the army, or engaging in public employments, they might raise themselves at once into the privileged class.

  The condition of the curials, then, both as citizens and in relation to the State, was onerous and devoid of liberty. Municipal administration was a burdensome service, to which the curials were doomed, and not a right with which they were invested. Let us now see what was the condition of the curials, not in relation to the State, and to the other classes of citizens, but in the curia and amongst themselves. Here still existed the forms, and even the principles, of liberty. All the curials were members of the curia, and sat therein. The ability to bear the burdens of the office entailed that of exercising its rights, and taking part in its affairs; the names of all the curials of each municipium were inscribed, in an order which was determined according to their dignity, age, and other circumstances, in a book called the album curiae. When there was occasion to deliberate upon any matter, they were all convoked together by the superior magistrate of the town, the duumvir, aedilis or praetor, and they all gave their opinions and their votes; everything was decided by the majority of votes: and no deliberation of the curia was valid unless two-thirds of the curials were present.

  The attributes of the curia as a body were: 1. The examination and decision of certain affairs; 2. The appointment of magistrates and municipal officers. Nowhere can I find an enumeration of the affairs which fell under the cognizance of the curia as a body. Everything, however, indicates that most of those municipal interests which required more than the simple execution of the laws or of orders already given, were discussed in the curia. The proper and independent authority of the municipal magistrates appears to have been very limited. For example, there is reason to believe that no expense could be incurred without the authorization of the curia. It fixed the time and place for holding fairs; it alone granted recompenses; and so forth.

  There were even occasions on which the authorization of the curia was not sufficient, and when it was necessary to have the sanction of all the inhabitants, whether curials or not; for example, for the sale of any property belonging to the commune, or for the despatch of deputies to wait on the emperor in reference to any grievance or request. On the other hand, it is evident that, by the general progress of despotism, the imperial power continued daily to interfere more and more in the affairs of the municipia, and to limit the independence of the curiae. Thus they might not erect new buildings without the permission of the governor of the province; the reparation of the walls around the towns was subject to the same formality; and it was also necessary for the emancipation of slaves, and for all acts which tended to diminish the patrimony of the city. By degrees, also, even those affairs the final decision of which had previously belonged to the curiae fell, by way of objection or appeal, under the authority of the emperor and his delegates in the provinces. This occurred in consequence of the absolute concentration of judicial and fiscal power in the hands of the imperial functionaries. The curia and the curials were then reduced to be nothing more than the lowest agents of the sovereign authority. There was left to them hardly anything beyond the right of consultation and the right of complaint.

  With regard to the appointment to municipal magistracies, it remained for a long time, in reality, in the hands of the curia, without any necessity for its confirmation by the governor of the province, except in exceptional cases of towns which it was specially intended to ill-use or punish. But even this right soon became illusory by reason of the power given to provincial governors to annul the appointment on the demand of the person elected. When municipal functions had become merely burdensome, all the curials elected to discharge these offices, who had any influence with the governor, were able, under some pretext or another, to get their election annulled, and thus to escape from the load.

  There were two kinds of municipal offices: the first, called magistratus, which conferred certain honours and a certain jurisdiction; the second, calledmunera, simple employments without jurisdiction and without any particular dignity. The curia appointed to both kind of offices; only the magistrates proposed the men whom they thought competent to fulfil the munera; but even these were not really appointed until they had obtained the suffrages of thecuria.

  The magistratus were: 1. Duumvir; this was the most usual name of the chief municipal magistrate. He was also called, in certain localities, quatuorvir, dictator, aedilis, praetor. His tenure of office was for a year; it corresponded pretty nearly with that of our mayors; the duumvir presided over the curia, and directed the general administration of the affairs of the city. He had a jurisdiction con fined to matters of small importance; he also exercised a police authority which gave him the right of inflicting certain punishments upon slaves, and of provisionally arresting freemen. 2. Aedilis; this was a magistrate generally inferior to the duumvir; he had the inspection of public edifices, of the streets, of corn, and of weights and measures. These two magistrates, the duumvir andaedilis, were expected to give public festivals and games. 3. Curator reipublicae; this officer, like the aedile, exercised a certain oversight over public edifices; but his principal business was the administration of the finances; he farmed out the lands of the municipium, received the accounts of the public works, lent and borrowed money in the name of the city, and so forth.

  The munera were: 1. Susceptor, the collector of taxes, under the responsibility of the curials who appointed him. 2. Irenarchae, commissaries of police, whose duty it was to seek out and prosecute offences, in the first instance. 3. Curatores, officers charged with various particular municipal services; curator frumenti,curator calendarii, the lender out on good sureties of the money of the city, at his own risk and peril. 4. Scribae, subaltern clerks in the two offices. To this class belonged the tabelliones, who performed almost the same functions as our notaries.

  In later times, when the decay of the municipal system became evident, when the ruin of the curials and the impotence of all the municipal magistrates to protect the inhabitants of the cities against the vexations of the imperial administration, became evident to despotism itself; and when despotism, suffering at length the punishment of its own deeds, felt society abandoning it on every side, it attempted, by the creation of a new magistracy, to procure for themunicipia some security and some independence. A defensor was given to every city; his primitive mission was to defend the people, especially the poor, against the oppression and injustice of the imperial officers and their agents. He soon surpassed all the other municipal magistrates in importance and influence. Justinian gave the defenders the right to exercise, in reference to each city, the functions of the governor of the province during the absence of that officer; he also granted them jurisdiction in all cases which did not involve a larger sum than 300 aurei. They had even a certain amount of authority in criminal matters, and two apparitors were attached to their person; and in order to give some guarantees of their power and independence, two means were employed; on the one hand, they had the right of passing over the various degrees in the public administration, and of carrying their complaints at once before the praetorian prefect; this was done with the intention of elevating their dignity by freeing them from the jurisdiction of the provincial authorities. On the other hand, they were elected, not by the curia merely, but by the general body of the inhabitants of themunicipium, including the bishop and all the clergy; and as the clergy then alone possessed any energy and influence, this new institution, and consequently all that still remained of the municipal system, fell into its hands almost universally. This was insufficient to restore the vigour of the municipia, under the dominion of the empire; but it was enough to procure for the clergy great legal influence in the towns after the settlement of the Barbarians. The most important result of the institution of defenders was to place the bishops at the head of the municipal system, which otherwise would have dissolved of itself, through the ruin of its citizens and the nullity of its institutions.

  Such are the facts: they demonstrate the phenomenon which I indicated at the outset, namely, the destruction of the middle class in the empire; it was destroyed materially by the ruin and dispersion of the curials, and morally by the denial of all influence to the respectable population in the affairs of the State, and eventually in those of the city. Hence it arose that, in the fifth century, there was so much uncultivated land and so many towns almost deserted, or inhabited only by a famished and spiritless population. The system which I have just explained contributed, much more powerfully than the devastations of the Barbarians, to produce this result.

  In order rightly to apprehend the true character and consequences of these facts, we must reduce them to general ideas, and deduce therefrom all that they contain in regard to one of the greatest problems of social order. Let us first examine them on the relations of the municipal system with political order, of the city with the State. In this respect, the general fact which results from those which I have stated, is the absolute separation of political rights and interests from municipal rights and interests; a separation equally fatal to the political rights and interests, and to the municipal rights and interests of citizens. So long as the principal citizens possessed, at the centre of the State, real rights and an actual influence, the municipal system was not wanting in guarantees of security, and continued to develop itself. As soon as the principal citizens lost their influence at head quarters these guarantees disappeared, and the decay of the municipal system was not long in manifesting itself.

  Let us now compare the course of things in the Roman world, with what has occurred in the modern states. In the Roman world, centralization was prompt and uninterrupted. In proportion as she conquered the world, Rome absorbed and retained within her walls the entire political existence of both victors and vanquished. There was nothing in common between the rights and liberties of the citizen, and the rights and liberties of the inhabitant; political life and municipal life were not confounded one in the other, and were not exhibited in the same localities. In regard to politics, the Roman people had, in truth, only one head; when that was stricken, political life ceased to exist; local liberties then found themselves unconnected by any bond, and without any common guarantee for their general protection.

  Among modern nations, no such centralization has ever existed. On the contrary, it has been in the towns, and by the operation of municipal liberties, that the mass of the inhabitants, the middle class, has been formed, and has acquired importance in the State. But when once in possession of this point of support, this class soon felt itself to be in straits, and without security. The force of circumstances made it understand that, so long as it was not raised to the centre of the State, and constitutionally established there; so long as it did not possess, in political matters, sights which should prove the development and pledge of those which it exercised in municipal affairs—these last would be insufficient to protect it in all its interests, and even to protect themselves. Here is the origin of all the efforts which, from the thirteenth century onwards, either by States General or Parliaments, or by more indirect means, were made for the purpose of raising the burghers to political life, and associating with the rights and liberties of the inhabitant, the rights and liberties of the citizen. After three centuries of endeavour, these efforts were unsuccessful. The municipal system was unable to give birth to a political system which should correspond with it and become its guarantee. The centralization of power was effected without any centralization of rights. Thenceforward the municipal system proved weak and incapable of defending itself; it had been formed in spite of feudal domination; it was unable to exist in presence of a central authority, and in the midst of administrative monarchy. The towns gradually lost, obscurely and almost unresistingly, their ancient liberties. No one is ignorant that, at the moment when the French revolution broke out, the municipal system in France was nothing more than a vain shadow, without consistency or energy.

  Thus although, in the Roman world and amongst ourselves, matters have progressed in inverse proportion, although Rome began by the centralization of public liberties, and modern States by municipal freedom, in both cases facts alike reveal to us the double truth that the two orders of liberties and rights are indispensable to one another, that they cannot be separated without mutual injury, and that the ruin of one necessarily entails the ruin of that which at first survives.

  A second result of no less importance is revealed to us by the same facts. The separation of the municipal from the political system led, in the Roman empire, to the legal classification of society and to the introduction of privilege. In modern States, an analogous classification and the presence of aristocratic privileges prevented the municipal system from raising itself to political influence, and from producing the rights of the citizen from the local rights of the inhabitant. Where, then, municipal and political life are strangers to one another, where they are not united in the same system and bound together in such a manner as reciprocally to guarantee each other’s security, we may be certain that society either is or soon will be divided into distinct and unchangeable classes, and that privilege either already exists or is about to make its appearance. If the burgesses have no share in the central power, if the citizens who exercise or share in the central power do not at the same time participate in the rights and interest of the burgesses, if political and municipal existence proceed thus collaterally, instead of being, as it were, included in each other, it is impossible for privilege not to gain a footing, even beneath the iron hand of despotism and in the midst of servitude.

  If from all this we desire to deduce a still more general consequence, and to express it in a purely philosophical form, we shall acknowledge that, in order that right may certainly exist in any place, it must exist everywhere, that its presence at the centre is vain unless it be present also in localities; that, without political liberty, there can be no solid municipal liberties, and vice versa. If, however, we consider the facts already stated in reference to the municipal system taken in itself and in its internal constitution; if in these facts we look for principles—we shall meet with the most singular amalgamation of the principles of liberty with those of despotism; an amalgamation, perhaps unexampled, and certainly inexplicable to those who have not well understood the course of circumstances, both in the formation and in the decline of the Roman world.

  The presence of principles of liberty is evident. They were these. 1. Every inhabitant possessing a fortune which guaranteed his independence and intelligence, was a curial; and, as such, called upon to take part in the administration of the affairs of the city. Thus, the right was attached to presumed capacity, without any privilege of birth, or any limit as to number;2 and this right was not a simple right of election, but the right of full deliberation, of immediate participation in affairs, as far as they related to what occurred in the interior of a town, and to interests which might be understood and discussed by all those who were capable of raising themselves above the cares of individual existence. The curia was not a restricted and select council, it was an assembly of all the inhabitants who possessed the conditions of curial capacity. 2. An assembly cannot administrate—magistrates are necessary. These were all elected by the curia, for a very short time; and they answered for their administration by their private fortune. 3. In circumstances of importance, such as changing the condition of a city, or electing a magistrate invested with vague and more arbitrary authority, the curia itself was not sufficient; the whole body of the inhabitants was called in to take part in these solemn acts.

  Who, on beholding such rights, would not think that he saw a small republic, in which municipal and political life were merged in one another, and in which the most democratic rule prevailed? Who would think that a municipality thus regulated formed a part of a great empire, and depended, by narrow and necessary bonds, on a remote and sovereign central power? Who would not, on the contrary, expect to meet with all the outbreaks of liberty, all the agitations and cabals, and frequently all the disorder and violence which, at all periods, characterize small societies thus shut up and governed within their own walls?

  Nothing of the kind was the case, and all these principles of liberty were lifeless. Other principles existed which struck them to death. 1. Such were the effects and exactions of the central despotism that the quality of curial ceased to be a right confessedly belonging to all who were capable of exercising it, and became a burden imposed upon all who were able to bear it. On the one hand, the government discharged itself from the care of providing for those public services which did not affect its own interests, and so cast the obligation on this class of citizens; and, on the other hand, it employed them to collect the taxes destined for its use, and made them responsible for the payment thereof. It ruined the curials in order to pay its own functionaries and soldiers; and it granted to its own functionaries and soldiers all the advantages of privilege, in order to obtain their assistance forcibly to prevent the curials from escaping from their impending ruin. Complete nullities as citizens, the curials lived only to be fleeced. 2. All the elective magistrates were, in fact, merely the gratuitous agents of despotism, for whose benefit they robbed their fellow-citizens, until they should be able, in some way or another, to free themselves from this unpleasant obligation. 3. Their election even was valueless, for the imperial delegate in the province could annul it, and they had the greatest personal interest in obtaining this favour from him; in this way also, they were at his mercy. 4. Lastly, their authority was not real, for it had no sanction. No effective jurisdiction was allowed them; they could do nothing that might not be annulled. Nay, more: as despotism daily perceived more clearly their impotence or ill-will, it daily encroached further upon the domain of their attributes, either by its own personal action, or by its direct delegates. The business of the curia vanished successively with its powers; and a day was not far distant when the municipal system would be abolished at a single stroke in the rapidly decaying empire, “because,” the legislator would say, “all these laws wander, in some sort, vaguely and objectless about the legal territory.”

  Thus, the municipal power, having become completely estranged from political and civil power, ceased to be a power itself. Thus, the principles and forms of liberty, isolated remains of the independent existence of that multitude of towns which were successively added to the Roman empire, were impotent to defend themselves against the coalition of despotism and privilege. Thus, here also, we may learn what so many examples teach us; namely, that all the appearances of liberty, all the external acts which seem to attest its presence, may exist where liberty is not, and that it does not really exist unless those who possess it exercise a real power—a power, the exercise of which is connected with that of all powers. In the social state, liberty is participation in power; this participation is its true, or rather its only, guarantee. Where liberties are not rights, and where rights are not powers, neither rights nor liberties exist.

  We must not, therefore, be surprised either at that complete disappearance of the nation which characterized the fall of the Roman empire, or at the influence which the clergy soon obtained in the new order of things. Both phenomena are explained by the state of society at that period, and particularly by that state of the municipal system which I have just described. The bishop had become, in every town, the natural chief of the inhabitants, the true mayor. His election, and the part which the citizens took in it, became the important business of the city. It is to the clergy that we owe the partial preservation, in the towns, of the Roman laws and customs, which were incorporated at a later period into the legislation of the State. Between the old municipal system of the Romans, and the civil-municipal system of the communes of the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical municipal system occurred as a transition. This transition state lasted for several centuries. This important fact was nowhere so clearly and strongly developed as in the monarchy of the Visigoths in Spain.

  LECTURE 24

  Sketch of the history of Spain under the Visigoths. ~ Condition of Spain under the Roman empire. ~ Settlement of the Visigoths in the south-west of Gaul. ~ Euric’s collection of the laws of the Visigoths. ~ Alaric’s collection of the laws of the Roman subjects. ~ Settlement of the Visigoths in Spain. ~ Conflict between the Catholics and Arians. ~ Political importance of the Councils of Toledo. ~ Principal kings of the isigoths. ~ Egica collects the Forum judicum. ~ Fall of the Visigothic monarchy in Spain.

  Under the Roman empire, before the Barbarian invasions, Spain enjoyed considerable prosperity. The country was covered with roads, aqueducts, and public works of every description. The municipal government was almost independent; the principle of a landed census was applied to the formation of thecuriae; and various inscriptions prove that the mass of the people frequently took part with the Senate of the town, in the acts done in its name. There were conventus juridici, or sessions held by the presidents of the provinces and their assessors in fourteen towns of Spain; and conventus provinciales, or ordinary annual assemblies of the deputies of the towns, for the purpose of treating of the affairs of the province, and sending deputies to the emperor with their complaints and petitions.

  All these institutions fell into decay at the end of the fourth century. The imperial despotism, by devolving all its exactions upon the municipal magistrates, had rendered these offices onerous to those who filled them, and odious to the people. On the other hand, since the emperor had made himself the centre of all, the provincial assemblies were useless except as intermediaries between the cities and the emperor; when the municipal organization had become enervated, and the emperor had almost entirely disappeared, these assemblies were found to be inconsistent and powerless in themselves. The sources whence they emanated, and the centre at which they terminated, were devoid of strength, and perished.

  Such was the condition of Spain when, in 409, the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi crossed the Pyrenees. The Vandals remained in Galicia and Andalusia until 429, at which period they passed into Africa; the Alans, after having dwelt for a time in Lusitania and the province of Carthagena, emigrated into Africa with the Vandals. The Suevi founded a kingdom in Galicia, which existed as a distinct State until 585, when Leovigild, king of the Visigoths, reduced it under his sway. Finally Ataulphus, at the head of the Visigoths, entered Southern Gaul, acting sometimes as an ally, and sometimes as an enemy of the empire. He was assassinated at Barcelona, in the year 415.

  I shall now pass in rapid review the principal events which mark the history of the Visigoths in Spain, subsequently to the death of Ataulphus.

  1. Wallia, king of the Visigoths, from 415 to 419, made peace with the Emperor Honorius, on condition of making war against the other Barbarians in Spain. He was furnished with supplies, and authorized to establish himself in Aquitaine. He fixed his residence at Toulouse, and waged war against the Alans and Vandals. The Romans regained possession of a part of Spain; Wallia’s Goths, mingled with the Alans, settled in the province of Tarragona. Catalonia (Cataulania, Goth-Alani) derives its name from this commingling of the two nations. The settlement of the Goths in Gaul lay between the Loire, the Ocean, and the Garonne, and comprehended the districts of Bordeaux, Agen, Perigueux, Saintes, Poitiers, and Toulouse.

  2. Theodoric I. (419–451). Under this monarch, the Visigoths extended their dominion in the south-east of Gaul. Their principal wars were with the Roman empire, which, after having made use of the Goths against the Vandals and Suevi, was now using the Huns against the Goths. In 425, occurred the siege of Arles by Theodoric; in 436, the siege of Narbonne. There was a disposition among the inhabitants of the country to range themselves under the dominion of the Goths, who were able to defend them against the other Barbarians, and to renounce their allegiance to Rome, which was bringing other Barbarians to subdue the Goths. About 449, the kingdom of the Visigoths extended as far as the Rhone. Theodoric made several expeditions into Spain; generally as the price of peace with the Romans. In 451, Theodoric was killed at a battle fought against Attila, either at Chalons-sur-Marne, or Mery-sur-Seine.

  3. Thorismund (451–453). A victory was gained over Attila, who had attacked the Alans settled on the Loire and in the neighbourhood of Orleans. It was evidently the Visigoths who drove the Huns out of Gaul. Thorismund was assassinated.

  4. Theodoric II. (453–466). Avitus, Magister militiae in the south of Roman Gaul, travelled to Toulouse to treat of peace with Theodoric, and was made emperor by the aid of the Visigoths. In concert with the Romans, Theodoric II. made an expedition into Spain against the Suevi. Rechiar, king of the Suevi, was defeated on the 5th of October, 450, near Astorga. This was rather an expedition than a conquest on the part of the Visigoths. Theodoric II., a curious portrait of whom has been left us by Sidonius Apollinarius, was assassinated in 462; he had acquired the district of Narbonne.

  5. Euric (466–484). This reign was the culminating point of the Visigothic monarchy in Gaul. Euric led expeditions beyond the Loire against the Armoricans; in 474, he conquered Auvergne, which was then ceded to him by treaty; he had already conquered Arles and Marseilles, so that the monarchy of the Visigoths then extended from the Pyrenees to the Loire, and from the Ocean to the Alps, thus adjoining the monarchies of the Burgundians and Ostrogoths. Euric had also extended his dominions into Spain, where he possessed the Tarragonese district and Boetica, which he had conquered from the Suevi. Euric had the laws and customs of the Goths written in a book. A passage of Sidonius Apollinarius which speaks of Theodoricianae leges, has led to the belief that Theodoric commenced this collection; but Euric is also called Theodoric.

  6. Alaric II. (484–507). This reign was the epoch of the decay of the Visigothic monarchy in Gaul. Alaric, less warlike than his predecessors, gave himself up to the pursuit of pleasure. He was defeated by Clovis, at Vouillé near Poi-tiers, and left dead on the field. The Franks in the east, and the Burgundians in the west, dismembered the Visigothic monarchy, which thus became reduced to Languedoc, properly so called, and a few districts adjacent to the Pyrenees.

  Alaric did for his Roman subjects what Euric had done for the Goths. He collected and revised the Roman laws, and formed them into a code called theCodex Alaricianus. This code was based upon the Codex Theodosianus published in 438 by Theodosius the Younger, and upon the Codex Gregorianus, the Codex Hermogenianus, the Pauli Sententiae, and the Constitutiones Imperiales, published subsequently to the reign of Theodosius. This code was also called theBreviarium Aniani. It has been thought that Anianus, the referendary of Alaric, was its principal editor; but Père Sirmond has proved that Anianus only published it by order of the king, and sent authentic copies of it into the provinces. By an act of Alaric, the Roman legislation was, so to speak, revived, rearranged, and adapted to the monarchy of the Goths. It thenceforth emanated from the Gothic king himself. In the north of Gaul, whilst the Barbarian laws ceased to be customs and became written laws, the Roman laws lost their force as a whole, and became customs; in the south, on the other hand, they remained written laws, and retained much greater power, exercising an important influence upon the laws of the Barbarians. It would appear that this twofold written legislation must tend necessarily to maintain the separation of the two nations; but it contributed on the contrary to bring it to an end.

  7. After the death of Alaric II., his legitimate son Amalaric, still a child, was taken into Spain. His natural son, Gesalic, became a king in Gaul. At this period, the monarchy of the Visigoths was transferred from Gaul into Spain. The Franks, Burgundians, and Ostrogoths, seized the Gallic possessions of the Visigoths. Gesalic was defeated, and Amalaric reigned under the protection of his grandfather Theodoric, and the tutelage of Theudes.

  8. On the death of Amalaric, Theudes was elected king, and reigned from 531 to 548. He fixed the seat of the Visigothic monarchy in Spain. He waged long wars against the Franks, and, though an Arian, behaved with tolerance towards the Catholics. He authorized the bishops to meet annually in council at Toledo. Until the reign of Theudes, the principle of hereditary succession to the throne appears to have prevailed among the Visigoths; after Theudes, the principle of election prevailed in fact and in law.

  9. From 548 to 567, reigned Theudegisil, Agila, Athanagild. There were continual wars between the Franks, the Suevi, and the Romans. To obtain the assistance of the Romans in his rebellion against Agila, Athanagild gave up to the Emperor Justinian several places between Valentia and Cadiz. Roman garrisons were accordingly sent into those towns. The Romans had also retained possession of other towns in Spain. Athanagild took up his residence at Toledo. He was the father of Queen Brunehault. At his death, the grandees remained five months without electing his successor. At length they elected Liuva, the governor of Narbonne, who associated his brother Leovigild with him on the throne. Leovigild governed Spain, and Liuva, Visigothic Gaul. Liuva died in 570, and Leovigild became sole king. With him commences, to speak truly, the complete and regular monarchy of the Visigoths in Spain.

  10. Leovigild, from 570 to 586, consolidated and extended the monarchy. He gained great victories over the Greco-Romans who had recovered a part of Spain, and won from them Medina-Sidonia, Cordova, and other towns. He also defeated the Vascons* who had maintained their independent occupation of the country on both sides of the Pyrenees. In 586, he completely subdued the Suevi; he greatly extended the royal power, made large confiscations of the property of the church and the nobles, persecuted the Catholics, and convoked a council of Arian bishops at Toledo, in 582, to endeavour to explain Arianism in such a manner as to satisfy the people, and to insure its general reception in his dominions. A civil war broke out between Leovigild and his son Hermenegild, who was a Catholic. After various vicissitudes, Hermenegild was taken, con fined at Seville in a tower which bears his name, and put to death in 584. Before his insurrection, he was associated with his father in the crown, as was also his brother Recared, who governed the provinces in Gaul. Leovigild corrected and completed the laws of Euric.

  Up to this period, there was no unity in the Visigothic monarchy. General institutions were wanting. The national assemblies were more irregular than in other countries. Neither the principle of hereditary succession, nor that of election, prevailed as regarded the kingly office. Out of fourteen kings, six had been assassinated. There was no coherence among the provinces of the kingdom. The clergy were deeply divided amongst themselves. The king gave a factitious preponderance to the Arian minority.

  11. In 586, Recared I. succeeded Leovigild, declared himself a Catholic, and convoked the third general council of Toledo, in 587. A union was effected between the royal and ecclesiastical authority. Recared found himself in a position somewhat analogous to that of Constantine the Great, after his conversion to Christianity. He was energetically supported by the Catholic clergy, whom he, in his turn, as zealously maintained. At the third council of Toledo, the two powers made in common the laws of which they both had need. An important fact should be noticed in the tenure of this council. During the first three days the ecclesiastics sat alone, and regulated religious affairs exclusively. On the fourth day, laymen were admitted; and affairs both civil and religious were then treated of.

  Recared made war against the Franks of Gothic Gaul, and against the Romans in Spain. This last war was terminated by the intervention of Pope Gregory the Great, who negociated a treaty between the Emperor Maurice and Re-cared, the latter of whom, since 590, had sent ambassadors to the Pope. The Arian clergy excited several rebellions against Recared.

  12. In 601, Recared was succeeded by his son Liuva II., who was assassinated in 603. Withemar, his successor, was assassinated in 610. Gundemar was then elected, but he died in 612. Sisebut acceded to the throne in 613, and made war against the remnant of the Roman Empire in Spain. He reduced to a mere nullity the possessions which the emperor had until then retained. He imposed upon the Jews the necessity of being baptized. Heraclius had commenced this persecution in the Eastern Empire; and it entered as a condition into the treaty which he made with Sisebut. The Jews, when driven from Spain, took refuge in Gaul, where they were equally persecuted by Dagobert: so that they knew not whither to flee for refuge. The laws of Sisebut were issued in virtue of the king’s authority alone, without the concurrence of the councils.

  13. Recared, the second son of Sisebut, reigned for a few months. He was succeeded, in 621, by Suinthila, son of Recared I., who was elected king. Suinthila had served as a general under Sisebut. We frequently meet with similar cases in the history of the Visigoths; and they prove that the idea of hereditary succession was still not firmly established. Suinthila made a great expedition against the Basques. He drove them to the other side of the Pyrenees, and built a fortress which is believed to have been Fontarabia. He completely expelled the Romans from Spain, by sowing dissension between the two patricians who still governed the two Roman provinces, and by granting the Roman troops who remained in the country permission to return home.

  14. In 631, occurred the usurpation of Sisenand by the aid of King Dago-bert, who sent an army of Franks, which penetrated as far as Saragossa. Suinthila abdicated the throne. Sisenand succeeded him, and reigned from 631 to 636. In 634, Sisenand’s usurpation was confirmed by the fourth council of Toledo. The crown was declared elective by the bishops and nobles, and ecclesiastical privileges received great extension. From 636 to 640, Chintila reigned. During his reign, the fifth and sixth councils of Toledo passed laws regarding the elections of kings and the condition of their families after their death, against the Jews, and on other subjects. Chintila was succeeded by his son Tulga, who was deposed in 642.

  15. Chindasuinth reigned tyrannically from 642 to 652. Two hundred of the principal Goths were put to death, and their property confiscated; many of the inhabitants emigrated; Chindasuinth convoked the seventh council of Toledo, the canons of which against the emigrants were very rigorous. In all the measures of his government, we may discern the influence of the Catholic clergy, intimately connected with the king against the Arian faction. One canon ordained that every bishop residing near Toledo, should spend one month in every year at the court of the king. Chindasuinth revised and completed the collection of the laws relating to different classes of his subjects, and entirely abolished the special employment of the Roman law in his dominions. In 649, he associated his son Recesuinth with him in the crown, and obtained his recognition as his successor.

  On opening the eighth council of Toledo, Recesuinth said; “The Creator raised me to the throne by associating me in the dignity of my father, and by his death the Almighty has transmitted to me the authority which I have inherited.” These words are the expression of the theory of divine right. Recesuinth directed the council to revise and complete the collection of laws; imposed a fine of thirty pounds of gold on any one who should appeal to any other than the national law; permitted marriages between the Romans and Goths, which had been until then interdicted; revoked the laws of his father against the emigrants; and restored a portion of the confiscated property. A law was also passed, separating the private domain of the king from the public domain. The preponderance of the bishops in the council is evident. The canons are signed by seventy-three ecclesiastics, and by only sixteen counts, dukes, or proceres.1 Recesuinth died on the 1st September, 672.

  16. Wamba, elected on the 19th September, 672, manifested great repugnance to accept the crown. He repressed the rebels in Gothic Gaul, and besieged Narbonne and Nismes. He also vigorously opposed the descents of the Saracens, who were beginning to infest the coasts of Spain, as the Normans were infesting those of Gaul. He fortified Toledo and many other towns. During his reign the division of the kingdom into dioceses took place; six archbishoprics and seventy bishoprics were established. Wamba made several laws for organizing military service, and repressing the excesses of the clergy.

  17. In 680, Wamba was deposed by the intrigues of Erwig, who was supported by the clergy. Wamba abdicated, and withdrew to a convent. Erwig convoked the twelfth council of Toledo, at which Wamba’s voluntary abdication was announced, and Erwig appointed his successor. The new monarch directed the council to revise and modify the laws of Wamba regarding military service, and the penalties to be imposed upon delinquents. A less severe legislation was the work of the twelfth and thirteenth councils of Toledo.

  18. Erwig had given his daughter Cixilone in marriage to Egica, a near relation of Wamba. In 687, Egica succeeded Erwig. He charged the sixteenth council of Toledo to make a complete collection of the laws of the Visigoths; and this collection, under the name of the Forum judicum, or Fuero juzgo, long ruled the Spanish monarchy.

  19. Egica had associated with himself his son Witiza, who succeeded him in 701. Witiza was tyrannical and dissolute. He allowed the priests to marry, recalled the Jews, entered into conflict with the Spanish clergy and the Pope; violently persecuted the principal lay lords, among others Theutfred and Favila, dukes of Cordova and Biscay, and sons of king Chindasuinth; and fell a victim, in 710, to a conspiracy formed against him by Roderic, son of Theutfred. Roderic, or Rodrigo, became king of the Visigoths, and his reign was the last of this monarchy. I shall not relate to you his wars with the Saracens, or the celebrated adventure of Count Julian and his daughter La Cava, who was violated by Roderic, or any of the last scenes of this history which have now become popular poetry.* Political institutions are now the sole subject of our study. In my next lectures, I shall tell you of the Forum judicum, a very remarkable legislative work, which deserves our serious examination and attention.

  LECTURE 25

  Peculiar character of the legislation of the Visigoths. ~ Different sorts of laws contained in the Forum judicum. ~ It was a doctrine as well as a code. ~ Principles of this doctrine on the origin and nature of power. ~ Absence of practical guarantees. ~ Preponderance of the clergy in the legislation of the Visigoths. ~ True character of the election of the Visigothic kings. ~ The Visigothic legislation characterized by a spirit of mildness and equity towards all classes of men, and especially towards the slaves. ~ Philosophical and moral merits of this legislation.

  Of all the Barbarian codes of law, that of the Visigoths is the only one which remained in force, or nearly so, until modern times. We must not expect to find in this code itself the only, or even the principal, cause of this circumstance. And yet the peculiar character of this code contributed powerfully to determine its particular destiny; and more than one phase in Spanish history is explained, or at least elucidated, by the special and distinctive character of its primitive legislation. This character I wish to make you thoroughly understand. I cannot now deduce therefrom all the consequences which it contains; but I think they will readily be perceived by the careful observer.

  The legislation of the Visigoths was not, like that of the Franks, Lombards, and others, the law of the Barbarian conquerors. It was the general law of the kingdom, the code which ruled the vanquished as well as the victors, the Spanish Romans as well as the Goths. King Euric, who reigned from 466 to 484, had the customs of the Goths written out. Alaric II., who ruled from 484 to 507, collected and published in the Breviarium Aniani, the Roman laws which were applicable to his Roman subjects. Chindasuinth, who reigned from 642 to 652, ordered a revision and completion of the Gothic laws, which had already been frequently revised and augmented since the time of Euric; and completely abolished the Roman law. Recesuinth, who reigned from 652 to 672, by allowing marriages between the Goths and Romans, endeavoured completely to assimilate the two nations: thenceforward, there existed, or at least there ought to have existed, on the soil of Spain, one single nation formed by the union of the two nations, and ruled by one single code of laws, comprising the essential parts of the two codes. Thus, whilst the system of personal laws, or laws based on the origin of individuals, prevailed in most of the Barbarian monarchies, the system of real laws, or laws based upon land, held sway in Spain. The causes and consequences of this fact are of great importance.

  Four different kinds of laws may be distinguished in the Forum judicum. 1. Laws made by the kings alone, in virtue of their own authority, or merely with the concurrence of their privy council, officium palatinum. 2. Laws made in the national councils held at Toledo, in concert with the bishops and grandees of the realm, and with the assent, more frequently presumed than expressed, of the people. At the opening of the council, the king proposed, in a book called tomus regius, the adoption of new laws or the revision of old ones; the council deliberated thereupon; and the king sanctioned and published its decisions. The influence of the bishops was predominant. 3. Laws without either date or author’s name, which seem to have been literally copied from the various collections of laws successively compiled by Euric, Leovigild, Recared, Chindasuinth, and other kings. 4. Lastly, laws entitled antiqua noviter emendata,1 which were mostly borrowed from the Roman laws, as is formally indicated by their title in some manuscripts.

  The Forum judicum, as we possess it at the present day, is a code formed of the collection of all these laws, as finally collected, revised, and arranged at the sixteenth council of Toledo, by order of King Egica. The most ancient Castilian version of the Forum judicum appears to have been made during the reign of Ferdinand the Saint (1230–1252).

  Legislation is almost always imperative; it prescribes or interdicts; each legal provision usually corresponds to some fact which it either ordains or prohibits. Rarely does it happen that a law, or code of laws, are preceded by a theory on the origin and nature of power, the object and philosophic character of law, and the right and duty of the legislator. All legislations suppose some solution or other to these primary questions, and conform thereto; but it is by a secret bond, frequently unknown to the legislator himself. The law of the Visigoths has this singular characteristic, that its theory precedes it, and is incessantly recurrent in it—a theory formally expressed, and arranged in articles. Its authors wished to do more than ordain and prohibit; they decreed principles, and converted into law philosophical truths, or what appeared to them to be such.

  This fact alone indicates that the Forum judicum was the work of the philosophers of that period; I mean, the clergy. Never did such a proceeding occur to the mind of a new people, still less to a horde of Barbarian conquerors. Assuredly a doctrine which thus serves as preface and commentary to a code, merits our best attention. “The law,” says the Forum judicum,

  is the emulator of divinity, the messenger of justice, the mistress of life. It regulates all conditions in the State, all ages of human life; it is imposed on women as well as on men, on the young as well as on the old, on the learned as well as on the ignorant, on the inhabitants of towns as well as on those of the country; it comes to the aid of no particular interest; but it protects and defends the common interest of all citizens. It must be according to the nature of things and the customs of the State, adapted to the time and place, prescribing none but just and equitable rules, clear and public, so as to act as a snare to no citizen.

  In these ideas on the nature and object of written law, the fundamental idea of the theory is revealed. There is an unwritten, eternal, universal law, fully known to God alone, and which the human legislator seeks after. Human law is good only in so far as it is the emulator and messenger of the divine law. The source of the legitimacy of laws is, then, not to be found on earth; and this legitimacy originates, not in the will of him or them who make the laws, whoever they may be, but in the conformity of the laws themselves to truth, reason, and justice—which constitute the true law.2

  All the consequences of this principle were certainly not present to the mind of the Spanish bishops, and many of the consequences which they deduced were very false; but the principle was there. They deduced from it this other principle, then unknown to Europe, that the character of law is to be universal, the same for all men, foreign to all private interests, given solely for the common interest. On the other hand, it was the character of the other Barbarian codes that they were conceived for the furtherance of the private interests, either of individuals or of classes. Thus the whole system of laws, whether good or bad, which issued therefrom, bore this imprint; it was a system of privileges, privatae leges. The councils of Toledo alone attempted to introduce into politics the principle of equality in the sight of the law, which they derived from the Christian idea of equality in the sight of God. Thus, the law of the Visigoths was, at this period, the only one that could be called lex publica.

  From this theory on the nature of law, resulted the following theory on the nature of power. 1. No power is legitimate except in so far as it is just, as it governs and is itself governed by the true law, the law of justice and truth. No human will, no terrestrial force can confer on power an external and borrowed legitimacy; the principle of its legitimacy resides in itself and in itself alone, in its morality and its reason. 2. All legitimate power comes from above. He who possesses and exercises it, holds it solely by reason of his own intellectual and moral superiority. This superiority is given to him by God himself. He does not, therefore, receive power from the will of those over whom he exercises it; he exercises it legitimately, not because he has received it, but because he possesses it in himself. He is not a delegate or a servant, but a superior, a chief.

  This two-fold consequence of the definition of law frequently occurs in the legislation of the Visigoths. “The king is called king (rex) in that he governs justly (recte). If he acts with justice, he legitimately possesses the name of king; if he acts with injustice, he miserably loses it. Our fathers, therefore, said with reason: Rex ejus eris si recta facis; si autem non facis, non eris.3 The two chief virtues of royalty are justice and truth.” “The royal power, like the whole of the people, is bound to respect the laws. Obeying the will of heaven, we give, to ourselves as well as to our subjects, wise laws, which our own greatness and that of our successors is bound to obey, as are also the whole population of our realm.”

  “God, the Creator of all things, in arranging the structure of the human body, raised the head above, and willed that thencefrom should issue the nerves of all the members. And he placed in the head the torch of the eyes, that thence might be detected all things that might be injurious. And he established therein the power of intellect, charging it to govern all the members, and wisely to regulate their action. We must therefore first regulate that which concerns princes, watch over their safety, protect their life; and then ordain that which has relation to peoples, in such sort that while suitably guaranteeing the safety of kings, we may at the same time better guarantee that of the peoples.”

  After having established that that power is alone legitimate which acts according to justice and truth, which obeys and prescribes the true law, and that all legitimate power comes from above, and derives its legitimacy from itself, and not from any terrestrial will, the theory of the councils of Toledo comes to a stop. It does not regard that which is actually occurring in the world: it forgets that, with such a definition, no one here below possesses legitimate power or can fully possess it, and that, nevertheless, society has a right to exact that actual power should be legitimate. This theory knows and lays down the true principles of power; but it neglects its guarantees.

  Here we come to the junction-point of the two doctrines which have ever contested, and still contest, the possession of the world. One maintains that power comes from below; that, in its origin as well as in right, it belongs to the people, to numbers; and that those who exercise it, exercise it only as delegates, as servants. This theory misunderstands the true principles and the true nature of power; but it tends to constitute those guarantees which rightfully belong to society. Considered as a theory, it maintains, and assumes to render legitimate, the despotism of numbers. But as, in practice, this despotism is impossible, it soon violates its own principle, and limits its operation to the organization of a system of guarantees, the object and result of which is to constrain actual power to become, in its conduct, rightful and legitimate power. The opposite theory, which is more profound and true at its starting-point, assigns absolute power and sovereignty to that Being alone, in whom resides all truth and justice: it refuses it, at the outset, to chiefs, as well as to peoples; it subordinates both alike to eternal laws which they did not make, and which they are equally bound to observe. It reasonably affirms that all legitimate power comes from above, that it is derived from superior reason, not from number, and that number should submit to reason; but soon, forgetting that it has placed sovereignty beyond the earth, and that no one here below is God, it becomes dazzled by its own lustre; it persuades itself, or tries to do so, that the power which comes from above, descends upon earth as full and absolute as it is at its source; it is indignant that limits should be affixed to its exercise, and if there is nothing to stop its progress, it establishes, in fact, a permanent despotism, after having denied, in principle, its legitimacy; whereas, the opposite theory, which assumes to found despotism in principle, almost invariably ends by destroying it in fact, and by establishing only a limited power.

  Such, then, are the consequences of the theory regarding power and law, conceived by the Visigothic legislators. I do not say the consequences which logically flow from it, when the theory is held in all its bearings and faithfully followed out; but the actual consequences which it almost always entails, by the natural tendency of things, and by the deviation into which they are forced by the passions of mankind. 1. The best depositaries of legitimate power, those who most probably possess a knowledge of the true law, are the ecclesiastics. Ministers of the divine law in the relations of man with God, they naturally hold the same office in the relations of man with man. It may then be presumed that, wherever this theory prevails, the political predominance of the clergy is already established, and will continue to increase. The theory is at first its symptom, and becomes afterwards its cause. 2. The political predominance of the clergy does not well accord with the principle of hereditary monarchy. The history of the Jews furnishes an example of this. The transmission of actual power taking place altogether independently of the men who are thought to possess rightful power in a higher degree than all others, is an inconsistency. The theory will, therefore, tend to make monarchy elective, or at least to place every monarch, at his accession, under the necessity of obtaining the recognition and sanction of the clergy. 3. The election of the monarch, or the necessity for his recognition, must be the only political guarantee, the only limit affixed to the exercise of actual power. This power, once constituted in this manner, is sovereign; for the depositaries of true sovereignty, which emanates from God, have conferred it upon its possessor by election. It would be absurd and impious to seek for guarantees against its excess in powers of an inferior order, less enlightened and less pure. Therefore, every institution the object of which is either to divide power, or to limit it in its exercise by opposing to it other powers emanating from other sources, is proscribed by this theory. Elective monarchical power is absolute. All the inferior powers necessary for the government of society are derived from it, and are instituted by it in its own name.

  These consequences are met with in the legislation of the Visigoths to as great an extent as the necessary incoherence of human affairs will allow.

  I. The political predominance of the bishops in the Visigothic monarchy, is a fact evident throughout its history. The councils of Toledo made both the kings and the laws. The principal Gothic laymen who attended and deliberated thereat were few in number, as is proved by the signatures to the canons of the councils. The phrases with which we sometimes meet, cum toto populo, populo assentiente,4 are mere formulas which pay a kind of homage to ancient facts rather than to present and real facts. Excommunication is the legal punishment decreed against bad kings, against attempts at usurpation, insurrection, and other crimes. The predominance of the bishops was not con fined to the councils. The oversight of local functionaries and judges was also intrusted to them, and they had the power of provisionally overruling any judgments of which they disapproved. The bishops and the king were the only persons who could not personally defend their own cause, and who were bound to appear by proxy in such cases, lest their personal presence should influence the decision of the judge. The personal and real privileges granted to the clergy, the facility and perpetuity accorded to donations made to churches, everything in fact in the laws as well as in history, testifies that, in political matters, the bishops occupied the foremost rank, and that their predominance daily increased.

  It must not however be supposed that this predominance was unlimited, or that it was established without efforts; it was a difficult task to subjugate a Barbarian king and people to an almost exclusively moral power, and the code of the Visigoths contains several enactments tending to restrain the independence of the clergy, and to keep them under obedience to the civil power. Ecclesiastics of every rank were bound, under the same penalties as laymen, to appear and defend their causes before the civil judges. These same judges were competent to punish licentious priests, deacons, and sub-deacons. The eleventh council of Toledo ordained that bishops guilty of certain crimes should be judged by the ordinary laws, and punished in the same cases as laymen, by thelex talionis.5 The laws of Wamba compelled ecclesiastics as well as laymen to do military service, and other duties of a corresponding kind. In a word, that clergy which we behold at the head of society and constituting the national assembly almost by themselves, was at the same time less isolated from the civil order, and less constituted as a distinct body by jurisdiction and privilege, than it was elsewhere at the same period. However, the coincidence of these two facts is natural. We feel less need of separation from a society, as we become nearer subduing it.

  II. As to the election of kings, which may be regarded as the natural consequence of the system, or simply of the theocratic tendency, it is formally laid down as a principle in the Forum judicum, and was the common law of the Visigothic monarchy: but we must not mistake as to the origin and character of this institution; in Spain, it was much less an institution of liberty than an institution of order, a means of preventing civil wars and the disorders attendant upon usurpations.

  From causes difficult to discover, the principle of the regular hereditariness of royalty did not prevail among the Visigoths as among the other Barbarian peoples. The throne at the death of the kings, and even during their lifetime, was the object aimed at by a host of ambitious individuals, who contested for itvi et armis,6 and seized or lost it according to the powers of the claimants and their factions. It was against this state of things, much more than with a view to establish or maintain the right of the nation to choose its own sovereign, that the election of the monarch by the bishops and grandees assembled in council at Toledo, was instituted. The text of the law clearly lays this down. “Henceforth the sovereigns shall be chosen for the glory of the kingdom, in such sort that, in the royal town, or in the place in which the prince shall have died, his successor shall be chosen by the consent of the bishops, the grandees of the palace, and the people: and not at a distance by the conspiracy of a few perverse persons, or by a seditious tumult of an ignorant multitude.” Various canons of the fifth, sixth, seventh and thirteenth councils of Toledo, inserted as laws in theForum judicum, have as their only object the repression of attempts at usurpation, and interdict all seizure of the throne by force, determine what classes of men can never be eligible to the kingly office, and also guarantee the lives and property of the families of the dead kings, against the violence and avidity of their elected successors. In a word, all tends to prove that this election was intended to counteract violent usurpation much more than to prevent regular hereditary succession.

  Historical facts lead us to the same result. The succession of the Visigothic kings was a series of violent usurpations. Scarcely do we meet with one or two examples of veritable elections, made freely and without any anterior constraint, in consequence of the throne falling vacant. Almost always the election by the council only sanctioned the usurpation; and at the same time that we may doubt of its liberty, we see that its special object is to prevent the return of a great disorder. Neither is there anything to indicate that when, by reason of the preponderance of a more powerful or more popular king, the principle of hereditary succession was on the point of introducing itself, the councils either attempted to oppose its entrance, or considered the act as an infraction of their fundamental law. In every circumstance, at this period, in this state of society, and particularly in great monarchies, the want of order, of rule, of some check to restrain the irregular operation of force, was the dominant want felt by men who, like the bishops, were much more enlightened and much more civilized than the Barbarian conquerors; and political institutions, as well as civil laws, were framed rather with this object than with a view to the assurance of liberty.

  Such being its true nature, the election of the kings by the councils of Toledo could evidently not have rested entirely in the hands of the clergy. Armed and ambitious Barbarians would not have endured patiently to receive the crown at the will of bishops, nearly all of whom were Romans. Originally, the bishops exercised, in fact, no other right than that of sanctioning present usurpation, by anathematizing similar conduct in the future. In proportion as their moral influence and real power became consolidated and extended, they attempted higher things, and appeared to aspire to the famous right of giving and taking away the crown. The Forum judicum furnishes two remarkable proofs of this progress. The fourth council of Toledo, held during the reign of Sisenand, in 671, decreed by its seventy-fifth canon, “that when the king had died in peace, the grandees of the realm and the bishops should elect his successor, by common consent.” At a later period, when this canon was transported as a law into the national code, it was amplified in these terms: “Let no one, therefore, in his pride, seize upon the throne; let no pretender excite civil war among the people; let no one conspire the death of the prince; but, when the king is dead in peace, let the principal men of the whole kingdom, together with the bishops, who have received power to bind and to loose, and whose blessing and unction confirm princes in their authority, appoint his successor by common consent and with the approval of God.” A similar interpolation occurs in the insertion of a canon of the eighth council, which began: “We, the bishops, priests, and other inferior clerks, in concert with the officers of the palace, and the general assembly, decree,” &c. In the Forum judicum, after the word priests, these words are added: “Who have been established by our Lord Jesus Christ, to be the directors and heralds of the people. ” Such phrases as these clearly indicate the progress of ecclesiastical pretensions, and their success. It is, however, certain as a fact, that the councils of Toledo never really disposed of the crown, but that it was almost always taken by force; and that the election of the kings by the grandees and bishops, though established as a principle by the laws, must not be considered as a proof either of the complete predominance of the theocratic system, or of the extent of the national liberty.

  III. But if, after having ascertained who possessed the right of appointment to the highest political office, and the mode in which this office was conferred, we endeavour to discover, from the laws of the Visigoths, what duties were imposed on their kings, and what guarantees they gave their subjects for the performance of those duties, the consequences which we have already indicated, as likely to result from the theory that presided over this code, become clearly revealed. Good precepts abound, but real guarantees are wanting.

  To those who read these laws, the legislator appears much better aware of the duties of the sovereign, and of the rights and necessities of the people, than were the other Barbarian legislators; and, in fact, he was so. But if they next inquire where were the independent forces capable of procuring or insuring the maintenance of these principles, and how the citizens exercised their rights or defended their liberties, they find absolutely nothing. The code of the Visigoths, though more enlightened, more just, more humane, and more complete than the laws of the Franks or Lombards, left despotism at greater liberty, and almost entirely disarmed freedom. Texts in abundance might be quoted in support of this assertion.

  If, from these general principles, we descend to the details of legislation, we shall find that the code of the Visigoths was, in this respect also, much more provident, more complete, more wise, and more just, than any other Barbarian code. The various social relations were much better defined therein; and their nature and effects more carefully analyzed. In civil matters, we meet with repetitions of the Roman law at almost every step; in criminal matters, the proportion of punishments to crimes was determined according to moral and philosophical notions of considerable justice. We discern therein the efforts of an enlightened legislator struggling against the violence and inconsiderateness of Barbarian manners. The title, De caede et morte hominum,7 compared with the corresponding laws of other peoples, is a very remarkable example of this. In other codes the injury done seems almost alone to constitute the crime, and the punishment is fixed in that material reparation which results from a pecuniary composition. In this code, crime is measured by its moral and true element—intention. The various shades of criminality, absolutely involuntary homicide, homicide by inadvertence, homicide by provocation, homicide with or without premeditation, are all distinguished and defined almost as accurately as in our codes, and the punishments vary in an equitable proportion. The justice of the legislator went further than this. He attempted, if not to abolish, at least to diminish that diversity of legal value established among men by the other Barbarian codes. The only distinction which it maintained was that between the freeman and the slave. In regard to freemen, the punishment does not vary, either according to the origin or rank of the dead man, but simply according to the different degrees of the moral culpability of the murderer. With regard to slaves, though not daring completely to deprive masters of the right of life and death, the Forum judicum at least attempted to subject them to a public and regular course of procedure:

  If no one who is guilty or accomplice of a crime should remain unpunished, how much more should those be punished who have committed homicide wickedly and with levity. Thus, as cruel masters, in their pride, frequently put to death their slaves without any fault on their part, it is fitting altogether to extirpate this license, and to ordain that the present law shall be eternally observed by all. No master or mistress may, without a public trial, put to death any of their male or female slaves, or any person dependent upon them. If a slave, or any other servant, commit a crime which may lead to his capital condemnation, his master or accuser shall immediately give information thereof to the judge of the place where the action was committed, or to the count, or to the duke. After the discussion of the affair, if the crime be proved, let the culprit suffer, either by sentence of the judge, or of his master, the punishment of death which he has deserved; in such sort, however, that if the judge will not put the culprit to death, he shall draw up a capital sentence against him, in writing, and then it shall be in the power of the master to kill him or to keep him in life. In truth, if the slave, by a fatal boldness, while resisting his master, has struck him or attempted to strike him with a weapon, or a stone, or by any other blow, and if the master in self-defence has killed the slave in his anger, the master shall in no wise suffer the punishment of homicide. But he must prove that this was the case; and he must prove it by the testimony or oath of the slaves, both male and female, who were present at the time, and by the oath of himself, the author of the deed. Whosoever, from pure wickedness, and by his own hand or that of another, shall have killed his slave without bringing him to public trial, shall be branded with infamy, declared incapable of giving evidence, and doomed to pass the rest of his life in exile and penitence; and his property shall be given to his nearest relatives, to whom the law grants it as an inheritance.

  This law alone, and the efforts which its passage reveals, do great honour to the Visigothic legislators; for nothing honours the laws and their authors so much as a courageous moral conflict against the bad customs and evil prejudices of their age and country. We are often forced to believe that the love of power has a great share in the construction of laws which aim at the maintenance of order and the repression of violent passions; the excess of passion borders closely on the rights of liberty, and order is the hackneyed pretext of despotism. But here, power has nothing to gain; the law is disinterested; it seeks after justice only; it seeks after it laboriously, in opposition to the strong who reject it, and for the benefit of the weak who are unable to call in its aid—perhaps, even, in opposition to the public opinion of the time, which, after having had great difficulty in looking on a Roman as a Goth, had still more in regarding a slave as a man. This respect for man, whatever may be his origin or social condition, is a phenomenon unknown to Barbarian legislation; and nearly fourteen centuries elapsed before the doctrine passed from religion into politics, from the Gospel into the codes. It is therefore no slight honour to the Visigothic bishops that they did their best to guard and transfer into the laws this noble sentiment, which it is so difficult to disentangle from the meshes of fact, and which is continually in danger of being crushed beneath the pressure of circumstance. It continually recurs in their legislation, both in general precepts and in special regulations; and when it yields, either before the inconsiderate brutality of Barbarian customs, or before the despotic traditions of Roman jurisprudence—traditions with which the minds of the Spanish bishops themselves were imbued—we still discern, even in these bad laws, the obscure presence of a good principle labouring to surmount the obstacles beneath which it has succumbed.

  LECTURE 26

  Central institutions of the Visigothic monarchy. ~ True character of the Councils of Toledo. ~ Amount of their political influence. ~ The Officium palatinum. ~ Prevalence of Roman maxims and institutions, among the Goths, over Germanic traditions. ~ Proof of this in the local and central institutions of the Visigoths. ~ Refutation of the errors of Savigny and the Edinburgh Review on this subject. ~ Conclusion.

  My last lecture, I think, convinced you, gentlemen, that the code of the Visigoths, taken in itself, and in its intentions as expressed by written laws, gives the idea of a better social state, a juster and more enlightened government, a better regulated country, and, altogether, a more advanced and milder state of civilization, than that which is revealed to us by the laws of the other Barbarian peoples. But to this more humane and wise legislation, to the general principles dictated by superior reason, there is wanting, as I have already observed, an actual sanction, an effective guarantee. The laws are good; but the people, for whose benefit they were enacted, have hardly any share in their execution, and the business resulting therefrom. Up to a certain point, the code bears testimony to the wisdom and good intentions of the legislature; but it presents no evidence of the liberty and political life of the subjects.

  Let us first look at the centre of the State. The single fact of the political predominance of the bishops, the sole name of the councils of Toledo, indicate the decay of the old Germanic customs, and the disappearance of national assemblies. The Anglo-Saxons had their Wittenagemot; the Lombards their assembly at Pavia, circumstante immensa multitudine;1 the Franks their Champs de Mars and Champs de Mai, and their placita generalia.2 Doubtless, the existence of these assemblies entailed scarcely any of the consequences which we attach at the present day to the idea of such institutions; and they certainly constituted a very slight guarantee of liberty, which it was then impossible to guarantee. In reality, also, they took a very small part in the government. Nevertheless, the simple fact of their existence attests the prevalence of Germanic customs; arbitrary power, though exercised in fact, was not established in principle; the independence of powerful individuals struggled against the despotism of the kings; and in order to dispose of these isolated independencies, to form them into a national body, it was necessary occasionally to convoke them together in assemblies. These assemblies live in the laws as well as in history; the clergy were received therein, because of their importance and superior knowledge,—but they were merely received. Far from being their sole constituents, they did not even form their centre.

  In Spain, instead of entering into the national assembly, the clergy opened the assembly to the nation. Is it likely that the name only was changed, and that Gothic warriors came to the council, as formerly to their Germanic assemblies? We have beheld the same name applied to very different things: for example, judicial parliaments have superseded political parliaments; but we have never seen the same thing represented under different names, especially during the infancy of nations. When existence consists almost solely of traditions and customs, words are the last things to change and perish.

  The councils of Toledo, then, were actually councils, and not Champs de Mai or placita. Morally, this fact is probable; historically, it is certain. Their acts have come down to us, and they are acts of an entirely ecclesiastical assembly, specially occupied with the affairs of the clergy; and into which laymen entered only occasionally, and in small numbers. The signatures of laymen, affixed to the canons of the thirteenth council, only amount to twenty-six; and in no other are they so numerous.

  These councils were not held, like the Champs de Mars or de Mai and theplacita generalia of the Carlovingians, at fixed, or at least, frequent periods. Between the third and fourth councils, forty-four years elapsed; between the tenth and eleventh, eighteen years . The king convoked them at his pleasure, or as necessity required. The Visigothic code ordains absolutely nothing in this respect, either on the kings, or on the members of the assembly. None of its enactments have reference, even indirectly, to a national assembly.

  The nature of these councils of Toledo being thus clearly determined, it remains for us to inquire what influence they exerted in the government. What were they as guarantees of the public liberties, and of the execution of the laws?

  Before consulting special facts, the very nature of these assemblies may furnish us with some general indications with regard to their political influence. The clergy, taking a direct and active part in the government, were never in a natural and simple position. I do not speak either of the ecclesiastical law, or of the special mission of the clergy, or of the separation of the spiritual from the temporal order, which are questions still involved in obscurity. I examine facts alone. In fact, in the States of modern Europe, and at their origin, as well as in later times, the clergy did not govern, they neither commanded armies, nor administered justice, nor collected the taxes, nor held sway over the provinces. They penetrated to a greater or less distance, by more or less regular means, along the various paths of political life; but they never traversed them fully, freely, and thoroughly; politics never were their special and avowed career. In a word, the social powers, from the lowest to the highest degree, never were, either in law, or in fact, naturally lodged in their hands. When the bishops, therefore, in council assembled, interfered in the civil government, they were called to regulate affairs which did not concern them, and to occupy themselves about matters which did not constitute the habitual and recognised business of their position and life. This intervention, therefore, necessarily bore an equivocal and uncertain character. Great influence might have been attached thereto; but it could not possess any power of energetic and effectual resistance. If warrior chiefs meet together in assembly around their monarch, they can rely on their comrades and their soldiers to support their resolutions; if elected deputies assemble to vote taxes and ratify the laws of the country, they are sustained by the number, credit, and opinion of those who chose and deputed them. If bodies charged with the administration of justice are, at the same time, called to deliberate upon certain acts of the sovereign, they may, by suspending the exercise of their functions, place the government in an almost untenable position. In these various combinations, a positive force, more or less regular in its character, stands at the back of the men appointed to control the supreme power. On the part of the clergy, any decisive resistance, in political matters, is almost impracticable, for not one of the effective forces of society is naturally at their disposal; and, in order to gain possession of such a force, they must abandon their position, abjure their character, and thus compromise the moral force whence they derive their true point of support. Thus, by the nature of things, the clergy are but ill-adapted to be constituted into a political power, with the mission of exercising control, and offering resistance. If they desire to remain within the limits of their position, they find themselves, at the decisive moment, unprovided with effective and trusty weapons. If they seek after such weapons, they throw the whole of society into disturbance, and incur the legitimate reproach of usurpation. Modern history, at every step, demonstrates this two-fold truth. When the clergy have believed themselves strong enough to resist in the same way as civil powers would have done, they have compromised themselves as clergy, and have increased disorder rather than obtained reform. When they have not made such attempts, their resistance has almost invariably been ineffectual at the moment when it was most necessary; and as, in such cases, ecclesiastics generally feel conscious of their weakness, they have not opposed any solid barrier to the encroachments of power; and, when they have not consented to be the instruments of its will, they have yielded after an impotent admonition.

  Such was the position of the Visigothic bishops. They had not yet acquired, in temporal matters, sufficient force to struggle openly against the crown. They felt that a great part of their importance was due to their close alliance with the royal power, and that they would be great losers by breaking off the connection. They could not, therefore, carry their resistance very far, or establish in reality an independent political assembly. They went as far as to sanction the royal power, and to associate themselves with it by becoming its advisers; but they attempted nothing beyond. Facts prove this. These councils of Toledo, whither usurpers came to be elected, and which gave an entire code to the Visigoths, exercised in fact, over the great events of this period in Spain, less influence than was exerted in France by the Champs de Mars and de Mai. They occupied, but did not supply, the place of the old Germanic assemblies, for they did not possess their brute force, and were not in a position to substitute for it any sufficient regular force. Spain was indebted to them for a much better legislation than that possessed by other Barbarian nations, and probably also, in their daily practice, for a more enlightened and humane administration of justice; but in vain do we seek to find therein the principle of a great institution of liberty, and the characteristics of a veritable resistance of absolute power. During the period which now occupies our attention, the reigning power in the other States founded by the Barbarians was force—disorderly, capricious, and unsettled force, sometimes distributed amongst a multitude of almost independent chieftains; sometimes concentrated, for a brief space, and according to circumstances, in the hands of one man, or of a brutal and transitory aristocracy. No principle was acknowledged; no right was legal; all was matter of fact, liberty as well as power; and the germs of free institutions existed in the disorderly relations of these independent or ill-united forces, although, to speak the truth, liberty was nowhere visible. In Spain, and through the influence of the clergy, the government undoubtedly assumed greater generality and a more regular form; the laws afforded greater protection to the weak; the administration paid more attention to their condition; and there was less disorder and violence in society at large. Broader and more elevated moral ideas frequently governed the exercise of power. But, on the other hand, power was constituted under a more absolute form; Roman maxims prevailed over Germanic traditions; theocratic doctrines lent their aid to the arbitrary power of the Barbarians. The councils of Toledo modified and enlightened despotism, but did not limit the exercise of power.

  Some writers have thought they perceived, in another institution which existed at the centre of the Visigothic monarchy, the principle and instrument of a limitation of the sovereign authority. I refer to the officium palatinum, a species of council formed around the king, by the grandees of his Court, and the principal functionaries of the government. The importance of this council, and its participation in public business, are attested by a large number of laws passed either independently of the councils of Toledo, or in virtue of their deliberation. The words, cum omni palatino officio, cum assensu sacerdotum majorumque palatii, ex palatino officio,3 and the like, frequently occur in the code of the Visigoths. These texts and the voice of history do not admit of a doubt that the officium palatinum frequently interfered in the legislation, in the government, and even in the elevation of kings.

  It would be a mistake, however, to regard it as a political institution, a guarantee of liberty, a means of exercising control and offering resistance. Power could not, in any case, subsist alone, by itself and in the air; it must, of sheer necessity, conciliate interests, appropriate forces, in a word, surround itself with auxiliaries, and maintain its position by their aid. In the Roman Empire, this necessity had given birth to the creation of the Court and of the officium palatinum, instituted by Diocletian and Constantine. In the Barbarian States, it led the kings to surround themselves with Antrustions, Leudes, sworn vassals, and all those natural or factitious grandees, who, becoming dispersed at a later period, and settling in their own domains, became the principal members of the feudal aristocracy. From these two sources arose the officium palatinum of the Visigothic kings, with this difference, that, in this point as in others, Roman institutions prevailed over Barbarian customs, to the great advantage of absolute power.

  The ocium palatinum of the Visigoths was composed of the grandees of the realm (proceres), whom the kings attached to themselves by donations of lands and offices, and of the principal functionaries, dukes, counts, vicars, and others, who held their functions from the kings. This court undoubtedly formed a sort of aristocracy which was frequently consulted on public affairs, which sate in the councils, and which furnished the king with assessors whenever he delivered judgments. The necessity of things required that it should be so; and as necessity always entails consequences which far exceed the wishes of those who are constrained to yield to its sway, there is also no doubt that this aristocracy, on many occasions, thwarted the kings who could not dispense with its assistance, and thus limited their empire.

  But human nature is the same amongst barbarian nations as amongst civilized peoples; and the coarseness of forms, the brutality of passions, and the limited range of ideas, do not prevent similar positions from leading to the same results. Now, it is in the nature of an aristocracy that is closely pent up around the prince, of a Court aristocracy, to use power for their own advantage rather than to limit it for the benefit of the State. It almost inevitably becomes a focus of faction and intrigue, around which individual interests are set in motion, and not a centre of controlment and resistance in which the public interest finds a place. If the times are barbarous and manners violent, individual interests assume the forms of barbarism and use the means of violence; if satisfied, they obey with the same servility as before; if discontented, they poison, assassinate, or dethrone. Such was the case in the monarchy of the Visigoths. All usurpations and revolutions in power originated in the officium palatinum; and when a king attempted to subject the nobles to the performance of public services, to limit or even to examine into the concessions which they demanded, that king lost the empire. Such was the fate of Wamba.

  The Visigothic sovereigns had, moreover, in the bishops, a powerful counterpoise, which they set in opposition to the nobles of their Court, in order to prevent them from aspiring to entire independence. The influence of the clergy, too weak to act as an effectual check on the power of the prince, was strong enough, in the hands of the prince, to prevent the check from coming from any other quarter. The reign of Chindasuinth affords an example of this.

  Finally, as I have already said, the predominance of Roman maxims and institutions in Spain was so great, that the central aristocracy bore more resemblance to the officium palatinum of the emperors than to the Antrustions orLeudes of Germanic origin. Elsewhere, these last were not slow to obtain sufficient strength to assert their independence, to isolate themselves from the prince, and finally to become petty sovereigns in their own domains. In Spain, things did not occur precisely thus. It appears that the proceres received from the king dignities and offices in greater abundance than lands, and thus acquired less individual and personal strength. Perhaps the equality granted to the Roman population, and the fusion of the two peoples, did not permit so great a dilapidation of property and distribution of domains as that which took place in France. What would have occurred if the monarchy of the Visigoths had not been interrupted in its course by the conquest of the Arabs? Would the dismemberment of the royal power and the dispersion of the Court have led to the dispersion and independence of the landed aristocracy? We cannot say. This much is certain, that the phenomenon which was exhibited in France, at the fall of the Carlovingians, did not occur among the Visigoths, in the eight century: the officium palatinum had neither destroyed nor divided the royal power, and made but feeble attempts to limit it.

  One fact must be added, which, though universally attested, is not explained in a satisfactory manner. Of the various German peoples, the Goths preserved in the smallest degree their primitive institutions and manners. The Ostrogoths in Italy, under Theodoric, like the Visigoths in Spain, allowed Roman habits to prevail amongst them, and permitted their kings to arrogate to themselves the plenitude of imperial power. We even find, among the Goths of Italy, still fewer traces of the existence of the old national assemblies, and of the participation of the people in the affairs of the State.

  It would therefore be vain to seek, in the Visigothic monarchy, for the principles, or even the remnants, of any great institution of liberty, or of any effectual limitation of power. Neither the councils of Toledo, nor the officium palatinum present this character; but there resulted from them something that did not result from the Champs de Mars and de Mai, or from the Saxon Wittenagemot—a code of laws, which, for that period, are very remarkable for their large philosophical views, their foresight, and their wisdom; but this code, though it indicates the handiwork of enlightened legislators, nowhere reveals the existence of a free people. It contains even fewer germs or monuments of liberty than the rudest of Barbarian laws; and the royal power, thus considered as in itself the centre of the State, appears as much more absolute in right, and much less limited in fact, than it was anywhere else. An examination of the local institutions of the Visigoths will lead us to the same result.

  Local institutions are the most real, perhaps the only real, institutions of Barbarian peoples. They do not possess sufficient vitality or enlargement of mind to originate or preserve general institutions. The material contiguity of individuals is an almost indispensable condition of the existence of society amongst them; it is therefore in the local institutions of the German peoples that we must seek the history of their political life. The forms of these institutions, and the modifications which they underwent, exercised far greater influence over their destiny, than the revolutions which occurred in central institutions, such as the Wittenagemot, the placita generalia, and the royal power.

  As you have already seen, the laws of most of the German peoples present three co-existent and conflicting systems: institutions of liberty; institutions of territorial patronage, which gave birth to feudalism; and monarchical institutions. The assembly of free men transacting the general business, and administering justice in every district; the landowners, exercising authority and jurisdiction throughout their domains; the king’s delegates, whether dukes, counts, or others, also possessing authority and jurisdiction: such are the three powers which have reciprocally contested the government of localities, and whose existence and vicissitudes are proved by the laws as well as by facts.

  The code of the Visigoths presents no trace whatever of the first of these systems, and scarcely any of the second; the third immensely predominates. There was no mallum, no placitum,4 no assemblies of free men in the provinces; no enactment ordains, or even refers to them. Scarcely does there exist any indication of the power of the patron over his client, of the landowner over the inhabitants of his domains. The law which I quoted in my last lecture, with reference to slaves, proves that, even in their case, the jurisdiction belonged to the royal judge of the district.

  The Forum judicum mentions a large number of local magistrates who were invested with the power of administering affairs and distributing justice.

  As there is a great variety in the means of remedying evils and terminating affairs, let the duke, count, vicar, conservator of the peace (pacis assertor), tinfadus,5millenarius, quingentenarius, centenarius, decanus, defensor, numerarius,6 and those who are sent to any place by order of the king, and those who are accepted as judges by the agreement of the litigant parties,—let all persons, in fine, of whatever order they may be, who are regularly invested with power to judge, and each person in such proportion as he has received power to judge, equally obtain from the law the name of judges, in order that, having received the right to judge, the duties as well as the advantages connected with that right may devolve upon them.

  It is difficult to determine with precision the different functions of all these magistrates, the hierarchy which existed among them, and the manner in which each of them received and exercised his power. Those who belonged to towns, as the defensor and the numerarius, were certainly elected by the clergy and inhabitants. Several others, as the millenarius and centenarius, seem to have been appointed by the dukes and counts of the provinces; but however this may be, nothing indicates that they received their authority in a popular and independent way; the opposite principle is formally laid down in these terms:

  No one shall be permitted to judge suits, except those who have received power from the prince to do so, or those who have been chosen as judges, by agreement of the litigants; the choice of these last shall be made in presence of three witnesses, and shall be attested by their mark or signature. If those who have received from the king power to judge, or those who exercise judicial power by commission from the counts or other royal judges, have charged, by writing, and according to the prescribed rules, other persons to fill their places, these last shall exercise, in the regulation and decision of affairs, a power similar to that of those by whom they were appointed.

  Thus, all the judges, all the local officers, received their power from the king or his delegates. Of the three systems of institutions, whose co-existence and conflict are manifested amongst most of the German peoples, the monarchical system is the only one with which we meet in the code of the Visigoths.

  In addition to the permanent judges, established in various localities, the kings had power to send special commissioners, either to restore order in disaffected provinces, or to give judgment in cases of particular importance. Criminal as well as civil affairs were submitted to the decision of the royal judges. All these judges received salaries from the king; but they also levied such enormous fees on the litigants, that the fees frequently amounted to one-third of the value of the object in litigation. A law was passed, limiting them to one-twentieth. Any who thought they had reason to complain of the decision of the judge might appeal, either to the duke or count of the province, or to the king himself. If the appeal was deemed well-founded, in addition to gaining the cause, the judge had to pay the appellant a sum equal to the value of the object in litigation. If the judgment was confirmed, the appellant had to pay the same amount to the judge, and if he could not do so, he was condemned publicly to receive a hundred lashes.

  Up to this point, nothing in the constitution of judicial authority exhibits any of those guarantees of liberty contained in the laws of the other Barbarian peoples. Nothing discloses any remnant or even remembrance of the old forms of judgment by the assembly of free men, per Rachimburgos, bonos homines, &c. Some passages of the Forum judicum, however, prove that the judges, at least, had assessors. The fourth council of Toledo formally prohibits the kings from administering justice alone; and several texts allude to auditores.7 Most learned men, and amongst others Heineccius, are of opinion that the assessors were not mere councillors; and that the judge was bound to take the opinions of a majority of them. I am inclined to think so too. Several texts, however, formally indicate that the judge was at liberty to take assessors or not, as he pleased.

  In the absence of those real guarantees of liberty, which originated elsewhere in the more or less effectual intervention of the freemen in the judgment of cases, the Forum judicum contains a multitude of precautions or laws against bad judges. In case of appeal to the count or king, if it were proved that the wrong decision of the judge was occasioned by malice, corruption, or prevarication of any kind, and if he were unable to pay the appellant the requisite sum, he was given to him as a slave, and condemned to receive besides fifty lashes in public. He was absolved from all penalty, however, if he proved, under oath, that his decision was pronounced in error or ignorance. The judges who neglected to prosecute the licentious were punished with a hundred lashes, and fined 300 solidi. The priests and bishops everywhere were enjoined to exercise a strict surveillance over the judges; and as the former then derived their chief strength from their superior knowledge and their protection of the weak, it is not unlikely that this guarantee was effective.

  But all this was defective, as you perceive, by the radical defect of the system of pure monarchy, which gives, as the only guarantee for the good conduct of the depositaries of power, the surveillance and authority of superior depositaries placed in the same position, and invested with the same functions.

  • . . . Sed quis custodiet ipsos
  • Custodes? . . .8

  The true guarantees of liberty can only reside in the concurrence of collateral and independent powers, none of which is absolute, and which mutually control and limit each other. Of this the Forum judicum affords us no trace, at any stage in the long hierarchy of the government.

  The local government of the Visigoths, then, presents still fewer institutions containing any active principle of liberty, any real force of control or resistance, than are found in their political regime, and at the centre of the State. Such is, at least, the unavoidable result to which we are led by an examination of the general and definitive code of this nation.

  This result has appeared so singular, so opposed to German customs, and to the state of things among other peoples of the same origin, that hardly any man of erudition has been willing to read it in the Forum judicum; and that those even who have failed to find in this code any proof of the existence of free institutions, and almost any trace of old Barbarian institutions, have striven to discover them elsewhere in Spain at this period. I shall say nothing of Abbé Mariana,9 who, in his Teoria de las Cortes, is determined to discover, in the councils of Toledo, not only the Spanish Cortes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but also all the principles and guarantees of liberty—all, in fine, that constitutes a national assembly and a representative government. I have already demonstrated the moral improbability and the historic unreality of the fact. Two more learned men than Abbé Mariana, and less inclined than he to find what they seek, have thought that they perceive, in the Forum judicum, proofs that the purely monarchical system, associated with the theocratic system, did not prevail so completely among the Visigoths; and that they can discover among them evidences of effective and extended public liberties: I refer to M. de Savigny, in his History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, and to a writer in the Edinburgh Review,* in an article on The Gothic Laws of Spain. I do not think that the researches of these two learned critics destroy the general results which I have just laid before you. They nevertheless contain many curious facts hitherto little noticed, and which throw much light on the study of the political institutions of the Visigothic monarchy. I shall, therefore, make you acquainted with them, and examine the consequences to which they lead.

  M. de Savigny, when investigating the traces of the perpetuation of the Roman law after the fall of the Empire, expresses himself in these terms, in reference to the Visigoths: “Upon the constitution of this monarchy,” he says,

  we possess sufficiently complete information in the Breviarium Aniani, who, about the year 506, that is, nearly a century after the foundation of the State, drew up the Roman law into a sort of code for the ancient inhabitants of the country. This code consists, as is well known, of two parts: one contains texts quoted word for word from the Roman law; the other an interpretation specially prepared on this occasion. With regard to the texts quoted from the Roman law, we cannot attach great importance to them, when we speak of the real state of things at the period of this publication; as they were drawn from sources much more ancient, expressions and even entire phrases were necessarily retained which had reference to various circumstances of a social state that had already passed away and fallen into desuetude; the interpretation was intended to explain this disagreement. But this interpretation, drawn up ad hoc, is, on the other hand, very trustworthy, especially when it does not implicitly follow either the words or the sense of the text, for then we can no longer regard it as a servile and thoughtless copy, especially in what relates to matters of public law. It is impossible to believe that real establishments, institutions set before the eyes of all, and with which all might be acquainted, could have been mentioned unintentionally and described without an object. Now, in this interpretation, the Roman praeses has entirely disappeared; but the municipal community, with its particular jurisdiction and its decurions taking part in the administration of justice, subsists in all its integrity: it even appears to possess more individual consistency and independence than it had enjoyed under the emperors.

  The general principle of the defensores, of their duties and the mode of choosing them, is explained in the interpretation, as well as in the text of the Theodosian code. According to the text, the governor of the province was not to be burdened with the judgment of petty offences; but it does not mention who was to judge them, whereas the interpretation expressly names the defensor. According to the text, the introduction of a civil suit might take place either before the governor, or before those who had the right to draw up the necessary acts; the interpretation adds the defensor....

  M. de Savigny then quotes a number of other examples to prove the maintenance, and even extension, of the functions of the defenders of the cities. “Other passages,” he continues,

  have reference to the curia, the decurions, and even to the citizens in general. The system of decurions, in general, is received in theBreviarium, with very few modifications, but merely great abridgement. To one passage of the text which casually mentions adoption, the interpretation adds, as a commentary, that it is the choice of an individual as a child, made in presence of the curia. The Visigothic jurisconsult, Gaius, says, that emancipation, which formerly took place before the president, was, at the period at which he wrote, performed before the curia. The text determines by whom tutors were appointed at Constantinople, namely, by the prefect of the city, ten senators, and the praetor, whose duty it was to watch over the interests of the pupils: the interpretation substitutes in their place the judge, with the chief men of the town. The text speaks of the necessity of a decree to authorize the alienation of the property of a minor: the interpretation adds, that this decree must be obtained from the judge or the curia. The text ordains that, at Constantinople, wills should be opened by the same office that received them: the interpretation substitutes the curia in its place. According to the text, donations should be registered either before the judge (the governor of the province), or before the municipal magistrate (the duumvir): the interpretation substitutes the curia for the municipal magistrate—which does not, in reality, alter the sense of the law, but which proves what is demonstrated by many other passages, that the general point of view was completely changed; anciently the chief municipal authority, and especially jurisdiction, was considered, according to Roman maxims, to be a personal right of the magistrate: according to the interpretation, it belonged less to the defensor himself, than to the curia taken collectively.... Under the emperors, the honorati, that is, those who had occupied high municipal dignities, had a seat of honour near the governor of the province when he administered justice; they were only expected to abstain from being present when their own causes were under consideration. The interpretation applies this to the curials; an application which is remarkable in two respects, first, because it proves that the curials were held in great consideration, and secondly, because this does not merely refer to the possession of a seat of honour by them, but to an actual participation in the jurisdiction of the municipal judge, that is, of the duumvir or defensor.. . . The text of the code ordains that, out of Rome, in order to pronounce sentence on a criminal accusation brought against a senator, five senators shall be chosen by lot: the interpretation makes this rule general, and requires five men to be chosen from the leading members of the same rank as the accused person, that is, decurions or plebeians, according to the condition of the accused person himself. Finally, the text ordained that every judge should receive his domesticus or cancellarius from the choice of the principal persons employed in his chancery: the interpretation retains the rule, merely substituting the burgesses of the city for the persons employed in the chancery.

  Such are the traces of municipal liberties which M. de Savigny discovers in the Breviarium Aniani, and which he considers as the common and permanent law of the Visigothic monarchy. They prove, in fact, not merely the maintenance, but also the extension and enfranchisment, of the rights and guarantees possessed by the inhabitants of the towns before the settlement of the Barbarians. But strong objections may be raised against the importance which the author attaches to these texts, and the extent of the conclusions which he deduces therefrom.

  I. The Breviarium Aniani does not contain the common and permanent law of the Spanish monarchy of the Visigoths. It only gives the special legislation of the Roman subjects of the Visigothic kings, when the kings resided at Toulouse, and had as yet only uncertain possessions in Spain; when the South of Gaul constituted the bulk, and almost the whole, of the kingdom. There is nothing to prove that all that is contained in the Breviarium Aniani, towards the end of the fifth century, for the benefit of the Romans of Southern Gaul, subsisted in Spain until the eighth century, for the benefit of the Goths and Romans, when merged into a single nation. The silence of the Forum judicum, which is the true code of the Spanish Visigoths, upon most of these arrangements, proves more against their maintenance than is demonstrated in their favour by the text of the Breviarium, which was drawn up in another place, at an earlier period, and for a portion only of the people.

  II. About a hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Breviarium, the Goths and Romans were united into a single nation. The collection of laws, successively augmented under the different reigns, and completed by Chindasuinth, became the sole code of the kingdom; all other laws were abolished, and the Breviarium was necessarily included in this abolition. The text of the law of Recesuinth is formal:

  That absolutely none of the men of our realm be permitted to lay before the judge, for the decision of any affair, any other collection of laws than that which has just been published, and according to the order in which the laws are unscribed therein; and this, under penalty of a fine of thirty pounds of gold to our treasury. Any judge who should hesitate to decline any other book that might be presented to him as suited to regulate his decision, will be punished by the same fine.

  M. de Savigny foresaw this objection; and without absolutely dissembling it he has tried to weaken it by not quoting the text of the law of Recesuinth, and by speaking only of the attempts made by the Visigothic kings, that Spain should contain only a single nation, and be governed by a single code. These evasions are in striking contrast with his usual candour. He then makes use of the existence of the defensores, proof of which is found in the Forum judicum, to assume the maintenance of all the prerogatives and liberties attributed to them by the Breviarium. This conclusion is evidently hasty and excessive.

  I do not dispute that the towns of Spain were able to retain, or indeed that they did necessarily retain, some institutions, some guarantees of municipal liberty. I should not infer their absolute disappearance from the silence of the Forum judicum. The despotism of the Barbarian kings, however careful it may have been to gather the heritage of Roman maxims, was neither as wise nor as circumstantial as that of the emperors. It allowed the curiae and their magistrates to continue in existence, and these petty local powers assuredly had more reality and independence under its rule than they had possessed under the Empire. The clergy, principally dwelling in the towns, and bound by strong ties to the Roman race, was itself interested in protecting them, and the more so, because it naturally placed itself at the head of the municipalities. Thus much is certain, that the remnants of institutions of surety and liberty which existed there, occupy no place in the written laws, although these laws are much more detailed than those of other Barbarian peoples, and embrace the whole civil order. They could not, therefore, be considered as forming a part of the general constitution of the kingdom; they neither modified its political character, nor changed the results of the principles that prevailed therein.

  If M. de Savigny has looked for the institutions of the Visigoths in an epoch anterior to the definitive establishment of their true monarchy, and in a collection of laws abolished by the Forum judicum, the author of the dissertation contained in the Edinburgh Review has addressed his inquiries to times and documents posterior by four or five centuries to the destruction of the kingdom of the Visigoths by the Arabs; and by transporting the consequences which he has obtained therefrom into the epoch which occupies our attention, he has fallen into an error still less supported by facts than was that of M. de Savigny. His researches and inferences are the following:

  It must not be supposed that the whole body of the law of the Visigoths appears in the twelve books of their code. They had their common or traditionary law, still existing in unwritten usages and customs, as well as their written law; and we are supported by analogy in asserting that this common law often spoke, when the statute law was silent. It outlived the monarchy; and we now collect it from the Fueros or ancient customs of Castile and Leon. The customs in question are preserved in the charters of the towns, which gave bye-laws to the inhabitants, confirming the unwritten common law of the country, sometimes with greater or lesser modifications in the detail, but agreeing in general principles. We equally discover them in the acts of Cortes, which, to borrow the expression of Sir Edward Coke, are often “affirmances of the common law.” The traditionary Fueros of Castile also formed the basis of the Fuero Viejo de Castilla, which received its last revision under Peter the Third. And even Alonso the Wise, though he planned the subversion of the ancient jurisprudence of his kingdom, admitted into the Partidas such of those Fueros de España as relate to the tenures of land, and to military service. Consisting of ancient usages, neither re fined by the learning of the councils nor restrained by the power of the kings, the Fueros of Castile and Leon bear a nearer affinity to the jurisprudence of the Teutonic nations than the written code. The water ordeal is noticed only once, in a law newly amended by Flavius Egica. But ordeal by compurgation, the most ancient form of trial by jury, and the battle ordeal, do not appear at all. Neither do we find any notice of the custom of returning military leaders by the verdict of a jury. All these customs, however, were Fueros of Spain in the Middle Ages. Nor could they possibly have then existed, had they not been preserved by immemorial usage and tradition.

  The author then passes these ancient usages in review. The first to which he refers is the appointment of military leaders by a jury. He traces this custom back to the forests of Germany: and then shows how it could not fail to succumb universally beneath the establishment of the feudal system, and in consequence of the hierarchical subordination of persons and lands. He discovers traces of this in the nomination, by the people, of the Anglo-Saxonheretochs10 and constables,11 who were at first military officers; and also in the election of the kings of Norway by the verdicts of twelve of the principal men of each province. He then returns to Spain, “where,” he says,

  we shall find our old Gothic juries employed in electing the chief officers of the army and navy of the Castilians, the Adalid, the Almocaden, the Alfaqueque, and the Comitre. Who was to be the Adalid? The question must be answered in the words of the wise king Alonso. It is said by the ancients that “the Adalid should be endowed with four gifts—the first is wisdom, the second is heart, the third is good common sense, and the fourth is loyalty; and when a king or any other great lord wishes to make an Adalid, he must call unto himself twelve of the wisest Adalides that can be found, and these must swear that they will truly say, if he whom they wish to choose to be an Adalid hath the four gifts of which we have spoken, and if they answer yea, then they are to make him an Adalid.”

  Here we have clearly an inquest by twelve men giving their verdict upon oath. If it happened that twelve Adalides could not be found, then a kind of tales de circumstantibus12 was added to this special jury of Adalides. The king or lord was to make up the full number of twelve with other men well approved in war and deeds of arms, and their verdict was as good as if they had been all Adalides. And he who dared to act as an Adalid without being fully elected, was to suffer death. “It was advised in ancient times,” says Alonso, “that they were to have the qualities before mentioned, because it was necessary that they should possess them, in order to be able to guide the troops and armies in time of war, and therefore they were called Adalides, which is equivalent to guides (que quiere tanto decir como guiadores).”

  The author is, therefore, of opinion that this word comes from adal, adel, noble, and leid, lead, leiten, to guide or conduct. The Adalid was the guide or chief of the Almogavars, or cavalry soldiers. The Adalid mayor was commander-in-chief of all the Almogavars, or Castilian cavalry.

  After his election by this species of jury, the Adalid was thus solemnly admitted to his office.

  The king gave him rich garments, and a sword and a horse, and arms of wood and iron, according to the customs of the country. By a rico hombre, a lord of knights, the sword was to be girt, and then a shield was placed upon the ground, the future Adalid stepped upon it, and the king drew the sword out of its scabbard, and put it naked in his hand. And now as many of the twelve Adalids as can assemble round the shield, grasp its edge, and lift him up as high as they may: they turn his face towards the east.—“In the name of God,” exclaims the Adalid, “I defy all the enemies of the faith, and of my lord the king, and of his land.” And, thus speaking, he lifted up his arm, and struck a stroke downward, and he then struck another stroke across, thus describing in the air the sweet and holy sign of redemption, and he repeated this challenge four times towards each of the quarters of the world. Then the Adalid sheathed his sword, and the king placed a pennon in his hand, saying, “I grant unto thee that henceforward thou art to be an Adalid. ” An Adalid might have risen to command from the lowest rank in the Castilian army. He might have been a peon or foot-soldier, but he became the fellow and companion of the hereditary nobles, the lords of vassals, and the ricos hombres.

  In this ceremony, the author perceives a repetition of the forms used at the election of kings among the Germans, or at least at the choice of military leaders; duces ex virtute sumunt.13

  I would by no means affirm that there does not exist, in this mode of choosing captains, in the concurrence of these twelve jurymen, and even in the number twelve itself, any remnant of old Germanic customs. This much is evident, that what has just been described was much rather a sort of chivalric ceremony in connection with the elevation of a man to a superior rank, than the election of a barbaric chief; all the forms, all the details of the elevation of an Adalid, remind us much more of chivalric usage than of Germanic custom; and it is a strange anachronism to suppose that all this took place, five hundred years before, among the Visigoths, notwithstanding that no mention is made of it in any historic monument, and, what is still more conclusive, notwithstanding that the general state of manners at that time gives no hint of anything of the kind. It is much more probable that these customs originated among the Goths during their struggle against the Arabs, in the mountains of Northern Spain, and in consequence of the new direction of mingled feudalism and liberty, which was imparted to their manners by this new position.

  The Almocadene or captain of foot soldiers, the Alfaqueque or officer employed to treat for the ransom of captives from the Moors, and the Comitre or captain of a ship, were appointed in a similar manner, and by the recommendation of a jury composed, not of members of the class to which the candidate belonged, but to members of the class to which he aspired. This circumstance alone settles the question; for it is a result of chivalric, and not of Barbarian manners; it reminds us of the squire who was dubbed knight by knights, and not of the warrior who was chosen or judged by his peers.

  I shall not follow the author in his researches on ordeal by boiling water and by fire, or upon trial by combat. Although we meet with traces of these customs in the old monuments of some Barbarian legislations, they were not the common law of modern peoples, during the first epoch of their establishment on the Roman territory. It was at a later period, and by the influence either of the corruption of religious ideas by superstition, or of the military organization of the feudal system, that they became developed, recognized, and formed into a veritable jurisprudence. The general facts of Europe do not, therefore, authorize us to conclude that, because they existed among the Spaniards in the fourteenth century, they also existed among the Visigoths in the seventh century. The almost absolute silence of the historic monuments of the first epoch, here retains all its authority.

  The facts relative to compurgation,14 by the oath of a certain number of witnesses, are more important and more curious. “Compurgation,” says our author, “is directed in express terms in all the Teutonic laws; but it does not appear to have been admissible in trials conducted according to the forms prescribed by the Fuero juzgo. Yet afterwards, this ordeal was widely spread as afuero, both in civil and criminal trials. Though discountenanced by the legislature, it was retained in practice; and a forcible illustration is thus given of the stubbornness with which the Goths adhered to their usages and customs.Trial by jury, through it, in its germ was felt to be a benefit.”

  As an ancient and general usage of Castile, the trial is sanctioned in the Fuero Viejo. As a local custom or bye-law of the cities of Castile and Leon and their dependencies, it was very frequently established, or rather declared, by the charters granted by their founders.

  Three thousand sueldos, according to the Fuero Viejo, were paid for dishonouring the palace of the king, or spoiling his castle; and five hundred sueldos was the price of the head of the merino, or the composition for scandalizing him; and every man who wished to save himself from the payment of these mulcts, was to defend himself by the oath of twelve men, for such was the usage of Castile in the old time. When accused of the death of another fijo d’algo, the suspected noble defended himself by the oath of eleven other fijos d’algo, himself the twelfth, and, as true knights, they were all sworn, upon the Gospel Book, with their spurs upon their heels. There were two insults only which gave a Dueña, or a squire, the right of complaining that a fijo d’algo, had scandalized them, viz., a blow or a wound, or the robbery of their mules or garments. Within three days, the party so injured by a caitiff knight was obliged to complain of the offence, and to disclose the injury to the fijos d’algo of the town, the labradores, and to the inmates of the fijos d’algo, if there were any, and to cause the town-bell to be rung, saying, “such a one hath thus dishonoured me.” These formalities having been observed, the fijo d’algo was bound to answer the complaint; reparation was made if he confessed it, by forfeiting five hundred sueldos, the price of his own head; but if he denied it, he was to clear himself by the oath of eleven other fijos d’algo, himself the twelfth. But a labrador accused of injuring a fijo d’algo was not to be admitted to defend himself by his peers; and he was unfairly compelled to swear with eleven fijos d’algo, himself the twelfth.

  These customs are taken from the general code. In peculiar districts, compurgation was so much in vogue, that compurgatrixes were allowed to female culprits. At Anguas, as well as in other towns, a woman charged with theft could defend herself by the oaths of a jury of other women. More whimsical was the Fuero of Cuenca, which is passing strange, both for the spirit of the law and the terms in which it is expressed. If perchance any husband suspected that his wife had planted horns upon his head, although he was not able to prove the fact by evidence, the wife was to justify herself by swearing to her chastity, with twelve good wives of the neighbourhood; and if they pronounced her to be pure, her husband was obliged to be persuaded that she was so.

  The customs of St. Sebastien in Guipuscoa, allowed an odd kind of proceeding, resembling the assessment of damages by the verdict of a jury. The ravisher was to pay the price of virginity, or he was to marry the object of his ungovernable passion; which punishment, as the charter wisely observes, “is fully equal to a fine.” But if she, who had been a maid, was unworthy of becoming his wife, he was to provide her with such a husband as she might have reasonably expected to have obtained previous to her mishap, “according to the estimation of the alcalde, and of twelve good men of St. Sebastien.”

  The fullest directions concerning the use of the ordeal are contained in the charter of Molina. Don Molrique de Lara incorporated the town of Molina, the seigniory of the noble house of Lara, in the year 1152. His charter may be quoted as the most valuable record concerning the ancient municipal jurisprudence of Castile which has yet been published, as it displays the entire constitution and government of a Castilian town. * * * * Fines, according to the old Gothic law, were enacted at Molina for wounds and maims. The accuser was to support his charge by three “vecinos ” or burghers of the town, if the offence was committed within its walls. Two vecinos sufficed if without. And, in default of full proof, the culprit either swore with twelve vecinos, or fought with the accuser; but the latter had the choice of the ordeal. * * * * When a murder had been committed, if one of those engaged in the fray took the guilt on his own head, saying, “I killed him, ” the others were “to save themselves with twelve true burghers,”—los otros salvense con doce vecinos derecheros. It might happen, that none would confess the crime; and as all were then equally liable to suspicion, the relations of the dead man were at liberty to select any one as the murderer, “just as they thought fit”; after which the supposed murderer named eleven relations of the slain, and these, together with the accuser, swore to his being guilty or not guilty. Unanimity was required; and if one or two would not swear, that is to say, if they could not agree with the majority, each one who was so dissentient swore with twelve, that neither he, nor any one for his use, had received any bribe; then he was discharged. But if the defendant did not “fall” by the withdrawing of his juror, he was at liberty to name another. This proceeding is remarkable; a new aspect is given to the ordeal by calling in the compurgators to swear with the accuser instead of the accused; and in this form it is, perhaps, more closely assimilated to a jury-trial. It may be observed, that a practice once prevailed in England of withdrawing the dissentient jurors, and replacing them by others, till an unanimous verdict was obtained.

  Such are the facts which the author of these researches has collected on the existence of ancient Germanic customs, or analogous usages, in the towns of Castile and Leon, dating from the twelfth century. He unhesitatingly concludes therefrom that these same customs existed in the sixth and seventh centuries among the Spanish Visigoths, and formed a part of their institutions.

  It is inconvenient to prove that facts are not true, for it devolves on him who affirms them to prove that they are so; and, in such a case as this, when we speak of epochs separated by five or six centuries, and by such a revolution as the dispossession of a people and a foreign conquest, inductions are not sufficient. The Forum judicum is absolutely silent upon the appointment of military leaders, and upon compurgation by juries; nay, more, this latter institution is incompatible with the arrangements of this code in reference to judges and the administration of justice. No other contemporary authority contradicts the Forum judicum. Must we, upon the authority of facts of much more recent date, and which refer to an entirely different state of civilization, refuse to believe proofs so direct, and testimonies so positive?

  I am aware of all that may be said about the disorders of these times, the continual gaps in the laws, and the disposition of legislators to omit precisely those usages which were most simple and universal, as though they had no need to be consecrated or even indicated by formal enactment. It is, in fact, very possible that the practice of compurgation by juries was not completely unknown to the Visigoths; it recurs in all Germanic customs, and it may not have disappeared either entirely or all at once, even after the introduction of a code derived principally from the Roman laws. But it is impossible to believe, in spite of this code, that it continued to be the common law, the fundamental institution, the veritable judicial system of the nation.

  It is more easy to explain, with likelihood, the existence of these practices among the Spanish Goths of the twelfth century, than to justify, without proofs, or rather in opposition to all evidence, the arbitrary supposition of their prevalence among the Visigoths of the seventh. Such institutions have in themselves something of spontaneity; they correspond to a certain degree of civilization, to a certain state of social institutions; we meet with them under forms more or less similar, but fundamentally analogous, not only among all the Germanic peoples, but also among nearly all those barbaric peoples which, scarcely issued from a nomadic life, begin to establish themselves on a new territory, after they have conquered it. Now, the destruction of the monarchy of the Visigoths by the Arabs suspended the course of the institutions which it had received two centuries before, broke off the councils of Toledo, crushed or greatly diminished the predominance of the clergy, and, in fine, put a stop to the civilization which had commenced, and gave to affairs an entirely new direction. Scattered among the mountains, frequently wandering, separated into various bands, those of the Goths who did not submit to the conquerors, returned, so to speak, toward the life which their ancestors led in the forests of Germany. Roman institutions, Roman maxims, all that collection of laws and ideas which they had received from the clergy, and which had prevailed over their own habits, disappeared almost necessarily in this shock, or at least were retained only by those Goths who remained under the dominion of the Mussulmans. The companions of Pelagius, up to a certain point, became Germans once more, from sheer necessity. It was after this involuntary return to their primitive condition, and, by consequence, to their ancient institutions, that they resumed the offensive against the Arabs, and reconquered Spain by degrees, bringing back with them those political and judicial customs, usages, and practices, which they had partially regained. Free institutions, moreover, could not fail to regain vitality at this period; for they alone can supply strength in times of danger or misfortune. It was not in the power of the customs of the officium palatinum, and of the maxims of the councils of Toledo, to restore the Goths to their subjugated country, and reinstate the descendants of Chindasuinth upon the throne of their fathers. The participation of the people in public affairs, the sternness of Barbarian manners, and the energy of irregular liberty, could alone produce such effects. There is every reason to believe that the institutions of Spain, after the re-establishment of the kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Arragon, &c, were new institutions, and the result of the new position of the Goths, much more than the legacy of the ancient Visigoths. We find proofs of this in the general Cortes of the kingdom, in the constitutions and liberties of the towns, in the whole political order of the State, which has no connection whatever with the old monarchy, and follows much more naturally as a result of the condition and necessities of new monarchies. The political system established by the councils of Toledo and theForum judicum could not have taken deep root; it fell before necessities which it was unable to meet. The Forum judicum itself would perhaps have completely succumbed, had it not continued to be the law of those Goths who had submitted to the yoke of the Moors; it moreover regulated civil order, which is always more firmly fixed, and less influenced by revolutions. It therefore continued, in this respect, to be the general law of Spain; whilst political order assumed a new form and was regulated by other institutions.

  The Forum judicum and contemporary authorities are the only true source at which we can study the political institutions of the ancient Visigoths; a source which is doubtless incomplete, and which does not inform us of all that existed; a source which, probably even, especially neglected to gather up what still remained of Germanic manners and habits, but which it is impossible to repudiate in order to admit facts and general institutions which are directly contrary to it. The consequences which I have deduced from these original and contemporary authorities, therefore, still subsist, and determine the true political system of the monarchy of the Visigoths. The imperial government, and ecclesiastical theories, were its constituent elements. These elements prevailed over Germanic customs. They were doubtless modified in order that they might be adapted to a Barbarian people; but, by modification, they gained dominion, and became the general form, the fundamental law, of the State. If the Spanish Goths afterwards entered upon a course more analogous to that pursued by other modern nations of the same origin, it is in the invasion of the Arabs, in the second conquest of Spain by the re-Germanized Goths, and in the effects of this great revolution, but not in the institutions of the monarchy of the Visigoths, that we may discern the causes of this procedure.

  end of part 1

  PART 2

  ESSAYS OF REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND, FROM THE CONQUEST TILL THE REIGN OF THE TUDORS

  LECTURE 1

  Subject of the course: the history of the origin and establishment of representative government in Europe. ~ Different aspects under which history is considered at various epochs. ~ Poetic history; philosophic history; political history. ~ Disposition of our time to consider history under these various aspects. ~ Fundamental principle and essential characteristics of representative government. ~ Existence of this principle and these characteristics in England at all times.

  I think it necessary to remind you, gentlemen, of the plan which I adopted last year with regard to our study of the political institutions of Europe. The essential object of that plan was to give some unity and compactness to this vast history. And this is not an arbitrary and self-chosen object. In the development of our continent, all its peoples and all its governments are connected together; in spite of all struggles and separations, there is really some unity and compactness in European civilization. This unity, which has been revealing itself from day to day, is now evident; never have geographical limits possessed less sway than in our times; never has such a community of ideas, feelings, aspirations, and efforts united, in spite of territorial demarcations, so great a mass of men. That which is now revealed has been labouring for more than twelve centuries to manifest itself; this external and apparent community has not always existed; but such has always been, at bottom, the unity of European civilization, that it is impossible thoroughly to understand the history of any of the great modern peoples without considering the history of Europe as a whole, and contemplating the course pursued by humanity in general. It is a vast drama in which every people has its part to perform, and with the general events of which we must be acquainted in order to understand the particular scenes connected therewith.

  I have divided the history of the political institutions of Europe into four great epochs, which are distinguished from each other by essentially different characteristics. The first is the barbarian epoch; a time of conflict and confusion, in which no society could be established, no institution be founded and become regularly prevalent in any part of Europe; this epoch extends from the fifth to the tenth century. The second is the feudal epoch, and extends from thetenth to the fourteenth century. The third is the epoch of efforts towards constitutional monarchy; feudalism declines, the populations become free, and royalty employs them to extend and augment its power; this epoch embraces the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. In the fourth period, on the Continent, all efforts towards a representative system have failed or almost entirely disappeared; pure monarchy prevails. England alone decidedly obtains a constitutional government. This epoch lasts from the sixteenth century to the French Revolution.

  These epochs were not determined by an arbitrary choice,—their division results from the general facts which characterize them. They will not all form the subject of this course of lectures. I wish to study the political institutions of Europe with you, and representative government is the centre towards which all our studies tend. Where I perceive no trace of the representative system, and no direct effort to produce it, I turn aside, and transfer my attention to some other quarter. Nor shall I merely limit our studies in reference to epochs only; I shall limit them also in respect to places. Last year, in my lectures on the first epoch, I did not follow the progress of political institutions in the whole of Europe, but confined my observations to France, Spain, and England. We have now to study the third epoch; but the States-General of France and the Cortes of Spain were only unfruitful attempts at representative government. I shall therefore postpone our study of them, and devote this year’s course to the attentive examination of the origin of representative government in England, the only country in which it received uninterrupted and successful development. This study is particularly necessary to us at the present day, and we are ourselves well-disposed to enter upon it with an earnest desire to reap advantage from it.

  According to their political state, and in the degree of their civilization, do the peoples consider history under various aspects, and look to it for various kinds of interest. In the early ages of society, whilst all is new and attractive to the youthful imagination of man, he demands poetical interest; the memories of the past form the groundwork of brilliant and simple narratives, fitted to charm an eager and easily satis fied curiosity. If, in such a community, where social existence is in full vigour, and the human mind is in a state of excitement, Herodotus reads to the Greeks assembled at Olympia his patriotic narratives, and the discoveries of his voyages, the Greeks delight in them as in songs of Homer. If civilization is but little advanced—if men live more isolated—if “country,” in the concrete, at least, exists but slightly for them—we find simple chronicles intermingled with fables and legends, but always marked with that naïf and poetical character which, in such a condition of existence, the human mind requires in all things. Such are the European chronicles from the tenth to the fifteenth century. If, at a later period, civilization becomes developed in a country without the coeval establishment of liberty, without an energetic and extensive political existence, when the period of enlightenment, of wealth, and of leisure, does arrive, men look for philosophical interest in history; it no longer belongs to the field of poetry; it loses its simplicity; it no longer wears its former real and living physiognomy; individual characters take up less space, and no longer appear under living forms; the mention of names becomes more rare; the narrative of events, and the description of men, are more its pretext than its subject; all becomes generalized; readers demand a summary of the development of civilization, a sort of theory of the peoples and of events; history becomes a series of dissertations on the progress of the human race, and the historian seems only to call up the skeleton of the past, in order to hang upon it general ideas and philosophic reflections. This occurred in the last century; the English historians of that period, Robertson, Gibbon, and Hume, have represented history under that aspect; and most of the German writers still follow the same system. The philosophy of history predominates; history, properly so called, is not to be found in them.

  But if advanced civilization and a great development of the human intellect coincide, in a nation, with an animated and keen political existence; if the struggle for liberty, by exciting the mind, provoke energy of character; if the activity of public life be added to the general claims of thought, history appears in another light; it becomes, so to speak, practical. No longer is it required to charm easily excited imaginations by its narratives, nor to satisfy by its meditations active intellects debarred from exercising themselves upon aught but generalities. But men expect from it experience analogous to the wants they feel, to the life they live; they desire to understand the real nature and hidden springs of institutions; to enter into the movements of parties, to follow them in their combinations, to study the secret of the influence of the masses, and of the action of individuals; men and things must resuscitate before them, no longer merely as an interest or diversion, but as a revelation of how rights, liberties, and power are to be acquired, exercised, and defended; how to combine opinions, interests, passions, the necessities of circumstances, all the elements of active political life. That is what history becomes for free nations; it is from that point of view that Thucydides wrote the history of the Peloponnesian war, Lord Clarendon and Bishop Burnet that of the English Revolution.

  Generally, and by the very nature of things, it is in regular order, and at distant intervals, that history assumes one or other of these various kinds of interest in the eyes of the people. A taste for simple narratives, a liking for philosophic generalizations, and a craving for political instruction, almost always belong to very different times and degrees of civilization.

  By a rare concurrence of circumstances, all these tastes and acquirements seem to unite at the present day; and history is now susceptible amongst us of all these kinds of interest. If it narrate to us with truth and simplicity the first attempts at social life, the manners of infant nations; that singular state of society in which ideas are few in number but keen, and wants are energetic although unvaried, in which all the pretensions of barbarian force struggle against all the habits of wild liberty, it will find us capable of understanding such a recital, and somewhat disposed to be charmed therewith. Fifty years ago, a faithful picture of this age in the life of peoples would have appeared only coarse and revolving; its interesting and poetical character would have been neither relished nor understood; conventionalisms were then turned into habits, and factitious manners held sway over the whole of society; Homer himself, in an age so destitute of simplicity and naturalness, was admired on hearsay only; and if no one dared to call in question his title to glory, he was pitied for having been obliged to shed the lustre of his genius upon an epoch of barbarism and ignorance. Prodigious events have since renewed the state of society, broken up old forms, conventional habits, and factitious manners; simple ideas and natural feelings have resumed their empire; a kind of rejuvenescence has taken place in the minds of men, and they have become capable of understanding man at every degree of civilization, and of taking pleasure in the simple and poetic narratives of infant society. In our days it has been felt that barbarian times also deserved, in some respects, to be called heroic times; in our days, mankind has discovered the faculty, as well as the necessity, of obtaining a true knowledge of the institutions, ideas, and manners of peoples, on their entrance into social life. Thus this section of history has regained an interest which it had ceased to possess; it is no longer regarded as the patrimony of the erudite; it has been seized upon by novelists themselves, and the public have taken delight in following their footsteps.

  At the same time, the need of broad philosophical views of the course of human affairs and the progress of society, has gained strength instead of becoming extinguished; we have not ceased to look to facts for something more than mere narratives; we still expect them to be summed up in general ideas, and to furnish us with those great results which throw light on the sciences of legislation and political economy, and on the vast study of the destiny of the human race. Far, then, from being less inclined to consider history under a philosophic point of view, it seems to have acquired a wider interest in this respect. More than ever, we feel the necessity of tracing events back to their primitive causes, of reducing them to their simplest expression, of penetrating into their remotest effects; and if old chronicles have regained their charm in our eyes, the great combinations of historic philosophy still constitute a pressing necessity of our minds.

  Finally, our birth into public life, the institutions that we possess and that we will not lose, that aurora of liberty which, though it arose in the midst of tempests, is not destined to perish therein, the past which we leave behind us, the present with which we are busied, the future which awaits us, infine, our entire position—all impart to history, considered under the political point of view, the most imperious interest. Before our time, the movement of public life, the game of parties, the war of factions, the struggles of assemblies, all the agitations and developments of power and liberty, were things which men had heard of but had not seen, which they had read of in books but which were not actually existing around the reader. These things have occurred, and are now occurring under our very eyes; every consideration leads us to study them, every circumstance aids us to comprehend them. And not to us alone has political life been restored: it has returned into history, hitherto cold and vague to the minds of those who had not been struck by the real visions of the scenes which it relates. And while regaining our comprehension of history, we have also become aware of the counsels and the lessons which it can furnish us; its utility no longer consists, as formerly, in a general idea, a sort of moral and literary dogma professed by writers rather than adopted and practised by the public. Now, a more or less thorough acquaintance with history, and especially with that of free peoples, is not merely an accomplishment of cultivated minds; it is a necessity to every citizen who feels desirous to take part in the affairs of his country, or merely to appreciate them correctly. And thus this great study now presents itself to us with all the kinds of interest that it is able to offer, because we have in us ability to consider it under all its aspects, and to seek and to find all that it contains.1

  Such are the motives which induce me to select the history of the political institutions of England as the subject of this course of lectures. Here, in effect, history considered under its three different aspects, presents itself with the greatest simplicity and richness. Nowhere have the primitive manners of modern peoples been preserved for a longer period, or exercised so decisive an influence upon the institutions of a country. Nowhere do great philosophical considerations spring with greater abundance from the contemplation of events and men. Here, infine, representative government, the special object of our study, developed itself without interruption, received into its bosom and fertilized by its alliance the religious movement imparted to Europe in the sixteenth century, and thus became the starting point of the political reformation which is now beginning on the Continent.

  It is by no means my intention to relate to you the history of England. I intend merely to consider it under its political point of view; and even under this point of view, we shall not study all the institutions of the kingdom. Representative government is our theme; and we shall therefore follow the history of the Parliament step by step. We shall only refer to judicial, administrative, and municipal institutions in so far as they are connected with representative government, and have contributed either to form it, or to determine its character.

  Last year, before entering upon our examination of facts, I attempted to define with precision what we ought to understand by representative government. Before seeking for its existence, I desired to know by what signs we might discern its presence. Now that we are about to study the history of the only representative government which, until our days, has existed with full vitality in Europe, I think it well to recapitulate some of these ideas.

  I have said that I had no very high opinion of the division of governments by publicists, into monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic; and that, in my opinion, it was by their essential principle, by their general and internal idea, that governments were characterized and distinguished. The most general idea that we can seek out in a government is its theory of sovereignty, that is, the manner in which it conceives, places, and attributes the right of giving law and carrying it into execution in society.

  There are two great theories of sovereignty. One seeks for it and places it in some one of the real forces which exist upon the earth, no matter whether it be the people, the monarch, or the chief men of the people. The other maintains that sovereignty as a right can exist nowhere upon earth, and ought to be attributed to no power, for no earthly power can fully know and constantly desire truth, reason, and justice—the only sources of sovereignty as a right, and which ought also to be the rule of sovereignty in fact. The first theory of sovereignty founds absolute power, whatever may be the form of the government. The second combats absolute power in all its forms, and recognises its legitimacy in no case. It is not true to say that of these two theories, one or the other reigns exclusively in the various governments of the world. These two theories commingle in a certain measure; for nothing is completely destitute of truth or perfectly free from error. Nevertheless, one or the other always dominates in every form of government, and may be considered as its principle.

  The true theory of sovereignty, that is, the radical illegitimacy of all absolute power, whatever may be its name and place, is the principle of representative government.

  In fact, in representative government, absolute power, sovereignty as a right, inhere in none of the powers which concur to form the government: they must agree to make the law; and even when they have agreed, instead of accepting for ever the absolute power which actually results from their agreement, the representative system subjects this power to the variableness of election. And the electoral power itself is not absolute, for it is confined to the choice of the men who shall have a share in the government.

  It is, moreover, the character of that system, which nowhere admits the legitimacy of absolute power, to compel the whole body of citizens incessantly, and on every occasion, to seek after reason, justice, and truth, which should ever regulate actual power. The representative system does this, 1. by discussion, which compels existing powers to seek after truth in common; 2. by publicity, which places these powers when occupied in this search, under the eyes of the citizens; and 3. by the liberty of the press, which stimulates the citizens themselves to seek after truth, and to tell it to power.

  Finally, the necessary consequence of the true theory of sovereignty is, that all actual power is responsible. If, in fact, no actual power possesses sovereignty as a right, they are all obliged to prove that they have sought after truth, and have taken it for their rule; and they must legitimize their title by their acts, under penalty of being taxed with illegitimacy. The responsibility of power is, in fact, inherent in the representative system; it is the only system which makes it one of its fundamental conditions.

  After having recognised the principle of representative government, we investigated its external characteristics, that is to say, the forms which necessarily accompany the principle, and by which alone it can manifest its existence. These forms we reduced to three: 1. division of powers; 2. election; and 3. publicity. It is not difficult to convince ourselves that these characteristics necessarily flow from the principle of representative government. Indeed, 1. all sole power in fact soon becomes absolute in right. It is therefore necessary that all power in fact should be conscious of dependence. “All unity,” says Pascal, “that is not multitude, is tyranny.” Hence results the necessity for two Houses of Parliament. If there be only one, the executive power either suppresses it, or falls into so subaltern a condition that there would soon remain only the absolute power of the single House of Parliament. 2. Unless election occurred frequently to place power in new hands, that power which derived its right from itself would soon become absolute in right; this is the tendency of all aristocracies. 3. Publicity, which connects power with society, is the best guarantee against the usurpation of sovereignty as a right by the actual power.

  Representative government can neither be established nor developed without assuming, sooner or later, these three characteristics; they are the natural consequences of its principle; but they do not necessarily co-exist, and representative government may exist without their union.

  This was the case in England. It is impossible not to enquire why representative government prevailed in that country, and not in the other States of the Continent. For, indeed, the Barbarians who settled in Great Britain had the same origin and the same primitive manners as those who, after the fall of the Roman Empire, overran Europe; and it was not in the midst of very different circumstances that they consolidated their dominion in that country.

  From the fifth to the twelfth century, we find no more traces of true representative government in England than upon the Continent; its institutions were analogous to those of the other European nations; and we behold in every land the conflict of the three systems of free, feudal, and monarchical institutions.

  We cannot fully resolve this question beforehand, and in a general manner. We shall answer it gradually, as we advance in the examination of facts. We shall see by what successive and varied causes political institutions took a different course in England to that which they pursued on the Continent. We may, however, indicate at once the great fact which, from a very early period, determined the character and direction of British institutions.

  The first of the great external characteristics of representative government, division of power, is met with in every age, in the government of England. Never was the government concentrated in the hands of the king alone; under the name of the Wittenagemot, of the Council or Assembly of the Barons, and after the reign of Henry III., of the Parliament, a more or less numerous and influential assembly, composed in a particular manner, was always associated with the sovereignty. For a long period, this assembly somewhat subserved despotism, and sometimes substituted civil war and anarchy in the place of despotism; but it always interfered in the central government. An independent council, which derived its strength from the individual power of its members, was always adjoined to the royal authority. The English monarchy has always been the government of the king in council, and the king’s council was frequently his adversary. The great council of the king became the Parliament.

  This is the only one of the essential characteristics of the system of representative government, which the government of England presents, until the fourteenth century. During the course of this epoch, the division of power, far from efficiently repressing despotism, served only to render it more changeful and more dangerous. The council of barons was no more capable than the king himself, of comprehending and establishing a stable political order and true liberty; these two forces were incessantly in conflict, and their conflict was war, that is to say, the devastation of the country, and the oppression of the mass of the inhabitants. But from this there resulted, in process of time, two decisive facts, from which liberty took its origin; they were these:

  1. From the very fact that power was divided, it followed that absolute power, sovereignty as a right, was never attributed to the king, nor supposed to be in itself legitimate. Now, this is the very principle of representative government; but this principle was far from being understood, or even suspected, philosophically speaking. It was incessantly stifled by force, or else it was lost in the confusion of the ideas of the time regarding divine right, the origin of power, and so forth; but it existed in the depths of the public mind, and became by slow degrees a fundamental maxim. We find this principle formally expressed in the writings of Bracton, Lord Chief Justice under Henry III., and of Fortescue, who held the same office under Henry VI. “The king,” says Bracton, “should be subject to no man, but only to God and to the law, for the law makes him king; he can do nothing upon earth but that which, by law, he may do; and that which is said in the Pandects, that that which pleases the king becomes law, is no objection; for we see by the context, that these words do not mean the pure and simple will of the prince, but that which has been determined by the advice of his councils, the king giving the sanction of his authority to their deliberations upon the subject.”

  “The English monarchy,” says Fortescue, “ non solum est regalis, sed legalis et politica potestas,” 2 and he frequently develops this idea. The limitation of powers was, thus, at a very early period, a matter of public right in England; and the legitimacy of sole and absolute power was never recognized. Thus was established and preserved, for better times, the generative principle of all legitimate power as well as of all liberty; and by the virtue of this principle alone was maintained, in the souls of the people, that noble sentiment of right which becomes extinguished and succumbs wherever man finds himself in presence of an unlimited sovereignty, whatever may be its form and name.

  2. The division of the supreme power produced yet another result. When the towns had acquired greater wealth and importance, when there had been formed, beyond the circle of the king’s immediate vassals, a nation capable of taking part in political life, and which the government found it necessary to treat with consideration, this nation naturally adjoined itself to the great council of the king, which had never ceased to exist. In order to gain itself a place in the central government, it had no need abruptly to create new institutions; a place was already prepared to receive it, and although its entrance into the national council ere long changed its nature and forms, it at least was not under the necessity of asserting and re-animating its existence. There was a fact capable of receiving extension, and of admitting into its bosom new facts, together with new rights. The British Parliament, to say truth, dates only from the formation of the House of Commons; but without the presence and importance of the council of Barons, the House of Commons would, perhaps, never have been formed.

  Thus, on the one hand, the permanence of the idea that the sovereignty ought to be limited, and, on the other, the actual division of the central power, were the germs of representative government in England. Until the end of the thirteenth century we met with no other of its characteristics; and the English nation, until that period, was not perhaps actually more free and happy than any of the peoples of the Continent. But the principle of the right of resistance to oppression was already a legal principle in England; and the idea of the supremacy which holds dominion over all others, of the supremacy of the law, was already connected, in the mind of the people and of the jurisconsults themselves, not with any particular person, or with any particular actual power, but with the name of the law itself. Already the law was said to be superior to all other powers; sovereignty had thus, in principle at least, left that material world in which it could not fix itself without engendering tyranny, to place itself in that moral world, in which actual powers ought constantly to seek it. Many favourable circumstances were doubtless necessary to fecundate these principles of liberty in England. But when the sentiment of right lives in the souls of men, when the citizen meets with no power in his country which he is bound to consider as infallible and absolutely sovereign, liberty can never fail to spring up. It has developed itself in England less universally, less equally, and less reasonably, we venture to believe, than we are permitted to hope will be the case at the present day in our own country; but, in fine, it was born, and increased in growth in that country more than in any other; and the history of its progress, the study of the institutions which served as its guarantees, and of the system of government to which its destinies seem henceforward to link themselves, is at once a great sight and a necessary work for us. We shall enter upon it with impartiality, for we can do so without envy.3

  LECTURE 2

  Sketch of the History of England, from William the Conqueror to John Lackland (1066‒1199). ~ William the Conqueror (1066‒1087). ~ William Rufus (1087‒1100). ~ Henry I. ~ (1100‒1135). ~ Stephen (1135‒115). ~ Henry II. ~ (1154‒1189). ~ Constitutions of Clarendon. ~ Richard Coeur de Lion (1189‒1199).

  Before entering upon the history of representative government in England, I think it necessary, in the first place, to remind you of the facts which served, as it were, as its cradle—of the movements of the different nations which successively occupied England—the conquest of the Normans—the state of the country at the period of this conquest, about the middle of the eleventh century—and the principal events which succeeded it. A knowledge of facts must always precede the study of institutions.

  The Britons—Gauls or Celts in origin—were the first inhabitants of Great Britain. Julius Caesar subjugated them, and the Roman dominion substituted a false and enervating civilization in the place of their barbarian energy. On being abandoned by Rome, when that city abdicated piecemeal the empire of the world, the Britons were unable to defend themselves, and summoned the Saxons to their assistance. The latter, finding them already conquered, from their allies became ere long their masters, and exterminated or drove back into the mountains of Wales, the people whom the Romans had subdued. After a long series of incursions, the Danes established themselves in the north of England, during the ninth century, and in the latter part of the eleventh century, the Normans conquered the whole country.

  Towards the middle of the eleventh century, and before the Norman conquest, great enmity still subsisted between the Saxons and the Danes, whereas between the Danes and Normans the recollections of a common origin were still fresh and vivid. Edward the Confessor had been brought up at the Court of Normandy, and the Normans were held in great favour by him. He had appointed several of them to great offices in his realm. The primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Norman; and Norman was spoken at the Court of Edward. All these circumstances seemed to prepare the way for the invasion of England by the Normans.

  The internal state of England was equally favourable to it. The Saxon aristocracy had risen in proportion as the royal power had declined; but the power of the great land-holders was a divided power, and their dissensions opened a door for foreign interference. Harold, the brother-in-law of king Edward, who had died without issue, had just usurped the crown; so that William had not even to oppose a legitimate monarch. “Whether the English make Harold or another their duke or king, I grant it,” said William on the death of Edward; but he, nevertheless, assumed to be heir of the kingdom, by virtue of a will of the deceased monarch, and came to assert his right at the head of an army of 40,000 men. On the 14th of October, 1065, Harold lost both the crown and his life at the battle of Hastings. The primate then offered the crown of England to William, who accepted it after some show of hesitation, and was crowned on the 6th of December. He at first treated his Saxon subjects with mildness, but ordered the construction of a number of fortresses, and gave large grants of lands to his Norman comrades. During a journey which he made into Normandy, in the month of March, 1067, the Saxons revolted against the tyranny of the Normans. William suppressed the revolt, and continued for some time still faithful to his policy of conciliation. But rebellions continued to arise, and William now had recourse to rigorous measures. By repeated confiscations he ensured the sovereign establishment of the Normans, and of the feudal system. The Saxons were excluded from all great public employments, and particularly from the bishoprics. William covered England with forts, substituted the Norman language for the Anglo-Saxon, and made it the language of law—a privilege which subsisted until the reign of Edward III. He enacted very severe laws of police, among others the law of curfew, so greatly detested by the Saxons, but which already existed in Normandy; and finally, he laid waste the county of Yorkshire, the stronghold of the Saxon insurgents.

  The Pope had given his approval to William’s enterprise, and had excommunicated Harold. Nevertheless, William boldly repulsed the pretensions of Gregory VII, and forbade his subjects to recognize any one as Pope, until he had done so himself. The canons of every council were to be submitted to him for his sanction or rejection. No bull or letter of the Pope might be published without the permission of the king. He protected his ministers and barons against excommunication. He subjected the clergy to feudal military service. And finally, during his reign, the ecclesiastical and civil courts, which had previously been commingled in the county courts, were separated.

  After the death of William, in 1087, his States were divided among his three sons, Robert, William, and Henry. William Rufus succeeded to the throne of England, and Robert to the dukedom of Normandy. William’s reign is remarkable only for acts of tyranny, for the extension of the royal forests, and for odious exactions; he would not appoint bishops to any of the vacant episcopal sees, but appropriated their revenues to his own use, considering them as fiefs whose possessors were dead.

  William Rufus was almost constantly at war with his brother Robert. He ended by buying Normandy of him, or, to speak more correctly, he received it in pledge for thirteen thousand silver marks which he lent to Robert when about to join the Crusaders. In the year 1100, he made a similar bargain with William, Count of Poitou and Duke of Guienne. The Norman barons bitterly regretted that Robert was not King of England, as well as Duke of Normandy. They rebelled several times against William; and various facts indicate that the Saxon nation gained something by these revolts, and was rather better treated, in consequence, by its Norman monarch. But the relations of the two peoples were still extremely hostile when William Rufus was killed while hunting, on the 2nd of August, 1100.

  Henry I. usurped the crown of England from his brother Robert, to whom it rightfully belonged; and the Norman barons, who preferred Robert, offered only a feeble resistance to Henry; he was crowned in London. His first act was a charter, in which, to gain forgiveness for his usurpation, he promised not to seize upon the revenues of the church during the vacancy of benefices; to admit the heirs of the crown vassals to the possession of their estates, without exposing them to such violent exactions as had been usual during the preceding reigns; to moderate the taxes, to pardon the past, and finally to confirm the authority of the laws of St. Edward, which were so dear to the nation. A short time after the concession of this charter, Henry married Matilda, the daughter of the King of Scotland, and niece of Edgar Atheling, the last heir of the Saxon dynasty; by this marriage he hoped to conciliate the attachment of the Saxon people. In order to marry him, Matilda was liberated from her vows, for she had taken the veil, not with the intention of becoming a nun, says Eadmer, but in order to escape from the brutal violence of the Normans.

  In 1101, Robert returned from the Crusades, and invaded England, but a treaty soon put a stop to his progress, and he renounced his pretensions on receiving a pension of 3000 marks, and the promise of succeeding to Henry’s inheritance. The bad government of Robert in Normandy occasioned continual disturbances in that country, and maintained the ever-increasing tendency towards the union of Normandy with England. Henry, taking advantage of this state of things, invaded Normandy, where he had many powerful adherents, and after three years of war, in 1106, the battle of Tenchebray decided the fate of Robert, who was taken prisoner and confined in Cardiff Castle, where he languished twenty-eight years. Normandy was then united to England.

  The reign of Henry I. was disturbed by continual quarrels with the clergy; he was obliged to renounce the right of investiture, which was held to confer spiritual dignity, but the bishops continued to swear to him fidelity and homage, by reason of their temporal possessions. In the midst of the obstacles which lay in his path, Henry governed with vigour and prudence; he humbled the great barons, restored order, and restrained the clergy; and these were the qualities which then constituted a great king. The pretended code which is ascribed to Henry I. is a later compilation; but he effected several important reforms, among others, by repressing the abuses of the right of purveyance, by which the socage tenants of the king were bound gratuitously to supply the court, while journeying, with provisions and carriages. It is also said that he substituted, for tenants of this class, the payment of a money rent instead of the rent in kind which they had formerly paid; but it is not probable that this was a general rule.

  Henry I. died in 1135. His reign promoted, to some extent, the fusion of the two peoples: but the separation was still wide. His son William being dead, Henry had appointed as his successor his daughter Matilda, the wife of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou; and an assembly of barons had ratified his choice. But, during the absence of Matilda, Stephen, Count of Boulogne, the grandson of William the Conqueror by his mother Adela, the wife of Stephen, Count of Blois, usurped the crown of England; but only a few barons attended at his coronation, on the 22nd of December, 1135. Stephen was anxious, by making large concessions, to obtain pardon for his usurpation; and he published two charters, which promised all that those issued by Henry had promised, including the maintenance of the laws of Edward the Confessor. The clergy and barons, however, swore to him only a conditional oath; and wishing to make him pay dearly for their support, the church exacted from him the sanction of all its privileges, and the barons obtained permission to build fortresses upon their estates. The kingdom soon bristled with castles and ramparts. Eleven hundred and fifteen were erected during the reign of Stephen, and assured, far more effectually than his charters, the power and independence of the barons.

  In 1139, an insurrection broke out in favour of Matilda. King Stephen was defeated and made prisoner at the battle of Lincoln, on the 26th of February, 1141. A synod of ecclesiastics, without the co-operation of any laymen, gave the crown to Matilda; the deputies of the city of London were the only laymen present, and they demanded the liberation of King Stephen, but in vain; they were admitted into the synod merely to receive orders. A conspiracy against Matilda overthrew, ere long, the bold work of the clergy; Stephen regained his liberty in 1142, and the civil war recommenced. But a new enemy had now arisen against him. Prince Henry, the son of Matilda, though still young, had already rendered himself remarkable for his bravery and prudence. His mother promised him the dukedom of Normandy; the death of his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, had given him Maine and Poitou; and his marriage with Eleanor of Guienne had gained him two other vast provinces of France. In 1154, he appeared in England with an army, but a negotiation speedily terminated the conflict, and Henry was acknowledged as the successor of Stephen, who died a year afterwards, on the 25th of October, 1154.

  A variety of circumstances were favourable to the power of Henry II. at his accession. He united in his own person the rights of both the Saxon and Norman dynasties. He possessed immense dominions on the Continent; he was Count of Anjou, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Guienne Maine, Saintonge, Poitou, Auvergne, Périgord, Augoumois and Limousin. He married his third son, Geoffrey, while still a child, to the infant heiress of the duchy of Brittany. He soon became engaged in war with the nobility and the clergy. He revoked all the gifts of the royal domains which had been granted by Stephen and Matilda, and regained by arms all that was not restored to him peaceably. He demolished a large number of the feudal fortresses. No coalition of the barons had as yet been formed, and their individual power was utterly unable to compete with that of Henry; they therefore submitted. The king also rallied around him a great number of interests by the maintenance of strict order, and by the appointment of itinerant justices to secure a more equitable administration of the laws. His struggle with the clergy was more stormy, and its success less complete; for the clergy, who were already constituted into a most powerful corporation, and were sustained from without by the Holy See, had found within their own body a chieftain capable of resisting even the greatest monarch. Thomas Becket, born in London in 1119, had advanced so far in the favour of Henry as to be appointed his Lord High Chancellor. His services, his devotedness, the magnificence of his mode of life, all combined to persuade Henry that, by elevating Becket to the highest ecclesiastical dignities, he would gain a powerful supporter in the church; he, therefore, had him appointed Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the kingdom. But no sooner was Becket appointed to this office than he devoted himself to the interests of his order, and boldly undertook to exercise, and even to extend the rights of his position. A clerk had committed a murder; Becket punished him according to the laws of the clergy: Henry desired to have him judged by the civil law; Becket resisted; and Henry seized this opportunity for attacking openly and systematically the ecclesiastical power. He assembled the bishops, and inquired of them whether they would submit to the ancient laws of the realm, or not; and they were forced to consent to do so. The famous Council of Clarendon was convoked in 1164 to define these laws, and fix the limits of the two powers. The king had conciliated the support of the lay barons. Sixteen articles resulted from the deliberations of this assembly; they are to the following effect:

  1. All suits concerning the advowson and presentation of churches shall be determined in the civil courts. 2. Ecclesiastics, when accused of any crime, shall appear before the king’s justices, who shall determine whether the case ought to be tried in the secular or episcopal courts. The king’s justices shall inquire into the manner in which causes of this kind are judged by the ecclesiastical courts; and if the clerk is convicted or confesses his crime, he shall lose his benefit of clergy. 3. No archbishop, bishop, or ecclesiastic of high rank shall leave the kingdom without the king’s permission. If he should go abroad, he must give surety to the king for his return, and for his good conduct in all matters affecting the interests of the king. 4. Excommunicated persons shall not be bound to give security for continuing in their present place of abode, but merely for presenting themselves to suffer the judgment of the church and to receive absolution. 5. No tenant in chief of the king, no officer of his household, or of his demesnes, shall be excommunicated, or his lands put under an interdict, until application has been made to the king, or, in his absence, to the grand justiciary, in order to obtain justice at his hands. 6. All appeals in spiritual causes shall be carried from the archdeacon to the bishop, from the bishop to the primate, and from him to the king, and shall be carried no further without the king’s consent. 7. If any law-suit arise between a layman and an ecclesiastic concerning the nature of a fief, the question shall be decided by the king’s chief justice, by the verdict of twelve probi homines;1 and according as the nature of the fief may be determined, further proceedings shall be carried on before the civil or ecclesiastical courts. 8. Any inhabitant of a city, town, borough or manor in the king’s demesnes, who has been cited before an ecclesiastical court to answer for some offence, and who has refused to appear, may be placed under an interdict; but no one may be excommunicated till the chief officer of the place where he resides be consulted, that he may compel him by the civil authority to give satisfaction to the church. 9. The judgment of all causes, for debts contracted by oath or otherwise, is referred to the civil courts. 10. When any archbishopric, or bishopric, or abbey, or priory of royal foundation is vacant, the king shall enjoy its revenues; and when it becomes necessary to fill up a see, the king shall summon a chapter to proceed, in the royal chapel, to the election, which must obtain the sanction of the king, according to the advice of the prelates whom he may have thought proper to consult; and the bishop-elect shall swear fealty and homage to the king as to his lord, for all his temporal possessions, with the exception of the rights of his order. 11. Churches belonging to the king’s fee shall not be granted in perpetuity without his consent. 12. No layman shall be accused before a bishop, except by legal and reputable promoters and witnesses; and if the culprit be of such high rank that no one dares to accuse him, the sheriff, upon the demand of the bishop, shall appoint twelve lawful men of the neighbourhood, who, in presence of the bishop, shall pronounce upon the facts of the case, according to their conscience. 13. Archbishops, bishops, and other spiritual dignitaries who are immediate vassals of the king, shall be regarded as barons of the realm, and shall possess the privileges and be subjected to the burdens belonging to that rank, except in the case of condemnation to death or to the loss of a limb. 14. That if any person resist a sentence legally pronounced upon him by an ecclesiastical court, the king shall employ his authority in obliging him to make submission. In like manner, if any one throw off his allegiance to the king, the prelates shall assist the king with their censures in reducing him. 15. Goods forfeited to the king shall not be protected in churches or churchyards. 16. No villein shall be ordained a clerk without the consent of the lord on whose estate he was born.

  When the constitutions of Clarendon had once been adopted, the king required that the bishops should affix their seals thereto; all consented with the exception of Becket, who resisted for a long while, but yielded at length, and promised “legally, with good faith, and without fraud or reserve,” to observe the constitutions. The king sent a copy of them to Pope Alexander, who approved only the last six articles, and annulled all the rest. Strong in the support of the Pope, Becket did penance for his submission, and renewed the conflict. It soon became desperate. The king harassed Becket with persecutions of all kinds, requiring him to give an account of his administration while Chancellor, and charging him with embezzlement; the bishops became alarmed and deserted the cause of the primate. Becket resisted with indomitable courage; but he was finally compelled to fly to the Continent. Henry confiscated all his property, and banished all his relatives and servants, to the number of four hundred. Becket excommunicated the servants of the king, and, from his retirement in a French monastery, made Henry totter on his throne. At length, the Pope with his legates, and the King of France, interfered to put an end to this conflict. Henry, who was embarrassed by a multitude of other affairs, yielded, and Becket returned to his see. But his conscience united with his pride to rekindle the war. He censured the prelates who had failed to support him, and excommunicated some of the king’s servants who had been active in their persecution of the clergy. “What!” cried Henry, in a transport of passion, “of the cowards who eat my bread, is there not one who will free me from this turbulent priest?” He was then at Bayeux; four of his gentlemen set out at once for Canterbury, and assassinated Becket on the steps of the altar of his cathedral, on the 29th of December, 1170. The king dispatched a courier in pursuit of them, but he arrived too late to prevent the consummation of the deed. Henry manifested the utmost grief at the death of Becket; we may, however, suppose his sorrow to have been feigned. In order to avert the consequences, he at once sent envoys to Rome to attest his innocence, and the Pope contented himself with fulminating a general excommunication against the authors, fautors, or instigators of the assassination.

  Other events, wars with Scotland and France, and an expedition into Ireland, diverted the public attention from Becket’s death. In 1172, Henry resumed his negotiations with Rome, and concluded a treaty which, on the whole, ratified the enactments of the Council of Clarendon. When he had thus become reconciled with the Pope, he made his peace with his subjects, whose enmity he feared, by a public penance on the tomb of Becket, who was honoured by all England as a martyr.

  In 1172, some English adventurers conquered without difficulty, and almost without a battle, a part of Ireland. Henry led an expedition into that country, and his authority was recognized. The remainder of his life was agitated by continual wars in defence of his possessions on the Continent, and by the rebellions of his children, who were anxious to divide his power and dominions before his death. He died of grief at their conduct on the 6th of July, 1189, at Chinon, near Saumur; and the corpse of one of the greatest kings of England and of his age was left for some time, deserted and stripped, upon the steps of an altar. His eldest son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, succeeded him without difficulty.

  In every age, and at every great epoch of history, we almost invariably witness the appearance of some individuals who seem to be the types of the general spirit and dominant dispositions of their time. Richard, the adventurer-king, is an exact representation of the chivalrous spirit of the feudal system and of the twelfth century. Immediately upon his accession, his only thought was the accumulation of money for the Crusades; he alienated his domains; he publicly sold offices, honours, and even the loftiest dignities, to the highest bidder; he even sold permissions not to go on the Crusade; and he was ready to sell London, he said, if he could find a purchaser. And while he was sacrificing everything to his passion for pious adventures, his people massacred the Jews because some of them had appeared at the coronation of the king, notwithstanding the prohibition.

  Richard set out at length for the Crusades, leaving as Regent during his absence his mother Eleanor, who had excited the princes her sons to rebellion against the king their father; and he associated the Bishops of Durham and Ely with her in the regency. The tyranny of the Bishop of Ely spread confusion throughout England; he placed his colleague under arrest, and governed alone with boundless arrogance, until at last Prince John had him deposed by a council of barons and prelates. Richard, on his return from the Crusades, was, as is well known, detained prisoner in Austria, from the 20th of December, 1193, to the 4th of February, 1194, when he recovered his liberty by the devotedness of one of his vassals. The power of feudal feelings and ties was also manifested in the eagerness of his subjects to pay his ransom. Richard, when restored to his kingdom, spent the remainder of his life in continual wars in France, and died, on the 6th of April, 1199, of a wound received at the siege of the castle of Chalus, near Limoges, while endeavouring to gain possession of a treasure which, it was said, the Count of Limoges had found.

  During the reign of Richard, the liberties of the towns and boroughs, which had commenced under William Rufus, made considerable progress, and prepared the way for that decisive advance of national liberties and representative government in England—the Great Charter of King John.

  LECTURE 3

  Anglo-Saxon institutions. ~ Effects of the Norman Conquest upon Anglo-Saxon institutions. ~ Effects of the Conquest upon Norman institutions. ~ Causes which made the Norman Conquest favourable to the establishment of a system of free institutions in England.

  After having given a summary, in the preceding lecture, of the principal historical facts, we are now about to survey Anglo-Norman institutions during the period to which we have just turned our attention, namely, from the middle of the eleventh century until the end of the twelfth.

  How came it that free institutions were established from this time forth among this people, and not in other countries? The answer to this question may be found in the general facts of English history, for institutions are much more the work of circumstances than of the texts of laws.

  The States which were founded in Europe, from the fifth to the seventh century, were established by hordes of wandering Barbarians, the conquerors of the degraded Roman population. On the side of the victors, there existed no fixed and determinate form of social life; on the side of the vanquished, forms and institutions crumbled into dust; social life died of inanition. Hence arose long disorders, ignorance and impossibility of a general system of organization, the reign of force, and the dismemberment of sovereignty.

  Nothing of the kind occurred in England in the eleventh century, in consequence of the Norman Conquest. A Barbarian people which had already been established in a country for two hundred years conquered another Barbarian people which had been territorially established for six hundred years. For this reason, many decisive differences may be observed between this conquest and those which took place on the Continent.

  1. There was much more resemblance, and consequently much more equality, between the two peoples; their origin was the same, their manners and language were analogous, their civilization was almost identical, and the warlike spirit was as powerful among the vanquished as among the victors. Thus, two nations under almost similar conditions, found themselves in presence of one another, and the conquered nation was able, as well as disposed, to defend its liberties. Hence arose many individual evils, but no general and permanent abasement of one race before the other. Oppressed at first, but retaining its warlike character, the Saxon race offered an energetic resistance, and gradually raised itself from its inferior position.

  2. The two peoples also possessed political institutions of a singularly analogous nature, whereas elsewhere, in France and in Italy, the Roman populations, to speak the truth, possessed no institutions at all. The communes and the clergy were required to maintain, even obscurely, the Roman law among societies on the Continent; whereas in England, Saxon institutions were never stifled by Norman institutions, but associated with them, and finally even changed their character. On the Continent, we behold the successful sway of barbarism, feudalism, and absolute power, derived either from Roman or ecclesiastical ideas. In England, absolute power was never able to obtain a footing; oppression was frequently practised in fact, but it was never established by law.

  3. The two peoples professed the same religion; one had not to convert the other. On the Continent, the more Barbarian victor adopted the religion of the vanquished, and the clergy were almost entirely Romans; in England, they were both Saxons and Normans. Hence resulted an important fact. The English clergy, instead of enrolling themselves in the retinue of the kings, naturally assumed a place among the landed aristocracy, and in the nation. Thus the political order has almost constantly predominated in England over the religious order; and ever since the Norman Conquest, the political power of the clergy, always called in question, has always been on the decline.

  This is the decisive circumstance in the history of England—the circumstance which has caused its civilization to take an altogether different course to that taken by the civilization of the Continent. Of necessity, and at an early period, a compromise and amalgamation took place between the victors and the vanquished, both of whom had institutions to bring into common use; institutions more analogous than existed anywhere else—stronger and more fully developed, because they belonged to peoples which had already been territorially established for a considerable time.

  Thus, Saxon institutions and Norman institutions are the two sources of the English government. The English commonly refer their political liberties to the former source; they see that, on the Continent, feudalism did not produce liberty; and they attribute their feudalism to the Normans, and their liberty to the Saxons. This distinction has even become a symbol of modern political parties; the Tories, in general, affect a neglect of Saxon institutions, whilst the Whigs attach to them the greatest importance. This view of events appears to me to be neither exact nor complete. Saxon institutions were not, by themselves, the principle of English liberties. The forced assimilation of the two peoples and of the two systems of institutions, was their true cause. There is even room for doubt whether, without the Conquest, liberty would have resulted from Saxon institutions; and we may believe that they would have produced in England results analogous to those which occurred on the Continent. The Conquest inspired them with new virtue, and caused them to produce results which, if they had been left to themselves, they would not have produced. Political liberty issued from them, but was begotten by the influence of the Conquest, and in consequence of the position in which the Conquest placed the two peoples and their laws.

  I will now recall to your recollection Anglo-Saxon institutions as they existed before the Conquest; and you will soon see that it was the forced approximation of the two peoples which gave them vitality, and brought forth the liberties of England.

  Among local institutions, some were based upon common deliberation, and others upon hierarchical subordination; that is to say, some upon a principle of liberty, and others upon a principle of dependence. On one side, were the courts of hundred and the county-courts; on the other, the great landowners and their vassals: every man of fourteen years old and upwards was obliged to belong either to a hundred or to a lord, that is, to be free or vassal. These two hostile systems, then, placed in presence of one another, conflicted as upon the Continent. There is some doubt about the question whether, before the Conquest, feudalism existed with regard to lands: that it existed with regard to persons there can be no doubt, for their hierarchical classification was real and progressive. In localities, although the system of free institutions subsisted, the system of feudal institutions was gaining ground; seignorial jurisdictions were encroaching upon free jurisdictions; and almost the same process, in fact, was going on as upon the Continent.

  If we look at central institutions, we observe the same phenomenon. On the Continent, feudalism was produced by the aggrandizement of the king’s vassals, and by the dislocation of the sovereignty. The national unity, which resided in the assembly of the nation, became dissolved; the monarchical unity was unable to resist; and monarchy and liberty perished together. Events had taken the same course among the Anglo-Saxons. Under Edward the Confessor, the decay of the royal authority is evident. Earl Godwin, Siward, Duke of Northumberland, Leofric, Duke of Mercia, and many other great vassals, are rivals rather than subjects of the king; and Harold usurping the crown from Edgar Atheling, the legitimate heir, bears a strong resemblance to Hugh Capet. The sovereignty tends to dismemberment. Monarchical unity is in danger; national unity is in the same declining state, as is proved by the history of the Wittenagemot. This general assembly of the nation was at first the assembly of the warriors; afterwards the general assembly of the land-owners, both great and small; and at a later period, the assembly of the great land-owners alone, or of the king’s thanes. Even these at last neglect to attend its meetings; and isolate themselves upon their estates, in which each of them exercises his share of the dismembered sovereignty. This is almost identical with the course of affairs on the Continent. Only, the system of free institutions still subsists in England with some energy in local institutions, and especially in the county-courts. The feudal system is in a less advanced state than on the Continent.

  What would have happened if the Conquest had not occurred? It is impossible to say with certainty, but probably just what happened on the Continent. The same symptoms are manifested, the decay of the royal authority and of the national assembly; and the formation of a hierarchical landed aristocracy, almost entirely independent of the central power, and exercising almost undisputed sovereignty in its domains, excepting only feudal liberties.

  While Anglo-Saxon institutions were in this state, the Normans conquered England. What new elements did they introduce, and what effect did the Conquest produce upon the Saxons?

  The feudal system was completely established in Normandy; the relations of the duke with his vassals, the general council of the barons, the seignorial administration of justice, the superior courts of the duke, were all organized already. This system is impracticable in a large State, especially when manners have made but little progress; it leads to the dislocation of the State and of the sovereignty, and to a federation of powerful individuals, who dismember the royal power. But in a State of limited extent, like Normandy, the feudal system may subsist without destroying unity; and notwithstanding William’s continual wars with some of his vassals, he was in very reality the powerful chieftain of his feudal aristocracy. The proof of this is contained in the very enterprize upon which he led them. He had, say the chronicles, from forty to sixty thousand men, of whom twenty-five thousand were hired adventurers or men who joined his standard in the hope of obtaining booty. He was not a leader of Barbarians, but a sovereign undertaking an invasion at the head of his barons.

  After the Conquest and their territorial establishment, the bonds which united the Norman aristocracy were necessarily drawn still closer together. Encamped in the midst of a people who regarded them with hostility and were capable of vigorous resistance, the conquerors felt the need of unity; so they linked themselves together, and fortified the central power. On the Continent, after the Barbarian invasions, we hear of hardly any insurrections of the original inhabitants: the wars and conflicts are between the conquerors themselves; but in England they are between the conquerors and the conquered people. We indeed meet, from time to time, with revolts of the Norman barons against the king; but these two powers generally acted in concert, for their interest was their bond of union. Moreover, William had found a royal domain of large extent, already in existence: and it received immense increase from confiscations of the lands of Anglo-Saxon rebels. Although the spoliation was not universal, it was carried out with unexampled promptitude and regularity. William soon had 600 direct vassals, nearly all of whom were Normans, and his landed property was divided into 60,215 knight’s fees, a large quantity of which frequently belonged to the same master; for example, Robert de Mortaigne alone possessed 973 manors, the Earl of Warrenne 278, and Roger Bigod 123; but they were all scattered through different counties, for though the prudent William was willing to make his vassals rich, he was not desirous of making them too powerful.

  Another proof of the cohesion of the Norman aristocracy is supplied by the Doomsday Book; a statistical account of the royal fiefs, and register of the demesne lands and direct vassals of the king, which was begun in 1081 and terminated in 1086: it was compiled by royal commissioners. King Alfred had also directed the compilation of a similar register, but it has been lost. Nothing of the kind was ever done in any other country.

  The same cause which rendered Norman feudalism in England more compact and regular than on the Continent, produced a corresponding effect upon the Saxons. Oppressed by a powerful and thoroughly united enemy, they formed in serried ranks, constituted themselves into a national body, and clung resolutely to their ancient laws. And in the first instance, the establishment of William did not appear to have been entirely the work of force; there were even some forms of election; after the battle of Hastings, the crown was offered to him by the Saxons, and at his coronation at Westminster, he swore to govern the Saxons and Normans by equal laws. After this period, we incessantly find the Saxons claiming to be ruled by the laws of Edward the Confessor, that is to say, by the Saxon laws, and they obtained this right from all the Norman kings in succession. These laws thus became their rallying point, their primitive and permanent code. The county-courts, which continued to exist, also served to maintain the Saxon liberties. Feudal jurisdiction had made but little progress among the Saxons; it received extension on the arrival of the Normans; but it had no time to strike deep root, for it found itself limited on the one hand by the county-courts, and on the other by the royal jurisdiction. On the Continent, the royal authority conquered judicial power from feudalism; in England, the royal authority was superimposed upon the county-courts. Hence arises the immense difference between the two judicial systems.

  Lastly, the Saxons still possessed landed property, which they defended or claimed in reliance upon titles anterior to the Conquest, and the validity of these titles was recognised.

  To sum up the whole matter, the Norman Conquest did not destroy right among the Saxons, either in political or civil order. It opposed in both nations that tendency to isolation, to the dissolution of society and of power, which was the general course of things in Europe. It bound the Normans to one another, and united the Saxons among themselves; it brought them into presence of each other with mutual powers and rights, and thus effected, in a certain measure, an amalgamation of the two nations and of the two systems of institutions, under the sway of a strong central power. The Saxons retained their manners as well as their laws; their interests were for a long time interests of liberty, and they were able to defend them. This position, far more than the intrinsic character of Saxon institutions, led to the predominance of a system of free government in England.

  LECTURE 4

  The English Parliament in the earliest times of the Anglo-Norman Monarchy. ~ Different names given to the King’s Great Council. ~ Its characteristics. ~ Its constitution. ~ Opinions of Whigs and Tories on this subject.

  You have already seen what was the influence of the Norman Conquest on the political destinies of England; and what was the position in which the two peoples were placed by it. They did not unite, nor did they mutually destroy one another. They lived in a state of national and political conflict, the one people being invested with a large power of government, while the other was far from being destitute of the means of resistance. We have now to enquire what were those institutions upon which this struggle was founded. We shall not concern ourselves with all the institutions which then existed in society: we are now looking for the sources of representative government, and are therefore at present only interested in those in which the germs of a representative system existed.

  In order to determine with some precision the object of our study, it will be necessary to form some idea of the different functions of the power which is applied to the government of society. In the foremost rank is presented the legislative power, which imposes rules and obligations on the entire mass of society and on the executive power itself. Next appears the executive power, which takes the daily oversight of the general business of society—war, peace, raising of men and of taxes. Then the judicial power, which adjusts matters of private interest according to laws previously established. Lastly, the administrative power, charged, under its own responsibility, with the duty of regulating matters which cannot be anticipated and provided for by any general laws.

  During three centuries these powers have tended to centralization in France; so much so, that if we would study the government of the country we must attend to them all, for they were all united and limited to the same individuals. Richelieu, Louis XIV, the Revolution, Napoleon, though in different positions, seem to have inherited the same projects and moved in the same direction. Such has not been the case in England. The administrative power there, for example, is to the present time divided and subdivided; it belongs either to those who are themselves interested in its movements, or to local magistrates, independent of the central power of the State, and forming no corporation among themselves. The judicial power itself is divided. It was so to some extent, through another and stronger cause, in the earlier times of England’s social life, as in all societies which have made but small advancement. Different powers are then not only distributed but commingled. The legislative power is no more central than others: its functions are continually usurped by local powers. Judicial power is almost entirely local. Centralization commences with the executive power properly so called, and this for a long time remains the only one in which any centralizing tendency is found. The proof of this is furnished by the feudal system, when almost all powers—those connected with justice, militia, taxes, &c.—were local, although the feudal hierarchy had at its head the king, and the assembly of the most important possessors of fiefs.

  In this distribution and confusion of powers at the period we are considering, the institutions which we have especially to study in order to find the origin of representative government, are those which were central, that is to say, the Parliament and the king. On the Continent, centralization has resulted from an absolute power which has broken up and absorbed all local powers. In England, on the other hand, local powers have subsisted after a thousand vicissitudes, while they have increasingly regulated and defined their own action. A central government has emanated from them by degrees—it has progressively formed and extended itself. We shall trace this formation step by step, and shall only study local institutions as they relate to this one fact; and we shall see that this circumstance has been the principal cause of the establishment of a free government in England.

  It is easily presumed that, in such a state of society, no other central institution, properly so called, existed for a long time, except royalty. There are certain maxims, certain habits of central political action, but no constant rule: the facts are varied and contradictory. Men of considerable influence, almost sovereigns in their own domains, are much less desirous of any participation in the central power; they rather attempt to defend themselves from it as often as it infringes upon their interests, than endeavour at all to control it beforehand, and to act upon it in a general manner. As in France, at the end of the Carlovingian dynasty, a king can hardly be met with, so in England, under the first Norman kings, a Parliament can hardly be found. That which existed bearing any resemblance to one differs but little from the Saxon Wittenagemot in the form which belonged to it immediately before the Conquest, or from the Council of Barons in Normandy. We find in the works of historians, and in charters, the following names: Curia de more, Curia regis, Concilium, Magnum Concilium,Commune Concilium, Concilium regni. But these are to be regarded only as vague expressions which designate assemblies, without giving any clue by which to determine their constitution and their power. Hale sees in them “a Parliament as complete and as real as has ever been held in England.” Carte and Brady see in them only tribunals, privy councils dependent upon the king, or pompous gatherings for the celebration of certain solemnities. It will be better for us to examine each of these words, and seek for the actual facts which correspond to them in the period to which our attention is directed.

  According to the Tories in general, the words Curia de more, or Concilium, Curia regis, Magnum or Commune Concilium, represent different assemblies. Concilium is a privy council composed of men chosen by the king to serve him in the government. This Concilium was at the same time Curia regis, a tribunal to judge of matters brought before the king, and presided over by him, or, in his absence, by the chief justice. It was called also Curia de more, because its assemblies were held, according to ancient usage, three times in the course of the year, at Easter, Whitsuntide, and Christmas, and was even adjourned regularly from one period to another, as is done to the present day by the Courts at Westminster.

  According to the Whigs, all these words originally designated, and continued to the reign of Henry II. (1154‒1189) to designate the general assembly of the nobles of the kingdom, who necessarily assembled before the king in order to try cases, to make laws, and to give their concurrence to the government.

  The first of these opinions puts too great a restraint upon the meaning of the words; the second generalizes too much on isolated facts, and assigns to them an importance which does not belong to them.

  Curia de more, Curia regis, signi fied originally neither the merely privy council of the king nor his tribunal; it was evidently a grand assembly at which all the nobles of the kingdom were present, either to treat of the affairs of State, or to assist the king in the administration of justice. “The king,” says the Saxon Chronicle, “was wont to wear his crown three times a year—at Easter in Winchester; at Whitsuntide in Westminster; at Christmas in Gloucester; and then there were present with him all the great men of all England, archbishops and bishops, abbots and counts, thanes and knights.”—“A royal edict,” says William of Malmesbury, “called to the Curia de more all the nobles of every grade, in order that those sent from foreign countries might be struck with the magnificence of the company, and with the splendour of the festivities.”—“Under William Rufus,” says Eadmer, “all the nobles of the kingdom came, according to usage, to the king’s court, on the day of our Saviour’s nativity.” Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, having presented himself ad Curiam pro more, “was received with joy by the king and all the nobility of the kingdom.” In 1109, at Christmas, “the kingdom of England assembled at London, at the court of the king, according to custom.”

  Curia regis designates generally the place of the king’s residence, and by an extension of meaning the assembly held in that place; this assembly was general, and not a mere gathering of permanent judges. William I., summoning the Dukes of Norfolk and Hereford to attend and receive judgment in Curia regis, “convoked,” says Ordericus Vitalis, “all the nobility to his court.” Several judicial assemblies held under William Rufus, are called ferme totius regni nobilitas, totius regni adunatio.1 Facts and expressions of the same kind are to be found in documents of the time of Stephen. Even under Henry II., when the Court of King’s Bench had already become a distinct tribunal, the expression Curia regis is applied to the general assembly collected for the transaction of public business. Henry convoked his Curia at Bermondsey, cum principibus suis de statu regni et pace reformanda tractans.2 The second of the Constitutions of Clarendon orders all the immediate vassals of the crown interesse judiciis curiae regis.3 The great Council of Northampton, which passed judgment in the complaints of the crown against Becket, is called Curia regis; it comprised not only the bishops, counts and barons, but besides these, the sheriffs and the barons secundae dignitatis.4 Lastly, under Richard I., the general assembly of the nobles of the kingdom is still called Curia regis in the trial of the Archbishop of York: “On this occasion there were present the Earl of Morton and almost all the bishops, earls and barons of the kingdom.”

  A little consideration will show us the inferences to be drawn from all these facts. At this period the legislative and judicial powers were not separated; both of them belonged to the assembly of the nobles, as they had previously belonged to the Wittenagemot of the Saxons. When deliberations with reference to a subject or personage of importance were required, this was the assembly that judged, as it interposed on all great occasions in the government. Thus all these different expressions denote originally the same assembly, composed of the nobles of the kingdom who were called to bear their share in the government.

  How did they interpose? What power, what functions belonged to them?—these are questions which were futile at that time: for no one then had determinate functions, but everything was decided according to fact and necessity. The facts are these: “It was the ancient usage that the nobles of England should at Christmas time meet at the king’s court, either to celebrate the festival, or to pay their respects to the king, or to deliberate concerning the affairs of the kingdom.” We find that these assemblies were occupied in legislation, in ecclesiastical affairs, in questions of peace and war, in extraordinary taxes, in the succession of the crown, in the domestic affairs of the king, his marriage, the nuptials of his children, dissensions in the royal family, in one word, in all matters of government, says Florence of Worcester, whenever the king did not feel himself strong enough to settle them without the assistance of the general assembly, or when the mode in which he had settled them had excited complaints in sufficient number to admonish him of the necessity of taking the advice of others.

  As to the holding of these assemblies, they were not regular: the Whigs have attached too much importance to the three periods mentioned as the times of their annual convocation: these gatherings were rather of the nature of solemnities, or festivals, than public assemblies. The king at that time considered it very important that he should exhibit himself surrounded by numerous and wealthy vassals, species multitudinis;5 his force and dignity were thereby displayed, just as that of every baron was exhibited in his own dominions. Besides, under Henry II. and Stephen, these three epochs ceased to be regularly observed. The Tories, on the other hand, not considering the gatherings called Curiae de more and Curiae regis as political assemblies, have represented them as extremely infrequent, which they were not; there is not a single reign, from the Conquest to the times of King John, in which several instances of them are not to be found; only there was nothing settled and fixed in this respect.

  The question of the constitution of these assemblies remains. Historians and charters say nothing definite on this point: they speak of their members as magnates, proceres, barones, sometimes as milites, servientes, liberi homines. There is every reason to suppose that the feudal principle was here applied, and that, as a matter of right, all the immediate vassals of the king owed to him service at court as well as in war. On the other hand, the number of the vassals attached to the crown under William I. exceeded 600; and there is no reason for believing that all these would present themselves at the assembly, nor are there any facts to indicate that they did so. It had already become, for the most part, rather an onerous service than a right; accordingly they only presented themselves in small numbers.

  The word most frequently employed is barones: it would appear to have been originally applied to all the direct vassals of the crown, per servitium militare, by knightly service; we find that the use of the word was limited more and more till it was applied almost exclusively to those vassals of the crown who were sufficiently wealthy and large proprietors to have a court of justice established in the seat of their barony. It is even difficult to admit that this last principle was generally followed. The name of barones was finally applied only to those immediate vassals who were so powerful that the king felt himself obliged to convoke them. There was no primitive and constant rule to distinguish the barons from other vassals; but a class of vassals was gradually formed who were more rich, more important, more habitually occupied with the king in affairs of state, and who came at last to arrogate to themselves exclusively the title of barons.

  The bishops and abbots also formed part of these assemblies, both as being heads of the clergy, and as immediate vassals of the king or of the barons.

  No trace of election or of representation is to be found, either on the part of the king’s vassals who did not present themselves at the assembly, or on the part of the towns. These last had in general suffered very greatly by the Norman Conquest. In York the number of houses was reduced from 1607 to 967; in Oxford from 721 to 243: in Derby from 243 to 140; in Chester from 487 to 282.

  These, then, are the essential facts which we may gather with reference to the constitution and power of the King’s Court, or general assembly of the nobles of the nation. We see how little influence must have been exerted by an assembly of so irregular a character; and we shall see this still more strikingly illustrated when we have brought it into comparison with the rights, the revenues, and all the powers which were at that time enjoyed by royalty.

  LECTURE 5

  The Anglo-Norman royalty: its wealth and power. ~ Comparison of the relative forces of the Crown and of the feudal aristocracy. ~ Progress of the royal power. ~ Spirit of association and resistance among the great barons. ~ Commencement of the struggle between these two political forces.

  In order to judge accurately of the power and importance of royalty at the period we are considering, we must first ascertain its actual position and resources; and we shall see by the extent of these resources, and by the advantages of this position, how feeble in its action on the royal power must have been the influence of the assembly of barons.

  The riches of the Norman king were independent of his subjects; he possessed an immense quantity of domains, 1,462 manors, and the principal towns of the kingdom. These domains were continually being augmented, either by confiscations, causes for which were of frequent occurrence, or by the failure of lawful heirs. The king gave lands on a free tenure to those cultivators who would pay for them a determinate rent (free socage tenure). This was the origin of most of the freeholders, whether in the king’s domains or in those of his barons. The king, in his domains, imposed taxes at will; he also arbitrarily imposed custom-house regulations on the importation and exportation of merchandize; and he fixed the amount of fines and of the redemption money for crimes. He sold public offices, among others that of sheriff, which was a lucrative one on account of the share in fines which belonged to it. The county sometimes would pay for the right to nominate its sheriff, or to avoid a nomination already made. Lastly, the sale of royal protection and justice was a source of considerable revenue.

  As to the immediate vassals of the king, they owed him, First, a military service of forty days whenever it was required; Secondly, pecuniary aid under three circumstances—to ransom the king when made prisoner, to arm his eldest son as a knight, or to marry his eldest daughter. The amount of this aid was undetermined up to the reign of Edward I.; it was then fixed at twenty shillings for the fief of a knight, and as much for every twenty pounds sterling value in land held in socage tenure. Thirdly, the king had a right to receive from his vassals a relief or fine on the death of the possessor of a fief; he was guardian if the heir were a minor, and enjoyed all the revenues of the fief till the majority of the heir; he also had a control over their marriages, that is to say, the vassal of a king could not marry without his consent. All these rights were indeterminate, and negotiations were substituted for them in which the greater force always had the advantage. Fourthly, the dispensation from feudal military service gave rise to an impost termed escuage, a kind of ransom-money fixed arbitrarily by the king, as representative of a service to which he had a claim; and he even imposed it in many cases on his vassals when they would have preferred to serve in person. Henry II., by his purely arbitrary will, levied five escuages in the course of his reign.

  In addition to these taxes levied by the king, another must be mentioned called the danegeld, or tax paid for defence against the Danes; this tax was raised several times during this period on all lands throughout the kingdom. The last example of it is to be found in the twentieth year of the reign of Henry II.

  By means of these independent revenues and arbitrary taxes, the Norman kings constantly kept up bodies of paid troops, who could enable them to exercise their power without restraint, which did not take place till a considerably later period on the Continent.

  Lastly, from William the Conqueror till Henry II. the judicial power tended always to concentrate itself in the hands of the king. In this last reign the work was very nearly accomplished: how this came to pass, I will endeavour to show.

  Originally the jurisdictions that co-existed were as follows: 1. The courts of hundred and the county-courts, or meetings of the freeholders of these territorial subdivisions, under the presidency of the sheriff: 2. The courts-baron, or feudal jurisdictions: 3. The grand court of the king, where the king and the assembled barons administered justice to the barons in cases between any of themselves, or in cases of appeal, which could only take place when justice had been refused in the court of the manor or county.

  The Court of Exchequer, instituted by William the Conqueror, was, at first, only a simple court for receiving the accounts of the administration of the king’s revenues, and those of the sheriffs, bailiffs, &c., and for judging the suits that arose on this subject. It was composed of barons, chosen by the king to form his council, and to aid him in his government. In proportion as the larger assembly, the Curia regis, came to be held less frequently, so did the Court of Exchequer gain in importance. The barons who composed it began to judge on their own responsibility, and alone, in the absence and before the convocation of the assembly; this change was introduced by necessity, confirmed by custom, and finally sanctioned and established by law. About the year 1164, another royal court of justice, distinct from the Court of Exchequer, arose out of it, the members of which, however, were the same as those composing the Court of Exchequer. The kings lent their assistance to this change, because it benefited their revenues. At this period were established writs of chancery, which gave to purchasers the right to apply at once to the royal justice, without previously passing the subordinate courts of justice. Soon the ignorance of the freeholders, who composed the county-courts, necessitated the same extension of the royal justice there also, and, in the reign of Henry I., itinerant justices were sent into the counties, in order to administer there in the same way as was done by the Court of Exchequer. This institution was in full vigour only during the reign of Henry II.

  In this way the predominant influence of the king, in judicial order, was established; this was a powerful instrument in producing centralization and unity, and yet, as the royal judges only interposed their services as supplementary to the institution of the jury, and did not substitute them for it—for questions of fact and questions of right remained distinct—the germ of free institutions, that existed in the judicial order, was not entirely destroyed.

  A king invested with such powerful resources could with difficulty be restrained by an irregular assembly; accordingly the government of the Norman kings was almost always arbitrary and despotic. Persons and property were never in security; the laws, taxes, and judicial sentences were almost always merely an expression of the royal will.

  When we consider these facts collectively, we may be led to two very opposite results, according to the point of view from which we regard them: on the one hand, we see the general assembly of the nation interfering pretty frequently in public affairs, not by virtue of any particular official character it possessed, nor for the purpose of exercising any one special right, such as that of making general laws, or of voting supplies, but on occasions widely differing from one another, and for the purpose of acquiescing in the entire course of government. Laws, external relations, peace, war, ecclesiastical affairs, the judgment of important cases, the administration of the royal domains, nominations to great public offices, even the interior economy and proceedings of the royal family, all seem to belong to the province of this national assembly. No matter is foreign to it, no function forbidden to it, no kind of investigation or of action refused to it. All distinction of provinces, all lines of demarcation between the prerogatives of the crown and those of the assembly, appear to be unknown; we might say that the entire government belonged to the assembly, and that it exercised in a direct way that activity, that general supervision, which belongs indirectly to the mature and perfected representative system, by virtue of its influence on the choice of those who are to be the depositaries of power, and by means of the principle of responsibility.

  On the other hand, if we forget the assembly and examine the royal power, as isolated, we shall see it exercising itself in a multitude of cases, in as absolute and arbitrary a manner as if no assembly had existed to share in the government. The king, on his own responsibility, made laws, levied taxes, dispossessed proprietors, condemned and banished important persons, and exercised, in a word, all the rights of unlimited sovereignty. This sovereignty appears entire, sometimes in the hands of the assembly, sometimes in those of the king; when the assembly proceeds to interfere in all the details of government, we do not findany complaint from the king, as if an encroachment had been made on his prerogatives; and when, on the other hand, the king governs despotically, we do not find the assembly bestirring itself to protest against the extension of royal power, as a blow aimed at their rights.

  Thus we are met by two classes of facts, simultaneously existing in this infancy of society—facts which seem to belong to a fully developed system of free institutions, and facts which are characteristic of absolute power. On the one hand, the aim of free governments, which is, that the nation should interfere, directly or indirectly, in all public affairs, seems to be attained; on the other hand, the independent and arbitrary domination of the royal power appears to be recognized.

  This is a result that must necessarily arise in the disorder of a nascent and troubled stage of civilization. Society is then a prey to chaos—all the rights and all the powers of a community co-exist, but they are confounded, unregulated, unmarked by limits, and without any legal guarantee—freemen have not yet abdicated any of their liberties, nor has force yet renounced any of its pretensions. If any one had said to the barons of William, or of Henry I., that they had nothing to do with affairs of State, except to comply when the king demanded an impost, they would have been indignant. All the affairs of the State were theirs, because they were interested in them; and when they were called upon to deliberate concerning peace or war, they believed that they were exercising a right belonging to them, and not making a conquest over royal authority. No freeman, who was strong enough to defend his freedom, recognized any right in another person to dispose of him without his consent, and found it a very simple matter to give his advice on questions that were interesting to him. The king, in his turn, measuring his right by his force, did not recognize in any person, nor, consequently, in any assembly, the legal right to prevent him from doing that which he was able to do. There were then, properly speaking, no public rights or powers at all; they were almost entirely individual and dependent on circumstances; they are to be found, but in a state of isolation, unconscious of their own nature, and, indeed, of their very existence.

  In this disorderly state of things, the able and energetic government of William I., Henry I. and Henry II. caused the royal power gradually to assume a much more general and consistent character. Accordingly, national assemblies became by degrees more rare and less influential; under Stephen, they almost entirely disappeared. The barons no longer had a common meeting-point, and were more occupied with the rule of their own domains than with any association with the royal power for the purpose of controlling or restraining it. Each devoted himself more exclusively to his own affairs, and the king, following this example, made himself almost the sole master of those of the State. He availed himself of the need of order and regularity that made itself felt every day, in order to constitute himself, in some sort, the dispenser of them. By these means he soon became the first in name, as well as the most powerful in fact. Through him, the roads became more secure; he protected the feeble, and repressed robbers. The maintenance of public order devolved upon the royal power, and became the means of extending and strengthening it more and more. Whatever the king had possessed himself of by conquest, he vindicated as his own by right. Thus was formed the royal prerogative.

  But at the same time different circumstances concurred to draw the barons forth from their isolation, to unite them among themselves, and to form them into an aristocracy. The Anglo-Norman throne was successively occupied by three usurpers, William II., Henry I., and Stephen. Invested with a power whose title was doubtful, they felt the necessity of bringing the barons to recognize their claims; hence the first charters were conceded. No one of the barons was powerful enough, in himself, to restrain the threatened extension of royal power, but they formed the habit of making coalitions; and as each of the barons entering into such coalitions, felt the necessity of attaching his vassals to himself, concessions were made to them also. The absence of large fiefs, in England, served the cause both of power and of liberty; it allowed power to form itself into unity with greater facility, and it obliged liberty to seek for guarantees in the spirit of association. That which finally contributed in the most decided way to form and consolidate this aristocratic coalition, was the irregular and usurping conduct of John during the long absence of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and the disorders and civil wars which were naturally the results of this absence. In the midst of these disorders the government fell into the hands of a council of barons, that is to say, of a portion of the aristocracy. Those who had no share whatever in the central power did not cease to control it, and to regard it as rightfully theirs; in this way, the one party formed a habit of governing, the other that of resisting a government which was in the hands of their equals, and not of the king himself. John, by his cowardice and ill-judged familiarity, had brought the throne into disrespect before he himself ascended it, and his barons much more easily conceived the idea of resisting as a king, one whom they had despised as a prince.

  Thus, in the space of a hundred and thirty years, two elements in the State, which were at first confounded and had almost acted in common, were separated and formed into distinct powers—the royal power on the one hand, and on the other, the company of barons. The struggle between these two forces then commenced, and we shall see royalty continually occupied in defending its privileges, and the aristocracy as unweariedly busying itself in the endeavour to extort new concessions. The history of the English charters, from the reign of William I. to that of Edward I., who granted them a general confirmation, is the history of this struggle, to which England is indebted for the earliest appearance of the germs of a free government, that is to say, of public rights and political guarantees.

  LECTURE 6

  History of English Charters. ~ Charter of William the Conqueror (1071). ~ Charter of Henry I. (1101). ~ Charters of Stephen (1135–1136). ~ Charter of Henry II. (1154).

  Liberties are nothing until they have become rights—positive rights formally recognized and consecrated. Rights, even when recognized, are nothing so long as they are not entrenched within guarantees. And lastly, guarantees are nothing so long as they are not maintained by forces independent of them, in the limit of their rights. Convert liberties into rights, surround rights by guarantees, entrust the keeping of these guarantees to forces capable of maintaining them—such are the successive steps in the progress towards a free government.1

  This progress was exactly realized in England in the struggle, the history of which we are about to trace. Liberties first converted themselves into rights; when rights were nearly recognized, guarantees were sought for them; and lastly, these guarantees were placed in the hands of regular powers. In this way a representative system of government was formed.

  We may date from the reign of King John as the period when the efforts of the English aristocracy to procure a recognition and establishment of their rights became conspicuous; they then demanded and extorted charters. During the reign of Edward I., the charters were fully recognized and confirmed; they became real public rights. And it was at the same epoch that a Parliament began to be definitely formed, that is to say, the organization of political guarantees commenced, and with it the creation of the regular power to which they are entrusted.

  I have shown how the two great public forces—royalty and the council of barons, were formed, cemented, and brought into juxtaposition. We must now follow these forces into the combats in which they engaged their energies in order to have their reciprocal rights recognized and regulated; and to do this we must trace the history of English charters. I shall then enquire how the guarantees were organized, that is to say, how the Parliament was formed.

  When William the Conqueror arrived in England, his position with respect to the Norman barons and knights had been already regulated on the Continent by the feudal law; their respective rights were fixed and recognized. After the Conquest, fear of the Anglo-Saxons kept the king and the Normans so far united, that neither of them cared much to extort concessions from the other. Very different, however, were the relations between William and his English subjects. He had to adjust these relations—here was a legislation to be created, and rights to be recognized or contested. The English made the most strenuous efforts to preserve their Saxon laws, and it appears to have been in the fourth year of William’s reign (the year 1071) that they succeeded in gaining an assurance that these laws should be maintained. There is reason to believe that on this occasion he granted the charter intituled, “ Charta regis de quibusdam statutis per totam Angliam firmiter observandis.”2 Some have asserted that this charter was not granted till nearly the end of William’s reign, but I see no reason for assigning any other period to it than that which I have mentioned.

  This charter, the authenticity of which* has been sometimes questioned, I think on insufficient grounds, is a kind of vague declaration containing the general principles of feudal political law. William, in it, recognizes rights which he often allowed himself to violate; for his power rendered the violation of his promises easy. The Norman barons did not form themselves into any body, unless perhaps against the English; they were all too much occupied in the work of establishing themselves in their new domains. If they sometimes roused themselves to oppose the tyranny of William, their revolts were only partial, and the king adroitly used the English in order to put them down. His son, William Rufus, by adopting the same policy, obtained similar success. But Henry I. had to pay for his usurpation; the charter which he granted was the inevitable consequence of his possession of the throne.

  This charter of Henry’s contains a solemn promise to respect all ancient rights. In it the king promises no more to follow all the evil practices by which the kingdom of England was oppressed under the king his brother, that is to say, not to appropriate the revenues of vacant abbacies and bishoprics, nor again to sell or farm ecclesiastical benefices, and to permit the heirs of his vassals to inherit their possessions on paying a just and legitimate fine. He assures to his barons their right to give their daughters or sisters in marriage to whomsoever they will, provided it be not to one of the king’s enemies; he grants to widows who are left without children the possession of their dowry and jointure, and liberty to marry again according to their free choice; and he renounces the right of guardianship, placing it in the hands either of the wife or some relative. He gives to all his vassals the right to dispose of their property either by gift or by will, renounces the right arbitrarily to levy taxes on the farms of his vassals, abandons the forests which William Rufus had usurped, and abolished feudal aids, even in the three cases which we have already speci fied. Lastly, he withdraws the right of coining from the towns and counties, pardons all the offences and crimes committed before his reign, and recommends his vassals to allow their vassals to enjoy all the advantages which he accords to them.

  These concessions were merely recognitions of rights, without guarantees. Henry, accordingly, despite his oaths, violated these magnificent promises; and the abuses which they ought to have removed were not diminished in any degree, during the whole extent of his reign.

  Another charter was granted by Henry I. to the city of London, by which it was authorized, among other things, to elect its own sheriff and chief magistrate, to hold its accustomed assemblies, not to pay either the danegeld or any other scot, or imposts for works along rivers, and not to give lodging to the retinue of the king.

  Lastly, we find new promises and new concessions made by Henry I. in 1101, when his brother Robert laid claim to his rights. Wishing to assure himself of the fidelity of his barons, Henry assembled them at London, and delivered to them a speech, in which, after having given a hideous representation of Robert’s person, he added:—“As for me, I am truly a mild king, modest and pacific; I will preserve to you, and diligently guard your ancient liberties, which I have before sworn to maintain; I will listen with patience to your wise suggestions, and will govern you justly after the example of the best princes. If you desire it, I will confirm this promise by a written charter, and I will swear afresh to observe inviolably all the laws of the holy king Edward,” &c. &c.

  These promises, made in a moment of danger, were always forgotten as soon as ever the danger had disappeared. During his entire reign, Henry continually violated the charter to which he had bound himself by oath, both as regards matters relating to feudal dependence, and in the levying of imposts. According to the historians, he levied each year a tax of twelve pence on every hide of land, a tax which was probably identical with the danegeld.

  Stephen, Henry’s successor, granted charters to his subjects as Henry had done, and these charters were also the result of usurpation. He published two; the first only confirmed the liberties granted by Henry I., and the laws of Edward the Confessor. The second is remarkable as containing a promise made by Stephen to reform the abuses and exactions of his sheriffs. At this period public offices were farmed, and those who filled them, seeking to gain all the advantages possible from them, were far more oppressive on their own account than on account of the king. Accordingly it was no difficult matter to appeal to the king against his own officers. Such a mode of appeal, however, indicates that legal and regular guarantees were unrecognized and but little thought of. The barons however began to procure them, by force. They obtained from the king permission to fortify their castles and put themselves in a state of defence. And the clergy on their part, while taking the oath offidelity, attached to it a condition that they should be released from its obligation as soon as the king should trespass on ecclesiastical liberties.

  The charter granted by Henry II., about the year 1154, still expresses nothing more than a recognition of rights; it does not contain any new promise, or any concession of guarantees. The reign of this prince, I need hardly remind you, was entirely occupied with his disputes with the clergy, with the revolts of his sons, and with his conquests, both on the Continent and in Ireland. No important differences were brought into discussion between him and his barons; no progress in existing institutions is visible, and we may say that the reign of Henry II., considered from this point of view, was orderly and stationary.

  If, however, the king, so far as his relations to his barons were concerned, obtained an almost uninterrupted submission, and caused the demolition of most of those forti fied castles which had been constructed during the preceding reign, the towns on the other hand, and especially the city of London, increased in strength and importance, and the aristocracy became every day more compact by means of the fusion of the Normans and the English, a fusion which was almost completed during this reign, at least among the upper classes.

  The fact of this period which bears most importantly upon the subject which we have under consideration, is the substitution of the escuage for the personal service of the vassals. It is under the reign of Henry II. that we find this impost collected for the first time, at least in the form of a general measure. The establishment and limitations of the escuage became soon the principal object of contention between the king and his barons. The use which the kings came to make of the resources derived from this impost was fatal to them, for they employed it in order to keep up armies of foreign mercenaries, especially Brabanters; and by these measures, they gave a new motive to the English barons to coalesce. The expulsion of foreign soldiers became at length one of the continually recurring demands of the barons.

  Henry II. towards the close of his reign, imposed by his own authority a tax of one sixth on all moveable property. He abandoned the danegeld.

  The reign of Richard, which was entirely occupied with his brilliant but unfortunate expeditions, offers nothing especially illustrative of the history of institutions. The absence of the king and the weakness of the royal power supplied the feudal aristocracy with opportunities for extending their importance; but they did not at that time take advantage of their superiority to procure a recognition of their rights—not until the reign of John did the struggle become violent and the victory decisive.

  LECTURE 7

  Charter of John, or the Great Charter (1215). ~ Three epochs in John’s reign. ~ Formation of a coalition among the barons. ~ Civil war. ~ Conference at Runnymead. ~ Concession of the Great Charter. ~ Analysis of this Charter. ~ Its stipulations refer to national rights as well as to those of the barons. ~ John petitions and obtains from Innocent III. ~ a bull to reverse the Great Charter. ~ Resistance of the English clergy. ~ Recommencement of the civil war (October, 1215). ~ Louis of France, son of Philip Augustus, is appealed to by the barons. ~ Death of John (October, 1216).

  During King Richard’s absence, the administration of the kingdom had fallen into the hands of the barons: the feudal aristocracy had begun again to interfere directly in the government, both by way of encroachment and of resistance. Still, the acts of the barons had no longer the same character which they possessed under the preceding reigns; they no longer offered an open resistance; they did not demand any new charters; they did not petition for the observance of former ones: but they silently collected their forces in anticipation of astruggle which was to be decisive. We find them submitting to the exactions which Richard imposed on all classes of society, both for his crusade and for his ransom. Nevertheless, the old maxims as to the necessity of obtaining the consent of the barons to every extraordinary imposition, had revived with new vigour. This right of giving consent to tributes was vindicated with an increasingly determined firmness; and in the first assembly, which Richard held at Nottingham after his return from the East, he was unable to establish an im-post of two shillings on every hide of land until he had obtained the consent of his barons. Already every tribute that was levied on the sole authority of the king had begun to stir up a spirit of resistance. This resistance declared itself as soon as John ascended the throne, and the opposition which had been preparing during the reign of Richard then started into prominence.

  The reign of John may be divided into three epochs: from 1199 till 1206, he was occupied with his quarrels with the king of France, and with the struggle which arose from the refusal of the barons to second him in his continental enterprises. From 1206 to 1213, John was occupied by his disputes with the Pope and the clergy. Lastly, from the year 1213 to the close of his reign, his position with reference to the barons and the clergy became more and more hostile; it revealed to him their power and his own feebleness; and constantly succumbing before them, we see him yielding one point after another to the clergy and barons, who were always united in their attacks upon him, until at length he granted that celebrated charta usually called Magna Charta, which is a lasting monument of John’s defeat and the abiding basis of the English constitution.

  John was not the lawful heir to the crown; it belonged to his nephew, Arthur, Duke of Bretagne, whose rights were further confirmed by a testament of Richard. Nevertheless, by his largesses and his yielding disposition, John found no difficulty in usurping the throne of England. The opposition was stronger in his continental possessions; the feudal ideas there prevailing favoured the system of representation, and the people were more disposed to recognize the claims of a son than those of a brother. Anjou, Poitou, Maine and Touraine declared for Arthur. In 1201 (others say in 1204) John demanded of the barons, whom he had assembled at Oxford, that they should assist him in the war which he purposed carrying on in France. They required, as the price of their assistance, that the king should promise to restore to them their liberties and privileges. John, without having granted anything to them, succeeded in winning over one after another, until he had obtained from each individually what had been refused to him by all when assembled. Nevertheless, this opposition showed that the coalition among the barons had taken shape and consistence.

  John, who had as yet done nothing to deserve that his usurpation should be overlooked, rendered himself odious by an imprudent divorce, and by vexatious indignities. He introduced into his retinue, bullies, whom he called champions of royalty; and he obliged the discontented barons to enter into the lists with them, and to settle, by these pretended judicial combats, their disputes with the crown. At length, his exactions, his tyrannical proceedings, and above all, the murder of Arthur, whom he is said to have assassinated with his own hand, excited against him an almost general rising. Abandoned by his barons, driven from Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and a part of Poitou, John, instead of conciliating the minds of his people, only acted in such a manner as to alienate them more and more, and only defended himself by rendering himself more odious. A new escuage of two marks and a half for every knight’s fief was extorted from the barons. John had, therefore, to endure a new refusal when he asked them a second time to follow him to the Continent. In vain was it that he employed those means which had before succeeded; he was obliged to yield, and to allow Philip Augustus to take possession of Normandy, and reunite it to the crown of France.

  It was not enough for John that he had entered into hostilities with the lay aristocracy; he still further made himself inimical to the clergy. On the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Augustin monks had arrogated to themselves the right of appointing his successor without the consent of the king. John, nettled by this invasion of his prerogatives, united with the bishops, who also protested against an election in which they had taken no part, and in concert with them, nominated the Bishop of Norwich to the vacant see. Upon this, Innocent III. interfered in the dispute; but without confirming either of the two elections, he ordered the English clergy to choose Cardinal Stephen Langton. The king, enraged against the Court of Rome, drove all the monks from Canterbury, and made himself master of their revenues. Accordingly, the Pope excommunicated the monarch, placed the whole kingdom under his ban, and released his subjects from the oath offidelity which they had sworn to John. Moreover, he charged Philip Augustus to execute his decrees, and offered to him the crown of England. Philip eagerly accepted the present, while John, frightened by the double danger which pressed upon him, demanded, but in vain, assistance from his barons; he had acted unjustly towards them, and now he found them indifferent to his misfortunes. At last, stripped of all resources and left without hope, he sought safety in submission, and saved himself by means of base servility: he declared himself a vassal of the pope, and engaged to pay him annually a tribute of a thousand marks.

  After John had thus ransomed his crown, he soon endangered it again by renewed acts of imprudence; his base tyranny, and his criminal attempts on the wife of Eustace de Vesci, roused the barons against him, and their opposition was directed and stimulated by the primate Langton.

  It is not to be wondered at that the feudal aristocracy should act under the guidance of an ecclesiastic; the two orders made common cause, and this coalition, which preceding kings had always endeavoured to prevent, was one of the effects of John’s odious and absurd conduct. He forgot that the royal power could only maintain itself so long as the power of the clergy and that of the barons balanced one another; when they united, he was obliged to succumb. Their union was the result of John’s base submission to the Holy See; the English clergy, tired of the despotism of Rome, and regretting the loss of their privileges, openly embraced the cause of national liberty.

  Such was the pervading feeling, when (August 25, 1213) an assembly of the barons was convened at London. In one of their meetings, Cardinal Langton informed them that he had found a copy of the charter of Henry I., which was then entirely forgotten; this charter was read to the assembly, and received with enthusiasm. Another meeting was held at Saint Edmundsbury (November 20, 1214), and there each baron, laying his hand upon the altar, took an oath that he would use his efforts to force the king to restore in full vigour the charter of Henry I. They soon presented themselves at London in arms, and on January 5, 1215, they demanded from John, in a formal and positive way, the renewal of this charter, as well as of the laws of Edward the Confessor. John, terrified by their firmness, requested that some leisure might be granted to him in order to think over these demands, and accordingly his answer was deferred till Easter. During this interval, he endeavoured to introduce division among his enemies, and in the first place, wishing to conciliate the clergy, he granted them by a charter the liberty of electing their own bishops and abbots, and sent William de Mauclerc to Rome to complain of the audacity of the barons. They too despatched Eustace de Vesci to Rome, to represent to the pontiff the justice and sacredness of their cause. This embassy, however, failed in its object; the Pope condemned the barons: but they were not to be intimidated from their purposes, and John, determining to make another effort in order to secure the support of the church, took the cross on the 2nd of February, 1215, and made a vow to lead an army into Palestine.

  The respite, however, which the barons had granted to the king came to an end, and they met again at Stamford in Lincolnshire, on the 19th of April, 1215, being followed by nearly two thousand knights in arms. The king asked them what their claims were; they made at Stamford the same answer as they had made in London, and presented the charter which they had sworn to establish. “And why do they not demand my crown also?” exclaimed John in his fury; “by God’s teeth, I will not grant them liberties which will make me a slave.” This answer was taken as a declaration of war, and on the 5th of May following, the barons met at Wallingford, solemnly renounced their oath of allegiance, and at the same time named Robert Fitz-Walter general of the “army of God and of Holy Church.”

  War was declared: in vain did the Pope address letters to the barons, in which he commanded them to desist from their enterprise; the hostilities which had been commenced only continued with greater vigour, and on the 24th of May, the triumphant barons took possession of London with the consent of the citizens. John left the city and retired to Odiham, in the county of Hampshire, with no other escort than seven knights. From his retreat he attempted, without success, to enter into negociations; he proposed the intervention of the Pope, but this was also refused: ba ffl ed in all his attempts, he was at length necessitated to acquiesce in the law which had been forcibly imposed on him.

  On the 13th of June, a conference was opened in the plain called Runnymead, between Windsor and Staines. The two parties had separate encampments, as declared enemies; after some trifling debates, the king at first adopted the preliminary articles, and four days after, on the 19th of June, 1215, he made the grant of the famous act known by the name of the Great Charter—Magna Charta.

  This charter, the most complete and important that had yet appeared, may be divided into three distinct parts; one referring to the interests of the clergy, another regulating those of the nobility, and the third, those belonging to the people. This methodical division is not taken from the order in which the articles of the actual charter are distributed, but I have here adopted it in order to render my account of it more natural and distinct.

  The Great Charter refers but little to ecclesiastical interests, since they had been settled by the charter already granted to the clergy. All that was therefore required was that this should be confirmed. This accordingly is done in the first article, which grants a general confirmation to all ecclesiastical immunities and privileges.

  The privileges of the laity, on the other hand, were more uncertain, and more strongly contested; it was therefore necessary that they should be minutely investigated and separately conceded. The Great Charter is almost entirely devoted to the settlement of the rights, and the confirmation of the privileges, claimed by the laity.

  In the first place, it determines with precision what had been obscure and ambiguous in the feudal laws; and it fixes the amount of relief which the immediate or indirect inheritors of fiefs should pay. Hitherto this relief had been indeterminate. (Arts. 2 to 3.)

  Then follow the precautions prescribed respecting the marriage of feudal wards, and those which regard the widows and children of vassals. (Arts. 6 to 8.)

  The right and mode of collecting aids and escuages, are regulated by the two following articles:

  Art. 12. That no escuage or extraordinary aid shall be imposed in our kingdom, except by the national council of our kingdom, unless it be to ransom our person, to equip our eldest son as a knight, and to marry our eldest daughter: and for these last cases only a reasonable amount of aid shall be demanded, &c.

  Art. 14. In order to hold the national council of the kingdom, for the purpose of imposing any other aid than for the three cases heretofore mentioned, or to impose an escuage, we will call together the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls and great barons, individually and by letters from ourself; and we will assemble together by means of our viscounts and bailiffs, all those who are directly dependent upon us. The great convocation shall be made on a fixed day, namely, at intervals not greater than forty days, and in an appointed place; and in the letters of convocation we will expound the reason of such convocation; and the convocation thus made, the business shall be transacted on the day appointed, by the council consisting of those who are present, although all those who have been summoned may not have arrived.

  This charter is the first document in which we find a distinction established between the greater and lesser barons, and the higher and lower clergy; an important fact, since it may perhaps be regarded as the original source of the separation between the two Houses of Parliament.

  Lastly, several articles have for their object to limit the rights of the king on the lands of his tenants, to fix the amount of fine imposed on beneficiaries according to the gravity of their offence, to determine the length of time during which lands should remain sequestrated on account of felony; in one word, to give to the barons greater independence and security than they had ever before enjoyed.

  These are the principal enactments of the Great Charter in favour of the nobility; up to this point, we find only sanctions given to particular privileges, we have only met with that which favours the interests of certain classes in society. But it contains also clauses of wider and more general application; it has for its object also the interests of the nation as a whole.

  First of all, almost all the immunities granted to the barons with respect to the king, the vassals obtained with respect to their lords. These were not allowed from this time to collect aids and escuages on their lands, except in the same cases and in the same manner as the king. (Art. 15.)

  Justice was for the future to be administered in a fixed and uniform manner; the following are the articles in which this important provision is expressed:

  Art. 17. The court of common pleas shall not follow our court (curia), but shall be held in a fixed place.

  Art. 18. We, or if we are absent from the kingdom, our chief justiciary, shall send four times a year into each county two judges, who, with four knights, chosen by each county, shall hold the assizes at the time and place appointed in the said county.

  Art. 39. No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his tenement, or outlawed, or exiled, or in anywise proceeded against; we will not place or cause to be placed hands upon him, unless by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

  Art. 40. Justice shall not be sold, refused, or delayed to any one.

  Moreover, the king promises to appoint only capable and upright judges (Art. 41); to forbid their condemning any person whatever, without having previously heard the witnesses (Art. 38); to reinstate every man who had been dispossessed without legal judgment (Art. 32); to repair the injuries committed under Henry II., and Richard I. (Art. 53); to put a stop to the imposts for the construction of bridges (Art. 23); and to interdict annoyances of all kinds inflicted either on townsmen, merchants, or villeins (Arts. 20, 26, 28, 30, 31).

  He grants and assures to the city of London, as well as to all other cities, boroughs, towns, and harbours, the possession of their ancient customs and liberties (Art. 13).

  Lastly, the 41st Article provides that all merchants shall have full and free liberty of entering England, of leaving it, of remaining there, and of travelling there by land and by water, to buy and to sell without being subject to any oppression (male tolta) according to the ancient and common usages, &c.

  These, then, are the concessions made to promote the interests of all.

  It is not, however, enough that rights should be recognized and promises made; it is further necessary that these rights should be respected, and that these promises should be fulfilled. The 61st and last article of the Great Charter is intended to provide this guarantee. It is there said that the barons shall elect twenty-five barons by their own free choice, charged to exercise all vigilance that the provisions of the Charter may be carried into effect; the powers of these twenty-five barons is unlimited: if the king or his agents allow themselves to violate the enactments of the Charter in the smallest particular, the barons will denounce this abuse before the king, and demand that it be instantly checked. If the king do not accede to their demand, the barons shall have the right, forty days after the summons has been issued by them, to prosecute the king, to deprive him of his lands and castles (the safety of his person, of the queen, and of their children, being respected), until the abuse has been reformed to the satisfaction of the barons.

  Though such a right was granted, no guarantee was thereby given; it only authorized civil war; it was to perpetuate the struggle indefinitely, and formally to leave the ultimate decision of the question to force. It was still far from being a regularly constituted political guarantee; but the spirit of that age was not capable either of discovering or of comprehending such a guarantee—it could only understand the recognition of its rights. However, the forcible guarantee which the Great Charter established was so far valuable, inasmuch as it centralized the feudal aristocracy by organizing the council of barons.

  It has been often said that the Great Charter would not have been supported by the barons had not it not been for its influence on their special interests. This opinion is untenable: how is it possible that at least a third of the articles should have related to promises and guarantees made on behalf of the people, if the aristocracy had only aimed at obtaining that which should benefit themselves? We have only to read the Great Charter in order to be convinced that the rights of all three orders of the nation are equally respected and promoted.

  Another question has been raised, as to whether John did or did not grant a special charter relating to forests at the time when he granted the Great Charter. Mathew Paris is the only author who speaks of this charter of forests, and there are several reasons why his authority should in this matter be rejected. First of all, the preliminary articles of the Great Charter contain nothing on this point; in the second place, Articles 44, 47, and 48 in the Great Charter itself settle whatever relates to forests; and lastly, the king and the Pope, in their correspondence prior to these events, make no allusion to this twofold concession.

  When the king had distinctly adopted each article of the Great Charter, the agreement between him and his barons, which had been concluded on the 15th of June, was executed in order to ensure the fulfilment of his engagements. The guarding of the city of London was entrusted to the barons till the 15th of August following, and that of the Tower to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  John dissembled at first, and appeared to submit without any reserve to all the sacrifices which were imposed upon him; but such a mask soon became intolerable to him. After a short time he broke out into complaints and threatenings, and retired in fury to the Isle of Wight. While there, he procured the enrolment of an army of Brabanters in order to regain his power by battle, and despatched a messenger to Rome beseeching for aid against the violence that had been done him. Innocent III., hearing what had occurred, and irritated by the audacity of the barons, whom he called his vassals, annulled the Great Charter, and excommunicated all the barons who had joined in the rebellion.

  The king, trusting to this powerful support, threw aside the mask, and retracted all his engagements. But he speedily perceived that those spiritual weapons, which had recently been so potent when opposed to him, were now without value when placed in his own hands. Archbishop Langton refused to pronounce the sentence of excommunication. He was summoned to Rome and suspended, but in vain; the clergy sustained him in his disgrace, and confirmed his refusal. John attempted ineffectually to divide the two orders—whenever he made any preparations for fighting, they became inseparable allies.

  John had now no other hope except in the support of his foreign mercenaries; he made one last effort, and in the month of October 1215, war was again enkindled between him and the barons. The attack was unforeseen; the barons being suddenly surprised retreated before the king, who advanced in triumph as far as Rochester Castle, of which he made himself master after an obstinately resisted siege. He made prisoner its governor, William d’Albiney, one of the twenty-five barons appointed to guard the maintenance of the charter, and the most distinguished captain among them: this was an irreparable loss to their party; and from this moment the king met with no regular resistance. His tyranny might now glut itself with vengeance; he let loose his satellites, and the entire kingdom was soon filled with the devastating effects of his rage.

  Nevertheless, some barons in the north still resisted him manfully; and the remnants of the coalition combined with them; but feeling themselves too weak, they sought in their turn safety from a foreign ally. The crown of England was offered in their name to Prince Louis, son of Philip Augustus, who thereupon sent an army to attempt the conquest of England.

  Louis had scarcely landed when the aspect of affairs entirely changed. John, abandoned by his friends and by his soldiers, lost in a short time all that he had recovered. The entire kingdom fell into the hands of his young rival, and Dover was the only town which remained faithful to John. Prince Louis, however, though he had so far succeeded, did not establish himself on his newly acquired throne. The predilection which he invariably manifested for the French nobles could not but be distasteful to the English barons, and the avowals of the Count of Melun, made on his deathbed, had the effect of detaching almost all the nobility of the kingdom from the side of Louis. This noble induced the barons to distrust the king, who, he affirmed, fully intended to dispossess all of them, and to distribute their lands among his favourites and natural subjects. This disclosure, whether it was true or false, had a powerful effect on the minds of the barons, and most of them renewed their allegiance to their former king.

  John had now set his army on foot, and fortune seemed to promise him new successes, when death surprised him on the 17th of October, 1216. This event was more fatal to Louis than a lost battle could have been. The hatred of the English to their king died with him—they hastened to rally round his young son—a general defection quickly ruined the already tottering cause of the French prince, and after he had continued this useless struggle for a short time, he abandoned a throne for the offer of which he was indebted merely to the accidental distress of the English barons, and which he would never have been able to secure by the mere force of his arms.

  LECTURE 8

  Charters of Henry III. First Charter of Henry III. (November, 1216). ~ Louis of France renounces his title to the Crown, and leaves England. ~ Second Charter of Henry III. (1217). ~ Forest Charter granted by Henry III. (1217). ~ Confirmation of Charters (1225). ~ 4 Revocation of Charters (1227). ~ New confirmation of Charters (1237). ~ Continual violation of Charters. ~ Civil war. ~ Renewal of Charters (1264). ~ New confirmation of Charters (1267). ~ Death of Henry III. (November 16, 1272).

  Hitherto we have only seen, in the charters, recognitions of rights more or less open and complete; they are transactions between two rival powers, one of whom gives promises while the other establishes rights; but there is no power to guarantee that these promises shall be faithfully kept and these rights duly regarded. The only curb placed on royalty is the prospect of a civil war that is always threatening to break out—a remedy which is incompatible with order and stability, two elements which are indispensable to a free government.

  Under the reign of Henry III., the feeling began to be entertained that civil war is an evil guarantee; and other means of preventing the violation of oaths were sought and dimly apprehended. The charters which were obtained in this reign have still as their chief aim the obtaining of new concessions and promises; but efforts towards the formation of guarantees are also apparent, and we may now trace the first attempts after a legal and efficient constitution.

  This reign must be regarded under the two aspects which have been indicated. Our object at present being only to follow the history of English Charters, we shall examine the facts of this period only under the first point of view: when we come to treat of the formation of the Parliament, we shall search there for the first attempts after an organized constitution.

  Henry, who was but a child when his father died, found an able protector in William, Earl of Pembroke, Marshal of England, who was then commander of the royal armies. Pembroke had been a faithful servant to King John, and transferred to the son that friendship which he had given to the father. His only thought was that Henry should succeed to the throne, and accordingly the ceremony of coronation was performed at Gloucester, on the 28th of October, 1216. Afterwards, in a council of barons assembled at Bristol, on the 11th of November, he assumed the title of Regent, and in order to render the cause of the young king popular he granted a new charter in his—the king’s—name. This charter corresponded, with the exception of a few modifications, to that given by King John. All the articles are omitted which refer to the establishment of escuages, to the liberty of entering and leaving the kingdom, to the preservation of forests and dykes, and to the customs of the counties; moreover, the article was suppressed which granted the right of resistance by armed force in case the king should violate his promises. These suppressions were not, however, definitely concluded; it is stated in the charter that “the prelates and lords have determined that these things shall remain open, until they have more fully deliberated concerning them.”*1

  We see by this that the barons at that time showed themselves less exacting than they had been during John’s reign, or rather that they no longer stipulated for any other interests than those which personally affected themselves, neglecting those belonging to other classes in the nation.

  However this may be, this new charter produced the effect which Pembroke had desired; it finally broke up the party which had been formed in favour of Prince Louis of France, and strengthened that of King Henry. The French, however, had still some adherents left; the city of London especially persisted, with an obstinate determination, in remaining faithful to them. But after numerous reverses, they could hold out no longer; a treaty was concluded between the two monarchs on the 11th of September, 1217; Louis abandoned all pretensions to the crown, left England with the remnant of his party, and Henry remained in quiet possession of the sovereignty.

  The retreat of the French re-established harmony in the kingdom, but in order to render the concord more certain and immediate two more charters were granted. One was similar to the preceding; only one remarkable modification is to be found, namely the decision that the escuage should be levied as in the time of Henry II. The other is known under the name of the Charta de Foresta, being the same that has been erroneously attributed to King John: it has only one special aim, and contains nothing but a series of regulations as to the extent and limits of the forests belonging either to the nobility or to the crown.

  These charters were perpetually violated by the agents of power. For several years these infractions did not occasion more than partial complaints, but at length, in the year 1223, the protestation became general and urgent. The council of barons was summoned to London, where they demanded a new confirmation of the charters. One of the councillors of the regency, William de Bri-were, ventured to oppose, saying that “all these liberties had been extorted from the king;” but the Archbishop of Canterbury smartly reproved him, telling him that if he loved the king, he at all events would not venture to trouble the kingdom. The young king promised that the charters should be henceforth observed, and twelve knights were appointed in each county, who should enquire what were, according to ancient usages, the rights of the king and the liberties of his subjects.

  Still, new anxieties soon excited new protestations. Since the preceding reign the barons had held in trust most of the royal castles and domains, and this was the principal guarantee they had that their treaties should be observed. Suddenly their possession of this guarantee was threatened: a bull of Pope Honorius III., which declared Henry to be of age when he was seventeen years old, ordered at the same time that all those who had royal domains in their hands should restore them to the king. This bull occasioned many suspicions as to Henry’s intentions; fears began to be entertained lest, having obtained his majority, he should revoke the two charters to which he had sworn during his minority. The king and his advisers perceived the necessity of meeting this disturbed state of feeling, and on the 11th of February, 1225, the king granted of his own accord a new confirmation of the charters. As an acknowledgment of this they granted him a fifteenth part of all the moveable property of the kingdom as a subsidy.

  But this mutual accommodation did not last long. At the end of two years, Henry, having obtained his true majority, revoked all the charters, under the pretext that they had been granted when he was not in the free possession of his body and of his seal; “ cum nec sui corporis nec sigilli aliquam potestatem habuerit.”

  This revocation excited the most active discontent. The indignant barons turned their rage against the man whom the public voice accused as the author of these proceedings. This was Hubert de Burgh, the grand justiciary and intimate counsellor of Henry. This minister was from that time exposed to the most violent attacks, and did not cease to be persecuted by the rage of his opponents till at length, in 1232, the king yielded to the storm, withdrew his favour from the obnoxious minister, and exiled him from the court.

  The murmurs of the barons were hardly appeased when Henry seemed as if desirous of exciting them afresh, by again surrounding himself with men who were hated by his subjects. This was a foreigner, a Poitevin, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, who became the king’s favourite on the disgrace of Hubert de Burgh. From that time, only foreigners were trusted with places and favours by the prince. Not content with draining the coffers of the State, they burdened the people with exactions—their insolence was perfectly unbridled. When the laws of England were appealed to against them, “we are not English,” they said, “we do not know what is the purport of these laws.” The indignant barons urgently demanded justice, and in the year 1234, two years after the disgrace of Hubert de Burgh, the king found himself compelled to abandon Peter des Roches and to dismiss the foreigners from his court. But shortly after, on his marriage with Eleanor, daughter of the Count of Provence, the Provençals took the place of the Poitevins, and in their turn drew on themselves the hatred of the English barons.

  The irritation was general, when the king, who was in want of money, assembled the barons at Westminster, in the month of January, 1237, in order to demand of them a subsidy. The barons answered him with a refusal and with menaces. Henry, alarmed at this, had recourse to a remedy which had not yet lost its efficiency, namely, a new confirmation of the charters. Hardly was it granted before he obtained a subsidy of a thirtieth part of all moveable property.

  But his prodigality soon dissipated these feeble resources; again was he obliged to resort to arbitrary and tyrannical means in order to provide himself with money—to exactions, to forced loans, a new kind of impost which is then for the first time to be met with in English history. It is remarkable, however, that Henry never dared to levy any general tribute on the nation on his own personal responsibility. Imposts that were really public were never collected except under the professed sanction of a council of the barons, and after the king had purchased their good will by a new confirmation of the charters.

  On the 13th of May, 1253, a sentence of excommunication was solemnly pronounced against any person who should infringe the royal charters; and at the close of the ceremony the prelates threw down their extinguished but smoking tapers, exclaiming, “May the soul of every one who incurs this sentence so stink and be extinguished in hell!” And the king added, “So help me God! I will keep these charters inviolate, as I am a man, as I am a Christian, as I am a knight, and as I am a king crowned and anointed!”

  Again were the charters violated, and at length it was seen that their repeated renewals were vain—civil war was therefore declared. The Earl of Leicester, at the head of a party of barons, took up arms, at first with the intention of effectually limiting, but afterwards of entirely usurping the royal authority. This rebellion had now no longer for its aim to obtain the renewal of charters, it tended also to found practical guarantees of recognized rights. Of these I shall speak more in detail when I come to consider the formation of the Parliament. At present I will content myself with observing that the result of the insurrection headed by the Earl of Leicester was a general renewal of the charters, granted on the 14th of March, 1264—a kind of treaty of peace between the king and the barons, the king’s object being to obtain from them the enlargement of Prince Edward, whom they retained as a hostage.

  At length, three years after, on the 18th of November, 1267, some time before the departure of Prince Edward for Palestine, the king once more confirmed the charters in the Parliament assembled at Marlborough. This confirmation was the last granted by Henry III.; he died five years afterwards, on the 16th of November, 1272, having passed a long reign in making promises to be afterwards violated, renewed, retracted, and then renewed again.

  LECTURE 9

  Conclusion of the history of Charters under the reign of Edward I. ~ Political conflict follows civil war. ~ The king frequently violates the Charters, especially in the matter of imposts. ~ The barons resist energetically. ~ Edward gives a definitive confirmation to the Charters (1298‒1301). ~ A bull of Clement V., solicited by Edward I., annuls the Charters. ~ Its failure. ~ Death of Edward I. ~ (July 7, 1307).

  During the two preceding reigns the struggle between the feudal aristocracy and the royal power has been really a civil war. Under Edward I. the struggle continued, but the civil war ceased. The barons did not protest in favour of their liberty with any less resolute determination than they had hitherto manifested, nor did the king defend his prerogatives less vigorously, but neither party appealed to arms. This is the general history of important struggles; they are begun by a trial of strength between the two contending parties, and when the problem of material forces has been resolved, the struggle changes its direction and its theatre; it becomes concentrated into an assembly, and the victorious party has no longer any other aim than to legalize the victory already gained, and thus add a constitutional validity to a material victory. Parliamentary debates follow civil war. When the parliamentary debates have lasted through a certain number of years, and have received the sanction of time, the struggle may be regarded as terminated. To this stage had matters arrived in the reign of Edward I.; the resistance which was shewn during his reign only displayed itself in Parliament; and, when it had lasted for thirty years, the rights which it had tended to consecrate were for ever recognized and tolerably respected.

  At the time of Henry’s death, his son Edward was in Palestine; notwithstanding his absence, however, he was proclaimed king without any opposition. The capacity which he had displayed in the troubles of the kingdom, and the moderation which he had often shewn, had gained for him general favour. Upon his return to England, he justified the expectations which had been formed concerning him; many abuses were reformed, and a better order was introduced into the administration of justice.

  I shall pass rapidly over the first twenty-four years of this reign. They were occupied with the conquest of Wales, and with Edward’s wars in Scotland, which were incessantly renewed by the insurrections of the Scotch. During all this time, although we hear of very frequent assemblies of Parliament, we scarcely hear anything even of the charters. The administration of the kingdom, which was vigorous and fair, excited few complaints, and public attention was absorbed by the expeditions and victories of the monarch.

  Nevertheless the necessity of frequently raising subsidies, in order to keep up his numerous armies, soon obliged Edward to adopt violent and arbitrary measures. He limited the quantity of wool which might be exported, and placed on every sack of wool, that was exported, a duty of forty shillings, that is to say, more than a third of its value; all the rest of the wool and hides, that were ready for shipping, were confiscated to the service of the king. He demanded of each sheriff two thousand quarters of wheat, and as many of oats, authorising them to take the required wheat or oats wherever they could lay their hands upon them; besides which he caused a large quantity of cattle to be seized. Lastly, showing no regard for feudal right, he imposed on every landed proprietor, having a larger revenue than twenty pounds sterling, whatever might be the nature of his domains, the obligation to attend him in the war which he was about to prosecute in France.

  The dissatisfaction among the people and barons was general, and it was soon redoubled, in consequence of a fraud to which Edward did not hesitate to resort in raising a subsidy, which had been granted to him by the Parliament, held at Saint Edmundsbury in the preceding year (1296). Instead of contenting himself with the eighth* of the moveable property, which had been granted to him, he assumed that the impost was much larger, and obliged his subjects to pay it.

  In the midst of the excitement caused by these measures, Edward convoked his barons at Salisbury to arrange with them for the departure and march of his armies. He had intended to send one of his armies to Gascony, and to lead the other into Flanders, himself taking the command of the latter in person, while the former was to march under the direction of Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and of Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the one the Constable, the other the Lord Marshal of England. These two men, who were vigorous champions of the national cause, refused to accept the mission which was offered to them. The object of their refusal was to compel the king to purchase their compliance by a renewed promise to confirm the charters, a promise which he had already made, but which he seemed in no haste to carry out. When Edward gave them the order to repair to Gascony, they answered that they were ready to follow him to Flanders, but that the character of their offices would not allow them to separate themselves from his person. “You shall go,” said the king, “whether I go with you or not.” Hereford replied that he would not go; upon which Edward exclaimed, “By the everlasting God, sir earl, you shall either go or hang.” “By the everlasting God, sir king,” replied Hereford, coolly, “I will neither go nor hang.” Edward did not feel himself sufficiently powerful to punish this haughty reply; and, fearing lest he should find the same spirit of resistance in all the barons, he abandoned his intention of sending an army into Gascony. The two earls quitted Salisbury with their retinue, and the king, after he had placed their offices in the hands of two other lords, prepared to embark for Flanders.

  But before his departure, on the 12th of August, 1297, he addressed to all the sheriffs of the kingdom a singular kind of manifesto, one which was, perhaps, unique at that period, which he intended should be read before the assembled people. In it the king explained the causes of his quarrel with the two earls, excused the exactions he had made by pleading the necessities of war, and desired his subjects to maintain peace and order. This proclamation, or, perhaps, rather this appeal to the public, shews how greatly power already felt itself dependent upon the support of opinion, and constrained in some way to acknowledge a responsibility to it.

  To this apology for his conduct, which the king put forth, the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford replied by another manifesto, which was presented to the king at Winchelsea, in which they recounted all the public wrongs and demanded redress. Edward answered that his council was dispersed, and that he could not attend to these protests till his return, and he accordingly went on his expedition, leaving his son regent of the kingdom.

  Upon this the two earls, after having published their manifesto and the king’s reply to it, presented themselves before the treasurers and barons of the exchequer, and forbade them, as they would dread to excite a civil war, to collect, for the king, the tribute of one-eighth, which had been granted by the Parliament at Saint Edmundsbury, affirming that the granting of it had been illegal.

  In order to bring these differences to a close, the prince-regent assembled a Parliament in London, on the 10th of October, 1297. The two earls were invited to take their place in the assembly, and came escorted by five hundred horse and a body of infantry, and would not consent to enter London until they had obtained permission to place a guard at each gate. They demanded a general confirmation of the charters, and, moreover, asked that several additions should be made to them. The prince-regent subscribed to all their demands, and the act of confirmation signed by him was immediately sent to the king, who was at Ghent. Edward, after he had taken three days to consider the matter, sanctioned the confirmation,* and granted an amnesty to the two earls, who, satis fied with this exhibition of generosity on the part of the king, went, subsequently, to Scotland to assist him in the war which he was carrying on there.

  When Edward returned again to England, the barons demanded that he, in his own person, should confirm the charters which had been granted to them. The king evaded these demands, and retired to Windsor. Thither the barons followed him to renew their importunities and their complaints. The king excused himself on the ground of ill-health, and told them to return to London, where he would send them an answer. This answer was a new confirmation of the charters, but contained one restrictive clause: salvo jure coronae nostrae.1 At the public reading of the charter, which was made at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the assembly hearing how all their rights were definitely confirmed in it, made the most lively manifestations of joy; but hardly had the reserve clause been pronounced, when violent murmurs were raised on all sides; the people immediately left the church, and the angry barons retired to their domains, resolved once more to appeal to force.

  Edward perceived that he had raised a storm of opinion against him, and, after innumerable delays and evasions, and complaining haughtily that he was too closely pressed, he, at length, decided upon convoking a Parliament on the 6th of March, 1300, and confirmed without any restriction all the concessions which he had already made; he even added new guarantees, which were contained in articles called articuli super chartas. The chief provisions contained in these additions consist in a regulation that the charters should be publicly read in the county courts four times every year, and that there should be elected in each county court, from among the knights of the court, three justices, sworn to receive all complaints of infractions of the charters, and to pronounce penalties against the offenders.

  Lastly, in the following year, 1301, at a Parliament held at Lincoln, Edward, after having received its approval to a new limitation of the forests, which had been for a long time demanded and at length concluded, yet once more confirmed the charters.

  From the time when this charter of confirmation was granted, the rights which it proclaimed were definitively recognized. The open and exterior struggle ceased at this period, but the secret and concealed did not. Edward endured impatiently the yoke which he had taken upon himself, and endeavoured to release himself from it. He did not, however, dare to raise the mask, but concealed all his efforts. Towards the close of the year 1304, he petitioned Pope Clement V. to release him from his oaths. The pontiff complied with his wishes, and by a bull, dated January 5, 1305, declared that all the promises and concessions made by Edward were abrogated, null and void.*

  This prince did not dare, as John had formerly done, to take advantage of this bull, and he therefore kept it quite secret; but he still had recourse to secret manoeuvres. He began by a series of vile persecutions of those who had headed the confederation of the barons, and especially of the Earl of Norfolk and the Archbishop of Canterbury. These two men, though they were in former years so boldly courageous, now yielded with a feebleness that can only be excused by their great age. But it was too late; the authority of the king could no longer effect anything against the charters, and the feebleness even of their former defenders could not add to the power of royalty. Death soon after put a stop to all Edward’s efforts to carry out the designs he had formed: it surprised him suddenly while he was in Scotland, on the 7th of July, 1307. From that period the charters, notwithstanding all attacks made upon them, have remained as the immoveable basis of public right in England.

  statute issued by edward i., in confirmation of the charters. november 5, 1297

  Edward, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Guyan, to all those that these present letters shall hear or see, greeting. Know ye that we, to the honour of God and of Holy Church, and to the profit of our realm, have granted that, for us and for our heirs, the charter of liberties and the charter of the forest, which were made by common consent of all the realm, in the time of King Henry our father, shall be kept in every point without breach. And we will that the same charters shall be sent under our seal, as well to our justices of the forest as to others, and to all sheriffs of shires, and to all our other officers, and to all our cities throughout the realm, together with our writs in the which it shall be contained; that they cause the aforesaid charters to be published, and declare to the people that we have confirmed them in all points; and that our justices, sheriffs, and mayors, and other ministers, which, under us, have the laws of our land to guide, shall allow the said charters, pleaded before them in judgment, in all their points, that is to wit, the Great Charter as the common law, and the charter of the forest for the wealth of our realm.

  And we will that if any judgment be given from henceforth contrary to the points or the charters aforesaid by the justices, or by any other our ministers, that hold pleas before them against the points of the charters, it shall be undone and holden for nought.

  And we will that the same charters shall be sent, under our seal, to cathedral churches throughout our realm, there to remain, and shall be read before the people two times by the year.

  And all archbishops and bishops shall pronounce the sentence of excommunication against all those that by word, deed, or counsel do contrary to the foresaid charters, or that in any point break, or undo them. And that the said curses be twice a year denounced and published, by the prelates aforesaid. And if the same prelates, or any of them, be remiss in the denunciation of the said sentences, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, for the time being, shall compel and distrain them to the execution of their duties in form aforesaid:

  And foresomuch as divers people of our realm are in fear that the aids and tasks which they have given us beforetime towards our wars, and other business, of their own grant and goodwill, howsoever they were made, might turn to a bondage to them and their heirs, because they might be at another time found in the Rolls, and likewise for the prises taken throughout the realm by our ministers, we have granted for us and for our heirs, that we will not draw such aids, tasks, nor prises into a custom, for any thing that hath been done heretofore, be it by Roll or any other precedent that may be found.

  Moreover we have granted for us and for our heirs, as well to archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, and other folk of Holy Church, as also to earls, barons, and all the commonality of the land, that for no business for henceforth we shall take such manner of aids, tasks, or prises, but by the common assent of the realm, and for the common profit thereof, saving the ancient aids and prises due and accustomed.

  And foresomuch as the more part of the commonality of this realm find themselves sore grieved with the maletent of wool, that is to wit, a toll of forty shillings for every sack of wool, and have made petition for us to release the same; we at their requests, have clearly released it, and have granted, for us and our heirs, that we shall not take such things without their common consent and goodwill; saving to us and our heirs the custom of wools, skins, and leather, granted before by the commonality aforesaid. In witness of which things we have caused these our letters to be made patents. Witness, Edward, our son, at London, the 10th day of October, the five and twentieth year of our reign.

  And be it remembered that this same charter, in the same terms, word for word, was sealed in Flanders, under the king’s great seal, that is to say, at Ghent, the 5th day of November, in the twenty-fifth year of the reign of our aforesaid lord the king, and sent into England.

  letter of clement v. to edward i

  Clement, bishop, servant of God’s servants, to our well-beloved son in Jesus Christ, Edward, illustrious king of England, health and apostolic benediction:

  The purity of thy loyal devotion, which is and has been uniform and conspicuous in thy unwearied attention to the desires of the Holy See, well deserves that the Holy See itself should remove all that is hostile to thy welfare, should suppress whatever displeases thee, and should ever secure for thee the enjoyment of all good.

  We have learnt recently, by an account worthy of credit, that lately, when thou wert in Flanders, and even before thy arrival there, when thy efforts were being used to maintain thy prerogatives against thy enemies and rivals, that then certain magnates and nobles of thy kingdom, and other persons who are hostile to thy authority, taking advantage of the opportunity when thou wert occupied in fighting against those in another kingdom, who were opposed to thy rule, threatened that, unless thou wouldst make certain concessions of a diverse and unjust character, both relating to forest and other rights, which have, from time immemorial, belonged to the crown, and the dignity of thy rank, (which also, previously, they had importunately sought before thy departure from the said kingdom,) they would conspire against thee, would excite the people, and disseminate various scandals:

  And that thou, prudently treating their conspiracy, and wishing then to avoid the dangers that were pressing upon thee, didst grant these concessions, more by constraint than with thy free consent:

  And that, finally, on thy return to thy kingdom, the wars not having then terminated, the said magnates, and others, through their importunate and presumptuous suggestions, did obtain from thee the renewal of these concessions; and that they have, moreover, extorted royal orders to the effect that in every cathedral church in the kingdom there should be pronounced, twice every year, a sentence of excommunication against those who should violate the said concessions, as is expounded formally and in detail in the said commands, under the authority of the royal seal:

  As, therefore, the Holy Apostolic See regards thy kingdom favourably, even above all other kingdoms, and entertains for thee, personally, the most friendly feelings, and recognizes that all these concessions have been made and extorted at the expense of thine honour, and to the detriment of thy royal sovereignty:

  So by the apostolic authority, and by our full power, we revoke, annul, and dissolve the said concessions and all their effects, and all that can result from them, as also the sentences of excommunication which have or may be pronounced in order to their observance, either in the said churches or elsewhere, we declare them abolished, null, and without authority; annulling also the orders and letters to which they have given occusion; we decree for thee and for thy successors on the throne of England, that ye neither are nor ever shall be bound to observe them, even although ye may have engaged yourselves so by oath; besides that, as thou hast assured us, at the time when thy coronation was solemnized, thou didst swear to maintain the honours and the prerogatives of thy crown; so that, if even thou hast bound thyself to any penalty on this account, we absolve thee therefrom, as well as from the accusation of perjury if it should be made against thee.

  To ensure the execution of our desires, we expressly forbid our venerable brethren, the archbishops, bishops, and others, ecclesiastical as well as secular, who are settled in thy kingdom, to do or attempt anything against the tenor of the present annulment, abrogation, revocation, and abolition, under penalty, as regards the archbishops and bishops, of suspension from their offices and benefices; and, if they persist for one month, under penalty of excommunication, which shall be, for this sole reason, pronounced against them, and all who are accessory to their designs.

  We declare beforehand that every attempt against our present decree is null and void.

  If, however, there is any right belonging to the inhabitants of the said kingdom, which they possess by virtue of previous letters and concessions so made by thee, we mean not to withdraw these from them.

  It shall not be allowed to any one absolutely to violate in any particular, or only to contradict the present act of abrogation, revocation, annulment, and abolition.

  If any one dare to allow this in himself let him know that he incurs the indignation of the Almighty, and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul.—(Rymer, Acta Publica, vol. ii., p. 372.)

  LECTURE 10

  Necessity of inquiring into the political sense of the word representation at the time when a representative government began to be formed. ~ Mistaken theories on this subject. ~ Rousseau’s theory, which denies representation and insists on individual sovereignty. ~ Theories of writers who attempt to reconcile the principle of representation with that of individual sovereignty. ~ Erroneousness of the idea that the sovereignty belongs to the majority. ~ True idea of representation.

  We have studied the primitive institutions of the Anglo-Norman government; we have traced the successive steps in the history of the charters, and of the struggle which was carried on by the barons to secure their confirmation by the royal power; but up to this point we have not seen anything of a representative government. We have, however, now arrived at the point when this government began to appear. Our attention is now to be called to the creation of a Parliament, that is to say, to the birth of a representative system.

  As we approach this great historical question, a question in political philosophy presents itself before us:—what is the true and legitimate sense of this word representation as applied to the government of a community? It is not for us to pass over this question without noticing it: the history of political institutions is now no longer a bare recital of facts—it must rest on principles; it neither deserves the name nor possesses the authority of science, till it has sounded and placed in clear light the primary foundation in reason, from which the facts which it collects trace their origin. Political history cannot now be otherwise than philosophical; this is demanded by the stage of human culture which the mind of society has reached.

  Let us now suppose a representative government, aristocratic or democratic, monarchical or republican, completely established and in action: if any one were to ask a citizen of such a State—supposing him to be a man of good sense but unversed in political speculations—“Why do you elect such a deputy?” he would answer, “Because in the consideration of public affairs, I believe him to be more capable than any other of sustaining the cause to which my opinions, my feelings, my interests, are allied.”

  Now bring this man before the political theorists who have treated of representation; let his good sense be brought into contact with their systems—truth would soon be perplexed and obscured by the falsities of science.

  One learned gentleman would thus address him:—“What have you done? You have supplied yourself with a representative—you are no longer free—you are no longer in truth a citizen of a free State. Liberty means a man’s sovereignty over himself, the right to be governed only by his individual will. And sovereignty cannot be represented, just because the will cannot be represented—it is either the same or something entirely different, there is no medium. Who has certified you that your representative will always and on all occasions have the same will as yourself? He will certainly not be so accommodating. So far then from your being represented, you have surrendered to him your will, your sovereignty, your liberty. You have given yourself up not to a representative, but to a master. And why? Because you are an indolent, grasping, cowardly individual, who pay far more regard to your own personal concerns than to public matters, who will rather pay for soldiers than go to war, who will rather appoint deputies and stay at home than go yourself and share in the deliberations of a national council.”

  This is the way in which Rousseau conceives of representation: he considers that it is delusive and impossible, and that every representative government is in its own nature illegitimate.*

  Let the same citizen be addressed by other doctors who, entertaining the same ideas of sovereignty and liberty as those held by Rousseau, and nevertheless believing in representation, endeavour to harmonize these different conceptions. They might say to him: “Most true; sovereignty resides in yourself and in yourself alone; but you may delegate without abandoning it;—you do so every day; to your steward you commit the management of your lands, to your physician the care of your health, and you place your legal affairs into the hands of your solicitor. Life is vast and complicated, your personal control is insufficient for all its activity and demands; everywhere you avail yourself of others in the exercise of your own power—you employ servants. This is only a new application of the same principle—you employ one servant more. If he swerve from your directions, if he fail in giving expression to your will, we grant that he abuses his trust. When you give him your suffrage, you do not surrender to him your liberty—he on the other hand in receiving them has renounced his own. The mandate which he holds from you makes him a slave while it makes you free. On this condition representation becomes legitimate, for the person represented does not cease to be sovereign.”

  What will the citizen say to this? He must make his choice: such, he is told, is the nature of representation that, in one way or another, whenever he appoints a deputy he makes some one a slave, either his representative or himself. This was far from his intention; wishing to live at once in freedom and in security, he connected himself, acting in concert with his fellow citizens, with a man whom he regarded free as well as himself, and whom he judged capable of defending his liberty and ensuring his tranquillity; when he gave this man his suffrage he did not believe he was either enslaving himself or the object of his choice—he thought to enter into a relation of alliance with him, not of sovereignty or of servitude—he only did what is virtually done every day by men, who, having interests which are identical and not being able to manage them individually and directly, entrust them to that individual among their number who appears to be most capable of efficiently conducting them, thus shewing by their confidence their respect for his superiority, and preserving at the same time the right to judge, by his conduct, if the superiority is real and the confidence deserved. Regarded in itself, this is the fact of election—neither more nor less. What then is to be said of the theory which comes to denaturalize the fact, and to give it an import and significance which it never had in its origin either in the intention or the reason of the parties interested.

  The source of all this confusion is to be found in a wrong apprehension of the word representation; and the word has been misunderstood, because false ideas have been entertained regarding sovereignty and liberty. We must therefore revert to earlier stages of the enquiry.

  The fundamental principle of the philosophies which we oppose is, that every man is his own absolute master, that the only legitimate law for him is his individual will; at no time had any one, be his credentials what they may, any right over him, if he does not give his consent to it. Starting from this principle, Rousseau saw, and saw truly, that as the will is a purely individual fact, so all representation of the will is impossible. Assuming that the will is the sole source of the legitimate power which a man exercises over himself, it follows that no man can transmit this power to another, for he cannot determine that his will shall be conveyed to another man and cease to reside in himself. He cannot confer a power which would certainly involve the risk of his being obliged to obey another will than his own; for on this very account, if on no other, that power would be illegitimate. All thought of representation, therefore, is a delusion, and all power founded on representation is tyrannical, for a man only remains free so long as he obeys no law but that of his own will.

  The conclusion is inevitable—Rousseau’s only fault was that he did not push it far enough. Going as far as this would lead him, he would have entirely abstained from seeking after the best government, he would have condemned all constitutions—he would have affirmed the illegitimacy of all law and all power. In fact, how does it concern me that a law emanated yesterday from my will, if today my will has changed? Yesterday my will was the only source of legitimacy for the law; why then should the law remain legitimate when it is no longer sanctioned by my will? Can I not will more than once? Does my will exhaust its rights by a single act? And because it is my only master, must I, therefore, submit slavishly to laws from which this master who has made them bids me to enfranchise myself? This was not overlooked by Rousseau: “It is absurd,” he says, “to suppose that the will should fetter itself with chains for the future.”*

  This then is the consequence of the principle when fairly carried out. Rousseau did not see this, or did not dare to see it; it is destructive not only of all government, but also of all society. It imposes upon man an absolute and continued isolation, does not allow him to contract any obligations, or to bind himself by any law, and brings an element of dissolution even into the bosom of the individual himself, who can no more bind himself to his own nature than to any other person: for his past will, that is to say, what he no longer wills, has no more right over him than the will of a stranger.

  Rousseau was at least sometimes doubtful as to the application of his principle, and he only lost sight of it when, if he had remained faithful to it, he would have been obliged to sacrifice all else to it. Minds less powerful than his, and therefore less able to cast off the yoke of social necessities, have believed that they could preserve the principle without admitting all its consequences. Like Rousseau, they have admitted that, every man being the sole master of himself, no law can be binding upon him which is not conformed to his will—an axiom which has become popular under this form: No one is bound to obey laws to which he has not given his consent. Reasoning with strict logical rigour, Rousseau would have perceived that this axiom did not leave any standing place for organized power. He had, at all events, clearly shown that all representation of power was condemned by it as illegitimate and delusive. Other political theorists have undertaken to deduce from it representation itself, and all the powers of which it is the basis. They have proceeded in some such manner as the following:—

  They have placed themselves fearlessly in presence of existing facts, determined to regulate them according to their convenience by imposing alternately upon the facts a principle which they reject, and upon this principle consequences which it will not naturally admit. Given—society to maintain and government to construct, without ceasing to affirm that the will of man is the source of legitimacy for power. It is required that this work should follow from this principle—they determine that it shall.

  But an impossibility confronts them at the outset; how to avoid imposing upon men any law without their consent. How shall all individual wills be consulted regarding each particular law? Rousseau did not hesitate; he pronounced great States to be illegitimate, and that it was necessary to divide society into small republics in order that, once at least, the will of each citizen might give its consent to the law. Even if that could be done, the problem would be far from being solved, so that the principle should appear fully exemplified, whatever tests might be applied to it. But still an impossibility had at length disappeared, and logical consistency was preserved. The political theorists of whom we are speaking, far more timid than Rousseau, have not dared to protest against the existence of large communities, but they have not feared to get over the impossibility by the aid of a new inconsistency. While they do not allow to individuals the right only to obey laws conformed to their will, they substitute for it the right only to obey laws which emanate from a power which has been constituted by their will; they have thought to pay respect to the principle, by basing the legitimacy of the law on the election of the legislative power. Thus the theory of representation, that is, of the representation of wills, has re-appeared, in spite of Rousseau’s logical reasonings: for, so long as the will of man is recognized as the only legitimate sovereign for him, if the creation of a power be attempted by means of representation, the kind of representation that will really be attempted will be the representation of wills.

  But this theory must be carried out, and reduced to practice. Now, after having annulled, so far as the creation of the law is concerned, so many individual wills, the least that could be expected is that all should be called upon to give their voice in the nomination of those who shall be commissioned to make laws. Universal suffrage was therefore the inevitable consequence of the principle already so violently perverted; it has been sometimes professed, but never actually adopted. Here then once more a new impossibility has occasioned a new inconsistency. Nowhere has the right of voting for the legislative power belonged to more than a fragment of society; women, at least, have always been excluded from it. Thus then, while the will has been recognized as the sole legitimate sovereign in every individual, a large number of individuals have not even taken any part in the creation of that factitious sovereignty which representation has given to all.

  We might pursue these investigations, and we should find at every step some new deviation from the principle which, it is pretended, is always to be respected as forming the abiding basis on which the formation of governments depends. The most remarkable of these deviations is certainly the supremacy which is everywhere attributed to the majority over the minority. Who does not see that, when the principle of the absolute sovereignty of the individual over himself has been once admitted, this supremacy is entirely false? And if false, how is society possible?

  I have said enough, I think, to shew that this alleged principle is powerless for the legitimate creation of the government of society, and that it must incessantly yield to necessity, and finally vanish altogether. I will now consider it from another point of view. I will suppose that the work has been accomplished, that a government has been constructed; and I inquire what will be the influence of this principle upon the government which, it is affirmed, is derived from it, and which has only been created by the suffrance of numerous inconsistencies. What right will the government have over individuals, by whose will alone, it is said, it possesses any legitimacy? Here, as elsewhere, it is necessary that the principle should again be referred to; it must determine the right of the government when it has been established, just as it must have guided its formation.

  Two systems present themselves. According to the one, the individual wills which have created a legislative power have not thereby lost their inherent sovereignty; they have provided themselves with servants and not with masters; it is true they have created this power in order that it may command, but on condition that it shall obey. In itself, and in relation to those from whom it holds its commission, it is nothing but a kind of executive power, appointed to put in form the laws which it has received, and constantly subordinated to that other power which remains diffused among the individuals with whom it originally resided, and which, although without form and without voice, is nevertheless the only absolute and permanently legitimate authority. In fact, there is a sovereign, which not only does not govern, but which obeys, while there is a government which commands, but is not sovereign.

  According to the other system, those individual wills which have created the legislative and central power are, so to speak, absorbed into it; they have abdicated in favour of the power which represents them; and it represents them in the whole extent of their inherent sovereignty. This is, obviously, pure and un-mixed despotism, rigorously deduced from the principle that wills are to be represented in government, and which has in fact been assumed by all governments which have emanated from this source. “ The elect of the sovereign is itself sovereign”: such was the declaration both of the Convention and of Napoleon; hence the destruction of all responsibility in power, and of all the rights belonging to citizens. This certainly was not the consummation which the friends of liberty demanded of representation.

  The first of these systems is the most plausible, and still possesses many conscientious advocates. This system is so far good, inasmuch as it ignores an inherent right to sovereignty as the possession of any government; its error is, that this right is allowed to exist elsewhere. I do not here examine it in relation to any other principle than that from which it professes to be derived; and if the individual wills which have created the legislative power are bound to obey its laws, what becomes of this principle? Every man, you say is free only in so far as he is left master of his own will. Those then alone will be free in your government, who, by a happy coincidence of sentiment with their legislators, approve the laws as thoroughly as if they had made them themselves; for whoever is bound to obey laws, whether he approve them or not, immediately loses his sovereignty over himself—his liberty. And if he has a right to disobey, if the will of the legislative power is not authoritative over the wills which have created it, what becomes of this power? What becomes of government? What becomes of society?

  It must seem a somewhat super fluous expenditure of logical force to appeal so often to a principle while power is being gradually constructed, when the same principle, if once more appealed to when the business is apparently completed, is found to give a death-blow to this very power. Such, however, must be the result: for the principle has disavowed, from the outset, the power which was to be deduced from it.

  If, then, we find that this principle, consistently pursued, can only result in the dissolution of society or the formation of a tyranny—if it can issue in no legitimate power whatever—if it finally lands us, after our inquiries after a free and reasonable political order, in the alternative of impossibility or inconsistency—must we not most evidently seek for the evil in the principle itself from which we started?

  It is not true, then, that man is the absolute master of himself—that his will is the only legitimate law—that no one, at any time, under any circumstances, has any right over him unless he has consented thereto. When philosophers have considered man in himself, apart from all connection with his fellows, only regarding his active life in its relation to his own understanding, they have never thought of declaring that his will is for him the only legitimate law, or, which amounts to the same thing, that every action is just and reasonable merely because it is voluntary. All have recognized that a certain law which is distinct from the individual will encircles him—a law which is called either reason, morality, or truth, and from which he cannot separate his conduct without making the exercise of his liberty either absurd or criminal. All systems, on whatever principles they may found the laws of morality and reason—whether they speak of interest, feeling, general consent, or duty—whether they are spiritualistic or materialistic in their origin—whether they emanate from sceptics or from dogmatists—all admit that some acts are reasonable and others unreasonable, some just and others unjust, and that if the individual does in fact remain free to act either according to or in violation of reason, this liberty does not constitute any right, or cause any act which is in itself absurd or criminal to cease to be so because it has been performed voluntarily.

  More than this: as soon as an individual prepared to act demands from his understanding some enlightenment for his liberty, he perceives the law which enjoins upon him that which is in itself true, and at the same time he recognizes that this law is not the product of his own individual nature, and that, by the volitions of his will, he can neither disown nor change it. His will remains free to obey or to disobey his reason: but his reason, in its turn, remains independent of his will, and necessarily judges, according to the law which it has recognized, the will which revolts against it.

  Thus, speaking philosophically and rightfully, the individual considered in himself, may not dispose of himself arbitrarily and according to his solitary will. Laws which are obligatory are not created or imposed upon him by his will. He receives them from a higher source; they come to him from a sphere that is above the region of his liberty—from a sphere where liberty is not—where the question to be considered is not whether a thing is willed or not willed, but whether it is true or false, just or unjust, conformable or contrary to reason. When these laws descend from this sublime sphere in order to enter into that of the material world, they are constrained to pass through the region where liberty, which exists on the confines of these two worlds, has its sway; and here it is that the question arises whether the free will of the individual will or will not conform to the laws of this sovereign reason. But in whatever way this question is decided, sovereignty does not forsake reason and attach itself to will. In no possible case can will of itself confer upon the acts which it produces the character of legitimacy; they have, or they have not this characteristic, according as they are or are not conformed to reason, justice, and truth, from which alone legitimate power can spring.

  To express the same thought in a different way—man has not an absolute power over himself in virtue of his will: as a moral and reasonable being he is a subject—subject to laws which he did not himself make, but which have a rightful authority over him, although, as a free agent, he has the power to refuse them, not his consent but his obedience.

  If we look at all philosophical systems in their basis—if we rise above the differences that may exist in their forms—we shall be convinced that no one is to be found which has not admitted the principle which I have now expressed. How then does it arise that philosophers, when they leave man regarded as an isolated being, and look at him in his relations with other men, have started from a principle which they would not have dared to adopt as the foundation of their moral doctrines, but which has served as a basis to their political theories? How comes it that the will which, in the solitary individual, has never been raised to the position of an absolute and solely legitimate sovereign, does yet suddenly find itself invested with this title and its corresponding rights, as soon as the individual is brought into the presence of other individuals of like nature with himself?

  The fact may be thus represented: In that commingling and collision of individuals which we call society, the philosophers of whom we speak have pertinaciously adhered to that which does in fact first present itself, namely, the commingling and collision of individual wills. A true instinct, unrecognized perhaps by them, has suddenly reminded them that the will is not, in itself, and by its essential constitution, the legitimate sovereign of man. If it does not occupy this position in the individual and so far as he is himself concerned, how should it be elevated to such a rank when another individual is concerned? How should that which, in its own acts, has nothing that is legitimate in the view of reason, when it says I will—how should it have any right to impose its will as the law for another person? No will, merely because it is a will, has any authority over another will:—this is evident; any opposite assumption is revolting; it is brute force, sheer despotism.

  How shall these perplexities be removed? How shall individual wills be made to co-operate without conflicting, to shelter without overpowering one another? Philosophers have only seen one method of accomplishing this, and that is to attribute to each will an absolute sovereignty, an entire independence; they have declared that every individual is the absolute master of his own person; that is to say, they have elevated all individual wills to the rank and position of sovereignty. Accordingly the will which, in man considered apart and by himself, possesses no sovereign and legitimate power, has been invested with it as soon as man is viewed in his relations with other men. Thus the reply, my will does not consent, which, within the individual himself, cannot establish any right if it be contrary to the laws of the reason, has become, outside of the individual, the foundation of right, the ever-sufficient and finally authoritative reason.

  Is it necessary that we should prove that a principle, which, in its application to man considered as an individual, is evidently false and destructive of all morality and of all law, is equally so in the relations between man and man; and that in the one case as in the other, the legitimacy of law and of power, that is to say, of obedience or of resistance, is derived from quite another source than the will?—Two facts shall serve us in the stead of arguments:

  Who has ever denied the legitimacy of parental authority? it has its limits, and may be carried to excess like every other human power; but has it ever been alleged that it is illegitimate so often as the obedience of the child, whom it seeks to control, is not voluntary? An instinctive sense of the truth has in this case prevented any one from even maintaining such an absurdity. Nevertheless the will of the child, considered in itself, does not at all differ from that of the fully-grown man; it is of the same nature, and it is equally precious to the individual. Here then is an illustration of legitimate power in cases in which obedience to it is not voluntary. And from whence does this power borrow its legitimacy? evidently from the superiority of the father’s reason to that of the child, a superiority which indicates the position which the father is called to occupy by a law above him, and which establishes his right to assume that position. The rightful sway here does not belong to the will of the child, who wants the reason that is necessary for such sway, nor even does it belong to the mere will of the father, for will can never vindicate right from itself; it belongs to reason, and to him who possesses it. The mission which is given by God to the father to fulfil, is that he should teach his child what reason teaches him, and should bend his will to the claims of reason, until he shall be able to control his will for himself. The legitimacy of parental power is derived from the fact of this mission: this establishes its right and also determines its limits, for the father has no right to impose upon the child any laws except such as are just and reasonable. Hence the rules and processes of a judicious education, that is to say, of the legitimate exercise of parental power; but the principle of right is in the mission and the reason of the parent, and not in either of the wills which are here brought into relation one to the other.

  Let me remind you of another fact. When any man is well known to be mad or idiotic, it is customary to deprive him of his full liberty. On what grounds? has his will perished? if it is the principle of legitimate power, is it not always there to exercise it? The will is still there; but the true sovereign of the man, the lord of the will itself, reasoning intelligence, has departed from the individual. It must therefore be supplied to him from another source—a reason external to himself must govern him, since his own has become incapable of controlling his will.

  What is true concerning the child and the imbecile is true of man in general: the right to power is always derived from reason, never from will. No one has a right to impose a law because he wills it; no one has a right to refuse submission to it because his will is opposed to it; the legitimacy of power rests in the conformity of its laws to the eternal reason—not in the will of the man who exercises, nor of him who submits to power.

  If therefore philosophers desired to give a principle of legitimacy to power, and to restrain it within the limits of right, instead of raising all individual wills to the position of sovereigns and of rivals in sovereignty, they should have brought them all into the condition of subjects, and appointed over them one sovereign. Instead of saying that every man is his own absolute master, and that no other man has a right over him against his will, they should proclaim that no man is the absolute master either of himself or of any other person, and that no action, no power exercised by man over man, is legitimate if it wants the sanction of reason, justice, and truth, which are the law of God. In one word, they should everywhere proscribe absolute power, instead of affording it an asylum in each individual will, and allow to every man the right, which he does in fact possess, of refusing obedience to any law that is not a divine law, instead of at tributing to him the right, which he does not actually possess, of obeying nothing but his own will.

  I may now return to the particular question which I proposed in starting, and determine what representation truly is—thus justifying in its principle as in its results, the system of government to which this name is applied.

  We are no longer concerned to represent individual wills, which is really an impossibility, as Rousseau has fully demonstrated, though he was mistaken in thinking that this is the aim of representation. We are not, therefore, careful to evade this impossibility, and so fall into inconsistency, as has been done by other political theorists. These attempts, illegitimate in principle and vain in their issues, are, besides, chargeable with the immense mischief of deceiving men; for they profess to establish themselves on a principle which they constantly violate; and by a culpable falsehood, they promise to every individual a respect for his individual will—whether enlightened or ignorant, reasonable or unreasonable, just or unjust—such as, in fact, they cannot give to it, and which they are of necessity obliged to deny.

  The true doctrine of representation is more philosophical and more sincere. Starting from the principle that truth, reason, and justice—in one word, the divine law—alone possess rightful power, its reasoning is somewhat as follows:—Every society, according to its interior organization, its antecedents, and the aggregate of influences which have or do still modify it, is placed to a certain extent in a position to apprehend truth and justice as the divine law, and is in a measure disposed to conform itself to this law. Employing less general terms:—there exists in every society a certain number of just ideas and wills in harmony with those ideas, which respect the reciprocal rights of men and social relations with their results. This sum of just ideas and loyal wills is dispersed among the individuals who compose society, and unequally diffused among them on account of the infinitely varied causes which influence the moral and intellectual development of men. The grand concern, therefore, of society is—that, so far as either abiding infirmity or the existing condition of human affairs will allow, this power of reason, justice, and truth, which alone has an inherent legitimacy, and alone has the right to demand obedience, may become prevalent in the community. The problem evidently is to collect from all sides the scattered and incomplete fragments of this power that exist in society, to concentrate them, and from them, to constitute a government. In other words, it is required to discover all the elements of legitimate power that are disseminated throughout society, and to organize them into an actual power; that is to say, to collect into one focus, and to realize, public reason and public morality, and to call them to the occupation of power.

  What we call representation is nothing else than a means to arrive at this result:—it is not an arithmetical machine employed to collect and count individual wills, but a natural process by which public reason, which alone has a right to govern society, may be extracted from the bosom of society itself. No reason has in fact a right to say beforehand for itself that it is the reason of the community. If it claims to be such, it must prove that it is so, that is to say, it must accredit itself to other individual reasons which are capable of judging it. If we look at facts, we shall find that all institutions, all conditions of the representative system, flow from and return to this point. Election, publicity, and responsibility, are so many tests applied to individual reasons, which in the search for, or the exercise of, power, assume to be interpreters of the reason of the community; so many means of bringing to light the elements of legitimate power, and preventing usurpation.

  In this system, it is true—and the fact arises from the necessity of liberty as actual in the world—that truth and error, perverse and loyal wills, in one word, the good and evil which co-exist and contend in society as in the individual, will most probably express themselves; this is the condition of the world; it is the necessary result of liberty. But against the evil of this there are two guarantees: one is found in the publicity of the struggle, which always gives the right the best chance of success, for it has been recognized in all ages of the world that good is in friendship with the light, while evil ever shelters itself in darkness; this idea, which is common to all the religions of the world, symbolizes and indicates the first of all truths. The second guarantee consists in the determination of a certain amount of capacity to be possessed by those who aspire to exercise any branch of power. In the system of representing wills, nothing could justify such a limitation, for the will exists full and entire in all men, and confers on all an equal right; but the limitation flows necessarily from the principle which attributes power to reason, and not to will.

  So then, to review the course we have taken, the power of man over himself is neither arbitrary nor absolute; as a reasonable being, he is bound to obey reason. The same principle subsists in the relations between man and man; in this case also, power is only legitimate in so far as it is conformed to reason.

  Liberty, as existing in the individual man, is the power to conform his will to reason. On this account it is sacred; accordingly the right to liberty, in the relations of man with man, is derived from the right to obey nothing that is not reason.

  The guarantees due to liberty in the social state have, therefore, for their aim, to procure indirectly the legitimacy of actual power, that is to say, the conformity of its wills to that reason which ought to govern all wills, those which command as well as those which obey.

  Therefore no actual power ought to be absolute, and liberty is guaranteed only in so far as power is bound to prove its legitimacy.

  Power proves its legitimacy, that is to say, its conformity to the eternal reason, by making itself recognized and accepted by the free reason of the men over whom it is exercised. This is the object of the representative system.

  So far then from representation founding itself on a right, inherent in all individual wills, to concur in the exercise of power, it on the other hand rests on the principle that no will has in itself any right to power, and that whoever exercises, or claims to exercise power, is bound to prove that he exercises, or will exercise it, not according to his own will, but according to reason. If we examine the representative system in all its forms—for it admits of different forms according to the state of society to which it is applied—we shall see that such are everywhere the necessary results and the true foundations of that which we call representation.1

  LECTURE 11

  Formation of a Parliament. ~ Introduction of county deputies into the Parliament. ~ Relations of the county deputies to the great barons. ~ Parliament of Oxford (1258). ~ Its regulations, termed the Acts of Oxford. ~ Hesitancy of the county deputies between the great barons and the crown.

  Before we commenced the history of the charters, and after we had for some time fixed our attention on the Anglo-Norman government, we saw that this government was composed of but two great forces, royalty and the council of barons, a unique and central assembly, which alone shared with the king the exercise of power. Such was the state in which we found the government of England under William the Conqueror and his sons. But from their reigns to that of Edward I., a great change was being gradually evolved; after a laborious struggle, the charters were finally conceded, and the rights which they proclaim were definitively recognised. If, after this complete revolution, we cast a glance over the institutions of the country, we find them all changed; we perceive that the government has taken another form, that new elements have been introduced into it, that the Parliament—composed in one of its divisions of the lords spiritual and temporal, in the other of deputies from the counties and boroughs—has taken the place of the great council of barons.

  This transformation is a fact; how was it produced? what were its causes and its mode of advance? what was the new Parliament after its formation? how far and in what respects did the introduction of these deputies change the character of the government? These are the questions that we have now to consider; and in order to answer them we must analyze and examine the principal individual facts which here combine to produce the common result.

  The first of these facts is the introduction of county deputies into the national assembly. I shall first enquire how this event was brought about; and I shall then propose similar enquiries with respect to the introduction of town and borough representatives into the same assembly.

  Two causes effected the introduction of county deputies into Parliament: first, the privileges belonging to knights as immediate vassals of the king; secondly, their interference in county affairs by means of the county-courts.

  The immediate vassals of the king had in that capacity two fundamental rights; that no extraordinary charge should be imposed without their consent, and that they should have a place in the king’s court, either to give judgments, or to treat of public affairs. They were from both these circumstances, members of the general assembly by inheritance. They formed the political nation. They took a part in the government, and in the determination of public charges, as a personal right.

  Although they were not elected and had received neither appointment nor mandate, we may nevertheless say that they were regarded as representing their own vassals, and that it was only in virtue of the power which was attributed to them in this fictitious representation that they exercised the right of levying im-posts on all the proprietors in the kingdom.*

  Perhaps they never could have fully organized themselves into a united body, and soon this became impossible. On the one hand, there rose up among the direct vassals of the king, some influential barons, who united a considerable number of knights’ fiefs into one, and became by this cause much more powerful; and on the other hand, the number of knights with smaller wealth became much more considerable by the division of fiefs, which was itself the result of a vast variety of causes. However, the right of appearing at the general assembly and of giving their personal sanction to all extraordinary imposts, always remained to them. This is formally recognized in Magna Charta, Article 14.

  This same article proves at the same time that there existed an evident inequality between different immediate vassals, for it ordains that the great barons should be summoned individually, while the others should be convoked en masse by means of the sheriffs. This is not the first time that such a difference in the mode of convocation is to be observed; it had already existed for some time, and was exemplified whenever the king required from his vassals the military service which they were bound to give him.

  Thus, at the commencement of the thirteenth century, the right to take a seat in the national assembly belonged to all the immediate vassals of the king, but it was scarcely ever exercised on account of obstacles which increased every day. The assembly was almost entirely composed of the great barons.

  But the other vassals, on the other hand, did not renounce their political existence; if their influence daily became more and more limited to their own county, there at least they exercised their rights and interfered actively in affairs. We often find that knights were nominated, sometimes by the sheriff, some times by the court itself, to give their decision on matters connected with the county. Thus William the Conqueror charged two free men in each county with the business of collecting and publishing the ancient laws and local customs. The Great Charter provides that twelve knights shall be elected in each county to enquire into abuses. These examples are frequent in the reigns of Henry III. and Edward I. Two writs of Henry III.* prove that subsidies were at that time assessed, not, as previously, by the judges in their circuits, but by knights elected in the county-court. The knights in this way brought their influence to bear upon government by the offices they discharged in their provinces, while at the same time they preserved, though without exercising it, the right to appear at the general assemblies.

  But, on the other hand, in proportion as they thus became separated from the great barons, the knights who were direct vassals of the king united themselves more closely to another class of men, with whose interests they after a time completely identi fied themselves. They did not alone occupy a position in the county courts; many freeholders, subordinate vassals of the king, also constantly presented themselves at these courts, and performed the same administrative or judicial functions. Service in the county court was an obligation imposed in common, by their tenure, on all freeholders, whether vassals of the king or of any other feudal lord. Many of the latter were more wealthy and influential than certain direct vassals of the king. The practice of sub-enfiefment augmented their number continually. Many who were simply socagers gradually became considerable freeholders by receiving free lands from different nobles. Thus, a body of freeholders was formed in every county, the county court being its centre. There they all discharged the same functions, and exercised the same rights; whatever, in other respects, might be their feudal relations with the crown. We thus see that the dissolution, on the one hand, of the ancient general assembly of immediate vassals of the king, and the localisation, on the other hand, of a great number of them in the county courts, while at the same time their interests were united with those of the freeholders, prepared the elements of a new nation, and consequently of a new political order.

  Let us now see how this new nation manifested its existence, and was brought to a central position in the State by means of representation.

  In 1214, while the discontented barons were preparing for revolution, John convoked a general assembly at Oxford. The writs of the king ordered the sheriffs to demand for that assembly the assistance of a certain number of armed knights; while other writs † ordered that the followers of the barons should present themselves at Oxford without arms, and enjoined besides that the sheriffs should send to Oxford four approved knights from each county “in order to consider, with us, the affairs of our kingdom.”

  This is the first indication of knights being represented in Parliament, that is to say, of the admission of certain individuals, who should appear and act in the name of all.

  Was then this idea at that time present to their minds? Probably not. How were these four knights nominated? Were they chosen by the sheriff, or elected by the county court? Were these writs actually executed? All this is uncertain. But that which admits of no doubt is the aim and tendency of this innovation. The contents of the writs themselves, and the circumstances in the midst of which they were issued, clearly indicate its object. It is evident that John wished to find in the knights of the shires a means of defence against the barons, and that consequently the former already formed a class so far distinct from the latter that the attempt to separate them entirely from it was not altogether unreasonable, while they were sufficiently important to be appealed to as powerful auxiliaries.

  John’s attempt did not succeed. Facts prove that, in the struggle between the royal power and the barons, the knights and other freeholders espoused the cause of the latter, who, as they protested in favour of public rights, were acting no less for the interest of the knights than for their own.

  The struggle continued during the whole of Henry the Third’s reign, and throughout this period we find the king constantly endeavouring to alienate the knights from the party of the barons and win them over to his own, while the barons exerted themselves to keep the knights attached to themselves.

  The following is an illustration of the attempts made by the royal power. In 1225, one of the periods when the charters were confirmed by Henry III., we find that writs were addressed to the sheriffs of eight counties, requiring them to cause to be elected in each of these counties four knights who should present themselves at Lincoln, where the council of barons was then assembled, in order to set forth the grievances of their counties against the said sheriffs, who also should be present to explain or defend themselves. In this case, there is no reference except to merely local affairs of particular counties, and the four knights are not called upon to take any part in the general assembly, but they are elected and sent in order to treat of the affairs of their counties before the central council. Here the election is a positive fact in the case, and the nature of their commission—to protest against local grievances—is one of the principles of representation.

  In 1240, we find a general assembly of barons meeting in London, in which, however, there is nothing remarkable except the name given to it by the chroniclers. In speaking of it, Matthew Paris employs for the first time, the word Parliament (parliamentum).

  Lastly, in 1254, when Henry III. was in Gascony and wanted money, he ordered the convocation of an extraordinary Parliament in London in order to demand of it an extraordinary subsidy. At the same time, he addressed a writ to the sheriffs, enjoining them to cause two knights to be elected in the county courts, “in the stead of each and all of them” (vice omnium et singulorum eorumdem), to deliberate on the aid to be granted to the king. Here then is a real and positive instance of representation; deputies are elected, they are introduced into the assembly, and a deliberative voice is there given to them. Certain historians have maintained that these writs were not executed, but on this point no satisfactory information is to be had. However, as it is proved that a subsidy was granted to the king, there is reason to believe that it was consented to by this assembly, composed of barons and knights.

  Up to this time, the great feudal aristocracy had retained the knights and other freeholders on their side; we have now to see how they became alienated from them, and how, after having been for a long time the allies of the barons, they became afterwards allies of the throne.

  During the year 1254, a general irritation broke out in the kingdom on the occasion of the demand for an extraordinary subsidy. Henry III., who was misled by the artifices and promises of Pope Innocent IV., had engaged in an adventurous war against Manfred, the usurper of the throne of Naples—a war in which Henry must have borne all the expense, and of which the Pope would doubtless have reaped all the advantages, if it had succeeded. But there was no occasion that his good faith should be put to such a test, for the war was an entire failure. Henry, however, had contracted an enormous debt; his prodigality and extravagance had drained his resources; and he was obliged to appeal to his subjects in order to relieve himself of this burden. These demands for money, which indicate what progress the principle that the king cannot levy imposts on his sole responsibility had made, served as a pretext for the discontented barons to take arms against their king. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, placed himself at their head, and civil war was declared.

  But the aristocracy were weary of these incessant combats, which only yielded momentary advantages. The insurgents formed the project of no longer contenting themselves with conquering the king—they determined so far to fetter him as that henceforth he should be fully dependent upon them. The barons who had wrested Magna Charta from King John had attempted, in order to provide themselves with guarantees, to give beforehand a legal organization to civil war, in case the charter should be violated. The barons who dictated the law to Henry III., went farther: they attempted to organize, not a resistance but a power, and to secure for themselves guarantees, not in civil war but in the very constitution of the government. Not being able to restrain the authority of the king within just limits, they undertook to deprive him of it altogether, and to assume it themselves—in one word, to substitute the government of an aristocracy for that of the king.

  They had already made a similar attempt in 1244, when their design had been that four prominent members of their body should be admitted to the council of the king, who would have followed him constantly and governed under his name. At that time the attempt had been unsuccessful, but at the time which we are now considering, their endeavours were followed by better results. In the Parliaments convoked successively in 1255, 1257, and 1258, the most violent reproaches were heaped upon Henry III. as to his prodigality, his faults, his infatuated enterprises, and above all the violation of his oaths of fidelity to the Great Charter. Henry was intimidated, and, as he desired to appease his barons in order to obtain from them a subsidy, he promised to repair his errors and reform his government. It was determined that this reform should be regulated by a Parliament convoked at Oxford, June 11, 1258.

  This is the first assembly that has received the official designation of Parliament. The barons attended it, armed and followed by a large retinue; Henry, on the contrary, not having taken any precautions against them, found himself their prisoner. Nevertheless they performed what had been agreed upon, that is to say, that they should commit the care of deciding on the projected reforms to twenty-four barons, of whom twelve were chosen by them, and twelve nominated by the king.1

  An unlimited authority was conferred upon these twenty-four mediators. They began by making a complete change in the form of government. Their first concern was to form the king’s council, and four barons chosen by the confederation were commissioned to organize it. They composed it of fifteen members, and of these fifteen, nine at least were taken from the party of the barons, so that the chief power was placed entirely in the hands of these nine persons, and consequently, in the hands of the barons.

  A large number of regulations, known under the name of the Acts of Oxford, were determined upon by this assembly, that is to say, by the council of twenty-four barons. No complete collection of them is to be found in any authentic document. The following may be gathered from different historians; among other things the barons demanded:

  • 1. That the charters should be confirmed;
  • 2. That they themselves should annually nominate the judges, the chancellor, the treasurer, and other officers of the king;
  • 3. That they should have the keeping of the royal castles;
  • 4. That three Parliaments should be convoked every year, in the months of February, June, and October;
  • 5. That a permanent commission of twelve barons should be appointed, who should be present at these Parliaments, and assist the royal council in the transaction of all business;
  • 6. That four knights should be appointed in each county, to receive all complaints against the sheriffs or other officers of the king, and to give an account of these to the next Parliament;
  • 7. That, for the future, the sheriffs should be nominated by the county courts;
  • 8. Lastly, that the king, his son Edward, his brothers, the archbishops, bishops, &c., should be obliged on oath to promise fidelity to the Acts of Oxford.

  It was further agreed that the committee of twenty-four barons should reform all the abuses that had been committed in the kingdom, and administer, in the name of the king, the laws that were necessary for this purpose; and then allow the government thus regulated to proceed in an orderly way.

  But after the separation of the Parliament, the barons, under the pretext that they had yet abuses to reform and laws to administer, refused to resign their power; and not content with retaining it illegally, they employed it to their own advantage. Their acts and laws had no other object than their own personal interest. Without knowing it, they were acting ruinously to themselves, for they detached from their party that part of the population which clearly apprehended their designs. Two laws especially alienated the minds of the people from them; one of these laws took away from the sheriffs the right to fine those barons who should refuse to present themselves at the county courts, or at the assizes held by the judges in circuit. The second decided that the judges’ circuits should only take place every seven years.

  These measures opened the eyes of the people, and they speedily abandoned the authors of them. One fact may prove how far their tyranny had been already exercised at the expense of the country. A deputation was sent to Prince Edward in the name of the English bachelors (communitatis bachelariae Angliae), praying him to compel the barons to finish their work and fulfil their promises, as the king had fulfilled his. The prince replied that he had sworn fidelity to the Acts of Oxford, and that he was resolved to keep his oath. Nevertheless, he demanded of the barons that they should resign their power, threatening if they refused, to compel them to do so, and to take into his hands the interests of the community.

  What was this communitas bachelariae Angliae? There is reason to believe that by this name, the body of knights of shires represented themselves. We see by this that the great barons had alienated from themselves this class of men, and that the king had begun to attach them to his party.

  From these facts we see that besides the two great powers anciently established—the nobility and royalty—a third power had been formed at this period, which alternately inclined to one or other of these rival powers, and which already exercised a strong influence, since it ensured victory to the party in whose favour it might pronounce.

  LECTURE 12

  Struggle between Henry III. ~ and his Parliament. ~ Arbitration of Saint Louis. ~ The Earl of Leicester heads the great barons in their struggle with the king. ~ He is defeated and killed at Evesham (1265). ~ Admission of deputies from towns and boroughs into Parliament (1264). ~ Royalist reaction. ~ Leicester’s memory remains popular.

  We have seen how, in the midst of the struggles between royalty and the feudal aristocracy, an intermediate class arose—a new but already imposing power—and how the two contending powers each felt the necessity of securing an alliance with this third power; we have now to follow, by the examination of authentic documents, that is to say, of the writs and laws of the period, the progress of this new class, which we shall find taking an increasingly active part in the government of the country.

  We have seen how the twenty-four barons, who were commissioned to reform the constitution of the kingdom, abusing the power which they thus held in trust, had refused, in spite of the king and the country, to resign their dictatorship. This refusal soon excited violent dissensions between them and the king, and civil war was on the point of being again enkindled. In 1261, Henry sent writs to several sheriffs, enjoining them to send to him, at Windsor, the three knights of each shire who had been summoned to St. Albans by the Earl of Leicester and his party. These writs plainly show that the king and the barons endeavoured more than ever to conciliate the body of knights, and that the king had then succeeded in attaching them to his party.

  Henry sought yet another assistance. On his entreaty, the Pope released him from his oath of fidelity to the Acts of Oxford. Delivered from his scruples, Henry now openly broke off his agreements with the barons, and again possessed himself of the reins of government. In 1262, he convoked a Parliament at Westminster, that his authority might be sustained by its sanction. He met with but little opposition: wishing, however, to deprive the barons of every motive for revolt, he agreed to leave the adjustment of their claims to the judgment of an arbitrator. The great renown for wisdom and equity which Saint Louis possessed pointed him out as the best judge in this important dispute. Accordingly Henry and his barons agreed to abide by his decision.

  Saint Louis assembled his great council at Amiens, and after careful deliberations, he recorded a judgment by which the Acts of Oxford were to be annulled, and the king to be placed again in possession of his castles, as well as of the right to nominate his own counsellors. But as he was equally careful to preserve the lawful prerogatives of the English people and those of the crown, Saint Louis gave his formal approval to all the ancient privileges, charters, and liberties of England, and proclaimed an absolute and reciprocal amnesty for both parties.

  Scarcely had this decision been made known than Leicester and his party refused to submit to it, and took up arms for the purpose of seizing by force that which had been refused to them by justice. Civil war was recommenced with much animosity, but it was not of long duration. Leicester surprised the royalist army at Lewes, in the county of Sussex, on the 14th of May, 1264. Henry and his son Edward, being vanquished and taken prisoners, were constrained to receive the terms offered them by the conqueror. The conditions which he imposed were severe, but he did not assume to himself the right of settling the reforms that were to be made in the government; he only retained as hostages the brother and son of the king, and left to Parliament the care of settling political questions. Ideas respecting the legal authority of Parliaments, and the illegitimacy of force in matters relating to government, must have made considerable progress, when we find that the victorious Earl of Leicester did not venture to regulate on his own sole responsibility the plan of administration for the kingdom.

  He did not, however, scruple to exercise other rights which did not belong to him any more than these. Under the king’s name, who, though to all appearance set at liberty, did in fact remain his prisoner, Leicester governed the kingdom. In each county he created extraordinary magistrates, called preservers of the peace. Their duties were almost identical with those of the sheriffs, but their power was of much wider range. Leicester enjoined them to cause four knights to be elected in each county, and to send them to the Parliament which was to meet at London in June 1264.

  This Parliament assembled and passed a decree which was designed to organize the government. This decree constrained the king to follow in everything the advice of a council composed of nine members, nominated by three principal electors, the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester, and the Bishop of Winchester.

  Leicester still remained the real head of the State. In the midst of his power he was troubled by alarming disturbances; powerful preparations to oppose him were being made in France. These attempts were unsuccessful, and Leicester, in order to anticipate any fresh opposition, undisguisedly sought protection from that part of the population, which was every day becoming more numerous and powerful—the middle classes. On the 14th of December 1264, he summoned a Parliament, and gave to it all the extent which it has since preserved, that is to say, he called to it the peers, county deputies, and also borough deputies. This innovation was intended to conciliate popular favour, and Leicester did not relax in his endeavours to preserve it. Relieved from royal authority, he wished also to free himself from the aristocracy by whose assistance he had conquered the king. He turned his tyranny against the great barons who were not pliant to his caprices. He confiscated their lands, no longer summoned them to Parliament, and annoyed them in a thousand ways in their persons and their rights. But this was the infatuated course of a conqueror intoxicated by success. As soon as the royal power and the aristocracy combined against him, Leicester was obliged to yield. On the 28th of May, 1266, Prince Edward escaped from his confinement, raised an army against Leicester, and offered him battle on the 4th of August at Evesham. Leicester was defeated and killed in the combat. His conduct was, though factious, yet great and bold, so that he may be called the founder of representative government in England, for, while he struggled at one time against the king, at another time against the barons who were rivals to himself, he hastened the progress of the middle classes, and definitely established for them a place in the national assembly.

  Henry, delivered from slavery by the death of Leicester, recovered his power and used it with moderation. Several Parliaments were convoked during the last years of his reign, but it is not proved that any deputies from the counties and boroughs sat in them. There is even reason for thinking that, in the midst of the disorder that then prevailed in the kingdom, the trouble of convoking them, which was always tedious and difficult, was dispensed with. The Parliament held at Winchester on the 8th of September 1265, in which the confiscation of the goods of the rebels was granted to the king, was composed entirely of prelates and barons. This also was the case with regard to that which was convened by the king at Kenilworth, the 22nd of August, 1266, in which, after the rigour of the confiscations had been somewhat moderated, the Acts of Oxford were annulled, but the charters were solemnly confirmed. Nor do we find that deputies were present at the Parliament held at St. Edmundsbury in 1267; but they were admitted to that held at Marlborough, convened in 1269, to which were called “the wisest in the kingdom, as well those belonging to a lower as to a higher rank.” Two years afterwards the deputies from counties and boroughs were summoned to a grand ceremony, in order to transfer the remains of Edward the Confessor to a tomb which the king had caused to be prepared in Westminster Abbey. After the ceremony a Parliament assembled; but it is uncertain whether or not the deputies had a place in it. This fact, however, does not the less prove the great importance which had at this time been acquired by the towns, and the habit which had been gradually established of summoning their deputies on all great occasions.

  Such are the facts of the reign of Henry III. which relate to the introduction of county deputies into Parliament. No general act, no constitutional statute, called them thither. Indeed the idea of such political proceedings hardly existed at that period. Neither the government nor the people felt the need of regulating facts in a general manner, and fixing them on an absolute basis. The human mind had not arrived at that state of progress in which the conception of such a design is possible. Facts spontaneously developed themselves, in isolation and confusion, and according to the influence of existing circumstances. We may present a summary exhibiting the nature of their progress, and the causes by which the representation of counties was accomplished, in the following manner:—

  All the king’s vassals originally formed one body, and were entitled to a seat in the general assembly.

  This class of proprietors became divided; some became great barons, and continued to sit in the central assembly. Others continued to possess only a local influence. By this cause they were separated from the great barons, and became united by common interests to other free proprietors. The county courts became the point of convergence for this new class.

  A struggle arose between the king and the great barons. Both of these sought support from the class of freeholders which existed in the counties. A part of these preserved, as direct vassals of the king, the right to take their seat in the central assembly. The great barons certainly alone exercised this right; but as their tendency was to possess themselves of authority, and to identify the great council of barons with the government, they felt the necessity of conciliating the body of freeholders who were vassals of the king or of themselves; and the idea of causing them to be represented by means of election was so much the more natural, inasmuch as elections had often taken place in the county courts, when there was any occasion to commit local affairs into the hands of certain proprietors. Thus the centralization of the higher aristocracy to resist the royal authority did of necessity involve and cause the centralization of the inferior proprietors, who could only exert their influence in the way of election.

  Lastly, the principle that consent was necessary before any impost could be levied had prevailed; the charters established it to the advantage of the barons with regard to the king, and of the inferior vassals in reference to their lords. The more that power became centralized either in the hands of the king or of the assembly of barons, the more did the consent of the other proprietors to im-posts also necessarily centralize itself. That which had previously been local became general, and the centralization of the aristocracy of great barons involved the centralization of the aristocracy of free proprietors.

  Another question now presents itself for examination: namely, the admission of town and borough deputies to parliament.

  In general the towns possessed, before the Norman Conquest, considerable wealth and importance. We have seen them take a part in political events, and interfere actively in state affairs. The citizens of London concurred in the election of several Saxon kings; and those of Canterbury attended, under Ethelred II., at the county court. It is, however, nearly certain that the towns never sent deputies to the Wittenagemot. Their rights were limited within the circle of their own walls, and when they took part in politics, it was in an accidental and irregular manner.

  After the Norman Conquest, the towns fell into decay, and lost not only their influence on general affairs, but even their local and individual rights. Their riches vanished with the commerce whence they had been derived, and the oppression of the conquerors completed their ruin.

  They progressively recovered, especially after the reign of Henry II. At that time, considerable rights began to be granted or rather to be restored to them. The lord of the domain in which they were situated was at first the proprietor of them, and received tribute from their inhabitants; but they were allowed to ransom themselves from this burden by taking the town in fee-farm, a kind of tenure analogous to that of socage. Lastly, several towns obtained charters of incorporation, which gave them a more or less free municipal system.

  The lord, whether king or baron, retained the right of imposing taxes upon them at will. This right, called the right of tallage, was at first exercised in an entirely arbitrary way, in virtue of the very superior force possessed by the lords; but in proportion as this superiority became enfeebled, and the towns, on the other hand, became strong enough to defend their independence, it was found necessary to make terms with them. In order to obtain money from them, privileges had to be granted to them; and if they did not exact concessions of this kind, they at least contended with their lord on behalf of their interests. Those towns especially which lay in the domain of the king, and were the most important of all, vindicated their rights with the greatest degree of vehemence. The royal judges had now no other occupation in their circuits than to obtain tribute from the towns and boroughs, leaving those which could resist pretty nearly to dictate their own terms, and making arbitrary charges on those which were not in a condition to defend themselves.

  By these causes the admission of town deputies into the national assembly was delayed, while, on the other hand, the admission of county deputies was hastened. In the counties there was not that unity which is the natural characteristic of towns; there was hardly any possibility of treating separately and successively with proprietors scattered over their domains; and in order to obtain money from them, they had to be united. It was not so in the towns; the king dealt with them separately, made his advances upon them as they became isolated from one another, and always obliged them either to yield or to make him presents, to all appearance voluntarily.

  However, some towns early acquired sufficient importance not only to gain and defend their liberties, but also to take part in general politics. Among these towns, London and the Cinque ports* must especially be mentioned. The importance which these possessed is established by a great number of facts, and we often find their inhabitants called nobiles and even barones. Indeed, their deputies appeared sometimes at the general assembly even before the Parliament of 1264, but in this there was no general principle, no public right recognized. There was this difference between the introduction into Parliament of county deputies, and that of town deputies—that the former is associated with a right, the right of the immediate vassals of the king, and therefore possessed from the first a character of generality; while the second, the introduction of town deputies, was dissevered from every idea of right, and resulted simply from isolated facts bearing no relation to one another. Representatives were granted to a particular town, but this did not involve any similar concession to all towns. Hence the arbitrariness that of necessity prevailed in the division of representation among towns and boroughs. Hence the vices which still actually exist in the electoral system of England.† There remain to the present day towns of considerable importance which send no deputies to the House of Commons; and these abuses arise from the fact that the elections of towns and boroughs have never been regulated in a general manner, and as public rights. In the first instance, all was decided by a solitary fact, and the right to representation has still continued as a right in the case of many boroughs and towns, although the primitive fact which originally suggested the right has disappeared—the fact, namely, of the importance of the town or borough. Through these causes the evil of rotten boroughs was introduced into the representative system of England.

  However this may be, not till the parliament of 1264 do we see deputies from towns and boroughs appear in any large numbers in the Parliament. We do not know how many towns were then called upon to exercise this right; but the writs were addressed to them directly, and not by the intervention of the sheriffs. This innovation was doubtless a result of the policy of the Earl of Leicester. He had sought for protection against the king in the knights of the shires, and through these auxiliaries the king and the royal authority had fallen into his hands; but soon finding the want of another support against the barons, who had become his rivals, he found it in the towns, and called upon them to take a share in the exercise of power. This it was that rendered his memory so popular that the king was obliged especially to forbid his being spoken of as a saint.

  We must then refer the complete formation of the English Parliament to the year 1264. Its existence was still very precarious; it rested on no law, on no public right; it was the creation of a time of faction. The first Parliament, in which Leicester had principally ruled (the Parliament of Oxford) was soon called the Mad Parliament—Parliamentum insanum. It might have been expected that the new form of Parliament, the presence of county and borough deputies, would have shared the same fate as that suffered by the other institutions which were introduced by Leicester for the purpose of organizing a purely aristocratic government, and which disappeared with him. But these rudiments of parliamentary organization were of a different character; they were veritably public institutions, which, instead of attaching themselves merely to particular interests, had for their basis the interests of the entire population. They survived Leicester, and his attempts against the royal power, which was itself obliged to adopt them. Under the reign of Edward I. they became definitely established, and acquired a consistency and stability which would no longer allow of their being attacked with success.

  LECTURE 13

  Progress of the Parliament under the reign of Edward I. ~ Frequent holding of Parliament. ~ Different composition of Parliaments. ~ Deputies from the counties and towns were not always present. ~ Discretionary power of the king in the convocation of barons. ~ The varying number of county and borough deputies.

  Great political institutions generally originate under feeble and incapable princes; in the midst of the troubles which arise in their reign, they are extorted from them. They are consolidated under more able princes, who know how to recognize the necessity for them, and to understand the advantages which they may derive from them.

  This was the case in England under Henry III. and Edward I. Henry, who was entirely deficient in firmness, allowed, although quite against his inclination, all the concessions which were demanded of him to escape from his hands; his son, who was able and energetic, instead of setting himself to destroy the institutions which his father had permitted to come into being, made himself master of them, and turned them to his own advantage. Edward I. would not perhaps have allowed them to begin in his reign; but finding them in vigorous existence, he accepted them as they were, and instead of dreading or dispersing the new Parliament, he availed himself of it as an instrument to serve and strengthen a power which he exercised with intelligence. It was by the aid of the Parliament that Edward I. conferred, so to speak, a national character upon his wars and conquests—enterprises which might perhaps have excited his people against him, if he had reigned alone, and acted at once without public support and public control.

  Two kinds of Parliament appeared under Edward I. The one kind was composed only of the higher barons, and seemed to form the grand council of the king; in the other, deputies from counties and boroughs had a seat.

  No legal and fixed distinction existed between these assemblies; their attributes were almost identical, and they often exercised the same powers. However, the meetings of those Parliaments which were composed only of the higher barons were very frequent; they took place regularly four times a year. The other Parliaments, on the contrary, were only convened on extraordinary occasions, and when it was necessary to obtain from the freeholders, either of the counties or of the towns and boroughs, some general impost.

  This, however, was not the only motive which could lead to the convocation of this last mentioned assembly, which, in truth, alone deserves the name of Parliament. Whenever business arose of so great importance that the concurrence of a great number of interests was judged necessary, the great Parliament was assembled, and by this cause its range of deliberation became more extended, and it assumed a greater consistency.

  We may infer the moral force which the Parliament had already acquired at this period, by the political maxims which were generally admitted. Robert of Winchelsea, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking to the Pope on behalf of the king and his barons, addressed to him this remarkable sentiment: “ It is the custom of the kingdom of England that, in matters which regard the state of that kingdom, the advice of all those interested in the matter should be consulted.”* There is no need that we should take this principle in its most rigorous application; it is not the fact that all those who were interested in these matters were consulted about them; but the sentiment is still a witness of the progress which had already been made by the ideas of a free and public government. This progress is still further attested by the answer which Edward himself made to the clergy, who demanded of him the repeal of a statute designed to restrain the accumulation of property in mortmain: “ This statute,” said he, “ had been made by the advice of his barons, and consequently it could not be recalled without their advice.” † In this case, also, the principle was very far from being strictly observed, and Edward himself, in 1281, on his own authority, altered several of the statutes which had been passed in 1278 by the Parliament at Gloucester. Nothing therefore was more irregular and uncertain than the rights of the public and the forms of government at this period. Principles were professed which were only very partially carried into practice, and which were often entirely neglected. But in the midst of this apparent disorder, great institutions were gradually being formed; the innovations of the preceding reign became habits, and these habits, sanctioned by time, became necessities. Thus rights were established.

  As to the distinction which I have just made between the different assemblies which met at this period, as they are all equally called Parliaments, and exercised at various times the most different powers, it is difficult to fix precisely upon those which ought to be regarded as positive Parliaments. The boundaries which separate them are contracted and often imperceptible; it would be great temerity to pretend accurately to determine what was the real character of any particular assembly, and consequently whether it ought or ought not to be regarded as a Parliament. Whenever Tory writers have not found the presence of county and borough deputies attested by positive and official proof, such as the writs of convocation, they have denied the fact of their presence. But this is an excessive and partial exactness: very often the chronicles of the period supply the lack of writs, and indicate that these deputies were present. I will now point out the principal facts which have been omitted by these writers, which prove that complete Parliaments were frequently holden.

  While Edward was still in Palestine, a Parliament was assembled in Westminster to take an oath of fidelity to the new king from the hands of the Archbishop of York, and, according to several chroniclers, four knights from each shire and four deputies from each city were summoned thither.

  Edward, on his return to England, convened a new Parliament at Westminster, on the 25th of April, 1275. The preamble to the statutes which were on that occasion decreed has been preserved: it declares that “these statutes have been made by king Edward by the advice of his council, and with the consent of the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, barons, and of the commonalty of the kingdom.”

  In the following year another Parliament was assembled in the same place; it was constituted in the same manner, and, to all appearance, consisted of the same members.

  The year 1283 offers many proofs of the admission of deputies from the Commons into Parliament. In the month of January two extraordinary assemblies were convened, one at Northampton, the other at York, to raise the forces and obtain the subsidies that were necessary for the conquest of Wales. The writs of convocation have been preserved: in the one case, the sheriffs were ordered to send to Northampton all the freeholders who possessed a revenue of more than twenty pounds sterling; in the other case, they are enjoined to cause to be elected in each county, city, borough, and mercantile town (villa mercatoria), four knights and townsmen having full power “for the whole of the commonalty.” Lastly, in the month of June of this same year, a Parliament met at Shrewsbury, in order to decide on the fate of David, prince of Wales, who had been made prisoner, after the conquest of that country. The writs of convocation are of four kinds: the first are addressed individually to one hundred and eleven earls or barons; the second to the magistrates of twenty-one towns or boroughs; the third enjoin the sheriffs to cause two knights to be elected for each county; the fourth are addressed to seventeen members of the king’s privy council, among whom are the judges. From 1283 to 1290 we meet with several Parliaments, some of which are even celebrated by the statutes which emanated from them; however, there is no proof that any deputies from counties and boroughs were present at them.

  But, in 1290, Edward on his return from France convened a Parliament at Westminster, in which it is certain that some county deputies sat. A writ has been preserved dated June 14th, 1290, addressed to the sheriff of Northumberland, and ordering him to cause two or three knights to be elected. There is every reason to believe that this county was not the only one thus privileged, and that there were others which also sent deputies to this Parliament. This convocation was probably intended to enable the county deputies to pronounce concerning the statute Quia emptores terrarum, which authorised the proprietors of fiefs to sell them at their discretion, and rendered the subsequent possessors direct vassals of the lord of the fief, while the sellers ceased to be such; this removed the necessity of sub-enfeofment, and must have considerably increased the number of the direct vassals of the king. Boroughs were not represented in this Parliament: probably because the matters of which it treated did not immediately concern them.

  From 1290 to 1294 we find several Parliaments in which there is no indication that county and borough deputies had a seat. In these Parliaments the affairs of Scotland were considered. The magnates of the kingdom alone took part in them. In the Parliament held at Westminster in the month of October, 1294, only borough representatives are wanting; county deputies were admitted to it; they granted to the king a tenth of the moveable wealth of the kingdom.

  In the following year we find that not only the boroughs and counties, but even the inferior clergy, exercised the right to be represented in the great assembly held at Westminster in the month of September, 1295. We possess the writs of convocation addressed to the bishops and archbishops, ordering them to cause a certain number of deputies for the chapters and for the clergy to be nominated; we have also those which summon forty-nine earls or barons individually, and those which enjoin the sheriffs to cause two knights to be elected for each county, and two deputies for each borough in the county. These boroughs were about a hundred and twenty in number. This assembly was more general in its character than any other that had as yet met; all classes of society had access to it, and we may truly say that the entire nation was represented. Accordingly the regular and complete establishment of the British Parliament is generally dated from this year, 1295.

  This great assembly did not act as one single body; it was divided into two houses, the one containing lay representatives, the other ecclesiastical; and not only was the place of their meeting distinct, but their votes were distinct also. The barons and knights granted to the king an eleventh of their moveable wealth; the townsmen gave a seventh, and the clergy, after long disputes with the king, ended by only granting him a tenth, which was the offer originally made.

  The Parliament which was held in the month of August, 1296, was constituted in the same way as its predecessor, and the votes in it were similarly divided. The barons and knights granted only a twelfth part of their moveable property, and the burgesses an eighth.

  In 1297, a Parliament met at Salisbury, but the writs by which it was convened are lost; we do not therefore posess any direct proof of the presence of deputies from counties and boroughs in this assembly; however, there is extant a writ of the 30th of July, in the same year, in which Edward states that the towns and counties have granted him subsidies, and this indirect proof may supply the want of the writs of convocation.

  During this same year (1297), the quarrel broke out between the aristocracy and the crown on the subject of the confirmation of the charters, and the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford, by their bold steadfastness, secured victory for the national cause, and extorted from the king a complete and definite sanction to the rights and institutions whose maintenance they vindicated. We find at this time that two deputies were summoned from each county to receive from the hands of the prince-regent those charters which had been confirmed by the king.

  From the time when these charters were definitely confirmed, the convocation of deputies from the counties and boroughs was no longer an irregular and arbitrary transaction—it became a necessity. Accordingly, their presence in the Parliaments is constantly attested by authentic proofs.

  Thus they were admitted to the Parliament convened at York, on the 15th of April, 1298; the writs of convocation of which are preserved. They were also present in the Parliament held at Lincoln on the 29th of December, 1299. The writs of convocation for this Parliament are similar to those which convened the preceding one. They summon the same deputies who had been present at the last Parliament, enjoining further that substitutes should be chosen in the place of any who had died since that time. We find, moreover, that writs were addressed to the chancellors of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, requiring them to send to the Parliament four or five deputies in the case of Oxford, and two or three from Cambridge; and directing them to select such deputies from among those who were most discreet and most learned in the law—de discretioribus et in jure scripto magis expertis praedictae Universitatis.

  Lastly, the writs of convocation for the Parliament held at Westminster on the 24th of July, 1302, are in all respects similar to the preceding.

  I will not further trace this series of facts, which henceforth ceases to be remarkable because of its unvarying uniformity. Suffice it to say that all the Parliaments which were held during the last five years of the reign of Edward I. were of the same nature and composed of the same members. Two of these, however, deserve special attention. The first is that held at Westminster in 1305. The particulars of its dissolution are preserved to us, as well as those which relate to the mode in which the petitions which already flowed into it were received. The second is that which met at Carlisle in 1307. We have the lists of the bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, &c., who sat in it. The number of earls or barons amounts to eighty-six, that of the bishops and abbots to sixty-eight. There were besides a great number of deputies from the inferior clergy, forming the lower house of the ecclesiastical convocation; and there were, moreover, two knights from each county, two citizens from each city, and two burgesses from each borough.

  From all these facts it follows that, if at the commencement of the fourteenth century the Parliament was not yet constituted in an actual and definite form, yet it already rested on a fixed basis: moreover, as to its composition, we may deduce from the facts to which I have already referred, the following results:

  I. The Parliament was composed, in the first place, of earls or lay barons convened individually by the king; secondly, of archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors, also summoned individually; thirdly, of deputies from the knights or freeholders of the counties; fourthly, of deputies from cities, towns, and boroughs.

  II. No law or statute, no ancient or recognized right, determined who were the earls, barons, abbots, &c., whom the king was bound to convoke individually. He acted somewhat arbitrarily in this respect, often omitting to summon those whom he had summoned on previous occasions.* These omissions were sometimes, though rarely, resisted by protests. The importance of a noble and of his family was the only guarantee of his convocation to the Parliament. Disorder, civil wars, and confiscations, prevented this convocation from being an incontestable and hereditary right, except in the case of a permanent feudal tenure.

  III. The principal functionaries of the king, such as the judges and members of the privy council, were almost always convened to the Parliament by virtue of their official position; indeed, they were uniformly either earls or barons.

  IV. The convocation of county and borough deputies was not a legal or public necessity; but it became an actual necessity by the predominance of the principle that consent in all matters of impost was a right.

  V. The convocation of county deputies was more certain and regular than that of borough deputies; more certain, because it originated partly in a right which had not then been questioned, and which it was necessary to respect—the right, namely, of every immediate vassal to a seat in the general assembly; more regular, because the county courts, which were all composed of the same elements and possessed of the same interests, constituted a uniform and identical whole throughout England, so that some could not be admitted to the privilege of representation without all the rest being admitted also. As the towns and boroughs, on the other hand, only owed their admission into Parliament to varying causes without unity or connexion with each other, and were only called to assist in matters which concerned themselves individually; so the admission of a representative from one town did not at all involve the admission of representatives from other towns, nor even the continuance of this privilege in any one case.

  VI. The number of town and borough deputies was not fixed. The king determined this arbitrarily. Nevertheless the convocation of two deputies for each county, and as many for each borough, passed into a rule.

  VII. However irregular the convocation of borough deputies might be, there is no reason to think that the number of boroughs which were then represented in the assembly was as limited as has been assumed; there is no reason to think, as has been maintained by Tory historians, that only towns in the domains of the king originally sent deputies to Parliament. The assumption is, on the contrary, contradicted by facts which prove that, besides the towns belonging to the royal domain, those which had received a charter of incorporation, either from the king or from some great baron, were represented; as were also those which, without having received any such charter, were rich enough to pay the expenses of their deputies. However, the importance of particular towns, and the necessity that was felt for their concurrence in public business, was in this respect the only rule; and most frequently, the choice of the towns which should be represented was left to the arbitrary decision of the sheriffs.

  LECTURE 14

  Mode of election of the deputies of counties and boroughs. ~ Who were the electors? No uniform principle to regulate elections in boroughs and towns. ~ Voting in public.

  We have seen how county and borough deputies were introduced into Parliament; but we are still far from having obtained a complete and correct idea of representative government as it existed in England at the period at which we have now arrived. We have yet to learn by whom and in what manner these members were nominated—in a word, what was then the electoral system, if we may be allowed to give this name to a collection of isolated customs and institutions unconnected with each other, and almost entirely destitute of any generality or unity of character.

  The two political parties, whose opposition and debates are met with at every step in the study of English institutions, have not failed to resolve this question, each in a different manner. The Tories, always disposed to limit the boundaries of public liberty, maintain that the introduction of county members into Parliament arose primarily from the impossibility of uniting in the general assembly all the direct vassals of the king, the whole body of whom alone had the right to be present; and that landowners of this class were originally the sole electors of these representatives. The Whigs assert, on the other hand, that all the freeholders in the county, whether direct or indirect vassals of the king, have always taken part in this election.

  I shall seek the solution of this question exclusively in the facts which have special reference to the introduction of county members into Parliament; and as this change has been the result not of secondary or unforeseen circumstances, but of the natural course of time and of events, it is needful first to call to mind the general facts which preceded it and gave it birth.

  We have seen that, a large number of the direct vassals of the king having very early renounced, on account of their small wealth or influence, their attendance at the general assembly, their political existence became localized and restricted to county affairs, and to attendance at the county court, at which those affairs were transacted. The direct vassals of the king, however, were not the only persons interested in the affairs of the county. Many other freeholders, whether vassals of the great barons or originally simple socagers, possessed considerable wealth and influence;* and as actual possession at this period was almost the only arbiter of right, there is little doubt, a priori, that all the freeholders of any importance in the county were then admitted to the county-court, to direct the administration of justice and to discuss their common interests.

  These probabilities are changed into absolute facts by the testimony of history. It is proved that the knights, who were direct vassals of the king, did not alone compose the county-courts. From the time of William the Conqueror to the end of the reign of Edward I. a multitude of deeds, laws, writs, and historic records prove that all the freeholders, or nearly all, sat in these courts; and that if there were some exceptions to this rule, they did not in the least proceed from any general distinction between the direct or indirect vassals of the king, but merely from particular conditions imposed on individual tenures. For it does not appear that all freemen-landholders were equally compelled to make their appearance at the county-courts, as this service was esteemed a burden rather than a privilege.

  It may then be regarded as certain, that either by the fall of many of the direct vassals of the king, or by the elevation of a great number of the simple vassals of the nobles, there had arisen in every county a body of freeholders, all of whom, in reference to the affairs of the county, and independently of the nature of their feudal relations, possessed the same importance and equal rights.

  The county-courts, thus composed, exercised the right of election long before the regular and definitive introduction of their representatives into Parliament. Here officers invested with the powers necessary for the transaction of the county business were sometimes elected; and sometimes knights were appointed to execute the measures of the central government, or sent thither as bearers of complaints or representations. Instances of such elections are numerous. The charters have frequently prescribed them, and they are continually spoken of in the chronicles.

  It cannot be affirmed that this appointment of particular knights for the transaction of specific local business was always conducted in a regular manner and by a distinct election. It was sometimes done by the sheriffs alone: but it is certain that most generally it took place “by the community of the county, with the consent and by the advice of the county, per communitatem comitatus, de assensu et consilio comitatus.”

  We gather from all these facts, first, that before the introduction of county-members into Parliament, the direct vassals of the king, who, on account of their inferior importance, had ceased to attend at the general assembly, did not form a distinct body in the county-courts, or a particular class of landowners invested with peculiar rights; but that, on the contrary, they were merged in the general class of freeholders, nearly all of whom also attended the county-court, and there exercised the same rights; and, secondly, it is unquestionable that this assembly of freeholders was in the habit, in certain cases, of appointing some one of its members either for the management of the county business, or for any other purpose.

  Are we to believe that when the object in view was sending representatives of the county to Parliament, there was substituted, in place of the existing order of things, a new order by which to elect them? or, in other words, that those freeholders, who, though direct vassals of the king, were on the same footing with the other freeholders as regarded all the operations of the county-court, were distinguished from them by being alone called upon to elect members of Parliament? Nothing is less probable in itself, and in fact nothing is less true than that there was such a disorganization of the county-courts at election times.

  It is not at all probable, because, in the state of society at this period, the status quo almost always ruled. We are greatly deceived if we expect to find the institutions of the time under the sway of some general rule, and issuing in the inevitable consequences of a principle. There was no such dominant general rule or principle. When a new law appears, it is the product of facts, not of a theory. When any new demand is made upon society, it is society in its actual condition, and not a systematically constituted society, which replies to the demand.

  The freeholders in general formed the county-court on every occasion, and took part in all its acts. What reason could there be for suddenly setting aside an established custom in order to create a privilege in favour of certain landowners whose position, although special in some respects, was but little distinguished from that of others? Was there any occasion for an act so unusual that it could not be put in force without subverting the customs then in vogue? There was none: on the contrary, this act appeared to the county landowners as only another circumstance allied to the many existing facts of the same description: they neither foresaw all the importance which this fact could not fail to acquire, nor all the consequences to which it would necessarily lead. This election of knights summoned to Parliament, although somewhat more important than other elections, resembled all those which were frequently made in the county-court, and in which every freeholder took part. Why should the right of voting on such occasions have belonged exclusively to particular individuals among them? Were they not all equally interested, as the majority of the taxes were levied on their personal property; and the principal duty of the deputies was the settlement of the taxes? How is it possible to believe otherwise than that this, like every other election, was made by all the members of the county-court without distinction?

  Facts, I repeat, confirm these probabilities. The writs addressed to the sheriffs by the king for the election of county members, are conceived in the same terms as those issued for elections relating exclusively to the administration of local affairs. They equally set forth that these knights shall be elected with the assent of the community of the county, de assensu communitatis comitatus. Further, the returns of the sheriffs declare that the election has been made “in full county, by the whole of the community of the county,” in pleno comitatu, per totam communitatem comitatus. Under the succeeding reigns, terms yet more formal were employed; thus, about the middle of the reign of Edward III. the writs contain, that the election ought to be made “according to the will, and with the consent, of the men of the county,” de arbitrio et consensu hominum comitatus. Finally, facts which have come down to us from later times prove that all freeholders possessed an equal right of participation in these elections. In 1405, a statute of Henry IV., intended to prevent certain abuses committed on these occasions by sheriffs under the preceding reign, orders among other things, that “all those who should be present at the county-court, even when they had not been duly summoned thither by the sheriff, should take part in the election.” Lastly, under Henry VI., the great number of the freeholders having given rise to many disturbances during the elections, two statutes (the first issued in 1429, and the second in 1432) limited the right of suffrage to freeholders possessing an annual income of forty shillings: this was the first and last limitation of the kind, and it still continues to subsist in England.

  Thus, moral probabilities and historical facts alike indicate, that since the origin of the Parliament in its actual form, the representatives of counties have been elected not only by the direct vassals of the king, but by all the freeholders, whether mediate or immediate vassals, who composed the county court. In order definitively to establish this opinion, nothing remains but to examine the proofs that are alleged in favour of the opposite opinion. These may be reduced to two: first, it is said, that as the direct vassals of the king alone possessed originally the right of sitting in the general assembly, and as the election of knights of the shire arose entirely from the impossibility of assembling in Parliament all the direct vassals of the king, the latter alone must have been the electors of the representatives who were sent in their place. Secondly, the vassals of the barons long demanded exemption from the obligation of contributing to the payment of the fees allotted to the county members, which proves that they could not have shared in the election; for had they done so their claim would have been absurd. Both these proofs have the fault of being indirect, and of resting upon consequences deduced from general facts, and not upon special and positive facts, such as those I have just adduced in support of the contrary opinion. Moreover, the first argument supposes the existence of a general and absolute principle which was invariably followed; and that the county members were summoned to Parliament only to represent the direct vassals of the king. This supposition is neither probable nor conformable to facts. We again repeat, that there was at this period no general principle, no fixed and invariable rule. General principles and their consequences exist only in a calm and settled state of society; they are incompatible with a rude population and long-continued disorder. How, then, could social classifications and their corresponding rights have remained fixed and distinct in the midst of such chaotic confusion? Besides, the feudal system never exercised such complete sway in England as to insure anything like a strict observance of its principles. It is true that the right possessed by all the direct vassals of the king to appear in the central assembly, was one of the sources of county representation; but when this right, after having fallen into desuetude, began to revive in the persons of representatives, it was outweighed by an actual and more powerful circumstance, the formation of the general class of freeholders, meeting at the county-court, and there exercising the same functions and equal rights. This fact is incontestible; so the Tories are compelled to acknowledge that the deputies were elected by all present at the county-court. But how do they attempt to escape from the consequences of this confession? They maintain that the direct vassals alone sat in the county-court: an opinion too much opposed to the nature of things and to all the facts which I have brought forward, to require refutation.

  There is another difficulty which perplexes Tory writers, and which they are equally unsuccessful in their attempts to surmount. It is impossible for them to deny that under the reigns subsequent to that of Edward I., and especially under Henry IV., all the freeholders in the county took part in the election: now, to avoid this embarrassment, it is pretended, that taking advantage of the disorder of the times they had usurped the right of suffrage, and that the statute of Henry IV. (in 1405) for the first time legalized this abuse, and lawfully summoned the freeholders to the election of deputies. There is no probability in this supposition, which is not supported by a single fact. Between the reigns of Edward I. and Henry IV., nothing can be discovered which indicates the usurpation of the electoral right by a portion of the freeholders who had remained till then strangers to the election. No trace of change in the composition of the county-courts is to be found, nor any alteration in the form or language of the writs of convocation. Everything indicates, on the contrary, that the elections continued to be conducted as in former times; and that the statute of Henry IV. has evidently no other object than to prevent the illegal practices of the sheriffs, which had become scandalous under the reign of Richard II. Thus, in whatever light it is viewed, this first argument is utterly valueless.

  The second is of no greater worth. It is founded upon the supposition that those only who have a voice in the election of representatives ought to contribute to the payment of their salary. Now this supposition is explicitly contradicted by a writ of Edward III., which proves that even the villani, the simple husbandmen, who certainly took no part in the election, were required to contribute to the payment of the fees. If it appear, then, that the freeholders demanded release from this impost, it cannot thence be concluded that they had no share in the election.

  In these demands there is nothing extraordinary. The office of member of Parliament was originally more an onerous burden than an advantage. The person elected was compelled to give security to guarantee his attendance at the assembly. A curious instance is mentioned of an elected knight who could not find the required bail; the sheriffs, therefore, seized his oxen and farm-horses to compel him to fulfil the duties of his office. In a short time, to render the charge less onerous it was made lucrative: fees being awarded to the representatives. These fees were levied on the entire county, with the exception of certain particular immunities. A writ of Edward III. proves this distinctly. It is true that the vassals of the barons, chiefly under the reign of Edward III., made frequent claims of exemption from payment of the salaries due to the members: but these were not founded upon the circumstance that they had had no share in the election; they rested on a pretext derived from feudal law, maintaining that, as their lords sat in Parliament in their own right, that is to say, in their quality of peers, they were represented by them, and ought not to pay the salaries of the county representatives. It is evident that these claims proceeded from confusing ideas of the ancient feudal representation (a fiction which rendered the noble in some sort the proxy of his vassals) with ideas of the new system of representation. These facts in no way prove that the vassals of the barons took no part in the election of the county members; all that they indicate is that the collection of the members’ salaries was very arbitrary, and was regulated by different customs in each county; no conclusion can, however, be drawn from them relative to electoral rights.

  Now that I have reduced to their just value these two arguments, the sole support of the opinion which I oppose, it appears very nearly certain that all the freeholders who attended the county-court united in the election of the representatives, whatever might be the nature of their feudal relation to the crown.

  Having completed our researches into the election of county members, let us next examine how the election of the representatives of boroughs was conducted.

  Although in the county-courts no fixed rule nor systematic distinction regulated the distribution of electoral rights, there was at least something general and identical in them throughout England. The counties were territorial districts of the same nature; the county-courts, wherever situated, were the same institution, and the freeholders formed one class of men. Out of circumstances nearly everywhere alike, there naturally arose an electoral system in all places the same.

  It was not, nor could it be thus with respect to the boroughs. They had acquired their liberties successively to a greater or less extent, and under a thousand different forms. The political state of one town gives no clue to that of other towns, as they were not at all correspondent to one another. Sometimes the municipal rights belonged to the more or less numerous corporation which held the town in fee-farm; sometimes to the general body of freeholders who held their houses in burgage-tenure, a kind of tenure analogous to the tenure in socage; sometimes to the entire body of householders; occasionally, but more rarely, to the whole of the inhabitants. When any particular borough was summoned to send deputies to Parliament, it occurred to no one to consider this new right as distinct from their municipal rights, and to regulate the electoral system on a separate basis. This summons had reference to the borough in its existing condition, and did not introduce the slightest innovation into the exercise of the civic authority. The citizens who, in virtue of their charter, enjoyed the right of managing the affairs of the borough, also exercised that of naming its representatives. There was then nothing general or uniform in the foundation of this new right, and it would be impossible to reduce the elections in towns and boroughs to any common principle. We can only examine a number of particular facts, and derive from them the following results:

  I. The political right of electing members of Parliament was not distinct from the municipal rights of the borough, and was exercised in the same manner and by the same citizens.

  II. From this it follows that the election was commonly made by the council, who directed the local interests of the borough: the number of electors, therefore, was very limited at the outset.

  III. Where a corporation held a town in fee-farm, it also possessed the right of appointing the members of Parliament. These corporations were generally composed of a few individuals.

  IV. As the freeholders of many boroughs sat in the county-courts, not a few of the elections of borough members took place originally in these very county-courts, and by the borough freeholders who repaired thither, and who exercised this power either on their own account, or as authorized by their fellow-citizens.

  V. The writs or orders for the election of deputies were at first addressed directly to the borough magistrates themselves. This, at least, was the case in 1264, the period of the first convocation with which we are acquainted of the representatives of boroughs under Henry III. In 1283, the same procedure was followed by Edward I. for the convocation of the Shrewsbury Parliament, to which the representatives of twenty-one boroughs were summoned. In 1295, the writs were addressed to the sheriffs of the counties in which the boroughs were situated, and from that period, this has been the habitual and legal form of convening the boroughs. In 1352 and 1353, however, Edward III. addressed his writs directly to the municipal magistrates, on the first occasion for ten boroughs, and on the second for thirty-eight. These are the last examples of similar convocations. The Cinque-ports remained the only boroughs which received the writs directly.

  These facts explain how borough-representation has been so easily corrupted in England, and remains so disgraceful to this day.* In every town political rights have remained restricted to the municipal bodies, who, originally, were usually comprised in a very narrow circle. The general tendency has been ever since, and especially at the period of the revolution of 1640, to extend electoral rights in boroughs, and thus to render the election more popular; but, on the whole, the choice is invariably made by the municipal powers, organized according to their ancient charters of incorporation. In the counties, electoral rights have adapted themselves to all the vicissitudes of property, and have become proportionably extended: in the boroughs, they have remained unaltered. Every unchangeable institution is vicious, because ultimately it will be sure to establish privileges in opposition to the actual state of society.

  I should wish to be able to add to these researches into the electoral system of England in the thirteenth century some particular and circumstantial details concerning the forms of elections; but nothing can be discovered on this subject, either in history or in the laws. The laws did not mention the matter, because at this stage of civilization it is not thought that such things require to be either regulated or expressed. It is probable that the electors, who were generally very few in number, agreed among themselves, in presence of the sheriff, on the representatives they wished to appoint; and that the sheriff, by a writ, informed the Court of Chancery of the nomination. The only important circumstance in this mode of election was the open voting, which has been perpetuated to this day. Nobody then attached sufficient importance to his choice to think concealment necessary.

  Until the reign of Henry IV., we do not find any law respecting the forms of election. In proportion as the elections became important, the sheriffs, profiting by the absence of all forms, took the matter into their own hands, and managed it agreeably to their own will. The law to which I refer was passed in order to prevent these abuses. Here, as everywhere, the organization of sureties took place long after the recognition and exercise of rights.

  LECTURE 15

  Philosophical examination of the electoral system in England in the fourteenth century. ~ The system was the natural result of facts. ~ Who were the electors? ~ Four principles which determine the solution of this question.

  The facts adduced in my previous lecture, prove that the electoral system of England in the fourteenth century was determined by no philosophical combination, by no general intention. This system arose naturally and spontaneously, out of facts. Its study is therefore more curious and interesting: modern times are full of science and artifice; institutions do not now become developed with simplicity and freedom; under the pretext of giving them regularity, things are distorted, to suit some particular interest, or to accommodate a theory. Nothing of this nature occurred in the formation of the British Parliament; science did not then exist, and cunning was unnecessary. The House of Commons was not of sufficient importance for the executive to be much disturbed about its origin; the office of member for a county or borough was not enough sought after to induce different interests and parties to direct all their instruments of warfare and stratagems of policy to this end. Representatives of the country were required, who were to be chosen by the method of election—but this election had no occasion to adapt itself to a theory, or to be false in any way. In such a state of society, the electoral system might be vicious and incomplete in a thousand ways; its forms might be irregular and destitute of all needful guarantees, but its general principles would be natural and sound. These principles are what I propose to seek after, and to bring to light, in the present Lectures. They were neither known or thought of in the fourteenth century, but they exist in facts; for there is a reason for every fact, and all are subject to certain laws. Before entering upon the ancient English electoral system, singly and in itself, we should first consider it in its relations to society in general, to the powers by which it was ruled, and to the liberties which it enjoyed.

  In the present day, political science has rarely considered questions in this point of view, though it is the first and most important of all; it has operated on society and its government by a process of dissection; it has taken all powers and rights one by one, and has endeavoured to define each separately, and with regard to itself alone; seeking first completely to disjoin them from one another, and then to make them to proceed together, confining each strictly to its own sphere. In this manner have we seen enumerated the legislative power, the executive power, the electoral power, the judicial power, and the administrative power, and every effort of science has been exerted to make these different powers co-exist, while maintaining among them a rigorous distinction, and enjoining upon them never to fall into confusion, nor even to assimilate their offices and action. The same system has been applied to the rights and liberties of citizens. It is easy here to discern the triumph of the fondness for analysis which characterized the last century. But analysis is a method of study, not of creation. The spirit of analysis is scientific, but never political. In politics, whether dealing with rights or powers, the object is to create real vital forces, capable either of enforcing obedience or resisting oppression. This can never be attained by analysis; for, in reality, actual life is a very complicated matter, requiring the union and amalgamation of a multitude of different elements, each modified and sustained by the others. Analysis elucidates and separates into parts, but never constructs. This truth is demonstrated by the political history of our own time. All these powers and rights, so carefully enumerated and distinguished by science, so narrowly enclosed within specified limits, were found in the time of action to be destitute of consistency, energy, and reality. It was decreed that the legislative power should be absolutely separated from the executive power, the judicial power from the administrative, the municipal from the electoral power: liberties and rights have been isolated and dissected just in the same way as powers; and ere long all these rights and powers, incapable of existence and action in their isolated condition, have become centralized or lost in the hand of an individual or collective despotism, which alone was powerful and real, because it alone was other than a theoretic design or a scientific conception.1

  It may be fearlessly affirmed that rights, like public powers, will never regain reality and energy until they escape from this pretended science, which, under the pretext of classifying, enervates and nullifies them; until, united by positive ties, they mutually rest on one another, and coalesce to bring about the same results. Doubtless, the great analytical labour performed in our own time will not prove fruitless; many well grounded distinctions and necessary limitations will be maintained; all powers will not again fall into general confusion, nor will all rights become concentrated. There is some truth and usefulness in the results of the social dissection which has been performed; but if it were to be perpetuated, if rights and powers were to remain in the state of isolation and dissolution in which science has placed them at the present day, we should never possess either government or freedom.

  It is very evident that nothing of this kind occurred at the period of the formation of the British Parliament. Politics did not wear so scientific a character, nor lay claim to such consideration, as at present. It was necessary to summon together the principal men in the kingdom—merchants, landowners, and others—that they might assist in particular public business. But this was never imagined to be the creation of a new right, or of a new power. Established rights and existing powers were called upon to exercise this new function, and to appear under this new form. The freeholders, that is to say, every free and varitable landowner, used to assemble in the county-courts, to administer justice and to treat together of common interests; and these county-courts were charged with the nomination of representatives. In towns of any importance, the citizens, under forms more or less liberal, regulated their own affairs, chose their own magistrates, and exercised in common certain rights and powers; and these municipal corporations were required to send members to Parliament. Thus, the assemblies which we now designate electoral colleges were never at that period, as they now are, special and isolated assemblies, invested with a temporary duty, and in all other respects unconnected with the administration of the country. County courts and municipal corporations, which were already firmly planted and established, and possessed inherent strength, were constituted into electoral colleges. Thus the electoral system from its origin was united with every right and institution, and with almost every local and real power. It was the extension and development of existing liberties, a powerful force added to other forces previously in action and exercising government over other interests. It was not that in one place there were merely electors, in another administrators, and elsewhere judges; but there was a body of citizens who participated in the administration of local affairs, and in rendering justice; and who elected deputies for the transaction of general business. It is easily understood that—being thus deeply rooted in the community at large, and closely united to all other powers—the electoral power (to employ the language of the present day) was defended from every vicissitude through which we have seen it pass, when attempts have been made to establish it, by itself, in some particular aspect or combination.2

  This then is the first characteristic of the electoral system which occupies our attention. We need not hesitate to elevate this characteristic into a principle, and to assert that where it is not met with, election, that is to say, representative government itself, will be either powerless or harassed by continual storms.

  It is an error in modern politics immoderately to fear power, whatever may be its form or situation. It is divided and subdivided infinitesimally, until it no longer exists, so to speak, except as powder. This is not the way to establish liberty.3 Liberty cannot exist except by the possession of rights, and rights are worthless if they are not themselves powers—vital and strongly constituted powers. Placing right on one side and power on the other is not constituting a free government, but establishing a permanent tyranny, sometimes under the name of despotism, and sometimes under that of revolution; the problem is to place power everywhere in the hands of right, which can only be done by organizing or accepting at once, in the very centre of the government, and in every stage of its action, authority and resistance. Now resistance is only real and effectual when capable on all occasions of opposition to authority, when authority is compelled to treat with it at all times, to conquer or to yield. What then is the electoral right or power, if so it is called, when isolated from every other power? Its exercise is transient and infrequent; it is the crisis of a day imposed upon actual authority, which may, it is true, be defeated, but which, if it escapes, is afterwards perfectly free, and continues its course without the least obstruction, or sleeps in blind security. If, on the other hand, the electoral right is supported by other rights of more direct and frequent occurrence, if the electoral system is closely interwoven with the whole government, if the same citizens who have nominated the members, interfere in the affairs of the country under other forms but by the same title, if the central authority needs on other occasions their assent and support, if it finds them elsewhere also grouped and united for the exercise of other functions of power, then all rights serve as guarantees to one another; the electoral system is no longer suspended in air, and it becomes difficult to violate it in principle, or to elude it in its consequences.

  It is impossible to doubt that to this close union of electoral rights, with a multitude of other public and local rights, the electoral system is indebted in England for its strength and permanence. One fact among a thousand others will prove this. When the central power, finding itself threatened by the elections, has endeavoured to rid itself of their influence, it has been compelled to withdraw from the towns and corporations, their charters and liberties. Without this nothing could have been done. But by this also, everything was attacked, and liberty and right being everywhere emperilled, the nation put forth its efforts not only to re-establish a House of Commons, but also to regain a multitude of other rights which had no reference to the election of representatives. It is the secret of good constitutional legislation, thus to unite all rights with each other in such a manner that it is impossible to weaken any one of them without endangering all.

  This characteristic of the British electoral system has also produced, in regard to the elections themselves, other consequences no less felicitous, which I shall presently indicate. I shall now consider this system in itself, in its interior organization.

  All the elements and laws of every electoral system resolve themselves into these two questions: I. In whom are the electoral rights vested? that is to say, who are the electors? II. How are these rights exercised? that is to say, what are the modes of procedure and the forms of election?

  I wish to bring together in succession under these two questions, all the facts which relate thereto in the electoral system in England, in the fourteenth century, and to examine what general principles are contained in these facts.

  And first, who were the electors? There were two classes of electors, in the same manner as there were two kinds of elections—those for counties and those for boroughs. This classification was not the result of a systematic combination nor of any previous intention: it was the expression of a fact.

  Originally the knights, and a little later, the freeholders, alone formed the political nation, and alone possessed political rights. All enjoyed the same right of assisting at the court or council of their lord; politically, therefore, they were equal. When the towns had acquired sufficient importance to assist the central power when needful, and strength enough to resist it if occasion required, then inhabitants became citizens. A new nation truly then entered the state. But in entering there, it remained distinct from that by which it was preceded. The representatives of boroughs never deliberated with those of counties. Each of these two classes treated with the government of those affairs which interested itself, and consented on its own account to the taxes which weighed on itself alone. Originally there was no more coalition between the representatives than between the electors: the distinction was complete. It cannot be said that there was inequality, for there was no room for comparison. They were simply two different societies represented by their deputies to the same government; and the difference of the representation arose from no other principle than the real and primitive difference between the two societies.

  Now if each of these societies is considered singly and in itself, an equality of political rights will be found among the citizens called to enjoy them. As, in the counties, all the freeholders had the same right to participate in the election, so, in the towns, every member of the corporation to which a charter had been granted shared in the election of their representatives.

  Thus the variety of classes existing in society was reproduced in the representation. But, on the one hand, the different classes were completely independent of one another: the knights of the shire did not tax the citizens, nor the citizens the knights of the shire; much less did either take part in the other’s elections. On the other hand, the principle of the equality of right prevailed in each class, among the citizens summoned to share in the election.

  There is nothing, then, that can be deduced from this in favour of an inequality among men called by virtue of the same principle to take part in a like action. Such an inequality never existed in the electoral administration of England in the fourteenth century. The difference that existed was derived from society itself, and was continued even to the very centre of representation, which did not present a more uniform whole than society itself.

  The true, the sole general principle which is manifested in the distribution of electoral rights as it then existed in England, is this, that right is derived from, and belongs to, capacity. This requires some explanation.

  It is beyond doubt that, at this period, setting aside the chief barons whose personal importance was such that it was necessary to treat with each of them individually, the freeholders, the clergy, and the burgesses of certain towns, could alone act as citizens. Those not comprised in one or other of these classes were chiefly poor husbandmen, labouring on subordinate and precarious property. They included all men invested with real independence, free to dispose of their person and wealth, and in a position to rise to some ideas of social interest. This it is which constitutes political capacity. This capacity varies according to time and place; the same degree of fortune and enlightenment is not everywhere and always sufficient to confer it, but its elements are constantly the same. It exists wherever we meet with the conditions, whether material or moral, of that degree of independence and intellectual development which enables a man freely and reasonably to accomplish the political act he is required to perform. Assuredly, considering the masses, as they should be considered in such a matter, these conditions are not met with in England in the fourteenth century, elsewhere than among the freeholders, the clergy, and the burgesses of the chief towns. Beyond these classes nothing is found but almost servile dependence and brutal ignorance. In summoning these classes, then, to join in the election, the electoral system summoned every capable citizen. It was derived, therefore, from the principle that capacity confers right; and among citizens whose capacity was recognized, no inequality was established.

  Thus neither the sovereignty of the majority nor universal suffrage, were originally the basis of the British electoral system. Where capacity ceased, limitation of right was established. Within this limit the right was equal in all.

  It is easy to prove that this is the sole principle on which it is possible to found a national and true electoral system. Let us for the moment forget facts, and consider the question from a purely philosophical point of view.

  What motive has assigned in all times and countries a fixed age at which a man is declared to have attained his majority, that is to say, is considered free to manage his own affairs according to his own will? This appointment is nothing more than the declaration of the general fact, that, at a certain age, man is capable of acting, freely and reasonably, in the sphere of his individual interests. Is this declaration arbitrary? No, for if the period of his majority were fixed at ten years or at forty, the law would evidently be absurd; it would assume the presence of capacity where it did not exist, or else would not recognize it where it did exist—that is to say, it would confer or withhold the right wrongfully.

  It is capacity, then, that confers right; and capacity is a fact independent of law, which law cannot create or destroy at will, but which it ought to endeavour to recognize with precision, that it may at the same time recognize the right whichflows from it. And why does capacity confer right? because in reason, and reason alone, is right inherent. Capacity is nothing else than the faculty of acting in accordance with reason.

  What is true of the individual considered in relation to his personal interests, is true also of the citizen in relation to social interests. Here, also, capacity confers right. Here, also, right cannot be refused to capacity without injustice. Here, also, capacity is a fact which the law, if it be just, asserts and distinguishes, to attach thereto the right.

  This is the only principle in virtue of which the limitation of electoral rights can be reasonably assigned, and it was this which, without general intention or philosophic views, the nature of things and good sense caused to prevail in England at the end of the thirteenth century.

  This principle equally repels the admission of the incapable, which would give dominion to the majority, that is, to material force; and would lead to the exclusion of some portion of the capable citizens, which would be an injustice; and to inequality between capacities, of which the least is declared sufficient, which would institute privilege.

  This principle once laid down, whether by the enlightened intention of the legislator, or by the simple force of things, it becomes necessary to put it in practice, that is, to seek and recognize in society those capacities which confer rights. By what exterior signs, susceptible of determination by law, can this capacity be recognized? this is the second enquiry which presents itself when the question is to fix the limit of electoral rights.

  Evidently, we can only proceed here upon assumptions, and those of a general character. The capacity of acting freely and reasonably for the promotion of social interests, is revealed by no more distinct signs than any other internal disposition. Besides, the law operates on the masses; its decisions will necessarily be inexact, and yet must be rigorous. In their application to individuals they will often assume capacity where it is not, and will not in all instances discern it where it is. This is the imperfection of human science; the endeavour of the wise is to restrict this imperfection within its narrowest limits.

  The electoral system of England was less faulty, in this respect, at its commencement, than it has since become. It is very probable that, in the fourteenth century, all political capacity was almost entirely contained in the classes of the freeholders, the clergy, and the burgesses of the important towns. This kind of qualification corresponded, then, very nearly with the true external signs of capacity. It may even be said that if the representative system had then possessed all its energy, if the assembly of representatives had had power and importance to become the principal spring of government, and the object of individual ambition, it would very soon have been discovered that the legal conditions of capacity included a multitude of individuals in whom capacity did not truly exist. It was because many of those who possessed the right of sharing in elections took no part in them that the inconvenience of so much latitude was not at first experienced. The principle remained intact because it did not bear all its fruits. When the House of Commons occupied a higher place in the State, it became necessary to restrict the electoral right by requiring the freeholders themselves to possess an annual income of forty shillings. The action of Parliament in the government, and by consequence the importance of electoral rights, far surpassed the intelligence and independence of many of the men to whom ancient custom had accorded them. Thence arose the limitation established by the Parliament under Henry IV. Since that period, the progress of society and the changes which have occurred in the condition of property and industry, have altered in this respect the exactness, and therefore the excellence, of the electoral system. The legal signs of electoral capacity remain the same as to right, but, in fact, they have changed. Formerly, the freeholders were the only landowners who were truly free and capable of exercising political rights; the copyholders were then little better than villani: this has long ceased to be the case; although the legal distinction still subsists, it is merely nominal: copyholds are properties as free, as secured, and as fully hereditary as freeholds. The title of freeholder is now no longer, as formerly, the only one which designates a landowner capable of exercising political rights. The law, in its description of the external characters of electoral capacity, no longer corresponds really and truly with social facts. This inconvenience is not very great in practice, because there are few copy-holders of any importance who do not possess a freehold of forty shillings rent. It is however real, for it maintains a distinction between properties as to electoral rights, which is not founded upon any real difference between the nature of the properties, and the capacity of their possessors. The system has become much more vicious as regards electoral rights in boroughs. Here the external signs by which the law pretends to recognize capacity, are become, in many instances, utterly false. The importance of particular towns, and the material or intellectual development of their inhabitants, was originally the cause of their investiture with electoral rights. The capacity was there; the right followed. Now the principle has disappeared; there are some boroughs destitute of importance, the inhabitants of which possess neither wealth nor independence; capacity is no longer there, but nevertheless the right continues still. It might be supposed that the name of the borough, its site, or its walls, are the signs of an electoral capacity which ought to reside there for ever—that the privilege appertained to the stones. On the other hand there are other towns, which in the fourteenth century would not have failed to obtain their electoral rights, because in effect the capacities of their citizens would have been recognized, that do not yet possess them.

  Thus a principle, equitable at first, has ceased to be so, because attempts have been made to arrest the progress of its effects; or rather the principle itself has perished, and a great part of the electoral system of England is nothing more than a violation of it.

  By this it may be seen that, if the principle which attaches right to capacity in the matter of election, is universal in its nature, and susceptible of constant application, the conditions of this capacity and the external signs by which it is to be recognized are essentially variable, and can never be restricted to the terms of a law without endangering the existence of the principle itself. The vicissitudes of electoral rights, even in the earliest time of the existence of Parliament, demonstrate this. Political rights belonged at first to the freeholders alone. Who could reasonably have sought deputies and electors in those devastated boroughs, abandoned for the most part by their ancient inhabitants, peopled only by a few poor families, whose condition and ideas were not elevated above those of the most miserable peasants?

  Some towns rose again and became repeopled; commerce brought with it wealth, and wealth procured social importance, and the development of mind. Representatives should emanate from these bodies; for there were certainly electors. New capacities form and declare themselves by new symptoms. At the same time, or soon after, the number of freeholders increases by the division of fiefs, many among them fall to a much lower condition than that of the ancient freeholders, and no longer possess the same independence. Will they preserve the same rights when their capacity is no longer the same? no, necessity makes each to know his value; the mere title of freeholder is no longer a correct sign of electoral capacity. Another is sought, and the condition of forty shillings rent enters into the laws. Thus, without any violation, and even by the authority of the principle, the conditions and signs of electoral capacity vary according to the real state of society. It is only when this portion of the electoral system becomes invariable that the principle will be violated.

  It would then be vain and dangerous to pretend to regulate, beforehand and for ever, this part of the electoral system of a free people. The determination of the conditions of capacity and that of the external characteristics which reveal it, possess, by the very nature of things, no universal or permanent character. And not only is it unnecessary to endeavour to fix them, but the laws should oppose any unchangeable prescription regarding them. The more numerous andflexible the legal characteristics of electoral capacity, the less need this danger be dreaded. If, for example, the land-tax was regulated and fixed once for all, as it is to be desired that it may be, this tax alone would be an incorrect sign of electoral capacity; for it would not follow the vicissitudes of property: it would enfeoff the land itself with the right of election; the rent would be a better indication, because it would be more pliable. If, instead of attributing electoral rights by name and for ever to a particular borough, the English laws had conferred them upon every town whose population reached a certain limit, or the revenue from which attained a certain amount, the representation of boroughs, instead of becoming corrupt, would have followed the changes and progress of true political capacity. We could multiply these examples, and prove in a thousand ways that it is better neither to adopt any one legal sign of electoral capacity, nor to place this sign beyond the reach of the vicissitudes of society.

  In summing up, we may deduce, from our examination of the electoral system of England in the fourteenth century, these three conclusions: I. The right ought to be co-extensive with the capability of judicious election, for it is its source. II. The conditions of electoral capacity should vary according to time, place, the internal state of society, public intelligence, &c. III. The external characteristics prescribed by the laws, as declaring the accomplishment of the conditions of electoral capacity, should neither be utterly immutable nor derived entirely from purely material facts.4

  LECTURE 16

  Subject of the lecture. ~ Continuation of the philosophical examination of the electoral system in England in the fourteenth century. ~ Characteristics of the elections. ~ Examination of the principle of direct or indirect election.

  I now pass to the second of the great questions to which every electoral system gives rise. What are the proceedings and forms of the election? In this question many others are comprised. These may be divided into two classes: the one class relating to the manner of assembling the electors; the other, to their mode of operation when assembled.

  The close union of the electoral system with the exercise of other rights and political powers, has been productive in England of extensive and very beneficial consequences with regard to the mode of collecting the electors together.

  Originally the election of county representatives required no special and extraordinary convocation of the electors. At appointed times, they repaired to the county-court to fulfil the functions with which they were charged, and on these occasions they elected their representatives. The first writs addressed to the sheriffs set forth: Quod eligi facias in proximo comitatu, “you will elect in the next county-court.”

  When the importance of the House of Commons had imparted a corresponding importance to the election of its members, and the necessity of preventing the abuses arising from elections made, so to speak, by chance, and without any one receiving special notice thereof, had become felt, the election was announced throughout the country by a proclamation summoning the attendance of all the electors and indicating the time and place of the convocation of Parliament. The election thus became a special and solemn act; but was always conducted in the county-court, and at one of its periodic meetings.

  Ultimately, by the lapse of time, the changes of the judicial system, and the development of every institution, the county-courts ceased to retain in England that position which they anciently occupied. Their jurisdiction is now rare and very limited; the greater part of the freeholders never attend them; nor are they of any considerable political importance. At the present day the sole important object of any assembly of freeholders in these courts is the election of representatives, but the circumscriptions remain the same: frequent relations still exist among the freeholders of the county; the county-court is still their centre: it is now the electoral college, and that is its sole important character; but the electoral college is still the ancient county-court.

  The great political result of all these facts is this, that the election of representatives has always been, and still is, not the work of an assembly of men extraordinarily and arbitrarily convened for that purpose, among whom no other tie subsists, and who possess no regular and habitual common interests, but the fruit of ancient relations, of constant and tried influences among men otherwise united in the transaction and possession of common affairs, functions, rights, and interests. In examining the question in itself, we shall very soon become convinced that this is the only way to insure veracity in elections, and suitableness and authority in the elected representatives.

  The object of election is evidently to obtain the most capable and best accredited men in the country. It is a plan for discovering and bringing to light the true, the legitimate aristocracy, which is freely accepted by the masses over whom its power is to be exercised. To attain this end it is not sufficient to summon the electors together and to say to them, “Choose whom you will”; but they should have the opportunity of understanding thoroughly what they are about, and of concerting together how to do it. If they do not know each other, and are equally unacquainted with the men who solicit their suffrages, the object is evidently defeated. You will have elections which will result neither from the free choice nor the actual wishes of the electors.

  Election in its nature is a sudden act which does not leave much room for deliberation. If this act is not linked with the habits and previous doings of the electors, if it is not in some sort the result of long anterior deliberation, and the expression of their habitual opinion, it will be too easy to take the real wish of the electors by surprise, or to induce them to listen only to the passion of the moment; and the election will thus be deficient either in sincerity or in nationality. If, on the contrary, the men who have met to elect a representative have long been united by common interests; if they are accustomed to conduct their affairs among themselves; if the election, instead of taking them out of the habitual sphere in which their lives are passed, their activity displayed, and their thoughts exchanged, only assembles them at the centre of that sphere, to obtain the manifestation, the summary of their opinions, their wishes and the natural influence which they exercise over each other; then the election can, and generally will be, both rational and sincere.

  The whole of that part of the electoral system which relates to the assembling of the electors ought, then, to be founded upon respect for natural in-fluences and relations. The election should assemble the electors together at that centre towards which they are habitually attracted by their other interests. Well-tried and freely accepted influences constitute true and legitimate society among men. Far from dreading them, in them alone should the real desire of society be sought. Every method of uniting electors which annuls or destroys these influences, falsifies the elections, and makes them run counter to their intended object: the less the electoral assembly is extraordinary, the more will it be adapted to the regular and constant existence of those who compose it, and the better will it attain its legitimate end. On these terms only can there be electoral colleges that do what they wish, and know what they are doing; on these terms only can there be representatives who exercise over the electors a solid and salutary influence.

  The maintenance of natural influences, and thereby the sincerity of elections, has not been the only good effect of the primitive identity of the electoral assemblies and the county-courts.

  These courts being the centre of a multitude of administrative, judicial, or other interests, presided over by the interested persons themselves, it was impossible that the boundaries of the district to which they related could be very extensive; as much inconvenience would thereby have resulted to the men who frequently repaired thither. The division of England into counties was not a systematic performance, and it presents some striking irregularities. But the force of events prevented most of the counties from including a very extended territory. This advantage is retained in the electoral system. The connections and ideas of the great majority of citizens do not stretch beyond a certain material sphere: and it is only within the limits of this sphere that they are really conversant with affairs and act upon their own knowledge. If the election is at too great a distance from them, they cease to be enlightened and free agents, and become tools. Now, since it is of the will and judgment of the citizens that the choice is required, it is absurd to withhold from them, at the same time the necessary conditions of reason and liberty. There is always, then, a limit beyond which the extent of an electoral convocation should not be carried, and this limit is itself a fact, which results from the manner in which men and interests are grouped together, in the divisions and subdivisions of the country. It ought to be large enough for the election to produce representatives capable of fulfilling their public mission, and contracted enough to insure that the greater number of the citizens who take part in the election may act with discernment and freedom. If the elections were conducted in England according to hundreds they would yield, perhaps, obscure and ignorant representatives; if by episcopal dioceses, they would in fact annul a great part of the electoral body. The material circumstance of the necessity of a distant removal is of least consequence. The moral disorder which would result from too widely extended boundaries is much more serious.

  Further; the extension of political rights is no less interested in this than the excellence of the results of the election. It is desirable to enlarge the sphere of their rights, as far as it is admitted by the imperious condition of capacity. Now, capacity depends upon a multitude of causes. A man perfectly capable of prudent choice within a radius of five miles from his dwelling, becomes absolutely incapable of doing so if the radius be extended to twenty miles: in the first case, he had the full use of his reason and freedom; in the second, he loses it. If, then, you would judiciously multiply the number of the electors, do not place the electoral centre too far from the points of circumference from whence some will have to repair thither. In all this we must proceed to some extent upon supposition, and general results alone are sought; but the principle is invariably the same. The election must be made by electors capable of choosing wisely, and must supply in those who are elected, men capable of thoroughly comprehending the interests upon which they will have to administrate. These are the two requirements, between which the limits of electoral boundaries should be sought, subject always to the condition of never determining these boundaries in an arbitrary way, so as to break through the habits, and destroy the natural and permanent state of society. Generally speaking, the division into counties formerly attained this twofold object in England.

  The boundaries being defined, in accordance with the natural grouping of the citizens, and the electors being assembled, what is required of them?

  Custom, and no standard derived from population, wealth, or any other cause, has ordained in England, that two members only should be returned from each district, with the exception of a very few places. This custom probably derives its origin from the impossibility which formerly existed of finding in the boroughs, and even in the counties, a greater number of men able and willing to undertake a mission then very little sought after. It has been seen that on several occasions three or four knights were required from the county-courts. The number was very soon reduced to two, and this fact has become the general law. Whatever may be its historic principle, this fact contains a rational principle, viz., that the election is neither sound nor good, except when the number required to be elected is very small.

  No one has ever denied that the fundamental law of all election is this, that the electors should do what they desire, and understand what they are doing. In practice, however, this is often forgotten. It is forgotten when electors, meeting together but for a short space of time, are required to make choice of more than one or two. The great merit of election is, that it should proceed from the elector, that on his part it is a true choice, an act both of judgment and will. Beyond doubt, no extraneous will or judgment may in any case be rightfully imposed upon him; though he may always accept or reject that which is proposed to him: but this is not sufficient; the elector must be placed in such a position that his personal judgment, his own will, shall be not only free, but stimulated to display themselves in their actual character. Their exercise must be not only possible, but must not be too difficult. Now, this error is fallen into when, instead of one or two names, a whole list of names is demanded. The elector, almost always incapable of completing this list of himself and by the help of his own discernment, falls under the dominion of combinations which he suffers rather than accepts; for he does not possess the knowledge necessary for judging correctly of their whole aim and effect. Who does not know that almost every elector in such a case cannot include in his list more than one or two names that are truly known to him, and which he really desires? The choice of the remainder is made for him, and he writes them in confidence or out of complaisance. And who makes this choice? The party to which the elector belongs. Now, party in-fluence, like every other influence, is good only so far as it is exercised upon those who can form a just opinion of it, and not submit to it blindly. The despotism of party spirit is no better than any other despotism, and all good legislation should tend to preserve citizens from its sway. Into elections, as into every other act, levity, inconsiderateness, or passion may enter: but to these dispositions the law is not bound to show respect and afford facility. It should, on the contrary, strive to prevent their having any effect; and by the process of the election itself, it should, as far as possible, secure to the citizen the exercise of his judgment as well as the independence of his will. It is not requisite to repel all influences, or to declare them illegitimate beforehand. Every election is the result of influences, and it would be folly to pretend to isolate the elector under the pretext of obtaining his unbiassed opinion and desire. This would be to forget that man is a reasonable and free being; and that reason is called to debate, and liberty to choose. The soundness of election arises precisely from the con-flict of influences. The law must allow them to reach the elector, and grant them all natural means of acting upon his judgment; but it ought not to deliver him up to them defenceless. It should take certain precautions against human weakness, and the most efficacious of these precautions will be, to require nothing of the elector that he cannot perform with true spontaneity of action. The citizen being thus left to himself, all influences may act upon him: they may perhaps induce him to abandon the name that he loved for one with which he was previously unacquainted; but they will need at least to exert greater efforts to conquer his reason or to subdue his will. Now, it is right that they should be condemned to make such efforts, and that they should not be able to obtain from levity, precipitation, or ignorance alone, an assent, the effect of which is to give to the whole country an exponent whom the elector himself would not have desired had he been able, in nominating him, to make a full use of his reason.

  When we investigate the causes which have introduced into certain countries, in the matter of election, a custom so opposed to the true interests of liberty, and which is never met with where liberty has really been introduced into the practice of political life, we perceive that it is derived, in part at least, from the evil principle on which the whole electoral system has been founded. Electoral rights have been isolated from other rights, and separately constituted; electoral assemblies have been in no way connected with other public affairs, with local administration, or with common and permanent interests. They have been made extraordinary and solemn assemblies of very brief duration. The electoral boundaries have in general been too widely extended: hence has arisen the necessity of suddenly assembling together the whole body of electors, of dismissing them almost immediately, and at the same time, of requiring from them the choice of too many representatives. In England, the poll remains open at least fifteen days for the election of one or two members. Every one gives his vote when it bests suits him. In America, the other forms are yet more mild and free. In the system which has prevailed with us, on the contrary, all is sudden and precipitate: everything is done en masse, and by masses of people whose reason and liberty are in a great measure disabled from acting, by the haste and extent of the operation. Hence also is derived the scheme of the ballot, and of an absolute majority, consequences inevitablyflowing from a rapid and numerous election; whilst elsewhere, the system of a relative and long-contested plurality affords public opinion leisure to select, and freedom to manifest its choice. And hence, finally, arises the necessity of an elected bureau, which entrusts beforehand to the majority the inspection of all the electoral operations, thus casting suspicion upon the authenticity of the results. When liberty is everywhere to be found, when all rights are bound together and mutually sustained, when publicity is real and universally present, there will always be independent magistrates to whom the direction and superintendence of elections may be confided; and there is then no necessity for placing them under the influence of party spirit, in order to withdraw them from the always-suspected influence of superior authority.

  These details relate to the forms of electoral operations; but as their vicesflow from the general principles which regulate them, it was necessary to point out this connection.

  Direct election has been the constant practice of England; and America has adopted the same system. It has been otherwise in most of the European States in which representative government has been established in our own times. This is one of the most important facts presented to our view by the British electoral system. In this system, direct election has been the natural consequence of the idea that was then entertained regarding political rights. Not only were these rights unshared by all, but they were not even distributed systematically, or upon one general plan. They were recognized wherever the capacity of exercising them was actually to be met with. The importance of freeholders and citizens had entailed upon them the right of interference in public affairs. This intervention was their right when these affairs related to themselves. Being unable to exercise this right personally, they elected representatives. In the spirit of the time, this right of election corresponded exactly to the right that the powerful barons exercised of being represented in Parliament by delegated agents. The individual importance of a powerful baron being very great, his proxy was individual. The freeholders and citizens also possessed an individual right, but not the same importance, and they therefore had one proxy to represent many of them. But, fundamentally, the representation was founded on the same principle—the individual rights of the electors to debate on and consent to such matters as interested them.

  In this point of view, it is easy of comprehension that direct election prevailed, and that no other idea presented itself to the public mind. All indirect election, every new medium placed between Parliament and the elector, would have appeared, and would in fact have been, a diminution of the right, a weakening of the importance and political intervention of the electors.

  Direct election, then, is the simple idea, the primitive and natural electoral system of representative government, when representative government is itself the spontaneous produce of its true principle—that is to say, when political rights are derived from capacity.

  In considering this mode of election under a purely philosophical point of view, and as it respects not merely the electors alone, but society in general, does it remain equally preferable to every other more artificial combination?

  It is necessary to examine it first in its relation to the rational principle of representative government; and, in the second place, in its practical results.

  We have in a previous lecture laid down the rational principle of representative government. In right, this principle asserts, that true sovereignty is that of justice; and that no law is legitimate if it is not conformable to justice and to truth, that is to say, to the divine law. In fact, this principle recognizes, that no man or assembly of men, in a word, no terrestrial force, is fully conscious and constantly desirous of reason, justice, and truth—the true law. Connecting this right and fact together, the inference is, that the public powers which actually exercise sovereignty ought to be constantly required and constrained on every occasion to seek after the true law, the sole source of legitimate authority.

  The object of the representative system, in its general elements as well as in all the details of its organization, is, then, to collect and concentrate all the scattered elements of reason which exist in society, and to apply it to its government.

  From thence it necessarily follows that representatives ought to be the men most capable: 1. To discover, by means of their united deliberation, the law of reason, the truth which, on all occasions, the least as well as the greatest, exists, and ought to be the ground of decision; and 2. To enforce the recognition and observance, by the citizens in general, of this law when once discovered and expressed.

  In order to discover and secure the men most capable of fulfilling this mission, that is to say, good representatives, it is necessary to compel those who think or profess themselves to be such, to prove their capacity, and to obtain its recognition and assertion from the men who, in their turn, are capable of forming a judgment upon it, that is to say, upon the individual capacity of any man who aspires to become a representative. Thus does legitimate power evidence itself, and it is thus that, in the fact of election, philosophically considered, this power is exercised by those who possess it, and accepted by those who recognize it.

  Now, there is a certain relation, a certain tie, between the capacity of being [a good representative or otherwise], and the capacity of recognizing the man who possesses the capacity of being. This is a fact which is continually illustrated in the world. The brave man excites those to follow him who can associate themselves with his bravery. The skilful man obtains obedience from those who are capable of comprehending his skill. The wise man engages the belief of those who are capable of appreciating his knowledge. Every superiority has a certain sphere of attraction in which it acts, and gathers around itself real inferiorities, which are, however, in a condition to feel and to accept its action.

  This sphere is by no means boundless. This also is a simple, self-evident fact. The relation which connects a superiority with the inferiorities by which it is recognized, being a purely intellectual relation, cannot exist where there does not also exist a sufficient degree of knowledge and intelligence to form the connection. A man, though very fit to recognize the superiority capable of deliberating on the affairs of his commune, may be quite unfit to distinguish and point out by his vote a person who shall be capable of deliberating on the affairs of the State. There are, then, some inferiorities, destitute of all true relation with certain superiorities, and which, if they were called upon to distinguish between them, would be either unable to do so, or would arrive at a most incorrect conclusion.

  The limit at which the faculty ceases of recognizing and accepting the superiority which constitutes the capacity of being a good deputy, is that at which the right of election ought to cease; for it is here that the capacity ceases of being a good elector.

  Above this limit, the right of election exists only because of the actual existence of the capacity of recognizing the superior capacity that is sought. Below it, there is no right.

  From thence, the necessity of direct election philosophically results. Evidently it is desired to obtain that which is sought. Now, that which is sought, is a good representative. Superior capacity, that of the representative, is necessarily, therefore, the dominant condition, the starting-point of the whole operation. You will obtain this superior capacity by requiring its recognition by all those capacities which, although inferior, stand in natural relation with it. If, on the contrary, you begin by electing the electors, what will be the result? you have to accomplish an operation analogous to the preceding, but the point of departure is altered, and the general condition is lowered. You take as your foundation the capacity of the elector, that is to say, a capacity inferior to that which you wish definitively to obtain; and you necessarily address yourself to capacities still more inferior and quite unfit to conduct you, even under this form, to the more elevated result at which you aim; for the capacity of the elector being only the ability to select a good representative, it would be necessary to be in a position to comprehend the latter condition in order to comprehend the former, which can never happen.

  Indirect election, therefore, considered in itself, derogates from the primitive principle as well as from the ultimate object of representative government, and debases its nature. Considered in its practical results, in facts, and independently of every general principle, this system appears equally unsatisfactory.

  In the first place, we regard it as admitted, that it is desirable that the election of representatives should not be in general the work of a very small number of electors. When electoral assemblies are very limited, not only is the election deficient in that action and energy which sustain political life in society, and afterwards contribute in great measure to the power of the representative himself, but general interests, expansive ideas, and public opinions cease to be the motive and regulating power. Coteries form themselves—in the place of political parties, personal intrigues spring up; and a struggle is established between interests, opinions, and relations, which are almost individual in their nature. The election is no less disputed, but it is less national, and its results possess the same fault.

  Starting, then, from this point, that electoral assemblies ought to be sufficiently numerous to prevent individualities from obtaining such easy dominion, I seek to discover how, by indirect election, this end can reasonably be attained.

  Two hypotheses alone are possible: either the territorial boundaries, within which the assembly will be formed, charged with the nomination of the electors, will be very narrow, or will be of considerable extent. In England, for example, the electors would be required from the tithings or the hundreds, which correspond very nearly to our communes and cantons. If these boundaries are very narrow, and only a very small number are required to be selected from each—two electors for example—very probably some of these electors will be of a very inferior order.

  True electoral capacities are by no means equally divided among communes; one commune may possess twenty or thirty, while another contains only a few, or perhaps none at all; and this is the case with the majority. If each district is required to furnish the same, or nearly the same number of electors, great violence will be done to realities. Many of the incapable will be summoned; many who are capable will be excluded; and, finally, an electoral assembly will be constituted, but little adapted for the wise choice of representatives. If, on the contrary, each district is required to designate a number of electors proportioned to its importance, its population, and the wealth and intelligence that are concentrated in it, then, wherever the number to be chosen is considerable, there will no longer be any true choice.

  It has already been shown, that elections, when they are numerous and simultaneous, lose their character. There will be lists of electors prepared by the external influence either of parties or of power, which will be adopted or rejected without discernment or freedom. In this respect experience has everywhere confirmed the previsions of reason.

  If the districts summoned to name the electors possess any great extent, another alternative presents itself. Either each will be required to choose only a small number, and then the object will be defeated, for the assembly whose duty it will be to elect the representatives will be very innumerous: or a large number of electors will be required from each district, and then the inconvenience which has been already pointed out will be incurred.

  Let all the possible combinations of indirect election be exhausted, and there will not be found one which can finally supply, for the election of representatives, an assembly sufficiently numerous, and formed at the same time with discernment and liberty. In this system these two results mutually exclude each other.

  I proceed now to another vicious practice connected with this system, which is no less serious than those just indicated.

  The end of representative government is to bring publicly into proximity and contact the chief interests and various opinions which divide society, and dispute for supremacy, in the just confidence that from their debates will result the recognition and adoption of the laws and measures which are most suitable for the country in general. This end is only attained by the triumph of the true majority—the minority being constantly listened to with respect.

  If the majority is displaced by artifice, there is falsity. If the minority is removed from the struggle beforehand, there is oppression. In either case representative government is corrupted.

  All the constituent laws of this form of government have, then, two fundamental conditions to fulfil: first, to secure the manifestation and triumph of the true majority; and, secondly, to insure the intervention and unshackled endeavour of the minority.

  These two conditions are as essential to the laws which regulate the mode of the election of representatives, as to those which preside over the debates of deliberative assemblies. In neither case ought there to be falsehood or tyranny.

  An electoral system which would annul beforehand—with regard to the final result of the elections, that is to say, with regard to the formation of the deliberative assembly—the influence and participation of the minority, would destroy representative government, and would be as fatal to the majority itself as any law which, in the deliberative assembly, should condemn the minority to silence.

  This, to a certain extent, is the result of indirect election.

  By direct election, and supposing that the limit of electoral capacity has been reasonably fixed by law, that is to say, at the point at which true capacity actually ceases, all the citizens whose social position, fortune, or intelligence place them above this limit, are equally summoned to unite in the choice of representatives. No inquiry is made of them concerning the opinions or interests which they advocate. The result of the election will make known the true majority; but whatever that may be they will have no cause to complain: the trial will have been complete, and they will have taken their rightful part in it.

  Indirect election, on the contrary, effects beforehand a thorough purgation of the electoral capacities, and eliminates a certain number, solely on account of the opinions or interests which they may hold. It intrudes into the sphere of these capacities in order to exclude a part of the minority, so as to give to the majority a factitious force, and thus to destroy the true expression of the general opinion. We should exclaim loudly against a law which should say, a priori: “All the men, or only the third or fourth part of the men, attached to such an interest or such an opinion, shall be excluded from all participation in the election of representatives, whatever may otherwise be their importance and social position.” This is precisely what is done, a posteriori, by indirect election; and thereby it introduces into representative government positive disorder, for it creates a means of tyranny for the benefit of the majority. It may even happen, and examples of this are not wanting, that indirect election, when thus employed to eliminate a portion of the natural electoral capacities, may result in turning against the majority itself, and putting it in the minority. A supposition will clearly explain this idea. If, in the fourteenth century, it had been decreed in England, that “the copyholders and villeins should unite in nominating the electors of the members of Parliament,” is it not evident that their choice would have fallen on the lords whose lands they rented or cultivated by any particular title; and that the inhabitants of the towns, the citizens, would have been almost absolutely excluded from the House of Commons? Thus, this part of the nation, which had already attained so much importance, would have seen themselves deprived of the exercise of political rights by a system which urged, as its sole specious pretext, the extension of these rights to a greater number of individuals.

  This is, in fact, the true source of indirect election; it is derived from the sovereignty of numbers, and from universal suffrage: and as it is impossible to reduce these two principles to practice, it is attempted to retain some shadow of their existence. The principle of representative government is violated, its nature debased, and the right of election weakened, in order that consistent adherence to an erroneous doctrine may, to all appearance, be maintained. Who can fail to see that such a system must necessarily enervate election, and that reality and energy can be preserved by the system of direct election alone? Every action, the result of which is distant and uncertain, inspires little interest; and the same men who will unitedly display great discernment and animation in the choice of their municipal officers, would give their suffrage blindly and coldly to subsequent electors whom their thoughts never follow into the future in which they interfere so little. This pretended homage to wills not sufficiently enlightened to be trusted with a greater share of influence in the choice of representatives, is at the bottom nothing but miserable quackery and lying adulation; and under a simulated extension of political rights there is concealed the restriction, mutilation, and enfeebling of these rights in the sphere in which they really exist, and in which they might be exercised in all their fulness and with complete effect.

  The true way to diffuse political life in all directions, and to interest as great a number of citizens as possible in the concerns of the State, is not to make them all combine in the same acts, although they may not all be equally capable of performing them; but to confer upon them all those rights which they are capable of exercising. Rights are worth nothing unless they are full, direct, and efficacious. In place of perverting political rights by weakening them, under the pretext of giving them diffusion, let local liberties everywhere exist, guaranteed by real rights. The electoral system itself will thus become much more powerful than it could possibly be under a pretended system of universal suffrage.

  The last important fact to be noticed in the electoral system of England in the fourteenth century, is open voting. Some have attempted to regard this as an absolute principle capable of constant application; but we think it ought not so to be considered. The only absolute principle in this matter is, that election should be free, and should truly display the true thoughts and real wishes of the electors. If open voting puts a serious restraint on liberty of elections and perverts their results, it ought to be abolished. Doubtless such a condition argues infirmity of liberty and timidity of morals, and proves that a portion of society is in conflict with influences which it is afraid to shake off, though it ardently desires to be rid of them. This is a melancholy fact, but it is one which liberty, rendered fruitful by time, can alone destroy. It is very true that open voting in elections, as well as in the debates of deliberative assemblies, is the natural consequence of representative government. It is quite true that there is a degree of shame attached to liberty if it claim secresy for itself while imposing publicity on power. That liberty which can only attack is still very feeble; for the true power of freedom consists in its bold defence and avowal of its rights. Certainly there is an ill grace in the complaints of the niggardliness and delay with which power grants rights, when concealment is necessary for the exercise of rights already possessed. But when reason is applied to practice, it regards, for some time at least, nothing besides facts; and the most imperious of all principles is necessity. To impose open voting when it would injure freedom of election would be to compromise general liberty itself, which, ere long, must necessarily establish open voting.

  To sum up what I have said. Nearly all the fundamental principles of a free and reasonable electoral system may be discovered in the electoral system of England in the fourteenth century. Bestowal of electoral rights upon capacity; close union of electoral rights with all other rights; regard to natural influences and relations; absence of all arbitrary and factitious combinations in the formation and proceedings of electoral assemblies; prudent limitation in the number to be chosen by each assembly; direct election, and open voting; all are to be met with. These are entirely due to the decisive circumstance that the electoral system and representative government itself were in England the simple and natural result of facts, the consequence and development of real and powerful anterior liberties, which served as their basis, and guarded and nourished in their bosom the roots of the tree which is indebted to them for its growth.1

  By another equally decisive circumstance, this system, though so national and spontaneous in its origin, became corrupted, at least in part, and appears at the present day to require correction. Perhaps it is owing to its very power that it remains inflexible: it has only followed at a distance the vicissitudes and progress of social conditions. It now protects the remnants of those abuses against which, at first, and for a long time, it was directed; and yet the reform of these abuses, by whatever means and at whatever period it may be effected, will be the fruit of the institutions, habits, principles, and sentiments which this system has established.

  LECTURE 17

  Origin of the division of the English Parliament into two Houses. ~ Its original constitution. ~ Reproduction of the classifications of society in the Parliament. ~ Causes which led the representatives of counties to separate from the barons, and coalesce with the representatives of boroughs. ~ Effects of this coalition. ~ Division of the Parliament into two Houses in the fourteenth century.

  Our attention has hitherto been directed only to the elements of which the Parliament was composed, and to the proceedings that took place at its formation, that is to say, to the process of election: we have now to consider another question; we must enquire what were the internal and external constitution and organisation of the Parliament thus composed.

  The Parliament at the beginning of the fourteenth century was not divided, as at present, into the House of Lords and the House of Commons; nor did it, on the other hand, consist of a single body. Accounts vary regarding the date at which it assumed its present form. Carte fixes it in the seventeenth year of the reign of Edward III. (1344); the authors of the Parliamentary History, in the sixth year of the same reign (1333); Mr. Hallam in the first year of the reign of Edward III. (1327), or, perhaps, even in the eighth year of the reign of Edward II. (1315).

  The principal cause of this diversity of opinion is the different circumstance with which each author connects the fact of the union of county and borough members into one single assembly. This fact is deduced by some from the date of their assembling together in the same place; by others from the period of their common deliberation; and by others again, from the union of their votes upon the same question. And as each of these circumstances occurred in one particular Parliament independently of the others, the period which Parliament first existed in its present form is carried back or forward according to the circumstance which is regarded as decisive in this respect. However this may be, it may be affirmed that the division of Parliament into two Houses—one comprising the lords or great barons individually summoned, and the other all the elected representatives of counties and boroughs; and both these houses deliberating and voting together in all matters of business—was not completely and definitively effected, until towards the middle of the fourteenth century. It is necessary to trace the steps by which this fact was gradually accomplished. This is the only way thoroughly to comprehend its nature and its causes.

  Originally, as we have seen, all the immediate vassals of the king had the same right of repairing to Parliament and taking part in its deliberations. Mere knights, therefore, when they repaired thither, sat, deliberated, and voted, with the great barons.

  When election was substituted for this individual right in the case of the knights of shires, and only those elected by the county-courts were entitled to attend the Parliament, they still continued to be members of the class to which they had previously belonged. Although elected and deputed not only by those knights who were immediate vassals of the king, but also by all the freeholders of their county, they continued to sit, deliberate, and vote, together with the great barons who were individually summoned.

  The representatives of the boroughs, on the contrary, whose presence in Parliament was a novel circumstance (which was not connected with any anterior right exercised merely under a new shape), formed a distinct assembly from their first appearance in Parliament, sitting apart, deliberating and voting on their own account, and as thoroughly separated from the knights of the shire as from the great barons.

  This separation is evident from the votes of Parliament at this period. At the Parliament held at Westminster under Edward I., in 1295, the earls, barons, and knights of the shire granted the king an eleventh part of their personal property, the clergy a tenth part, and the citizens and burgesses a seventh. In 1296, the former granted a twelfth part, and the latter an eighth. In 1305, the former gave a thirtieth part, and the clergy, the citizens, and burgesses a twentieth. Under Edward II., in 1308, the barons and knights granted one twentieth, the clergy a fifteenth, the citizens and burgesses a fifteenth. Under Edward III., in 1333, the knights of the shire granted a fifteenth, the same as the prelates and the nobles, and the citizens and burgesses a tenth; and yet the records of this Parliament expressly declare that the knights of the shire and the burgesses deliberated in common. In 1341, the prelates, earls and barons, on the one hand, and the knights of the shire on the other, granted a ninth of their sheep, lambs, andfleeces; and the burgesses, a ninth of all their personal property. In 1345, the knights of the shire granted two-fifteenths, the burgesses a fifth: the lords granted nothing but promised to follow the king in person. Thus, at this latter period, the knights of the shire no longer voted in common with the lords, but they still voted apart from the burgesses.

  In 1347, the commons without distinction granted two-fifteenths, to be levied in two years in the cities, the boroughs, the ancient domains of the crown, and the counties. At this period, then, the fusion of the two elements of the Commons House was complete: and it continued so ever afterwards, although a few examples are still found of special taxes, voted by the representatives of the towns and boroughs alone in the case of customs, especially in 1373.

  The original separation, then, was between the representatives of the counties and those of the boroughs. The recollections of feudal law allied the former to the great barons during more than fifty years. This separation was not confined solely to voting the supplies. Everything indicates, although it is nowhere proved by written evidence, that the knights of the shire and the representatives of the boroughs did not deliberate together any more on other affairs, either legislative or otherwise, which interested only one of the two classes. When mercantile interests were in question, the king and his council discussed them solely with the representatives of the towns and boroughs. Thus, there is reason to believe that the statute entitled The Statute of Acton-Burnel, passed in 1283, was enacted in this manner on the advice of the borough representatives alone, who met for this purpose at Acton-Burnel, whilst the knights of the shire sat with the great barons at Shrewsbury, to assist at the trial of David, Prince of Wales, then a prisoner. The separation of the two classes of representatives could therefore be carried thus far, that each class may have sat in different, though neighbouring towns.

  When they sat in the same town, and especially at Westminster, the whole Parliament met together, most probably in the same chamber; but the great barons and knights of the shire occupied the upper end, and the borough representatives the lower part, of the chamber.

  A distinction existed even among the borough members. Until the reign of Edward III., the representatives of those boroughs which formed part of the ancient domain of the crown constituted a separate class, and voted distinct supplies.

  The division of Parliament, then, far from having originated in the forms which prevailed fifty years later, arose from principles altogether different. No idea then existed of truly general interests and a national representation. The particular interests which were of sufficient importance to take part in the government, intervened in it solely on their own account, and treated separately of their own affairs. Did the matter in hand relate exclusively to things in which the great barons appeared to be interested, and where the king required their assistance alone—they alone assembled and deliberated. Was the question one of modifications in the nature or mode of the transmission of feudal territorial property—the knights of the shire were summoned; and in this way the statute Quia emptores was enacted under Edward I. Were commercial interests concerned—the king treated of them with the borough representatives only. In these various cases, as in the matter of supplies, the deliberation and vote of the different classes of members of Parliament were distinct. These classes were formed in reference to their common interests, and took no part in each other’s affairs: and very rarely, probably never, at this period, was there any matter of sufficiently general and common importance to all, for all to have been summoned to deliberate and vote in common.

  Thus the classification of society was perpetuated in the Parliament, and was the true principle of the division between the members of Parliament.

  This state of things did not long continue, because the classification of society itself, in which it originated, also tended to its own effacement. The county members could not fail to separate themselves altogether from the great barons, and completely to combine with the borough representatives; and for the following reasons.

  If the knights of the shire continued for some time to sit and vote with the great barons, this was merely the effect of old association, a relic of the ancient parity of their feudal position. This equality had already received a severe check by the substitution of election for individual right of presence. The cause which had led to this change continued at work; the disparity of importance and wealth between the great barons and plain knights of the shire went on increasing; the remembrance of feudal political right became weakened; and the social position of the knights of the shire daily became more different from that of the great barons. Their parliamentary position could not fail to follow the same course. All things combined to separate them more and more.

  At the same time every circumstance tended to associate the representatives of the counties with those of the boroughs. They had the same origin, and appeared in Parliament by virtue of the same title—election. The tie which had attached the county elections to feudal right became progressively enfeebled. Furthermore, these two classes of deputies were alike correspondent to certain local interests. These interests were often identical or of the same nature. The inhabitants of the towns situated in a county, and the rural landowners of the county, were often engaged in the same affairs, and frequently entertained the same claims and desires. Besides, the county-courts were a common centre at which they habitually assembled together. Both the county and borough elections frequently took place in these courts. Thus, while certain causes increasingly separated the knights of the shire from the great barons, other causes approximated them more closely to the borough representatives. The analogy of social positions naturally hastened the fusion of parliamentary positions.

  Lastly, the great barons constituted the chief council of the king. They often assembled around him in this capacity, and independently of any convocation of the elected deputies. By reason of their personal importance, they engaged in public affairs, and took part in the government in an habitual and permanent manner. The representatives of the counties and boroughs, on the contrary, interfered in the administration of public affairs only from time to time, in certain particular cases. They possessed rights and liberties, but they neither governed, nor contested with each other for the government, nor were they constantly associated in it. Their political position was in this respect the same, and was therefore very different from that of the great barons. All things tended, then, broadly to distinguish them from the latter class, and to connect them together.

  The constitution of Parliament in its present form is the result of all the above causes. It was accomplished in the middle of the fourteenth century, although some instances of separation between the two elements of the House of Commons may subsequently be met with. These cases very soon disappeared and the union became complete. One fact alone remained, and that was the superiority in importance and influence of the county representatives over the representatives of boroughs, notwithstanding the habitual inferiority of their numbers. This fact, with the exception of only a few intervals, is met with throughout the whole course of the history of Parliament.

  Thus was effected, on the one side, the separation of the Houses of Peers and Commons, and on the other, the union of the different elements of the House of Commons into a single assembly, composed of members exercising the same rights and voting on all occasions in common.

  This is the great fact which has decided the political destiny of England. By themselves alone, the borough deputies would never have possessed sufficient power and importance to form a House of Commons capable of resisting sometimes the king, and sometimes the great barons, and of gaining an ever-increasing influence in public affairs. But the aristocracy, or rather, the feudal nation, being divided into two parts, and the new nation which was forming in the towns becoming combined with the county freeholders there, arose from the combination a competent and imposing House of Commons. There was a large body of the nation independent both of the king and of the great nobles. It happened also that the king could not, as in France, make use of the Commons to annihilate the political rights and privileges of the ancient feudal system, without substituting new liberties in their places. On the Continent, the enfranchisment of the Commons definitively led to absolute power. In England, a portion of the feudal class having united with the Commons, they combined to defend their liberties. On the other hand, the crown, supported by the great barons, who could not hope to set up as petty independent sovereigns in their own domains, possessed sufficient power to defend itself in its turn. The great barons consequently were obliged to rally round the throne. It is not true, though it is constantly reiterated, that the aristocracy and people have made common cause in England against the regal power, and that English liberty has arisen out of that circumstance. But it is true that the division of the feudal aristocracy having prodigiously augmented the power of the Commons, popular liberties at an early date possessed sufficient means of resistance, and the royal power received at the same time sufficient support.

  Thus, considering the division of Parliament into two houses under the historic point of view, we see both how it was effected, and how favourable it has been to the establishment of popular liberty. Is this, then, all? Are this fact and its results mere accidents arising out of circumstances peculiar to England, and to the state in which society happened to be in the fourteenth century? Or is this division of legislative power into two houses a constitutional form intrinsically good, and everywhere as well founded in reason as it was, in England, in the necessities of the times? This question must be examined in order properly to appreciate the influence which this form has exercised on the development of the constitutional system in England, and rightly to understand its causes.

  LECTURE 18

  Examination of the division of the legislative power into two Houses. ~ Diversity of ideas on this subject. ~ Fundamental principle of the philosophic school. ~ Source of its errors. ~ Characteristics of the historic school. ~ Cause of the division of the British Parliament into two Houses. ~ Derivation of this division from the fundamental principle of representative government. ~ Its practical merit.

  In order to judge in itself of the division of the legislative power into two Chambers, and to estimate its merit, we must first detach it from certain particular and purely local characteristics, which are not essentially inherent in it; and which have associated it in England with causes which are not in all times and places to be met with. Not a few writers have fallen into grave errors, on this and many other questions, by neglecting to take this step at the outset. Some have formed their judgment of this institution entirely from a few of the causes which led to its establishment in England in the fourteenth century; and as, generally speaking, they did not approve either of these causes or their effects, and had a bad opinion of the social condition of which they formed part, they have condemned the institution itself, appearing to believe that it was derived solely from that social condition, and could not possibly be detached from it. Others, on the contrary, struck either with the general reasons which may be urged in favour of the institution, or with the good effects which it has produced in England and elsewhere, have adopted it exactly in that particular form in which it was introduced among our neighbours by their ancient social condition, asserting that all the characteristics which it there presents are essential to it, and even constitute it. Thus, the institution has sometimes been censured on account of particular facts which accompanied its establishment and combined to produce it, and sometimes these facts and their special consequences have been adopted as principles, simply because they were associated with an institution deemed intrinsically good. These two modes of judgment, both of which are equally erroneous, characterize the two schools, which may be called distinctively the philosophic school and the historic school. As this twofold method of considering political questions has warped them, sometimes in one sense and sometimes in another, it appears to me that it would be useful to offer some general observations on this subject, which may afterwards be applied to the particular question with which we are now occupied.

  One idea reigns in the philosophic school—that of Right. Right is constantly taken both as its starting-point, and as its goal. But right itself requires to be investigated; before adopting it as a principle or pursuing it as an object, we must know what it is. To discover right, the philosophic school commonly confines itself to the individual. It takes hold of man, considers him isolatedly and in himself, as a rational and free being, and deduces from an examination of his nature that which it denominates his rights. Once in possession of these rights, they are advanced as a requirement of justice and reason, which ought to be applied to social facts as the sole rational and moral rule by which these facts should be judged, if judgment only be required—or instituted, if the object be to institute government.

  The historic school is held in bondage by another idea—that of Fact. It does not, if possessed of any good sense, deny right: it even proposes right as its goal, but it never adopts it as its starting-point. Fact is the ground to which everything is brought; and as facts cannot be considered isolatedly, as they are all bound up together; and as the past itself is a fact with which the facts of the present are connected, it professes great respect for the past and admits right only so far as it is founded on anterior facts; or at least this school seeks to establish right, only by uniting it closely with these facts, and striving to deduce it from them. Such are the points of view, not exclusively, for that cannot be, but dominantly, of the two schools. How much is true, and how much erroneous in each? That is to say, what is there incomplete in both?

  The philosophic school is correct in adopting Right not only as its end but also as its starting-point. It is right in maintaining that an institution is not good, simply because it exists or has existed, and that there are rational principles by which all institutions should be judged, and rights superior to all facts—rights which cannot be violated unless the facts which violate them are illegitimate, although real, and even powerful.

  But though right in standing upon this foundation, which is its principal characteristic, the philosophic school is often mistaken when it attempts to go farther. We say that it is mistaken, philosophically speaking, and independently of all ideas of application and practical danger.

  Its two chief errors, in my opinion, are these: I. Its researches after right are misdirected; and, II. It mistakes the conditions under which right can be realised.

  It is not by considering man in isolation, in his single nature, and individually, that his rights may be discovered. The idea of right implies that of relation. Right can be declared only when relation is established. The fact of a connexion, of an approximation, in a word, of society, is implied in the very word right. Right originates with society. Not that society, at its origin, created right by an arbitrary convention. Just as truth exists before man becomes acquainted with it, so does right exist before it is realised in society. It is the legitimate and rational rule of society in every step of its development, and at every moment of its existence. Rules exist before their application; they would still exist even if they were never applied. Man does not make them. As a reasonable being, he is capable of discovering and understanding them. As a free being, he can either obey or violate them; but whether he be ignorant of them or knowingly violate them, their reality, so far as they are rules, that is to say, their rational and moral reality, is independent of him, superior and antecedent to his ignorance or his knowledge, to the respect or neglect with which he treats them. Laying down this principle then on the one side, that rule virtually exists before the relation or society to which it corresponds, and on the other side, that it is not manifested and declared until society is established, that is to say, that it can only be applied when society really exists, we inquire, What is this right and how can it be discovered?

  Right, considered in itself, is the rule that each individual is morally bound to observe and respect in his relations with another individual; that is to say, the moral limit at which his lawful liberty is arrested and ceases in his action on that individual; or, in other words, the right of a man is the limit beyond which the will of another man cannot morally be exercised over him in the relation which unites them.

  Nothing can be more certain than that every man in society has a right to expect that this limit will be maintained and respected as regards himself by other men and by society itself. This is the primitive and unalterable right which he possesses in virtue of the dignity of his nature. If the philosophic school had confined itself to laying down this principle, it would have been perfectly correct, and would have reminded society of the true moral rule. But it has attempted to go further: it has pretended to determine, beforehand and in a general way, the exact limit in every instance in which the will of individuals over each other, or of society over individuals, ceases to be legitimate. It has not contented itself with establishing right in principle, but has considered itself capable of enumerating all social rights a priori, and of reducing them to certain general formulae which should comprise them all, and might thus be applied to every relation to which society gives birth. By this it has been led to overlook many very positive rights, and to create many pretended rights which have no reality. If it be true, as we have laid it down, that right is the legitimate rule of a relation, it is plain that the relation must be known before the right which ought to govern it can be understood. Now social relations, whether between one man and another, or between one and several, are neither simple nor identical. They are infinitely multiplied, varied, and interwoven; and right changes with relation. An example will best explain our meaning. We will select the most simple and natural of social relations, that of the father to the child. Nobody will presume to assert that here no right exists, that is to say, that neither the father nor the child have any respective rights to be mutually observed, and that their will alone should arbitrarily regulate their reciprocal relations. In the outset, whilst the child is devoid of reason, his will has little or no right: the right belongs entirely to the will of the father, which even then is, doubtless, legitimate only so far as it is conformable to reason, but which is not and cannot be subordinate to that of the child, on which it is exercised and which it directs. In proportion as reason becomes developed in the child, the right of the father’s will becomes restricted; this right is always derived from the same principle, and ought to be exercised according to the same law; but it no longer extends to the same limit, but becomes changed and narrowed day by day with the progress of the intellectual and moral development of the child, up to the age when at length the child, having become a man, finds himself in a totally different relationship to his father—a relationship in which another right holds sway, that is to say, in which the paternal right is enclosed within entirely different limits, and is no longer exercised in the same way.

  If, in the most simple of social relations, the right, though immutable in its principle, suffers so many vicissitudes in its application—if the limit at which it stops is so continually altered, according as this relation changes in nature and character—to a far greater extent will this be the case in all other social relations, which are infinitely more changeful and complicated. Every day old rights will perish; every day new ones will arise; that is to say, different applications will daily be made of the principle of right; and each occasion will vary at the limits at which the right ceases, either on one side or the other, in the innumerable relations which constitute society.

  It is not, then, a simple matter to determine right, nor can it be done once for all, and according to certain general formulae. Either these formulae must be reduced to this dominant truth, that no will, whether that of man over man, of society over the individual, or of the individual over society, ought to be exercised contrary to justice and reason—or else these formulae are vain; that is to say, they confine themselves to expressing the principle of right, or try unsuccessfully to enumerate and regulate beforehand all its applications.

  In this there consists the first error of the philosophic school, that, proud of having re-established the principle of right (a matter, certainly, of immense importance), it has thenceforth esteemed itself, by continuing the same process, in a condition to recognise and define all rights; that is to say, all applications of the principle to social relations; an attempt which is most dangerous because it is impossible. It is not granted to man thus to discern, beforehand and at a glance, the whole extent of the rational laws which ought to regulate the relations of men both among themselves and with society in general. Doubtless, in each of these relations and in all the vicissitudes which they undergo, there is a principle which is their legitimate rule, and which determines rights; and it is this principle which must be discovered. But it is in the relation itself, over which this principle should hold sway, that it is contained and may be discovered; it is intimately connected with the nature and object of this relation, and these are the first data that must be studied in order to arrive at a knowledge of the principle. The philosophic school almost constantly neglects this labour. Instead of applying itself to the discovery of the true rights which correspond to the various social relations, it arbitrarily constructs rights while pretending to deduce them from the general and primitive principle of right; an attempt the reverse of philosophical, for special rights are applications, not consequences logically deduced from this principle; which is perfectly exhibited in each particular case, but which does not contain within itself all the elements or all the data required for the discovery of the right in every case.

  The second error of the philosophic school is that of mistaking the conditions under which right may be realised, that is to say, under which it may become associated with facts, so as to regulate them.

  It has long been said that two powers, right and might, truth and error, good and evil, dispute the mastery of the world. What is not so often said, though it is no less true, is this—they dispute for it because they simultaneously possess it, because they co-exist in it everywhere at the same time. These two powers, so opposite in their nature, are never separated; in fact, they meet and mingle everywhere, forming by their co-existence and conflict that sort of impure and troubled unity which is the condition of man on earth; and which is reproduced in society as well as in individuals. All mundane facts bear this character: there are none that are completely devoid of truth, justice, and goodness; none that are wholly and purely right, good, or true. The simultaneous presence, and at the same time the struggle, of might and right, forms the primitive and dominant fact which is reproduced in all other facts.

  The philosophical school habitually loses sight of this intimate and inevitable amalgamation of might and right in all that exists and takes place upon the earth. Because these two powers are hostile, it thinks them separate. When it recognises some great violation of right in an institution, a power, or a social relation, it concludes that right is utterly absent from it; and imagines, at the same time, that if it can succeed in laying hold of this fact, and shaping and regulating it according to its own will, it will secure the undisputed sway of right in that fact. Hence the contempt, one might almost say the hatred, with which it judges and treats facts. Hence also, the violence with which it pretends to impose upon them those rules and forms which constitute right in its eyes: what regard is due to that which is only the work of might? what sacrifices are not due to that which will be the triumph of right and reason? and the firmer the minds and the more energetic the characters of these reasoners, the more will they be ruled and the further misguided by this method of viewing human things. Facts past and present do not deserve so much disdain, nor do future ones merit so much confidence. We do not here adopt the views of the sceptics, nor would we regard all facts as equally good or bad, and equally invested with or destitute of reason and right. Nothing can be more contrary to our opinion. We firmly believe in the reality and legitimacy of right, in its struggle against might, and in the utility as well as the moral obligation of sustaining right in this eternal but progressive combat. We only ask that, in this struggle, nothing may be forgotten, and nothing confounded; and that indiscriminate attacks may not be made. We ask that because a fact may contain many illegitimate elements, it is not therefore to be supposed a priori to contain nothing besides, for such is not the case. Right exists everywhere more or less, and everywhere right ought to be respected. There is also more or less falsity and incompleteness in the speculative idea which we form to ourselves of right, and there will be unjust force and violence employed in the strife in which this idea is made to prevail, and in the new facts which will result from its triumph. This is not saying that the combat ought to be suspended, or that the triumph ought not to be pursued. It is only necessary truthfully to recognise the condition of human things, and never to lose sight of it, whether the question be one of judgment or of action.

  This is what the philosophic school can rarely consent to do. Taking right for the point at which it sets out, and also that at which it aims, it forgets that facts subsist between these two extremes—actual and existing facts, independent data; a condition which of imperative necessity must be submitted to, when the extension of right is sought after, since these facts are the very matters to which right must be applied. This school begins by neglecting one of the fundamental elements of the problem which it has to solve; it falls into reverie, and constructs imaginary facts, whilst it ought to be operating on real facts. And when compelled to quit hypotheses, and deal with realities, it becomes irritated at the obstacles which it meets, and unreasonably condemns the facts which throw them in its way. Thus, through having desired impossibilities, it is led to forget a part of that which is actually true. Society at every period swerves more or less from the general type of right; that is to say, the facts which constitute its material and moral condition are more or less regulated according to right, and also become in a greater or less degree susceptible of receiving a more absolute form, a more perfect rule, and of continually assimilating more closely to reason and truth; and this it is which must be absolutely studied and understood before passing a judgment on these facts, or endeavouring to effect their change and improvement. Perfection is the aim of human nature and of human society; perfection is the law of their existence, but imperfection is its condition. The philosophic school does not accept this condition; and is thus misled in its endeavours towards attaining perfection, and even in its own idea of the perfection to which it aspires.

  The historic school possesses other characteristics, and falls into different errors. With the utmost respect for facts, it easily allows itself to be induced to attribute to them merits to which they are not entitled; to see more reason and justice, that is to say, more right, in them than they really contain, and to resist even the slightest bold attempt to judge and regulate them according to principles more conformable to general reason. It is even inclined to deny these principles, to maintain that there is no rational and invariable type of right that man can take for a guide in his efforts or his opinions: an error of great magnitude, and sufficient to place this school, philosophically considered, in a subordinate rank. What then is perfection, if there is no ideal perfection to be aimed at? What is the progress of real rights, if there is no rational right to comprehend them all? What is the human mind, if it is incapable of penetrating far beyond actual realities in its knowledge of this rational right? and how can it judge of them except by comparing them with this sublime type, which it never holds in full possession, but which it cannot deny without abnegating itself, and losing every fixed rule and guiding thread? Doubtless, facts command respect, because they are a condition, a necessity; and they deserve it, because they always contain a certain measure of right. But the judgment ought never to be enslaved by them, nor should it attribute absolute legitimacy to reality. Is it so difficult, then, to perceive that evil is evil even when it is powerful and inevitable? The historic school constantly endeavours to evade this confession. It tries to explain every institution, and to abstain from giving judgment upon them, as if explanation and judgment were not two distinct acts, which possess no right over one another. It never suffers the institution of a comparison between the real state of any society and the rational state of society in general; as if the real, or even the possible, were the limit of reason; as if, when judging, reason should be deposed, because when applied it is compelled to undergo conditions and to yield to obstacles which it cannot conquer. The historic school would be perfectly right if it confined itself to the careful study of facts, bringing to light that portion of right which they contain, and searching out the degree of perfection which they are capable of receiving, and if it restricted itself to maintaining that it is not easy to distinguish real rights, unjust to condemn facts en masse, and impossible and dangerous to neglect them altogether. But when it undertakes to legitimise facts by facts; when it refuses to apply the invariable law of justice and rational right to all, it abandons every principle, falls into a sort of absurd and shameful fatalism, and disinherits man and society of that which is most pure in their nature, most legitimate in their pretensions, and most noble in their aspirations.

  To sum up, the philosophic school possesses the merit of everywhere acknowledging the principle of right, and adopting it as the unchangeable rule of its judgment on facts. Its errors consist in its knowledge of facts being slight, imperfect, and precipitate; and in not allowing to facts the power which is inseparable from them, and the degree of legitimacy which they always contain. The historic school is better acquainted with facts, appreciates their causes and consequences more equitably, effects a more faithful analysis of their elements, and arrives at a more exact knowledge of particular rights as well as at a more just estimate of practicable reforms. But it is deficient in general and fixed principles: its judgment sfluctuate according to chance; and accordingly it almost always hesitates to come to a conclusion, and never succeeds in satisfying the mind, which the philosophic school, on the contrary, always impresses strongly, at the risk of leading it astray.

  We have insisted on the distinctive characters and opposite errors of these two schools, because we meet with them unceasingly when investigating how institutions and social facts have been appreciated and understood. Of this we have given an example by indicating the two points of view under which the division of the legislative power into two Chambers has been commonly considered. The historic school approves and recommends it; but it often founds its reasons on illegitimate facts, and adheres too absolutely to the forms which this institution has assumed in the past, while it refrains from attaching itself to any rigorous and rational principle. The philosophic school has long maintained, and many of its disciples still believe, that this is an accidental and arbitrary institution, which is not founded on reason and the very nature of things.

  Let us now consider this institution in itself, after having disentangled it from that which, in England, has related merely to its actual origin, and to the local circumstances in the midst of which it took its rise.

  It is beyond doubt that the immense inequality of wealth and credit—in a word, of power and social importance, which existed between the great barons and the other political classes of the nation, whether freeholders or burgesses, was in England the sole cause of the institution of the House of Peers. No political combination or idea of public right had anything to do with its formation. The personal importance of a certain number of individuals, in this case, created their right. Political order is necessarily the expression, the reflection, of social order. In this stage of civilisation especially, power is indisputably conveyed from society into the government. There was a House of Peers because there were men who, bearing no comparison with others, could not remain confounded with them, exercising only the same rights, and possessing no greater amount of authority.

  To the same cause must be ascribed several of the leading characteristics of the House of Peers; the hereditary transmission of social importance, wealth, and power (the result of the feudal system as regards property), carried with it the inheritance of political importance. This is proved by the fact, that originally the sole hereditary peers were the barons by feudal tenure. Hereditary right did not originally belong to the barons by writ; although individually summoned to the Upper House, they exercised, when sitting there, the same rights. The judicial functions of the House of Peers also had the same source. At first they belonged to the general assembly of the direct vassals of the king. When the greater number of these vassals ceased to attend that assembly, the great barons who alone attended, continued to exercise nearly all its functions, and especially its judicial authority. Of this they continued to hold possession when the knights re-entered Parliament by means of election. Thus, a right, which originally devolved upon the general assembly of the political nation, became concentrated in the new House of Peers, at least in every case unaffected by the new jurisdictions instituted by the king. On examining in all its details the political part now performed in England by the House of Peers, it will be found that a great number of its attributes are only the results of ancient facts, that they are not inherent in the institution itself, but solely derived from the social position of the great barons; and at the same time it will be perceived that all these facts are connected with the general and primitive fact of the great inequality then subsisting between the great barons and the citizens.

  As this inequality really existed, and could not fail to re-appear in the government, it was very fortunate for England that it assumed the form of the House of Peers. Inequality is never more oppressive and fatal than when displayed solely for its own advantage, and in an individual interest. This is the invariable result when the upper ranks are dispersed over the country, and are brought into contact with, and into the presence of, their inferiors alone. If, instead of uniting in the House of Peers to exercise, as members of that assembly, the power they possessed over society, the great barons had each remained on his own estates, their superiority and power would have weighed heavily on all their vassals and farmers, and social emancipation would have been very much retarded. Every baron would then have had to do with his inferiors alone. In the House of Peers, on the contrary, he had to deal with his equals; and to obtain influence in that assembly, and effect his will, he was obliged to have recourse to discussion, to the advancement of public reasons, and to constitute himself the exponent of some interest superior to his own personal interest, and of opinions around which it would be possible for men to unite together. Thus men, who, had they remained isolated on their domains, would have acted only upon inferiors and for their own interest, were constrained, when they had met together, to act upon their equals, and for the interests of the masses, whose support alone could increase their power in the frequent struggles which this new situation imposed upon them. Thus by the single fact of its concentration, the high feudal aristocracy insensibly changed its character. Each of its members possessed rights originally derived entirely from his own power, which he came to the House of Peers to exercise solely for his own interest; but when once brought together into each other’s presence, all these individual interests experienced the necessity of seeking new means of obtaining credit and authority elsewhere than in themselves. Personal powers were constrained to sink themselves into a public power. An assembly composed of individual superiorities, jealous only to preserve and increase their power, became gradually converted into a national institution, compelled to adapt itself, in many points, to the interest of all. As I have elsewhere had occasion to say, one of the greatest vices of the feudal system was to localise sovereignty, and to bring it everywhere, so to speak, to the door of those over whom it was exercised. The formation of the House of Peers weakened this evil in England, and thus, at least in a political point of view, struck a deadly blow at feudalism.

  Further, the great barons thus formed into a body, had the power and duty of defending in common their rights and liberties against the royal power; and their resistance, instead of consisting in a series of isolated wars, as was the case in France, immediately assumed the character of a collective and truly political resistance, founded on certain general principles of right and liberty. Now there is something contagious in these principles and their language, which very soon extends them beyond the limits within which they are at first enclosed. Right calls forth right, liberty engenders liberty. The demands and resistance of the great barons provoked similar demands and resistance in other classes of the nation. Without the concentration of the high aristocracy in the House of Peers, the House of Commons would probably have never been formed. From all these factsflows this consequence, that when great inequality actually exists in society between different classes of citizens, it is not only natural but useful to the progress of justice and liberty, that the superior class should be collected and concentrated into a great public power, in which individual superiorities become placed on a more elevated level than that of personal interest; they learn to treat with their equals, to meet with opposition, and to furnish an example of the defence of liberties and rights; while by exposing themselves in some sort to the view of the whole nation, they experience by this fact alone the necessity of adapting themselves, to a certain extent, to its opinions, sentiments, and interests.

  But, it may be said, a social inequality of sufficient magnitude to occasion the formation of such a power, is neither a universal fact, nor one in itself good and desirable; and under this point of view the House of Peers, as it is constituted in England, was simply a remedy for an evil. There can be no doubt that the accumulation of land, wealth, and positive power which belonged to the great barons, and the securing of all these social advantages, were the result of violence, and as contrary to the internal tendency as to the rational principles of society in general. If then the division of the legislative power into two Chambers is derived only from such causes, it might in certain cases be inevitable and even beneficial; but where these causes are not met with, nothing would recommend it, or ought to make its necessity a matter of regret. The equitable and natural distribution of social advantages, their rapid circulation, the free competition of rights and powers—this is the object, as it is the rational law of the social condition. An institution which, in itself and by its nature, is opposed to this object and derogates from this law, contains nothing which ought to lead to its adoption when not imposed by necessity.

  Is this the case with regard to the division of the legislative power into two Chambers, setting aside those particular characteristics which, in the English House of Peers, are derived solely from local and accidental facts, and cannot be referred to rational causes of universal validity?

  Before considering this question in its relation to the fundamental principle of representative government, some observations are necessary.

  It is by no means true, that similar inequalities to those which produced the preponderance of the great barons in England, and a permanent classification of society in conformity to these facts, are natural conditions of the social state. Providence does not always sell her benefits at so high a price to the human race, and has not rested the very existence of society on this denomination, this immovable constitution of privilege. Reason must believe, and facts prove, that society can not only subsist, but is even better off in another condition; in a condition in which the principle of free competition exercises more dominion, and where the different social classes are more nearly allied. It is certain, however, that there exist in society two tendencies, equally legitimate in their principle, and equally salutary in their effects, although in permanent opposition to each other. The one is the tendency to the production of inequality, the other, the tendency to maintain or restore equality between individuals. Both are natural and indestructible: this is a fact which requires no proof, the aspect of the world displays it everywhere; and if we look within, we shall perceive it in ourselves. Who does not desire, in some respect or another, to raise himself above his equals? and who would not also wish, in some particular, to bring down his superiors to an equality with himself? These two tendencies, considered in their principle, are equally legitimate: the one is attached to the right of the natural superiorities which exist in the moral as well as in the physical order of the universe; the other, to the right of every man to that justice which desires that no arbitrary force should deprive him of any of the social advantages which he possesses, or might acquire, unaided and without injury to his fellows. To prevent natural superiorities from displaying themselves, and exercising the power that belongs to them, is to create a violent inequality, and to mutilate the human race in its noblest parts. To enslave men in regard to those rights which are common to all, by reason of the similitude of their nature, to unequal laws imposed or maintained by force, is to insult human nature and to forget its imperishable dignity. In fine, these two tendencies are equally salutary in their effects: without the one, society would be inert and lifeless; without the other, might alone would dominate, and right would for ever be suppressed. In considering them as respects that which is legitimate and moral in each, let us ask what is this tendency to inequality but the desire to elevate ourselves, to extend our influence, and to bring to light and effect the triumph of that portion of moral power which is naturally placed by the will of God the Creator, in each particular individual? and is it not this impulse which constitutes the life and determines the progress of the human race? On the other hand, what is this tendency to equality except resistance to force, to capricious arbitrary wills, and the desire to yield obedience only to justice and true law? Doubtless, in both these tendencies, the bad as well as the the good parts of our nature display themselves: there is a taint of insolence in the desire of self-elevation, and of envy in the passion for equality. Injustice and violence may be employed either to abase superiors or to surpass equals; but in that conflict of good and evil, which is everywhere the condition of man, it is not the less true that the two tendencies of which I am speaking constitute the very principle of social life, the twofold cause which makes the human race advance in the career of improvement, which leads it back when it wanders astray, and urges it forward when perverse powers or wills seek to arrest its course.

  The tendency to inequality is then a fact inevitable in itself, legitimate in its principle, and salutary in its effects, if it is restrained by the law of competition, that is to say, beneath the condition of a permanent and free struggle with the tendency to equality, which, in the order of Providence, appears to be the fact by which it is destined to be balanced. In every country there will always arise and exist a certain number of great individual superiorities, who will seek an analogous place in government to that which they occupy in society. They ought not to obtain it for their personal interest, nor to extend it beyond what comports with the public interest, nor should they retain it longer than they possess the title in virtue of which they assumed it, that is to say, their actual importance, nor should they preserve this title by means violative of the principle of free competition, and the maintenance of the rights which are common to all. All this is indubitable, but, this being allowed, there will still remain the necessity of introducing and concentrating among the superior powers all the great superiorities of the country, in order to engage them in the transaction of public affairs, and in the defence of the general interests.

  This, as we have seen, is the sole object of the representative system: its precise purpose is to discover and concentrate the natural and real superiorities of the country, in order to apply them to its government. Now, is it good in itself, and in conformity with the fundamental principle of this system, to apply only one method of seeking out these superiorities, and to gather them all into a single voting urn? that is to say, must they be united in one single assembly, formed upon the same conditions, after the same tests, and by the same mode? We now reach the pith of the question.

  The principle of the representative system is the destruction of all sovereignty of permanent right, that is to say, of all absolute power upon earth. The question of what is now called omnipotence has at all times been agitated. If by this is understood an actually definitive power, in the terms of established laws, such a power always exists in society, under a multitude of names and forms: for wherever there is a matter to be decided and completed, there must be a power to decide and complete it. Thus, in the family, the father exercises the power of definitively determining, in certain particulars, the conduct and destiny of his children; in a well regulated municipality, the municipal council definitively enacts the local budget; in civil trials, certain tribunals give final judgment upon cases submitted to their decision; and in the political system, electoral omnipotence belongs to the electors. Definitive power is thus disseminated through the social state, and is necessarily met with everywhere. Does this imply that a power ought somewhere to exist, which possesses omnipotence by right, that is to say, which has the right to do anything it pleases? That would be absolute power; and it is the formal design of the representative system, as well as the object of all its institutions, to provide against the existence of such a power, and to take care that every power shall be submitted to certain trials, meet with obstacles, undergo opposition, and, in fine, be deprived of sway until it has either proved its legitimacy, or given reason for presuming it.

  There is not, then, and there cannot be, any omnipotence by right, that is to say, any power which should be allowed to say: “that is good and just because I have so decided it”; and every effort of political science, every institution, ought to tend to the prevention of such a power being anywhere formed; and should provide that the actual omnipotence which exists under so many names in society, should everywhere meet with restraints and obstacles enough to prevent its conversion into an omnipotence by right.

  Until the summit of society is reached, and while those powers only are constituted, above which other permanent powers will be placed for the purpose of controlling them, and with power to enforce their authority, this end appears easy to attain.

  Judicial power, municipal power, and every second class power may be definitive without much danger, because if they are abused in a manner likely to become fatal, the legislative or executive power will be there to repress them. But we must necessarily come at last to the supreme power, to that power which superintends all others, and is not itself ruled or restrained by any visible and constituted power. Shall the right of omnipotence appertain to this? Certainly not, whatever may be its form or name. It will, however, be always prone to aspire to it, and able to usurp it, for in the political system it possesses omnipotence, and of this it cannot be deprived; for in reference to general interests, as well as to local and private interests, a definitive power is a necessity.

  Here then, all the foresight of the politician ought to be displayed: he will need all his art and all his efforts, to prevent actual omnipotence from asserting its inherent rightfulness, and general definitive power from becoming absolute power.

  This result is endeavoured to be secured by a variety of means: I. by recognising the individual rights of citizens—the effect of which is to superintend, control, and limit this central supreme power, and constantly to subject it to the law of reason and justice to which it ought to be subordinated; this is the object of the jury, of the liberty of the press, and of publicity of all kinds: II. by constituting, in a distinct and independent way, the principal powers of the second class, such as the judicial and municipal powers; on such a plan that these being themselves repressed and restrained when necessary by the central power, may restrain and repress it in their turn if it should attempt to become absolute: III. by organising the central power itself in such a manner as to make it very difficult for it to usurp rightful omnipotence, and to provide that it shall meet with such oppositions and obstacles within itself as will not admit of its attaining actual omnipotence except under laborious conditions, the accomplishment of which gives ground to presume that it does in effect act in accordance with reason and justice; that is to say, that it possesses legitimacy.

  This last description of means is the only one connected with the question that now occupies our attention. The division of the legislative power into two Chambers has precisely this object. It is directed against the easy acquisition of actual omnipotence at the summit of the social system, and consequently against the transformation of actual omnipotence into rightful omnipotence. It is therefore conformable to the fundamental principle of the representative system, and is a necessary consequence of it.

  Why is it undesirable that the legislative and executive powers, that is to say, the entire supreme power, should reside either in one man or in a single assembly? why does tyranny always spring from these two forms of government? Because it is in the nature of things, that a power which has no equal should think itself rightfully sovereign, and should very soon become absolute. It has happened thus in democracies, aristocracies, and monarchies; wherever actually sovereign power has been conferred upon a single man, or a single body of men, that man, or that body, has assumed to be rightfully sovereign; and more or less frequently, and with greater or less violence, it has exercised despotism.

  The art of politics, the secret of liberty is, then, to provide equals for every power for which it cannot provide superiors. This is the principle which ought to preside in the organisation of the central government: for on these terms only can the establishment of despotism at the centre of the State be prevented.

  Now if the legislative power is entrusted to a single assembly, and the executive power to one man, or if the legislative power is divided between one assembly and the executive power, is it possible for each of these powers to possess sufficient force and consistence to admit of the necessary equality between them, that is to say, to secure that neither shall become the sole and undisputed sovereign power? Such an example has never been witnessed: where-ever the central power has been thus constituted, a struggle has arisen, which has resulted, according to the times, either in the annihilation of the executive power by the legislative assembly, or of the legislative assembly by the executive power. Some countries have been governed by a single assembly, others by several assemblies, of which some have been aristocratic and others democratic; while all have contested with each other for the sovereignty. These various forms of government have given rise either to tyranny or to continued commotions, and have nevertheless endured. But a government in which the legislative assembly and the executive power have remained distinct, preserving their personality and their independence, and reciprocally limiting each other, is a phenomenon without example, either in antiquity or in modern times. One of these powers has always speedily succumbed, or been soon reduced to a state of subordination and dependence equivalent to nonentity, at least as regarded the essential purposes for which it was instituted.

  This could not fail to be the case. Equality is impossible between powers which are completely dissimilar, either in their nature, or in their means of obtaining power or credit. The dominion of one person, that is to say, the pure monarchical form of government, derives its springs and means of action from certain dispositions of human nature, and certain conditions of society. The full and exclusive rule of a single assembly derives the same from other dispositions and other social circumstances; according as one or other class of these circumstances predominate, kings have abolished assemblies, and assemblies have overthrown kings. But the co-existence of these two systems of government, when confronted with each other and acting in direct opposition, is impossible. They do not then act as a restraint upon each other, but they wage a war of extermination: such an event has accordingly never been met with except in revolutionary times: it may possibly have been an unavoidable condition of such epochs; but then it has always involved one or other of these forms of despotism: it has never become the basis of a free and regular government.

  When it is once admitted that the division of the central power is indispensable, in order to prevent all usurpation of rightful omnipotence, or, at least, to render such usurpation infrequent and difficult, it necessarily follows that this division ought to be effected in such a way that the resulting powers shall be capable of regular co-existence, that is to say, of mutually restraining, limiting, and compelling each other to seek in common for that reason, truth, and justice, which ought to regulate their will and preside over their actions. It is essential that neither of these powers should elevate itself so much above the others as to be able to throw off their yoke; for the excellence of the system consists precisely in their mutual dependence, and in the efforts which it imposes on them to secure unanimity. Now there can be no mutual dependence, except between powers which are invested with a certain degree of independence, and with strength enough to maintain it.

  The division of the central power, or of the actual sovereignty, between the executive power and two legislative assemblies is, therefore, strictly derived from the fundamental principle of the representative system; or rather it is the sole constitutional form which fully corresponds to this principle, and guarantees its maintenance, since this is the only form which, by providing equals for powers which admit of no superiors, prevents them all from claiming and usurping rightful sovereignty, that is to say, absolute power.

  Why has this truth been so frequently forgotten? why has this constitutional form been so often repudiated by men who, nevertheless, desired to establish representative government?—Because they have forgotten the principle of this form of government. At the very moment when they were directing their efforts against absolute power, they have imagined that it legitimately existed somewhere; and they have attributed it to society itself—to the entire people. They have thus proved wanting in consistency and courage in their opposition to absolute power; and either have not known, or have not dared, to pursue it wherever it might be found; to leave it no refuge; to denounce and banish it under every possible name and form. Thus, admitting the existence of one sole sovereign, naturally and eternally legitimate, they have also been obliged to admit an undivided representation of this undivided sovereign. The sovereignty of the people, thus understood, necessarily carries with it the unity of the legislative power: and when tyranny has sprung from it, when the lessons of experience have led men to seek other combinations, when it has been considered right to divide the legislative assembly, it has been done with the assertion, that such a step was contrary to the principle of representative government, but necessary: that principles cannot rigorously be followed, and that it is necessary to believe in the theory, but not to practise it. Such language is an insult to truth, for truth never contains evil; and when evil does appear anywhere, it arises not from truth but from error. If the consequences of a principle are fatal, it is not because the principle, though in itself true, is not applicable, but because it really is not true. It has been said by the advocates of divine right: There is only one God; there ought therefore to be only one king; and all power belongs to him because he is the representative of God. The advocates of the sovereignty of the people say: There is only one people; there ought therefore to be only one legislative assembly, for that represents the people. The error is the same in both cases, and in each instance it leads equally to despotism. There is only one God, that is certain: but God exists nowhere upon the earth, for neither is any man nor is the entire people God, nor do any perfectly know his law, or constantly desire it. No actual power, then, ought to be undivided, for the unity of actual power supposes a plenitude of rightful power which nobody possesses or can possess.

  Far, then, from the division of legislative power being a derogation from the principles of political liberty, it is, on the contrary, in perfect harmony with these principles, and is specially directed against the establishment of absolute power.

  Having thus established the principle, it would be easy to consider it in practice, and to demonstrate its good effects. It would be easy to prove that it is indispensible for realising the responsibility of the executive power; for curbing inordinate ambition, and turning every kind of superiority to the profit of the State; for preventing fundamental institutions, the public rights of citizens, and all the higher branches of legislation, from being treated as simple measures of government, and made subject to the instability of political experience: but these considerations would lead me too far; I wished to establish this constitutional form in principle, because it is owing to the want of such foundations that it has long been regarded with mistrust and doubt by many enlightened men. Its utility is never disputed; its good results are acknowledged; but men are generally ignorant how it can be made to agree with the general principles of a free government; and it has been found, not without reason, that these principles would be weakened by any derogation from them. In times when the human race is subject to regenerative influences, empiricism is never the ruling spirit: man then requires some rational and rigorous principles which may furnish a solution to every difficulty; and he mistrusts experience when he finds her counsels at variance with those primitive axioms which his reason has firmly adopted. This is our natural disposition: let us not lament it, it characterises all great epochs; it is then only necessary rigidly to examine principles themselves, and to grant dominion to those ideas only which truly deserve it.

  A second question remains for consideration: it is, to ascertain how the division of the legislative power into two houses ought to be effected, and what should be the mode of formation, what the attributes and the relations of the two assemblies. This, at least to a great degree, is a question of circumstance, the solution of which is almost entirely dependent upon the state of society, its internal constitution, and the manner in which wealth, influence, and intelligence, are distributed; this is sufficiently indicated by what I have said about the causes that led to the formation of the House of Peers in England. It is evident, for example, that those countries in which there was no such inequality as then existed between the different classes of society, would be ill adapted for a division of the legislative power based upon the same ideas, presenting the same characteristics, and entailing the same consequences. Perhaps the only general idea which can be laid down beforehand upon this subject is, that the two assemblies should not proceed from the same source, and be constituted in the same manner; in a word, that they should not be exactly alike. The object of their separation would then be defeated, for their similitude would destroy the mutual independence which is the condition of their utility.

  LECTURE 19

  Power and attributes of the British Parliament in the fourteenth century. ~ At its origin, and subsequent to its complete development, the Parliament retained the name of the Great Council of the kingdom. ~ Difference between its attributes and its actual power at these two epochs. ~ Absorption of almost the entire government by the Crown; gradual resumption of its influence by the Parliament.

  The first name borne in England by the assembly which was succeeded by the Parliament, was, as you have seen, that of the great council, the common council of the kingdom,—magnum commune consilium regni. The same name has also been given to the Parliament in England for the last two centuries, when it is desired to indicate completely the nature of its interference in the government, and the part which it there performs. It is called the great national council: the king governs in Parliament, that is to say, with the advice and consent of the great council of the nation.

  Thus, both at the origin of the British government, and since it has attained its complete development, the same idea has been attached to the assembly, or union of the great public assemblies; and they have both been designated by the same word.

  At both these periods, the Parliament or the corresponding assembly which preceded it, has never actually been, and, indeed, could not be considered as a special power, distinct from the government properly so called—an accessory limited in its action to a certain number of affairs or emergencies. The government itself has resided in it. All superior powers have there been concentrated and called into exercise.

  At the origin of modern States, and especially of England, it was very far from being thought that the whole and sole right of the body of capable citizens, of the political nation, consisted in consenting to the imposition of taxes; that they were otherwise subjected to an independent authority, and were not authorized in any way to interfere, either directly or indirectly, in the general affairs of the State. Whatever these affairs might be, they were their affairs, and they always occupied themselves with them, when their importance naturally called for their intervention. This is testified by the history of the Saxon Wittenagemot, of the Anglo-Norman Magnum Consilium and of all the national assemblies of the German peoples, in the earliest period of their existence. These assemblies were truly the great national council, deliberating and deciding on the affairs of the nation in concert with the king.

  When the representative system has achieved all its mighty conquests, and borne its essential fruits, it has invariably resorted to this; and returned in fact to the point from which it set out. In spite of all distinctious and apparent limitations, the power of Parliament has extended to everything, and has exercised a more or less immediate, but in reality a decisive influence on all the affairs of the State. Parliament has again become the great national council in which all the national interests are debated and regulated, sometimes by means of anterior deliberation, at other times by those of responsibility.

  When this first and last condition of free governments has been recognized, it will be perceived that a very different intermediate condition is to be met with, in which Parliament, although sometimes styled the great national council, exercises none of its functions, does not in a permanent manner interfere in political affairs, and is not, in a word, the seat and habitual instrument of government. During the whole of this period, the government is separate from the Parliament, and resides altogether in the royal power, around which are grouped the principal members of the great aristocracy. The Parliament is necessary in certain cases, but it is not the centre, the focus, of political action. It exercises rights, defends its liberties, and labours for their extension; but in-fluences the government in no decisive way: and principles which belong only to absolute monarchy co-exist with the more or less frequent convocation of the representatives of the nation.

  Such was the state of the British Parliament, from its formation in the thirteenth century until nearly the end of the seventeenth. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that it resumed all the characteristics of a great national council, and became once more the seat of the entire government.

  The British Parliament was not, then, in the fourteenth century either what the public assemblies of the German peoples had originally been, nor what it is in the present day. In order properly to comprehend what, at that period, was the nature of its power and the scope of its influence, we must follow the progress of events.

  Common deliberation on common affairs is the principle, as well as the most simple form, of political liberty. This principle fully obtained at the infancy of modern nations. The national assembly was the great council in which public affairs of every kind were transacted. The king, the natural head of this council, was required to convoke it, and to follow its advice.

  By the dispersion of the nation over an extended territory, the great national council became dispersed, and could not be assembled: for some time, however, it retained its ancient form, and the full extent of its ancient rights; but power is attached to continual presence, and the great council became of rare occurrence. Its numbers rapidly thinned; and it was very soon composed of great landowners alone, whom wealth, political importance, and that ambition which increases with the growth of power, frequently assembled round the king. The government, which formerly resided in the great national council, now resided only in this new council, formed of the king and the great barons, who became daily further separated from the body of the nation. The same words continued to be employed: the king always governed with his great council; but this was no longer the same assembly; the government and the body of the nation had become disjoined.

  The king endeavoured to free himself from the great barons, and to govern alone; they resisted; and in the struggle in which they engaged for the de-fence of their liberties or the preservation of their influence in the central government, they were compelled to seek support from the body of the nation, the freeholders and the burgesses. The issue of this struggle was favourable to liberty; the freeholders and the burgesses, who were become almost strangers to the central government, renewed their connection with it by the formation of Parliament; and this great council of the king, which for two centuries had been continually contracting, once more began to extend.

  But at their return, the new citizens were very far from taking the same place which their ancestors had occupied. The development of inequality is always the first result of the progress of the social state. Royalty had extended and fortified its power; it now existed by itself, powerful and independent, and claiming distinct rights proportionate to its own strength. It was the same with the great barons, who also were strong and independent in themselves. If it had been possible to congregate in a single assembly all the descendants of those ancient Saxons or Normans who had originally formed the great common council, a very different spectacle would have been presented. Instead of finding an assembly of warriors, not enjoying perfect equality, certainly, but sufficiently equal for each to preserve his personal importance, and to consider himself in a condition to defend it; instead of seeing a chief at their head, too little distinguished from the principal men among them to be powerful without their adherence—there would have been a king invested with great wealth and power, mighty barons followed by a multitude of retainers almost entirely dependent upon them, and a body of citizens obliged to unite and act collectively for the recovery of some influence over those measures which interested them most directly. In this new composition of society and of the national assembly, the deputies of the counties and boroughs were very far from pretending to associate themselves with the government properly so called, or from thinking to control or direct the central power in all public affairs; several centuries necessarily elapsed before their ideas could acquire so much generality, and their interference in Parliament became so comprehensive. They assembled there for the sole purpose of defending themselves, and those whom they represented, against the most crying abuses of power, against the violent and arbitrary invasion of their persons and their possessions. Discussing the demands for supplies that were addressed to them, and presenting their complaints to the government against the most perilous acts of injustice of the agents of the king or of the great nobles, constituted the whole of their mission, and, in their own opinion, the full extent of their rights. Their personal importance was too trivial, and their intellectual activity too limited, for them to imagine themselves called to discuss and regulate the general affairs of the State. They resisted power when it directly attacked them, or required great sacrifices from them; but royalty and its prerogatives, the ordinary council of the king, and his measures in regard to legislation, peace and war, or general politics, in a word, the government properly so called, were entirely beyond their interference. They had not the power, or even the wish, to meddle with such matters; it was all discussed and decided between the king, his ministers, and the great nobles who were naturally called to take part therein by the elevation and importance of their social position.

  Both the ancient assembly of the Saxon or Norman warriors, then, and the existing Parliament, would be vainly sought for in the Parliament of the fourteenth century. No violence is done to facts: a new society had been formed which could only engender a political order in accordance with its own character. Great inequality prevailed, and this inequality would naturally reappear between the powers to which it gave birth. The primitive and simple unity which exists in an uncivilized community had disappeared; the wise unity to which a state of civilised society can elevate itself by the diffusion of wealth and intelligence, was still far distant. There was a king, a House of Lords, and a House of Commons: but there was not a Parliament in the political sense which is now attached to that word.

  The permanent co-existence of royalty and a great public council, through all these vicissitudes of government and liberty, is an important fact. This council, formed at first by the general assembly of the nation, afterwards restricted to the great barons, and speedily admitting within its circle the representatives of other social conditions, has always been in England the principal organ of the central government. The English monarchy has never succeeded in isolating and enfranchising itself therefrom. It has been narrowed or extended by reason of changes occurring in society: but it has always constituted the condition and form of the monarchy. Popular liberty, so to speak, has always maintained a footing in the central power; the nation has never been completely excluded from participation in its own affairs. The progress of Parliament has been the progress of the government itself. In vain was the House of Commons feeble and inactive at its origin: it did exist, and it formed part of the king’s council; it was always present to embrace, in some measure, every opportunity of extending its influence, and aggrandising its position and the part it had to perform. In the fourteenth century, its power was very limited, its attributes very restricted, and its intervention in public affairs very infrequent; but it was impossible that it should not daily increase. In effect it did greatly increase from the time of Edward I. to that of Henry VI. During the wars of the Red and White Roses, the great feudal aristocracy destroyed itself by its contentions. When Henry VII. ascended the throne, there no longer existed a body of great barons capable of offering armed resistance to the royal power. The House of Commons, though strengthened, had not yet emerged from its condition of inferiority, and was incapable of taking the place of the great barons in resistance to royalty. Hence the Tudor despotism in the sixteenth century, the only period at which the maxims of absolute power have prevailed in England; but even in that very century, the House of Commons daily penetrated further into the government, until its power was fully revealed by the great Revolution of the seventeenth century.

  I have now given you a glimpse of the space between the period of the definitive formation of the British Parliament, and that at which it sought to obtain its entire dominion. In our subsequent lectures we shall examine the principal phases in the development of this great government during those three centuries.

  LECTURE 20

  Condition and attributes of the Parliament during the reign of Edward II. (1307‒1327). ~ Empire of favourites. ~ Struggle of the barons against the favourites. ~ Aristocratic factions. ~ Petitions to the king. ~ Forms of deliberations on this subject. ~ Deposition of Edward II.

  In order to explain the manner in which the British Parliament was formed, I have found it necessary, up to this point, to follow history step by step—to enter into all the details, and to collect all the facts, that might serve as proofs either of its existence, or of its participation in public affairs. I have now another object to attain, and I must therefore pursue another course. The Parliament is now definitively formed; and if I were to continue to narrate all the facts which relate to it, and to keep a register, as it were, of all its acts, I should write the history of the country, and not that of its institutions. What I am seeking to describe, is the development of representative government; and I shall avoid all questions unconnected with this object. The extension which the Parliament received, the revolutions which it underwent—in a word, its personal and internal life, will constitute the subject to which our attention must be directed.

  On considering the reign of Edward I. from a political point of view, it is evident that, notwithstanding the agitations by which it was disturbed, there was, during that reign, some wholeness and unity in the exercise of power. Edward was a firm and capable prince, who well knew how to concentrate and direct the various forces of society; in him, the State possessed a centre and a chief. Under Edward II., the English government lost all solidity and unity: no intelligent and determined will presided over it; the nation had no rallying-point; the string of the bundle was broken; all forces and all passions were displayed at hap-hazard, and came into conflict upon the interests of individuals or factions.

  In such a state of things, what could the Parliament be? Nothing, or next to nothing, unless it were an instrument of factions. The body of barons was then, and long continued to be, the preponderant portion of the assembly: the Commons, though strong enough sometimes to defend themselves when their own interests were at stake, were not sufficiently powerful to interfere, in a decisive manner, in public affairs, and to become the centre of the government. All matters were, therefore, arranged between the court and the barons, or rather between the different factions into which the body of barons was divided. The Commons appeared in the train of one or other party, to give their alternate triumphs the appearance of a national adhesion, but without ever determining the course of events, or even modifying them in any effectual manner. The supreme power and the country were a prey to the conflicts and schisms of the high aristocracy.

  In order clearly to demonstrate that such was the state of institutions and of the central government at this period, it will be sufficient to refer to the three principal events of this reign.

  The first is the conflict which the English barons maintained against the king, with regard to a favourite, Piers Gaveston, whom, in spite of his father’s advice, Edward II. had persisted in retaining in his confidence. The favourite and his creatures absorbed all the power and advantages of the court; and in 1311, the barons, desiring their share of riches and favours, after having attempted all other means for his overthrow, demanded his dismissal with arms in their hands. Their enterprise was evidently intended neither to promote the interests of the people nor those of the king; it was a revolt of courtiers. They fought, not to assert the inviolability of charters or rights, but to obtain the employments and treasures of a favourite. Nevertheless, they attempted to give a national colour to their rebellion. The plans and measures of the great rebel Parliament held at Oxford during the reign of Henry III. were revived; Lords Ordainers were appointed to reform the State; they bid for public favour by the abolition of a few abuses; they enacted that the possessors of landed property alone should be appointed sheriffs; they limited the right of purveyance, which was held by the crown; and they prohibited all grants of royal letters-patent ordering the suspension of the regular course of justice. But these were merely outward appearances intended to conceal the selfish egotism of the great barons; their only object was to make themselves masters of the royal authority, of the right of appointing to the chief offices of state, and of the revenues of the crown. They put Gaveston to death, and seized upon the whole power. The representatives of counties and boroughs, who were present in the Parliament by which these designs were executed, gave their consent; but they were mere followers of the rebellion, and had no influence upon the government. The great barons, who came to Parliament in arms and accompanied by their troops, had the entire management of everything in their own hands.

  Edward escaped from the tutelage imposed upon him by the coalition of the barons, only to fall under the sway of two new favourites, Hugh le Despencer, or Spencer, and his son. The elevation of these two courtiers raised up against them a storm similar to that which had overthrown Gaveston. The new rebellion which broke out in 1321 is the second remarkable event of this reign. It was first manifested by a sentence passed against the two Spencers by the great barons of the realm. They passed it by their own authority alone, without the concurrence either of the Commons or of the king, and at the same time compelled the king to grant them an amnesty for themselves and their adherents; shortly afterwards, the civil war began, and the confederated barons were overcome. Edward convoked a Parliament at York, in 1322, at which the Commons attended, and which repealed first the sentence against the two Spencers, and afterwards all the ordinances passed by the Lords Ordainers in 1311 and 1312, as being contrary to the rights of the king, and to the laws and usages of the country. Thus, whether the court or the rebels prevailed, a Parliament always sanctioned their triumph, saving only the ever-ready recourse to civil war, the only true means of decision.

  Moreover, it is evident that the riches which were amassed by court favours and the exercise of royal power were a constant subject of jealousy and faction. The petition presented to the king in 1322 by Hugh Spencer the elder against the barons who had condemned him, sets forth that they had devastated sixty-three of his manors or domains in fifteen different counties—that they had carried off 28,000 sheep, 22,000 head of cattle, two harvests, one from his barns and granaries, and one of standing corn, 600 horses, a great quantity of provisions of all kinds, and complete suits of armour to equip 200 men—and that they had moreover done damage, in his castles and lands, to the amount of more than 30, 000 l. sterling. Such was then the wealth of a great English baron; and herein resided an inexhaustible source of rebellions.

  A third event, the deposition of Edward II., presents a spectacle of the same character as the two preceding occurrences. This was the result of a new confederation of the barons, at whose head the queen, Isabella, had placed herself. A Parliament, convoked at Westminster, on the 7th of January, 1327, declared the incapacity of the king, then a prisoner in Kenilworth Castle. A deputation, composed of four bishops, two earls, four barons, three deputies from each county, and several burgesses of London, of the Cinque Ports, and of other cities, was sent to acquaint him with the resolution of the Parliament, and formally to renounce the oath of fidelity. This deputation received from Edward II. his abdication in favour of his son Edward III., then fourteen years of age, under whose name the dominant faction expected to wield the supreme power to its own advantage.

  Notwithstanding the interference of the Commons in this and the preceding acts, it is clear that the whole affair was managed between aristocratic factions influenced by personal interests, and profiting by the king’s incapacity to appropriate to themselves the government and all its advantages. There is nothing to indicate any progress of political institutions and triumph of national liberties. The government of the barons, after such scenes, was even more arbitrary and oppressive than that of the king.

  It is, nevertheless, a remarkable fact that, in all these occurrences, the sanction of the Parliament was always regarded as necessary, and as the only means of terminating and legalizing the works of violence. The Parliament, or at least the House of Commons, was merely a passive instrument in the matter; but it was already thought impossible to dispense with its concurrence. Now, as it is part of the nature of this instrument to serve the cause of public liberties and to lead, sooner or later, to their extension, every circumstance that augmented its importance and established its necessity may be considered as a progress of the representative system.

  I will now bring under your notice the principal parliamentary facts of this period, and inquire in what respects the principles of a free government were manifested or introduced in them.

  It was at this time that the Parliament decidedly became the centre towards which all demands for the reform of abuses, the redressing of grievances, the modification of laws, in a word, all petitions, were directed; it had possessed this character from its origin, but in a less extended measure. When the Parliament, or rather the body of barons in Parliament assembled, had begun once more to act as the great council of the king, a host of applications which had previously never been made, or had been addressed to the king alone, were addressed to the king in Parliament, and became a subject for deliberation at its meetings. Thus, in the Parliament held at Westminster, in 1315, we find that 268 petitions were presented.

  These petitions were of two kinds. Some were presented by the Commons to the king in council, and had reference to demands or complaints of general interest. Others were presented by individuals, corporations, or towns, and had reference to private or local interests. The former class gave birth to the right of initiative; the latter to the right of petition. Both classes were addressed to the king, in whom the actual power resided; and upon whom, on this account, it devolved not only to provide for the general necessities of the State, but also to do justice to special interests.

  On the opening of each Parliament, a certain number of days were fixed for the reception of petitions. A certain number of persons, chiefly judges or councillors of the king, were appointed to receive them, to investigate their nature, to classify them according to their objects, to set aside those which were to form the subject of discussion in the Parliament itself, and finally to present them to Parliament. This discussion was almost confined to the House of Barons, who were supposed to form a great intermediary council between the privy council of the king and the entire Parliament. The barons, when assembled in the privy council, deliberated and decided upon the demands of the Commons relative to matters of general interest. If these demands referred to certain complaints against abuses of the exercise of the royal power, or against the conduct of the sheriffs, for example, the king answered them in his own name alone, after having taking the advice of his privy council, of the judges, or of the barons, according to circumstances. If the petitions prayed for some interpretation or declaration of the existing law, the answer was given in the same manner. If they suggested the enactment of a new law, the king, when he judged it convenient, proposed this law to the Parliament; but in early times, this was very rarely the case; and when the petition had once been presented, the Commons ordinarily had nothing further to do with the matter than to receive the answer of the king.

  As to those petitions which originated from individuals or from bodies unconnected with the Parliament, and which related only to matters of private interest, the meeting of Parliament was merely chosen as the occasion of their presentation, because it was more favourable than any other period for obtaining a reply. The royal council decided upon all those petitions which did not require the intervention of the barons or of the entire Parliament.

  The presentation of petitions at this period is, therefore, a very complex fact with which are connected not only the right of petition to the Houses of Parliament, but also the right of petition to the government generally, the right of initiative, the jurisdiction of the Houses of Parliament, in short, a host of institutions essential to the representative system, and each of which it is necessary to consider separately. They all existed, but in a confused and embryo state, in this a ffl uence of petitions of all kinds, which called into action very different powers, then exercised indiscriminately. This original confusion was, undoubtedly, one of the principal causes of the universality of the power of the British Parliament. We cannot now examine into all the institutions which sprang from this source, and progressively disentangled themselves, assuming a distinct form. The question of the right of petition, in the sense which is attached to it at the present day, is in itself deserving of our careful examination, and will form the subject of our next lecture.

  One particular fact attests the progress which the Commons were beginning to make in the comprehension of their power and rights. It is beyond doubt that, originally, the voting of supplies always furnished them with an opportunity of obtaining some concessions or the redress of their grievances; this is proved by the history of English charters. But, in 1309, when granting Edward II. a twentieth part of their moveable goods, they expressly attached the condition that “the king should take into consideration, and should grant them the redress of certain grievances of which they had to complain.”* These grievances had existed for a long while, and were perpetuated for a considerable period afterwards; but the Commons had begun to look them full in the face, and to insist year after year upon their redress, as the only condition upon which they would grant the supplies.

  A statute passed in 1322, by the Parliament at York, which revoked the sentence against the two Spencers, declared that “thenceforward all laws respecting the estate of the crown, or of the realm and people, must be treated, accorded, and established in Parliament by the king, by and with the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and commonalty of the realm.” This is a formal recognition of the right of the Commons to interfere in the legislation of the country, and in all great public affairs.

  Many English publicists attach great importance to this statute, and regard it as the first act which officially sanctioned the fundamental principle of the British government. This importance appears to me to be exaggerated. The principle enunciated by this statute had been put into practice on many previous occasions, and a sufficiently clear knowledge was not then possessed of that which constituted matter of legislation and general interest to obtain conformity to it in practice. It is, therefore, far from being the case that the Commons, from this time forth, always exercised the power allotted to them by this statute. Nevertheless, the official exposition of the principle indicates progress in the ideas of the times.

  Such are the principal facts of the reign of Edward II., with regard to the condition and action of the Parliament. They contained no very important innovation, but they announce the consolidation and natural progress of the institutions definitively established under Edward I. Tory writers, taking their stand upon the preponderant influence exercised by the great barons during the reign of Edward II., have attempted to cast doubts even upon the presence of the Commons at several of the Parliaments of this period. Whig writers, on their side, endeavour to deduce, from the proofs which are extant of the presence of the Commons, an argument for their great importance and decisive participation in events. The former are mistaken when they deny the presence of the Commons in Parliament, from their having been unable to find any writs of convocation addressed to the sheriffs; for the writs which order the payment of the salaries of the representatives are extant for nearly all the Parliaments of this period. The latter deduce too extensive results from the presence of the Commons in the Parliament: it is beyond all doubt that the high aristocracy, who sat in the House of Lords, then managed and directed affairs almost entirely alone. The progress of liberty is not so rapid; the most important point is, that it be certain. Thenceforward it was certain, and it received great development during the two following reigns.

  LECTURE 21

  Of petitions during the early times of representative government. ~ Regulations on the subject. ~ Transformation of the right of petition possessed by the Houses of Parliament into the right of proposition and initiative. ~ Petitions ceased to be addressed to the king, and are presented to Parliament. ~ Origin of the right of inquiry. ~ Necessity for representative government to be complete. ~ Artifices and abuses engendered by the right of petition.

  The circumstances which occur at the origin of an institution are well calculated to make us acquainted with its nature. At such periods, events are simple, and produce themselves spontaneously. No effort has yet been made either to evade them or to change their nature, and the state of society is not sufficiently complicated to render it impossible to attain the object aimed at by any but subtle and indirect means.

  To say truth, in what does the right of petition consist? It is the right to demand the reparation of an injury, or to give expression to a desire. Such a demand must naturally be addressed to the power which is capable of satisfying the desire or repairing the injury—which has authority, and power enough to grant the prayer of the petition.

  Accordingly, in the fourteenth century, all petitions, whether they emanated from the two Houses of Parliament, or from individuals unconnected with those Houses, whether they had reference to general or private interests, were addressed to the king. No one had any idea of petitioning the Houses themselves; the king governed; in him resided both the right and the power to redress public or private grievances, and to satisfy the requirements of the nation. To him the barons, commons, corporations, and citizens applied whenever they had need.

  The king governed in his council: and of all his councils, the Parliament was the most eminent and the most extensive. In certain cases, the advice and acquiescence of the Parliament, as a whole or in part, were necessary to the exercise of the royal authority. The meeting of Parliament was, therefore, the natural opportunity for the presentation of all petitions. It was, as it were, the moment at which the nation and the government met face to face, either to transact in common those affairs which required their concurrence, or to make those reciprocal demands of which they mutually stood in need. Private citizens naturally availed themselves of this opportunity for presenting their own petitions, either because the co-operation of the great powers of the State was necessary to grant their prayers, or because they referred to demands upon which the king was competent to decide alone, but to which his attention would then be more effectually directed, as they might receive support from the patronage of the barons or deputies met in council with the king.

  In all cases, it was to the king in his council, that is to say, to the government itself, that petitions were addressed; and far from the Houses of Parliament, after having received and examined them, referring them to the government for decision, it was the king who, by officers specially appointed for the purpose, received and examined them, and afterwards called the attention of both Houses to those with whose prayers he could not comply without their sanction. All complaints and demands were thus forwarded directly to the power entrusted with the duty of coming to a definitive decision regarding them; and the Houses of Parliament interfered subsequently only in certain cases, and then as a necessary council.

  Such was the primitive and natural fact. The progress of the representative system, however, completely changed its course and character.

  We have seen that, in the fourteenth century, petitions were of two kinds; first, those drawn up or presented to the king, by one or both Houses, and relating to grievances of a more or less general character; secondly, those addressed to the king by corporations or citizens, and relating to collective or private interests. We have now nothing further to do with the first class of these petitions. As far as the Houses of Parliament are concerned, they have become transformed into a right of initiative, more or less efficacious and more or less direct. This right, its importance and its forms, give rise to questions of an entirely distinct character. At the present day, the complaints or demands addressed by private citizens to the legislative authorities, are alone called by the name of petitions.

  There is now no further question about the right of addressing such demands to the executive power itself—to the government properly so called. No one thinks of contesting the right of citizens to seek in this manner the redress of their grievances, or the satisfaction of their desires. Nor that this right, in itself so simple and incontestable, has not sometimes assumed great political importance, and thereby occasioned animated discussions. In 1680, Charles II., having ceased for several years to convoke a Parliament, a great number of petitions were addressed to him demanding its convocation. The king, by proc lamation, declared them seditious, and refused to receive them; but the Parliament having met at last, the House of Commons enacted, on the 27th of October, 1680; “ 1. That it is, and ever hath been, the undoubted right of the subjects of England to petition the king for the calling and sitting of Parliaments, and redressing of grievances. 2. That to traduce such petitioning as a violation of duty, and to represent it to his Majesty as tumultuous or seditious, is to betray the liberty of the subject, and contribute to the design of subverting the ancient legal constitution of this kingdom, and introducing arbitrary power. 3. That a committee be appointed to enquire after all such persons, that have offended against the right of the subject.”*

  A state of crisis could alone lead to such an attempt to destroy the most natural of the right of citizens—the right of addressing the government itself in order to make known to it their desires—and the Charter, reasonably, neither sanctioned nor limited it. The right to which it gave sanction, and which alone now bears the name of the right of petition, is the right of applying to the two Houses of Parliament to urge their interference, either in some matter of general legislation, or for the redress of private grievances. To this right the question which we have now under consideration is restricted. We must enquire how it became introduced into the representative system of government and in what respects the various forms which it has successively assumed correspond to the various stages of the development of that system.

  In fact, this right did not exist in the fourteenth century; that is to say, nobody thought either of exercising or of demanding it. The Houses of Parliament, and particularly the House of Commons, were themselves the great public petitioner. They had quite enough to do to present and obtain the reception of their own demands, without incurring the labour of interfering on behalf of private interests, which at that time were treated generally with much less consideration. They were, moreover, too slightly connected with the government thus to meddle with the details of its action. They were neither the seat nor the centre of power. Their assembly lasted only for a short period. The king’s answers to their own demands were ordinarily given only during the next session. In such a state of things, it was natural that all private petitions should go directly to the king in council, for from that source alone could redress be expected.

  When the Houses had acquired greater importance, sat for a longer period, and interfered in all great public affairs—when, in full and secure possession of their fundamental rights, they began to apply them to practice instead of limiting their efforts to defend their existence—when, in a word, they had acquired, in public opinion and in reality the consistency of public powers associated in the government of the State, it became natural that petitions should be presented to them against the abuses or errors of the government which they were appointed to control. The right of petition to the Houses of Parliament was then regarded as a natural consequence of the right of petition to the king. The Parliament was always considered and called the great council of the king. This council, it is true, was habitually in opposition and conflict with the government of the king, which still remained exterior to it, and endeavoured to free itself from its control: but ancient traditions retained their sway; complaint was made to one part of the government against the injuries committed by the other part. The new mode of petitioning did not, therefore, appear extraordinary, and no attempt was made either to authorize or prohibit it. It was brought into use without opposition.*

  But when this practice was introduced, the Houses of Parliament themselves had undergone great change of form, and received considerable development, as regarded their internal constitution, their proceedings, and their privileges. Instead of those petitions which, at the outset, they had been accustomed to present to the king, the right of initiative had been substituted, and this right belonged to every member of either of the two Houses of Parliament who might exercise it by bringing forward, with such formalities and delays as were required by usage, any motion with which he thought it fitting to occupy the assembly. With the right of initiative was connected the right of enquiry into all such facts or acts as appeared to the House of sufficient importance to induce it to desire a thorough knowledge of them and afterwards to adopt a resolution regarding them, either of prosecution or of censure, or simply to declare its opinion. On coming before Houses invested with such rights, petition necessarily took another course than would have been the case had those rights been wanting. And in the first place it passed into a custom that they must be presented by a member; this custom was not, originally, a precaution against the abuse of the right of petition, but the natural form of its exercise. As every member enjoyed the right to call the attention of the House, by motion, to any particular subject it was natural that he should make use of this right when ever he became the exponent, to the House, of the demand of his constituents or his friends. By this means, they acquired an authority which they could not otherwise have obtained; the House was thus made to deliberate, not upon the petition, but upon the motion of the member who has presented it, and who had based upon it a proposition either for an enquiry, or for an address, or for a prosecution, or for a law, or for any other act which the House was entitled to accomplish. And whatever this motion might be, it was subjected to all the formalities and all the delays which, on every occasion, regulated the debates and deliberations of the assembly.

  Thus invested with all the rights necessary for exercising over the government, by one mode or another, the influence which properly belonged to them, the English Houses of Parliament regarded the petitions which were presented to them merely as an opportunity for exercising this influence in virtue of these rights. They did not act as a sort of patron placed between the petitioners and the government from which the redress of the grievance was definitively demanded; nor did they refer the petition to the government, with a postscript of their own to request the passing of any act of which they were unable to superintend or compel the execution. After its presentation, they no longer had anything whatever to do with the petition; if the motion to which it had given rise were adopted, then began an act of the House itself, accomplished with all the usual formalities and terminated by a resolution which specially belonged to it, and which placed the government in presence of the thoroughly-discussed and clearly-expressed opinion or will of the assembly which shared with it in the exercise of the supreme power in the nation.

  When, by a further progress, the government found itself at last obliged to fix its seat within the Houses of Parliament, when they had become once more the great national council, discussing and deciding public affairs in public, petitions also were restored to their natural state, to their primary condition—that is to say, being addressed to the Houses of Parliament, they were addressed to the king in council, to the government itself, which consisted in the royal power, surrounded by the parliamentary majority, and compelled to justify its wishes and acts against the attacks of the opposition, which sat in the same council, by virtue of the same title, and with the same rights. What has been the consequence of this? Every petition, when converted into a motion by a member of the House, gives rise to a regular combat, conducted according to the usual formalities, between the ministry and the opposition. The issue of this conflict fully decides the fate of the petition, that is to say, the result at which it aims; it has not to go elsewhere in search of a solution; the House has neither compromised itself frivolously, nor given its verdict inconsiderately; and, with the exception of the case of appeal to a new House after a dissolution, all its acts, after having been accomplished in obedience to those formalities which give pledge of their maturity, directly attain their object.

  Such has been the course of the right of petition in England. Closely connected with the whole system of representative government, it has kept pace with the progress of that system, adapting itself to its various successive stages, and holding the same rank with the other rights of deliberative assemblies. It has thus been brought back to its true nature, which is incessantly to proclaim and assert, in the centre of the government itself, the grievances and the requirements of citizens, so as to ensure, after mature deliberation, the redress of the former and the satisfaction of the latter.

  I do not say that this result is always attained in England; other causes have, in certain respects, neutralized the natural virtue of representative government, and prevented it from producing all its legitimate results. I merely say that the right of petition has there assumed its reasonable form, and that, but for the action of causes which effect a general change of the system, it would by that form attain the object which its advocates should propose to themselves.

  Let us now enquire what must happen in a different state of things, when representative government, though perhaps less changed in certain particulars, is nevertheless much more incomplete. It will be seen how the right of petition may introduce disorder among the public powers of a State and yet remain almost illusory.

  This is the hypothesis upon which I stand. I suppose the Houses of Parliament invested, by right, with great power, associated in the legislation of the country, voting taxes, receiving accounts of the administration of the revenue of the State, carrying on their discussions in public, and enjoying a large amount of liberty in these debates. It is beyond a doubt that, in the public opinion, they will be held to possess the mission and the power to obtain the redress of all grievances, and the satisfaction of all legitimate requirements, and to compel the executive power to act, on all occasions, in accordance with justice, the laws, and the general interests of the country. It is from the action of the Houses of Parliament that the public and the citizen will expect all that they desire or hope; and towards them they will turn their eyes to obtain it.

  Such being the disposition of the public mind, if these same Houses do not possess the right of initiative, or the right of enquiry, or any positive external jurisdiction—if it is not in their power to set themselves in motion and to pursue their own objects—in a word, if their means of direct action are far below their written mission and the public expectation, what will be the consequence?

  Evidently both the Houses and the public will seek for indirect means of exercising that influence which rightfully belongs to them, and which is actually imputed to them. And if the right of petition had been solemnly sanctioned, to it will resort be made to supply the place of deficient rights, and by it will members of the Houses strive to obtain that control over the whole government, of which it has been tempted to deprive them.

  Who cannot perceive, for example, that the right of petition is a real right of initiative, since its effect is to introduce, into the Houses of Parliament, questions which the government has not brought forward, and to give rise to discussions which the government has not originated? Thus, the right of initiative, though denied to members of the Houses, belongs to all citizens, to the first comer, even to a fictitious name. The elect of a large number of citizens may not provoke his colleagues to discuss with him a solemnly propounded question: but if he leave the House, if he cast aside his character of representative and assume that of petitioner, he has the power to do so, and the humblest citizen possesses it finally with himself. Thus, instead of an initiative, the utility and propriety of which would be guaranteed by the character and position of the members of the Houses, an initiative is substituted which is guarded by no guarantee, and which imposes no moral obligation upon the man who exercises it, since he is not a part of the public power which he sets in motion.

  And as this power holds a very lofty position in the public opinion, as it is supposed to possess the mission and the power to remedy every evil, its interference will be solicited in matters of all kinds; it will be called upon to deliberate upon affairs most foreign to its attributes; and its petitioners will afterwards be astonished to find its actual power so limited in comparison with the immensity of the rights which it is supposed to enjoy.

  It will soon be felt that there is disorder in such a state of things, and attempts will be made to remedy it. Restrictions will be imposed, if possible, upon this universal initiative. The remedy would present itself spontaneously, if every member of the legislative assemblies had the right to propose such motions as he judged fitting. It would then come to pass, as it did in England, that every petition must be presented by a member, and must become, on his part, the subject of a motion. Thus the members themselves would exercise over petitions that kind of censorship from which it is impossible to liberate them. In the absence of this censorship, another kind is invented; the petitions are referred to a committee ad hoc, appointed to examine them beforehand, and to call the attention of the House to those which appear to deserve its notice; but to whom does this censorship belong? to the parliamentary majority which names the committee. This is the reverse of the natural order of things. Petitions almost always belong to the minority. The minority presents and supports them. The minority is, consequently, placed, in this respect, at the discretion of the majority, whose censorship may become a means of tyranny; whereas, if the right of initiative belonged to all the members, a legitimate censorship would be established, which would refuse to bring forward a multitude of unsuitable petitions, and would neither reject nor postpone any of those which were possessed of real importance.

  After the first step in the exercise of the right, that is to say, after the presentation of petitions, comes their discussion. If they could be introduced by a member only, this discussion would be subject to all the delays and formalities required for the due regulation of legislative debates. A first motion, for instance, would suggest that the petition should be read; a second, that it be printed; a third, that it form the subject of an enquiry, or of an address to the crown, or of a law. During this process, facts would be cleared up, and opinions would be formed; and a conflict would occur between the minority and the majority, only if the latter should formally refuse to grant the justice demanded, or to comply with the wish expressed. In the other system, on the contrary, the debate must be precipitate and confused; the House and the government must adopt their resolution in a few moments, often without thoroughly understanding what they demand of, or refuse to, one another. Petitions succeed and fall upon one another with a rapidity that produces sometimes violence, and sometimes in difference; and the right of petition itself thus becomes an occasion of disorder, or is treated with a sort of levity and disdain which compromises it in the legislative chambers, and also compromises the Chambers in the opinion of the public.

  The manner in which petitions are introduced into the Chambers is not the only cause of so vicious a mode of deliberation, but the absence of the right of enquiry also contributes greatly towards it. Every petition received by one of the Chambers calls for a resolution on its part; there is therefore something more than mere singularity in depriving it of the means of adopting that resolution with a full knowledge of the cause. It is a great defect of representative government that, leading as it necessarily does to the systematic organization and permanent conflict of parties, it habitually divides the truth into two parts, and induces men never to consider questions on more than one side, and to see only half the ideas or facts in reliance upon which their decision must be made. It is, without doubt, a system of exaggeration and partiality; and this evil is, to a certain point, inevitable. All means of diminishing it are, therefore, of great importance. Now, the most effectual, indisputably, is to compel opposing opinions to unite, on certain occasions, in a common search after truth. This is the effect of the right of enquiry. When these opinions reach the moment of decision, without having been brought into contact or made acquainted with each other, without having been constrained mutually to communicate motives and facts, their resolution will chiefly be dictated by party spirit, and by anterior engagements which have experienced no necessity to modify it. Everything, on the other hand, that brings the minority and the majority into presence, before the moment when they must appear in public and pronounce their decision, draws them for a time out of their habitual sphere, and leads them to extend or to correct their ideas. This is especially the case in reference to facts. It is immensely inconvenient if all communications of this kind can only be made at the rostrum, and in the midst of the decisive combat; for they are then rejected, and scarcely ever influence the decision. Thus, as the absence of the right of enquiry leaves parties in their natural ignorance and primitive crudity, it is injurious not only to the goodness of the special resolutions of deliberative assemblies, but also to the wisdom of their general arrangements.

  Besides, when the right of enquiry is wanting, its absence is supplied in the same way as that of the right of initiative by the right of petition. As it is impossible to undertake a serious and complete investigation of any particular kind of abuse which appears to have introduced itself into the government, special complaints are suggested and multiplied. Now, the right of petition is no more competent to supply the place of the right of enquiry than that of the right of initiative. The revelation of abuses or grievances which it occasions is, by the very nature of things, full of confusion and error; matters are seldom presented without prejudice and with generality. And yet, from the very fact that there are no means of going into the details, and examining them in all their bearings, men are involuntarily led to put confidence in these complaints. Never were the demands presented by the House of Commons itself for the redress of grievances so numerous and violent as in those times when it was allowed to address them to the king only, and was permitted neither to have them thoroughly investigated by its own members, nor to sum them up in a body of facts accompanied by satisfactory proofs.

  Finally, when the representative system of government is complete, and provided with all the rights and all the means of action which it needs in order to accomplish its ends, the right of petition is nothing but the right of calling the attention of the Houses of Parliament, by means of one of their members, to any particular question, or act of the governing power. When once this first provocation has taken place by way of petition, the petition has attained its object; nothing more is necessary but a discussion and resolution of the House itself, which takes place according to the ordinary formalities, as if it had originated within the assembly itself, and independently of all relations with the external world. Thus the exercise of a right which should belong to all citizens is reconciled with the dignity of the public power of the nation, and with the maturity befitting their acts. Thus all grievances may solicit redress, all desires may be expressed, without giving rise to any disorder, any precipitation, or any subversion of the procedure of the great deliberative bodies. When, on the contrary, these deliberative bodies themselves are deprived of the rights and means of action which are necessary to them for the fulfilment of their destination, the right of petition becomes an irregular and often violent means by which the public and the legislative chambers endeavour to supply their deficiencies. And then this right, by all the practices to which it lends itself, and by the vicious mode of deliberation which it entails, creates, in its turn, new disorders which men undertake to remedy by imposing upon the right itself restrictions or trammels which would be completely useless if the legislative chambers were invested with all the means of action which are their due. Political liberty has this in common with science generally; it is most dangerous when it is incomplete. The history of the British Parliament proves this at every step.

  LECTURE 22

  Condition of the Parliament under Edward III. ~ Progress of the power of the Commons. Their resistance to the king. ~ Regularity of the convocation of Parliament. ~ Measures taken for the security of its deliberations. ~ Division of the Parliament into two Houses. ~ Speaker of the House of Commons. ~ Firmness of the House of Commons in maintaining its right to grant taxes. ~ Accounts given by the government of the collection of the taxes. ~ Appropriation of the funds granted by Parliament. ~ Parliamentary legislation. ~ Difference between statutes and ordinances.

  Hitherto we have only met with political struggles between the king and his barons, or between opposite aristocratic factions; the Commons have hitherto appeared only in a second rank; they exercised as yet hardly any direct in-fluence over general affairs, over the government properly so called; or if they occasionally interfered in the administration of the country, it was merely as the auxiliary or the instrument of some particular faction.

  The reign of Edward III. presents a different aspect; the conflict between the king and his barons has ceased, and all the great aristocracy seems to be grouped around the throne; but at the same time, the Commons have formed themselves into a body, distinct and powerful in itself. They do not aspire to snatch the supreme power from the hands of the king and the barons; they would not have strength enough to do so, nor do they entertain any thought of it; but they resist every encroachment upon those rights which they are beginning to know and to appreciate; they have acquired a consciousness of their own importance, and know that all public affairs properly fall under their cognizance. Finally, either by their petitions, or by their debates in reference to taxation, they are daily obtaining a larger share in the government, exercise control over affairs which, fifty years before, they never heard mentioned, and become, in a word, an integral and almost indispensable part of the great national council, and of the entire political machine.

  Thus, whereas hitherto the political aspect of England has been the conflict of the great barons with the king; from the reign of Edward III., the resistance of the Commons to the king’s government, generally formed and sustained by the barons, becomes the great fact of the history. It is not unintentionally that I here employ the words conflict and resistance. In the first period, in fact, the barons struggled, not only to defend their rights, but to invade the supreme power, and to impose their own government upon the king. This conflict was consequently nothing but a permanent civil war. But during the second period, this was no longer the case; we hear of no revolts, and of no civil wars: under Edward III., at least, the Commons do not arm to attack the government with force; but they oppose to it a political resistance, they constantly protest against the abuses and arbitrariness of the central power. Instead of directing their attacks against the king himself, they lay all blame upon his ministers, and begin to assert and popularize the principles of parliamentary responsibility. Finally, they separate completely from the great barons, act on their own account, and become the true depositaries of the pledges of public liberties.

  This was a great revolution, and it prepared the way for all others. The more minutely we examine into the events of the reign of Edward III., the more proofs shall we discover of this important change. I shall content myself with giving a rapid summary of these proofs by recapitulating the general facts which characterize this reign.

  The first of these facts is the regularity, previously unexampled, with which the Parliament was convoked. A measure was adopted for this purpose in 1312, during the reign of Edward II., by the Lords Ordainers. Subsequently we meet with two statutes relative to the convocation of this assembly, one of which was passed in 1331, and the other in 1362. Finally, in 1377, the last year of the reign of Edward III., the Commons themselves demanded by petition that the sessions of Parliament should take place regularly every year. It is curious to compare this petition with the requests addressed to the king, under previous reigns, by the members of the House of Commons, to be exempted from serving in Parliament: they had now begun to feel that their mission was not a burden, but a right.

  During the reign of Edward III., we may enumerate forty-eight sessions of Parliament, which makes nearly one session in each year.

  Nor did the Parliament merely provide for the regularity of its convocation; it took measures, at the same time, to ensure the security of its deliberations. In 1332, a royal proclamation forbade all persons to wear coats of mail, or to carry any other offensive or defensive arms, in those towns in which the Parliament was sitting: it also prohibited all games and diversions which might disturb the deliberations of the assembly. The frequent recurrence of proclamations of this kind announces the formation of a regular assembly.

  It is also during the reign of Edward III., in 1313, that we hear for the first time of the Parliament being divided into two Houses. According to historical documents of that year, the prelates, counts and barons, on the one hand, and the representatives of the counties and boroughs, on the other, sat at Westminster, the former in the White Chamber, and the latter in the Painted Chamber; and deliberated thus upon the question of peace with France.

  Finally, it is also at the end of this reign, in 1377, that the rolls of Parliament first make mention of the Speaker of the House of Commons; Sir Thomas Hungerford is the first person upon whom this title was conferred. Previously, the House used to select one of its members whenever it was necessary to speak in its name, either to the king, or in the full Parliament: and it was probably in 1377, that it began to appoint its Speaker for the whole session, and at its commencement.

  It has been asserted that, during this reign and in earlier times, every session of Parliament involved a fresh election; and that the right of proroguing the existing Parliament to a new session did not appertain to the king. This is an error. It was necessary that a session of Parliament should take place in each year, but not an election. The following fact proves this. The Parliament held under Edward I. in 1300, resumed its session in 1301. The writs summon the deputies of the previous year, except in cases in which a new election was necessary on account of death or absolute inability to serve. In 1305, the king prorogued Parliament on the 21st of March, and allowed the deputies to return home, “ Issint qu’ils reveignent prestement et sanz délai, quele houre qu’ils soient autrefois remandez.”—“On condition that they should return readily and without delay, at such time as they might be previously recalled.” In 1312, during the reign of Edward II., the Parliament separated after having sat two months, and on the same day the king addressed writs to the sheriffs, ordering them to send “the same knights and burgesses—eosdem milites et cives,” to Westminster on the 2nd of November following, “to the same Parliament which we have thought should be continued there—ad idem Parliamentum quod ibidem duximus continuandum.” This Parliament thus prorogued actually met, and sat from the 2nd of November to the 18th of December, after which it was dissolved. In 1329, during the reign of Edward III., the Parliament which sat at Salisbury, from the 15th to the 31st of October, was adjourned to Westminster, where it held a second session, from the 10th to the 22nd of February, 1330. We meet with similar instances in 1333 and 1372. The Parliaments were, therefore, not elected annually, and the right of prorogation was in full vigour.

  Thus was developed and regulated the internal constitution of the Parliament: thus, instead of being merely an accidental meeting, limited to the accomplishment of a single object, it gradually assumed the consistency of a political assembly of periodical obligation.

  A second general fact, which serves to support the views which I have advanced, is the voting of taxes. There is, perhaps no reign which presents so many instances of arbitrary and illegal imposts as that of Edward III., and yet there is not one which contributed more powerfully to secure the triumph of the principle that taxes are legitimate only when they are freely granted. This principle was incessantly lost sight of practically by the king, who was pressed by necessities, created partly by his wars, and partly by the bad administration of his revenues. His whole reign was spent in efforts to regain, under forms more or less indirect, the right of taxing his subjects at his pleasure; but the Commons, on their side, never ceased to protest against these efforts, sometimes attaching the revocation of an arbitrary tax to the concession of a legal subsidy, and sometimes by endeavouring to introduce the principle of the necessity of consent into all those ways by which the king attempted to elude it. Thanks to their perseverance, the schemes of power were, if not always frustrated, at least always unmasked, and thereby rendered impotent for the future.

  Instances of this conflict abound in the Parliaments held in the years 1333, 1340, 1347, 1348, and 1349, which are in general filled only with complaints of the Commons, demanding either the abolition or the diminution of unjust and illegal taxes, which had been imposed without their consent. To all these demands the king replied, sometimes by a formal refusal, sometimes by reference to the consent which had been granted him by the Lords, and sometimes by an assurance that the tax should not be levied for any length of time; but if the Commons threatened to refuse him new subsidies, he felt himself compelled to meet these demands by some new concessions.

  Nor was it merely by keeping a firm hand upon the voting of taxes that the House of Commons maintained its rights; it also extended them beyond the concession of subsidies on two important occasions. In 1340, the Parliament, suspecting that a portion of the subsidies voted by it had not found its way into the royal exchequer, appointed certain persons to receive the accounts of the tax-collectors, and required them to give security for the payment of all that they received. This is the first instance of any account whatever being given to Parliament with regard to taxes; it began by desiring to make sure of the fidelity of the receipts, and thus took a first step towards asserting its rights to receive an account of the employment of the funds, that is to say, of their expenditure. In 1354, we perceive the dawn of another parliamentary right, that of the appropriation of the public funds. The Parliament, when granting a tax upon wool, added to its vote the condition that the money derived from this subsidy should be devoted to the expenses of the war then waging, and not to any other purpose.

  After all, it is not to be wondered at that the king and his Parliament were incessantly at variance with regard to subsidies, and mutually occasioned each other continual miscounts. There was then no means of estimating receipts and expenditure beforehand. The king involved himself in an expense without knowing to what sum it would amount; and the Parliament voted a subsidy without knowing what it would produce. In 1371, the Parliament granted a subsidy of £ 50, 000, to be levied at the rate of 22 s. 3 d. on every parish, which supposed the existence of 45, 000 parishes in England. It turned out, however, that there were only 9, 000. The king convoked a great council, to which he summoned only half the deputies of the last Parliament, one from each county and borough, “to save expense—ad parcendum sumptibus.” The matter was laid before this council, which ordained the assessment of every parish at 116 s. instead of at 22 s. 3 d., in order to raise the sum of £ 50, 000. Great disorder must necessarily have accompanied such ignorance.

  The third general fact which proves the great increase of importance which the Parliament had obtained at this period, is its participation in the legislation. When we open a collection of the statutes of this reign, we find at the head of each statute one of the two following formulas: “ A la requeste de la commune de son roïalme par lor pétitions mises devant lui et son conseil, par assent des prélats, comtes, barons, et autres grantz, au dit Parlement assemblés,” &c.* Or: “ Par assent des prélats, comtes, et barons, et de tote la commune du roïalme, au dit Parlement assemblés,” &c. † Sometimes the statute begins with these words: “ Ce sont les choses que notre seigneur le roi, les prélats, seignours, et la commune ont ordiné en ce présent Parlement.” ‡

  All these formulas express the participation of the House of Commons in the legislation of the country; and prove, as I have already observed, that this participation was generally exercised by the presentation of petitions to the king; the lords deliberated upon these petitions, which were afterwards converted into statutes by the king, without being returned to the House of Commons to receive its express assent under the form of statutes. Accordingly, as the Commons did not interfere in the enactment of statutes by any direct vote, their petitions were frequently mutilated and altered; and the statutes, which were drawn up either by the judges or by the members of the privy council, did not always faithfully convey their meaning. It was probably with a view to remedy this inconvenience that, in the Parliament of 1341, a certain number of prelates, barons, and royal councillors, with twelve knights of shires and six burgesses, were appointed a commission for the purpose of converting into statutes such petitions as gave rise to measures of general legislation.

  But all the petitions of the Commons were not resolved into statutes; they frequently gave occasion merely to ordinances. Many dissertations have been written upon the distinction between the legislative acts designated by these two words. It has been maintained that ordinances were issued by the king alone, by the advice of the Lords, but without the concurrence of the Commons. Originally, this distinction was incorrect, for most ordinances were issued, just as statutes were enacted, upon the request of the Commons. Thus, in 1364, the Parliament having desired the passing of sumptuary laws, the king demanded of both Houses, by the chancellor, “whether they would have such matters as they agreed on to be by way of ordinance or of statute?” And they replied: “By way of ordinance, that they might amend the same at their pleasure.”* From this answer it has been inferred, with great appearance of reason, that the nature of statutes was to be perpetual, whereas ordinances were only temporary.

  Ordinances were not inscribed, like statutes, upon the rolls of Parliament; they were less solemn in their character, although their object frequently had reference to matters equally legislative and of equally general interest, such as the enactment of jurisdiction or of penalties. It is not more easy to clearly distinguish ordinances from statutes, than great councils from Parliaments properly so called. All that we can say is, that less importance and stability were attributed to this class of legislative measures.

  Legislative measures were not always adopted upon the petition of the Commons; the king also exercised the right of initiative, not only in matter of taxation, but in reference to all other subjects of general interest. Thus, in 1333, Sir Jeffrey Scroop of Markham, in the king’s presence, and at his command, informed the prelates, earls, barons, and other nobles, of the disorders committed in the country by bands of armed marauders; pointed out the necessity of repressing their outrages; and demanded of them to suggest to the king such measures as they deemed suitable to effect this purpose. The prelates hereupon retired, saying that it did not befit them to deliberate upon such a subject. The other nobles deliberated among themselves, and proposed to the king a series of regulations for the maintenance of the public peace. These regulations were read in presence of the nobles, the knights of the shires, and the “commons—genz du commun,” who all gave their assent to them, and the necessary measures were adopted in consequence. A result of this deliberation was the restoration of the Conservators of the Peace, who had been temporarily appointed by the Earl of Leicester, during the reign of Henry III., and who were the precursors of the justices of the peace.

  After all, it is easy to imagine that, in the fourteenth century, confused ideas were entertained as to what was and what was not matter for legislation; since, in our own days, we not only feel, but formally admit, the impossibility of fixing the limit a priori, in a philosophic and absolute manner.

  LECTURE 23

  Continuation of the history of the progress of the Commons House of Parliament during the reign of Edward III. ~ Their interference in questions of peace and war; and in the internal administration of the kingdom. ~ Their resistance of the influence of the Pope, and of the national clergy, in temporal affairs. ~ First efforts of the Commons to repress abuses at elections. ~ First traces of function of Committees of both Houses to investigate certain questions in common.

  It was not merely in the matter of taxation and of general legislation that the House of Commons, during the reign of Edward III., extended and consolidated its rights. Its interference in the administration of public affairs, in politics properly so called, assumed at this period a development previously unexampled, and an entirely a novel character. It began really to take part in the government of the State. This is proved by a multitude of facts.

  First, in the matter of peace and war, its intervention became, at this period, habitual and almost indispensable. Mr. Hallam seems to me to have fallen into error on this subject; he is of opinion that the king alone, in the fourteenth century, desired that the Commons should interfere in questions of this kind, in order that he might cast the responsibility upon them, but that they constantly refused to incur it. I think that this assertion is incorrect. The Commons of the fourteenth century frequently sought and exercised this power, and accepted the attendant responsibility; and they always gained greatly by it. The principal facts are these. In 1328, during the minority of Edward, and while Mortimer reigned in his name, the treaty of peace with Scotland, which fully liberated that kingdom from all feudal subordination to England, was concluded with the consent of the Parliament. The Commons are expressly mentioned; and we may suppose that Mortimer was anxious thereby to cover his own responsibility for a disgraceful treaty. In 1331, Edward consulted the Parliament upon the question of peace or war with France, on account of his continental possessions, and also upon his projected journey to Ireland. The Parliament gave its opinion in favour of peace and of the king’s departure for Ireland. In 1336, it urged the king to declare war against Scotland, saying: “That the king could no longer, with honour, put up with the wrongs and injuries daily done to him and his subjects by the Scots.”* In 1341, after Edward’s first victories in France, the Parliament pressed him to continue the war, and furnished him with large subsidies; and all classes of society bestirred themselves to support the king in a conflict which had become national. In 1343, the Parliament was convoked to examine and advise what had best be done in the existing state of affairs, especially in regard to the treaty recently concluded by the king with his enemy the king of France. Sir Bartholomew Burghersh told the Parliament that “as the war was begun by the common advice of the prelates, great men, and commons, the king could not treat of, or make peace, without the like assent.”† The two houses deliberated separately, and gave their opinion that the king ought to make peace if he could obtain a truce that would be honourable and advantageous to himself and his friends; but if not, the Commons declared that they would aid and maintain his quarrel with all their power. In 1344, when the truce with the king of France had been broken off by him, the Parliament, on being consulted, manifested a desire for peace, but thought it could only be obtained by carrying on the war with energy, and voted large subsidies for the purpose. In 1348, the war had become increasingly burdensome; all the subsidies proved insufficient; and the king again consulted the Parliament “concerning the war undertaken with its consent.” The Commons, perceiving that they had gone rather too far in their language, now showed greater reserve and answered “that they were not able to advise anything concerning the war, and therefore desired to be excused as to that point; and that the king will be advised by his nobles and council, and what shall be by them determined, they would consent unto, confirm, and establish. ‡ In 1354, the Lord Chamberlain, by the king’s command, informed the Parliament: “That there was great hopes of bringing about a peace between England and France, yet the king would not conclude anything without the consent of his Lords and Commons. Wherefore he demanded of them, in the king’s name, whether they would assent and agree to a peace, if it might be had by treaty.” To this the Commons replied at first, “that what should be agreeable to the king and his council in making of this treaty, would be so to them”; but on being asked again, “If they consented to a perpetual peace, if it might be had,” they all unanimously cried out, Yea! Yea! § Finally, on the 25th of January, 1361, peace having been concluded by the treaty of Bretigny, the Parliament was convoked, the treaty was submitted to its inspection and received its approval, and on the 31st a solemn ceremony took place in the cathedral church at Westminster, when all the members of Parliament, both Lords and Commons, individually swore upon the altar to observe the peace.

  In 1368, the negotiations with Scotland were submitted to the consideration of the Parliament; the king of Scotland, David Bruce, offered peace on condition of being relieved from all homage of his crown to the king of England. The Lords and Commons replied, “That they could not assent to any such peace, upon any account, without a disherison of the king, his heirs and crown, which they themselves were sworn to preserve, and therefore must advise him not to hearken to any such propositions”;* and they voted large subsidies to continue the war.

  In 1369, the king consulted the Parliament as to whether he should recommence the war with France, because the conditions of the last treaty had not been observed; the Parliament advised him to do so, and votes subsidies.

  These facts prove the most direct and constant intervention of the Commons in matters of peace and war. Nor did they seek to elude this responsibility, so long as the war was successful and national. When the subsidies became excessive, they manifested greater reserve in giving their opinion beforehand. When fortune turned decidedly against Edward III., at the close of his reign, the Commons, as we shall presently see, took advantage of the right of intervention which they had acquired, to possess themselves also of the right of impeaching the ministers to whom they attributed the misfortunes of the time. All this follows in the natural course of things, and clearly demonstrates the continually increasing influence of the Commons in political matters.

  In regard to the internal administration of the country, their progress was not less perceptible. Until the reign of Edward III. all attempts to encroach upon the central government had originated with the barons; it was the barons who, under Henry III. and Edward II., had seized upon the right of appointing to great public offices, and of disposing of the revenues of the State. In 1342, the Commons ventured a similar endeavour, less direct and arrogant in its character, but tending towards the same object by more regular and better chosen means. Profiting by the necessities of the king, who was then destitute of funds, and utterly unable to continue the war with France, they presented to him the two following petitions: 1.“That certain by commission may hear the account of those who have received wools, moneys, or other aid for the king, and that the same may be enrolled in the chancery.” To this the king consented, upon condition that the treasurer and lord chief baron should be members of the commission. 2.“That the chancellor and other officers of state may be chosen in open Parliament, and at the same time be openly sworn to observe the laws of the land and Magna Charta.” To this also the king consented, but with these restrictions: “That if any such office, by the death or other failure of the incumbent, become void, the choice to remain solely in the king, he taking therein the assent of his council; but that every such officer shall be sworn at the next Parliament, according to the petition; and that every Parliament following the king shall resume into his hands all such offices, so as the said officers shall be left liable to answer all objections.”* These decisions were immediately converted into statutes. The chancellor and treasurer, with the judges and other officers of the crown, were required to swear to observe them upon the cross of Canterbury. The chancellor, treasurer, and several judges, protested against this act, as being contrary to their first oath and to the laws of the realm; their protest was entered upon the rolls of Parliament, but the statute was nevertheless definitively passed. The Commons had now obtained the most formal recognition of the responsibility of ministers to Parliament. The most pressing necessities alone had extorted consent from the king. Scarcely had the Parliament dissolved, when the king, by his own authority only, formally revoked the statute by writs addressed to all the sheriffs; and it is a most singular circumstance that so illegal an act excited no remonstrance, and that the statute was revoked by the Parliament itself in the year following.

  The mere attempt, however, was a great step. It proves that two fundamental ideas had taken possession of the minds of the representatives of the Commons; first, that the Parliament ought to exercise some influence over the choice of the king’s ministers; secondly, that these ministers should be responsible to Parliament for their conduct. As to the first point, the Commons of the fourteenth century employed a very bad method of obtaining it, by claiming that their influence over the choice of the agents of the supreme power should be direct, and by interfering directly in the appointment of ministers; they prodigiously weakened, if they did not utterly destroy, ministerial responsibility: and the progress of representative government has proved that indirect in-fluence, exercised in such matters by a majority of the Parliament, is alone admissible and efficacious. But it was a great thing for the Commons to have attained such growth as to dare to entertain such an idea of their rights. They resumed the exercise of these rights, with greater success, at the close of this reign. The king was old and feeble; his arms were everywhere unsuccessful; abuses multiplied at his court; Edward had fallen beneath the sway of favourites; one of his sons, the Duke of Lancaster, alone enjoyed his favour, and abused it; a woman, named Alice Perers or Pierce, possessed a shameful in-fluence over him, which she employed chiefly in supporting the interest of her friends, in the courts of justice. She might often be seen, sitting within the precincts of the judicial tribunals, intimidating by her presence the judges whom she had pestered with her solicitations. A report was spread at the same time that the Duke of Lancaster intended to have himself declared heir to the crown, to the prejudice of the youthful son of the Black Prince, who was then in a dying state, and who possessed the affection of the whole nation. A Parliament was convoked in 1376 ; and a powerful party in both Houses pronounced against the ministers of the king. In the Upper House, the Black Prince himself led the attack, and in the Lower House, the opposition was headed by Peter de la Mare. The Commons demanded that the king’s council should be augmented by ten or twelve members, prelates, lords, or others; that no important matter should be decided without the consent of six or four of them; and finally, that all the officers of the crown should be sworn to receive no present, emolument, or reward beyond their legal salaries and expenses. The king consented to all these demands upon condition that he should himself appoint the new councillors, and that the chancellor, the treasurer, and the keeper of the privy seal should be allowed to discharge the duties of their office without their interference. The Commons next endeavoured to obtain that the justices of peace in each county should be appointed by the lords and knights of that county in Parliament, and should not be removed without their consent; but the king refused to grant this. The Commons continued to complain of the king’s evil counsellors, attributing to them the distress into which the king had fallen, the dilapidation of the subsidies, and so forth. Finally, with a view to the immediate application of the principles which they maintained, they formerly impeached the Lords Latimer and Nevil, who occupied posts in the king’s household, and four merchants of London, named Lyon, Ellis, Peachey, and Bury, who were farmers of the royal subsidies. This accusation had its effect; the accused persons were declared incapable of all public employment, and banished from the court and council, and their property was confiscated. As for Alice Perers, the Commons attacked her also, and the king was constrained to issue the following ordinance: “Whereas complaint has been brought before the king that some women have pursued causes and actions in the king’s court by way of maintenance, and for hire or reward, which thing displeases the king, the king forbids that any woman do it hereafter, and in particular Alice Perers, under the penalty of forfeiting all that the said Alice can forfeit, and of being banished out of the realm.”*

  Nothing of this kind had previously been attempted by the Commons. This Parliament sat from the end of April to the 6th of July, 1376, that is, for a longer period than any preceding Parliament; the number of its petitions to the king was 223, and all its acts were so popular that it received the name of the Good Parliament.

  But the Commons were not in a position to maintain unassisted so brilliant a success; their triumph had been due in great measure to the co-operation of the Black Prince and his party in the Upper House; and the Black Prince died before the closing of the Parliament. The king, by settling the crown upon his son Richard, dissipated many fears. A new Parliament was convoked on the 27th of January, 1377, and one of his first acts was to solicit the revocation of the sentence passed in the preceding year against Lord Latimer and Alice Perers; which request was granted. Six or seven only of those knights who had been members of the previous Parliament sat in the new one; and Peter de la Mare was imprisoned. Nevertheless, the new Parliament maintained the rights already acquired in several particulars; it insisted upon the proper appropriation of the subsidies, upon an account being given of the receipts, and so forth. The death of Edward III. which occurred on the 21st of June, 1377, put an end to a struggle which was probably about to arise once more between the Commons and the advisers of the crown.

  In addition to this intervention of the House of Commons in the general affairs of the State, some particular facts prove the progress which its influence was making in all respects, and deserve to be remarked in this point of view.

  I. The Commons began energetically to resist both the power which the Pope still assumed to exercise in England, and the internal influence of the English clergy themselves. In 1343, they protested against the right which the Pope claimed to have to appoint foreigners to certain vacant ecclesiastical benefices, and against other abuses of the same kind. They called upon his majesty and the lords to aid them in expelling the papal power from the kingdom, and addressed to the Pope himself a letter full of the most indignant remonstrances. Previously, the barons alone had actively interfered in affairs of this kind. In 1366, the king informed the Parliament that the Pope intended to cite him to Avignon to do homage for his crown, according to the terms of the treaty concluded with king John, and also to pay the tribute promised upon that occasion. The Lords on the one hand, and the Commons on the other, replied that king John had no right to contract such engagements without the consent of the Parliament, called upon the king to refuse to comply with the Pope’s citation, and promised to support him with all their power. In 1371, the Commons complained that the great offices of the State were occupied by ecclesiastics, to the great detriment of the king and the state, and demanded that in future they should be excluded therefrom, leaving to the king the right of choosing his officers, provided they were laymen. Finally, in 1377, they demanded that no ordinance or statute should be enacted upon petition of the clergy, without the consent of the Commons; and that the Commons should be bound by none of the constitutions which the clergy might make for its own advantage and without their consent, since the clergy would not be bound by the statutes or ordinances of the king to which they had not consented. This conflict between the national representatives and the clergy soon became a permanent habit, which contributed powerfully, in the sixteenth century, to the introduction of the Reformation.

  II. In 1337, the Parliament turned its attention to the protection of the national industry. It prohibited the exportation of English wools, and granted great encouragement to those foreign clothworkers who should take up their residence in England. These regulations soon fell into desuetude in consequence of the wars with France; but they prove the disposition of the Parliament to give attention to all matters of public interest.

  III. It was also during this reign that, for the first time, we find the Parliament manifesting anxiety about the abuses which were committed at elections, and seeking to prevent their recurrence. In 1372, an ordinance, passed at the suggestion and by the advice of the Commons, prohibited the election of sheriffs during the continuance of their functions, and also of lawyers, because they made use of their authority to procure their own election, and afterwards cared only for their own private interests.*

  IV. Finally, it is under this reign that we first find committees of the two Houses uniting to investigate certain questions in common, and afterwards reporting the result of their investigations to their respective Houses. It is remarkable that this usage, so necessary to facilitate the progress of the representative system and to procure good deliberations, should have arisen precisely at that period when the Parliament became divided into two Houses. It was the natural consequence of their former combination in a single assembly. There was no regular or invariable plan with regard to the mode of the formation of these committees. Sometimes the king himself appointed a certain number of lords, and invited the Commons to choose a certain number of their own members to confer with them; sometimes the Commons named the lords with whom they wished to confer; and sometimes each House appointed its own committee.

  It is remarkable that most of the parliamentary sessions of this reign begin with a confirmation of Magna Charta and the Charta de Foresta, which were always regarded as the foundation of the public rights and liberties, and also violated with sufficient frequency to render it necessary incessantly to renew their concession.

  All these facts prove the immense progress made by representative government in general, and by the House of Commons in particular, during the course of this reign.

  LECTURE 24

  State of the Parliament under Richard II. ~ Struggle between absolute royalty and parliamentary government. ~ Origin of the Civil List. ~ Progress of the responsibility of ministers. ~ Progress of the returns of the employment of the public revenue. ~ The Commons encroach upon the government. ~ Reaction against the sway of the Commons. ~ Violence and fall of Richard II. ~ Progress of the essential maxims and practices of representative government.

  It is a remarkable fact in the history of England that, during the interval which elapsed between the years of 1216 and 1399, an able monarch always succeeded an incapable king, and vice versa. This circumstance proved very favourable to the establishment of free institutions, which never had time either to fall beneath the yoke of an energetic despotism or to dissolve in anarchy.

  The reign of Richard II. does not present, like that of Edward III., the spectacle of the struggle of the Commons in defending their rights, and extending them by the very fact that they were defending them against the royal power, which was incessantly striving to evade those rights because they checked its authority, but which was nevertheless sufficiently acute to perceive that it stood in need of the assistance of the people, and could not afford to quarrel with their representatives. During the reign of Richard, the conflict assumes a more general character; it now involves far more than special or occasional acts of resistance. The question at issue now is, whether the king shall govern according to the advice and under the control of his Parliament, or rule alone and in an almost arbitrary manner. A positive conflict arose between parliamentary government and purely royal government; a violent conflict, full of reciprocal iniquities, but in which the question between liberty in general and absolute power was laid down more clearly and completely than it had ever been before.

  The vicissitudes of this struggle are broadly outlined in facts. The reign of Richard II. may be divided into two parts. From 1377 to 1389, the government was parliamentary, that is to say, the Parliament exercised the supreme control and really directed all public affairs, notwithstanding the attempts at resistance on the part of the king and his favourites. From 1389 to 1399, this state of things underwent a change, and the king progressively regained the upper hand. Not that the Parliament abandoned or lost all its rights; for that of voting the taxes, in particular, was boldly maintained, and even respected to a certain extent. But generally speaking, the government was arbitrary, the king had the sole disposal of it, and the Parliament, which had lost its preponderating influence, interfered only as an instrument. This state of things was contrary to the desires and instincts of the country, and it was terminated by a tragical event. Richard was deposed by a proscribed exile who landed in England with sixty men, but found both the Parliament and the entire nation disposed to support him, or at all events, not to oppose him. The deposition of Richard and the elevation of the House of Lancaster were the work of force, but of force supported by that powerful adhesion which the silence and immobility of the public afford to enterprises which tend to overthrow an odious or despised government.

  Such was the general aspect of this reign. I shall not linger to detail its events, but merely select and bring to light those facts which relate to the condition of the public institutions of the country, and which prove the truth of that which I have just affirmed.

  As you have already seen, during the last years of the reign of Edward III., the influence of the Commons in the government had rapidly augmented; and its further progress was favoured by the minority of Richard II. Sixty years before, the nonage of the king would have placed the State under the control of some faction of barons; but during the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Commons take the initiative in all things, and plainly say how they think the government should be administered.

  A first Parliament was convoked in the month of September, 1377. Peter de la Mare, formerly the leader of the opposition, was liberated from prison, and chosen speaker of the House of Commons. Three lords selected by the Commons were appointed to confer with them regarding the public necessities. Three propositions were submitted by the Commons to the king and lords: 1. the formation of a council of government; 2. the appointment of “men of virtuous and honest conversation” to guard the person and conduct the education of the king, and to take care “that the charge of the king’s household should be borne by the revenues of the crown, so that what was granted to the wars might be expended that way only”; 3. the strict observance of the common law and statutes of the realm, “that they might not be defeated by the singularity of any about the king.”* The Lords granted the first proposition, rejected the first part of the second as too harsh and interfering too much with the liberty of the royal person, promised to deliberate upon the second part with the great officers of the king’s household, and gave their unhesitating assent to the third proposition.

  The second of these propositions contains the germ of the distinction between the civil list and taxes voted for the public expenditure. A subsidy was voted by the Commons, after the establishment of the administration. It was agreed that moneys thus raised should be lodged in the keeping of special treasurers, who should give an account of their receipts and disbursements, in such manner as the king and council should order. Two London merchants, William Walworth and John Philpot, were appointed to this office by the king.

  Several other petitions were presented by this Parliament. 1. That the evil councillors of the late king Edward might be removed from the royal councils—which was granted. 2. That, during the king’s minority, all the ministers and other great functionaries of State, might be appointed by Parliament; and that if an office fell vacant, while Parliament was not sitting, it should be filled up by the king’s council, subject to the approval of the next Parliament—which was granted in the case of the greater officers, but refused in respect to those of less importance. 3. That Parliament should be holden once a year—in reply to which it was promised that “the statutes made for that purpose shall be observed and kept.”* It is clear that, in all these matters, the initiative and general direction of the government belonged to the Commons.

  On the 25th of April, 1378, a second Parliament met, and voted a poll-tax, as the king had involved himself by loans. The chancellor concluded his speech by saying that, for all past and probable expenditure, the treasurers were prepared to give account.

  On the 20th of October, 1378, a third Parliament met, and a fresh subsidy was demanded. The Commons maintained that the king ought not to be in want of one, and that a promise had been made that no further imposts should be levied for a long time. The chancellor, Richard le Scroop, denied that any such promise had been made; and long and violent debates ensued upon this question. The Commons demanded that an account should be given them of the way in which the last subsidy had been spent. The chancellor asserted that they had no right to require this, but finally yielded, under protest that it should not be considered a precedent. The Commons accordingly examined the accounts.

  The Commons next requested that five or six lords or prelates should be deputed to confer with them respecting the public charges: thus aspiring to make their own body the centre of deliberation, and affecting to regard the lords only as a part of the king’s council. The lords refused their request, and proposed that, according to ancient usage, each house should appoint certain of its members to confer together. This suggestion was adopted, and a subsidy voted. The Commons further demanded the appointment of special treasurers to receive and disburse its proceeds; which was granted.

  On the 15th of January, 1380, a fourth Parliament was held, for the purpose of demanding fresh subsidies, rendered necessary by the wars with France and Scotland, the revolts in Gascony, and other causes. The chancellor concluded his speech by saying “that the lords of the great council were ready to lay before the Commons the receipts of the last subsidial grants, and the disbursements of the same.”

  The Commons demanded: 1. That the counsellors given to the king at his accession, should be dismissed (probably because they suspected them of unfaithfulness in the management of the public revenue); 2. That the five chief officers of State should not be changed until the next Parliament; 3. That a commission should be formed to survey and examine, in all his courts and palaces, the state of the king’s household, and the expenses and receipts in all the offices—which was granted, and the commission composed of six lords and six members of the House of Commons; 4. That some of the most discreet barons should be placed about the king, in order to give wise answers to foreign ministers. One baron only, the Earl of Warwick, was appointed for this purpose. A subsidy was then voted.

  In November, 1380, a fifth Parliament met to vote further subsidies; and a long discussion arose between the Commons and the Lords regarding the amount. A fixed sum of £ 16, 000 was required; to meet which the Commons voted a poll-tax of 15 groats on every individual above 15 years of age, mendicants alone excepted; and annexed to their vote the condition that the rich should help the poor to pay the tax. The Commons moreover voted that “no knight, citizen, or burgess of the present Parliament should be collector of this money”; apparently in order to avoid every suspicion of partiality in its assessment. A violent popular insurrection broke out in consequence of this tax; and in order to quell it, the king was obliged to make promises of general enfranchisement.

  On the 14th of September, 1382, a sixth Parliament assembled; but was adjourned on account of a quarrel between the Duke of Lancaster and the Earl of Northumberland, who had both come thither in arms, with a numerous retinue. The importance of these great barons was such that the Parliament could not meet until the king had succeeded in reconciling them. Great agitation was felt in this Parliament, as it did not know how to calm the disturbance in the country. The charter of manumission which had been extorted from the king was revoked. The Commons accused the bad government of the king of having caused the insurrection, and drew a melancholy picture of the deplorable state of the people. A committee of inquiry was appointed in consequence. The Commons refused to grant a subsidy, basing their refusal upon the disposition of the country to revolt. The king declared that he would not grant his amnesty for all the offences committed during the late insurrection, unless a subsidy were granted; and under the influence of this threat, the Commons yielded.

  At the opening of this Parliament, the Commons demanded that the prelates, the lords temporal, the knights, the judges, in a word, the various estates of the realm, should examine, each for their own class, the charges which should be brought; and should report the same to the Commons, who would deliberate upon it. This was an attempt to make themselves a sovereign and undivided assembly; but the king maintained the ancient usage, which required that the Commons should deliberate first of all, and communicate their propositions to the king and lords.

  This Parliament was twice prorogued; from the 15th of December to the 15th of January, 1383, and again from the latter date to the 7th of May.

  Seven sessions of the Parliament were held from the 7th of May 1383, to the 1st of October 1386. The king endeavoured to free himself from the control of the Parliament. In 1383, he dismissed a very popular chancellor, Richard le Scroop, because he had refused to seal some inconsiderate gifts of property which had become confiscated to the crown. During the same year, the clergy obtained from the king a violent statute against the Lollards or disciples of Wickliffe. The Commons complained of this, saying that the statute was surreptitious; that it had never received their consent, and that “it was not their meaning to bind themselves, or their successors, to the prelates, any more than their ancestors had done before them.” They, therefore, demanded and obtained the revocation of the statute; but after their departure, the act of revocation was set aside, and the statute maintained.

  In 1383, also, the Commons having demanded to confer with a committee of lords whom they mentioned by name, the king consented to their request, but added that it belonged to him alone to appoint the lords whom he thought fit to send to such conferences. In the same Parliament the Commons prayed the king “to place the most discreet and valuable officers about his person,” and to regulate his household in such a way that his revenues might be well administered, and prove sufficient to meet his wants. The king answered that he would summon to him the persons who suited him, and that he would regulate his household by the advice of his council. In 1386, the Commons petitioned that the state of the king’s household should be examined every year by the chancellor, the treasurer, and the keeper of the privy seal; and that they should be authorized to reform its abuses. The king replied that he would order such an examination when it pleased him. The Commons next inquired who were the ministers and chief officers of State whom the king intended to place at the head of affairs. The king replied that he had officers sufficient at present, and would change them at his pleasure. All these facts indicate an effort on the part of the king and his council to free themselves from the control of Parliament. In proportion as this desire became apparent, the Commons became, in certain respects, more timid and reserved. In 1383, the king consulted them as to whether he should march in person at the head of his army against France; and they replied that it was not in their province to decide upon such a question, but that it should be referred to the council. In 1385, they were consulted on the question of peace or war with France: and refused to give an opinion. The king insisted upon having an answer, but all that he could obtain from them was that “if they were in the king’s place, they would prefer peace.” Every circumstance, on both sides, indicates an imminent separation, or at least a progressive estrangement. The king was desirous to escape from the guidance of the Parliament; and the Parliament refused to share the responsibility of the king’s council.

  Richard was under the sway of two favourites, Robert de Vere, Marquis of Dublin, and Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Hence the government was courtly, capricious, destructive, and laid claim to an insolent and frivolous exercise of arbitrary authority. The haughty tone of the chancellor Suffolk was extremely offensive in the speeches with which he opened the Parliaments of 1384 and 1385. The Commons could endure the government (though often tyrannical) of a council of barons with much greater willingness than that of a pack of court favourites. The great feudal aristocracy were deeply rooted in the associations of the country; but the arrogance and frivolity of favourites were unspeakably offensive to the people. The storm broke out in the Parliament which met on the 1st of October, 1386. The Commons, “with one accord,” impeached the Earl of Suffolk. The king withdrew to Eltham. The two Houses sent to him to demand the dismissal of the lord treasurer and of the chancellor, relating to whom, they said, they had matters to treat of which could not be safely done whilst he remained in his office. The king sent an evasive answer; and the Parliament declared that it would do nothing so long as the king continued absent, and the Earl of Suffolk remained minister. The king proposed that they should depute forty knights of their number to confer with him. The Parliament refused. After a long and singular correspondence, the king was constrained to yield and to choose new ministers.

  Doubt has been cast upon several of these facts, and especially upon the king’s correspondence with the Parliament. Knyghton is the only historian who records it, but there is reason to believe it authentic. The Earl of Suffolk was impeached and condemned. The charges brought against him were of little weight as legal crimes, but of great importance as abuses in the government. A committee of eleven lords was appointed by Parliament to regulate all public affairs, and to govern in concert with the king. The Parliament enacted the penalties of high treason against any person who should advise the king not to follow the counsels of this committee, and constrained the king to confirm these resolutions by letters-patent. The king, on his part, made protestation in full Parliament, with his own mouth, “that for any thing which was done in that Parliament he would not any prejudice should come to him or his crown; but that the prerogative and liberties of it should be safe and preserved.”

  In 1387, the king travelled through the west and north of England; and assembled at Nottingham a council composed of partisans of his favourites. He inquired of the sheriffs of the neighbouring counties what forces they could raise for his assistance, if he should find it necessary to oppose the committee of eleven lords. The sheriffs replied that the people were convinced that the lords were friends to the king, and desired the welfare of the country, and that therefore few persons would be found willing to take up arms against them. The king then commanded the sheriffs to elect to the next Parliament those persons only whom he should nominate. They answered that they could not undertake to secure the election of any persons but those who were to the people’s liking. The king then summoned the judges to Nottingham, and proposed to them various questions concerning the rights and prerogatives of the crown. The judges, either intimidated or guided by Sir Robert Tressillian, gave answers tending to establish the arbitrary power of the king and to free his government from the control of the Parliament. This was the evident object of the whole of this struggle.

  Dissension now broke out between the king and the lords. A Parliament was convoked. The king inserted in his writs an order to return those persons who were debatis modernis magis indifferentes;1 but he was soon obliged to erase this clause, and to declare it illegal in new writs. The Parliament met on the 3rd of February, 1388, and took precautions to ensure that it should alone decide upon all great public matters, and that it should not be dissolved after having voted a subsidy. An accusation was lodged by five lords, called appellants, against the favourites of the king, and the judges. This accusation really conceals a great party conflict beneath the forms of judicial procedure. The Upper House declared that, on such grave occasions, the Parliament alone could judge, and was bound by none of the laws which regulate the proceedings of other courts. Eighteen persons were condemned, most of them to death, and many by default. The Parliament separated after having sat five months. It was called the Wonderful Parliament, and also the Pitiless Parliament. It had been careful to declare that the condemnation of the favourite councillors and judges, did not in any way throw discredit upon the king himself.

  The authority of the committee of eleven lords over the government was exercised without opposition for a year. In May, 1389, the king assembled his council, and declared that, being now of full age, he was capable of governing his inheritance himself, and that it was not fitting that he should be in a worse condition than every subject in his dominions who could freely dispose of his goods. “It is well known,” he said, “that for several years I have lived under your guardianship, and I thank you for the trouble you have taken on my account; but now that I have reached my majority, I am determined to remain no longer under tutelage, but to take in hand the government of my kingdom and to appoint or revoke my ministers and other officers according to my pleasure.” He changed the chancellor and other great officers, and dismissed from his council several of the eleven lords.

  Here began the second epoch in this reign—the epoch of reaction against the Parliament. Great obscurity prevails as to the causes which placed Richard II. in a position to effect such a revolution; but he was most probably emboldened to do so by division in the committee of eleven lords, and by the bad use which some of them had made of their power. The king and his new council governed at first with prudence, and manifested great respect for the Parliament. On the 16th of January, 1390, a Parliament was convoked. The new ministers resigned their offices, and submitted their conduct to its scrutiny. The Parliament declared that it found no cause for complaint, and the ministers resumed their functions. Seven Parliaments were held from 1390 to 1397. They became more and more timid and docile, and the king’s authority assumed an increasingly extended and arbitrary character. These are the principal facts which characterize this reaction:—

  In 1391, the Parliament assured the king that the royalty and prerogatives of his crown should ever remain intact and inviolable; that if they had in any way been infringed, it should be reformed; and that the king should enjoy as large liberty as any of his predecessors ever did: “which prayer seemed to our lord the king honest and reasonable,” and he consented to it. In 1391 and 1392, the Parliament admitted the king’s power to dispense with the observance of certain statutes in ecclesiastical matters, on condition that these statutes should not be held to be thereby revoked. In 1392, the king, being off ended with the city of London, withdrew from it its liberties and imprisoned its magistrates; but shortly afterwards he restored its liberties to the city, and imposed on it a fine of £ 1000 sterling. In 1394, the judges who had been banished to Ireland by the Parliament of 1388, were recalled. In 1397, a bill was brought forward in the House of Commons, proposing that all extravagant expenditure should be avoided in the royal household; and that those bishops and ladies who had nothing to do at court should not have permission to reside there. The king was incensed at this bill before it was presented to him, and said in the Upper House, “that it was directed against those liberties and royalties which his progenitors had enjoyed, and which he was resolved to uphold and maintain.” He ordered the Lords to inform the Commons of his resolution, and directed the Duke of Lancaster to command Sir John Bussy, the Speaker of the Commons, to inform him what member had introduced the bill into Parliament. The Commons became alarmed, and humbly besought the king’s pardon. At a conference, they placed the bill in the king’s hands, and delivered up to him its proposer, Thomas Haxey. The king forgave them, and the Parliament itself declared Haxey guilty of treason. The clergy saved his life by claiming him as a clerk—which proves that at this period ecclesiastics were not excluded from Parliament.

  In September, 1397, Richard II. at length judged himself in a position to assume the plenitude of his power, to annul all that had been done in 1388 to limit his authority, and to avenge his injuries.

  A Parliament was convoked. Every precaution had been taken to ensure its docility. The sheriffs had been changed; and all sorts of practices had been put in force to influence the elections. Numerous bodies of troops formed the royal guard. The Parliament was opened with great solemnity. The chancellor, the Bishop of Exeter, took as the text of his speech: Rex unus erit omnibus.2 Subsequent events fully corresponded with these preliminaries. All the acts of the Parliament of 1388 were revoked, and their authors accused of treason; five of them were condemned to death. The principal leader of the opposition, the Duke of Gloucester, was assassinated in prison at Calais, after having been constrained to acknowledge his past crimes in a confession in which he formerly accused himself of having “restrained the king of his freedom.” After these condemnations the same Parliament held a second session at Shrewsbury, in which the answers of the judges in 1387 were declared good and legitimate, and precisely the same measures were taken to render these new decisions inviolable, which had been employed by the Parliament of 1388 to ensure the observance of its own resolutions. These two sessions lasted sixteen days. In less than two years afterwards, Richard was dethroned.

  He thought himself, however, well secured against such a contingency; for he had taken all sorts of precautions firmly to establish the power which he had just regained. The Parliament had granted him, for his lifetime, the duty upon wools and hides, upon condition only that this concession should not be regarded as a precedent by the kings his successors. As several of the petitions and other matters laid before the Parliament during its last session had not been fully terminated, the Parliament at its dissolution appointed a permanent committee of twelve lords and six members of the House of Commons, to whom it transferred its powers to regulate and decide, in concert with the king, all affairs of public business. Richard thus remained surrounded by the men who had just assisted him to regain arbitrary power; and although the mission of this committee was limited to the settlement of those affairs only which the Parliament had not had time to arrange, it did not hesitate to take possession of the entire government. In concert with the king, it issued ordinances, and declared the penalties of high treason against any person who should attempt to resist its authority; and it imposed on all the lords the obligation, under oath, to respect and maintain all that it should enact. All the powers of Parliament were thus usurped by this committee. Private vexations were added to this general usurpation; in spite of the amnesty which had been proclaimed, even by the last Parliament, Richard continued to wreak his vengeance upon the adherents of the Parliament of 1388. He extorted money from seventeen counties under the pretence that they had taken part in the rebellion; and he forced wealthy citizens to sign blank cheques in order to ransom themselves from prosecutions for treason, which blanks he filled up at his pleasure.

  Such acts as these could not fail to produce general hatred and indignation; and an accidental cause led to their manifestation. A quarrel existed between the Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk; and the last Parliament had left the dispute to the decision of the king and his committee. A single combat between the two dukes was appointed to take place at Coventry; but the king anticipated the duel, and banished both the dukes, one for ten years, and the other for life. By letters patent, he expressedly authorized the Duke of Hereford to sue, during his banishment, for the livery of any lands that might be bequeathed to him. In 1399, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and father of Hereford, died. The king and his committee annulled the letters-patent, and confiscated the property of the Duke of Lancaster. Richard then set out for Ireland. On the 4th of July, 1399, the Duke of Hereford, who had become Duke of Lancaster by the death of his father, landed in England. He made rapid progress, and when Richard returned to England, he soon found himself abandoned and taken prisoner. A Parliament was convoked in his name on the 30th of September. Richard abdicated. An accusation in thirty-three articles was drawn up against him; and his deposition was pronounced by the Parliament. Henry of Lancaster claimed the crown in virtue of a pretended right of birth. It was granted to him on the 6th of August, 1399, and new writs were issued for the convocation of a Parliament within six days. This was impossible: so the same Parliament met again, and became the Parliament of Henry IV. Richard, who had been kept prisoner in Pomfret Castle, was put to death on the 23rd of October, 1399.

  This royal catastrophe was the work of force, just as the deposition of Edward II. had been; but public opinion and public passion had a much greater share in it. efforts were made to impart even to these acts of violence an appearance of constitutional regularity, and the progress of parliamentary government may be discerned even in its tragical excitements.

  Such were, in a political point of view, the character and progress of this reign. A few particular facts are worthy of notice.

  1. The extension of the practice of forced loans. In 1378, a petition was presented that no man should be constrained to lend money to the king; and it was granted. Nevertheless, in 1386, a writ addressed to several inhabitants of Boston enjoins them to make every person possessing property of more than twenty pounds in value contribute to the loan of £ 200 which the town had promised to grant to the king, and which would be received in deduction from the subsidies of the present Parliament.

  2. The principle of the appropriation of subsidies becomes increasingly prevalent.

  3. The Commons make efforts to ensure that their petitions should not be altered when passed into statutes. In 1382, they requested the communication of one of the king’s ordinances before it was registered: and desired that some of their members should be present during the preparation of the rolls. The affair of Thomas Haxey gives us reason to believe that the practice commenced, during this reign, of proceeding in the form of bills discussed and adopted by both Houses before they were submitted for the sanction of the king. Nevertheless, in 1382, the House of Commons having requested the opinion of the House of Lords on a question which then occupied their attention, the Lords replied that ancient usage required that the Commons should first communicate their opinion to the king and assembled lords. This very fact, however, proves that the present form of initiative was about to introduce itself.

  4. In 1384, the town of Shaftesbury addressed a petition to the king, lords and commons, against the sheriff of Dorsetshire, who had made a false return of an election, and left out the name of the person really elected. We are not aware of the result of this petition, but this is the first instance of the official intervention of the Commons in the matter of contested elections. Only three examples of analogous petitions are to be met with in previous times, viz. under Edward II. in 1319, under Edward III. in 1363, and under Richard II. in 1384. Until then, the king alone had examined the petition, and referred its judgment to the ordinary tribunals.

  5. In 1382, a statute ordains, under penalty of fine or other punishment, that all the lords and deputies of the Commons shall repair to Parliament when they are summoned; and that all the sheriffs shall cause all due and accustomed elections to be made, without omitting any borough or city.

  These particular acts, as well as the general course of events, attest the progress of constitutional maxims and practices.

  LECTURE 25

  Summary of the history of the Parliament from the death of Richard II. ~ to the accession of the House of Stuart. ~ Progress of the forms of procedure, and of the privileges of Parliament. ~ Liberty of speech in both Houses. ~ Inviolability of members of Parliament. ~ Judicial power of the House of Lords. ~ Decadence of the Parliament during the wars of the Roses, and under the Tudor dynasty. ~ Causes of this decadence and of the progress of royal authority, from Henry VII. to Elizabeth. ~ Conclusion.

  It is impossible to comprehend the entire scope of the character and influence of great events. Some occurrences, which procure order and liberty for the present, prepare the way for tyranny and confusion in the future; while others, on the contrary, establish absolute power at first, and subsequently give birth to full political freedom. We cannot fail to be struck by this reflection when we consider the prodigious difference which exists between the immediate results and the remote consequences of the deposition of Richard II. It delivered England from an arbitrary, insolent, and disorderly government; but sixty years afterwards it gave rise to the wars of the Red and White Roses, and to all those cruel internal distractions which facilitated the establishment of the Tudor despotism: so that the decay of English liberties, from 1461 to 1640, had its primary source in the event which, in 1399, had consummated their triumph.

  In considering the general character of the state of the government from 1399 to 1461, under the first three kings of the House of Lancaster, Henry IV., Henry V., and Henry VI., we must admit that this period was remarkable neither for the unchangeableness nor for the progress of institutions. During this epoch, the Parliament gained none of those signal victories which distinguished the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II.; no really new right, no fundamental and previously unknown guarantee, were added to those already possessed. Neither did arbitrary power again assume the offensive, and obtain the advantage; and the crown and Parliament engaged in no serious conflict calculated to compromise the existence of either party, or notably to change their degree of political importance. In truth, the work of this period was to regularize the results of previous struggles. The Parliament exercised, without much opposition, the right for which it had fought during the fourteenth century, viz., the voting of taxes, the appropriation of the subsidies, the investigation of the public accounts, intervention in the legislature, and the impeachment of the great officers of the crown. The kings, though frequently seeking to elude the application of these rights, never ignored them completely, or braved them openly. The whole of the political machine remained almost unaltered; but though it underwent no great revolutions, it received many important developments in its internal organization. Practical ameliorations were sought after and attained; further consequences were deduced from established principles; and this epoch is more remarkable for various improvements in the springs of parliamentary government, than for the conquest of great rights, or the formation of fundamental institutions.

  The internal constitution of the Parliament, especially during the course of this period, made important progress; from this time we may date, with some degree of accuracy, its principal forms of procedure and its most essential privileges.

  One of the most essential is, certainly, liberty of speech. During the reign of Henry IV., we find the speaker of the House of Commons demanding it of the king at the opening of every session. One of the first acts of the first Parliament held during this reign, in 1399, was to obtain the revocation of the sentence passed upon Thomas Haxey, in the reign of Richard II. Every circumstance proves that, under Henry IV., the Commons used greater liberty of speech than they had previously enjoyed. It was, indeed, made a subject of special praise to Sir John Tibetot, speaker in the Parliament of 1406. The king soon manifested great distrust of the extension given to this right, which was probably exercised with all the rudeness which characterized the manners of that time. In 1410, he told the Commons that he hoped that they would no longer use unbecoming language, but act with moderation. In 1411, the speaker, Sir Thomas Chaucer, having made the usual demand at the opening of the session, the king replied that he would allow the Commons to speak as others before had done, but that “he would have no novelties introduced, and would enjoy his prerogative.” The speaker requested three days to give a written answer to this observation, and then replied “that he desired no other protestation than what other speakers had made; and that if he should speak anything to the king’s displeasure, it might be imputed to his own ignorance only, and not to the body of the Commons,”* which the king granted.

  We meet with no infringement upon the liberty of speech enjoyed by the Commons until the Parliament of 1455, at which time a deputy from Bristol, Thomas Young, complained that he had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, six years before, on account of a motion which he had brought forward in the House. The object of this motion had been to declare that, as the king then had no children, the Duke of York was the legitimate heir to the throne. The Commons transmitted this petition to the Lords, and the king commanded his council to do whatever might be judged fitting on behalf of the petitioner.

  In all official transactions with the king and the lords, the Speaker was the mouthpiece of the House of Commons, and for him especially liberty of speech was then demanded. He acted in the name, and on the behalf, of the House, on almost all occasions. In 1406, we find him giving his consent, in this capacity, to the act which regulated the succession of the crown.

  The inviolability of the members of Parliament was a right of no less importance than liberty of speech. The ancient Saxon laws granted protection and security to the members of the Wittenagemot, in going and returning from the place of meeting, provided they were not notorious robbers and brigands. From the formation of the new Parliament, the same right was claimed by its members, who, as they came to transact the business of the king in his national council, were entitled to exemption from arrest or hindrance. In 1403, Sir Thomas Brooke repaired to Parliament as a representative of Somersetshire; and one of his suite, Richard Cheddre, was maltreated and beaten by John Salage. A statute ordained that Salage should pay double damages to Cheddre, according to the award of the Court of Queen’s Bench; and “moreover, it is granted by the said Parliament that the same shall be done in times to come, in similar cases.” This circumstance gave rise to a petition of the Commons, who prayed that all lords, knights, citizens, and burgesses, coming to Parliament and residing there, might be, as well as their followers and domestics, under the special protection and defence of the king, until their return home; and that they might be arrested for no debt, contract, or suit, or imprisoned in any manner during that time, under penalty of a fine to be paid to the king, and damages to the person injured. The king replied that provision should be made to this effect. The statute of 1403 was renewed in 1433, during the reign of Henry VI.

  In 1430, a complaint was laid before the House of Commons on account of the imprisonment, for debt, of William Lake, the servant of William Mildred, one of the members for London. He was set at liberty by a special act of Parliament.

  In 1453, the Commons complained to the king and to the lords of the imprisonment of Thomas Thorpe, their speaker, who had been arrested for debt at the suit of the Duke of York. The Lords referred the matter to the judges, who replied through Sir John Fortescue: “That it was not their part to judge of the Parliament’s actions, who were judges and makers of the laws themselves; only they said there were divers supersedeas of privilege of Parliament brought into courts; but a general supersedeas, to suppress all proceedings, there was not. For, if there should, it would seem as if the High Court of Parliament, that ministered all justice and equity, should hinder the process of the common law, and so put the party complainant without remedy, inasmuch as actions at common law are not determinable in Parliament; but if any member of Parliament be arrested for such cases as are not for treason, felony, or surety of the peace, or for a judgment had before Parliament, it was usual for such person to be quitted of such arrest, and set at liberty to attend his service in Parliament.”*

  Notwithstanding this answer of the judges, the Lords decided that Thorpe should remain in prison: and ordered the Commons, in the king’s name, to elect another speaker, which they did. But this was a party quarrel; Thorpe was attached to the House of Lancaster, and the Duke of York was then in the ascendant. The privilege then existed, but still in a precarious manner, and a special act of Parliament was necessary on every occasion to ensure its being put into practice.

  It was also during this period that the right of parliamentary initiative superseded the right of petition. We have already noticed the abuses originated by the initiative which the House of Commons exercised by means of its petitions; and that the petitions were not always faithfully reproduced in the statutes which they had suggested. We have also seen what efforts had already been put forth by the Commons to prevent these trickeries. In 1414, during the reign of Henry V., they complained of them in a special petition, to which the king replied by promising that in future the statutes should correspond exactly to the petitions granted. But this guarantee was very insecure, and the Commons had already begun to obtain more effectual securities by accustoming themselves to draw up in the form of complete bills, the statutes which they had previously suggested by petitions; and sending them to the House of Lords, that they might be discussed and adopted by that House, before they were presented to the king, who then had nothing more to do than to give or refuse his sanction. It is impossible to indicate with precision the period at which this important change took place; for it was accomplished gradually, and was not remarked by the historians of the time. The usage of petitions co-existed for some time with that of bills. The following facts indicate the progress of the change. Under Richard II., in 1382 (and I have already alluded to this fact), the Commons attempted to obtain the opinion of the Lords, upon a certain question, before bringing under the notice of the king. The attempt was repulsed by the Lords, who staked their honour upon not separating from the king, and upon receiving simultaneously and in concert with him, the propositions of the Commons. The complete initiative of the Houses of Parliament arose, naturally and necessarily, from the voting of taxes. Originally, as you have seen, each class of deputies voted alone those taxes which were destined to weigh especially upon themselves; and the knights of the shire deliberated and voted upon this matter with the Lords. When the knights of the shire had fully combined with the deputies of the boroughs—when the House of Commons deliberated and voted, in a body, upon the same taxes—it became necessary that the votes on such matters should receive the consent of the Lords, who would also have to bear the consequences. Bills passed in reference to subsidies were thencefor-ward discussed and voted by both Houses before they were laid before the king; and the initiative, in its present form, was thus fully established in this particular case. In 1407, a remarkable incident brought this form of proceeding to light, gave it final sanction, and deduced from it at the same time two other parliamentary rights of great importance. In consequence of a debate which arose between the House of Lords and the House of Commons with regard to the initiative of subsidies, three principles were recognised, and have since remained firmly established: 1. Parliamentary initiative in its present form; 2. The exclusive initiative of the Commons in the matter of subsidies; 3. The right of the Houses, that the king should take no cognizance of the subject of their deliberations until they had come to a decision upon it, and were in a position to lay it before him as the desire of the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled.

  It was natural that that which was practised with regard to subsidies should soon extend to all matters; and that the propositions of Parliament, whatever might be their object, should reach the king as emanating from both Houses instead of being merely the petitions of one of them. Mr. Hallam affirms, without giving any particulars, that this practice became general during the reign of Henry VI., and from this period he dates the real division of the legislature into three branches. I am inclined to think that this practice had commenced at an earlier date, although it was rarely carried into effect; and it is certain, from the very constitution of Parliament at this epoch, that it did not become constant and general until a later period.

  In 1406, I find the Commons demanding, by the mouth of the speaker, Sir John Tibetot, the right of withdrawing their bills from the House of Lords, at any stage of the deliberation upon them, in order to introduce amendments; which was granted. The Commons were therefore already in the habit of occasionally drawing up their petitions in the form of bills, and of passing them through the House of Lords before presenting them to the king.

  At this period, the House of Lords was still regarded as the great council of the king, and as a sort of intermediary between the privy council and the entire Parliament; and a number of propositions on matters of government, and even of legislation, still emanated from the Commons alone, and were presented, in the form of petitions, to the king and lords. The practice of initiative by way of bills adopted by both Houses could not, therefore, have been general. The periods of the king’s minority or absence tended increasingly to impart the character of a great council of government to the House of Lords. Accordingly these epochs, and especially the reign of Henry VI., abound in propositions or petitions of the Commons to the Lords. It was at a later period, when the king and his privy council had regained a more independent power than their predecessors had enjoyed—that is to say, under the Tudor dynasty—that the Upper House became entirely disjoined from the government properly so called, and found itself placed, with respect to the king, in almost the same position as the House of Commons. Then alone did the practice of proceeding by bills discussed in both Houses before they were laid before the king, assume a constant and general character, that is to say, the parliamentary initiative was definitively substituted for the ancient right of petition possessed by each House, and especially by the Commons.

  With regard to the order of the debates in Parliament, it was an ancient custom that the king should not reply to the petitions of the Commons until the last day of the session; which rendered it impossible to make the concession of subsidies dependent upon the king’s answers. They endeavoured to reverse this order, probably during the reign of Richard II.; for the sixth question which he proposed to the judges was whether, when the king had called the attention of Parliament to any subject, the Parliament might attend to other matters before deciding upon the propositions of the king. The judges replied that such a proceeding was an act of treason. The answers of the judges of Richard II. having been declared illegitimate in the Parliament of 1399, the foregoing dictum was comprised in the general reprobation. Accordingly, in 1401, the Commons maintained that it was not their custom to grant any subsidy until the king had replied to their petitions, and they demanded that this course should be pursued. The king said that he would confer on the subject with the Lords, and on the last day of the session, he replied “that there was never such use known, but that they should first go through with all other business before their petitions were answered; which ordinance the king intended not to alter.” We do not find that the Commons then resisted, or attempted to procure the recognition, in a general manner, of the principle which they asserted. But this principle was frequently put into practice in subsequent Parliaments, and the king was forced not to throw any hindrance in its way. In 1407, Parliament opened on the 20th of October. On the 9th and 14th of November, the Commons presented themselves before the king, explained their numerous grievances, received his answer, and granted no subsidies until the 2nd of December following. In 1410, Parliament met on the 27th of January; and it was not until the 9th of May, after it had obtained satisfaction on several points, among others on the dismissal of two members of the privy council, that it granted a subsidy. This practice became almost constant during the reign of Henry VI. We find an evident proof of this in the Parliament held in November 1455. The Commons sent several times to demand of the Lords the appointment of a Protector for the kingdom, on account of the imbecility of Henry VI.; and the Archbishop of Canterbury urged the Lords to give a definitive answer, “for it is well known that the Commons will not give attention to any affairs of the Parliament until they have obtained an answer, and satisfaction of their request.”

  The principle had, therefore, become a fact, and was generally admitted as a fact.

  It was also during the course of this period that elections to Parliament, and the rights of Parliament in the matter of elections, began to be regulated. I have already observed in treating of the formation of the Parliament, that the electoral system had been definitively established by statutes of Henry IV. in 1405, and of Henry VI. in 1429 and 1432. Many facts prove that at this date the importance of the House of Commons had become so great, that the elections were a subject of frequent frauds. A number of statutes of detail, during the reign of Henry VI., were passed to prevent such frauds, and to regulate the procedure by which they should be investigated and punished. Then also, for the first time, we find conditions imposed on the choice of the electors. The ancient spirit of electoral institutions required that the persons elected should be inhabitants of the county or town which they were chosen to represent. This was converted into an express law by a statute of Henry V. in 1413, which was renewed by a statute of Henry VI., in 1444 ; but the law has fallen into desuetude by the force of circumstances, without ever having been formally repealed.

  The judgment of elections continued to belong, during this period, to the lords and the king’s council, who were frequently urged to exercise this prerogative by petitions from the Commons.

  It was also at this epoch that the judicial power, which originally resided in the entire Parliament, was declared to belong exclusively to the House of Lords. This declaration was made in 1399, at the suggestion of the Commons themselves, and by the mouth of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who said: “That the Commons were only petitioners, and that all judgment belonged to the king and lords; unless it was in statutes, grants of subsidies, and such like.” Since this period the Commons, when they desired to interfere in judgments otherwise than by impeachment, were obliged to employ the means of bills of attainder. They adopted this plan in the case of the Duke of Suffolk in 1450, and very frequently afterwards.

  These are the most notable marks of progress made, during this period, by the constitution and forms of Parliament. If we now consider Parliament, no longer in itself and its own internal proceedings, but in its relations to the government properly so called, we shall find that its rights and influence in matters of taxation, legislation, and public administration were the same as it had won under Edward III. and Richard II., and that it merely exercised them with greater assurance and less opposition. Henry IV. tried more than once to resist the power of the House of Commons; but it had set him upon the throne, and felt itself in a position to confine him within the limit of his authority. In 1404, it demanded of him the dismissal of four officers of his household; and he replied with singular humility “that he knew no cause why they should be removed, but as the Lords and Commons judged it for the interest of the kingdom and his own advantage, he would remove them, and would do as much in future to any minister who should incur the hatred of his people.” In 1406, the Commons submitted for the approbation of the king thirty articles which, they said, they had drawn up to ensure the better administration of public affairs, and which they demanded that the king’s officers should swear to observe. These articles, though of a temporary nature, were intended to repress many existing abuses, and to restrict the royal prerogative in certain respects. The king thought that he could not refuse his assent. Towards the end of his reign, Henry IV. appeared more bold, and less disposed to yield unresistingly to the control of the Parliament; but his death prevented all serious conflict. The glory of Henry V. and the passion for wars with France filled up his somewhat brief reign; the Parliament sustained him in all his measures, and even went so far as to grant him, in 1415, a subsidy for life, with power to use it arbitrarily and at his pleasure. During the minority of Henry VI., or rather during all that part of his reign which was not stained with civil war, and was in fact a long minority, the power of Parliament reached its climax, and absorbed the entire government. All matters were decided between the Lords and Commons; but it was too soon for the nation, thus left to its own guidance, to provide itself with a regular government. Violent factions arose among the aristocracy, which the House of Commons was not in a condition to repress. That great development of public institutions and liberties which had commenced under king John, and continued with such regularity since the reign of Edward III., was suddenly interrupted, and England plunged into the violent anarchy of the wars of the Red and White Roses, to emerge only into the despotism of the House of Tudor.

  How came it that institutions, already so strong and active, at least in appearance, decayed so rapidly? How came it that parliamentary government, which seemed in possession of all its essential rights and principles, paused in its progress, and yielded for more than a century to the rule of an almost absolute monarchy? Now that I have reached the conclusion of this course of lectures, I cannot investigate with you the causes of this apparently singular fact; but they may be discerned in another very remarkable fact—in the analogy which prevails between the history of England and the history of France at this period. In France, also, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we discern the appearances of attempts at representative government; these incoherent and superficial essays were succeeded by the wars of religion, the League, and the great disorders of the sixteenth century; and order was not restored, France did not regain repose and vigour, until the establishment of absolute power by Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV., and by the annihilation, as a political power, of that ancient feudal aristocracy who had been able neither to procure for the country, nor to assume for themselves, in the government of France, their legitimate and lasting position.

  In England, as you have just seen, representative government, originating in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not confine itself to incoherent and feeble essays; but established itself upon its essential foundations, and speedily obtained considerable development. The sanguinary conflicts for the succession to the throne, the protracted dissensions of the Red and White Roses, abruptly arrested its progress. Just as in France, from the reign of Louis XI., we hear nothing of attempts at the establishment of free institutions, so in England, during the reigns of Edward IV. and Richard III., the Parliament has no history. In the intervals of the civil war, it appears only as the instrument of the vengeance of the victorious party, and to pass bills of attainder against the leaders of the vanquished faction. It voted a few taxes, but this was the only one of its rights which it still maintained, and even this was eluded by the practice of Benevolences, or gifts in appearance voluntary, but in reality compulsory, of which we meet with a few examples in antecedent times, but which received great extension under Edward IV. Finally, more than once several years elapsed without a Parliament being convoked, especially from 1477 to 1482 ; such a suspension had been unprecedented since 1327.

  The civil wars of the fifteenth century, however, are only the superficial, and as it were, external cause of this sudden decadence of representative government in England; in order to discover its true cause, we must penetrate deeper into the state of society.

  Until this period, the three great forces in English society—the royal power, the aristocracy, and the Commons—had maintained intimate and continual relations amongst themselves, and had served each other by turns, either as an obstacle or as a means of success. It was by the aid of the great barons that the Commons had been enabled to win their liberties. The royal power, though strong in itself, had nevertheless been obliged to resort sometimes to the barons, and sometimes to the Commons. From the political concurrence of these three great social forces, and from the vicissitudes of their alliances and fortunes, the progress of representative government had resulted. Liberty can be established only where there does not exist in the State any constituted power sufficiently preponderant to usurp absolute authority.1

  In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the equipoise of these three forces ceased. The royal power disappeared in some sort, in consequence of the imbecility of Henry VI. and afterwards by the uncertainty of the right of succession to the crown. The government fell into the hands of the high aristocracy, who were divided and distracted by their intestine quarrels. The Commons were not in a condition to act the part of mediators between these terrible factions, and to impose upon them respect for public order. The knights of the shire took part in the train of the great barons with whom they were still dependently connected by a multitude of ties: and the towns, thus left alone, could do nothing, but were carried away in the general stream. In this state of disorder and violence, the Commons disappeared, or if they were not materially annihilated, their political power vanished. The high aristocracy worked its own dissolution; many great families were destroyed, and many more were ruined. Henry VII., at his accession, found only the wreck of that nobility which had made his predecessors tremble. The great barons, wearied with their own excesses, and stripped of a great part of their resources, were no longer inclined or able to continue that struggle against the royal power, which had been headed by their ancestors ever since the days of king John. On this side therefore, the royal power no longer had any powerful antagonists. On the other side, the Commons, wasted and enervated by civil war, were not in a condition to take the place of the high aristocracy in the struggle against the royal authority. They had taken part in the government as followers of the nobles; and when they found themselves standing almost alone in presence of the crown, it did not even occur to them that this interference was their right: they, therefore, contented themselves with defending a few special rights, particularly that of consenting to large subsidies; and, in other respects, they allowed themselves to be governed. Hence arose the government of Henry VIII., and at a later period, that of Elizabeth.

  More than a century was requisite to enable the English Commons—reinvigorated and strengthened, in a material point of view, by long years of order and prosperity, and in a moral point of view, by the reformation of religion—to acquire sufficient social importance and intellectual elevation to place themselves, in their turn, at the head of the resistance against despotism, and to draw the ancient aristocracy in their train. This great revolution in the state of society broke out in the reign of Charles I., and determined that political revolution, which, after fifty years of conflict, finally established representative government in England.

  the end

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  [1. ]For a presentation of the new French liberals, see the anthology New French Thought, ed. Mark Lilla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  [2. ]Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  [3. ]Initially, the doctrinaires’ group included François Guizot (1787–1874), Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845), Prosper de Barante (1782–1866), Victor de Broglie (1792–1867), Hercule de Serre (1776–1824), and Camille Jordan (1771–1821). Other important members such as Charles de Rémusat (1797–1875), Jean-Philibert Damiron (1794–1862), Theodore Jouffroy (1796–1842), and Pellegrino Rossi (1787–1848) joined the doctrinaires’ group later on. The very word doctrinaire is a misnomer; it was given to Guizot and his colleagues, not for the alleged rigidity of their doctrine, but for their professorial tone in parliamentary debates. For a presentation of Guizot and the French doctrinaires, see C.-H. Pouthas, Guizot pendant la Restauration (Paris: Plon, 1923), Luis Diez del Corral, El liberalismo doctrinario (Madrid: Instituto de estudios políticos, 1956), Douglas Johnson, Guizot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), and Gabriel de Broglie, Guizot (Paris: Perrin, 1990). Also see Larry Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” in The Idea of Freedom, ed. Alan Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 153–74; Siedentop, Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 20–40; and Siedentop, “Introduction,” to Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe (London: Penguin, 1997). For a detailed analysis of the doctrinaires’ political thought, see Aurelian Craiutu, The Difficult Apprenticeship of Liberty: Reflections on the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, Lexington Books, forthcoming).

  [4. ]Larry Siedentop, “Introduction,” in François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe (London: Penguin, 1997), p. vii.

  [5. ]“Biographical Notice of M. Guizot,” in François Guizot, The History of Civilization from the Fall of the Empire to the French Revolution, vol. 1 (London: Bohn, 1894), p. xvii.

  [6. ]During that time, Guizot was minister of foreign affairs and chief spokesman of the government in the Chamber of Deputies.

  [7. ]François Guizot, Mélanges d’histoire et de politique (Paris: Ladvocat, 1869), p. xiii.

  [8. ]For a comprehensive discussion of this topic, see Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958). Mellon also edited a substantial selection from Guizot—Historical Essays and Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972)—that included a few chapters from The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe.

  [9. ]François Guizot, History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, p. 221; also see pp. 11–12. All page numbers refer to the present edition.

  [10. ]Ibid., pp. 28–29, 90–91. Writes Guizot: “When we are about to speak of the institutions of a country at any given period, we must first understand what was the state of persons in that country at that period. . . . The first question to be solved, then, is that of the state of persons; we must precisely understand which are those classes that really figure in history” (ibid., p. 28). The dependence of political institutions on the social condition is also emphasized in Guizot’s Essays on the History of France (1823).

  [11. ]Guizot, History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, p. 9. Also see pp. 4–6, 222–25.

  [12. ]Ibid., pp. 47–55.

  [13. ]Ibid., pp. 370–71.

  [14. ]Ibid., pp. 69–70, 227, 295–97.

  [15. ]Ibid., pp. 285–97.

  [16. ]Ibid., p. 287.

  [17. ]Ibid., pp. 295–97.

  [18. ]See Guizot, Archives Philosophiques, Politiques et Littéraires, vol. 2 (Paris: Fournier, 1817), p. 184. Although this idea seems to have a strong statist connotation, Guizot’s position does not amount to an uncritical defense of state power. Guizot emphasized the importance of publicity as a new means of government and defended limited government (constitutionalism).

  [19. ]These words have often been detached from the larger context to which they belong. This is what Guizot in fact said: “Éclairez-vous, enrichissez-vous, améliorez la condition morale et matérielle de notre France: voilà les vraies innovations.” The phrase is taken from Le Moniteur, March 2, 1843. For more detail, see J. Allier, “Esquisse du personnage de Guizot,” in Actes du colloque François Guizot (Paris: Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français), pp. 27–45.

  [1. ]For more details on the historical and political context of the Bourbon Restoration, see C.-H. Pouthas, Guizot pendant la Restauration (Guizot During the Restoration) (Paris: Plon, 1923); Luis Diez del Corral, El liberalismo doctrinario(The Doctrinaire Liberalism) (Madrid: Instituto de estudios políticos, 1956); Douglas Johnson, Guizot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (The Guizot Moment) (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Gabriel de Broglie, Guizot (Paris: Perrin, 1990).

  [1. ]A few words about Guizot’s historical method are in order here. In Guizot’s view, historical investigations must combine respect for the past and the desire to contribute to the progress of society. Not surprisingly, his historical writings had a strong political agenda, as illustrated by the following statement: “Ever since the birth of modern societies, their condition has been such, that in their institution, in their aspirations, and in the course of their history, the representative form of government . . . has constantly loomed more or less distinctly in the distance, as the port at which they must at length arrive, in spite of the storms which scatter them, and the obstacles which confront and oppose their entrance” (The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, p. 12; all pages refer to the present edition, henceforth abbreviated as HORG). Guizot looked for a juste milieu, a middle ground between those who harbored only “proud disdain of the past” (ibid., p. 6) and those who remained mired in the past without being able to understand and adapt to the present (ibid., p. 8). To this effect, he criticized those who wanted to “dissever the present from its connection with former ages and to begin society afresh” (ibid., p. 7). Another important characteristic of Guizot’s historical method was the alliance of philosophy and history, the constant passing from the examination of circumstances to that of ideas, from the exposition of facts to the commentary of doctrines. He believed that, in order to apprehend correctly the character and consequences of facts, one must reduce them to general patterns and ideas. For more details, also see HORG, pp. 224-25. The same method underlies Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe, ed. Larry Siedentop (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 65-66, 201-202 (henceforth abbreviated as HCE).

  [2. ]For more details, see Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book II; Book XIV, 3; Book XVIII, 23; Book XXX, 19. Unlike Montesquieu, Guizot did not claim that representative institutions could be found “in the woods of Germany.” He pointed out that no general political order existed during the first ten centuries because of the incessant conflict between various political powers.

  [* ] On this see Guizot’s History of Civilization in France. Lectures vii and viii.

  [3. ]For more details, also see HORG, pp. 221–22. In HCE Guizot also referred to four epochs: the barbarian epoch; the feudal age; the age in which the first attempts at representative government were made; and, finally, the age marked by the progress of representative system in England and the development of absolute monarchy on the Continent.

  [4. ]This is an excellent summary of Guizot’s political vision. He believed that the mission of his (post-revolutionary) generation was to establish free representative institutions by reconciling freedom and order. This task required a long apprenticeship of liberty, a stern exercise of power, and “habits of laborious and patient application” (HORG, p. 17). Worth noting is Guizot’s emphasis on the arduousness of duty, self-denial (Kant’s influence is obvious in this regard!), laborious study, and determination. In Guizot’s view, the just political agenda was dictated by national (as opposed to factional) interests and had to follow both reason and the public interest. For more details, see Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, Vol. I (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1870), pp. 158–66, 193–205.

  [5. ]Worth noting is the relation between the social and the political order, a theme that looms large in Guizot’s writings, most notably in connection with his theory of democracy as social condition. Against those who argued that representative government was a dangerous modern institution, Guizot claimed that it had deep roots in the past and represented the only political regime that was suitable to the new spirit of the age. “Almost everywhere,” he wrote, “the representative form of government is demanded, allowed, or established. This fact . . . has certainly its roots in the past political career of the nations, as it has its motives in their present condition” (HORG, p. 11). In other words, in France, the establishment of representative government was demanded by the new social condition that was characterized by a new configuration of mores, laws, class structure, property relations, and economic interests. For more details on the doctrinaires’ theory of democracy as état social (social condition), see Charles de Rémusat, “L’esprit de réaction: Royer-Collard et Tocqueville” (“The Spirit of Reaction: Royer-Collard and Tocqueville”), Revue des deux mondes, October 15, 1861, pp. 777–813; Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville and the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires,” History of Political Thought, Vol. XX, No. 3, Autumn 1999, pp. 456–93.

  [1. ]For more details on the condition of Europe at the fall of the Roman Empire, see Guizot, HCE, Lecture II, pp. 27–46. Of utmost importance is Guizot’s emphasis on the coexistence and combat of different principles and systems of political organization (theocratic, monarchic, aristocratic, and popular) that had limited and modified each other over time, thereby contributing to the progress of European civilization. Guizot argued that “in Europe liberty has been the result of the variety of the elements of civilization, and of the state of struggle in which they have constantly existed” (ibid., p. 31).

  [* ]Honorius succeeded peaceably to the sovereignty of the West, which he had received from his father in the preceding year; while his elder brother Arcadius obtained possession of the East.

  [† ]The country on the north-west coast of Gaul, from the Loire to the Seine.

  [‡ ]The Roman province in the south of Gaul, so called from its chief city, Narbo or Narbonne; Caesar calls it simply Provincia, and hence comes the modern name of Provence.

  [* ] Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. i., pp. 180–181.

  [* ] In bc 113–101. Marius finally defeated the Teutones at Aix, in the year 102; and the Cimbri, near Vercelli, in the year 101.

  [2. ]Guardian of the Saxon coast.

  [* ] Nennius, cap. 31.

  [† ]History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. i. p. 320.

  [1. ]Guizot’s ideas on the relation between the social and the political order had a profound impact on Tocqueville. Guizot emphasized the role of “the habits of the heart”—mores, customs, and laws—as well as their impact on the development of political institutions. The seminal point made by Guizot is that it is necessary to study first society, its composition, mores, and the relations between the different classes and properties in order to understand the nature of political institutions. He also addressed the same topic in his Essays on the History of France, originally published in 1823.

  [* ]A hide of land was about 120 acres.

  [2. ]Upright and lawful man.

  [3. ]Guizot emphasized the importance of local institutions as safeguards of individual freedom and argued that, without local (municipal) institutions, there can be no liberties. Moreover, he considered the predominance of the municipal form and spirit to be the most important legacy of the ancient Roman civilization and went as far as to praise the barbarians’ keen sense of individual independence (for an extensive discussion of this topic, see HORG, pp. 156–60). Nonetheless, Guizot argued that, in the infancy of the European civilization, when the principle of individuality reigned supreme, the local assemblies and institutions did not contain the true principle of representative government, because they were based upon the principle of individual right. In Guizot’s view, the progress of civilization also implied a trend toward centralization; it is important to note that the tension between centralization and decentralization was a major theme in Guizot’s writings.

  [1. ]Chief.

  [2. ]Chief of centuriated land.

  [* ] From wapen, weapons, and tac, a touch, i.e. a shaking or striking of the arms; or from the same wapen, and tac, a taking or receiving of the vassal’s arms by a new lord in token of subjection; or because the people, in confirmation of union, touch the weapon of their lord. See Blackstone, In-trod., sec. 4. and Holinshed, vol. v. p. 37.

  [3. ]Men in charge of a hundred.

  [4. ]Before the leading men and the vast multitude of other confidants.

  [5. ]This is the first reference to the “true” principles of representative government, a theme to which Guizot frequently returns in this book. For him, representation was not a mechanism to collect individual wills, but a process by which the fragments of reason disseminated in society are collected and brought (through elections and publicity) to form the government of society. This passage also highlights the centrality of political capacity to Guizot’s definition of representative government (power must be granted to the “most capable” citizens). For more details on this issue, see HORG, pp. 52–54, 226–27, 295–97, 345–47.

  [1. ]The comparison between England and France is a major theme in HORG. In his Memoirs, Guizot explained: “Ce fut à cette époque que je m’adonnai sérieusement a l’étude de l’Angleterre, de ses institutions et des longues luttes qui les ont fondées. Passionnément épris de l’avenir politique de ma patrie, je voulais savoir avec précision à travers quelles vérités et quelles erreurs, parquels efforts persévérants et quelles transactions prudentes un grand peuple avait réussi à conquérir et à conserver un gouvernement libre” (Mémoires, Vol. I, Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1870, p. 318). Like Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant, Guizot wanted to understand why England and France had followed two different patterns of development and what had made possible the consolidation of moderate constitutional monarchy across the Channel. In Guizot’s view, the key point was to look at the relations and alliances between the monarch, the nobles, and the commons in the two countries. In England, the king could not, as in France, make use of the Commons to annihilate the political rights and privileges of the aristocracy, without substituting new liberties in their place. A portion of the feudal class united with the people in order to defend their liberties against the monarch (Tocqueville developed this idea in Old Regime and the Revolution). Guizot admired the division of powers in England, the tradition of self-government, the effective limitation of sovereignty, and the absence of absolute power; for more details, see HORG, pp. 89, 221–30, 247, 357–58, 377–81, 433–35. In his History of Civilization in France, Guizot argued that “English civilization has been especially directed toward social perfection; toward the amelioration of the external and public condition of men; toward the amelioration, not only of their material but also of their moral condition; toward the introduction of more justice, more prosperity into society; toward the development of right as well as of happiness” (I quote from François Guizot, Historical Essays and Lectures, ed. Stanley Mellon, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, p. 271). For a comprehensive discussion of the image of England in nineteenth-century French political thought, see Pierre Réboul, Le mythe anglais dans la littérature française sous la Restauration (The English Myth in the French Literature During the Restoration) (Lille: Bibliothèque Universitaire, 1962).

  [2. ]In Guizot’s view, power and excellence (i.e., exquisite talent, qualities, and abilities) were connected; power had always been granted to “the most brave and courageous ones,” and had never been based on a social contract among equals. Note that Guizot did not equate superior force with superior virtue; he only claimed that, in virtue of a natural law sui generis, the most assertive and brave individuals had always managed to impose their will and extend their domination. Guizot developed this idea in Des moyens de gouvernment et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France (On the Means of Government and Opposition in the Actual State of France) (Paris: Ladvocat, 1821), pp. 163–64.

  [1. ]Guizot’s critique of Montesquieu’s classification of governments must be understood in relation to his theory of the sovereignty of reason. For Guizot, the key issue was not who exercises power, but the source and limitations of the sovereign power; he also argued that it would be a mistake to concentrate on the exterior characteristics of representative government. The upshot of his view is that no individual or group can ever be granted the possession of an inherent right to sovereignty. Hence, Guizot proposed a new classification of governments depending on whether they attribute sovereignty as a right to individuals or to reason, truth, and justice. Only those forms of government that recognize the sovereignty of reason, truth, and justice can be said to be legitimate. For more details on the new classification proposed by Guizot, see HORG, pp. 52, 64–65. In Guizot’s view, representative government was predicated on the assumption that sovereignty does not reside in any person, and that all powers must be directed to the fulfillment of the precepts of reason, truth, and justice.

  [2. ]This is another important passage in which Guizot discusses the goal of representative government; in his view, representative institutions must create social unity, preserve liberty, and raise a barrier to tyranny (absolute power) and anarchy. Borrowing a famous aphorism from Pascal, Guizot argues that representative government should be seen as a means of bringing multiplicity to unity and preventing the formation of a fallacious unity (which is not a genuine expression of multiplicity). Moreover, the very principle of representative government is “the destruction of all sovereignty of permanent right” (HORG, p. 371). In Guizot’s view, publicity plays a key role in helping representative institutions to draw forth from the bosom of society the “veritable and legitimate aristocracy” in order to constitute the government of society. Writes Guizot: “This end is only attained by the triumph of the true majority—the minority being constantly listened to with respect. If the majority is displaced by artifice, there is falsity. If the minority is removed from the struggle beforehand, there is oppression. In either case representative government is corrupted” (ibid., p. 348). For more details, see ibid., pp. 54, 57, 345–48, 371–72.

  [3. ]In Guizot’s view, publicity is the cornerstone of representative government because it creates new bonds between society and government. Publicity requires and calls upon all individuals who possess rights to enter upon a common search for reason, truth, and justice. Liberty of the press and the openness of debates in deliberative assemblies are instrumental in limiting political power and preventing the usurpation of the sovereignty of right. It is publicity that places the executive and legislative powers under the control of the citizens, while freedom of the press prompts them to seek reason, truth, and justice in common. Guizot argues that because of publicity and freedom of the press, power is no longer opaque for society, as more transparency and new forms of communication are created between government and society. As to the relation between publicity and elections, Guizot believed that publicity cannot be a substitute for elections and that, without publicity, there can be no true elections. “Où la publicité manque,” he wrote, “il peuty avoir des élections, des assemblées, des délibérations; mais les peuples n’y croient pas et ils ont raison. . . . La publicité seule corrige, en grande partie, les fâcheux effets d’une mauvaise machine politique” (Guizot, “Des garanties légales de la liberté de la presse” [On Legal Guarantees for Freedom of the Press], Archives Philosophiques, Politique, et Littéraires, Vol. V, Paris: 1818, pp. 186–87). For more details on publicity, see Guizot, HORG, pp. 62–63, 69–70, and Aurelian Craiutu, The Difficult Apprenticeship of Liberty: Reflections on the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, Lexington Books, forthcoming).

  [1. ]The difference between the principle of representative government and political democracy is another key idea in Guizot’s political thought. It will be recalled that Guizot welcomed democracy as a social condition while also arguing for limited franchise. This ambivalent attitude toward democracy was widely shared by nineteenth-century liberals. Haunted by the specter of the darkest episodes of the Revolution, Guizot feared the potentially destructive elements of democracy. Nonetheless, he defended civil equality and civil rights, which he considered to be fundamental principles of the new social order. Furthermore, the distinction between representative government and political democracy must be related to another important dichotomy in Guizot’s political philosophy between the sovereignty of reason and popular sovereignty. Unlike political democracy, representative government grants power and political rights only in proportion to the capacity of individuals to act according to reason and justice. Therefore, representative government is not purely and simply the government of the numerical majority, but the “government by the majority of those who are qualified to govern” (HORG, p. 62). For another important statement on political democracy, also see Guizot, “De la démocratie dans les sociétés modernes,” Revue française, Vol. III, 1837, pp. 139–225.

  [2. ]This is yet another important passage in which Guizot elaborates on the distinction between the sovereignty of reason and the sovereignty of the people. It will be recalled that for Guizot, the legitimacy of power does not necessarily result from the number of voices that might support a certain course of action, since justice and wisdom are not necessarily present in the will of the majority. Moreover, Guizot argues that it is false to assume that the entire people could ever exercise political power in the proper sense of the word.

  [1. ]As in the case of other nineteenth-century liberals, Guizot emphasized constitutionalism, the division of powers, elections, and publicity, which is another way of saying that Guizot’s liberalism was fundamentally opposed to any form of absolute power. In his view, the only legitimate sources of right were reason, truth, and justice. The division of powers—i.e., the existence of several powers supplementary to each other in the exercise of actual sovereignty—was a natural consequence of the principle that no power or individual can be granted an inherent right to sovereignty (sovereignty of right). For more details, see HORG, pp. 68–69, 328–29.

  [* ] This event is clearly and minutely related by Daru, in his “ Histoire de Venise. ” (Vol. i. pp. 449–464.)

  [2. ]With a vast crowd surrounding.

  [1. ]A thousand Franks, a thousand Sarmatians, / Once indeed we slew.

  [2. ]More without a ruler than with liberty.

  [3. ]Guizot refers here to Jean Charles Léonard Sismondi (1773–1842), an influential Swiss historian and economist. Among his most important works were Nouveaux principes d’économie politique (New Principles of Political Economy), De la richesse commerciale, ou Principes d’économie politique appliquée à la législation du commerce (On Commercial Wealth: Principles of Political Economy Applied to Commercial Legislation), Études sur les constitutions des peuples libres (Studies on the Constitutions of Free Peoples).

  [1. ]That they never undertake to choose from the loins of another a king for all time.

  [1. ]Inspectors of the state of the kingdom and of the conduct of the nobles.

  [* ] Lothaire, Pepin, and Louis the Germanic, the three elder sons of Louis the Débonnair.

  [2. ]For a comprehensive discussion of this theme, see Guizot, HCE, Lectures VII–XI, pp. 119–96.

  [1. ]This is an excellent illustration of Guizot’s sociological acumen and method. His argument is that, in order to understand political institutions, one must start by studying the condition of persons and landed property that alone can account for the direction of social change. Guizot points to the great diversity in the conditions of property in the Middle Ages (allodial or independent, beneficiary, and tributary) and the ensuing inequality in the amount of wealth. He argues that the condition and the relations of persons did not originally depend on the condition of territorial properties and cannot be deduced from them. He also claims that the destruction of feudal property had led to the atomization of society that contributed to the centralization of government. For more details, see HORG, pp. 112–15.

  [2. ]Salic land is the maternal land of the Ripuarian Franks, the land acquired by notice of lot of the Burgundians, the inheritance of the Saxons, and the paternal land of the formulas of Marculf.

  [3. ]Property, possession, estate, inheritance.

  [1. ]Under loan.

  [* ] There are different etymologies of the word vassus, from haus, a house; from gast, a guest; from fest, fast, established; from geselle (vassallus).—The word Gasinde, which expresses the familia, so far as it comprises the individuals inhabiting the house, the guests in opposition to the mancipia, induces me to think that vassus comes from gast. (Anton, Gesch. der Deuts. Land., vol. i. p. 526.)
  
  We read in the Salic law (tit. 43): Si quis romanum hominem convivam regis occiderit, sol. 300 culpabilis judicetur.2 The Roman editors of this law would have rendered the word gast by conviva.

  [3. ]A vassal bound to serve his superior; a loyal subject to the king.

  [4. ]Without any fee.

  [1. ]Vassals of our vassals.

  [2. ]The same idea is discussed in HCE: “Wherever individuality predominates almost exclusively, wherever man consider no one but himself, and his ideas do not extend beyond himself, and he obeys nothing but his own passions, society (I mean a society somewhat extended and permanent) becomes for him almost impossible. Such, however, was the moral condition of the conquerors of Europe, at the time upon which we are now preoccupied. I remarked in my last lecture that we are indebted to the Germans for an energetic sentiment of individual liberty, of human individuality. But in a state of extreme barbarism and ignorance, this sentiment becomes selfishness in all its brutality, in all its unsociability. From the fifth to the eighth century it was at this point among the Germans. They cared only for their own interests, their own passions, their own will: how could they be reconciled to a condition even approximating to the social? . . . Constantly did society attempt to form itself; constantly was it destroyed by the act of man, by the absence of the moral conditions under which alone it can exist” (HCE, p. 56). Also see HORG, p. 133.

  [3. ]Guizot was certainly one of the first authors to perceive the connection between two aspects of political life that account for the paradoxical evolution of liberal societies. First, Guizot grasped that, contrary to the tenets of classical liberalism, the development of representative government inevitably leads to a considerable extension of the power of the state over civil society. Second, he understood that this extension was furthered by social demand and explained that the two tendencies were not contradictory (as many believed), but represented, in fact, the two sides of the same coin.

  [1. ]Here Guizot argues that true liberty cannot exist in the infancy of societies when individuals struggle to maintain and assert their independence. In his view, true liberty cannot be secured in the absence of a genuine and stable political society which alone can provide guarantees for the continuance of individual liberties. That is why liberties can only be safeguarded by the institutions and principles of representative government; to use Guizot’s own words, “liberty cannot exist except by the possession of rights. . . . Where liberties are not rights, and where rights are not powers, neither rights nor liberties exist” (ibid., pp. 177, 331). This idea looms large in Guizot’s thought and should be related to his definition of liberty. In Lecture 19, he distinguished between two ways in which we usually conceive of liberty. “First, as the independence of the individual having no law but his own will; and secondly, as the enfranchisement of every individual from every other individual will, which is contrary to reason and justice” (ibid., p. 134).

  [* ] That is, of course, districts analogous to these divisions.

  [1. ]This long discussion sheds light on Guizot’s distinction between moral and natural liberty, i.e., between social freedom and individual independence. For Guizot, liberty is not the freedom to do what ones pleases, but the freedom to do what the precepts of reason, truth, and justice require us to do. In other words, liberty is respectable only insofar as it is defined as the power of discovering and translating into practice the principles of reason, truth, and justice. Writes Guizot: “Liberty, as existing in the individual man, is the power to conform his will to reason . . . ; accordingly the right to liberty . . . is derived from the right to obey nothing that is not reason”(HORG, p. 296). Guizot developed the same idea in his unfinished treatise Philosophie politique: de la souveraineté (Political Philosophy: On Sovereignty), where he pointed out that liberty cannot be identified with individual sovereignty or will, since no individual will can ever be the source of legitimate power. On the contrary, human beings are (and can remain) free only as long as they obey a transcendent law which does not depend on their will or consent. The upshot of this idea is that only the law of reason, truth, justice can legitimately command universal allegiance. For more details on Guizot’s theory of liberty, see HORG, pp. 285–97.

  [2. ]For a detailed discussion of Hincmar’s letter (written in 882), see HORG, pp. 143–48.

  [3. ]Royal judges; also see p. 149.

  [1. ]This is the conclusion of a long discussion that started from the assumption that true liberty cannot exist in the infancy of society. Guizot is keen on pointing out that there is no trace of the principle of representative government in the general assemblies of the Germanic tribes, since they were based on the principle of individual right (might), not upon any ideas of general law and public interest.

  [1. ]That there be public hospitality with the inhabitants of Coere.

  [2. ]Assembly.

  [3. ]Free peoples, allied cities, allied kings, provinces.

  [4. ]When property had been established by the law.

  [5. ]Given over on assurance.

  [6. ]For a comprehensive discussion of the role of Christianity in the progress of the European civilization, see HCE, Lectures V and VI (pp. 82–118). Guizot concludes: “Upon the whole, the influence [of the Church] has been salutary; not only has it sustained and fertilized the intellectual movement in Europe, but the system of doctrines and precepts . . . was far superior to anything with which the ancient world was acquainted. There was at the same time movement and progress” (HCE, p. 109). Guizot’s reevaluation of the role of the attitude of the Church toward the modern world was a response to the anti-clericalism of many eighteenth-century writers. To this effect, he argued that some of the principles upon which the doctrines of the Church were founded, such as the equality of all creatures in the face of God, played a key role in the political development of Western Europe. In other words, Guizot claimed that, far from being a rejection of the ideals of Christianity as ultra-conservative writers (Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald) argued, the movement to democracy as social condition (equality of conditions) reflected and followed Christian ideas and principles.

  [* ] Novell. Leo. 46.

  [1. ]Chief of horsemen or foot-soldiers.

  [2. ]The notion of capacity (capacité) plays a central role in Guizot’s political philosophy and his conception of representative government. In his view, political capacity requires a certain degree of wealth, education, independence, intellectual maturity, reason, and liberty and is defined as “the capacity to act according to reason and justice” (HORG, p. 61). This principle of distinction was predicated on a twofold assumption: (1) electors must have certain qualities in order to be allowed to vote; (2) elected representatives should be highly distinguished citizens who have a stake in the preservation of the social order. On this view, only those who possess a certain amount of wealth and education could be free from dependence on the will of others. They alone were considered capable of developing a sound, enlightened, and free political judgment, since they were free to dispose of their person and wealth and were in a position to rise to some ideas of social interest. Finally, it is important to note that Guizot and the other doctrinaires did not conceive of political capacity as a form of aristocratic inheritance. They insisted that limited suffrage was not supposed to create an oligarchy of wealth, “the most absurd of all types of oligarchies” according to Royer-Collard. For more details, see La vie politique de M. Royer-Collard: ses discours et ses écrits (Royer-Collard’s Political Life: His Discourses and Writings), ed. Prosper de Barante, Vol. I, Paris: Didier, pp. 409–10). As Guizot pointed out, “no one is recognized as possessing an inherent right to an office or a function . . . as soon as the capacity is presumed or proved, it is placed in a position where it is open to a kind of legal suspicion” (HORG, p. 62).

  [* ] Probably the Basques of the present day.

  [1. ]Grandees.

  [* ] For the legend of Count Julian, and other information regarding this most interesting period of Spanish history, see Washington Irving’s “Legends of the Conquest of Granada and Spain,” in Bohn’s edition of his works.

  [1. ]Ancient matters newly corrected.

  [2. ]This passage that explains the relation between human and divine law is essential for understanding the theological background of Guizot’s political thought and his doctrine of the sovereignty of reason (on this issue, also see HCE, pp. 50–51). In Guizot’s view, man-made laws are legitimate only insofar as they are in conformity with the dictates of reason, truth, and justice “which constitute the true law.” Two corollaries of this idea are worth pointing out. First, no human will can confer legitimacy to power since the principle of legitimacy has a transcendent origin. Legitimate power does not come from below; only that power which acts according to the “true” law of reason, justice, and truth is legitimate and comes “from above” (ibid., p. 189). Second, force can never be the foundation of political legitimacy. As Guizot himself explains in HCE, one of the most important characteristics of political legitimacy “is to reject physical force as a source of power, and to connect it with a moral idea, with a moral force, with the idea of right, of justice, and of reason” (HCE, p. 50).

  [3. ]You will be the king of this if you do just things; if, however, you do not do [ just things], you will not be [king].

  [4. ]With the entire people, with the people giving assent.

  [5. ]The law of retaliation.

  [6. ]By force and arms.

  [7. ]On the slaughter and death of men.

  [1. ]With a vast crowd surrounding.

  [2. ]General assemblies.

  [3. ]With the entire palace council, with the assent of the priests and the majority of the palace, from the palace council.

  [4. ]Mallum: assembly in which important debates were held; placitum: agreement.

  [5. ]Seneschal.

  [6. ]Commander of a thousand, commander of five hundred, commander of a hundred, commander of ten, defender, keeper of accounts.

  [7. ]Hearers, assessors.

  [8. ]But who will guard the guardians themselves?

  [9. ]Juan de Mariana (1536–1624) was educated at the University of Acala, taught in Paris, and then moved to Toledo, where he remained until his death. He was the author of Historiae derebus Hispaniae and De Rege et regis institutione, an important philosophical treatise on the origin and nature of the state. Karl Friedrich von Savigny (1779–1861) was a distinguished German historian whose most famous work was Geschichte des Römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, translated into English by William Holloway as The History of the Roman Law During the Middle Ages (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979). The article quoted by Guizot and published in Edinburgh Review (vol. 31, pp. 94–132), a review of M. Sempere’s Histoire des Cortés d’Espagne (Bordeaux, 1815), was written by John Allen.

  [* ] Edinburgh Review, vol. xxxi., pp. 94–132.

  [10. ]The leader of an army, the commander of a militia of a shire or district (also heretogas).

  [11. ]The chief officer of the household, court, administration, or military force of a ruler. It derives from comes stabuli, count or officer of the stable, marshal (in the Theodosian Code, ad 438).

  [12. ]Such men from those surrounding.

  [13. ]Kings are chosen based on virtue.

  [14. ]Compurgation is the action of clearing a man from a charge or accusation by the oaths of a number of other citizens. This mode of trial prevalent among the old Teutonic peoples began to lose its importance as trial by jury imposed itself in the twelfth century.

  [1. ]These passages are important for understanding the relation between history and politics in Guizot’s writings. Guizot’s method combines broad philosophical views with historical narratives; he writes a political history that seeks to offer political instruction by explaining how rights and liberties were acquired and how various opinions and interests could be combined in political life. In Guizot’s view, a thorough acquaintance with the history of free peoples is necessary to every citizen who wants to get involved in politics.

  [2. ]Not only is a kingly, but a lawful and civil power.

  [3. ]The emphasis on the division and limitation of power and sovereignty is central to Guizot’s liberalism. He pointed out that the limitation of powers and the affirmation of the right of resistance to oppression were matters of public right in England. Guizot also mentioned that, in England, local powers subsisted and successfully defined and regulated their own action vis-à-vis the central power, while on the Continent, centralization resulted from the vanishing of local powers and the rise of absolute power (HORG, p. 240‒47). Not surprisingly, Guizot believed that, if France were to build a true representative government, the country ought to reinvent local autonomy and local institutions. Madame de Staël’s book Considerations on the French Revolution is essential reading for understanding how England became an object of praise and admiration during the Bourbon Restoration in France. For more details on Guizot’s understanding of English constitutionalism, see HORG, pp. 300‒305, 353‒58, 377‒81, as well as the note on p. 43.

  [1. ]Upright men.

  [1. ]The nobility of almost the entire kingdom, the union of the entire kingdom.

  [2. ]With his princes discussing the state of the kingdom and restoring peace.

  [3. ]To be among the judges of the king’s court.

  [4. ]Of second rank.

  [5. ]The spectacle of a multitude.

  [1. ]This passage is important for understanding the relation between rights and liberties in Guizot’s political thought. The key idea is that liberties must be duly protected by rights if they are to be effective; free government requires not only liberties and rights (as guarantees), but also forces capable of maintaining them in practice. Not surprisingly, Guizot was a great admirer of Magna Charta, “the most complete and important [charter] that had yet appeared” (HORG, pp. 266‒67), by virtue of which the rights of all three orders of the English nation were equally respected and promoted.

  [2. ]Charter of the king concerning certain laws to be observed steadfastly throughout all England.

  [* ]The original is lost, but a copy of it exists in the Red Book of the Exchequer, which gives a strong presumption for its authenticity. Besides, the charter of Henry I. makes a distinct allusion to it.

  [* ]The original of this charter still exists in the archives of Durham Cathedral.

  [1. ]These passages explain Guizot’s opposition to Rousseau’s ideas on liberty, representation, sovereignty, and social contract. It is worth noting that Guizot’s critique of Rousseau differed, for example, from Constant’s. If the latter criticized the author of the Social Contract for advocating aflawed theory of (absolute) sovereignty that threatened individual freedom, Guizot loathed Rousseau’s “individualism,” which he believed to be “destructive not only of all government, but also of all society” (HORG, p. 288). Unlike Rousseau, Guizot believed that popular sovereignty might lead to despotism and anarchy instead of liberty. Reason, he argued, is superior to individual will; that is why, for Guizot, Rousseau’s famous definition of liberty as obedience to the laws we have prescribed to ourselves was mistaken. For a comprehensive discussion of the legacy of Rousseau, see Jean Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France après la Révolution (Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Post-revolutionary France) (Paris: Armand Collin, 1972).

  [* ]An eighth, a tenth, &c. was a money tax levied on counties, cities, boroughs, or other towns, and so called because it was the eighth, tenth, &c. of the sum at which these counties, towns, &c. had been anciently valued under the reign of William I. Thus each town knew what it had to contribute. The valuations were contained in the Doomsday Book. (Parliam. Hist., vol. i. p. 83.)

  [* ]A copy of this charter will be found, in a note, at the end of this lecture. It is of all others the most explicit in favour of public liberties. It was given at Ghent, Nov. 5, 1297; the original is preserved in the British Museum.

  [1. ]With the law of our crown preserved.

  [* ]A copy of this bull will be found in a note at the end of this lecture.

  [* ]Du Contrat Social, b. iii. c. xv.

  [* ]Du Contrat Social, b. ii. c. i.

  [1. ]This lecture, a true tour de force, is one of the most important theoretical chapters of the book and could be seen as an excellent outline of Guizot’s political vision. Here Guizot elaborates on “true” representation, the distinction between reason and will, the object of representative system, Rousseau’s “mistake,” the role of publicity, and political capacity. For another statement of Guizot’s political philosophy, see his Philosophie politique: de la souveraineté (Political Philosophy: On Sovereignty). For more details on Guizot’s reading of Rousseau’s Social Contract, see n. 1 on p. 273.

  [* ]This is expressly indicated by two writs, one in the reign of John, dated Feb. 17, 1208; the other issued by Henry III., July 12, 1237.

  [* ]One in 1220, the other in 1225.

  [† ]Dated November 15, 1214.

  [1. ]These pages contain important insights on the formation of Parliament as a fundamental institution of representative government. Also see HORG, pp. 311‒19, 399‒435.

  [* ]The five towns of Dover, Sandwich, Romney, Hastings and Hythe, were called the Cinque ports.

  [† ]It must not be forgotten that this course of lectures was delivered in 1821, ten years before the passing of the Reform Bill.

  [* ]“Consuetudo est regni Angliae quod in negotiis contingentibus statum ejusdem regni, requiritur consilium omnium quos res tangit.”

  [† ]“Consilio magnatum suorum factum crat, et ideo absque eorum consilio non crat revocandum.”

  [* ]Thus Edward summoned to the Parliament of Shrewsbury (1283) a hundred and eleven earls or barons; to the Parliament of Westminster (1295), he only summoned fifty-three; and out of the hundred and eleven who were present in 1283, sixty were absent in 1295. The latter Parliaments of his reign furnish several instances of similar irregularities. Thus we find at this time ninety-eight lay proceres who were only once summoned to the Parliament, and fifty who were summoned once, twice, or three times. There was a distinction among the barons who were summoned individually: some were summoned by virtue of their feudal tenure, others, only in virtue of the writ of convocation, whether they were or were not immediate vassals of the king. These last exercised in the Parliament the same rights as the former, only it does not appear that the sole fact of a writ of convocation conferred upon them a hereditary right. There are even several examples of ecclesiastical peers who were convened by special writs, and who obtained a discharge from the obligation to attend the Parliament by proving that they held no fief of the king. The practice of creating barons or peers was of later introduction: first, by a statute of the Parliament (under Edward III.); secondly, by letters patent from the king (under Richard II.).

  [* ]It may be seen in the Black Book of the Exchequer that Godfrey Fitzwilliam, in Bucking-hamshire, held twenty-seven knights’ fiefs of Earl Walter Gifford, whilst Guilbon Bolbech, in the same county, held of the king only one knight’s fief.

  [* ]Before the reform of Parliament in 1832.

  [1. ]This is a good illustration of Guizot’s views on the division (separation) of powers. He believed that the art of politics requires the harmonious co-existence of various powers and principles that would limit and control each other.

  [2. ]Guizot’s views on what a “sound” electoral system should look like are worth examining in detail. He admired the English electoral system because it was linked to local liberties, rights, and strong habits of self-government. Those who had the right to vote, claimed Guizot, were not merely electors, but also citizens who participated in the direction of local affairs; in other words, the right to vote must be rooted in the mores and practices of society. That is why Guizot argued that it is not sufficient to summon the electors together and ask them to choose their representatives; instead, they must know each other well, understand thoroughly what they are supposed to do, and be entirely familiar with those who compete for office. The key idea is that electors must not listen to their transient passions and impulses that might distort their judgment, but must be united by common interests and ties. On this topic, also see HORG, pp. 340‒52.

  [3. ]The originality of Guizot’s theory of power must be underscored here. He criticized those classical liberals who wanted government to be a humble servant and its tasks to be strictly limited. In Guizot’s opinion, to ask the state to be nothing but a passive and powerless umpire would amount to subverting authority and society alike. Believing in the virtues of wise political crafting, Guizot defended a more nuanced theory of power that was supposed to replace the negative view of state power held by classical liberals. He believed that it would be mistaken to claim that power is a priori (intrinsically) bad, for this would amount to misunderstanding the dignity of power properly exercised. What we should fear, he concluded, is not power tout court, but unaccountable, absolute power; this explains the need to prevent actual power-holders from using their influence in order to transform their de facto power into an inherent right. For a clear statement of Guizot’s constitutionalism, see HORG, pp. 371‒76, where he speaks about individual rights, the separation of powers, and the need to divide the legislative power into two houses. “There is not then,” writes Guizot, “and there cannot be, any omnipotence by right, that is to say, any power which should be allowed to say: ‘that is good and just because I have so decided it’; and every effort of political science, every institution, ought to tend to the prevention of such a power being anywhere formed; and should provide that the actual omnipotence which exists under so many names in society, should everywhere meet with restraints and obstacles enough to prevent its conversion into an omnipotence by right” (ibid., p. 371). An excellent summary of Guizot’s theory of power can also be found in his Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition (1821) and HCE, pp. 228‒45.

  [4. ]This lecture and the next one (16) are particularly important for understanding Guizot’s views on the relation between political capacity and representative government. He was keen on pointing out that it would be dangerous and futile to try to regulate once and forever the conditions and signs of electoral capacity, because these qualifications change as new capacities arise and impose themselves. The key point is that capacity confers right, since capacity is a fact which is independent of law and which law cannot destroy or ignore. It is also worth noting that, in Guizot’s opinion, the individual superiorities who will seek a place in government ought not to obtain it for their personal interest, but must always follow what the public interest and the common good dictate (HORG, p. 369‒71). In Guizot’s view, representatives ought to be those who are most capable to discover, by means of their common deliberations, and translate into practice the dictates of reason, truth, and justice (also see ibid., pp. 346‒48). Their capacity must, however, be constantly legitimated and proved in front of the entire nation.

  [1. ]This is a clear statement of Guizot’s views on what good government requires: union of electoral right with all other rights; inclusion of “natural superiorities” in the direction of political affairs; political prudence in promoting reforms; direct elections; bestowal of electoral rights according to political capacity. This was, in fact, Guizot’s juste milieu theory, a cautious middle ground between the ideal of Revolution and Reaction. As he wrote in his Mémoirs: “Ce fut à ce mélange d’élévation philosophique et de modération politique, à ce respect rationnel des droits et des faits divers, à ces doctrines à la fois nouvelles et conservatrices, antirévolutionnaires sans être rétrogrades et modestes au fond, quoique souvent hautaines dans leur langage, que les doctrinaires dûrent leur importance comme leur nom.... Les doctrinaires répondaient à un besoin réel et profond quoique obscurément senti des esprits en France, ils avaient à coeur l’honneur intel-lectuel comme le bon ordre de la société, leurs idées se présentaient comme propres à régénerer en même temps qu’à clore la Révolution. (Guizot, Mémoires, Vol. 1, pp. 157‒58).

  [* ]These grievances were eleven in number, viz: 1. That the king’s purveyors took all kinds of provisions without giving any security for the payment; 2. That additional duties had been imposed on wine, on cloth, and on other foreign imports; 3. That by the debasement of the coin, the value of all commodities had been advanced; 4. That the stewards and marshals of the king’s household held pleas, which did not fall under their cognizance; 5. And exercised their authority beyond the verge, that is, a circuit of twelve leagues round the king’s person; 6. That no clerks were appointed, as they had been under the last monarch, to receive the petitions of the Commons in Parliament; 7. That the officers appointed to take articles for the king’s use in fairs and markets, took more than they ought, and made a profit of the surplus; 8. That in civil suits, men were prevented from obtaining their right by writs under the privy seal; 9. That felons eluded the punishment of their crimes by the ease with which charters of pardon were obtained; 10. That the constables of the castles held common pleas at their gates without any authority; and 11. That the escheators ousted men of their inheritances, though they had appealed to the king’s courts.—Rot. Parl. i. 441.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. iv. p. 1174.

  [* ]Mr. Hallam is of opinion that the interference of the Commons in regard to petitions relating to matters of private interest originated solely in this desire to repress the encroachments of the Privy Council. “From the first years of Henry V.,” he says, “though not, I think, earlier, the Commons began to concern themselves with the petitions of individuals to the Lords or Council.... Many of the requests preferred to them were such as could not be granted without transcending the boundaries of law. A just inquietude as to the encroachments of the king’s council had long been manifested by the Commons: and finding remonstrances ineffectual, they took measures for preventing such usurpations of legislative power, by introducing their own consent to private petitions. These were now presented by the hands of the Commons, and in very many instances passed in the form of statutes with the express assent of all parts of the legislature. Such was the origin of private bills, which occupy the greater part of the rolls in Henry V. and VI.’s Parliament.” (Hallam’s Middle Ages, vol. ii. p. 224.)
  
  Beginning from the reign of Edward III. (1322), or, as Mr. Hallam thinks, from that of Edward II. (1310), we find both Houses, at the opening of the session, each appoint a committee for the purpose, not only of receiving, but of examining petitions, in order to enquire into the truth of the facts stated, before the petitions became the subject of deliberation in Parliament. (Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 230.) It is doubtful whether the committees received directly the petitions addressed to the king in council, or whether those which fell under the cognizance of the Parliament were referred to them by the officers of the king. In 1410, we meet with an instance of a private petition, addressed to the Commons, and transmitted by them to the king, with their recommendation. (Report of the Lords Commissioners, p. 362.) For the mode of the presentation of petitions, both to the Privy Council, and to the House of Lords, see Hallam’s dissertation on the Privy Council, in the second volume of his History of the Middle Ages.

  [* ]“At the request of the commons of his realm, by their petitions laid before him and his council, and by the assent of the prelates, earls, barons, and other nobles, in the said Parliament assembled.”

  [† ]“By the assent of the prelates, earls and barons, and of all the commons of the realm, in the said Parliament assembled.”

  [‡ ]“These are the things which our lord the king, the prelates, lords, and commons have ordained in this present Parliament.”

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 128.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 93.

  [† ]Ibid. p. 106.

  [‡ ]Ibid. p. 115.

  [§ ]Ibid. p. 122.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 131.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 104.

  [* ]Rot. Parl. ii. 329.

  [* ]The influence of the king upon elections was manifested at this period in a direct manner, or nearly so. Two edicts of Edward III., passed at an interval of more than forty years, prove this. The first, dated on the 3rd of November, 1330, concludes thus: “And because that, before this time, several knights, representatives for counties, were people of ill designs and maintainers of false quarrels, and would not suffer that our good subjects should show the grievances of the common people, nor the matters which ought to be redressed in Parliament, to the great damage of us and our subjects;—we, therefore, charge and command that you cause to be elected, with the common consent of your county, two, the most proper and most sufficient knights, or sergeants of the said county, that are the least suspected of ill designs, or common maintainers of parties, to be of our said Parliament, according to the form of our writ which you have with you. And this we expect you shall do, as you will eschew our anger and indignation.” (Parl. Hist. vol. i. p. 84.) This writ was issued at the time when the young king had just delivered himself from the yoke of Mortimer and his faction. The second writ, dated in 1373, orders the sheriffs “to cause to be chosen two dubbed knights, or the most worthy, honest, and discreet esquires of that county, the most expert in feats of arms, and no others; and of every city two citizens, of every borough two burgesses, discreet and sufficient, and such who had the greatest skill in shipping and merchandizing.”—Parl. Hist. vol. i. p. 137.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 160.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. pp. 161, 162.

  [1. ]Who were in present debates indifferent.

  [2. ]There will be one king among all.

  [* ]Parliamentary History, vol. i. p. 313.

  [* ]Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, vol. ii. p. 287.

  [1. ]This is yet another illustration of Guizot’s emphasis on antagonism and competition in a free society. It will be recalled that for Guizot, it was the equilibrium between various political powers and principles of social organization that had led to the preservation and strengthening of liberty in England. He concludes his historical investigation by arguing that liberty can be established only when there is no single power capable of stifling the development of others to the point of usurping authority and becoming absolute. The same idea can be found in HCE: “Nothing but the general freedom of all rights, all interests, and all opinions, the free manifestation and legal coexistence of all these forces, can ever restrain each force and each power within its legitimate limits, prevent it from encroaching on the rest” (HCE, p. 244).

  [* ] There are different etymologies of the word vassus, from haus, a house; from gast, a guest; from fest, fast, established; from geselle (vassallus).—The word Gasinde, which expresses the familia, so far as it comprises the individuals inhabiting the house, the guests in opposition to the mancipia, induces me to think that vassus comes from gast. (Anton, Gesch. der Deuts. Land., vol. i. p. 526.)
  
  We read in the Salic law (tit. 43): Si quis romanum hominem convivam regis occiderit, sol. 300 culpabilis judicetur.2 The Roman editors of this law would have rendered the word gast by conviva.

  [2. ]If anyone kills a Roman guest of the king, he will be judged liable for 300 solidi (a type of gold coin).

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  11: Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution, 3 vols [1878]

  Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution, 3 vols., trans. John Durand, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1864 on 2011-04-18

  The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

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  12: Viscount James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire [1873]

  Viscount James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire. A New Edition, enlarged and revised throughout, with a Chronological Table of Events and Three Maps (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1911).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/2337 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

  ---

  PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1904

  Forty years have passed since this book was first published, and since then our knowledge of mediaeval history has been much increased and events have happened which render some of the remarks then made no longer applicable. I have not however attempted to rewrite the whole book, for this reason, among others, that were I to do so it would almost inevitably grow out of a small volume devoted to a single Idea and Institution into a systematic history of the Empire and the Popedom in the Middle Ages. That would double or treble its size, and make it unsuitable to one class of the students who have used it in its present form. I have therefore confined myself to such changes and enlargements as seemed to be most needed. Where events of significance had been omitted or too briefly noticed, additions have been made. For instance, the struggle of the Emperor Lewis IV against Pope John XXII and the careers of Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzo have been somewhat more fully described. An entirely new chapter has been inserted dealing with the East Roman or Byzantine Empire, a topic inadequately handled in previous editions. A concluding chapter, sketching the constitution of the new German Empire and the forces which have given it strength and cohesion, has been appended. This chapter, and that which (first published in 1873) traces the process whereby after 1813 national sentiment grew in Germany, and national unity was achieved in 1871, are not indeed necessary for the explanation of an institution whose best days were over four centuries ago. But they help to explain it, if only by contrast; and the convenience to a reader of finding a succinct account of the foundation and the character of this modern representative—if one may call it so—of the mediaeval Empire will, I hope, be deemed to compensate for whatever loss of symmetry is involved in an extension of the treatise beyond its original limits. With a similar practical aim, I have prefixed a pretty full Chronological Table of important events, presenting such an outline of the narrative history of the Empire as may serve to elucidate the text, and have added three maps.

  The book has been revised throughout: statements which seemed to have been too broadly expressed, or which political changes have made no longer true, have been corrected: more exact references have been given and new illustrations inserted in the notes. I have to acknowledge with cordial thanks the help which in the verification of statements and references I have received from my friend Mr. Ernest Barker, lecturer on history at Wadham College, Oxford.

  Did custom permit the dedication to any one of a new edition of a book long before the public, I should have dedicated the pages that follow to Mr. Goldwin Smith, now the honoured patriarch of English historians, from whom forty-three years ago, when he was professor at Oxford, I received my first lessons in modern history, and whose friendship I have ever since been privileged to enjoy.

  JAMES BRYCE.

  September 13, 1904.

  PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

  The object of this treatise is not so much to give a narrative history of the countries included in the Romano-Germanic Empire—Italy during the Middle Ages, Germany from the ninth century to the nineteenth—as to describe the Holy Empire itself as an institution or system, the wonderful offspring of a body of beliefs and traditions which have almost wholly passed away from the world. Such a description, however, would not be intelligible without some account of the great events which accompanied the growth and decay of Imperial power; and it has therefore appeared best to give the book the form rather of a narrative than of a dissertation; and to combine with an exposition of what may be called the theory of the Empire an outline of the political history of Germany, as well as some notices of the affairs of mediaeval Italy. To make the succession of events clearer, a Chronological List of Emperors and Popes has been prefixed.

  The great events of 1866 and 1870 reflect back so much light upon the previous history of Germany, and so much need, in order to be properly understood, to be viewed in their relation to the character and influence of the old Empire, that although they do not fall within the original limits of this treatise, some remarks upon them, and the causes which led to them, will not be out of place in it, and will perhaps add to whatever interest or value it may possess. As the Author found that to introduce these remarks into the body of the work, would oblige him to take to pieces and rewrite the last three chapters, a task he had no time for, he has preferred to throw them into a new supplementary chapter, which accordingly contains a brief sketch of the rise of Prussia, of the state of Germany under the Confederation which expired in 1866, and of the steps whereby the German nation has regained its political unity in the new Empire.

  Lincoln’s Inn, London,
  June 28, 1873.

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EMPERORS AND POPES

  * Reckoning the Anti-pope Felix (ad 356) as Felix II.
  Year of Accession	Bishops of Rome	Emperors	Year of Accession
  ad			bc
  		Augustus.	27
  			ad
  		Tiberius.	14
  		Caligula.	37
  		Claudius.	41
  42	St. Peter (according to Jerome).
  		Nero.	54
  67	Linus (according to Irenaeus, Eusebius, Jerome).
  68	Clement (according to Tertullian and Rufinus).	Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian.	68
  78	Anacletus (?).
  		Titus.	79
  		Domitian.	81
  91	Clement (according to some later writers).
  		Nerva.	96
  		Trajan.	98
  100	Evarestus (?).
  109	Alexander (?).
  		Hadrian.	117
  119	Sixtus I.
  129	Telesphorus.
  		Antoninus Pius.	138
  139	Hyginus.
  143	Pius I.
  157	Anicetus.
  		Marcus Aurelius.	161
  168	Soter.
  177	Eleutherius.
  		Commodus.	180
  		Pertinax.	193
  		Didius Julianus.	193
  		Niger.	193
  193	Victor (?).	Septimius Severus.	193
  202	Zephyrinus (?).
  		Caracalla, Geta.	211
  		Opilius Macrinus, Diadumenian.	217
  		Elagabalus.	218
  219	Calixtus I.
  		Alexander Severus.	222
  223	Urban I.
  230	Pontianus.
  235	Anterius or Anteros.	Maximin.	235
  236	Fabianus.
  		The two Gordians, Maximus Pupienus, Balbinus.	237
  		The third Gordian.	238
  		Philip.	244
  		Decius.	249
  251	Cornelius.	Hostilian, Gallus.	251
  252	Lucius I.	Volusian.	252
  253	Stephen I.	Aemilian, Valerian, Gallienus.	253
  257	Sixtus II.
  259	Dionysius.
  		Gallienus alone.	260
  		Claudius II.	268
  269	Felix.
  		Aurelian.	270
  275	Eutychianus.	Tacitus.	275
  		Florian.	276
  		Probus.	276
  		Carus.	282
  283	Caius.
  		Carinus, Numerian.	284
  		Diocletian.	284
  		Maximian, associated with Diocletian.	286
  296	Marcellinus.
  304	Vacancy.
  		Constantius, Galerius.	305
  		Severus.	306
  		Constantine (the Great).	306
  		Licinius.	307
  308	Marcellus I.	Maximin.	308
  		Constantine, Galerius, Licinius, Maximin, Maxentius, and Maximian reigning jointly.	309
  310	Eusebius.
  311	Melchiades.
  314	Sylvester I.
  		Constantine (the Great) alone.	323
  336	Marcus I.
  337	Julius I.	Constantine II, Constantius II, Constans.	337
  		Magnentius.
  352	Liberius.
  		Constantius alone.	353
  356	(Felix, Anti-pope.)
  		Julian.	361
  		Jovian.	363
  		Valens and Valentinian I.	364
  366	Damasus I.
  		Gratian and Valentinian I.	367
  		Gratian and Valentinian II.	375
  		Theodosius.	379
  384	Siricius.
  		Arcadius (in the East), Honorius (in the West).	395
  398	Anastasius I.
  402	Innocent I.
  		Theodosius II. (E)	408
  417	Zosimus.
  418	Boniface I.
  418	(Eulalius, Anti-pope.)
  422	Celestine I.
  		Valentinian III. (W)	424
  432	Sixtus III.
  440	Leo I (the Great).
  		Marcian. (E)	450
  		Maximus, Avitus. (W)	455
  		Majorian. (W)	455
  		Leo I. (E)	457
  461	Hilarius.	Severus. (W)	461
  		Vacancy. (W)	465
  		Anthemius. (W)	467
  468	Simplicius.
  		Olybrius. (W)	472
  		Glycerius. (W)	473
  		Julius Nepos. (W)	474
  		Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus. (All E)	474
  		Romulus Augustulus. (W)	475
  		(End of the Western line in Romulus Augustulus.)	476
  483	Felix III.*	(Henceforth, tillad 800, Emperors reigning at Constantinople.)
  		Anastasius I.	491
  492	Gelasius I.
  496	Anastasius II.
  498	Symmachus.
  498	(Laurentius, Anti-pope.)
  514	Hormisdas.
  		Justin I.	518
  523	John I.
  526	Felix IV.
  		Justinian.	527
  530	Boniface II.
  530	(Dioscorus, Anti-pope).
  532	John II.
  535	Agapetus I.
  536	Silverius.
  537	Vigilius.
  555	Pelagius I.
  560	John III.
  		Justin II.	565
  574	Benedict I.
  578	Pelagius II.	Tiberius II.	578
  		Maurice.	582
  590	Gregory I (the Great).
  		Phocas.	602
  604	Sabinianus.
  607	Boniface III.
  607	Boniface IV.
  		Heraclius.	610
  615	Deus dedit.
  618	Boniface V.

  * The names in italics are those of East Frankish or German kings who never made any claim to the imperial title				* Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome.				* Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome				* Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome.				† All the succeeding Emperors, except Charles VII and Francis I, belong to the House of Hapsburg.				‡ Crowned Emperor, but at Bologna, not at Rome.				* Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome.
  Year of Accession	Popes	Emperors	Year of Accession
  ad			bc
  625	Honorius I.
  638	Severinus.
  640	John IV.
  642	Theodorus I.	Constantine III, Heracleonas, Constans II.	641
  649	Martin I.
  654	Eugenius I.
  657	Vitalianus
  672	Adeodatus.	Constantine IV (Pogonatus).	668
  676	Domnus or Donus I.
  678	Agatho.
  682	Leo II.
  683(?)	Benedict II.
  685	John V.	Justinian II.	685
  685(?)	Conon.
  687	Sergius I.
  687	(Paschal, Anti-pope.)
  687	(Theodorus, Anti-pope.)
  		Leontius.	694
  		Tiberius III.	697
  701	John VI.
  705	John VII.	Justinian II restored.	705
  708	Sisinnius.
  708	Constantine.
  		Philippicus Bardanes.	711
  		Anastasius II.	713
  715	Gregory II.
  		Theodosius III.	716
  		Leo III (the Isaurian).	718
  731	Gregory III.
  741	Zacharias.	Constantine V (Copronymus).	741
  752	Stephen (II).
  752	Stephen II (or III).
  757	Paul I.
  767	(Constantine, Anti-pope.)
  768	Stephen III (IV).
  772	Hadrian I.
  		Leo IV.	775
  		Constantine VI.	780
  795	Leo III.
  		Deposition of Constantine VI by Irene.	797
  		Charles I (the Great).	800
  		(Following henceforth the new Western line.)
  		Lewis I (the Pious).	814
  816	Stephen IV.
  817	Paschal I.
  824	Eugenius II.
  827	Valentinus.
  827	Gregory IV.
  		Lothar I.	840
  844	Sergius II.
  847	Leo IV.
  855	Benedict III.	Lewis II (in Italy).	855
  855	(Anastasius, Anti-pope.)
  858	Nicholas I.
  867	Hadrian II.
  872	John VIII.
  		Charles II, the Bald (W. Frankish).	875
  882	Martin II.	Charles III, the Fat (E. Frankish).	881
  884	Hadrian III.	Interval from 888.
  885	Stephen V.
  891	Formosus.	Guido (in Italy).	891
  		Lambert (in Italy).	894
  896	Boniface VI.	Arnulf (E. Frankish).	896
  896	Stephen VI.
  897	Romanus.
  897	Theodore II.
  898	John IX.
  		Lewis (the Child).*	899
  900	Benedict IV.
  903	Leo V.	Lewis III king of Provence (in Italy).	901
  903	Christopher.
  904	Sergius III.
  911	Anastasius III.	Conrad I.	911
  913	Lando.
  914	John X.
  		Berengar (in Italy).	915
  928	Leo VI.	Henry I (the Fowler) of Saxony.	918
  929	Stephen VII.
  931	John XI.
  936	Leo VII.	Otto I (the Great), crowned E. Frankish king at Aachen.
  939	Stephen VIII.
  941	Martin III.		936
  946	Agapetus II.
  955	John XII.	Saxon House.
  963	Leo VIII.	Otto I, crowned Emperor at Rome.	962
  964	(Benedict V, Anti-pope?)
  965	John XIII.
  972	Benedict VI.
  		Otto II.	973
  974	(Boniface VII, Anti-pope?)
  974	Domnus II (?).
  974	Benedict VII.
  983	John XIV.	Otto III.	983
  985	John XV.
  996	Gregory V.
  996	(John XVI, Anti-pope?)
  999	Sylvester II.
  		Henry II (the Saint).	1002
  1003	John XVII.
  1003	John XVIII.
  1009	Sergius IV.
  1012	Benedict VIII.	House of Franconia.
  1024	John XIX.	Conrad II (the Salic).	1024
  1033	Benedict IX.
  		Henry III (the Black).	1039
  1044	(Sylvester, Anti-pope.)
  1045	Gregory VI.
  1046	Clement II.
  1048	Damasus II.
  1048	Leo IX.
  1054	Victor II.
  		Henry IV.	1056
  1057	Stephen IX.
  1058	Benedict X.
  1059	Nicholas II.
  1061	Alexander II.
  1073	Gregory VII (Hildebrand).
  		(Rudolf of Swabia, rival.)	1077
  1080	(Clement, Anti-pope.)
  1086	Victor III.	(Hermann of Luxemburg, rival.)	1081
  1087	Urban II.	(Conrad of Franconia, rival.)	1093
  1099	Paschal II.
  1102	(Albert, Anti-pope.)
  1105	(Sylvester, Anti-pope.)
  		Henry V.	1106
  1118	Gelasius II.
  1118	(Gregory, Anti-pope.)
  1119	Calixtus II.
  1121	(Celestine, Anti-pope.)
  1124	Honorius II.
  		Lothar II (of Saxony).	1125
  1130	Innocent II.	House of Swabia or Hohenstaufen.
  	(Anacletus, Anti-pope.)	*Conrad III	1138
  1138	(Victor, Anti-pope.)
  1143	Celestine II.
  1144	Lucius II.
  1145	Eugenius III.
  		Frederick I (Barbarossa).	1152
  1153	Anastasius IV.
  1154	Hadrian IV.
  1159	Alexander III.
  1159	(Victor, Anti-pope.)
  1164	(Paschal, Anti-pope.)
  1168	(Calixtus, Anti-pope.)
  1181	Lucius III.
  1185	Urban III.
  1187	Gregory VIII.
  1187	Clement III.
  		Henry VI.	1190
  1191	Celestine III.
  		*Philip, Otto IV (rivals).	1197
  1198	Innocent III.
  		Otto IV (House of Brunswick).	1208
  		Frederick II.	1212
  1216	Honorius III.
  1227	Gregory IX.
  1241	Celestine IV.
  1241	Vacancy.
  1243	Innocent IV.	(Henry Raspe, rival.)	1246
  		(William of Holland, rival.)	1246-7
  		*	1250
  1254	Alexander IV.	Interregnum.	1254
  		*Richard (earl of Cornwall), *Alfonso (king of Castile) (rivals).
  1261	Urban IV.		1257
  1265	Clement IV.
  1269	Vacancy.
  1271	Gregory X.
  		*Rudolf I (of Hapsburg).	1273
  1276	Innocent V.
  1276	Hadrian V.
  1277	John XX or XXI.
  1277	Nicholas III.
  1281	Martin IV.
  1285	Honorius IV.
  1289	Nicholas IV.
  1292	Vacancy.	*Adolf (of Nassau).	1292
  1294	Celestine V.
  1294	Boniface VIII.
  		*Albert I (of Hapsburg).	1298
  1303	Benedict XI.
  1305	Clement V.
  		Henry VII (of Luxemburg).	1308
  1314	Vacancy.	Lewis IV (of Bavaria).	1314
  		(Frederick of Austria, rival.)
  1316	John XXII.
  1334	Benedict XII.
  1342	Clement VI.
  		Charles IV (of Luxemburg).
  1352	Innocent VI.	(Günther of Schwartzburg, rival.)	1347
  1362	Urban V.
  1370	Gregory XI.
  1378	Urban VI.	*Wenzel (of Luxemburg).	1378
  	(Clement VII, Anti-pope.)
  	Beginning of the Great Schism.
  1389	Boniface IX.
  1394	(Benedict, Anti-pope.)
  		*Rupert (of the Palatinate).	1400
  1404	Innocent VII.
  1406	Gregory XII.
  1409	Alexander V.
  1410	John XXIII.	Sigismund (of Luxemburg).
  		(Jobst, of Moravia, rival.)	1410
  	End of the Great Schism.
  1417	Martin V.
  1431	Eugene IV.
  		*Albert II (of Hapsburg).†	1438
  1439	(Felix V, Anti-pope.)
  		Frederick III.	1440
  1447	Nicholas V.
  1455	Calixtus III.
  1458	Pius II.
  1464	Paul II.
  1471	Sixtus IV.
  1484	Innocent VIII.
  1493	Alexander VI.	*Maximilian I.	1493
  1503	Pius III.
  1503	Julius II.
  1513	Leo X.
  		‡ Charles V.	1519
  1522	Hadrian VI.
  1523	Clement VII.
  1534	Paul III.
  1550	Julius III.
  1555	Marcellus II.
  1555	Paul IV.
  		*Ferdinand I.	1558
  1559	Pius IV.
  		*Maximilian II.	1564
  1566	Pius V.
  1572	Gregory XIII.
  		*Rudolf II.	1576
  1585	Sixtus V.
  1590	Urban VII.
  1590	Gregory XIV.
  1591	Innocent IX.
  1592	Clement VIII.
  1604	Leo XI.
  1604	Paul V.
  		*Matthias.	1612
  		*Ferdinand II.	1619
  1621	Gregory XV.
  1623	Urban VIII.
  		*Ferdinand III.	1637
  1644	Innocent X.
  1655	Alexander VII.
  		*Leopold I.	1658
  1667	Clement IX.
  1670	Clement X.
  1676	Innocent XI.
  1689	Alexander VIII.
  1691	Innocent XII.
  1700	Clement XI.
  		*Joseph I.	1705
  		*Charles VI.	1711
  1720	Innocent XIII.
  1724	Benedict XIII.
  1730	Clement XII.
  1740	Benedict XIV.
  		*Charles VII (of Bavaria).	1742
  		*Francis I (of Lorraine).	1745
  1758	Clement XIII.
  		*Joseph II.	1765
  1769	Clement XIV.
  1775	Pius VI.
  		*Leopold II.	1790
  		*Francis II.	1792
  1800	Pius VII.
  		ABDICATION OF FRANCIS II.	1806
  1823	Leo XII.
  1829	Pius VIII.
  1831	Gregory XVI.
  1846	Pius IX.
  		GERMAN EMPERORS
  		William I.	1871
  		Frederick.	1888
  		William II.	1888
  1878	Leo XIII.
  1903	Pius X.

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE

  THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

  CHAPTER I

  INTRODUCTORY

  Chap. I.Of those who in August, 1806, read in the newspapers that the Emperor Francis II had announced to the Germanic Diet his resignation of the imperial crown there were probably few who reflected that the oldest political institution in the world had come to an end. Yet it was so. The Empire which a note issued by a diplomatist on the banks of the Danube extinguished was the same which the crafty nephew of Julius had won for himself, against the powers of the East, beneath the cliffs of Actium; and which had preserved almost unaltered, through eighteen centuries of time, and through the greatest changes in extent, in power, and in character, a title and pretensions from which their ancient meaning had long since departed. Nothing else so directly linked the old world to the new—nothing else displayed so many strange contrasts of the present and the past, and summed up in those contrasts so much of European history. From the days of Constantine till far down into the Middle Ages it was, conjointly with the Papacy, the recognized centre and head of Christendom, exercising over the minds of men an influence such as its material strength could never have commanded.

  It is of this influence and of the causes that gave it power rather than of the external history of the Empire that the following pages are designed to treat. That history is indeed full of interest and brilliancy, of grand characters and striking situations. But it is a subject too vast for any single canvas. Without a minuteness of detail sufficient to make its scenes dramatic, and give us a lively sympathy with the actors, a narrative history can have little value and still less charm. But to trace with any minuteness the career of the Empire, would be to write the history of Christendom from the fifth century to the twelfth, of Germany and Italy from the twelfth to the nineteenth; while even a narrative of more restricted scope, which should attempt to disengage from a general account of the affairs of those countries the events that properly belong to imperial history, could hardly be compressed within reasonable limits. It is therefore better, declining so great a task, to attempt one simpler and more practicable though not necessarily inferior in interest; to speak less of events than of principles, and endeavour to describe the Empire not as a State but as an Institution, an institution created by and embodying a wonderful system of ideas. In pursuance of such a plan, the forms which the Empire took in the several stages of its growth and decline must be briefly sketched. The characters and acts of the great men who founded, guided, and overthrew it must from time to time be touched upon. But the chief aim of the treatise will be to dwell more fully on the inner nature of the Empire, as the most signal instance of the fusion of Roman and Teutonic elements in modern civilization: to shew how such a combination was possible; how Charles and Otto were led to revive the imperial title in the West; how far during the reigns of their successors it preserved the memory of its origin, and influenced the European commonwealth of nations.

  Strictly speaking, it is from the year 800 ad, when a King of the Franks was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, that the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire must be dated. But in history there is nothing isolated, and just as to explain a modern Act of Parliament or a modern conveyance of lands we must go back to the feudal customs of the thirteenth century, so among the institutions of the Middle Ages there is scarcely one which can be understood until it is traced up either to classical or to primitive Teutonic antiquity. Such a mode of inquiry is most of all needful in the case of the Holy Empire, itself no more than a tradition, a fancied revival of departed glories. And thus one who seeks to explain out of what elements the imperial system was formed, might be required to scrutinize the antiquities of the Christian Church, to survey the constitution of Rome in the days when Rome was no more than the first of the Latin cities, nay, to travel back yet further to that Jewish theocratic polity whose influence on the minds of the mediaeval priesthood was necessarily so profound. Practically, however, it may suffice to begin by glancing at the condition of the Roman world in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era. We shall then see the old Empire with its scheme of absolutism fully matured; we shall mark how the new religion, rising in the midst of a hostile power, ends by embracing and transforming it; and we shall be in a position to understand what impression the whole huge fabric of secular and ecclesiastical government which Roman and Christian had piled up made upon the barbarian tribes who pressed into the charmed circle of the ancient civilization.

  CHAPTER II

  THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE ENTRANCE OF THE BARBARIANS

  Chap. II.That ostentation of humility which the subtle policy of Augustus had conceived, and the jealous hypocrisy of Tiberius maintained, was gradually dropped by their successors,The Roman Empire in the second century. till despotism became at last recognized in principle as the government of the Roman Empire. With an aristocracy decayed, a populace degraded, an army no longer recruited from Italy, the semblance of liberty that yet survived might be swept away with impunity. Republican forms had never been known in the provinces, and the aspect which the imperial administration had originally assumed there soon reacted on its position in the capital. Earlier rulers had disguised their supremacy by making a slavish senate the instrument of their more cruel or arbitrary acts. As time went on, even this veil was withdraw;ad 193-211. and in the age of Septimius Severus the Emperor stood forth to the whole Roman world as the single centre and source of political power and action. The warlike character of the Roman State was preserved in his title of Commander (Imperator); his provincial lieutenants were military governors; and a more terrible enforcement of the theory was found in his practical dependence on the army, at once the origin and the support of his authority. But, as he united in himself every function of government, his sovereignty was civil as well as military. Laws emanated from him; all officials acted under his commission; the sanctity of his person bordered on divinity. This increased concentration of power was mainly required by the necessities of frontier defence, for within there was more decay than disaffection. Few troops were quartered through the country: few fortresses checked the march of armies in the struggles which placed Vespasian and (a century later) Severus on the throne. The distant crash of war from the Rhine or the Euphrates was scarcely heard or heeded in the profound calm of the Mediterranean coasts, where, after the extinction of piracy, fleets had ceased to be maintained. No quarrels of race or religion disturbed that calm, for all national distinctions were becoming merged in the idea of a common Empire. The gradual extension of Roman citizenship through the founding of coloniae,Obliteration of national distinctions. first throughout Italy and then in the provinces, the working of the equalized and equalizing Roman law, the even pressure of the government on all subjects, the movements of population caused by commerce and the slave traffic, were steadily assimilating the various peoples. Emperors who were for the most part natives of the provinces cared little to cherish Italy or even, after the days of the Antonines, to conciliate Rome. It was their policy to keep open for every subject a career by whose freedom they had themselves risen to greatness, and to recruit the senate from the most illustrious families in the cities of Gaul, Spain, and Asia.ad 211-217. The edict by which Caracalla extended to all natives of the Roman world the rights of Roman citizenship, though prompted by no motives of generosity, proved in the end a boon. Annihilating distinctions of legal status among freemen, it completed the work which trade and literature and toleration to all beliefs but one were already performing, and left, so far as we can tell, only one nation still cherishing a national feeling.a The Jew was kept apart by his religion: but the Jewish people was already dispersed over the world. Speculative philosophy lent its aid to this general assimilation. Stoicism, with its doctrine of a universal system of nature, made minor distinctions between man and man seem insignificant: and by its teachers the idea of a world-commonwealth whereof all men are citizens was for the first time proclaimed. Alexandrian Neo-Platonism, uniting the tenets of many schools, and bringing the mysticism of Egypt and the East into connection with the logical philosophies of Greece, had opened up a new ground of agreement or controversy for the minds of all the world.The capital. Yet the commanding position of the Roman city was scarcely shaken. The actual power of her assemblies had indeed long since departed. Rarely were her senate and people permitted to choose the sovereign: more rarely still could they influence his policy. Neither law nor custom raised the inhabitants of the city above other subjects, or accorded to them any advantage in the career of civil or military ambition. As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom in making herself the mistress of others, so now in becoming the Universal State,b she, the conqueror, had descended to the level of the conquered.c But the sacrifice had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language that had overspread the world:d at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their labour: she was the head of the Empire and of civilization, and in riches, fame, and splendour far outshone as well the other cities of that time as the fabled glories of Babylon or Persepolis.

  Scarcely had these slowly-working influences brought about this unity, when other influences began to threaten it. New foes assailed the frontiers; while the loosening of the structure within was shewn by the long struggles for power which followed the death or deposition of each successive emperor. In the period of anarchy after the fall of Valerian,ad 253-270. generals were raised by their armies in every part of the Empire, and ruled great provinces as monarchs apart, owning no allegiance to the possessor of the capital. The breaking-up of the Western half of the Empire into separate kingdoms might have been anticipated by two hundred years had the barbarian tribes on the borders been bolder, or had there not arisen in Diocletian a prince active and skilful enough to bind up the fragments before they had lost all cohesion,Diocletian,ad 284-305. meeting altered conditions by new remedies. The policy he adopted of dividing and localizing authority recognized the fact that the weakened heart could no longer make its pulsations felt to the body’s extremities. He parcelled out the supreme power among four monarchs, ruling as joint-emperors in four capitals, and then sought to give it a factitious strength by surrounding it with an oriental pomp which his earlier predecessors would have scorned. The sovereign’s person became more sacred, and was removed further from the subject by the interposition of a host of officials. The prerogative of Rome was menaced by the rivalry of Nicomedia, and the nearer greatness of Milan. Constantine trod in the same path, developing the system of titles into a sort of nobility,Constantine,ad 306-337. separating the civil from the military functionaries, placing counts and dukes along the frontiers and in the cities, making the household larger, its etiquette stricter, its offices more dignified, though to a Roman eye degraded by their attachment to the monarch’s person. The crown became, for the first time, the fountain of honour.

  These expedients proved insufficient to prop the tottering fabric of imperial administration. Taxation, which grew always heavier as the number of persons who bore it was reduced, depressed the aristocracy:e population decreased, agriculture withered, serfdom spread: it was found more difficult to raise native troops and to pay any troops whatever. The removal by Constantine of the imperial residence to Byzantium, if it prolonged the life of the Eastern half of the Empire, shook the Empire as a whole, by accelerating the separation of East and West. By that removal Rome’s self-abnegation that she might Romanize the world was completed; for though the new capital preserved her name, and followed her customs and precedents, yet now the imperial sway ceased to be connected with the city which had created it. Thus did the idea of Roman monarchy become more universal; for, having lost its local centre, it subsisted no longer by historic right only, but, so to speak, naturally, as a part of an order of things which a change in external conditions seemed incapable of disturbing. Henceforth the idea of a Roman Empire might stand unaffected by the disasters of the city. And though, after the partition of the Empire had been confirmed by Valentinian I,ad 364. and finally settled on the death of Theodosius the Great, the seat of the Western government was removed first to Milan and then to Ravenna,ad 395. neither event destroyed Rome’s prestige, nor the notion of a single imperial nationality common to all her subjects. The Syrian, the Pannonian, the Briton, the Spaniard, still called himself a Roman.f

  Christianity.For that imperial nationality was now beginning to be supported by a new and vigorous power. The emperors had indeed opposed Christianity as disloyal and revolutionary: had more than once put forth their whole strength to root it out. But the unity of the Empire, and the ease of communication through its parts, had favoured the spread of the new faith: persecution had scattered the seeds more widely, had forced on it a firm organization, had given it martyr-heroes and a history. When Constantine, partly perhaps from a genuine moral sympathy, yet doubtless also in the well-grounded belief that he had more to gain from the zealous support of its professors than he could lose by the aversion of those who still cultivated a languid paganism, extended toleration to Christianity and ultimately embraced it himself, it was already a great political force, able, and not more able than willing, to repay him by aid and submission.Its alliance with the State. Yet the league was struck in no mere mercenary spirit, for the league was inevitable. Of the evils and dangers incident to such an alliance of the civil and the ecclesiastical authority as that which grew up in the century after Constantine, there was as yet no experience: of that antagonism between Church and State which to a modern appears so natural, there was not even an idea. In the Psalms and the historical books of the Old Testament (the influence of which on the early Christians was profound) the unity of the nation stands based upon religion: Israel is the people of Jehovah, owes Him collective as well as individual worship, conquers and prospers by His help. Among the Romans religion had been an integral part of the political constitution, a matter far more of national or tribal or family feeling than of personal devotion to a spiritual power.g Both in Israel and at Rome the mingling of religious with civic patriotism had been harmonious, giving strength and elasticity to the whole body politic. So perfect a union was now no longer possible in the Roman Empire, for the Christian community had already a governing body of its own in those rulers and teachers on whom the growth of sacramentalism, and of sacerdotalism its necessary consequence, was every day conferring more and more power, while marking them off more sharply from the mass of the Christian people. Since therefore the ecclesiastical organization could not be identical with the civil, it became its counterpart. Suddenly called from danger and ignominy to the seat of power, and finding her inexperience perplexed by a sphere of action vast and varied, the Church was compelled to continue the process on which she had already entered of framing her government upon the model of the secular administration. Where her own machinery was defective, as in the case of doctrinal disputes affecting the whole Christian world, she sought the interposition of the Sovereign; in all else she strove not to sink into, but to reproduce for her own ecclesiastical purposes, the imperial system. And just as with the extension of the Empire all the independent rights of districts, towns, or tribes had disappeared, so now the primitive freedom and diversity of individual Christians and local churches, already circumscribed by the frequent struggles against heresy and schism, was finally overborne by the idea of one Visible Catholic Church, uniform in faith and ritual; uniform too in her relation to the civil power and the increasingly oligarchical character of her government. Thus, under the combined force of doctrinal theory and practical needs, there shaped itself a hierarchy of patriarchs, metropolitans, and bishops, their jurisdiction, although still chiefly spiritual, recognized, and after a time enforced, by the laws of the State, their provinces and dioceses usually corresponding to the administrative divisions of the Empire. As no patriarch yet enjoyed more than an honorary supremacy, the earthly head of the Church—so far as she could be said to have a head—was virtually the Emperor himself. The presumptive right to intermeddle in religious affairs which he had in heathen times derived from the office of Pontifex Maximus, regularly assumed by the successors of Augustus, was readily admitted; and the clergy, preaching the duty of obedience now as it had been preached even in the days of Nero and Decius,h were well pleased to see him preside in General Councils, issue edicts against heresy, and testify even by arbitrary measures his zeal for the advancement of the faith and the overthrow of pagan rites.i But though the tone of the Church remained humble, her strength waxed greater, nor were occasions wanting which revealed the future that was in store for her. The resistance to the Emperor of St. Athanasius (Archbishop of Alexandria), and his final triumph in the long struggle against the Arians, proved that the new society could put forth a power of opinion such as had never been known before: the abasement of Theodosius the Emperor before Ambrose the Archbishop admitted the supremacy of spiritual authority. In the decrepitude of old institutions, in the barrenness of literature and the feebleness of art, it was to the Church that the life and feelings of the people sought more and more to attach themselves; and when in the fifth century the horizon grew black with clouds of ruin, those who watched with despair or apathy the approach of irresistible foes, fled for comfort to the shrine of a religion which even those foes revered.

  It embraces and preserves the imperial idea.But that which we are above all here concerned to remark is, that this church system, demanding a more rigid uniformity in doctrine and organization, making more and more vital the notion of a visible body of worshippers united by participation in the same sacraments, maintained and propagated afresh the feeling of a single Roman people throughout the world. Christianity as well as civilization became conterminous with the Roman Empire.j To be a Roman was to be a Christian: and this idea soon passed into the converse. To be a Christian was to be a Roman.

  CHAPTER III

  THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS

  Chap. III.Upon a world so constituted did the barbarians of the North descend. From the dawn of history they shew as a dim background to the warmth and light of the Mediterranean coasts,The barbarians. changing little while kingdoms rise and fall in the South, only thought on when some hungry swarm comes down to pillage or to settle. It is always as foes that they are known. The Romans never forgot the invasion of Brennus; and their fears, renewed by the irruption of the Cimbri and Teutones,bc 101. could not let them rest till the extension of the frontier to the Rhine and the Danube removed Italy from immediate danger. A little more perseverance under Tiberius, or again under Hadrian, would probably have reduced all Germany as far as the Baltic and the Oder. But the politic or jealous advice of Augustusa was followed, and it was only along the frontiers that Roman arts and culture affected the Teutonic races. Commerce was brisk; Roman envoys penetrated the forests to the courts of rude chieftains; adventurous barbarians entered the provinces, sometimes to admire, oftener, like the brother of Arminius,b to take service under the Roman flag, and rise to a distinction in the legion which some feud denied them at home. This was found even more convenient by the hirer than by the hired; till by degrees barbarian mercenaries came to form the largest, and certainly the most efficient, part of the Roman armies. The bodyguard of Augustus had been so composed; the praetorians were generally selected from the bravest frontier troops, most of them German; the practice could not but increase with the extinction of the free peasantry, the growth of villenage, and the effeminacy of all classes. Emperors who were, like Maximin, themselves sprung from a barbarian stock, encouraged a system by whose means they had risen, and whose advantages they knew. After Constantine, the levies from outside the Empire form the majority of the troops;Admitted to Roman titles and honours. after Theodosius, a Roman is the exception. The soldiers of the Eastern Empire in the time of Arcadius are almost all Goths, vast bodies of whom had been settled in the provinces; while in the West, Stilichoc can oppose Rhodogast only by summoning the German auxiliaries from the frontiers. Along with this practice there had grown up another,ad 405. which did still more to make the barbarians feel themselves members of the Roman State. The pride of the old republic had been exclusive, but under the Empire the maxim was accepted that neither birth nor race should exclude a subject from any post which his abilities deserved. This principle, which had removed all obstacles from the path of the Spaniard Trajan, the Thracian Maximin, the Arabian Philip, was afterwards extended to the conferring of honour and power on persons who did not even profess to have passed through the grades of Roman service, but remained leaders of their own tribes. Ariovistus had been soothed by the title of Friend of the Roman People; in the third century the insignia of the consulshipd were conferred by Gallienus on Naulobatus a Herulian chief: Crocus and his Alemanni entered as an independent body into the service of Rome; along the Rhine whole tribes received, under the name of Laeti, lands within the provinces on condition of military service; and the foreign aid which the Sarmatian had proffered to Vespasian against his rival, and Marcus Aurelius had indignantly rejected in the war with Cassius, became the usual, at last the sole support of the Empire, in civil as well as in external strife.

  Thus in many ways was the old antagonism broken down—Romans admitting barbarians to rank and office, barbarians catching something of the manners and culture of their neighbours. And thus when the final movement came, and the Teutonic tribes slowly established themselves through the provinces, they entered not as savage strangers, but as settlers knowing something of the system into which they came, and not unwilling to be considered its members; despising the degenerate provincials who struck no blow in their own defence, but full of respect for the majestic power which had for so many centuries confronted and instructed them.

  Their feelings towards the Roman Empire.Great during all these ages, but greatest when they were actually traversing and settling down in the Empire, must have been the impression which its elaborate machinery of government and mature civilization made upon the minds of the Northern invaders. With arms whose fabrication they had learned from their foes, these children of the forest conquered well-tilled fields, and entered towns whose busy workshops, marts stored with the productions of distant countries, and palaces rich in monuments of art, equally roused their wonder. To the beauty of statuary or painting they might often be blind, but the rudest mind must have been awed by the massive piles with which vanity or devotion, or the passion for amusement, had adorned Milan and Verona, Arles, Treves, and Bordeaux. A deeper awe would strike them as they gazed on the crowding worshippers and stately ceremonial of Christianity, most unlike their own rude sacrifices. The exclamation of the Goth Athanarich, when led into the market-place of Constantinople, may stand for the feelings of his nation: ‘Without doubt the Emperor is a God upon earth, and he who attacks him is guilty of his own blood.’e

  The social and political system, with its cultivated language and literature, into which they came, would impress fewer of the conquerors, but by those few would be admired beyond all else. Its regular organization supplied what they most needed and could least construct for themselves, and hence it was that the greatest among them were the most desirous to preserve it. Except Attila the Hun, there is among these terrible hosts no destroyer; the wish of each leader is to maintain the existing order, to spare life, to respect every work of skill and labour, above all to perpetuate the methods of Roman administration,Their desire to preserve its institutions. and rule the people as the deputy or successor of their Emperor. Titles conferred by him were the highest honours they knew: they were also the only means of acquiring something like a legal grant of authority, a claim to the obedience of the provincial subject, and of turning a patriarchal or military chieftainship into the regular sway of an hereditary monarch. Civilis had long since endeavoured to govern his Batavians as a Roman general.f Alarich became master-general of the armies of Illyricum. Clovis exulted in the bestowal of an honorary consulship; his grandson Theodebert addresses the Emperor Justinian as ‘Father.’g Sigismund the Burgundian king, created count and patrician by the Emperor Anastasius, professed the deepest gratitude and the firmest faith to that Eastern court, which was powerless to help or to hurt him. ‘My people is yours,’ he writes, ‘and to rule them delights me less than to serve you; the hereditary devotion of my race to Rome has made us account those the highest honours which your military titles convey; we have always preferred what an Emperor gave to all that our ancestors could bequeath. In ruling our nation we hold ourselves but your lieutenants: you, whose divinely-appointed sway no barrier bounds, whose beams shine from the Bosphorus into distant Gaul, employ us to administer the remoter regions of your Empire: your world is our fatherland.’h

  A contemporary historian has recorded the remarkable disclosure of his own thoughts and purposes, made by one of the ablest of the barbarian chieftains, Athaulf the West Goth, the brother-in-law and successor of Alarich. ‘It was at first my wish to destroy the Roman name, and erect in its place a Gothic empire, taking to myself the place and the powers of Caesar Augustus. But when experience taught me that the untameable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to live beneath the sway of law, and that to abolish the laws on which the state rests would destroy the state itself, I chose the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic strength the fame of Rome, desiring to go down to posterity as the restorer of that Roman power which I could not replace. Wherefore I avoid war and strive for peace.’i

  The records of the time, scanty as they are, shew us how valuable was the experience of Roman officials to princes who from leaders of tribes had become rulers of wide lands; and in particular how indispensable the aid of the Christian bishops, the intellectual aristocracy of their new subjects, whose advice could alone guide the policy of the conqueror and secure the good-will of the vanquished. Not only is this true; it is but a small part of the truth, one form of that manifold and overpowering influence which the old system exercised over the intruding strangers not less than over its own children. For it is hardly too much to say that the thought of antagonism to the Empire and the wish to extinguish it never crossed the mind of the barbarians.j The conception of that Empire was too universal, too august, too enduring. It was everywhere around them, and they could remember no time when it had not been so. It had no association of people or place whose fall could seem to involve that of the whole fabric; it had that connection with the Christian Church which made it all-embracing and venerable.

  The belief in its eternity.There were especially two ideas whereon it rested, and from which it obtained a peculiar strength and a peculiar direction. The one was the belief that as the dominion of Rome was universal, so must it be eternal. Nothing like it had been seen before. The empire of Alexander had lasted a short lifetime; and within its wide compass were included many arid wastes, and many tracts where none but the roving savage had ever set foot. That of the Italian city had for fourteen generations embraced all the most wealthy and populous regions of the civilized world, and had laid the foundations of its power so deep that they seemed destined to last for ever. If Rome moved slowly for a time, her foot was always planted firmly: the ease and swiftness of her later conquests proved the solidity of the earlier; and to her, more justly than to his own city, might the boast of the Athenian statesman be applied: that she advanced farthest in prosperity, and in adversity drew back the least. From the end of the republican period her poets, her orators, her jurists, ceased not to repeat the claim of world-dominion, and confidently predict its eternity.k The proud belief of his countrymen which Virgil had expressed —

  • ‘His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pono:
  • Imperium sine fine dedi’ —

  was shared by the early Christians when they prayed for the persecuting power whose fall would bring Antichrist upon earth. Lactantius (a contemporary of Constantine) writes: ‘When Rome the head of the world shall have fallen, who can doubt that the end is come of human things, aye, of the earth itself. She, she alone is the state by which all things are upheld even until now; wherefore let us make prayers and supplications to the God of heaven, if indeed His decrees and His purposes can be delayed, that that hateful tyrant come not sooner than we look for, he for whom are reserved fearful deeds, who shall pluck out that eye in whose extinction the world itself shall perish.’l With the triumph of Christianity this belief had found a new basis. For as the Empire had decayed, the Church had grown stronger: and now while the one, trembling at the approach of the destroyer, saw province after province torn away, the other, rising in stately youth, prepared to fill her place and govern in her name, and in doing so, to adopt and sanctify and propagate anew the notion of a universal and unending state.

  Sanctity of the imperial name.The second chief element in this conception was the association of such a state with its absolute and irresponsible head, the Emperor. The hatred to the name of King, which their earliest political struggles had left in the Romans, by attaching to their ruler a new and strange title, marked him off from all the other sovereigns of the world. To the provincials especially he became an awful impersonation of the great machine of government which moved above and around them. It was not merely that he was, like a modern king, the centre of power and the dispenser of honour: his pre-eminence, broken by no comparison with other princes, by the ascending ranks of no titled aristocracy, had in it something almost supernatural. The right of legislation had become vested in him alone: the decrees of the people, and resolutions of the senate, and edicts of the magistrates were, during the last three centuries, replaced by imperial ‘Constitutions’; his domestic council, the Consistory, was the supreme court of appeal; his interposition, like that of some terrestrial Providence, was invoked, and legally provided so to be, to reverse or overleap the ordinary rules of law.m From the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus his person had been hallowed by the office of chief pontiffn and the tribunician power; to swear by his head was considered the most solemn of all oaths;o his effigy was sacred,p even on a coin; to him or to his Genius temples were erected and divine honours paid while he lived;q and when, as it was expressed, he ceased to be among men, the title of Divus was accorded to him, after a solemn consecration.r In the confused multiplicity of mythologies, the worship of the Emperor was the only worship common to the whole Roman world, and was therefore that usually proposed as a test to the Christians on their trial. Under the new religion the form of adoration vanished, the sentiment of reverence remained: and the right to control the Church as well as the State, admitted by the bishops assembled in the first oecumenical council at Nicaea, and frequently exercised by the sovereigns of Constantinople, made the Emperor hardly less essential to the new conception of a world-wide Christian monarchy than he had been to the military despotism of old.

  These considerations explain why the men of the fifth century, clinging to preconceived ideas, and filled with the belief, drawn from Jewish prophecy, that the great Fourth Kingdom was to last till the end of the world, refused to believe in that dissolution of the Empire which they saw with their own eyes. Because it could not die, it lived. And there was in the slowness of the change and its external aspect, as well as in the fortunes of the capital, something to favour the illusion. The Roman name was shared by every subject; the Roman city was no longer the seat of government, nor did her capture extinguish the imperial power, for the maxim was now accepted, Where the Emperor is, there is Rome.s But her continued existence, not permanently occupied by any conqueror, striking the nations with an awe which the history or the external splendours of Constantinople, Milan, or Ravenna could nowise inspire, was an ever new assertion of the endurance of the Roman race and dominion. Dishonoured and defenceless, the spell of her name was still strong enough to arrest the conqueror in the moment of triumph. The irresistible impulse that drew Alarich was one of glory or revenge, not of destruction: the Hun turned back from Aquileia with a vague fear upon him: the Ostrogoth adorned and protected his splendid prize.

  Last days of the Western Empire.In the history of the last days of the Western Empire, two points deserve special remark: its continued union with the Eastern branch, and the way in which its ideal dignity was respected while its representatives were despised. Stilicho was the last statesman who could have saved it. After his death,ad 408. and after the City had been captured by Alarich in ad 410, the fall of the Western throne, though delayed for two generations by traditional reverence, became practically certain. While one by one the provinces were abandoned by the central government, left either to be occupied by invading tribes or to maintain a precarious independence, like Britain and the Armorican cities, by means of municipal unions, Italy lay at the mercy of the barbarian auxiliaries and was governed by their leaders. The degenerate line of Theodosius might have seemed to reign by hereditary right, but after their extinction in Valentinian III it was from the haughty Ricimer, general of the barbarian troops, that each phantom Emperor—Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Anthemius, Olybrius—received the purple only to be stripped of it when he presumed to forget his dependence.ad 395. Though the division between Arcadius and Honorius had definitely severed the two realms for administrative purposes, they were still deemed to constitute a single Empire, and the rulers of the East interfered more than once to raise to the Western throne princes they could not protect upon it. Ricimer’s insolence quailed before the shadowy grandeur of the imperial title: his ambition, and that of Gundobald his successor, were bounded by the name of Patrician. The bolder genius of Odoacer,t commander of the barbarian auxiliaries, resolved to abolish an empty pageant, and extinguish the title and office of Emperor in the West. Yet over him too the spell had power; and as the Gaulish warrior had gazed on the silent majesty of the senate in a deserted city, so the Herulian revered the power before which the world had bowed, and though there was no force to check or to affright him, shrank from grasping in his own barbarian hand the sceptre of the Caesars.Its extinction by Odoacer. When, at Odoacer’s bidding, Romulus, nicknamed Augustulus, the boy whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native Caesar of Rome, had formally announced his resignation to the senate, a deputation from that body proceeded to the Eastern court to lay the insignia of royalty at the feet of the reigning Emperor Zeno.ad 476. The West, they declared, no longer required an Emperor of its own: one monarch sufficed for the world; Odoacer was qualified by his wisdom and courage to be the protector of their state, and upon him Zeno was entreated to confer the title of Patrician and the administration of the Italian provinces.u The Emperor, though he reminded the Senate that their request ought rather to have been made to the lately dispossessed Western Emperor Julius Nepos, granted what he could not refuse, and wrote to Odoacer, addressing him as Patrician. Assuming the title of King,x Odoacer continued the consular office, respected the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of his subjects, and ruled for fourteen years under the nominal suzerainty of the Eastern Emperor.y There was thus legally no extinction of the Western Empire at all, but only a reunion of East and West. In form, and to some extent also in the belief of men, things now reverted to their state during the first two centuries of the Empire, save that New Rome on the Bosphorus instead of Old Rome on the Tiber was the centre of the civil government. The joint tenancy which had been conceived by Diocletian, carried further by Constantine, renewed under Valentinian I and again at the death of Theodosius, had come to an end; once more did a single Emperor sway the sceptre of the world, and head an undivided Catholic Church. To those who lived at the time, this year (ad 476) was no such epoch as it has since become, nor was any impression made on men’s minds commensurate with the real significance of the event. It is, indeed, one of the most striking instances in history of a change whose magnitude was not perceived until long after it occurred. For though the cessation of an Emperor reigning in the West did not destroy the Empire in idea, nor wholly even in fact, its consequences were from the first immense. It hastened the developement of a Latin as opposed to Greek and Oriental forms of Christianity: it emancipated the Popes: it gave a new character to the projects and government of the Teutonic rulers of the Western countries. But the importance of remembering its formal aspect to those who witnessed it will be felt as we approach the era when the Empire was revived by Charles the Frank.z

  Odoacer.Odoacer’s monarchy was not more oppressive than were those of the barbarian kings who were reigning in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. But the confederated mercenary troops who supported it were a loose swarm of predatory tribes: themselves without cohesion, they could take no firm root in Italy. Under his rule no progress seems to have been made towards the reorganization of society; and the first real attempt to blend the peoples and maintain the traditions of Roman wisdom in the hands of a new and vigorous race was reserved for a more famous chieftain, the greatest of all the barbarian conquerors, the forerunner of the first barbarian Emperor, Theodorich the Ostrogoth.Theodorich,ad 493-526. The aim of his reign, though he professed deference to the Eastern court which had favoured the invasion in which he overthrew Odoacer, and whose titular supremacy he did not reject,a was the establishment of what would have become a national monarchy in Italy. Brought up as a hostage in the court of Constantinople, he learned to know the advantages of an orderly and cultivated society and the principles by which it must be maintained; called in early manhood to roam as a warrior-chief over the plains of the Danube, he acquired along with the arts of command a sense of the superiority of his own people in valour and energy and truth. When the defeat and death of Odoacer had left both Italy and Sicily at his mercy, he sought no further conquest, easy as it would have been to tear away new provinces from the Eastern realm, but strove only to preserve and strengthen the ancient polity of Rome, to breathe into her decaying institutions the spirit of a fresh life, and without endangering the military supremacy of his own Goths, to conciliate by indulgence and gradually raise to the level of their masters the degenerate population of Italy. The Gothic nation appears from the first less cruel in war and more sage in council than any of their Germanic brethren:b all that was noble among them shone forth now in the rule of the greatest of the Amals. From his palace at Verona,c commemorated in the song of the Nibelungs, he issued equal laws for Roman and Goth, and bade the intruder, if he must occupy part of the lands, at least respect the goods and the person of his fellow subject. Jurisprudence and administration remained in native hands: two annual consuls, one named by Theodorich, the other by the Eastern monarch, presented an image of the ancient state; and while agriculture and the arts revived in the provinces, Rome herself celebrated the visits of a master who provided for the wants of her people and preserved with care the monuments of her former splendour.d With peace and plenty men’s minds took hope, and the study of letters revived. The last gleam of classical literature gilds the reign of the barbarian.

  By the consolidation of the two races under one wise government, Italy might have been spared six hundred years of gloom and degradation. It was not so to be. Theodorich was tolerant, but toleration was itself an offence in the eyes of his orthodox subjects: the Arian Goths were and remained strangers and enemies among the Catholic Italians. Scarcely had the sceptre passed from the hands of Theodorich to his weaker offspring, when Justinian, who had viewed with jealousy the greatness of his nominal lieutenant, determined to assert his dormant rights over Italy and Sicily;Italy and Sicily conquered by Justinian,ad 535-553. its people welcomed Belisarius as a deliverer, and in the long struggle that followed the race and name of the Ostrogoths perished for ever. Thus again reunited in fact, as it had been all the while united in theory, to the Roman Empire, Italy was divided into counties and dukedoms, and obeyed the exarch of Ravenna, viceroy of the East Roman court, till the arrival of the Lombards in ad 568 drove him from some districts, and left him only a feeble authority over the Eastern and Southern parts of the peninsula.

  The transalpine provinces.Beyond the Alps, though the Roman population had by this time ceased to seek help from the Eastern sovereigns, the Empire’s rights were still deemed to subsist, though as respects Gaul they were deemed to have been yielded by Justinian to the Franks.e As has been said, those rights had been admitted by the conquerors themselves: by Athaulf, when he reigned in Aquitaine as the vicar of Honorius, and recovered Spain from the Suevi to restore it to its ancient masters; by the West Gothic kings of Spain, when they permitted the Mediterranean cities to send tribute to Constantinople; by Clovis, when, after the representatives of the old government, Syagrius and the Armorican cities, had been conquered or absorbed, and the West Gothic kingdom in Aquitaine had been overthrown, he received with delight from the Eastern emperor Anastasius the grant of a Roman dignity to confirm his possession. Arrayed like a Fabius or Valerius in the consul’s purple robe and senatorial chlamys, the Sicambrian chieftain rode through the streets of Tours, while the shout of the provincials hailed him Augustus.f They already obeyed him, but his power was now legalized in their eyes, and it was not without a melancholy pride that they saw the terrible conqueror himself yield to the spell of the Roman name, and do homage to the enduring majesty of their legitimate sovereign.

  Lingering influences of Rome.Yet the severed limbs of the Empire forgot by degrees their original unity. As in the breaking up of the old society, which we trace from the sixth to the eighth century, rudeness and ignorance grew apace, as language and manners were changed by the infiltration of Teutonic settlers, as men’s thoughts and hopes and interests were narrowed by isolation from their fellows, as the organization of the Roman province and the Germanic tribe alike dissolved into a chaos whence the new order began to shape itself, dimly and doubtfully as yet, the memory of the old Empire, its symmetry, its sway, its civilization, must needs wane and fade. It might have perished altogether but for the two enduring witnesses Rome had left—her Church and her Law.Religion. The barbarians had at first associated Christianity with the Romans from whom they learned it: the Romans had used it as their only bulwark against oppression. The hierarchy were the natural leaders of the people, and the necessary councillors of the king. Their power grew with the decay of civil government and the spread of superstition; and when the Frank found it too valuable to be abandoned to the vanquished people, he insensibly acquired the feelings and policy of the order which he entered.

  As the Empire fell to pieces, and the new kingdoms which the conquerors had founded began in their turn to dissolve, the Church clung more closely to her unity of faith and discipline, the common bond of all Christian men. That unity must have a centre, that centre was Rome. A succession of able and zealous pontiffs extended her influence—the sanctity and the writings of Gregory the Great were famous through all the West. Never permanently occupied by barbarians, she retained her peculiar character and customs, and laid the foundations of a power over men’s souls more durable than that which she had lost over their bodies.gJurisprudence. Only second in importance to this influence was that which was exercised by the permanence of the old law, and of its creature the municipal organization of the cities. The barbarian invaders retained the customs of their ancestors, characteristic memorials of a rude people, as we see them in the Salic law or in the ordinances of Ini and Alfred. But the subject population and the clergy continued to be governed by that elaborate system which the genius and labour of many generations had raised to be the most lasting monument of Roman greatness.

  The civil law had maintained itself in Spain and Southern Gaul, nor was it utterly forgotten even in the North, in Britain, on the borders of Germany. Revised collections of extracts from the Theodosian Code and other Roman law books were issued by the West Gothic and Burgundian princes.h For some centuries it was the patrimony of the subject population everywhere, and in Aquitaine and Italy has outlived feudalism. The presumption that all men were to be judged by it who could not be proved to be subject to some other law continued to be accepted down to the end of the Middle Ages.i Its phrases, its forms, its courts, its subtlety and precision, all recalled the strong and cultivated society which had produced it. Other motives, as well as those of kindness to their subjects, made the new kings favour it; for it exalted their prerogative, and the submission enjoined by it on one class of their subjects soon came to be demanded from the other, by their own Teutonic customs almost the equals of the prince. Considering attentively how many of the old institutions continued to subsist, and studying the ideas of that time, as they are faintly preserved in its scanty records, it seems hardly too much to say that in the eighth century the Roman Empire still existed in the West: existed in men’s minds as a power weakened, delegated, suspended, but not destroyed.

  It is easy for those who read the history of an age in the light of those that followed it, to perceive that in this men erred; that the tendency of events was wholly different; that society had entered on a new phase, wherein every change did more to localize authority and strengthen the aristocratic principle at the expense of the despotic. We can see that other forms of life, more full of promise for the distant future, had already begun to shew themselves. They, with no type of power or beauty but that which had filled the imagination of their forefathers, and now loomed on them grander than ever through the mist of centuries, mistook (as did many of the great spirits of Italy down to the days of Dante and Rienzo) memories for hopes, and sighed only for the renewal of its strength. Events were at hand by which these hopes seemed destined to be gratified.

  CHAPTER IV

  RESTORATION OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST

  Chap. IV.It was towards Rome as their ecclesiastical capital that the thoughts and hopes of the men of the sixth and seventh centuries were constantly directed. Yet not from Rome, feeble and corrupt, nor on the exhausted soil of Italy, was the deliverer to arise. Just when, as we may suppose, the vision of a renewal of imperial authority in the Western provinces was beginning to vanish away, there appeared in the furthest corner of Europe, sprung of a race but lately brought within the pale of civilization, a line of chieftains devoted to the service of the Holy See, and among them one whose power, good fortune, and heroic character pointed him out as worthy of a dignity to which doctrine and tradition had attached a sanctity almost divine.

  The Franks.Of the new monarchies that had risen on the ruins of Rome, that of the Franks was by far the greatest. In the third century they appear, with Saxons, Alemanni, and Thuringians, as one of the greatest German tribe leagues. The Sicambri (for it seems probable that this famous race was a chief source of the Frankish nation) had now laid aside their former hostility to Rome, and her future representatives were thenceforth, with few intervals, her faithful allies. Many of their chiefs rose to high places: Malarich receives from Jovian the charge of the Western provinces; Bauto and Mellobaudes figure in the days of Theodosius and his sons; the legendary Merovech (grandfather of Clovis, and supposed to be the son of a water-sprite), whose name has given itself to the Merwing dynasty, is said to have fought under Aetius against Attila in the great battle of Chalons; his countrymen endeavoured in vain to save Gaul from the Suevi and Burgundians. Not till the Empire was evidently helpless did they claim a share of the booty; then Clovis, or Chlodovech, chief of the Salian tribe, leaving his kindred the Ripuarians in their seats on the lower Rhine, advanced out of Flanders to wrest Gaul from the barbarian nations which had entered it some sixty years before.ad 489. Few conquerors have had a career of more unbroken success. By the defeat of the Roman governor Syagrius he was left master of the Northern provinces: the Burgundian kingdom in the valley of the Rhone was in no long time reduced to dependence: last of all, the West Gothic power was overthrown in one great battle, and Aquitaine added to the dominions of Clovis. Nor were the Frankish arms less prosperous against the Germans who dwelt beyond the Rhine. A victory (supposed to have been won at Tolbiac) led to the submission of the Alemanni: their allies the Bavarians followed, and when the Thuringian power had been broken by Theodorich I (son of Clovis), the Frankish league embraced all the tribes of Western and Southern Germany. The dominion thus formed, stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Inn and the Ems, was of course in no sense a Gallic empire. Nor, although the widest and strongest monarchy that had yet been founded by a Teutonic race, was it, under the Merovingian kings, a united kingdom at all, but rather a congeries of principalities, held together by the predominance of a single tribe and a single family, who ruled in Gaul as masters over a subject race, and in Germany exercised a sort of hegemony among kindred and scarcely inferior tribes. But towards the middle of the eighth century a change began. Under the rule of Pipin of Herstal and his son Charles Martel, mayors of the palace to the last feeble Merovingians, the Austrasian Franks in the lower Rhineland became acknowledged heads of the nation, and were able, while establishing a firmer government at home, to direct its whole strength to projects of foreign ambition. The form those projects took arose from a circumstance which has not yet been mentioned. It was not solely or even chiefly to their own valour that the Franks owed their past greatness and the yet loftier future which awaited them, it was to the friendship of the clergy and the favour of the Apostolic See. The other Teutonic nations, Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Suevians, Lombards, had been most of them converted by Arian missionaries who proceeded from the Roman Empire during the short period when Arian doctrines were in the ascendant. The Franks, who were among the latest converts, were Catholics from the first, and after the days of Clovis, whom the clergy had welcomed as a sort of new Constantine, gladly accepted the clergy as their teachers and allies. Thus it was that while the hostility of their orthodox subjects had weakened the Vandal kingdom in Africa and the East Gothic kingdom in Italy, the eager sympathy of the priesthood helped the Franks to vanquish their Burgundian and West Gothic enemies, and made it comparatively easy for them to blend with the Roman population in the provinces. They had done good service against the Saracens of Spain; they had aided the English Winfrith (St. Boniface) in his mission to the heathen of Germany;a and at length, as the most powerful among Catholic nations, they attracted the eyes of the ecclesiastical head of the West, now sorely bested by domestic foes.

  Italy: the Lombards.Since the invasion of Alboin, Italy had groaned under a complication of evils. The Lombards who had entered along with that chief in ad 568 had settled in considerable numbers in the valley of the Po, which became the seat of their kingdom, and had founded the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, leaving the Adriatic coast as well as Rome and the Southern provinces to be governed by the exarch of Ravenna as viceroy of the Eastern crown. This subjection was, however, little better than nominal. Although too few to occupy the whole peninsula, the invaders were yet strong enough to harass every part of it by inroads which met with little resistance from a population unused to arms, and without the spirit to use them in self-defence. More cruel and repulsive, if we may believe the evidence of their enemies, than any other of the Northern tribes, the Lombards were certainly singular in their aversion to the clergy, never admitting them to the national councils. Tormented by their repeated attacks, Rome sought help in vain from Constantinople, whose forces, scarce able to repel from her walls the Avars and Saracens, could give no support to the distant exarch of Ravenna. The Popes were the Emperor’s subjects;The Popes. they awaited his confirmation, like other bishops; they had more than once been the victims of his anger.b But as the city became more accustomed to a practical independence, and the Pope rose to a predominance, real if not yet legal, his tone grew bolder than that of the Eastern patriarchs. In the controversies that had raged in the Church, he had had the wisdom or good fortune to espouse (though not always from the first)c the orthodox side: it was now by another quarrel of religion that his deliverance from an unwelcome yoke was accomplished.

  Iconoclastic controversy,ad 726.The Emperor Leo, born among the Isaurian mountains, where a simpler faith may yet have lingered, and stung by the Mohammedan taunt of idolatry, determined to abolish the worship of images, which seemed to be fast obscuring the more spiritual part of Christianity. An attempt which had been sufficient to cause tumults among the submissive populations of the East excited in Italy a fiercer commotion. The people rose with one heart in defence of what had become to them more than a symbol: the exarch was slain: the Pope, though unwilling to sever himself from the lawful head and protector of the Church, must yet resist and rebuke the prince whom he could not reclaim from so hateful a heresy.d Liudprand, king of the Lombards, improved his opportunity. Falling on the Exarchate as the champion of images, on Rome as the pretended ally of the Emperor, he overran the one, and all but succeeded in capturing the other. Overawing Liudprand by the majesty of his office, the Pope escaped for the moment, but he saw his peril. Placed between a heretic and an invader, he turned his gaze beyond the Alps, to a Catholic chief who had just achieved a signal deliverance for Christendom by his defeat of the Spanish Musulmans on the field of Poitiers.ad 732. Gregory II, though his reluctance to break with the Eastern Empire led him to dissuade the North Italians from the notion of setting up an Emperor against Leo,e had already opened communications with Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, and virtual ruler of the Frankish realm.The Popes appeal to the Franks. As the crisis becomes more pressing, Gregory III (who had excommunicated the Iconoclasts in a synod at Rome) finds in the same quarter his only hope, and appeals to him, in urgent letters, to hasten to the succour of Holy Church.f Some accounts add that Charles was offered, in the name of the Roman people, the office of consul and patrician. It is at least certain that here begins the connection of the old imperial seat with the rising Germanic power: here first the pontiff leads a political movement, and shakes off the ties that bound him to his legitimate sovereign. Charles died before he could obey the call; but his son Pipin (surnamed the Short) made good use of the new friendship with Rome. He was the third of his family who had ruled the Franks with the full power of a monarch: it seemed time to abolish the pageant of Merovingian royalty; yet a departure from the ancient line might shock the feelings of the people. A course was taken whose dangers no one then foresaw: the Holy See, now for the first time invoked as an international or supranational power, pronounced the deposition of the feeble Merovingian Childeric,ad 750-51. and gave to the royal office of his successor Pipin a sanctity hitherto unknown; adding to the old Frankish election, which consisted in raising the chief on a shield amid the clash of arms, the Roman diadem and the Hebrew rite of anointing.Pipin patrician of the Romans,ad 754. The compact between the chair of Peter and the Teutonic throne was hardly sealed, when the latter was summoned to discharge its share of the duties. Twice did Aistulf the Lombard assail Rome, twice did Pipin descend to the rescue: the second time at the bidding of a letter written in the name of St. Peter himself.g Aistulf’s resistance was easily overcome; and the Frank bestowed on the Papal chair all that had belonged to the Exarchate in North Italy, receiving as the meed of his services the title of Patrician.h

  Import of this title.As a foreshadowing of the higher dignity that was to follow, this title requires a passing notice. Introduced by Constantine at a time when its original meaning had been long forgotten, it was designed to be, and for awhile remained, the name not of an office but of a rank, the highest after those of emperor and consul. As such, it was usually conferred upon provincial governors of the first class, and in time also upon barbarian potentates whom the imperial court might wish to flatter or conciliate. Thus Odoacer, Theodorich, the Burgundian king Sigismund, Clovis himself, had all received it from the Eastern Emperor; so too in still later times it was given to Saracenic and Bulgarian princes.i In the sixth and seventh centuries an invariable practice seems to have attached it to the East Roman viceroys of Italy, and thus, as we may conjecture, a natural confusion of ideas had made men take it to be, in some sense, an official title, conveying an extensive though undefined authority, and implying in particular the duty of overseeing the Church and promoting her temporal interests. It was doubtless with such a meaning that the Romans and their bishop bestowed it upon the Frankish kings, acting quite without legal right, for it could emanate only from the Emperor, but choosing it as the title which bound its possessor to render to the Church support and defence against her Lombard foes. Hence the phrase is always ‘Patricius Romanorum’; not, as formerly, ‘Patricius’ alone: hence it is usually associated with the terms ‘defensor’ and ‘protector.’ And since ‘defence’ implies a corresponding measure of obedience on the part of those who profit by it, there must have been conceded to the new patrician more or less of positive authority in Rome, although not such as to extinguish either the practical power of the Pope or the titular supremacy of the Emperor.

  Extinction of the Lombard kingdom by Charles, king of the Franks.So long indeed as the Franks were separated by a hostile kingdom from their new allies, this control of Rome remained little better than nominal. But when on Pipin’s death the restless Lombards again took up arms and menaced the possessions of the Church, Pipin’s son Charles, whom we commonly call Charlemagne, swept down like a whirlwind from the Alps at the call of Pope Hadrian, seized King Desiderius in his capital, himself assumed the Lombard crown, and made Northern Italy thenceforward an integral part of the Frankish Empire. Proceeding to Rome at the head of his victorious army, the first of a long line of Teutonic kings who were to experience alternately her love and her hate, he was received by Hadrian with distinguished honours, and welcomed by the people as their leader and deliverer.ad 774. Yet even then, whether out of policy or from that sentiment of reverence to which his ambitious mind did not refuse to bow, he was moderate in claims of jurisdiction, he yielded to the pontiff the place of honour in processions, and renewed, although in the guise of a lord and conqueror, the gift of the Exarchate and Pentapolis, which Pipin had made to the Roman Church twenty years before.

  Charles and Hadrian.It is with a strange sense, half of sadness, half of amusement, that in watching the progress of this grand historical drama we recognize a mixture of higher and lower motives in the minds of the chief actors. The Frankish king and the Roman pontiff were for the time the two most powerful forces that urged the movement of the world, leading it on by swift steps to a mighty crisis of its fate, themselves guided, as it might well seem, by the purest zeal for its spiritual welfare. Their words and acts, their character and bearing in the sight of expectant Christendom, were worthy of men destined to leave an indelible impress on their own and many succeeding ages. Nevertheless in them too appears the undercurrent of material interests. The lofty and fervent mind of Charles was not free from the stirrings of personal ambition: yet these may be excused as being almost inseparable from an intense and restless genius, which, be it never so unselfish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix upon everything its grasp and raise out of everything its monument. So too in the policy of the Popes the desire to secure spiritual independence was mingled with less noble motives. Ever since the disappearance of an Emperor from Italian soil had virtually emancipated the ecclesiastical potentate from secular control, the most abiding object of his schemes and prayers had been the acquisition of territorial wealth in the neighbourhood of his capital. He had indeed a sort of justification, for Rome, a city with neither trade nor industry, was crowded with poor, for whom it devolved on the bishop to provide.j Yet the pursuit was one which could not fail to pervert the purposes of the Popes and give a sinister character to their action. It was this fear for the lands of the Church more than for religion or the safety of the city, neither of which was seriously endangered by the Lombard attacks, that had prompted their passionate appeals to Charles Martel and Pipin; it was now the well-grounded hope of having these possessions confirmed and extended by Pipin’s greater son that made the Roman ecclesiastics so forward in his cause. And it was the same lust after worldly wealth and pomp, mingled with the dawning prospect of an independent principality, that now began to seduce them into a long course of guile and intrigue. For this is probably the very time, although neither the exact date nor the complicity of any Pope can be established, to which must be assigned the extraordinary forgery of the Donation of Constantine, whereby it was pretended that power over Italy and the whole West had been granted by the first Christian Emperor to Pope Sylvester and his successors in the Chair of the Apostle.k

  For the next twenty-four years Italy remained quiet. The government of Rome was carried on in the name of the Patrician Charles, although it does not appear that he sent thither any official representative; while at the same time both the city and the Exarchate continued to admit the nominal suzerainty of the Eastern Emperor, employing the years of his reign to date documents. Southern Italy, which had received only a slight infusion of Teutonic blood, and to which the Greek tongue—its use recently increased by an immigration of Greek refugees during the Iconoclastic troubles—was still familiar, had remained loyal to the East Roman princes, and continued to form part of their realm till the rise of the Norman kingdom in the eleventh century.Accession of Pope Leo III,ad 796. In ad 796 Leo the Third succeeded Pope Hadrian, and signalized his devotion to the Frankish throne by sending to Charles the banner of the city and the keys of the holiest of all Rome’s shrines, the confession of St. Peter, asking that some officer should be deputed to the city to receive from the people their oath of allegiance to the Patrician. He had soon need to seek the Patrician’s help for himself. In ad 798 a sedition broke out: the Pope, going in solemn procession from the Lateran to the church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, was attacked by a band of armed men, headed by two officials of his court, nephews of his predecessor; was wounded and left for dead, and with difficulty succeeded in escaping to Spoleto, whence he fled northward into the Frankish lands. Charles had led his army against the revolted Saxons: thither Leo following overtook him at Paderborn in Westphalia. The king received with respect his spiritual father, entertained and conferred with him for some time, and at length sent him back to Rome under the escort of Angilbert, one of his trustiest ministers; promising to follow ere long in person. After some months peace was restored in Saxony, and in the autumn of 799 Charles descended from the Alps once more, while Leo revolved deeply the great scheme for whose accomplishment the time was now ripe.

  Belief in the Roman Empire not extinct.Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since the last Caesar of the West resigned his power into the hands of the senate, and left to his Eastern brother the sole headship of the Roman world. To the latter Italy had from that time been nominally subject; but it was only during one brief interval between the death of Teia the last Ostrogothic king and the descent of Alboin the first Lombard that his power had been really effective. In the further provinces, Gaul, Spain, Britain, it was only a memory. But the idea of a Roman Empire as a necessary part of the world’s order had not vanished: it had been admitted by those who seemed to be destroying it; it had been cherished by the Church; it was still recalled by laws and customs; it was dear to the subject populations, who fondly looked back to the days when despotism was at least mitigated by peace and order. We have seen the Teuton endeavouring everywhere to identify himself with the system he overthrew. As Goths, Burgundians, and Franks sought the title of consul or patrician, as the Lombard kings when they renounced their Arianism styled themselves Flavii, so even in distant England the fierce Saxon and Anglian conquerors used the names of Roman dignities, and after a time began to call themselves imperatores and basileis of Britain. Within the last century and a half the rise of Mohammedanism,l a vast religious community which was also a vast temporal dominion, had brought out the common Christianity of Europe into a fuller relief, while the march of Saracenic invasion exposed Italy to terrible dangers. The False Prophet had left one religion, one Empire, one Commander of the faithful: the Christian commonwealth needed more than ever an efficient head and centre. Such leadership it could no wise find in the Court on the Bosphorus, shaken by the Arab conquests, and growing ever more alien to the West. The name of ‘respublica,’ permanent at the elder Rome, had become long since obsolete in the Eastern Empire. Its government, which had from the first been tinged with a Greco-Asiatic colour, had now drifted away from its ancient traditions into the forms of an Oriental despotism. Claudian had already sneered at ‘Greek Quirites’:m the general use, since Justinian’s time, of the Greek tongue, and the difference of manners and usages, made the taunt now more deserved.Motives of the Pope. The Pope had no reason to wish well to the East Roman princes, who, while insulting his weakness, had given him no help against the savage Lombards, and who for nearly seventy yearsn had been contaminated by a heresy the more odious that it touched not speculative points of doctrine but the most familiar usages of worship. In North Italy their power was extinct: no pontiff since Zacharias had asked their confirmation of his election: nay, the appointment of the intruding Frank to the patriciate, an office which it belonged to the Emperor to confer, was of itself an act of rebellion. Nevertheless their rights subsisted in theory: they were still, and while they retained the imperial name must so long continue, titular sovereigns of the Roman city. Even Pope Hadrian had addressed Constantine VI with studied humility. Nor could the spiritual head of Christendom dispense with the temporal head; without the Roman Empire there could not be a Roman nor by necessary consequence (as was believed) a Catholic and Apostolic Church.o For, as will be shewn more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was indissoluble in thought: Christianity seemed to stand or fall along with the great Christian state: they were but two names for the same thing. Moved by these ideas and pressed by these needs the Pope took a step which some among his predecessors are said to have already contemplated,p and towards which the events of the last fifty years had pointed. The moment was opportune. The widowed Empress Irene, famous alike for her beauty, her talents, and her crimes, had deposed and blinded her son Constantine VI: a woman, a usurper, almost a parricide, sullied the throne of the world. By what right, it might well be asked, did the factions of a distant city in the East impose a master on the original seat of empire? It was time to provide better for the most august of human offices: an election at Rome was as valid as at Constantinople: the possessor of the real power should be clothed with the outward dignity also. Nor could it be doubted where that possessor was to be found. The Frank had been always faithful to Rome: his baptism was the enlistment of a new barbarian auxiliary. His services against Arian heretics and Lombard marauders, against the Saracen of Spain and the Avar of Pannonia, had earned him the title of Champion of the Faith and Defender of the Holy See. He was now unquestioned lord of Western Europe, whose subject nations, Celtic and Teutonic, were eager to be called by his name and to adopt his customs.q In Charles, the hero who united under one sceptre so many races, and whose religious spirit made him appear to rule all as the vicegerent of God, the pontiff might well see, as later ages saw, the new golden head of a second image,r erected on the ruins of that whose mingled iron and clay seemed crumbling to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks of Constantinople.

  Coronation of Charles at Rome,ad 800.At length the Frankish host entered Rome. The charges brought against the Pope were heard; his innocence, already vindicated by a miracle, was pronounced by the Patrician in full synod; his accusers were condemned in his stead. Charles remained in the city for some weeks; and on Christmas Day, ad 800,s he heard mass in the basilica of St. Peter. On the spot where now the gigantic dome of Bramante and Michael Angelo towers over the buildings of the modern city, the spot which tradition had hallowed as that of the Apostle’s martyrdom, Constantine the Great had erected the oldest and stateliest temple of Christian Rome. Nothing could be less like than was this basilica to those Northern cathedrals, shadowy, fantastic, irregular, crowded with pillars, fringed all round by clustering shrines and chapels, which are to most of us the types of mediaeval architecture. In its plan and decorations, in the spacious sunny hall, the roof plain as that of a Greek temple, the long row of Corinthian columns, the vivid mosaics on its walls, in its brightness, its sternness, its simplicity, it had preserved every feature of Roman art, and had remained a perfect expression of Roman character.t Out of the transept a flight of steps led up to the high altar underneath and just beyond the great arch, the arch of triumph as it was called: behind in the semicircular apse sat the clergy, rising tier above tier around its walls; in the midst, high above the rest, and looking down past the altar over the multitude, was placed the bishop’s throne, itself the curule chair of some forgotten magistrate.u From that chair the Pope now rose, as the reading of the Gospel ended, advanced to where Charles, who had exchanged his simple Frankish dress for the sandals and the chlamys of a Roman patrician, knelt in prayer by the high altar, and as in the sight of all he placed upon the brow of the barbarian chieftain the diadem of the Caesars, then bent in obeisance before him, the church rang to the shout of the multitude, again free, again the lords and centre of the world, ‘To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving Emperor, be life and victory.’x In that shout, echoed by the Franks without, was pronounced the union, so long in preparation, so mighty in its consequences, of the Roman and the Teuton, of the memories and the civilization of the South with the fresh energy of the North, and from that moment modern history begins.

  CHAPTER V

  EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES

  Chap. V.The coronation of Charles is not only the central event of the Middle Ages, it is also one of those very few events of which, taking them singly, it may be said that if they had not happened, the history of the world would have been different. In one sense indeed it has scarcely a parallel. The assassins of Julius Caesar thought that they had saved Rome from monarchy, but monarchy came inevitable in the next generation. The conversion of Constantine changed the face of the world, but Christianity was spreading fast, and its ultimate triumph was only a question of time. Had Columbus never spread his sails, the secret of the Western sea would yet have been pierced by some later voyager: had Charles V broken his safe-conduct to Luther, the voice silenced at Wittenberg would have been taken up by echoes elsewhere. But if the Roman Empire had not been restored in the West in the person of Charles, it would never have been restored at all, and the endless train of consequences for good and for evil that followed could not have been. Why this was so may be seen by examining the history of the next two centuries. In that day, as through all the Dark and Middle Ages, two forces were striving for the mastery. The one was the instinct of separation, disorder, anarchy, caused by the ungoverned impulses and barbarous ignorance of the great bulk of mankind; the other was that passionate longing of the better minds for a formal unity of government, which had its historical basis in the memories of the old Roman Empire, and its most constant expression in the devotion to a visible and catholic Church. The former tendency was, in secular affairs, the stronger, but the latter, used and stimulated by an extraordinary genius like Charles, achieved in the year 800 a victory whose results were never to be lost. When the hero was gone, the returning wave of anarchy and barbarism swept up violent as ever, yet it could not wholly obliterate the past: the Empire, maimed and shattered though it was, had struck its roots too deep to be overthrown by force, and when it perished at last, perished from inner decay. It was just because men felt that no one less than Charles could have won such a triumph over the evils of the time, by framing and establishing a gigantic scheme of government, that the excitement and hope and joy which the coronation evoked were so intense. Their best evidence is perhaps to be found not in the records of that time itself, but in the cries of lamentation that broke forth when the Empire began to dissolve towards the close of the ninth century, in the marvellous legends which attached themselves to the name of Charles the Emperor, a hero of whom any exploit was credible,a in the devout admiration wherewith his German successors looked back to, and strove in all things to imitate, their all but superhuman prototype.

  Import of the coronation.As the event of ad 800 made an unparalleled impression on those who lived at the time, so has it engaged the attention of men in succeeding ages, has been viewed in the most opposite lights, and become the theme of interminable controversies. It is better to look at it simply as it appeared to the men who witnessed it. Here, as in so many other cases, may be seen the errors into which jurists have been led by the want of historical feeling. In rude and unsettled states of society men respect forms and obey facts, while careless of rules and principles. In England, for example, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it signified comparatively little whether an aspirant to the throne was next lawful heir, but it signified a great deal whether he had been duly crowned and was supported by a strong party. Regarding the matter thus, it is not hard to see why those who, writing seven centuries afterwards, judged the actors of ad 800 as they would have judged their contemporaries, should have misunderstood the nature of that which then came to pass. Baronius and Bellarmine, Spanheim and Conring, are advocates bound to prove a thesis, and therefore believing it; nor does either party find any lack of plausible arguments.b But canonist and civilian alike proceed upon strict ecclesiastical or legal principles, and no such principles can be found in the case, or be fitly applied to it. Neither the instances cited by the Cardinal from the Old Testament of the power of priests to set up and pull down princes, nor those which shew the earlier Emperors controlling the bishops of Rome, really meet the question. Pope Leo acted not as having alone the right to transfer the crown; the practice of hereditary succession and the theory of popular election would have equally excluded such a claim. He was the spokesman of the popular will, which, identifying itself with the sacerdotal power, hated the Easterns and was grateful to the Franks. Yet he was also something more. The act, as it specially affected his interests, was mainly his work, and without him would never have been brought about at all. It was natural that a confusion of his secular functions as leader of the people, and his spiritual as consecrating priest, should lay the foundation of the right claimed afterwards of raising and deposing monarchs at the will of Christ’s vicar. The Emperor was passive throughout; he did not, as in Lombardy, appear as a conqueror, but was received by the Pope and the people as a friend and ally. Rome no doubt became his capital, but it had already obeyed him as Patrician, and the greatest fact that stood out to posterity from the whole transaction was that the crown was, if not bestowed, yet at least imposed, by the hands of the pontiff. He seemed the divinely appointed agent through whom the will of God expressed itself.c

  Contemporary accounts.The best way of shewing the thoughts and motives of those concerned in the transaction is to transcribe the narratives of three contemporary, or almost contemporary annalists, two of them German and one Italian. The Annals of Lauresheim say:—

  ‘And because the name of Emperor had now ceased among the Greeks, and their Empire was possessed by a woman, it then seemed both to Leo the Pope himself, and to all the holy fathers who were present in the self-same council, as well as to the rest of the Christian people, that they ought to take to be Emperor Charles king of the Franks, who held Rome herself, where the Caesars had always been wont to sit, and all the other regions which he ruled through Italy and Gaul and Germany; and inasmuch as God had given all these lands into his hand, it seemed right that with the help of God and at the prayer of the whole Christian people he should have the name of Emperor also. Whose petition king Charles willed not to refuse, but submitting himself with all humility to God, and at the prayer of the priests and of the whole Christian people, on the day of the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ he took on himself the name of Emperor, being consecrated by the lord Pope Leo.’d

  Very similar in substance is the account of the Chronicle of Moissac (ad ann. 801):—

  ‘Now when the king upon the most holy day of the Lord’s birth was rising to the mass after praying before the confession of the blessed Peter the Apostle, Leo the Pope, with the consent of all the bishops and priests and of the senate of the Franks and likewise of the Romans, set a golden crown upon his head, the Roman people also shouting aloud. And when the people had made an end of chanting the Laudes, he was adored by the Pope after the manner of the emperors of old. For this also was done by the will of God. For while the said Emperor abode at Rome certain men were brought unto him, who said that the name of Emperor had ceased among the Greeks, and that among them the Empire was held by a woman called Irene, who had by guile laid hold on her son the Emperor, and put out his eyes, and taken the Empire to herself, as it is written of Athaliah in the Book of the Kings; which when Leo the Pope and all the assembly of the bishops and priests and abbots heard, and the senate of the Franks and all the elders of the Romans, they took counsel with the rest of the Christian people, that they should name Charles king of the Franks to be Emperor, seeing that he held Rome the mother of empire where the Caesars and Emperors were always used to sit; and that the heathen might not mock the Christians if the name of Emperor should have ceased among the Christians.’e

  These two accounts are both from a German source: that which follows is Roman, written probably within some fifty or sixty years of the event. It is taken from the Life of Leo III in the Vitae Pontificum Romanorum, which used to pass under the name of Anastasius the papal librarian.

  ‘After these things came the day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and all men were again gathered together in the aforesaid basilica of the blessed Peter the Apostle: and then the gracious and venerable pontiff did with his own hands crown Charles with a very precious crown. Then all the faithful people of Rome, seeing the defence that he gave and the love that he bare to the Holy Roman Church and her Vicar, did by the will of God and of the blessed Peter, the keeper of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, cry with one accord with a loud voice, “To Charles, the most pious Augustus, crowned of God, the great and peace-giving Emperor, be life and victory.” While he, before the holy confession of the blessed Peter the Apostle, was invoking divers saints, it was proclaimed thrice, and he was chosen by all to be Emperor of the Romans. Thereon the most holy pontiff anointed Charles with holy oil, and likewise his most excellent son to be king, upon the very day of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ; and when the mass was finished then after the mass the most serene lord Emperor offered gifts.’f

  In these three accounts there is no serious discrepancy as to the facts, although the Italian priest, as is natural, heightens the importance of the part played by the Pope, while the Germans are more disposed to rationalize the event, talking of a synod of the clergy, a consultation of the people, and a formal request to Charles, which the silence of Eginhard, as well as the other circumstances of the case, forbid us to accept as literally true. Similarly the Roman narrative passes over the adoration rendered by the Pope to the Emperor, upon which most of the Frankish records insist in a way which puts it beyond doubt.Impression which they convey. But the impression which the three accounts leave is essentially the same. They all shew how hard it is to give a technical character to the transaction as an act either of conquest or of election. The Frankish king does not of his own might seize the crown, but rather receives it as coming naturally to him, as the legitimate consequence of the authority he already enjoyed. The Pope bestows the crown, not in virtue of any right of his own as head of the Church: he is merely the instrument of God’s providence, which has unmistakeably pointed out Charles as the proper person to defend and lead the Christian commonwealth. The Roman people do not formally choose and appoint, but by their applause accept the chief who is presented to them. The act is conceived of as directly ordered by the Divine Providence which has brought about a state of things that admits of but one issue, an issue which king, priest, and people have only to recognize and obey; their personal ambitions, passions, intrigues, sinking and vanishing in reverential awe at what seems the immediate interposition of Heaven. And as the result is desired by all parties alike, they do not think of inquiring into one another’s rights, but take their momentary harmony to be natural and necessary, never dreaming of the difficulties and conflicts which were to arise out of what then seemed so simple. And it was just because everything was thus left undetermined, resting not on express stipulation but rather on a sort of mutual understanding,Later theories respecting the coronation. a sympathy of beliefs and wishes which augured no evil, that the event admitted of being afterwards represented in so many different lights. Four centuries later, when Papacy and Empire had been forced into the mortal struggle by which the fate of both was decided, three distinct theories regarding the coronation of Charles will be found advocated by three different parties, all of them plausible, all of them to some extent misleading. The Swabian Emperors held the crown to have been won by their great predecessor as the prize of conquest, and drew the conclusion that the citizens and bishop of Rome had no rights as against themselves. The patriotic party among the Romans, appealing to the early history of the Empire, declared that only by the voice of their senate and people could an Emperor be lawfully created, he being their chief magistrate, the temporary depositary of their authority. The Popes pointed to the indisputable fact that Leo imposed the crown, and argued that as God’s earthly vicar it was then his right, and must always continue to be their right, to give to whomsoever they would an office created to be the handmaid of their own. Of these three it was the last view that eventually tended to prevail, yet to an impartial eye it cannot claim, any more than do the two others, to contain the whole truth. Charles did not conquer, nor the Pope give, nor the people elect. As the act was unprecedented, so was it extralegal;g it was a revolt of the ancient Western capital against a daughter who had become a mistress; an exercise of the sacred right of insurrection, justified by the weakness or wickedness of the Eastern princes, hallowed to the eyes of the world by the sanction of Christ’s representative, but founded upon no law, nor competent to create any for the future.

  Was the coronation a surprise?It is an interesting and somewhat perplexing question, how far the coronation scene, an act as imposing in its circumstances as it was momentous in its results, was prearranged among the parties. Eginhard tells us that Charles was accustomed to declare that he would not, even on so high a festival, have entered the church had he known of the Pope’s intention.h Even if the monarch had uttered, the secretary would hardly have recorded a falsehood long after the motive that might have prompted it had disappeared. Of the existence of the motive that has been most commonly assumed, a fear of the discontent of the Franks who might think their liberties endangered, little or no proof can be brought from the records of the time, wherein the nation is represented as exulting in the new dignity of their chief as an accession of grandeur to themselves. Nor can we assume that Charles’s disavowal was merely meant to soothe the offended pride of the East Roman princes, from whom he had little to fear, and who were none the more likely to recognize his dignity, if they should believe it to be not of his own seeking. Yet it is hard to suppose the whole affair a surprise; for it was the goal towards which the policy of the Frankish kings had for many years pointed, and Charles himself, in sending before him to Rome many of the spiritual and temporal magnates of his realm, in summoning thither his son Pipin from a war against the Lombards of Benevento, had shewn that he expected some more than ordinary result from this journey to the imperial city. Alcuin moreover Alcuin of York, the trusted adviser of Charles in matters religious and literary, appears from one of his extant letters to have sent as a Christmas gift to his royal pupil a carefully corrected and superbly adorned copy of the Scriptures, with the words ‘ad splendorem imperialis potentiae.’ This has commonly been taken for conclusive evidence that the plan had been settled beforehand, and such it would be were there not some reasons for giving the letter an earlier date, and looking upon the word ‘imperialis’ as a mere magniloquent flourish.i More weight is therefore to be laid upon the arguments supplied by the nature of the case itself. The Pope, whatever his confidence in the sympathy of the people, would never have ventured on so momentous a step until previous conferences had assured him of the feelings of the king, nor could an act for which the assembly were evidently prepared have been kept a secret. Nevertheless, the declaration of Charles himself can neither be evaded nor set down to mere dissimulation. It is more fair to him, and on the whole more reasonable, to suppose that Leo, having satisfied himself of the wishes of the Roman clergy and people as well as of the Frankish magnates, resolved to seize an occasion and place so eminently favourable to his long-cherished plan, while the king, carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment and seeing in the pontiff the prophet and instrument of the divine will, accepted a dignity which he might have wished to receive at some later time or in some other way.j If, therefore, any positive conclusion be adopted, it would seem to be that Charles, who may probably have given a more or less vague consent to the project, was surprised and disconcerted by a sudden fulfilment which interrupted his own carefully studied designs. And although a deed which changed the history of the world was in any case no accident, it may well have worn to the Frankish and Roman spectators the air of a surprise. For there were no preparations apparent in the church; the king was not, like his Teutonic successors in the aftertime, led in procession to the pontifical throne: suddenly, at the very moment when he rose from the sacred hollow where he had knelt among the ever-burning lamps before the holiest of Christian relics—the body of the prince of the Apostles—the hands of that Apostle’s representative placed upon his head the crown of glory and poured upon him the oil of sanctification. There was something in this to thrill the beholders with the awe of a Divine presence, and make them hail him whom that presence seemed almost visibly to consecrate, the ‘pious and peace-giving Emperor, crowned of God.’

  The reluctance of Charles to assume the imperial title has been variously explained. Some high authoritiesk think that his sagacity stretched far enough into the future to discern the danger of the precedent set by the Pope’s action,Theories regarding the motives of Charles. and the claims which might thereafter be based upon it. True it is that when the time came for his son to be crowned as co-emperor, Charles himself set the crown on the head of Lewis. Yet Pope Leo had been so humble towards Charles, so far from advancing those pretensions to supremacy which, foreshadowed by Pope Nicholas I sixty years later, appeared full-blown under Gregory VII, that we may doubt whether the Emperor could have perceived all that lay involved in the imposition of the crown by papal hands. Eginhardl himself seems to hint that Charles feared the jealous hostility of the Eastern Court, which could not only deny his claim to the title, but might disturb by intrigues his dominions in Italy. Accepting this statement, the problem remains, how is this reluctance to be reconciled with those acts of his which clearly shew him aiming at the Roman crown? A probable solution is suggested by a distinguished historian,m who argues from a minute examination of the previous policy of Charles, that while it was the great object of his reign to obtain the crown of the world, he foresaw at the same time the opposition of the East Roman Court, and the want of legality from which his title would in consequence suffer. He was therefore bent on getting from the Eastern rulers, if possible, a transference of their crown; if not, at least a recognition of his own: and he appears to have hoped to win this by the negotiations which had been for some time kept on foot with the Empress Irene. Just at this moment came the coronation by Pope Leo, interrupting these deep-laid schemes, irritating Constantinople, and forcing Charles into the position of a rival who could not with dignity adopt a soothing or submissive tone. Nevertheless, he seems not even then to have abandoned the hope of obtaining a peaceful recognition. He was not, if we may credit Theophanes,n deterred by Irene’s crimes from seeking her hand in marriage. And when the project of thus uniting the East and West in a single Empire, baffled for a time by the opposition of her minister Aetius, was rendered impossible by her subsequent dethronement and exile, he did not abandon the policy of conciliation until a surly acquiescence in, rather than admission of, his dignity had been won from the Eastern Emperor Nicephorus and confirmed by his successor Michael.o

  Defect in the title of the Teutonic Emperors.Whether, supposing Leo to have been less precipitate, a cession of the crown, or an acknowledgement of the right of the Romans to confer it, could ever have been obtained by Charles is more than doubtful. But it is clear that he judged rightly in rating its importance high, for the want of it was the great blemish in his own and his successors’ dignity. To shew how this was so, reference must be made to the events of ad 476. Both the extinction of the Western Empire in that year and its revival in ad 800 have been generally misunderstood in modern times, and although the mistake is not, in a certain sense, of practical importance, yet it tends to confuse history and to blind us to the ideas of the people who acted on both occasions. When Odoacer compelled the abdication of Romulus Augustulus, he did not abolish the Western Empire as a separate power, but caused it to be reunited with or sink into the Eastern, so that from that time there was, as there had been before Diocletian, a single undivided Roman Empire. In ad 800 the very memory of the separate Western Empire, as it had stood from the death of Theodosius till Odoacer, had, so far as appears, been long since lost, and neither Leo nor Charles nor any one among their advisers dreamt of reviving it. They too, like their predecessors, held the Roman Empire to be one and indivisible, and proposed by the coronation of the Frankish king not to proclaim a severance of the East and West, but to reverse the act of Constantine, and make Old Rome again the civil as well as the ecclesiastical capital of the Empire that bore her name. Their deed was in its essence illegal, but they sought to give it every semblance of legality: they professed and partly believed that they were not revolting against a reigning sovereign, but legitimately filling up the place of the deposed Constantine the Sixth, the people of the imperial city exercising their ancient right of choice, their bishop his right of consecration.

  Their purpose was but half accomplished. They could create, but they could not destroy. They set up an Emperor of their own, whose representatives thenceforward reigned in the West, but Constantinople, which they did not attempt to reduce to obedience, retained her sovereigns as of yore; and Christendom saw henceforth two imperial lines, not as in the time before ad 476, the conjoint heads of a single realm, but always rivals and usually enemies, each denouncing the other as a pretender, each professing to be the only true and lawful head of the Christian Church and people. Although therefore we must in practice speak during the next seven centuries (down till ad 1453, when Constantinople fell before the Turkish Sultan Mohammed II) of an Eastern and a Western Empire, the phrase is in strictness incorrect, and was one which either court ought to have repudiated. The Byzantines almost always did repudiate it;p the Latins usually; although, yielding to facts, they sometimes condescended to employ it themselves. But their theory was always the same. Charles was held to be the legitimate successor, not of Romulus Augustulus, but of Constantine VI, of his father Leo IV, of Heraclius, Justinian, Arcadius, and the whole Eastern line; and hence it is that in the annals of the time and of many succeeding centuries, the name of Constantine VI, the sixty-seventh in order from Augustus, is followed without a break by that of Charles, the sixty-eighth.

  Government of Charles as Emperor.The maintenance of an imperial line among the Easterns was a continuing protest against the validity of Charles’s title. But from their enmity he had little to fear, and in the eyes of the world he seemed to step into their place, adding the traditional dignity which had been theirs to the power that he already enjoyed. North Italy and Rome ceased for ever to own the supremacy of Constantinople; and while the Eastern princes paid a shameful tribute to the Musulman, the Frankish Emperor—as the recognized head of Christendom—received from the Patriarch of Jerusalem the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Calvary; the gift of the Sepulchre itself, says Eginhard, from ‘Aaron king of the Persians.’q Out of this peaceful intercourse with the famous Khalif the romancers created a crusade. Within his own dominions the sway of Charles assumed a more sacred character.His authority in matters ecclesiastical. Already had his unwearied and comprehensive activity made him throughout his reign an ecclesiastical no less than a civil ruler, summoning and sitting in councils, examining and appointing bishops, settling by capitularies the smallest points of church discipline and polity. A synod held at Frankfort in ad 794 condemned the decrees of the second Council of Nicaea, which had been approved by Pope Hadrian, censured severely the conduct of the Eastern Emperors in suggesting them, and without excluding images from churches, altogether forbade them to be worshipped or even venerated. Not only did Charles preside in and direct the deliberations of this synod, although legates from the Pope were present—he also caused a treatise to be drawn up stating and urging its conclusions; he pressed Hadrian to declare Constantine VI a heretic for denouncing doctrines to which Hadrian had himself consented. There are letters of his extant in which he lectures Pope Leo in a tone of easy superiority, admonishes him to obey the holy canons, and bids him pray earnestly for the success of the efforts which it is the monarch’s duty to make for the subjugation of pagans and the establishment of sound doctrine throughout the Church. Nay, subsequent Popes themselves admitted and applauded the despotic superintendence of matters spiritual which he was wont to exercise, and which led some one to give him playfully a title that had once been applied to the Pope himself, ‘Episcopus episcoporum.’

  The imperial office in its ecclesiastical relations.Acting and speaking thus when merely king, it may be thought that Charles needed no further title to justify his power. The inference is in truth rather the converse of this. Upon what he had done already the imperial title would naturally follow: the attitude of protection and control which he held towards the Church and the Holy See belonged, according to the ideas of the time, properly and only to an Emperor. His coronation was, therefore, the fitting completion and legitimation of his authority, sanctifying rather than increasing it. We have, however, one remarkable witness to the importance that was attached to the imperial name, and the enhancement which he conceived his office to have received from it. In a great assembly held at Aachen,Capitulary ofad 802.ad 802, the lately-crowned Emperor revised the laws of all the races that obeyed him, endeavouring to harmonize and correct them, and issued a capitulary singular in subject and tone.r All persons within his dominions, as well ecclesiastical as civil, who have already sworn allegiance to him as king, are thereby commanded to swear to him afresh as Caesar; and all who have never yet sworn, down to the age of twelve, shall now take the same oath. ‘At the same time it shall be publicly explained to all what is the force and meaning of this oath, and how much more it includes than a mere promise of fidelity to the monarch’s person. Firstly, it binds those who swear it to live, each and every one of them, according to his strength and knowledge, in the holy service of God; since the lord Emperor cannot extend over all his care and discipline. Secondly, it binds them neither by force nor fraud to seize or molest any of the goods or servants of his crown. Thirdly, to do no violence nor treason towards the holy Church, or to widows, or orphans, or strangers, seeing that the lord Emperor has been appointed, after the Lord and His saints, the protector and defender of all such.’ Then in similar fashion purity of life is prescribed to the monks; homicide, the neglect of hospitality, and other offences are denounced, the notions of sin and crime being intermingled and almost identified in a way to which no parallel can be found, unless it be in the Mosaic code. There God, the invisible object of worship, is also, by necessary consequence, the judge and ruler of Israel; here the whole cycle of social and moral duty is deduced from the obligation of obedience to the visible autocratic head of the Christian state.

  In most of Charles’s words and deeds, nor less distinctly in the writings of his adviser Alcuin, may be discerned the working of the same theocratic ideas. Among his intimate friends he chose to be called by the name of David, exercising in reality all the powers of the Jewish king; presiding over this kingdom of God upon earth rather as a second Constantine or Theodosius than in the spirit and traditions of the earlier successors of Augustus. Among his measures there are two which in particular recall the first Christian Emperor. As Constantine founds so Charles erects on a firmer basis the connection of Church and State. Bishops and abbots are as essential a part of rising feudalism as counts and dukes. Their benefices are held under the same conditions of fealty and the service in war of their vassal tenants, not of the spiritual person himself: they have similar rights of jurisdiction, and are subject alike to the imperial missi. The monarch often tries to restrict the clergy, as persons, to spiritual duties; quells the insubordination of the monasteries; endeavours to bring the seculars into a quasi-monastic life by instituting and regulating chapters. But after granting wealth and power, the attempt was vain; his strong hand withdrawn, they laughed at control. Again, it was by him first that the payment of tithes, for which the priesthood had long been pleading, was made compulsory in Western Europe, and the support of the ministers of religion recognized as a legally binding obligation.

  Influence of the imperial title in Germany and Gaul.In civil affairs also Charles acquired, with the imperial title, a new position. Later jurists labour to distinguish his power as Roman Emperor from that which he held already as king of the Franks and their subject allies: they insist that his coronation gave him the capital only, that it is absurd to talk of a Roman Empire in regions whither the eagles had never flown.s In such expressions there seems to lurk either confusion or misconception. It was not the actual government of the city that Charles obtained in ad 800; that his father had already held as Patrician, and he had himself exerted the rights which the title gave. It was far more than the titular sovereignty of Rome which had hitherto been supposed to be vested in the Emperor at Constantinople. It was nothing less than the headship of the world, believed to appertain of right to the lawful Roman Emperor, whether he reigned on the Bosphorus, the Tiber, or the Rhine. As that headship, although never denied, had been in abeyance in the West for several centuries, its bestowal on the king of so vast a realm was a change of the first moment, for it made the coronation not merely a transference of the seat of Empire, but a renewal of the Empire itself, a bringing back of it from faith to sight, from the world of belief and theory to the world of fact and reality. And since the powers it gave were autocratic and unlimited, it must swallow up all minor claims and dignities: the rights of Charles the Frankish king were merged in those of Charles the successor of Augustus, the lord of the world. That his imperial authority was theoretically irrespective of place is clear from his own words and acts, and from all the monuments of that time. He would not, indeed, have dreamed of treating the high-spirited Franks as Justinian had treated his half-Oriental subjects, nor would the warriors who followed his standard have brooked such an attempt. Yet even to German eyes his position must have been altered by the halo of vague splendour which now surrounded him; for all, even the Saxon and the Slav, had heard of Rome’s glories, and revered the name of Caesar.Action of Charles on Europe. And in his effort to weld discordant elements into one body, to introduce regular gradations of authority, to control the Teutonic tendency to localization by his missi—officials commissioned to traverse each some part of his dominions, reporting on and redressing the evils they found—as well as by his own oft-repeated personal progresses, Charles was guided by the traditions of the old Empire. His sway is the revival of order and culture, seeking to fuse the West into a compact whole, whose parts are never thenceforward to lose the marks of their connection and their half-Roman character, gathering up all that is left in Europe of intellect knowledge and skill, hurling it with the new force of Christianity on the infidel of the South and the masses of untamed barbarism to the North and East. Ruling the world by the gift of God, and by the transmitted rights of the Romans and their Caesar whom God had chosen to conquer it, he renews the original aggressive movement of the Empire. The civilized world has subdued her invader,t and now arms him against savagery and heathendom. Hence the wars, not more of the sword than of the cross, against Saxons, Avars, Slavs, Danes, Spanish Arabs, where monasteries are fortresses and baptism the badge of submission. The overthrow of the Irminsûl,u in the first Saxon campaign, sums up the changes of seven centuries. The Romanized Teuton destroys the monument of his country’s freedom, for it is also the emblem of paganism and barbarism. The work of the Cheruscan Arminius is undone by his successor.

  His position as Frankish king.This, however, is not the only side from which Charles’s policy and character may be regarded. If the unity of the Church and the shadow of imperial prerogative was one pillar of his power, the other was the Frankish nation. The empire was still military, though in a sense strangely different from that of Julius or Severus. The warlike Franks had permeated Western Europe; their primacy was admitted by the kindred tribes of Bavarians, Lombards, Thuringians, Alemannians, and Burgundians; the Slavonic peoples on the borders trembled and paid tribute; the Spanish Alfonso of Asturias found in the Emperor a protector against the infidel foe. His influence, if not his exerted power, crossed the ocean: the kings of the Scots sent gifts and called him lord:x the restoration of Eardulf to Northumbria, still more of Egbert to Wessex, might furnish a better ground for the claim of suzerainty than many to which his successors had afterwards recourse.

  As it was by Frankish arms that this predominance in Europe which the imperial title adorned and legalized had been won, so was the government of Charles Roman in name rather than in fact. It was not by restoring the effete mechanism of the old Empire, but by his own vigorous personal action and that of his great officers, that he strove to administer and reform. With every effort for a strong central government, there is no despotism: each nation retains its laws, its hereditary chiefs, its free popular assemblies. The conditions granted to the Saxons after long and cruel warfare, conditions so favourable that in the next century their dukes hold the foremost place in Germany, shew how little he sought to make the Franks a dominant caste.General results of his Empire. One may think of him as a second Theodorich, trying to maintain the traditions of Rome and to breathe a new spirit into the ancient forms. The conception was magnificent; and it fitted the time better than it had done in the hands of Theodorich, not only because Charles was himself orthodox and pious, but also because the name and dominion of Rome were now more closely associated with Christianity than they had been in days when the recollection of heathen Emperors was still fresh in the memory of men. But two obstacles forbade success. The one was the ecclesiastical, especially the papal power, apparently subject to the temporal, but with a strong and undefined prerogative which only waited the occasion to trample on what it had helped to raise. The Pope might take away the crown he had bestowed, and turn against the Emperor the Church which now obeyed him. The other was to be found in the discordance of the component parts of the Empire. The nations were not ripe for settled life or extensive schemes of polity; the differences of race, language, manners, over vast and thinly-peopled lands baffled every attempt to maintain their cohesion: and when once the spell of the great mind was withdrawn, the mutually repellent forces began to work, and the mass dissolved into that chaos out of which it had been formed. Nevertheless, the parts separated not as they met, but having all of them undergone influences which continued to act when political connection had ceased. For the work of Charles—a genius pre-eminently creative—was not lost in the anarchy that followed: rather are we to regard his reign as the beginning of a new era, or as laying the foundations whereon men continued for many generations to build.

  

  Personal habits and sympathies.It is no longer necessary to shew how little the modern French, children of the Latinized Celt, have to do with the Teutonic Charles. At Rome he might assume the chlamys and the sandals, but at the head of his Frankish host he strictly adhered to the customs of his country, and was beloved by his people as the very ideal of their own character and habits. Of strength and stature almost superhuman, in swimming and hunting unsurpassed, steadfast and terrible in fight, to his friends gentle and condescending, he was a Roman, much less a Gaul,y in nothing but his culture and his schemes of government, otherwise a German. The centre of his realm was the Rhine; his favourite residences Aachenz and Engilenheim;a his sympathies—as they are shewn in the gathering of the old hero-lays,b the composition of a German grammar, the ordinance against confining prayer to the three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin,—were all for the race from which he sprang, and whose advance, represented by the victory of Austrasia, the true Frankish fatherland along the lower Rhine, over Neustria (central Gaul) and Aquitaine, spread a second Germanic wave over the conquered countries.

  His Empire and character generally.There were in his Empire, as in his own mind, two elements, those two from the union and mutual action and reaction of which modern civilization has arisen. These vast domains, reaching from the Ebro to the mountains of Hungary, from the Eyder to the Liris, were the conquests of the Frankish sword, and, although the army was drawn from all the more warlike races, the imperial governors and officers were mostly of Frankish blood. But the conception of the Empire, that which made it a State and not a mere mass of subject tribes like those great Eastern dominions which rise and perish in a lifetime, the realms of Sesostris, or Attila, or Timur, was inherited from an older and a grander polity, and had in it an element which was Roman rather than Teutonic—Roman in its striving after the uniformity and precision of a well-ordered administration, which should subject the individual to the system and realize perfection through the rule of law.c And the bond, too, by which the Empire was chiefly held together was Roman in its origin, although Roman in a sense which would have surprised Trajan or Severus, could it have been foretold them. The ecclesiastical body was already organized and beginning to be centralized, and it was in his control of the ecclesiastical body that the secret of Charles’s power lay. Every Christian—Frank, Gaul, or Italian—owed loyalty to the head and defender of his religion: the unity of the Empire was a reflection of the unity of the Church.

  Into a general view of the government and policy of Charles it is not possible here to enter. Yet his legislation, his assemblies, his administrative schemes, his magnificent works, recalling the projects of Alexander and Caesar, the zeal for education and literature, which he shewed in the collection of manuscripts, the founding of schools, the gathering of eminent men from all quarters around him, cannot be appreciated apart from his position as restorer of the Roman Empire. Like most of those who have led the world, Charles was many great things in one, and was so great just because the workings of his genius were so harmonious. He was more than a barbarian warrior, more than an astute negotiator; there is none of his qualities which would not be forced out of its place were we to characterize him chiefly by it. Comparisons between famous men of different ages are generally as unprofitable as they are easy: the circumstances among which Charles lived do not permit us to institute a minute parallel between his greatness and that of those two to whom it was once the fashion to compare him, nor to say whether he was as profound a statesman as Julius Caesar, as skilful a commander as Napoleon. But scarcely either to the Roman or to the Corsican was he inferior in that quality by which both he and they chiefly impress our imagination—the vivid and unresting energy which swept him over Europe in campaign after campaign, which sought a field for its workings in theology and science, in law and literature, no less than in politics and war. As it was this amazing activity that made him the conqueror of Europe, so was it by the variety of his culture that he became her civilizer. From him, in whose wide deep mind the whole mediaeval theory of the world and human life mirrored itself, did mediaeval society take the form and impress which it retained for centuries, and the traces whereof are among us and upon us to this day.

  The great Emperor was buried at Aachen, in that basilica which it had been the delight of his later years to erect and adorn with the treasures of ancient art. His tomb under the dome—where now we see an enormous slab, with the words ‘Carolo Magno’—was inscribed, ‘Magnus atque Orthodoxus Imperator.’d Poets, fostered by his own zeal, sang of him who had given to the Franks the sway of Romulus.e The gorgeous mists of romance gradually rose and wreathed themselves round his name, till by canonization as a saint he received the highest glory the world or the Church could confer.f For the Roman Church claimed then, as she claims still, the privilege which, in one form or another, humanity seems scarce able to deny itself, of raising to honours almost divine its great departed; and as in pagan times temples had risen to a deified Emperor, so churches were dedicated to St. Charlemagne. Between Sanctus Carolus and Divus Julius how strange an analogy and how strange a contrast!

  CHAPTER VI

  CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS

  Chap. VI.Lewis the Pious,a left by Charles’s death sole heir, had been some years before associated with his father in the Empire, and had been crowned by his father’s hand in a way which, intentionally or not,Lewis the Pious. appeared to deny the need of papal sanction. But it was soon seen that the strength to grasp the sceptre had not passed with it. Too mild to restrain his turbulent nobles, and thrown by over-conscientiousness into the hands of the clergy, he had reigned few years when dissensions broke out on all sides. Charles had wished the Empire to continue one, under the supremacy of a single Emperor, but with its several parts, Lombardy, Aquitaine, Austrasia, Bavaria, each a kingdom held by a scion of the reigning house. A scheme dangerous in itself, and rendered more so by the absence or neglect of regular rules of succession, could with difficulty have been managed by a wise and firm monarch. Lewis tried in vain to satisfy his sons (Lothar, Lewis, and Charles) by dividing and redividing his dominions: they rebelled; he was deposed, and forced by the bishops to do penance, again restored, but without power, a tool in the hands of contending factions. On his death the sons flew to arms, and the first of the dynastic quarrels of modern Europe was fought out on the field of Fontenay. In the partition treaty of Verdun which followed,Partition of Verdun,ad 843. the Teutonic principle of equal division among heirs triumphed over the Roman one of the transmission of an indivisible Empire: the practical sovereignty of all three brothers was admitted in their respective territories, while a barren precedence was reserved to Lothar,Lothar I. with the imperial title which he, as the eldest, already enjoyed. A more important result was the separation of the Gaulish and German nationalities. Their difference of feeling, shewn already in the support of Lewis the Pious by the Germans against the Gallo-Franks and the Church, perhaps an early instance of the aversion of the Teutonic peoples to the pretensions of the spiritual power, took now a permanent shape: modern Germany proclaims the era of ad 843 the beginning of her national existence, and celebrated its thousandth anniversary in 1843. To Charles the Bald was given Francia Occidentalis, that is to say, Neustria and Aquitaine; to Lothar, who as Emperor must possess the two capitals, Rome and Aachen, a long and narrow kingdom stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and including the northern half of Italy; Lewis (surnamed, from his kingdom, the German) received all east of the Rhine,—Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Austria, Carinthia, with possible supremacies over Czechs in far-off Bohemia and Moravia. Throughout these regions German or some Slavonic tongue was spoken; through Charles’s kingdom a corrupt language, equally removed from Latin and from modern French. Lothar’s, being mixed and having no national basis, was the weakest of the three, and soon dissolved into the separate sovereignties of Italy, Burgundy, and Lotharingia, the name of which is perpetuated in the German Lothringen, the French Lorraine.

  On the tangled history of the period that follows it is not possible to do more than touch. After passing from one branch of the Carolingian line to another,bLewis II. the imperial sceptre was at last possessed and disgraced by Charles the Fat, who united all the dominions of his great-grandfather.Charles II (the Bald). This unworthy heir could not avail himself of recovered territory to strengthen or defend the expiring monarchy. He was driven out of Italy in ad 887, and his death in 888 has been usually taken as the date of the extinction of the Carolingian Empire of the West.Charles III (the Fat). The Germans, still attached to the ancient line, chose Arnulf, an illegitimate Carolingian (grandson of Lewis the German), for their king: he entered Italy and was crowned Emperor by his partisan the Corsican Pope Formosus, in 896. But Germany, divided and helpless,End of the Carolingian Empire of the West,ad 888. was in no condition to maintain her power over the Southern lands: Arnulf retreated in haste, leaving Rome and Italy to sixty years of stormy independence.

  That time was indeed the nadir of order and civilization. From all sides the torrent of barbarism which Charles the Great had stemmed was rushing down upon his Empire. The Saracen wasted the Mediterranean coasts, and sacked Rome herself. The Dane and Norseman swept the Atlantic and the North Sea, pierced France and Germany by their rivers, burning, slaying, carrying off into captivity: pouring through the Straits of Gibraltar, they fell upon Provence and Italy. By land, while Wends and Czechs and Obotrites threw off the German yoke and threatened the borders, the wild Hungarian bands, pressing in from the steppes of the Caspian, dashed over Germany like the flying spray of a new wave of barbarism, and carried the terror of their battleaxes to the Apennines and the ocean. Under such strokes the already loosened fabric swiftly dissolved. No one thought of common defence or wide organization: the strong built castles, the weak became their bondsmen, or took shelter under the cowl: the governor—count, abbot, or bishop—tightened his grasp, turned a delegated into an independent, a personal into a territorial authority, and hardly owned a distant and feeble suzerain. The grand vision of a universal Christian Empire was being utterly lost in the isolation, the antagonism, the increasing localization of all powers: it might seem to have been but a passing gleam from an older and better world.

  The German kingdom.In Germany, the greatness of the evil worked at last its cure. When the male line of the Eastern branch of the Carolingians had ended in Lewis (surnamed the Child), son of Arnulf, the chieftains chose and the people accepted as king Conrad duke of the Franconians, and after him Henry duke of the Saxons, both representing the female line of Charles.Henry the Fowler. Henry laid the foundations of a firm monarchy, driving back the Magyars and Wends, recovering Lotharingia, founding towns to be centres of orderly life and strongholds against Hungarian irruptions. He had meant to claim at Rome the rights of his kingdom, rights which Conrad’s weakness had at least asserted by the demand of tribute; but death overtook him, and the plan was left to be fulfilled by Otto his son.

  Otto the Great.The Holy Roman Empire, taking the name in the sense which it commonly bore in later centuries, as denoting the sovereignty of Germany and Italy vested in a Germanic prince, is the creation of Otto the Great. Substantially, it is true, as well as technically, it was a prolongation of the Empire of Charles; and it rested (as will be shewn in the sequel) upon ideas essentially the same as those which brought about the coronation of ad 800. But a revival is always more or less a revolution: the one hundred and fifty years that had passed since the death of Charles had brought with them changes which made Otto’s position in Germany and Europe less commanding and less autocratic than his predecessor’s. With narrower geographical limits, his Empire had a less plausible claim to be the heir of Rome’s universal dominion; and there were also differences in its inner character and structure sufficient to justify us in considering Otto (as he is usually considered by his countrymen) not a mere successor after an interregnum, but rather a second founder of the imperial throne in the West.

  Before Otto’s descent into Italy is described, something must be said of the condition of that country, where circumstances had again made possible the plan of Theodorich, permitted it to become an independent kingdom, and given the title of Emperor to its king.

  The bestowal of the imperial crown on Charles the Great was long afterwards described as a ‘transference of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks.’ But it was not in this light that the men of time regarded it. There was no conscious purpose of settling the office in one nation or one dynasty: there was but an extension of that longestablished principle of the equality of all Romans which had made Trajan and Maximin Emperors. The ‘arcanum imperii,’ whereof Tacitus speaks, ‘posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri,’c had even in heathen days become alium quam Romanum; and now, the names of Roman and Christian having grown co-extensive, a barbarian chieftain was, as a Roman citizen, eligible to the office of Roman Emperor. Treating him as such, the people and pontiff of the capital had in the vacancy of the Eastern throne asserted their ancient rights of election, and while attempting to reverse the act of Constantine, had, as it turned out, re-established the division of Valentinian. The dignity was therefore in strictness personal to Charles; though, in point of fact, and by consent, it tended to become hereditarily transmissible, just as it had formerly been transmitted in the families of Constantine and Theodosius. To the Frankish crown or nation it was by no means legally attached, though the Franks might think it to be so; it had passed to their king only because he was the greatest European potentate, and might equally well pass to some stronger race, if any such appeared. Hence, when the line of Carolingian Emperors ended in Charles the Fat, the rights of Rome and Italy might be taken to revive, and there was nothing to prevent the citizens and the Pope from choosing whom they would. At that memorable era (ad 888) the four kingdoms which this prince had united fell asunder; West France, where Odo or Eudes then began to reign, was never again united to Germany; East France (Germany) chose Arnulf; Burgundyd split up into two principalities, in one of which (Transjurane) Rudolf proclaimed himself king, while the other (Cisjurane with Provence) submitted to Boso;e while Italy (i.e. Northern and Middle Italy, for Southern Italy still obeyed Constantinople) was divided between the parties of Berengar of Friuli and Guido of Spoleto. The former was chosen king by the estates of Lombardy; the latter, and on his speedy death his son Lambert, was crowned Emperor by the Pope. Arnulf’s descent chased them away and vindicated the claims of the Franks, but on his flight the Italians and anti-German faction at Rome became again free. Berengar was made king of Italy, and afterwards Emperor. Lewis of Burgundy, son of Boso, renounced his fealty to Berengar, and procured the imperial dignity, whose vain title he retained through years of misery and exile, till ad 928.f No one of these Emperors was strong enough to rule well even in Italy; beyond it they were not so much as recognized. The crown had become a bauble with which unscrupulous Popes dazzled the vanity of princes whom they summoned to their aid, and soothed the credulity of their more honest supporters. The demoralization and confusion of the country, the shameless profligacy of Rome and her pontiffs during this period, were enough to prevent a true Italian kingdom from being built up on the basis of Roman choice and national unity. Italian indeed it could scarcely be called, for these Emperors were still in blood and manners Teutonic, and akin rather to their Transalpine neighbours than to their Romanic subjects. But Italian it might soon have become under a vigorous rule which would have organized it within and knit it together to resist attacks from without. And therefore the attempt to establish such a kingdom is remarkable, for it might have had great consequences; might, if it had prospered, have spared Italy much suffering and Germany endless waste of strength and blood. He who from the summit of Milan cathedral sees across the misty plain the gleaming turrets of its icy wall sweep in a great arc from North to West, may well wonder that a land which nature has so severed from its neighbours should, since history begins, have been so often the victim of their intrusive tyranny.

  In ad 924 died Berengar, the last of these phantom Emperors. After him Hugh of Burgundy, and Lothar his son, reigned as kings of Italy, if puppets in the hands of a riotous aristocracy can be so called. Rome was meanwhile ruled by the consul or senator Alberic,g who had placed himself at the head of her never quite extinct republican institutions, and in the weakness of the Papacy was almost absolute in the city. Lothar dying, his widow Adelheidh was sought in marriage by Adalbert son of Berengar II, the new Italian monarch.Adelheid, queen of Italy. A gleam of romance is shed on the Empire’s revival by her beauty and her adventures. Rejecting the odious alliance, she was seized by Berengar, escaped with difficulty from the loathsome prison where his barbarity had confined her, and appealed to Otto the German king, the model of that knightly virtue which was beginning to shew itself after the fierce brutality of the last age. He listened, descended into Lombardy by the Adige valley,Otto’s first expedition into Italy,ad 951. espoused the injured queeni and forced Berengar to hold his kingdom as a vassal of the East Frankish crown. That prince was turbulent and faithless; new complaints ere long reached his liege lord, and envoys from the Pope offered Otto the imperial title if he would revisit and pacify Italy. The proposal was well-timed.Invitation sent by the Pope to Otto. Men still thought, as they had thought in the centuries before the Carolingians, that the Empire was suspended, not extinct; and the desire to see its effective power restored, the belief that without it the world could never be right, might seem better grounded than it had been before the coronation of Charles. Then the imperial name had recalled only the faint memories of Roman majesty and order:Motives for reviving the Empire. now it was also associated with the golden age of the first Frankish Emperor, when a single firm and just hand had guided the State, reformed the Church, repressed the excesses of local power: when Christianity had advanced against heathendom, civilizing as she went, fearing neither Hun nor Saracen. One annalist tells us that Charles was elected ‘lest the pagans should insult the Christians, if the name of Emperor should have ceased among the Christians.’j The motive would be bitterly enforced by the calamities of the last fifty years. In a time of disintegration, confusion, strife, all the longings of every wiser and better soul for unity, for peace and law, for some bond to bring Christian men and Christian states together against the common enemy of the faith, were but so many cries for the restoration of the Roman Empire.k These were the feelings that on the field of Merseburg broke forth in the shout of ‘Henry the Emperor’:ad 933. these the hopes of the Teutonic host when after the great deliverance of the Lechfeld they greeted Otto, conqueror of the Magyars, as ‘Imperator, Pater Patriae.’l

  Condition of Italy.The anarchy which an Emperor was needed to heal was at its worst in Italy, desolated by the feuds of a crowd of petty princes. A succession of infamous Popes, raised by means yet more infamous, the paramours and sons of Theodora and Marozia, had disgraced the chair of the Apostle, and though Rome herself might be lost to decency, Western Christendom was roused to anger. The rule of Alberic had been succeeded by the wildest confusion, and calls were heard for the renewal of that imperial authority which all admitted in theory,m and which nothing but the resolute opposition of Alberic himself had prevented Otto from claiming in 951. From the Eastern Empire, to which Italy was more than once tempted to turn, nothing could be hoped; its dangers from foreign enemies were aggravated by the plots of the court and the seditions of the capital; it was becoming more and more alienated from the West by the Photian schism and the question regarding the Procession of the Holy Ghost, which that quarrel had started. Germany was extending and consolidating herself, had escaped domestic perils, and might think of reviving ancient claims. No one could be more willing to revive them than Otto the Great. His ardent spirit, after waging a successful struggle against the turbulent magnates of his German realm, had engaged him in wars with the surrounding nations, and was now captivated by the vision of a wider sway and a loftier world-embracing dignity. Nor was the prospect which the papal offer opened up less welcome to his people. Aachen, their capital, was the ancestral home of the house of Pipin: their sovereign, although himself a Saxon by race, titled himself king of the Franks, in opposition to the Frankish rulers of the Western branch, whose Teutonic character was disappearing among the Romanized inhabitants of Gaul. They held themselves in every way the true representatives of the Carolingian power, and accounted the period since Arnulf’s death nothing but an interregnum which had suspended but not impaired their rights over Rome. ‘For so long,’ says a writer of the time, ‘as there remain kings of the Franks, so long will the dignity of the Roman Empire not wholly perish, seeing that it will abide in its kings.’n The recovery of Italy was therefore to German eyes a righteous as well as a glorious design, approved by the Teutonic Church which had lately been negotiating with Rome on the subject of missions to the heathen, embraced by the people, who saw in it an accession of strength to their young kingdom. Everything smiled on Otto’s enterprise, and the connection which was destined to bring so much strife and woe to Germany and to Italy was welcomed by the wisest of both countries as the beginning of a better era.

  Descent of Otto the Great into Italy.Whatever were Otto’s own feelings, whether or not misgivings were within him lest he might be sacrificing, as modern writers have thought that he did sacrifice, the greatness of his German kingdom to the lust of universal dominion, he shewed no hesitation in his acts. Descending from the Alps with an overpowering force, he was acknowledged as king of Italy at Pavia;o and, having first taken an oath to protect the Holy See and respect the liberties of the city,His coronation at Rome,ad 962. advanced to Rome. There, with Adelheid his queen, he was crowned in the church of St. John Lateran by John XII, on the day of the Purification, the second of February, ad 962. The details of his election and coronation are unfortunately still more scanty than in the case of his great predecessor. Most of our authorities dwell chiefly on the Pope’s part in the act,p yet it is plain that the consent of the people was still thought an essential part of the ceremony, and that Otto rested after all on his host of conquering Saxons. Be this as it may, there was neither question raised nor opposition made in Rome. The usual courtesies and promises were exchanged between Emperor and Pope, the latter owning himself a subject, and the citizens swore for the future to elect no pontiff without Otto’s consent.

  CHAPTER VII

  THEORY OF THE MEDIAEVAL EMPIRE

  Chap. VII.These were the events and circumstances of the time: let us now look at the causes. The restoration of the Empire by Charles may seem to be sufficiently accounted for by the width of his conquests,Why the revival of the Empire was desired. by the peculiar connection which already subsisted between him and the Roman Church, by his commanding personal character, by the temporary vacancy of the throne at Constantinople. The causes of its revival under Otto must be sought deeper. Making every allowance for the favouring incidents which have already been dwelt upon, there must have been some further influence at work to draw him and his successors, Saxon and Frankish kings, so far from home in pursuit of a barren crown, to lead the Italians to accept the dominion of a stranger and a barbarian, to make the Empire itself appear through the whole Middle Age not what it seems now, a gorgeous anachronism, but an institution divine and necessary, having its foundations in the very nature and order of things. The Empire of the elder Rome had been splendid in its life, yet its judgement was written in the misery to which it had brought the provinces, and the helplessness that had invited the attacks of the barbarian. Now, as we at least can see, it had long been dead, and the course of events was adverse to its revival. Its actual representatives, the Roman people, were a turbulent rabble, sunk in a profligacy notorious even in that rude age. Yet not the less for all this did men cling to the idea, and strive through long ages to stem the irresistible time-current, fondly believing that they were breasting it even while it was sweeping them ever faster and faster away from the old order into a region of new thoughts, new feelings, new forms of life. Not till the days of the Renaissance and the Reformation was the illusion dispelled.

  Mediaeval theories.The explanation is to be found in the beliefs which filled the human mind during these centuries. To describe those beliefs concisely and yet faithfully is difficult, for although some of their salient features remained substantially the same from the days of St. Augustine almost to the days of Erasmus, no single epoch in that long series of generations can be taken as shewing them in their full and typical completeness. The system of ideas which created and sustained the Holy Empire was in some of its aspects, or some of its parts, constantly growing, in other aspects and other parts constantly decaying, from the fifth century to the fifteenth, the relative prominence of its cardinal doctrines varying from age to age. But, just as the painter who sees the evershifting lights and shades play over the face of a wide landscape faster than his brush can place them on the canvas, in despair at representing their exact position at any single moment, contents himself with painting the effects that are broadest and most permanent, and at giving rather the impression which the scene makes on him than every detail of the scene itself, so here the best and indeed the only practicable course seems to be that of setting forth in its most self-consistent form the body of ideas and beliefs on which the Empire rested, although this form may not be exactly that which they can be asserted to have worn in any one century, and although the illustrations adduced may have to be taken sometimes from earlier, sometimes from later writers. As the fundamental doctrines were in their essence the same during the whole of the Middle Ages, such a general description as is here attempted may, mutatis mutandis, serve true for the tenth as well as for the fourteenth century.

  The Middle Ages were, as compared with the ages that preceded and the ages that followed, essentially unpolitical. Ideas as familiar to the commonwealths of antiquity as to ourselves, ideas of the common good as the object of the State, of the rights of the people, of the comparative merits of different forms of government, were to those generations, though such ideas often found an unconscious expression in practical expedients, in their speculative form little known, and to most men incomprehensible.a Feudalism was the one great secular institution to which those times gave birth, and feudalism was a social and a legal system, only indirectly and by consequence a political one. Yet the human mind, so far from being idle, was in certain directions never more active; nor was it possible for it to remain without general conceptions regarding the relation of men to each other in this world. Such conceptions were neither made an expression of the actual present condition of things nor scientifically determined by an induction from the past; they were partly inherited from the imperial scheme of law and government that had preceded, partly evolved from the principles of that metaphysical theology which was ripening into scholasticism. Now the two great ideas which expiring antiquity bequeathed to the ages that followed were those of a World-Monarchy and a World-Religion.

  The World-Religion.Before that great movement towards assimilation which began with the Hellenization of the East and was completed by the Western and Northern as well as the Eastern conquests of Rome, men, with little knowledge of each other, with no experience of wide political union,b had held differences of race to be natural and irremovable barriers. Similarly, religion appeared to them a matter purely local and national; and as there were gods of the hills and gods of the valleys,c gods of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced in its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of another country who worshipped other deities as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings. Such feelings, if keenest in the East, frequently shew themselves in the early records of Greece and Italy: in Homer the hero who wanders over the unfruitful sea glories in sacking the cities of the stranger;d the primitive Latins have the same word for a foreigner and an enemy: the exclusive systems of Egypt, Hindostan, China, are only more vehement expressions of the belief which made Athenian philosophers look on a state of war between Greeks and barbarians as natural, and defend slavery on the same ground of the original diversity of the races that rule and the races that serve.e The Roman dominion giving to many nations a common speech and law, smote this feeling on its political side; Christianity more effectually banished it from the soul by substituting for the variety of local pantheons the belief in One God, before whom all men are equal.f

  Coincide with the World-Empire.It is on religion that the inmost and deepest life of a nation rests. Because divinity was divided, humanity had been divided likewise; the doctrine of the unity of God now enforced the unity of man, who had been created in His image. The first lesson of Christianity was love, a love that was to join in one body those whom suspicion and prejudice and pride of race had hitherto kept apart. There was thus formed by the new religion a community of the faithful, a Holy Empire, designed to gather all men into its bosom, and standing opposed to the manifold polytheisms of the older world, exactly as the universal sway of the Caesars was contrasted with the innumerable kingdoms and city republics that had gone before it. The analogy of the two movements made them appear parts of one great world-movement towards unity: the coincidence of their boundaries, which had begun before Constantine, lasted long enough after him to associate them indissolubly together, and make the names of Roman and Christian convertible.g

  World-State and the Universal Church.Men who were already disposed (for reasons set forth aboveh ) to believe the Roman Empire to be eternal, came, under influences of far greater power, to believe the Church, founded by the ever-living Son and guided by the everpresent Spirit of God, to be also eternal. Seeing the two institutions allied and conterminous, they took their alliance and interdependence to be equally eternal; and went on for centuries believing in the necessary existence of the Roman Empire, because they believed in its necessary union with the Catholic Church.

  Oecumenical councils, where the whole spiritual body gathered itself from every part of the temporal realm under the presidency of the temporal head, presented the most visible and impressive examples of the connection of the World-Church and the World-State. The language of civil government was, throughout the West, that of the sacred writings and of worship; the greatest mind of his generation consoled the faithful for the fall of their earthly commonwealth Rome, by describing to them its successor and representative, the ‘city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.’i

  Preservation of the unity of the Church.Of these two parallel unities, that of the political and that of the religious society, meeting in the higher unity of all Christians, which may be indifferently called Catholicism or Romanism (since in that day those words would have had the same meaning), that unity only which had been entrusted to the keeping of the Church survived the storms of the fifth century. Many reasons may be assigned for the firmness with which she clung to it. Seeing one institution after another falling to pieces around her, seeing how countries and cities were being severed from each other by the irruption of strange tribes and the increasing difficulty of communication, she strove to save religious fellowship by strengthening the ecclesiastical organization, by drawing tighter every bond of outward union. Necessities of faith were still more powerful. Truth, it was said, is one, and as it must bind into one body all who hold it, so it is only by continuing in that body that they can preserve it. There is one Flock and one Shepherd. Thus along with the growing rigidity of dogma, which may be traced from the council of Jerusalem to the council of Trent, there had been developed, out of the original and natural attachment to the teaching of the apostles preserved by tradition, the idea that the Church is the divinely-appointed guardian of doctrine, able to supplement as well as to interpret the revealed word: and with this, there had also grown up the habit of exalting the universal conscience and belief above the individual, and allowing the soul to approach God only through the universal consciousness, represented by the sacerdotal order:Mediaeval Theology requires Ont Visible Catholic Church. principles still maintained by one branch of the Christian Church, and for some at least of which reasons could be assigned then, in the paucity of written records and the blind ignorance of the mass of the people, weightier than those on which stress has in later days been laid.

  There was also another cause yet more deeply seated, and which it is hard adequately to describe. It was not exactly a want of faith in the unseen, nor a shrinking fear which dared not look forth on the universe alone: it was rather the powerlessness of the untrained mind to realize the idea as an idea and live in it: it was the tendency to see everything in the concrete, to turn the parable into a fact, the doctrine into its most literal application, the symbol into the essential ceremony; the tendency which interposed the Virgin Mother and the saints between the worshipper and the spiritual Deity, and could satisfy its devotional feelings only by visible images even of these; which conceived of man’s aspirations and temptations as the result of the direct action of angels and devils; which expressed the strivings of the soul after purity by the search for the Holy Grail; which in the Crusades sent myriads to win at Jerusalem by earthly arms the sepulchre of Him whom they found it hard to serve in their own spirit and approach by their own prayers. And therefore it was that the whole fabric of mediaeval Christianity rested upon the idea of the Visible Church. Such a Church could be in nowise local or limited. To acquiesce in the establishment of National Churches, independent and self-sufficing, would have appeared to those men, as it must always appear when scrutinized, opposed to the genius of Christianity as a religion meant for all mankind, defensible, when capable of defence at all, only as a temporary resource in the presence of insuperable difficulties. Had this plan, on which so many have dwelt with complacency in later times, been proposed either to the primitive Church in its adversity or to the dominant Church of the ninth century, it would have been rejected with horror. But since there were as yet no nations, the plan was one which did not and could not present itself. The Visible Church was therefore the Church Universal, the whole congregation of Christian men dispersed throughout the world, the Church held together by one hope, one faith, one baptism.j

  Idea of political unity upheld by the clergy.Now of the Visible Church the emblem and stay was the priesthood; and it was by them, in whom dwelt whatever of learning and thought was left in Europe, that the second great idea whereof mention has been made—the belief in one universal temporal state—was preserved. As a matter of fact, that state had perished out of the West, and it might seem their interest to let its memory be lost. They, however, did not so calculate their interest. So far from feeling themselves opposed to the civil authority in the seventh and eighth centuries, as many of them came to do in the twelfth and thirteenth, the clergy were fully persuaded that its maintenance was indispensable to their own welfare, and to that of the whole Christian commonwealth. They were, be it remembered, at first Romans themselves, living by the Roman law, using Latin as their proper tongue, and imbued with the idea of the historical connection of the two powers. And by them chiefly was that idea expounded and enforced for many generations, by none more earnestly than by Alcuin of York, the adviser of Charles.k The limits of those two powers had become confounded in practice: bishops were princes, the chief ministers of the sovereign, sometimes even the leaders of their flocks in war: kings were accustomed to summon ecclesiastical councils and appoint to ecclesiastical offices.

  Influence of the metaphysics of the time upon the theory of a World-State.But, like the unity of the Church, the doctrine of a universal monarchy had a theoretical as well as an historical basis, and may be traced up to those metaphysical ideas out of which the system we call Realism developed itself. The beginnings of philosophy in those times were logical; and its first efforts were to distribute and classify: system, subordination, uniformity, appeared to be that which was most desirable in thought as in life. The search after causes became a search after principles of classification, since simplicity and truth were held to be attainable not by an analysis of thought into its elements, nor by an observation of the process of its growth, but rather through a sort of genealogy of notions, a statement of the relations of classes as containing or excluding each other. These classes, genera, or species, were not themselves held to be conceptions formed by the mind from phenomena, nor mere fortuitous aggregates of objects grouped under and called by some common name; they were real things, existing independently of the individuals who composed them, recognized rather than created by the human mind. In this view, Humanity is an essential quality present in all men, and making them what they are: as regards it they are therefore not many but one, the differences between individuals being no more than accidents. The whole truth of their being lies in the universal property, which alone has a permanent and independent existence. The common nature of the individuals thus gathered into one Being is typified in its two aspects, the spiritual and the secular, by two persons, the World-Priest and the World-Monarch, who present on earth a similitude of the Divine unity. For, as we have seen, it was through its concrete and symbolic expression that a thought could then be best apprehended.l

  Although it was primarily to unity in religion that the clerical body was both by doctrine and by practice attached, they found this inseparable from the corresponding unity in politics. They saw that every act of man has a social and public as well as a moral and personal bearing, and concluded that the rules which directed and the powers which rewarded or punished must be parallel and similar, not so much two powers as different manifestations of one and the same. That the souls of all Christian men should be guided by a well compacted hierarchy, rising through successive grades to one supreme head, while for their deeds they were answerable to a multitude of local, unconnected, mutually irresponsible potentates, appeared to them necessarily opposed to the Divine order. As they could not imagine, nor value if they had imagined, a communion of the saints without its expression in a Visible Church, so in matters temporal they recognized no brotherhood of spirit without the bonds of form, no universal humanity save in the image of a universal State.m In this, as in so much else, the men of the Middle Ages were the slaves of the letter, unable, with all their aspirations, to rise above the concrete, and prevented by the very grandeur and boldness of their conceptions from carrying them out in practice against the enormous obstacles that met them.

  Deep as this belief had struck its roots, it might never have risen to maturity nor sensibly affected the progress of events, had it not gained in the pre-existence of the monarchy of Rome a definite shape and a definite purpose. It was chiefly by means of the Papacy that this came to pass at the end of and after the second century.The ideal State supposed to be embodied in the Roman Empire. The Roman Church had already begun to be regarded in the West as a specially trustworthy guardian of Christian doctrine. The pre-eminence of the City had given to the Roman bishop a position of influence and authority great even in the days of Irenaeus: and when, under Constantine, the Christian Church was strengthening her organization on the model of the State which thenceforth protected her, the bishop of the capital perceived and improved the analogy between himself and the head of the civil government. The notion that the chair of Peter was the imperial throne of the Church had dawned upon the Popes very early in their history, and grew stronger every century under the operation of causes already specified. Even before the Empire had fallen in the West, St. Leo the Great could boast that to Rome, exalted by the preaching of the chief of the Apostles to be a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal city, there had been appointed a spiritual dominion wider than her earthly sway.n In ad 476 Rome ceased to be the political capital of the Western countries, and the Papacy, inheriting no small part of the local authority which had belonged to the Emperor’s officers, drew to herself the reverence which the name of the city still commanded, until, in the days which followed her emancipation from the control of the Emperors at Constantinople, she had perfected in theory a scheme which made her the exact counterpart of the departed despotism, the centre of the hierarchy, absolute mistress of the Christian world.Constantine’s Donation. The character of that scheme is best set forth in the singular document, most stupendous of all the mediaeval forgeries, which under the name of the Donation of Constantine commanded for seven centuries the almost unquestioning belief of mankind.o Itself a portentous fabrication, it is unimpeachable evidence of the thoughts and beliefs of the priesthood which framed it, some time between the middle of the eighth and the end of the ninth century. It tells how Constantine the Great, cured of his leprosy by the prayers of Pope Sylvester, resolved, on the fourth day from his baptism, to forsake the ancient seat for a new capital on the Bosphorus, lest the continuance of the secular government should cramp the freedom of the spiritual, and how he bestowed therewith upon the Pope and his successors the sovereignty over Italy and the countries of the West. But this is not all, although this is what historians, in admiration of its splendid audacity, have chiefly dwelt upon. The edict proceeds to grant to the Roman pontiff and his clergy a series of dignities and privileges, all of them enjoyed by the Emperor and his senate, all of them showing the same desire to make the pontifical a copy of the imperial office. The Pope is to inhabit the Lateran palace, to wear the diadem, the collar, the purple cloak, to carry the sceptre, and to be attended by a body of chamberlains. Similarly his clergy are to ride on white horses and receive the honours and immunities of the senate and patricians.p

  Interdependence of Papacy and Empire.The notion which prevails throughout, that the chief of the religious society must be in every point conformed to his prototype the chief of the civil, is the key to all the thoughts and acts of the Roman clergy, not less plainly seen in the details of papal ceremonial than it is in the gigantic scheme of papal legislation. The Canon law which the Roman Curia began to build up after Pope Hadrian I, and which rose apace in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the enlarged activity and growing claims of the Papacy, was intended by its authors to reproduce and rival the imperial jurisprudence. In the middle of the thirteenth century Gregory IX, who was the first to consolidate it into a code, sought the fame and received the title of the Justinian of the Church, and a correspondence was traced between its divisions and those of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. But during the earlier period the wish and purpose of the clergy, even when the temporal power was weak or hostile, was to imitate and rival, not to supersede it, since they held it the necessary complement of their own, and thought the Christian people equally imperilled by the fall of either. Hence the reluctance of Gregory II to break with the East Roman princes, and the maintenance of their titular sovereignty till ad 800: hence the part which the Holy See played in transferring the crown to Charles, the first sovereign of the West capable of fulfilling its duties; hence the grief with which its weakness under his successors was seen, the gladness when it descended to Otto as representative of the Frankish kingdom.

  The Roman Empire revived in a new character.Up to the era of ad 800 there had been at Constantinople a legitimate historical prolongation of the Roman Empire. Technically, as we have seen, the election of Charles, after the deposition of Constantine VI, was itself a prolongation, and maintained the old rights and forms in their integrity. But the Pope, though he knew it not, did far more than effect a change of dynasty when he rejected Irene and crowned the barbarian chief. Restorations are always delusive. As well might one hope to stop the earth’s course in her orbit as to arrest that ceaseless change and movement in human affairs which forbids an old institution, suddenly transplanted into a new order of things, from filling its ancient place and serving its former ends. The dictatorship at Rome in the second Punic war was not more unlike the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar, nor the States-general of Louis XIII to the assembly which his unhappy descendant convoked in 1789, than was the imperial office of Theodosius to that of Charles the Frank; and the seal, ascribed to ad 800, which bears the legend ‘Renovatio Romani Imperii,’q expresses, more justly perhaps than was intended by its author, a second birth of the Roman Empire.

  It is not, however, from the days of the later Carolingians that a proper view of this new creation can be formed. That period was one of transition, of fluctuation and uncertainty, in which the office, passing from one dynasty and country to another, had not time to acquire a settled character and claims, and was without the power that would have enabled it to support them. From the coronation of Otto the Great a new period begins, in which the ideas that have been described as floating in men’s minds took clearer shape, and attached to the imperial title a body of definite rights and definite duties. It is this latter phase, the Holy Empire, that we have now to consider.

  Position and functions of the Emperor.The realistic philosophy, and the needs of a time when the only notion of civil or religious order was submission to authority, required the World-State to be a monarchy: tradition, as well as the continued existence of a part of the ancient institutions, gave the monarch the name of Roman Emperor. A king could not be universal sovereign, for there were many kings: the Emperor must be universal, for there had never been but one Emperor; he had in older and brighter days been the actual lord of the civilized world; the seat of his power was placed beside that of the spiritual autocrat of Christendom.r His functions will be seen most clearly if we deduce them from the leading principle of mediaeval mythology, the exact correspondence of earth and heaven. As God, in the midst of the celestial hierarchy, rules blessed spirits in Paradise, so the Pope, His vicar, raised above priests, bishops, metropolitans, reigns over the souls of mortal men below. But as God is Lord of earth as well as of heaven, so must he (the Imperator coelestiss ) be represented by a second earthly viceroy, the Emperor (Imperator terrenus), whose authority shall be of and for this present life. And as in this present world the soul cannot act save through the body, while yet the body is no more than an instrument and means for the soul’s manifestation, so must there be a rule and care of men’s bodies as well as of their souls, yet subordinated always to the well-being of that element which is the purer and the more enduring. It is under the emblem of soul and body that the relation of the papal and imperial power is presented to us throughout the Middle Ages.t The Pope, as God’s vicar in matters spiritual, is to lead men to eternal life; the Emperor, as vicar in matters temporal, must so control them in their dealings with one another that they may be able to pursue undisturbed the spiritual life, and thereby attain the same supreme and common end of everlasting happiness. In the view of this object his chief duty is to maintain peace in the world, while towards the Church his position is that of Advocate or Patron, a title borrowed from the practice adopted by churches and monasteries of choosing some powerful baron to protect their lands and lead their tenants in war.u The functions of Advocacy are twofold: at home to make the Christian people obedient to the priesthood, and to execute priestly decrees upon heretics and sinners; abroad to propagate the faith among the heathen, not sparing to use carnal weapons.x Thus does the Emperor answer in every point to his antitype the Pope, his power being yet of a lower rank, created on the analogy of the papal, as the papal itself had been modelled after the elder Empire. The parallel holds good even in its details; for just as we have seen the churchman assuming the crown and robes of the secular prince, so now did he array the Emperor in his own ecclesiastical vestments, the stole and the dalmatic, gave him a clerical as well as a sacred character, removed his office from all narrowing associations of birth or country,Correspondence and harmony of the spiritual and temporal powers. inaugurated him by rites every one of which was meant to symbolize and enjoin duties in their essence religious. Thus the Holy Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire are one and the same thing, seen from different sides; and Catholicism, the principle of the universal Christian society, is also Romanism; that is, rests upon Rome as the origin and type of its universality; manifesting itself in a mystic dualism which corresponds to the two natures of its Founder. As divine and eternal, its head is the Pope, to whom souls have been entrusted; as human and temporal, the Emperor, commissioned to rule men’s bodies and acts.

  In nature and compass the government of these two potentates is the same, differing only in the sphere of its working; and it matters little whether we call the Pope a spiritual Emperor or the Emperor a secular Pope. Nor, though the one office is below the other as far as man’s life on earth is less precious than his life hereafter, is therefore, on the older and sounder theory, the imperial authority delegated by the papal. For, as has been said already, God is represented by the Pope not in every capacity, but only as the ruler of spirits in heaven: as sovereign of earth, He issues His commission directly to the Emperor. Opposition between two servants of the same King is inconceivable, each being bound to aid and foster the other, the co-operation of both being needed in all that concerns the welfare of Christendom at large. This is the one perfect and self-consistent scheme of the union of Church and State;Union of Church and State. for, taking the absolute coincidence of their limits to be self-evident, it assumes the infallibility of their joint government, and derives, as a corollary from that infallibility, the duty of the civil magistrate to root out heresy and schism no less than to punish treason and rebellion. It is also the scheme which, granting the possibility of their harmonious action, places the two powers in that relation which gives to each of them its maximum of strength. But by a law to which it would be hard to find exceptions, in proportion as the State became more Christian, the Church, who to work out her purposes had assumed worldly forms, became by the contact worldlier, meaner, spiritually weaker; and the system whose foundations were joyfully laid in the days of Constantine, and which culminated triumphantly in the Empire Church of the Middle Ages, has in each succeeding generation been slowly losing ground, has seen its brightness dimmed and its completeness marred, and sees now those who are most zealous on behalf of its surviving institutions feebly defend or silently desert the principle upon which all must rest.

  The complete accord of the papal and imperial powers which this theory, as sublime as it is impracticable, requires, was attained only at a few points in their history.y It was finally supplanted by another view of their relation, which, professing to be a developement of a principle recognized as fundamental, the superior importance of the religious life, found increasing favour in the eyes of fervent churchmen.z Declaring the Pope sole representative on earth of the Deity, it concluded that from him, and not directly from God, must the Empire be held—held feudally, it was said by many—and it thereby thrust down the temporal power to be the servant instead of the sister of the spiritual.a Nevertheless, the Papacy in her meridian, and under the guidance of her greatest minds, of Hildebrand, of Alexander II, of Innocent III, not seeking to abolish or absorb the civil government, required only its obedience, and exalted its dignity against all save herself.b It was reserved for Boniface VIII, whose extravagant pretensions betrayed the decay that was already at work within, to show himself to the crowding pilgrims at the jubilee of ad 1300, seated on the throne of Constantine, arrayed with sword, and crown, and sceptre, shouting aloud, ‘I am Caesar—I am Emperor.’c

  Proofs from mediaeval documents. The theory of an Emperor’s place and functions thus sketched cannot be definitely assigned to any point of time; for it was growing and changing from the fifth century to the fifteenth. Nor need it surprise us that we do not find in any one author a full account of the grounds whereon it rested, since much of what seems strangest to us was then too obvious to need statement or explanation. No one, however, who examines mediaeval writings can fail to perceive, sometimes from direct words, oftener from allusions or assumptions, that such ideas as these are present to the minds of the authors.d That which stands out most clearly is the connection of the Empire with religion. From every record, from chronicles and treatises, proclamations, laws, and sermons, passages may be adduced wherein the defence and spread of the faith, and the maintenance of concord among the Christian people, are represented as the function to which the Empire has been set apart. The belief expressed by Lewis II, ‘Imperii dignitas non in vocabuli nomine sed in culmine pietatis gloriosae consistit,’e appears again in the address of the archbishop of Mentz to Conrad II,f as Vicar of God; is reiterated by Frederick I,g when he writes to the prelates of Germany, ‘On earth God has placed no more than two powers, and as there is in heaven but one God, so is there here one Pope and one Emperor. Divine providence has specially appointed the Roman Empire to prevent the continuance of schism in the Church;’h is echoed by jurists and divines down to the days of Charles V.i It was a doctrine which we shall find the friends and opponents of the Holy See equally concerned to insist on—the one party to make the transference (translatio) of the imperial dignity ‘from the Greeks to the Germans’ appear entirely the Pope’s work, and thereby to establish his right of overseeing or cancelling the election of an Emperor; the others, by setting the Emperor at the head of the whole congregation of Christians, to reduce the bishop of the capital to a place in the world-realm similar to that held by the primate in each of the countries of Christendom.j The Emperor’s headship was deemed to stand out and be exerciseable chiefly in the two duties already noticed. As Defender of the Faith—the counterpart of the Musulman Commander of the Faithful—he was leader of the Church militant against her infidel foes, was in this capacity summoned to conduct crusades, and in later times recognized chief of the confederacies against the conquering Ottomans. As representative of the whole Christian people, it belonged to him to convoke General Councils, a right not without importance even when exercised concurrently with the Pope, but far more weighty when the object of the Council was to settle a disputed election, or, as at Constance, to depose reigning pontiffs themselves.

  No better illustrations can be desired than those to be found in the Office for the imperial coronation at Rome,The coronation ceremonies. too long to be transcribed here, but well worthy of an attentive study.k The rites prescribed in it are rites of consecration to a religious office: the Emperor, besides the sword, globe, and sceptre of temporal power, receives a ring as the symbol of his faith, is ordained a subdeacon, assists the Pope in celebrating mass, partakes as a clerical person of the communion in both kinds, is admitted a canon of St. Peter and St. John Lateran. The oath to be taken by an elector begins, ‘Ego N. volo regem Romanorum in Caesarem promovendum, temporale caput populo Christiano eligere.’ The Emperor swears to cherish and defend the Holy Roman Church and her bishop: the Pope prays after the reading of the Gospel, ‘Deus qui ad praedicandum aeterni regni evangelium Imperium Romanum praeparasti,l praetende famulo tuo Imperatori nostro arma coelestia.’ Among the Emperor’s official titles there occur these: ‘Head of Christendom,’ ‘Defender and Advocate of the Christian Church,’ ‘Temporal Head of the Faithful,’ ‘Protector of Palestine and of the Catholic Faith.’m

  The rights of the Empire proved from the Bible.Very singular are the reasonings by which the necessity and divine right of the Empire are proved out of the Bible. The mediaeval theory of the relation of the civil power to the priestly was profoundly influenced by the account in the Old Testament of the Jewish theocracy, in which the king, though the institution of his office is described as being a derogation from the purity of the older system, appears divinely chosen and commissioned, and stood in a peculiarly intimate relation to the national religion. From the New Testament the authority and eternity of Rome herself was established. Every passage was seized on where submission to the powers that be is enjoined, every instance cited where obedience had actually been rendered to imperial officials, a special emphasis being laid on the sanction which Christ Himself had given to Roman dominion by pacifying the world through Augustus, by being born at the time of the taxing, by paying tribute to Caesar, by saying to Pilate, ‘Thou couldest have no power at all against Me except it were given thee from above.’

  More attractive to the mystical spirit than these direct arguments were those drawn from prophecy, or based on the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Very early in Christian history had the belief formed itself that the Roman Empire—as the fourth beast of Daniel’s vision, as the iron legs and feet of Nebuchadnezzar’s image—was to be the world’s last and universal kingdom. From Origen and Jerome downwards it found unquestioned acceptance,n and that not unnaturally. For no new power had arisen to extinguish the Roman, as the Persian monarchy had been blotted out by Alexander, as the realms of his successors had fallen before the conquering republic herself. Every Northern conqueror, Goth, Lombard, Burgundian, had cherished her memory and preserved her laws; Germany had adopted even the name of the Empire ‘dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly, and diverse from all that were before it.’ To these predictions, and to many others from the Apocalypse, were added those which in the Gospels and Epistles foretold the advent of Antichrist.n He was to succeed the Roman dominion, and the Popes are more than once warned that by weakening the Empire they are hastening the coming of the enemy and the end of the world. It is not only when groping in the dark labyrinths of prophecy that mediaeval authors are quick in detecting emblems, imaginative in explaining them. Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in a singular fashion. As it did not occur to them to ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were originally addressed, so they were quite as careless whether the sense they discovered was one which the language used would primarily and naturally bear to any reader at any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text; and, once propounded, the interpretation acquired in argument all the authority of the text itself. Melchizedek is both priest and king; therefore the Pope has regal as well as ecclesiastical authority. The two swords of which Christ said, ‘It is enough,’ are the spiritual and temporal powers, and the grant of the spiritual to Peter involves the supremacy of the Papacy.o Thus one writer proves the eternity of Rome from the seventy-second Psalm, ‘They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations;’ the moon being of course, since Gregory VII, the Roman Empire, as the sun, or greater light, is the Popedom. Another quoting, ‘Qui tenet teneat donec auferatur (he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way),’p with Augustine’s explanation thereof,q says, that when ‘he who letteth’ is removed, tribes and provinces will rise in rebellion, and the Empire to which God has committed the government of the human race will be dissolved. From the miseries of his own time (he wrote under Frederick III) he predicts that the end is near. The same spirit of symbolism seized on the number of the electors: ‘the seven lamps burning in the unity of the sevenfold spirit which illumine the Holy Empire.’r Strange legends told how Romans and Germans were of one lineage; how Peter’s staff had been found on the banks of the Rhine, the miracle signifying that a commission was issued to the Germans to reclaim wandering sheep to the one fold.s So complete does the scriptural proof appear in the hands of mediaeval churchmen, many holding it a mortal sin to resist the power ordained of God, that we forget they were all the while only adapting to an existing institution what they found written long before; we begin to fancy that the Empire was maintained, obeyed, exalted for centuries, on the strength of words to which we attach in almost every case a wholly different meaning.

  Illustrations from Mediaeval Art.It would be a pleasant and profitable task to pass on from the theologians to the poets and artists of the Middle Ages, and endeavour to trace through their works the influence of the ideas which have been expounded above. But it is a task far too wide for the scope of the present treatise; and one which would demand an acquaintance with those works themselves such as only minute and long-continued study could give. For even a slight knowledge enables any one to see how much still remains to be interpreted in the imaginative literature and in the paintings of mediaeval times, and how apt we are in glancing over a piece of work to miss those seemingly trifling indications of the artist’s thought or belief which are all the more precious that they are indirect or unconscious. Therefore a history of mediaeval art which shall evolve its philosophy from its concrete forms, if it is to have any value at all, must be minute in description as well as subtle in method. But lest this class of illustrations should appear to have been wholly forgotten, it may be well to mention here two pictures in which the theory of the mediaeval empire is unmistakeably set forth. One of them is in Rome, the other in Florence; every traveller in Italy may examine both for himself.

  Mosaic of the Lateran Palace at Rome.The first of these is the famous mosaic of the Lateran triclinium, constructed by Pope Leo III about ad 800, which, afterwards restored and moved to its present site, may still be seen over against the façade of the great basilica of St. John Lateran. Originally meant to adorn the state banqueting-hall of the Popes, it is now placed in the open air, in the finest situation in Rome, looking from the brow of a hill across the green ridges of the Campagna to the olive-groves of Tivoli and the glistering crags and snow-capped summits of the Umbrian and Sabine Apennine. It represents in the centre Christ surrounded by the Apostles, whom He is sending forth to preach the Gospel; one hand is extended to bless, the other holds a book with the words ‘Pax Vobis.’ Below and to the right Christ is depicted again, and this time sitting: on His right hand kneels Pope Sylvester, on His left the Emperor Constantine; to the one He gives the keys of heaven and hell, to the other a banner surmounted by a cross. In the group on the opposite, that is, on the left side of the arch, we see the Apostle Peter seated, before whom in like manner kneel Pope Leo III and Charles the Emperor; the latter wearing, like Constantine, his crown. Peter, himself grasping the keys, gives to Leo the pallium of an archbishop, to Charles the banner of the Christian army. The inscription is, ‘Beate Petre donas vitam Leoni PP et bictoriam Carulo regi donas;’ while round the arch is written, ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax omnibus bonae voluntatis.’

  The order and nature of the ideas here symbolized is sufficiently clear. First comes the revelation of the Gospel, and the divine commission to gather all men into its fold. Next, the institution, at the memorable era of Constantine’s conversion, of the two powers by which the Christian people is to be respectively taught and governed. Thirdly, we are shewn the permanent Vicar of God, the Apostle who keeps the keys of heaven and hell, re-establishing these same powers on a new and permanent basis.t The badge of ecclesiastical supremacy he gives to Leo as the spiritual head of the faithful on earth, the banner of the Church Militant to Charles, who is to maintain her cause against heretics and infidels.

  Fresco in S. Maria Novella at Florence.The second painting is of greatly later date. It is a fresco in the chapter-house of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novellau at Florence, usually known as the Capellone degli Spagnuoli. It has been commonly ascribed, on Vasari’s authority, to Simone Martini of Siena, but an examination of the dates of his life seems to discredit this view.x Most probably it was executed between ad 1340 and 1350. It is a huge work, covering one whole wall of the chapter-house, and filled with figures, some of which, but seemingly on no sufficient authority, have been taken to represent eminent persons of the time—Cimabue, Arnolfo, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Laura, and others. In it is represented the whole scheme of man’s life here and hereafter—the Church on earth and the Church in heaven. Full in front are seated side by side the Pope and the Emperor: on their right and left, in a descending row, minor spiritual and temporal officials; next to the Pope a cardinal, bishops, and doctors; next to the Emperor, the king of France and a line of nobles and knights. Behind them appears the Duomo of Florence as an emblem of the Visible Church, while at their feet is a flock of sheep (the faithful) attacked by ravening wolves (heretics and schismatics), whom a pack of spotted dogs (the Dominicansy ) combat and chase away. From this, the central foreground of the picture, a path winds round and up a height to a great gate where the Apostle sits on guard to admit true believers: they passing through it are met by choirs of seraphs, who lead them on through the delicious groves of Paradise. Above all, at the top of the painting and just over the spot where his two lieutenants, Pope and Emperor, are placed below, is the Saviour enthroned amid saints and angels.z

  Antinational character of the Empire.Here, too, there needs no comment. The Church Militant is the perfect counterpart of the Church Triumphant: her chief danger is from those who would rend the unity of her visible body, the seamless garment of her heavenly Lord; and that devotion to His person which is the sum of her faith and the essence of her being, must on earth be rendered to those two lieutenants whom He has chosen to govern in His name.

  A theory such as that which it has been attempted to explain and illustrate, is utterly opposed to restrictions of place or person. The idea of one Christian people, all whose members are equal in the sight of God—an idea so forcibly expressed in the unity of the priesthood, where no barrier separated the successor of the Apostle from the humblest curate—and in the prevalence of one language for worship and ecclesiastical government, made the post of Emperor independent of the race, or rank, or actual resources of its occupant. The Emperor was entitled to the obedience of Christendom, not as hereditary chief of a victorious tribe, or feudal lord of a portion of the earth’s surface, but as solemnly invested with an Office. Not only did he excel in dignity the kings of the earth: his power was different in its nature; and, so far from supplanting or rivalling theirs, rose above them to become the source and needful condition of their authority in their several territories, the bond which joined them in one harmonious body. The vast dominions and vigorous personal action of Charles the Great had concealed this distinction while he reigned; under his successors the imperial crown appeared disconnected from the direct government of the kingdoms into which his realm had been divided, existing only in the form of an undefined suzerainty, as the type of that unity without which men’s minds could not rest. It was characteristic of the Middle Ages, that demanding the existence of an Emperor, they cared little who he was or how he was chosen, so he had been duly inaugurated; and that they were not shocked by the contrast between unbounded rights and actual helplessness. At no time in the world’s history has theory, professing all the while to control practice, been so utterly divorced from it. Ferocious and sensual, that age worshipped humility and asceticism: there has never been a purer ideal of love, nor a grosser profligacy of life.

  The power of the Emperor cannot as yet be called international, though this became in later times its most important aspect; for in the tenth century national distinctions had scarcely begun to exist. But its genius was clerical rather than territorial, Roman rather than Teutonic: it rested not on armed hosts or wide lands, but upon the duty, the awe, the love of its subjects.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM

  Chap. VIII.This was the office which Otto the Great assumed in ad 962. But it was not his only office.Union of the Roman Empire with the German kingdom. He was already a German king; and the new dignity by no means superseded the old. The union in one person of two characters, a union at first personal, then official, and which became at last a fusion of the two characters into something different from what either had been, is the key to the whole subsequent history of Germany and the Empire.

  Germany and its monarchy.Of the German kingdom little need be said, since it differs in no essential respect from the other kingdoms of Western Europe as they stood in the tenth century. The five or six great tribes or tribe-leagues which composed the German nation had been first brought together under the sceptre of the Carolingians; and, though still retaining marks of their independent origin, were prevented from separating by community of speech and a common pride in the great Frankish Empire. When the male line of Charles the Great ended in ad 911, by the death of Lewis the Child (son of Arnulf), Conrad, duke of the Franconians, and after him Henry (the Fowler), duke of the Saxons, were chosen to fill the vacant throne. By his vigorous yet conciliatory action, his upright character, his courage and good fortune in repelling the Hungarians, Henry laid deep the foundations of royal power: under his more famous son it rose into a stable edifice. Otto’s coronation feast at Aachen, where the great nobles of the realm did him menial service, where Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, Thuringians, and Lorrainers gathered round the Saxon monarch, is the inauguration of a true Teutonic realm, which, though it called itself not German but East Frankish, and claimed to be the lawful representative of the Carolingian monarchy of Charles, had a constitution and a tendency in many respects different.

  Feudalism.There had been under the Carolingian princes a singular mixture of the old German local organization by tribes or districts (the so-called Gauverfassung), such as we find in the earliest records, with the method introduced by Charles of maintaining by means of officials, some fixed, others moving from place to place, the control of the central government. In the suspension of that government which followed his days, there grew up a system whose seeds had been sown as far back as the time of Clovis, a system whose essence was the combination of the tenure of land by military service with a peculiar personal relation between the landlord and his tenant, whereby the one was bound to render fatherly protection, the other aid and obedience. This is not the place for tracing the origin of feudality on Roman soil, nor for shewing how, by a sort of contagion, it spread into Germany, how it struck firm root in the period of comparative quiet under Pipin and Charles, how from the hands of the latter it took the impress which determined its ultimate form, how the weakness of his successors allowed it to triumph everywhere. Still less would it be possible here to examine its social and moral influence. Politically it might be defined as the system which made the owner of a piece of land, whether large or small, the governor of those who dwelt thereon: an annexation of personal to territorial authority more familiar to Eastern despotism than to the free races of primitive Europe. On this principle were founded, and by it are explained, feudal law and justice, feudal finance, feudal legislation, each tenant holding towards his lord the position which his own tenants held towards himself. And it is just because the relation was so uniform, the principle so comprehensive, the ruling class so firmly bound to its support, that feudalism was able to lay upon society that grasp which the struggles of twenty generations have, in some parts of Europe, not yet wholly shaken off.

  The feudal king.Now by the middle of the tenth century, Germany, less fully committed than France to feudalism’s worst feature, the bondage of the peasantry, was otherwise thoroughly feudalized. As for that equality of all the freeborn save the sacred line which we find in the Germany of Tacitus, there had been substituted a gradation of ranks and a concentration of power in the hands of a landholding caste, so had the monarch lost his ancient character as leader and judge of the people, to become the head of a turbulent oligarchy. He was titular lord of the soil, could exact from his vassals service and aid in arms and money, could dispose of vacant fiefs, could at pleasure declare war or make peace. But all these rights he exercised less as sovereign of the nation than as standing in a peculiar relation to the feudal tenants, a relation which had in its origin been personal, and whose prominence obscured the political duties of prince and subject. And great as these rights might become in the hands of an ambitious and politic ruler, they were in practice limited by the corresponding duties he owed to his vassals, and by the difficulty of enforcing them against a powerful offender. The king was not permitted to retain in his own hands escheated fiefs, must even grant away those he had held before coming to the throne; he could not interfere with the jurisdiction of his tenants in their own lands,The nobility. nor prevent them from waging war or forming leagues with each other like independent princes. Chief among the Germanic nobles stood the dukes, who, although their authority was now delegated, theoretically at least, instead of independent, territorial instead of personal, retained nevertheless much of that hold on the exclusive loyalty of their subjects which had belonged to them as hereditary leaders of the tribe under the ancient system. They were, with the three Rhenish archbishops, by far the greater subjects, often aspiring to the crown, sometimes not unable to resist its wearer. The constant encroachments which Otto made upon their privileges, especially through the institution of the Counts Palatine, destroyed their ascendancy, but not their importance. It was not till the thirteenth century that they disappeared with the rise of the second order of nobility.The Germanic feudal polity generally. That order, at this period far less powerful, included the counts, margraves or marquises, and landgraves, originally officers of the crown, now feudal tenants; holding their lands of the dukes, and maintaining against them the same contest which they in turn waged with the crown. Below these came the barons and simple knights, then the diminishing class of freemen, the increasing class of serfs. The institutions of primitive Germany were almost all gone; supplanted by a new system, partly the natural result of the formation of a settled from a halfnomad society, partly imitated from that which had arisen upon Roman soil, west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. The army was no longer the Heerbann of the whole nation, which had been wont to follow the king on foot in distant expeditions, but a cavalry militia of barons and their retainers, bound to service for a short period, and rendering it unwillingly where their own interest was not concerned. The frequent popular assemblies, whereof under the names of the Mallum, the Placitum, the Mayfield, we hear so much under Clovis and Charles, were now never summoned, and the laws that had been promulgated there were in their old form obsolete, though the substance of some was embodied in well established customs. No national council existed, save the Diet in which the higher nobility, lay and clerical, met their sovereign, sometimes to decide on foreign war, oftener to concur in the grant of a fief or the proscription of a rebel. Every district had its own rude local usages administered by the court of the local lord: other law there was none, for imperial jurisprudence had in these lately civilized countries not yet filled the place left empty by the disuse of the old barbarian codes.

  This condition of things was indeed better than that utter confusion which had gone before, for a principle of order had begun to group and bind the tossing atoms; and though the union into which it drove men was an imperfect and narrow one, it was something that they should have learnt to unite themselves at all. Yet nascent feudality was but one remove from anarchy; and the tendency to isolation and diversity had continued, despite the efforts of the Church and the Carolingian princes, to be all-powerful in Western Europe. The German kingdom was already a bond between the German races, and appears strong and united when we compare it with the France of Hugh Capet, or the England of Ethelred II; yet its history down to the twelfth century is little else than a record of disorders, revolts, civil wars, of a ceaseless struggle on the part of the monarch to enforce his feudal rights, a resistance by his vassals equally obstinate and more frequently successful. What the issue of the contest might have been if Germany had been left to take her own course is matter of conjecture, though the example of every European state except England and Poland may incline the balance in favour of the crown. But the strife had scarcely begun when a new influence was interposed: the German king became Roman Emperor.The Roman Empire and the German kingdom. No two systems can be more unlike than those whose headship became thus vested in one person: the one centralized, the other local; the one resting on a sublime theory, the other the rude offspring of anarchy; the one gathering all power into the hands of an irresponsible monarch, the other limiting his rights and authorizing resistance to his commands; the one demanding the equality of all Christians as creatures equal before Heaven, the other bound up with an aristocracy the proudest, and in its gradations of rank the most exact, that Europe had ever seen. Characters so repugnant could not, it might be thought, meet in one person, or if they met must strive till one swallowed up the other. It was not so. In the fusion which began from the first, though it was for a time imperceptible, each of the two characters gave and each lost some of its attributes: the king became more than German, the Emperor less than Roman, till, at the end of six centuries, the monarch in whom two ‘persons’ had been united, appeared as a third different from either of the former, and might not inappropriately be entitled ‘German Emperor.’a The nature and progress of this change will appear in the after history of Germany, and cannot be described here without in some measure anticipating subsequent events. A word or two may indicate how the process of fusion began.

  It was natural that the great mass of Otto’s subjects, to whom the imperial title, dimly associated with Rome and the Pope, sounded grander than the regal, without being known as otherwise different, should in thought and speech confound them. The sovereign and his ecclesiastical advisers, with clearer views of the new dignity and of the relation of the two offices to one another,Results of this union in one person. found it impossible to separate them in practice, and were glad to merge the lesser in the greater. For as lord of the world, Otto was Emperor north as well as south of the Alps. When he issued an edict, he claimed the obedience of his Teutonic subjects in both capacities; when as Emperor he led the armies of the gospel against the heathen, it was the standard of their feudal superior that his armed vassals followed: when he founded churches and appointed bishops, he acted partly as suzerain of feudal lands, partly as protector of the faith, charged to guide the Church in matters temporal. Thus the assumption of the imperial crown brought to Otto as its first result an apparent increase of domestic authority; it made his position by its historical associations more dignified, by its religious more hallowed; it raised him higher above his vassals and above other sovereigns; it enlarged his prerogative in ecclesiastical affairs, and by necessary consequence gave to ecclesiastics a more important place at court and in the administration of government than they had enjoyed before. Great as was the power of the bishops and abbots in all the feudal kingdoms, it stood nowhere so high as in Germany. There the Emperor’s double position, as head both of Church and State, required the two organizations to be exactly parallel. In the eleventh century a full half of the land and wealth of the country, and no small part of its military strength, was in the hands of Churchmen: their influence predominated in the Diet; the archchancellorship of the Empire, highest of all offices, was held by, and eventually came to belong of right to, the archbishop of Mentz, as primate of Germany. It was by Otto, who in resuming the attitude must repeat the policy of Charles, that the greatness of the clergy was thus advanced. He is commonly said to have wished to weaken the aristocracy by raising up rivals to them in the hierarchy. It may have been so, and the measure was at any rate a disastrous one, for the clergy soon approved themselves scarcely less rebellious than those whom they were expected to restrain. But in accusing Otto’s judgement, historians have often forgotten in what position he stood to the Church, and how it behoved him, according to the doctrine received, to establish in her an order like in all things to that which he found already subsisting in the State.

  Changes in title.The style which Otto adopted shewed his desire thus to merge the king in the Emperor.b Charles had called himself ‘Imperator Caesar Carolus rex Francorum invictissimus’; and again, ‘Carolus serenissimus Augustus, Pius, Felix, Romanorum gubernans Imperium, qui et per misericordiam Dei rex Francorum atque Langobardorum.’ Otto and his first successors, who until their coronation at Rome had used the titles of ‘Rex Francorum,’ or ‘Rex Francorum Orientalium,’ or oftener still ‘Rex’ alone, discarded after it all titles save the highest of ‘Imperator Augustus,’ seeming thereby, though they too had been crowned at Aachen and Milan, to claim the authority of Caesar through all their dominions. Tracing as we are the history of a title, it is needless to dwell on the significance of the change. Charles, son of the Ripuarian allies of the Emperor Probus, had been a Frankish chieftain on the Rhine; Otto, the Saxon successor of the Cheruscan Arminius, would rule his native Elbe with a power borrowed from the Tiber.

  Nevertheless, the imperial element did not in every respect predominate over the royal.Imperial power feudalised. The monarch might desire to make good against his turbulent barons the boundless prerogative which he acquired with his new crown, but he lacked the power to do so; and they, disputing neither the supremacy of that crown nor his right to wear it, refused with good reason to let their own freedom be infringed upon by any act of which they had not been the authors. So far was Otto from embarking on so vain an enterprise, that his rule was even more direct and more personal than that of Charles had been. There was no scheme of mechanical government, no claim of absolutism; there was only the resolve to make the energetic assertion of the king’s feudal rights subserve the further aims of the Emperor. What Otto demanded he demanded as Emperor, what he received he received as king; the singular result was that in Germany the imperial office was itself pervaded and transformed by feudal ideas. Feudality needing, to make its theory complete, a lord paramount of the world, from whose grant all ownership in land must be supposed to have emanated, and finding such a suzerain in the Emperor, constituted him liege lord of all kings and potentates, keystone of the feudal arch, himself, as it was expressed, ‘holding’ the world from God. There were not wanting Roman institutions to which these notions could attach themselves. Constantine, imitating the courts of the East, had made the dignitaries of his household great officials of the State: these were now reproduced in the cup-bearer, the seneschal, the marshal, the chamberlain of the Empire, presently to become its electoral princes. The holding of land on condition of military service had been known in Roman days: the divided ownership of feudal law found its analogies in the Roman tenure of emphyteusis. Thus while Germany was Romanized the Empire was feudalized, and came to be considered not the antagonist but the perfection of an aristocratic system. This conception of a suzerainty over minor potentates, since it was adapted to existing political facts, enabled the Empire afterwards to assume an international character. Nevertheless, even while they seemed to blend, there remained between the genius of imperialism and that of feudalism a deep and lasting hostility. And so the rule of Otto and his successors was in a measure adverse to feudal polity, not from knowledge of what Roman government had been, but from the necessities of their position, raised as they were to an unapproachable height above their subjects, surrounded with a halo of sanctity as protectors of the Church. Thus were they driven to seek to reduce local independence, and assimilate the various races through their vast territories. It was Otto who made the Germans, hitherto an aggregate of tribes, a single people, and welding them into a strong political body taught them to rise through its collective greatness to the consciousness of national life, never thenceforth to be extinguished.

  The commons.One expedient against the land-holding oligarchy which old Roman traditions as well as present needs might have suggested it was scarcely possible for Otto to use. He could not invoke the friendship of a Third Estate, for as yet none existed. The Teutonic order of freemen, which two centuries earlier had formed the bulk of the population, was now fast disappearing, just as in England all who did not become thanes were classed as ceorls, and from ceorls sank for the most part, after the Norman Conquest, into villeins. It was only in the Alpine valleys and along the shores of the ocean that small free communities maintained themselves. Town-life there was none, till Henry the Fowler forced his forest-loving people to dwell in fortresses that might repel the Hungarian invaders; and the burgher class thus beginning to form was as yet too small to be a power. But popular freedom, as it expired, bequeathed to the monarch such of its rights as could be saved from the grasp of the nobles; and the crown thus became what it has been wherever an aristocracy presses upon both, the tacit ally of the people. More, too, than the royal name could have done, did the imperial name invite the sympathy of the commons. For in all, however ignorant of its history, however unable to comprehend its functions, there yet lived a feeling that it was in some mysterious way consecrated to Christian brotherhood and equality, to peace and law, to the restraint of the strong and the defence of the helpless.

  CHAPTER IX

  SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS

  Chap. IX.He who begins to read the history of the Middle Ages is alternately amused and provoked by the seeming absurdities that meet him at every step. He finds writers proclaiming amidst universal assent magnificent theories which no one attempts to carry out. He sees men stained with every vice full of sincere devotion to a religion which, even when its doctrines were most obscured, never sullied the purity of its moral teaching. He is disposed to conclude that such people must have been either fools or hypocrites. Yet in so concluding he would greatly err. Every one knows how little a man’s actions conform to the general maxims which he would lay down for himself, and how many beliefs he holds without realizing their application, so that his opinions, though they influence his thoughts, do not govern his conduct. Now in the Middle Ages this perpetual opposition of theory and practice was peculiarly abrupt. Men’s impulses were more violent and their conduct more reckless than is usually seen in modern communities; while the absence of a criticizing and measuring spirit made them surrender their minds more unreservedly than they would now do to a complete and imposing theory. Therefore it was, that while every one believed in the rights of the Empire as a part of divine truth, no one would yield to them where his own passions or interests interfered. Resistance to God’s Vicar might be and indeed was admitted to be a deadly sin, but it was one which few hesitated to commit. Hence, in order to give this unbounded imperial prerogative any practical efficiency, it was found necessary to prop it up by the limited but tangible authority of a feudal king. And the one spot in Otto’s empire on which feudality had never fixed its grasp, and where therefore he was forced to rule merely as Emperor, and not also as king, was that in which he and his successors were never safe from insult and revolt. This spot was his capital. Accordingly an account of what befel the first Saxon Emperor in Rome is a not unfitting comment on the theory expounded above, as well as a curious episode in the history of the Apostolic Chair.

  Otto the Great in Rome.After his coronation Otto had returned to North Italy, where the partizans of Berengar and his son Adalbert still maintained themselves in arms. Scarcely was he gone when the restless Pope, who found too late that in seeking an ally he had given himself a master, renounced his allegiance, opened negotiations with Berengar, and did not even scruple to send envoys pressing the heathen Magyars to invade Germany. The Emperor was soon informed of these plots, as well as of the flagitious life of the pontiff, a youth of twenty-five, the most profligate if not the most guilty of all who have worn the tiara. But he affected to despise them, saying, with a sort of unconscious irony, ‘He is a boy, the example of good men may reform him.’ When, however, Otto returned with a strong force, he found the city gates shut, and a party within furious against him. John the Twelfth was not only Pope, but as the heir of Alberic, the head of a strong faction among the nobles, and a sort of temporal prince in the city. But neither he nor they had courage enough to stand a seige: John fled into the Campagna to join Adalbert, and Otto entering convoked a synod in St. Peter’s. Himself presiding as temporal head of the Church, he began by inquiring into the character and manners of the Pope. At once a tempest of accusations burst forth from the assembled clergy. Bishop Liudprand, a credible although a hostile witness, gives us a long list of them:—‘Peter, cardinal-priest, rose and witnessed that he had seen the Pope celebrate mass and not himself communicate. John, bishop of Narnia, and John, cardinal-deacon, declared that they had seen him ordain a deacon in a stable, neglecting the proper formalities. They said further that he had defiled by shameless acts of vice the pontifical palace; that he had openly diverted himself with hunting; had put out the eyes of his spiritual father Benedict; had set fire to houses; had girt himself with a sword, and put on a helmet and hauberk. All present, laymen as well as priests, cried out that he had drunk to the devil’s health; that in throwing the dice he had invoked the help of Jupiter, Venus, and other demons; that he had celebrated matins at uncanonical hours, and had not fortified himself by making the sign of the cross. After these things the Emperor, who could not speak Latin, since the Romans could not understand his native, that is to say, the Saxon tongue, bade Liudprand bishop of Cremona interpret for him, and adjured the council to declare whether the charges they had brought were true, or sprang only of malice and envy. Then all the clergy and people cried with a loud voice, ‘If Pope John hath not committed all the crimes which Benedict the deacon hath read over, and even greater crimes than these, then may the chief of the Apostles, the blessed Peter, who by his word closes heaven to the unworthy and opens it to the just, never absolve us from our sins, but may we be bound by the chain of anathema, and on the last day may we stand on the left hand along with those who have said to the Lord God, “Depart from us, for we will not know Thy ways.” ’

  The solemnity of this answer seems to have satisfied Otto and the council: a letter was despatched to John, couched in respectful terms, recounting the charges brought against him, and asking him to appear to clear himself by his own oath and that of a sufficient number of compurgators. John’s reply was short and pithy.

  ‘John the bishop, the servant of the servants of God, to all the bishops. We have heard tell that you wish to set up another Pope: if you do this, by Almighty God I excommunicate you, so that you may not have power to perform mass or to ordain no one.’a

  To this Otto and the synod replied by a letter of humorous expostulation, begging the Pope to reform both his morals and his Latin. But the messenger who bore it could not find John: he had repeated what seems to have been thought his most heinous sin, by going out into the country to shoot:b and after a search had been made in vain, the synod resolved to take a decisive step.Deposition of John XII. Otto, who still led their deliberations, demanded the condemnation of the Pope; the assembly deposed him by acclamation, ‘because of his reprobate life,’ and having obtained the Emperor’s consent, proceeded in an equally hasty manner to raise Leo, the chief secretary and a layman, to the chair of the Apostle.

  Otto might seem to have now reached a position loftier and firmer than that of any of his predecessors. Within little more than a year from his arrival in Rome, he had exercised powers greater than those of Charles himself, ordering the dethronement of one pontiff and the installation of another, forcing a reluctant people to bend themselves to his will. The submission involved in his oath to protect the Holy See was more than compensated by the oath of allegiance to his crown which the Pope and the Romans had taken, and by their solemn engagement not to elect or ordain any future pontiff without the Emperor’s consent.c But he had yet to learn what this obedience and these oaths were worth. The Romans had eagerly joined in the expulsion of John; they soon began to regret him. They were mortified to see their streets filled by a foreign soldiery, the habitual licence of their manners sternly repressed, their most cherished privilege, the right of choosing the universal bishop, grasped by the strong hand of a master who used it for purposes with which they did not sympathize. In a fickle and turbulent people, disaffection quickly turned to rebellion. One night, Otto’s troops being most of them dispersed in their quarters at a distance,Revolt of the Romans. the Romans rose in arms, blocked up the Tiber bridges, and fell furiously upon the Emperor and his creature the new Pope. Superior valour and constancy triumphed over numbers, and the Romans were overthrown with terrible slaughter; yet this lesson did not prevent them from revolting a second time, after Otto’s departure in pursuit of Adalbert. John the Twelfth returned to the city, and when his pontifical career was speedily closed by the sword of an injured husband,d the people chose a new Pope in defiance of the Emperor and his nominee. Otto again subdued and again forgave them, but when they rebelled for a third time, in ad 966, he resolved to shew them what imperial supremacy meant. Thirteen leaders, among them the twelve tribunes, were executed, the consuls were banished, republican forms entirely suppressed, the government of the city entrusted to the Pope as viceroy. He, too, must not presume on the sacredness of his person to set up any claims to independence. Otto regarded the pontiff as no more than the first of his subjects, the creature of his own will, the depositary of an authority which must be exercised according to the discretion of the sovereign. He obtained from his nominee, Leo VIII, a confirmation of the veto on papal elections which the citizens had yielded in ad 963 (and which it was afterwards supposed that Hadrian I had granted to Charles) in a decree which may yet be read among the documents which constitute canon law.e The vigorous exercise of such a power might be expected to reform as well as to restrain the apostolic see; and it was for this purpose, and in noble honesty, that the Teutonic monarchs employed it. But the fortunes of Otto in the city are a type of those which his successors were destined to experience. Notwithstanding their admitted rights and the momentary enthusiasm with which they were greeted in Rome, not all the efforts of Emperor after Emperor could gain any firm hold on the capital they were so proud of. Visiting it only once or twice in their reigns, they must be supported among a fickle populace by a large army of strangers, which melted away with terrible rapidity under the sun of Italy amid the deadly hollows of the Campagna.f Rome soon resumed her turbulent independence.

  Otto’s rule in Italy.Causes partly the same prevented the Saxon princes from gaining a firm footing throughout Italy. Since Charles the Bald had bartered away for the crown all that made it worth having, no Emperor had exercised effective authority there. The missi dominici had ceased to traverse the country; the local governors had thrown off control, a crowd of petty potentates had established principalities by aggressions on their weaker neighbours. Only in the dominions of great nobles, like the marquis of Tuscany and duke of Spoleto, and in some of the cities where the supremacy of the bishop was paving the way for a republican system, could traces of political order be found, or the arts of peace flourish. Otto, who, though he came as a conqueror, ruled legitimately as Italian king, found his feudal vassals less amenable than in Germany. While actually present he succeeded by progresses and edicts, and stern justice, in doing something to still the turmoil; on his departure Italy relapsed into that disorganization for which her natural features were not less answerable than the mixture of her races. Yet it was at this era, when the confusion was wildest, that there appeared the first rudiments of an Italian nationality, based partly on geographical position, partly on the use of a common language and the slow growth of peculiar customs and modes of thought. But though already jealous of the Tedescan, Lombards and Tuscans were still very far from disputing his sway. Pope, magnates, and cities bowed to Otto as king and Emperor; nor did he bethink himself of crushing while it was weak a sentiment whose developement threatened the existence of his empire. Holding Italy equally for his own with Germany, and ruling both on the same principles, he was content to keep it a separate kingdom, neither changing its institutions nor sending Saxons, as Charles had sent Franks, to represent his government.g

  Otto’s foreign policy.The lofty claims which Otto acquired with the Roman crown urged him to resume the plans of foreign conquest which had lain neglected since the days of Charles: the growing vigour of the Teutonic people, now definitely separating themselves from surrounding races (this is the era when frontier countships such as the Marks of Brandenburg, Meissen, and Schleswig, were established), placed in his hands a force to execute those plans which his predecessors had wanted. In this, as in his other enterprises, the great Emperor was active, wise, successful. Retaining the southern half of Italy, and unwilling to confess the loss of Rome, the Eastern Emperors had not ceased to annoy her German masters by intrigue, and might now, under the vigorous leadership first of Nicephorus and then of the Armenian John Tzimiskes, hope again to menace them in arms.Towards Byzantium. Policy, and the fascination which an ostentatiously legitimate court exercised over the Saxon stranger, made Otto, as Napoleon wooed Maria Louisa, seek for his heir the hand of the princess Theophano, daughter of the Emperor Romanus II. Bishop Liudprand’s account of his embassy represents in an amusing manner the rival pretensions of the old and new Empires.h The Easterns, who fancied that with the name they preserved the character and rights of Rome, held it almost as absurd as it was wicked that a Frank should insult their prerogative by reigning in Italy as Emperor. They refused him that title altogether; and when the Pope had, in a letter addressed ‘Imperatori Graecorum,’ asked Nicephorus Phocas, successor of Romanus II and stepfather of Theophano, to gratify the wishes of the Emperor of the Romans, the Eastern was furious. ‘You are no Romans,’ said he, ‘but wretched Lombards: what means this insolent Pope? with Constantine all Rome migrated hither.’ The wily bishop appeased him by reviling the citizens of Rome, while he insinuated that Constantinople had no right to take their name, and proceeded to vindicate the Francia and Saxonia of his master. ‘ “Roman” is the most contemptuous name we can use—it conveys the reproach of every vice, cowardice, falsehood, avarice. But what can be expected from the descendants of the fratricide Romulus? to his asylum were gathered the offscourings of the nations: thence came these κοσ μοκράτορες.’ Nicephorus among other demands required the ‘theme’ or province of Rome as the price of compliance;i his successor, and murderer, John Tzimiskes, was more moderate, and Theophano became the bride of Otto II.

  Towards the West Franks.Holding the two capitals of Charles the Great, Otto might vindicate the suzerainty over the West Frankish kingdom which it had been meant that the imperial title should carry with it. Arnulf had asserted the claim by making Eudes, the first king of the line which takes its name from his grand-nephew Hugh Capet, receive the crown as a feudatory: Henry the Fowler had been less successful. Otto pursued the same course, intriguing with the discontented nobles of the Carolingian Louis d’Outremer, and receiving their fealty as Superior of Roman Gaul. These pretensions, however, could have been made effective only by arms, and the feudal militia of the tenth century was no such instrument of conquest as the hosts of Clovis and Charles had been. The star of the Carolingian king upon the fortress-hill of Laon was paling before the rising greatness of the Parisian Capets: a Romano-Celtic nation had formed itself, distinct in tongue from the Franks, whom it was fast absorbing, and still less willing to submit to a Saxon stranger. The modern kingdom of Francej may be said to date from the accession of Hugh Capet, ad 987, and the claims of the Roman Empire were never afterwards formally admitted.

  Lorraine and BurgundyOf that France, however, Aquitaine was virtually independent. Lotharingia and Burgundy did not belong to it at all. The former of these kingdoms had adhered to the West Frankish king, Charles the Simple, against the East Frankish Conrad: but now, as mostly German in blood and speech, threw itself into the arms of Otto, and was thenceforth (till the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) an integral part of the Empire. Burgundy, a separate kingdom, had, by seeking from Charles the Fat a ratification of Boso’s election, by admitting, in the person of Rudolf the first Transjurane king, the feudal superiority of Arnulf, acknowledged itself to be dependent on the German crown. Otto governed it for thirty years, nominally as the guardian of the young king Conrad (son of Rudolf II).

  Otto’s conquests to the North and East approved him a worthy successor of the first Emperor. He penetrated far into Jutland,Denmark and the Slaves. annexed Schleswig, made Harold the Blue-toothed his vassal. The Slavic tribes were obliged to submit, to follow the German host in war, to allow the free preaching of the Gospel in their borders. The Hungarians he forced to forsake their nomad life, and relieved Europe from the fear of Asiatic invasions by strengthening the frontier of Austria. Over more distant lands,England. Northern Spain and England, it was not possible to recover the commanding position of Charles. Henry, as head of the Saxon name, may have wished to unite its branches on both sides the sea,k and it was perhaps partly with this intent that he gained for Otto the hand of Edith, sister of the English king Athelstan the Victorious. But the claim of supremacy, if any there was, was repudiated by Edgar, when, exaggerating the lofty style assumed by some of his predecessors, he called himself ‘Basileus and Imperator of Britain,’l thereby seeming to pretend to a sovereignty over all the nations of the island similar to that which the Roman Emperor claimed over the states of Christendom.

  Extent of Otto’s Empire.This restored Empire, which professed itself a continuation of the Carolingian, was in many respects different. It was less wide, including, if we reckon strictly, only Germany proper and two-thirds of Italy; or counting in subject but separate kingdoms, Burgundy, Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, Denmark, perhaps Hungary.Comparison between it and that of Charles. Its character was less ecclesiastical. Otto exalted indeed the spiritual potentates of his realm, and was earnest in spreading Christianity among the heathen: he was master of the Pope and Defender of the Holy Roman Church. But religion held a less important place in his mind and his administration: he made fewer wars for its sake, summoned no councils, and did not, like his predecessor, criticise the discourses of bishops. It was also less Roman. We do not know whether Otto associated with that name anything more than the right to universal dominion and a certain oversight of matters spiritual, nor how far he believed himself to be treading in the steps of the earlier Caesars. He could not speak Latin, though he tried in middle life to learn it, he had few learned men around him, he cannot have possessed the varied cultivation which had been so fruitful in the mind of Charles. Moreover, the conditions of his time were different, and did not permit similar attempts at wide organization. The local potentates would have submitted to no missi dominici; separate laws and jurisdictions would not have yielded to imperial capitularies; the placita at which those laws were framed or published would not have been crowded, as of yore, by armed freemen. But what Otto could he did, and did it to good purpose. Constantly traversing his dominions, he introduced an order and prosperity before unknown, and left everywhere the impress of an heroic character. Under him the Germans became not only a united nation, but were at once raised on a pinnacle among European peoples as the imperial race, the possessors of Rome and Rome’s authority. The political connection with Italy, while stirring their spirit, brought with it a knowledge and culture hitherto unknown, and gave the newly kindled energy an object. Germany became in her turn the instructress of the neighbouring tribes, who trembled at Otto’s sceptre; Poland and Bohemia received from her their arts and their learning with their religion. If the revived Romano-Germanic Empire was less splendid than the Empire of the West had been under Charles, it was, within narrower limits, firmer and more lasting, since based on national and social forces which the other had wanted. It perpetuated the name, the language, the literature, such as it then was, of Rome; it extended her spiritual sway; it strove to represent that concentration for which men cried, and became a power to unite and civilize Europe.

  Otto II,ad 973-983.The time of Otto the Great has required a fuller treatment, as the era of the Holy Empire’s foundation: succeeding rulers may be more quickly dismissed. Yet Otto III’s reign cannot pass unnoticed: short, sad, full of bright promise never fulfilled.Otto III,ad 983-1002. His mother was the Eastern princess Theophano; his perceptor the illustrious Gerbert of Aurillac (who had studied in the schools of Moorish Spain), archbishop, first of Rheims and afterwards of Ravenna: through the one he felt himself connected with the legitimacy of the Eastern Empire, and had imbibed its absolutist spirit; by the other he had been reared in the dream of a renovated Rome, with her memories turned to realities. To accomplish that renovation, who so fit as he who with the vigorous blood of the Teutonic conqueror inherited the venerable rights of Constantinople?His ideas. Fascination exercised over him by the name of Rome. It was his design, now that the solemn millennial era of the birth of Christ had arrived, to renew the majesty of the city and make her again the capital of a world-embracing Empire, victorious as Trajan’s, despotic as Justinian’s, holy as Constantine’s. His young and visionary mind was too much dazzled by the gorgeous fancies it created to see the world as it was—Germany rude, Italy unquiet, Rome corrupt and faithless. In ad 995, at the age of fifteen, he took from his grandmother’s hands the reins of government, and entered Italy to receive his crown, and quell the disorders of Rome. There he put to death the rebel Crescentius, in whom modern enthusiasm has seen a patriotic republican, who, reviving the institutions of Alberic, had ruled as consul, or senator, sometimes entitling himself Emperor. The young monarch reclaimed, perhaps extended, the privilege of Charles and Otto the Great, by nominating successive pontiffs: first Bruno his cousin (Gregory V), then Gerbert, whose papal name of Sylvester II recalled significantly the ally of Constantine: Gerbert,Pope Sylvester II,ad 1000. to his contemporaries a marvel of science and learning, in later legend the magician who, at the price of his own soul, purchased preferment from the Enemy, and by him was at last carried off in the body. With the substitution of these men for the profligate priests of Italy, began that Teutonic reform of the Papacy which raised it from the abyss of the tenth century to the point where Hildebrand found it. The Emperors were working the ruin of their power by their most disinterested acts.

  Schemes of Otto III. Changes of style and usage.With his tutor on Peter’s chair to second or direct him, Otto laboured on his great project in a spirit almost mystic. He had an intense religious belief in the Emperor’s duties to the world—in his proclamations he calls himself ‘Servant of the Apostles,’ ‘Servant of Jesus Christ’m —together with the ambitious antiquarianism of a fiery imagination, kindled by the memorials of the glory and power he represented. Even the wording of his laws witnesses to the strange mixture of notions that filled his eager brain. ‘We have ordained this,’ says an edict, ‘in order that, the Church of God being freely and firmly stablished, our Empire may be advanced and the crown of our knighthood triumph; that the power of the Roman people may be extended and the commonwealth be restored; so may we be found worthy after living righteously in the tabernacle of this world, to fly away from the prison of this life and reign most righteously with the Lord.’ To exclude the claims of the Eastern Court he used the title ‘Romanorum Imperator’ instead of the simple ‘Imperator’ of his predecessors. His seals bear a legend resembling that used by Charles, Renovatio ‘Imperii Romanorum’; even the ‘commonwealth,’ despite the results that name had produced under Alberic and Crescentius, was to be re-established. He built a palace on the Aventine, then the most healthy and beautiful quarter of the city; he devised a regular administrative system of government for his capital—naming a patrician, a prefect, and a body of judges, who were commanded to recognize no law but the Roman. The formula of their appointment has been preserved to us: in it the Emperor delivering to the judge a copy of the code bids him ‘with this code judge Rome and the Leonine city and the whole world.’ He introduced into the simple German court the ceremonious magnificence of the East, not without giving offence to many of his followers.n He asserted his prerogative by conferring the regal title upon the rulers of Hungary and Poland. His father’s wish to draw Italy and Germany more closely together, he followed up by giving the chancellorship of both countries to the same churchman, by maintaining a strong force of Germans in Italy, and by taking his Italian retinue with him through the Transalpine lands. How far these brilliant and wide-reaching plans were capable of realization, had their author lived to attempt it, can be but guessed at. It is reasonable to suppose that whatever power he might have gained in the South he would have lost in the North. Dwelling rarely in Germany, and in sympathies more a Southern than a Teuton, he reined in the fierce barons with no such tight hand as his grandfather had been wont to do; he displeased the Germans by favouring the claim which the Pope advanced to control their prelates; he neglected the schemes of northern conquest; he released the Polish monarch from the obligation of tribute, and relaxed the hold of Germany on the Hungarians. But all, save that those plans were his, is now no more than conjecture, for Otto III, ‘the wonder of the world,’ as his own generation called him, died childless on the threshhold of manhood; the victim, if we may trust a story of the time, of the revenge of Stephania, the widow of Crescentius, who ensnared him by her beauty, and slew him by a lingering poison. They carried him across the Alps with laments whose echoes sound faintly from the pages of monkish chroniclers, and buried him in the choir of the basilica at Aachen some fifty paces from the tomb of Charles beneath the central dome. Two years had not passed since, setting out on his last journey to Rome, he had opened that tomb, had gazed on the great Emperor, sitting on a marble throne, robed and crowned, with the Gospel-book open before him; and there, touching the dead hand, unclasping from the neck its golden cross, had taken as it were, an investiture of Empire from his Frankish forerunner.o Short as was his life and few his acts, Otto III is in one respect more memorable than any who went before or came after him. None save he desired to make the seven-hilled city again the seat of dominion, reducing Germany and Lombardy and Greece to their rightful place of subject provinces. No one else so forgot the present to live in the light of the ancient order; no other soul was so possessed by that fervid mysticism and that reverence for the glories of the past, whereon rested the idea of the mediaeval Empire.

  The direct line of Otto the Great had now ended, and though the Franks might elect and the Saxons accept Henry II (called the Saint)p (great-grandson of Henry the Fowler and thus second cousin of Otto III), Italy was not bound by their acts. Neither the Empire nor the Lombard kingdom could yet be claimed as of right by the German king.Italy independent. Her princes placed Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, on the vacant throne of Pavia, moved partly by the growing aversion to a Transalpine power, still more by the desire of impunity under a monarch feebler than any since Berengar. But the selfishness that had exalted Ardoin soon overthrew him. Ere long a party among the nobles, seconded by the Pope, invited Henry, who had already entered Italy in ad 1004; his strong army made opposition hopeless, and at Rome he received the imperial crown, ad 1014.Henry II Emperor,ad 1014-1024. The crowning there of three successive German kings, and the alliance of the second with an East Roman dynasty, had evidently strengthened the attraction which the South had for the North. It is, perhaps, more singular that the Transalpine kings should have clung so pertinaciously to Italian sovereignty than that the Lombards should have so frequently attempted to recover their independence. For the former had often little or no hereditary claim, they were not secure in their seat at home, they crossed a huge mountain barrier into a land of treachery and hatred. But Rome’s glittering lure was irresistible, and the disunion of Italy promised an easy conquest. Surrounded by martial vassals, these Emperors were generally for the moment supreme: once their pennons had disappeared in the gorges of Tyrol, things reverted to their former condition, and Tuscany was little more dependent than France.Southern Italy. In Southern Italy the viceroy of the Eastern Emperor ruled from Bari, and Rome was an outpost instead of the centre of Teutonic power. A curious evidence of the wavering politics of the time is furnished by the Annals of Benevento, the Lombard town which on the confines of the East Roman and West Roman realms gave steady obedience to neither. They usually date by and recognize the princes of Constantinople,q seldom mentioning the Franks, till the reign of Conrad II; after him the Western becomes Imperator, the Eastern, appearing more rarely, is Imperator Constantinopolitanus. Assailed by the Saracens, masters already of Sicily, these regions seemed on the eve of being lost to Christendom, and the Romans sometimes bethought themselves of returning under the sceptre of Constantinople. As the weakness of the East Roman monarchs in the South favoured the rise of the Apulian dominion which the Norman Robert Wiscard established (ad 1059-1077), so did the liberties of the Northern cities shoot up in the absence of the Germanic Emperors and the feuds of the territorial magnates. Milan, Pavia, Cremona, were only the foremost among many populous centres of industry, some of them already self-governing, all quickly absorbing or repelling the rural nobility, and not afraid to display by tumults their aversion to the Germans.

  Conrad II,ad 1024-1039.The reign of Conrad II (usually called the Salic), the first Emperor of the great Franconian line, is remarkable for the accession to the Empire of Burgundy, or, as it is after this time more often called, the kingdom of Arles.r Rudolf III, the last king, had proposed to bequeath it to Henry II, and the states were at length persuaded to consent to its reunion to the crown from which it had been separated, though to some extent dependent, since the death of Lothar I (son of Lewis the Pious). On Rudolf’s death in 1032, Eudes, count of Champagne, endeavoured to seize it, and entered the North-western districts, from which he was dislodged by Conrad with some difficulty. Unlike Italy, it became an integral member of the Germanic realm: its prelates and nobles sat in imperial diets, and long retained the style and title of Princes of the Holy Empire. The central government was, however, seldom effective in these outlying territories, exposed always to the intrigues, finally to the aggressions, of Capetian France.

  Henry III,ad 1039-1056.Under Conrad’s son Henry the Third the Empire attained the meridian of its power. At home Otto the Great’s prerogative had not stood so high. The duchies, always the chief source of disquietude, were allowed to remain vacant or filled by the relatives of the monarch, who himself retained, contrary to usual practice, those of Franconia and (for some years) Swabia. Abbeys and sees lay virtually in his gift. Intestine feuds were repressed by the proclamation of a public peace. Abroad, the feudal superiority over Hungary, which Henry II had gained by conferring the title of King with the hand of his sister Gisela, was enforced by war, the country made almost a province, and compelled to pay tribute. In Rome no German sovereign had ever been so absolute.His reform of the popedom. A disgraceful contest between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy.s Henry deposed them all, and appointed their successor: he became hereditary patrician, and wore constantly the green mantle and circlet of gold which were the badges of that office, seeming, one might think, to find in it some further authority than that which the imperial name conferred. A Roman synod granted to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff; and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry’s encroachments alarmed his own nobles no less than the priesthood, and the reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his successor.t A mere chance, as some may call it, determined the course of history.Henry IV,ad 1056-1106. The great Emperor died suddenly in ad 1056, and a child was left at the helm, while storms were gathering that might have demanded the wisest hand.

  CHAPTER X

  STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY

  Chap. X.Reformed by the Emperors and their Teutonic nominees, the Papacy had resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the ambitious schemes shadowed forth by Nicholas I, and which the degradation of the last age had only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest mind, Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now advanced to their completion, and proclaimed that war of the ecclesiastical power against the civil power in the person of the Emperor, which became the centre of the subsequent history of both. While the nature of the struggle cannot be understood without a glance at their previous connection, the vastness of the subject forbids an attempt to draw even its outlines, and restricts our view to those relations of Popedom and Empire which arise directly out of their respective positions as heads spiritual and temporal of the universal Christian state.

  Growth of the papal power.The eagerness of Christianity in the age immediately following her recognition as the religion favoured by the state to purchase by submission the support of the civil power, has been already remarked. The change from independence to supremacy was gradual. The tale we smile at, how Constantine, healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Sylvester, and retired to Byzantium that no secular prince might interfere with the jurisdiction or profane the neighbourhood of Peter’s chair, worked great effects through the belief it commanded for many centuries. Nay more, it had a sort of groundwork in fact. Through the removal of the seat of government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus the Pope grew to be the greatest personage in the city, and in the prostration after Alarich’s invasion he was seen to be so. Henceforth he alone was a permanent and effective, though still unacknowledged power, as truly superior to the senate and consuls in the revived municipal republic after the ninth century as Augustus and Tiberius had been to the faint continuance of their earlier prototypes. Pope Leo the First asserted the universal jurisdiction of his see,a and his persevering successors slowly enthralled Italy, Illyricum, Gaul, Spain, Africa, dexterously confounding their undoubted metropolitan and patriarchal rights with those of oecumenical bishop, in which they were finally merged. By his writings and the fame of his personal sanctity, by the conversion of England and the introduction of an impressive ritual, Gregory the Great did more than any other pontiff to advance Rome’s ecclesiastical authority. Yet his tone to Maurice of Constantinople was deferential, to Phocas adulatory; his successors were not consecrated till confirmed by the Emperor or the Exarch; one of them was dragged in chains to the Bosphorus, and banished thence to Scythia. When the Image-breaking controversy and the intervention of Pipin weakened and ultimately broke the allegiance of the Popes to the East, the Franks, as patricians and Emperors, seemed to step into the position which Constantinople had lost.b At Charles’s coronation says the Saxon poet,

  • ‘Et summus eundem
  • Praesul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim
  • Principibus fuit antiquis.’

  Their relations were, however, no longer the same. If the Frank vaunted conquest, the priest spoke only of free gift. What Christendom saw was that Charles was crowned by the Pope’s hands,Relations of the Papacy and the Empire. and undertook as his principal duty the protection and advancement of the Holy Roman Church. The circumstances of Otto the Great’s coronation gave an even more favourable opening to sacerdotal claims, for it was a Pope who summoned him to Rome and a Pope who received from him an oath of fidelity and aid, as it had been through the action of successive pontiffs that the fleeting Emperors of the preceding hundred years had each obtained the crown. In the conflict of three powers, the Emperor, the pontiff, and the people—represented by their senate and consuls, or by the demagogue of the hour—the most steady, prudent, and far-sighted was sure eventually to prevail. The Popedom had no minorities, as yet few disputed successions, few revolts within its own army—the host of churchmen through Europe. The conversion of Germany by the English Winfrith (St. Boniface), under its direct sanction, gave it a hold on the rising hierarchy of the greatest European state; the extension of the rule of Charles and Otto diffused in the same measure its emissaries and pretensions. The first disputes turned on the right of the prince to confirm the elected pontiff, which was afterwards supposed to have been granted by Hadrian I to Charles, in the decree quoted as ‘Hadrianus Papa.’c This ‘ius eligendi et ordinandi summum pontificem,’ which Lewis I appears as abandoning by the ‘Ego Ludovicus,’d was claimed by the Carolingians whenever they felt themselves strong enough, and having fallen into desuetude in the troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was formally renewed to Otto the Great by his nominee Leo VIII. We have seen it used, and used in the purest spirit, by Otto himself, by his grandson Otto III, last of all, and most autocratically, by Henry III. Along with it there had grown up a bold counter-assumption of the papal chair to be itself the source of the imperial dignity. In submitting to a fresh coronation by the Pope, Lewis the Pious tacitly admitted the invalidity of that previously performed by his father: Charles the Bald did not scout the arrogant declaration of John VIII,e that to him alone the Emperor owed his crown; and the council of Pavia,f when it chose that monarch king of Italy, repeated the assertion. Subsequent Popes knew better than to apply to the chiefs of Saxon and Franconian chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian had not resented; but the precedent remained, the weapon was only hid behind the pontifical robe to be flashed out with effect when the moment should come. There were also two other great steps which papal power had taken. By the invention or adoption of the False Decretalsg it had provided itself with a legal system suited to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority through the Christian world in causes spiritual and over persons ecclesiastical. Canonistical ingenuity found it easy in one way or another to make this include all causes and persons whatsoever: for crime is always, and wrong is often, sin, nor can aught be anywhere done which may not affect the clergy.Temporal power of the Popes. On the gifts of Pipin and Charles, repeated and confirmed by Lewis I, Charles II, Otto I, and Otto III, and now made to rest on the more venerable authority of the first Christian Emperor, it could found claims to the sovereignty of Rome, Tuscany, and all else that had belonged to the exarchate. Indefinite in their terms, these grants were not meant by the donors to convey full political authority over the districts bestowed—that belonged to the head of the Empire—but only, as in the case of other church estates, a sort of perpetual usufruct, a beneficial enjoyment which did not carry sovereignty, but might be deemed to carry a sort of feudal lordship over the tenants who dwelt upon the soil. They were, in fact, what we should call endowments. Nor had the gifts been ever actually reduced into possession: the Pope had been hitherto more frequently the victim than the lord of the neighbouring barons. The grants were, however, not denied, and might be made a formidable engine of attack. Appealing to them, the Pope could brand his opponents as unjust and impious; and could summon nobles and cities to defend him as their liege lord, just as, with no better original right, he subsequently invoked the help of the Norman conquerors of Naples and Sicily.

  The attitude of the Roman Church to the imperial power at Henry the Third’s death was externally respectful. The title of a German king to receive the crown of the city was not seriously disputed and the Pope was his lawful subject. Hitherto the initiative in reform had come from the civil magistrate. But the secret of the pontiff’s strength lay in this: he, and he alone, could confer the crown, and had therefore the right of imposing conditions on its recipient. Frequent interregna, while they had enabled the Pope to assume upon each occasion a more and more independent position, had prevented the power of the Transalpine sovereigns from taking firm root. None of them could claim to reign by hereditary right: none could deny that the holy Church had before sought and might again seek a defender elsewhere. And since the need of such defence had originated the ‘transference of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks,’ since to render such defence was the Emperor’s chief function, the Pope might surely hold it to be his duty as well as his right to see that the candidate was capable of fulfilling his task, to reject him if he neglected or misperformed it.

  Hildebrandine reforms.The first step was to remove a blemish in the constitution of the Church, by fixing a defined body to choose the supreme pontiff. This Nicholas II did in ad 1059, under the counsel and impulse of the archdeacon Hildebrand. His decree vested the election in the college of cardinals, while it contemplated the subsequent assent of the clergy and people of Rome and reserved the rights of Henry IV and more vaguely of his successors.h Then the reforming spirit, kindled by the abuses and depravity of the last century, advanced apace. Directed by Hildebrand, who after having exerted a predominant influence during two pontificates himself became Pope as Gregory the Seventh in ad 1073, it strove for two main objects—the enforcement of celibacy, especially on the secular clergy, who enjoyed in this respect considerable freedom; and the extinction of simony.i In the former, the Emperors and part of the laity were not unwilling to join: the latter no one dared to defend in theory.ad 1075. But when Gregory declared that it was sin for the ecclesiastic to receive his benefice under conditions from a layman, and so condemned the whole system of the feudal investitures of land to the clergy, he aimed a deadly blow at the authority of every secular ruler. Half of the land and wealth of Germany was in the hands of bishops and abbots, who would now be freed from the Emperor’s control to pass under that of the Pope. In such a state of things government itself would be impossible.

  Henry IV and Gregory VII.Henry and Gregory already mistrusted each other: after this decree war was inevitable. The Pope cited his opponent to appear and be judged at Rome for his vices and misgovernment. The Emperorj replied by convoking a synod, which deposed and insulted Gregory. At once the dauntless monk pronounced Henry excommunicate, and fixed a day on which, if still unrepentant, he should cease to reign. Supported by his own princes, the monarch might have defied a command backed by no external force; but the Saxons, never contented since the first place had passed from their own dukes to the Franconians, only waited the signal to burst into a new revolt, whilst through all Germany the Emperor’s tyranny and irregularities of life had sown the seeds of disaffection. Shunned, betrayed, threatened, he rushed into what seemed the only course left,ad 1077. and Canosa saw Europe’s mightiest prince, titular lord of the world, a suppliant before the successor of the Apostle. Henry soon found that his humiliation had not served him; driven back into opposition, he defied Gregory anew, set up an anti-pope, overthrew the rival whom his rebellious subjects had raised, and maintained to the end of his sad and chequered life a power often depressed but never destroyed. Nevertheless had all other humiliation been spared, that one scene in the yard of the Countess Matilda’s castle, an imperial penitent standing barefoot and woollen-frocked on the snow, till the priest who sat within should admit and absolve him, was enough to mark a decisive change, and inflict an irretrievable disgrace on the crown so abased.k Its wearer could no more, with the same lofty confidence, claim to be the highest power on earth, created by and answerable to God alone. Gregory had extorted the recognition of that absolute superiority of spiritual authority which he was wont to assert so sternly, proclaiming that to the Pope, as God’s Vicar, all mankind are subject, and all rulers responsible, so that he, the giver of the crown, may also excommunicate and depose. And he discovered a simile which played a great part in subsequent controversy, a simile so happily suited to the modes of thought of the Middle Ages that no one dreamt of denying that it expressed the meaning of Scripture and the purpose of the Creator. Writing to William the Conqueror, king of England, he says:l “For as for the beauty of this world, that it may be at different seasons perceived by fleshly eyes, God hath disposed the Sun and the Moon, lights that outshine all others; so lest the creature whom His goodness hath formed after His own image in this world should be drawn astray into fatal dangers, He hath provided in the apostolic and royal dignities the means of ruling it through divers offices. . . . If I, therefore, am to answer for thee on the dreadful day of judgment before the just Judge who cannot lie, the creator of every creature, bethink thee whether I must not very diligently provide for thy salvation, and whether, for thine own safety, thou oughtest not without delay to obey me, that so thou mayest possess the land of the living.’

  Gregory was not the inventor or first propounder of these doctrines; they had been before his day a part of mediaeval Christianity, interwoven with its most vital doctrines. Six centuries earlier Pope Gelasius I had implicitly stated them in a letter enjoining obedience on the Emperor Anastasius. They were held by many others in Gregory’s day, and expressed with a more militant vehemence by his contemporary and friend Alfanus of Salerno.m But Gregory was the first who dared to apply them to the world as he found it. His was that rarest and grandest of gifts, an intellectual courage and power of imaginative belief which, when it has convinced itself of aught, accepts it fully with all its consequences, and shrinks not from acting at once upon it. A perilous gift, as the melancholy end of his own career proved, for men were found less ready than he had thought them to follow out with unswerving consistency like his the principles which all acknowledged. But it was the very suddenness and boldness of his policy that secured the ultimate triumph of his cause, awing men’s minds and making that seem realized which had been till then a vague theory. His premises once admitted—and no one dreamt of denying them—the reasonings by which he established the superiority of spiritual to temporal jurisdiction were unassailable. With his authority, in whose hands are the keys of heaven and hell, whose word can bestow eternal bliss or plunge in everlasting misery, no earthly potentate can compete or interfere. If his power extends into the infinite, how much more must he be supreme over things finite? It was thus that Gregory and his successors were wont to argue: the wonder is, not that they were obeyed, but that they were not obeyed more implicitly. In the second sentence of excommunication which Gregory passed upon Henry the Fourth are these words:—

  ‘Come now, I beseech you, O most holy and blessed Fathers and Princes, Peter and Paul, that all the world may understand and know that if ye are able to bind and to loose in heaven, ye are likewise able on earth, according to the merits of each man, to give and to take away empires, kingdoms, princedoms, marquisates, duchies, countships, and the possessions of all men. For if ye judge spiritual things, what must we believe to be your power over worldly things? and if ye judge the angels who rule over all proud princes, what can ye not do to their slaves?’

  Results of the struggle.Doctrines such as these do indeed strike equally at all temporal governments, nor were the Innocents and Bonifaces of later days slow to apply them so. On the Empire, however, the blow fell first and heaviest. As when Alarich entered Rome, the spell of ages was broken, Christendom saw its stateliest and most venerable institution dishonoured and helpless; allegiance was no longer undivided, for who could presume to fix in each case the limits of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions? The potentates of Europe beheld in the Papacy a force which, if dangerous to themselves, could be made to repel the pretensions and baffle the designs of the strongest and haughtiest among them. Italy learned how to meet the Teutonic conqueror by gaining papal sanction for the leagues of her cities. The German princes, anxious to narrow the prerogative of their head, were the natural allies of his enemy, whose spiritual thunders, more terrible than their own lances, could enable them to depose an aspiring monarch, or extort from him any concessions they desired. Their altered tone is marked by the promise they required from Rudolf of Swabia,ad 1077. whom, at the Pope’s suggestion, they set up as a rival to Henry, that he would not endeavour to make the throne hereditary.

  It is not possible here to dwell on the details of the great struggle of the Investitures, rich as it is in the interest of adventure and character, momentous as were its results for the future. A word or two must suffice to describe the conclusion, not indeed of the whole drama, which was to extend over centuries, but of what may be called its first act. Even that act lasted beyond the lives of the original performers. Gregory the Seventh passed away at Salerno in ad 1085, exclaiming with his last breath, ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.’ Twenty-one years later Henry IV died,ad 1106. dethroned by an unnatural son whom the hatred of a relentless pontiff had raised in rebellion against him. But that son, the Emperor Henry the Fifth, so far from conceding the points in dispute, proved an antagonist more ruthless and not less able than his father. He claimed for his crown all the rights over ecclesiastics that his predecessors had ever enjoyed, and when at his coronation in Rome, ad 1111, Pope Paschal II refused to complete the rite until he should have yielded, Henry seized both Pope and cardinals and compelled them by a rigorous imprisonment to consent to a treaty which he dictated. Once set free, the Pope, as was natural, disavowed his extorted concessions, and the struggle was protracted for ten years longer, until nearly half a century had elapsed from the first quarrel between Gregory VII and Henry IV. The Concordat of Worms, concluded between Pope Calixtus II and Henry V,Concordat of Worms,ad 1122. provided for the freedom of ecclesiastical elections and the renunciation by the Emperor of investiture by the ring and the crozier, but it left to him the right of investing the clergy with all temporalities by the sceptre, and the right to require from them (except those who held directly from the Pope) the performance of their duties as feudal vassals. This settlement was in form a compromise, designed to spare either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the Papacy remained master of the field. The Emperor retained but one-half of those rights of investiture which had formerly been his. He could never resume the position of Henry III; his wishes or intrigues might influence the proceedings of a chapter, his oath bound him from open interference. He had entered the strife in the fullness of dignity; he came out of it with tarnished glory and shattered power. His wars had been hitherto carried on with foreign foes, or at worst with a single rebel noble; now his former ally was turned into his fiercest assailant, and had enlisted against him half his court, half the magnates of his realm. At any moment his sceptre might be shivered in his hand by the bolt of anathema, and a host of enemies spring up from every convent and cathedral.

  Two other results of this great conflict ought not to pass unnoticed. The Emperor was alienated from the Church at the most unfortunate of all moments, the era of the Crusades.The Crusades. To conduct a great religious war against the enemies of the faith, to head the church militant in her carnal as the Popes were accustomed to do in her spiritual strife, this was the very purpose for which an Emperor had been called into being; and it was indeed in these wars, more particularly in the first three of them, that the ideal of a Christian commonwealth, embodied in the theory of the mediaeval Empire, was once for all and never again realized by the combined action of the great nations of Europe. Had such an opportunity fallen to the lot of Henry III, he might have used it to win back a supremacy such as had belonged to the first Carolingians. But Henry IV’s proscription excluded him from all share in an enterprise which he must otherwise have led—nay more, committed it to the guidance of his foes. The religious feeling which the crusades evoked—a feeling which became the origin of the great orders of chivalry, and somewhat later of the two great orders of mendicant friars—turned against the power which resisted ecclesiastical claims, and was made to work the will of the Holy See, which had blessed and organized the project. A century and a half later the Pope did not scruple to preach a crusade against the Emperor himself.

  Again, it was now that the first seeds were sown of that fear and hatred wherewith many among the German people never thenceforth ceased to regard the encroaching Romish court. Branded by the Church and forsaken by the nobles, Henry IV retained the affections of the burghers of Worms and Liége. It soon became the test of Teutonic patriotism to resist Italian priestcraft.

  Limitations of imperial prerogative.The changes in the internal constitution of Germany due to the long anarchy of Henry IV’s reign are seen when the extent of the royal prerogative as it had stood at the accession of Conrad II, the first Franconian Emperor, is compared with its state at Henry V’s death. All fiefs are now hereditary, and when vacant can be granted afresh only by consent of the States; the jurisdiction of the crown is less wide; the idea is beginning to make progress that the most essential part of the Empire is not its supreme head but the totality of princes and barons. The greatest triumph of these feudal magnates is seen in the establishment of the elective principle, which when confirmed by the three free elections of Lothar II, Conrad III, and Frederick I, passes into an undoubted law. The Prince-Electors are mentioned in ad 1156 as a distinct and important body.n The bishops, too, whom the policy of Otto the Great and Henry II had raised, are now not less dangerous than the dukes, whose power it was hoped they would balance; possibly more dangerous, since protected by their sacred character and their allegiance to the Pope, while able at the same time to command the arms of their countless vassals. Nor were the two succeeding Emperors the men to retrieve those disasters.Lothar II, 1125-1138. The Saxon Lothar the Second is the willing minion of the Pope; performs at his coronation a menial service unknown before, and takes a more stringent oath to defend the Holy See, that he may purchase its support against the Swabian party in his own dominions. Conrad the Third,Conrad III, 1138-1152. the first Emperor of the great house of Hohenstaufen,o represents tendencies more anti-papal; but domestic troubles and an unfortunate crusade prevented him from effecting anything in Italy. He never even entered Rome to receive the crown.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE EMPERORS IN ITALY: FREDERICK BARBAROSSA

  Chap. XI.The reign of Frederick the First, whom the Italians surnamed Barbarossa, is the most brilliant in the annals of the Empire. Its territory had been wider under Charles, its strength perhaps greater under Henry the Third,Frederick I (of Hohenstaufen), 1152-1189. but it never appeared in such pervading vivid activity, never shone with such lustre of chivalry, as under the prince whom his countrymen have taken to be one of their national heroes, and who is still, as the half-mythic type of Teutonic character, honoured by picture and statue, in song and in legend, through the breadth of the German lands. The reverential fondness of his annalists and the whole tenour of his life go far to justify this admiration, and dispose us to believe that nobler motives were joined with personal ambition in urging him to assert so haughtily and carry out so harshly those imperial rights in which he had unbounded confidence. Under his guidance the Transalpine power made its greatest effort to subdue the two antagonists which then threatened and were fated in the end to destroy it—the Papacy and the spirit of municipal independence in Italy.

  His relations to the Popedom.Even before Gregory VII’s time it might have been predicted that two such potentates as the Emperor and the Pope, closely bound together, yet each with pretensions wide and undefined, must ere long come into collision. The boldness of that great pontiff in enforcing, the unflinching firmness of his successors in maintaining, the supremacy of clerical authority, inspired their supporters with a zeal and courage which more than compensated the advantages of the Emperor in defending rights he had long enjoyed. On both sides the hatred was soon very bitter. But even had men’s passions permitted a reconciliation, it would have been found difficult to bring into harmony adverse principles, each theoretically irresistible, yet mutually destructive. As the spiritual power, in itself purer, since exercised over the soul and directed to the highest of all ends, eternal felicity, was entitled to the obedience of all, laymen as well as clergy; so the spiritual person, to whom, according to the view then universally accepted, there had been imparted by ordination a mysterious sanctity, could not without sin be subject to the lay magistrate, be installed by him in office, be judged in his court, and render to him any compulsory service. Yet it was no less true that civil government was indispensable to the peace and advancement of society; and while it continued to subsist, another jurisdiction could not be suffered to paralyze its workings, nor one-half of the people be altogether removed from its control. Thus the Emperor and the Pope were forced into hostility as champions of opposite systems, however fully each might admit the strength of his adversary’s position, however bitterly he might bewail the violence of his own partisans. There had also arisen other causes of quarrel, less respectable but not less dangerous. The pontiff demanded and the monarch refused the lands which the Countess Matilda of Tuscany had bequeathed to the Holy See; Frederick claiming them as feudal suzerain, the Pope eager by their means to carry out those schemes of temporal dominion which Constantine’s donation sanctioned, and Lothar’s apparent renunciation of the sovereignty of Rome had done much to encourage. As feudal superior of the Norman kings of Naples and Sicily, as protector of the towns and barons of North Italy who feared the German yoke, the successor of Peter wore already the air of an independent potentate.

  Contest with Hadrian IVNo man was less likely than Frederick to submit to these encroachments. He was a sort of imperialist Hildebrand, strenuously proclaiming the immediate dependence of his office on God’s gift, and holding it every whit as sacred as his rival’s. On his first journey to Rome, he refused to hold the Pope’s stirrup,a as Lothar had done, till Pope Hadrian the Fourth’s threat that he would withhold the crown enforced compliance.b Complaints arising not long after on some other ground, the Pope exhorted Frederick by letter to shew himself worthy of the kindness of his mother the Roman Church, who had given him the imperial crown, and would confer on him, if dutiful, benefits still greater. This word benefits—beneficia—understood in its usual legal sense of ‘fief,’ and taken in connection with the picture set up at Rome to commemorate Lothar’s homage, provoked angry shouts from the nobles assembled in Diet at Besançon in Burgundy; and when the legate (afterwards Pope Alexander III) answered, ‘From whom, then, if not from our Lord the Pope, does your king hold the Empire?’ his life was scarcely safe from their fury. On this occasion Frederick’s vigour and the remonstrances of the Transalpine prelates obliged Hadrian to explain away the obnoxious word, and remove the picture. Soon after the quarrel was renewed by other causes, and came to centre itself round the Pope’s demand that Rome should be left entirely to his government. Frederick, in reply, appeals to the civil law, and closes with the words, ‘Since by the ordination of God I both am called and am Emperor of the Romans, in nothing but name shall I appear to be ruler if the control of the Roman city be wrested from my hands.’ That such a claim should need assertion marks the change since Henry III; how much more that it could not be enforced. Hadrian’s tone rises into defiance; he mingles the threat of excommunication with references to the time when the Germans did not yet possess the Empire. ‘What were the Franks till Pope Zacharias welcomed Pipin? What is the Teutonic king now till consecrated at Rome by holy hands? The chair of Peter has given and can withdraw its gifts.’

  With Pope Alexander III.The disputed papal election that followed Hadrian’s death produced a second and more momentous conflict. Frederick, as head of Christendom, proposed to summon the bishops of Europe to a general council, over which he should preside, like Justinian or Heraclius. Quoting the favourite text of the two swords, ‘On earth,’ he continues, ‘God has placed no more than two powers: above there is but one God, so here one Pope and one Emperor. Divine Providence has specially appointed the Roman Empire as a remedy against continued schism.’c The plan failed; and Frederick adopted the candidate whom his own faction had chosen, while the rival claimant, Alexander III, appealed, with a confidence which the failed; and Frederick adopted the candidate whom his own faction had chosen, while the rival claimant, Alexander III, appealed, with a confidence which the issue justified, to the support of sound churchmen throughout Europe. The keen and long doubtful strife of twenty years that followed, while apparently a dispute between rival Popes, was in substance an effort by the secular monarch to recover his command of the priesthood, not less truly so than that contemporaneous conflict of the English Henry II and St. Thomas of Canterbury, with which it was frequently involved. Unsupported, not all Alexander’s genius and resolution could have saved him: with the aid of the Lombard cities, whose league he had counselled and hallowed, and of the fevers of Rome, by which the conquering German host was suddenly annihilated, he won a triumph the more signal, that it was over a prince so wise and so pious as Frederick. At Venice, which, inaccessible by her position, maintained a sedulous neutrality, claiming to be independent of the Empire, yet seldom led into war by sympathy with the Popes, the two powers whose strife had roused all Europe were induced to meet by the mediation of the doge Sebastian Ziani. Three slabs of red marble in the porch of St. Mark’s point out the spot where Frederick knelt in sudden awe, and the Pope with tears of joy raised him, and gave the kiss of peace. A later legend, to which poetry and painting have given an undeserved currency,d tells how the pontiff set his foot on the neck of the prostrate king, with the words, ‘The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.’e It needed not this exaggeration to enhance the significance of that scene, even more full of meaning for the future than it was solemn and affecting to the Venetian crowd that thronged the church and the piazza. For it was the renunciation by the mightiest prince of his time of the project to which his life had been devoted: it was the abandonment by the secular power of a contest in which it had twice been vanquished, and which it could not renew under more favourable conditions.

  Authority maintained so long against the successor of Peter would be far from indulgent to rebellious subjects. For it was in this light that the Lombard cities appeared to a monarch bent on reviving all the rights his predecessors had enjoyed: nay, all that the law of ancient Rome gave her absolute ruler.Revival of the study of the civil law. It would be wrong to speak of a rediscovery of the civil law. That system had never perished from Gaul and Italy, had been the groundwork of some codes or bodies of custom, and the substance, modified only by the changes in society, of many others. The Church excepted, no agent did so much to keep alive the memory of Roman institutions. The twelfth century now beheld the study cultivated with a surprising increase of knowledge and ardour, expended chiefly upon the extracts from the classical jurists contained in the Digest of the Emperor Justinian. First in Italy and the schools of the South, then in Paris and Oxford, they were expounded, commented on, extolled as the perfection of human wisdom, the sole, true, and eternal law. Vast as has been the labour and thought expended from that time to this in the elucidation of the civil law, it is hardly too much to say that in acuteness, in subtlety, in all the branches of legal science and art which can subsist without help from historical knowledge and the methods of historical criticism, these so-called Glossatores have been seldom equalled and never surpassed by their successors. The teachers of the canon law, who had not as yet become the rivals of the civilian, and were accustomed to recur to his books where their own were silent, spread through Europe the fame and influence of the Roman jurisprudence; while its own professors were led both by their feeling and their interest to give to all its maxims the greatest weight and the fullest application. Men just emerging from barbarism, with minds unaccustomed to create and blindly submissive to authority, viewed written texts with an awe to us incomprehensible. All that the most submissive jurists of Rome had ever ascribed to their monarchs was directly transferred to the Caesarean majesty who inherited their name. He was ‘Lord of the world, absolute master of the lives and property of all his subjects, that is, of all men; the sole fountain of legislation, the embodiment of right and justice. These doctrines, which the great Bolognese jurists, Bulgarus, Martinus, Hugolinus, and others who surrounded Frederick, taught and applied, as matter of course, to a Teutonic, a feudal king, were by the rest of the world not denied, were accepted in fervent faith by his German and Italian partisans. ‘To the Emperor belongs the protection of the whole world,’ says bishop Otto of Freysing. ‘The Emperor is a living law upon earth.’f To Frederick, at the diet of Roncaglia, the archbishop of Milan speaks for the assembled magnates of Lombardy: ‘Do and ordain whatsoever thou wilt, thy will is law; as it is written, “Quicquid principi placuit legis habet vigorem, cum populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem concesserit.” ’g The Hohenstaufen himself was not slow to accept these magnificent ascriptions of dignity, and though modestly professing his wish to govern according to law rather than override the law, was doubtless roused by them to a more confident assertion of a prerogative so hallowed by age and by what seemed a divine ordinance.

  Frederick in Italy.That assertion was most loudly called for in Italy. The Emperors might appear to consider it a conquered country without privileges to be respected, for they did not summon its princes to the German diets, and overawed its own assemblies at Pavia or Roncaglia by the Transalpine host that followed them. Its crown, too, was theirs whenever they crossed the Alps to claim it, while the elections on the banks of the Rhine might be adorned but could not be influenced by the presence of barons from the southern kingdom.h In practice, however, the imperial power stood lower in Italy than in Germany, for it had been from the first intermittent, depending on the personal vigour and present armed support of each invader. The theoretic sovereignty of the Emperor-king was nowise disputed: in the cities toll and tax were of right his: he could issue edicts at the Diet, and require the tenants in chief to appear with their vassals. But the revival of a control scarcely exercised since Henry IV’s time was felt as an intolerable hardship by the great Lombard cities, proud of riches and population equal to that of the duchies of Germany or the kingdoms of the North, and accustomed for more than a century to a turbulent independence. For republican institutions and popular freedom Frederick had little sympathy. At Rome the people, stirred by the fervour of Arnold of Brescia, had renewed, but with larger ideas, the attempt of Crescentius.i The city had thrown off the yoke of its bishop, and a commonwealth under consuls and senate professed to emulate the spirit while it renewed the forms of the primitive republic. Its leaders had written to Conrad III,k asking him to help them to restore the Empire to its position under Constantine and Justinian; but the German, warned by St. Bernard, had preferred the friendship of the Pope. Filled with a vain conceit of their own importance, they repeated their offers to Frederick when he sought the crown from Hadrian the Fourth. A deputation, after dwelling in highflown language on the dignity of the Roman people, and their kindness in bestowing the sceptre on him, a Swabian and a stranger, proceeded to demand a largess ere he should enter the city. Frederick’s anger did not hear them to the end: ‘Is this your Roman wisdom? Who are ye that usurp the name of Roman dignities? Your honours and your authority are yours no longer; with us are consuls, senate, soldiers. It was not you who chose us to be rulers, but Charles and Otto that rescued you from the Greek and the Lombard, and conquered by their own might the imperial crown. That Frankish might is still the same: wrench, if you can, the club from Hercules. It is not for the people to give laws to the prince, but to obey his command.’l This was Frederick’s version of the ‘Translation of the Empire.’m

  The Lombard cities.He who had been so stern to his own capital was not likely to deal more gently with the rebels of Milan and Tortona. In the contest by which Frederick is chiefly known to modern Italy, he is commonly painted as the foreign tyrant, the forerunner of the Austrian oppressor,n crushing under the hoofs of his cavalry the home of freedom and industry. Such a view is unjust to a great man and his cause. To the despot liberty is always licence; yet Frederick was the enforcer of admitted claims; the aggressions of Milan threatened her neighbours; the refusal, where no actual oppression was alleged, to admit his officers and allow his regalian rights, seemed a wanton breach of oaths and engagements, treason against God no less than himself.o Nevertheless our sympathy must go with the cities, in whose victory we recognize the triumph of freedom and civilization. Their resistance was at first probably a mere aversion to unused control, and to the enforcement of imposts less offensive in former days than now, and by long dereliction apparently obsolete.p Republican principles were not avowed, nor were sentiments of Italian nationality appealed to. But the progress of the conflict developed new motives and feelings, and gave the cities clearer notions of what they fought for. As the Emperor’s antagonist, the Pope was their natural ally: he blessed their arms, and called on the barons of Romagna and Tuscany for aid; he made ‘The Church’ ere long their watchword, and helped them to conclude that league of mutual support by means whereof the party of the Italian Guelfs was formed. Another cry, too, began to be heard, hardly less inspiriting than the last, a cry that had been silent for thirteen centuries, the cry of freedom and municipal self-government—freedom little understood and terribly abused, self-government which the cities who claimed it for themselves refused to their subject allies, yet both of them, through their power of stimulating effort and quickening sympathy, as much nobler than the harsh and repressive system of a feudal monarchy as the citizen of republican Athens had risen above the slavish Asiatic or the brutal Macedonian. Nor was the fact that Italians were resisting a Transalpine invader without its effect. There was as yet no distinct national feeling, for half Lombardy, towns as well as rural nobles, fought under Frederick; but events made the cause of liberty always more clearly the cause of patriotism, and increased that fear and hate of the Tedescan for which Italy has had such bitter justification.

  Temporary success of Frederick.The Emperor was for a time successful: Tortona was taken, Milan razed to the ground, and her name apparently extinguished. Greater obstacles had been overcome, and a fuller authority was for the moment exercised than in the days of Otto the Great or Henry the Third. The glories of the first Frankish conqueror were triumphantly recalled, and Frederick was compared by his admirers to the hero whose canonization he had procured, and whom he strove in all things to imitate.q ‘He was esteemed,’ says one, ‘second only to Charles in piety and justice.’ ‘We ordain this,’ says a decree: ‘Ut ad Caroli imitationem ius ecclesiarum statum reipublicae incolumem et legum integritatem per totum imperium nostrum servaremus.’r But the hold the name of Charles had on the minds of the people, and the way in which he had become, so to speak, an eponym of Empire, has better witnesses than grave documents. A rhyming poet sings:s —

  • ‘Quanta sit potentia vel laus Friderici
  • Cum sit patens omnibus, non est opus dici;
  • Qui rebelles lancea fodiens ultrici
  • Repraesentat Karolum dextera victrici.’

  The Diet at Roncaglia was a chorus of gratulations over the re-establishment of order by the destruction of the dens of unruly burghers.

  Victory of the Lombard League.This fair sky was soon clouded. From her quenchless ashes uprose Milan; Cremona, forswearing old jealousies, helped to rebuild what she had destroyed, and the confederates, committed to what seemed an all but hopeless strife, clung faithfully together till on the field of Legnano the Empire’s banner went down before the carrocciot of the free city. Times were changed since Aistulf and Desiderius had trembled at the distant tramp of the Frankish hosts. A new nation was arising, slowly reared through suffering into strength, now at last by heroic deeds conscious of itself. The power of Charles had overleaped boundaries of nature and language that were too strong for his successor, and that grew henceforth ever firmer, till they made the Empire itself a delusive name. Frederick, though harsh in war, and now baulked of his most cherished hopes, could accept a state of things he had found it beyond his power to change: he signed cheerfully and kept dutifully the peace of Constance, which left him little but a titular supremacy over the Lombard towns.

  Frederick as German king.At home no Emperor since Henry III had been so much respected and so generally prosperous. He had vast hereditary possessions, including, we are told, no less than four hundred castles. Uniting in his person the Saxon and Swabian families, he healed on the northern side of the Alps the long feud of Welf and Waiblingen: his prelates were faithful to him, even against Rome: no turbulent rebel disturbed the public peace. Germany was proud of a hero who maintained her dignity so well abroad, and he crowned a glorious life with a happy death, leading the van of Christian chivalry against the Musulman.u Frederick, the greatest of the Crusaders, as St. Louis is the best, is among the noblest types of mediaeval character in many of its shadows, in all its lights.

  Legal in form, though in practice sometimes admitting the exercise of an almost absolute authority, the government of Germany was, like that of other feudal kingdoms, restrained chiefly by the difficulty of coercing refractory vassals. All depended on the monarch’s character, and one so vigorous and popular as Frederick could generally lead the majority with him and overawe the rest. A false impression of the real strength of his prerogative might be formed from the readiness with which he was obeyed, for this was largely due to the tact which was happily united with his firmness. He repaired the finances of the kingdom, controlled the dukes, introduced a more splendid ceremonial, endeavoured to exalt the central power by multiplying the nobles of the second rank, afterwards the ‘college of princes,’ and by trying to substitute the civil law and Lombard feudal code for the old Teutonic customs, different in every province. If not successful in this project, he fared better with another.The German cities. Since Henry the Fowler’s day towns had been growing up through Southern and Western Germany, especially where rivers offered facilities for trade. Cologne, Treves, Mentz, Worms, Speyer, Nürnberg, Ulm, Regensburg, Augsburg, were already considerable cities, not afraid to beard their lord or their bishop, and promising before long to counterbalance the power of the territorial oligarchy. Policy or instinct led Frederick to attach them to the throne, enfranchising many, granting, with municipal institutions, an independent jurisdiction, conferring various exemptions and privileges; while receiving in turn their good-will and loyal aid, in money always, in men when need came. His immediate successors trode in his steps, and thus there arose in the state a third order, the firmest bulwark, had it been rightly used, of imperial authority; an order whose members, the Free Cities, were through many ages the centres of German intellect and freedom, the only haven from the storms of civil war, the surest hope of future peace and union. In them national congresses used, in the dark days after 1815, to meet: from them aspiring spirits strove to diffuse those ideas of Germanic unity and free self-government, which they had done much to keep alive. Out of so many flourishing commonwealths, four onlyx were spared by foreign conquerors and faithless princes till the day came which made them again the members of a great and truly German state. To the primitive order of freemen, scarcely existing out of the towns, except in Swabia and Switzerland, Frederick further commended himself by allowing them to be admitted to knighthood, by restraining the licence of the nobles, by imposing a public peace, by making justice in every way more accessible and impartial. To the southwest of the green plain that girdles in the rock of Salzburg, the gigantic mass of the Untersberg frowns over the road which winds up a long defile to the glen and lake of Berchtesgaden. There, far up among its limestone crags, in a spot scarcely accessible to human foot, the peasants of the valley point out to the traveller the black mouth of a cavern, and tell him that within the red-bearded Emperor lies amid his knights in an enchanted sleep,y waiting the hour when the ravens shall cease to hover round the peak, and the pear-tree blossom in the valley, to descend with his Crusaders and bring back to Germany the golden age of peace and strength and unity. Often in the evil days that followed the fall of Frederick’s house, often when tyranny seemed unendurable and anarchy endless, men thought on that cavern, and sighed for the day when the long sleep of the just Emperor should be broken, and his shield be hung aloft again as of old in the camp’s midst, a sign of help to the poor and the oppressed.

  

  CHAPTER XII

  IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS

  Chap. XII.The era of the Hohenstaufen is perhaps the fittest point at which to turn aside from the narrative history of the Empire to speak shortly of the legal position which it professed to hold to the rest of Europe, as well as of certain duties and observances which throw a light upon the system it embodied. This is not indeed the era of its greatest power. That was already past. Nor is it conspicuously the era when its ideal dignity stood highest: for that remained scarcely impaired till three centuries had passed away. But it was under the Hohenstaufen, owing partly to the splendid abilities of the princes of that famous line, partly to the suddenly-gained ascendancy of the Roman law, that the actual power and the theoretical influence of the Empire most fully coincided. There can therefore be no better opportunity for noticing the titles and claims by which it announced itself the representative of Rome’s universal dominion, and for collecting the various instances in which they were (either before or after Frederick’s time) more or less admitted by the other states of Europe.

  The territories over which Frederick would have declared his jurisdiction to extend may be classed under four heads:—

  First, the German lands, in which, and in which alone, the Emperor was, up till the death of Frederick the Second (ad 1250), effective ruler.

  Second, the non-German districts of the Holy Empire, where the Emperor was acknowledged as sole monarch, but in practice little regarded.

  Third, certain outlying countries, owing allegiance to the Empire, but governed by kings of their own.

  Fourth, the other states of Europe, whose rulers, while admitting the superior rank of the Emperor, were virtually independent of him.

  Limits of the Empire.Thus within the actual boundaries of the Holy Empire were included only districts coming under the first and second of the above classes, i.e. Germany, Northern Italy, and the kingdom of Burgundy or Arles—that is to say, Provence, Dauphiné, the Free County of Burgundy (Franche Comté), and what is now Western Switzerland. Lorraine, Alsace, the rest of Switzerland and the Low Countries were of course parts of Germany. To the north-east, Bohemia and the Slavic principalities in Mecklenburg and Pomerania were as yet not integral parts of its body, but rather dependent outliers. Beyond the Mark of Brandenburg, from the Oder to the Vistula, dwelt pagan Lithuanians or Prussians,a free till the establishment among them of the Teutonic Knights, which took place with the approval of Frederick II in 1228-40.

  Hungary.Hungary had owed a doubtful allegiance since the days of Otto I. Gregory VII had claimed it as a fief of the Holy See; Frederick wished to reduce it completely to subjection, but could not overcome the reluctance of his nobles. After Frederick II, by whom it was recovered from the Mongol hordes, no imperial claims were made for so many years that at last they became obsolete, and were confessed to be so by the Constitution of Augsburg, ad 1566.b

  Poland.Under Duke Misico, Poland had submitted to Otto the Great, and continued, with occasional revolts, to obey the Empire, till the beginning of the Great Interregnum (as it is called) in 1254. Its duke was present at the election of Richard, ad 1257. Thereafter, in 1295, Duke Primislas had himself crowned king in token of emancipation (for the title of king which Otto III had granted to Boleslas I had become disused) and the country became independent, though some of its provinces were long afterwards reunited to the German state. Silesia, originally Polish, was attached to Bohemia by Charles IV, and so became part of the Empire; Posen and Galicia were seized by Prussia and Austria respectively, ad 1772.c Down to her partition in that year, the constitution of Poland remained in some points a copy of that which had existed in the German kingdom of the twelfth century.

  Denmark.Lewis the Pious had received the homage of the Danish king Harold, on his baptism at Mentz, ad 826; Otto the Great’s victories over Harold Blue Tooth made the country subject, and added the Mark of Schleswig to the Empire: but the boundary soon receded to the Eyder, on whose banks might be seen the inscription,—

  • ‘Eidora Romani terminus imperii.’

  King Peterd attended at the Diet held at Merseburg shortly after Frederick I’s coronation, and received from the Emperor, who as suzerain had been required to decide a disputed question of succession to the Danish throne, his own crown; he did homage, and bore the sword before the Emperor. Since the Great Interregnum Denmark has been always free.e

  France.Otto the Great was the last Emperor whose suzerainty the West Frankish kings had admitted; nor were Henry VI and Otto IV successful in their attempts to enforce it. Boniface VIII, in his quarrel with Philip the Fair, offered the French throne, which he had pronounced vacant, to Albert I; but the wary Hapsburg declined the dangerous prize.f The superiority, however, which the Germans continued to assert, irritated Gallic pride, and led to more than one contest. Charles V of France gave the Emperor Charles IV black horses on which to ride into Paris, when the latter paid him a visit there, himself riding a white horse, because the custom of the Emperors had been, so says the chronicler, to enter their cities on a white charger. French jurists steadily insisted that their king held from God alone. Blondel denies the Empire any claim to the Roman name; and in ad 1648 the French envoys at Münster refused for some time to admit that precedence of the imperial envoys which no other European state disputed. Till recent times the title of the Archbishop of Treves, ‘Archicancellarius per Galliam atque regnum Arelatense,’ preserved the memory of an obsolete supremacy which the constant aggressions of France might seem to have reversed.

  Sweden.No reliance can be placed on the author who tells us that Sweden was granted by Frederick I to Waldemar the Dane;g the fact is improbable, and we do not hear that such pretensions were ever put forth before or after. Norway, too, seems to have been left untouched—the Emperors had no fleets—and Iceland, which had remained undiscoveredh till long after the days of Charles the Great, was down to the year 1262 the only absolutely free Republic in the world. It is a curious illustration of mediaeval habits of thought that the envoys of the king of Norway, when seeking to persuade the Icelandic people to accept his supremacy, argued that monarchy was the form of government divinely ordained, and existed in every part of the European continent.

  Spain.Nor does it appear that authority was ever exercised by any Emperor, after the first Carolingians, in Spain. Nevertheless the choice of Alfonso X by some of the German electors, in ad 1258, seems to imply that the Spanish kings were members of the Empire. And when, ad 1053, Ferdinand the Great of Castile had, in the pride of his victories over the Moors, assumed the title of ‘Hispaniae Imperator,’ the remonstrance of Henry III declared the rights of Rome over the Western provinces indelible, and the Spaniard, though protesting his independence, was forced to resign the usurped dignity.i

  England.No act of sovereignty is recorded to have been done by any of the Emperors in England, though as heirs of Rome they might be thought to have better rights over it than over Poland or Denmark.j There was, however, a vague notion that the English, like other kingdoms, must depend on the Empire: a notion which appears in Conrad III’s letter to John of Constantinople;k and which was countenanced by the submissive tone in which Frederick I was addressed by the Plantagenet Henry II.l English independence was still more compromised in the next reign, when Richard I, according to Hoveden, ‘by the advice of his mother Eleanor stripped himself of the kingdom of England, and delivered it over to the Emperor as Lord of the World.’ But as Richard was at the same time invested with the kingdom of Arles by Henry VI, his homage may have been for that fief only; and it was probably in that capacity that he voted (by his eight deputies), as a prince of the Empire, at the election of Frederick II. The case finds a parallel in the claims of England over the Scottish king, doubtful, to say the least, as regards the domestic realm of the latter, certain as regards Cumbria, which he had long held from the Southern crown.m But Germany had no Edward I. Henry VI is said at his death to have released Richard from his submissionn (this too may be compared with Richard’s release to the Scottish king William the Lion), and Edward II declared the kingdom of England to be wholly free from all subjection to the Empire.o Yet the notion survived: the Emperor Lewis the Bavarian, when he named Edward III his vicar in the great war between France and England, demanded, though in vain, that the English monarch should kiss his feet,p and the election of Edward as Emperor after the death of Lewis carried with it an implication that England was still in a certain sense a part of the Empire. The Emperor Sigismund,q visiting Henry V at London, at the time of the meeting of the council of Constance, was met by the Duke of Gloucester, who, riding into the water to the ship where the Emperor sat, required him, at the sword’s point, to declare that he did not come purposing to infringe on the king’s authority in the realm of England.r One curious pretension of the imperial crown called forth many protests. It was declared by civilians and canonists that no notary public could have any standing, or attach any legality to the documents he drew or attested, unless he had received his diploma either from the Emperor or from the Pope. A strenuous denial of a doctrine so injurious was issued by the parliament of Scotland under James III.s

  Ireland.No Roman soldier ever trod the soil of Ireland, nor did any mediaeval emperor ever exercise any authority there. But even in Ireland the influence of the imperial idea was felt. In that isle, before the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century, a chieftain or magnate whose wealth consisted in cattle, was accustomed to give them out among his dependants to be pastured; and thus the expression ‘to receive stock’ from any one came to denote the holding of a subordinate or vassal position, similar to that of the feudal tenant who receives land as a beneficium from his lord. Now the Brehon law, after shewing how the inferior princes may receive stock from the King of Erin—the Ard Righ or supreme king of the whole island (who, however, even when he existed, had little more than a titular authority)—goes on to say, ‘When the King of Erin is without opposition (i.e. when he holds Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, the three chief ports which were often in the hands of Norsemen or Danes), he receives stock from the King of the Romans,’ i.e. the Emperor. And one commentator (probably a cleric) adds that sometimes it is the Successor of Patrick (i.e. the Archbishop of Armagh) who gives stock to the King of Erin, thereby setting the Primate of Ireland in the position above the Emperor which the theory of high Papalists in continental Europe assigned to the Pope.t

  Naples.The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, although of course claimed as a part of the Empire, was under the Norman dynasty (ad 1060-1189) not merely independent, but the most dangerous enemy of the German power in Italy. Henry VI, the son and successor of Barbarossa, obtained possession of it by marrying Constance the heiress of the Norman kings. But both he and Frederick II treated it as a separate patrimonial state, instead of incorporating it with their more northerly dominions. After the death of Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen, it passed away to an Angevin, then to an Aragonese dynasty, continuing under both to maintain itself independent of the Empire, nor ever again, except under the Emperor Charles V, held by the occupant of the Germanic throne.

  Venice.One spot in Italy there was whose singular felicity of situation enabled her through long centuries of obscurity and weakness, slowly ripening into strength, to maintain her freedom unstained by any submission to the Frankish and German Emperors. Venice glories in deducing her origin from the fugitives who escaped from Aquileia when that city was destroyed by Attila: it is at least probable that her population received no sensible admixture of Teutonic settlers, and they continued during the ages of Lombard and Frankish rule in Italy to regard the East Roman sovereign as the representative of their ancient masters. Charles the Great acknowledged by treaty their dependence on the East; and in the tenth century, when summoned to submit to Otto II, they had said, ‘We wish to be the servants of the Emperors of the Romans’ (the Constantinopolitan). Their fleet, joined with a force of Frankish Crusaders, overthrew this very throne in ad 1204, but the pretext of allegiance to the East had served its turn, and had aided them in defying or evading the demands of obedience made by the Teutonic princes. Alone of all the Italian republics, Venice never, down to her extinction by France and Austria in ad 1797, recognized within her bounds any secular Western authority save her own.

  The East.The kings of Cyprus and Armenia sent to Henry VI to confess themselves his vassals and ask his help. Over remote Eastern lands, where Frankish foot had never trode, Frederick Barbarossa asserted the indestructible rights of Rome, mistress of the world. A letter to Saladin, amusing from its absolute identification of his own Empire with that which had sent Crassus to perish in Parthia, and had blushed to see Mark Antony ‘consulem nostrum’ at the feet of Cleopatra, is preserved by Hoveden: it bids the Soldan withdraw at once from the dominions of Rome, else will she, with her new Teutonic defenders, of whom a pompous list follows, drive him from them with all her ancient might.u

  The Byzantine Emperors.Unwilling as were the great kingdoms of Western Europe to admit the territorial supremacy of the Emperor, the proudest among them never refused, until the end of the Middle Ages, to recognize his precedence and address him in a tone of respectful deference. Very different was the attitude of the East Roman princes, who denied his claim to be an Emperor at all. The separate existence of the Eastern Church and Empire was always, as has been said above, a blemish in the title of the Teutonic sovereigns. But it was even more. It was a continuing protest against the whole system of an Empire Church of Christendom, centring in Rome, ruled by the successor of Peter and the successor of Augustus. Instead of the one Pope and one Emperor whom mediaeval theory presented as the sole earthly representatives of the invisible Head of the Church, the world saw itself distracted by the interminable feud of rivals, each of whom had much to allege on his behalf. It was easy for the Latins to call the Easterns schismatics and their Emperor an usurper, but practically it was impossible to dethrone him or reduce them to obedience—indeed the Teutonic sovereigns never made a serious claim to the provinces in which Greek was spoken—nor could the Eastern Church be treated, even in controversy, with the contempt that any Western schismatics would have incurred. But as the East Roman Empire is treated of in a separate chapter, it is sufficient here to indicate this one conspicuous exception to the general recognition of imperial supremacy.

  Dignities and titles.Though Otto the Great and his successors had dropped all titles save the highest, they did not therefore endeavour to unite their several kingdoms, but continued to go through four distinct coronations at the four capitals of their Empire.x These are concisely given in the verses of Godfrey of Viterbo, a notary of Frederick’s household:y —

  • ‘Primus Aquisgrani locus est, post haec Arelati,
  • Inde Modoetiae regali sede locari
  • Post solet Italiae summa corona dari:
  • Caesar Romano cum vult diademate fungi
  • Debet apostolicis manibus reverenter inungi.’

  The four crowns.By the crowning at Aachen, the old Frankish capital, the monarch became ‘king’; formerly ‘king of the Franks,’ or ‘king of the Eastern Franks’; now, since Henry II’s time, ‘king of the Romans, always Augustus.’ At Monza (or, more rarely, at Milan) in later times, at Pavia in earlier times, he became king of Italy, or of the Lombards;z at Rome he received the double crown of the Roman Empire, ‘double,’ says Godfrey, as ‘urbis et orbis’:—

  • ‘Hoc quicunque tenet, summus in orbe sedet;’

  though others hold that, uniting the mitre to the crown, it typifies spiritual as well as secular authority. The crown of Burgundy or the kingdom of Arles,a first gained by Conrad II, was a much less splendid matter, and carried with it little effective power. Most Emperors never assumed it at all, Frederick I not till late in life, when an interval of leisure left him nothing better to do. These four crownsb furnish matter of endless discussion to the old writers; they tell us that the Roman was golden, the German silver, the Italian iron, the metal corresponding to the dignity of each realm.c Others say that that of Aachen is iron, and the Italian silver, and give elaborate reasons why it should be so.d There seems to be no doubt that the allegory created the fact, and that all three crowns were of gold (or gilded silver), though in that of Italy there was and is inserted a piece of iron, a nail, it was believed, of the true Cross.

  Meaning of the four coronations.Why, it may well be asked, seeing that the Roman crown made the Emperor ruler of the whole habitable globe, was it thought necessary for him to add to it minor dignities which might be supposed to have been already included in this supreme one? The reason seems to be that the imperial office was conceived of as something different in kind from the regal, and as carrying with it not the immediate government of any particular kingdom, but a general suzerainty over and right of controlling all. Of this a pertinent illustration is afforded by an anecdote told of Frederick Barbarossa. Happening once to inquire of the famous jurists who surrounded him whether it was really true that he was ‘lord of the world’ (dominus mundi), one of them simply assented, another, Bulgarus, answered, ‘Not as respects ownership’ (non quantum ad dominium). In this dictum, which is evidently conformable to the philosophical theory of the Empire, we have a pointed distinction drawn between feudal sovereignty, which supposes the prince original owner of the soil of his whole kingdom, and imperial sovereignty, which is irrespective of place and exercised not over things but over men, as God’s rational creatures. But the Emperor, as has been said already, was also the East Frankish king, uniting in himself, to use the legal phrase, two wholly distinct ‘persons,’ and hence he might acquire more direct and practically useful rights over a portion of his dominions by being crowned king of that portion, just as a feudal monarch often came to be count of lordships whereof he was already feudal superior; or, to take a better illustration, just as a bishop may hold livings in his own diocese. That the Emperors, while continuing to be crowned at Milan and Aachen, did not in practice call themselves kings of the Lombards and of the Franks, was probably merely because these titles seemed insignificant compared to that of Roman Emperor.

  ‘Emperor’ not assumed till the Roman coronation.In this supreme title, as has been said, all lesser honours were blent and lost, but custom or prejudice forbade the German king to assume it till actually crowned at Rome by the Pope.e Matters of phrase and title are never unimportant, least of all in an age not only uncritical but also superstitiously attached to forms and precedents: and this restriction had the most important consequences. The reverence for Rome as the ancient seat of power, and the sense of the close relation between the temporal and the spiritual sovereign, created an association which soon became indissoluble between the office and title of Emperor, and the crowning in the City by the Pope.f ‘Rome,’ says the biographer of St. Adalbert, ‘seeing that she both is and is called the head of the world and the mistress of cities, is alone able to give to kings imperial power, and since she cherishes in her bosom the body of the Prince of the Apostles, she ought of right to appoint the Prince of the whole earth.’g The crown was therefore too sacred to be conferred by any one but the supreme Pontiff, or in any city less august than the ancient capital.Origin and results of this practice. Had it become hereditary in any family, Lothar I’s, for instance, or Otto’s, this feeling might have worn off; as it was, each successive transfer to a new family or dynasty, to Guido, to Otto I, to Henry II, to Conrad the Salic, strengthened it. The force of custom, tradition, precedent, is immense, when checked neither by written rules nor by free discussion. What sheer assertion will do is shewn by the success of a forgery so gross as the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, accepted at first because it occurred to no one, nor was it obviously any one’s interest, to contest their genuineness, accepted afterwards, when their tendency was perceived, because they had by this time found general currency, recognized ultimately as valid because they had passed into authorized collections. No arguments are needed to discredit the alleged decree of Pope Benedict VIII,h which forbade the German prince to take the name or office of Emperor till approved and consecrated by the Pontiff, but a doctrine so favourable to papal pretensions was sure not to want advocacy; Hadrian IV proclaims it in the broadest terms, and through the efforts of the clergy and the spell of reverence in the Teutonic princes, it passed into an unquestioned belief.i That none ventured to use the title till the Pope conferred it, made it seem to depend on his will, enabled him to exact conditions from every candidate, and gave colour to his pretended suzerainty. Since by feudal theory every honour and estate is held from some superior, and since the divine commission has been without doubt issued directly to the Pope, must not the whole earth be his fief, and he the lord paramount, to whom even the Emperor is a vassal? This argument, which drew plausibility from the rivalry between the Emperor and other monarchs, as compared with the undisputedj authority of the Pope, was a favourite with the high sacerdotal party: first distinctly advanced by Hadrian IV, when he set up the picturek representing the homage of Lothar II, which had so irritated the followers of Barbarossa, though it had already been hinted at in Gregory VII’s gift of the crown to Rudolf of Swabia, with the line—

  • ‘Petra dedit Petro, Petrus diadema Rudolfo.’l

  Nor was it only by putting him at the Pontiff’s mercy that this dependence of the imperial name on a coronation in the city injured the German sovereign.m With strange inconsistency it was not pretended that the Emperor’s rights were any narrower before he received the rite: he could summon synods, confirm papal elections, exercise jurisdiction over the citizens: his right to receive the crown itself was not, at least till the days of Gregory VII, seriously denied. No one thought of contesting the claim of the German nation to the Empire, or the authority of the German electors, strangers though they were, to give Rome and Italy a master. The republican followers of Arnold of Brescia might murmur, but they could not dispute the truth of the proud lines in which the poet who sang the glories of Barbarossan describes the result of the conquest of Charles the Great:—

  • ‘Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum
  • Hostibus expulsis, ad nos iustissimus ordo
  • Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni
  • Nos penes est. Quemcunque sibi Germania regem
  • Praeficit, hunc dives summisso vertice Roma
  • Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine Rhenus.’

  But the real strength of the Teutonic kingdom was wasted in the pursuit of a glittering toy: once at least in his reign each Emperor undertook a long and dangerous expedition, and dissipated in a costly and ever to be repeated strife the forces that might have achieved conquest elsewhere, or made him feared and obeyed at home.

  The title ‘Holy Empire.’At this epoch appears another title, of which more must be said. To the accustomed ‘Roman Empire’ Frederick I adds the epithet of ‘Holy.’ Of its earlier origin, under Conrad II (the Salic), which some have supposed,o there is no documentary trace.p So far as is known it occurs first in the summons or circular letter issued by Frederick in ad 1157,qr requiring the magnates of the Empire to give him their aid in his expedition against the recalcitrant cities of Lombardy: ‘Quia urbis et orbis gubernacula tenemus iuxta diversos eventus rerum et successiones temporum sacro imperio et divae reipublicae consulere debemus,’ where the second phrase is a synonym repeating the idea of the first. It occurs also afterwards in other documents of his reign, as for example in a letter to the East Roman Emperor Isaac Angelus. Used occasionally by Henry VI and Frederick II, it is more frequent under their successors, William, Richard, Rudolf, till after Charles IV’s time it becomes habitual, and during the last few centuries the familiar description in current speech of the Germanic State.s

  The adoption of the title did not mark or coincide with any constitutional or political change, for the Empire, as has already been shewn, was in its wider form essentially and substantially the creation of Charles, in its narrower form, as practically consisting of Germany and Northern Italy (of course also with a vague unenforceable claim to universal sovereignty), the creation of Otto the Great. Nor are its original meaning and the motives which led Frederick and his first successors to employ it, altogether clear. Some have regarded it as a perpetuation of the court style of Rome and Constantinople which attached sanctity to the person of the monarch: thus David Blondel, contending for the honour of France, calls it a mere epithet of the Emperor, applied by confusion to his government.t Others saw in it a religious meaning, referring to Daniel’s prophecy, or to the fact that the Empire was contemporary with Christianity, or to Christ’s birth under it.u Strong churchmen derived it from the dependence of the imperial crown on the Pope. There were not wanting those who maintained that it meant nothing more than great or splendid. There need not, however, be any great doubt as to its true sense and purport. The ascription of sacredness to the person, the palace, the letters, and so forth, of the sovereign, so common in the later ages of ancient Rome, had been partly retained in the German court. Liudprand calls Otto ‘imperator sanctissimus.’x Still this sanctity, which the Easterns above all others lavished on their princes, is something personal, is nothing more than the divinity that in all countries doth hedge a king. Far more intimate and peculiar was the relation of the revived Roman Empire to the Church and religion. As has been said already, it was neither more nor less than the Visible Church, seen on its secular side, the Christian society organized as a state under a form divinely appointed, and therefore the name ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was the needful and rightful counterpart to that of ‘Holy Catholic Church.’y Such had long been the belief, and so the title might have had its origin as far back as the tenth or ninth century, might even have emanated from Charles himself. Alcuin in one of his letters uses the phrase ‘imperium Christianum.’ But there was a further reason for its introduction under the second Hohenstaufen, immediately after his contest with Pope Hadrian IV. Ever since Hildebrand had claimed for the priesthood exclusive sanctity and supreme jurisdiction, extreme papalists had been wont to speak of the civil power as being, compared with that of their own chief, merely secular and earthly. It may be conjectured that to meet this reproach, no less injurious than insulting, Frederick or his advisers began to use in public documents the expression ‘Holy Empire’; thereby wishing to assert the divine institution and religious duties of his office. Previous Emperors had called themselves ‘Catholici,’ ‘Christiani,’ ‘ecclesiae defensores’;z now their State itself is consecrated an earthly theocracy. ‘Romanum imperium . . . ad remedium tam perniciosi morbi (sc. schismatis) divina providit clementia,’a writes Frederick to the English Henry II. The theory was one which the best and strongest Emperors had most striven to carry out; it continued to be zealously upheld long after it had ceased to be practicable. In the proclamations of mediaeval kings there is a constant dwelling on their divine commission. Power in an age of violence sought to justify while it enforced its commands, to make brute force less brutal by appeals to a higher sanction. This is seen nowhere more than in the style of the German sovereigns: they delight in the phrases ‘maiestas sacrosancta,’b ‘imperator divina ordinante providentia,’ ‘divina pietate,’ ‘per misericordiam Dei’; many of which were preserved till, like those used now by other European kings, like our own ‘Defender of the Faith,’ they had become at last more grotesque than solemn. The freethinking Emperor Joseph II, at the end of the eighteenth century, was ‘Advocate of the Christian Church,’ ‘Vicar of Christ,’ ‘Imperial head of the faithful,’ ‘Leader of the Christian army,’ ‘Protector of Palestine, of general councils, of the Catholic faith.’c

  The title, if it added little to the power, yet certainly seems to have increased the dignity of the Empire, and by consequence the jealousy of other states, of France especially. This did not, however, go so far as to prevent its recognition by the Popes and the French kings,d and after the sixteenth century it would have been a breach of diplomatic courtesy to omit it. Nor have imitations been wanting: witness such phrases as ‘Holy Russia,’ and such titles as ‘Most Christian king (France),’ ‘Catholic king (Spain),’ ‘Defender of the Faith (England).’

  CHAPTER XIII

  FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN: RENEWED STRIFE OF PAPACY AND EMPIRE

  Chap. XIII.In the three preceding chapters the Holy Empire has been described in what is not only the most brilliant but the most momentous period of its history; the period of its rivalry with the Popedom for the chief place in Christendom. For it was mainly through their relations with the spiritual power, by their friendship and protection at first, no less than by their subsequent hostility, that the Teutonic Emperors influenced the developement of European politics. The reform of the Roman Church which went on during the reigns of Otto I and his successors down to Henry III, and which was chiefly due to the efforts of those monarchs, was the true beginning of the grand period of the Middle Ages, the first of that long series of movements, changes, and creations in the ecclesiastical system of Europe which was, so to speak, the master current of history, secular as well as religious, during the centuries which followed. The first result of Henry the Third’s purification of the Papacy was seen in the attempt of Gregory the Seventh to subject all jurisdiction to that of his own chair, and in the long struggle of the Investitures, which brought out into clear light the opposing pretensions of the temporal and spiritual powers. Although destined in the end to bear far other fruit, the immediate effect of this struggle was to evoke in all classes an intense religious feeling; and, in opening up new fields of ambition to the hierarchy, to stimulate wonderfully their capacity for political organization. It was this impulse that gave birth to the Crusades, and that enabled the Popes, stepping forth as the rightful leaders of a religious war, to bend it to serve their own ends: it was thus too that they struck the alliance—strange as such an alliance seems now—with the rebellious cities of Lombardy, and proclaimed themselves the protectors of municipal freedom. But the third and crowning triumph of the Holy See was reserved for the thirteenth century. In the foundation of the two great orders of ecclesiastical knighthood, the all-powerful all-pervading Dominicans and Franciscans, the religious fervour of the Middle Ages culminated: in the overthrow of the only power which could pretend to vie with her in antiquity, in sanctity, in universality, the Papacy saw herself exalted to rule alone over the kings of the earth. Of that overthrow, following with terrible suddenness on the days of strength and glory which we have just been witnessing, this chapter has now to speak.

  Henry VI, 1190-1197.It happened strangely enough that just while their ruin was preparing, the house of Swabia gained over their ecclesiastical foes what seemed likely to prove an advantage of the first moment. The son and successor of Frederick Barbarossa was Henry VI, a man who had inherited all his father’s severity with none of his father’s generosity. By his marriage with Constance, the heiress of the Norman kings, he had become master of Naples and Sicily. Emboldened by the possession of what had been hitherto the stronghold of his predecessors’ bitterest enemies, and able to threaten the Pope from south as well as north, Henry conceived a scheme which might have wonderfully changed the history of Germany and Italy. He proposed to the Teutonic magnates to lighten their burdens by uniting these newly-acquired countries to the Empire, to turn their feudal lands into allodial, and to make no further demands for money on the clergy, on condition that they should pronounce the crown hereditary in his family. Results of the highest importance would have followed this change, which Henry advocated by setting forth the perils of interregna, and which he doubtless meant to be but part of an entirely new system of polity. Already so strong in Germany, and with an absolute command of their new kingdom, the Hohenstaufen might have dispensed with the renounced feudal services, and built up a firm centralized system, like that which was already beginning to develope itself in France. First, however, the Saxon princes, then some ecclesiastics headed by Conrad archbishop of Mentz, opposed the scheme; the pontiff withdrew his consent, and Henry had to content himself with getting his infant son Frederick the Second chosen king of the Romans. On Henry’s untimely death the election was set aside, and the contest which followed between Otto of Brunswick (son of the Saxon duke Henry the Lion and of Matilda sister of Richard Cœur de Lion) and Philip of HohenstaufenPhilip, 1198-1208. (brother of Henry the Sixth) gave the Popedom, now guided by the genius of Innocent the Third, an opportunity of extending its sway at the expense of its antagonist.Innocent III and Otto IV. The Pope moved heaven and earth on behalf of Otto, whose family had been the constant rivals of the Hohenstaufen, and who was himself willing to promise all that Innocent required; but Philip’s personal merits and the vast possessions of his house gave him while he lived the ascendancy in Germany. His death by the hand of an assassin, while it seemed to vindicate the Pope’s choice, left the Swabian party without a head, and the papal favourite was soon recognized over the whole Empire. But Otto IV became less submissive as he felt his throne more secure.Otto IV, 1201 (1198)-1212. Though he was a Welf by birth, he had no sooner received the imperial crown at Rome, than he retracted the engagements he had made, and proceeded to reclaim both the territories that had belonged to the Countess Matilda and the rights he had but just forsworn. The Roman Church at last deposed and excommunicated her ungrateful son, and Innocent rejoiced in a second successful assertion of pontifical supremacy, when Otto was dethroned by the youthful Frederick the Second, whom a tragic irony sent into the field of politics as the champion of the Holy See, whose hatred was to embitter his life and extinguish his house.

  Frederick the Second, 1212-1250.Upon the events of that terrific strife, for which Emperor and Pope girded themselves up once more, upon the narrative of Frederick the Second’s career, with its romantic adventures, its sad picture of marvellous powers lost on an age not ripe for them, blasted as by a curse in the moment of victory, it is not necessary, were it even possible, here to enlarge. That conflict did indeed determine the fortunes of the German kingdom no less than of the republics of Italy, but it was upon Italian ground that it was fought out and it is to Italian history that its details belong. So too of Frederick himself. Out of the long array of the Germanic successors of Charles, he is, with Otto III, the only one who comes before us with a genius and a frame of character that are not those of a Northern or a Teuton.a There dwelt in him, it is true, all the energy and knightly valour of his father Henry and his grandfather Frederick I. But along with these, and changing their direction, were other gifts, inherited perhaps from his half Norman, half Italian mother and fostered by his education in Sicily, where Musulman and Byzantine influences were still potent,b a love of luxury and beauty, an intellect refined, subtle, philosophical. Through the mist of calumny and legend it is but dimly that the truth of the man can be discerned, and the outlines that appear serve to quicken rather than appease the curiosity with which we regard one of the most extraordinary personages in history. A sensualist, yet also a warrior and a politician; a profound lawgiver and an impassioned poet; in his youth fired by crusading fervour, in later life persecuting heretics while himself accused of blasphemy and unbelief; of winning manners and ardently beloved by his followers, but with the stain of more than one cruel deed upon his name, he was the marvel of his own generation, and succeeding ages looked back with awe, not unmingled with pity, upon the inscrutable figure of the last Emperor who had braved all the terrors of the Church and died beneath her ban, the last who had ruled from the sands of the ocean to the shores of the Ionian sea. But while they pitied they condemned. The undying hatred of the Papacy threw round his memory a lurid light; him and him alone of all the imperial line, Dante, the worshipper of the Empire, must perforce deliver to the flames of hell.c

  Struggle of Frederick with the Papacy.Placed as the Empire was, it was scarcely possible for its head not to be involved in war with the constantly aggressive Popedom—aggressive in its claims of territorial dominion in Italy as well as of ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the world. But it was Frederick’s peculiar misfortune to have given the Popes a hold over him which they well knew how to use. In a moment of youthful enthusiasm he had taken the cross from the hands of an eloquent monk, and his delay to fulfil the vow was branded as impious neglect. Excommunicated by Gregory IX for not going to Palestine, he went, and was excommunicated for going: having concluded an advantageous peace, he sailed for Italy, and was a third time excommunicated for returning. To Pope Gregory he was at last after a fashion reconciled, but with the accession of Innocent IV the flame burst out afresh. The struggle filled and embittered the rest of Frederick’s life. It continued through the reign of his son Conrad IV, and proved fatal to his grandson Conradin, last scion of the great Swabian house.

  The special pretexts which kindled the strife need not be enumerated: the real causes were always the same, and could only be removed by the submission of one or other combatant. Chief among them was Frederick’s possession of South Italy and Sicily. Now were seen the fruits which the first Frederick had stored up for his house when he gained for Henry his son the hand of the Norman heiress. Apulia and Sicily had been for some two hundred years recognized as a fief of the Holy See, and the Pope, who felt himself in danger while encircled by the powers of his rival, was determined to use his feudal right to the full and make it the means of extinguishing imperial authority throughout Italy. But although the strife had arisen out of territorial disputes, it soon assumed a religious character, it reopened every ancient fountain of hatred, and passed into a contest between the civil and the spiritual potentate. The time was one of intellectual upheaval and unrest: heresies were rife: the air was full of new doctrines. To this troubled or rebellious spirit Frederick, himself perhaps influenced by Muslim speculation, and certainly no dutiful son of the Church, made his appeal. The claim of the Papacy to control the secular power was met by a counterclaim on the Emperor’s part to exercise ecclesiastical authority—it would almost seem to create a new imperial Church of which he should be the head. Strange tales were told of his own beliefs and purposes. Some said that he sought to establish a new and better religion, that he deemed himself to be, like the Fatimite Sultans of Egypt, a sort of emanation from the divinity, and received nothing less than adoration from his followers. Others denounced him as an unbeliever who rejected the priesthood because they could no longer work miracles, who placed Moses and Christ beside Mohammed as impostors, who refused to admit as true anything that could not be proved from facts by human reason. Whatever ground these charges may have had, they inflamed the minds of men, and passion grew hotter than it had ever been in the days of Henry IV and Hildebrand, of Barbarossa and Alexander III. The Popes saw in Frederick the most dangerous of their enemies, because he struck at the root of their claims and sought to divert from them the allegiance of Christendom. They branded him as an apostate: they asserted that the Empire had been given to the Germans as a fief to be held from the Apostolic See, and declared that the power of Peter, symbolized by the two keys, was secular as well as spiritual. The Emperor appealed to law, to the indelible rights of Caesar; he claimed the right of reforming the Church against the will of the hierarchy,d compared himself to Elijah rooting out the prophets of Baal, and denounced his foe as the Antichrist of the New Testament, since it was God’s representative on earth whom he was resisting. The one scoffed at anathema, upbraided the avarice of the Church, and treated her soldiery, the friars, with a severity not seldom ferocious. The other solemnly deposed a rebellious and heretical prince, offered the imperial crown to Robert of France, to the heir of Denmark, to Hakon the Norse king,e succeeded at last in raising up rivals in Henry of Thuringia and William of Holland. Frederick died in the midst of his strife, ad 1250, and his son Conrad IV (associated with him in the Empire since 1237) survived him only four years. Germany was by this time a prey to anarchy, for Conrad had been occupied with efforts to save Italy. Manfred, an illegitimate son of Frederick II, maintained the contest there till his defeat and death near Benevento in 1266; and with Conrad or Conradin, son of Conrad IV, a gallant boy of fifteen who had crossed the Alps to assert his rights to Sicily (which the Pope had bestowed on Charles of Anjou), the house of Hohenstaufen ended.

  Though this long struggle was a continuation of that which began nearly two centuries before under Henry IV, yet in this latest phase it is not so much the Teutonic Emperor who is attacked as the Sicilian king, the unbeliever and friend of Mohammedans, the hereditary enemy of the Church, the assailant of Lombard independence, whose success must leave the Papacy defenceless. And as it was from the Sicilian kingdom that the strife had chiefly sprung, so was the possession of the Sicilian kingdom a source as much of weakness as of strength, for it distracted Frederick’s forces and put him in the false position of a liegeman resisting his lawful suzerain. Truly, as the Greek proverb says, the gifts of foes are no gifts, and bring no profit with them. The Norman kings were more terrible in their death than in their life: they had sometimes baffled the Teutonic Emperor; their heritage destroyed him.

  Conrad IV, 1250-1254.With Frederick fell the Empire. From the ruin that overwhelmed the greatest of its houses it emerged, living indeed, and destined to a long life, but so shattered, crippled, and degraded, that it could never more be to Europe and to Germany what it once had been. In the last act of the tragedy were joined the enemy who had now blighted its strength and the rival who was destined to insult its weakness and at last blot out its name.ad 1268. The murder, after his defeat at Tagliacozzo, of Frederick’s grandson Conradin—a hero whose youth and whose chivalry might have moved the pity of any other foe—was approved, if not suggested, by Pope Clement; it was wrought by the minions of Charles of Anjou.

  Italy lost to the Empire.The Lombard league had successfully resisted Frederick’s armies and the more dangerous Ghibeline nobles: their strong walls and swarming population made defeats in the open field hardly felt; and now that South Italy had passed away from a German line—first to an Angevin, afterwards to an Aragonese dynasty—it was plain that the peninsula was irretrievably lost to the Emperors. Why, however, should they not still be strong beyond the Alps? was their position worse than that of England when Normandy and Aquitaine no longer obeyed a Plantagenet? The force that had enabled them to rule so widely would be all the greater in a narrower sphere.

  Decline of imperial power in Germany.So indeed it might once have been, but now it was too late. The German kingdom broke down beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. To be universal sovereign Germany had sacrificed her own political unity and the vigour of her national monarchy. The necessity under which projects in Italy and disputes with the Pope laid each Emperor of purchasing by concessions the support of his own princes, the ease with which in his absence the magnates could usurp, the difficulty which the monarch returning found in resuming the privileges of his crown, the temptation to revolt and set up pretenders to the throne which the Holy See held out—these were the causes whose steady action laid the foundation of that territorial independence which rose into a stable fabric at the era of the Great Interregnum.The Great Interregnum. Frederick II had by two Pragmatic Sanctions, ad 1220 and 1232, formally granted rights, already beginning to be rooted in custom, which were wide enough to give the bishops and nobles practical sovereignty in their own towns and territories, except when the Emperor should be present; and thus his direct jurisdiction became restricted to his narrowed domain, and to the cities immediately dependent on the crown. With so much less to do, an Emperor became altogether a less necessary personage; and hence the seven magnates of the realm, now by law or custom virtually sole electors, were in no haste to fill up the place of Conrad IV, whom the supporters of his father Frederick had acknowledged. William of Holland was in the field, but resisted by the Swabian party: on his death, in 1256, a new election was called for, and at last set on foot. The archbishop of Cologne advised his brethren to choose some one rich enough to support the dignity,Double election of Richard of England and Alfonso of Castile. not strong enough to be feared by the electors: both requisites met in the Plantagenet Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of the English Henry III. He received three, eventually four votes, came to Germany, and was crowned at Aachen. But three of the electors, finding that the sums he had paid to them were smaller than those received by others, seceded in disgust, and chose Alfonso X of Castile,f who, shrewder than his competitor, continued to watch the stars at Toledo, enjoying the splendours of his title while troubling himself about it no further than to issue now and then a proclamation.gState of Germany during the Interregnum. Meantime the condition of Germany was frightful. The new Didius Julianus, the chosen of princes baser than the praetorians whom they copied, had neither the character nor the outward power and resources to make himself respected. Every floodgate of anarchy was opened: prelates and barons extended their domains by war: robber-knights infested the highways and the rivers: the misery of the weak, the tyranny and violence of the strong, were such as had not been seen for centuries. Things were worse than they had ever been under the Saxon and Franconian Emperors; for the petty nobles who had then been in some measure controlled by their dukes, were now, after the extinction of several of the great houses, left without any feudal superior. Only in the cities were shelter or peace to be found. Those of the Rhine had already leagued themselves for mutual defence, and maintained a struggle in the interests of commerce and order against universal brigandage.Death of Richard,ad 1271. At last, when Richard had been some time dead, it was felt that such things could not go on for ever: with no public law, and no courts of justice, an Emperor, the embodiment of legal government, was the only resource. The Pope himself, having now sufficiently improved the weakness of his enemy, found the disorganization of Germany beginning to tell upon his revenues, and threatened that if the electors did not appoint an Emperor, he would.Rudolph of Hapsburg, 1273-1292. Thus urged, they chose, in ad 1273, Rudolf, count of Hapsburg, founder of the house of Austria.h

  Change in the position of the Empire.From this point there begins a new era. We have seen the Roman Empire revived in ad 800, by a prince whose vast dominions gave ground to his claim of universal monarchy; again erected in ad 962, on the narrower but firmer basis of the German kingdom. We have seen Otto the Great and his successors during the three following centuries, a line of monarchs of unrivalled vigour and abilities, strain every nerve to make good the pretensions of their office against the rebels in Italy and the ecclesiastical power. These efforts had now failed signally and hopelessly. Each successive Emperor had entered the strife with resources scantier than his predecessors, each had been more decisively vanquished by the Pope, the Lombard cities, and the German princes. The Holy Roman Empire might, and, so far as its practical utility was concerned, ought now to have been suffered to expire; nor could it have ended more worthily than with the last of the Hohenstaufen. That it did not so expire, but lived on six hundred years more, till it became a piece of antiquarianism hardly more venerable than ridiculous—till, as Voltaire said, it was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire—was owing partly indeed to the belief, still unshaken, that it was a necessary part of the world’s order, yet chiefly to its connection, which was by this time indissoluble, with the German kingdom. The Germans had confounded the two characters of their sovereign so long, and had grown so fond of the style and pretensions of a dignity whose possession appeared to exalt them above the other peoples of Europe, that it was now too late for them to separate the local from the universal monarch. If a German king was to be maintained at all, he must be Roman Emperor; and a German king there must still be. Deeply, nay, mortally wounded as the event proved his power to have been by the disasters of the Empire to which it had been linked, the time was by no means come for its extinction. In the unsettled state of society, and the conflict of innumerable petty potentates, no force save feudalism was able to hold society together; and its efficacy for that purpose depended, as the anarchy of the recent Interregnum shewed, upon the presence of the recognized feudal head.

  That head, however, was no longer what he had been. The relative position of Germany and France was now exactly the reverse of that which they had occupied two centuries earlier.Decline of the regal power in Germany as compared with France and England. Rudolf was as conspicuously a weaker sovereign than Philip III of France, as the Franconian Emperor Henry III had been stronger than the Capetian Philip I. In every other state of Europe the tendency of events had been to centralize the administration and increase the power of the monarch, even in England not to diminish it: in Germany alone had political union become weaker, and the independence of the princes more confirmed. The causes of this change are not far to seek. They all resolve themselves into this one, that the German king attempted too much at once. The rulers of France, where manners were less rude than in the other Transalpine lands, and where the Third Estate rose into importance more quickly, had reduced one by one the great feudatories by whom the first Capetians had been scarcely recognized. The English kings had annexed Wales, Cumbria, and part of Ireland, had retained a prerogative great if not uncontrolled, and exercised no doubtful sway through every corner of their country. Both had won their successes by the concentration on that single object of their whole personal activity, and by the skilful use of every device whereby their feudal rights, personal, judicial, and legislative, could be applied to fetter the vassal. Meantime the German monarch, whose utmost efforts it would have needed to tame his fierce nobles and maintain order through wide territories occupied by races unlike in dialect and customs, had been struggling with the Lombard cities and the Normans of South Italy, and had been for full two centuries the object of the unrelenting enmity of the Roman pontiff. And in this latter contest, by which more than by any other the fate of the Empire was decided, he fought under disadvantages far greater than his brethren in England and France. William the Conqueror had defied Hildebrand, William Rufus had resisted Anselm; but the Emperors Henry the Fourth and Frederick the First had to cope with prelates who were Hildebrand and Anselm in one; the spiritual heads of Christendom as well as the primates of their special realm, the Empire. And thus, while the ecclesiastics of Germany were a body more formidable from their possessions than those of any other European country, and enjoyed far larger privileges, the Emperor could not, or could with far less effect, win them over by invoking against the Pope that national feeling which made the cry of Gallican liberties so welcome even to the clergy of France.

  Relations of the Papacy and the Empire.After repeated defeats, each more crushing than the last, the imperial power, so far from being able to look down on the papal, could not even maintain itself on an equal footing. Against no pontiff since Gregory VII had the monarch’s right to name or confirm a Pope, undisputed in the days of the Ottos and of Henry III, been made good. It was the turn of the Emperor to repel a similar claim of the Holy See to the function of reviewing his own election, examining into his merits, and rejecting him if unsound, that is to say, impatient of priestly tyranny. A letter of Innocent III, who was the first to make this demand in terms, was inserted by Gregory IX in his digest of the Canon Law, the inexhaustible armoury of the churchman, and continued to be quoted thence by every canonist till the end of the sixteenth century.i It was not difficult to find grounds on which to base such a doctrine. Gregory VII deduced it with characteristic boldness from the power of the keys, and the superiority over all other dignities which must needs appertain to the Pope as arbiter of eternal weal or woe. Others took their stand on the analogy of clerical ordination, and urged that since the Pope in consecrating the Emperor gave him a title to the obedience of all Christian men, he must have himself the right of approving or rejecting the candidate according to his merits. Others again, appealing to the Old Testament, shewed how Samuel discarded Saul and anointed David in his room,j and argued that the Pope now must have powers at least equal to those of the Hebrew prophets. But the ascendancy of the doctrine dates from the time of Pope Innocent III, whose ingenuity discovered for it an historical basis. It was by the Apostolic See, he declared, that the Empire was taken away from the Greeks and given to the Germans in the person of Charles,k and the authority which Leo then exercised as God’s representative must abide thenceforth and for ever in his successors, who can therefore at any time recall the gift, and bestow it on a person or a nation more worthy than its present holders. This is the famous theory of the Translation of the Empire, which plays so large a part in controversy down to the seventeenth century,l a theory with plausibility enough to make it generally successful, yet one which to an impartial eye appears far removed from the truth of the facts.m Leo III did not suppose, any more than did Charles himself, that it was by his sole pontifical authority that the crown was given to the Frank; nor do we find such a notion put forward by any of his successors down to the twelfth century.n Gregory VII in particular, in a remarkable letter dilating on his prerogative, appeals to the substitution by papal interference of Pipin for the last Merovingian king, and even goes back to cite the case of Theodosius humbling himself before St. Ambrose, but says never a word about this ‘Translatio,’ excellently as it would have served his purpose.o

  Sound or unsound, however, these arguments did their work, for they were urged skilfully and boldly, and none denied that it was by the Pope alone that the crown could be lawfully imposed. In some instances the rights claimed were actually made good. Thus Innocent III withstood Philip and overthrew Otto IV; thus another haughty priest commanded the electors to choose the Landgrave of Thuringia (ad 1246), and was by some of them obeyed; thus Gregory X compelled the recognition of Rudolf, who subsequently (ad 1279) admitted in a letter to Pope Nicholas III that the Germans owed the imperial crown to the Papacy. His son Albert I, anxious for the support of Boniface VIII against the German archbishops, made a similarly humiliating acknowledgement of the alleged right of transfer.

  These admissions were, however, virtually recalled and the rights of the Empire strenuously asserted in the long and bitter conflict maintained against four successive Popes by the Emperor Lewis the Fourth. At the death of Henry VII, Pope Clement V, a Frenchman by birth, who had transferred his seat from turbulent Rome to Avignon,p claimed for himself the Vicariate of the vacant Empire and claimed also a general supremacy over the imperial crown. His successor, Pope John XXII, while reasserting his claim to the Vicariate,q summoned Lewis and his rival Frederick of Austria, both of whom had obtained some electoral votes, to submit their pretensions to his decision,ad 1316. and when Lewis refused, his resentment, accentuated by the Emperor’s opposition to his schemes for strengthening himself in Italy by stirring up enemies against the Ghibeline chiefs there, led him to form the plan of ejecting Lewis from the throne and transferring it to the French king Charles IV. John accordingly required the Emperor to resign the crown and shew himself obedient to the Holy See, without whose approval, it was insisted, no election was valid. Lewis protested and appealed to a General Council, but was promptly excommunicated, and his subjects declared to be released from their allegiance. Having by this time overthrown his rival Frederick, and finding that national feeling had been roused in Germany by the arrogance of the Pope, Lewis took courage, obtained a legal opinion in his favour from the University of Bologna, enlisted in his service a host of Franciscan friars who were embarked in a furious quarrel of their own with the Pope, and obtained the powerful aid of two of the greatest among mediaeval thinkers, the Paduan Marsiliusr and the English Franciscan William of Ockham. These men became his confidential advisers, and wrote pamphlets long enough to be called treatises on his behalf against the Pope. Stimulated by the counsels of Marsilius and John of Jandun, another bold spirit from the University of Paris, Lewis marched upon Rome and made friends with the Roman people, who thereupon summoned Pope John to return to his see, and on his refusal chose Lewis as their Senator. Extruding the Pope’s ally king Robert of Naples they named Sciarra Colonna Prefect of the City, and authorized him and three other syndics to perform the coronation.ad 1328. This accordingly took place. After the Emperor had, by a startling departure from precedent, received the crown from lay hands, he was consecrated by bishops whom the Pope had excommunicated.s Thereupon Lewis (who had appointed Marsilius papal vicar in the City) and the Romans proceeded in a solemn parliament to depose Pope John (by the name of Jacques of Cahors) for heresy and treason, and as a ‘Destroyer of Peace.’t A Franciscan friar was chosen Pope in his place and crowned with the tiara by the hands of the Emperor.

  These revolutionary proceedings, which could hardly have been attempted but for the absence of John XXII at Avignon and the disgust excited by his arrogance and greed,u are doubly surprising as being carried through by a man whom his subsequent conduct shews to have been weak and vacillating. But it was rather to the weakness than to the strength of Lewis that they were due. He was in the hands of three strong men, one of them, Castruccio Castracani, lord of Lucca, a brilliant and unscrupulous Ghibeline leader, the other two, Marsilius and John of Jandun, uncompromising theorists, prepared to strike at the cardinal doctrines on which papal authority rested. Nor is it only as the boldest assertion of the rights of the Empire that the action of Lewis in Rome is memorable. It was also the one instance in which the Romans gave effect to their cherished doctrine that the transference of the imperial crown to Charles the Great had been their doing, the one instance in which the Teutonic power, allying itself with the Roman people, used their pretensions to be the fountain of legal right not only to supersede the Pope in his function of crowning the German king, but also to restore to them the function of choosing their own pastor, who in becoming bishop of Rome becomes also bishop of the whole world. To this point had the union of the ancient Roman law with the Aristotelian doctrines of the State brought the fiery scholastic champions of the secular power, who once and once only during the Middle Ages found an opportunity for putting their theories into practice.

  As it was the extravagant pretensions of Boniface VIII and John XXII that had caused this reaction against their office, so the extreme measures taken by Lewis provoked in turn a reaction against himself. The Romans were fickle, as was their wont: Castruccio, obliged to return to Tuscany, and alienated from the Emperor, died soon afterwards, as did Sciarra Colonna. Lewis was forced to abandon Rome, and in 1329 the Romans solemnly abjured both Lewis and their antipope, who next year flung himself at John’s feet. Meanwhile the Emperor, having lost his hold on Italy, sought after his return to Germany to propitiate the Pope. John, haughty and inexorable, insisted on absolute submission.x His successor, Benedict XII, influenced by France, was less peremptory but no more compliant; and Clement VI (1344-52) renewed the excommunication and required Lewis to admit that the Empire was a fiet of the Holy See. The German Estates, however, shewing more spirit than the Emperor himself, in two Diets held at Frankfort in 1338 and 1339, solemnly enounced and embodied in a Pragmatic Sanction the declaration that the Empire is held from God alone, and that the sovereign, once duly chosen by the electors, needs no confirmation or approval by the Pope.y The electors in their famous conference held at Rhense in 1338 made a like declaration.

  The writings of Ockham and Marsilius seem to have had considerable influence on opinion; and the book of Marsilius, entitled Defensor Pacis, is indeed one of the most remarkable treatises that remain to us from the Middle Ages. In holding that the ultimate source of power is in the people, Marsilius does not stand alone, for this position, sanctioned by the well-known doctrine of the old Roman law that the supreme authority of the Emperor springs from a delegation to him by the people of their inherent powers,z is to be found in other mediaeval publicists. But he goes further, maintaining that the Church does not consist in any special sense of the clergy, but of all Christians; that a General Council stands above the Pope, that it ought to consist of laymen as well as of clerics, that persons of different religious opinions ought to be all equal before the law, and that the priesthood have no right to judge, much less to punish, heresy, since each man is answerable for his speculative opinions to the judgement of Christ only. Marsilius denies to the clergy the right to hold property (except what is needed to support life), as also any immunities or privileges outside their purely spiritual sphere of action, declares that Christ did not come on earth to establish any worldly power (regnum meum non est de hoc mundo), that the Pope ought not to have any such power,—the power of the keys does not imply it, for God alone can remit sins,—that the distinction of bishops and priests has no basis in the New Testament. He argues that St. Peter had no pre-eminence over the other apostles, that it is doubtful whether he was ever bishop of Rome, or even came to Rome at all, and that such authority as the Pope enjoys is due solely to the fact that Rome had been the old imperial city. No wonder that Pope Clement VI observed, after perusing the Defensor Pacis, ‘Never have I read a worse heretic.’

  These doctrines struck at the root not merely of the particular claim made by John XXII, but of the whole sacerdotal system of the Middle Ages. Their enunciation coincided with the most extreme assertion of high Papalist doctrine ever made. Agostino Trionfo’s book on the Power of the Pope, dedicated to John XXII as the book of Marsilius had been to Lewis IV, claims for the Holy See absolute power over all secular sovereigns in all matters, temporal as well as spiritual. There is no appeal from him even to God, much less to a council, for his judgement is God’s. He may conceivably lapse into heresy, and, if so, he ceases ipso facto to be Pope, because spiritual life resides in faith, without which he is spiritually dead, as a corpse is not a man. But he is bound by no law except the Divine. He stands higher than the angels, and may receive the same sort of adoration as is rendered to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints. He can at his pleasure depose an Emperor, appoint another, withdraw their functions from the electors, cancel any law issued by an Emperor or king, because he represents God upon earth with the plenitude of God’s authority.a

  In these propositions laid down by Trionfo, with the hearty approval of the Papal Curia, ecclesiastical pretensions may be deemed to have reached their high-water mark; and it presently appeared that the tide was beginning to turn. As the view which placed the Vicar of God little below God Himself came rather too late, for it went further than the opinion of Europe was now disposed to follow, so on the other hand the book of Marsilius came too early to have its full effect. Two centuries were to pass before the soil was ready to receive the seed which this precursor of Luther and Zwingli had sown.b During those two centuries the Popes steadily declined in reputation and authority. Some of their moral sway over men’s minds was not while they dwelt at Avignon under the shadow of France. Still more was lost in the Great Schism which divided the Church for more than a generation (ad 1378-1417);c and most of all was lost by the avarice and extortion—a cause of irritation to the clergy almost as much as to the laity—of which not a few pontiffs were guilty during this long period. After the middle of the fifteenth century the Popes, by this time firmly re-established in Rome, became more occupied with the building up of a temporal dominion in Italy than with the assertion of their authority over emperors and kings. So far indeed as the Emperor was concerned, they had the less need to trouble him, because Charles the Fourth had (ad 1355) abandoned to the Pope those territorial rights over Rome and Italy for which his predecessors had fought. No succeeding Emperor tried to make them good. The great Council of Constance, in which Western Christendom assembled under the auspices of the Emperor Sigismund, deposed two rival Popes, and obtained the resignation of a third, offered an opportunity which a man with the vigour and loftiness of Henry the Third might have seized to recover the influence of the imperial office and to use it for the benefit of the Church. But Sigismund was no Henry the Third; nor did any one after him essay the perhaps impossible task of correcting the abuses of ecclesiastical power. The Hapsburg Frederick the Third, timid and superstitious, abased himself before the Romish Court; and the long line of his Austrian successors has generally adhered to the alliance then struck.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION: THE SEVEN ELECTORS

  Chap. XIV.The reign of Frederick the Second was not less fatal to the domestic power of the German king than to the European supremacy of the Emperor.Territorial Sovereignty of the Princes. His two Pragmatic Sanctions had conferred rights that made the feudal aristocracy almost independent, and the long anarchy of the Interregnum had enabled them not only to use but to extend and fortify their power.Adolf, 1292-1298. Rudolf of Hapsburg had striven, not wholly in vain, to coerce their insolence, but the contest for the crown between his son Albert and Adolf Count of Nassau which followed his death, the short and troubled reign of Albert himself, the absence of Henry the Seventh in Italy,Albert I, 1298-1308. the civil war of Lewis of Bavaria and Frederick duke of Austria, rival claimants of the imperial throne, the difficulties in which Lewis, the successful competitor, found himself involved with a succession of Popes—all these circumstances tended more and more to narrow the influence of the crown and complete the emancipation of the turbulent nobles.Henry VII, 1308-1314. They now became virtually supreme in their own domains, enjoying full jurisdiction (certain appeals excepted), the right of legislation, privileges of coining money, of levying tolls and taxes: some had scarcely even a feudal bond to remind them of their allegiance.Lewis IV, 1314-1347. The numbers of the nobility who held directly of the crown had increased prodigiously by the extinction of the dukedoms of Franconia and Swabia, and the reduction in area of that of Saxony: along the Rhine the lord of a single tower was often almost an independent prince. The petty tyrants whose boast it was that they owed fealty only to God and the Emperor shewed themselves in practice equally regardless of both powers. Preeminent were the three great houses of Austria, Bavaria, and Luxemburg, this last having acquired Bohemia, ad 1309. Next came the electors, already considered collectively more important than the Emperor, and forming for themselves considerable principalities. Brandenburg and the Rhenish Palatinate are strong states before the end of this period; Bohemia and the three archbishoprics almost from its beginning.

  The chief object of the magnates was to keep the monarch in his present state of helplessness. The Hohenstaufen had been strong by their hereditary dominions as well as by their imperial authority: Frederick I is said to have been lord of four hundred castles. Unfortunately the Emperors who followed that great house had not similar patrimonial possessions; and indeed Rudolf was chosen because his private resources were too slender to make him an object of disquiet. Till the expense which the crown entailed had begun to prove ruinous to its wearer, the electors preferred to confer it on some petty prince, such as were Rudolf and Adolf of Nassau and Günther of Schwartzburg, seeking when they could to keep it from settling in one family. They bound the newly elected monarch to respect all their present immunities, including those which they had just extorted as the price of their votes; they checked all his attempts to recover lost lands or rights: they ventured at last (in 1399) to depose their anointed head, Wenzel, king of Bohemia, whose dissipated life and neglect of his duties certainly justified their displeasure. Thus fettered, the Emperor sought only to make the most of his short tenure, using his position to aggrandize his family and raise money by the sale of crown estates and privileges.Policy of the Emperors. His individual action and personal relation to the subject was replaced by a merely legal and formal one: he represented order and legitimate ownership, and so far was still necessary to the political system. But imperial progresses through the country were abandoned: unlike his predecessors, who, when they assumed the sceptre, had turned from the administration of their own domains to the service of the nation, he lived mostly in his own states, sometimes beyond the Empire’s frontier.

  How thoroughly the national character of the office was gone is shewn by the repeated attempts to bestow it on foreign or half-foreign potentates, who could not fill the place of a German king of the good old vigorous type. Not to speak of Richard and Alfonso, the French Charles Count of Valois was proposed against Henry VII,a and Edward III of England actually elected against Charles IV (the English parliament forbade him to accept). Sigismund, though he belonged to the house of Luxemburg, was, when chosen, a Hungarian king with interests primarily Hungarian; and George Podiebrad who was elected against Frederick III ruled over a Bohemia which felt itself more Slavonic than Germanic. The Emperor’s only hope would have been in the support of the cities.Power of the cities. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they had increased wonderfully in population, wealth, and boldness: the Hanseatic confederacy was the mightiest power of the North, and cowed the Scandinavian kings: the towns of Swabia and the Rhine formed great commercial leagues, maintained regular wars against the counter-associations of the nobility, and seemed at one time, by an alliance with the already virtually independent Switzers,b on the point of turning West Germany into a federation of free municipalities. Feudalism, however, was still too strong; the cavalry of the nobles was irresistible in the field, and the thoughtless Wenzel, who might have helped and used them, let slip a golden opportunity of repairing the losses of two centuries. After all, the Empire was perhaps past redemption, for one fatal ailment paralyzed all its efforts. The Empire was poor.Financial distress. The constructive abilities of Frederick I and his grandson, which ought to have been applied, as was the constructive talent of the English Henry II, to the establishment of an immediate financial control by the crown, and the introduction of some scheme of direct taxation, were distracted by their enterprises in Italy; and neither from princes, from ecclesiastics, nor from cities was any adequate royal revenue secured. The crown lands, which had suffered heavily under Frederick II, were further usurped during the confusion that followed; till at last, through the reckless prodigality of sovereigns who sought only their immediate interest, little was left of the vast and fertile domains along the Rhine from which the Saxon and Franconian Emperors had drawn the chief part of their revenue. Regalian rights, the second fiscal resource, had fared no better. Tolls, customs, mines, rights of coining, of harbouring Jews, and so forth, were either seized or granted away: even the advowsons of churches had been sold or mortgaged; and the imperial treasury depended mainly on an inglorious traffic in honours and exemptions. Things were so bad under Rudolf that the electors refused to make his son Albert king of the Romans, declaring that, while Rudolf lived, the public revenue which with difficulty supported one monarch, could much less maintain two at the same time.c Sigismund told his Diet, ‘Nihil esse imperio spoliatius, nihil egentius, adeo ut qui sibi ex Germaniae principibus successurus esset, qui praeter patrimonium nihil aliud habuerit, apud eum non imperium sed potius servitium sit futurum.’ Patritius, the secretary of Frederick III, declared that the revenues of the Empire scarcely covered the expenses of its ambassadors.d Poverty such as these expressions point to, a poverty which became greater after each election, not only involved the failure of the attempts which were sometimes made to recover usurped rights,e but put every project of reform within or war without at the mercy of a jealous Diet. The three orders of which that Diet consisted, electors, princes, and cities,f were each of them bent on its own interests and mutually hostile; their niggardly grants did no more than keep the Empire from dying of inanition.

  Charles IV (ad 1347-1378), and his electoral constitution.The changes thus briefly described were in progress when Charles the Fourth, king of Bohemia, son of that blind king John of Bohemia who fell at Cressy, and grandson of the Emperor Henry VII, found himself settled upon the throne which he had, as a candidate favoured by the Pope, disputed for some years with Lewis IV. His skilful and consistent policy aimed at settling what he perhaps despaired of reforming, and the famous instrument which, under the name of the Golden Bull, became the corner-stone of the Germanic constitution, confessed and legalized the independence of the electors and the powerlessness of the crown. The most conspicuous defect of the existing system was the uncertainty of the elections, followed as they usually were by a civil war. It was this which Charles set himself to redress.

  German kingdom not originally elective.The kingdoms founded on the ruins of the Roman Empire by the Teutonic invaders presented in their original form a rude combination of the elective with the hereditary principle. One family in each tribe had, as the offspring of the gods, an indefeasible claim to rule, but from among the members of such a family the warriors were free to choose the bravest or the most popular as king.g That the German crown came to be purely elective, while in France, Castile, Aragon, England, and most other European states, the principle of strict hereditary succession established itself, was due to the failure of heirs male in three successive dynasties; to the restless ambition of the nobles, who, since they were not, like the French, strong enough to disregard the royal power, did their best to weaken it; to the intrigues of the churchmen, zealous for a method of appointment prescribed by their own law and observed in capitular elections; to the wish of the Popes to gain an opening for their own influence and make effective the veto which they claimed; above all, to the conception of the imperial office as one too holy to be, in the same manner as the regal, transmissible by descent. Had the German, like other feudal kingdoms, remained merely local, feudal, and national, it would without doubt have ended by becoming a hereditary monarchy. Transformed as it was by the Roman Empire, this could not be. The headship of the human race being, like the Papacy, the common inheritance of all mankind, could not be confined to a single family, nor pass like a private estate by the ordinary rules of succession.

  Electoral body in primitive times.The right to choose the war-chief belonged, in the earliest ages, to the whole body of freemen. Their suffrage, which must have been very irregularly exercised, became by degrees vested in their leaders, but the assent of the multitude, although ensured already, was needed to complete the ceremony. It was thus that Henry the Fowler, and Henry the Saint, and Conrad II were chosen.h Though even tradition might have commemorated what extant records place beyond a doubt, it was commonly believed, till the end of the sixteenth century, that the elective constitution had been established, and the privilege of voting confined to seven persons, by a decree of Gregory V and Otto III, which a famous jurist describes as ‘lex a pontifice de imperatorum comitiis lata, ne ius eligendi penes populum Romanum in posterum esset.’i St. Thomas says, ‘Election ceased from the times of Charles the Great to those of Otto III, when Pope Gregory V established that of the seven princes, which will last as long as the holy Roman Church, who ranks above all other powers, shall have judged expedient for Christ’s faithful people.’j Since it tended to exalt the papal power, this fiction was accepted, no doubt honestly accepted, and spread abroad by the clergy. And indeed, like so many other fictions, it had a sort of foundation in fact. The premature death without an heir of Otto III, the fourth of a line of monarchs among whom son had regularly succeeded to father, threw back the crown into the gift of the nation, and was no doubt one of the chief causes why it did not in the end become hereditary.k

  Thus under the Saxon and Franconian sovereigns, the throne was theoretically elective, the assent of the chiefs and their followers being required, though little more likely to be refused than it was to an English or a French king; practically hereditary, since both of these dynasties succeeded in occupying it for four generations, the father procuring the son’s election during his own lifetime. So it might well have continued had the German king been a merely national king like his brethren in France and England. But, under the operation of the influences already described, the territorial aristocracy, sometimes aided by the Pope, were able to turn the developement of the ancient constitution into a new channel, so that the German kingdom became in point of law incontestably elective, and so continued ever thereafter. The precise steps by which this came to pass, and the nature of the proceedings at an election, have been matter for long and tangled controversy. Some points remain doubtful, because the original authorities are curt or vague in their accounts, especially as respects the procedure at those uncontested elections in which a reigning Emperor secured the choice of his son during his own lifetime.l Without attempting to discuss these points, a few general propositions may be stated as probably true.m

  In the process of choosing a German king to be afterwards raised to the dignity of Roman Emperor, three stages may be distinguished.

  The first stage is that of the deliberations and negotiations of the magnates which issue in the selection of one from among several candidates. For this process there would seem to have been, down till the middle of the thirteenth century, no rules formally prescribed and observed. There was no recognized method of voting, nor does the right of voting appear to be confined to any specified persons. Things were in practice determined not by a majority of votes, but by the personal, official, and territorial weight and power of those who took part. The number of the nobles whom custom admitted to join might be greater or less, but in fact the influence of the leading princes, ecclesiastical and secular, prevailed. Sometimes these magnates were allowed, or took it upon themselves, to make a preliminary selection, from all those who might be considered candidates for the throne, either of a certain small number, or of one only, to be thereupon presented to the nobles generally as the man fittest to be chosen. As early as 1156 this preliminary and informal selection, which took place at the election of Conrad II in 1024, of Lothar II in 1125, and of Frederick I in 1152, had obtained the name of Praetaxation; and in the persons who exercised it we may find the germ of the electoral college of later times.n

  The second stage of the process consisted in the solemn declaration by the princes, usually in the order of their official status or rank, of their choice of a particular person as king. This was the formal Electio in the strict sense of the word, and this custom required to be unanimous. In it certain magnates, three ecclesiastical and three or four secular, secured the right of delivering their voice first: and this prerogative voice would seem to have set them in a position of special authority which led to their being ultimately recognized as the persons exclusively entitled to elect. They were doubtless those, or the chief among those, who occasionally exercised the function of praetaxation. Here legal theory may have helped to settle what custom had left vague. It is first in the famous law book called the Saxon Mirror (Sachsenspiegel) compiled by Eike von Reppgau about ad 1230, that six princes (of whom more anon) are named as enjoying a special right. They are said to be ‘first in the choice,’ the first to make that formal expression of acceptance which technically constituted the election.o

  The last part of the process was the approval of the counts and other minor nobles,p completed by that acclamation of the multitude which preserved the tradition of choice by the nation as a whole, but which gradually lost its importance under the preponderating influence of the great ecclesiastical and secular potentates. As we find, down at least till the middle of the twelfth century, no legal line drawn between those who were and those who were not entitled to vote—indeed, so far as law went, it might be said that all nobles and knights were entitled to some sort of voice—there was evidently a wide door open for disputes, and when an election was disputed, no means except war existed for settling it (Pope Innocent III and his successors claimed, but the Germans denied, a right of interference).q Contests there were, and contests would have been more frequent had there not been a strong tendency to prefer the heir of the preceding sovereign, and had not the crown been often secured by a reigning Emperor for his son. A sense of the danger involved in this absence of fixed rules probably contributed to make the nation more and more disposed to recognize a special right of choice as vested in the few great potentates who towered above the other princes.

  Comparing the electoral constitution of the Empire at the death of the last Saxon Emperor in ad 1024, and at the death of the last Hohenstaufen in 1254, we see that two great changes had passed upon it. It had become a fundamental doctrine that the Germanic (and imperial) throne, unlike the thrones of other countries, was purely elective. So clearly did the princes perceive this to be the keystone of their freedom that the influence and the liberal offers of Henry VIr failed to induce them to surrender their privilege. And at the same time that practice of preliminary selection, and that right of being the first to deliver a formal elective voice, which have been already referred to, had ripened into a practically exclusive privilege of election. As this privilege became vested in a small body, the assent of the rest of the nobility began to be assumed as virtually given or certain to be given, so that after a time it passed not only out of use, but almost out of memory. Even in 1198 Pope Innocent III speaks of ‘princes specially entitled to choose the Roman king.s On the double choice of Richard and Alfonso, ad 1257, the substantial question was as to the majority of votes in the electoral college:t neither then nor afterwards was there any practical recognition of the rights of the other princes, counts, and barons, important as their voices had been three centuries earlier.

  The origin of that college is a matter somewhat intricate and obscure. At the election of Frederick I in ad 1152, certain princes led and decided the choice of the nation,The seven electors. and at the election of Philip in 1198 the preponderant influence of a few is again apparent.u But we do not yet find anything to indicate that a legal right as distinguished from a practically admitted preeminence had become vested in any particular persons.x First in the Sachsenspiegel do we find six named as specially, one can hardly say exclusively, entitled, viz. the three Rhenish archbishops—the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the duke of the Saxons, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. Other authorities of the time recognize a seventh, the king of Bohemia, whom the Sachsenspiegel rejects as not being German. Then in ad 1263 a letter of Pope Urban IV declares (adopting the view stated by the friends of Richard of Cornwall, and by that time generally accepted in Germany), that by immemorial custom the right of choosing the Roman king belongs to seven persons, the seven who had just divided their votes on Richard and Alfonso of Castile. Of these seven, the three archbishops of Mentz, Treves, and Cologne, pastors of the oldest and richest sees, represented the German Church and had always borne a leading part in elections. The other four ought, according to the ancient constitution, to have been the dukes of the four nations, Franks, Swabians, Saxons, Bavarians, to whom had also belonged the four great offices of the imperial household. But of these dukedoms the two first named were now extinct, and their place and power in the State, as well as the household offices they had held, had descended upon two principalities of more recent origin, those, namely, of the Palatinate of the Rhine and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The Saxon duke, though with greatly narrowed dominions, retained his leading place and his office of arch-marshal, and the claim of his Bavarian compeer would have been equally indisputable had it not so happened that both he and the Palsgrave of the Rhine were members of the great house of Wittelsbach. This house had acquired the dukedom of Bavaria in 1180 and the Palatinate, which represented the vote of the extinct dukedom of Lorraine, in 1214; but as both dignities were united in one person, no difficulty arose until the death of Duke Otto the Illustrious in 1253. When his sons shared his dominions, Lewis becoming Palsgrave, and Henry Duke of Bavaria, nothing was settled as to the vote and other rights of an elector, and before long both sons claimed these, and both with apparently reasonable grounds. The number Seven was now, however, beginning to be recognized as sacred: the king of Bohemiay would not relinquish the place to which he laid claim as cupbearer; and the other electors were unwilling to see two votes enjoyed by one family. Thus a contest, which more than once nearly led to war, arose between the rival lines of Wittelsbach, and between the Bavarian line (whose title was thought the weaker of the two) and the king of Bohemia. Rudolf I, who in 1289 pronounced in favour of Bohemia, and Lewis IV, who directed that the vote should be exercised by the two lines alternately, in vain attempted to settle it, nor was it laid to rest until the issuing and confirming, at the Diets of Nürnberg and Metz in 1356, of Charles IV’s Golden Bull.Golden Bull of Charles IV,ad 1356. This instrument, thenceforth regarded as a fundamental law of the Empire, after finally assigning the disputed vote and office of cupbearer to Bohemia (of which Charles was then king) proceeds to lay down a variety of rules for the conduct of imperial elections. Frankfort is fixed as the place of election, as a tradition dating from East Frankish days preserved the feeling that both election and coronation ought to take place on Frankish soil; the archbishop of Mentz is named convener of the electoral college; to Bohemia is given the first, to the Count Palatine the second place among the secular electors. A majority of votes was in all cases to be decisive. As to each electorate there was attached a great office, it was supposed as early as the time of the Sachsenspiegel that this was the title by which the vote was possessed; though in truth the office and the right of election had both the same source, for the great offices naturally belonged to the greatest of the imperial feudatories. The three prelates were archchancellors of Germany, Gaul and Burgundy, and Italy respectively: Bohemia cupbearer, the Palsgrave seneschal, Saxony marshal, and Brandenburg chamberlain.z

  These arrangements, under which disputed elections became far less frequent, remained undisturbed till the breaking out of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Emperor Ferdinand II by an unwarranted stretch of prerogative deprived (in 1621) the Palsgrave Frederick (king of Bohemia and husband of Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England) of his electoral vote, and transferred it (1623) to his own partisan, Maximilian of Bavaria. At the peace of Westphalia the mediaeval mysticism which revered the number Seven had become out of date, so the Palsgrave was reinstated as eighth elector,Eighth electorate. Bavaria retaining her vote and rank, but with a provision that if the Bavarian branch of the house of Wittelsbach should come to an end, the Palsgrave should step into its place, which accordingly happened on the extinction of the Bavarian line in 1777. The sacred number having been once broken through, less scruple was felt in making further changes. In ad 1692,Ninth electorate. the Emperor Leopold I conferred a ninth electorate on the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which was then in possession of the duchy of Hanover and succeeded to the throne of Great Britain in 1714; and, in ad 1708, the assent of the Diet thereto was obtained. It was in this way that English kings came again to vote, as Richard the First had voted five centuries before, at the election of a Roman Emperor.

  It is not a little curious that the only potentate who continued down to our own days to entitle himself Elector should be one who never actually joined in electing an Emperor, having been under the arrangements of the old Empire a simple Landgrave.a In ad 1803, Napoleon, among other sweeping changes in the Germanic constitution, procured the extinction of the electorates of Cologne and Treves, annexing their territories to France, and gave the title of Elector, as the highest after that of king, to the Duke of Wurtemberg, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hessen-Cassel, and the Archbishop of Salzburg.b Three years afterwards the Empire itself ended, and the title became meaningless.

  As the Germanic Empire is the most conspicuous example of a monarchy not hereditary that the modern world has seen, we may pause for a moment to consider what light its history throws upon the character of elective monarchy in general, a contrivance which has always had attractions for a certain class of political theorists.

  First let it be observed how difficult, one might almost say impossible, it was found to maintain in practice the elective principle.Objects of an elective monarchy: how far attained in Germany. In point of law, the imperial throne was from the tenth century to the nineteenth absolutely open to any orthodox Christian candidate. But as a matter of fact, the competition was confined to a few powerful families, and there was always a strong tendency for the crown to become hereditary in some one of these. Thus the Franconian Emperors held it from ad 1024 till 1125, the Hohenstaufen, themselves the heirs of the Franconians, for more than a century (1138-1254 with an interruption of fifteen years);Choice of the fittest. the house of Luxemburg enjoyed it during four (though not continuous) reigns, and when in the fifteenth century it fell into the tenacious grasp of the Hapsburgs, they managed to retain it thenceforth (with but one trifling interruption) till it vanished out of nature altogether. Therefore the chief benefit which the scheme of elective sovereignty seems to promise, that of putting the fittest man in the highest place, was but seldom attained, and attained even then rather by good fortune than by design. Yet it is to be noted that every monarch from Henry the Fowler down to Charles IV, a space of four centuries, was a man of character and energy, who spent himself freely in the service of the State. Germany had no such ruler as England suffered from in John, or Edward II, or Richard II; nor was the average of capacity so high among the kings of France.

  Restraint of the sovereign.No similar objection can be brought against the second ground on which an elective system has sometimes been advocated, its operation in moderating the power of the crown, for this was attained in the fullest and most ruinous measure. We are reminded of the man in the fable, who opened a sluice to water his garden, and saw his house swept away by the furious torrent. The power of the crown was not moderated but destroyed. Each successful candidate was forced to purchase his title by the sacrifice of rights which had belonged to his predecessors, and must repeat the same shameful policy later in his reign to procure the election of his son. Feeling at the same time that his family could not make sure of keeping the throne, he treated it as a life-tenant is apt to treat his estate, seeking only to make out of it the largest present profit. And the electors, aware of the strength of their position, presumed upon it and abused it to assert an independence such as the nobles of other countries could never have aspired to.

  Recognition of the popular will.Modern political speculation supposes the method of appointing a ruler by the votes of his subjects, as opposed to the system of hereditary succession, to be an assertion by the people of their own will as the ultimate fountain of authority, an acknowledgement by the prince that he is no more than their minister and deputy. To the theory of the Holy Empire nothing could be more repugnant. This will best appear when the aspect of the system of election at different epochs in its history is compared with the corresponding changes in the composition of the electoral body which have been described as in progress from the ninth to the fourteenth century. In very early days, the tribe chose a ruler, who was, though he usually belonged to the most noble family, little more than the first among his peers, with a power circumscribed by the will of his subjects. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the right of choice had passed into the hands of the magnates, and the people were only asked to assent. In the same measure had the relation of prince and subject taken a new aspect. We must not expect to find, in such rude times, a clear apprehension of the technical quality of the elective process, and the throne had indeed become for a season so nearly hereditary that the election was often a mere matter of form. But it seems to have been regarded, not as a delegation of authority by the nobles and people, with a power of resumption implied, but rather as their subjection of themselves to the monarch who enjoys, as of his own right, a wide and ill-defined prerogative. In yet later times, when, as has been shewn above, the assembly of the chieftains and the applauding shout of the host had been superseded by the secret conclave of the seven electoral princes, the strict legal view of election became fully established, and no one was supposed to have any title to the crown except what a majority of votes might confer upon him. Meantime, however, the conception of the imperial office itself had been thoroughly permeated by religious ideas; and the fact that the sovereign did not, like other princes, reign by hereditary right, but by the choice of certain persons, was supposed to be an enhancement and consecration of his dignity.Conception of the electoral function. The electors, to draw what may seem a subtle, but is nevertheless a real distinction, selected, but did not create. They only named the person who was to receive what it was not theirs to give. God, say the mediaeval writers, not deigning to interfere visibly in the affairs of this world, has willed that these seven princes of Germany should discharge the function which once belonged to the senate and people of Rome, that of choosing His earthly viceroy in matters temporal. But it is immediately from Himself that the authority of this viceroy comes, and men can have towards him no relation except that of obedience. It was in this period, therefore, when the Emperor was in practice the mere nominee of the electors, that the belief in his divine right stood highest, to the exclusion either of the mutual responsibility of feudalism, or of any practically enforcible responsibility to the people.

  General results of Charles IV’s policy.Peace and order appeared to be promoted by the institutions of Charles IV, which removed one fruitful cause of civil war. But these seven electoral princes acquired, with their extended privileges, a marked and dangerous predominance in Germany. They had once already, in their famous meeting at Rhensec in 1338, acted as an independent body, repudiating in the name of the nation the extravagant claims of the Pope, and declaring that it was by their election alone that the Emperor acquired his rights. The position which they had then assumed, in a heartily patriotic spirit, was now legalized and made permanent. They became a separate order in the State, and were to enjoy full regalian rights in their territories.d Causes were not to be evoked from their courts, save when justice should have been denied: their consent was necessary to all public acts of consequence. They claimed, as the choosers of the sovereign, to be the representatives of the ancient Roman Senate: and, since in the Middle Ages every institution must have its religious side, the persons of these senators were held to be sacred, and the seven mystic luminaries of the Holy Empire, typified by the seven lamps of the Apocalypse, soon gained much of the Emperor’s hold on popular reverence, as well as that actual power which he lacked. To Charles, who viewed the German Empire much as Rudolf had viewed the Roman, this result came not unforeseen. For him, the old dreams of world dominion had become as remote and obsolete as the dream of recovering Jerusalem. With few scruples, and little sense of what the honour of his crown required, he was an astute and thoroughly practical politician. Nothing of the old chivalric spirit of his grandfather Henry appears in his character or his conduct. He saw in his office a means of serving personal ends, and to them, while appearing to exalt by elaborate ceremonies its ideal dignity, he deliberately sacrificed what real strength was left. The object which he sought steadily through life was the prosperity of the Bohemian kingdom, and the advancement of his own house. In the Golden Bull, whose seal bears the legend—

  • ‘Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi’e —

  there is not a word of Rome or of Italy. To Germany he was indirectly a benefactor, by the foundation of the University of Prague,f the mother of all her schools: otherwise her bane. He legalized anarchy, and called it a constitution. The sums expended in obtaining the ratification of the Golden Bull, in procuring the election of his son Wenzel, in aggrandizing Bohemia at the expense of Germany, had been amassed by keeping a market in which honours and exemptions, with what lands the crown retained, were put up openly to be bid for. In Italy the Ghibelines saw, with shame and rage, their chief hasten to Rome with a scanty retinue, and return from it as swiftly, at the mandate of an Avignonese Pope, leaving the city the very day on which he had been crowned, halting on his route only to traffic away the last rights of his Empire. The Guelf might cease to hate a power he could now despise.

  Thus, alike at home and abroad, the German king had become practically powerless by the loss of his feudal privileges, and saw the authority that had once been his parcelled out among a crowd of rapacious nobles. Meantime how had it fared with the rights which he claimed by virtue of the imperial crown?

  CHAPTER XV

  THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER

  Chap. XV.That the Roman Empire survived the seemingly mortal wound it had received at the era of the Great Interregnum, and continued to put forth pretensions which no one was likely to make good where the Hohenstaufen had failed,Theory of the Roman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. has been attributed to its identification with the German kingdom, in which some life was still left. But this was far from being the only cause which saved it from extinction. It had not ceased to be upheld in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the same singular theory which had in the ninth and tenth been strong enough to re-establish it in the West. The character of that theory was indeed somewhat changed, for if not positively less religious, it was less exclusively so. In the days of Charles and Otto, the Empire, in so far as it was anything more than a tradition from times gone by, rested upon the belief that with the Visible Church there must be coextensive a single Christian state under one head and governor. But now that the Emperor’s headship had been repudiated by the Pope, and his interference in matters of religion denounced as a repetition of the sin of Uzziah; now that the memory of mutual injuries had kindled an unquenchable hatred between the champions of the ecclesiastical and those of the civil power, it was natural that the latter, while they urged, fervently as ever, the divine sanction given to the imperial office, should at the same time be led to seek some further basis whereon to establish its claims. What that basis was, and how they were guided to it, will best appear when a word or two has been said on the nature of the change that had passed on Europe in the course of the three preceding centuries, and the progress of the human mind during the same period.

  Such has been the accumulated wealth of literature, and so rapid the advances of science among us since the close of the Middle Ages, that it is not now possible by any effort fully to enter into the feelings with which the relics of antiquity were regarded by those who saw in them their only possession. It is indeed true that modern art and literature and philosophy have been produced by the working of new minds upon old materials: that in thought, as in nature, we see no new creation. But with us the old has been transformed and overlaid by the new till its origin is forgotten: to them ancient books were the only standard of taste, the only vehicle of truth, the only stimulus to reflection. Hence it was that the most learned man was in those days esteemed the greatest: hence the creative energy of an age was exactly proportioned to its knowledge of and its reverence for the written monuments of those that had gone before. For until they can look forward, men must look back: till they should have reached the level of the old civilization, the nations of mediaeval Europe must continue to live upon its memories. Over them, as over us, the common dream of all mankind had power; but to them, as to the ancient world, that golden age which seems now to glimmer on the horizon of the future was shrouded in the clouds of the past. It is to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we are accustomed to assign that new birth of the human spirit—if it ought not rather to be called a renewal of its strength and quickening of its sluggish life—with which the modern time begins. And the date is well chosen, for it was then first that the transcendently powerful influence of Greek literature began to work upon the world.Revival of learning and literature,ad 1100-1400. But it must not be forgotten that for a long time previous there had been in progress a great revival of learning, and still more of zeal for learning, which being caused by and directed towards the literature and institutions of Rome, might fitly be called the Roman or Latin Renaissance. The twelfth century saw this revival begin with that eager study of the legislation of Justinian, whose influence on the doctrines of imperial prerogative has been noticed already. The thirteenth witnessed the rapid spread of the scholastic philosophy, a body of systems most alien, both in subject and in method, to anything that had arisen among the ancients, yet one to whose developement Greek metaphysics and the theology of the Latin fathers had largely contributed, and the spirit of whose reasonings was far more free than the presumed orthodoxy of its conclusions suffered to appear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there arose in Italy the first great masters of painting and song; and the literature of the new languages, springing into the fulness of life in the Divina Commedia, adorned not long after by the names of Petrarch and Chaucer, assumed at once its place as a great and ever-growing power in the affairs of men.

  Growing freedom of spirit.Now, along with the literary revival, partly caused by, partly causing it, there had been also a wonderful stirring and uprising in the mind of Europe. The yoke of church authority still pressed heavily on the souls of men; yet some had been found to shake it off, and many more murmured in secret. The tendency was one which shewed itself in various and sometimes apparently opposite directions. The revolt of the Albigenses, the spread of the Cathari and other so-called heretics, the excitement created by the writings of Wiclif and Huss, witnessed to the fearlessness wherewith it could assail the dominant theology. It was present, however skilfully disguised, among those scholastic doctors who busied themselves with proving by natural reason the dogmas of the Church: for the power which can forge fetters can also break them. It took a form more dangerous because of a more direct application to facts, in the attacks, so often repeated from Arnold of Brescia downwards, upon the wealth and corruptions of the clergy, and above all of the papal court. For the agitation was not merely speculative.Influence of thought upon the arrangements of society. There was beginning to be a direct and rational interest in life, a power of applying thought to practical ends, which had not been seen before. Man’s life among his fellows was no longer a mere wild beast struggle; man’s soul no more, as it had been, the victim of ungoverned passion, whether it was awed by supernatural terrors or captivated by examples of surpassing holiness. Manners were still rude, and governments unsettled; but society was learning to organize itself upon fixed principles; to recognize, however faintly, the value of order, industry, equality; to adapt means to ends, and conceive of the common good as the proper end of its own existence. In a word, Politics had begun to exist, and with them there had appeared the first of a class of persons whom friends and enemies may both, though with different meanings, call ideal politicians; men who, however various have been the doctrines they have held, however impracticable many of the plans they have advanced, have been nevertheless alike in their devotion to the highest interests of humanity, and have frequently been derided as theorists in their own age to be honoured as the prophets and teachers of the next.

  Separation of the peoples of Europe into hostile kingdoms: consequent need of an international power.Now it was towards the Roman Empire that the hopes and sympathies of these political speculators as well as of the jurists and poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were constantly directed. The cause may be gathered from the circumstances of the time. The most remarkable event in the history of the last three hundred years had been the formation of nationalities, each distinguished by a peculiar language and character, and by steadily increasing differences of habits and institutions. And as upon this national basis there had been in most cases established strong monarchies, Europe was broken up into disconnected bodies, and the cherished scheme of a united Christian state appeared less likely than ever to be realized. Nor was this all. Sometimes through race-antagonism, more often by the jealousy and ambition of their sovereigns, these countries were constantly involved in war with one another, violating on a larger scale, and with scarcely less destructive results than in time past, the peace of the religious community; while each of them was at the same time torn within by frequent insurrections, and desolated by long and bloody civil wars. The new nationalities were too fully formed to allow the hope that by their extinction a remedy might be applied to these evils. They had grown up in spite of the Empire and the Church, and were not likely to yield in their strength what they had won in their weakness. But it still appeared possible to soften, if not to overcome, their antagonism. What might not be looked for from the erection of a presiding power common to all Europe, a power which, while it should oversee the internal concerns of each country, not dethroning the king, but treating him as an hereditary viceroy, should be more especially charged to prevent strife between kingdoms, and to maintain the public order of Europe by being not only the fountain of international law, but also the judge in its causes and the enforcer of its sentences?

  The Popes as international judges.To such a position had the Popes aspired. They were indeed excellently fitted for it by the respect which the sacredness of their office commanded; by their control of the tremendous weapons of excommunication and interdict; above all, by their exemption, as the heads of an order which belonged to no one nation, from those narrowing influences of place, or blood, or personal interest, which it would be their chiefest duty to resist in others. And there had been pontiffs whose fearlessness and justice were worthy of their exalted office, and whose intervention was gratefully remembered by those who found no other helpers. Nevertheless, judging the Papacy by its conduct as a whole, it had been tried and found wanting. Even when its throne stood firmest and its purposes were most pure, one motive had always biassed its decisions—a partiality to the most submissive. During the greater part of the fourteenth century it was at Avignon the willing tool of the French kings; in the pursuit of a temporal principality it had mingled in and been contaminated by the unhallowed politics of Italy; its supreme council, the college of cardinals, was distracted by the intrigues of two bitterly hostile factions. And while the power of the Popes had declined steadily, though silently, since the days of Boniface the Eighth, the arrogance of the great prelates and the vices of the inferior clergy had provoked throughout Western Christendom a reaction against the pretensions of all sacerdotal authority. As there is no theory at first sight more attractive than that which entrusts all government to a supreme spiritual power, which, knowing what is best for man, shall lead him to his true good by appealing to the highest principles of his nature, so there is no disappointment more bitter than that of those who find that the holiest office may be polluted by the lusts and passions of its holder; that craft and hypocrisy lead while fanaticism follows; that here too, as in so much else, the corruption of the best is worst. Some such disappointment there was in Europe now, and with it a certain disposition to look with favour on the secular power: a wish to escape from the unhealthy atmosphere of clerical despotism to the rule of positive law, harsher, it might be, yet surely less corrupting. Espousing the cause of the Roman Empire as the chief opponent of priestly claims, this tendency found it, with shrunken territory and diminished resources, fitter in some respects for the office of an international judge and mediator than it had been as a great national power. For though far less widely active, it was losing that local character which was fast gathering round the Papacy. With feudal rights no longer enforcible, and removed, except in his patrimonial lands, from direct contact with the subject, the Emperor was not, as heretofore, conspicuously a German and a feudal king, and occupied an ideal position less marred by the incongruous accidents of birth and training, of national and dynastic interests.

  Duties attributed to the Empire.To that position three cardinal duties were attached. He who held it must typify spiritual unity, must preserve peace, must be a fountain of that by which alone among imperfect men peace is preserved and restored, law and justice. The first of these three objects was sought not only on religious grounds, but also from that longing for a wider brotherhood of humanity towards which, ever since the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, was broken down, the aspirations of the higher minds of the world have been constantly directed. Placed in the midst of Europe, the Emperor was to bind its races into one body, reminding them of their common faith, their common blood, their common interest in each other’s welfare. And he was therefore above all things, claiming indeed to be upon earth the representative of the Prince of Peace, bound to listen to complaints, and to redress the injuries inflicted by sovereigns or peoples upon each other; to punish offenders against the public order of Christendom; to maintain through the world, looking down as from a serene height upon the schemes and quarrels of meaner potentates, that supreme good without which neither arts nor letters, nor the gentler virtues of life, can rise and flourish. The mediaeval Empire was in its essence what its modern imitators have sometimes professed themselves: the Empire was Peace: the oldest and noblest title of its head was ‘Imperator pacificus.’a And that he might be the peacemaker, he must be the expounder of justice and the author of its concrete embodiment, positive law; chief legislator and supreme judge of appeal, like his predecessor the compiler of the Corpus Iuris, the one and only source of all legitimate authority. In this sense, as governor and administrator, not as owner, is he, in the words of the jurists, Lord of the worldb ; not that its soil belongs to him in the same sense in which the soil of France or England belongs to their respective kings: he is the steward of Him who has received the nations for His inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession. It is, therefore, by him alone that the idea of pure right, acquired not by force but by legitimate devolution from those whom God Himself had set up, is visibly expressed upon earth. To find an external and positive basis for that idea is a problem which it has at all times been more easy to evade than to solve, and one peculiarly distressing to those who could neither explain the phenomena of society by reducing it to its original principles, nor inquire historically how its existing arrangements had grown up.Divine right of the Emperor. Hence the attempt to represent human government as an emanation from divine: a view from which all the similar but less logically consistent doctrines of divine right that have prevailed in later times are borrowed.

  From the struggle of the Investitures onwards there had been much debate as to the source of civil authority. One theory sought it in the Visible Church. Christ had committed power to Peter: Peter had transmitted it to his successors: it was from those successors that the Emperor must obtain it. The other theory based itself on history and on law. God’s providence had conferred the rule of the world upon the Roman people; and the Roman people had delegated their power to Augustus and his successors, for had it not been written, ‘Populus ei (sc. Principi Romano) et in eum omne suum imperium et protestatem concessit’?c Nor did this view fail to reinforce itself by the appeal to the passages of Scripture which enjoin obedience to the powers that be, because they are ordained of God.d Some thinkers conceived the delegation by the people to the Emperor to have been final and irrevocable. Some held it compatible with a fresh action by the people, and pointed out that when the Empire was transferred from the Easterns to the Franks by the election of Charles the Great, Rome (or the West generally) had resumed its ancient rights, and the Pope did no more than act as the spokesman of the people. Some, again, went so far as to argue that an Emperor who palpably transgressed the Law of Nature—it was agreed that both Emperor and Pope were subject to the Law of Nature, which was practically the Law of God—might be deposed by his subjects. An avowed heretic, for instance, could not demand obedience; indeed, an heretical or, let us say, anti-Christian Emperor like Julian would be a contradiction in terms. It was even held by some that not only the right of election, but also supreme legislative power, remained always in the people, though no one could say how the people were to exercise it, for there were no organs for popular legislation. A further and indeed an insoluble question was: Who were the people? The followers of Arnold of Brescia saw in the inhabitants of Rome the same populus Romanus which had of old exerted universal dominion. But such a claim was too bold even for the Middle Ages, and the better accepted view understood by ‘the people’ either the whole of the Emperor’s actual subjects (totus populus imperio Romano subiectuse ), or all Christians, or mankind as a whole,fi.e. all nations, acting, as Ockham suggests, by a majority. Widely as opinions differed upon these matters there was on two points a general agreement. Power originally belonged to the people, and was conferred by them upon the Emperor. Even St. Thomas of Aquinum recognizes this, though some later writers held that Christ when He came took all power to Himself and bestowed it upon Peter. This doctrine of popular sovereignty, partly founded on the Politics of Aristotle, embodied ideas that belonged to Greek republican theory as well as traditions that had descended from Roman republican law. It contained, in germ,g the principles of the English, American, and French revolutions: it is one of the most curious links between the ancient and the modern world. The other point touched the nature of the power which the Emperor exercised. Being exercised under direct responsibility to God that power came from God, though it had come through the gift of the people. It was all the more conformable to divine and natural law because it did not pass by descent, but was conferred by electors who, like the cardinals when choosing a Pope, were only instruments in the hand of God, their function having been entrusted to them by God and the people.h Being thus derived from the Law of God and of Nature, the rights of the Emperor are eternal and imprescriptible. They exist irrespective of their actual exercise, and no voluntary abandonment, not even an express grant, can impair them. Pope Boniface the Eighthi reminds the king of France, and imperialist lawyers till the seventeenth century repeated the claim, that he, like other princes, is of right and must ever remain subject to the Roman Emperor. And the sovereigns of Europe long continued to address the Emperor in language, and yield to him a precedence, which admitted the inferiority of their own position.j

  Roman Empire, why an international power.It is easy to see how it was to the Roman Emperor, and to him only, that the international duties and privileges above mentioned could be attributed. Being Roman, he was of no nation, and therefore fittest to judge between contending states, and appease the animosities of race. His was the imperial tongue of Rome, not only the vehicle of religion and law, but also, since no other was understood everywhere in Europe, the necessary medium of diplomatic intercourse. As there was no Church but the Holy Roman Church, and he its temporal head, it was by him that the communion of the saints in its outward form and on its secular side was represented, and to his keeping that the sanctity of peace must be entrusted. As direct heir of those who from Julius to Justinian had shaped the legal principles generally recognized through Europe,k he was, so to speak, legality personified (animata lex in terris); the only sovereign on earth who, being possessed of power by an unimpeachable title, could by his grant confer upon others rights equally valid. And as he claimed to perpetuate the greatest political system the world had known, a system which still moves the wonder of those who see before their eyes empires as much wider than the Roman as they are less symmetrical, and whose vast and complex machinery far surpassed anything the fourteenth century possessed or could hope to establish, it was not strange that he and his government (assuming them to receive the obedience to which they were entitled) should be taken as the ideal of a perfect monarch and a perfect state.

  There was in this theory nothing that was absurd, though much that was impracticable. The ideas on which it rested are still unapproached in grandeur and simplicity, still as far in advance of the average thought of Europe, and as unlikely to find men or nations fit to apply them, as when they were promulgated five hundred years ago. The practical evil which the establishment of such a universal monarchy was intended to meet, that of wars and hardly less ruinous preparations for war between the states of Europe, remains what it was then. The remedy which mediaeval theory proposed has been in some measure applied by the construction and reception of the rules we call international law; the greater difficulty of erecting a tribunal which can decide with the power of enforcing its decisions, remains unsolved.l

  IllustrationsOf the many applications and illustrations of these doctrines which mediaeval documents furnish, it will suffice to adduce two or three.Right of creating kings. No imperial privilege was prized more highly than the power of creating kings, for there was none which raised the Emperor so much above the rulers of the various nations. In this, as in other international concerns, the Pope soon began to claim a jurisdiction, at first concurrent, then separate and independent. But the older and more consistent view assigned it, as flowing from the possession of supreme secular authority, to the Emperor; and it was from him that the rulers of Burgundy, Bohemia, Hungary, apparently Poland also, received the regal title.m The prerogative was his in the same manner in which that of conferring titles is still held to belong to the sovereign in every modern kingdom. And so when Charles the Bold, last duke of French Burgundy, proposed to turn his wide and populous dominions into a kingdom, it was from Frederick III that he sought permission to do so. The Emperor, however, was greedy and suspicious, the duke uncompliant; and when Frederick found that terms could not be arranged between them, he stole away suddenly, and left Charles to carry back, with ill-concealed mortification, the crown and sceptre which he had brought ready-made to the place of interview.n

  Chivalry.In the same manner, as representing what was common to and valid throughout all Europe, nobility, and more particularly knighthood, centred in the Empire. The great Orders of Chivalry were international institutions, whose members, having consecrated themselves a military priesthood, had no longer any country of their own, and could therefore be subject to no one save the Emperor and the Pope. For knighthood was constructed on the analogy of priesthood, and knights were conceived as being to the world in its secular aspect exactly what priests, and more especially the monastic orders, were to it in its religious aspect: to the one body was given the sword of the flesh, to the other the sword of the spirit; each was universal, each had its autocratic head.o Singularly, too, were these notions brought into harmony with the feudal polity. Caesar was lord paramount of the world: its countries great fiefs, whose kings were his tenants in chief, the suitors of his court, owing to him homage, fealty, and military service against the infidel.

  One illustration more of the way in which the Empire was held to be something of and for all mankind cannot be omitted. Although from the practical union of the imperial with the German throne none but Germans were latterly chosen to fill it,p it remained in point of law absolutely free from all restrictions of country or birth. In an age of the most intense aristocratic exclusiveness, the highest office in the world was the only secular one open to all Christians.Persons eligible as Emperors. The old writers, after debating at length the qualifications that are or may be desirable in an Emperor, and relating how in pagan times Gauls and Spaniards, Moors and Pannonians, were thought worthy of the purple, decide that two things, and no more, are required of the candidate for Empire: he must be freeborn, and he must be orthodox.q

  The Empire and the New Learning.It is not altogether easy to estimate the respective influence exerted by each of the three revivals which I have attempted to distinguish. The spirit of the ancient world by which the men who led these movements fancied themselves animated, was in truth a pagan, or at least a strongly secular spirit, in many respects inconsistent with the associations which had now gathered round the imperial office. And this hostility did not fail to shew itself when at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the fulness of the Renaissance, a direct and for the time irresistible sway was exercised by the art and literature of Greece, when the mythology of Euripides and Ovid supplanted that which had fired the imagination of Dante and peopled the visions of St. Francis; when men forsook the image of the saint in the cathedral for the statue of the nymph in the garden; when the uncouth jargon of scholastic theology was equally distasteful to the scholars who formed their style upon Cicero and to the philosophers who drew their inspiration from Plato. That meanwhile the admirers of antiquity did ally themselves with the defenders of the Empire, was due partly indeed to the false notions that were entertained regarding the early Caesars, yet still more to the common hostility of both schools to the Papacy. It was as successor of Old Rome, and by virtue of her traditions, that the Holy See had established so wide a dominion; yet no sooner did Arnold of Brescia and his followers begin to claim liberty in the name of the ancient constitution of the Roman city, than they found in the Popes their bitterest foes, and turned for help to the secular monarch against the clergy. With similar aversion did the Papal Curia view the revived study of the ancient jurisprudence, so soon as it became, in the hands of the school of Bologna and afterwards of the jurists of France, a power able to assert its independence and resist ecclesiastical pretensions. In the ninth century, Pope Nicholas the First had himself judged in the famous case of Teutberga, wife of Lothar, according to the civil law: in the thirteenth, his successorsr forbade its study, and the canonists strove to expel it from Europe.s And as the current of educated opinion among the laity was beginning, however imperceptibly at first, to set against sacerdotal tyranny, it followed that the Empire would find sympathy in any effort it could make to regain its lost position. Thus the Emperors became, or might have become had they seen the greatness of the opportunity and been strong enough to improve it, the exponents and guides of the political movement, the pioneers, in secular matters at least, of the Reformation. But the revival came too late to arrest, if not to adorn, the decline of their office. The growth of a national sentiment in the several countries of Europe, which had already gone too far to be arrested, and was urged on by forces far stronger than the theories of Catholic unity which opposed it, imprinted on the resistance to papal usurpation, and even on the instincts of political freedom, that form of narrowly local patriotism which they long retained and have not yet wholly lost. It can hardly be said that upon any occasion,The doctrine of the Empire’s rights and functions never carried out in fact. except the gathering of the Council of Constance by Sigismund, did the Emperor appear filling a truly international place. For the most part he exerted in the politics of Europe an influence little greater than that of other princes. In actual resources he stood below the kings of France and England, far below his vassals the Visconti of Milan.t Yet this helplessness, such was men’s faith or their timidity, and such their unwillingness to make prejudice bend to facts, did not prevent his dignity from being extolled in the most sonorous language by writers whose imaginations were enthralled by the halo of traditional glory which surrounded him.

  We are thus brought back to ask, What was the connection between imperialism and the literary revival?

  Attitude of the men of letters.To moderns who think of the Roman Empire as the heathen persecuting power, it is strange to find it depicted as the model of a Christian commonwealth. It may seem stranger still that the study of antiquity should have made men advocates of arbitrary power. Democratic Athens, oligarchic Rome, suggest to us Pericles and Brutus: the moderns who have striven to apply the spirit of antiquity to politics have been men like Algernon Sidney, and Vergniaud, and Shelley. The explanation is the same in both cases.u The ancient world was known to the earlier Middle Ages by tradition, freshest for what was latest, and by the authors of the old Empire. Both presented to them the picture of a mighty despotism and a civilization brilliant far beyond their own. Writings of the fourth and fifth centuries, unfamiliar to us, were to them authorities as high as Livy or Tacitus; yet Virgil and Horace too had sung the praises of the first and wisest of the Emperors. To the enthusiasts of poetry and law, Rome meant universal monarchy;x to those of religion, her name called up the undimmed radiance of the Church under Sylvester and Constantine.Petrarch. Petrarch, the apostle of the dawning Renaissance, is excited by the least attempt to revive even the shadow of imperial greatness: as he had hailed Cola di Rienzo, he welcomes Charles IV into Italy, and execrates his departure. The following passage is taken from his letter to the Roman people asking them to receive back Rienzo:—‘When was there ever such peace, such tranquillity, such justice, such honour paid to virtue, such rewards distributed to the good and punishments to the bad, when was ever the state so wisely guided, as in the time when the world had obtained one head, and that head Rome; the very time wherein God deigned to be born of a virgin and dwell upon earth. To every single body there has been given a head; the whole world therefore also, which is called by the poet a great body, ought to be content with one temporal head. For every two-headed animal is monstrous; how much more horrible and hideous a portent must be a creature with a thousand different heads, biting and fighting against one another! If, however, it is necessary that there be more heads than one, it is nevertheless evident that there ought to be one to restrain all and preside over all, that so the peace of the whole body may abide unshaken. Assuredly both in heaven and in earth the sovereignty of one has always been best.’

  Dante.His passion for the heroism of Roman conquest and the ordered peace to which it brought the world, is the centre of Dante’s political hopes: he is no more a Ghibeline embittered by exile, but a patriot whose fervid imagination sees a nation arise regenerate at the touch of its rightful lord. Italy, the spoil of so many Teutonic conquerors, is the garden of the Empire which Henry is to redeem: Rome the mourning widow, whom Albert is denounced for neglecting.y Passing through Purgatory, the poet sees Rudolf of Hapsburg seated gloomily apart, mourning his sin in that he left unhealed the wounds of Italy.z In the deepest pit of Hell’s ninth circle lies Lucifer, huge, three-headed; in each mouth a sinner whom he crunches between his teeth, in one mouth Iscariot the traitor to Christ, in the others the two traitors to the first Emperor of Rome, Brutus and Cassius.a To multiply illustrations from other parts of the poem would be an endless task; for the idea is ever present in Dante’s mind, and displays itself in a hundred unexpected forms.b Virgil himself is selected to be the guide of the pilgrim through hell and Purgatory, not so much as being the great poet of antiquity, as because he ‘was born under Julius and lived beneath the good Augustus,’ because he was divinely charged to sing of the Empire’s earliest and brightest glories. Strange, that the shame of one age should be the glory of another. For Virgil’s melancholy panegyrics upon the destroyer of the republic are no more like Dante’s appeals to the coming saviour of Italy than is Caesar Octavianus to Henry count of Luxemburg.

  Attitude of the Jurists.The visionary zeal of the man of letters was seconded by the more sober devotion of the lawyer. Conqueror, theologian, and jurist, Justinian is a hero greater than either Julius or Constantine, for his enduring work bears him witness. Absolutism was the civilian’s creed:c the phrases ‘legibus solutus,’ ‘lex regia,’ whatever else tended in the same direction, were taken to express the prerogative of him whose official style of Augustus, as well as the vernacular name of ‘Kaiser,’ designated the legitimate successor of the compiler of the Corpus Iuris. Since it was upon this legitimacy that his claim to be the fountain of law rested, no pains were spared to seek out and observe every custom and precedent by which Old Rome seemed to be connected with her representative.

  Imitations of Old Rome.Of the many instances that might be collected, it would be tedious to enumerate more than a few. The offices of the imperial household, instituted by Constantine the Great, were attached to the noblest families of Germany. The Emperor and Empress, before their coronation at Rome, were lodged in the chambers called those of Augustus and Livia;d a bare sword was borne before them by the praetorian prefect; their processions were adorned by the standards—eagles, wolves, and dragons, which had figured in the train of Hadrian or Theodosius.e The constant title of the Emperor himself, according to the style introduced by Probus, was ‘semper Augustus,’ or ‘perpetuus Augustus,’ which erring etymology translated ‘at all times increaser of the Empire.’f Edicts issued by a Franconian or Swabian sovereign were inserted as Novelsg in the Corpus Iuris, in the latest editions of which custom still allows them a place. The pontificatus maximus of his pagan predecessors was supposed to be preserved by the admission of each Emperor as a canon of St. Peter’s at Rome and St. Mary’s at Aachen.h Sometimes we even find him talking of his consulship.i Annalists usually number the place of each sovereign from Augustus downwards.j The notion of an uninterrupted succession, which moves the stranger’s wondering smile as he sees ranged round the magnificent Golden Hall of Augsburg the portraits of the Caesars, laurelled, helmeted, and periwigged, from Julius the conqueror of Gaul to Joseph the partitioner of Poland, was to those generations not an article of faith only because its denial was inconceivable.

  Reverence for ancient forms and phrases in the Middle Ages.And all this historical antiquarianism, as one might call it, which gathers round the Empire, is but one instance, though the most striking, of that eager wish to cling to the old forms, use the old phrases, and preserve the old institutions to which the annals of mediaeval Europe bear witness. It appears even in trivial expressions, as when a monkish chronicler says of evil bishops deposed, Tribu moti sunt, or talks of the ‘senate and people of the Franks,’ when he means a council of chiefs surrounded by a crowd of half-naked warriors. A certain continuity of institutions there had really been. One may say, for instance, that the mediaeval trade-guilds, though often traceable to a different source, represented the old collegia, and that villenage was not unconnected with the system of coloni under the later Empire. But the men of the Middle Ages were not thinking of such cases when they reproduced the old phrases in drawing up edicts and charters on Roman precedents. They imitated for the love of imitating, and liked to fancy themselves to be the heirs of an old order which had never quite vanished. Even in remote Britain, the Teutonic invaders used after a time Roman ensigns, and stamped their coins with Roman devices; called themselves ‘Basileis’ and ‘Augusti.’ Especially did the cities perpetuate Rome through her most lasting boon to the conquered, municipal self-government; those of later origin emulating in their adherence to antique style others which, like Nismes and Cologne, Zurich and Augsburg, could trace back their institutions to the coloniae and municipia of the first centuries. On the walls and gates of hoary Nürnberg the traveller still sees emblazoned the imperial eagle, with the words ‘Senatus populusque Norimbergensis,’ and is borne in thought from the quiet provincial town of to-day to the stirring republic of the fourteenth century: thence to the Forum and the Capitol of her greater prototype.k For, in truth, through all that period which we call the Dark and Middle Ages, men’s minds were possessed by the belief that all things continued as they were from the beginning, that no chasm never to be recrossed lay between them and that ancient world to which they had not ceased to look back. We who are centuries removed can see that there had passed a great and wonderful change upon thought, and art, and literature, and politics, and society itself: a change whose best illustration is to be found in the process whereby there arose out of the primitive basilica the Romanesque cathedral, and from it in turn the endless varieties of Gothic. But so gradual was the change that each generation felt it passing over them no more than a man feels that perpetual transformation by which his body is renewed from year to year;Absence of the idea of change or progress. while the few who had learning enough to study antiquity through its contemporary records were prevented, by the utter want of criticism and of what we call historical feeling, from seeing how prodigious was the contrast between themselves and those whom they admired. There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which fastens upon the differences between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavours to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard. Such a spirit was, before the last two or three centuries, foreign to art as well as to philosophy and history. The converse and the parallel of the fashion of calling mediaeval offices by Roman names, and supposing them therefore the same, is to be found in those old German pictures of the siege of Carthage or the battle between Porus and Alexander, where in the foreground two armies of knights, mailed and mounted, are charging each other like Crusaders, lance in rest, while behind, through the smoke of cannon, loom out the Gothic spires and towers of the beleaguered city. And thus, when we remember that the notion of progress and developement, and of change as the necessary condition thereof, was unwelcome or unknown in mediaeval times, we may better understand, though we do not cease to wonder, how men, never doubting that the political system of antiquity had descended to them, modified indeed, yet in essence the same, should have believed that the Frank, the Saxon, and the Swabian ruled all Europe by a right which seems to us not less fantastic than the fabled charter whereby Alexander the Great bequeathed his empire to the Slavonic race for the love of Roxolana.

  It is a part of that perpetual contradiction of which the history of the Middle Ages is full, that this belief was often quite out of relation to actual facts. The more abjectly helpless the Emperor becomes, so much the more sonorous is the language in which the dignity of his crown is extolled. His power, we are told, is eternal, the provinces having resumed their allegiance after the barbarian irruptions;l it is incapable of diminution or injury: exemptions and grants by him, so far as they tend to limit his own prerogative, are invalid:m all Christendom is still of right subject to him, though it may contumaciously refuse obedience.n The sovereigns of Europe are solemnly warned that they are resisting the power ordained of God.o No laws can bind the Emperor, though he may choose to live according to them: no court can judge him, though he may condescend to be sued in his own: none may presume to arraign the conduct or question the motives of him who is answerable only to God. So writes Aeneas Sylvius while Frederick the Third, chased from his capital by the Hungarians, is wandering from convent to convent, an imperial beggar; while the princes, whom his subserviency to the Pope has driven into rebellion, are offering the imperial crown to Podiebrad the Bohemian king.p

  Henry VII,ad 1308-1313.But the career of Henry the Seventh in Italy is the most remarkable illustration of the Emperor’s position: and imperialistic doctrines are set forth most strikingly in the treatise which the greatest spirit of the age wrote to herald or commemorate the advent of that hero, the De Monarchia of Dante.q Rudolf, Adolf of Nassau, Albert of Hapsburg, none of them crossed the Alps or attempted to aid the Italian Ghibelines who battled in the name of their throne. Concerned only to restore order and aggrandize his house, and thinking apparently that nothing more was to be made of the imperial crown, Rudolf was content never to receive it, and purchased the Pope’s goodwill by surrendering his jurisdiction in the capital, and his claims over the bequest of the Countess Matilda. Henry the Luxemburger ventured on a bolder course; urged perhaps only by his lofty and chivalrous spirit, perhaps in despair at effecting anything with his slender resources against the princes of Germany.ad 1310. Crossing from his Burgundian dominions with a scanty following of knights, and descending from the Cenis upon Turin, he found his prerogative as high in men’s belief after sixty years of neglect as it had stood under the last Hohenstaufen. The cities of Lombardy opened their gates; Milan decreed a vast subsidy; Guelf and Ghibeline exiles alike were restored, and imperial vicars appointed everywhere. Supported by the Avignonese pontiff, Clement V, who dreaded the restless ambition of his French neighbour, king Philip the Fair, Henry had the interdict of the Church as well as the ban of the Empire at his command. But the illusion of success vanished as soon as men, recovering from their first impression, began to be again governed by their ordinary passions and interests, and not by an imaginative reverence for the glories of the past. Tumults and revolts broke out in Lombardy; at Rome the king of Naples held St. Peter’s, and the coronation, performed by the Pope’s legates, must take place in the half-ruined basilica of St. John Lateran, on the southern bank of the Tiber.r The hostility of the Guelfic league, headed by the Florentines, Guelfs even against the Pope, obliged Henry to depart from his impartial and republican policy, and to purchase the aid of the Ghibeline chiefs by granting them the government of cities. Meantime the Pope himself, under pressure from France, had become unfriendly, and was throwing difficulties in his path.Death of Henry VII. With few troops, and encompassed by enemies, the heroic Emperor sustained an unequal struggle for a year longer, till, ad 1313, he sank beneath the fevers of the deadly Tuscan summer. His German followers believed, nor has history wholly rejected the tale, that poison was given him by a Dominican monk, in sacramental wine.

  Later Emperors in Italy.Others after him descended from the Alps, and Lewis IV even vindicated, during a few troubled months, the rights of his crown in Rome.s But the rest came, either like Rupert and Sigismund, at the behest of a faction, which found them useful tools for a time, then flung them away in scorn; or like Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third, as the docile creatures of a French or Italian pontiff. With Henry the Seventh ends the history of the Empire in Italy, and Dante’s book is an epitaph instead of a prophecy. A sketch of its argument will convey a notion of the feelings with which the noblest Ghibelines fought, as well as of the spirit in which the Middle Ages were accustomed to handle such subjects.

  Dante’s feelings and theories.Weary of the endless strife of princes and cities, of the factions which within every city strove against each other, seeing municipal freedom, the only mitigation of turbulence, vanish with the rise of domestic tyrants, Dante raises a passionate cry for some power to still the tempest, not to quench liberty or supersede local self-government, but to correct and moderate them, to restore unity and peace to hapless Italy. His reasoning is throughout closely syllogistic: he is alternately the jurist, the theologian, the scholastic metaphysician: the poet of the Divina Commedia is betrayed only by the compressed energy of diction, by his clear vision of the unseen, rarely by a glowing metaphor.

  The ‘De Monarchia.’Monarchy is first proved to be the true and rightful form of government.t Men’s objects are best attained during universal peace: this is possible only under a monarch. And as he is the image of the divine unity, so man is through him made one, and brought most near to God. There must, in every system of forces, be a ‘primum mobile’; to be perfect, every organization must have a centre, into which all is gathered, by which all is controlled.u Justice is best secured by a supreme arbiter of disputes, himself untempted by ambition, since his dominion is already bounded only by ocean. Man is best and happiest when he is most free; to be free is to exist for one’s own sake. To this noblest end does the monarch and he alone guide us; other forms of government are perverted,x and exist for the benefit of some class; he seeks the good of all alike, being to that very end appointed.y

  Abstract arguments are then confirmed from history. Since the world began there has been but one period of perfect peace, and but one of perfect monarchy, that, namely, which existed at our Lord’s birth, under the sceptre of Augustus. Since then the heathen have raged, and the kings of the earth have stood up; they have set themselves against their Lord, and His anointed the Roman prince.z The universal dominion, the need for which has been thus established, is then proved to belong to the Romans. Justice is the will of God, a will to exalt Rome shewn through her whole history.a Her virtues deserved honour: Virgil is quoted to prove those of Aeneas,The ‘De Monarchia.’ who by descent and marriage was the heir of the three continents: of Asia through Assaracus and Creusa; of Africa by Electra (daughter of Atlas and mother of Dardanus) and by Dido(!); of Europe by Dardanus and by Lavinia. God’s favour was approved in the fall of the shields to Numa, in the miraculous deliverance of the capital from the Gauls, in the hailstorm after Cannae. Justice is also the advantage of the State: that advantage was the constant object of the virtuous Cincinnatus, and the other heroes of the republic. They conquered the world for its own good, and therefore justly, as Cicero attests;b so that their sway was not so much the command as the protection of the whole earth. Nature herself, the fountain of all right, had, by their geographical position and by the gift of a genius so vigorous, marked them out for universal dominion:—

  • ‘Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
  • Credo equidem: vivos ducent de marmore vultus;
  • Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus
  • Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
  • Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
  • Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
  • Parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.’

  Finally, the right of war asserted, Christ’s birth, and death under Pilate, ratified their government.c For Christian doctrine requires that the procurator should have been a lawful judge,d which he was not unless Tiberius was a lawful Emperor. Else Adam’s sin and that of his race was not duly punished in the person of the Saviour.

  The relations of the imperial and papal power are then examined, and the passages of Scripture (tradition being rejected), to which the advocates of the Papacy appeal, are elaborately explained away. The argument from the sun and moone does not hold, since both lights existed before man’s creation, and at a time when, as still sinless, he needed no controlling powers. Else accidentia would have preceded propria in creation. The moon, too, does not receive her being nor all her light from the sun, but so much only as makes her more effective. So there is no reason why the temporal should not be aided in a corresponding measure by the spiritual authority. This difficult text disposed of, others fall more easily; Levi and Judah, Samuel and Saul, the incense and gold offered by the Magi;f the two swords, the power of binding and loosing given to Peter. Constantine’s Donation was illegal: no single Emperor or Pope can disturb the everlasting foundations of their respective thrones: the one had no right to bestow, nor the other to receive, such a gift. In giving the imperial crown to Charles the Great, Leo the Third exceeded his powers: ‘usurpatio iuris non facit ius.’ It is alleged that all things of one kind are reducible to one individual, and so all men to the Pope. But Emperor and Pope differ in kind, and so far as they are men, are reducible only to God, on whom the Empire immediately depends; for it existed before Peter’s see, and was recognized by Paul when he appealed to Caesar. The temporal power of the Papacy can have been given neither by natural law nor divine ordinance, nor universal consent: nay, it is against its own Form and Essence, the life of Christ, who said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’

  Man’s nature is twofold, corruptible and incorruptible: he has therefore two ends, active virtue on earth, and the enjoyment of the sight of God hereafter; the one to be attained by practice conformed to the precepts of philosophy, the other by the theological virtues. Hence two guides are needed, the Pontiff and the Emperor, the latter of whom,The ‘De Monarchia’: conclusion. in order that he may direct mankind in accordance with the teachings of philosophy to temporal blessedness, must preserve universal peace in the world. Thus are the two powers equally ordained of God, and the Emperor, though supreme in all that pertains to the secular world, is in some things dependent on the Pontiff, since earthly happiness is subordinate to eternal. ‘Let Caesar, therefore, shew towards Peter the reverence wherewith a firstborn son honours his father, that, being illumined by the light of his paternal favour, he may the more excellently shine forth upon the whole world, to the rule of which he has been appointed by Him alone who is of all things, both spiritual and temporal, the King and Governor.’ So ends the treatise.

  Dante’s arguments are not stranger than his omissions. No suspicion is breathed against the genuineness of Constantine’s Donation; no proof is adduced, for no doubt is felt, that the Empire of Henry the Seventh is the legitimate continuation of that which had been swayed by Augustus and Justinian. Yet Henry was a German, sprung from Rome’s barbarian foes, the elect of those who had neither part nor share in Italy and her capital.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES

  Chap. XVI.‘It is related,’ says Sozomen in the ninth book of his Ecclesiastical History, ‘that when Alarich was hastening against Rome, a holy monk of Italy admonished him to spare the city, and not to make himself the cause of such fearful ills. But Alarich answered, “It is not of my own will that I do this; there is One who forces me on, and will not let me rest, bidding me spoil Rome.” ’a

  Towards the close of the tenth century the Bohemian Woytech, famous in after legend as St. Adalbert, forsook his bishopric of Prague to journey into Italy, and settled himself in the Roman monastery of Sant’ Alessio. After some few years passed there in religious solitude, he was summoned back to resume the duties of his see, and laboured for awhile among his half-savage countrymen. Soon, however, the old longing came over him: he resought his cell upon the brow of the Aventine, and there, wandering among the ancient shrines, and taking on himself the menial offices of the convent, he abode happily for a space. At length the reproaches of his metropolitan, the archbishop of Mentz, and the express commands of Pope Gregory the Fifth, drove him back over the Alps, and he set off in the train of Otto the Third, lamenting, says his biographer, that he should no more enjoy his beloved quiet in the mother of martyrs, the home of the Apostles, golden Rome. A few months later he died a martyr among the pagan Lithuanians of the Baltic.b

  Nearly four hundred years later, and nine hundred after the time of Alarich, Francis Petrarch writes thus to his friend John Colonna:—

  ‘Thinkest thou not that I long to see that city to which there has never been any like nor ever shall be; which even an enemy called a city of kings; of whose people it hath been written, “Great is the valour of the Roman people, great and terrible their name”; concerning whose unexampled glory and incomparable empire, which was, and is, and is to be, divine prophets have sung; where are the tombs of the apostles and martyrs and the bodies of so many thousands of the saints of Christ?’c

  It was the same irresistible impulse that drew the warrior, the monk, and the scholar towards the mystical city which was to mediaeval Europe more than Delphi had been to the Greek or Mecca to the Islamite, the Jerusalem of Christianity, the city which had once ruled the earth, and now ruled the world of disembodied spirits.d For there was then, as there is now, something in Rome to attract men of every class. The devout pilgrim came to pray at the shrine of the Prince of the Apostles, too happy if he could carry back to his monastery in the forests of Saxony or by the bleak Atlantic shore the bone of some holy martyr; the lover of learning and poetry dreamed of Virgil and Cicero among the shattered columns of the Forum; the Teutonic kings, in spite of pestilence, treachery and seditions, came with their hosts to seek in the ancient capital of the world the fountain of temporal dominion. She was more glorious in her decay and desolation than the stateliest seats of modern power. Nor has the spell yet wholly lost its power. To half the Christian nations Rome has remained the metropolis of religion, to all the metropolis of art. In her streets, and hers alone among the cities of the world, may every form of human speech be heard.

  But while men thought thus of Rome, what was Rome herself?

  The modern traveller, after his first few days in Rome, when he has looked out upon the Campagna from the summit of St. Peter’s, paced the chilly corridors of the Vatican, and mused under the echoing dome of the Pantheon, when he has passed in review the monuments of regal and republican and papal Rome, begins to seek for some relics of the twelve hundred years that lie between Constantine and Pope Julius the Second. ‘Where,’ he asks, ‘is the Rome of the Middle Ages, the Rome of Alberic and Hildebrand and Rienzo? the Rome which dug the graves of so many Teutonic hosts; whither the pilgrims flocked; whence came the commands at which kings bowed? Where are the memorials of the brightest age of Christian architecture, the age which reared Cologne and Rheims and Westminster, which gave to Italy the cathedrals of Tuscany and the wave-washed palaces of Venice?’

  To this question there is no answer. Rome, the mother of the arts, has scarcely a building to commemorate those times, for to her they were times of turmoil and misery, times in which the shame of the present was embittered by recollections of a brighter past. Nevertheless a minute scrutiny may still discover, hidden in dark corners or disguised under an unbecoming modern dress, much that carries us back to the mediaeval town, and helps us to realize its social and political condition. Therefore a brief notice of the state of Rome during the Middle Ages, with especial reference to those monuments which the visitor may still examine for himself, may have its use, and is no unfitting pendant to an account of the institution which drew from the City its name and its magnificent pretensions. Moreover, as will appear more fully in the sequel, the history of the Roman people is an instructive illustration of the influence of the ideas upon which the Empire itself rested, as well in their weakness as in their strength.e

  It is not from her capture by Alarich, nor even from the more destructive ravages of the Vandal Gaiserich, that the material and social ruin of Rome must be dated, but rather from the repeated sieges which she sustained during the war of Justinian against the Ostrogoths.f This struggle, however, long and exhausting as it was, would not have proved so fatal had the previous condition of the city been sound and healthy.Causes of the rapid decay of the City. Her wealth and population in the middle of the fifth century were probably little inferior to what they had been in the most prosperous days of the imperial government. But this wealth was entirely gathered into the hands of a small and luxurious aristocracy. The crowd that filled her streets was composed partly of poor and idle freemen, unaccustomed to arms and long since deprived of political rights; partly of a far more numerous herd of slaves, gathered from all parts of the world, and morally even lower than their masters. There was no middle class, and no effective municipal administration, for although the senate and consuls with many of the lesser magistracies continued to exist, they had for centuries enjoyed little power, and were nowise fitted to lead and rule the people. Hence it was that when the long Gothic war and the subsequent inroads of the Lombards had reduced the great families to beggary, the old framework of society dissolved and could not be replaced. In a State rotten to the core there was no vital force left for reconstruction. The ancient forms of political activity had been too long dead to be recalled to life: the people wanted the moral force to produce new ones, and all the authority that could be said to exist in the midst of anarchy tended to centre itself in the chief of the new religious society.

  Peculiarities in the position of Rome.So far Rome’s condition was like that of the other great towns of Italy and Gaul. But in two points her case differed from theirs, and to these the difference of her after fortunes may be traced. Her bishop had at hand no temporal potentate to overshadow his dignity or check his ambition, for the vicar of the Eastern court lived far away at Ravenna, and seldom interfered except to ratify a papal election or punish a more than commonly outrageous sedition. Her population received an all but imperceptible infusion of that Teutonic blood and those Teutonic customs by whose stern disciple the inhabitants of Northern Italy were in the end renovated. Everywhere the old institutions had perished of decay: in Rome the social and economic conditions were such that it was only out of the ecclesiastical system that new institutions could arise. Her condition was therefore the most pitiable in which a community can find itself, one of ceaseless struggle without purpose or progress. The citizens were divided into three orders: the military class, including what was left of the ancient aristocracy; the clergy, a host of priests, monks, and nuns, attached to the countless churches and convents; and the people, or plebs, as they are called, a poverty-stricken rabble without trade, without industry, with little municipal organization to bind them together. Of these two latter classes the Pope was the natural leader; the first was divided into factions headed by some three or four of the great families, whose quarrels kept the town in incessant bloodshed. The internal history of Rome from the eighth to the twelfth century is an obscure and tedious record of the contests of these factions with each other, and of the aristocracy as a whole with the slowly-growing power of the Church.

  Her condition in the ninth and tenth centuries.The revolt of the Romans from the Image-breaking Emperors in the East, followed as it was by the reception of the Franks as patricians and Emperors, is an event of the first importance in the history of Italy and of the Popedom. In the domestic constitution of Rome it made little change. With the instinct of a profound genius Charles the Great saw that Rome, though it might be ostensibly the capital, could not be the seat of government for his dominions. He continued to reside in Germany, and did not even fit up as a palace any one of the group of dwellings that stood, some of them still comparatively unscathed, upon the Palatine. For a time the awe of his power, the presence of his missus or lieutenant, and the occasional visits of his successors Lothar and Lewis II to the city, repressed her internal disorders. But after the death of the prince last named, and still more after the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire itself, Rome relapsed into a state of profligacy and barbarism to which, even in that age, Europe supplied no parallel, a barbarism which had inherited the vices of civilization without its virtues. The papal office in particular seemed to have lost its religious character, as many of its occupants had lost all claim to moral purity. For more than a century the chief priest of Christendom was no more than a tool of some ferocious faction among the nobles. Criminal means had raised him to the throne; violence, sometimes going the length of mutilation or murder, deprived him of it. The marvel is, a marvel in which papal historians have not unnaturally discovered a miracle, that after sinking so low, the Papacy should ever have risen again. Its rescue and exaltation to the pinnacle of glory was accomplished not by the Romans but by the efforts of the Transalpine Church, aiding and prompting the Saxon and Franconian Emperors. Yet even the religious reform did not abate intestine turmoil, and it was not till the twelfth century that a new spirit began to work in politics, which ennobled if it could not heal the sufferings of the Roman people.

  Growth of a republican feeling: hostility to the Popes.Ever since the days of Albericg their pride had revolted against the haughty behaviour of the Teutonic Emperors. From still earlier times they had been jealous of sacerdotal authority, and now watched with alarm the rapid extension of its influence. The events of the twelfth century gave these feelings a definite direction. It was the time of the struggle of the Investitures, in which Gregory VII and his disciples had been striving to draw power over the things of this world as well as over those of the next into their grasp. It was the era of the revived study of Roman law, by which alone the extravagant pretensions of the decretalists could be resisted. The Lombard and Tuscan towns had become flourishing republics, independent of their bishops, and at open war with their Emperor. Municipal self-government already existed at Rome in some rude form, but now its recent developement in other parts of Italy, and especially in the North, naturally told upon the imperial city and vivified its old traditions. While all these things were stirring the minds of the Romans,Arnold of Brescia in Rome, 1146-1155. Arnold of Brescia came preaching religious reform, denouncing the simoniacal practices and corrupt life of the clergy, not indeed, like some others of the so-called schismatics of his time, rejecting a sacerdotal order, but proclaiming that confession ought to be made not to it, but by Christians to one another,h that the sinfulness of a priest destroyed the value of the sacraments he administered, that spiritual persons ought to be confined to spiritual duties and neither to possess worldly goods nor exercise secular authority.i On the minds of the Romans such teaching fell like the spark upon dry grass. They threw off the yoke of the Pope, against which the Comune di Roma had often struggled; they drove out the imperial prefect, reconstituted the senate and what they called the equestrian order (apparently an organization of the minor nobles), appointed consuls, struck their own coins, and professed to treat the Germanic Emperors as their nominees, whose authority, though admitted as legitimate, was in their view derived from the Roman people. To have successfully imitated the republican constitution of the cities of Northern Italy would have been much, but with this they were not content. Knowing in a vague ignorant way that there had been a Roman republic before there was a Roman Empire, they fed their vanity with visions of a renewal of all their ancient forms, and saw in fancy their senate and people sitting again upon the Seven Hills and ruling over the kings of the earth. Stepping, as it were, into the arena where Pope and Emperor were contending for the headship of the world, they rejected the one as a priest, and declaring the other to be only their creature, they claimed as theirs the true and lawful inheritance of the world-dominion which their ancestors had won. Antiquity was in one sense on their side, and to us now it seems less strange that the Roman people should aspire to rule the earth than that a German barbarian should rule it in their name. But practically the scheme was absurd, and could not maintain itself against any serious opposition. As a modern historian aptly expresses it, ‘they were setting up ruins:’ they might as well have tried to raise a stately temple out of the broken columns that strewed their Forum. The reverence which the men of the Middle Ages felt for Rome was given altogether to the name and to the place, and nowise to the people. Their armed force was insignificant: so far from holding Italy in subjection, they could scarcely maintain themselves against the hostility of Tusculum.

  Yet it might have been worth the while of the Germanic Emperors to have made the Romans their allies, and bridled by their help the temporal ambition of the Popes.Short-sighted policy of the Emperors. Overtures were addressed to Conrad the Third in 1146—he refused to receive the envoys or to answer the letter—and again in 1151. Another opportunity arose when Frederick the First approached Rome in 1155 at the head of a great army.j But the Swabian repelled in the most contumelious fashion the envoys of the senate. Even while he dreaded and resisted, he always respected the Vicar of Christ: towards the Romans he felt the contempt of a feudal king for burghers, and of the Lord of the World for a petty knot of rebels. Pope Hadrian the Fourth, whose insight found no heresy more dangerous than one which threatened the authority of the clergy, had, by the terrible weapon of interdict and with the support of the greater nobles, driven Arnold of Brescia out of Rome; and when the fugitive found protection, near Viterbo, from one of the counts of the district, the Pope required Frederick to seize him. The Emperor was at that moment seeking to induce the Pope to crown him, so Arnold was taken, tried by the prefect of the city, hanged, his body burned, and his ashes cast into the Tiber, lest the people should treasure them up as relics.k His constancy in the presence of death, his refusal to recant, the calm dignity of his silent confession and prayer, softened the executioners, while it moved the beholders to tears; and the Emperor himself regretted too late his hasty compliance with the Pope’s demand.l

  Arnold is a remarkable figure, not only because he sought to reinvigorate the civic life of Rome but also because his is one of the earliest and clearest of the voices that were raised from time to time throughout the Middle Ages against the fatal secularization of the Church by wealth and temporal authority.Significance of Arnold’s career. The Church he desired was a church of apostolic poverty. He was an idealist, who taught, says his contemporary John of Salisbury, ‘things most consonant to the law of Christians, and most remote from actual life.’m Though a disciple of Abelard, he is less a dialectician than a theologian, perhaps less a theologian than a practical reformer, appealing to the words of Scripture, and seeking to bring back the primitive simplicity of the early days of Christianity. He is a forerunner in one sense of Dante, in another of Marsilius of Padua, one may even say, of the reformers of the sixteenth century. And, though the attempt to revive against the Pope the long obsolete powers of the Roman people may now seem fanciful, it must be remembered that the rights of the laity against the sacerdotal order and its head had, in the world as it then stood, no institution whereto they could attach themselves, no means whereby to make themselves respected, except the Emperor—whom the Romans sought to win—and the organization, under the Emperor, of a municipal republic. Arnold was hopelessly overmatched. Material force was against him; and the main stream of opinion was still running strongly in the channel into which Gregory VII had directed the hierarchical doctrine of his time. Nor did that stream slacken till the beginning of the fourteenth century. But it is the mark of a hero to be willing to face desperate odds: and those who in the end of the fifteenth century saw the papal court sunk in corruption, in worldliness, and indeed in a sort of paganism, might well deem that the Catholic Church would have fared better if the principles of Arnold had prevailed.

  The martyrdom of their Lombard leader did not quench the hopes of his Roman followers. The republican constitution continued to exist, and rose from time to time, during the weakness or the absence of the pontiff, into a brief and fitful activity.n It was indeed recognized by the Popes themselves. They used to receive the title and authority of Senator for life, and in particular, in ad 1337, Benedict XII gratefully accepted from the people the offices of Senator and Captain, Syndic and Defensor of the Republic.o Once awakened, the idea, seductive at once to the imagination of the scholar and the vanity of the Roman citizen, could not wholly disappear, least of all while the Popes were absent at Avignon, and two centuries after Arnold’s time it found a more brilliant though less disinterested exponent in the tribune Nicholas Rienzo.p

  Career of the tribune Cola di Rienzo.The career of this singular personage is misunderstood by those who suppose him to have been possessed of profound political insight, a republican on modern principles. He was indeed, despite his overweening conceit and what seems to us his charlatanry, both a patriot and a man of genius, in temperament a poet, filled with soaring ideas. But those ideas, although dressed out in gaudier colours by his lively fancy, were after all only the old ones, memories of the long-faded glories of the heathen republic, and a series of scornful contrasts levelled at her present oppressors, both of them shewing no vista of future greatness except through the revival of those ancient names to which there were no things to correspond.

  It will be remembered that in ad 1327 the Emperor Lewis IV had, in his conflict with Pope John XXII, suddenly embraced and turned to account the claims of the city. Against the hostility of the Church he set the will of the Roman people. Acting under their decree Sciarra Colonna and his three fellow Syndics crowned the Bavarian, following, as was alleged, the precedent of ad 800, when Charles the Great had received the Empire as the gift of the Romans. If Cola di Rienzo, then a youth of fourteen, witnessed the coronation, this recognition of the rights of Rome may well have sunk deep into his mind. Some seventeen years later,ad 1344. being then a notary in the Pope’s service, he began a strange campaign addressed to the eyes no less than to the ears of the multitude, in which he displayed allegorical pictures, and delivered harangues upon those ancient rights of Senate and People which he was seeking to bring back into effective action, taking as his text, on one famous occasion, an inscription recording the statute by which the imperium had been conferred upon Vespasian.qHis revolution. In ad 1347 he effected with the aid of some conspirators, and with the consent of the Papal Vicar, a sort of bloodless revolution, obtained a decree by which he was placed at the head of the executive government as Tribune, effected a number of reforms, and bridled the excesses of the nobility. He then despatched letters to all the chief cities of Italy inviting them to send representatives to a great assembly to be held at Rome. Some of them complied, and many more received the invitation respectfully, for there was a general desire to be rid of intestine strife and to recall the Pope from Avignon to Rome. In a gathering of jurists, and again in a Roman Parliament, Cola solemnly declared Rome to be the Head of the World, and (it is said) revoked all the gifts, concessions, and privileges which had been conferred by previous rulers, from Constantine downwards, upon the Holy See and the Germanic Electors.r Somewhat later, repeating this declaration, he conferred the Roman citizenship upon all the cities of Italy,Attempt to unite Italy under Rome. proclaiming them to be free, asserted for the city and people of Rome and for Italy the rights of the Empire and the function of choosing the Emperor, and cited the seven Electors and all others in Germany to appear before him and defend such rights as they claimed. Even the rival Emperors Lewis IV and Charles king of Bohemia (who had been chosen against Lewis in ad 1346) were included in this citation. The Romans applauded, but these latest assumptions, coupled with the whimsical antics into which Cola’s vanity had betrayed him, were too much for the public opinion of Italy, and far too much for the Pope. Clement VI denounced the Tribune as a heretic, and bade the Vicar depose him: the nobles gathered their forces against Rome, Cola quailed and fled; and when, after years of exile among the Apennines, and of captivity first in Bohemia (whither he had gone to win the favour of Charles IV), and afterwards at Avignon,s he was sent back to Rome by Pope Innocent VI under the wing of Cardinal Albornoz,ad 1354. he perished after a brief spell of authority, torn to pieces by the fierce and fickle populace.Cola’s character and ideas. Cola, with some learning, and a passionate love of antiquity, possessed dazzling eloquence and histrionic power. But he had no grasp of actualities, no sense of what was possible, no faculty for prompt decision, and what was no less fatal, he lacked both military skill and physical courage. In his later career he was by turns a Ghibeline and a Guelf, equally willing to bid for the favour of the Emperor and for the support of the Pope. His appeals were made, not to democratic principles but to antiquity, to the unquenched faith in the name of Rome, to that nascent spirit of Italian nationality which resented the intrusion of the foreigner. The idea of an Italy united with Rome for its capital is the only one of his dreams which proved, after five centuries, to be ultimately realizable; but his career did nothing to bring it nearer. He is memorable not as a creator of new ideas, but as one of the last and most fanciful exponent of those old ideas which were destined soon thereafter to fade and vanish away, as the moon’s light dies out under the brightening dawn. This dawn, however, was as yet scarcely visible. Men’s minds still lay under the old spell. The acts and plans of the Tribune, though they astonished his contemporaries by their boldness, do not seem to have been deemed either so strange or so utterly unpractical as they appear to us to-day. In the breasts of men like Petrarch, who loved Rome even more than they distrusted her people, the enthusiasm of Cola found a sympathetic echo: others scorned and denounced him as an upstart, a demagogue, possibly a heretic, certainly a rebel. But both friends and enemies seem to have comprehended and regarded as natural his feelings and designs, which were altogether those of his age. Being, however, a mere matter of imagination, not of reason, having no anchor, so to speak, in realities, no true relation to the world as it then stood, these schemes of republican revival were as transient and unstable as they were quick of growth and gay of colour. As the authority of the Popes became consolidated, and free municipalities disappeared elsewhere throughout Italy, the dream of a renovated Rome at length withered up and fell and died. Its last struggle was made in the conspiracy of Stephen Porcaro,ad 1453. in the time of Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and from that time onward there was no question of the supremacy of the bishop within his holy city.

  It is never without a certain regret that we watch the disappearance of a belief, however illusive, around which the love and reverence of mankind once clung. But this illusion need be the less regretted in that it had only the feeblest influence for good on the state of mediaeval Rome.Causes of the failure of the struggle for independence. During the three centuries that lie between Arnold of Brescia and Porcaro, the disorders of Rome were hardly less violent than they had been in the Dark Ages, and to all appearance worse than those of any other European city. There was a want not only of fixed authority, but of those elements of social stability which the other cities of Italy possessed. In the greater republics of Lombardy and Tuscany the bulk of the population were artizans, hard-working orderly people; while above them stood a prosperous middle class, engaged mostly in commerce, and having in their system of tradeguilds an organization both firm and flexible. It was by foreign trade that Genoa, Venice, and Pisa became great, as it was the wealth acquired by manufacturing industry that enabled Milan and Florence to overcome and incorporate the territorial aristocracies which surrounded them.

  Rome possessed neither source of riches. She was ill-placed for trade; having no market she produced no goods to be disposed of, and the unhealthiness which long neglect had brought upon her Campagna made its fertility unavailable. Already she stood as she stood down to our own time, lonely and isolated, a desert at her very gates.Internal condition of the city. The people. As there was no industry, so there was nothing that deserved to be called a citizen class. The people were a mere rabble, prompt to follow the demagogue who flattered their vanity, prompter still to desert him in the hour of danger. Superstition was with them a matter of national pride, but they lived too near sacred things to feel much reverence for them: they ill-treated the Pope and fleeced the pilgrims who crowded to their shrines: they were probably the only community in Europe that sent no recruit to the armies of the Cross. Priests, monks, and all the nondescript hangers-on of an ecclesiastical court formed a large part of the population; while of the rest many were supported in a state of half-mendicancy by the countless religious foundations, themselves enriched by the gifts or the plunder of Latin Christendom.The nobility. The noble families were numerous, turbulent, ferocious; they were surrounded by bands of unruly retainers, and waged a constant war against each other from their castles in the adjoining country or in the streets of the city itself. Had things been left to take their natural course, one of these families, the Colonna, for instance, or the Orsini, would probably have ended by overcoming its rivals, and have established, as was the case in the republics of Lombardy, Romagna, and Tuscany, a ‘signoria’ or local tyranny, like those which had once prevailed in the cities of Greece.The bishop. But the presence of the sacerdotal power, as it had hindered the growth of feudalism, stood also in the way of such a developement as this, and in so far aggravated the confusion of the city. Although the Pope did not till the fifteenth century establish his title as legitimate sovereign, he was by far the most considerable person in Rome, and the only one whose authority had both a permanent and an official character. But the reign of each pontiff was short; he had no military force, he was frequently—and from 1305 till 1378 continuously—absent from his see. He was, moreover, very often a member of one of the great families, and, as such, no better than a faction leader at home, while venerated by the rest of Europe as the Universal Priest.

  The Emperor.The person who should have been to Rome what the national king was to the cities of France, or England, or Germany, was the Emperor. But he was like one of those wandering hero-spectres in the Odyssey who draw from a draught of blood a momentary vitality, and then relapse into shadowy feebleness. When he came with an army, and the streets of Rome were filled with slaughter, he secured a few days or weeks of power. At other times his phantom authority did little more than furnish a pretext to the Colonna and other Ghibeline chieftains for their opposition to the papal party. Even his abstract rights were matter of controversy. The Popes, whose predecessors had been content to govern as the lieutenants of Charles and Otto, now maintained that Rome as a spiritual city could not be subject to any temporal jurisdiction, and that she was therefore not really a part of the Emperor’s dominions, though at the same time his capital. Not only, it was urged, had Constantine yielded up Rome to Sylvester and his successors, Lothar the Saxon had at his coronation formally renounced his sovereignty by doing homage to the pontiff and receiving the crown as his vassal. The Popes felt then as they feel now, that their dignity and influence would suffer if they should even appear to admit in their place of residence the jurisdiction of a civil potentate, and although they could not secure their own authority, they were at least able to exclude any other. Hence it was that they were so uneasy whenever an Emperor came to them to be crowned, that they raised up difficulties in his path, and endeavoured to be rid of him as soon as possible. And here something must be said of the programme,Visits of the Emperors to Rome. as one may call it, of these imperial visits to Rome, and of the marks of their presence which the Germans left behind them, remembering always that after the time of Frederick the Second it was rather the exception than the rule for an Emperor to be crowned in his capital at all.

  The traveller who to-day enters Rome by the railway from the north, slips in before he is aware, is huddled into a vehicle at the terminus, and set down at his hotel in the middle of the modern town before he has caught a glimpse of the city from a distance. Fifty years ago when he came overland from Tuscany along the bleak road that passes near Veii and crosses the Milvian bridge, he had indeed from the slopes of the Ciminian range a splendid prospect of the sea-like Campagna, girdled in by glittering hills, but of the city he saw no sign, save the pinnacle of St. Peter’s, until he was within the walls. Far otherwise was it in the Middle Ages.Their approach. Then travellers of every grade, from the humble pilgrim to the new-made archbishop who came in the pomp of a lengthy train to receive from the Pope the pallium of his office, approached from the north or northeast side; following a track along the hilly ground on the Tuscan side of the Tiber until they halted on the brow of Monte Mario—the Mount of Joyt —and saw the city of their solemnities lie spread before them, from the great pile of the Lateran far away upon the Coelian hill, to the basilica of St. Peter’s at their feet. They saw it not, as now, a sea of billowy cupolas, but a mass of low, red-roofed houses, varied by tall brick towers, and at rarer intervals by masses of ancient ruin, then larger far than now; while over all rose those two monuments of the best of the heathen Emperors, monuments that still look down, serenely changeless, on the armies of new nations and the festivals of a new religion—the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan.

  Their entrance.From Monte Mario the Teutonic host descended, when they had paid their orisons, into the Neronian field, the piece of flat land that lies outside the gate of St. Angelo.u Here it was the custom for the elders of the Romans to meet the elected Emperor, present their charters for confirmation, and receive his oath to preserve their good customs.x Then a procession was formed: the priests and monks, who had come out with hymns to greet the Emperor, led the way; the knights and soldiers of Rome, such as they were, came next; then the monarch, followed by a long array of Transalpine chivalry. Passing into the city they advanced to St. Peter’s, where the Pope, surrounded by his clergy, stood on the great staircase of the basilica to welcome and bless the Roman king. On the next day came the coronation, with ceremonies too elaborate for description,y ceremonies which, we may well believe, were seldom duly completed. Far more usual were other rites, of which the book of ritual makes no mention, unless they are to be counted among the ‘good customs of the Romans’; the clang of war-bells, the battle-cry of German and Italian combatants.Hostility of Pope and people to the Germans. The Pope, when he could not keep the Emperor from entering Rome, required him to leave the bulk of his host without the walls, and if foiled in this, sought safety in raising up plots and seditions against his too powerful friend. The Roman people, on the other hand, violent as they often were against the Pope, had nevertheless a sort of national pride in him. Very different were their feelings towards the Teutonic chieftain, who came from a far land to receive in their city, yet without thanking them for it, the ensign of a power which the prowess of their forefathers had won. Bereft of their ancient right to choose the universal bishop, they clung all the more desperately to the belief that it was they who chose the universal prince; and were mortified afresh when each successive sovereign contemptuously scouted their claims, and paraded before their eyes his rude barbarian cavalry. Thus it was that a Roman sedition was the usual accompaniment of a Roman coronation. The three revolts against Otto the Great have been already described. His grandson Otto the Third, in spite of his passionate fondness for the city, was met by the same faithlessness and hatred, and departed at last in despair at the failure of his attempts at conciliation.z A century afterwards Henry the Fifth’s coronation produced violent tumults, occasioned by his seizing the Pope and cardinals in St. Peter’s, and keeping them prisoners till they submitted to his terms. Remembering this, Pope Hadrian the Fourth would fain have forced the troops of Frederick Barbarossa to remain without the walls, but the rapidity of their movements disconcerted his plans and anticipated the resistance of the Roman populace. Having established himself in the Leonine city,a Frederick barricaded the bridge over the Tiber under the fortress of St. Angelo, and was duly crowned in St. Peter’s. But the rite was scarcely finished when the Romans, who had assembled in arms on the Capitol, dashed over the bridge, fell upon the Germans, and were with difficulty repulsed by the personal efforts of the Emperor. Into the city, whose narrow streets and thick-set strongholds made advance dangerous, he did not venture to pursue them, nor was he at any period of his reign able to make himself master of the whole of it. Finding themselves similarly baffled, his successors at last accepted their position, and were content to take the crown on the Pope’s conditions and depart without further question.

  Memorials of the Germanic Emperors in Rome.Coming so seldom and remaining for so short a time, it is not wonderful that the Teutonic Emperors should, in the seven centuries from Charles the Great to Charles the Fifth, have left fewer marks of their presence in Rome than Titus or Hadrian alone has done; fewer and less considerable even than those which tradition attributes to Servius Tullius and the elder Tarquin. Those monuments which do exist are just sufficient to make the absence of all others more conspicuous. The most important dates from the time of Otto the Third, the only Emperor who attempted to make Rome his permanent residence.Of Otto the Third. Of the palace, possibly nothing more than a tower, which he built on the Aventine, no trace has been discovered; but the church, founded by him to receive the ashes of his friend the martyred St. Adalbert, may still be seen upon the island in the Tiber. In it there stands, in front of the high altar, an ancient marble font which shews upon one side a figure of St. Adalbert, and on another side one of the Emperor himself, both executed in the rude style of the eleventh century. Having received from Benevento relics supposed to be those of Bartholomew the Apostle,b it became dedicated to that saint, and is at present the church of San Bartolommeo in Isola, whose quaintly picturesque bell-tower of red brick, now grey with extreme age, looks out from among the orange-trees of a convent garden over the swift-eddying yellow waters of the Tiber.

  Of Otto the Second.Otto the Second, son of Otto the Great, died at Rome, and lies buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s, the only Emperor who has found a resting-place among the graves of the Popes.c His tomb is not far from that of his nephew Pope Gregory the Fifth: it is a plain one of roughly chiselled marble. The lid of the superb porphyry sarcophagus in which he lay for a time now serves as the great font of St. Peter’s, and may be seen in the baptismal chapel on the left of the entrance of the church, not far from the monument to the last of the English Stuarts. Last of all must be mentioned a curious relic of the Emperor Frederick the Second,Of Frederick the Second. the prince whom of all others one would least expect to see honoured in the city of his foes. It is an inscription in the palace of the Conservators upon the Capitoline hill, built into the wall of the great staircase, and relates the victory of Frederick’s army over the Milanese, and the capture of the carrocciod of the rebel city, which he sends as a trophy to his faithful Romans. These are all or nearly all the traces of her Teutonic lords that Rome has preserved till now. Pictures indeed there are in abundance, from the mosaic of the Scala Santa at the Laterane and the curious frescoes in the church of Santi Quattro Incoronati,f down to the paintings of the Sistine antechapel and the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican, where the triumphs of the Popedom over all its foes are set forth with matchless art and equally matchless unveracity. But these are mostly long subsequent to the events they describe, and these all the world knows.

  Associations of the highest interest would have attached to the churches in which the imperial coronation was performed—a ceremony which, whether we regard the dignity of the performers or the splendour of the adjuncts, was probably the most imposing that Europe has known. But old St. Peter’s disappeared in the end of the fifteenth century, not long after the last Roman coronation, that of Frederick the Third, while the basilica of St. John Lateran, in which Lothar the Saxon and Henry the Seventh were crowned, damaged by time and by fire and an earthquake in the fourteenth century, has been so wofully modernized that we can hardly figure it to ourselves as the same building.g

  Causes of the want of mediaeval monuments in Rome.Bearing in mind what was the social condition of Rome during the Middle Ages, it becomes easier to understand the architectural barrenness which at first excites the visitor’s surprise. Rome had no temporal sovereign, and there were therefore only two classes who could build at all, the nobles and the clergy. Of these, the former had seldom the wealth, and never the taste, which would have enabled them to construct palaces graceful as the Venetian or massively grand as the Florentine and Genoese.Barbarism of the aristocracy. Moreover, the constant practice of war within the city made defence the first object of a house, beauty and convenience the second. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century, fortresses rather than mansions were what the great families needed. The nobility, therefore, either adapted ancient edifices to their purpose or built out of their materials those huge square towers of brick, a few of which still frown over the narrow streets in the older parts of Rome. We may judge of their number from the statement that the senator Brancaleone levelled one hundred and forty of them, as Frederick I had in his time destroyed a good many. With perhaps no more than one exception, that of the so-called House of Rienzo, a building obviously older by at least two centuries than the Tribune’s time, these towers are the only domestic edifices in the city erected before the middle of the fifteenth century. The vast palaces to which strangers now flock for the sake of the picture galleries they contain, have been most of them constructed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, a few even later. Among the earliest is that Palazzo Cenci,h whose gloomy low-browed arch so powerfully affected the imagination of Shelley.

  Why more was not done by the clergy.It was no want of wealth that hampered the architectural efforts of the clergy, for large revenues flowed in upon them from every corner of Christendom. A good deal was actually spent upon the erection or repairs of churches and convents, although with a less liberal hand than that of such great Transalpine prelates as Hugh of Lincoln or Conrad of Cologne. But the Popes always needed money for their projects of ambition, and in times when disorder and corruption were at their height the work of building stopped altogether. Thus it was that after the time of the Carolingians scarcely a church was erected, though some were repaired and enlarged, until the beginning of the twelfth century,ad 1308-1377. when the reforms of Hildebrand had breathed new zeal into the priesthood. The Babylonish captivity of Avignon, as it was called, with the Great Schism of the West that followed upon it,ad 1378-1417. was the cause of a second similar intermission, which lasted nearly a century and a half.

  Tendency of the Roman builders to adhere to the ancient manner.At every time, however, even when his work went on most briskly, the labours of the Roman architect took the direction of restoring and readorning old churches rather than of erecting new ones. While the Transalpine countries, except in a few favoured spots, such as Provence and part of the Rhineland, remained during several ages with few and rudely built stone churches, Rome possessed, as the inheritance of the earlier Christian centuries, a profusion of houses of worship, some of them still unsurpassed in splendour, and far more than adequate to the needs of her diminished population. In repairing these from time to time, the original form and style of work were, down to the days of the Renaissance, in most cases preserved, while in constructing new churches, the abundance of models, beautiful in themselves and hallowed as well by antiquity as by religious feeling, enthralled the invention of the workman, bound him down to be at best a faithful imitator, and forbade him to deviate at pleasure from the old-established manner. Thus it befell that while his brethren throughout the rest of Europe were passing by successive steps from the old Roman and Byzantine styles to Romanesque, and from Romanesque to Pointed, the Roman architect scarcely departed from the plan and arrangements of the primitive basilica. This is one chief reason why there is so little of Gothic work in Rome, so little even of Romanesque like that of Pisa.Absence of Gothic in Rome. What there is appears chiefly in the pointed window, more rarely in the arch, seldom or never in spire or tower or column. Only one of the existing churches of Rome is Gothic throughout, and that, the Dominican church of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva, was built by foreign monks. In some of the other churches, and especially in the cloisters of the convents, instances may be observed of the same style: in others slight traces, by accident or design almost obliterated.i

  Destruction and alteration of the old buildings:The mention of obliteration suggests a third cause of the comparative want of mediaeval buildings in the city—the constant depredations and changes of which she has been the subject. Ever since the time of Constantine Rome has been a city of destruction, and Christians have vied with pagans, citizens with enemies, in urging on the fatal work. Her siege and capture by the Norman Robert Wiscard,By invaders.j the ally of Hildebrand against Henry the Fourth, was far more ruinous than the attacks of the Goths or Vandals, and itself yields in atrocity to the sack of Rome in ad 1527 by the soldiers of the Catholic king and most pious Emperor Charles the Fifth.kBy the Romans of the Middle Ages. Since the days of the first barbarian invasions the Romans have gone on building with materials taken from the ancient temples, theatres, law-courts, baths, and villas, stripping them of their gorgeous casings of marble, pulling down their walls for the sake of the blocks of travertine, setting up their own hovels on the top or in the midst of these majestic piles. Thus it has been with the memorials of paganism: a somewhat different cause has contributed to the disappearance of the mediaeval churches. What pillage, or fanaticism, or the wanton lust of destruction did in the one case, the ostentatious zeal of modern times has done in the other.By modern restorers of churches. The era of the final establishment of the Popes as temporal sovereigns of the city is also that of the supremacy of the Renaissance style in architecture. After the time of Nicholas the Fifth, the pontiff against whom, it will be remembered, the spirit of municipal freedom made its last struggle in the conspiracy of Porcaro, everything was built in the neo-classic style, and the prevailing enthusiasm for the antique produced a corresponding dislike to everything mediaeval, a dislike conspicuous in men like Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, from whom the grandeur of modern Rome may be said to begin. Not long after their time the great religious movement of the sixteenth century, while triumphing in the north of Europe, was in the south met and overcome by a counter-reformation in the bosom of the old church herself, and the construction or restoration of ecclesiastical buildings became again the passion of the devout.l No employment, whether it be called a pleasure or a duty, could have been better suited to the court and aristocracy of Rome. They were indolent; wealthy, and fond of displaying their wealth; full of good taste, and anxious, especially when advancing years had chased away youth’s pleasures, to be full of good works also. Popes and cardinals and the heads of the great families vied with one another in building new churches and restoring or enlarging those they found till little of the old was left; raising over them huge cupolas, substituting massive pilasters for the single-shafted columns, adorning the interior with a profusion of rare marbles, of carving and gilding, of frescoes and altar-pieces by the best masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. None but a bigoted mediaevalist can refuse to acknowledge the warmth of tone, the repose, the stateliness, of the churches of modern Rome; but even in the midst of admiration the sated eye turns away from the wealth of ponderous ornament, and longs for the clear pure colour, the simple yet grand proportions, that give a charm to the buildings of an earlier age.

  Existing relics of the Dark and Middle Ages.Few of the ancient churches have escaped untouched; many have been altogether rebuilt. There are also some, however, in which the modernizers of the sixteenth and subsequent centuries have spared two features of the old structure, its rounded apse or tribune and its bell-tower. The interior of the concave tribune is usually covered with mosaics,The mosaics. exceedingly interesting, both from the ideas they express and as the only monuments of pictorial art that remain to us from the Dark Ages.m To speak of them, however, as they deserve to be spoken of, would involve a digression for which there is no space here. The campanile or bell-tower is a quaint little square brick tower, of no great height, usually standing detached from the church, and having in its topmost, sometimes also in its other upper stories, several arcade windows, divided by tiny marble pillars.m What with these campaniles, then far more numerous than they are now, and with the huge brick fortresses of the nobles, towers must have held in the landscape of the mediaeval city very much the part which domes do now. Although less imposing, they were probably more picturesque, the rather as in the earlier part of the Middle Ages the houses and churches, which are now mostly crowded together on the flat of the Campus Martius, were scattered over the heights and slopes of the Coelian, Aventine, and Esquiline hills, regions which were deserted after the ruin wrought by Robert Wiscard, and which remained almost unbuilt upon till the recent growth of the city has (since 1870) begun to cover the Esquiline and part of the Coelian with houses.n Modern Rome lies chiefly on the opposite or north-eastern and north-western sides of the Capitol, and the change from the old to the new site of the city was not completed until the sixteenth century. The Rome of Frederick Barbarossa and Arnold of Brescia lay mostly round the Capitol and between the Capitol and the Tiber; it included the old suburb of Trastevere, but not the region near St. Peter’s, which constituted the (then still separate) Leonine city. In ad 1536, in anticipation of the entry of Charles the Fifth, the rebuilding of the Capitol (afterwards carried on by Michael Angelo) was begun upon foundations said to have been laid by the first Tarquin; and the palace of the Senator, the greatest municipal edifice of Rome, which had hitherto looked towards the Forum and the Coliseum, was made to front in the direction of St. Peter’s and the modern town, which had then already begun to spread out over the old Campus Martius and the slopes of the Quirinal.

  Changed aspect of the city of RomeThe Rome of to-day is no more like the city of Rienzo than she is to the city of Trajan; just as the Roman church of the twentieth century differs profoundly, complete as her historical continuity may appear, from the church of Hildebrand. But among all their changes, both church and city have kept themselves wonderfully free from the intrusion of foreign, or at least of Teutonic, elements, and have faithfully preserved at all times something of an old Roman character.Analogy between her architecture and her civil and ecclesiastical constitution. Latin Christianity inherited from the imperial system of old that firmly knit yet flexible organization, which was one of the grand secrets of its power. The great men whom mediaeval Rome gave to or trained up for the Papacy were, like their predecessors of the ancient world, administrators, legislators, statesmen; seldom enthusiasts themselves, but perfectly understanding how to use and guide the enthusiasm of others—of the French and German crusaders, of such men as Francis of Assisi and Dominic and Ignatius. Between Catholicism in Italy and Catholicism in Germany or England there was always, as there is still, a perceptible difference. So also, if the analogy be not too fanciful, was it with Rome the city.Preservation of an antique character in both. Socially she seemed always drifting towards feudalism; yet she never fell into its grasp. Materially, her architecture was at one time considerably influenced by Pointed forms, yet Gothic never became, as in the rest of Europe, the dominant style. It approached Rome late, and departed from her early, so that we scarcely notice its presence, and seem to pass almost without a break from the old Romanesqueo to the new Graeco-Roman of the Renaissance. Thus regarded, the history of the city, both in her political fortunes and in her buildings, is seen to be intimately connected with that of the Holy Empire itself. The Empire in its title and its pretensions expressed the idea of the permanence of the institutions of the ancient world; Rome the city had, in externals at least, carefully preserved their traditions: the names of her magistracies, the character of her buildings, all spoke of antiquity, and gave it a strange and shadowy life in the midst of new races and new forms of faith.

  Based on the feeling of the unity of mankind, the Empire was a perpetuation of the Roman dominion into which the old nationalities had been absorbed,Relation of the city and the Empire. with the addition of the Christian element which had created a new nationality that was also universal. By the extension of her citizenship to all her subjects heathen Rome had become the common home, and, figuratively, even the local dwelling-place of the civilized races of man. By the theology of the time Christian Rome had been made the mystical type of humanity, the one flock of the faithful scattered over the whole earth, the holy city whither, as to the temple on Moriah, all the Israel of God should come up to worship. She was not merely an image of the mighty world, she was the mighty world itself in miniature. The pastor of her local church is also the universal bishop; the seven suffragan bishops who consecrate him are overseers of petty sees in Ostia, Antium, and the like, towns lying close round Rome: the cardinal priests and deacons who join these seven in electing him derive their title to be princes of the Church, the supreme spiritual council of the Christian world, from the incumbency of a parochial cure within the precincts of the city. Similarly, her ruler, the Emperor, is ruler of mankind; he is deemed to be chosen by the acclamations of her people:p he must be duly crowned in one of her basilicas. She is, like Jerusalem of old, the mother of us all.

  There is yet another way in which the record of the domestic contests of Rome throws light upon the history of the Empire. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth her citizens did not cease to demand in the name of the old republic their freedom from the tyranny of the nobles and the Pope, and their right to rule over the world at large. These efforts—selfish and fantastic we may call them, yet men like Petrarch did not disdain to them their sympathy—issued from the same theories and were directed to the same ends as those which inspired Otto the Third and Frederick Barbarossa and Dante himself. They witness to the same incapacity to form any ideal for the future except a revival of the past; the same belief that one universal state is both desirable and possible, but possible only through the means of Rome: the same refusal to admit that a right which has once existed can ever be extinguished. In the days of the Renaissance these notions were passing silently away: the succeeding century brought with it misfortunes that broke the spirit of the nation. Italy was the battlefield of Europe: her wealth became the prey of a rapacious soldiery: Florence, the noblest of her republics, was conquered by an unfeeling Emperor, and handed over to a despot as a pledge of amity to a selfish Medicean Pope.Extinction of the Florentine republic,ad 1530. When the hope of independence had been lost, the people turned away from politics to live for art and literature, and found, before many generations had passed, how little such devotion could compensate for the departure of a national spirit, and of the activity of civic life. A century after the golden days of Ariosto and Raphael, Italian literature had become frigid and affected, while Italian art was dying of mannerism.

  At length, after long ages of sloth, the stagnant waters were troubled. The Romans, who had lived in listless contentment under the paternal sway of the Popes, received new ideas from the advent of the revolutionary armies of France, and found the papal system, since its re-establishment in 1815 as an ecclesiastical bureaucracy, less tolerable than it had been of yore.Feelings of the modern Italians towards Rome. When the rest of Italy had been delivered from the rule of Hapsburgs and Bourbons, the name of Rome became again a rallying-cry for the patriots of Italy, but in a sense most unlike the old one. The contemporaries of Arnold and Rienzo desired freedom as a step to universal domination: their descendants, inspired by national patriotism as well as by civic pride, more wisely sought to be the capital of the Italian kingdom. Dante prayed for a monarchy of the world, a reign of peace and Christian brotherhood: those who, five centuries later, invoked his name as the earliest prophet of their creed strove after an idea that never crossed his mind—the gathering of all Italians into a national state. Yet this he and they had in common,—they and he alike desired to exclude the Papacy from the sphere of secular government.

  One who watched the long struggle of the Italians to make Rome the free capital of a united nation, from the days of the Mazzinian triumvirate of 1849 to the happier day when the army of Victor Emmanuel passed through the Porta Pia, may be permitted to recall the sentiments of that time, now grown dim to the new generation.

  Dull common-sense politicians in other countries did not then understand this passion for Rome as a capital, and used to lecture the Italians on their flightiness. The Italian patriots did not themselves argue or pretend that the banks of the Tiber were a suitable site for a capital. They admitted, in the days before 1870 to which I am referring, that Rome was lonely, unhealthy, and in a bad strategical position; that she had no particular facilities for trade; that her people were less thrifty and industrious than the Tuscans or the Piedmontese. Nevertheless all Italy cried with one voice for Rome, believing that her national life could never thrill with a strong and steady pulsation till the ancient capital had become the nation’s heart. They felt that it was owing to Rome—Rome pagan as well as Christian—that they had once played so grand a part in the drama of European history, and that the recollections of those glorious days had done much to create the passion for national unity. This enthusiasm for a famous name was substantially the same feeling as that which created and hallowed the Holy Empire of the Middle Ages. The events which on both sides of the Atlantic befell during the momentous forty years between 1830 and 1870 proved that men were not then, any more than they had ever been before, chiefly governed by calculations of material profit and loss. Sentiments, fancies, theories, retained their power; the spirit of poetry had not wholly passed away from politics. Strange, therefore, as seems to us the worship paid to the name of mediaeval Rome by those who saw the sins and the misery of her people, it can hardly have been an intenser feeling than was the imaginative reverence wherewith the patriots of Italy during those years of struggle looked on the city whence, as from a fountain, all the streams of their national life had sprung, and in which, as in an ocean, they were all again to mingle.

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE EAST ROMAN EMPIRE

  Chap. XVIIDuring the Middle Ages, Western statesmen and churchmen, Western thinkers and writers, took little note of the Eastern Empire which stubbornly held its ground at Constantinople down to ad 1453. Its claim to represent the ancient dominion of Rome was practically ignored. Its splendid efforts in the defence of civilization against the fierce tribes of the North, and the still more formidable Musulmans of the East, received slight recognition, and scarcely any support. Even in later times the part played by the people and rulers of New Rome was inadequately appreciated, and it is only in our own days that history has begun to atone for this long neglect.a

  The two imperial lines, which the revolt of Italy and the coronation of Charles the Great in ad 800 substituted for the one Roman Emperor whom Christian doctrine had required and continued to require, were, after that fateful year, always rivals and usually unfriendly rivals. But their direct relations either of negotiation or of armed hostility were infrequent. Each went its own way. Each had foes of its own to confront. Each affected the other much less than might have been expected, when it is remembered that each maintained its claim to be the heir of Rome, and to perpetuate the political and religious traditions of the early Christian Emperors. Yet few as the points of contact were, the history of the East Roman is a necessary complement to that of the West Roman Empire, for the course of events in each throws an instructive light upon the course of events in the other. As the divergences are worth noting, so too are the resemblances. Both Empires rested upon the memories of Rome. Both stood in a peculiar relation to the Christian Church. Both had to deal with the instreaming races of the North. But these conditions of life told differently upon the one and upon the other, and gave a different direction to their respective fortunes.

  To sketch, even in outline, the long and chequered and romantic history of the Eastern Empire would be altogether outside the scope of this book. But from among the salient features that mark its annals I may single out for comment a few which specially serve to illustrate the parallel or divergent history of the West.

  Slight effect on the East Roman Empire of the coronation of Charles the Great.It has already been remarked (see p. 26 and p. 62, supra) that neither the extinction of the line of Emperors who reigned in the West down to ad 476, nor the establishment of a second imperial line at Old Rome by the coronation of Charles the Great in ad 800, was an event of critical significance in the history of the East Roman realm. By the event of ad 476 the Eastern monarch became the sole legal representative of Roman claims, claims still admitted in theory, to the lordship of the whole Western world. But the only practical result of this nominally enlarged authority was to induce, fifty years afterwards, Justinian’s reconquest of North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy, territories which added nothing to the effective strength of the Empire, and which were successively lost, Africa in the seventh, Sicily and Sardinia in the ninth, Italy partly in the eighth and partly in the eleventh century. By the event of ad 800 the right to represent Rome, carrying with it the headship of the whole Christian commonwealth, was withdrawn from the Eastern line, so far as the Roman Church and the Franks could withdraw it, so that such titular sovereignty, by this time shadowy, as still remained to the Roman Emperor over the world at large, became henceforth vested in those Western potentates, first Frankish, then Italian, ultimately German, who could obtain it from the hands of the Pope, or (in later days) by the election of the German princes. But this effort to transfer the claim to universal monarchy did not affect the legal rights of the Eastern sovereign in the countries which actually obeyed him, and affected but slightly the position he held towards the states that bordered on his own. Though he had lost Rome he continued to hold Southern Italy; nor did any of his nearer provinces in Thrace, or Greece, or Asia shew any signs of turning to his new Teutonic rivals. To the Westerns (other than the Southern Italians) he was already merely a name; so none of their peoples or cities, except Venice, thought of cleaving to him. To the Easterns he had been, and still remained, not only the national monarch of whom they were proud, but the legitimate heir of Old Rome; for the coronation of Charles in which the Pope, the citizens of Old Rome, and the Franks had joined, was in their eyes an outrageous usurpation. Thus the Eastern Empire was, for practical purposes, no more weakened by the incoming of Charles, and afterwards of Otto the Great, than it had been strengthened by the disappearance of Romulus Augustulus in ad 476. We may therefore cast our glance over its history as a whole, covering a thousand years from the accession of Arcadius in ad 395—the point at which the real political separation of East and West begins—to the taking of Constantinople by Mohammed the Second in ad 1453.

  Constant struggles of the Eastern Empire:A long history! longer than that of any European monarchy, or indeed of any monarchy save those of China and Japan; and a history which amazes us by the power of recovery and rejuvenescence which this singular state displays. From the time of Justinian onwards, it had to support, against formidable enemies on either side, a veritable and unending struggle for life, longer and more perilous than the struggle which in earlier days Rome had for centuries maintained against the Samnites, against Carthage, and against the Italian allies.

  against the Northern barbarians,On the north swarms of fierce savages poured down in succession upon it from the wilds of Scythia. First, about the beginning of the sixth century, came various Slavonic tribes. Then the Avars, established along the Theiss and the Middle Danube,ad 619 and 626. began a long series of desolating raids, and twice appeared before Constantinople. Then, early in the seventh century, the Bulgarians, a Finnish people, moved out of their old seats on the Volga and the Kama, occupied the region which now bears their name, laid waste and ultimately settled in the adjoining parts of Thrace (where they became blent with, and adopted the speech of the Slavic tribes), and threatened Constantinople itself. Further to the north-east, the Petchenegs, also a Finnic or Tatar race, having established themselves in the steppes of the Dnieper and the Don, frequently attacked the frontiers; and somewhat later, the Russians (perhaps led by chieftains of Scandinavian stock), descending the Dnieper in their light boats and crossing the Euxine, were twice repelled with difficulty from the walls of the capital. Of all these enemies the Bulgarians were the most dangerous because the nearest. The Emperor Basil II reduced them in the tenth century to nominal subjection, but they regained their freedom within less than a century, and continued to threaten the Empire until they fell before the rising power of the Ottoman Turks. While the greater part of Thrace had thus been overspread by the Bulgarians, the North-west provinces had passed to the Slavs, the power of whose leading kingdom culminated in the reign of the Servian Tsar Stephen Dushan in the thirteenth century. Thus, speaking broadly, it may be said that, from the middle of the sixth century onwards, the Empire was constantly at war with these Northern barbarians, and often seemed on the point of succumbing to their attacks.

  against the Musulman Arabs and Turks.Meantime it had to resist still more terrible foes advancing from the south. The first wave of Arab invasion tore away Syria and Egypt, rolled over Asia Minor, and carried a Musulman host to the shores of the Bosphorus (ad 673). After many long and fierce struggles the whole of Asia Minor was recovered, and in the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh century even Northern Syria (except Tyre and Damascus) and Armenia were reconquered by John Tzimiskes and Basil II. But in the middle of the eleventh the rise of the Seljukian Turks drove back the Romans from Syria, and by degrees forced them out of the eastern and central parts of Asia Minor.Battle of Manzikert,ad 1071. Armenia was lost for ever, and in the thirteenth century only a strip of country along the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora remained to Christianity. The ruin of Central and Southern Asia Minor, in earlier ages one of the most flourishing and populous regions of the world, dates from the devastating border wars in which Turks and Romans alternately harried it.

  Attack of the Crusaders,ad 1204.Yet neither the Bulgarians, nor the Arabs, nor the Seljukian sultans inflicted so deadly a blow on the Empire as did those from whom enmity ought least of all to have been expected. The Normans, after winning South Italy, attacked the Eastern Roman territories in Epirus, and were with difficulty repelled by Manual Comnenus. In ad 1204 a powerful fleet of Latin Christians, French, German, and Venetian, setting out on the Fourth Crusade, turned aside from the professed aim of their expedition, besieged and took Constantinople, and set up a short-lived line of Latin Emperors there.Latin Emperors,ad 1204-1261. From this catastrophe the Empire never really recovered. After the fall of the Latin dynasty a vigorous prince of East Roman stock and Orthodox faith, already reigning at Nicaea, regained the throne, and his successors, ruling mere fragments of the old territory in Europe and Asia, held the throne till the Ottoman Turks, by that time masters of the whole of its dominions on the European continent, captured the city in 1453.

  The record of these constant wars against two sets of enemies is a splendid record, for, sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other, the fortunes of the East Romans seemed often desperate. The admiration which their resistance excites becomes even greater when we reflect that the Empire had no natural frontiers easily defensible in war, and that it was frequently troubled by the struggles of rival aspirants for the crown. The causes of the strength it shewed for defence, and the source of the vitality which enabled it so often to recover from wounds apparently deadly, deserve to be examined.

  High among those causes is to be placed the perpetuation of the name and traditions of the ancient Roman power.Causes of the long resistance of the Eastern Empire. The thought that they were Romans, the heirs and representatives of the great ruling race which had brought the whole world under its sway, was the lifespring of this strangely mixed people, in whose veins there flowed scarcely any Italian blood, and very few of whom could speak the Roman tongue.Traditions of Rome. The Western peoples called them Greeks, as modern Europe has been wont to do. But as they were not Greeks in race, for the descendants of the Greek colonies on the Aegean and the Propontis can have contributed but a slight infusion of Greek blood, so neither, though their art and letters were Hellenistic, did they shew many of the distinctive qualities which had marked the Greeks of the classical ages. Still less were they Romans by stock or by character, though they called themselves, and were called throughout the East, by that title, perpetuated in the names Roum and Roumelia given to their territories, and the name Romaic used to describe their language. But the old name and the old institutions, changed indeed in the course of ages, but changed by no sudden break, gave them a sense of superiority over all other peoples, a pride and self-confidence which supported them in many a dark hour. This made them a nation, and indeed a nation which, though local diversities and local forms of speech survived, was for defensive purposes closely welded together. Though we hear of many insurrections in the capital, many contests for the crown between rival claimants, there is scarcely ever a racial or provincial revolt, seldom any attempt of a magnate to set himself up as ruler of an independent realm. The Empire stood one and indivisible against all its foes. This sentiment of an imperial nationality, no longer universal, but national in the strictest sense, because bound into one not only by political ties, but also by those of language, ideas, and manners,b became further intensified by the existence of one great centre of population.Strength of Constantinople. Constantinople gave strength to the Empire, through its incomparable position, all but impregnable to attack. It was an admirable centre for naval operations, since it touched both the Mediterranean and the Euxine, and could use the sea for expeditions to the distant points that were threatened. It was also a wonderful reservoir of national energy. Though the East Roman armies were mainly composed of the barbarian or semi-barbarian subjects who dwelt in the frontier provinces, the teeming population and the riches of the city intensified the spirit and pride of the whole people, and gave the Empire a heart whose pulsations were felt to the furthest extremities. In the tenth century, before the rise of the great Italian republics, Constantinople stood practically alone in the Christian world as a centre of commerce, wealth, and splendour, with a thousand inhabitants for every hundred that could be found in Old Rome or in the largest cities of Germany or Gaul.cThe civil administration. And Constantinople was also the centre of a well ordered administration such as existed nowhere else in the world. That highly organized civil service which ancient Rome had built up from the days of Julius Caesar to those of Diocletian had been preserved in full efficiency down into the twelfth century, in the end of and after which the signs of decay became more evident.d It powerfully contributed to hold the provinces together, to provide the government, always pressed by costly wars, with a revenue, and to maintain the public order and public confidence which enable industry and commerce to flourish. One may almost say that, as Constantinople was the heart, so the civil service supplied the nerves and sinews of the monarchy. In this respect the East Roman Empire stood contrasted with its Romano-Germanic sister. Charles the Great attempted to govern his wide dominions by imperial officers sent forth to carry out his orders and correct and control the action of the local magnates. But he had nothing that could be called an administrative system. Neither had Otto the Great or his Saxon, Franconian, or Swabian successors. The only permanent organization their realm possessed was the intricate and cumbrous machinery of feudalism, hardly better fitted for war than it was for advancement in the arts of peaceful life. And none of the Teutonic monarchs had a city which could be called in any true sense a capital. Least of all did they find such a centre in Rome, the most disaffected spot in their dominions.

  As an efficient civil administration helped to maintain the internal prosperity of the Empire, and enabled it to bear the cost of war, so the excellence of its military arrangements gave it strength for defence. The army was skilfully organized and carefully drilled: it had a system of scientific tactics: it drew recruits from outside the Empire as well as from the more warlike of the races that dwelt within. The fleet, efficiently appointed and trained, remained for a long time, perhaps down to the twelfth century, superior to any hostile navy it had to encounter. And the Easterns had at their disposal an extremely important implement of warfare in that mysterious ‘Romaic’ or ‘Greek’ Fire or ‘Sea Fire’ invented by Kallinikus in the seventh century—a liquid which they cast upon the vessels of an enemy, and which burnt or exploded where it fell. It often secured to them a victory, or covered them in retreat.e

  Despotic government of the Empire.The East Roman monarchy was a pure despotism. After the accession of Claudius Caesar, the third successor of Augustus, no one seems ever to have thought either of restoring the shattered republican constitution or of creating any monarchical constitution whatever, that is to say, any set of institutions designed to associate the people with the conduct of government, or to determine the succession to the throne, or to limit the authority of its occupant. In the ancient world monarchy had come to mean autocracy. For more than a thousand years the very idea of a regular constitution, in the Greek sense or old Roman sense, as well as in that mediaeval sense which re-emerged with the rise of the Italian republics in the twelfth century, seemed to have utterly vanished. It was assumed that the Emperor must be an irresponsible ruler. It was left to chance to determine who should be Emperor. A body called the Senate continued to exist, as it continued to exist at Old Rome, and it submissively recognized the person who had already made himself master of the city. But the crown was the price of the strongest. No body of persons had an effective legal right to choose its wearer. A palace intrigue, the favour of a queen, a rising in the streets, the caprice of an army returning from the field, threw it into the hands of some aspirant perhaps hitherto unknown: and he became at once a sort of God upon earth, sometimes entitled ‘Equal to the Apostles,’f approached with slavish prostrations, sole legislator and supreme judge, virtual master of the lives and property of all his subjects. The crimes by which he might have risen did not diminish the sanctity which his person received from the office. Despotism was of course tempered, as it must always be, by various environing influences, by the sentiment of the Church, by public opinion, sometimes expressing itself in sedition or insurrection, by the views and interests of the noble families of the capital, and (in later days) of the great land-holders in the rural districts. But these factors acted practically, not through any legal channels. Thus the Eastern Empire has only a dynastic, an ecclesiastical, and a military history. It has no constitutional history.Absence of any regular constitution. The Teutonic Empire, which, though an autocracy in theory, was never a despotism in fact, had in all its phases some sort of constitution, and what might be called a kind of political life. At several moments it became the theatre for a conflict of great principles. But the Eastern Empire had no political life whatever. In it no strife of principles arose. It was always substantially the same institution, which no one thought of changing—a monarchy not only above law but in so far outside law as that law had nothing to do with determining the person on whom it descended. In a state constantly at war this concentration of power in one hand had some advantages; just as the absence of regular rules of succession had the merit of giving to energy and ambition opportunities for displacing the incapable. Men of force came more readily to the top than they do in hereditary monarchies. There was of course a tendency for the throne to become settled in a family, for an Emperor usually tried to secure the succession for his son or some other relative either by publicly destining him for power, or by associating him as co-Emperor during his own life. Sometimes a woman of character was able to bestow the crown on successive husbands, who got in this way (perhaps by the aid of murder) a sort of title by affinity. But when the vigour of a reigning stock began to die out, the stock usually disappeared, and an upstart adventurer set up a new dynasty. Several times such a bold and strenuous man became the deliverer of the Empire from its foes. Heraclius, Leo the Isaurian, Basil the First, and the founder of the Comnenian line, were all men of conspicuous force and capacity. The advent of each marked a renewal of the aggressive power of the State.

  Association of the imperial government with the Orthodox Church.But of all the causes which prolonged the existence of the Eastern Empire the most potent was its association, one might say its identification, with the Orthodox Church. Religion had for a time been in the East a disruptive force. The theological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries had contributed to bring about the loss of Egypt and Syria to the Musulmans in the seventh century, for the Monophysites of those regions, hostile to the doctrine settled by the Council of Chalcedon, which was then dominant at Constantinople, offered only a feeble resistance to the invader. So in later days the diffusion of the so-called heresies of the Bogomiles or Paulicians weakened the loyalty of the North-western provinces. But the Orthodox faith, once it had been defined and determined by the first six Councils, fixed itself deep in the people of the capital and of the districts which formed the solid nucleus of the Empire, and presently grew into a bond of incalculable strength. Side by side with the pride in the Roman name, it created a national feeling far more intense than the sentiment of common subjection to a world-embracing power which had sprung up and become a unifying force under the Antonines and their successors. Some historians of the eighteenth century thought that Christianity hastened the fall of the Roman Empire. Rather may it be said that Christianity saved the Roman Empire. As it was the sense of one faith binding men into one commonwealth of the faithful that kept alive the imperial idea in the West, and enabled Charles and Otto to set up the ancient image on a new Teutonic pedestal, so it was the sense that they were the people chosen of God and Christ to defend that faith, a sense constantly stimulated by strife with heathen on the north and Musulmans on the south, that gave hope, courage, and unity to the East Romans all through the Dark and Middle Ages.g Well would it have been for them if in the last fatal years and months they could have so far abated their devotion to the minutiae of the Orthodox creed and to the claims of their own spiritual chief as to have bought by prompter, franker, and fuller concessions the help of the Pope and of Latin arms.h

  When we pass to consider the points in which the Eastern Empire may profitably be compared with that of its Western sister, three will be found to deserve special examination: the relations of each power to the Northern invaders, its relations to the Church, its relations to the traditions and institutions of ancient Rome.

  Relations of the Empire and the Church to the barbarians of the North.As from the fourth century onwards it was the mission and the glory of the Latin Church to convert and civilize the invading races of the North who descended upon the Western provinces,i so too did the Eastern Church and Empire, when they found, somewhat later, swarms of Slav and Bulgarian heathen settling on their borders, begin after a time to impart their culture to these formidable neighbours. Both divisions of the Christian world had the same task: both in a manner fulfilled it. Yet there are striking differences. The West had to deal chiefly with Teutonic peoples, most of them already partially Christianized (though many were at first Arians), and most of them well advanced beyond mere barbarism. Much of its work was done before the revolt of North Italy in the eighth century severed East and West. The East received the attacks of Slavonic and Finnish tribes, all heathen, all rude and fierce, and therewithal, if not inferior in natural intelligence, yet in a far lower stage of culture. When, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, and Lombards settled in the Roman provinces the imperial power was dying. These intruding settlers scarcely deemed themselves its enemies; and most of them soon began to cherish such of its institutions as survived, and to bow themselves to the teachings of the Latin Church.j They became easily blent with the Roman provincials. The Franks who stood out as the leading race presently became the defenders of the Popedom, took up the traditions of the old Empire, accepted the transference of its crown to their own sovereign, and kept it thenceforth in Teutonic hands. The Roman sceptre became their sceptre, and there remained no sense of antagonism between the children of the conquered and those of the conquerors. But in the East, though the Slavs who settled in Macedonia, Illyria, and Greece during the seventh and eighth centuries became Graecized and subjects, if somewhat unruly subjects, of the Emperor, the later Slavonic intruders, and still more the Finnish Bulgarians, came as savage pagan plunderers, destroyed such Roman civilization as they found and were thenceforth (with a few intervals of peace) deadly enemies. The Empire maintained a continual conflict with them.Conversion of the Bulgarians and Serbs. They were ultimately converted (the Bulgarians in ad 864, the Servians about the same time), and with their new faith they received the use of letters, the rudiments of law, and a certain measure of culture. Somewhat later, the same change passed upon the Russians, who, standing further away, came into less close and frequent contact with the East Romans, a contact sometimes of alliance and sometimes of warfare. Constantinople became to all these peoples the metropolis of religion and civilization, and the colour which their religion then received is still evident in all the churches of Eastern Europe. The peculiar spirit of Byzantine Christianity may be discerned to-day as well in the attitude of the Church of Russia to the Tsar as in the attitude of the Russian and Hellenic peoples to their clergy. But all these Danubian and trans-Danubian races, Serbs, Bulgars, Roumanians, and Russians, remained outside the circle of imperial traditions. They never imbibed the Roman spirit, never became absorbed into the secular civilization which New Rome had preserved.The barbarians never taken into the Empire. Still less did they so mingle with its population as to give to the East Roman realm that new life, that rich and varied developement of letters, thought, and art, which in Italy issued from the mingling of the Teutonic and Italic elements. There were occasional marriage alliances between the royal houses of these nations and the imperial houses. Not a few of the best generals of the Empire and some of its ablest sovereigns were of Slavonic, as still more were of Armenian blood. The pride of Constantinople might have refused to accept a barbarian king as Roman Emperor. Yet had it been possible for Simeon the mighty Bulgarian Tsar of the tenth century, himself, like the Gothic Theodorich, educated at Constantinople, or for Vladimir the Great who ruled the Russians eighty years later, to be crowned in St. Sophia as Charles had been crowned in St. Peter’s, the Eastern Empire might have widened its foundation, and have received an accession of strength sufficient to enable it to repel the Latin Crusaders in 1204 and to hold Asia Minor against the Seljukian Sultans. Simeon did indeed take the title of Basileus, and did obtain from Pope Nicholas I a grant of the imperial crown, as the price of his adhesion to the Latin Church: but nothing came of this brief alliance. Or, again, had the men of the Eastern Empire been strong enough to conquer, to incorporate and to assimilate the Balkanic peoples, such an infusion of new blood might have given it a fresh and long enduring life. That events took a different course, that the Empire, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians weakened one another by incessant strife, that the destroying Ottomans were thus, and by the apathy of Western Europe, permitted to overspread these vast provinces, and hold them in cruel bondage for many centuries, may well be deemed to be, like the extinction of the Ostrogothic race in Italy, one of the great and unredeemed catastrophes of history. Driven within ever narrowing limits, with a population that had now become slender and impoverished, the Eastern Empire perished. The peoples to the North—Bulgarians, Serbs of Servia and Bosnia, and Roumanians, crushed beneath the Ottoman yoke, were left far behind in the march of European civilization. Only within the last seventy or eighty years have they begun to add that new culture which the West has bestowed to the scanty relics of what they learned from Byzantium seven hundred years before.

  Relations of Church and Empire in the East and in the West.The Church was the mainstay as well of the Eastern as of the Western Empire. In the latter it recalled the imperial title to life: in the former it kept that title alive through many troublous centuries. But here the resemblance ends. In the West, the Latin Church found itself free to grow and develope without interference from the secular power. No Emperor after Constantine dwelt in Rome, and from ad 476 to ad 800 there was no Emperor at all in Italy.k The bishop of the imperial city had the field to himself. Even when strong men like Charles and Otto bore the sceptre, the head of the State was too distant and crossed the Alps too rarely to be able to impose a permanent restraint on the head of the Church. But in the East the Church sprang up under the shadow of the Empire, and remained thereafter, both ecclesiastically and spiritually, a stunted growth. In the days of Justinian, a high spirited African prelate remarked that the Greek bishops, having wealthy churches, were afraid to oppose the Emperor. Justinian, arrogating to himself the virtual control of the Church, kept the Patriarch of Constantinople bitted and bridled: and although the archbishop of the imperial city was always a personage to be reckoned with, capable of exerting a potent influence in ecclesiastical quarrels, and sometimes even in contests for the throne, he never disputed the civil supremacy of the Emperor, never, as did his brother at Old Rome, attempted to claim the right of selecting or deposing the successor of Constantine. Even when the loss of Syria and Egypt had practically removed from him the rivalry of the three ancient patriarchates of Jerusalem,Inferior position of the Eastern Patriarch. Alexandria, and Antioch, the ecclesiastical head of the Eastern hierarchy could not pretend to the authority that belonged to the Latin Patriarch, who held the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.l In his chair of Constantinople no apostle had sat: of none of his predecessors had the fateful words been spoken, ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church.’

  After the days of Pope Gregory VII, the Church of Rome was at least the equal, and sometimes almost the mistress, of the Empire. The Eastern Church was always the handmaid of the Eastern State.m The Teutonic Emperor was the shadow of the Pope, cast on the secular world. The Eastern Patriarch was the shadow of the Emperor, cast on the spiritual world. A truly National Church she was, and as a National Church she gave immense cohesion and vitality to the East Roman realm. She was less arrogant, less corrupted by wealth, perhaps less penetrated by political worldliness than the Western Church had in the thirteenth century become. The Emperors also gained by escaping those long and bitter struggles with the ecclesiastical power which lasted in the West from the middle of the eleventh to the middle of the fourteenth century. But the East Roman nation, both as a secular and a religious community, suffered by the subjection into which the Church had been brought. Its spirit was roused by no great conflict of principles like that which stirred and stimulated the thoughts and feelings of Italians and Germans, of Frenchmen and Englishmen, in the days of the mediaeval Popes, and which, never completely closed, found its later expression in the movement for religious reform which rent the Christian community in the sixteenth century. It had not the glorious exuberance of emotional as well as intellectual life which illumines the annals of the Western Church from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It could show no such names as those of St. Anselm, Peter Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, William of Ockham, John Wiclif, Gerson, Savonarola, Erasmus, Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Zwingli, Calvin. That the Orthodox Church of the East, whose fold contains more than a hundred millions of men, is to-day in all the countries that adhere to it, in Russia and Roumania, in Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece, so much less of an intellectual and spiritual factor in the life of the people than are the various branches of the Western Church, whether the Roman Catholic branch or the countless forms of Protestantism, is largely due to the heavy hand which the Eastern monarchs laid upon their Patriarch and their bishops.

  Character of Eastern Christianity.Other causes no doubt there were for the decadence of Eastern Christianity. As in the mediaeval West the teachings of the Gospel and its appeal to the individual soul were overlaid, sometimes even obscured, by the conception of a Visible Church within which alone salvation can be found, because it is only by her ministers that the sacraments can be dispensed, so in the East the passionate theological controversies regarding the Trinity and the Incarnation which had filled the minds of laity as well as clergy, from the fourth to the seventh century, led to the exaltation of doctrinal orthodoxy as the central and vital element in the Christian life. The Eastern Church no doubt also valued itself upon its catholicity, as the Western Church valued itself upon its orthodoxy. But just as the sense of membership in one great body organized under one Vicar of God upon earth is the characteristic note of the one, so the full acceptance in the exactly right sense of all the dogmas enunciated by the Church is specially and pre-eminently distinctive of the other. This fettering of the mind by the decrees of ancient Councils, this concentration of attention on abstract and sometimes scarcely comprehensible propositions, is doubtless accountable not only for a deficient sense of the duty of the Church to enforce morality in conduct (a point better cared for in the Latin Church), but also for much of the glacial torpor which the history of Eastern Christianity sets before us. But the control of the civil power and the nationalizing of religion until religion seems to become a sort of ceremonial function of the State have also been paralyzing influences. Thus the Eastern rulers failed even more conspicuously than the Catholic West failed, and then Protestant kingdoms have also failed, to solve the problem of maintaining a religious community in dependence on, or in legal connection with, the civil government without at the same time injuring its spiritual freedom, and rendering it less responsive to the changing currents of thought and feeling among its members.

  Respective claims of the two Empires to represent Rome.The enquiry which of the two rival imperial lines had, after ad 800, the better title to represent ancient Rome is one fitter to occupy the minds of controversialists in the tenth century than to be debated in the twentieth: nor is there much use in asking which of the two had preserved a more genuinely Roman character, for both States had, like all human institutions, whether ecclesiastical or civil, undergone changes which made them essentially different from the majestic predecessor whose name they bore. To us both seem almost equally unlike the heathen Empire, for both were Christian, and while the one was feudal the other had taken an Oriental colour. But it is worth while to examine the view which each took of itself, and the sense in which each deemed itself to represent the rights and the glories of the ancient World Power; for, however strange may seem to us the ideas that inspired the Teutonic and the Byzantine princes respectively, those ideas were potent factors in history.

  Hostility of the two Churches and Empires.The two lines were always rivals, since neither would or could admit the title of the other to the great inheritance. This made them enemies, and their enmity was intensified by the antagonism of what we may call, from the languages they used in worship, the Greek and Latin Churches. Disputes on points of doctrine and on points of ecclesiastical precedence had arisen in the sixth and seventh centuries. The mutual aversion of the Churches, embittered by the quarrel over the use of images in worship, was prolonged, after that source of strife had vanished, by the refusal of the Patriarchs at Constantinople to admit the supremacy of the chair of Peter, till in the ninth, and more definitely in the middle of the eleventh century, aversion passed into the schism which finally severed the two communions, that fatal schism, without which neither would the Crusaders of ad 1204 have attacked a Christian capital, nor would that capital, in its last hour of dire necessity two and a half centuries later, have been abandoned by the Western nations. Other causes for the alienation of the two Churches there were, but the chief one was a point of doctrine which, though subtle theologians may draw a chain of inferences from it, was and remains beyond the reach of ordinary human intelligence, the question whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone.

  Pretensions of each imperial line.Each of the rival lines had much to allege on its behalf. The Easterns traced, from Constantine downwards, an unbroken succession of monarchs always reigning in the same city, preserving, along with the Roman name, the titles and ceremonies, the supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and the civil institutions which had existed in the days of the first Christian Emperor. No breach of continuity affected their title. In Eastern eyes the coronation of Charles the Great was an act of unholy rebellion: his successors barbarian intruders, ignorant of the laws and usages of the ancient State, and with no claim to be deemed Romans except that which the favour of an arrogant pontiff might confer. Standing all by themselves, a bright spot of civilization in a barbarian world, with wild Bulgarians to the north and Muslim sons of the desert to the south, they formed an extravagant conceit of their own importance, and plumed themselves all the more upon the incomparable lustre of their crown. Seldom, and only when sore need drove them to courtesy, did they recognize the titles used by the Frankish and German sovereigns. Basil the Macedonian reproached the Western Emperor Lewis the Second with presuming to use the name of Basileus; to which the Frank retorted that he was as much an Emperor as Basil, but that anyhow Basileus was only the Greek for ‘king,’ and need not mean ‘Emperor’ at all. Nicephorus Phocas refused to call Otto the Great anything but ‘King of the Lombards’:n Conrad III was addressed by Kalo-Joannes as ‘amice imperii mei Rex’:o Isaac Angelus, more insolently, styled Frederick the First ‘chief prince of Alemannia.’p The great Hohenstaufen, half resentful, half contemptuous, told the Eastern envoys that he was Romanorum Imperator, and bade their master call himself ‘Romaniorum,’ from the Thracian province of Romania. Once, at least, an Eastern sovereign attempted to extrude his Teutonic competitor from the lordship of the world. When Frederick the First was engaged in his struggle with Pope Alexander the Third and the cities of Lombardy, Manuel Comnenus, the most valiant and most aspiring of his line, while attempting to reconquer Southern Italy from the Norman kings, gave his support to the rebellious Lombards, helped the Milanese to rebuild their walls, sought to win over the nobles of Rome, and invited the Pope to deprive Frederick of the imperial crown and restore it to himself as the rightful claimant. The wary pontiff, however, though the request was accompanied by a promise to secure the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches, as well as by large gifts of money, could not see his way to so revolutionary a step as a reversal of that ‘Translation of the Empire,’ which had been effected by his predecessor three centuries and a half before. ‘These things,’ he said, ‘are too high for me and too complicated.’q He was wise. The chasm that divided the East from the West was already too wide to be thus bridged.

  Strength of the Western position: Rome and the Pope.Against that legitimacy and continuity on which the East Romans relied, the Western monarchs had two things to set. With them was the City. With them was the Chair of the Apostle. The chroniclers who describe the coronation of Charles justly dwell upon the fact that ‘he held Rome, the mother of Empire, where the Caesars had always been wont to sit,’ and that it was the successor of Peter who placed the crown upon his brow.r Rome and the Catholic Church, these were the two pillars of Empire: and with these the Germans and Italians were so well content that they scarcely felt the rival pretensions of Constantinople to be a flaw in the title of their Emperor. The Eastern Church was no doubt then, as she is now, a thorn in the side of the Papacy. But the Pope was the last person who could, in his quarrels with the Teutonic sovereigns, use the Eastern claim in any argument against them, because to have treated Constantinople as the equal of Rome would have been to lower his own see to the level of Constantinople, as well as to question the validity of the transference effected by Pope Leo III. Neither, however, did any other antagonists of the Teutonic Emperors—as for instance the writers who in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries maintained the independence of the crown of France—lay stress upon the existence of an Empire in the East as evidence against the claim of the Germanic sovereign to oecumenical supremacy.Slight knowledge of the East in the West. The truth seems to be that the Western World, from the ninth century onwards, knew and cared comparatively little about the East. The intellectual and social unity of Europe was in those days maintained by the clergy and especially, after the middle of the thirteenth century, by the friars: and the clergy seldom passed outside the bounds of Latin Christendom. By land there was little intercourse, except when a crusading host passed through, for rude Slavonic tribes lay between, and such sea trade as went on between Italy and Constantinople—after the eleventh century it was chiefly in the hands of the Pisans, the Genoese, and the Venetians—did little to establish relations in the sphere of thought and literature, how little may be judged from the paucity of Greek MSS. in Western Europe. Even Dante could not read Greek and never saw a Greek copy of the Homeric poems.s Thus the mass of the people scarcely remembered the existence of the Eastern Christians: and of those who did, the most part thought of them as Samaritans who refused to worship at Jerusalem, perverse rebels against the authority of the Apostolic See, who were little better than heretics or infidels. And although the few ecclesiastics of superior knowledge and insight could not treat the pretensions of communities which had been among the first to embrace Christianity, and had preserved so many of its ancient forms, with the scorn that was felt for Western sectaries, although the Roman Church has never questioned the validity of Eastern orders, nor deemed those who stand within the Eastern fold to be outside the bounds of covenanted salvation, still these leaders of opinion were so preoccupied by the established theory of the identity of the Roman Church and the Roman Empire, and so convinced of the right of Peter to choose whom he would as the temporal guardian of his flock, that they could not apprehend the weak points in their own position or the strength of their opponents’. Enthralled by the majesty of their own theory, a theory which existed outside the sphere of fact, they were not disturbed by a fact inconsistent with it.

  They lived in a sort of cloudland, where the real truths seemed to be those grand ideas that shone upon them like stars through an encircling mist. Their preoccupation with the conception of a universal Christian commonwealth was a part of that imaginative vision and mystic sense which ennoble the Middle Ages, and which make it delightful and refreshing to turn back to those times from the garish day of a world ruled by the methods of physical science and the methods of historical criticism. This power it was which enabled them to bequeath to us so much on which our imagination still feeds, so much splendid poetry, so much myth and fancy and legend, matter fit for poetry, on which the creative genius of later centuries has worked.

  The West was full of imaginative minds, not in Italy, Provence, and Germany only, but as far as remote Erin and still remoter Iceland.The East Romans less disposed to idealize their Emperor. But the East Romans were not imaginative. They were a practical people, with their eyes fixed on the actual. Superstitious they were, and full of a reverence for the past which often ran into a fantastic antiquarianism. But they were neither poetical nor mythopoeic. Their Emperor was a living and familiar personage. He was, like the kings of other countries, king over a nation, the ruler of a realm which, once universal, had been narrowed to a nation, with a national language and a national character. He was indeed a far more resplendent sort of king than were the kings of the barbarians, being the successor of the Caesars of old, with a never abandoned claim to be the first of all potentates. But he was so essential to their particular state, so firmly rooted in all its traditions, that neither the disobedience of the Roman city nor the hostility of the Roman pontiff affected their confidence in his right and their right to represent the Roman dominion. The rivalry of the West had no doubt cost them Italy, and it detracted from their importance in the eyes of other nations. It was an odious fact, like the existence of the Bulgarians, who had robbed them of Thrace, and the existence of the Hagarenes,t who had robbed them of Syria. But it never shook their self-confidence, and their sense of immeasureable superiority to the barbarians of Central and Western Europe. Even Latin had become to them what it had been to the Athenians ten centuries before, a barbarian language.

  Contrast of the East and the West as respects literature and thought.This difference of attitude illustrates the contrast between the people of the Western and those of the Eastern Empire in the sphere of thought and letters.

  The Holy Empire, except in so far as it was united with the German kingdom, was a dream, a sublime conception, half theology and half poetry, of the unity of mankind, who are themselves the children of God, as realized in one Church, which is also a State, and in one State, which is also a Church. The East Roman Empire was a reality, a tangible fact in an actual world, drawing neither strength nor beauty from any theory, and not appearing to need any theory to support it. Why was this so? Why did not the same group of ideas which had kept alive the memory of Rome in the West down to the days of Charles the Great, and which in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries developed those ideas into that ordered form which they held in men’s minds in the time of Dante—why did not these ideas fill and sway men’s minds in the East also, and find due expression in their literature and their art? Why did not the Ideal array the Actual in those gorgeous hues which the great Westerns lavished on their two heads of Christendom, the Sun and the Moon of their ethereal firmament?

  Why did the East theorize so little regarding the Empire?One reason may have been because the Emperor had in the East always been a tangible and permanent fact. The Easterns were reverent, and they were not less superstitious than the Westerns. Superstition goes with a profound belief in forms and ceremonies. But the constant presence of the successor of Constantine made him an object not so fit to be idealized as the Emperor of tradition had become in the West, and dispensed with the need for a philosophic theory.u The autocrat of Constantinople required no doctrinal scheme to buttress his power: the Western did require it just because he was less able to stand by his own strength. So perhaps we may find another reason in the fact that the East had not in its capital a mystic Mother of Empire, such as was Old Rome, filled with the bones of martyrs, and had not, as its chief pastor, the Universal Bishop, the living representative on earth of the Divine Word in heaven. The Patriarch of Constantinople was only a primate, standing not greatly above other bishops. Constantinople was, moreover, an artificial creation, the work of one Emperor, suddenly raised into a capital out of a town previously famous only for its admirable site. It had neither the immemorial renown nor the hallowed associations of the elder city on the Tiber.

  Yet perhaps we must seek a still deeper cause. The East was not steeped, as was the West, in the idea of a Church organized and administered like a State. Italy, which had stamped her type of practical intellect upon the whole Latin West, had achieved in earlier days two great things: she had created an Administration and a Law fitted for a world. The Hellenistic East, not Greek in the old classical sense, as we are too apt to assume, but a mixture of Hellenic and Asiatic elements, had shewn no gift for the creation of institutions, but had applied an amazing speculative and dialectic faculty to the abstract problems of theology. After the extinction of imperial rule in the West, the Latin Church, still permeated by the practical instincts of Rome, went on developing an ecclesiastical organization, modelled upon the civil administration which had perished, till her efforts culminated in the mediaeval hierarchy and the system of Canon Law. She could not think of the Christian people except in the form of a body of worshippers organized under a government, and a government with an autocratic head. Thus she created the Pope; and the Pope (as we have seenx ) re-created the Emperor. But to the Eastern Christians, occupied as they had been with determining the nature of God and of Christ, the Christian people appeared in the form of a body of worshippers professing exactly the same lifegiving dogmas. Doctrine, not organization, came first in their minds. As their civil administration had never been shattered, they had less need, even if they had possessed the capacity, to build up an ecclesiastical system like that of the West; nor would the secular power have permitted them to do so. Hence they did not turn their Patriarch into a Pope: and hence there was no Pope to create an Emperor in his own image. Herein may lie an explanation of the seeming paradox that the Eastern monarch, with far greater practical authority in ecclesiastical affairs than his Western rivals exercised, except perhaps in the days of Charles and again of Henry the Third, had not that ideal position in the world of politics, morals, and religion—three things which were virtually the same to these mediaeval thinkers—which Christian theory assigned to the Emperor in the West.

  Let us note one more difference, affecting the conception of the imperial office, between the temper and mind of East and of West.

  Want of creative power among the Easterns.The intellect of the East Romans had ceased to be creative. Whether it was that they had not experienced that renewal of vital forces which the intermixture of Northern blood gave to the Italians, or that they lacked the freshness of vision and susceptibility to impressions which a new set of social conditions create, or that they were too much isolated, too little stirred by peaceful intercourse with other peoples (for their contact with their neighbours was almost always hostile), or whether they were oppressed by the stores of knowledge which had come down to them from the ancient world—whatever be the cause, they seemed to want intellectual initiative and that kind of constructive faculty which depends on imagination. Their talent and their industry—and there was plenty both of talent and of industry—ran to the piling up of knowledge, the recording of facts, the investigation of minute points in theology or in archaeology.y The West had creative power without learning: the East had learning without creative power. This is perhaps the reason why the Eastern Empire lost, and may never regain, its hold upon the interest of mankind. Standing apart and unfriended, it has a splendid record of stubborn resistance to formidable enemies on every side, and of a patriotism which the bitterest internal discords never extinguished. Its annals are full of striking incidents and brilliant personalities. But these personalities, brilliant by their energy and their adventures, seldom touch the deepest springs of interest, for they are not associated with great principles, nor does any literary or artistic genius, rising to greatness among his fellow countrymen, cast his rays upon them. After Justinian’s days, the East Roman Empire produced, and has left us, little in the higher forms of art and nothing in institutions. It added nothing to the common store of thought and beauty in literature. It produced no speculative philosophy like that of the great Western schoolmen, no romantic figures in whom the gifts of thought and of action were united, like Bernard of Clairvaux and Arnold of Brescia, and least of all any poetry like that of mediaeval Provence and Italy.

  Yet it has been a mighty factor in history, for it stemmed for centuries the tide of Asiatic invasion, and it kept alive a Church which has helped to create and maintain an intense national feeling among the largest and most swiftly growing of modern European peoples. The Russians, who are as much a religious as a political community, carry with them over the vast spaces of Northern and Central Asia the traditions of an Empire conterminous with a Church, an Empire which is at once the offspring and the guardian of the Orthodox Faith.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE RENAISSANCE: CHANGE IN THE CHARACTER OF THE EMPIRE

  Chap. XVIII.In Frederick the Third’s reign the Empire sank to its lowest point. It had shot forth a fitful gleam under Sigismund, who in convoking and helping to guide the Council of Constance had revived one of the highest functions of his predecessors.Wenzel,ad 1378-1400. Rupert, 1400-1410. Sigismund, 1410-1438. Council of Constance, 1414-1418. The precedents of the first great oecumenical councils, and especially of the Council of Nicaea, had established the principle that it belonged to the Emperor, even more properly than to the Pope, to convoke ecclesiastical assemblies from the whole Christian world. The tenet commended itself to the reforming party in the Church, headed by John Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, whose aim it was, while making no changes in matters of faith, to correct the abuses which had grown up in discipline and government, and limit the power of the Popes by exalting the authority of General Councils, to whom it was now sought to ascribe an immunity from error superior to that, whatever it might be, which resided in the successor of Peter. And although it was only the sacerdotal body, not the whole Christian people, who were thus made the exponents of the universal religious consciousness, the doctrine was nevertheless a foreshadowing of the larger claims which were soon to follow. The existence of the Holy Empire and the existence of General Councils were, as has been already remarked, essential parts of one and the same theory,a and it was therefore more than a coincidence that the last occasion on which the whole of Latin Christendom met to deliberate and act as a single commonwealth,b was also the last on which that commonwealth’s lawful temporal head appeared in the exercise of his international functions. Never afterwards was he, in the eyes of Europe, anything more than a German monarch.

  Albert II, 1438-1440. Frederick III, 1440-1493.It might seem doubtful whether he would long remain a monarch at all. When Sigismund died leaving no male heir the electors chose as Emperor his son-in-law Albert of Hapsburg, who had just been made king of Hungary. Albert was a man of ability and character, who might have done something to restore the power of the crown. But he died after two years: and his successor Frederick duke of Styria, a Hapsburg of the younger line, had neither the energy nor the courage which the conditions of the moment required. So when in ad 1493 the long and calamitous reign of Frederick ended, it was impossible for the princes to see with unconcern the condition into which their selfishness and turbulence had brought the Empire. The time was indeed critical. Hitherto the Germans had been protected rather by the weakness of their enemies than by their own strength.Weakness of Germany as compared with the other states of Europe. From France there had been little to fear while the English menaced her on one side and the Burgundian dukes on the other; from England still less while she was torn by the strife of York and Lancaster. But now throughout Western Europe the power of the feudal oligarchies was broken; and its chief countries were being, by the establishment of fixed rules of succession and the absorption of the smaller into the larger principalities, rapidly built up into compact and aggressive military monarchies. Thus Spain became a great state by the union of Castile and Aragon, and the conquest of the Moors of Granada. Thus in England there arose the popular despotism of the Tudors. France had in the first half of the fifteenth century been desolated by intestine feuds, and for a time prostrate at the feet of England. Now, enlarged and consolidated under Lewis the Eleventh and his successors, she began to acquire that predominant influence on the politics of Europe which her commanding geographical position, the martial spirit of her people, and the restless ambition of her rulers, secured to her during several centuries. Meantime there had appeared in the far East a foe still more terrible. The capture of Constantinople gave the Turks a firm hold on Europe, and inspired them with the hope of effecting in the fifteenth century what Abderrahman and his Spanish Saracens had so nearly effected in the eighth—of establishing the faith of Islam through all the provinces that obeyed the Western as well as the Eastern Caesars. The navies of the Ottoman sultans swept the Mediterranean; their well appointed armies pierced Hungary and threatened Vienna.

  Loss of imperial territories.Nor was it only that formidable enemies had arisen without: the frontiers of Germany herself were exposed by the loss of those adjoining territories which had formerly owned allegiance to the Emperors. Poland, once tributary, had shaken off the yoke at the Great Interregnum, and had recently wrested West Prussia from the Teutonic knights, and compelled their Grand Master to swear allegiance in respect of East Prussia, which they still retained. Bohemia, where German culture had struck deeper roots, remained a member of the Empire; but the privileges she had obtained from Charles the Fourth, and the subsequent acquisition of Silesia and Moravia, made her virtually independent. The restless Hungarians avenged their former vassalage to Germany by frequent inroads on her eastern border.

  Italy.Imperial power in Italy ended with the life of Frederick the Second, for the ill starred expeditions of Henry the Seventh and Lewis the Fourth gave it only a brief and fleeting revival. Rupert did indeed cross the Alps, but it was as the hireling of Florence; Frederick the Third received the Lombard as well as the imperial crown, but it no longer conveyed the slightest power. In the beginning of the fourteenth century Dante still hopes the renovation of his country from the action of the Teutonic Emperors. A little later Matthew Villani sees clearly that they do not and cannot reign to any purpose south of the Alps.c Nevertheless the phantom of imperial authority lingers on for a time. It is put forward by the Ghibeline tyrants of the cities to justify their attacks on their Guelfic neighbours: even resolute republicans like the Florentines do not yet venture altogether to reject it, however unwilling to permit its exercise. Before the middle of the fifteenth century, the names of Guelf and Ghibeline had ceased to have any sense or meaning; the Pope was no longer the protector nor the Emperor the assailant of municipal freedom, for municipal freedom itself had wellnigh disappeared. But the old war-cries of the Church and the Empire were still repeated as they had been three centuries before, and the rival principles that had once enlisted the noblest spirits of Italy on one or other side had sunk into a pretext for wars of aggrandizement or of a hatred now become traditional. That which had been remarked long before in Greece was seen to be true here; the spirit of faction outlived the cause of faction, and became itself the new and prolific source of a useless and endless strife.

  After Frederick the Third no Emperor was crowned in Rome, and almost the only trace of that connection between Germany and Italy, to maintain which so much had been risked and lost, was to be found in the obstinate belief of the later Hapsburg Emperors, that their own claims, though often purely dynastic and personal, could be strengthened by an appeal to the imperial rights of their predecessors. Because Frederick Barbarossa had overawed Lombardy with a Transalpine host they fancied themselves the better entitled to demand duchies for themselves and their relatives, and to entangle the Empire in wars wherein no interest but their own was involved.

  Burgundy.The kingdom of Burgundy or Arles, if it had never added much strength to the Empire, had been useful as an outwork against France. And thus its loss—Dauphiné passing over, partly in ad 1350, finally in 1457, Provence in 1486—proved a serious calamity, for it brought the French nearer to Switzerland, and opened to them a tempting passage into Italy. The Emperors did not for a time expressly renounce their suzerainty over these lands, but if it was hard to enforce a feudal claim over a rebellious landgrave in Germany, how much harder to control a vassal who was also the mightiest king in Europe.

  On the north-west frontier, the fall in ad 1477 of the great principality which the dukes of French Burgundy were building up was seen with pleasure by the Rhinelanders whom Charles the Bold, the last duke, had incessantly alarmed. The duchy of Burgundy, a part of its territories, fell to the king of France as feudal suzerain; other parts, including the Netherlands, passed to the house of Hapsburg by the marriage of Mary, daughter of Duke Charles, to Maximilian son of Frederick the Third and afterwards Emperor. The effect of its fall was to leave France and Germany directly confronting each other, and it was soon seen that the balance of strength lay on the side of the less numerous but better organized and more active nation.

  Switzerland.Switzerland, too, could no longer be considered a part of the Germanic realm. The revolt of the Forest Cantons, in ad 1313, was against the oppressions practised in the name of Albert count of Hapsburg, rather than against the legitimate authority of Albert the Emperor. But although several subsequent sovereigns, and among them conspicuously Henry the Seventh and Sigismund, favoured the Swiss liberties, yet while the antipathy between the Confederates and the territorial nobility gave a peculiar direction to their policy, the accession of new cantons to their body, and their brilliant success against Charles the Bold in ad 1477, made them proud of a separate national existence, and not unwilling to cast themselves loose from the stranded hulk of the Empire. Maximilian tried to conquer them, but after a furious struggle, in which the valleys of Western Tyrol were repeatedly laid waste by the peasants of the Engadin, he was forced to give way, and in ad 1500 recognized them by treaty as practically independent. Not, however, till the peace of Westphalia, in ad 1648, was the Swiss Confederation in the eye of public law a sovereign state, and even after that date some of the towns continued to stamp their coins with the double eagle of the Empire, as some of the North Italian cities also did in days when the power of the Emperor had become merely a memory.

  Internal weakness.If these losses of territory were serious, far more serious was the plight in which Germany herself lay. The country had now become not so much an Empire as an aggregate of very many small states, governed by princes who would neither remain at peace with each other nor combine against a foreign enemy, under the nominal presidency of an Emperor who had little lawful authority, and could not exert what he had.d The electors had for a time acted together as a body claiming to exert control over imperial affairs; and their Union (Kurfürstenverein), formed at Bingen in ad 1424, imposed stringent conditions on the newly elected Emperor Albert II in 1438. But dissensions presently arose between them; and the Diet or National Assembly was by its constitution and its cumbrous methods of procedure unfit to introduce reforms or to weld the component principalities into a united realm.

  There was another cause, besides those palpable and obvious ones already enumerated, to which this state of things must be ascribed. That cause is to be found in the theory which regarded the Empire as an international power, supreme among Christian states. From the day when Otto the Great was crowned at Rome, the characters of German king and Roman Emperor were united in one person, and it has been shewn how that union tended more and more to become a fusion. If the two offices, in their nature and origin so dissimilar, had been held by different persons,Influence of the theory of the Empire as an international power upon the Germanic constitution. the Roman Empire would most probably have soon disappeared, while the German kingdom grew into a robust national monarchy. The connection of the two gave a longer life to the one and a feebler life to the other, while at the same time it transformed both. So long as Germany was only one of the countries that bowed beneath their sceptre it was possible for the Emperors, though we need not suppose they troubled themselves with speculations on the matter, to distinguish their imperial authority, as international and more than half religious, from their royal, which was, or was meant to be, national and feudal. But when within the narrowed bounds of Germany these international functions had ceased to have any meaning, when the rulers of England, Spain, France, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Italy, Burgundy, had in succession repudiated imperial control, and the Lord of the World found himself obeyed by none but his own people, he would not sink from being Lord of the World into a simple Teutonic king, but continued to play in the more contracted theatre the part which had belonged to him in the wider. Thus did Germany instead of Europe become the sphere of his international jurisdiction; and her electors and princes, originally mere vassals, no greater than a count of Champagne in France, or an earl of Chester in England, stepped into the place which it had been meant that the several monarchs of Christendom should fill. If the effective power of their head had been in the sixteenth century what it was in the eleventh, the additional dignity so assigned to these magnates might have signified very little. But coming in to confirm and justify the liberties already won, the new theory of their relation to the sovereign had a great though at the time scarcely perceptible influence in changing the Germanic Empire, as we may now begin to call it, from a state into a sort of confederation or body of states, united indeed for some of the purposes of government, but separate and independent for others more important. Thus, and that in its ecclesiastical as well as its civil organization, Germany became a miniature of Christendom.e The Pope, though he retained the wider sway which his rival had lost, was in an especial manner the head of the German clergy, as the Emperor was of the laity: the three Rhenish prelates sat in the supreme college beside the four temporal electors: the nobility of prince-bishops and abbots was as essential a part of the constitution and as influential in the deliberations of the Diet as were the dukes, counts, and margraves of the Empire. The world-embracing Christian state was to have been governed by a hierarchy of spiritual pastors, whose graduated ranks of authority should exactly correspond with those of the temporal magistrates, who were to be, like them, endowed with worldly wealth and power, and to enjoy a jurisdiction co-ordinate although distinct. This system, which it was in vain attempted to establish in Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was in its main features that which prevailed in the Germanic Empire from the fourteenth century onwards. And conformably to the analogy which may be traced between the position of the archdukes of Austria in Germany after the fifteenth century,Position of the Emperor in Germany compared with that of his predecessors in Europe. and the place which the four Saxon and the two first Franconian Emperors had once held in Europe, both being recognized as titular leaders in all that concerned the common interest, in the one case of the Christian, in the other of the whole German people, while neither of them had any power of direct government in the territories of local kings and potentates in the former cases, princes in the latter; so the plan by which those who chose Maximilian Emperor sought to strengthen their national monarchy was in substance that which the Popes had followed when they conferred the crown of the world on Charles and Otto. The pontiffs then, like the electors now, finding that they could not give with the title the power which its functions demanded, were driven to the expedient of selecting for the office persons whose private resources enabled them to sustain it with dignity. The first Frankish and the first Saxon Emperors were chosen because they were already the mightiest potentates in Europe; Maximilian because he was the strongest of the German princes. The parallel may be carried one step further. Just as under Otto and his successors the Roman Empire was Teutonized, so now under the Hapsburg dynasty, from whose hands the sceptre departed only once thenceforth, the Teutonic Empire tends more and more to lose itself in an Austrian monarchy.

  Growth of the Hapsburg influence in Germany.Of that monarchy and of the power of the house of Hapsburg, Maximilian was, hardly less than Rudolf his ancestor, the founder.f Uniting in his person those wide domains through Germany which had been dispersed among the collateral branches of his house, and controlling by his marriage with Mary of Burgundy the richest part of the territories of Charles the Bold, he was a prince greater than any who had sat on the Teutonic throne since the death of Frederick the Second. But it was as archduke of Austria, count of Tyrol, duke of Styria and Carinthia, feudal superior of lands in Swabia, Alsace, and Switzerland, that he was great, not as Roman Emperor. For just as from him the Austrian monarchy begins, so with him the Holy Empire in its old meaning ends. That strange system of doctrines, half religious, half political, which had supported it for so many ages, was growing obsolete, and the theory which had wrought such changes on Germany and Europe passed ere long so completely from remembrance that we can now do no more than call up a faint and wavering image of what it must once have been.

  Character of the epoch of Maximilian.For it is not only in imperial history that the accession of Maximilian is a landmark. That time—a time of change and movement in every part of human life, a time when printing had become common, and books were no longer confined to the clergy, when drilled troops were replacing the feudal militia, when the use of gunpowder was changing the face of war—was especially marked by one event, to which the history of the world offers no parallel before or since, the discovery of America.The discovery of America,ad 1492. The cloud which from the beginning of things had hung thick and dark round the borders of civilization was suddenly lifted.g The feeling of mysterious awe with which men had regarded the firm plain of earth and her encircling ocean ever since the days of Homer, vanished when astronomers and geographers taught them that she was an insignificant globe, which, so far from being the centre of the universe, was itself swept round in the motion of one of the least of its countless systems. The notions that had hitherto prevailed regarding the life of man and his relations to nature and the supernatural, were rudely shaken by the knowledge that was soon gained of tribes in every stage of culture and living under every variety of condition, who had developed apart from all the influences of the Eastern hemisphere. In ad 1453 the capture of Constantinople and extinction of the Eastern Empire had dealt a fatal blow to the prestige of tradition and an immemorial name: in ad 1492 there was disclosed a world whither the eagles of the all-conquering Rome had never winged their flight, and in which the name of Christ had never been heard.h No one could now have repeated the arguments of the De Monarchia.

  The Renaissance.Another influence, too, widely different, but not less momentous, was beginning to spread from Italy beyond the Alps. Since the barbarian tribes settled in the Roman provinces, no change had come to pass in Europe at all comparable to that which followed the diffusion of the New Learning in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Enchanted by the beauty of the ancient models of art and poetry, more particularly those of the Greeks, men came to regard with aversion or contempt all that had been done or produced from the days of Trajan to those of Pope Nicholas the Fifth. To them, the Latin style of the writers who lived after Tacitus was debased: the architecture of the Middle Ages was barbarous: the scholastic philosophy was an odious jargon. Aristotle himself, Greek though he was, Aristotle who had been for three centuries more than a prophet or an apostle, was hurled from his throne, because his name was associated with the dismal quarrels of Thomists and Scotists. That spirit, whether we call it analytical or sceptical, or earthly, or simply secular, for it is more or less all of these—the spirit which was the exact antithesis of mediaeval mysticism, had swept in and carried men away, with all the force of a pent-up torrent. People were content to gratify their tastes and their senses, caring little for worship, and still less for doctrine: their hopes and ideas were no longer such as had made their forefathers crusaders or ascetics: their imagination was possessed by associations far different from those which had inspired Dante: they did not revolt against the Church, but they had no enthusiasm for her, and they had enthusiasm for whatever was fresh and graceful and intelligible. From the gloomy devotion of the cloister, from the rude pleasures of the feudal castle, they turned away, too indifferent to be hostile. And so, in the midst of the Renaissance, so, under the consciousness that former things were passing from the earth, and a new order opening, so, with the other beliefs and memories of the Middle Age, the shadowy rights of the Roman Empire melted away in the fuller modern light. Here and there a jurist muttered that no neglect could destroy its universal supremacy, or a priest declaimed to listless hearers on its duty to protect the Holy See; but to Germany it had become an ancient device for holding together the discordant members of her body, to its possessors an engine for extending the power of the house of Hapsburg.

  Empire henceforth German.Henceforth, therefore, we must look upon the Holy Roman Empire as lost in the Germanic; and after a few faint attempts to resuscitate old-fashioned claims, nothing remains to indicate its origin save a sounding title and a precedence among the states of Europe. It was not that the Renaissance exerted any direct political influence either against the Empire or for it. Men were too busy upon statues and coins and manuscripts to care what befel Popes or Emperors. It acted rather by silently withdrawing the whole system of doctrines upon which the Empire had rested, and thus leaving it, since it had previously no support but that of opinion, without any support at all.

  Attempts to reform the Germanic constitution.During Maximilian’s eventful reign several efforts were made to construct a new constitution, but it is to German rather than to imperial history that they properly belong. Here, indeed, the history of the Holy Empire might close, did not the still unchanged title beckon us on, and were it not that the course things took in these later centuries may be traced back to causes dating from those earlier days when the name of Roman was not wholly a mockery. One such event of Maximilian’s time proved to have a profound importance for the future. Ever since the age of Conrad III and Frederick I, when the study of the ancient Roman law was revived in Italy, the doctrines of that law had been making way in Germany, partly because it was conceived to have been enacted for all time by the remote predecessors of the Teutonic Emperors, partly because the German students who resorted to the universities of Italy—there was no university in the Transalpine parts of the Empire till Charles IV founded one at Prague in 1347-1348—brought back with them the legal ideas and rules they had learnt there, and applied these as practitioners or judges at home. Thus, except as regards the law of land rights, which continued to be German, the maxims of Roman law contained in Justinian’s Corpus Iuris had come to be largely recognized in German courts, though more largely in the South and West than in Saxony, where a native law book (the Sachsenspiegel) had obtained much authority. In ad 1495 an Imperial Court of Justice (‘Reichskammergericht’) for the Empire was established: and it is from the declaration then made of the validity of the Corpus Iuris as law that the formal acceptance of Roman jurisprudence is usually dated.i In Maximilian’s day Germany included the Netherlands: and thus it is that the law of Rome has come to prevail in the Dutch East Indies, in Ceylon, and in South Africa. The splendid labours of the Dutch jurists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of the German jurists in the eighteenth and nineteenth have had much to do with the diffusion of this law over the world, for it is not only the basis of all the codes of Southern and Western Europe, as well as of the law of Scotland, but has powerfully influenced the systems of Scandinavia, of Poland, of Hungary, and of the Russian Empire. It may indeed be said to divide with English law the dominion of the civilized world.

  The creation of this Imperial Chamber and the proclamation of a Public Peace did something to secure the preservation of civil order and the better administration of justice. But schemes still more important failed through the bad constitution of the Diet, and the unconquerable jealousy of the Emperor and the Estates.j Maximilian refused to have his prerogative, indefinite though weak, restricted by the appointment of the administrative council (‘Reichsregiment’) which had been advocated by the Elector of Mentz, and when the Estates extorted it from him, did his best to ensure its failure. As a counterpoise he created a sort of Privy Council (‘Hofrath’) to be dependent on himself and to exercise both administrative and judicial powers. Abandoned for a time and thereafter re-established, this Aulic Council lasted as long as the Empire itself, and was sometimes an effective instrument in the hands of the Hapsburgs, not so much for carrying out their own projects as for resisting those of others. In the Diet, which consisted of three Colleges, electors, princes, and cities, the lower nobility and knights of the Empire were unrepresented, and naturally resented every decree that affected their position, refusing to pay taxes in voting which they had no voice. The interests of the princes and the cities were often irreconcileable, while the strength of the crown would not have been sufficient to make its adhesion to the latter of any effect. The policy of conciliating the commons, which Sigismund had tried, succeeding Emperors seldom cared to repeat, content to gain their point by raising factions among the territorial magnates, and so to stave off the unwelcome demand for reform. After many earnest attempts to establish a representative system, such as might resist the tendency to local independence and cure the evils of separate administration, the hope so often baffled died away.Causes of the failure of the projects of reform. Forces were too nearly balanced: the sovereign could not extend his personal control, nor could the reforming party limit him by a strong council of government, for such a measure would have equally trenched on the independence of the states. So ended the first great effort for German unity, interesting from its bearing on the events and aspirations of our own day; interesting, too, as giving the most convincing proof of the decline of the imperial office. For the projects of reform did not propose to effect their objects by restoring to Maximilian the authority his predecessors had once enjoyed, but by setting up a body which would have resembled far more nearly the senate of a federal state than the council of ministers which surround a monarch. The existing system developed itself further: relieved from external pressure, the princes became more despotic in their own territories: new bodies of law grew up, and new systems of administration were introduced: the insurgent peasantry were crushed down with more confident harshness. Already had leagues of princes and cities been formedk (that of the Swabian towns was one of the strongest forces in Germany, and often the monarch’s firmest support); now alliances begin to be contracted by some princes with foreign powers, and receive a direction of formidable import from the rivalry which the pretensions on Naples and Milan of Charles the Eighth and Lewis the Twelfth of France kindled between their house and the Austrian. It was no slight gain to have friends in the heart of the enemy’s country, such as French intrigue found in the Elector Palatine and the count of Würtemberg.

  Germanic nationality.Nevertheless this was also the era of the first conscious feeling of German nationality, as distinct from imperial. Driven in on all hands, with Italy and the Slavonic countries and Burgundy hopelessly lost, Teutschland learnt to separate itself from Welschland.lChange of titles. The Empire became the representative of a narrower but more practicable national union. It is not a mere coincidence that at this date there appear several notable changes of style. ‘Nationis Teutonicae’ (Teutscher Nation) is added to the simple ‘sacrum imperium Romanum.’ The title of ‘Imperator electus,’ which Maximilian obtains leave from Pope Julius the Second to assume,m when the Venetians prevent him from reaching his capital, marks the practical severance of Germany from Rome. No subsequent Emperor received his crown from the ancient capital (Charles the Fifth was indeed crowned by the Pope’s hands, but the ceremony took place at Bologna, and was therefore of at least questionable validity); each assumed after his German coronation the title of Emperor Elect,n and employed this in all documents issued in his name.The title ‘Imperator Electus.’ But the word ‘elect’ being omitted when he was addressed by others, partly from motives of courtesy, partly because the old rules regarding the Roman coronation were forgotten or remembered only by antiquaries, he was never called, even when formality was required, anything but Emperor. The substantial import of another title now first introduced is the same. Before Otto the First, the Teutonic king had called himself either ‘rex’ alone, or ‘Francorum orientalium rex,’ or ‘Francorum atque Saxonum rex’: after ad 962, all lesser dignities had, for the purposes of titular description, been merged in the ‘Romanorum Imperator.’o To this Maximilian appended ‘Germaniae rex,’ or, adding Frederick the Second’s bequest,p ‘König in Germanien und Jerusalem.’ It has been thought that from a mixture of the title king of Germany, and that of Emperor, has been formed the phrase ‘German Emperor,’ or less correctly, ‘Emperor of Germany.’q But more probably these expressions grew up in people’s mouths as convenient descriptions of the sovereign who was Emperor but was practically no longer Roman.r

  That the Empire was thus sinking into a merely German power cannot be doubted. But it was only natural that those who lived at the time should not have fully discerned the tendency of events. Again and again did the restless and sanguine Maximilian propose the recovery of Burgundy and Italy,—his last scheme, perhaps hardly serious, was to adjust the relations of Papacy and Empire by becoming Pope himself: nor were successive Diets less zealous to check private war, still the scandal of Germany, to set right the gear of the imperial chamber, to make the imperial officials permanent, and their administration uniform throughout the country. But while they talked the heavens darkened, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

  

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE REFORMATION AND ITS EFFECTS UPON THE EMPIRE

  Chap. XIXThe Reformation falls to be mentioned here, not as a religious movement, but as the cause of political changes, which still further rent the Empire, and struck at the root of the theory by which it had been created and upheld. Luther completed the work of Hildebrand. Hitherto it had seemed not impossible to strengthen the German state into a monarchy, compact if not despotic; the very Diet of Worms, where the monk of Wittenberg proclaimed to an astonished Church and Emperor that the day of spiritual autocracy was past, had framed and presented a fresh scheme for the construction of a central council of government. The great religious schism put an end to all such hopes, for it became a source of political disunion far more serious and permanent than any that had existed before, and it taught the two sections into which Germany was henceforth divided to regard each other with feelings more bitter than those of hostile nations.

  Accession of Charles V (1519-1558).The breach came at the most unfortunate time possible. After an election, more memorable than any preceding, an election in which Francis the First of France and Henry the Eighth of England had been his competitors, a prince had just ascended the imperial throne who united dominions vaster than any Europe had seen since the days of his great namesake. Spain and Naples, Flanders, and other parts of the Burgundian lands, as well as large regions in Eastern Germany, obeyed Charles: he drew inexhaustible revenues from a new empire beyond the Atlantic. Such a power, directed by a mind more resolute and profound than that of Maximilian his grandfather, might have well been able, despite the stringency of his coronation engagementsa and the watchfulness of the electors,b to override their extorted privileges, and make himself practically as well as officially the head of the nation. Charles the Fifth, though from the coldness of his mannerc and his Flemish speech never a favourite among the Germans, was in point of fact far stronger than Maximilian or any other Emperor who had reigned for three centuries. In Italy he succeeded, after long struggles with the Pope and the French, in rendering himself supreme: England he knew how to lead, by flattering Henry and cajoling Wolsey: from no state but France had he serious opposition to fear. To this strength his imperial dignity was indeed a mere ornament: its sources were the infantry of Spain, the looms of Flanders, the barbaric treasures of Mexico and Peru. But a control once re-established would soon have been legitimated by the rights which the imperial title seemed to carry with it; and as the first Charles had veiled the terror of the Frankish sword under the mask of Roman election, so might his successor sway a hundred provinces with the sole name of Roman Emperor, and transmit to his race a dominion as wide and more enduring.

  One is tempted to speculate as to what might have happened had Charles espoused the reforming cause. His reverence for the Pope’s person is sufficiently seen in the sack of Rome and the captivity of Pope Clement VII;Attitude of Charles towards the religious movement. the traditions of his office might have led him to tread in the steps of the Henrys and the Fredericks, into which even the superstitious Lewis the Fourth and the unstable Sigismund had sometimes ventured; the awakening zeal of the German people, exasperated by the exactions of the Romish court, would have strengthened his hands, and enabled him, while moderating the excesses of change, to fix his throne on the deep foundations of national love. It may well be doubted—Englishmen at least have reason for the doubt—whether the Reformation would not have lost as much as it could have gained by being entangled in the meshes of royal patronage. But, setting aside Charles’s personal leaning to the old faith, and forgetting that he was king of the most bigoted race in Europe, his position as Emperor made him almost perforce the Pope’s ally. The Empire had been recalled into being by Rome, had vaunted the protection of the Apostolic See as its highest earthly privilege, had latterly been wont, especially in Hapsburg hands, to lean on the Papacy for support. Itself founded entirely on prescription and the traditions of immemorial reverence, how could it abandon the cause which the longest prescription and the most solemn authority had combined to consecrate? With the German clergy, despite occasional quarrels, it had been on better terms than with the lay aristocracy; their heads had been the chief ministers of the crown; the advocacies of their abbeys were the last source of imperial revenue to disappear. To turn against them now, when furiously assailed by heretics; to abrogate claims hallowed by antiquity and a hundred laws, would be to pronounce its own sentence, and the fall of the eternal city’s spiritual dominion must involve the fall of what still professed to be her temporal. Charles would have been glad to see some abuses corrected; but a broad line of policy was called for, and he cast in his lot with the Catholics.d

  Ultimate failure of the repressive policy of Charles.ad 1547.Of many momentous results only a few need be noticed here. The reconstruction of the old imperial system upon the basis of Hapsburg power, proved in the end impossible. Yet for some years it had seemed actually accomplished.’ When the Smalkaldic league had been dissolved and its leaders captured, the whole country lay prostrate before Charles. He overawed the Diet at Augsburg by his Spanish soldiery: he forced formularies of doctrine upon the vanquished Protestants: he set up and pulled down whom he would throughout Germany, amid the muttered discontent of his own partizans. Then, as in the beginning of the year 1552 he lay at Innsbruck, fondly dreaming that his work was done, waiting the spring weather to cross to Trent, where the Catholic fathers had again met to settle the faith of the world, news was suddenly brought that North Germany was in arms, and that the revolted Maurice of Saxony had seized Donauwerth, and was hurrying through the Bavarian Alps to surprise his sovereign.e Charles rose and fled south over the snows of the Brenner, then eastwards, under the blood-red cliffs of dolomite that wall in the Pusterthal, far away into the silent valleys of Carinthia: the council of Trent broke up in consternation: Europe saw and the Emperor acknowledged that in his fancied triumph over the spirit of revolution he had done no more than block up for the moment an irresistible torrent. When this last effort to produce religious uniformity by violence had failed as hopelessly as the previous devices of holding discussions of doctrine and calling a general council, a sort of armistice was agreed to in 1555, which lasted in mutual fear and suspicion for more than sixty years. Four years after this disappointment of the hopes and projects which had occupied his busy life, Charles, weighed down by cares and with the shadow of coming death already upon him, resigned the sovereignty of Spain and the Indies, of Flanders and Naples, into the hands of his son Philip the Second; while the imperial sceptre passed to his brother Ferdinand, who had been some time before (1531) chosen king of the Romans.Ferdinand I, 1558-1564. Maximilian II, 1564-1576. Destruction of the Germanic state-system. Ferdinand was content to leave things much as he found them, and the amiable Maximilian II, who succeeded him, though personally well inclined to the Protestants, saw himself fettered by his position and his allies, and could do little or nothing to quench the flame of religious and political hatred. Germany remained divided into two omnipresent factions, and so further than ever from harmonious action, or a tightening of the long-loosened bond of allegiance to the imperial crown. The states of each creed being now gathered into two antagonistic leagues, there could no longer be a recognized centre of authority for judicial or administrative purposes. Least of all could a centre be sought in the Emperor, the leader of the papal party, the suspected foe of every Protestant. Too closely watched to do anything of his own authority, too much committed to one party to be accepted as a mediator by the other, he was driven to attain his own objects by falling in with the schemes and furthering the selfish ends of his adherents, by becoming the accomplice or the tool of the Jesuits. The Lutheran princes addressed themselves to reduce a power of which they had still an over-sensitive dread, and found when they exacted from each successive sovereign engagements more stringent than his predecessor’s, that in this, and this alone, their Catholic brethren were not unwilling to join them. Thus obliged to strip himself one by one of the ancient privileges of his crown, the Emperor came to have little influence on the government except that which his intrigues might exercise. Nay, it became almost impossible to maintain a government at all. For when the Reformers found themselves outvoted at the Diet, they declared that in matters of religion a majority ought not to bind a minority. As the measures were few which did not admit of being reduced to this category, for whatever benefited the Emperor or any other Catholic prince injured the Protestants, nothing could be done save by the assent of two bitterly hostile factions. Thus scarce anything was done; and even the courts of justice were stopped by the disputes that attended the appointment of every judge or assessor.

  Alliance of the Protestants with France.In the foreign politics of Germany another result followed. Inferior in military force and organization, the Protestant princes at first provided for their safety by forming leagues among themselves. The device was an old one, and had been employed by the monarch himself before now, in despair at the effete and cumbrous forms of the imperial system. Soon they began to look beyond the Vosges, and found that France, burning heretics at home, was only too happy to smile on free opinions elsewhere. The alliance was easily struck; Henry the Second assumed in 1552 the title of ‘Protector of the Germanic liberties,’ and a pretext for interference was never wanting in future.

  These were some of the visible political consequences of the great religious schism of the sixteenth century.The Reformation spirit, and its influence upon the Empire. But beyond and above them there was a change more momentous than any of its immediate results. There is perhaps no event in history which has been represented in so great a variety of lights as the Reformation. It has been called a revolt of the laity against the clergy, or of the Teutonic races against the Italians, or of the kingdoms of Europe against the universal monarchy of the Popes. Some have seen in it only a burst of long-repressed anger at the luxury of the prelates and the manifold abuses of the ecclesiastical system; others a renewal of the youth of the Church by a return to primitive forms of doctrine. All these indeed to some extent it was; but it was also something more profound, and fraught with mightier consequences than any of them. It was in its essence the assertion of the principle of individuality—that is to say, of true spiritual freedom. Hitherto the personal consciousness had been a faint and broken reflection of the universal; obedience had been held the first of religious duties; truth had been conceived as a something external and positive, which the priesthood who were its stewards were to communicate to the passive layman, and in the formal and unquestioning acceptance of which, even if not fully comprehended as truth, there lay a saving virtue. The great principles which mediaeval Christianity still cherished were obscured by the limited, rigid, almost sensuous forms which had been forced on them in times of ignorance and barbarism. That which was in its nature abstract, had been able to survive only by taking a concrete expression. The universal consciousness became the Visible Church: the Visible Church hardened into a government and degenerated into a hierarchy. Holiness of heart and life was sought by outward works, by penances and pilgrimages, by gifts to the poor and to the clergy, wherein there might dwell little enough of a charitable mind. The presence of divine truth among men was symbolized under one aspect by the existence on earth of an infallible Vicar of God, the Pope; under another, by the reception of the present Deity in the sacrifice of the mass; in a third, by the doctrine that the priest’s power to remit sins and administer the sacraments depended upon a transmission of miraculous gifts unbroken from the time of the Apostles. All this system of doctrine, which might, but for the position of the Church as a worldly and therefore obstructive power, have gradually expanded, renewed, and purified itself during the four centuries that had elapsed since its completion,f and thus remained in harmony with the growing intelligence of mankind, was suddenly rent in pieces by the convulsion of the Reformation, and presently flung away by those among the peoples of Europe which have thenceforth been usually, if not always, the foremost in thought and action. The leaders of the new movement sought to supersede that which was external and concrete by that which was inward and spiritual. They proclaimed that the individual spirit, while it continued to mirror itself in the world-spirit, had nevertheless an independent existence as a centre of self-issuing force, and was to be in all things active rather than passive. Truth was no longer to be truth to the soul until it should have been by the soul recognized, and in some measure even created; but when so recognized and felt, it was, under the form of faith, to transcend outward works and to transform the dogmas of the understanding; it was to become the living principle within each man’s breast, infinite itself, and expressing itself infinitely through his thoughts and acts. He who as a spiritual being was no longer to be guided by the priest, but brought into direct relation with the Divinity, needed not, as heretofore, to be enrolled a member of a visible congregation of his fellows, that he might live a pure and useful life among them.Effect of the Reformation on the doctrines regarding the Visible Church. Thus among the peoples that accepted the Reformation the Visible Church as well as the priesthood lost that paramount importance which had hitherto belonged to it, and sank from being the depositary of all religious tradition, the source and centre of religious life, the arbiter of eternal happiness or misery, into a mere association of Christian men, for the expression of mutual sympathy and the better attainment of certain common ends. Like those other doctrines which were now assailed by the German, Swiss, and British Reformers, this mediaeval view of the nature of the Visible Church had been naturally, and so, it may be said, necessarily developed between the third and the twelfth century, and must therefore have represented the thoughts and satisfied the wants of those times. By the Visible Church the flickering lamp of knowledge and literary culture, as well as of religion, had been fed and tended through the long night of the Dark Ages. But the form which the Christian Church had taken, though clothed with external splendour and hallowed by immemorial traditions, had now been interpenetrated and overgrown by abuses and corruptions which seemed to have so become a part of its being as to make it capable of no further healthy developement, and unable to satisfy minds which in growing stronger had grown more conscious of their strength. Before the awakened zeal of the Northern nations it stood a cold and lifeless system, whose organization as a hierarchy checked the free activity of thought, whose bestowal of worldly power and wealth on spiritual pastors drew them away from their proper duties, and which by maintaining alongside of the civil magistracy a co-ordinate and rival government, maintained also that view of the separation of the spiritual element in man from the secular, which had been so complete and so pernicious during the Middle Ages, which debases life, and severs religion from morality.

  Consequent effect upon the Empire.To dwell upon this fundamental change in the conception of the Visible Church is not foreign to the present subject. The Holy Empire is but another name for the Visible Church. It has been shewn already how mediaeval theory constructed the civil on the model of the ecclesiastical society; how the Roman Empire was the shadow of the Popedom—designed to rule men’s bodies as the pontiff ruled their souls. Both alike claimed obedience on the ground that Truth is One, and that where there is One faith there must be One government.g And, therefore, since it was this very principle of Formal Unity that the Reformation overthrew, it became a revolt against the principle of authority in all its forms; it erected the standard of civil as well as of religious liberty, since both of them are needed, though needed in a different measure, for the worthy developement of the individual spirit. The Empire had never been conspicuously the antagonist of popular freedom, and was, even under Charles the Fifth, far less formidable to the commonalty than were the territorial princes of Germany. But submission, and submission on the ground of indefeasible transmitted right, upon the ground of Catholic traditions and the duty of the Christian magistrate to suffer heresy and schism as little as the parallel sins of treason and rebellion, had been its constant claim and watchword. Since the days of Julius Caesar it had passed through many phases, and in so far as it was a Germanic monarchy, it had recognized the rights of the vassals and had admitted the delegates of the cities to a place in the national assembly. But these principles of the mediaeval monarchy, half feudal, half drawn from Teutonic antiquity, principles themselves now decaying, had little to do with the religious conceptions and the Roman traditions on which the theory of the Empire rested. In that theory there was no place for popular rights. And hence the indirect tendency of the Reformation to narrow the province of government and exalt the privileges of the subject was as plainly adverse to what one may call the Imperial Idea as the Protestant claim of the right of private judgement was to the pretensions of the Papacy and the priesthood.

  Immediate influence of the Reformation on political and religious liberty.The remark must not be omitted in passing, how much less than might have been expected the religious movement did at first actually effect in the way of promoting either political progress or freedom of conscience. The habits of centuries were not to be unlearnt in a few years, and it was natural that ideas struggling into existence and activity should work erringly and imperfectly for a time. By a few inflammable minds liberty was carried into antinomianism, and produced the wildest excesses of life and doctrine. Several fantastic sects arose, refusing to conform to the ordinary rules without which human society could not subsist. But these commotions neither spread widely nor lasted long. Far more pervading and more remarkable was the other error, if that can be called an error which was the almost unavoidable result of the circumstances of the time.Conduct of the Protestant states. The principles which had led the Protestants to sever themselves from the Roman Church, should have taught them to bear with the opinions of others, and warned them from the attempt to connect agreement in doctrine or manner of worship with the indispensable forms of secular government. Still less ought they to have enforced that agreement by civil penalties; for faith, upon their own shewing, had no value save when it was freely given. A church which does not claim to be infallible is bound to allow that some part of the truth may possibly be with its adversaries. A church which permits or encourages human reason to apply itself to revelation has no right first to argue with people and then to punish them if they are not convinced. But whether it was that men only half saw what they had done, or that finding it hard enough to unrivet priestly fetters, they welcomed all the aid a temporal prince could give, the actual consequence was that religion, or rather theological creeds, began to be involved with politics more closely than had ever been the case before. Through the greater part of Christendom wars of religion raged for a century or more, and down to our own days feelings of religious antipathy continued to affect the relations of the Powers of Europe. In almost every country the form of doctrine which triumphed associated itself with the state, and maintained the despotic system of the Middle Ages, while it forsook the grounds on which that system had been based. It was thus that there arose National Churches, which were to be to the several Protestant countries of Europe that which the Church Catholic had been to the world at large; churches, that is to say, each of which was to be co-extensive with its respective state, was to enjoy landed wealth and exclusive political privilege, and was to be armed with coercive powers against recusants. It was not altogether easy to find a set of theoretical principles on which such churches might be made to rest, for they could not, like the old Church, point to the historical transmission of their doctrines; they could not claim to have in any one man or body of men an infallible organ of divine truth; they could not even fall back upon general councils, or the argument, whatever it may be worth, ‘Securus iudicat orbis terrarum.’ But in practice these difficulties were soon got over, for the dominant party in each state, if it did not claim to be infallible, was at any rate quite sure that it was right, and could attribute the resistance of other sects to nothing but moral obliquity. The will of the sovereign, as in England, or the will of the majority, as in Holland, the Scandinavian countries and Scotland, imposed upon each country a peculiar form of worship, and kept up the practices of mediaeval intolerance without their justification. Persecution, which might be at least palliated in an infallible Catholic and Apostolic Church, was peculiarly odious when practised by those who were not catholic, who were no more apostolic than their neighbours, and who had just revolted from the most ancient and venerable authority in the name of rights which they now denied to others. If union with the Visible Church by participation in a material sacrament be necessary to eternal life, persecution may be held a duty, a kindness to perishing souls. But if the kingdom of heaven be in every sense a kingdom of the spirit, if saving faith be possible out of one visible body and under a diversity of external forms, if the sense of the written revelation of God be ascertainable by the exercise of human reason, guided by the Divine breath which bloweth where it listeth, persecution becomes at once a crime and a folly. Therefore the intolerance of Protestant rulers, though the forms it took were less cruel than those practised by the Roman Catholics, was also far less defensible; for it had seldom anything better to allege on its behalf than motives of political expediency, or, more often, the headstrong passion of a ruler or a faction to silence the expressions of any opinions but their own. To enlarge upon this theme, did space permit it, would not be to digress from the proper subject of this narrative. For the Empire, as has been said more than once already, was far less an institution than a theory or doctrine. And hence it is not too much to say, that the ideas which have but recently ceased to prevail in Western Europe regarding the duty of the magistrate to compel uniformity in doctrine and worship by the civil arm, may all be traced to the relation which theory established between the Roman Church and the Roman Empire; to the conception, in fact, of an Empire Church itself.

  Influence of the Reformation on the name and associations of the Empire.Two of the ways in which the Reformation affected the Empire have been now described, its immediate political results, and its far more profound doctrinal importance, as implanting new ideas regarding the nature of freedom and the province of government. A third, though apparently almost superficial, cannot be omitted. Its name and its traditions, little as they retained of their former magic power, were still such as to excite the antipathy of the German reformers. The form which the doctrine of the supreme importance of one faith and one body of the faithful had taken was the dominion of the ancient capital of the world through her spiritual head, the Roman bishop, and her temporal head, the Emperor. As the names of Roman and Christian had been once convertible, so long afterwards were those of Roman and Catholic. The Reformation, separating into its parts what had hitherto been one conception, attacked Romanism if not Catholicity, and formed religious communities which, while continuing to call themselves Christian, repudiated the form with which Christianity had been so long identified in the West. As the Empire was founded upon the assumption that the limits of Church and State are exactly co-extensive, a change which withdrew half of its subjects from the one body while they remained members of the other, transformed it utterly, destroyed the meaning and value of its old arrangements, and forced the Emperor into a strange and incongruous position. To his Protestant subjects he was merely the titular head of the nation, to the Catholics he was also the Defender and Advocate of their church. Thus from being chief of the whole state he became the chief of a party within it, the Corpus Catholicorum, as opposed to the Corpus Evangelicorum; he lost what had been hitherto his most sacred claim to the obedience of the subject; the awakened feeling of German nationality was driven into hostility to an institution whose title and history seemed to bind it to the centre of foreign tyranny. After exulting for seven centuries in the heritage of Roman rule, half of the nation cherished again the feeling with which their ancestors had resisted Julius Caesar and Germanicus. Two mutually repugnant systems could not exist side by side without striving to destroy one another. The instincts of theological sympathy overcame the duties of political allegiance, and men who were subjects both of the Emperor and of their local prince, gave most of their loyalty to him who professed their doctrines and protected their worship. For in North Germany princes as well as people were mostly Lutheran: in the Southern and especially the South-eastern lands, where the magnates held to the old faith, Protestants were scarcely to be found except in the free cities and a few remote valleys among the mountains. The same causes which injured the Emperor’s position in Germany swept away the last semblance of his authority through other countries. In the religious conflict which rent the Christian world for a century or more after Charles V, the Protestants of England and France, of Holland and Sweden, thought of him as the ally of Spain, of the Vatican, of the Jesuits; and he of whom it had been believed a century before that by nothing but his existence was the coming of Antichrist on earth delayed, was in the eyes of the Northern divines either Antichrist himself or Antichrist’s foremost champion. The earthquake that opened a chasm in Germany was felt through Europe; its states and peoples marshalled themselves under two hostile banners, and with the Empire’s expiring power vanished that united Christendom it had been created to lead.

  Troubles of Germany.Some of the effects thus sketched began to shew themselves soon after that famous Diet of Worms, from Luther’s appearance at which, in ad 1521, we may date the beginning of the Reformation. But just as the end of the religious conflict in England can hardly be placed earlier than the Revolution in 1688, nor in France than the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, so it was not till after more than a century of doubtful strife that the new order of things was fully and finally established in Germany.h The arrangements made at Augsburg in 1530, like most treaties on the basis of uti possidetis, were no better than a hollow truce, satisfying no one,Rudolf II, 1576-1612. and consciously made to be broken. The church lands which Protestants had seized, and Jesuit confessors urged the Catholic princes to reclaim, furnished an unceasing ground of quarrel.Matthias, 1612-1619. Neither party yet knew the strength of its antagonists sufficiently to abstain from insulting or persecuting their modes of worship, and the smouldering hate of half a century was kindled by the troubles of Bohemia into the Thirty Years’ War.

  Thirty Years’ War, 1618-1648.The imperial sceptre held for thirty-six years by the indolent and vacillating Rudolf II (1576-1612), the corrupt and reckless policy of whose ministers had done much to exasperate the already suspicious minds of the Protestants, had now passed, after the short reign of his brother Matthias,Ferdinand II,ad 1619-1637. into the firmer grasp of Ferdinand the Second.i Jealous, bigoted, implacable, skilful in forming and concealing his plans, resolute to obstinacy in carrying them out in action, the house of Hapsburg could have had no abler and no more unpopular leader in their second attempt to turn the Germanic Empire into an Austrian military monarchy. They seemed for a time as near to the accomplishment of the project as Charles the Fifth had been.Plans of Ferdinand II. Leagued with Spain, backed by the Catholics of Germany, served by the genius of Wallenstein, Ferdinand proposed nothing less than the extension of the Empire to its old limits, and the recovery of his crown’s full prerogative over all its vassals. Denmark and Holland were to be attacked by sea and land: Italy to be reconquered with the help of Spain: Maximilian of Bavaria and Wallenstein to be rewarded with principalities in Pomerania and Mecklenburg. The latter general was all but master of Northern Germany when the successful resistance of Stralsund turned the wavering balance of the war.Gustavus Adolphus. Soon after (ad 1630), Gustavus Adolphus crossed the Baltic, and saved Europe from an impending reign of the Jesuits. Ferdinand’s high-handed proceedings had already alarmed even the Catholic princes. Of his own authority he had put the Elector Palatine and other magnates to the ban of the Empire: he had transferred an electoral vote to Bavaria; had treated the districts overrun by his generals as spoil of war, to be portioned out at his pleasure; had unsettled all possession by requiring the restitution of church property occupied since ad 1555. The Protestants were helpless; the Catholics, though they complained of the flagrant illegality of such conduct, did not dare to oppose it; the rescue of Germany was the work of the Swedish king. In four campaigns he destroyed the armies and the prestige of the Emperor; devastated his lands, emptied his treasury, and left him at last so enfeebled that no subsequent successes could make him again formidable. Such, nevertheless, was the selfishness and apathy of the Protestant princes, divided by the mutual jealousy of the Lutheran and the Calvinist party—some, like the Saxon Elector,Ferdinand III, 1637-1658. inglorious descendant of the famous Maurice, bribed by the crafty Austrian; others afraid to stir lest a reverse should expose them unprotected to his vengeance—that but for the interference of France the issue of the long-protracted contest would have gone against them,ad 1634. although Wallenstein had now fallen by the hand of assassins suborned by Ferdinand II. It was the leading principle of Richelieu’s policy to depress the house of Hapsburg and keep Germany disunited: hence he encouraged Protestantism abroad while trampling it down at home. Like Cavour two centuries later, he did not live to see the triumph his skill had won.The Peace of Westphalia. That triumph was sealed in ad 1648, on the utter exhaustion of all the combatants, and the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück were thenceforward the basis of the Germanic constitution.

  CHAPTER XX

  THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA: LAST STAGE IN THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE

  Chap. XX.The Peace of Westphalia is the first, and, with the possible exception of the Treaties of Vienna in 1815, the most important of those attempts to reconstruct by diplomacy the European states-system which have played so large a part in modern history. It is important, however, less as marking the introduction of new principles, than as winding up the struggle which had convulsed Germany since the revolt of Luther, sealing its results, and closing definitely the period of the Reformation. Although the causes of disunion which the religious movement called into being had now been at work for more than a hundred years, their effects were not fully seen till it became necessary to establish a system which should represent the altered relations to one another of the German states. It may thus be said of this famous peace, as of the other so-called ‘fundamental law of the Empire,’ the Golden Bull, that it did no more than legalize a condition of things already in existence, but which by being legalized acquired new importance. To all parties alike the result of the Thirty Years’ War was thoroughly unsatisfactory—to the Protestants, who had lost Bohemia, and were still obliged to hold an inferior place in the electoral college and in the Diet: to the Catholics, who were forced to permit the exercise of heretical worship, and leave the church lands in the grasp of sacrilegious spoilers: to the princes, who could not throw off the burden of imperial supremacy: to the Emperor, who could turn that supremacy to no practical account. No other conclusion was possible to a contest in which every one had been vanquished and no one victorious; which had ceased because while the reasons for war continued the means of war had failed. Nevertheless, the substantial advantage remained with the German princes, for they gained the formal recognition of that territorial independence whose origin may be placed as far back as the days of Frederick the Second, and the maturity of which had been hastened by the events of the last preceding century. It was, indeed, not only recognized but justified as rightful and necessary. For while the political situation, to use a current phrase, had changed within the last two hundred years, the eyes with which men regarded it had changed still more. Never by their fiercest enemies in earlier times, not once by Popes or Lombard republics in the heat of their strife with the Franconian and Swabian Caesars, had the Emperors been reproached as mere German kings, or their claim to be the lawful heirs of Rome denied. The Protestant jurists of the seventeenth century were the first persons who ventured to scoff at the pretended lordship of the world, and declare their Empire to be nothing more than a German monarchy, in dealing with which no superstitious reverence need prevent its subjects from making the best terms they could for themselves, and controlling a sovereign whose religious predilections bound him to their ecclesiastical enemies.

  The treatise of Hippolytus a Lapide.It is instructive to turn suddenly from Dante or Peter de Andlau to a book published shortly before ad 1648, under the name of Hippolytus a Lapide,a and notice the matter-of-fact way, and bitterly contemptuous spirit, in which, disregarding the traditional glories of the Empire, he comments on its actual condition and prospects. Hippolytus, the pseudonym which the jurist Chemnitz assumed, urges with violence almost superfluous that the Germanic constitution must be treated entirely as a native growth: that the so-called ‘lex regia’ and the whole system of Justinianean absolutism which the Emperors had used so dexterously, were in their applications to Germany not merely incongruous but positively absurd. With eminent learning, Chemnitz examines the early history of the Empire, draws from the unceasing contests of the monarch with the nobility the unexpected moral that the power of the former has been always dangerous, and is now more dangerous than ever, and then launches out into a long invective against the policy of the Hapsburgs, an invective which the ambition and harshness of the late Emperor (Ferdinand II) made only too plausible. The one real remedy for the evils that menace Germany he states concisely—‘domus Austriacae extirpatio’: but, failing this, he would have the Emperor’s prerogative restricted in every way, and provide means for resisting or dethroning him. It was by these views, which seem to have made a profound impression in Germany, that the states, or rather France and Sweden acting on their behalf, were guided in the negotiations of Osnabrück and Münster. By extorting a full recognition of the sovereignty of all the princes, Catholics and Protestants alike, in their respective territories, they bound the Emperor from any direct interference with the administration, either in particular districts or throughout the Empire.Rights of the Emperor and the Diet, as settled inad 1648. All affairs of public importance, including the rights of making war or peace, of levying contributions, raising troops, building fortresses, passing or interpreting laws, were henceforth to be left entirely in the hands of the Diet. The Aulic Council, which had been sometimes the engine of imperial oppression, and always of imperial intrigue, was so restricted as to be comparatively harmless for the future. The ‘reservata’ of the Emperor were confined to the rights of granting titles and confirming tolls. In matters of religion, an exact though not perfectly reciprocal equality was established between the two chief ecclesiastical bodies, and the right of ‘Itio in partes,’ that is to say, of deciding questions in which religion was involved by amicable negotiations between the Protestant and Catholic states, instead of by a majority of votes in the Diet, was definitely conceded. Both Lutherans and Calvinists were declared free from all jurisdiction of the Pope or any Catholic prelate. Thus the last link which bound Germany as a whole to Rome was snapped, the last of the principles by virtue of which the Empire had existed was abandoned. For the Empire now contained and recognized as its members persons who formed a visible body at open war with the Holy Roman Church; and its constitution admitted schismatics to a full share in all those civil rights which, according to the doctrines of the early Middle Age, could be enjoyed by no one who was out of the communion of the Catholic Church. The Peace of Westphalia was therefore an abrogation of the sovereignty of Rome, and of the theory of Church and State with which the name of Rome was associated. And in this light was it regarded by Pope Innocent the Tenth, who commanded his legate to protest against it, and subsequently declared it void by the bull ‘Zelo domus Dei.’b

  The transference of power within the Empire from its head to its members, was a small matter compared with the losses which the Empire suffered as a whole. The real gainers by the treaties of Westphalia were those who had borne the brunt of the battle against Ferdinand the Second and his son.Loss of imperial territories. To France were ceded Brisac, the Austrian part of Alsace, and the lands of the three bishoprics in Lorraine—Metz, Toul, and Verdun, which her armies had seized in ad 1552; to Sweden, Northern Pomerania, Bremen, and Verden. There was, however, this difference between the position of the two, that whereas Sweden became a member of the German Diet for what she received (as the king of Holland was, until 1866, a member for Dutch Luxemburg, and as the king of Denmark, up till the accession of Christian IX in 1863, was for Holstein), the acquisitions of France were delivered over to her in full sovereignty, and for ever (as it then seemed) severed from the Germanic body. And as it was by their aid that the liberties of the Protestants had been won, these two states obtained at the same time what was more valuable than territorial accessions—the right of interfering at imperial elections, and generally whenever the provisions of the treaties of Osnabrück and Münster, which they had guaranteed, might be supposed to be endangered. The bounds of the Empire were further narrowed by the final separation of two countries, once integral parts of Germany, and up to this time legally members of her body. The United Provinces of Holland and the Swiss Confederation were, in ad 1648, declared independent.

  The Peace of Westphalia is an era in the history of the Holy Empire not less clearly marked than the coronation of Otto the Great,Constitution of Germany after the Peace. or the death of Frederick the Second. As from the days of Maximilian I it had borne a mixed or transitional character, well expressed by the name Romano-Germanic, so henceforth it is in everything but title purely and solely a German Empire. Properly, indeed, it was no longer an Empire at all, but a Federation, and that of the loosest sort. For it had no common treasury, no efficient common tribunals,c no means of coercing a refractory member;d its states were of different religions, were governed according to different forms, were administered judicially and financially without any regard to each other. The traveller by rail in Central Germany used, up till 1866, to be amused to find, every hour or two, by the change in the soldiers’ uniforms, and in the colour of the stripes on the railway fences, that he had passed out of one and into another of its miniature kingdoms. Much more surprised and embarrassed would he have been a century earlier,Number of petty independent states: effects of such a system on Germany. when, instead of the present twenty-two, there were three hundred petty principalities between the Alps and the Baltic, each with its own laws, its own court (in which the ceremonious pomp of Versailles was faintly reproduced), its little army, its separate coinage, its tolls and custom-houses on the frontier, its crowd of meddlesome and pedantic officials, presided over by a prime minister who was often the unworthy favourite of his prince and sometimes the pensioner of a foreign court. This vicious system, which paralyzed the trade, the literature, and the political thought of Germany, had been forming itself for some time, but did not become fully established until the Peace of Westphalia, by finally emancipating the princes from imperial control, had left them masters in their own territories. The impoverishment of the inferior nobility and the decline of the commercial cities caused by a war that had lasted a whole generation, removed every counterpoise to the power of the electors and princes, and made absolutism supreme just where absolutism is least defensible, its states too small to have any public opinion, states in which everything depends on the monarch, and the monarch depends on his favourites. After ad 1648 the provincial estates or parliaments became obsolete in most of these principalities, and powerless in the rest. Germany was forced to drink to its very dregs the cup of feudalism, feudalism from which all the sentiment that once ennobled it had departed.

  Feudalism in France, England, Germany.It is instructive to compare the results of the system of feudality in the three chief countries of modern Europe. In France, the feudal head absorbed all the powers of the state, and left to the aristocracy only a few privileges, odious indeed, but politically worthless. In England, the mediaeval system expanded into a constitutional monarchy, where the landholding oligarchy was still strong, but the commons had won the full recognition of equal civil rights. In Germany, everything was taken from the sovereign, and nothing given to the people; the representatives of those who had been fief-holders of the first and second rank before the Great Interregnum were now independent potentates; and what had been once a monarchy was now an aristocratic federation. The Diet, originally an assembly of the whole people, and thereafter of the feudal tenants-in-chief, meeting from time to time like our early English Parliaments, became in ad 1654 a permanent body, at which the electors, princes, and cities were represented by their envoys. In other words, it was not so much a national Parliament as an international congress of diplomatists.

  Causes of the continued maintenance of the Empire.Where the sacrifice of imperial, or rather federal, rights to state rights was so complete, we may wonder that the farce of an Empire should have been retained at all. A mere German Empire would probably have perished; but the Teutonic people could not bring itself to abandon the venerable heritage of Rome. Moreover, the Germans were of all European peoples the most slow-moving and long-suffering; and as, if the Empire had fallen, something must have been erected in its place, they preferred to work on with the clumsy machine so long as it would work at all. Properly speaking, it has no history after this; and the history of the particular states of Germany which takes its place is one of the dreariest chapters in the annals of mankind. It would be hard to find, from the Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution, a single grand character or a single noble enterprise; a single sacrifice made to great public interests, a single instance in which the welfare of the people was preferred to the selfish passions of their princes. One ruler there was indeed of consummate powers, the ruler who by building up a strong and well-administered state became the true founder of that greatness which has enabled the Prussian kingdom to revive the Germanic Empire and to bear its weight. But the policy of Frederick II was throughout a purely Prussian, rather than a German policy, and though he did much for his subjects, he did nothing through or by them, and gave no opportunity for the developement among them of self-government or of the spirit of Germanic nationality. The military history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will always be read with interest; but free and progressive countries have a history of peace not less rich and varied than that of war; and when we ask for an account of the political life of Germany in the eighteenth century, we hear nothing but the scandals of buzzing courts, and the wrangling of diplomatists at never-ending congresses.

  Useless and helpless as the Empire had become, it was not without its importance to the neighbouring countries, with whose fortunes it had been linked by the Peace of Westphalia.The Empire and the balance of power. It was the pivot on which the political system of Europe was to revolve: the scales, so to speak, which marked the equipoise of power that had become the grand object of the policy of all states. This modern travesty of the plan by which the theorists of the fourteenth century had proposed to keep the world at peace, used means less noble and attained its end no better than theirs had done. No one will deny that it was and is desirable to prevent a universal monarchy in Europe. But it may be asked whether a system can be considered successful which allowed Frederick of Prussia to seize Silesia, which did not check the aggressions of Russia and France upon their neighbours, which was for ever bartering and exchanging lands in every part of Europe without thought of the inhabitants, which permitted and was never able to redress such a calamity as the partitionment of Poland. And if it be said that bad as things have been under this system, they would have been worse without it, it is hard to refrain from asking whether any evils could have been greater than those which the people of Europe have suffered through constant wars with each other, and through the withdrawal, even in time of peace, of so large a part of their population from useful labour to be wasted in maintaining gigantic standing armies.

  Position of the Empire in Europe.The result of the extended relations in which Germany now found herself to Europe, with two foreign kings never wanting an occasion, one of them never the wish, to interfere, was that a spark from her set the Continent ablaze, while flames kindled elsewhere were sure to spread hither. Matters grew worse as her princes inherited or created so many thrones abroad. The Duke of Holstein acquired Denmark, the Elector of Saxony Poland, the Elector of Hanover England, the Archduke of Austria Hungary and Bohemia, while the Elector (originally Margrave) of Brandenburg assumed, on the strength of non-imperial territories to the north-eastward which had come into his hands, the style and title of King of Prussia.e Thus the Empire seemed again about to embrace Europe; but in a sense far different from that which those words would have expressed under Charles and Otto. Its history for a century and a half is a dismal list of losses and disgraces. The chief external danger was from French influence, for a time supreme, always menacing. For though Lewis XIV, on whom, in ad 1658, half the electoral college wished to confer the imperial crown, was before the end of his life an object of intense hatred, officially entitled ‘Hereditary enemy of the Holy Empire,’f France had nevertheless a strong party among the princes at her beck. The Rhenish and Bavarian electors were her favourite tools. The ‘réunions’ begun in ad 1680, a pleasant euphemism for robbery in time of peace, added Strasburg and other places in Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté to the monarchy of Lewis, and brought him nearer the heart of the Empire; his ambition and cruelty were witnessed to by repeated wars, and by the devastation of the Rhine countries; the ultimate though short-lived triumph of his policy was attained when Marshal Belleisle dictated the election of Charles VII in ad 1742. In the Turkish wars, when the princes left Vienna to be saved by the Polish king Sobieski, the Empire’s weakness appeared in pitiable light. There was, indeed, a complete loss of hope and interest in the old system.Weakness and stagnation of Germany. The princes had been so long accustomed to consider themselves the natural foes of a central government, that a request made by it was sure to be disregarded; they aped in their petty courts the pomp and etiquette of Vienna or Paris, grumbling that they should be required to garrison the great frontier fortresses which alone protected them from an encroaching neighbour. The Free Cities had never recovered from the famines and sieges of the Thirty Years’ War: Hanseatic greatness had waned, and the southern towns had sunk into languid oligarchies. All the vigour of the people in a somewhat stagnant age either found its sphere in rising states like the Prussia of Frederick the Great, or turned away from politics altogether into other channels. The Diet had become contemptible from the slowness with which it moved, and its tedious squabbles on matters the most frivolous. Many sittings were consumed in the discussion of a question regarding the time of keeping Easter, more ridiculous than that which had distracted the Western churches in the seventh century, the Protestants refusing to reckon by the reformed calendar because it was the work of a Pope. Collective action through the old organs was confessed impossible, when the common object of defence against France was sought by forming a league under the Emperor’s presidency, and when at European congresses the Empire was not represented at all.g No change could come from the Emperor, whom the capitulation of ad 1658. deposed ipso facto if he violated its provisions. As Dohm said, to keep him from doing harm, he was kept from doing anything.

  Leopold I, 1658-1705. Joseph I, 1705-1711. Charles VI, 1711-1740.Yet little was lost by his inactivity, for what could have been hoped from his action? From the election of Albert the Second, ad 1437, to the death of Charles the Sixth, ad 1740, the sceptre had remained in the hands of one family. So far from being fit subjects for undistinguishing invective, the Hapsburg Emperors may be contrasted favourably with the contemporary dynasties of France, Spain, or England. Their policy, viewed as a whole from the days of Rudolf I downwards,The Hapsburg Emperors and their policy. had been neither conspicuously tyrannical, nor faltering, nor dishonest. But it had been almost always a selfish family policy. Entrusted with an office which might, if there be any power in those memories of the past to which the champions of hereditary monarchy were wont to appeal, have stirred their sluggish souls with some enthusiasm for the heroes on whose throne they sat, some wish to advance the glory and the happiness of Germany, they had cared for nothing, sought nothing, used the Empire as an instrument for nothing but the attainment of their own personal or dynastic ends. Placed on the eastern verge of Germany, the Hapsburgs had added to their ancient lands in Austria proper, Styria and Tyrol, non-German territories far more extensive, and had thus become the chiefs of a separate and independent state. They endeavoured to reconcile its interests with the interests of the Empire, so long as it seemed possible to recover part of the old imperial prerogative. But when such hopes were dashed by the defeats of the Thirty Years’ War, they hesitated no longer between an elective crown and the rule of their hereditary dominions, and comported themselves thenceforth in European politics not as the representatives of Germany, but as heads of the great Austrian monarchy. There would have been nothing culpable in this had they not at the same time continued to entangle Germany in wars with which she had no concern: to waste her strength in tedious combats with the Turks, or plunge her into a new struggle with France, not to defend her frontiers or recover the lands she had lost, but that some scion of the house of Hapsburg might reign in Spain or Italy. Watching the whole course of their foreign policy, marking how in ad 1736 they had bartered away Lorraine for Tuscany, a German for a non-German territory, and seeing how at home they opposed every scheme of reform which could in the least degree trench upon their own prerogative, how they strove to obstruct the imperial chamber lest it should interfere with their own Aulic council, men were driven to separate the body of the Empire from the imperial office and its possessors,h and when plans for reinvigorating the one failed, to leave the others to their fate. Still the old line clung to the crown with that Hapsburg gripe which has almost passed into a proverb.Causes of the long retention of the throne by Austria. Odious as Austria was, no one could despise her, or fancy it easy to shake her commanding position in Europe. Her alliances were fortunate: her designs were steadily pursued: her dismembered territories always returned to her. Though the imperial throne continued strictly elective, it was impossible not to be influenced by long prescription. Projects were repeatedly formed to set the Hapsburgs aside by electing a prince of some other linei , or by passing a law that there should never be more than two, or four, successive Emperors of the same house. France ever and anon renewed her warnings to the electors, that their freedom was passing from them, and the sceptre becoming hereditary in one haughty family.j But it was felt that a change would be difficult and disagreeable, and that the heavy expense and scanty revenues of the Empire required to be supported by larger patrimonial domains than most German princes possessed. The heads of states like Prussia and Hanover, states whose size and wealth would have made them suitable candidates, were Protestants, and thus practically excluded both by the connection of the imperial office with the Church, and by the majority of Roman Catholics in the electoral college,k who, however jealous they might be of Austria, were led by habit and by sympathy to rally round her in moments of peril. The one occasion on which these considerations were disregarded shewed their force. On the extinction of the male line of Hapsburg in the person of Charles the Sixth, the intrigues of the French envoy, Marshal Belleisle,Charles VII, 1742-1745. procured the election of the Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria, who stood first among the Catholic princes. His reign was a succession of misfortunes and ignominies. Driven cut of Munich by the Austrians,Francis I, 1745-1765. the head of the Holy Empire lived in Frankfort on the bounty of France, cursed by the country on which his ambition had brought the miseries of a protracted war.l The choice in 1745 of Duke Francis of Lorraine, husband of the archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa, was meant to restore the crown to the only power capable of wearing it with dignity: in Joseph the Second, her son, it again rested on the brow of a scion of the ancient line.m In the war of the Austrian succession, which followed the death of Charles the Sixth, the Empire as a body took no part; in the Seven Years’ War its whole might broke in vain against one resolute member.Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763. Under Frederick the Great Prussia approved herself at least a match for France and Austria leagued against her, and the semblance of unity which the predominance of a single power had hitherto given to the Empire was replaced by the avowed rivalry of two military monarchies.Joseph II, 1765-1790. The Emperor Joseph the Second, a sort of philosopher-king, than whom few have more narrowly missed greatness, made a desperate effort to set things right, striving to restore the disordered finances, to purge and vivify the Imperial Chamber. Nay, he renounced the intolerant policy of his ancestors, quarrelled with the Pope,n and presumed to visit Rome, whose streets heard once more the shout that had been silent for three centuries, ‘Long live our Emperor! You are in your own house! You are the master!’o But his indiscreet haste was met by a sullen resistance, and he died disappointed in plans for which the time was not yet ripe, leaving no result save the league of princes which Frederick the Great had formed to oppose his designs on Bavaria.Leopold II, 1790-1792. Last phase of the Empire. His successor, Leopold the Second, abandoned the projected reforms, and a calm, the calm before the hurricane, settled down again upon Germany. The existence of the Empire was almost forgotten by its subjects: there was nothing to remind them of it but a feudal investiture now and then at Vienna (real feudal rights were obsolete, as Joseph II found when he tried to enforce them); a concourse of solemn old lawyers at Wetzlar puzzling over interminable suits,p and some thirty diplomatists at Regensburg, the relics of that Imperial Diet where once a hero-king,The Diet. a Frederick or a Henry, enthroned amid mitred prelates and steel-clad barons, had issued laws for every tribe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic.q The solemn triflings of this socalled ‘Diet of Deputation’—which Frederick the Great compared to dogs in a yard baying the moon—have probably never been equalled elsewhere.r Questions of precedence and title, questions whether the envoys of princes should have chairs of red cloth like those of the electors, or only of the less honourable green, whether they should be served on gold or on silver, how many hawthorn boughs should be hung up before the door of each on May-day; these, and such as these, it was their chief employment not to settle but to discuss. The pedantic formalism of old Germany passed that of Spaniards or Turks; it had now crushed under a mountain of rubbish whatever meaning or force its old institutions had contained. It is the penalty of greatness that its form should outlive its substance: that gilding and trappings should remain when that which they were meant to deck and clothe has departed. So our sloth or our timidity, not seeing the mischief which a soulless sham can do, maintains in being what once was good long after it has become helpless and hopeless: so now at the close of the eighteenth century, strings of sounding titles were all that was left of the Empire which Charles had founded, and Frederick had adorned, and Dante had sung.

  Feelings of the German people.The German mind, just beginning to put forth the first blossoms of its noblest literary epoch, turned away in disgust from the spectacle of ceremonious imbecility more than Byzantine. National feeling seemed gone from princes and people alike. Not to speak of cynical monarchs like Frederick the Great and Joseph II, even Lessing, who did more than any one else to create the German literary spirit, says, ‘Of the love of country I have no conception: it appears to me at best a heroic weakness which I am right glad to be without.’ There were nevertheless persons who saw how fatal such a system was, lying like a nightmare on the people’s soul. Speaking of the Union of Princes (Fürstenbund) formed by Frederick of Prussia to preserve the existing condition of things, Johannes von Müller writes:s ‘If the German Union serves for nothing better than to maintain the status quo, it is against the eternal order of God, by which neither the physical nor the moral world remains for a moment in the status quo, but all is life and motion and progress. To exist without law or justice, without security from arbitrary imposts, doubtful whether we can preserve from day to day our children, our honour, our liberties, our rights, our lives, helpless before superior force, without a beneficial connection between our states, without a national spirit at all, this is the status quo of our nation. And it was this that the Union was meant to maintain. If it be this and nothing more, then bethink you how when Israel saw that Rehoboam would not hearken, the people gave answer to the king and spake, “What portion have we in David, or what inheritance in the son of Jesse? to your tents, O Israel: David, see to thine own house.” See then to your own houses, ye princes.’

  Nevertheless, though the Empire stood like a corpse brought forth from some Egyptian sepulchre, ready to crumble at a touch, there seemed no reason why it should not stand so for centuries more. Fate was kind, and slew it in the light.

  CHAPTER XXI

  FALL OF THE EMPIRE

  Chap. XXI.Goethe has described the uneasiness with which, in the days of his childhood, the burghers of his native Frankfort saw the walls of the Roman Hall covered with the portraits of Emperor after Emperor, till space was left for few,Francis II, 1792-1806. at last for one.a In ad 1792 Francis the Second mounted the throne of Augustus, and the last place was filled. Three years before there had arisen on the western horizon a little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, and now the heaven was black with storms of ruin. There was a prophecy,b dating from the first days of the Empire’s decline, that when all things were falling to pieces, and wickedness rife in the world, a second Frankish Charles should rise as Emperor to purge and heal, to bring back peace and purify religion. If this was not the mission of the avatar who had risen to be First Consul and thereafter Emperor among the West Franks, he was at least anxious to tread in the steps and revive the glories of the hero whose throne he professed to have again erected. We may smile at the historical parallel with which the Bonapartist courtiers flattered their lord in ad 1804, the parallel between the heir of a long line of fierce Teutonic chieftains, whose vigorous genius had seized what it could of the monkish learning of the eighth century,Napoleon, Emperor of the West. and the son of the Corsican lawyer, with all the brilliance of a Frenchman and all the resolute profundity of an Italian, reared in, yet only half believing, the ideas of the Encyclopaedists, swept up into the seat of absolute power by the whirlwind of a revolution. Alcuin and Talleyrand are not more unlike than are their masters. But though in the characters and temper of the men there is little resemblance, though their Empires agree in this only, and hardly even in this, that both were founded on conquest, there is nevertheless a sort of grand historical similarity between their positions. Both were the leaders of fiery and warlike nations, the one still untamed as the creatures of their native woods, the other drunk with revolutionary fury. Both aspired to found, and seemed for a time to have succeeded in founding, universal monarchies. Both were gifted with a strong and susceptible imagination, which if it sometimes overbore their judgement, was yet one of the truest and highest elements of their greatness. As the one looked back to the kings under the Jewish theocracy and the Emperors of Christian Rome, so the other thought to model himself after Julius Caesar and Charlemagne. For, useful as was the fancied precedent of the title and career of the great Carolingian to a chief determined to be king, yet unable to be king after the fashion of the Bourbons, and seductive as was such a connection to the imaginative vanity of the French people, it was no studied purpose or simulating art that led Napoleon to remind his subjects so frequently of the hero he claimed to represent.Belief of Napoleon that he was the successor of Charlemagne. No one who reads the records of his life can doubt that he believed, as fully as he believed anything, that the same destiny which had made France the centre of the modern world had also appointed him to sit on the throne and carry out the projects of Charles the Frank, to rule all Europe from Paris, as the Caesars had ruled it from Rome.c Imaginative minds are apt to be swept away by the dreams they have themselves created. Napoleon began by invoking the memories of Charlemagne to serve his purposes: the memories of Charlemagne ended by dominating him. It was in this belief that he went to the ancient capital of the Frankish Emperors to receive there the Austrian recognition of his imperial title: that he talked of ‘revendicating’ Catalonia and Aragon, because they had formed a part of the Carolingian realm,Attitude of the Papacy towards Napoleon. though they had never obeyed any descendant of Hugh Capet: that he undertook a journey to Nimwegen, where he had ordered the ancient palace to be restored, and inscribed on its walls his name below that of Charles: that he summoned Pius VII to attend his coronation, as Pope Stephen had come ten centuries before to instal Pipin in the throne of the last Merovingian. The same desire to be regarded as lawful Emperor of the West shewed itself in his assumption of the Lombard crown at Milan; in the words of the decree by which he annexed Rome to the Empire, ‘revoking the donations which my predecessors, the French Emperors, have made’;d in the title ‘King of Rome,’ which he bestowed on his ill-fated son, in imitation of the German ‘King of the Romans.’e So too he called himself ‘Emperor of the French,’ not ‘of France’: and as he had brought within his dominions not only parts of North-western Germany but also Rome and the Papal states, ‘the Empire’ had plainly become much more than French. It was, like the Carolingian realm, not a national monarchy, though one which rested on the dominance of a nation.f We are even told that it was at one time his intention to eject the Hapsburgs, and be chosen Roman Emperor in their stead. Had this been done, the analogy would have been complete between the position which the French ruler held to the house of Austria now, and that in which Charles and Otto had stood to the distant Caesars of the East. It was curious to see the spiritual head of the Catholic Church turning away from his ancient ally to the reviving power of France—France, where the Goddess of Reason had been honoured with festivals eight years before—just as his predecessor had sought the help of the first Carolingians against his Lombard enemies.g The difference was indeed great between the feelings wherewith Pius the Seventh addressed his ‘very dear son in Christ,’ and those that had pervaded the intercourse of Pope Hadrian the First with the son of Pipin; just as the contrast is strange between the principles that shaped Napoleon’s policy and the vision of a theocracy that had floated before the mind of Charles. Neither comparison is much to the advantage of the modern; but Pius might be pardoned for catching at any help in his distress, and Napoleon found that the protectorship of the Church strengthened his position in France, and gave him dignity in the eyes of Christendom.h

  A swift succession of triumphs had left only one thing still preventing the full recognition of the Corsican warrior as sovereign of Western Europe, and that one was the existence of the old Romano-Germanic Empire.The French Empire,ad 1804. Napoleon had not long assumed his new title when he began to mark a distinction between ‘la France’ and ‘l’Empire français.’ France had, since ad 1792, advanced to the Rhine, and, by the annexation of Piedmont, had overstepped the Alps; the French Empire included, besides the kingdom of Italy, a mass of dependent states, Naples, Holland, Switzerland, and many German principalities, the allies of France in the same sense in which the ‘socii populi Romani’ were allies of Rome. When the last of Pitt’s coalitions had been destroyed at Austerlitz,ad 1805. and Austria had made her submission by the peace of Presburg, the conqueror felt that his hour was come. He had now overcome two Emperors, those of Austria and Russia, claiming to represent the old and the new Rome respectively, and had in eighteen months created more kings than had the occupants of the Romano-Germanic throne in as many centuries. It was time, he thought, to sweep away obsolete pretensions, and claim the sole inheritance of that Western Empire, of which the titles and ceremonies of his court presented a grotesque imitation.i The task was an easy one after what had been already accomplished.Napoleon in Germany. Previous wars and treaties had so redistributed the territories and changed the constitution of the Germanic Empire that it could hardly be said to exist in anything but name. In French history Napoleon appears as the restorer of peace, the rebuilder of the shattered edifice of social order, the author of a code and an administrative system which the Bourbons who dethroned him were glad to preserve. Abroad he was the true child of the Revolution, and conquered only to destroy. It was his mission—a mission more beneficent in its result than in its intention or its meansj —to break up in Germany and Italy the pernicious system of petty principalities, to reawaken the spirit of the people, to sweep away the relics of an outworn feudalism, and leave the ground clear for the growth of newer and better forms of political life. Since ad 1797, when Austria at Campo Formio perfidiously exchanged the Netherlands for the territories of Venice, territories which she had no more right to receive than the French Republic had to give, the work of destruction had gone on apace. All the German princes west of the Rhine had been dispossessed, and their territories incorporated with France, while the rest of the country had been revolutionized by the arrangements of the Peace of Luneville and the ‘Indemnities,’ dictated by the French to the Diet in February 1803. New kingdoms were erected, electorates created and extinguished, the lesser princes mediatized, the free cities occupied by troops and bestowed on some neighbouring potentate. More than any other change, the secularization of the dominions of the prince-bishops and abbots proclaimed the fall of the old constitution, whose principles had required the existence of a spiritual alongside of the temporal aristocracy. The Emperor Francis, partly foreboding the events that were at hand, partly in order to meet Napoleon’s assumption of the imperial name by depriving that name of its special meaning and sanctity, began in ad 1805 to style himself ‘Hereditary Emperor of Austria,’ while not yet abandoning his former title.k The next act of the drama was one in which we may more readily pardon the ambition of a foreign conqueror than the selfishness of the German princes, who broke every tie of ancient friendship and duty to grovel at his throne.The Confederation of the Rhine. By the Act of the Confederation of the Rhine,l signed at Paris, July 17, 1806, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and several other states, sixteen in all, withdrew from the body and repudiated the laws of the Empire, while on August 1st the French envoy at Regensburg announced to the Diet that his master, who had consented to become Protector of the Confederate princes, no longer recognized the existence of the Empire.Abdication of the Emperor Francis II. Francis the Second resolved at once to anticipate this new Odoacer, and by a declaration, dated August 6th, 1806, resigned the imperial dignity. The instrument announces that finding it impossible, in the altered state of things, to fulfil the obligations imposed by the engagements taken at his election he considers as dissolved the bonds which attached him to the Germanic body, releases from their allegiance the states of which it consisted, and retires to the government of his hereditary dominions under the title of ‘Emperor of Austria.’m Throughout, the term ‘German Empire’ (Deutsches Reich) is employed. But it was the crown of Augustus, of Constantine, of Charles, of Otto, of Maximilian, that Francis of Hapsburg laid down, and a new era in the world’s history was marked by the fall of its most venerable institution.End of the Empire. One thousand and six years after Leo the Pope had crowned the Frankish king in St. Peter’s, eighteen hundred and fifty-eight years after Caesar had conquered at Pharsalia, the Holy Roman Empire came to its end.

  There was a time when this event would have been thought a sign that the last days of the world were at hand. But in the whirl of change that had bewildered men since ad 1789, it passed almost unnoticed. No one could yet fancy how things would end, or what sort of a new order would at last shape itself out of chaos. When Napoleon’s universal monarchy had dissolved, and the old andmarks shewed themselves again above the receding waters, it was commonly supposed that the Empire would be re-established on its former footing.n Such was indeed the wish of many states, and among them of Great Britain, whose sovereign was in respect of Hanover a member of the Germanic body.o Though a simple revival of the old Romano-Germanic Empire was plainly out of the question, it still appeared to them that Germany would be best off under the presidency of a single head, entrusted with the ancient office of maintaining peace among the members of the confederation. But the new kingdoms, Bavaria especially, were unwilling to admit a superior; Prussia, elated at the glory she had won in the war of independence, would have disputed the crown with Austria; Austria herself cared little to resume an office shorn of much of its dignity, with duties to perform and no resources to enable her to discharge them. Use was therefore made of an expression in the Peace of Paris which spoke of uniting the German states by a federal bond,p and the Congress of Vienna was decided by the wishes of Austria and the difficulty of bringing the various monarchs to agree to anything else,Congress of Vienna,ad 1814-1815. to establish a league of states. Thus was brought into existence the Germanic Confederation—an institution confessed almost from its birth to be a temporary expedient, an unsatisfactory compromise between the reality of local sovereignty and the semblance of national union, which,The Germanic Confederation,ad 1815-1866. after an ignoble and often-threatened life of half a century, fell unregretted upon the fields of Königgrätz and Langensalza.

  CHAPTER XXII

  SUMMARY AND REFLECTIONS

  Chap. XXII.After what has been already said in examining each of the phases through which the Holy Empire passed, only a few concluding pages are needed to describe its character and to sum up the results of its long-continued life.General summary. A general character can hardly help being either vague or misleading, for the aspects which the Empire took are as many and as various as the ages and conditions of society during which it continued to exist. Among the peoples around the Mediterranean, whose national feeling had died out, whose national faiths were extinct or had turned to superstition, whose thought and art had lost their force and freshness, there arose a gigantic military power, the power first of a city, then of an administrative system culminating in an irresponsible monarch, which pressing with equal weight on all its subjects, gave them a new imperial nationality, and became to them a religion as well as a government. When this system, weakened by internal decay, was at length beginning to dissolve, the tribes of the North came down, too rude to maintain the elaborate institutions they found subsisting, too few and scattered to introduce their own simpler institutions, and in the weltering confusion that followed, the idea of a civilized commonwealth would have perished, had not the association of a young and vigorous faith with the name and the authority of Rome formed the foundation for a new unity, politically weak, but morally close and durable. Then the strong hand of the first Frankish Emperor raised the fallen image and bade the nations bow down to it once more. Under him it was for some brief space a sort of military theocracy; under his German successors the first of feudal kingdoms, the centre of European chivalry. As feudalism wanes, the imperial office, as well as the imperial idea, was again transformed, and after promising for a time to become an hereditary Hapsburg monarchy, it sank at last into the presidency, not more dignified than powerless, of an international league.

  Perpetuation of the name of Rome.To the modern world, penetrated by a critical and practical spirit, a perpetuation under conditions so diverse of the same name and the same pretensions appears at first sight absurd, a phantom too vain to impress the most superstitious mind. Closer examination corrects such a notion. No power was ever based on foundations more sure and deep than those which Rome laid during three centuries of conquest and four of undisturbed dominion. If her empire had been an hereditary or local kingdom, it might have fallen with the extinction of the royal line, the overthrow of the tribe, the destruction of the city, to which it was attached. But it was not so limited. It was imperishable because it was universal; and when its power had ceased, it was remembered with awe and love by the races whose separate existence it had destroyed, because it had spared the weak while it smote down the strong; because it had granted equal rights to all, and closed against none of its subjects the path of honourable ambition. When the military power of the conquering city had departed, her sway over the world of thought began. By her the Greek theory of a commonwealth of mankind had been reduced to practice; the magic of her name remained, and she held a sway over the imagination which the passing of century after century scarcely reduced. She had gathered up and embodied in her literature and institutions all the ideas and all the practical results of ancient thought. Embracing and organizing and propagating the new religion, she made it seem her own. Her language, her theology, her laws, her architecture, made their way where the eagles of war had never winged their flight, and with the spread of civilization have found new homes on the Ganges and the Mississippi.

  Parallel instances.Nor is such a claim of government prolonged under changed conditions by any means a singular phenomenon. Titles sum up the political history of nations, and are as often causes as effects: if significant to-day, how much more so in ages of ignorance when tradition was stronger than reason.Claims to represent the Roman Empire. Austria. Even in our time various pretensions have been put forward to represent the Empire of Rome, all of them without historical foundation, none of them without practical import. Austria clings to a name which seems to perpetuate the primacy held by Charles the Fifth in Europe, and was wont, while she held Lombardy, to justify her position there by invoking the feudal rights of the Franconian and Swabian sovereigns. With no more legal right than a prince of Reuss or a grand duke of Mecklenburg might pretend to, she continued after the disappearance of the old Empire to use its arms and devices, and being almost the youngest of European monarchies, she became respected as the oldest and most conservative. Bonapartean France,France. as the self-appointed heir of the Carolingians, grasped for a time the sceptre of the West, and under the ruler who fell in 1870 aspired to hold the balance of European politics, and be recognized as the leader and patron of the so-called ‘Latin races’ on both sides of the Atlantic.a Professing the creed of Constantinople, Russia claims the crown of the Eastern Caesars,Russia. and looks forward to the day when the capital which prophecy has promised for a thousand years will echo to the tramp of her armies. The doctrine of Panslavism, under an imperial head of the Orthodox Eastern Church, has become a formidable engine of aggression in the hands of a mighty despotism and a growing race, naturally drawn to expand its frontiers toward the south.Greece. Another testimony to the enduring influence of old political combinations is supplied by the eagerness with which modern Hellas embraced the notion of gathering the peoples of South-eastern Europe and Asia Minor that profess the Orthodox creed into a revived Empire of the East,The Turks. with its capital on the Bosphorus. Nay, the intruding Ottoman himself, different in faith as well as in blood, long ago declared himself the representative of the Eastern Caesars, whose dominion he extinguished. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent assumed the name of Emperor, and refused it to Charles the Fifth; his successors were once preceded through the streets of Constantinople by twelve officers, bearing straws aloft, a faint semblance of the consular fasces that had escorted a Quinctius or a Fabius through the Roman forum. Yet in no one of these cases was there that apparent legality of title which the shouts of the people and the benediction of the pontiff conveyed to Charles and Otto.b

  Parallel of the Papacy.These examples, however, are minor parallels: the complement and illustration of the history of the Empire is to be found in that of the Holy See. The Papacy, whose spiritual power was itself the offspring of Rome’s temporal dominion, evoked the phantom of her parent, used it, obeyed it, rebelled and overthrew it, in its old age once more drew it to her bosom, till in its downfall she heard the knell of the old order and saw the end of her own temporal power approaching.

  Both Papacy and Empire rose in an age when the human spirit was prostrated before authority and tradition, when the exercise of private judgement was impossible to most and sinful to all. Those who believed the miracles recorded in the Acta Sanctorum, and did not question the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, might well recognize as ordained of God the twofold authority of Rome, founded, as it seemed to be, on so many texts of Scripture, and confirmed by five centuries of undisputed possession.

  Both sanctioned and satisfied the passion of the Middle Ages for Unity. Ferocity, violence, disorder, were the conspicuous evils of that time: hence all the aspirations of the good were for something which, breaking the force of passion and increasing the force of sympathy, should teach the stubborn wills to sacrifice themselves in the view of a common purpose. To those men, moreover, unable to rise above the sensuous, seeing with eyes unlike ours both the connection and the difference of the spiritual and the secular elements in life, the idea of the Visible Church was full of awful meaning. Solitary thought was helpless, and strove to lose itself in the aggregate, since it could not create for itself that which was universal. The schism that severed a man from the congregation of the faithful on earth was hardly less dreadful than the heresy which excluded him from the company of the blessed in heaven. He who kept not his appointed place in the ranks of the Church militant had no right to swell the rejoicing anthems of the Church triumphant. Here, as in so many other cases, the continued use of traditional language prevents men from seeing how great is the difference between their own times and those in which the phrases they repeat were first used, and used in full sincerity. Whether the world is better or worse for the change which has passed upon its feelings in these matters is another question: all that is necessary to note here is that the change is a profound and pervading one. Obedience, almost the first of mediaeval virtues, is now often spoken of as if it were fit only for slaves or fools. Instead of praising, men are wont to condemn the submission of the individual will, the surrender of the individual belief, to the will or the belief of the community. Some persons declare variety of opinion to be a positive good. The great mass have little longing for a perfect unity of faith. They have no horror of schism. They cannot understand the fascination which the idea of one all-embracing, all-pervading Church exercised upon their mediaeval forefathers. A life in the Church, for the Church, through the Church; a life which she blessed in mass at morning and sent to peaceful rest by the vesper hymn; a life which she supported by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it by confession, purifying it by penance, admonishing it by the presentation of visible objects for contemplation and worship—this was the life which they of the Middle Ages conceived of as the rightful life for man; it was the actual life of many, the ideal of all. The unseen world was so unceasingly pointed to, and its dependence on the seen so intensely felt, that the barrier between the two seemed to disappear. The Church was not merely the portal to heaven; it was heaven anticipated; it was already self-gathered and complete. In one sentence from a singular mediaeval document may be found a key to much which seems strangest to us in the feelings of the Middle Ages: ‘The Church is dearer to God than heaven. For the Church does not exist for the sake of heaven, but conversely, heaven for the sake of the Church.’c

  Again, both Empire and Papacy rested on opinion rather than on material force, and when the struggle which began in the eleventh century came, the Empire succumbed, because its rival’s hold over the souls of men was firmer, more direct, enforced by penalties more terrible than the death of the body. The ecclesiastical host which Alexander III and Innocent IV led was animated by a loftier spirit and more wholly devoted to a single aim than the knights and nobles who followed the banner of the Swabian Caesars. Its allegiance was undivided; it comprehended the principles for which it fought. They trembled at even while they resisted the spiritual power.

  Papacy and Empire compared as perpetuations of a name.Both sprang from what might seem to be the accident of name. The power of the great Latin patriarchate was a Form: the ghost, it has been said, of the older Empire, favoured in its growth by circumstances, but really vital because capable of wonderful adaptation to the character and wants of the time. So too, though far less perfectly, was the Empire. Its Form was the tradition of the universal rule of Rome; it met the needs of successive centuries by civilizing barbarous peoples, by maintaining unity in confusion and disorganization, by controlling brute violence through the sanctions of a higher power, by being made the keystone of a gigantic feudal arch, by becoming in its old age the centre of a European states-system. And its history, as it shews the power of ancient names and forms, shews also how hopeless is the attempt to preserve in life a system which arose out of ideas and under conditions that have passed away, how unreal such a perpetuation may be, and how it may deceive men, by preserving the shadow while it loses the substance. This perpetuation itself, what is it but the expression of the belief of mankind, a belief incessantly corrected yet never weakened, that their old institutions can continue to subsist unchanged, that what has served their fathers will do well enough for them, that it is possible to make a system once for all perfect and abide in it for ever thereafter? Of all political instincts this is perhaps the strongest; often useful, often abused, but never more natural or more fitting than when it led men who felt skill and knowledge slipping from their grasp to seek to save what they could from the wreck of an older and higher civilization. It was thus that both Papacy and Empire were maintained by generations who had no type of greatness and wisdom save that which they associated with the name of Rome. Though it never could have existed save as a prolongation, though it was and remained through the Middle Ages an anachronism, the Empire of the tenth century had changed profoundly from the Empire of the second. Much more was the Papacy, though it too hankered after the forms and titles of antiquity, a truly new creation. And in the same proportion as it was new, and represented the spirit not of a past age but of its own, was it a power stronger and more enduring than the Empire. More enduring, because more lately born, and so in fuller harmony with the ruling spirit and cogent needs of the time, stronger, because at the head of the great ecclesiastical body, in and through which, rather than through secular life, the intelligence and political activity of the Middle Ages sought their expression. The famous simile of Gregory the Seventh is that which best describes the Empire and the Popedom. They were indeed the ‘two lights in the firmament of the militant Church,’ the lights which illumined and ruled the world all through the Middle Ages. And as moonlight is to sunlight, so was the Empire to the Papacy. The rays of the one were borrowed, feeble, often interrupted: the other shone with an unquenchable brilliance that was all her own.

  In what sense was the Empire Roman?If we analyze the Papacy and the Empire, we shall find that each is old, and each is new. The remark is true in a sense of all institutions, but it applies in a special sense to these two. The Papacy was new in the doctrines and the spirit which it drew from Scripture and Christian tradition. It was old in the form of its government, for this was modelled on the heathen autocracy, old also in the application of compulsive power to matters of opinion and belief, than which nothing could be more opposed to the teachings of Christ. The Empire was new in so far as it was a German kingdom, built up on feudal principles; new also in all that it had imbibed from Christianity—in the sense of its religious mission, and of faith as a bond to unite mankind in one world-embracing state. It was old not only in its name but in the effort to base its universal dominion upon the imprescriptible rights of Rome, and in the autocratic character which its adoption of the ancient Roman law as its own had made it, at least in outward semblance, assume.

  This distinction between its component elements may help to supply an answer to the question which the student of its history often puts to himself—‘Was it Roman in anything but name? and was that name anything better than a piece of fantastic antiquarianism?’ A comparison might be drawn between the Antonines of the second century and the Ottos of the tenth which should shew nothing but unlikeness. What the Empire was in the second century every student of the ancient classics knows. In the tenth it was a feudal monarchy, resting on a strong territorial oligarchy. Its chiefs were barbarians, the sons of those who had destroyed Varus and baffled Germanicus, sometimes unable even to use the tongue of Rome. Its powers, nominally wide, were limited by custom and the strength of the great vassals. It could scarcely be said to have a governmental organization, whether judicial or administrative. It was consecrated to the defence, nay, it existed by virtue of the religion, which Trajan and Marcus had persecuted. Nevertheless, however strongly the contrast be stated points of resemblance will remain. The Roman idea of universal denationalization survived as an idea, and drew with it that of a certain equality among all free subjects. The world’s highest dignity was for many centuries the only civil office to which any free-born Christian was legally eligible. So too there survived the Roman conception of Law, written, settled, scientific law, as the foundation of social order, as the regulator of the relations of members of the community, as the form through which the state must act.

  It may be added that there was among the Teutonic Emperors, when one compares them as a whole either with the East Roman monarchs or with the Muslim dynasties, a loftiness of spirit and a sense of duty to the realm they ruled which recalls the old Roman type. Trajan and Marcus might have found their true successors among the woods of Germany rather than in the palaces of Constantinople, where every office and name and custom had floated down from the court of Theodosius in a stream of unbroken legitimacy. The ceremonies of Henry the Seventh’s coronation would have been strange indeed to Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus; yet they were better than the purple buskins of Byzantium: they had more Roman dignity and force than the fantastic forms with which a Palaeologus was installed! Of the Germanic Empire in later centuries the same cannot be said. It had lived on, when honour and nature bade it die: it had become what the Empire of the Moguls had then become, and that of the Ottomans still later became, a curious relic of antiquity, on which the philosopher might muse, but from which the vigour of life and all power for good had long since departed. Institutions, however, should, like men, be judged by their prime.

  ‘Imperialism’: Roman, French, and mediaeval.The word ‘Imperialism’ has within our own time been used in varying senses and has evoked diverse feelings of attraction and repulsion. From the time when the first Bonaparte took the title of Emperor in France until the fall of Louis Napoleon in 1870, it was used to denote a system intended to imitate that which Julius Caesar and his subtle nephew erected upon the ruins of the republican constitution of Rome. The sacrifice of the individual to the mass, the concentration of all legislative and judicial powers in the person of the sovereign, the centralization of the administrative system, the maintenance of order by a large military force, the substitution of the influence of public opinion for the control of representative assemblies, were commonly taken, whether rightly or wrongly, to characterize that system: and the glory which surrounded the name of Rome, the peace and order which the sway of the Roman Caesars had, in its best days, secured for the world, were used to recommend Napoleonic rule in France and to justify French predominance in Europe. That system has passed away, those memories are no longer invoked.Essential principles of the mediaeval Empire. Neither with Bonapartean imperialism nor with other more recent sense given to the term had the doctrines on which the mediaeval Empire rested anything in common. There was, nevertheless, a thing which may be called mediaeval imperialism, a theory of the nature of the state and the best form of government, of which, since it has been already described,d it is enough to say here, that from three leading principles all its properties may be derived. The first and not the most essential was the existence of the state as a monarchy. The second was the exact coincidence of the Holy State’s limits, and the perfect harmony of its workings with the limits and the workings of Holy Church. The third was its universality. These three were vital. Forms of political organization, the presence or absence of constitutional checks, the degree of liberty enjoyed by the subject, the rights conceded to local authorities, all these were matters of secondary importance. But although there brooded over all the shadow of an autocracy, it was an autocracy not of the sword but of law, itself subject to that Law of Nature which mediaeval thinkers recognized as the expression of the will of a righteous God; an autocracy not chilling and blighting, but one which, in Germany at least, looked with favour on municipal freedom, and everywhere did its best for learning, for religion, for intelligence; an autocracy not hereditary, but one which maintained in theory the principle that he should rule who was found the fittest. To praise or to decry the Empire as a despotic power is to misunderstand it altogether. We need not, because an unbounded prerogative was useful in ages of turbulence, advocate it now; nor need we, with Sismondi, blame the Frankish conqueror because he granted no ‘constitutional charter’ to all the nations that obeyed him. Like the Papacy, the Empire expressed the political ideas of a time, and not of all time: like the temporal power of the Papacy, it decayed when those ideas changed; when men became more capable of rational liberty, when thought grew stronger, and the spiritual nature shook itself more free from the bonds of sense.

  Influence of the Holy Empire on Germany.The influence of the Empire upon Germany may in some aspects appear altogether unfortunate. For many generations the flower of Teutonic chivalry crossed the Alps to perish by the sword of the Lombards, or the deadlier fevers of Rome. Italy terribly avenged the wrongs she suffered. Those who destroyed the national existence of another people forfeited their own. The German kingdom, crushed beneath the weight of the Roman Empire, could never recover strength enough to form a compact and united monarchy, such as arose elsewhere in Europe. The race whom their neighbours had feared and obeyed till the middle of the thirteenth century saw themselves, down even to our own day, the prey of intestine feuds and their country the battlefield of Europe. Spoiled and insulted by a neighbour restlessly active and long superior in the arts of success, they were for a time accustomed to regard France as the downtrodden Slavonic tribes regarded them. The want of national union and political liberty from which Germany used to suffer need not be attributed to the differences of her races; for, conspicuous as that difference was in the days of Otto the Great, it was less conspicuous than in France, where intruding Franks, Goths, Burgundians, and Northmen were mingled with primitive Celts and Basques; less conspicuous than in Spain, or Italy, or Britain. Rather was it due to that decline of the central government which was induced by its strife with the Popedom, by its endless Italian wars, by the passion for universal dominion which made it the assailant of all the neighbouring countries. The absence or the weakness of the embarrassed monarch enabled his feudal vassals to establish petty despotisms, debarring the nation from united political action, and greatly retarding the emancipation of the commons. Thus, while the princes became shamelessly selfish, justifying their resistance to the throne as the defence of their own liberty—a liberty which included the oppression of their subjects—and ready on the least occasion to throw themselves into the arms of France, the body of the people were deprived of all political training, and found the lack of such experience impede their efforts down to our own time.

  For such misfortunes, however, as the Empire entailed upon the nation there was not wanting some compensation. The inheritance of the Roman Empire made the Germans the ruling race of Europe, and the brilliance of that glorious dawn could never fade entirely from their name. Even in those later days when they lived as a peaceful people, acquiescent in paternal government, and given to the quiet enjoyments of art, music, and meditation, they delighted themselves with memories of the time when their conquering chivalry was the terror of the Gaul and the Slave, the Lombard and the Saracen. The national life received a keen stimulus from the sense of exaltation which victory brought, and from the intercourse with countries where the old civilization had not wholly perished. It was this connection with Italy that raised the German lands out of barbarism, and did for them the work which Roman conquest had performed in Gaul, Spain, and Britain. From the Empire flowed the richness of their mediaeval life and literature: it first awoke in them a consciousness of national existence; its history inspired and served as material to their poetry; to many ardent patriots the splendours of the past became the beacon of the future. There was a bright side even to that long political disunion, which lasted down till the days when in achieving their national unity they became at the same time a mighty military power. When they complained that they were not a nation, and sighed for the harmony of feeling and singleness of aim which their great rival seemed to display, the example of a wonderful ancient people which never achieved political unity might have brought them some comfort. To the variety of conditions and aptitudes which the existence of so many small governments helped to produce may be partly attributed the breadth of developement in German thought and literature, by virtue of which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, it transcended the French hardly less than the Greek surpassed the Roman. Paris no doubt was great, but a country may lose as well as gain by the predominance of a single city; and Germany had in those days no cause to lament that she alone among modern states had never possessed a capital.

  In the years before 1866 when Austria and Prussia were disputing the headship of Germany, the merits of the old Empire were the subject of a brisk controversy among several German professors of history.eAustria as heir of the Holy Empire. The spokesmen of the Austrian or Roman Catholic party, a party which was then not less powerful in some of the minor German States than in Vienna, claimed for the Hapsburg monarchy the honour of being the legitimate representative of the mediaeval Empire, and declared that only by again accepting Hapsburg leadership could Germany win back the glory and the strength that once were hers.f The North German liberals ironically applauded the comparison. ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘your Austrian Empire, as it calls itself, is the true daughter of the old despotism: not less tyrannical, not less aggressive, not less retrograde; like its progenitor, the friend of priests, the enemy of free thought, the trampler upon the national feeling of the peoples that obey it. It is you whose selfish and anti-national policy blasts the hope of German unity now, as Otto and Frederick blasted it long ago by their schemes of foreign conquest. The dream of Empire has been our bane from first to last.’

  To an impartial eye, neither of these contending schools seemed entitled to press history into the service of partizan politics. Austria might indeed in those days, when she was ruling over a disaffected Venetia, a disaffected Hungary, a disaffected Galicia, seem to be only too faithfully reproducing the policy of the Saxon and Swabian Caesars. Yet the differences were manifest. If they oppressed the Italian cities they did it in the defence of rights which the Italians themselves admitted. If they lusted after a dominion over the races on their borders, that dominion was to them a means of spreading civilization and religion in savage countries, not of pampering upon their revenues an alien court and aristocracy. They strove to maintain a strong government at home, but they did it when a strong government was the first of political blessings. They gathered and maintained vast armies; but those armies were composed of knights and barons who lived for war alone, not of peasants torn away from useful labour and condemned to the cruel task of perpetuating their own bondage by crushing the aspirations of another nationality. If Otto and Frederick erred in pursuing the glittering lure of universal dominion, they were the victims of a belief which all the world shared, and they erred in the twilight of a half-barbarous age, not in the noonday blaze of modern civilization. The enthusiasm for mediaeval faith and simplicity which was so fervid in the first half of the nineteenth century has run its course, and is not likely soon to revive. He who reads the history of the Middle Ages will not deny that its heroes, even the grandest of them, were in some respects little better than savages. But when he approaches more recent times, and sees how, during the last three hundred years, kings have dealt with their subjects and with each other, he will forget the ferocity of the Middle Ages, in disgust at the heartlessness, the perfidy, the injustice all the more odious because it sometimes wears the mask of legality, which disgraces the annals of the military monarchies of Europe. And as the Holy Empire of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries cannot fairly be represented as having set a precedent for the later misdeeds of Austria, so neither did its traditions furnish a sufficient basis for the claims she then made to the leadership of the German nation. The day of imperial greatness was already past when Rudolf the first Hapsburg reached the throne; while during the later part of the Austrian period, from Ferdinand II to Francis II, the Holy Empire was to Germany a mere clog and incumbrance, which the unhappy nation bore because she knew not how to rid herself of it.

  We are not yet far enough removed from the Empire to estimate all its influence on European progress,Bearing of the Empire upon the progress of European civilization. just as he must travel far from the foot of a mountain who would take in at a glance its peaks and slopes and buttresses, appreciate the nobility of its lines, and perceive its relation to the valleys and ranges that fill the landscape on either side of it. But as the revival of the imperial name under Charles and Otto was mainly due to the continuing power of the Roman Law and the Roman Church, we may take note of the relation which it bore to these two great factors in modern civilization. From it came nearly everything in the political and legal institutions of the Middle Ages that was not feudal: and feudalism itself was modified by the notions which the Empire embodied. The conception of royalty which grew up in the thirteenth century and held its ground till recent times, and in particular the singular doctrine of the ‘divine right’ of a sovereign, belonged originally and properly to the Emperor, and was extended from his office to that of other monarchs. So the existence of the Empire greatly contributed to the prevalence of Roman law as a practical system through Europe, down to our own days.Influence upon modern jurisprudence. For while in Southern France and Central Italy, where the subject population greatly outnumbered their conquerors, the old system might have in any case survived, it may be conjectured that in other parts of the European continent there would have grown up (as happened in England) bodies of local customary law lacking that symmetry and scientific quality which characterize the law of Rome. The fact that there was still a Roman Emperor, and that the study of the law promulgated by his remote predecessors was renewed under his auspices in countries recognizing his supremacy, gave a life and reality to the ancient texts they could never have possessed, but for the notion that since the German monarch was the legitimate successor of Justinian, the Corpus Iuris must be binding on all his subjects. This strange idea was received with a faith so unhesitating that even the aristocracy, who naturally disliked a system which the Emperors and the cities favoured, must admit its validity, and by the middle of the sixteenth century Roman law prevailed through Germany.g When it is considered how great are the services which German writers have rendered and continue to render to the study of scientific jurisprudence this result will appear far from insignificant. But another of still wider import followed. When by the Peace of Westphalia a crowd of petty principalities were recognized as practically independent states, the need of a body of rules to regulate their relations and intercourse became pressing. Such a code (if one may call it by that name) Grotius and his successors compiled out of the principles which they found in the Roman law, then the private law of the Germanic countries, thus laying the foundation whereon the system of international jurisprudence has been built up during the last three centuries. That system could hardly have arisen in any country where the law of Rome had not been the fountain of legal ideas and the groundwork of positive enactments. In Germany, too, was it first carried out in practice, and with a success which is perhaps the best title of the later Empire to the grateful remembrance of mankind. Under its protecting shade small princedoms and free cities lived, down to Napoleon’s day, unmolested beside states like Saxony and Bavaria; each member of the Germanic body feeling that the rights of the weakest of his brethren were also his own.

  The most important chapter in the history of the Empire is that which describes its relation to the Church and the Apostolic See. Of the ecclesiastical power it was alternately the champion and the enemy.Influence of the Empire upon the history of the Church. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Emperors extended the dominion of Peter’s chair: in the tenth and eleventh they rescued it from an abyss of guilt and shame to be the instrument of their own downfall. The struggle which began under Gregory the Seventh, although it belonged to the political rather than to the religious sphere, awoke in the Teutonic nations a suspicion of the papal court, and a disposition to resist its pretensions. That struggle ended, with the death of the last Hohenstaufen, in the victory of the priesthood—a victory whose abuse by the arrogant and rapacious pontiffs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made it more ruinous than a defeat. The anger which had long smouldered in the breasts of the Northern peoples burst out in the sixteenth with a violence which alarmed those whom it had hitherto supported, and made the Emperors once more the allies of the Popedom, and the partners of its declining fortunes. But the nature of that alliance and of the hostility which had preceded it must not be misunderstood.Nature of the question at issue between the Emperors and the Popes. It is a natural, but not the less a serious error to suppose, as some modern writers have done, that the pretensions of the Empire and the Popedom were mutually exclusive; that each claimed all the rights, spiritual and secular, of a universal monarch. So far was this from being the case, that we find mediaeval writers and statesmen, even Emperors and Popes themselves, expressly recognizing a divinely appointed duality of government—two potentates, each supreme in the sphere of his own activity, Peter in things eternal, Caesar in things temporal. The relative position of the two does indeed in course of time undergo a signal alteration. In the age of Charles, the barbarous age of modern Europe, when men were and could not but be governed chiefly by physical force, the Emperor was practically, if not theoretically, the grander figure. Four centuries later, in the era of Pope Innocent III, when the power of ideas had grown stronger in the world, and was able to resist, or to bend to its service, the arms and the wealth of men, we see the balance inclined the other way. Spiritual authority is conceived of as being of a nature so high and holy that it is entitled to inspire and guide the civil administration. But there was not yet a purpose to supplant that administration or to degrade its head. The great struggle of the eleventh and two following centuries does not aim at the annihilation of one or other power, but turns upon the character of their connection. Hildebrand, the typical representative of the Popedom, requires the obedience of the Emperor on the ground of his own personal responsibility for the souls of their common subjects: he demands, not that the functions of temporal government shall be directly committed to himself, but that they shall be exercised in conformity with the will of God, whereof he is the exponent. The imperialist party, since they could not deny the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, nor the transcendent importance of eternal salvation, could do no more than protest that the Emperor, being also divinely appointed, was directly answerable to God, and remind the Pope that his kingdom was not of this world. There was in truth no way out of the difficulty, for it was caused by the attempt to sever things which, distinguishable in thought, hardly admit of severance in practice, life in the soul and life in the world, life for the future and life in the present. Then the Papacy, embittered by strife and intoxicated by victory, began to advance pretensions so extravagant as to provoke reaction. Frederick II claimed ecclesiastical authority: Lewis IV deposed a reigning Pope and crowned a friar as his successor. Each power had grievously wounded the other; the decline of both had begun, for each was losing its hold upon opinion. Yet for a while neither combatant had pushed his theory to extremities, since he felt that his adversary’s title rested on the same foundations as his own. The strife which had been keenest at the time when the world believed fervently in both powers, suddenly died away; and an alliance came when faith had forsaken the one and grown cold towards the other. From the Reformation onwards Empire and Popedom fought no longer against one another for supremacy, but side by side for existence.

  Ennobling influence of the conception of the World Empire.Nor was that which may be called the inner life of the Empire less momentous in its influence upon the minds of men than were its outward dealings with the Roman Church upon the various phases of her fortunes. In the Middle Ages, men conceived of the communion of the saints as the formal unity of an organized body of worshippers, and found the concrete realization of that conception in their universal religious state, which was in one aspect the Church, in another, the Empire. Into the meaning and worth of the conception, into the nature of the connection which subsists or ought to subsist between the Church and the State, this is not the place to inquire. That the form which that connection took in the Middle Ages was always imperfect and became eventually rigid and unprogressive was sufficiently proved by the event. But by it the European peoples were saved from the isolation, and narrowness, and jealous exclusiveness which had checked the growth of the earlier civilizations of the world, and which we see now lying like a weight upon the kingdoms of the East: by it they were brought into that mutual knowledge and co-operation which is the condition if it be not the source of all true culture and progress. For as by the Roman Empire of old the nations were first forced to own a common sway, so by the Empire of the Middle Ages was preserved the feeling of a brotherhood of mankind, a commonwealth of the whole world, whose sublime unity transcended every minor distinction.

  Principles adverse to the Empire.As despotic monarchs claiming the world for their realm, the Teutonic Emperors strove from the first against three principles, over all of which their forerunners of the elder Rome had triumphed—those of Nationality, Aristocracy, and Popular Freedom. Their early struggles were against the first of these principles, and ended with its victory in the emancipation, one after another, of France, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Burgundy, and Italy. The second, in the form of feudalism, menaced even when seeming to exalt and obey them, and succeeded, during and after the Great Interregnum, in destroying their effective strength in Germany. Aggression and inheritance turned the numerous independent principalities thus formed out of the greater fiefs, into a few military monarchies, resting neither on reciprocal loyalty, like feudal kingdoms, nor on religious duty and tradition, like the Empire, but on material force, more or less disguised by legal forms. That the hostility to the Empire of the impulse towards free self-government was accidental rather than necessary is seen by this, that the very same monarchs who sought to crush the Lombard and Tuscan cities favoured the growth of the free towns of Germany and sometimes favoured the free rural communities of what afterwards became Switzerland. The theoretical autocracy of Caesar could in practice reconcile itself with civic or cantonal autonomy just as easily as it did with the rights of the feudal vassal in the days when the vassal was content to keep his place. Nevertheless the principles whereon the Holy Empire rested, were in so far incompatible with freedom of judgement, of speech, and of action, that when the German and Swiss Reformers asserted the rights of the individual in the sphere of religion, they weakened the Empire by denying the necessity of external unity in matters spiritual. The extension of such doctrines to the secular world would have in like manner struck at the doctrine of imperial absolutism had it not found a nearer and deadlier foe in the actual tyranny of the princes. It is more than a coincidence, that as the proclamation of the liberty of thought had shaken, so the proclamation of liberty of action made by the revolutionary movement, whose beginning the world saw and only half understood in 1789, should have indirectly become the cause which overthrew the Holy Empire.

  Change marked by its fall.Its fall in the midst of the great convulsion that changed the face of Europe marks an era in history, an era whose character the events of the sixty years that followed went on unfolding: an era of the destruction of old forms and systems and the building up of new. The latest instances are the most memorable. Under our eyes, the work which Theodorich and Lewis the Second, Guido and Ardoin and the second Frederick, essayed in vain, was achieved by the steadfast will of the Italian people. The fairest province of the Empire, for which Franconian and Swabian battled so long, became at last a single monarchy under the Burgundian count, whom Sigismund created imperial vicar in Italy, and who, now that he holds the ancient capital, many call himself ‘king of the Romans’ more truly than did ever Greek or Frank or Saxon or Austrian since Constantine forsook the Tiber for the Bosphorus. No longer the prey of the stranger, Italy could forget the past, and sympathize, as indeed, since the fortunate alliance of 1866, she began to sympathize, with the efforts after national unity of her ancient enemy—efforts confronted by so many obstacles that for many years they seemed all but hopeless.

  On the new shapes that may emerge before the reconstruction of Europe is complete it would be idle to speculate. Yet one prediction may be ventured. No universal monarchy is likely to arise. More frequent intercourse, more rapid communications, the expansion of trade and the progress of thought, though they have effaced some prejudices and given nations a fuller knowledge of one another, have not lessened the strength of national feeling. The racial or commercial antagonisms of democracies are as fertile in menaces to peace as were ever the dynastic interests of princes. No one who reads the history of the last three hundred years, no one, above all, who studies attentively the career of Napoleon, can believe it possible for any state, however great her energy and material resources, to repeat in modern Europe the part of ancient Rome:Relations of the Empire to the nationalities of Europe. to gather into one vast political body races whose national individuality has grown more and more marked in each successive age. Nevertheless, it is in great measure due to Rome and to the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages that the bonds of national union are on the whole both stronger and nobler than they were ever before. The greatest historian of republican Rome, after summing up the results to the world of his hero’s career, closes his treatise with these words: ‘There was in the world as Caesar found it the rich and noble heritage of past centuries, and an endless abundance of splendour and glory, but little soul, still less taste, and, least of all, joy in and through life. Truly it was an old world, and even the patriotic genius of Caesar could not make it young again. The blush of dawn returns not until the night has fully descended. Yet with him there came to the much-tormented races of the Mediterranean a tranquil evening after a sultry day: and when, after long historical night, the new day broke once more upon the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-guided movement began their course towards new and higher aims, many were found among them in whom the seed of Caesar had sprung up, many who owed him, and who owe him still, their national individuality.’h If this be the glory of Julius, the first great founder of the Empire, so is it also the glory of Charles, the second founder, and of more than one amongst his Teutonic successors. The work of the mediaeval Empire was self-destructive; and it fostered, while seeming to oppose, the nationalities that were destined to replace it. It tamed the barbarous races of the North, and forced them within the pale of civilization. It preserved the memory of ancient order and culture. In times of violence and oppression, it set before its subjects the duty of rational obedience to an authority whose watchwords were peace and religion. It kept alive, in the face of national prejudices, the notion of a great European commonwealth. And by doing all this, it was in effect abolishing the need for an all-absorbing autocratic power like itself: it was making men capable of using national independence aright: it was enabling them to rise to the conception of a spontaneous activity, and of a freedom which is above law but not against it, to which national independence itself, if it is to be a blessing, ought to be a means.

  In the beginning of the fourteenth century the thoughts and hopes of the purest and most earnest minds were directed to the ideal of a Universal Christian State, by which universal peace should be secured; a lofty ideal, and one never to be forgotten by mankind. In the centuries that followed, other aims, other ideals, inspired the men who led the movement of the world, and five hundred years after Dante’s time noble lives were being consecrated to the deliverance of every people from alien rule, and the establishment of each as a free self-governing community. This too was a high ideal, and a precious one, for it meant the extinction of many tyrannies and the drying up of many springs of race hatred. No wonder that the principle of nationalities was then advocated with honest devotion as the perfect form of political developement. Yet finality cannot be claimed for this ideal, any more than for those that went before. If all other history did not bid us beware the habit of taking the problems and the conditions of our own age for those of all time, the warning which the history of the Empire gives might alone be warning enough. From the days of Augustus down to those of Charles the Fifth the whole civilized world believed in its existence as a part of the eternal fitness of things, and Christian theologians were not behind heathen poets in declaring that when it perished the world would perish with it. Yet the Empire vanished, and the world remained, and hardly noted the change.

  Difficulties arising from the nature of the subject.The highest themes which can occupy the mind are, as Dante has said, those which most transcend the resources of human language. So in parting from a great subject the feeling arises that words fail to convey the ideas it suggests, and that however much may have been said, much must remain unsaid, because incapable of expression. Here one is baffled partly by the magnitude of the subject, for it is a vast one, which needs to be studied as a whole, as an institution which through forty generations of men preserves its name and its claims while its relations to the world around it are constantly changing. But another difficulty lies still deeper. It lies in grasping the essence and spirit of the Holy Empire as it appeared to the saints and poets of the Middle Ages, and in realizing all that it meant to them. Formulas help us little: it is rather through imagination than by logic or analysis that we may succeed in apprehending the true significance of this strange creation of reverent tradition and mystical faith which filled the sky and scarcely touched the earth. A like difficulty meets us when we think of that other still more wonderful child of Rome and of tradition, the Papacy. The Protestants of the seventeenth century, who saw in it nothing but a gigantic upas-tree of fraud and superstition, planted and reared by the enemy of mankind, were hardly further from entering into the mystery of its being than the complacent philosophers of the eighteenth century, who explained in neat phrases the process of its growth, analyzed it as a clever piece of mechanism, enumerating and measuring the interests it appealed to. As there is a sense in which the Papacy is above explanation, because it appeals to emotion, not to reason, to faith, and not to sight, so of the Empire also may this be said, not that it is impossible to discover the beliefs which created and sustained it, but that the power and fascination of those beliefs cannot be adequately apprehended by men whose minds have been differently trained, and whose imaginations are fired by different ideals. Something we should know of it if we knew what were the thoughts of Julius Caesar when he laid the foundations on which Augustus built; of Charles the Great, when he reared anew the majestic pile; of Henry the Third, when he consecrated the strength of his crown to the purification of the Church; of Frederick ‘the Wonder of the World,’ when he strove to avert the surely coming ruin. Something more succeeding generations will know, who may judge the Middle Ages more fairly than we, still influenced by a reaction against all that is mediaeval, can hope to do, and to whom it will be given to see and understand new forms of political life, whose nature we cannot conjecture. Seeing more than we do, they will also see some things less distinctly. The Empire which to us still looms largely on the horizon of the past, will to them sink lower and lower as they journey onwards into the future. But its importance in universal history it can never lose. For into it all the life of the ancient world was gathered: out of it all the life of the modern world arose.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  THE PROGRESS OF GERMANY TOWARDS NATIONAL UNITY

  Chap. XXIII.In ad 1806 the Holy Empire died and was buried and to all appearance soon forgotten. No outworn shape of the past could have seemed less likely to be ever recalled to life, for the forces which had so long assailed and had at last destroyed it were stronger than ever, and threatened with extinction even that feeble shadow which, under the name of the Germanic Confederation, affected in some fashion to represent the unity of the German nation. Fifty years passed away; new questions arose; Europe ranged itself into new parties; men’s minds began to be swayed by new feelings. Time drove fast onwards, and the Holy Roman Empire seemed left so far behind among the mists of the past, that it was hard to believe that living men had seen it and borne part in its government. Then suddenly there arises from these cold ashes a new, vigorous, self-confident German Empire, a State which, although most different, as well in its inner character as in its form and legal aspect, from its venerable predecessor, is nevertheless in a real sense that predecessor’s representative. An account of this new creation of our own days, perhaps the most striking and fertile epoch in European annals, is therefore a fitting, if not a necessary, pendant to the history of the elder Empire; it is, in fact, the latest act of a long drama, which gives a new and more cheerful meaning to all that has gone before. For not only does the new Empire hold that central place among Continental States which the old Empire once filled: it is, in a moral and intellectual sense, the offspring of the old Empire, and, but for the pre-existence of the other, could never have itself come into being.

  It has been shewn in the earlier chapters of this treatise, how from the days of the Emperor Henry III, when the Holy Empire reached the maximum of its power, every succeeding change tended to sap its vitality, loosen its cohesion, diminish its material resources, weaken its hold on the love and faith of its subjects. The first crisis was marked by the death of Frederick II, when Italy was lost beyond hope of recovery; the second by the Reformation, and particularly by the Treaty of ad 1555; the third by the Peace of Westphalia, when Germany was legally reconstituted as a sort of federation of mutually suspicious and unfriendly states; the fourth, one may perhaps say, by the Seven Years’ War, when one vigorous member successfully resisted the whole force of Austria and some minor German powers, backed by the armies of France and Russia. It is easy for us now to see, that as after the first of these crises the Empire had no longer any chance of making good its claim to be a world-monarchy, co-extensive with Christianity, so after the second its prospects as a national State, claiming to unite all Germany under a single effective administration, were practically hopeless. The Germans, however, as was natural, did not see this until in 1648 the admission of the substantial independence of the princes had turned the imperial dignity into a mask under which the harsh features of the Hapsburg sovereigns tried in vain to conceal themselves. Over the sentiment of the people its name still retained some power, for it was associated with the glories of their earlier history, with heroic memories enshrined in song, with claims of world-supremacy which they could not bring themselves to forget. But it was no longer a rallying-point for national feeling, a centre to which the country looked for inspiration and guidance. There was indeed but little national feeling in the Germany of that age, little political hope or ardour, little interest in the welfare of the State as a whole, for there was nothing to stir men’s feelings as Germans or citizens, no struggles for great common objects against foreign powers, no play of political life at home, no assemblies, no free press, no local self-government. But, even if a national feeling had been awake, it would hardly have attached itself to the old Empire, which was not only cumbrous and antiquated, but seemed strange and in a way un-German, just because it was more than German; and which found the support of Rome now almost as injurious as her enmity had been in times gone by, since the friendship of Rome meant the hatred and jealousy of the Protestants. It can hardly be said that the Empire was so utterly dead but that it might have been vivified by a really great man, just as such an one might perhaps make the English or the Spanish monarchy a power even to-day. But had this come to pass, it would have been because the genius gave life to the office, not, as of old, because the office inspired its holder. And it was not so to be. The imperial throne did not find a man of the first order to fill it; and continued to stand rather because nobody appeared to overthrow it, than because any good reason remained for it in the changed order of things.

  The denationalization of Germany had indeed gone beyond politics. As after the establishment of foreign rule in Italy, Italian art and letters had become frigid and affected, so with that extinction of any free or united public life in Germany which followed the Thirty Years’ War, the blossoms of literature which had put themselves forth in the age of the Reformation were nipped and withered away. In Lewis the Fourteenth’s time, French influence became dominant in Germany, no less in poetry and criticism, than in matters of dress, furniture, and etiquette; and the ambition of German men of letters was to put off what they were hardly ashamed to call their native barbarism, and imitate the sparkling elegance of their Western neighbours and enemies. French was the fashionable language; French ideas and modes of thought were no less supreme than Greek ideas had been at Rome in the last half century of the Republic; French men of letters and science were imported, as apostles of enlightenment, by the best of the German princes, just as Germans have in later times been drawn into Russia by the Tsars.

  Just when this reign of foreign taste was most undisputed, just when the political life and national sentiment of Germany seemed bound in a frozen sleep, a change began; and it began, like many other great changes, from an unpromising quarter and in an unconscious way.

  The Margraviate of Brandenburg and the house of Hohenzollern.From the time of the Swabian Emperors, the Margrave of Brandenburg was one of the most considerable princes of the Empire, and before the reign of Rudolf the First he had become definitely recognized as an Elector with the office of Archchamberlain. His dominions consisted of the Mark proper, or Old Mark, to which were added the New and the Middle Mark, a flat, sandy territory of heaths and woods lying along the Elbe and the Havel, which had been conquered from the Wends in the days of Henry the Fowler, and gradually filled by a Teutonic population, together with a more or less vague authority, or claim of authority, over the Slavonic tribes to the north and east. In ad 1411 this territory was delivered over to Frederick, sixth Burggrave of Nürnberg,a by the Emperor Sigismund, whom he had served faithfully, and to whom he had advanced moneys, which the latter in this way repaid, giving Brandenburg as a sort of pledge which was not likely to be redeemed:b and in 1415 Sigismund formally conferred the Mark and the electoral dignity upon Frederick and his heirs, still, however, reserving (but on the occasion of the formal investiture of 1417 omitting this reservation) the right of redeeming his grant by the payment of 400,000 Hungarian gold gulden, and retaining to himself and his male heirs the reversion in the Electorate, expectant on the extinction of Frederick’s line, an event which has not yet happened. This Burggrave Frederick was the lineal descendant of a certain Conrad of Hohenzollern (first Burggrave in the days of Frederick Barbarossa), scion of an old Swabian family whose ancestral castle stands in the high limestone plateau of the Rauhe Alp, not very far from Hohenstaufen and from Altorf, the original seat of the Welfs; and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of the present Emperor William the Second. From the time of Elector Frederick the house of Hohenzollern held Brandenburg, adding to it by slow degrees various other scattered territories, with claims, which for a time could not be made good, to other territories, and in particular acquiring, in 1605 and 1618, the district known as East Prussia, lying along the Baltic beyond the Vistula, as the heritage of Albert the last Grandmaster of the Teutonic knights.c The Hohenzollerns embraced Protestantism, and after having played (in the person of the Elector George William) a rather contemptible part in the Thirty Years’ War, produced a really distinguished prince in Frederick the Great Elector, who reigned in the latter half of the seventeenth century. He freed East Prussia from the supremacy of Poland, consolidated his straggling dominions into a well-ordered state, and gave to his subjects, by the lustre of his military successes, a sort of incipient consciousness of national existence.

  Erection of the kingdom of Prussia.In 1700 his son Frederick, having secured or purchased the approval of the Emperor Leopold, but not without a furious protest from Pope Clement XI, whose prophetic spirit dreaded and denounced in Hildebrandine fashion the admission of a heretic to the most sacred of secular offices, called himself king of Prussia, taking his title from the above-named Duchy of East Prussia, and crowning himself at Königsberg, its ancient capital, on January 18, 1701. This region was not a part of the Holy Empire, and its original inhabitants, the Old Prussians,d were not Germans at all, but a Lithuanian people, who had remained pagans and barbarians till they were half conquered, half exterminated, by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their country Germanized by a constant immigration from the West. It is a curious freak of history, not unlike that which has extended the British name to the Teutonic and Gaelic inhabitants of the largest European island, that has transferred the name of this declining race to the greatest of modern German states.

  This assumption of royalty, the work of a prince who contributed nothing else to the greatness of his house, was a matter of far greater consequence than might have at first appeared. At that time no other member of the Empire (except the Emperor himself, who was king of Bohemia, and the Elector of Saxony, who had in 1697 been chosen king of Poland) wore a crown, and the new dignity was soon felt to have raised its owner into a higher European position, for it made him the fellow of the sovereigns of France, England, Denmark, Sweden, and brought him into what soon became a rivalry with his titular superior the Emperor. Had Austria been wise, she would have rejected a bribe far larger than that by which her compliance was purchased, would even have dispensed with the goodwill of Brandenburg in the struggle of the Spanish Succession, rather than have yielded to this young antagonist a moral advantage of such moment. For the time, however, little change seemed to have been made. Frederick the First was feeble and peaceful: the eccentric Frederick William I, who followed him, had a dutiful reverence for his Emperor, and prized his regiment of giants too highly to care to risk them in war. He was, moreover, thrifty to the verge of parsimony; and his energy, which was considerable, found scope for its exercise in a careful oversight of the revenue and civil service of the country which largely contributed to the successes of his son.

  Frederick the Great, 1740-1786.The greatness of the Prussian monarchy begins with Frederick II, the most remarkable man who had succeeded to a throne since Charles V. The military talents by which Europe knows him best, are a less worthy title to the admiration of posterity, than the ardour he shewed for good administration, for the prosperity and happiness of his people. Along with the instinctive desire of a powerful and active mind to have everything done in the best way, he had a complete superiority to prejudice and tradition, a love of justice, and a genuine sympathy, not indeed for political liberty, but for cultivation and enlightenment. It was at bottom this, fully as much as the glories of his campaigns, that made him, in spite of his cold heart and scornful manner, a favourite with his own people and an object of curiosity, even of pride, throughout Germany. Upon that country the moral effect of his reign was great. It stirred the national spirit to see a German prince defend his naturally weak kingdom against the allied might of Austria, France, and Rusia, and come out of the terrible struggle with undaunted confidence and undiminished territories. While the other states of the Empire were languishing under an old fashioned and wasteful misgovernment, Prussia set the example of an administration which, while rigidly frugal, strove to develope the resources of the country, of a highly-disciplined army, of a codified law, of a reformed system of procedure, of a capital to which men of literary and scientific eminence were gathered from all quarters. While bigotry and feudalism reigned on the Danube, Frederick made Berlin the centre of light for North Germany; and in this way effected as much for his kingdom as he had done by the seizure of wealthy Silesia, giving it a representative position, a claim on German interest and sympathy which there had been little in its earlier history, or in that of his own house, to awaken. But in all this it would be a mistake to attribute to the great king a conception of what it became afterwards the fashion to call ‘Prussia’s German Mission,’ the conscious foresight of a German patriot anxious to pave the way for the unity of the nation. There is little in Frederick’s words or acts to shew such a feeling; what he planned and cared for was the strength and wellbeing of his own Prussian State.e And when at the end of his life he took a lead in the politics of the Empire, by forming the League of Princes to oppose the ambitious designs of Joseph II, his purpose was simply to maintain the status quo,—that status quo whose dangers were so terribly displayed by the events of the next twenty years.f That League is memorable, not as being in any sense a project of reform, but as the first instance in which Prussia appears heading a party among the German States in hostility to Austria: it is the beginning of that Dualism, as the Germans call it, which at last reached a point where nothing but a life and death struggle could decide between the rival powers.

  Prussian policy of the wars of the French Revolution.What glory Prussia had gained under Frederick II she seemed determined to lose under his unworthy successor. Nothing, except indeed the behaviour of the minor German princes, could have been weaker, meaner, less patriotic than her conduct in the struggle with France which began in 1792.g In 1791 she had allied herself with Austria, but their relations, as might have been expected, soon ceased to be cordial. Frederick William II began to negotiate with the French Republic, in the hope of getting something for himself out of the confusion, and in 1795 concluded with France the separate Peace of Basel, by which a line of demarcation was drawn between North and South Germany, the former being declared neutral. When in 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine had been formed under Napoleon’s protectorate and the Holy Empire extinguished, Prussia, which by a convention (February 15, 1806) had obtained possession of Hanover, part, it need hardly be said, of the dominions of her late ally, the English king George III, endeavoured to unite the Northern States in a league, at whose head should stand her king, with the title and prerogative of Emperor, the Direktorium being composed of himself and the rulers of Saxony and Hessen-Cassel. Talleyrand, however, found it easy to baffle this scheme, on which he had at first pretended to smile—it is memorable as the first appearance of the conception of a North-German Confederation—and soon afterwards the defeats of Jena and Auerstädt, followed by that of Friedland, left Prussia at Napoleon’s mercy,ad 1806. if mercy he had any. By the Peace of Tilsit she submitted, losing her lands west of the Elbe, and in all more than half of her territories, recognizing the Confederation of the Rhine, and abandoning all claim to interfere in German politics. Meanwhile Saxony, the kingdom of Westphalia which Napoleon had just created, and the other purely German members of the old Empire, joined the Rhenish Confederation, that is to say, enrolled themselves the vassals of the Parisian crown. French domination was offensive everywhere, but nowhere so offensive as in Prussia, the feebleness of whose Court seems to have emboldened Napoleon to treat her with an insolent scorn he never thought of shewing to the more tenacious,The War of Liberation. though not more patriotic, Hapsburgs. Hence, too, when the uprising came, and the swelling wave of popular enthusiasm tossed back the French beyond the Elbe, the Weser, the Rhine itself, it was the much-suffering Prussian people that was foremost in the fight; it was northern heroes of the sword and pen, many of them not Prussians by birth, but drawn to Prussia as the centre of national hopes, that won the admiration and gratitude of a liberated Fatherland; while the French, who had been wont to treat the North Germans with a strangely misplaced contempt, felt for them, after the campaigns of Leipzig and Waterloo, a hatred not less bitter than that they bore to England herself.

  This great deliverance was far more the work of the people than of King or Court; but as was natural, it induced a burst of loyalty which strengthened and glorified the Prussian monarchy in the eyes of Germany, and gave it an opportunity of placing itself at the head of the nation. For the national feeling which had smouldered for two centuries or more, had now risen into a strong and brilliant flame; and it was on Prussia, more than on any other state, that its light was shed.h Austria’s merits as well as her faults did not permit her to be popular; Bavaria and Würtemberg had been aggrandized by Napoleon; Saxony had adhered to him throughout; Prussia had suffered most grievously and triumphed most signally. Now would have been the time for her to answer to the great cry that went up for freedom and unity, to secure by firm action the rights of the people in a consolidated German state.

  But the hour came without the man. Frederick William III was well intentioned indeed, but feeble and narrow-minded; and his court had not yet recovered from its horror at the principles of 1789 and the acts of 1793. As the want of representative institutions and of the habit of combination for political purposes gave the desire for unity no means of expressing itself practically, it remained an aspiration,The Congress of Vienna. a sentiment, nothing more. Thus, when the Congress of Vienna met to reconstitute Europe and Germany, the princes were masters of the situation; and they used their advantage with characteristic selfishness. The proclamation of Kalisch issued by the sovereigns of Prussia and Russia, when they leagued themselves against Napoleon (March 25th, 1813), announced the object of the two powers to be ‘to aid the German peoples in recovering freedom and independence, and to afford to them effective protection and defence in re-establishing a venerable Empire.’ The reconstitution of the country, it was added, was to be effected solely by the united action of the princes and peoples, and was to proceed ‘from the ancient and native spirit of the German nation; that Germany, the more perfectly this work was executed in its principles and compass, might so much the more appear again among the peoples of Europe in renovated youth, strength, and unity.’ But at the Congress nothing was heard, and indeed nothing would have been listened to, of the kind.i When it opened, Hardenberg the Prussian minister presented a scheme which, although it recognized in the princes an independence in some respects considerable, and already conceded to them by the treaties securing their adhesion against France, proposed to treat Germany as being for many purposes a united state, under institutions whose tendency would have been to make her less and less of a mere league. Austria however, under the chilling influence of Metternich, himself perhaps prompted by the darker spirit of Frederick von Gentz, received these proposals with dull disfavour: the minor potentates, headed by Bavaria and Würtemberg, entered energetic protests against anything which could infringe on their sovereignty, protests so sweeping that even Austria was obliged to remind them that under the old Empire certain rights were assured to German subjects, while the envoy of Hanover exclaimed against the ‘Sultanism’ of these members of the late Confederation of the Rhine. At last, after a long period of confusion and uncertainty, in which projects for the restoration of the ‘ancient venerable Empire’ were frequently put forward, and supported among others by Stein, a counter-scheme, propounded by Metternich, when he found that he could not secure the complete independence of the German princes, was moulded into the Act of Foundation of the Germanic Confederation. The work was hastily done, under the pressure of alarm at Napoleon’s return from Elba, and professed to be only an outline, which was to be subsequently improved and filled in. The diplomatists were exhausted by a long course of bickering and intrigue upon this and other questions; many were dissatisfied, but every one saw that his opponent’s power of hindering was greater than his own power of forcing a proposition through; and as it was clear that something must be done, people brought themselves to a sort of acquiescence, which, though it professed to be only temporary, could not easily be recalled, and made it harder to reopen the discussion. So the proposed completion, as was natural in a matter of so much delicacy and difficulty, never took place; and the revised draft of the Act of Confederation,Establishment of the Germanic Confederation. adopted on June 10th, 1815, a week before Waterloo, was in all its main features the constitution which lasted down till 1866. Prussia yielded with unaccountable readiness—unaccountable except on the hypothesis that her ministers, Hardenberg and William von Humboldt, despaired at such a time and among such people of effecting anything satisfactory—the points on which she had at first insisted; and made little further objection to the carrying out of Metternich’s views. Her king was a faithful member of the Holy Alliance: her government adhered to the principles associated with that compact, and was content in internal questions to follow humbly in the wake of Austria. While the Reaction was triumphing in the rest of Europe, Particularismj triumphed at Vienna, and the interests of the German people were forgotten or ignored.

  The federal constitution, while recognizing fully the sovereignty of the princes in their own territories, had made only the feeblest provisions for the concession of popular rights and the establishment of representative institutions in the several states. Almost the only expression which it allowed to be given to the idea of national unity was in the creation of a central federal body, the Diet, wherein only the princes and not their subjects were represented, which was empowered to act in foreign affairs, and which could be made by the great princes the means of repressing any liberal movements on the part of an individual member. But this did not satisfy Metternich. The excitement produced by the War of Liberation did not at once subside: the ideas of freedom, national unity, national greatness, which it had called forth, had obtained a dominion over the minds of the German youth; and were eloquently preached by some of the noblest spirits among its teachers.k These ideas, however, innocent as they would now appear, and well founded as was the jealousy of Russian influence which prompted their expression, were watched with fear and suspicion by the narrow minds of the Prussian king and the minister of Francis of Austria. In 1819, therefore, Metternich brought together, as if by accident, the ministers of ten leading German courts at Karlsbad in Bohemia, and procured their assent to a series of measures extinguishing the freedom of the press, restraining university teaching, forbidding societies and political meetings, and erecting a sort of inquisition at Mentz for the discovery and punishment of democratic agitators. These measures were soon after adopted by the Federal Diet at Frankfort, and followed by conferences of ministers at Vienna, out of which grew the instrument known as the Vienna Final Act (Schlussakt) of 1820, whereby the constitution of the Confederation was modified in a reactionary and anti-national spirit. Such securities as existed for the rights of the subject in the several states were diminished, while the Diet saw its powers enlarged whenever they could be employed for the suppression of free institutions, and received a frightfully wide police jurisdiction through the territories of the minor princes.

  Condition of Germany under the Confederation.This Karlsbad Conference struck the keynote of the policy of the Federal Diet during the three and thirty dreary years that lie between 1815 and the brief though bright awakening of 1848.l If the selfishness of rulers were not the commonest moral of history, there would be something extraordinary as well as offensive in the horror of change and reform which was now exhibited by these very princes who had, with Napoleon’s help or connivance, carried out by the mediatization of their weaker neighbours a revolution far more sweeping, and in point of law less defensible, than any which the patriotic reformers now proposed. These potentates, especially those of Northern Germany, were for the most part possessed by the same reactionary feelings as their two great neighbours; their rule was harsh and repressive, conceding little or nothing to the demands of their subjects, and prepared, especially after their alarms had been renewed by the revolution of 1830 in France, to check the most harmless expressions of the aspiration for national unity. Such unity now appeared further off than ever. While the old Empire lasted, princes and peoples owned one common head in the Emperor, and lived under a constitution which had descended, however modified, from the days when the nation formed a single powerful state. Now, by the mediatization of the lesser principalities, the extinction of the Knights of the Empire (Reichsritterschaft), the absorption of all the free cities save four, the class which had formed a link between the princes and the mass of the nation had been removed; the sovereigns had, in becoming fewer, become more isolated and more independent; they were members rather of the European than of the German commonwealth. Those moral effects of the War of Liberation, from which so much had at first been hoped, now seemed to have been lost utterly and for ever.

  The party of progress in Germany.Meanwhile the German liberals laboured under the immense difficulty of having no legitimate and constitutional mode of agitation, no lever, so to speak, by which they could move the mass of their countrymen. They were mere speakers and writers, because there was nothing else for them to do; dreamers and theorists, as unthinking people in more fortunate countries called them,Its difficulties. because the field of practical politics was closed to them. In only a few of the states did representative assemblies exist; and these were too small and too limited in their powers to be able to stimulate the political interests of their constituents. Prussia herself had no parliament of the whole monarchy until 1847: up to that year there had been only local Landes-Stände, estates or diets for the several provinces.

  Its aims: establishment of constitutional government.The liberal party had two objects to struggle for—the establishment or extension of free institutions in the several states, and the attainment of national unity. As respects the first of these, it may be remarked that the mere passion for freedom in the abstract has never produced a great popular movement. Long habit has made Englishmen, Swiss, and Americans think liberty essential to national happiness; yet liberty has in general been desired rather as a means than as an end: and there must always exist, in order to rouse a nation to disaffection or insurrection, either such a withdrawal of rights previously enjoyed as wounds its pride and its conservative feeling, or else the infliction by the governing power of positive evils which affect the subject in his daily life, his religion, his social and domestic relations. Now in Germany, and particularly in the Prussian State, such liberties had not been known since primitive times; and there were few serious practical grievances to be complained of. From the time of Frederick the Great Prussia had been well and honestly administered. Conscience was free, trade and industry were growing, taxation was not heavy, the press censorship did not annoy the ordinary citizen, and the other restraints upon personal freedom were only those to which the subjects of all the Continental monarchies had been accustomed. The habit of submission was strong; and there existed over most of Germany a good deal of loyalty, unreasoning perhaps, but not therefore the less powerful, towards the long-descended reigning houses. In several of the petty states there was indeed serious misgovernment, and an arbitrary behaviour on the sovereign’s part which might well have provoked revolt. Hessen-Cassel, for instance, was ruled by the unworthy minions of a singularly contemptible prince; and in Hanover King Ernest Augustus on his accession in 1837 abolished by a stroke of the pen the constitution which had been granted by his predecessor William.m But these states were too small for a vigorous political life; the nobility depended on the Court and were disposed to side with it; the power of the Confederation hung like a thunder-cloud on the horizon, ready to burst wherever Austria chose to guide it. It was therefore hard for the liberals to excite their countrymen to any energetic and concerted action; and when the governments thought fit to repress their attempts at agitation, this could be harshly done with little fear of the consequences.

  Attainment of national unity.In labouring for the creation of one united German state out of the multitude of petty principalities, the party of progress found themselves at a still greater disadvantage. There was indeed a desire for it, but only a sentimental desire; an idea which worked powerfully upon imaginative minds, but had little hold on the world of fact and reality, little charm for the steady-going burgher and the peasant whose vision was bounded by his own valley. Practical benefits might no doubt have been expected from its realization, such as the establishment of a common code of laws, the better execution of great public works, the protection of the nation from the aggressions of France and Russia; but these were objects whose importance it was hard to bring home to the average citizen in peaceful times. The seven millions of Germans who owned allegiance to Austria presented a constant difficulty. They were nearly all Roman Catholics. They had in the course of centuries drifted away from their brethren to the north and west. They had comparatively little sympathy with liberal ideas in politics, and they had stood outside the main current of German literary developement. Yet they were of Teutonic stock, and in any scheme for the national union of all Germany room must be found for them. And where was the movement towards German unity to begin? Not in the Federal Diet, of all places, for it consisted of the envoys of princes who would have been the first to suffer. Not in the local legislatures,* for they had no power to deal effectively with such questions, and would speedily have been silenced had they attempted by discussion to influence the policy of their masters. It was therefore only through the carefully guarded press, and occasionally in social or literary gatherings, that appeals to the nation could be made, or the semblance of an agitation kept up. There was no point to start from: it was all aspiration and nothing more; and so this movement, to which so many of the noblest hearts and intellects of Germany devoted themselves (though the two greatest stood aloof), made during many years little apparent progress. A Customs Union (Zollverein) was indeed created, ad 1833-1835, which eventually came to include all the German States except Austria, and a tie thereby established whose material advantages were soon felt; but this was done by the individual action of Prussia and the several States which one after another entered into her views, not by the Diet as a national work. Meanwhile the strictness of the repressive system was still maintained: Prussia,ad 1840. though now ruled by the more liberal Frederick William the Fourth, was still silent: the influence of Metternich was still supreme.

  Then came the revolution of 1848. The monarchy of Louis Philippe fell with a crash that sounded over Europe, and every German and Italian throne rocked to its foundation. In Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, not to speak of smaller capitals,The Revolution of 1848. there came, sooner or later, risings more or less formidable; more popular constitutions were promised or granted by the terrified princes: the Federal Diet, after a hasty declaration in favour of the liberties it had so long withheld, made way for a national Parliament, which was duly summoned, and met at Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. As the king of Prussia, cherishing a sentimental respect for Austria together with a natural dislike to revolution, refused to accept leadership, this assembly appointed as Administrator of the Empire (Reichsverweser) the Archduke John of Austria, while the Diet, joining in this appointment of the Archduke, virtually abdicated its functions. Then the Assembly set to work to frame a constitution for united Germany. According to the draft, completed early in 1849, Germany was to be a federal state, under a hereditary Emperor, irresponsible, but advised by responsible ministers; and with a parliament of two houses, one representing the states, members of the Empire; the other the people. On the 28th of March the Assembly offered the imperial dignity to the king of Prussia.n He hesitated to accept it without the consent of the other sovereigns; and exactly a month afterwards definitely refused it, perceiving the jealousy of some of the princes, although twenty-nine of them had already expressed their approval of the scheme; disliking several parts of the new constitution, fearing to give an implied sanction to revolutionary proceedings, and feeling himself unfit to take the helm of the German state at a moment of such difficulty and confusion. His refusal was a great and, as it proved, a fatal discouragement to the liberals, for it disunited them, and it destroyed their hopes of a powerful material support. Nevertheless the Frankfort assembly sat for some months longer, till, having migrated to Stuttgart, it dwindled down at last into a sort of Rump parliament, and was ultimately suppressed by force, while Prussia, at first in conjunction with Hanover and Saxony, started other and narrower plans for national organization, schemes modelled upon those of 1785 and 1806, but of which nothing ever came.The Re-action: re-establishment of the Confederation. Meantime the governments had recovered from their first alarm. Austria had reconquered North Italy, and had by Russia’s help overpowered the Magyars; France had re-established the Pope at Rome; everywhere over Europe the tide of reaction was rising fast. In 1850 Austria and Prussia took from the Archduke John such shadow of power as still remained to him as Reichsverweser, and at the conferences of Olmütz Prussia resumed her attitude of submissive adherence to Austria’s policy. By the middle of 1851 the Confederation was re-established on its old footing, with its old incapacity for good, its old capacities for mischief, and, it may be added, its old willingness to use those capacities for the suppression of free institutions in the more progressive states.

  Effects of the movements of 1848-1849.The effects, however, of the great uprising of 1848 were not lost in Germany any more than in Italy and Hungary. It had made things seem possible—seem even for a moment accomplished—which had been till then mere visions; it had awakened a keen political interest in the people, stirred their whole life, and given them a sense of national unity such as they had not had since 1814. By shewing the governments how insecure were the foundations of their arbitrary power, it had made them less unwilling to accept change; and had taught peoples how little was to be expected from the unforced good-will of princes. From this time, therefore, after the first reaction had spent itself, one may observe a real though slow progress towards free constitutional life. In some of the smaller states, and particularly in Baden, it soon came to be the policy of the government to encourage the action of the local parliament; and the Prussian assembly became in its long and spirited struggle with the crown a political school of incomparable value to the rest of Germany as well as to its own great kingdom.

  One other thing more the events of 1848-1850 did most effectively for the Germans, if indeed that wanted doing. They made clear to the nation the hopelessness of expecting anything from the Confederation. During the last sixteen years of its existence, nothing, except the promulgation under its sanction of a general code of commercial law, was done by the Federal Diet for national objects. Its deliberations had for many years been carried on in secret. It spoke with no authority to foreign princes, and behaved with sluggish irresolution in the question which was again beginning to agitate Germany, of the succession to Schleswig and Holstein, and the relation of these duchies to the Danish Crown.

  The restoration of the federal constitution in 1850-1851 was at the time regarded as merely provisional, accepted only because Austria and Prussia could not be got to agree upon any new scheme; and the successive projects of reform which thereafter emanated, sometimes from governments, sometimes from voluntary associations, kept the question of the reorganization of Germany and the attainment of some sort of national unity, constantly before the people. Thus, although nothing was done, and the tedious discussions which went on moved the laughter of other nations, the way was secretly but surely paved for revolution.Parties in Germany. In 1859 the liberals organized themselves in what was called the National Union (National-Verein), a body containing numerous members in nearly all the German States, and among them many distinguished publicists and men of letters. It held general meetings from time to time; and, when occasion arose, its permanent committee issued pamphlets and manifestoes, explaining the views and recommending the policy of the party. That policy was vague, so far as practical measures were concerned, yet clear in its ultimate object—viz. the union of all Germany in one federal state (whether republican or monarchical) and, if necessary, the absolute exclusion of Austria therefrom. This last feature procured for it from her adherents and from the German conservatives generally the name of the Little German (Kleindeutsch) party; and they, assuming the title of Great Germans (Grossdeutschen, i.e. the advocates of a Germany which should include Austria), founded in 1862 a rival association, which called itself the Reform Union, and in like manner held meetings and issued manifestoes. It found strong support in Hanover, Bavaria, and Würtemberg, but comparatively little in the middle states, and of course still less in Prussia. Its policy was mainly defensive; while the National Union, whose tendencies would naturally have been philo-Prussian and aggressive, found itself embarrassed by what seemed the resolutely reactionary attitude taken up by the Prussian king and ministers in the affairs of their own kingdom. A contest respecting the organization and payment of the army had broken out between the Government and the Chamber—a contest embittered first by the accession to the throne of the feudally-minded King William I (theretofore Regent),ad 1861. whose assertion of the principle of divine right at his coronation at Konigsberg had surprised and disquieted thinking people, and afterwards by the admission to the chief place in the ministry of a statesman who was then supposed to be the champion of tyranny and feudalism, even of the Austrian alliance. During the struggle which raged in the years 1862-1864 over the right of the Chamber to control taxation, and which at some moments seemed to threaten revolution, it was hard for the reformers to hope for anything from a power which levied without the consent of the Chamber the taxes it deemed necessary for the support of the army, and treated the representatives of the people with a roughness under which no one could tell that there lay concealed a substantial community of purpose.

  The liberals of the South and West were therefore in 1863 disposed to abjure Prussia as given over to a reprobate mind; and Austria thought she saw her opportunity. Encouraged by the measure of success which had attended his efforts to bring together in an imperial council (Reichsrath) representatives from the different provinces of the ill compacted monarchy, Schmerling, then chief minister at Vienna, conceived the hope of recovering the ancient primacy of the Hapsburgs, and thrusting the now unpopular Prussia into the background.The Fürsten Congress at Frankfort. Accordingly in August, 1863, the Emperor Francis Joseph invited the reigning princes and representatives of the free cities to meet him at Frankfort, to discuss a scheme of federal reform which he there propounded, and which, while it increased the power of Austria, appeared to strengthen the cohesion of the Confederation, and to introduce a certain popular element into its constitution. All save one attended; but that one was the king of Prussia. He had in the preceding year taken for his prime minister Otto Eduard Leopold, Freiherr of Bismarck-Schonhausen in the Old Mark of Brandenburg, a man who, having been Prussian representative in the Federal Diet from 1851 to 1859, had learned by experience the weakness of that body and its subservience to Austria, and was now becoming impatient to try some speedier and more forcible method than diplomatic discussion of ending the existing deadlock. Convinced that it was only ‘by blood and iron’ that Germany could be welded into a national State, he had resolved to create a powerful army and to place it completely under royal control; but, as he could not yet avow his designs, the conflict between him and the majority of the Prussian Chamber continued acute until the day came when the liberals saw what those designs had been, and how triumphantly they had been carried through. Under Bismarck’s advice, King William refused to have anything to do with the Austrian scheme, which fell therewith to the ground, and the Diet was troubled by no change for the rest of its unhonoured life.

  The Schleswig-Holstein question.Austria, however, would probably have tried to carry through her project had not another question suddenly arisen, which turned all thoughts in a different direction, threw the German powers into new relations to one another, and became at last the cause of the dissolution of the Confederation itself. In November, 1863, Frederick VII, king of Denmark, died; and the contest so long foreseen and delayed between the Danes and the Germans, respecting their rights over Schleswig and Holstein, broke out with unexpected vehemence.

  The Danish constitution of 1855 had incorporated these two duchies with Denmark for all purposes, although Holstein had always been a part of Germany, while Schleswig was by law indissolubly united to Holstein, and although the inhabitants even of Schleswig were in great majority of German speech. The Federal Diet had protested long ago against this constitution as an infraction of its rights, but it was not till October, 1863, that it decreed federal execution against Denmark. When, a few weeks later, Christian IX succeeded to the throne in virtue of the arrangements which Frederick VII had been empowered to make by the Treaty of London in 1852, no steps had as yet been taken to give effect to the decree. But the eyes of Europe were at once turned upon the new sovereign, whose title was disputed, and when, under the pressure of the heated populace of Copenhagen, he acceded to the constitution incorporating the duchies with Denmark, he found himself and his kingdom at once committed to the struggle. Prince Frederick of Augustenburgo claimed Schleswig and Holstein, and was supported not only by a considerable party in both duchies, but by the general sentiment of the Germans, who saw in his candidature the only chance of saving the duchies from the Danes.Excitement in Germany. The agitation in Germany soon grew vehement, and that the faster because the question was one upon which all parties and sections could unite. The National Union and Reform Union met, fraternized, and appointed a joint permanent committee, which issued addresses to the nation, established Schleswig-Holstein Unions throughout the country, and promoted the enlistment of bands of volunteers, who hurried to the border. Even the Federal Diet, though the opposition of Prussia and Austria prevented it from recognizing Frederick as Duke, carried out (against the will of those powers) the resolution for federal execution by sending, in December, 1863, a body of Saxons and Hanoverians to occupy Holstein.

  Policy of Prussia.Prussia had a difficult game to play, and she played it with consummate skill. Her ministers were unwilling to aid the Prince of Augustenburg, both because she was bound to Denmark as one of the signatories of the Treaty of London,p and because their views of the future included other contingencies which it would then have been premature to mention. But if hope and the voice of the nation called on them to act, prudence forbade them to act alone. It was essential to carry Austria along with them, not only because the Austrian alliance would be needed if England, France, and Russia threatened war, but because she could in this way be made to share the unpopularity which backwardness in the national cause was bringing upon Prussia, and because she was thus alienated from Bavaria, Hanover, and the other states of the second rank, with which her relations had been, especially since the Frankfort Congress, so close and cordial. When the co-operation of Austria had been secured—partly by adroitly playing on her fears of the democratic and almost revolutionary character which the Schleswig-Holstein movement was taking in Germany, partly through her own reluctance to let Prussia gain any advantage by acting alone against Denmark—Bismarck resolved to take the control of the quarrel out of the hands of the Diet, so as to decide the fate of the two duchies in the way most favourable to his own plans for the reconstruction of North Germany. Accordingly Prussia and Austria appealed to certain provisions of the Treaty of London recognizing the special rights of Schleswig; and summoned Denmark to withdraw at once the law of November 18th, 1863, whereby Schleswig was finally incorporated with the Danish monarchy.War with Denmark. When the Danes refused, a strong Prussian and Austrian force was poured into the duchies, not without indignation on the part as well of the rest of Germany as of the Prussian liberals, who believed that the object of this invasion was to check the national movement, expel Prince Frederick, and hand over Schleswig to Christian IX. Early in 1864 the united army passed the Dänewerk, stormed Düppel, overran Jutland, and had the Danish king and people at their mercy. A Conference was summoned in London: but it broke up without effecting anything; and when the Germans resumed hostilities, and it was clear that the expected help from England, Russia, or Franceq would not be forthcoming, Denmark submitted, and by the Treaty of Vienna (October, 1864) ceded Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg to the allied powers absolutely.Cession of Schleswig and Holstein. Prussia then pushed the Saxons and Hanoverians out of Holstein, and began to strengthen herself and make arrangements for the administration of the territory she occupied; while Austria, seeing this, began to hesitate, and suspect, and doubt whether her course had been altogether wise. She was soon to be still more cruelly undeceived.

  Questions as to their disposal.Now that the Danes were for ever dispossessed, the question arose—what was to become of the duchies. Everybody expected the recognition of Prince Frederick of Augustenburg: the Diet was clearly in his favour, and Austria seemed quite willing. Prussia, however, refused to consent. Her crown lawyers, to whom the whole matter had been referred, while not attempting to advocate certain ancient heriditary claims that had been put forward on behalf of the house of Hohenzollern, pronounced in an elaborate opinion that the title of Christian IX was legally preferable to that of Prince Frederick, and that, as the king’s title had passed by the cession to the two allied powers, the latter were now free to deal with the ceded territories as they pleased. Nevertheless, she professed herself ready to recognize Frederick as duke upon certain conditions, which were declared to be essential to the safety of Prussia on her north-west frontier, as well as to the protection of Schleswig-Holstein itself against the hostility of Denmark. These conditions included not only a strict defensive and offensive alliance of the new principality with Prussia, but an incorporation of its army and fleet with hers, an absorption of its postal and telegraphic system, the cession of its fortresses, and, in fact, a pretty complete subjection to her authority in military matters and in external politics. These proposals were, as was expected, rejected by Prince Frederick. He relied on Austria, and was buoyed up by the sympathy which his pretensions found not only in the rest of Germany, but even in the Prussian Chamber, where the liberal majority maintained unshaken its opposition to Bismarck’s foreign policy and schemes of military organization.Divergence of Prussian and Austrian policy. Meanwhile, voices began to be raised in the duchies for annexation to Prussia; Austria grew more and more suspicious; the relations of the officials of the two Powers established in the conquered territory became daily less friendly. Things seemed fast ripening towards a war, when, on the mediation of Bavaria and Saxony, the Convention of Gastein was signed between the rival sovereigns in the autumn of 1865. By this treaty Schleswig was in the meantime to be held by Prussia, Holstein by Austria, the question of the ultimate disposal of both duchies being reserved; while Austria sold her rights over Lauenburg to Prussia for 2,500,000 rix-dollars. This was felt to be a hollow truce, and its hollowness, despite the efforts of the Diet to arrange matters, was soon manifest. The Austrian authorities, knowing that they could not permanently retain Holstein, allowed an agitation to be kept up there on behalf of Prince Frederick. Prussia vehemently protested against this, and required Austria to maintain the status quo. Notes of complaint and recrimination were constantly passing between the two Powers,r notes whose tone became always more menacing. Then each accused the other of arming, Austria summoning the Diet to take steps to restrain Prussia, Prussia beginning to shadow forth plans for a reform in the federal constitution. Meanwhile both states were arming fast, and it became clear that the only question was which could first strike a blow, and upon what allies each could rely.s Prussia had secured Italy, which desired to expel the Austrians from Venetia:Alliance of Prussia with Italy. Austria managed to carry with her most of the greater German princes. In the memorable last sittings of the Diet of June 11th and 14th, 1866, Austria’s motion to mobilize the federal contingents, with a view to federal execution against Prussia, was supported by Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Würtemberg, Hessen-Cassel, Hessen-Darmstadt, and several of the minor states, thus giving her a large majority; while, for Prussia’s counter-proposition for a reform in the constitution of the Confederation, there voted only Luxemburg and four of the ‘curiae,’ consisting of northern and middle states of the third rank, seventeen in all out of the thirty-three. The partisans of both sides having thus committed themselves, there was no use in further resisting Austria in the Diet;Declaration of war by Prussia on Austria and some of the German states. so Prussia, having entered her protest against its proceedings, withdrew from the Confederation, declared war upon Hanover and Saxony on June 16th, upon Austria on June 18th, and pushed her armies forward with a speed which seemed almost to paralyze her opponents.

  The shortness of the war and the completeness of the victory surprised Europe, for though every one saw the gain to Prussia from the simultaneous attack delivered by Italy, few had known how great was the superiority of the Prussian to the Austrian armies in firearms, in organization, and in the military skill of the commanders. At Königgrätz in Bohemia the main Austrian army was overthrown on July 3, and forced to retire on Vienna, while shortly before her German allies suffered defeats scarcely less crushing.Battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa). She fared better in Italy, but the disaffection of the Magyars, added to the shock her prestige had received, made it doubtful whether she could gain anything by prolonging the struggle. Bismarck was wisely content to spare her the humiliation of ceding any German territory,t and in retiring from Venetia she lost a province which was a source rather of weakness than of strength. The Peace of Pragueu which followed marked a turningpoint in German history.The Peace of Prague. By it Prussia increased and consolidated her dominions through the annexation of the rich and populous territories of Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hessen-Cassel, and Nassau, together with the free city of Frankfort. She also secured her supremacy in Germany by creating a Federation of the North German States under her own presidency.The North German Confederation. The constitution of this Federation left some measure of independence to the minor princes, permitting them to send and receive diplomatic agents to and from other courts, levy local taxes, and summon their local legislatures as heretofore. But it effected a fusion of their military forces, which were placed under the king of Prussia; it vested in him, as president, the conduct of the foreign policy of the Confederation, and the right of making war and peace (this last with the consent of the federal parliament): and it transferred to the control of the federal parliament, over which the king presided through his nominee the federal chancellor, legislation upon a variety of important topics, including the taxation for federal objects, the control of the currency and the postal and telegraphic system. These provisions secured Prussia’s ascendancy in Germany; and although much that was anomalous and incomplete might be remarked in the scheme, as could hardly fail to be the case where one member had twenty-four millions of population and the remaining twenty-one only five millions among them, it formed a cohesive nucleus, all the more cohesive that it was comparatively small; and by accustoming the citizens of different principalities to act together in a common assembly, it gave them a feeling of common citizenship, which mitigated such discontent as might have been produced by the loss of local independence. Nevertheless the problem that had lain before Germany might seem only half solved. The exclusion of Austria from the Germanic body did no doubt make for national union, extinguishing that Dualism which had distracted the country ever since the rise of Prussia in the days of Frederick the Great. But with Austria went her German population of seven millions, filling the vast territories of Upper and Lower Austria, Tyrol, Styria, and parts of Bohemia and Carinthia—districts which had during many centuries formed a part of the old Empire. The new league, moreover, at whose head Prussia placed herself, included only the states north of the river Main, and thus, if it drew closer than before the bonds between those states, drew also a more marked distinction than heretofore between the two halves of the country, leaving the great principalities of Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden in a much more complete isolation. Germany, in fact, might appear to have purchased the completer unity of her northern half by the sacrifice of her unity as a whole.

  Treaties between Prussia and the South German States.It had been stipulated in the Treaty of Prague, at the instance of France, that the South German States should be at liberty to enter into a separate independent league of their own; and the French government doubtless hoped that now, when the scheme of a North German federation, first broached in 1806, had been at length carried out, something like Napoleon’s old Confederation of the Rhine, under the protectorate of France, would reappear in the South as a counterpoise to Prussia’s power. Very different was the turn which events took. Within a few months after the war of 1866, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and Hessen-Darmstadt, conquered foes whom Bismarck had judiciously conciliated by sparing them loss of territory and by exciting their fears of France, and who moreover wished to join the new Zollverein which Prussia was forming, entered into secret military treaties with the North German Confederation, whereby they bound themselves to unite their armies to its army, in the event of any attack on Germany by a foreign power.

  Temporary as the organization of the North German Confederation evidently was, no one predicted for it a life of five years only; and few expected its developement into a grander and more comprehensive union to be the work of its bitterest enemy.Attitude of the French Emperor. The alarm of France at the disclosure of Prussia’s military power by the campaigns of 1866, and at the increase of her strength through the extension of her dominions, was heightened by the publication of the secret treaties just referred to. Peace was with difficulty preserved when the question of the cession of Luxemburg arose;ad 1867. and from that time, at least, both countries felt that there existed only a truce full of suspicion between them. Louis Napoleon seems to have been hurried into speedier action by the belief that the military treaties had been extorted from the South German Powers, that those Powers, and especially Bavaria, would not support Prussia should war break out—he had not realized the strength of national feeling in South Germany—and that there was disaffection among the inhabitants of the newly annexed districts, which ought to be taken advantage of as soon as possible. But men were astonished that the inept diplomacy of the French Emperor should have fired the train so suddenly, and should, in letting himself appear to be the aggressor, have done his best to make the war which was declared against Prussia with ‘a light heart,’ a national war,July 15, 1870. in which all Germany felt its interests and feelings involved.x This it at once became. Seldom had such a national rising been seen—so swift, so universal, so enthusiastic, sweeping away in a moment the heartburnings of liberals and feudals in Prussia,The war with France, 1870-1871. the jealousies of North and South Germans, of Protestants and Catholics. Every citizen, every soldier, felt that this was a struggle for the greatness and freedom of his country; and the unbroken career of victory which carried the German arms over the east and centre of France, proved, in the truest sense, what strength there is in a popular cause. For it was, even more than the admirable organization of their armies, the skill of their generals, the corruption and weakness of the Bonapartist court—it was the passionate ardour of the whole German people, who felt that at last a crisis had come when patriotism called on them to put forth their utmost efforts, that secured for them a triumph to the completeness of which European history scarcely supplies a parallel.

  Never before for centuries, not even in the War of Liberation of 1814, had the nation felt and acted so completely as one. All saw that the time had now come to give this practically realized unity its formal political expression; nor was there a doubt as to what that form should be. The imperial name under which Germany had won her first glories in the great days of the Middle Ages, was that to which the sentiment of the nation turned; and it spared the susceptibilities of the sovereigns whose adherence to the national cause had given them a better claim on the regard of their subjects than most of them had before possessed. By a strange caprice of fate,Dec. 19, 1870. it was in a hall of the palace at Versailles, which the arch-enemy of Germany had reared, that the first of the German potentates offered to the king of Prussia, in the name of princes and peoples, that imperial crown which his brother had refused in 1849. On the 18th of January following, sixty-five years after the dissolution of the old Empire, King William was proclaimed Emperor, and Germany became again a single state in the eyes of Europe.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE

  Chap. XXIV.The new Empire now established in Germany is neither so new a creation nor so distinctly a unified State as its name might seem to convey.Constitution of the new German Empire. It is rather to be described as an extension of the North German Confederation under the form of a federal monarchy, whose peculiar constitution makes it unlike all other monarchies and all other federations. It consists of twenty-five States of all sizes, from Prussia with a population of 33,000,000 down to Schaumburg-Lippe with a population of 42,000. Three of its members—Lübeck, Bremen, and Hamburg—are free cities, survivors of the ancient Hanseatic League. The rest are hereditary monarchies, governed by sovereigns who are, according to the constitution of each particular State, more or less restrained or advised by legislatures of a more or less representative character. As these twenty-five States are very unequal in size and in power, so also do they differ in their relations to the Empire as a whole, for Prussia, by far the greatest, practically predominates over all the rest, while a few of the larger—Bavaria, Saxony, and Würtemberg—stand in a privileged position.

  A developement of the constitution of the North German Confederation.The Constitution of the Empire is best understood when it is regarded as a developement of the Germanic Confederation which was erected in 1815, upon the ruins of the ancient Empire. It has been evolved out of that League of States (Staatenbund) into a federal State (Bundesstaat) by three stages. The first was the exclusion of Austria and formation of the North German Confederation under the presidency of Prussia in 1866. The second was the conclusion of a series of military treaties between the North German Confederation and the South German States in 1866-1867. The third was the formal union of the North and South German States, under the name of an Empire, in 1871. Of these three steps towards unity the last seems the most imposing and certainly made the greatest impression upon the world at large. But the two former were really more important, for in 1866 a national popular assembly was created for all North Germany, and immediately thereafter a tie of immense practical importance was formed between all the German States. Thus the existing Constitution, though it dates from April 16, 1871—some important amendments were made in 1873 and 1888—is in its essential features that which was enacted in 1866. Its details are too numerous and intricate to be here set forth, but the general character of the federal scheme and of the several organs of government may be briefly summarized.

  Relation of the federal authority to the several States.In every federation the critical point is the distribution of powers between the central or federal authority, and those local authorities which are the component members of the united body. Here the central or federal (i.e. imperial) authority controls the army and navy, foreign relations, railways, main roads and canals, posts and telegraphs, coinage, weights and measures, copyrights and patents, and legislation upon nearly the whole field of civil and criminal law, together with the regulation of the press and of associations, and of imperial finance, including of course the customs tariff which is one and the same for all Germany. Bavaria, however, retains the management of her own railways, and both she and Saxony and Würtemberg enjoy certain other special exemptions or privileges. But though comparatively little legislative power is left to the States, administration remains almost entirely in their hands, and it is they who appoint and dismiss nearly all the executive officials, a concession to their rulers which may be deemed illogical, but which the political circumstances of the country prescribed. Judicial power is in so far a federal (imperial) matter, that the greater part of the law which the Courts administer (including the law of procedure) is contained in the imperial statute-books. But the judges are everywhere appointed by the State and act under its authority,a although the uniform interpretation of such parts of the law as rest on imperial legislation is secured by the existence of a Supreme Court of Appeal (Reichsgericht), which sits at Leipzig.Comparison with other modern federations. It will thus be seen that this federal Empire is for legislative purposes more fully unified than the other four great federations of modern times—the United States, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia—since in all these State legislatures retain wider powers than do the State legislatures of Germany. But Germany is less unified for the purposes of administration, both executive and judicial, than are those four communities, and her constitution admits, as regards the amount of rights left to the several component States, differences between the greater and the lesser altogether opposed to that principle of equality which those federations have deemed essential to their peace and stability.b

  Structure of the central government.The organization of the central or federal government of the German Empire is not less exceptional than is the structure of its federal system. The head of the executive is the Emperor. His office is not elective, as in the days of the Holy Empire, but hereditary, being indissolubly attached to the office of king of Prussia;The Emperor. and the imperial title therefore descends according to the family law of succession of the house of Hohenzollern. Outside his Prussian dominions, the Emperor enjoys little power in civil matters. He has no veto on legislation, though (as will presently appear) he has another means of controlling it. He appoints very few civil officials. His importance in the scheme of government depends on the fact that he is commander-in-chief of the army and navy, that he has the conduct of foreign affairs (action taken in which is, however, communicated to the federal Council), and that as Prussian king he exercises a predominant influence in the federal Council (Bundesrath) which constitutes one House of the imperial legislature. There is no imperial Cabinet, but the Chancellor of the Empire, who is usually also Prime Minister of Prussia, discharges, with the assistance of several secretaries of State, the function of chief minister for all imperial affairs. He presides in the federal Council and has the right, which he constantly exercises, of speaking in the other House. But he is responsible to his imperial master only and not to the representatives of the people.

  The legislature.The imperial legislature is also a peculiar creation, for it consists of two chambers more dissimilar in origin and functions than are the two Houses of other federations. One chamber, the federal Council (Bundesrath), is really a prolongation of the old Diet of the Holy Empire,The federal Council (Bundesrath). which, beginning as a sort of semi-popular assembly in Carolingian times, had passed through many phases before it perished in 1806, to be after a fashion restored in 1815, and again in 1866 for the North German Confederation. This Council consists of delegates, or rather diplomatic agents, appointed by and representing the sovereigns of the several States comprised in the Empire. Of these delegates, fifty-eight in all, seventeen belong to Prussia (she practically controls three others also), six to Bavaria, four to Saxony, four to Würtemberg, three to Baden, three to Hessen, two to Mecklenburg-Schwerin, two to Brunswick, and one each to the remaining smaller States. The Bundesrath meets at Berlin and sits in secret. Its members have no individual discretion, but vote under orders from their respective State governments, so that all the votes of any State which has more than one vote are cast in the same way, and can be cast whether or no all its delegates are present. This Chamber therefore represents not the peoples of the States, like the American or Australian Senates, but the governments of the States, which may or may not, according to the constitution of each State, be amenable to their respective peoples. It exercises various administrative and judicial functions, and has a legislative power which is in practice more important than that of the other Chamber, because bills originate more frequently in it than in the latter. Presided over by the imperial Chancellor, who is deputed thereto by the Emperor, the Bundesrath is the organ which expresses the collective sovereignty of the several princes of Germany considered as heads of the States which form the Empire; and through it the greater States, or any strong combinations of States, are able to make their influence felt. It is, however, above all things the organ through which Prussia, by far the greatest, asserts her predominance, and asserts it none the less effectively because the method is covert. She commands little more than a third of the votes, for when the Constitution was framed Bismarck prudently contented himself with a smaller representation than that to which her population would have entitled her, since he sought to soothe the apprehensions of Bavaria and other States of the second rank. But her strength and her prestige usually enable her to get her own way in the Council, and the power of the Emperor, which appears small when the civil functions formally attached to his office are examined, has become great through his control of the Bundesrath, as well as through his position at the head of army and navy.

  The Diet or popular Assembly (Reichstag).As this Council of officials represents the flock of German princes, now shepherded by the strenuous will of Prussia, so the other and elective chamber represents the German nation. It bears the old historic name of Diet (Reichstag), but it is a new creation, such as pre-revolutionary Germany never knew. First in 1848 did there appear a popular assembly whose menacing and fitful light was extinguished in the following year. Bismarck, when he created the North German Confederation, found it needful to draw the peoples of the several States together by a parliament in which they could be represented, and when that Confederation was expanded into an Empire of all Germany, the stature of this parliament grew with the increased need for such an expression of national unity.

  The Reichstag is elected by universal suffrage in electoral districts which were originally equal; and has 397 members, of whom 235 come from Prussia. It sits for five years, but may be dissolved by the federal Council with the consent of the Emperor.Its powers and working. All the members of the Bundesrath can appear and speak in it; and the Chancellor is frequently present to explain the views or defend the action of the imperial government. It enjoys full powers of legislation, yet in practice these powers are reduced by the fact that some of the most important revenue laws, having been enacted for a term of years, cannot be changed except by the consent of the Bundesrath; and it wants one important attribute of the parliaments of Britain, France, and Italy, in the peculiarity that neither the imperial Chancellor nor any other executive official is responsible to it, or can be displaced by its vote. It has therefore no control of administration, except in so far as administration is affected by criticism or depends upon legislation and upon the voting from time to time of supplies for administrative purposes. Moreover, as already observed, nearly all executive work rests with the States, whose officials are appointed by and are responsible to the State governments. In no country are officials more capable, in none perhaps does official work attract so much of the best practical talent which the nation supplies. Partly from traditional habit, which in all the German States has left foreign relations to be managed by the sovereign, partly because it feels its own weakness in being unable to displace the Chancellor, the Reichstag interferes very little in questions of external policy. It has been for many years divided into four, five, or even six groups, the mutual repulsion of which has hampered concerted action to resist or guide the imperial executive. Yet with these drawbacks, and though it has not gained upon the other organs of government, it has drawn to itself much political ability, has been the scene of many striking debates, and is an effective agency in welding together the populations of the various States into a truly united German nation.c

  Constitutional aspect of the new Empire.This outline may serve to shew what is the constitutional character of the new Empire. It is a State centralized in what concerns its foreign policy, its military and naval organization, and the larger part of its legislation, but not centralized as respects its officials, whether executive or judicial. It is more completely centralized as respects its North German members, who were practically bound fast to Prussia by her triumph in 1866,How far a united State. than as respects its four large South German members who joined by treaty after that year. Legally regarded, it is less of a unitary State than the old Empire was in the days of Henry VII, or even perhaps in those of Maximilian I, but far more of a unitary State than Germany was at any time after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Practically of course the country has attained a higher stage of effective action for common purposes than was ever attained before.

  Since the formation of the East Frankish or German kingdom under Conrad I (ad 911) Germany has never, except during Napoleon’s ascendancy from 1805 to 1814, ceased to be nominally a nation and a State. But the phases through which she has passed in those ten centuries are notably unlike those which mark the evolution of the other great European countries. In France, Spain, and England during the same period the tendency was constantly towards the consolidation into a strong unified kingdom of the various races that made up the population as well as of the principalities into which the territory was divided. In Italy there was down till the French Revolution no such tendency; that country, disunited ever since the entrance of the Lombards in the sixth century, remained no more, and perhaps no less, disunited in 1794. But in Germany the centripetal forces which had generally tended to prevail from Conrad I to Henry IV were suddenly arrested by the strife with the Popes and the wars of the Emperors in Italy. After Frederick II, the centrifugal forces decisively prevailed; and the process of dissolution went on, slowly but steadily, till the Peace of Westphalia, after which the country was nothing more than a loosely-constructed Confederation. But if that process had been slow, the reverse process was surprisingly swift. Germany had never seemed more disunited than she was in 1864. In 1866 she began the work of political reunion, and in 1871 that work was practically complete.

  To the intellectual and moral causes which enabled her statesmen to accomplish this work so promptly I shall presently return. Meantime let me endeavour to answer a question which will be put by those who have followed the story of the nation from the days of the first Frankish Emperor who brought all Germans under his sceptre. They will ask—What are the actual forces at work today?Prospects of the maintenance of a United Germany. What are the prospects of this recently-organized federal State? Are the centripetal tendencies stronger now than they were in the seventeenth century? Will it, like the old Empire, dissolve into separate political communities? Or will it follow the path which popular sentiment has, ever since 1813, marked out for it, by becoming a compact and united Power, such as France has been for some centuries, such as Italy became under Victor Emanuel?

  When the new Empire started on its career in 1871, not a few observers in foreign countries doubted whether it could long hold together. They pointed to the complicated nature of a constitution which might prove hard to work, and which must involve constant friction. They dwelt on the elements of jealousy and discord that were present, not merely in the existence of separate Courts, where a long descended dynasty was surrounded by a proud nobility, but also in the differences of character, habits, traditions, and religion among the various German races. Admitting the warmth of national sentiment evoked by the war of 1870, they insisted that this sentiment could not be relied on to keep the whole people together in more peaceful days or under the rule of less able and forceful ministers than Bismarck had shewn himself. And they were confirmed in these forebodings by the belief which still haunted them that the Germans were an unpractical race, likely to be led astray by their love for theories, ill fitted to work a piece of political machinery more abnormal if not more intricate than is either the British or the American Constitution.

  The event has belied these predictions. Comparatively few constitutional difficulties have arisen, comparatively few political crises have turned upon the federal structure of the government or the claims of the States as against the central authority. The leadership of Prussia has not been challenged by the minor States. Germany has, without becoming Prussian, grown to be more and more a united nation; and, so far from falling back into its old divisions, or splitting up into racial sections, it has developed a cohesive force and a Pan-Germanic sentiment which may even draw to itself, when the time comes for the dissolution of the ill compacted Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the eight millions of Germans who inhabit the western half of that spacious realm.d

  Among the causes which have enabled the federal constitution to work smoothly and consolidated the unity of the nation, the first place must be assigned to the external pressure which the presence of two formidable neighbour Powers, France and Russia, has applied.Causes which have made for Union since 1871. An immense and highly-disciplined army has been deemed a necessity; and the circumstance that nearly every citizen is or has been a soldier has kept the spirit of German pride and German patriotism at a high temperature, has inculcated the habit of obedience, has given an imposing prestige to the imperial Commander-in-chief.Pressure of foreign Powers.

  Unlike its venerable predecessor, this new Empire rests on a national basis. No foreign Power is a member of the Empire in respect of German territory. No State except Prussia holds any territory in which German is not the prevailing tongue. No one of the federated States can now make any separate alliance with any foreign Power. Hardly any are even represented at a foreign court.

  Political parties.It has been the good fortune of the federal Empire that State lines have not coincided with the lines on which either material interest or religious feeling has built up political parties. Neither in Prussia nor in any of the other greater States does one kind of economic interest, either the agricultural or the commercial, either the mining or the manufacturing, prevail to the exclusion of the others. So, though Prussia is mainly Protestant, there is a large Roman Catholic population on the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia as well as in Posen; and, though Bavaria is mainly Roman Catholic, there is a considerable Protestant population in the Upper Main basin and in the Palatinate. Parties have been based on real or supposed class interests or on economic doctrines or on religious sympathy. They have not been, except in the case of the Poles of Posen, local parties. Similarly, and largely for this reason, the political controversies that have from time to time arisen have not appealed to, and have not tended to excite, either State feeling against the central government, or animosities between the States themselves. Neither the conflict maintained by Bismarck and Falk against the claims of the Roman Catholic hierarchy which lasted from 1873 till 1886, nor the efforts to check by penal legislation the growth of Socialism, nor the disputes over the protective tariffs from time to time enacted, have evoked disruptive tendencies. Occupied with such questions as these, men were not led to occupy themselves with the constitutional structure of the government. Thus it has befallen that the chief political parties have found their adherents in every one of the greater States and have not tended to identify themselves with any particular State or group of States. The spirit of party, which in some federations has proved a powerful segregative force, has in Germany worked rather to associate in pursuit of the same aims politicians belonging to different States, making them feel their interests to be common, and giving them the habit of co-operation in the Reichstag. Nor is it idle to remark that South-western and South-central Germany, the region which had least felt Prussian influence and in which jealousy of a Prussian head of the nation might have been chiefly expected, was the region in which the memories and traditions of the mediaeval Empire had retained most force and freshness, and in which therefore popular sentiment was found naturally disposed to acquiesce in a restoration of the imperial title.

  Industrial developement.Let it be also noted that the establishment of the new Empire coincided with, and in some measure accelerated, a swift and striking developement of industrial resources. Germany was already becoming a great manufacturing and trading community. Increased trade and population led to the making of more railways, and to more traffic upon them, and thus the immense growth of internal intercourse and of wealth drew the various parts of the country more closely together, causing each to feel how much it gained from being united to the rest under one government and one system of law. These economic changes induced a change in the minds of men. Old-fashioned ‘particularism’ waned and idealistic republicanism vanished. Thought and will were directed to practical ends. Militarism and Industrialism, which have been perhaps the most potent forces in modern Germany, alike aided the assimilative process. The former embraced, the latter did not repel, the idea of a Pan-German monarchy. Both welcomed centralization.

  Much then of the success which has attended the constitution of the new Empire has been due to the favouring conditions and circumstances of the time, much to the sagacity of Bismarck and his fellow statesment who in constructing their scheme preferred practical convenience to theoretic symmetry.Strength of national feeling. Yet the chief reason why the building has proved itself stable lies in the fact that its foundations were long ago laid deep and firm. The permanence of an institution depends not merely on the material interests that support it, but on its conformity to the deep-rooted sentiment of the men for whom it has been made. When it draws to itself and provides a fitting expression for that sentiment, the sentiment becomes thereby not only more vocal but actually stronger, and in its turn imparts a fuller vitality to the institution. In the case of Germany, as in that of Italy, there had been for at least two generations before 1870 a constant ripening towards change and a growing desire for unity, although the strength of this feeling was not revealed till the moment came which gave it scope for vigorous action. First brought into self-conscious life by the great struggle of the War of Liberation, it was slowly developed and directed by a variety of concurrent forces;Its growth since 1814. partly by that longing for political freedom and equal civil rights which found its nearest enemy in the tyranny of many of the petty princes; partly by the decline, evident through all Europe, of the ancient sentiment of personal loyalty, and the substitution therefor of a rational conception of the nature of government and the rights of the people; partly by the dread of France and the resolve to prevent her from again extending her frontier to the Lower Rhine; partly by the better knowledge of their brethren which increased facilities of communication gave to every branch of the German race; but most of all by what we call the instinct or passion of nationality, the desire of a people already conscious of a moral and social unity, to see such unity expressed and realized under a single government, which shall give it a place and name among civilized states. The most powerful factors in the creation of this national spirit were the varied literary activity of Germany since the days of Lessing, the bracing-up of moral fibre by the teachings of Immanuel Kant, the strenuous intellectual life which produced not only two famous poets but a brilliant group of philosophers, historians, and jurists, together with the awakened interest and pride of the people in their earlier history, which was one of the firstfruits of that literary revival. Causes not dissimilar were at work in Italy, though there the actual oppression of foreign rulers made the sentiment more vehement. And it need not be doubted that the example of the efforts which Italy, Hungary, and Poland, not to speak of smaller peoples, were making to attain or reconquer national political life, had its influence upon the Germans, however little sympathy those efforts may have found among them.

  Time, and the long labours of many earnest hearts addressing their countrymen through the press and in the Universities, were needed to mature this feeling of moral, to strengthen this passion for political unity, to make it familiar and dear to the mass of the people, to give it a hold upon their imagination.Share of theorists and practical statesmen in the attainment of unity. It was not wonderful that in looking on the apathy of their fellow citizens and the selfishness of their princes, these pure and noble spirits should sometimes have despaired of success. And even when the feeling had been created and the occasion came which displayed its strength, it might have failed to fulfil its work, had not the power to use and guide it been lodged in the hands of a forceful and keen-sighted practical statesman. It was with Germany even as with Italy, where the work of Gioberti, Manin, Mazzini, and their brethren might have remained unfinished but for Cavour. And, as in Italy, the work was not carried through in the way or by the means which the first labourers had for the most part intended or desired.Nature of the process in Germany and Italy. The creation of a state de novo on ground cleared of all the existing principalities, a state which, even if in form a monarchy (though most would have preferred a republic), should be based on the recognition of popular rights, was what the idealistic politicians of both countries had looked forward to. But in both it was by the advance of an existing state, which extended itself to include wider and wider territories, and gave to them its organization, that the unity of the nation was brought about. And this was done with little or no change in the internal constitution of a growing kingdom, little movement (except in the way of an extended suffrage) towards a resettlement of society on democratic foundations. In the constitution of the North German Confederation and the new German Empire, there is no mention and slight indirect recognition of those ‘Fundamental Rights of the German people’ on which the Frankfort Parliament of 1848-1849 spent so much precious time and toil.

  ‘Prussia’s mission’: real character of her policy.The Prussian State by which the work was accomplished, had not in earlier days shewn much sense of what came to be afterwards called its ‘German mission.’ Neither in the words or acts of the great Frederick (nor indeed in those of his predecessors) is there a trace of what may be called Pan-Teutonic patriotism, of any enthusiasm for the splendour and happiness of Germany as a whole. Frederick’s purpose was to build up a strong and well-administered Prussian kingdom. For his German neighbours he had no more regard than for Frenchmen or Swedes; for the German language and literature little but contempt. The policy of his first two successors was distinctly Prussian rather than German; and the romantic Frederick William the Fourth disappointed the hopes of the nation almost as grievously in 1849 as Frederick William the Third had done thirty-five years before. No European court had been more consistently practical than that of Berlin; nor had any been apparently less conscious of a magnificent national vocation. Her rulers, themselves eschewing sentimental considerations, had seldom tried to awaken these in the minds of the people, or to turn them to account where they existed. When their own interests coincided with those of Germany at large, it was well: but they were not accustomed to proclaim themselves her champions, or the apostles of her national regeneration. Nevertheless it had for a long time been evident that if a political regeneration was to be brought about by force, it was from Prussia alone of the existing principalities that anything could be hoped, since she alone united the character, the traditions, and the material power that were needed to lead the country. Ever since the Reformation the policy of the Hapsburg princes had been regarded with aversion by the more intelligent and progressive part of the nation; while Prussia, recognized from the days of the Great Elector as the leading Protestant power, had become the representative of intellectual liberality and enlightenment.Causes of her success. Services rendered by Prussia. In recent times she had, by the foundation and wise encouragement of the two great universities of Berlin and Bonn, conferred eminent benefits on German learning and science, and gained a corresponding hold upon the respect of the educated classes. If the Prussians were in some respects less richly gifted than those of the middle and southern states, they possessed a practical energy and decision in which the latter were sometimes deficient; they acted while the others speculated and waited. Prussia had given the first example in Germany of a well-governed modern state, instinct with life, efficient in its working; and in creating it she was rendering an invaluable service to the German people. For this state, being a strong reality, which had stood the test of adversity and been matured by experience, whose well-knit administrative organization commanded the respect, if not always the affection, of its subjects, was found able to expand itself, so as to embrace the other populations and territories which from time to time were added to it. And it expanded, not only, as Austria had done in earlier centuries, towards the east, among races alien in blood and speech, some of whom have remained unfriendly, but also and chiefly westwards, over districts whose inhabitants, being themselves Germans, were rapidly fused and became not less patriotically-minded than those of the Mark of Brandenburg itself. After the fall of Napoleon it acquired and assimilated a large and rich dominion in the Rhineland and Westphalia; in 1866 it was enlarged by other territories hardly less important, while at the same time its military, and (to a great extent) its financial system, were applied to North German principalities. Thus the difficulty of creating a state de novo was avoided by the extension of the existing state; and if Germany, as idealistic politicians complain, has in a certain sense been turned into a larger Prussia, so too in no less measure is Prussia herself permeated by the spirit of Germany as a whole.

  Looking therefore to the form which the political reconstruction of Germany has taken, this reconstruction may fairly be said to be Prussia’s work.It would not have succeeded without the help of the theorists. But that work could never have been accomplished without the efforts of those very ‘sentimental’ or ‘romantic’ politicians who found themselves first ridiculed as visionaries or persecuted as agitators, and then pushed aside when the moment for action came. For it was they who prepared the feelings of the nation for this revolution, and who raised to the height of a national movement, justified by the popular will, what would otherwise have been a career of violent self-aggrandizement. It was with Germany as with Italy, where the work of Cavour, the practical statesman, could never have been accomplished without the previous labours of Mazzini, the prophet and moral reformer who fired the hearts of his countrymen.

  In what sense does the new Empire represent the old one?It is often asked how far the new German Empire can be deemed to be the successor and representative of the ancient Holy Empire as it stood from ad 800 till ad 1806. Those who have followed the events recounted and grasped the theory set forth in the preceding chapters will have no difficulty in answering this question. The new creation of 1866-1871 has never claimed to have inherited the legal status of the ancient monarchy which had expired sixty years previously. Its rights are only such as it has formally and expressly received from the constitution and the treaties which called it into being. And whoever looks above the bare legal rights to the general position and character of the new institution will perceive that it could not be a mere restoration, and that if it were it could not be a solid and durable state. Circumstances had so completely altered, that it became necessary to set up something which should correspond to the new conditions and embody the new spirit. So the present German Empire, which is a sort of expansion of the Prussian Kingdom to embrace all Germany, is hardly more like the realm of Frederick Barbarossa or Maximilian than the empire of Charles the Great was to that of Constantine or Theodosius.Unlike the Empire of the Hohenstaufen and the Hapsburgs. The Holy Empire claimed universal dominion because it represented the unity of all mankind; and though these pretensions had become obsolete, they were never formally renounced. It was almost as much an ecclesiastical as a secular institution. Ecclesiastical princes were among its Electors; its head must be in communion with the Holy Roman Church which, to the last, he solemnly bound himself to defend. But the new Empire claims nothing outside Germany and those colonial territories which Germany has recently acquired. It has no official connection with any church, and its head is in fact a Protestant. Its true historical predecessor might thus seem to be that German or East Frankish kingdom which Conrad the First and Henry the Fowler ruled before Otto the Great obtained the throne of the Roman Empire. The memory of this German kingdom was preserved by the fact that for some centuries Otto’s successors were crowned kings of Germany at Aachen before they were crowned emperors at Rome, but otherwise the Kingdom and the Empire were, as has been shewn in an earlier chapter, so welded together that they become at last one entity, called in later days the ‘Roman Empire of the German Nation.’ Of the two elements whose long union in one person thus ended in a fusion, the new Empire represents one element only, that German royalty which Otto held before his fateful journey to Rome. So historic sentiment may imagine the present Empire to be such a kingdom as that of Otto would have been had it, remaining purely German, been extended to include all the regions which the Germans now inhabit from the Meuse to the Vistula, and may figure to itself the Emperor William of Hohenzollern as the successor not so evidently of the Hapsburg monarchs of the eighteenth century as of the Saxon King Henry I who in an expedition against the Wendish heathen stormed their fort of Brannibor, and there, to guard his north-eastern frontier, laid the foundations of that Mark of Brandenburg which has grown into the Prussian monarchy.

  Yet it represents the unity of the nation.If therefore we regard either the Germanic nation as it was before it entangled itself with Italy and Rome, or the Germanic nation as it was when after the days of Charles the Fifth Italy and Rome had been lost to it, but before it had been cleft in twain by the Treaty of Westphalia, we may call the new Empire the legitimate representative of the unity of the nation as embodied in its monarchy. It is a militant monarchy, as were the monarchies of Charles and Otto. It is a national monarchy, for it includes all Germans except those who live under the sceptre of the Hapsburgs, those who in the Baltic provinces of Russia are forced to obey an alien and ill-beloved Power, and those more fortunate Germans who in the northern and eastern cantons of Switzerland have given to Europe an admirable example of ordered freedom. For the chief of this monarchy the imperial name has been revived, both on account of its venerable associations and because it serves to express, as it did in the last few centuries of its life, the titular superiority of the head of a federal state over the kings, grand dukes, and other princes who compose the Germanic body. In this respect it partially reproduces the relation which the Emperors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bore to the electors of that time. To the earlier Middle Ages, the idea of an emperor of a local area, whether great or small, was no doubt repugnant, for mediaeval doctrine could imagine only one Emperor, lord of all Christians, just as it could recognize only one spiritual head of the Catholic Church. It is perhaps some lingering sense of this feeling, as well as a wish not to infringe on the territorial rights of the heads of the several States,Title is ‘German Emperor,’ not ‘Emperor of Germany.’ that has caused the official style of the sovereign to be ‘German Emperor,’ that is, Emperor in Germany, or Emperor of German race, not ‘Emperor of Germany.’e The Germans have indeed had reason to regret the influence of the ancient title, for it was through the efforts to maintain the commanding place in Europe which this title carried with it that their sovereigns were distracted from the duties they owed to their own people, and that princes sprang up who wrested from the crown nearly all the authority which had once belonged to it. But if in this the influence of that great shadow of the past be thought pernicious, let it be therewithal remembered that to the ancient Empire is in large measure due this latest revival of national existence. It was the tradition of a glorious past when Germany led the world that made the Germans again a united people, the central power of continental Europe. And though the deep-rooted Prussian sentiment of King William I was at first averse to the adoption of that historic style which commended itself to the imagination of his son (afterwards the Emperor Frederick), the name of Emperor has served both to reconcile the greatest of the German princes to the loss of their titular independence and to imprint more deeply upon the mind of the people the sense that they are one not only in blood and speech, but also in the historical continuity of their national life.

  National unity in Italy and Germany.The parallelism between the course of events in Germany and in Italy which has several times already been referred to is strikingly seen in the events of 1870. As the war of 1866, in putting an end to the long dualism of Austria and Prussia, made a united Germany possible and simultaneously gave to Italy her Venetian provinces, so the war of 1870, while it brought about the re-establishment of the Germanic Empire, completed the unity of Italy also by making Rome again her possession and her capital. The Popedom which, in the thirteenth century, inflicted a fatal wound upon the Holy Empire, had in modern times allied itself with Austria and the petty despotisms of the Italian peninsula, had done its utmost to check as well the union as the freedom of the Italian people, and had raised almost to the rank of an article of faith those pretensions to temporal sway which had been one cause of its hostility to the mediaeval Emperors. It now found itself involved in the misfortunes of its old ally France, and saw that temporal sway perish along with the triumph of its former Teutonic enemies. The first German victories compelled the recall of the French troops from Rome, and allowed the Italians to establish themselves there; a few months later the swelling current of success brought about the union of North and South Germany in a single state. The same great struggle which restored political unity to the one nation cemented it in the other; and at the very moment when the imperial name was revived in the Transalpine countries the ancient imperial seat upon the Tiber became the capital of an Italian monarchy. The two great races whose national life had been sacrificed to the mediaeval Empire regained it together, and regained it by the defeat of that Empire’s ancient antagonists, the ecclesiastical power and the monarch of France. The triumph of the principle of nationality was complete. Old wrongs were redressed; old problems solved. The world seemed to have closed one page in its history, and men paused to wonder and conjecture what the next might have to unfold.

  EPILOGUE

  That which the next page did unfold proved different from what men had expected. It was a new Germany, it was a new Italy, that had been thus consolidated into new monarchies. The Germany of to-day is unlike the Germany of 1830 or even the Germany of 1860. Population and wealth have in many regions grown, and towns have extended themselves with a speed that reminds the traveller of the cities of Western America. More effectively than any other nation of Europe, the Germans have turned to account the advances made by scientific discovery. The industry of the people, the abundance of minerals in some districts, the excellence of the railway system, the efficiency of the administration, the admirable organization of instruction in all grades, and not least in the sphere of theoretical and applied science, have led to a developement of manufactures and of commerce which has been followed by a correspondingly marked devotion of national thought and effort to every form of material progress. Projects of expansion beyond the seas, not so much to obtain an outlet for colonization as to secure new markets for German trade—projects in which Prussia never indulged, but which seemed appropriate to a German Empire—have been carried out by the acquisition of territories in Africa, China, and the islands of the Pacific. Learning is still cultivated, research is still prosecuted, with unflagging energy; but philosophy, poetry, and art hold a less conspicuous place than they did in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  Italy has advanced less rapidly, because her mineral resources are less ample, and her people, who had been worse governed than the Germans, have had more leeway to make up. But in Italy also political unification has stimulated material progress, and material progress has absorbed more and more of the intelligence and energy of the population of the northern half of the peninsula.

  In both countries there was a certain disappointment because freedom and unity had not brought all the peace and contentment for which men had hoped; and many thought that the generation which had entered into the enjoyment of freedom and unity stood on a lower moral level than the generation which had toiled and fought for those blessings. In both countries, while the thoughts of the educated class have been occupied with practical and economic questions rather than with political theories or religious reforms, the masses of the people, stirred by a new antagonism to the wealthier classes and a new passion for equality, have begun to busy themselves with projects for so transforming the structure of society as to secure a better distribution, or even perhaps an ultimate extinction, of private property.

  Such ideas and projects shew how far the world has travelled from the days when the American and French Revolutions awoke a spirit of unrest in Europe. So too they suggest some reflections on the change that has passed upon the beliefs of mankind since the days when the Holy Empire embodied its loftiest ideal of human government. It is not only a new Germany and a new Italy that we see, but a new Europe, a Europe which in the course of the nineteenth century removed itself an immeasureable way from those ages of faith and imagination down which Caesar voyaged in the bark of Peter. The successor of Caesar is now an Emperor in Germany only, as the successor of Peter is obeyed by less than half of Western Christendom. But even if a universal monarchy were now possible, it would be a monarchy wholly unlike that which Dante held necessary to the welfare of mankind. The conditions of man’s life have changed, and the doctrines, theological and political, on which the Holy Empire rested, have vanished away. The mists of imagination have rolled off, and the world is now governed by facts—facts that stand out, hard and clear, in the light of common day.

  Europe betweenad 800 andad 1200.In the earlier Middle Ages Europe, still half-barbarous, was the prey of violence. Its greatest need was Justice, and a power strong enough and pious enough to execute justice, as the minister of God. The one force that confronted violence and rapacity was Religion. All had one religion, and though many by sinfulness of life belied their faith, none doubted its truth. Neither did any one doubt where the seat of authority lay. Rome, whence the Caesars had ruled the world, Rome where the Chief of the Apostles had exercised the pastorate given him by God when God walked the earth, was the divinely-appointed source of all lawful power. Whether that power was to be wielded by two rulers, each directly representing the Almighty, or whether the secular monarch was to be the servant of the spiritual—this was a question on which men were divided. But that the power of the secular ruler was consecrated by a Divine commission, and being so consecrated, was appointed for all time and for all mankind,—upon this they were at one. It was a small Christian world, which reached only from the Tagus to the Vistula: so a universal monarchy seemed less strange then than it does now. Nations were as yet scarcely conscious of themselves, and the strife that desolated Europe was more frequently within than between its countries. The disobedience of some rulers to the Emperor shook the theories of those who took dreams for realities hardly more than did the disobedience of a knot of heretics to the Pope.

  It was a Christendom which had one literature, written in one ancient tongue, also the one tongue of worship, for the vernaculars of France and Italy, of Spain, Germany, and England, were only just beginning to grow into cultivated languages. Religion, grounded on undisputed dogmas, ruled the intellectual world, with Philosophy and Art for her handmaidens. And, in the name of Religion, the Church held half the wealth of every country and ruled its inhabitants with a power stronger than the sword. The world might seem to have passed into the hands of the Church, though in gaining the whole world, the Church had wellnigh lost her own soul.

  The changes of recent centuries.It took centuries to break up this vast solid fabric of mediaeval society and mediaeval doctrine. The larger kingdoms were consolidated and the nations that dwelt in them felt themselves to be nations. New worlds were disclosed beyond the ocean, worlds which Rome had never known; and in them there have arisen new nations, one of which is mightier than any European state. The literary and philosophical Renaissance of the fifteenth century passed into the religious Reformation of the sixteenth, and out of the two movements arose the political Revolution which began in England in the seventeenth century, convulsed France in the eighteenth, reached Italy and Germany in the nineteenth. The work of the new ideas thus engendered has been for the most part destructive. The Church has been rent into many fragments. For a time there seemed a prospect that the See of Rome might recover her old dominion, but that prospect has now grown so faint that even the controversy regarding her claims is languidly maintained. For nearly three centuries she retained her wealth and power in the countries that were still loyal, but now wealth and legal power have almost gone: monasteries have been suppressed, bishops stripped of their estates: it is everywhere a secular world.

  Christianity has overspread the whole earth; and States calling themselves Christian are now masters of the Muslim and the heathen. But it is what would have been deemed by St. Bernard or by Dante a disintegrated and attenuated Christianity. Religion holds no such place of pride as she once held. Even in countries which still maintain a church established by law ecclesiastics are jealously excluded from mundane affairs. Nowhere, outside Russia and the most backward of the Spanish-American republics, does the State recognize the duty of protecting and propagating one form of faith. Theology occupies itself but little with the old questions regarding the nature of Christ and the relation of the Divine will to the human. She asks, What is the relation of God to Nature, and what is the evidence of the revelation of God to man? Philosophy does not inquire how justice is to be established, nor what is the true seat and origin of civil authority: she accepts political power as being the result of actual forces, the will or the acquiescence of the strongest elements in the community; and sees no more sacredness in the head of a State than in the chairman of a commercial company. Order, for which the Middle Ages sighed, has been established; and if justice is still imperfect, this is due, not to the impunity of law-breakers, but to faults in the law itself, springing perhaps from the selfishness of the classes that have shaped it. Order, whose name had been often discredited by being used as a cloak for tyranny, ceased long ago to be the great aim of progressive minds: it was Liberty that they set before themselves, believing that all other blessings would follow in her train. The subject has now become the citizen. He holds himself to have as much right to govern as he has duty to obey, and the obedience he owes is deemed to be due not to the representative of God but to the transient depositary of an authority that issues from himself.

  Ideals and disappointments.Yet this ideal of individual freedom which seemed a century ago so full of promise to those who had suffered from the despotism of custom and tradition, as well as from the pressure of meddlesome bureaucracies, has not realized all that was expected. Popular government, installed by the votes of a multitude on which the gift of power was assumed to have also bestowed wisdom, self-control, and public spirit, lost much of its credit when it was seen that masses of men were still prone to be swayed by unreasoning passions and racial animosities, still liable to fall under the control of wealth directed by astute self-interest. The hopes that illumined the first half of the nineteenth century have slowly paled; and the nearest approach to a scheme for the creation of an ideal State which has since emerged is that which would entrust the State with the function of superseding private property and allotting to each citizen his share of labour and of the means of subsistence. Material interests are uppermost in the minds of nations as in those of individuals: and the idealism of this new Europe is, so to speak, a material kind of idealism when compared to the old types of perfection in Church and State, as they were set forth either by the Catholic Church in the days of Hildebrand or by religious reformers from the days of Arnold of Brescia to those of Savonarola and of Calvin.

  This may be a passing phase, short in the view of world-history, the teachings of which seem to shew that men do not for any long time remain without a consistent theory of life, and a faith on which to ground such a theory. Ages of negation and criticism are succeeded by ages of construction. Filled with discordant schools of thought and irreconcileable schemes for social progress, permeated by a scepticism which distrusts all schemes equally, the world may appear to be waiting for some new idealistic system, possibly already in the germ. The foundation of institutions that have in the past proved durable has been laid in men’s innermost convictions, in certain fixed and settled principles, lying so deep as to be part of themselves, and inwoven with their strongest emotions, principles which they hold as self-evident and which bring the life of each into harmony with the lives of others and with the universe in which they are placed. These convictions are slow to form and slow to break: it is a work of many generations. Seven centuries were needed, from St. Augustine to Pope Gregory the Seventh, to create the mediaeval scheme. It lived for three centuries; and nearly four centuries more were needed to destroy the principles on which it rested.

  If in the years to come a new body of ideas and beliefs is by degrees built up capable of satisfying the need men have to find a consecration for Power and a tie which shall bind them together and represent the aspirations of collective humanity, the form these beliefs will take must differ widely in outward aspect from that in which the Middle Ages found satisfaction. But it may embody some portion of that which was the soul and essence of the Holy Empire—the love of peace, the sense of the brotherhood of mankind, the recognition of the sacredness and supremacy of the spiritual life.

  ADDITIONAL NOTES

  APPENDIX

  NOTE A

  ON THE BURGUNDIES

  It would be hard to mention any geographical name which, by its application at different times to different districts, has caused, and continues to cause, more confusion than this name Burgundy. There may, therefore, be some use in a brief statement of the more important of those applications. Without going into the minutiae of the subject, the following may be given as the ten senses in which the name is most frequently to be met with:—

  I. The kingdom of the Burgundians (regnum Burgundionum), formed by the settlement of this tribe in Savoy and the lands south-west of the Rhine,aad 443-475. At its meridian it included the whole valley of the Saone and Lower Rhone, from Dijon to the Mediterranean, and also the western half of what is now Switzerland. It was overthrown by the sons of Clovis in ad 534.

  II. The kingdom of Burgundy (regnum Burgundiae), mentioned occasionally under the Merovingian kings as a separate principality, confined within boundaries apparently somewhat narrower than those of the older kingdom last named.

  III. The kingdom of Provence or Burgundy (regnum Provinciae seu Burgundiae)—also, though less accurately, called the kingdom of Cisjurane Burgundy—was founded by Boso in ad 877-879, and included Provence, Dauphiné, the southern part of Savoy, and the country between the Saone and the Jura.

  IV. The kingdom of Transjurane Burgundy (regnum Iurense, Burgundia Transiurensis), founded by Rudolf in ad 888, recognized in the same year by the Emperor Arnulf, included the northern part of Savoy, and nearly all that part of Switzerland which lies between the Reuss and the Jura.

  V. The kingdom of Burgundy or Arles (regnum Burgundiae, regnum Arelatense), formed by the union, under Conrad the Pacific, in ad 937, of the kingdoms described above as III and IV. On the death, in 1032, of the last independent king, Rudolf III, it came partly by bequest, partly by conquest, into the hands of the Emperor Conrad II (the Salic), and thenceforward formed a part of the Empire. In the thirteenth century, France began to absorb it, bit by bit (though she did not take Avignon till the Revolution), and she has now (since the annexation of Savoy in 1861) acquired all except the Swiss portion.

  VI. The Lesser Duchy (Burgundia Minor) (Klein Burgund) corresponded very nearly with what is now Switzerland west of the Reuss, including Canton Valais. It was Transjurane Burgundy (IV) minus the parts of Savoy which had belonged to that kingdom. It disappears from history after the extinction of the house of Zähringen in the thirteenth century. Legally it was part of the Empire till ad 1648, though practically independent long before that date.

  VII. The Free County or Palatinate of Burgundy (Franche-Comté) (Freigrafschaft) (called also Upper Burgundy), to which the name of Cisjurane Burgundy originally and properly belonged, lay between the Saone and the Jura. It formed a part of III and V, and was therefore a fief of the Empire. The French dukes of Burgundy were invested with it in ad 1384. Its capital, the imperial city of Besançon, was given to Spain in 1651, and by the treaty of Nimwegen, 1678-1679, it was ceded to the crown of France.

  VIII. The Landgraviate of Burgundy (Landgrafschaft) lay in what is now Western Switzerland, on both sides of the Aar, between Thun and Solothurn. It was a part of the Lesser Duchy (VI), and, like it, is hardly mentioned after the thirteenth century.

  IX. The circle of Burgundy (Kreis Burgund), an administrative division of the Empire, was established by Charles V in 1548, and included the Free County of Burgundy (VII) and the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, which Charles inherited from his grandmother Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold.

  X. The Duchy of Burgundy (Lower Burgundy) (Bourgogne), the most northerly part of the old kingdom of the Burgundians, was always a fief of the crown of France (Francia Occidentalis), and a province of France till the Revolution. It was of this Burgundy that Philip the Good and Charles the Bold were Dukes. They were also Counts of the Free County (VII).

  There was very nearly being an eleventh Burgundy. In 1784 Joseph II proposed to the Elector of Bavaria to give him the Austrian Netherlands, except the citadels of Luxemburg and Limburg, with the title of King of Burgundy, in exchange for his Bavarian dominions, which Joseph was anxious to get hold of. The Elector consented, France (bribed by the offer of Luxemburg and Limburg) and Russia approved, and the project was only baffled by the promptitude of Frederick the Great in forming the League of Princes to preserve the integrity of German territories.

  The most copious and accurate information regarding the obscure history of the Burgundian kingdoms (III, IV, and V) is to be found in the contributions of Baron Frederic de Gingins la Sarraz, a Vaudois historian, to the Archiv für Schweizer Geschichte. Reference may also be made to Mr. E. A. Freeman’s Historical Geography, and to an essay in his historical essays entitled The Franks and the Gauls.

  NOTE B

  ON THE RELATIONS TO THE EMPIRE OF THE KINGDOM OF DENMARK, AND THE DUCHIES OF SCHLESWIG AND HOLSTEIN

  The history of the relations of Denmark and the duchies to the Romano-Germanic Empire is a very small part of the great Schleswig-Holstein controversy. But having been unnecessarily mixed up with two questions really quite distinct—the first, as to the relation of Schleswig to Holstein, and of both jointly to the Danish crown; the second, as to the diplomatic engagements which the Danish kings had in recent times contracted with the German powers—it bore its part in making the whole question the most intricate and interminable that had vexed Europe for two centuries and a half. The facts as to the Empire are as follows:—

  I. The Danish kings began to own the supremacy of the Frankish Emperors early in the ninth century. Having recovered their independence in the confusion that followed the fall of the Carolingian dynasty, they were again subdued by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, and continued tolerably submissive till the death of Frederick II and the period of anarchy which followed. Since that time Denmark has always been independent, although her king was, until the treaty of ad 1865, a member of the German Confederation as duke of Holstein and Lauenburg.

  II. Schleswig was in Carolingian times Danish; the Eyder being, as Eginhard tells us, the boundary between Saxonia Transalbiana (Holstein), and the Terra Nortmannorum (wherein lay the town of Sliesthorp), inhabited by the Scandinavian heathen. Otto the Great conquered all Schleswig, and, it is said, Jutland also, and added the southern part of Schleswig to the immediate territory of the Empire, erecting it into a margraviate. So it remained till the days of Conrad II, who made the Eyder again the boundary, retaining of course his suzerainty over the kingdom of Denmark as a whole. But by this time the colonization of Schleswig by the Germans had begun: and ever since the numbers of the Danish population seem to have steadily declined, and the people to have grown (except in the northern districts) more and more disposed to sympathize with their southern rather than their northern neighbours.

  III. Holstein always was an integral part of the Empire, as it was afterwards of the Germanic Confederation and is now of the new German Empire.

  NOTE C

  ON CERTAIN IMPERIAL TITLES AND CEREMONIES

  This subject is a great deal too wide and too intricate to be more than touched upon here. But a few brief statements may have their use; for the practice of the Germanic Emperors varied so greatly from time to time that the reader becomes hopelessly perplexed without some clue. And if there were space to explain the causes of each change of title, it would be seen that the subject, dry as it may appear, is neither barren nor dull.

  I.

  Titles of Emperors.

  Charles the Great styled himself ‘Carolus serenissimus Augustus, a Deo coronatus, magnus et pacificus imperator, Romanum (or Romanorum) gubernans imperium, qui et per misericordiam Dei rex Francorum et Langobardorum.’

  Subsequent Carolingian Emperors were usually entitled simply ‘Imperator Augustus.’ Sometimes ‘rex Francorum et Langobardorum’ was added.a

  Conrad I and Henry I (the Fowler) were only German kings.

  A Saxon Emperor was, before his coronation at Rome, ‘rex’ or ‘rex Francorum Orientalium,’ or ‘Francorum atque Saxonum rex’; after it simply ‘Imperator Augustus.’ Otto III is usually said to have introduced the form ‘Romanorum Imperator Augustus,’ but some authorities state that it occurs in documents of the time of Lewis I.

  Henry II and his successors, not daring to take the title of Emperor till crowned at Rome (in conformity with the superstitious notion which had begun with Charles the Bald), but anxious to claim the sovereignty of Rome as indissolubly attached to the German crown, began to call themselves ‘reges Romanorum.’ The title did not, however, become common or regular till the time of Henry IV, in whose proclamations (issued before his Roman coronation) it occurs constantly.

  From the eleventh century till the sixteenth, the invariable practice was for the monarch to be called ‘Romanorum rex semper Augustus’ till his coronation at Rome by the Pope; after it, ‘Romanorum Imperator semper Augustus.’

  In ad 1508, Maximilian I, being refused a passage to Rome by the Venetians, obtained a bull from Pope Julius II permitting him to call himself ‘Imperator electus’ (erwählter Kaiser). This title Ferdinand I (brother of Charles V) and all succeeding Emperors took immediately upon their German coronation, and it was till ad 1806 their strict legal designation,b and was always employed by them in proclamations or other official documents. The term ‘elect’ was however omitted even in formal documents when the sovereign was addressed, or spoken of in the third person; and in ordinary practice he was simply ‘Roman Emperor.’

  Maximilian added the title ‘Germaniae rex,’ which had never been known before, although the phrase ‘rex Germanorum’ may be found employed once or twice in early times. ‘Rex Teutonicorum,’ ‘regnum Teutonicum,’c occur often in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Henry VI took the title of Rex Siciliae. A great many titles of less consequence were added from time to time. Charles the Fifth had seventy-five, not, of course, as Emperor, but in virtue of his vast hereditary possessions.d

  It is perhaps worth remarking that the word ‘Emperor’ has not at all the same meaning now that it had even so lately as two centuries ago. Since a new use began with Napoleon, it has tended to become a title of no special significance, somewhat more pompous than that of King, and supposed to belong especially to despots. It is given to Eastern princes, like those of China, Japan, and Abyssinia, in default of a better name. It was for a time peculiarly affected by new dynasties; and grew so fashionable, that what with Emperors of Brazil, of Hayti, and of Mexico (countries that have now become republics), the good old title of King seemed in a fair way to become obsolete.e But in former times there was, and could be, but one Emperor; he was always mentioned with a certain reverence: his name summoned up a host of thoughts and associations, which moderns do not comprehend or sympathize with. His office, unlike that of modern Emperors, was by its very nature elective and not hereditary; and, so far from resting on conquest or the will of the people, rested on and represented pure legality. War could give him nothing which law had not given him already: the people had delegated all their power to him long ago, and he was now the viceroy of God.

  II.

  The Crowns.

  Of the four crowns something has been said in the text. They were those of Germany, taken at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) in earlier times,f latterly at Frankfort, once or twice at Regensburg;—of Burgundy, at Arles;—of Italy, sometimes at Pavia, more usually at Milan or Monza;—of the world, at Rome.

  The German crown was taken by every Emperor after the time of Otto the Great; that of Italy by every one, or almost every one, who took the Roman down to Frederick III, but by none after him; that of Burgundy, it would appear, by four Emperors only, Conrad II, Henry III, Frederick I, and Charles IV. The imperial crown was received at Rome by most Emperors till Frederick III; after him by none save Charles V, who obtained both it and the Italian at Bologna in a somewhat informal manner. From Ferdinand I onwards the Emperor bound himself by his capitulation, to use all diligence to obtain the imperial crown with reasonable promptitude (‘sich zum besten befleissigen zu wollen die kayserliche Cron auch in ziemlich gelegener Zeit zum schiersten zu erlangen’). At the Diet of Ratisbon in 1653 (when Ferdinand archduke of Austria was chosen king of the Romans) the Protestants protested against this article; but the Emperor, appealing to the Golden Bull, insisted on its retention. In the capitulation of Leopold I, however, and his successors down to Francis II, the article was modified so as to bind the new sovereign ‘die Romische-Konigliche Cron forderlichst zu empfangen, und alles dasjenige dabey zu thun so sich derenthalben gebuhret.’

  It should be remembered that none of the three inferior crowns were necessarily connected with that of the Roman Empire, which might have been held by a simple knight without a foot of land in the world. For as there had been Emperors (Lothar I, Lewis II, Lewis of Provence, son of Boso, Guy, Lambert, and Berengar) who were not kings of Germany, so there were several (all those who preceded Conrad II) who were not kings of Burgundy, and it is not clear that all were formally crowned or installed as kings of Italy. It is also worth remarking, that although no crown save the German was assumed by the successors of Charles V, their wider rights remained in full force, and were never subsequently relinquished. There was nothing, except the practical difficulty and absurdity of such a project, to prevent Francis II from having himself crowned at Arles,g Milan, and Rome.

  III.

  The King of the Romans (Römischer König).

  It has been shewn above how and why, about the time of Henry II, the German monarch began to entitle himself ‘Romanorum rex.’ Now it was not uncommon in the Middle Ages for the heir-apparent to a throne to be crowned during his father’s lifetime, that at the death of the latter he might step at once into his place. (Coronation, it must be remembered, which is now merely a spectacle, was in those days not only a sort of sacrament, but a matter of great political importance.) This plan was specially useful in an elective monarchy, such as Germany was after the twelfth century, for it avoided the delays and dangers of an election while the throne was vacant. But it seemed against the order of nature to have two Emperors at once,h and as the sovereign’s authority in Germany depended not on the Roman but on the German coronation, the practice came to be that each Emperor during his own life procured, if he could, the election of his successor, who was crowned at Aachen, in later times at Frankfort, and took the title of ‘King of the Romans.’ During the presence of the Emperor in Germany he exercised (unless by special delegation) no more authority than a Prince of Wales does in England, but on the Emperor’s death he succeeded at once, without any second election or coronation, and assumed (after the time of Ferdinand I) the title of ‘Emperor Elect.’i Before Ferdinand’s time, he would have been expected to go to Rome to be crowned there. While the Hapsburgs held the sceptre, each monarch generally contrived in this way to have his son or other near relative chosen to succeed him. But some were foiled in their attempts to do so; and, in such cases, an election was held after the Emperor’s death, according to the rules laid down in the Golden Bull.

  The first person who was chosen to be king in the lifetime of an Emperor seems to have been Conrad, son of the Emperor Henry IV.

  It was in imitation of this title that Napoleon called his son King of Rome.

  There was a certain resemblance between the position in Hindostan of the Mogul monarchs who ruled at Delhi, Lahore, and Agra, from Akbar the Great to Aurungzebe, and that of the earlier Teutonic Emperors in Europe. And the supremacy which the British Crown now holds in India over all or nearly all the native potentates is not unlike that which mediaeval theory assigned to the Emperor among Christian princes. It suggested the creation by statute (39 & 40 Vict. cap. 10) of the title ‘Emperor of India’ now attached to the king of Great Britain and Ireland.

  NOTE D

  LINES CONTRASTING THE PAST AND PRESENT OF ROME

  • Dum simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placebant,
  • Militia, populo, moenibus alta fui:
  • At simul effigies arasque superstitiosas
  • Deiiciens, uni sum famulata Deo,
  • Cesserunt arces, cecidere palatia divûm,
  • Servivit populus, degeneravit eques.
  • Vix scio quae fuerim, vix Romae Roma recordor;
  • Vix sinit occasus vel meminisse mei.
  • Gratior haec iactura mihi successibus illis;
  • Maior sum pauper divite, stante iacens:
  • Plus aquilis vexilla crucis, plus Caesare Petrus,
  • Plus cinctis ducibus vulgus inerme dedit.
  • Stans domui terras, infernum diruta pulso,
  • Corpora stans, animas fracta iacensque rego.
  • Tunc miserae plebi, modo principibus tenebrarum
  • Impero: tunc urbes, nunc mea regna polus.

  Written by Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, and afterwards archbishop of Tours (born ad 1057). Extracted from his works as printed by Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus.a

  NOTE E

  LIST OF BOOKS ON THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE WHICH MAY BE CONSULTED BY THE STUDENT

  The historical literature bearing on the history of the Empire from Charles the Great to Charles V is very large, and only a few books can be selected as specially useful to the student.

  The original authorities of most importance for German history will be found in the collection of Pertz (Monumenta Germanica Historica), which includes some bearing on Italy, and those for Italian history in Muratori, Scriptores Rerum Italicarum. Some others have also been recently published by the Italian Istituto Storico.

  Among systematic histories of comparatively recent date the following may be mentioned:—

  Jahrbucher des deutschen Reiches, by various scholars.

  Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, by Jaffé.

  Ranke,Weltgeschichte.

  Giesebrecht,Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit.

  Richter,Annalen der deutschen Geschichte.

  Histoire Générale du 4^meSiècle à nos jours, edited by E. Lavisse and A. Rambaud.

  Zeller,Histoire de l’Allemagne.

  Gibbon,Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by Bury.

  Hodgkin,Italy and her Invaders.

  Gregorovius,Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter.

  Gebhardt,Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte.

  Richter,Annalen der deutschen Geschichte im Mittelalter.

  Lamprecht,Deutsche Geschichte.

  Bury,History of the Later Roman Empire.

  Fisher (H. A. L.), The Mediaeval Empire.

  On constitutional subjects the student may consult:—

  Waitz,Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte.

  Hegel,Italienische Stadteverfassung.

  Schroder,Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte.

  For ecclesiastical history, the following works may be mentioned:—

  Milman,History of Latin Christianity.

  Hauck,Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands.

  Other books, and especially some of the more important original authorities, are referred to in the footnotes to the several chapters.

  [a ]As to this gift of citizenship, reference may be made to an essay on the Extension of Roman and English Law throughout the World in the author’s Studies in History and Jurisprudence, Vol. I.

  [b ]As it was said, Urbs fiebat Orbis.

  [c ]Under Diocletian, the provincial land tax and provincial system of administration were introduced into Italy, and the four imperial residences were Milan, Treves, Sirmium (in Pannonia), and Nicomedia (in Bithynia).

  [d ]Condita est civitas Roma per quam Deo placuit orbem debellare terrarum et in unam societatem reipublicae legumque longe lateque pacare.—St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, xviii, 22.

  [e ]According to the vicious financial system that prevailed, the curiales in each city were required to collect the taxes, and when there was a deficit, to supply it from their own property.

  [f ]See the eloquent passage of Claudian, In secundum consulatum Stilichonis, 129 sqq., and especially the following lines (150-160):
  
  

  • ‘Haec est in gremio victos quae sola recepit,
  • Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit,
  • Matris, non dominae, ritu; civesque vocavit
  • Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.
  • Huius pacificis debemus moribus omnes
  • Quod veluti patriis regionibus utitur hospes:
  • Quod sedem mutare licet: quod cernere Thulen
  • Lusus, et horrendos quondam penetrare recessus:
  • Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Oronten,
  • Quod cuncti gens una sumus. Nec terminus unquam
  • Romanae ditionis erit.’
  St. Patrick (a younger contemporary of Claudian), in his Epistle to Coroticus, speaks of the Christians of Gaul as Romans.

  [g ]In the Roman jurisprudence, ius sacrum is a branch of ius publicum.

  [h ]‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but from God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God’ (Rom. xiii. 1). ‘Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the Emperor as supreme; or unto Governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well’ (1 Pet. ii. 13). So Tertullian, writing circ. ad 200, says: ‘Sed quid ego amplius de religione atque pietate Christiana in imperatorem quem necesse est suspiciamus ut eum quem Dominus noster elegerit. Et merito dixerim, noster est magis Caesar, ut a nostro Deo constitutus.’—Apologet. cap. 34.

  [i ]Eusebius describes Constantine as a sort of ‘Summus episcopus’: οἱά τις κοινὸς ἐπίσκοπος ἐκ Θεου̑ καθεσταμένος συνόδους τω̑ν του̑ Θεου̑ λειτουργω̑ν συνεκρότει. And Constantine (according to Eusebius) described himself to the bishops in a similar way: ὑμει̑ς τω̑ν εἴσω τη̑ς ἐκκλησίας ἐγὼ δὲ τω̑ν ἐκτὸς ὑπὸ Θεου̑ καθεσταμένος ἂν εἴην.

  [j ]See the book of Optatus, Bishop of Milevis (circ. ad 370), Contra Donatistas. ‘Non enim respublica est in ecclesia, sed ecclesia in republica, id est, in imperio Romano, cum super imperatorem non sit nisi solus Deus’ (p. 999 of vol. ii of Migne; Patrologiae Cursus completus). The treatise of Optatus is full of interest, as shewing the growth of the idea of the visible Church, and of the primacy of Peter’s chair, as constituting its centre and representing its unity. In the end of the fifth century, the only Christian countries outside the limits of the Empire were Ireland and Armenia, and Armenia, maintaining a precarious existence beside the great Persian monarchy of the Sassanid kings, had been for a long time virtually dependent on the Roman power.

  [a ]‘Addiderat consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii, incertum metu an per invidiam.’—Tac. Ann. i. 11.

  [b ]Tac. Ann. ii. 9.

  [c ]Stilicho, the bulwark of the Empire, seems to have been himself a Vandal by extraction.

  [d ]Not the consulship itself, but the ornamenta consularia. An Aquitanian chieftain was legate of Central Gaul (Lugdunensis) under the name of Julius Vindex in ad 68.

  [e ]Jordanes, De Rebus Geticis, cap. 28.

  [f ]Tac. Hist. i and iv.

  [g ]‘Praecellentissimo Domino et Patri.’—Letters printed in Dom Bouquet, iv, Epp. 15 and 16.

  [h ]Letter printed among the works of Avitus, Bishop of Vienne (Migne’s Patrologia, vol. lix. p. 285).
  
  This letter is obviously the composition not of Sigismund himself, but of Avitus, writing on Sigismund’s behalf. But this makes it scarcely less valuable evidence of the feelings of the time.

  [i ]‘Referre solitus est (sc. Ataulphus) se in primis ardenter inhiasse: ut obliterato Romanorum nomine Romanum omne solum Gothorum imperium et faceret et vocaret: essetque, ut vulgariter loquar, Gothia quod Romania fuisset; fieretque nunc Ataulphus quod quondam Caesar Augustus. At ubi multa experientia probavisset, neque Gothos ullo modo parere legibus posse propter effrenatam barbariem, neque reipublicae interdici leges oportere sine quibus respublica non est respublica, elegisse se saltem, ut gloriam sibi de restituendo in integrum augendoque Romano nomine Gothorum viribus quaereret, habereturque apud posteros Romanae restitutionis auctor postquam esse non potuerat immutator. Ob hoc abstinere a bello, ob hoc inhiare paci nitebatur.’—Orosius, vii. 43.

  [j ]Athaulf formed only to abandon it.
  
  When in ad 587 Reccared, king of the West Goths of Spain, renounced Arianism to adopt the orthodoxy of the Empire, he called himself Flavius.

  [k ]See, among other passages, Varro, De lingua Latina, iv. 34; Cic. Pro Domo, 33; Virg. Aen. ix. 448; Hor. Od. iii. 30. 8; Tibull. ii. 5. 23; Ovid, Am. i. 15. 26; Trist. iii. 7. 51; and cf the Digest of Justinian, book xiv. 2. 9; and i. 1. 33 (‘Roma communis nostra patria’). The phrase ‘urbs aeterna’ appears in a constitution issued by Valentinian III (Nov. Valent. 17).
  
  Tertullian speaks of Rome as ‘civitas sacrosancta.’

  [l ]See Note I at the end.

  [m ]For example, by the ‘restitutio natalium,’ and the ‘adrogatio per rescriptum principis,’ or, as it is expressed, ‘per sacrum oraculum.’

  [n ]Even the Christian Emperors took the title of Pontifex Maximus, till Gratian refused it as unlawful: ἀθέμιστον εἰ̑ναι Χριστιάνῳ τὸ σχη̑μα νομίσας.—Zosimus, lib. iv. cap. 36. Pope Gelasius I (Tractat. iv. 11), noting that Melchizedek had been both king and priest, says that the Devil imitated this arrangement when he made the Roman Emperors chief pontiffs; but when Christ the true King and Priest came, He provided that the two offices should be thereafter distinct.

  [o ]‘Maiore formidine et callidiore timiditate Caesarem observatis quam ipsum ex Olympo Iovem, et merito, si sciatis. . . . Citius denique apud vos per omnes Deos quam per unum genium Caesaris peieratur.’—Tertull. Apolog. c. xxviii.
  
  Cf. Zos. v. 51: εἰ μὲν γὰρ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν τετυχήκει διδόμενος ὅρκος, ἠ̑ν ἂν ὡς εἰκὸς παριδει̑ν ἐνδίδοντας τῃ̑ του̑ θεου̑ ϕιλανθρωπίᾳ τὴν ἐπὶ τῃ̑ ἀσεβείᾳ συγγνώμην. ἐπεὶ δὲ κατὰ τη̑ς του̑ βασιλέως ὀμωμόκεσαν κεϕαλη̑ς, οὐκ εἰ̑ναι θεμιτὸν αὐτοι̑ς εἰς τὸν τοσου̑τον ὅρκον ἐξαμαρτει̑ν.

  [p ]Tac. Ann. i. 73; iii. 38, etc.

  [q ]It is curious that this should have begun in the first years of the Empire. See, among other passages that might be cited from the Augustan poets, Virg. Georg. i. 24; iv. 560; Hor. Od. iii. 3. 11; Ovid, Epp. ex Ponto, iv. 9. 105.

  [r ]Hence Vespasian’s dying jest, ‘Ut puto, deus fio.’ The title was not conferred upon Emperors of evil memory.

  [s ]ὅπου ἂν ὸ βασιλεὺς ᾐ̑, ἐκει̑ ἡ Ῥώμη—says Herodian.

  [t ]Odoacer or Odovacar, as it seems his name ought to be written, is usually, but incorrectly, described as a King of the Heruli, who led his people into Italy and overthrew the Empire of the West; others call him King of the Rugii, or Skyrri, or Turcilingi, or even of the Goths, for the name ‘Goth’ was sometimes used to denote the Teutonic invaders generally. The truth seems to be that he was not a king at all, but the son of a Skyrrian chieftain (Edecon, possibly the same Edecon as the one whom Attila sent as an envoy to Constantinople), whose personal merits made him chosen by the barbarian auxiliaries to be their leader. The Skyrri were a small tribe, apparently akin to the more powerful Heruli, whose name is often extended to them.

  [u ]Αὔγουστος ὁ Ὀρέστου υἱὸς ἀκούσας Ζήνωνα πάλιν τὴν βασιλείαν ἀνακεκτη̑σθαι τη̑ς ἕω. . . . ἠνάγκασε τὴν βουλὴν ἀποστει̑λαι πρεσβει̑αν Ζήνωνι σημαἰνουσαν ὡς ἰδίας μὲν αὐτοι̑ς βασιλείας οὐ δέοι, κοινὸς δὲ ἀποχρήσει μόνος ὢν αὐτοκράτωρ ὲπ’ ἀμϕοτὲροις τοι̑ς πέρασι. τὸν μέντοι Ὀδόαχον ὑπ’ αὐτω̑ν προβεβλη̑σθαι ἱκανὸν ὅντα σώζειν τὰ παρ’ αὐτοι̑ς πράγματα πολιτικὴν ἐχὼν νου̑ν καὶ σύνεσιν ὸμου̑ καὶ μάχιμον, καὶ δει̑σθαι του̑ Ζήνωνος πατρικίου τε αὐτῳ̑ ἀποστει̑λαι ἀξίαν καὶ τὴν τω̑ν Ἰτάλων τουτῳ̑ ὲϕει̑ναι διοίκησιν.—Corp. Scr. Hist. Byzant., vol. xix. p. 235 (Excerpta e Malchi Hist.).

  [x ]Not king of Italy, as is often said. The barbarian kings did not for several centuries employ territorial titles; Rex Angliae is not seen till Henry I: Rex Franciae not till Henry IV (of France), and Jordanes and Cassiodorus tell us that Odoacer never so much as assumed the insignia of royalty; but there is a coin on which he appears as ‘rex.’

  [y ]As to Odoacer and the occurrences of ad 476, cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. ii. p. 518 sqq.

  [z ]Statues of Zeno as reigning Emperor were set up in Rome.

  [a ]‘Nil deest nobis imperio vestro famulantibus,’ writes Theodorich to Zeno: So to Anastasius I, ‘Pati vos non credimus inter utrasque respublicas quarum semper unum corpus sub antiquis principiis fuisse declaratur aliquid discordiae permanere. . . . Romani regni unum velle, una semper opinio sit’ (Cassiod. Variar. i. 1). Cf. Jordanes, De Rebus Geticis, cap. 57. So in a letter to the Emperor Anastasius ‘Regnum nostrum imitatio vestri’ (Cassiod. Variar. i. 1).

  [b ]‘Unde et paene omnibus barbaris Gothi sapientiores exstiterunt Graecisque paene consimiles.’—Jord. cap. 5.

  [c ]See Note II at the end.

  [d ]He restored some of the buildings which were already falling to ruin in the Roman Forum. Bricks stamped with his name were found in 1902 near the south-west end of the recently uncovered floor of the Basilica Aemilia.

  [e ]Procopius tells us that when the Ostrogoths found themselves unable to defend their territories in South-eastern Gaul, they yielded these to Theodebert, king of the Franks, who thereupon obtained a confirmation of his possession from Justinian. Thus the barbarians obtained Marseilles, and celebrated at Arles the equestrian contest, probably the ludus Troianus, which had been instituted by Augustus, καὶ νυ̑ν κάθηνται μὲν ἐν τῃ̑ Ἀρελάτῳ τὸν ἱππικὸν ἀγω̑να θεώμενοι (Bell. Goth. iii. 33). He adds that the Franks did not think their acquisition of Gaul secure until it had been formally ratified by the Emperor.
  
  The (almost contemporary) Life of St. Trevirius says that the saint lived ‘eo tempore quo Gallia sub imperii iure Iustini consulis (the Emperor Justin I) exstitit,’ and refers to the reign of Theodebert as the time when ‘reges Galliarum Francorumque suae ditioni, sublato imperii iure, gubernacula ponerent, et sublata Reipublicae dominatione, propria fruerentur potestate.’—Extrac. from Vita S. Trevir. in Dom Bouquet, iii. 441.

  [f ]‘Igitur Chlodovechus ab imperatore Anastasio codicillos de consulatu accepit, et in basilica beati Martini tunica blattea indutus est et chlamyde, imponens vertici diadema . . . et ab ea die tanquam consul aut (= et) Augustus est vocitatus.’—Gregory of Tours, ii. 38. He may probably have also received the title of Patrician: a poem in Dom Bouquet, ii. 538, says of him, ‘Patricius magno sublimis fulsit honore.’

  [g ]Even so early as the middle of the fifth century, St. Leo the Great could say to the Roman people, ‘Isti (sc. Petrus et Paulus) sunt qui te ad hanc gloriam provexerunt ut gens sancta, populus electus, civitas sacerdotalis et regia, per sacram B. Petri sedem caput orbis effecta latius praesideres religione divina quam dominatione terrena.’—Sermon on the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul. (Opp. ap. Migne, tom. i. p. 336.)

  [h ]The Lex Romana Burgundionum, published by the Burgundian kings at the beginning of the sixth century, and the Lex Romana Visigothorum (Breviarium Alaricianum), published in or about ad 506, continued to form bodies of written law which were in use for a long time, and became the kernel of the customary law which grew up in South-eastern and Southern Gaul.
  
  Agathias, writing at Constantinople in the middle of the sixth century, says the Franks had adopted much of the Roman administration and law, οἱ Φράγγοι πολιτείᾳ ὡς τὰ πολλὰ χρω̑νται Ἴωμαικῃ̑ καὶ νόμοις τοι̑ς αὐτοι̑ς καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ὁμοίως ἀμϕί τε τὰ συμβόλαια καὶ γάμους καὶ τὴν του̑ θείου θεραπείαν νομίζουσιν (Hist. i. 2).

  [i ]‘Ius Romanum est adhuc in viridi observantia et eo iure praesumitur quilibet vivere nisi adversum probetur,’ says Maranta in the sixteenth century.

  [a ]‘Denique gens Francorum multos et foecundissimos fructus Domino attulit, non solum credendo, sed et alios salutifere convertendo,’ says the Emperor Lewis II in ad 871.

  [b ]This befel Pope Martin I, as in earlier days Sylverius.

  [c ]Vigilius in the days of Justinian, and Honorius I in those of Heraclius, had lapsed for a time into error.

  [d ]See Note III at end.

  [e ]‘Ammonebat ne a fide vel amore imperii Romani desisterent.’—Liber Pontificalis, ed. Duchesne, vol. i. p. 407. So Paulus Diaconus (ch. xliv): ‘Omnis Ravennae exercitus vel Venetiarum talibus iussis [the command to destroy images] uno animo restiterunt, et nisi eos prohibuisset Pontifex, imperatorem super se constituere fuissent aggressi.’

  [f ]Letter in Codex Carolinus, in Muratori’s Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, vol. iii (part 2nd), p. 75, addressed ‘Subregulo Carolo.’

  [g ]Letter in Cod. Carol. (Mur. R. S. I. iii. [2.] p. 96), a strange mixture of passionate adjurations, dexterous appeals to Frankish pride, and long scriptural quotations: ‘Declaratum quippe est quod super omnes gentes vestra Francorum gens prona mihi Apostolo Dei Petro exstitit, et ideo ecclesiam quam mihi Dominus tradidit vobis per manus Vicarii mei commendavi.’

  [h ]The exact date when Pipin received the title cannot be made out. Pope Stephen’s next letter (p. 96 of Mur. iii) is addressed ‘Pipino, Carolo et Carolomanno patricns.’ And so the Chronicon Casinense (Mur. iv. 273) says it was first given to Pipin. Probably it was not formally conferred on Charles Martel, although one or two documents may be quoted in which it is used of him. As one of these is a letter of Pope Gregory II’s, the explanation may be that the title was offered or intended to be offered to him, although never accepted by him. The nature and extent of Pipin’s donation (which cannot be found in any extant document) have been much disputed, but some sort of gift was evidently made.

  [i ]The title of Patrician appears even in the remote West: it stands in a charter of Ini the West Saxon king, and in one given by Richard of Normandy in ad 1015. Ducange, s.v.

  [j ]Even in Theodorich’s days, Cassiodorus had written to the Pope as guardian of the humbler classes: ‘Securitas plebis ad vestram respicit famam, cui divinitus est commissa custodia.’—Variar. ii. 157.

  [k ]See p. 99, post, and Note IV at end.

  [l ]From ad 712, when the Musulmans conquered Spain, till the fall of the Ommiyad dynasty in ad 750, the power of the Khalifate stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic. After ad 800 the Roman Empire in the East and the Romano-Frankish Empire in the West corresponded to the two Khalifates of Bagdad and Cordova.

  [m]

  • ‘Plaudentem cerne senatum
  • Et Byzantinos proceres, Graiosque Quirites.’
  • —In Eutrop. ii. 135

  [n ]Several Emperors during this period had been patrons of images, as was Irene at the moment of which I write: the stain nevertheless adhered to their government as a whole.

  [o ]The nature of the connection between the conception of the Roman Empire and the conception of a Catholic and Apostolic Church—things which to a modern, remembering the long struggle of Church and State, may seem naturally antagonistic, will be explained in chapter viii. The interest of history lies not least in this, that it shews us how men have at different times entertained wholly different notions respecting the relation to one another of the same ideas or the same institutions.

  [p ]Monachus Sangallensis, De Gestis Karoli; in Pertz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, ii. pp. 731 sqq.

  [q ]So Pope Gregory the Great had written two centuries earlier: ‘Quanto caeteros homines regia dignitas antecedit, tanto caeterarum gentium regna regni Francorum culmen excellit.’—Ep. v. 6.
  
  Had the Lombards not been neighbours and enemies of the See of Rome, as well as anti-clerical in their sentiments and habits, the restoration of an Empire in the West would probably have fallen to them instead of to the Franks.

  [r ]Alciatus, De Formula imperii Romani.

  [s ]Or rather, according to the then prevailing practice of beginning the year from Christmas Day, ad 801.

  [t ]An elaborate description of old St. Peter’s may be found in Bunsen’s and Platner’s Beschreibung der Stadt Rom; with which may be compared Bunsen’s work on the Basilicas of Rome.

  [u ]See Note V at end.

  [x ]‘Karolo Augusto a Deo coronato magno et pacifico imperatori vita et victoria.’

  [a ]Before the end of the tenth century we find the monk Benedict of Soracte ascribing to Charles an expedition to Constantinople and Palestine, with other marvellous exploits. A twelfth-century window in the cathedral of St. Denis represents his reception at Constantinople. The romance which passes under the name of Archbishop Turpin is well known. All the best stories about Charles—and some of them are very good—may be found in the book of the Monk of St. Gall. Many refer to his dealings with the bishops, towards whom he is described as acting like a good-humoured school-master.

  [b ]Baronius, Ann., ad ann. 800; Bellarminus, De translatione imperii Romani adversus Illyricum; Spanhemius, De ficta translatione imperii; Conringius, De imperio Romano Germanico.

  [c ]Cf. Greenwood, Cathedra Petri, vol. iii. p. 109.

  [d ]Ann. Lauresh., ap Pertz, M. G. H., Script. i. p. 38.

  [e ]Apud Pertz, M. G. H., Script. i. pp. 305, 306.

  [f ]Liber Pontificalis, Vita Leonis III.

  [g ]It must be remembered that no method of choosing an Emperor ever was prescribed by law either under the earlier Emperors at Rome or the later at Constantinople. So far as the right of choice could be said to reside in any body, it resided in the senate or the army, or (in a still more shadowy way) in the people, first of Old Rome, afterwards of New Rome (Constantinople), but in practice the senate counted for very little: it was a matter facti potius quam iuris. Hence the Romans in ad 800 might claim that they were revindicating a right which, originally vested in their ancestors, had been misused at Constantinople, and the more palpably misused because no woman had ever reigned except as consort of an Emperor.
  
  The Franks evidently attached importance to the Roman acclamations, but these would come from the party in Rome which favoured Pope Leo, and we must not suppose any formal election by the people.

  [h ]‘Imperatoris et Augusti nomen accepit, quod primo in tantum aversatus est ut adfirmaret se eo die, quamvis praecipua festivitas esset, aecclesiam non intraturum si pontificis consilium praescire potuisset. Invidiam tamen suscepti nominis, Romanis imperatoribus super hoc indignantibus, magna tulit patientia, vicitque eorum contumaciam magnanimitate, qua eis proculdubio longe praestantior erat, mittendo ad eos crebras legationes et in epistolis fratres eos appellando.’—Vita Karoli, c. xxxviii.

  [i ]Lorentz, Leben Alcuins. And cf. Döllinger, Das Kaiserthum Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger.

  [j ]A recent writer (Martens, Beleuchtung der neuesten Controversen über die römische Frage) thinks that Charles and Leo had arranged that the coronation should take place, but that the Emperor meant to crown himself, and then let the Pope anoint him.

  [k ]Dahn, Urgeschichte der romanischen und teutonischen Völker, Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. viii. p. 202 sqq. Dr. Hodgkin suggests another explanation also, the difficulty of securing the city of Rome for Charles’s eldest son, who was to be his chief heir, inasmuch as Italy was to be part of the dominions of his younger son.

  [l ]See the passage quoted in note ^h, p. 58.

  [m ]Döllinger, ut supra.

  [n ]Παρὰ Καρούλλου ἀποκρισιάριοι καὶ του̑ πάπα Λέοντος πρὸς τὴν Εἰρήνην αἰτούμενοι ζευχθη̑ναι αὐτὴν τῳ̑ Καρούλλῳ πρὸς γάμον καὶ ἑνω̑σαι τὰ Ἑῳ̑α καὶ τἀ Ἑσπέρια.—Theoph., Chron. in Corp. Scr. Hist. Byzant. vol. xliii. p. 737.

  [o ]Their ambassadors at last saluted him by the desired title: ‘Laudes ei dixerunt imperatorem eum et basileum appellantes.’ Eginh., Ann., ad ann. 812. Charles in a letter sent to Michael had addressed the latter as Emperor, and spoken of the peace established ‘inter Orientale et Occidentale imperium.’ There was thus a sort of reciprocal recognition, but (as will be further explained in chapter XVII) the two Empires did not as a rule admit one another’s claims.

  [p ]Although they occasionally conceded the title of Emperor to the Teutonic sovereign: as in the instances cited in note ^o, p. 62, and see post, ch. XVII.

  [q ]Harun er Rashid; Eginh., Vita Karoli, cap. 16.

  [r ]Pertz, M. G. H. iii. (Legg. i) p. 91.

  [s ]Putter, Historical Development of the German Constitution; so too Conring, and esp. David Blondel, Adv. Chiffletium.

  [t ]‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit,’ is repeated in this conquest of the Teuton by Roman civilization.

  [u ]See Note VI at end.

  [x ]Probably the Scots of Ireland.—Eginhard, Vita Karoli, cap. 16.

  [y ]He could, however, speak Latin as easily as German, but understood Greek better than he spoke it. He tried to learn to write, but, says Eginhard: ‘parum successit labor praeposterus et sero inchoatus.’

  [z ]Aix-la-Chapelle (called by English writers of the seventeenth century Aken). It is commemorated in the lines (to be found in Pertz’s edition of Eginhard) beginning—

  • ‘Urbs Aquensis, urbs regalis,
  • Sedes regni principalis,
  • Prima regum curia.’

  [a ]Engilenheim, or Ingelheim, lies near the left shore of the Rhine between Mentz and Bingen.

  [b ]‘Barbara et antiquissima carmina quibus veterum regum actus et bella canebantur scripsit memoriaeque mandavit.’—Vita Karoli, cap. 29.

  [c ]These things were not in fact done, but the idea of doing them was involved in the imperial tradition. So he reduced to writing the laws of the various tribes subject to him (probably the Germanic tribes), ‘Omnium nationum quae sub eius dominatu erant iura quae scripta non erant describere et literis mandari fecit.’—Vita Karoli, cap. 29.

  [d ]This basilica was built upon the model of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, and as it was the first church of any size that had been erected in those regions for centuries past, it excited extraordinary interest among the Franks and Gauls. In many of its features it resembles the beautiful church of San Vitale, at Ravenna (also supposed to have been influenced by that of the Holy Sepulchre), which was begun by Theodorich, and completed under Justinian. Probably San Vitale was used as a pattern by Charles’s architects: we know that he caused marble columns (along with a statue of Theodorich) to be brought from Ravenna to deck the church at Aachen. Over the tomb of Charles, below the central dome (to which the existing Pointed choir was added some centuries later), there hangs a huge chandelier, the gift of Frederick Barbarossa.

  [e ]‘Romuleum Francis praestitit imperium.’—Elegy of Ermoldus Nigellus, in Pertz, M. G. H. t. ii. So too Florus the Deacon—

  • Huic etenim cessit etiam gens Romula genti,
  • Regnorumque simul mater Roma inclyta cessit:
  • Huius ibi princeps regni diademata sumpsit
  • Munere apostolico, Christi munimine fretus.’
  • (Ap. Migne, cxix. p. 251.)

  [f ]A curious illustration of the influence of the name and fame of Charles, even on remote nations, is supplied by a story in the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson. Alfhild, a concubine of St. Olaf, had given birth to a child at night, while Olaf was asleep; and Sigvat his favourite skald, seeing it to be weak, and fearing it might die, caused it to be baptized at once, and gave it the name of Magnus. When the king awoke and heard what had been done, he was angry, and calling Sigvat asked, ‘Why hast thou called the child Magnus, which is not a name of our race?’ The skald answered, ‘I called him after king Karl Magnus, who I knew had been the best man in the world.’ The child grew up to be king Magnus the Good, the most popular and one of the greatest of the Norwegian kings; and from him the name became a common one, as it is to-day, over all the North.

  [a ]Usage has established this translation of ‘Hludowicus Pius,’ but ‘gentle’ or ‘kind-hearted’ would better express the meaning of the epithet.

  [b ]The dynasty of the region which was to become modern France (Francia occidentalis) had the least share of it. Charles the Bald was the only West Frankish Emperor, and reigned a very short time.

  [c ]Tac. Hist. i. 4.

  [d ]For an account of the various applications of the name Burgundy, see Appendix, Note A.

  [e ]The accession of Boso took place in ad 877, eleven years before Charles the Fat’s death. But the new kingdom could not be considered legally settled until the latter date, and its establishment is at any rate a part of that general break-up of the great Carolingian Empire whereof ad 888 marks the crisis. See Appendix, Note A.
  
  It is a curious mark of the reverence paid to the Carolingian blood, that Boso, a powerful and ambitious prince, seems to have chiefly rested his claims on the fact that he was husband of Irmingard, daughter of the Emperor Lewis II. Baron de Gingins la Sarraz (Archiv für Schweizer Geschichte) quotes a charter of his (drawn up when he seems to have doubted whether to call himself king), which begins, ‘Ego Boso Dei gratia id quod sum, et coniux mea Irmingardis proles imperialis.’

  [f ]Lewis had been surprised by Berengar at Verona, blinded, and forced to take refuge in his own kingdom of Provence.

  [g ]Alberic is called variously senator, consul, patrician, and prince of the Romans.

  [h ]Adelheid was daughter of Rudolf, king of Transjurane Burgundy. She was at this time in her nineteenth year.

  [i ]Otto’s first wife, the English Edith, grand-daughter of Alfred the Great, had died some time before.

  [j ]Chron. Moiss., in Pertz, M. G. H. i. 305. So Pope John VIII, when summoning Charles the Bald into Italy, says, ‘Et hanc terram, quae sui imperii caput est, ad libertatem reducat, ne quando dicant gentes: Ubi est imperator illius?’—Letter in Mansi, Concil xvii. 29.

  [k ]See especially the poem of Florus the Deacon (printed in the Benedictine collection and in Migne, cxix. pp. 249-253), a bitter lament over the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, from which I take four lines (p. 251):—

  • ‘Quid faciant populi quos ingens alluit Hister,
  • Quos Rhenus Rhodanusque rigant, Ligerisve, Padusve,
  • Quos omnes dudum tenuit concordia nexos,
  • Foedere nunc rupto divortia moesta fatigant?’

  [l ]Widukind, Annales (bk. iii. c. 49), in Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. p. 459. It may, however, be doubted whether the annalist is not here giving a very free rendering of the triumphant cries of the German army.

  [m ]Cf. esp. the ‘Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma,’ in Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. pp. 719-722.

  [n ]‘Licet videamus Romanorum regnum in maxima parte iam destructum, tamen quamdiu reges Francorum duraverint qui Romanum imperium tenere debent, dignitas Romani imperii ex toto non peribit, quia stabit in regibus suis.’—Liber de Antichristo, addressed by Adso, abbot of Moutier-en-Der, to Queen Gerberga (circa ad 950), ap. Migne, ci. p. 1290.

  [o ]From the money which Otto struck in Italy, it seems that he did occasionally use the title of king of Italy or of the Lombards. That he was crowned is perhaps not absolutely certain.

  [p ]‘A papa imperator ordinatur,’ says Hermannus Contractus. ‘Dominum Ottonem, ad hoc usque vocatum regem, non solum Romano sed et poene totius Europae populo acclamante imperatorem consecravit Augustum.’—Annal. Quedlinb., ad ann. 962. ‘Benedictionem a domno apostolico Iohanne, cuius rogatione huc venit, cum sua coniuge promeruit imperialem ac patronus Romanae effectus est ecclesiae.’—Thietmar, ii. c. 7 (Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. p. 747). ‘Acclamatione totius Romani populi ab apostolico Iohanne, filio Alberici, imperator et Augustus vocatur et ordinatur.’—Continuator Reginonis, s. a. 962 (Pertz, M. G. H., Script. i. p. 625). And similarly the other annalists.

  [a ]Political thought, in the modern sense of the word, began to re-emerge under the influence of Aristotle in the later half of the thirteenth century.

  [b ]Empires like the Persian did nothing to assimilate the subject races, who retained their own laws and customs, sometimes their own princes, and were bound only to serve in the armies and fill the treasury of the Great King.

  [c ]See 1 Kings xx. 23, with which compare 2 Kings xvii. 26.

  [d ]Od. iii. 72:—
  
  

  • . . . . ἢ μαψιδίως ἀλάλησθε,
  • οἰ̑ά τε ληϊστη̑ρες, ὑπεὶρ ἄλα, τοίτ’ ἀλόωνται
  • ψυχὰς παρθέμενοι, κακὸν ἀλλοδαποι̑σι ϕέροντες;
  Cf. Od. ix. 39; Il. v. 214 ἀλλότριος ϕώς; and the Hymn to the Pythian Apollo, l. 274.

  [e ]Plato, in the beginning of the Laws, represents it as natural between all states: πόλεμος ϕύσει ὑπάρχει πρὸς ἀπάσας τὰς πόλεις. Even Aristotle deems slavery to be based on a natural distinction, though before his time the orator Alcidamas had said, οὐδένα δου̑λον ἡ ϕύσις πεποίηκεν.

  [f ]See especially Acts xvii. 26; Gal. iii. 28; Eph. ii. 11 sqq., iv. 3-6; Col. iii. 11.

  [g ]‘Romanos enim vocitant homines nostrae religionis,’ says Gregory of Tours. In the early Middle Ages, Ῥωμαι̑οι is occasionally used to mean Christians, as opposed to Ἔλληνες, heathens.

  [h ]See p. 12, ante.

  [i ]Augustine, in the De Civitate Dei. His influence, great through all the Middle Ages, was greater on no one than on Charles.—‘Delectabatur et libris sancti Augustini, praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei praetitulati sunt.’—Eginhard, Vita Karoli, cap. 24. One can imagine the impression which such a chapter as that on the true happiness of a Christian Emperor (Book v, chap. 24) would make upon a pious and susceptible mind. It is hardly too much to say that the Holy Empire was built upon the foundation of the De Civitate Dei.

  [j ]Eph. iv. 4-6.

  [k ]‘Quapropter universorum precibus fidelium optandum est, ut in omnem gloriam vestram extendatur imperium, ut scilicet catholica fides . . . veraciter in una confessione cunctorum cordibus infigatur, quatenus summi Regis donante pietate eadem sanctae pacis et perfectae caritatis omnes ubique regat et custodiat unitas.’—Quoted by Waitz (Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, ii. 182) from an unprinted letter of Alcuin.

  [l ]A curious illustration of this tendency of mind is afforded by the descriptions we meet with of Learning or Theology (Studium) as a concrete existence, having a visible dwelling in the University of Paris. The three great powers which rule human life, says one writer, the Popedom, the Empire, and Learning, have been severally entrusted to the three foremost nations of Europe: Italians, Germans, French. ‘His siquidem tribus, scilicet sacerdotio imperio et studio, tanquam tribus virtutibus, videlicet naturali vitali et scientiali, catholica ecclesia spiritualiter mirificatur, augmentatur et regitur. His itaque tribus, tanquam fundamento pariete et tecto, eadem ecclesia tanquam materialiter proficit. Et sicut ecclesia materialis uno tantum fundamento et uno tecto eget, parietibus vero quatuor, ita imperium quatuor habet parietes, hoc est, quatuor imperii sedes, Aquisgranum, Arelatum, Mediolanum, Romam.’—Iordanis Chronica; in Schardius, Sylloge Tractatuum. And see Dollinger, Die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der katholischen Theologie, p. 8.

  [m ]‘Una est sola respublica totius populi Christiani, ergo de necessitate erit et unus solus princeps et rex illius reipublicae, statutus et stabilitus ad ipsius fidei et populi Christiani dilatationem et defensionem. Ex qua ratione concludit etiam Augustinus (De Civitate Dei, lib. xix.) quod extra ecclesiam nunquam fuit nec potuit nec poterit esse verum imperium, etsi fuerint imperatores qualitercumque et secundum quid, non simpliciter, qui fuerunt extra fidem Catholicam et ecclesiam.’—Engelbert (abbot of Admont in Upper Austria), De Ortu Progressu et Fine Imperii Romani (circa 1310), ap. Goldast, Politica imperii, p. 754.
  
  In this ‘de necessitate’ everything is included.

  [n ]See note ^g, p. 31.

  [o ]See p. 43, ante: and cf. Aegidi, Der Fürstenrath nach dem Luneviller Frieden.

  [p ]See as to the Donation Note IV at end of this volume.

  [q ]Of this curious seal, a leaden one, preserved at Paris, a figure is given upon the cover of this volume. There are few monuments of that age whose genuineness can be considered altogether beyond doubt; but this seal has many respectable authorities in its favour. See, among others, Le Blanc, Dissertation historique sur quelques monnoies de Charlemagne, Paris, 1689; J. M. Heineccius, De veteribus Germanorum aliarumque nationum sigillis, Lips. 1709; Anastasius, Vitae Pontificum Romanorum, ed. Vignoli, Romae, 1752; Götz, Deutschlands Kayser-Münzen des Mittelalters, Dresden, 1827; and the authorities cited by Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, iii. 179, n. 4.

  [r ]‘Praeterea mirari se dilecta fraternitas tua quod non Francorum set Romanorum imperatores nos appellemus; set scire te convenit quia nisi Romanorum imperatores essemus, utique nec Francorum. A Romanis enim hoc nomen et dignitatem assumpsimus, apud quos profecto primum tantae culmen sublimitatis effulsit,’ &c.—Letter of the Emperor Lewis II to Basil the Emperor at Constantinople, from Chron. Salernit., ap. Pertz, M. H. G., Script. iii. p. 523 (c. 106).

  [s ]‘Illam (sc. Romanan ecclesiam) solus ille fundavit, et super petram fidei mox nascentis erexit, qui beato aeternae vitae clavigero terreni simul et coelestis imperii iura commisit.’—Pope Nicholas II, ad 1060, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, Dist. xxii. c. 1. The expression is not uncommon in mediaeval writers. So ‘unum est imperium Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, cuius est pars ecclesia constituta in terris,’ in Lewis II’s letter.

  [t ]‘Merito summus Pontifex Romanus episcopus dici potest rex et sacerdos. Si enim dominus noster Iesus Christus sic appellatur, non videtur incongruum suum vocare successorem. Corporale et temporale ex spirituali et perpetuo dependet, sicut corporis operatio ex virtute animae. Sicut ergo corpus per animam habet esse virtutem et operationem, ita et temporalis iurisdictio principum per spiritualem Petri et successorum eius.’—St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum.

  [u ]‘Nonne Romana ecclesia tenetur imperatori tanquam suo patrono, et imperator ecclesiam fovere et defensare tanquam suus vere patronus? certe sic. . . . Patronis vero concessum est ut praelatos in ecclesiis sui patronatus eligant. Cum ergo imperator onus sentiat patronatus, ut qui tenetur eam defendere, sentire debet honorem et emolumentum.’ I quote this from a curious document, a pamphlet called forth by the great schism of ad 1378, in Goldast’s collection of tracts (Monarchia Imperii, vol. i. p. 229), entitled ‘Letter of the four Universities, Paris, Oxford, Prague, and the “Romana generalitas,” to the Emperor Wenzel and Pope Urban,’ ad 1380. The title or description is obviously untrue, but the document has all the appearance of being practically contemporary. It is therefore available as evidence of the ideas which filled men’s minds.

  [x ]So Leo III in a charter issued on the day of Charles’s coronation: ‘. . . actum in praesentia gloriosi atque excellentissimi filii nostri Caroli quem auctore Deo in defensionem et provectionem sanctae universalis ecclesiae hodie Augustum sacravimus.’—Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, ad ann. 800.
  
  So, indeed, Theodulf of Orleans, a contemporary of Charles, ascribes to the Emperor an almost papal authority over the Church itself:—

  • ‘Coeli habet hic (sc. Papa) claves, proprias te iussit habere;
  • Tu regis ecclesiae, nam regit ille poli;
  • Tu regis eius opes, clerum populumque gubernas,
  • Hic te coelicolas ducet ad usque choros.’
  • —In D. Bouquet, v. 415.

  [y ]Perhaps at no more than three: in the time of Charles and Leo III; again under Otto III and his two Popes Gregory V and Sylvester II; thirdly, under Henry III; certainly never thenceforth.

  [z ]The Sachsenspiegel (Speculum Saxonicum, circ. ad 1240), the great North-German law book, says, ‘The Empire is held from God alone, not from the Pope. Emperor and Pope are supreme each in what has been entrusted to him: the Pope in what concerns the soul; the Emperor in all that belongs to the body and to knighthood.’ The Schwabenspiegel, compiled half a century later, subordinates the prince to the pontiff: ‘The Pope gives the worldly sword of judgement to the Emperor: the spiritual sword belongs to the Pope that he may judge therewith.’ ‘Daz weltliche Schwert des Gerichtes daz lihet der Babest dem Chaiser; daz geistlich ist dem Babest gesetzt daz er damit richte.’

  [a ]So Boniface VIII in the bull Unam Sanctam (Corp. Iur. Canon. Extrav. Commun. i. 8) will have but one head for the Christian people: ‘Igitur ecclesiae unius et unicae unum corpus, unum caput, non duo capita quasi monstrum, Christus videlicet et Christi vicarius Petrus, Petrique successor. . . . In eius potestate duos esse gladios, spiritualem et temporalem, evangelicis dictis instruimur. Nam dicentibus apostolis “Ecce gladii duo hic,” in ecclesia scilicet, non respondit Dominus nimis esse sed satis. . . . Uterque gladius, spiritualis et materialis, est in potestate ecclesiae. Sed is quidem pro ecclesia, ille vero ab ecclesia exercendus. Ille sacerdotis, is manu regum et militum, sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis.’

  [b ]St. Bernard writes to Conrad III: ‘Non veniat anima mea in consilium eorum qui dicunt vel imperio pacem et libertatem ecclesiae vel ecclesiae prosperitatem et exaltationem imperii nocituram.’ So speaking of the papal claim to temporal and spiritual authority, he writes in the De Consideratione, addressed to Pope Eugenius III: ‘I ergo tu et tibi usurpare aude aut dominans Apostolatum aut Apostolicus dominatum. Plane ab alterutro prohiberis. Si utrumque simul habere velis, perdes utrumque’ (Bk. ii. ch. 6).

  [c ]Sedens in solio armatus et cinctus ensem, habensque in capite Constantini diadema, stricto dextra capulo ensis accincti, ait: “Numquid ego summus sum pontifex? nonne ista est cathedra Petri? Nonne possum imperii iura tutari? ego ego sum imperator.” ’—Fr. Pipinus (ap. Murat. S. R. I. ix), l. iv. c. 41. These words, however, are by this writer ascribed to Boniface when receiving the envoys of the Emperor Albert I, in ad 1299. I have not been able to find authority for their use at the jubilee, but give the current story for what it is worth.
  
  It is possible that Dante may be alluding to this sword scene in a remarkable passage of the Purgatorio (xvi. l. 106):—

  • ‘Soleva Roma, che ’l buon mondo feo,
  • Duo Soli aver, che l’ una e l’ altra strada
  • Facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo.
  • L’ un l’ altro ha spento, ed è giunta la spada
  • Col pastorale: e l’ un coll’ altro insieme
  • Per viva forza mal convien che vada.’

  [d ]See especially Peter de Andlau (De Imperio Romano); Dante (De Monarchia); Engelbert (De Ortu Progressu et Fine Imperii Romani); Landolfo Colonna (De translatione Imperii Romani); Marsilius Patavinus (De translatione Imperii Romani); Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (De Ortu et Authoritate Imperii Romani); Zoannetus (De Imperio Romano atque eius Iurisdictione); and the writers in Schardius’s Sylloge Tractatuum, and in Goldast’s Collection of Tracts, entitled Monarchia Imperii.

  [e ]Letter of Lewis II to Basil the Macedonian, in Chron. Salernit. in Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. p. 521 (c. 106), also given by Baronius, Ann. Eccl., ad ann. 871.

  [f ]‘Ad summum dignitatis pervenisti: Vicarius es Christi.’—Wippo, Vita Chuonradi, ap. Pertz, M. G. H., Script. ii. p. 260 (c. 3).

  [g ]Letter in Radewic or Rahewin, ap. Pertz, M. G. H., Script. xx. p. 476 (bk. iv. c. 56).

  [h ]Lewis IV is styled in one of his proclamations, ‘Gentis humanae, orbis Christiani custos, urbi et orbi a Deo electus praeesse.’—Pfeffinger, Vitriarius Illustratus.

  [i ]In a document issued by the Diet of Speyer (ad 1529) the Emperor is called ‘Oberst Vogt, und Haupt der Christenheit.’ Hieronymus Balbus, writing about the same time, puts the question whether all Christians are subject to the Emperor in temporal things, as they are to the Pope in spiritual, and answers it by saying, ‘Cum ambo ex eodem fonte perfluxerint et eadem semita incedant, de utroque idem puto sentiendum.’

  [j ]‘Non magis ad Papam depositio seu remotio pertinet quam ad quoslibet regum praelatos, qui reges suos prout assolent, consecrant et inungunt.’—Letter of Frederick II (lib. i. c. 3).

  [k ]Liber Ceremonialis Romanus, lib. i. sect. 5; with which compare the Coronatio Romana of Henry VII, in Pertz, M. G. H., Legg. ii. 1, pp. 528-537, and Muratori’s Dissertation in vol. i. of the Antiquitates Italiae Medii Aevi.

  [l ]See, for another prayer, Note VIII at end.

  [m ]See Goldast, Collection of Imperial Constitutions; and Moser, Römische Kayser.

  [n ]See Note VII at end.

  [o ]Papalists often insisted that both swords were given to Peter, while Imperialists assigned the temporal sword to John. Thus a gloss to the Sachsenspiegel says, ‘Dat eine svert hadde Sinte Peter, dat het nu de paves: dat andere hadde Johannes, dat het nu de keyser.’

  [p ]2 Thess. ii. 7.

  [q ]St. Augustine, however, though his commentary states the view (applying the passage to the Roman Empire) which was thereafter generally received, is careful not to commit himself positively to it.

  [r ]Iordanis Chronica (written towards the close of the thirteenth century).

  [s ]This is really no stranger than the belief long current, and perhaps not wholly extinct, that the coronation stone of Scone (now in Westminster Abbey) is the stone on which Jacob slept at Bethel, and which was afterwards carried to Ireland from Egypt, and from Ireland by the Scots to Dunstaffnage and thence to Scone.

  [t ]See Note IX at end.

  [u ]The church in which the opening scene of Boccaccio’s Decameron is laid.

  [x ]So Kugler (Eastlake’s ed. vol. i. p. 144), and so also Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, in their New History of Painting in Italy, vol. ii. pp. 85 sqq.

  [y ]Domini canes. Spotted because of their black-and-white raiment.

  [z ]There is of course a great deal more detail in the picture, which need not be described. St. Dominic is a conspicuous figure.
  
  It is worth remarking that the Emperor, who is on the Pope’s left hand, and so made slightly inferior to him while superior to every one else, holds in his hand, instead of the usual imperial globe, a death’s head, typifying the transitory nature of his power.

  [a ]Although this was of course never his legal title. Till 1806 he was ‘Romanorum Imperator semper Augustus’; ‘Römischer Kaiser.’

  [b ]Pütter, Dissertationes de Instauratione Imperii Romani: cf. Goldast’s Collection of Constitutions; and the proclamations and other documents collected in Pertz, M. G. H., Legg. ii. p. 19 sqq.

  [a ]‘Iohannes episcopus, servus servorum Dei, omnibus episcopis. Nos audivimus dicere quia vos vultis alium papam facere: si hoc facitis, da Deum omnipotentem excommunico vos, ut non habeatis licentiam missam celebrare aut nullum ordinare.’—Liudprand, Historia Ottonis, c. 13. The ‘da’ shews the progress of the change from Latin to Italian. The answer sent by Otto and the council takes exception to the double negative.

  [b ]‘In campestria pharetratus abierat.’

  [c ]‘Cives fidelitatem repromittunt hoc addentes et firmiter iurantes nunquam se papam electuros aut ordinaturos praeter consensum atque electionem domini imperatoris Ottonis Caesaris Augusti filiique ipsius regis Ottonis.’—Liudprand, Historia Ottonis, c. 8.

  [d ]‘In timporibus adeo a dyabulo est percussus ut infra dierum octo spacium eodem sit in vulnere mortuus,’ says Liudprand, c. 19, crediting with less than his wonted craft the supposed author of John’s death, who well might have desired a long life for so useful a servant.
  
  He adds—‘Sed eucharistiae viaticum, ipsius instinctu qui eumpercusserat, non percepit.’

  [e ]Corpus Iuris Canonici, Dist. lxiii, ‘In synodo.’ A decree which is probably substantially genuine, although the form in which we have it is evidently of later date.

  [f ]As to the fevers see Note X at end.

  [g ]There was a separate chancellor for Italy, as afterwards for the kingdom of Burgundy.

  [h ]Liudprand, Legatio Constantinopolitana.

  [i ]‘Sancti imperii nostri olim servos principes, Beneventanum scilicet, tradat,’ &c.—Legatio, c. 15. The epithet is worth noticing.

  [j ]Liudprand calls the Eastern Franks ‘Franci Teutonici’ to distinguish them from the Romanized Franks of Gaul or ‘Francigenae’ as they were frequently called. The name ‘Frank’ seems even so early as the tenth century to have been used in the East as a general name for the Western peoples of Europe. Liudprand says that the Eastern Emperor included ‘sub Francorum nomine tam Latinos quam Teutonicos.’ Probably this use dates from the time of Charles.

  [k ]Conring, De Finibus Imperii.

  [l ]Basileus was a favourite title of the English kings before the Conquest. Titles like this used in these early English charters prove, it need hardly be said, absolutely nothing as to the real existence of any rights or powers of the English king beyond his own borders. What they do prove (over and above the taste for florid rhetoric in the royal clerks) is the impression produced by the imperial style, and by the idea of the Emperor’s throne as supported by the thrones of kings and other lesser potentates. See hereon Freeman, Hist. of Norm. Conquest, vol. i. ch. 3, § 4; who, however, draws from the use of such titles conclusions regarding the rights of the English kings over the whole of Britain which seem unwarranted.

  [m ]In Pertz, M. G. H., Diplomatum ii. part ii. n. 226: ‘Otto servus apostolorum et deo favente Romanorum imperator Augustus.’ Ibid. n. 344: ‘Otto tercius Servus Iesu Christi et Romanorum imperator Augustus.’ These titles become general after the beginning of 1000; there seems only one example before (see n. 226).

  [n ]‘Imperator antiquam Romanorum consuetudinem iam ex magna parte deletam suis cupiens renovare temporibus multa faciebat quae diversi diverse sentiebant.’—Thietmar, Chron. bk iv. c. 29 (Pertz, M. G. H. iii. p. 781).

  [o ]The details regarding the finding of the body of Charles, though given by a contemporary annalist, have been recently discredited as inconsistent with Eginhard’s statement that Charles was buried on the day of his death, and are open to other objections. But there are points in the account which seem unlikely to have been invented; and it is possible that the placing of the body in the tomb was only provisional, and that it was immediately afterwards embalmed and set in the position in which Otto III found it.—Cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. viii. p. 273.

  [p ]Annales Quedlinb., ad ann. 1002, in Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. p. 78.

  [q ]Annales Beneventani, in Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. pp. 173 sq.; e.g. sub anno 958 (p. 175). So an annalist at Salerno, writing at the end of the tenth century, says that the true emperor is he who reigns at Constantinople though ‘the kings of the Gauls have now usurped the title.’ ‘Imperator omnimodis non dici potest nisi qui regnum Romanum praeest, hoc est Constantinopolitanum. Reges Gallorum nunc usurparunt sibi talem nomen, nam antiquitus omnimodis sic non vocitati sunt.’—Chron. Salern. apud (Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iii. p. 479).

  [r ]See Appendix, Note A.

  [s ]At a provincial synod held near Rheims in 991, Arnulf bishop of Orleans had delivered a vehement condemnation of the conduct and pretensions of recent pontiffs, going so far as to declare the Pope to be Antichrist, ‘sitting in the temple of God and setting himself forth as God’ (2 Thess. ii. 4). As Ranke remarks (Weltgeschichte, vii. p. 48), Arnulf and other opponents of papal claims were sadly hampered by the power ascribed to the Pope in the Pseudo Isidorian decretals, which they did not know to be forgeries.

  [t ]The Abbey of Cluny was already the centre of a monastic movement in favour of the deliverance of the clergy from secular control.

  [a ]‘Roma per sedem Beati Petri caput orbis effecta.’—See note^g p. 31.

  [b ]‘Claves . . . vobis ad regnum dimisimus.’—Pope Gregory III to Charles Martel, in Codex Carolinus, ap. Muratori, S. R. I. iii. part ii. p. 76. Some, however, prefer to read ‘ad rogum.’

  [c ]Corpus Iuris Canonici, Dist. lxiii. c. 22.

  [d ]Dist. lxiii. c. 30. This decree is, however, probably spurious.

  [e ]‘Nos elegimus merito et approbavimus una cum annisu et voto patrum amplique senatus et gentis togatae,’ &c., ap. Baron. Ann. Eccl., ad ann. 876.

  [f ]‘Divina vos pietas B. principum apostolorum Petri et Pauli interventione per vicarium ipsorum dominum Ioannem summum pontificem . . . ad imperiale culmen S. Spiritus iudicio provexit.’—Concil. Ticinense, in Mur. S. R. I. ii. part i. p. 150.

  [g ]These decrees attributed to early Councils and Popes were forged, probably in Gaul, about the middle of the ninth century, and before the eleventh had become accepted as authentic. The collection which passed under the name of Isidore contains some genuine matter with a great deal more palpably invented.

  [h ]Even Hildebrand when elected recognized these rights.
  
  It was at this time (ad 1059) that the same Pope, by investing the Norman robert Wiscard with the title of duke of Apulia and Calabria as a fief of the Holy See, provided for his successors in the chair of Peter an ally whose help was to prove invaluable to them.

  [i ]The sin of Simon (Acts viii. 18-24) was deemed to include the employment of any corrupt means to obtain preferment to an ecclesiastical office.

  [j ]Strictly speaking, Henry was at this time only king of the Romans: he was not crowned Emperor at Rome till 1084.

  [k ]The castle of Canosa, of which only scanty ruins remain, stood on one of the northern outliers of the Apennines, some ten miles S.W. of Reggio (Modenese).
  
  Lambert’s account of the penitence, which he makes to last for three days, has recently been called in question: see Holder Egger, Studien zu Lambert von Herzfeld in Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde (vol. xix, 1894).

  [l ]Letter of Gregory VII to William I, ad 1080.—Jaffé, Monumenta Gregoriana, p. 419.

  [m ]See as to Gelasius and Alfanus, and as to the view held by moderate churchmen, Note XI at end.

  [n ]‘Gradum statim post Principes Electores.’—Frederick I’s Privilege of Austria, in Pertz, M. G. H., Legg. ii. p. 101. As to the Electors, see chap. XIV, post.

  [o ]As to the castle of Hohenstaufen see Note XII at end.

  [a ]A great deal of importance seems to have been attached to this symbolic act of courtesy. See Art. I of the Sachsenspiegel. ‘Deme pavese is ok gesat to ridene to bescedener tiet up eneme blanken perde, unde de keiser sal ime den stegerip halden dur de sadel nicht ne winde.’

  [b ]Hadrian IV (Nicholas Breakspear), the only Englishman who ever became Pope, born in poverty near St. Albans, had been a monk in the convent to which he came begging alms, rose to be abbot, went to Rome on the business of his house, and was made Cardinal by Eugenius III. It was he who bestowed Ireland on the English king Henry II, all islands being within the jurisdiction of the Holy See.

  [c ]Letter to the German bishops in Rahewin; Bk. iv. ch. 5-6 (Pertz, M. G. H., Script. xx. 476).

  [d ]A picture in the great hall of the ducal palace (the Sala del Maggior Consiglio) represents the scene. See the description in Rogers’s Italy.

  [e ]Psalm xci. 13.

  [f ]‘Animata lex in terris,’ document of 1230, in Pertz, Legg. ii. p. 277.

  [g ]Rahewin, iv. c. 4 (Pertz, M. G. H., Script. xx. 446).

  [h ]Frederick’s election (at Frankfort) was made ‘non sine quibusdam Italiae baronibus.’—Otto Fris. II. c. 1 (ibid. p. 391). But this was the exception.

  [i ]See as to Arnold’s reforms post, chapter XVI.

  [k ]‘Excellentissimo atque praeclaro urbis et orbis totius domino, Conrado, Dei gratia Romano regi semper Augusto, S. P. Q. R. salutem et Romani imperii felicem et inclitam gubernationem.’ The letter winds up with the following lines in which both the teachings of Arnold and the influence of the Roman lawyers are recognizable. Cf Otto Fris. I. c. 28 (ibid. pp. 366-367):

  • ‘Rex valeat, quidquid cupit obtineat, super hostes
  • Imperium teneat, Romae sedeat, regat orbem
  • Princeps terrarum, ceu fecit Iustinianus.
  • Caesaris accipiat Caesar, quae sunt sua Praesul,
  • Ut Christus iussit, Petro solvente tributum!’

  [l ]Otto Fris. II. c. 21 (ibid. p. 405).

  [m ]Later in his reign, Frederick condescended to negotiate with these Roman magistrates against a hostile Pope, and entered into a sort of treaty by which they were declared exempt from all jurisdiction but his own.

  [n ]See the first note to Shelley’s Hellas. Sismondi’s history is largely answerable for this conception of Barbarossa’s position.

  [o ]They say rebelliously, says Frederick, ‘Nolumus hunc regnare super nos . . . at nos maluimus honestam mortem quam ut,’ &c.—Letter in Pertz, M. G. H., Legg. ii. p. 116.

  [p]

  • ‘De tributo Caesaris nemo cogitabat;
  • Omnes erant Caesares, nemo censum dabat;
  • Civitas Ambrosii, velut Troia, stabat,
  • Deos parum, homines minus formidabat.’
  Poems relating to the Emperor Frederick of Hohenstaufen, published by Grimm.

  [q ]Charles the Great was canonized by Frederick’s anti-pope in ad 1164 and confirmed afterwards by a Pope of undoubted title.

  [r ]Acta Concil. Harzhem, iii. p. 399.

  [s ]Poems relating to Frederick I, ut supra.

  [t ]The carroccio was a wagon with a flagstaff planted on it, which served the Lombards for a rallying-point in battle.

  [u ]He was drowned in the river Kalykadnus in Cilicia—some say while crossing it, others while bathing.

  [x ]Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and Frankfort.
  
  Of these Frankfort was annexed by Prussia in 1866, and her three surviving sisters have, by their entrance first into the North German confederation, and afterwards (1871) into the new German Empire, resigned a part of their independence.

  [y ]The legend attaches itself also to a cave in the high and steep hill of the Kyffhäuser in Thuringia (see Rückert’s ballad, which begins ‘Der alte Barbarossa, der Kaiser Friederich’). It is one which appears under various forms in many countries. In its earlier form it seems to have related to Frederick II, whose return to Germany was seriously hoped for as late as ad 1348—a Swiss annalist writing then says that many people of different races declared Frederick II would appear to reform the church whose corruptions were generally deplored. In ad 1519 we find it told of Frederick I.
  
  The Salzburg pear-tree could be seen till 1871.

  [a ]‘Pruzzi,’ says the biographer of St. Adalbert, ‘quorum Deus est venter et avaritia iuncta cum morte.’—Pertz, M. G. H., Scriptores, iv. p. 593 (c. 27).
  
  It is odd that this non-Teutonic people should have given their name to the great German kingdom of the present.

  [b ]Conring, De Finibus Imperii. It is hardly necessary to observe that the connection of Hungary with the Hapsburgs is of comparatively recent origin, and of a purely dynastic nature. The position of the archdukes of Austria as kings of Hungary had nothing to do legally with the fact that many of them were also chosen Emperors, although practically their possession of the imperial crown had greatly aided them in grasping and retaining the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia.

  [c ]They however did not become incorporated with the Empire, being held by the houses of Hohenzollern and Hapsburg respectively as parts of their extra-imperial dominions.

  [d ]Letter of Frederick I to Otto of Freysing, prefixed to the latter’s History, M. G. H., Scriptores, xx. p. 347. This king is also called Svend.

  [e ]See Appendix, Note B.

  [f ]In ad 1338 the Emperor Lewis IV, then allied to the English Edward III, adjudged to the latter Normandy, Aquitaine, and Anjou, and declared him entitled to the throne of France.

  [g ]Albertus Stadensis, M. G. H., Script. xi. p. 345, s. a. 1163.

  [h ]The Scots of Ireland, however, would seem to have occasionally visited it; and some few Irish hermits were found there by the first Norwegian colonists who landed in ad 874.

  [i ]There is an allusion to this in the poems of the Cid. Arthur Duck, De Usu et Authoritate luris Civilis, quotes the view of some among the older jurists, that Spain having been, so far as the Romans were concerned, a resderelicta, recovered by the Spaniards themselves from the Moors, and thus acquired by occupatio, ought not to be subject to the Emperors.

  [j ]One of the greatest of English kings appears performing an act of courtesy to the Emperor which was probably construed into an acknowledgement of his own inferior position. Describing the Roman coronation of the Emperor Conrad II, Wippo (c. 16), M. G. H., Script. xi. p. 265, tells us, ‘His ita peractis in duorum regum praesentia Ruodolfi regis Burgundiae et Chnutonis regis Anglorum divino officio finito imperator duorum regum medius ad cubiculum suum honorifice ductus est.’

  [k ]Letter in Otto Fris. i. c. 23 (M. G. H., Script. xx. p. 363): ‘Francia et Hispania, Anglia Dania ceteraque regna . . . cum debita reverentia et obsequio nos frequentant.’

  [l ]Letter in Rahewin, iii. c. 7 (M. G. H., Script. xx. p. 419), says, ‘Regnum nostrum vobis exponimus. . . . Vobis imperandi cedat auctoritas, nobis non deerit voluntas obsequendi.’

  [m ]‘Consilio Alianor matris suae, deposuit se de regno Angliae et tradidit illud imperatori (Henrico VI^to) sicut universorum domino, et investivit eum inde per pilleum suum, sed imperator, sicut prolocutum est, statim reddidit ei in conspectu magnatum Alemanniae et Angliae, regnum Angliae praedictum tenendum de ipso pro quinque millibus librarum sterlingorum singulis annis de tributo solvendis, et investivit eum inde imperator per duplicem crucem de auro. Sed idem imperator in morte sua de omnibus his et aliis conventionibus quietum clamavit ipsum Ricardum regem Angliae et heredes suos.’—Hoveden, Chronicon, ad ann. 1193, ed. Stubbs, Rolls Series, vol. iii. pp. 202-203. The alleged instances of homage by the Scots to the Saxon and early Norman kings are almost all complicated in some such way. The Scottish kings had once held also the earldom of Huntingdon from the English crown, and some have supposed (but on no sufficient grounds) that homage was also done by them for Lothian.

  [n ]Hoveden, ut supra.

  [o ]‘Regnum Angliae ab omni subiectione imperiali esse liberrimum.’—Selden, Titles of Honour, part i. chap. ii.

  [p ]Edward refused upon the ground that he was ‘rex inunctus.’

  [q ]Sigismund had shortly before given great offence in France by dubbing knights.

  [r ]Sigismund answered, ‘Nihil se contra superioritatem regis praetexere.’ Some have doubted the story.

  [s ]Selden, Titles of Honour, part i. chap. ii: ‘Our Souverain Lord hes full jurisdiction and Free Empire within his Realme, that his Hienesse may make Notares and Tabelliones quahis instruments sall have full faith in all contracts and causes within the Realme.’ Nevertheless, notaries in Scotland, as elsewhere, continued for a long time to style themselves ‘Ego M. auctoritate imperiali (or papali) notarius.’

  [t ]See Senchus Mor. ii. 225. My attention was called to this by Sir H. S. Maine: cf. his Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, p. 165. Ireland was the latest of Western Catholic countries to recognize the supremacy of the Chair of Peter; she did not do so till after the Anglo-Norman conquest.

  [u ]It is not necessary to prove this letter to have been the composition of Frederick or his ministers. If it be (as it doubtless is) contemporary, it is equally to the purpose as an evidence of the feelings and ideas of the age. As its authenticity has been questioned, I may mention that it is to be found not only in Hoveden, but also in the ‘Itinerarium regis Ricardi,’ in Ralph de Diceto, and in the ‘Chronicon Terrae Sanctae.’ See Dr. Stubbs’ edition of Hoveden, vol. ii. p. 356.

  [x ]See Appendix, Note C.

  [y ]Godefr. Viterb., Pentheon, M. G. H., Script. xxii. p. 221.

  [z ]It has been thought that the taking of the crown of Italy—it was pretty regularly taken from Henry II’s time, but whether by Otto II and Otto III is less clear—was a recognition of the separate nationality of Italy. But the fact that there had been a separate kingdom in Italy ever since Alboin’s invasion made the crown seem to give some fuller, or more direct, rights to the person who obtained it than he enjoyed simply as Emperor. Italy, though a part of the Empire, had not been merged in Germany.

  [a ]See Appendix, Note A.

  [b ]Some, says Marquard Freher, add a fifth crown, of Germany (making that of Aachen Frankish), supposed to belong to Regensburg.

  [c ]‘Dy erste ist tho Aken: dar kronet men mit der Yseren Krone, so is he Konig over alle Dudesche Ryke. Dy andere tho Meylan, de is Sulvern, so is he Here der Walen. Dy drüdde is tho Rome; dy is guldin, so is he Keyser over alle dy Werlt.’—Gloss to the Sachsenspiegel, quoted by Pfeffinger. Similarly Peter de Andlau.

  [d ]Cf Gewoldus, De Septemviratu imperii Romani. One would expect some ingenious allegorizer to have discovered that the crown of Burgundy must be, and therefore is, of copper or bronze, making the series complete, like the four ages of men in Hesiod. But I have not been able to find any such.

  [e ]Hence the numbers attached to the names of the Emperors are often different in German and Italian writers, the latter reckoning neither Henry the Fowler nor Conrad I. So Henry III (of Germany) calls himself ‘Imperator Henricus Secundus’; and all distinguish the years of their regnum from those of their imperium. Cardinal Baronius insists on calling Henry V Henry III, not recognizing Henry IV’s coronation, because it was performed by an antipope.

  [f ]For Sir H. S. Maine’s conjecture that Charlemagne took the title of Roman Emperor because he wished to be something more than King of the Franks—‘the Chieftain who would no longer call himself King of the tribe must claim to be Emperor of the World’ (Ancient Law, p. 105)—I have been unable to find any evidence.

  [g ]Life of St. Adalbert (written at Rome early in the eleventh century probably by a brother of the monastery of SS. Boniface and Alexius) in Pertz, M. G. H., Script. iv. p. 590 (c. 21).

  [h ]Given by Rudolphus Glaber, M. G. H., Script., on p. 59 (bk. i. c. 5). It is on the face of it an impudent forgery: ‘Ne quisquam audacter Romani Imperii sceptrum praepostere gestare princeps appetat neve Imperator dici aut esse valeat nisi quem Papa Romanus morum probitate aptum elegerit, eique commiserit insigne imperiale.’

  [i ]The Sachsenspiegel says, Election by the Germans gives the person chosen the right to be crowned; consecration by the bishops gives him the power and title of king; consecration by the Pope gives him the power and title of Emperor. ‘Die düdeschen solen durch recht den koning kiesen. Svenne die gewiet wert von den bischopen die dar to gesat sin, unde uppe den stul to Aken kumt, so hevet he koninglike walt unde koningliken namen. Svenne yn die paues wiet, so heute he des rikes gewalt unde keiserliken namen.’

  • So a poem of Frederick I’s time (see Note XVII at end) says,
  • ‘Mos fuit ut Romam tendant sumantque coronam
  • Teutonici reges; nec habet magnum ullus eorum
  • Imperii nomen, donec a praesule summo
  • Sumpserit oblatum manibus diadema sacratis.’

  [j ]The denial of the supreme jurisdiction of Peter’s chair by the Eastern churches affected very slightly the belief of Latin Christendom, just as the existence of a rival Emperor at Constantinople with at least as good a legal title as the Teutonic Caesar, was readily forgotten or ignored in Germany and Italy.

  [k ]Odious especially for the inscription,—
  
  

  • ‘Rex venit ante fores nullo prius urbis honore;
  • Post homo fit Papae, sumit quo dante coronam.’
  Another version of the first line is,—
  
  
  • ‘Rex stetit ante fores iurans prius urbis honores.’
  Cf. M. G. H., Script. xx. p. 422 (Rahewin, iii. 10).

  [l ]‘The Rock (i.e. Christ) gave the crown to Peter, and Peter (i.e. the Pope) to Rudolf.’

  [m ]Mediaeval history is full of instances of the superstitutious veneration attached to the rite of coronation (made by the Church almost a sacrament), and to the special places where or even utensils and emblematic objects with which it was performed. Every one knows the importance in France of Rheims and its sacred ampulla, brought down from heaven by a dove. So the Scottish king must be crowned at Scone, an old seat of Pictish royalty—Robert Bruce risked a great deal to receive his crown there. So no Hungarian coronation was valid unless made with the crown of St. Stephen; the possession whereof is still accounted so valuable by the Austrian court.
  
  Great importance seems to have been attached to the imperial globe (Reichsapfel) which the Pope delivered to the Emperor at his coronation.

  [n ]Whether the poem which used to pass under the name of Gunther Ligurinus be contemporary or the work of some later scholar is for the present purpose indifferent. The better opinion now seems to be that the poem belongs to the age of Frederick, and that ‘Ligurinus’ is its title.

  [o ]Zedler, Universal-Lexicon, s. v. Reich.

  [p ]It does not occur before Frederick I’s time in any of the documents printed in Pertz’s collection; and this is the date which Boeclerus also assigns in his treatise, De Sacro Imperio Romano, vindicating the terms ‘sacrum’ and ‘Romanum’ against the aspersions of Blondel.

  [q ]Pertz, Constitutiones et Acta Publica, vol. i. p. 224.

  [r ]Ibid. iv. p. 99.

  [s ]Readers of Goethe’s Faust will remember the student’s song:

  • ‘Das liebe heil’ge Römische Reich,
  • Wie hält’s nur noch zusammen?’

  [t ]Blondellus, Adv. Chiffletium. Most of these theories are stated by Boeclerus. Jordanes (Chronica) says, ‘Sacri imperii quod non est dubium sancti Spiritus ordinatione, secundum qualitatem ipsam et exigentiam meritorum humanorum disponi.’

  [u ]Marquard Freher’s notes to Peter de Andlau, book i. chap. vii.

  [x ]So in the song on the capture of the Emperor Lewis II by Adalgisus of Benevento, we find the words, ‘Ludhuicum comprenderunt sancto pio Augusto.’ (Quoted by Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, iii. p. 185; Eng. trans. iii. 169.)

  [y ]In the older churches of Germany one sometimes finds the tomb of a cardinal with the familiar inscription, ‘S. R. E. Card. Presb. (or Diac.)’ (Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalis Presbyter), and hard by the tomb of an elector with ‘S. R. I. Princ. Elect.’ (Sacri Romani Imperii Princeps Elector). The correspondence of the descriptions expresses the exact correspondence of the positions, spiritual and temporal, as conceived of in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  [z ]Goldast, Constitutiones.

  [a ]Pertz, M. G. H., Legg. ii. p. 119.

  [b ]‘Apostolic majesty’ was the proper title of the king of Hungary. The Austrian court has recently revived it.

  [c ]Moser, Römische Kayser.

  [d ]Urban IV used the title in 1259; Francis I (of France) calls the Empire ‘sacrosanctum.’

  [a ]I quote from the Liber Augustalis printed among Petrarch’s works the following curious description of Frederick: ‘Fuit armorum strenuus, linguarum peritus, rigorosus, luxuriosus, epicurus, nihil curans vel credens nisi temporale: fuit malleus Romanae ecclesiae.’
  
  As Otto III had been called ‘mirabilia mundi,’ so Frederick II is spoken of in his own time as ‘stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis.’ (So Matth. Paris.)

  [b ]The remains of Frederick’s palace castle, now sadly neglected, may be seen at Brancaccio, about two miles SSE. of Palermo, his favourite residence. His body lies in a porphyry sarcophagus in the cathedral, where also his father Henry VI is buried.

  [c ]‘Quà entro è lo secondo Federico.’—Inferno, canto x.

  [d ]Frederick is reported to have said: ‘Si principes imperii institutioni meae assentirent, ego utique multo meliorem modum credendi et vivendi cunctis nationibus ordinare vellem.’—Chron. Sanpetr. Erfurt. (quoted by Huillard Bréholles, Historia Diplom. Frederici II,^d1 Introd. dxv). Not only by his partizans but in his own letters Jesi, his birthplace, is referred to as Bethlehem, while Pier delle Vigne, his minister, is spoken of as the Peter of the new Church, ‘Petrus in cuius petra fundatur imperialis ecclesia et Augustalis animus roboratur in coena cum discipulis’ (Huillard Bréholles, ut supra,dxiii). This may be the origin of Dante’s reference to Piero as holding ‘both the keys of the heart of Frederick’ (Inf. xiii. 58).
  
  The wizard Michael the Scot, whose lean ghost Dante found in Malebolge (Inf. xx. 115), was astrologer to Frederick II and translated for him some works of Aristotle.

  [e ]Hakon, one of the greatest of the kings of Norway, and the one whose diplomacy succeeded in obtaining the submission of Iceland, refused, saying that he would fight against the enemies of the Church, but not against those of the Pope.

  [f ]Surnamed, from his scientific tastes, ‘the Wise.’

  [g ]The Interregnum is by some reckoned as the two years before Richard’s election; by others as the whole period from the death of Frederick II or that of his son Conrad IV till Rudolf’s accession in 1273.

  [h ]‘Electores imperii ad indictum et mandatum domini papae apud Franchenfurte super electione convenientes, comitem Rudolfum . . . in regem elegerunt.’—Ann. S. Rudb. Salisb. ad ann. (Pertz, M. G. H. ix). Rudolf, though only a count, had considerable possessions, was a man of force, and had won fame and popularity. He had been faithful to Frederick II and Conrad IV, and had accompanied Conradin into Italy. Hapsburg (Habichtsburg, ‘Hawk’s Burgh’) is a castle (built about ad 1020) in the Aargau on the banks of the Aar, and near the line of railway from Olten to Zürich, from a point on which a glimpse of its ruins may be had. ‘Within the ancient walls of Vindonissa,’ says Gibbon, ‘the castle of Hapsburg, the abbey of Konigsfelden, and the town of Brugg have successively arisen. The philosophic traveller may compare the monuments of Roman conquests, of feudal or Austrian tyranny, of monkish superstition, and of industrious freedom. If he be truly a philosopher, he will applaud the merit and happiness of his own time.’

  [i ]Corpus Iuris Canonici, Decr. Greg. i. 6, cap. 34, Venarabilem: ‘Ius et authoritas examinandi personam electam in regem et promovendam ad imperium ad nos spectat, qui eum inungimus, consecramus et coronamus.’

  [j ]Lewis II, not presaging the future, uses this parallel in his letter (before referred to) to the East Roman Emperor Basil: ‘Nam Francorum principes primo reges, deinde vero imperatores, dicti sunt ii. dumtaxat qui a Romano pontifice ad hoc oleo sancto perfusi sunt. . . . Porro si calumpniaris Romanum pontificem, quod gesserit, poteris calumpniari et Samuel, quod spreto Saule, quem ipse unxerat, David in regem ungere non renuerit.’

  [k ]‘Illis principibus,’ writes Innocent, ‘ius et potestatem eligendi regem [Romanorum] in imperatorem postmodum promovendum recognoscimus, ad quos de iure ac antiqua consuetudine noscitur pertinere, praesertim quum ad eos ius et potestas hujusmodi ab apostolica sede pervenerit, quae Romanum imperium in persona magnifici Caroli a Graecis transtulit in Germanos.’—Decr. Greg., ut supra, Venerabilem.

  [l ]Its influence, however, as Döllinger (Das Kaiserthum Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger) remarks, first became great when this letter, some forty or fifty years after Innocent wrote it, was inserted in the digest of the Canon Law. Döllinger gives an interesting account of the course of theory upon this subject, and of the various misconceptions and perversions (in writers of the twelfth and three following centuries) of the events connected with the breach between the Popes and the East Roman Emperors, and the consequent transference of the Empire to the Germans.

  [m ]See chapter V, ante.

  [n ]Pope Leo IX had, however, in 1054 claimed for his see rights over the Empire, based upon the Donation of Constantine, which would have covered the power to transfer the crown. Cf. his letter to Michael, Patriarch of Constantinople, in Migne, vol. cxliii. Ep. C. pp. 744 sqq.

  [o ]Upon this so-called ‘Translation of the Empire,’ many books remain to us: many more have probably perished. A good although far from impartial summary of the controversy may be found in Vagedes, De Ludibriis Aulae Romanae in transferendo Imperio Romano.

  [p ]Avignon was not yet in the territory of France: it lay within the bounds of the kingdom of Arles. But the French power was nearer than that of the Emperor; and pontiffs, many of them French by extraction, sympathized with princes of their own race.

  [q ]‘Vacante imperio Romano, cum in illo ad saecularem iudicem nequeat haberi recursus, ad summum pontificem, cui in persona B. Petri terreni simul et coelestis imperii iura Deus ipse commisit, imperii praedicti iurisdictio regimen et dispositio devolvitur.’—Bull Si fratrum (of John XXII, in ad 1316), in Bullar. Rom. So again: ‘Attendentes quod Imperii Romani regimen cura et administratio tempore quo illud vacare contingit ad nos pertinet, sicut dignoscitur pertinere.’ Boniface VIII, refusing to recognize Albert I because he was ugly and one-eyed (‘est homo monoculus et vultu sordido, non potest esse Imperator’), and had taken a wife from the serpent brood of Frederick II (‘de sanguine viperali Friderici’), had some fifteen years before declared himself Vicar of the Empire.
  
  In the ninth century, before these pretensions had been dreamt of, Pope John VIII dated his documents during vacancies of the imperial throne, ‘imperatore domino nostro Iesu Christo,’ a form not uncommon in the Middle Ages. So in a vacancy of the Popedom documents were sometimes dated ‘Petro pontificante.’

  [r ]As to Marsilius, see Note XIII at end. Ockham’s contentions are most fully set forth in a book he wrote much later, entitled Octo Quaestiones.

  [s ]An annalist observes: ‘Fuere qui dubitarent an invito pontifice haec rite agerentur: caeterum Populus Romanus e contra contendebat suas esse partes imperium conferre, Pontificis autem consecrare, iisdem auspiciis Carolum enim magnum tunc demum coronatum esse postquam Populus Romanus eum imperare iussisset.’—Nicol. Burgund., ad ann. 1328 (quoted by Gregorovius, History of Rome in the Middle Ages).

  [t ]This phrase suggests the hand of Marsilius, whose gigantic pamphlet on behalf of the Emperor was entitled Defensor Pacis

  [u ]How far this disgust had gone among religious men even fifty years earlier is shewn by the language of the Franciscan St. Bonaventura, who does not object to the view that Rome is the harlot of the Apocalypse who makes drunk princes and people, seeing that in Rome ecclesiastical posts are bought and sold; there the rulers of the Church meet, despising God and serving lust, belonging to Satan and plundering the treasure of Christ (quoted by Friedberg, Die mittelalterlichen Lehren über das Verhältniss von Staat und Kirche). Cf. Dante, Purg. xxxii. 109.

  [x ]He also required, though in vain, the punishment of Marsilius and John of Jandun, whom he called two beasts from hell (‘duas bestias de abysso Sathanae’).

  [y ]‘Imperialis dignitas et potestas est immediate a solo Deo; et de iure imperii et consuetudine antiquitus approbata postquam aliquis eligitur in imperatorem sive regem ab electoribus imperii concorditer, vel maiori parte eorumdem statim ex sola electione est rex verus et imperator censendus . . . nec Papae sive sedis apostolicae aut alicuius alterius approbatione indiget.’—Apud Goldast, Constitut. Imp. i. 336.

  [z ]Digest i. 4. 1; Inst. i. 2. 6.

  [a ]Papalists used to quote the text, ‘All power is given me in heaven and on earth,’ as proof of the temporal authority of the Pope, for Christ’s power was Peter’s, and Peter’s passed to his successors.

  [b ]A reason why the assaults of Marsilius and Ockham, as indeed of earlier impugners of the claims of the Papacy, did not make a deeper impression may perhaps be found in the fact that there was one doctrine, that relating to the Eucharist, which they did not dispute. Sacerdotalism stood deep-rooted in sacramentalism, and it was the denial of the dogma of the Real Presence that in the sixteenth century undermined the foundation whereon the power of the priesthood and Peter’s see rested.
  
  Upon the struggle of Lewis IV and the Popes, see besides Gregorovius (History of Rome in the Middle Ages), Friedberg, Die mittelalterlichen Lehren über das Verhältniss von Staat und Kirche (1874), and Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers (1874), both of whom deal fully with Marsilius and Ockham. Some excellent observations may also be found in Mr. R. L. Poole’s Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought (1884), chaps. viii and ix.

  [c ]That this Schism did not shake the authority of the Pope even more seriously shews how firm was the hold which the idea of the unity of Christendom in Church and State had upon the mediaeval mind.

  [a ]As to Peter Du Bois’ scheme for securing power in Italy to the kings of France, see Note XIV at end.

  [b ]The first League of the three Forest Cantons was formed in 1308. Others were added by degrees: and the number of eight was completed by the accession of Bern in 1353.

  [c ]Quoted by Moser, Römische Kayser, from Chron. Hirsaug.: ‘Regni vires temporum iniuria nimium contritae vix uni alendo regi sufficerent, tantum abesse ut sumptus in nutriendos duos reges ferre queant.’ So at Rupert’s death, under whom the mischief had increased greatly, most bishops were, we are told, better off than the Emperor.

  [d ]‘Proventus Imperii ita minimi sunt ut legationibus vix suppetant.’—Quoted by Moser. In 1495, Maximilian told his Diet ‘Das römische Reich sei jetziger Zeit ein grosser Last und falle davon kleiner Beth’ (the Empire is a heavy burden, with little gain therefrom); and Granvella, Charles V’s minister, said at the Diet of Speyer: ‘The Emperor has, for the support of his dignity, not a hazel-nut’s worth of profit from the Empire.’

  [e ]Albert I tried in vain to wrest the tolls of the Rhine from the grasp of the Rhenish electors.

  [f ]The cities did not, however, definitely establish their right to appear as an Estate or College in the Diet until ad 1489.

  [g ]The Aethelings of the line of Cerdic, among the West Saxons, the Swedish Ynglings, the Bavarian Agilolfings, may thus be compared with the Achaemenids of Persia or the heroic houses of early Greece.

  [h ]Wippo, describing the election of Conrad the Franconian, says, ‘Inter confinia Moguntiae et Wormatiae dum convenissent cuncti primates et, ut ita dicam, vires et viscera regni,’ cii.; M. G. H., Script., xi. 257. So Bruno says that Henry IV ‘regnum . . . electione communi suscepit’: M. G. H., Script. v. p. 330. So Amandus, secretary of Frederick Barbarossa, in describing his election, says: ‘Multi illustres heroes ex Lombardia, Tuscia, Ianuensi et aliis Italiae dominiis, ac maior et potior pars principum in Transalpino regno.’—Quoted by Mur. Antiq. Diss. iii. vol. i. p. 94. And see many other authorities to the same effect, collected by Pfeffinger, Vitriarius illustratus.

  [i ]Alciatus, De Formula Romani Imperii. He adds that the Gauls and Italians were incensed at the preference shewn to Germany. So too Landolfo Colonna, De Translatione Imperii Romani.

  [j ]Quoted by Gewoldus, De Septemviratu Sacri Imperii Romani, himself a strenuous advocate of Gregory’s decree, though he lived in the comparatively critical days of Ferdinand II. As late as ad 1648 we find Pope Innocent X maintaining that the sacred number Seven of the electors was ‘apostolica auctoritate olim praefinitus.’—Bull Zelo Domus in Bullar. Roman.

  [k ]Sometimes we hear of a decree made by Pope Sergius IV and his cardinals (of course equally fabulous with Otto’s). So John Villani, iv. 2.

  [l ]As early as 1152 we read, ‘Id iuris Romani Imperii apex habere dicitur ut non per sanguinis propaginem sed per principum electionem reges creentur.’—Otto of Freysing, Book II. c. 1. Gulielmus Brito, writing not much later, says—

  • ‘Est etenim talis dynastia Theutonicorum
  • Ut nullus regnet super illos, ni prius illum
  • Eligat unanimis cleri populique voluntas.’
  • —M. G. H., Script. xxvi. p. 334.

  [m ]There is a considerable literature on the early electoral system. Among more recent writers, reference may be made to Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte; Maurenbrecher, Geschichte der deutschen Königswahlen; Linder, Die deutschen Königswahlen, 1893, and Der Hergang bei den deutschen Königswahlen, 1899, Schröder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte.

  [n ]In the case of a papal election, a two-thirds majority was required (as it is in a convention of the Democratic party in the United States for the selection of a Presidential candidate). But an unanimous choice seems to have been originally required in Germany, and the need for it was first expressly negatived by the electors in their solemn gathering at Rhense in ad 1338.

  [o ]This second stage was formally the effective and binding act, the election (Kur) in a strict sense, though in fact it was only the ratification and formal announcement of a selection already made. Where there was no real contest, as where an Emperor procured by the exercise of his influence with the princes severally the election of his son, it became the whole election.

  [p ]The term laudatio, a declaration of consent with a pledge of loyalty, is used to describe sometimes this acceptance by the larger body, sometimes both of what have been here distinguished as the second and third parts of the process of election.

  [q ]See the Bull Venerabilem, already quoted, of Pope Innocent III.

  [r ]See pp. 205-206, supra.

  [s ]‘Principes ad quos principaliter spectat regis Romani electio.’

  [t ]The electors who chose Richard do indeed in their report to Pope Urban IV say that they acted after deliberating with other magnates, and by their common consent, but they assert that by custom the election belongs to certain princes, seven in number.

  [u ]The English Richard of Hoveden, writing of this election, which happened in his lifetime, singles out four princes as chief electors, viz. the archbishops of Mentz and Cologne, the duke of Saxony, and the Count Palatine of the Rhine (ad ann. 1198).

  [x ]There was no authority which would have been recognized as legally competent to confer a special right. Such constitution as the Empire had rested upon custom only.

  [y ]The claim of the king of Bohemia seems to have been made technically in respect of his office of cupbearer, practically because he was the equal in power and rank of any of the other electors. It was disputed partly on the ground that his kingdom was not properly German. ‘Rex Bohemiae qui pincerna est non eligit quia non est Teutonicus’ (Albert. Stad. ad 1240, following the phrase of the Sachsenspiegel, ‘Die schenke des rikes die koning von behemen, die ne heuet nenen kore, umme dat he nicht düdesch nis’).—M. G. H., Script. xi. p. 367.

  [z ]The names and offices of the seven are concisely given in these lines, which appear in the treatise of Marsilius of Padua, De Translatione Imperii Romani, c. xi (printed in Goldast, Monarchia Imperii, ii. p. 153):—
  
  

  • ‘Moguntinensis, Trevirensis, Coloniensis,
  • Quilibet imperii sit Cancellarius horum;
  • Et Palatinus dapifer, Dux portitor ensis,
  • Marchio praepositus camerae, pincerna Bohemus,
  • Hi statuunt dominum cunctis per saecula summum.’
  It is worth while to place beside this the first stanza of Schiller’s ballad, Der Graf von Hapsburg, in which the coronation feast of Rudolf is described:—
  
  
  • ‘Zu Aachen in seiner Kaiserpracht,
  • Im alterthümlichen Saale,
  • Sass König Rudolphs heilige Macht
  • Beim festlichen Krönungsmahle.
  • Die Speisen trug der Pfalzgraf des Rheins,
  • Es schenkte der Böhme des perlenden Weins,
  • Und alle die Wähler, die sieben,
  • Wie der Sterne Chor um die Sonne sich stellt,
  • Umstanden geschäftig den Herrscher der Welt,
  • Die Würde des Amtes zu üben.’
  It is a poetical licence, however (as Schiller himself admits), to bring the Bohemian there, for King Ottocar was far away at home, mortified at his own rejection, and already meditating war.

  [a ]The electoral prince (Kurfürst) of Hessen-Cassel. His retention of the title had this advantage, that it enabled the Germans readily to distinguish electoral Hesse (Kur-Hessen) from the Grand Duchy (Hessen-Darmstadt) and the landgraviate (Hessen-Homburg). This last relic of the electoral system passed away in 1866, when the Elector of Hessen was dethroned, and his territories (to the satisfaction of the inhabitants, whom he had worried by a long course of petty tyrannies) annexed to the Prussian kingdom, along with Hanover, Nassau, and the free city of Frankfort.

  [b ]France having annexed the whole left bank of the Rhine, the archiepiscopal chair of Mentz was transferred to Regensburg. It was now the only spiritual electorate, for the archbishopric of Salzburg had been secularized for the benefit of the archduke Ferdinand of Austria, in order to compensate him for the loss of Tuscany.

  [c ]See p. 225. Rhense is a hamlet on the left bank of the Rhine, some four or five miles above Coblentz. A little way north of it, and on the very shore, between the stream and the railway, stands, half hidden by walnut trees, the so-called Königsstuhl, a modern restoration of the building erected by Charles IV in 1376 for the meetings of the electors, who from long time past had been wont to assemble here. It was the point where the territories of the four Rhenish electors touched one another. Here several imperial elections were made: the last, Rupert’s, in 1400.

  [d ]Goethe, whose imagination was wonderfully attracted by the splendours of the old Empire, has given in the second part of Faust a sort of fancy sketch of the origin of the great offices and the territorial independence of the German princes. Two lines express concisely the fiscal rights granted by the Emperor to the electors:—
  
  

  • ‘Dann Steuer, Zins und Beed’, Lehn und Geleit und Zoll,
  • Berg-, Salz- und Münz-regal euch angehören soll.’
  Maximilian said of Charles IV: ‘Carolo quarto pestilentior pestis nunquam alias contigit Germaniae.’

  [e ]This line is said to be as old as the time of Otto III.

  [f ]The University of Prague was founded in ad 1347, on the model of the University of Paris, where Charles had himself studied. After it came Vienna (1365), Erfurt (1379), Heidelberg (1385-1386).

  [a ]The archbishop of Mentz addresses Conrad II on his election thus: ‘Deus quum a te multa requirat tum hoc potissimum desiderat ut facias iudicium et iustitiam et pacem patriae quae respicit ad te, ut sis defensor ecclesiarum et clericorum, tutor viduarum et orphanorum.’—Wippo, Vita Chuonradi, c. 3 (M. G. H., Script. xi. p. 260). So Pope Urban IV writes to Richard: ‘Ut Imperii Romani fastigium et eius culmen praesidens specialis advocati et defensoris praecipui circa ecclesiam gerat officium et . . . inimicis consternatis eiusdem in pacis pulchritudine sedeat populus Christianus et requie opulenta quiescat.’—Raynald. Ann. Eccl., ad ann. 1263.
  
  Compare also the ‘Edictum de crimine laesae maiestatis’ issued by Henry VII in Italy: ‘Ad reprimenda multorum facinora qui ruptis totius debitae fidelitatis habenis adversus Romanum imperium, in cuius tranquillitate totius orbis regularitas requiescit, hostili animo armati conentur nedum humana, verum etiam divina praecepta, quibus iubetur quod omnis anima Romanorum principi sit subiecta, scelestissimis facinoribus et rebellionibus demoliri,’ &c.—Pertz, M. G. H., Legg. ii. p. 544.
  
  See also a curious passage in the Life of St. Adalbert, describing the beginning of the reign at Rome of the Emperor Otto III, and his cousin and nominee Pope Gregory V: ‘Laetantur cum primatibus minores civitatis: cum afflicto paupere exultant agmina viduarum, quia novus imperator dat iura populis; dat iura novus papa’ (M. G. H., Script. iv. p. 591).

  [b ]See p. 194, ante.

  [c ]Inst. Iust. i. 2. 6; cf. Dig. i. 4. 1.

  [d ]See esp. Romans xiii. 1-5; 1 Peter ii. 13-15.

  [e ]Lupold of Bebenburg, De Iure Regni et Imperii Romani, cc. 12 and 17; and so William of Ockham, Octo Quaestiones.

  [f ]Cf. Ockham, Octo Quaestiones (quoted by Gierke, Iohannes Althusius), p. 85, note 30.

  [g ]See on this subject Gierke, ut supra, chap. iii.

  [h ]‘Populus Romanus habet potestatem eligendi imperatorem per ipsum ius divinum et naturale . . . unde electores qui communi consensu omnium Alemannorum et aliorum qui imperatori subiecti erant tempore Henrici II constituti sunt, radicalem vim habent ab ipso omnium consensu, qui sibi naturali iure imperatorem constituere poterant.’—Nicholas of Cues (afterwards Cardinal), De Concordantia Catholica, iii. c. 4, ap. Schard. Syntagma, p. 360.
  
  The views of the anti-Papal writers in and after the time of Lewis IV are usually tinged by their wish to find a remedy for the evils of papal autocracy in a General Council which it would be the function of the Emperor to convoke. Their eyes are fixed quite as much on the needs of the Church herself as on the constitutional rights of the Empire against the Papacy.

  [i ]‘Vicarius Iesu Christi et successor Petri transtulit potestatem imperii a Graecis in Germanos ut ipsi Germani . . . possint eligere regem Romanorum qui est promovendus in Imperatorem et monarcham omnium regum et principum terrenorum. Nec insurgat superbia Gallicorum quae dicat quod non recognoscit superiorem: mentiuntur, quia de iure sunt et esse debent sub rege Romanorum et Imperatore.’—Speech of Boniface VIII, April 30, 1303 (Pfeffinger, Corp. iur. publ. i. 377). It is curious to compare with this the words addressed nearly five centuries earlier by Pope John VIII to Lewis, king of Bavaria: ‘Si sumpseritis Romanum imperium, omnia regna vobis subiecta existent.’—Jaffé, Reg. Pont. p. 281.

  [j ]So Alfonso, king of Naples, writes to Frederick III: ‘Nos reges omnes debemus reverentiam Imperatori, tanquam summo regi, qui est Caput et Dux regum.’—Quoted by Pfeffinger, i. 379. And Francis I (of France), speaking of a proposed combined expedition against the Turks, says, ‘Caesari nihilominus principem ea in expeditione locum non gravarer ex officio cedere.’—Marquard Freher, Script. rer. Germ. iii. 425. For a long time no European sovereign save the Emperor ventured to use the title of ‘Majesty.’ The imperial chancery conceded it in 1633 to the kings of England and Sweden; in 1641 to the king of France. Zedler, Universal Lexicon, s. v. Majestät.

  [k ]With the progress of society and the growth of commerce the local customs were, through the greater part of Western and Central Europe, beginning either to give way to or to be remodelled and supplemented by the Civil Law.

  [l ]The recently created Hague Tribunal can render decisions in cases submitted to it, but cannot enforce its judgements.

  [m ]Thus we are told of the Emperor Charles the Bald, that he confirmed the election of Boso, king of Burgundy and Provence, ‘Dedit Bosoni Provinciam (sc. Carolus Calvus), et corona in vertice capitis imposita, eum regem appellari iussit, ut more priscorum imperatorum regibus videretur dominari.’—Regin. Chron., ad ann. 877 (M. G. H., Script. 1. p. 589). This statement is in fact incorrect, but it evidences the views of the time. Frederick II made his son Enzio (that famous Enzio whose romantic history every one who has seen Bologna will remember) king of Sardinia, and also erected the duchy of Austria into a kingdom, although for some reason the title seems never to have been used; and Lewis IV gave to Humbert of Dauphiné the title of king of Vienne, ad 1336. Otto III is said to have conferred the title of king on Boleslas of Poland, and when the Elector Frederick of Brandenburg sought to make himself king of Prussia in ad 1700, he was obliged to obtain the Emperor’s consent.

  [n ]The duke of Lithuania is said to have treated with Sigismund for the bestowal on him of the title of king.—Cf. Pfeffinger, Corp. Iur. Publ. i. 424.
  
  Henry VIII of England when he rebelled against the Pope called himself king of Ireland (his predecessors had used only the title ‘Dominus Hiberniae’) without asking the Emperor’s permission, in order to shew that he repudiated the temporal as well as the spiritual dominion of Rome. The Act 24 Hen. VIII, cap. 12 (Statute of Appeals) is said to be designed ‘to keep the imperiall crown of this realm from the anoyaunce as well of the See of Rome as from the auctoritie of other foreyne potentates attempting the diminution or violacion thereof.’ These ‘other foreyne potentates’ are probably the Emperors.

  [o ]It is probably for this reason that the Ordo Romanus directs the Emperor and Empress to be crowned (in St. Peter’s) at the altar of St. Maurice, the patron saint of knighthood.

  [p ]See especially Gerlach Buxtorff, Dissertatio ad Auream Bullam; and Augustinus Stenchus, De Imperio Romano; quoted by Marquard Freher. It was keenly debated, while Charles V and Francis I (of France) were rival candidates, whether any one but a German was eligible. By birth Charles was either a Spaniard or a Fleming; but this difficulty his partisans avoided by holding that he had been, according to the civil law, in potestate of Maximilian his grandfather. However, to say nothing of the Guidos and Berengars of earlier days, the examples of Richard and Alfonso are conclusive as to the eligibility of others than Germans. Edward III of England was, as has been said, actually elected; Henry VIII of England was a candidate. And attempts were frequently made to elect the kings of France.—Cf. Pfeffinger, Vitriarius illustratus, pp. 69 sqq.

  [q ]See Note XV at end.

  [r ]Honorius II in 1229 forbade it to be studied or taught in the University of Paris. Innocent IV published some years later a still more sweeping prohibition.

  [s ]See Savigny, Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter, vol. iii. pp. 81, 341-347.

  [t ]Gian Galeazzo Visconti overcame Rupert in 1401. Charles the Bold of Burgundy was a potentate incomparably stronger than the Emperor Frederick III from whom he sought the regal title.

  [u ]Cf. Sismondi, Républiques italiennes, iv. chap. xxvii.

  [x ]As to Justinian, see Dante, Paradiso, canto vi.

  [y]

  • ‘Vieni a veder la tua Roma, che piagne
  • Vedova, sola, e di e notte chiama:
  • “Cesare mio, perchè non m’ accompagne?” ’
  • Purgatorio, canto vi. 112.

  [z ]Purgatorio, canto vii. 94.

  [a ]Inferno, canto xxxiv. 52.

  [b ]See especially the long passage on the Roman Eagle in Parad. xviii, xix, and xx.

  [c ]Not that the doctors of the civil law were necessarily political partisans of the Emperors. Savigny says that there were on the contrary more Guelfs than Ghibelines among the jurists of Bologna.—Geschichte des röm. Rechts im Mittelalter, vol. iii. p. 80.

  [d ]Cf. Palgrave, Normandy and England, vol. ii (of Otto and Adelheid). The Ordo Romanus talks of a ‘Camera Iuliae’ in the Lateran palace, reserved for the Empress.

  [e ]See notes to Chron. Casin. in Muratori, S. R. I. iv. 515.

  [f ]‘Zu aller Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs.’

  [g ]Novellae Constitutiones.

  [h ]Marquard Freher, Scr. Rer. Germ. iii. The question whether the seven electors vote as singuli or as a collegium, is solved by shewing that they have stepped into the place of the senate and people of Rome, whose duty it was to choose the Emperor, though (it is naïvely added) the soldiers sometimes usurped it.—Peter de Andlau, De Imperio Romano.

  [i ]Thus Charles, in a capitulary added to a revised edition of the Lombard law issued in ad 801, says, ‘Anno consulatus nostri primo.’—M. G. H., Legg. i. p. 83. So Otto III calls himself ‘Consul Senatus populique Romani.’

  [j ]Francis II, the last Emperor, was one hundred and twentieth (or one hundred and twenty-second) from Augustus. Some chroniclers call Otto the Great Otto II, counting in Salvius Otho, the successor of Galba.

  [k ]Nürnberg herself was not of Roman foundation. But this makes the imitation all the more curious. [She is no longer (1904) a quiet town as when the lines in the text were written forty years ago.] The fashion even passed from the cities to rural communities like some of the Swiss cantons, e.g. ‘Senatus populusque Uronensis.’

  [l ]Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (afterwards Pope Pius II), an acute versatile and somewhat cynical politician, in his book De Ortu et Authoritate Imperii Romani.

  [m ]Thus some civilians held Constantine’s Donation null; and the canonists, though originally clear as to its legality, came to doubt whether the Emperor had any right to make it for the opposite reason, viz. that it was needless, because the Pope possessed already what it purported to convey.

  [n ]‘Et idem dico de istis aliis regibus et principibus, qui negant se esse subditos regi Romanorum, ut rex Franciae, Angliae, et similes. Si enim fatentur ipsum esse Dominum universalem, licet ab illo universali domino se subtrahant ex privilegio vel ex praescriptione vel consimili, non ergo desunt esse cives Romani, per ea quae dicta sunt. Et per hoc omnes gentes quae obediunt S. matri ecclesiae sunt de populo Romano. Et forte si quis diceret dominum Imperatorem non esse dominum et monarcham totius orbis, esset haereticus, quia diceret contra determinationem ecclesiae et textum S. evangelii, dum dicit, “Exivit edictum a Caesare Augusto ut describeretur universus orbis.” Ita et recognovit Christus Imperatorem ut dominum.’—Bartolus, Commentary on the Pandects, xlviii. i. 24; De Captivis et postliminio reversis.

  [o ]Peter de Andlau, multis locis (see esp. cap. viii), and other writings of the time. Cf. Dante’s letter to Henry VII: (Ep. vii) ‘Romanorum potestas nec metis Italiae nec tricornis Europae margine coarctatur. Nam etsi vim passa in angustum gubernacula sua contraxit undique, tamen de inviolabili iure fluctus Amphitritis attingens vix ab inutili unda Oceani se circumcingi dignatur. Scriptum est enim
  
  

  • “Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,
  • Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris.” ’
  So Fr. Zoannetus, as late as the sixteenth century, declares it to be a mortal sin to resist the Empire, as the power ordained of God.

  [p ]Cf. Gerlach Buxtorff, Dissertatio ad Auream Bullam.

  [q ]Boccaccio says that the De Monarchia was written in the view of Henry’s expedition; and he has been generally followed. Though Witte holds that Dante wrote it before his exile, the balance of argument seems to be decidedly in favour of the older view which assigns it to a later date, possibly 1311 or 1312. See Toynbee, Dante Studies, p. 302. Dante sees in Paradise the place, marked by a crown, reserved for Henry VII (Par. xxx. 134-138).

  [r ]The church, half destroyed by fire in ad 1308, was not yet rebuilt.

  [s ]See above, chapter XIII.

  [t ]This was the argument of the Norwegian envoys at the Icelandic Althing in 1262: see chapter XII, p. 186, ante.

  [u ]Suggesting the celestial hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite.

  [x ]Quoting Aristotle’s Politics.

  [y ]‘Non enim cives propter consules nec gens propter regem, sed e converso consules propter cives, rex propter gentem.’ (Bk. i. ch. 12.)

  [z ]‘Reges et principes in hoc unico concordantes, ut adversentur Domino suo et uncto suo Romano Principi,’ having quoted ‘Quare fremuerunt gentes’; Psalm II. (Bk. ii. ch. 1.)

  [a ]Especially in the opportune death of Alexander the Great, which delivered Italy from the danger of a Macedonian conquest.
  
  In his Convito (iv. 5) Dante argues for the divine choice of Rome from the fact that Aeneas came from Troy to Italy to found it at the very time when king David, the progenitor of Christ’s mother, was born.

  [b ]Cic. De Off. ii. 8. ‘Ita ut illud patrocinium orbis terrarum potius quam imperium poterat nominari.’

  [c ]Dante goes so far as to speak of the Kingdom of Heaven under the name of Rome, and of Christ as Roman. Beatrice says to him:—

  • ‘Sarai meco senza fine cive
  • Di quella Roma onde Cristo è Romano.’

  [d ]‘Si Romanum imperium de iure non fuit, peccatum Adae in Christo non fuit punitum. . . . Et supra totum humanum genus Tiberius, cuius vicarius erat Pilatus, iurisdictionem non habuisset nisi Romanum imperium de iure fuisset. Hinc est quod Herodes, quamvis ignorans quid faceret, sicut et Caiaphas, quum verum dixit de coelesti decreto, Christum Pilato remisit ad iudicandum.’ (Bk. ii. ch. 13.)

  [e ]See Note XVI at end.

  [f ]Typifying the spiritual and temporal powers. Dante meets this by distinguishing the homage paid to Christ from that which His Vicar can rightfully demand.

  [a ]Hist. Eccl. l. ix. c. 6 τὸν δὲ ϕάναι, ὡς οὐχ ἐκὡν τάδε ἐπιχειρει̑, ἀλλά τις συνεχω̑ς ἑνοχλω̑ν αὐτὸν βιάζεται, καὶ ἐπιτάττει τὴν Ῥώμην πορθει̑ν.

  [b ]See the two Lives of St. Adalbert in Pertz, M. G. H. iv, evidently compiled soon after his death.

  [c ]Another letter of Petrarch’s to John Colonna, written immediately after his arrival in the city, runs thus:—‘In praesens nihil est quod inchoare ausim, miraculo rerum tantarum et stuporis mole obrutus . . . praesentia vero, mirum dictu, nihil imminuit sed auxit omnia: vere maior fuit Roma maioresque sunt reliquiae quam rebar: iam non orbem ab hac urbe domitum sed tam sero domitum miror. Vale’ (Epp. Fam. ii. 14). The reliquiae have been sadly reduced since Petrarch wrote, but the stranger still feels after his first day in Rome that the city is more wonderful than he expected.

  [d ]The idea of the continuance of the sway of Rome under a new character is one which mediaeval writers delight to illustrate. In Appendix, Note D, there is quoted as a specimen a poem upon Rome, by Hildebert (bishop of Le Mans, and afterwards archbishop of Tours), written in the beginning of the twelfth century.

  [e ]The history of the City has been written by Ferdinand Gregorovius in his Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, of which there exists an English translation. [Since this chapter was written, in 1865, much has been done to unveil by excavation the antiquities of early imperial Rome, but little (except the church of S. Maria Antica) which throws light on the mediaeval city has been discovered.]

  [f ]The great siege in which Belisarius defended the city against Witigis is fully and vividly described by Procopius, Bell. Goth. bks. i. and ii.
  
  After capturing the city in ad 546, Totila, who had at first intended to destroy it utterly, turned out the inhabitants, and Rome stood empty for more than a month. See Procop., Goth. iii. 22 (ἐν Ῥώμῃ ἄνθρωπον οὐδένα ἐάσας, ἀλλ’ ἐρήμον αὐτὴν τὸ παράπαν ἀπολιπών); and cf. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, bk. v. ch. 20.

  [g ]See chapter VI, supra.

  [h ]A contemporary poem (see Note XVII at end) says:—

  • ‘Non debere illis populum delicta fateri
  • Sed magis alterutrum, nec eorum sumere sacra.’

  [i ]Arnold’s denunciations of the corruptions in the Church were probably no stronger than those of his contemporary St. Bernard, but the latter condemned Arnold’s doctrines while admiring the austerity of his life. So the poem: ‘Vir nimis austerus duraeque per omnia vitae.’

  [j ]Supra, p. 175.

  [k ]This treatment of the dead was not unusual in the Middle Ages. The remains of John Wiclif were disinterred from the chancel of his church at Lutterworth nearly forty years after his death and thrown into a stream called the Swift, which runs past the village.

  [l ]See Note XVII at end.

  [m ]‘Dicebat quae Christianorum legi concordant plurimum et a vita quam plurimum dissonant.’

  [n ]The series of papal coins is interrupted (with one or two slight exceptions) from ad 984 (not long after the time of Alberic) to ad 1304. In their place we meet with various coins struck by the municipal authorities, some of which bear on the obverse the head of the Apostle Peter, with the legend ‘Roman. Pricipe’: on the reverse the head of the Apostle Paul, legend, Senat. Popul. Q. R. Gregorovius, ut supra.

  [o ]Gregorovius, bk. xi. ch. 4.

  [p ]Rienzo seems to be a corruption of the name Laurence. The tribune calls himself in his Latin letters, ‘Nicolaus Laurentii.’

  [q ]This inscription on a brazen tablet may still be seen in the Capitol. Boniface VIII had hidden it away. Cola says, ‘Tabula magna erea erat literis antiquis insignita quam Bonifacius Papa VIII in odium Imperii occultavit et de ea quoddam altare construxit, a tergo litteris occultatis.’ (Document in Papencordt’s Cola di Rienzo.) It has now become a precious historical authority for the constitutional history of the old Empire.

  [r ]Whether, however, he intended to annual all the gifts to the Holy See has been doubted; a contemporary says he does not think the revocation ‘extendat se ad dominium Papae sed ad electores et Alamanniae imperatores credo quod se extendat et opinio omnium Romanorum est.’—Cochetus, ap. Papencordt, ut supra, Doc. 9.
  
  So Petrarch, in a letter to the Roman people, calls Rome ‘totius magnificentiae humanae supremum domicilium.’—(Epist. sine tit. iii.)

  [s ]See Note XVIII at end of volume.

  [t ]The Germans called this hill, which is one of the highest in or near Rome, conspicuous from a beautiful group of stone-pines and cypresses upon its brow, Mons Gaudii; the origin of the Italian name, Monte Mario, is not known, unless it be, as some think, a corruption of Mons Malus.
  
  There is now a fortification on the top which makes the best point of view less accessible than it used to be.
  
  It was on this hill that Otto the Third hanged Crescentius and his followers.

  [u ]This Campus Neronianus—the name is as old as the sixth century: see Procop. Goth. i. 19—has since 1885 been largely covered by the houses of the new quarter of Rome called Prati di Castello.

  [x ]See the Ordo Romanus in Muratori’s third Dissertation in the Antiquitates Italiae medii aevi.

  [y ]Great stress was laid on one part of the procedure,—the holding by the Emperor of the Pope’s stirrup for him to mount, and the leading of his palfrey for some distance. Frederick Barbarossa’s omission of this mark of respect when Pope Hadrian IV met him on his way to Rome, had nearly caused a breach between the two potentates, Hadrian absolutely refusing the kiss of peace until Frederick should have gone through the form, which he was at last forced to do in the presence of the army: ‘fortiter streugam tenuit.’

  [z ]A remarkable speech of expostulation made by Otto III to the Roman people (after one of their revolts) from the tower of his house on the Aventine has been preserved to us. It begins thus: ‘Vosne estis mei Romani? Propter vos quidem meam patriam, propinquos quoque reliqui; amore vestro Saxones et cunctos Theotiscos, sanguinem meum, proieci; vos in remotas partes imperii nostri adduxi, quo patres vestri cum orbem ditione premerent numquam pedem posuerunt; scilicet ut nomen vestrum et gloriam ad fines usque dilatarem; vos filios adoptavi: vos cunctis praetuli.’—Vita S. Bernwardi; in Pertz, M. G. H. t. iv.
  
  (It is from this form ‘Theotiscus’ that the Italian ‘Tedesco’ seems to have been derived.)

  [a ]The Leonine city, so called from Pope Leo IV, lay between the Vatican and St. Peter’s and the river.

  [b ]It would seem that Otto was deceived, and that in reality they are the bones of St. Paulinus of Nola.

  [c ]As to the burial-places of the Emperors, see Note XIX at end.

  [d ]See note^t, p. 178.

  [e ]See p. 116.

  [f ]These highly curious frescoes are in the chapel of St. Sylvester attached to the very ancient church of Quattro Santi on the Coelian hill, and are supposed to have been executed in the time of Pope Innocent III, possibly reproducing more ancient pictures which had disappeared. They represent scenes in the life of the Saint, more particularly the making of the famous donation to him by Constantine, who submissively holds the bridle of his palfrey. See p. 169. The picture was evidently executed under the influence of the claim advanced by Hadrian IV.

  [g ]The last imperial coronation, that of Charles the Fifth, took place in the church of St. Petronius at Bologna, Pope Clement VII being unwilling to receive Charles in Rome. It is a grand church, but the choir, where the ceremony took place, has been ‘restored’ out of recognition since Charles’s time.

  [h ]The name of Cenci is a very old one at Rome: it is supposed to be an abbreviation of Crescentius. We hear in the eleventh century of a certain Cencius, who on one occasion made Gregory VII prisoner. The Palazzo Venezia at the southern end of the present Corso is also of early date.

  [i ]See Note XX at end.

  [j ]A good deal of the mischief done by Robert Wiscard, from which the parts of the city lying beyond the Coliseum towards the river and St. John Lateran never recovered, is attributed to the Saracenic troops in his service. Saracen pirates are said to have once before sacked Rome. Gaiserich was not a heathen, but he was a furious Arian, which, as far as respect to the churches of the orthodox went, was nearly the same thing. The seven-branched candlestick and other vessels of the Second Temple, which Titus had brought from Jerusalem to Rome, are said to have been carried off by the Vandals and lost on the voyage to Africa.

  [k ]We are told that one cause of the ferocity of the German part of the army of Charles was their anger at the ruinous condition of the imperial palace.

  [l ]Under the influence, partly of this anti-pagan spirit, partly of his own restless vanity, partly of a passion to be doing something, Pope Sixtus the Fifth destroyed or spoiled not a few monuments of antiquity.

  [m ]See Note XXI at end.

  [n ]The Palatine hill seems to have been then, as it is for the most part now, a waste of stupendous ruins. In the great imperial palace upon its northern and eastern sides an official of the Eastern court had his residence in the beginning of the eighth century. In the time of Charles the Great, some seventy years later, this palace was no longer habitable.

  [o ]Such as we see it in the later and lesser churches of basilica form.

  [p ]The appearance on the stage of the seven Germanic electors was a result of the confusion of the German kingdom with the Roman Empire, and in strictness they ought to have had nothing to do with the Roman crown at all. The right to bestow it could only—on principle—belong to some Roman authority, and those who felt the difficulty were driven to suppose a formal cession of their privilege by the Roman people to the seven electors. See p. 235, supra; and cf. Matthew Villani (iv. 77), ‘Il popolo Romano, non da se, ma la chiesa per lui, concedette la elezione degli Imperadori a sette principi della Magna.’

  [a ]Gibbon does much less than justice to them: and the first modern historian who set them in a fuller and fairer light was the late Mr. Finlay. Le Beau, in his Histoire du Bas-Empire, gave a résumé of East Roman history useful in its day, and among more recent works of value are those of Karl Hopf (in Ersch and Gruber, vols. 85 and 86), and of Hertzberg (Geschichte der Byzantiner), with the excellent History of the Later Roman Empire of J. B. Bury.
  
  A full bibliography will be found in the learned and luminous Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur of K. Krumbacher, which is itself of great service for a comprehension of Byzantine history generally.

  [b ]Although many dissimilarities continued to subsist in the outlying provinces, and even in the highlands of Greece.

  [c ]The Norse Sagas call it Micklegarth (the Great City).

  [d ]By that time maritime commerce had largely passed into the hands of the Italian cities, especially Genoa, industry had begun to decline, and the rural population were impoverished. The border wars and raids of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries desolated Asia Minor, which has never recovered.

  [e ]See Bury, History of Later Roman Empire, vol. ii. p. 319, for a receipt for the making of it given by Marcus Graecus in the tenth century. Some of the ingredients of one kind of it are those of gunpowder; but it does not seem to have been used to hurl projectiles.

  [f ]Ἰσαπόστολος, a title first applied to Constantine the Great. As to the coronations of the Emperors, see Note XXI at end.

  [g ]This is of course more true of the people of the capital and the more civilized central districts of the Empire than of the outlying parts, in some of which a sort of heathenism survived for some time, while ancient semi-heathen superstitions and usages survived still longer.

  [h ]The Council which sat first at Ferrara and then at Florence did in ad 1439 effect a sort of union of the Eastern and Western churches; but the action of the Eastern Emperor and his prelates in yielding on most of the points was disapproved by a large part of his people, and caused bitter dissensions at Constantinople.

  [i ]The Germans eastward of the Rhine were, however, largely converted by Scottish missionaries from Ireland, such as St. Columban and St. Gall, who acted independently of Rome, as well as by Anglo-Saxon missionaries such as St. Boniface, who went with papal approval.

  [j ]As to certain exceptions, e.g. in the case of the Lombards, see above, chapter III.

  [k ]The Emperor Constans II paid a brief visit in ad 663; he was disgusted with Constantinople, but found Rome no more agreeable, and spent his last years at Syracuse. Heraclius, when (ad 617) he thought of removing the seat of power from Constantinople, had meant to fix it not at Rome but at Carthage.

  [l ]The claims of the Roman See are fully set forth in an interesting and characteristic letter of Pope Leo IX to the Eastern Emperor, which may be read in Mansi, Concil. vol. xix. col. 635.

  [m ]Cp. Liudprand, Legatio Constantinopolitana, c. 63. The bishop of Leucas assured Liudprand that his church had to pay the Emperor 100 aurei every year, and all the other churches more or less according to their means. ‘Quod quam iniquum sit,’ says Liudprand, ‘patris nostri Ioseph acta demonstrant’: for when he taxed Egypt in the time of famine he left the land of the priests free.

  [n ]Liutprand, Legatio Constantinopolitana. Nicephorus says, ‘Vis maius scandalum quam quod se imperatorem vocat’ (cap. xxv).

  [o ]Otto of Freysing, i. c. 30.

  [p ]See Note XXII at end.

  [q ]See Vita Alexandri III, ap. Muratori, S. R. T. iii. i. 460, col. ii. B-E.

  [r ]See chap. V, supra.

  [s ]Nearly forty years after Dante’s death Petrarch succeeded in procuring a MS. of the Iliad and Odyssey, and some years later Boccaccio, who had obtained another MS., had it literally translated into Latin and sent it to Petrarch. These are the first we hear of in Italy. See Paget Toynbee, Dante Studies and Researches, p. 205. However, Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, knew Greek, and his famous contemporary, Roger Bacon, appears to have composed a Greek Grammar.

  [t ]This was the name by which they usually called their Saracen or Arab enemies.

  [u ]It must be admitted that the Popes of the (later) ninth and tenth centuries were a reality in Rome and a reality not fit for idealization. But it was the Catholic world at a distance that idealized their office: it was the Teutonic Emperors that effected the great reformation which begins at the end of the tenth century.

  [x ]See chapter VII, ante.

  [y ]There was a great deal of literary activity at Constantinople, and it was not confined, as it practically was in the West, to clerics; laymen who were men of affairs wrote and wrote well.

  [a ]It is not without interest to observe that the Council of Basel (ad 1431-1443) showed signs of reciprocating imperial care by claiming those very rights over the Empire to which the Popes were accustomed to pretend.

  [b ]The Councils of Basel and Florence were not recognized from first to last by all Europe, as was the Council of Constance. When the Assembly of Trent met (ad 1545), the great religious schism had already made a general council, in the true sense of the word, impossible.

  [c ]‘E però venendo gl’ imperadori della Magna col supremo titolo, e volendo col senno e colla forza della Magna reggere gli Italiani, non lo fanno e non lo possono fare.’—M. Villani, iv. 77.
  
  Matthew Villani’s etymology of the two great faction names of Italy is worth quoting, as a fair sample of the skill of mediaevals in such matters:—‘La Italia tutta è divisa mistamente in due parti, l’ una che seguita ne’ fatti del mondo la santa chiesa—e questi son dinominati Guelfi; cioè, guardatori di fè. E l’ altra parte seguitano lo ’mperio o fedele o enfedele che sia delle cose del mondo a santa chiesa. E chiamansi Ghibellini, quasi guida belli; cioè, guidatori di battaglie.’

  [d ]‘Nam quamvis Imperatorem et regem et dominum vestrum esse fateamini, precario tamen ille imperare videtur: nulla ei potentia est; tantum ei paretis quantum vultis, vultis autem minimum.’—Aeneas Sylvius to the princes of Germany, quoted by Hippolytus a Lapide, De Ratione Status in Imperic Romano Germanico.

  [e ]See Aegidi, Der Fürstenrath nach dem Luneviller Frieden; a book which throws more light than any other with which I am acquainted on the inner nature of the Empire.

  [f ]The two immediately preceding Emperors, Albert II and Frederick III (1439-1493), had been Hapsburgs. It is nevertheless from Maximilian and his grandson Charles the Fifth that the ascendancy of that family must be dated.

  [g ]The discovery of the sea route to India, an event of scarcely inferior importance, was effected when Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1486 and Vasco de Gama reached the Malabar coast in 1493.

  [h ]Nevertheless, fantastic attempts were made by some of the earlier Spanish ecclesiastics in the New World to connect the native traditions with those Christian legends which carried some of the Apostles into the Far East. There may be seen in Tlascala (in Mexico) an ancient picture representing St. Thomas preaching to the natives in the form of the (so-called) ‘Toltec’ deity Quetzalcohuatl, the Feathered Serpent.

  [i ]The establishment of Roman jurisprudence in Germany was not an unmixed blessing, for it increased the prerogative of the ruler, raising him above the law; it sanctioned the use of torture in criminal proceedings; it made the law of high treason more searching and severe.

  [j ]An account of these attempts at constitutional reform may be found in vol. i of the new Cambridge Modern History, chap. ix (by Professor Tout).

  [k ]Wenzel had encouraged the leagues of the cities, and incurred thereby the hatred of the nobles.

  [l ]The Germans, like our own ancestors, called foreign, i.e. non-Teutonic nations, Welsh; yet apparently not all such nations, but only those which they in some way associated with the Roman Empire, the Cymry of Roman Britain, the Romanized Celts of Gaul, the Italians, the Wallachs of Transylvania and the two Danubian Principalities which are now the kingdom of Roumania. It does not appear that either the Magyars or any Slavonic people were called by any form of the name.
  
  In the Icelandic writings of the thirteenth century France (Francia occidentalis) is called ‘Valland.’

  [m ]Julius was well pleased to give it, as he had no desire to see Maximilian in Italy.

  [n ]See as to the coronation and the title of ‘Elected Emperor’ (Erwählter Kaiser) Appendix, Note C.

  [o ]‘Romanorum rex’ (after Henry II) till the coronation at Rome.

  [p ]But the Emperor was only one of many claimants to this kingdom; they multiplied as the prospect of regaining it died away.

  [q ]The term ‘Emperor of Germany’ does not occur, even in English books, till comparatively recent times. English writers of the seventeenth century always call him ‘The Emperor,’ pure and simple, just as they invariably say ‘the French king,’ not ‘the king of France’ (because the English kings still claimed France). But the phrase ‘Empereur d’Almayne’ may be found in very early French writers.

  [r ]See Moser, Römische Kayser; Goldast’s and other collections of imperial edicts and proclamations.

  [a ]The so-called ‘Wahlcapitulation.’

  [b ]The electors long refused to elect Charles, dreading the power which his hereditary dominions gave him, and were at last induced to do so only by their overmastering fear of the Turks.

  [c ]Nearly all the Hapsburgs seem to have wanted that sort of genial heartiness which, apt as it is to be stifled by education in the purple, has nevertheless been possessed by several other royal lines, and has often helped them; as for instance by more than one prince of the houses of Brunswick and Hohenzollern.

  [d ]Padre Tosti, Prolegomeni alla Storia Universale della Chiesa, suggests that Sigismund may have foreseen this danger: ‘Il grido della riforma clericale percuoteva le cime del laicale potere e rimbalzava per tutta la gerarchia sociale. Se l’imperadore Sigismondo nel consilio di Costanza non avesse fiutate queste consequenze nella eresia di Hus e di Girolamo di Praga, forse non avrebbe con tanto zelo mandati alle fiamme que’ novatori. Rotto da Lutero il vincolo di suggezione al Papa ed ai preti in fatti di religione, avvenne che anche quello che sommetteva il vassallo al barone, il barone al imperadore, si allentasse.’—Vol. ii. p. 398.

  [e ]Maurice is reported to have been just as well pleased at Charles’s escape. ‘I have no cage big enough,’ said he, ‘for such a bird.’

  [f ]The completion can hardly be deemed final until the eleventh century, in which transubstantiation was definitely established as a dogma.

  [g ]See the passage quoted in note^m, p. 99; and see also p. 111.

  [h ]Each German prince claimed, and usually secured, the right of establishing within his territories the creed he adopted, according to the maxim: ‘Cuius regio eius religio.’ Lutherans and the Calvinists applied this principle against each other.

  [i ]Matthias, brother of Rudolf II, reigned from 1612 till 1619.

  [a ]De Ratione Status in Imperio nostro Romano-Germanico.

  [b ]Even then the Roman pontiffs had lapsed into that scolding, anile tone (so unlike the fiery brevity of Hildebrand, or the stern precision of Innocent III) which for a long time thereafter characterized their public utterances. Pope Innocent the Tenth pronounces the provisions of the treaty, ‘ipso iure nulla, irrita, invalida, iniqua, iniusta, damnata, reprobata, inania, viribusque et effectu vacua, omnino fuisse, esse, et perpetuo fore.’ In spite of which they took effect.
  
  This bull may be found in vol. xvii of the Bullarium Romanum. It bears date Nov. 20th, ad 1648.

  [c ]The Imperial Chamber (Kammergericht), instituted in ad 1495, continued, with frequent and long interruptions, to sit while the Empire lasted. But its slowness and formality passed that of any other legal body the world has yet seen, and it had no power to enforce its sentences. Till 1689 it sat at Speyer, whence the saying ‘Spirae lites spirant et non exspirant’; in that year the French laid Speyer in ashes, and the Chamber was in 1693 established at Wetzlar, where Goethe (who had gone thither as a law student) saw it dawdling over its work in 1772. The house of Charlotte the heroine of the Sorrows of Werther is still shewn in this sleepy little city.

  [d ]The ‘matricula’ specifying the quota of each state to the imperial army could not be any longer employed.

  [e ]A member of the Palatinate family succeeded to the crown of Sweden in 1654.

  [f ]Erbfeind des heiligen Reichs.

  [g ]Only the envoys of the several states were present at Utrecht in 1713.

  [h ]We have unfortunately no terms to correspond to the distinction expressed by the German ‘Reich’ and ‘Kaiserthum.’

  [i ]So the elector of Saxony proposed in 1532 that, Albert II, Frederick III, and Maximilian having been all of one house, Charles V’s successor should be chosen from some other. Moser, Römische Kayser. See the various attempts of France in Moser. The coronation engagements (Wahlcapitulation) of every Emperor bound him not to attempt to make the throne hereditary in his family.

  [j ]In 1658 France offered to subsidize the Elector of Bavaria if he would become Emperor.

  [k ]Whether an Evangelical was eligible for the office of Emperor was a question often debated, but never actually raised by the candidature of any but a Roman Catholic prince. The ‘exacta aequalitas’ conceded by the Peace of Westphalia might appear to include so important a privilege. But it must be remembered that the peculiar relation in which the Emperor stood to the Holy Roman Church was one which no one out of the communion of that Church could hold, and that the coronation oaths could not have been taken by, nor the coronation ceremonies (among which was a sort of ordination) performed upon a Protestant.
  
  The Emperor Sigismund is said to have officiated as a deacon at a solemn mass at the opening of the Council of Constance, and chanted the Gospel.

  [l]

  • ‘The bold Bavarian, in a luckless hour,
  • Tries the dread summits of Caesarean power;
  • With unexpected legions bursts away,
  • And sees defenceless realms receive his sway. . . .
  • The baffled prince in honour’s flattering bloom
  • Of hasty greatness finds the fatal doom;
  • His foes’ derision and his subjects’ blame,
  • And steals to death from anguish and from shame.’
  • —Johnson,Vanity of Human Wishes.

  [m ]The following nine reasons for the long continuance of the Empire in the House of Hapsburg are given by Pfeffinger (Vitriarius Illustratus), writing early in the eighteenth century:—

  • 1. The great power of Austria.
  • 2. Her wealth, now that the Empire was so poor.
  • 3. The majority of Catholics among the electors.
  • 4. Her fortunate matrimonial alliances.
  • 5. Her moderation.
  • 6. The memory of benefits conferred by her.
  • 7. The example of evils that had followed a departure from the blood of former Caesars.
  • 8. The fear of the confusion that would ensue if she were deprived of the crown.
  • 9. Her own eagerness to have it.

  [n ]The Pope undertook a journey to Vienna to mollify Joseph, and met with a sufficiently cold reception. When he saw the famous minister Kaunitz and gave him his hand to kiss, Kaunitz took it and shook it.

  [o ]Joseph was the first Emperor since Charles the Bald who had kept his Christmas at Rome.

  [p ]Shortly before the Empire ended, there were more than sixty thousand lawsuits waiting to be heard.

  [q ]In 1764 the revenue of the Emperor (from the Empire) was estimated at 13,884 florins and 32 kreutzers. Some one remarks that one day’s journey, in Germany, might take a traveller through the territories of a free city, a sovereign abbot, a village belonging to an imperial knight, and the dominions of a landgrave, a duke, a prince, and a king, so small, so numerous, and so diverse were the principalities.

  [r ]He said of the Diet, ‘Es ist ein Schattenbild, eine Versammlung aus Publizisten die mehr mit Formalien als mit Sachen sich beschäftigen, und, wie Hofhunde, den Mond anbellen.’

  [s ]Deutschlands Erwartungen vom Fürstenbunde.

  [a ]Wahrheit und Dichtung, bk. i. The Römer Saal is still one of the sights of Frankfort. The portraits, however, which one now sees in it, seem to be all or nearly all of them modern; and few have any merit as works of art.

  [b ]Jordanis Chronica, ap. Schardium, Sylloge Tractatuum.

  [c ]See Note XIV at end.

  [d ]‘Je n’ai pu concilier ces grands intérêts [of political order and the spiritual authority of the Pope] qu’en annulant les donations des empereurs français, mes prédécesseurs, et en réunissant les états romains à la France.’—Proclamation issued in 1809; Oeuvres, iv.

  [e ]See Appendix, Note C.

  [f ]He did not annex Spain and Naples to ‘the Empire,’ but kept them as separate kingdoms under his brothers (the latter ultimately under Murat). There were political reasons for this course, but it is at least an interesting coincidence that neither country had belonged to the Carolingian Empire.

  [g ]Pope Pius VII wrote to the First Consul, ‘Carissime in Christo Fili noster . . . tam perspecta sunt nobis tuae voluntatis studia erga nos, ut quotiescunque ope aliqua in rebus nostris indigemus, eam a te fidenter petere non dubitare debeamus.’

  [h ]Let us place side by side the letters of Hadrian to Charles in the Codex Carolinus, and the following preamble to the Concordat of ad 1801, between the First Consul and the Pope (which I quote from the Bullarium Romanum), and mark the changes of a thousand years.
  
  ‘Gubernium reipublicae [Gallicae] recognoscit religionem Catholicam Apostolicam Romanam eam esse religionem quam longe maxima pars civium Gallicae reipublicae profitetur.
  
  ‘Summus pontifex pari modo recognoscit eandem religionem maximam utilitatem maximumque decus percepisse et hoc quoque tempore praestolari ex catholico cultu in Gallia constituto, necnon ex peculiari eius professione quam faciunt reipublicae consules.’

  [i ]He had arch-chancellors, arch-treasurers, and so forth. The Legion of Honour, which was thought important enough to be mentioned in the coronation oath, was meant to be something like the mediaeval orders of knighthood, whose connection with the Empire has already been mentioned.

  [j ]Napoleon’s feelings towards Germany may be gathered from the phrase he once used, ‘Il faut dépayser l’Allemagne.’
  
  Again, in a letter to his brother Louis, he says, ‘You must know that the annihilation of German nationality is a necessary leading principle of my policy.’

  [k ]Thus in documents issued by the Emperor during these two years he is styled ‘Roman Emperor Elect, Hereditary Emperor of Austria’ (erwählter Römischer Kaiser, Erbkaiser von Oesterreich).

  [l ]This Act of Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund) is printed in Koch’s Traités (continued by Schöll), vol. viii, and Meyer’s Corpus Iuris Confoederationis Germanicae, vol. i. It has every appearance of being a translation from the French, and was no doubt originally drawn up in that language. Napoleon is called in one place ‘Der nämliche Monarch, dessen Absichten sich stets mit den wahren Interessen Deutschlands übereinstimmend gezeigt haben.’ (The said Monarch, whose views have shewn themselves always in accord with the true interests of Germany.) The phrase ‘Roman Empire’ does not occur; we hear only of the ‘German Empire,’ ‘body of German states’ (Staatskörper), and so forth. This Confederation of the Rhine was eventually joined by every German state except Austria, Prussia, Electoral Hessen, and Brunswick.

  [m ]Histoire des Traités, vol. viii. The original may be found in Meyer’s Corpus Iuris Confoederationis Germanicae, vol. i. p. 70. It is a document in no way remarkable, except from the ludicrous resemblance which its language suggests to the circular in which a tradesman, announcing the dissolution of an old partnership, solicits, and hopes that by close attention to business he may merit, a continuance of his customers’ patronage to his business, which will henceforth be carried on under the name of, &c., &c.

  [n ]Koch (Schöll), Histoire des Traités, vol. xi. pp. 257 sqq.; Häusser, Deutsche Geschichte, vol. iv.

  [o ]Great Britain had refused in 1806 to recognize the dissolution of the Empire. And it may indeed be maintained that in point of law the Empire was never extinguished at all, but lived on as a sort of disembodied spirit. For it is clear that, technically speaking, the abdication of a sovereign destroys only his own rights, and does not dissolve the state over which he presides. Perhaps the Elector of Saxony might, legally, as imperial Vicar during an interregnum, have summoned the electoral college to meet and choose a new Emperor.

  [p ]‘Les états d’Allemagne seront indépendans et unis par un lien fédératif.’—Histoire des Traités, vol. xi. p. 257.

  [a ]This was put forward in Louis Napoleon’s letter to General Forey, explaining the object of that unlucky expedition to Mexico which helped to undermine his throne.

  [b ]Many other instances might be adduced: consider for instance the perpetuation of the office of consul at Rome and Constantinople for at least five centuries after it had ceased to carry power; consider the retention long after all claims to France had been abandoned of the title ‘King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland’ (its ultimate relinquishment distressed many persons); consider the retention to-day in Great Britain of the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ (when it had been dropped from a new coin public opinion compelled the renewal of its use); consider the refusal of the Count of Chambord, heir to the throne of France, to accept the crown when it was virtually within his grasp, unless he was permitted to use the white flag of Henry IV instead of the tricolour.

  [c ]‘Ipsa enim ecclesia charior Deo est quam coelum. Non enim propter coelum ecclesia, sed e converso propter ecclesiam coelum.’ From the tract entitled ‘A Letter of the four Universities to the Emperor Wenzel and Pope Urban VI,’ quoted in chapter VII, p. 105.

  [d ]See chapters VII and XV, ante.

  [e ]I have retained (in substance) this and the next following paragraph, written before 1866, because few people, outside Germany, realize to-day the part which the old Empire played in the political controversies of Germany when Austria was still a German power.

  [f ]See especially Von Sybel, Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich; and the answers of Ficker and Von Wydenbrugk; also Höfler, Kaiserthum und Papstthum, and Waitz, Deutsche Kaiser von Karl dem Grossen bis Maximilian.

  [g ]Modified of course by the canon law, and not superseding the feudal law relating to land.

  [h ]Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, iii, sub fin.

  [a ]Burggrave was the title of the Count, representing the Emperor, who held the castle which guarded the city.

  [b ]Much as the king of Denmark and Norway gave the Orkney and Shetland isles to the king of Scotland (ad 1468) as a pledge for the payment of the dowry of his daughter, a payment which has not yet been made.

  [c ]The Duchy of East Prussia was established by the Treaty of Krakow in 1525, under Polish suzerainty. The electors of Brandenburg, from the time of Joachim II onwards, obtained from Poland the co-investiture of it, but did not get the actual government into their hands till 1605, nor the full legal dominion till 1618; and the supremacy of Poland remained until released at the Peace of Wehlau in 1657.

  [d ]So called from their dwelling next to Russia—po Russia.

  [e ]The idea was started during the Seven Years’ War of uniting Germany under Prussian supremacy, deposing Francis I, and getting Frederick himself chosen Emperor; and his favourite minister Winterfeldt was, in 1757, sanguine enough to believe this could be effected. (See Schmidt, Preussens deutsche Politik, p. 22.) Frederick is said to have, while Crown Prince, formed the plan of marrying Maria Theresa, whose hatred he afterwards so fully earned.

  [f ]See p. 405, supra. This League, which Frederick modelled to some extent upon the Smalkaldic League of the sixteenth century, answered its purpose by checking Joseph, and preventing any change in the constitution of the Empire. See upon it Ranke’s Die deutschen Mächte und der Fürstenbund.

  [g ]See for the whole history of this period Sybel’s Geschichte der Revolutionszeit.

  [h ]Sybel (Begründung des Deutschen Reiches) well observes that the spirit of German nationality was largely re-created by a group of men, some of them not Prussians, on ground East of the Elbe which was not originally German but Slavonic.

  [i ]For the Congress of Vienna students may refer to L. Häusser’s Deutsche Geschichte; for the subsequent history of the Confederation to H. Schulze, Einleitung in das deutsche Staatsrecht, and K. Klüpfel, Die deutschen Einheitsbestrebungen seit 1815.

  [j ]Particularismus is the name by which the Germans denote the policy or feeling, which maintained the independence of the several local potentates who were members of the Germanic body.

  [k ]The history of the movement for German Unity from 1815 onwards may be read in H. von Sybel’s Begründung des Deutschen Reiches.

  [l ]See Aegidi, Aus dem Jahre 1819.

  [m ]On the death of William IV (of Great Britain) Hanover passed to his brother Ernest as heir male.

  [* ]Constitutions of some sort existed in most of the German States.

  [n ]In 1847, when things seemed quiet enough, Frederick William IV had opened negotiations with Austria with a view to improving the constitution of the Confederation, and making better provision for common defence and for internal communications. In the Berlin revolution of March, 1848, he had no doubt behaved with irresolution, but had shewn some real sympathy for the people. And this he felt. He heartily desired both the wellbeing and, to a certain extent, the freedom of his own Prussia and the greatness of Germany; but he was unhappily entangled with notions of divine right and various other mediaeval whimsies and sentiments. See as to this period Bismarck’s Reflections and Reminiscences, vol. i. ch. ii.
  
  A German Parliament had been demanded in October, 1847, by a congress of constitutional reformers, and a resolution to that effect submitted in the Baden Chamber on February 2, 1848, shortly before the revolution broke out in Paris.

  [o ]Prince Frederick had never assented to Frederick VII’s arrangements, and contended that he was not barred by his father’s renunciation of the rights of the family.

  [p ]The Confederation was not bound by the Treaty of London, as it had never been laid before the Diet. Prussia and Austria were.

  [q ]It was commonly believed at the time that Russia would not aid the Danes on account of her obligations to Prussia during the Polish insurrection of 1863; and that Louis Napoleon held back because he was disgusted at the cold reception given by the British government to his proposal for a general European Congress not very long before. The inaction of England was attributed on the Continent partly to the personal influence of the Sovereign, partly to the supposed prevalence of ‘peace at any price’ doctrines, partly to the fact that the Danish case was found, when closely scrutinized, to be no strong one. But the chief cause was the demand made by Louis Napoleon, that at the close of the war France should receive some extension of territory on the left bank of the Rhine. As the English army was unprepared, and the brunt of the fighting would have fallen on the French, he felt entitled to fix his conditions, but it was of course impossible for the British government to accede to them, and equally impossible for it to go to war without him.

  [r ]Austria at one time proposed to let Prussia have Holstein in exchange for part of Silesia: at another she offered to leave the duchies to be disposed of by the Diet. Prussia refused both propositions, well knowing, as regards the latter, that the decision of the Diet was foregone.

  [s ]The immediate cause of the war was the convocation by Austria of the states of Holstein, in order to pronounce on the rights of Prince Frederick. This Prussia declared to be an infraction of the Convention of Gastein; and her troops accordingly crossed the Eider, in order to reoccupy Holstein in virtue of her condominant rights under the Treaty of Vienna. Austria withdrew to avoid a collision; and made her final motion in the Diet which brought on the declaration of war.

  [t ]See as to Bismarck’s policy in dealing gently with Austria his own account in his Reflections and Reminiscences, ch. xx (esp. p. 47 of vol. ii of English translation). His judgement was approved by the result, for before many years passed he re-established friendly relations with her.

  [u ]It is impossible here to sketch even in outline the part played by Louis Napoleon, then Emperor in France, in the negotiations. Reference may be made to Sybel (ut supra) and to Sir S. Walpole’s lucid narrative in his History of Twenty-five Years, vol. ii.

  [x ]The breach arose over the offer to a prince of Hohenzollern, distantly related to King William, of the crown of Spain. See as to the circumstances which caused the declaration of war, Sybel, Begründung, and Bismarck, Recollections and Reminiscences, vol. ii. ch. xxii. Nothing could have been more foolish than the diplomacy of Louis Napoleon’s Foreign Minister; but Bismarck’s artful manipulation of the so-called ‘Ems incident,’ confessed long afterwards, served at the moment to put the conduct of France in a worse light than it now appears to bear.

  [a ]There is no such system of federal Courts through the country as exists in the United States.

  [b ]One part of the Empire is not included in any State. This is the territory of Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen) taken from France in 1871. It is organized as an ‘imperial district’ (Reichsland) under a governor appointed by the Emperor, sends fifteen members to the Assembly (Reichstag) and four delegates (without power of voting) to the federal Council.

  [c ]One exception is illustrative. Posen, the province taken by Prussia when Poland was partitioned (1772 and 1793), sends a body of Polish members to the Reichstag who act as a separate section there, accentuating the particularism or nationalism of their province.

  [d ]The fact that the inhabitants of the Archduchy of Austria, as well as of Tyrol, Styria, and Carinthia, are nearly all Roman Catholics, may interpose difficulties on both sides and retard this issue. Yet it cannot be pronounced improbable; and one of its consequences would be to make the German Empire a Mediterranean as well as a North Sea and Baltic Power.

  [e ]The Emperor Frederick mentions in the fragments of his Diary that have been made public (Bismarck disputed the authenticity of part of them) that this motive was present to the mind of those who called the new Empire into being. Bismarck says (Reflections and Reminiscences, ch. xxiii) that when King William consented to change his title, he preferred that of ‘Emperor of Germany,’ and was with difficulty driven to consent to ‘German Emperor,’ which Bismarck urged because it spared the susceptibilities of the German potentates. The Crown Prince Frederick had at first desired ‘King of Germany,’ because he thought the restoration of the Roman Empire by Charles the Great a misfortune for the nation.

  [I ]Note to p. 21
  
  Lact. Divin. Instit. vii. 25: ‘Etiam res ipsa declarat lapsum ruinamque rerum brevi fore: nisi quod incolumi urbe Roma nihil istiusmodi videtur esse metuendum. At vero cum caput illud orbis occiderit, et ῥύμη esse coeperit quod Sibyllae fore aiunt, quis dubitet venisse iam finem rebus humanis, orbique terrarum? Illa, illa est civitas quae adhuc sustentat omnia, precandusque nobis et adorandus est Deus coeli si tamen statuta eius et placita differri possunt, ne citius quam putemus tyrannus ille abominabilis veniat qui tantum facinus moliatur, ac lumen illud effodiat cuius interitu mundus ipse lapsurus est.’
  
  Cf. Tertull. Apolog. cap. xxxii: ‘Est et alia maior necessitas nobis orandi pro imperatoribus, etiam pro omni statu imperii rebusque Romanis, qui vim maximam universo orbi imminentem ipsamque clausulam saeculi acerbitates horrendas comminantem Romani imperii commeatu scimus retardari.’ Also the same writer, Ad Scapulam, cap. ii: ‘Christianus sciens imperatorem a Deo suo constitui, necesse est ut ipsum diligat et revereatur et honoret et salvum velit cum toto Romano imperio quousque saeculum stabit: tandiu enim stabit.’ So too the author—now usually supposed to be Hilary the Deacon—of the Commentary on the Pauline Epistles ascribed to St. Ambrose: ‘Non prius veniet Dominus quam regni Romani defectio fiat, et appareat Antichristus qui interficiet sanctos, reddita Romanis libertate, sub suo tamen nomine.’—Ad. II Thess. ii. 4, 7.

  [II ]Note to p. 28
  
  Theodorich (Θευδέριχος, Thiodorich; in Old German, Dietrich; in Dutch, Dirk; in French, Thierry) seems to have resided usually at Ravenna, where he died and was buried; a remarkable building which tradition points out as his tomb, but which cannot belong to his time, stands a little way out of the town, near the railway station. The porphyry sarcophagus, in which his body is supposed to have lain, may be seen built up into the wall of the building called his palace, situated close to the church of Sant’ Apollinare in Urbe, and not far from the tomb of Dante. There is no authority for attributing this building to Ostrogothic times; it is very different from the representation of Theodorich’s palace which we have in the contemporary mosaics of this church of Sant’ Apollinare at Ravenna.
  
  In the German legends, however,—legends which doubtless led to his being commemorated as a national hero by the superb figure guarding the tomb of the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck,—Theodorich is always the prince of Verona (Dietrich von Berne), probably because that city was better known to the Teutonic nations, and because it was thither that he moved his court when Transalpine affairs required his attention. His castle there stood in the old town on the left bank of the Adige, on the height now occupied by the citadel; it is doubtful whether any traces of it remain, for the solid foundations which we now see may have belonged to the fortress erected by Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the fourteenth century.

  [III ]Note to p. 38
  
  A singular account of the origin of the separation of the Greeks from the Latins occurs in the treatise of Landulfus de Columna (Landolfo Colonna), De translatione Imperii Romani (circa 1320). ‘The tyranny of Heraclius,’ says he, ‘provoked a revolt of the Eastern nations. They could not be reduced, because the Greeks at the same time began to disobey the Roman Pontiff, receding, like Jeroboam, from the true faith. Others among these schismatics [apparently with the view of strengthening their political revolt] carried their heresy further and founded Mohammedanism.’ Similarly, Marsilius of Padua in his revised version of Colonna’s book says that Mohammed, ‘a rich Persian,’ invented his religion to keep the East from returning to allegiance to Rome.
  
  It is worth remarking that few, if any, of the earlier historians (from the tenth to the fifteenth century) refer to the Emperors of the West from Constantine to Romulus Augustulus: the transference of the seat of Empire was deemed to have been effected by Constantine, and the very existence of this Western line seems to have been even in the eighth or ninth century altogether forgotten. The first mediaeval writer who mentions Romulus Augustulus as the last sovereign reigning at Rome is, according to Döllinger (Das Kaiserthum Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger, p. 111), Matteo Palmieri, who wrote about ad 1440.

  [IV ]Note to p. 43 and to p. 101
  
  The original forgery (or rather the extracts which Gratian gives from it) may be read in the Corpus Iuris Canonici, Dist. xcvi. cc. 13, 14: ‘Et sicut nostram terrenam imperialem potentiam, sic sacrosanctam Romanam ecclesiam decrevimus veneranter honorari, et amplius quam nostrum imperium et terrenum thronum sedem beati Petri gloriose exaltari, tribuentes ei potestatem et gloriae dignitatem atque vigorem et honorificentiam imperialem. . . . Beato Sylvestro patri nostro summo pontifici et universali urbis Romae papae, et omnibus eius successoribus pontificibus, qui usque in finem mundi in sede beati Petri erunt sessuri, de praesenti contradimus palatium imperii nostri Lateranense, deinde diadema, videlicet coronam capitis nostri, simulque phrygium, necnon et superhumerale, verum etiam et chlamydem purpuream et tunicam coccineam, et omnia imperialia indumenta, sed et dignitatem imperialem praesidentium equitum, conferentes etiam et imperialia sceptra, simulque cuncta signa atque banda et diversa ornamenta imperialia et omnem processionem imperialis culminis et gloriam potestatis nostrae. . . . Et sicut imperialis militia ornatur ita et clerum sanctae Romanae ecclesiae ornari decernimus. . . . Unde et pontificalis apex non vilescat sed magis quam terreni imperii dignitas gloria et potentia decoretur, ecce tam palatium nostrum quam Romanam urbem et omnes Italiae seu occidentalium regionum provincias loca et civitates beatissimo papae Sylvestro universali papae contradimus atque relinquimus. . . . Ubi enim principatus sacerdotum et Christianae religionis caput ab imperatore coelesti constitutum est, iustum non est ut illic imperator terrenus habeat potestatem.’
  
  The practice of kissing the Pope’s foot was adopted by the Papal in imitation of the ancient imperial court. It was afterwards revived by the Romano-Germanic Emperors.
  
  The spuriousness of the Donation of Constantine was proved by Laurentius Valla in 1440: Nicholas of Cues (1401-1464), afterwards Cardinal, also recognizes its falsity.

  [V ]Note to p. 49
  
  The primitive custom was for the bishop to sit in the centre of the apse, at the central point of the east end of the church (or, as it would be more correct to say, the end furthest from the great door, for the earliest churches do not always run east and west), just as the judge had done in those law courts on the model of which the first basilicas were constructed. This arrangement may still be seen in some of the churches of Rome, as well as elsewhere in Italy; nowhere better than in the churches of Ravenna, particularly the beautiful one of Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, and in the very ancient cathedral of Torcello, in the lagoons north-east of Venice.
  
  On the episcopal chair of the Pope were represented the labours of Hercules and the signs of the zodiac. It is believed at Rome to be the veritable chair of the Apostle himself; and whatever may be thought of such an antiquity as this, it can be satisfactorily traced back to the third or fourth century of Christianity. (The story that it is inscribed with verses from the Koran is, I believe, without foundation.) It is of oak and acacia wood, and is now enclosed in a gorgeous casing of bronze, and placed aloft at the eastern extremity of St Peter’s, just over the spot where a bishop’s chair would in the old arrangement of the basilica have stood. The Roman sarcophagus in which the body of Charles himself lay, bears reliefs of the rape of Proserpine. It may still be seen in the gallery of the basilica at Aachen.

  [VI ]Note to p. 69
  
  The notion that once prevailed that the Irminsûl was the ‘pillar of Hermann,’ set up on the spot of the defeat of Varus, is, however, now generally discredited. Some German antiquaries take the pillar to be a rude figure of the native god or hero Irmin, who, as Grimm (Deutsch Mythologie, i. 325) thinks, may be an eponym of the Herminones, and was probably worshipped by the Saxons as a warlike representation of Wodan. The omission of their ancestors to commemorate the victory that saved them from Rome has been at last supplied by the modern Germans, who in 1875 set up a colossal statue of Arminius or Hermann in the Teutoburger Wald, not far from the reputed scene of the battle. He has in fact become the earliest national hero. A rude ditty, apparently referring to the destruction of the pillar by Charles, still lives in the memory of the Westphalians round Paderborn, and runs thus:—
  
  

  • ‘Hermen sla dermen
  • Sla pipen, sla trummen
  • De Kaiser wil kummen
  • Met hammer un stangen
  • Wil Hermen uphangen.’
  Mommsen (Die Oertlichkeit der Varusschlacht) places the scene of the battle eight or ten miles north of Osnabrück, near a spot called Barenau.
  
  [The name of the deity is preserved in England in the Ermine Street (Eormenstræte), an ancient road which ran north from the Thames Valley into Lincolnshire.]

  [VII ]Note to p. 112
  
  The abbot Engelbert (De Ortu Progressu et Fine Imperii Romani) quotes Origen and Jerome to this effect, and proceeds himself to explain, from 2 Thess. ii. 3-9, how the falling away will precede the coming of Antichrist. There will be a triple ‘discessio,’ of the kingdoms of the earth from the Roman Empire, of the Church from the Apostolic See, of the faithful from the faith. Of these, the first causes the second; the temporal sword to punish heretics and schismatics being no longer ready to work the will of the rulers of the Church.
  
  St. Thomas Aquinas deals with the same prophecy in a remarkable way, shewing that the falling away is to be understood as referring to a discessio from the spiritual power. ‘Dicendum quod nondum cessavit, sed est commutatum de temporali in spirituale, ut dicit Leo Papa in sermone de Apostolis: et ideo discessio a Romano imperio debet intelligi non solum a temporali sed etiam a spirituali, scilicet a fide catholica Romanae Ecclesiae. Est autem hoc conveniens signum, nam Christus venit quando Romanum imperium omnibus dominabatur: ita e contra signum adventus Antichristi est discessio ab eo.’—Comment. ad 2 Thess. ii.
  
  A full statement of the views that prevailed in the earlier Middle Age regarding Antichrist—as well as of the singular prophecy of the Frankish Emperor who shall appear in the latter days, conquer the world, and then going to Jerusalem shall lay down his crown on the Mount of Olives and deliver over the kingdom to Christ—may be found in the little treatise, Vita Antichristi, which Adso, monk and afterwards abbot of Moutier-en-Der, compiled (circa 950) for the information of Queen Gerberga, wife of Louis d’Outremer. Antichrist is to be born a Jew of the tribe of Dan (Gen. xlix. 17), ‘non de episcopo et monacha, sicut alii delirando dogmatizant, sed de immundissima meretrice et crudelissimo nebulone. Totus in peccato concipietur, in peccato generabitur, in peccato nascetur.’ His birthplace is Babylon: he is to be brought up in Bethsaida and Chorazin.
  
  Adso’s book may be found printed in Migne, t. ci. p. 1290. As to the notions current regarding Antichrist (and their supposed derivation from earlier Jewish notions) see Bousset’s book on the Antichrist Legend, 1895 (English translation by A. H. Keene, 1896).
  
  No name has been more frequently fitted to different figures than this. Popes as well as Emperors have received it. Everybody in turn has been Antichrist from the Emperor Nero to President Loubet.

  [VIII ]Note to p. 113
  
  A prayer which still keeps its place in the office of the Roman Catholic Church for Good Friday, though it is no longer actually in use, expresses the ancient ideas: ‘Oremus pro Christianissimo Imperatore nostro N. ut Deus et Dominus noster subditas illi faciat omnes barbaras nationes ad nostram perpetuam pacem. . . . Omnipotens sempiterne Deus respice ad Romanum imperium ut gentes quae in sua feritate confidunt potentiae Tuae dextera comprimantur.’

  [IX ]Note to p. 117
  
  The ideas expressed in the mosaic of the Lateran triclinium were in substance conveyed by Pope Hadrian I, some twenty-three years before, when writing of Charles as representative of Constantine: ‘Et sicut temporibus Beati Sylvestri, Romani pontificis, a sanctae recordationis piissimo Constantino magno imperatore, per eius largitatem sancta Dei catholica et apostolica Romana ecclesia elevata atque exaltata est, et potestatem in his Hesperiae partibus largiri dignatus est, ita et in his vestris felicissimis temporibus atque nostris, sancta Dei ecclesia, id est, beati Petri apostoli, germinet atque exsultet, ut omnes gentes quae haec audierint edicere valeant, “Domine salvum fac regem, et exaudi nos in die in qua invocaverimus te”; quia ecce novus Christianissimus Dei Constantinus imperator his temporibus surrexit, per quem omnia Deus sanctae suae ecclesiae beati apostolorum principis Petri largiri dignatus est.’—Letter XLIX of Cod. Carol.,ad 777 (in Mur. Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, iii. part ii. 195).
  
  This letter is memorable as containing the first allusion, or what seems an allusion, to Constantine’s Donation. The document may not yet have been forged, but the legend doubtless existed, and the forger may well have believed it.

  [X ]Note to p. 138
  
  The fevers which prevailed in and near Rome during the summer and autumn were one of the chief causes which baffied the efforts of the Germanic Emperors from the days of Otto the Great to those of Lewis IV.
  
  St. Peter Damiani had, in the eleventh century, noted this when he wrote the lines—
  
  

  • ‘Roma vorax hominum domat ardua colla virorum,
  • Roma ferax febrium necis est uberrima frugum,
  • Romanae febres stabili sunt iure fideles.’
  What we popularly call ‘Roman’ or malarial fevers are fevers of an intermittent type, due, it is supposed, to haematozoa, spread by a mosquito; and for these intermittent fevers ancient and mediaeval medicine had no remedy. Had quinine been known, the history of those times might have been very different, and many a precious life—Dante’s, for instance—might have been prolonged. But cinchona, or, as it used to be called, Peruvian bark or Jesuits’ bark, was not introduced into Europe from South America till between 1632 and 1639. Dr. Norman Moore, to whom I owe this date, tells me that the maladies from which armies most usually suffer are dysentery and enteric fever: it may be chiefly from these that the German armies perished, but the prevalence of intermittent fevers would weaken the troops and predispose them to other diseases.

  [XI ]Note to p. 161
  
  Pope Gelasius I wrote to the Emperor Anastasius: ‘Duo sunt, Imperator Auguste, quibus principaliter mundus hic regitur, auctoritas sacrata pontificum et regalis potestas. In quibus tanto gravius est pondus sacerdotum quanto etiam pro ipsis regibus hominum in divino reddituri sunt examine rationem. Nosti enim, fili clementissime, quod licet praesideas humano generi dignitate, rerum tamen praesulibus divinarum devotus colla submittis, atque ab eis causas tuae salutis expetis, inque sumendis coelestibus sacramentis eisque (ut competit) disponendis, subdi te debere cognoscis religionis ordine potius quam praeesse, itaque inter haec ex illorum te pendere iudicio, non illos ad tuam velle redigi voluntatem.’—In Migne, vol. lix. ep. viii. p. 42. (Cf. Corpus Iuris Civilis, Nov. VI, principio.)
  
  These views of Pope Gelasius seem to have exerted much influence in the earlier Middle Ages. They are moderately expressed, and admit the rights of the Emperor in secular affairs, yet in principle they go far. When we reach Gregory VII’s time we find Alfanus, archbishop of Salerno, in a poem addressed ‘Ad Hildebrandum archidiaconum’ (Migne, vol. cxlvii), treating the spiritual power as the successor and the vindicator of the warlike might of Rome:—
  
  

  • ‘His (sc. artibus) et archiapostoli
  • Fervido gladio Petri
  • Frange robur et impetus
  • Illius (sc. saeva barbaries) vetus ut iugum
  • Usque sentiat ultimum
  • Quanta vis anathematis?
  • Quidquid et Marius prius
  • Quodque Iulius egerint
  • Maxima nece militum
  • Voce tu modica facis.
  • Roma quid Scipionibus
  • Caeterisque Quiritibus
  • Debuit mage quam tibi
  • Cuius est studiis suae
  • Nacta via potentiae?’
  ‘Saeva barbaries’ seems to mean the Germans.
  
  And in verses addressed to St. Peter he says:—
  
  
  • Iam cape Romanum consul Caesarque senatum
  • Ecce tibi cunctus servit sub sidere mundus.’
  But there were in the end of the eleventh century sound churchmen who (like St. Bernard afterwards) held views far more moderate, and desired to restrict the See of Rome to a purely spiritual jurisdiction. Gregorio di Catino (in Chron. Farfense, recently edited by Ugo Balzani) writes of the Pope, ‘Ipse pastor est animarum, ipse doctor fidei electorum, ipse caput omnium ecclesiarum, in his tamen rebus et causis non quae sunt ad seculum sed quae ad Deum, non enim claves terrae seu regni terrestris sed claves regni caelorum concessit illi omnium Pastor pastorum.’

  [XII ]Note to p. 166
  
  Hohenstaufen is a castle in Swabia (within what is now the kingdom of Würtemberg), about four miles from the Göppingen station of the railway from Stuttgart to Ulm. It stands, or rather stood, on the summit of a steep and lofty conical hill (visible from several points on the line of railway), commanding a boundless view over the great limestone plateau of the Rauhe Alp, the eastern declivities of the Schwartzwald, and the bare and tedious plains of western Bavaria. Of the castle itself, destroyed in the Peasants’ War, there remain only fragments of the wall-foundations: in a rude chapel lying on the hill slope below are some strange half-obliterated frescoes: over the arch of the door is inscribed ‘Hic transibat Caesar.’ Frederick Barbarossa had another famous palace at Kaiserslautern, a small town in the Palatinate, on the railway from Mannheim to Treves, lying in a wide valley at the western foot of the Hardt mountains. It was destroyed by the French, and a house of correction has been built upon its site; but in a brewery hard by there might be seen (in 1863) some of the huge low-browed arches of its lower story. A third castle where he sometimes dwelt, and in the great Knights’ Hall (Rittersaal) of which was held the famous Diet of 1179, was at Gelnhausen, south of Fulda. The ruins stand on an isle in the river Kinzig, and are very picturesque, showing remains of fine Romanesque work. The castle, begun in ad 1154 and completed in 1170, was occasionally inhabited by succeeding Emperors down to Sigismund. It suffered severely from the Swedes in the Thirty Years’ War.

  [XIII ]Note to p. 222
  
  Marsilius was born in or soon after ad 1270 of the burgher family of Raimondini or Mainardini in Padua. He was a man of many accomplishments—John Villani calls him ‘grande maestro in natura ed astrologia’—was in orders, though possibly he did not go so far as the diaconate, and at one time seems to have practised medicine. He was for a while with the Della Scala in Verona (where he may have met Dante Alighieri), taught in the University of Paris, whereof he was Rector in ad 1312, and immediately after Lewis IV had been excommunicated, departed suddenly thence, and with his friend John of Jandun presented the Defensor Pacis, just then composed by him with John’s help, to the Emperor. Lewis took them both into Italy with him, and when he left Rome preferred John to the see of Ferrara, which however the latter seems not to have lived to occupy, and Marsilius (who had been accused of wishing to be Pope) to the archbishopric of Milan. Marsilius never entered on that great office (perhaps fortunately for his consistency to his principles); and we lose sight of him after 1328, though he was still living in 1336. His ally, possibly his teacher, William of Ockham, seems not to have returned to England; he died at Munich and was buried in the (now destroyed) Franciscan church there in or soon after 1349 (Reizler, Literarische Widersacher der Päpste, p. 126). How much Central and Western Europe was in those days one intellectual community is well illustrated by the fact that the three chief champions of the German Lewis IV in his strife with the Pope were the Italian Marsilius, the Frenchman John of Jandun, and the Englishman William of Ockham.

  [XIV ]Note to p. 231
  
  It is a remarkable evidence of the decline of imperial power after the death of Frederick II, and of the impression which that decline, coupled with the failure of Rudolf, Adolf, and Albert to enter Italy, had made all over Europe, that not only the notion of transferring the crown of the Empire to the kings of France, but also plans for making France predominant in Italy and Rome, were seriously discussed at the beginning of the fourteenth century. One such plan may be found fully stated in the treatise De Recuperatione Terrae Sanctae of Peter Du Bois—a man full of bold schemes and novel ideas—who was a royal advocate living at Coutances in Normandy, and a warm partizan of Philip IV in his quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII. He proposes that the Pope should transfer all his temporal and feudal rights to the king of France and should himself come to live in France, the king of France becoming Senator of Rome. The Pope was to have a fixed pensio and the Emperor (Albert I) was to be appeased by having the imperial title made hereditary in his family, some compensation being given to the Germanic electors. France was at this time a kingdom practically stronger than the Empire; and after ad 1305 she could generally count on the Papacy: but within forty years the beginning of the great war with England disabled her for more than a century from actively prosecuting schemes in Italy or Germany.

  [XV ]Note to p. 267
  
  The mediaeval practice seems to have been that which still prevails in the Roman Catholic Church—to presume the doctrinal orthodoxy and external conformity of every citizen, whether lay or clerical, until the contrary be proved. Of course when heresy was rife it went hard with suspected men, unless they could either clear themselves or submit to recant. But it was unusual to require any one to pledge himself beforehand, as a qualification for an office, to certain doctrines. And thus, important as an Emperor’s orthodoxy was, he does not appear to have been subjected to any test (in the modern sense of the word), although the Pope pretended to the right of catechizing him in the faith and rejecting him if unsound. In the Ordo Romanus we find a long series of questions which the pontiff was to administer, but it does not appear, and is in the highest degree unlikely, that such a programme was ever carried out. At the German coronation, however (performed in earlier days at Aachen, afterwards at Frankfort), the custom was for the Emperor before he was anointed to declare his orthodoxy by an oath taken on the famous copy of the Gospels which was held to have been used by Charles the Great, and on a casket containing earth soaked with the blood of the martyr Stephen.
  
  At the coronation of an East Roman Emperor the Patriarch submitted a confession of orthodoxy which the Emperor subscribed.
  
  The charge of heresy was one of the weapons used with most effect against Frederick II (Lewis IV retorted it on Pope John XXII); and as the Popes might hold disobedience to themselves to be virtually heresy, it was a charge easily and often brought against their opponents.

  [XVI ]Note to p. 283
  
  There is a curious seal of the Emperor Otto IV (figured in J. M. Heineccius, De veteribus Germanorum atque aliarum nationum sigillis), on which the sun and moon are represented over the head of the Emperor. Heineccius says he cannot explain it, but it may possibly be taken as typifying the accord of the spiritual and temporal powers which were brought about at the accession of Otto, the Guelfic leader, and the favoured candidate of Pope Innocent III.
  
  The analogy between the lights of heaven and the potentates of earth, in which mediaeval writers rejoice, seems to have originated with Gregory VII. Ockham tries to avoid it by distinguishing between the substance and the accidents of the moon. A gloss upon a letter of Innocent III inserted in the Corpus Iuris Canonici (Decret. Greg I. p. 33) says, ‘Cum terra sit septies maior luna sol autem octies maior terra, restat ergo ut pontificatus dignitas quadragies septies sit maior regali dignitate.’
  
  This Sun and Moon argument continued to be so frequently used, and was apparently deemed so formidable, that the Parlement of Paris forbade it as late as ad 1626.—Friedberg, Die mittelalterlichen Lehren über das Verhältniss von Staat und Kirche.

  [XVII ]Note to p. 294
  
  Arnold was born about ad 1090 or perhaps a little later; he studied in the University of Paris and was associated with Abelard in the condemnation pronounced on the latter. Driven from France he lived for some time at Zürich, where his preaching made a deep impression, and thence made his way, apparently accompanied by some of his Alemannic followers, to Rome, where Pope Eugenius III permitted him to remain. He is described as not only a powerful and persuasive preacher but also a man of learning.
  
  He appears to have maintained that holy orders were not indelible, and to have denounced the rule of the Pope and cardinals in Rome; ‘praeterea non esse homines admittendos qui sedem imperii fontem libertatis Romam mundi dominam volebant subicere servituti’ (John of Salisbury). He and his followers mocked at the fable of Constantine’s Donation. See a letter in Wibaldi, Epistolae (No. 404) in Jaffé, Biblioth. I, quoted by Giesebrecht.
  
  The chief authorities for his Roman career are Otto of Freysing, i. 26 and ii. 20 sqq.; Godfrey of Viterbo, ll. 139 sqq.; and a poem, apparently by a contemporary hand, lately published (under the title Gesta di Federico imperatore in Italia) by the Italian Istituto Storico (the volume is edited by E. Monaci). This poem, after describing with sympathy the fortitude of Arnold at the moment of death, adds that Frederick was believed to have repented of the part he played, ‘set doluisse datur super hoc rex sero misertus’ (line 850). See also his contemporary John of Salisbury, Histor. Pontif. ch. 21 (Pertz, Script. xx. 537), and Gerhoh prior of Reichersberg, who, though a strong churchman, regrets Arnold’s execution, saying that he acted ‘zelo forte bono sed minore scientia,’ and that he wished the See of Rome was not answerable for his death. (Gerhoh is in Pertz, Libelli de lite Imperatorum et Pontificum, vol. iii.) A recent discussion of Arnold’s principles and conduct may be found in the interesting book of Ruggiero Bonghi, Arnaldo da Brescia, 1895. Brescia has erected a statue to her famous son, but Rome, though now beginning to be filled with such memorials, has not yet paid this honour to the boldest and most disinterested of mediaeval reformers; nor has Padua yet commemorated her Marsilius by any effigy, though she has called a street after him.

  [XVIII ]Note to p. 299
  
  Cola di Rienzo was the son of a man named Laurence, who kept a wineshop on the edge of the Ghetto near the Tiber. (Can Cola have had some Jewish blood? There are traces in his imagination and behaviour of something not quite Italian, not even Roman.) He gave himself out, in middle life, to be an illegitimate son of the Emperor Henry VII, and tells the story at length in a letter to the Emperor Charles IV, who was Henry’s grandson. The tale might possibly have been true, for Henry was in Rome in 1312, but is probably an invention, though Cola says the Romans believed it.
  
  The (apparently contemporary) Vita di Cola di Rienzo is one of the most striking among mediaeval biographies, and presents a picture so vivid that one cannot help thinking it life-like. There is much curious matter in his letters, which may be read in the Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, published by the Italian Istituto Storico (ed. A. Gabrielli, 1890).
  
  Cola called himself Augustus as well as tribune; ‘tribuno Augusto de Roma.’ He cited, on becoming Tribune, the cardinals to appear before the people of Rome and give an account of their conduct; and after them the Emperor. ‘Ancora citao lo Bavaro (Lewis the Fourth). Puoi citao li elettori de lo imperio in Alemagna, e disse “Voglio vedere che rascione haco nella elettione,” che trovasse scritto che passato alcuno tempo la elettione recadeva a li Romani.’—Vita, c. xxvi. His letter to the Commune of Viterbo begins: ‘Nicholaus severus et clemens, libertatis pacis iustitiaeque tribunus et sacrae Romanae reipublicae liberator, nobilibus et prudentibus viris potestati capitaneo bonis hominibus sindico consilio et communi civitatis Viterbii in Tuscia.’—Epist. II. p. 6, of Epistolario.

  [XIX ]Note to p. 307
  
  The only Teutonic Emperors buried in Italy besides Otto II were, so far as I know, Lewis the Second (whose tomb, with an inscription commemorating his exploits, is built into the wall of the north aisle of the famous church of St. Ambrose at Milan); Henry the Sixth and Frederick the Second, at Palermo; Conrad IV, at Messina; and Henry VII, whose sarcophagus may be seen in the Campo Santo of Pisa, a city always conspicuous for her zeal on the imperial side.
  
  Eight Emperors or German kings (Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry V, Philip, Rudolf I, Adolf, and Albert I) lie in the cathedral of Speyer; five (Charles IV, Wenzel, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II) at Prague; two (Charles I and Otto III) at Aachen; two (Henry II and Conrad III) at Bamberg; two (Lewis IV and Charles VII) at Munich; two (Arnulf and his son Lewis the Child) at Regensburg; Lewis the Pious at Metz, Lothar I at Prüm near Treves, Charles the Bald at St. Denis (in France), Charles the Fat at Reichenau on the Lake of Constance, Conrad I at Fulda, Henry I at Quedlinburg, Otto I at Magdeburg, Lothar II at Konigslutter near Brunswick, Otto IV at Brunswick, Rupert at Heidelberg, Sigismund at Nagy Várad (Gross Wardein) in Transylvania, Albert II at Stuhlweissenburg in Hungary, Charles V in the Escurial in Spain, Frederick III and most of his successors at Vienna. The bones of Frederick I were interred at Tyre. Of all the tombs the noblest is that of Maximilian I at Innsbruck.

  [XX ]Note to p. 312
  
  Thus in the noble church of San Lorenzo fuori le mura there are several Pointed windows, now bricked up; and similar ones may be seen in the church of Ara Coeli on the summit of the Capitol. So in the apse of St. John Lateran there are three or four windows of Gothic form: and in its cloister, as well as in that of St. Paul without the walls, a great deal of beautiful work in the so-called Lombard style. The elegant porch of the church of Sant’ Antonio Abate is Lombard. In the apse of the church of San Giovanni e Paolo on the Coelian hill there is an external arcade exactly like those of the Duomo at Pisa. Nor are these the only instances.
  
  The ruined chapel attached to the fortress of the Caetani family—the family to which Boniface the Eighth belonged, and which still holds a distinguished place among the Roman nobility—is a pretty little building, more like northern Gothic than anything within the walls of Rome. It stands upon the Appian Way, opposite the tomb of Caecilia Metella, which the Caetani used as a stronghold.

  [XXI ]Note to p. 314
  
  The finest of the similar Ravenna mosaics are rather older than these Roman ones: but some there, as well as a few others elsewhere in Italy (e.g. the beautiful ones at Torcello), date from the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. The magnificent mosaics of Monreale and Cefalú in Sicily belong to the twelfth century, and were probably executed by artists from Constantinople.
  
  These campaniles are generally supposed to date from the ninth and tenth centuries. Mr. J. H. Parker, however, a competent judge, told me that an examination of their mouldings convinced him that few or none, unless it be that of Santa Prassede, are older than the twelfth century.
  
  This of course applies only to the existing buildings. The type of tower may be, and indeed no doubt is, older.
  
  Somewhat similar towers may be observed in many parts of the Italian Alps, especially in the wonderful mountain land north of Venice, where such towers are of all dates from the eleventh or twelfth down to the nineteenth century, the ancient type having in these remote valleys been adhered to because the builder had no other models before him. In the valley of Cimolais (not very far from Longarone in Val d’Ampezzo) I have seen such a campanile in course of erection, precisely similar to others in the neighbouring villages some eight centuries old.
  
  The very curious round towers of Ravenna, some four or five of which are still standing, seem to have originally had similar windows, though these have been all, or nearly all, stopped up. The Irish round towers were probably copied from these Ravennate towers, or others of the same type. The Roman towers are all square.

  [XXII ]Note to p. 330
  
  The ceremonies of the coronation of an East Roman Emperor took by degrees an ecclesiastical and religious character not less marked than that which belonged to imperial coronations in the West. (Interesting details regarding them may be found in an article by W. Sickel in Byzantinische Zeitschrift, vol. vii. pp. 511-557; in another by Mr. Brightman in the Journal of Theological Studies for April, 1901.) The first coronation performed by the Patriarch of Constantinople was either that of Marcian (ad 450) or that of Leo I, ad 457 (after Anastasius it was the usual though not invariable practice); the first performed in a church (the usual place was S. Sophia) was that of Phocas in ad 602; the first in which the rite of anointing (customary in the West since the time of Pipin and that of Charles the Great) seems to have been used, was that of Basil I (ad 886) (Sickel, ut supra, p. 524). Brightman, however, puts it as far down as the coronation of (the Latin) Baldwin in 1204. Sometimes an Emperor crowned himself, sometimes when he took a colleague he crowned the person he had chosen. The practice of raising the newly-chosen Emperor on a buckler, which began with the inauguration of Julian in ad 361, and was evidently a Teutonic usage familiar to the barbarian troops who acclaimed Julian, continued in the Eastern Empire for some considerable time. The last recorded case seems to be that of Phocas; but it may well have lasted much longer. At his coronation the Eastern, like the Western, Emperor received the sacramental wine, like a priest, in the chalice, whereas laymen in the East communicated from a spoon containing both kinds (i.e. a morsel of bread dipped in wine) (intincta eucharistia). He also took an oath to defend the Church and solemnly professed his orthodoxy, subscribing a confession of faith, reciting the creed, and declaring his assent to the decrees of the seven oecumenical councils.
  
  Neither the diadem nor the assumption of the purple, which was the oldest sign of the imperial dignity, nor the action of the Patriarch, was essential to the authority of an Emperor. He was thus better off than his Western brother, who must receive the imperial crown in Rome and from the Roman bishop.

  [XXIII ]Note to p. 343
  
  ‘Isaachius a Deo constitutus Imperator, sacratissimus, excellentissimus, potentissimus, moderator Romanorum, Angelus totius orbis, heres coronae magni Constantini, dilecto fratri imperii sui, maximo principi Alemanniae.’ A remarkable speech of Frederick’s to the envoys of Isaac, who had addressed a letter to him as ‘Rex Alemaniae,’ is preserved by Ansbert (Historia de Expeditione Friderici Imperatoris):—‘Dominus Imperator divina se illustrante gratia ulterius dissimulare non valens temerarium fastum regis (sc. Graecorum) et usurpantem vocabulum falsi imperatoris Romanorum, haec inter caetera exorsus est:—“Omnibus qui sanae mentis sunt constat, quia unus est Monarchus Imperator Romanorum, sicut et unus est pater universitatis pontifex videlicet Romanus; ideoque cum ego Romani imperii sceptrum plusquam per annos XXX absque omnium regum vel principum contradictione tranquille tenuerim et in Romana urbe a summo pontifice imperiali benedictione unctus sim et sublimatus, quia denique Monarchiam praedecessores mei imperatores Romanorum plusquam per CCCC annos etiam gloriose transmiserint utpote a Constantinopolitana urbe ad pristinam sedem imperii, caput orbis Romam, acclamatione Romanorum et principum imperii, auctoritate quoque summi pontificis et S. catholicae ecclesiae translatam, propter tardum et infructuosum Constantinopolitani imperatoris auxilium contra tyrannos ecclesiae, mirandum est admodum cur frater meus dominus vester Constantinopolitanus imperator usurpet inefficax sibi idem vocabulum et glorietur stulte alieno sibi prorsus honore, cum liquido noverit me et nomine dici et re esse Fridericum Romanorum imperatorem semper Augustum.” ’
  
  Isaac was so far moved by Frederick’s indignation that in his next letter he addressed him as ‘generosissimum imperatorem Alemaniae,’ and in a third thus:—
  
  ‘Isaakius in Christo fidelis divinitus coronatus, sublimis, potens, excelsus, haeres coronae magni Constantini et Moderator Romeon Angelus nobilissimo Imperatori antiquae Romae, regi Alemaniae et dilecto fratri imperii sui, salutem,’ &c., &c. (Ansbert, ut supra).

  [XXIV ]Note to p. 410
  
  In an address by Napoleon to the Senate in 1804, bearing date 10th Frimaire (1st Dec.), are the words, ‘Mes descendans conserveront longtemps ce trône, le premier de l’univers.’ Answering a deputation from the department of the Lippe, Aug. 8th, 1811, ‘La Providence, qui a voulu que je rétablisse le trône de Charlemagne, vous a fait naturellement rentrer, avec la Hollande et les villes anséatiques, dans le sein de l’Empire.’—Oeuvres de Napoléon, tom. v. p. 521.
  
  ‘Pour le Pape, je suis Charlemagne, parce que, comme Charlemagne, je réunis la couronne de France à celle des Lombards, et que mon Empire confine avec l’Orient.’ (Quoted by Lanfrey, Vie de Napoléon, iii. 417.)
  
  ‘Votre Sainteté est souveraine de Rome, mais j’en suis l’Empereur.’—Letter of Napoleon to Pope Pius, Feb. 13th, 1806. Lanfrey.
  
  ‘Dites bien,’ says Napoleon to Cardinal Fesch, ‘que je suis Charlemagne, leur Empereur [of the Papal Court] que je dois être traité de même. Je fais connaître au Pape mes intentions en peu de mots; s’il n’y acquiesce pas, je le réduirai à la même condition qu’il était avant Charlemagne.’—Lanfrey, Vie de Napoléon, iii. 420.
  
  Napoleon said on one occasion, ‘Je n’ai pas succédé à Louis Quatorze, mais à Charlemagne.’—Bourrienne, Vie de Napoléon, vi. 256, who adds that in 1804, shortly before he was crowned, he had the imperial insignia of Charles brought from the old Frankish capital, and exhibited them in a jeweller’s shop in Paris, along with those which had just been made for his own coronation. But if there was not in this a trick of Napoleon’s, there must be a mistake of Bourrienne’s, for these insignia had been removed from Aachen by Austria in 1798. (Cf. Bock, Die Kleinodien des h. römischen Reiches, p. 4.) This was done in the same spirit which made him display the Bayeux embroidery, in order to incite his subjects to the conquest of England.

  [a ]Before this time, the Burgundians had been for a while upon the Middle Rhine. The Nibelungen-Lied places them at Worms.

  [a ]Waitz (Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte) says that the phrase ‘semper Augustus’ may be found in the times of the Carolingians, but in no official documents.

  [b ]There is some reason to think that towards the end of the Empire people had begun to fancy that ‘erwählter’ did not mean ‘elect,’ but ‘elective’ Cf. note^k, p. 414.

  [c ]These expressions seem to have been intended to distinguish the kingdom of the Eastern or Germanic Franks from that of the Western or Gallicized Franks (Francigenae), which having been for some time ‘regnum Francorum Occidentalium,’ grew at last to be simply ‘regnum Franciae,’ the East Frankish kingdom being no longer so called because swallowed up in the Empire.
  
  It is not very easy to say precisely when the name ‘Francia’ came to denote, to Europe generally, what we now call France. Bishop Leopold of Bamberg (ad 1353) complains that the French kings were then already called ‘reges Franciae’ instead of ‘reges Franciae Occidentalis.’ In the thirteenth century Snorri Sturluson speaks of Otto the Great as collecting an army from ‘Saxonland, Frankland, Friesland, and Vendland,’ apparently denoting by Frakland the old Frankish country (F. orientalis) (Heimskringla, Olafs Saga Tryggvasonar). In England the name had no doubt changed its meaning some time earlier.

  [d ]What is stated above can be taken as only generally and probably true: so great are the discrepancies among even the most careful writers on the subject, and so numerous the forgeries of a later age, which are to be found among the genuine documents of the early Empire. Goldast’s Collections, for instance, are full of forgeries and anachronisms. Detailed information may be found in Pfeffinger, Moser, and Pütter, and in the host of writers to whom they refer.

  [e ]We in England may be thought to have made some slight movement in the same direction, by calling the united great council of the Three Kingdoms the Imperial Parliament.

  [f ]In the gallery of the basilica in the ancient Frankish capital there may still be seen the marble throne on which the Emperors were crowned from the days of Lewis the Pious to those of Ferdinand the First. It was upon this chair that Otto III had found the body of Charles seated, when he opened his tomb in ad 1001. After Ferdinand I, the coronation as well as the election took place at Frankfort. An account of the ceremony may be found in Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung. Aachen, though it remained and indeed is still a German town, lay in too remote a corner of the country to be a convenient capital, and was moreover in dangerous proximity to the West Franks.

  [g ]Although to be sure the Burgundian dominions had all passed from the Emperor to France, the kingdom of Sardinia, and the Swiss Confederation, while Italy had practically been long since separated from the Empire.

  [h ]Nevertheless, Otto II was crowned Emperor, and reigned for some time along with his father, under the title of ‘Co-Imperator.’ So Lothar I was associated in the Empire with Lewis the Pious, as Lewis himself had been crowned in the lifetime of Charles. Many analogies to the practice of the Romano-Germanic Empire in this respect might be adduced from the history of the old Roman as well as of the Byzantine Empire.

  [i ]Maximilian had obtained this title, ‘Emperor Elect,’ from the Pope. Ferdinand took it as of right, and his successors followed the example. Frederick I appears to have, before his coronation, spoken of himself as ‘Imperator Electus.’

  [a ]See note ^d, p. 286.

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  13: Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome by Titus Livius, in 6 vols. [10 AD]

  Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome by Titus Livius. Translated from the Original with Notes and Illustrations by George Baker, A.M.. First American, from the Last London Edition, in Six Volumes (New York: Peter A. Mesier et al., 1823).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/170 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  14: Herodotus, The History [431 BC]

  Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, 4 vols. trans. George Rawlinson (New York: Tandy-Thomas Co., 1909).

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/1899 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  15: Thucydides, The English Works, vol. VIII (The Peloponnesian War Part I) [1839]

  Thucydides, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury; Now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, Bart., (London: Bohn, 1839-45). 11 vols. Vol. 8.

  Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/771 on 2011-04-18

  The text is in the public domain.

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  ADVERTISEMENT.

  The merit of Hobbes’ translation of Thucydides lies principally in the simplicity and force of the language: bearing in that respect some affinity to the original. Viewed merely as a translation, it will be found to contain, owing partly to the corrupt state of the Greek text of his day, partly to his habitual disregard of minute details so that accuracy were attained in essentials, manifold errors and omissions. As these defects disfigure the narrative, and sometimes perplex the reader, it has been considered worth while to attempt, by short notes, something towards their removal: without however affecting to offer a translation either critically correct or even free from many errors. In the performance of this task the interpretations of Goeller, Arnold, Thirlwall and others, have been followed wheresoever they were available: where such help failed, the editor had to rely on his own imperfect resources.

  To render the work more useful to the English reader and those not deeply versed in Grecian history, some historical notes have been added, drawn for the most part in substance from Mueller’s history of the Dorians, Hermann’s Grecian Antiquities, Thirlwall’s history of Greece, Niebuhr’s history of Rome, &c. Wheresoever Aristotle is cited, his Politics will be understood to be the work referred to.

  Several phrases having been marked by Hobbes himself with square brackets, to designate them as interpolations, the same marks have been added for the same purpose to other words and passages.

  Those corrections of the Greek text by Bekker and others only have been noticed, which serve to explain the cause of Hobbes’ departure in those instances from the right interpretation.

  It has been considered useless to reprint the maps belonging to the original edition, and referred to in the Epistle to the Reader. These were unavoidably rude and imperfect, and have been long superseded both by the more general maps to be found in any modern Atlas, and the numerous maps and plans which have been published of late years for the particular illustration of this history. It has however been thought useful to append Goeller’s map of the siege of Syracuse, which is accessible only in his edition of the text.

  E. G.

  TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR WILLIAM CAVENDISH, knight of the bath, baron of hardwick, and earl of devonshire.

  Right Honourable, I take confidence from your Lordship’s goodness in the very entrance of this Epistle, to profess, with simplicity and according to the faith I owe my master now in heaven, that it is not unto yourself, but to your Lordship’s father that I dedicate this my labour, such as it is. For neither am I at liberty to make choice of one to whom I may present it as a voluntary oblation; being bound in duty to bring it in as an account to him, by whose indulgence I had both the time and ammunition to perform it. Nor if such obligation were removed, know I any to whom I ought to dedicate it rather. For by the experience of many years I had the honour to serve him, I know this: there was not any, who more really, and less for glory’s sake favoured those that studied the liberal arts liberally, than my Lord your father did; nor in whose house a man should less need the university than in his. For his own study, it was bestowed, for the most part, in that kind of learning which best deserveth the pains and hours of great persons, history and civil knowledge: and directed not to the ostentation of his reading, but to the government of his life and the public good. For he read, so that the learning he took in by study, by judgment he digested, and converted into wisdom and ability to benefit his country: to which also he applied himself with zeal, but such as took no fire either from faction or ambition. And as he was a most able man, for soundness of advice and clear expression of himself, in matters of difficulty and consequence, both in public and private: so also was he one whom no man was able either to draw or justle out of the straight path of justice. Of which virtue, I know not whether he deserved more by his severity in imposing it (as he did to his last breath) on himself, or by his magnanimity in not exacting it to himself from others. No man better discerned of men: and therefore was he constant in his friendships, because he regarded not the fortune nor adherence, but the men; with whom also he conversed with an openness of heart that had no other guard than his own integrity and that nil conscire. To his equals he carried himself equally, and to his inferiors familiarly; but maintaining his respect fully, and only with the native splendour of his worth. In sum, he was one in whom might plainly be perceived, that honour and honesty are but the same thing in the different degrees of persons. To him therefore, and to the memory of his worth, be consecrated this, though unworthy, offering.

  And now, imitating in this civil worship the religious worship of the gentiles; who, when they dedicated any thing to their gods, brought and presented the same to their images: I bring and present this gift of mine, the history of thucydides, translated into English with much more diligence than elegance, to your Lordship; who are the image of your father, (for never was a man more exactly copied out than he in you), and who have in you the seeds of his virtues already springing up: humbly intreating your Lordship to esteem it amongst the goods that descend upon you, and in your due time to read it. I could recommend the author unto you, not impertinently, for that he had in his veins the blood of kings; but I choose rather to recommend him for his writings, as having in them profitable instruction for noblemen, and such as may come to have the managing of great and weighty actions. For I may confidently say, that notwithstanding the excellent both examples and precepts of heroic virtue you have at home, this book will confer not a little to your institution; especially when you come to the years to frame your life by your own observation. For in history, actions of honour and dishonour do appear plainly and distinctly, which are which; but in the present age they are so disguised, that few there be, and those very careful, that be not grossly mistaken in them. But this, I doubt not, is superfluously spoken by me to your Lordship. Therefore I end with this prayer: that it will please God to give you virtues suitable to the fair dwelling he hath prepared for them, and the happiness that such virtues lead unto both in and after this world.

  Your Lordship’s most humble servant,

  Tho: Hobbes.

  TO THE READERS.

  Though this translation have already past the censure of some, whose judgments I very much esteem: yet because there is something, I know not what, in the censure of a multitude, more terrible than any single judgment, how severe or exact soever, I have thought it discretion in all men, that have to do with so many, and to me, in my want of perfection, necessary, to bespeak your candour. Which that I may upon the better reason hope for, I am willing to acquaint you briefly, upon what grounds I undertook this work at first; and have since, by publishing it, put myself upon the hazard of your censure, with so small hope of glory as from a thing of this nature can be expected. For I know, that mere translations have in them this property: that they may much disgrace, if not well done; but if well, not much commend the doer.

  It hath been noted by divers, that Homer in poesy, Aristotle in philosophy, Demosthenes in eloquence, and others of the ancients in other knowledge, do still maintain their primacy: none of them exceeded, some not approached, by any in these later ages. And in the number of these is justly ranked also our Thucydides; a workman no less perfect in his work, than any of the former; and in whom (I believe with many others) the faculty of writing history is at the highest. For the principal and proper work of history being to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently towards the future: there is not extant any other (merely human) that doth more naturally and fully perform it, than this of my author. It is true, that there be many excellent and profitable histories written since: and in some of them there be inserted very wise discourses, both of manners and policy. But being discourses inserted, and not of the contexture of the narration, they indeed commend the knowledge of the writer, but not the history itself: the nature whereof is merely narrative. In others, there be subtle conjectures at the secret aims and inward cogitations of such as fall under their pen; which is also none of the least virtues in a history, where conjecture is thoroughly grounded, not forced to serve the purpose of the writer in adorning his style, or manifesting his subtlety in conjecturing. But these conjectures cannot often be certain, unless withal so evident, that the narration itself may be sufficient to suggest the same also to the reader. But Thucydides is one, who, though he never digress to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text, nor enter into men’s hearts further than the acts themselves evidently guide him: is yet accounted the most politic historiographer that ever writ. The reason whereof I take to be this. He filleth his narrations with that choice of matter, and ordereth them with that judgment, and with such perspicuity and efficacy expresseth himself, that, as Plutarch saith, he maketh his auditor a spectator. For he setteth his reader in the assemblies of the people and in the senate, at their debating; in the streets, at their seditions; and in the field, at their battles. So that look how much a man of understanding might have added to his experience, if he had then lived a beholder of their proceedings, and familiar with the men and business of the time: so much almost may he profit now, by attentive reading of the same here written. He may from the narrations draw out lessons to himself, and of himself be able to trace the drifts and counsels of the actors to their seat.

  These virtues of my author did so take my affection, that they begat in me a desire to communicate him further: which was the first occasion that moved me to translate him. For it is an error we easily fall into, to believe that whatsoever pleaseth us, will be in like manner and degree acceptable to all: and to esteem of one another’s judgment, as we agree in the liking or dislike of the same things. And in this error peradventure was I, when I thought, that as many of the more judicious as I should communicate him to, would affect him as much as I myself did. I considered also, that he was exceedingly esteemed of the Italians and French in their own tongues: notwithstanding that he be not very much beholden for it to his interpreters. Of whom (to speak no more than becomes a candidate of your good opinion in the same kind) I may say this: that whereas the author himself so carrieth with him his own light throughout, that the reader may continually see his way before him, and by that which goeth before expect what is to follow; I found it not so in them. The cause whereof, and their excuse, may be this: they followed the Latin of Laurentius Valla, which was not without some errors; and he a Greek copy not so correct as now is extant. Out of French he was done into English (for I need not dissemble to have seen him in English) in the time of King Edward the Sixth: but so, as by multiplication of error he became at length traduced, rather than translated into our language. Hereupon I resolved to take him immediately from the Greek, according to the edition of Æmilius Porta: not refusing or neglecting any version, comment, or other help I could come by. Knowing that when with diligence and leisure I should have done it, though some error might remain, yet they would be errors but of one descent; of which nevertheless I can discover none, and hope they be not many. After I had finished it, it lay long by me: and other reasons taking plaee, my desire to communicate it ceased.

  For I saw that, for the greatest part, men came to the reading of history with an affection much like that of the people in Rome: who came to the spectacle of the gladiators with more delight to behold their blood, than their skill in fencing. For they be far more in number, that love to read of great armies, bloody battles, and many thousands slain at once, than that mind the art by which the affairs both of armies and cities be conducted to their ends. I observed likewise, that there were not many whose ears were well accustomed to the names of the places they shall meet with in this history; without the knowledge whereof it can neither patiently be read over, perfectly understood, nor easily remembered: especially being many, as here it falleth out. Because in that age almost every city both in Greece and Sicily, the two main scenes of this war, was a distinct commonwealth by itself, and a party in the quarrel.

  Nevertheless I have thought since, that the former of these considerations ought not to be of any weight at all, to him that can content himself with the few and better sort of readers: who, as they only judge, so is their approbation only considerable. And for the difficulty arising from the ignorance of places, I thought it not so insuperable, but that with convenient pictures of the countries it might be removed. To which purpose, I saw there would be necessary especially two: a general map of Greece, and a general map of Sicily. The latter of these I found already extant, exactly done by Philip Cluverius; which I have caused to be cut, and you have it at the beginning of the sixth book. But for maps of Greece, sufficient for this purpose, I could light on none. For neither are the tables of Ptolomy, and descriptions of those that follow him, accommodate to the time of Thucydides; and therefore few of the places by him mentioned, therein described: nor are those that be, agreeing always with the truth of history. Wherefore I was constrained to draw one as well as I could myself. Which to do, I was to rely for the main figure of the country on the modern description now in reputation: and in that, to set down those places especially (as many as the volume was capable of) which occur in the reading of this author, and to assign them that situation, which, by travel in Strabo, Pausanias, Herodotus, and some other good authors, I saw belonged unto them. And to shew you that I have not played the mountebank in it, putting down exactly some few of the principal, and the rest at adventure, without care and without reason, I have joined with the map an index, that pointeth to the authors which will justify me where I differ from others. With these maps, and those few brief notes in the margin upon such passages as I thought most required them, I supposed the history might be read with very much benefit by all men of good judgment and education, (for whom also it was intended from the beginning by Thucydides), and have therefore at length made my labour public, not without hope to have it accepted. Which if I obtain, though no otherwise than in virtue of the author’s excellent matter, it is sufficient.

  OF THE LIFE AND HISTORY of THUCYDIDES.

  We read of divers men that bear the name of Thucydides. There is Thucydides a Pharsalian, mentioned in the eighth book of this history; who was public host of the Athenians in Pharsalus, and chancing to be at Athens at the time that the government of the four hundred began to go down, by his interposition and persuasion kept asunder the factions then arming themselves, that they fought not in the city to the ruin of the commonwealth. There is Thucydides the son of Milesias, an Athenian, of the town of Alope, of whom Plutarch speaketh in the life of Pericles; and the same, in all probability, that in the first book of this history is said to have had the charge of forty galleys sent against Samos, about twenty–four years before the beginning of this war. Another Thucydides the son of Ariston, an Athenian also, of the town of Acherdus, was a poet; though of his verses there be nothing extant. But Thucydides the writer of this history, an Athenian, of the town of Halimus, was the son of Olorus (or Orolus) and Hegesypele. His father’s name is commonly written Olorus, though in the inscription on his tomb it was Orolus. Howsoever it be written, it is the same that was borne by divers of the kings of Thrace; and imposed on him with respect unto his descent from them. So that though our author (as Cicero saith of him, lib. ii. De Oratore,) had never written an history, yet had not his name not been extant, in regard of his honour and nobility. And not only Plutarch, in the life of Cimon, but also almost all others that have touched this point, affirm directly that he was descended from the Thracian kings: adducing this for proof, that he was of the house of Miltiades, that famous general of the Athenians against the Persians at Marathon; which they also prove by this, that his tomb was a long time extant amongst the monuments of that family. For near unto the gates of Athens, called Melitides, there was a place named Coela; and in it the monuments called Cimoniana, belonging to the family of Miltiades, in which none but such as were of that family might be buried. And amongst those was the monument of Thucydides; with this inscription, Thucydides Oroli Halimusius. Now Miltiades is confessed by all, to have descended from Olorus king of Thrace; whose daughter another Miltiades, grandfather to this, married and had children by. And Miltiades, that won the memorable victory at Marathon, was heir to goodly possessions and cities in the Chersonnesus of Thrace; over which also he reigned. In Thrace lay also the possessions of Thucydides, and his wealthy mines of gold: as he himself professeth in his fourth book. And although those riches might come to him by a wife (as is also by some affirmed) which he married in Scapte–Hyle, a city of Thrace; yet even by that marriage it appeareth, that his affairs had a relation to that country, and that his nobility was not there unknown. But in what degree of kindred Miltiades and he approached each other, is not anywhere made manifest. Some also have conjectured that he was of the house of the Peisistratides: the ground of whose conjecture hath been only this, that he maketh honourable mention of the government of Peisistratus and his sons, and extenuateth the glory of Harmodius and Aristogeiton; proving that the freeing of the state of Athens from the tyranny of the Peisistratides was falsely ascribed to their fact, (which proceeded from private revenge in a quarrel of love), by which the tyranny ceased not, but grew heavier to the state, till it was at last put down by the Lacedæmonians. But this opinion, as it is not so well–grounded, so neither is it so well received as the former.

  Agreeable to his nobility, was his institution in the study of eloquence and philosophy. For in philosophy, he was the scholar (as also was Pericles and Socrates) of Anaxagoras; whose opinions, being of a strain above the apprehension of the vulgar, procured him the estimation of an atheist: which name they bestowed upon all men that thought not as they did of their ridiculous religion, and in the end cost him his life. And Socrates after him for the like causes underwent the like fortune. It is not therefore much to be regarded, if this other disciple of his were by some reputed an atheist too. For though he were none, yet it is not improbable, but by the light of natural reason he might see enough in the religion of these heathen, to make him think it vain and superstitious; which was enough to make him an atheist in the opinion of the people. In some places of his history he noteth the equivocation of the oracles; and yet he confirmeth an assertion of his own, touching the time this war lasted, by the oracle’s prediction. He taxeth Nicias for being too punctual in the observation of the ceremonies of their religion, when he overthrew himself and his army, and indeed the whole dominion and liberty of his country, by it. Yet he commendeth him in another place for his worshipping of the gods1 , and saith in that respect, he least of all men deserved to come to so great a degree of calamity as he did. So that in his writings our author appeareth to be, on the one side not superstitious, on the other side not an atheist.

  In rhetoric, he was the disciple of Antiphon; one (by his description in the eighth book of this history) for power of speech almost a miracle, and feared by the people for his eloquence. Insomuch as in his latter days he lived retired, but so as he gave counsel to, and writ orations for other men that resorted to him to that purpose. It was he that contrived the deposing of the people, and the setting up of the government of the four hundred. For which also he was put to death, when the people again recovered their authority, notwithstanding that he pleaded his own cause the best of any man to that day.

  It need not be doubted, but from such a master Thucydides was sufficiently qualified to have become a great demagogue, and of great authority with the people. But it seemeth he had no desire at all to meddle in the government: because in those days it was impossible for any man to give good and profitable counsel for the commonwealth, and not incur the displeasure of the people. For their opinion was such of their own power, and of the facility of achieving whatsoever action they undertook, that such men only swayed the assemblies, and were esteemed wise and good commonwealth’s men, as did put them upon the most dangerous and desperate enterprizes. Whereas he that gave them temperate and discreet advice, was thought a coward, or not to understand, or else to malign their power. And no marvel: for much prosperity (to which they had now for many years been accustomed) maketh men in love with themselves; and it is hard for any man to love that counsel which maketh him love himself the less. And it holdeth much more in a multitude, than in one man. For a man that reasoneth with himself, will not be ashamed to admit of timorous suggestions in his business, that he may the stronglier provide; but in public deliberations before a multitude, fear (which for the most part adviseth well, though it execute not so) seldom or never sheweth itself or is admitted. By this means it came to pass amongst the Athenians, who thought they were able to do anything, that wicked men and flatterers drave them headlong into those actions that were to ruin them; and the good men either durst not oppose, or if they did, undid themselves. Thucydides therefore, that he might not be either of them that committed or of them that suffered the evil, forbore to come into the assemblies; and propounded to himself a private life, as far as the eminency of so wealthy a person, and the writing of the history he had undertaken, would permit.

  For his opinion touching the government of the state, it is manifest that he least of all liked the democracy. And upon divers occasions he noteth the emulation and contention of the demagogues for reputation and glory of wit; with their crossing of each other’s counsels, to the damage of the public; the inconsistency of resolutions, caused by the diversity of ends and power of rhetoric in the orators; and the desperate actions undertaken upon the flattering advice of such as desired to attain, or to hold what they had attained, of authority and sway amongst the common people. Nor doth it appear that he magnifieth anywhere the authority of the few: amongst whom, he saith, every one desireth to be the chief; and they that are undervalued, bear it with less patience than in a democracy; whereupon sedition followeth, and dissolution of the government. He praiseth the government of Athens, when it was mixed of the few and the many; but more he commendeth it, both when Peisistratus reigned, (saving that it was an usurped power), and when in the beginning of this war it was democratical in name, but in effect monarchical under Pericles. So that it seemeth, that as he was of regal descent, so he best approved of the regal government. It is therefore no marvel, if he meddled as little as he could in the business of the commonwealth; but gave himself rather to the observation and recording of what was done by those that had the managing thereof. Which also he was no less prompt, diligent, and faithful by the disposition of his mind, than by his fortune, dignity, and wisdom able, to accomplish. How he was disposed to a work of this nature, may be understood by this: that when being a young man he heard Herodotus the historiographer reciting his history in public, (for such was the fashion both of that, and many ages after), he felt so great a sting of emulation, that it drew tears from him: insomuch as Herodotus himself took notice how violently his mind was set on letters, and told his father Olorus1 . When the Peloponnesian war began to break out, he conjectured truly that it would prove an argument worthy of his labour: and no sooner it began, than he began his history; pursuing the same not in that perfect manner in which we see it now, but by way of commentary or plain register of the actions and passages thereof, as from time to time they fell out and came to his knowledge. But such a commentary it was, as might perhaps deserve to be preferred before a history written by another. For it is very probable that the eighth book is left the same as it was when he first writ it: neither beautified with orations, nor so well cemented at the transitions, as the former seven books are1 . And though he began to write as soon as ever the war was on foot; yet began he not to perfect and polish his history, till after he was banished.

  For notwithstanding his retired life upon the coast of Thrace, where his own possessions lay, he could not avoid a service to the state which proved to him afterwards very unfortunate. For whilst he resided in the isle Thasos, it fell out that Brasidas the Lacedæmonian besieged Amphipolis; a city belonging to the Athenians, on the confines of Thrace and Macedonia, distant from Thasos about half a day’s sail. To relieve which, the captain thereof for the Athenians sent to Thucydides, to levy a power and make haste unto him: for Thucydides was one of the Strategi, that is, had authority to raise forces in those parts for the service of the commonwealth2 . And he did accordingly; but he came thither one night too late, and found the city already yielded up. And for this he was afterwards banished; as if he had let slip his time through negligence, or purposely put it off upon fear of the enemy. Nevertheless he put himself into the city of Eion, and preserved it to the Athenians with the repulse of Brasidas; which came down from Amphipolis the next morning, and assaulted it. The author of his banishment is supposed to have been Cleon; a most violent sycophant in those times, and thereby also a most acceptable speaker amongst the people. For where affairs succeed amiss, though there want neither providence nor courage in the conduction; yet with those that judge only upon events, the way to calumny is always open, and envy, in the likeness of zeal to the public good, easily findeth credit for an accusation.

  After his banishment he lived in Scapte–Hyle, a city of Thrace before mentioned, as Plutarch writeth; but yet so, as he went abroad, and was present at the actions of the rest of the war; as appeareth by his own words in his fifth book, where he saith, that he was present at the actions of both parts, and no less at those of the Peloponnesians, by reason of his exile, than those of the Athenians. During this time also he perfected his history, so far as is now to be seen; nor doth it appear that after his exile he ever again enjoyed his country. It is not clear in any author, where, or when, or in what year of his own age he died. Most agree that he died in banishment: yet there be that have written, that after the defeat in Sicily the Athenians decreed a general revocation of all banished persons, except those of the family of Peisistratus; and that he then returned, and was afterwards put to death at Athens. But this is very unlikely to be true, unless by after the defeat in Sicily, be meant so long after, that it was also after the end of the Peloponnesian war; because Thucydides himself maketh no mention of such return, though he outlived the whole war, as is manifest by his words in the fifth book. For he saith he lived in banishment twenty years after his charge at Amphipolis; which happened in the eighth year of this war: which, in the whole, lasted but twenty–seven years complete. And in another place he maketh mention of the razing of the long walls between Peiræus and the city; which was the last stroke of this war. They that say he died at Athens, take their conjecture from his monument which was there. But this is not a sufficient argument; for he might be buried there secretly, (as some have written he was), though he died abroad: or his monument might be there, and (as others have affirmed) he not buried in it. In this variety of conjecture, there is nothing more probable than that which is written by Pausanias, where he describeth the monuments of the Athenian city; and saith thus: “The worthy act of Œnobius in the behalf of Thucydides, is not without honour”: meaning that he had a statue. “For Œnobius obtained to have a decree passed for his return; who returning was slain by treachery; and his sepulchre is near the gates called Melitides.” He died, as saith Marcellinus, after the seven and fiftieth year of his age. And if it be true that is written by A. Gellius, of the ages of Hellanicus, Herodotus, and Thucydides, then died he not before the sixty–eighth year. For if he were forty when the war began, and lived (as he did certainly) to see it ended, he might be more when he died, but not less than sixty–eight years of age. What children he left, is not manifest. Plato in Menone, maketh mention of Milesias and Stephanus, sons of a Thucydides of a very noble family; but it is clear they were of Thucydides the rival of Pericles, both by the name Milesias, and because this Thucydides also was of the family of Miltiades, as Plutarch testifieth in the life of Cimon. That he had a son, is affirmed by Marcellinus out of the authority of Polemon; but of his name there is no mention, save that a learned man readeth there in the place of θεο .... (which is in the imperfect copy), Timotheus. Thus much of the person of Thucydides.

  Now for his writings, two things are to be considered in them: truth and elocution. For in truth consisteth the soul, and in elocution the body of history. The latter without the former, is but a picture of history; and the former without the latter, unapt to instruct. But let us see how our author hath acquitted himself in both. For the faith of this history, I shall have the less to say: in respect that no man hath ever yet called it into question. Nor indeed could any man justly doubt of the truth of that writer, in whom they had nothing at all to suspect of those things that could have caused him either voluntarily to lie, or ignorantly to deliver an untruth. He overtasked not himself by undertaking an history of things done long before his time, and of which he was not able to inform himself. He was a man that had as much means, in regard both of his dignity and wealth, to find the truth of what he relateth, as was needful for a man to have. He used as much diligence in search of the truth, (noting every thing whilst it was fresh in memory, and laying out his wealth upon intelligence), as was possible for a man to use. He affected least of any man the acclamations of popular auditories, and wrote not his history to win present applause, as was the use of that age: but for a monument to instruct the ages to come; which he professeth himself, and entitleth his book ΚΤΗΜΑ ΕΣ ΑΕΙ, a possession for everlasting. He was far from the necessity of servile writers, either to fear or flatter. And whereas he may peradventure be thought to have been malevolent towards his country, because they deserved to have him so; yet hath he not written any thing that discovereth such passion. Nor is there any thing written of them that tendeth to their dishonour as Athenians, but only as people; and that by the necessity of the narration, not by any sought digression. So that no word of his, but their own actions do sometimes reproach them. In sum, if the truth of a history did ever appear by the manner of relating, it doth so in this history: so coherent, perspicuous and persuasive is the whole narration, and every part thereof.

  In the elocution also, two things are considerable: disposition or method, and style. Of the disposition here used by Thucydides, it will be sufficient in this place briefly to observe only this: that in his first book, first he hath, by way of exordium, derived the state of Greece from the cradle to the vigorous stature it then was at when he began to write: and next, declared the causes, both real and pretended, of the war he was to write of. In the rest, in which he handleth the war itself, he followeth distinctly and purely the order of time throughout; relating what came to pass from year to year, and subdividing each year into a summer and winter. The grounds and motives of every action he setteth down before the action itself, either narratively, or else contriveth them into the form of deliberative orations in the persons of such as from time to time bare sway in the commonwealth. After the actions, when there is just occasion, he giveth his judgment of them; shewing by what means the success came either to be furthered or hindered. Digressions for instruction’s cause, and other such open conveyances of precepts, (which is the philosopher’s part), he never useth; as having so clearly set before men’s eyes the ways and events of good and evil counsels, that the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.

  For his style, I refer it to the judgment of divers ancient and competent judges. Plutarch in his book, De gloria Atheniensium, saith of him thus: “Thucydides aimeth always at this; to make his auditor a spectator, and to cast his reader into the same passions that they were in that were beholders. The manner how Demosthenes arranged the Athenians on the rugged shore before Pylus; how Brasidas urged the steersman to run his galley aground; how he went to the ladder or place in the galley for descent; how he was hurt, and swooned, and fell down on the ledges of the galley; how the Spartans fought after the manner of a land–fight upon the sea, and the Athenians of a sea–fight upon land: again, in the Sicilian war, how a battle was fought by sea and land with equal fortune: these things, I say, are so described and so evidently set before our eyes, that the mind of the reader is no less affected therewith than if he had been present in the actions.” There is for his perspicuity. Cicero in his book entitled Orator, speaking of the affection of divers Greek rhetoricians, saith thus: “And therefore Herodotus and Thucydides are the more admirable. For though they lived in the same age with those I have before named,” (meaning Thrasymachus, Gorgias, and Theodorus), “yet were they far from this kind of delicacy, or rather indeed foolery. For the one without rub, gently glideth like a still river; and the other” (meaning Thucydides) “runs stronglier, and in matter of war, as it were, bloweth a trumpet of war. And in these two (as saith Theophrastus) history hath roused herself, and adventured to speak, but more copiously, and with more ornament than in those that were before them.” This commends the gravity and the dignity of his language. Again in his second book, De Oratore, thus: “Thucydides, in the art of speaking, hath in my opinion far exceeded them all. For he is so full of matter, that the number of his sentences doth almost reach to the number of his words; and in his words he is so apt and so close, that it is hard to say whether his words do more illustrate his sentences, or his sentences his words.” There is for the pithiness and strength of his style. Lastly, for the purity and propriety, I cite Dionysius Halicarnassius: whose testimony is the stronger in this point, because he was a Greek rhetorician for his faculty, and for his affection, one that would no further commend him than of necessity he must. His words are these: “There is one virtue in eloquenee, the chiefest of all the rest, and without which there is no other goodness in speech. What is that? That the language be pure, and retain the propriety of the Greek tongue. This they both observe diligently. For Herodotus is the best rule of the Ionic, and Thucydides of the Attic dialect.” These testimonies are not needful to him that hath read the history itself; nor at all, but that this same Dionysius hath taken so much pains, and applied so much of his faculty in rhetoric, to the extenuating of the worth thereof. Moreover, I have thought it necessary to take out the principal objections he maketh against him; and without many words of mine own to leave them to the consideration of the reader. And first, Dionysius saith thus: “The principal and most necessary office of any man that intendeth to write a history, is to choose a noble argument, and grateful to such as shall read it. And this Herodotus, in my opinion, hath done better than Thucydides. For Herodotus hath written the joint history both of the Greeks and barbarians, to save from oblivion, &c. But Thucydides writeth one only war, and that neither honourable nor fortunate; which principally were to be wished never to have been; and next, never to have been remembered nor known to posterity. And that he took an evil argument in hand, he maketh it manifest in his proeme, saying: that many cities were in that war made desolate and utterly destroyed,partly by barbarians, partly by the Greeks themselves: so many banishments, and so much slaughter of men, as never was the like before, &c.: so that the hearers will abhor it at the first propounding. Now by how much it is better to write of the wonderful acts both of the barbarians and Grecians, than of the pitiful and horrible calamities of the Grecians; so much wiser is Herodotus in the choice of his argument than Thucydides.”

  Now let any man consider whether it be not more reasonable to say: That the principal and most necessary office of him that will write a history, is to take such an argument as is both within his power well to handle, and profitable to posterity that shall read it, which Thucydides, in the opinion of all men, hath done better than Herodotus: for Herodotus undertook to write of those things, of which it was impossible for him to know the truth; and which delight more the ear with fabulous narrations, than satisfy the mind with truth: but Thucydides writeth one war; which, how it was carried from the beginning to the end, he was able certainly to inform himself: and by propounding in his proeme the miseries that happened in the same, he sheweth that it was a great war, and worthy to be known; and not to be concealed from posterity, for the calamities that then fell upon the Grecians; but the rather to be truly delivered unto them, for that men profit more by looking on adverse events, than on prosperity: therefore by how much men’s miseries do better instruct, than their good success; by so much was Thucydides more happy in taking his argument, than Herodotus was wise in choosing his.

  Dionysius again saith thus: “The next office of him that will write a history, is to know where to begin, and where to end. And in this point Herodotus seemeth to be far more discreet than Thucydides. For in the first place he layeth down the cause for which the barbarians began to injure the Grecians; and going on, maketh an end at the punishment and the revenge taken on the barbarians. But Thucydides begins at the good estate of the Grecians; which, being a Grecian and an Athenian, he ought not to have done: nor ought he, being of that dignity amongst the Athenians, so evidently to have laid the fault of the war upon his own city, when there were other occasions enough to which he might have imputed it. Nor ought he to have begun with the business of the Corcyræans, but at the more noble acts of his country, which they did immediately after the Persian war: which afterward in convenient place he mentioneth, but it is but cursorily, and not as he ought. And when he had declared those with much affection, as a lover of his country, then he should have brought in, how that the Lacedæmonians, through envy and fear, but pretending other causes, began the war: and so have descended to the Corcyræan business, and the decree against the Megareans, or whatsoever else he had to put in. Then in the ending of his history, there be many errors committed. For though he profess he was present in the whole war, and that he would write it all: yet he ends with the naval battle at Cynos–sema, which was fought in the twenty–first year of the war. Whereas it had been better to have gone through with it, and ended his history with that admirable and grateful return of the banished Athenians from Phile; at which time the city recovered her liberty.”

  To this I say, that it was the duty of him that had undertaken to write the history of the Peloponnesian war, to begin his narration no further off than at the causes of the same, whether the Grecians were then in good or in evil estate. And if the injury, upon which the war arose, proceeded from the Athenians; then the writer, though an Athenian and honoured in his country, ought to declare the same; and not to seek nor take, though at hand, any other occasion to transfer the fault. And that the acts done before the time comprehended in the war he writ of, ought to have been touched but cursorily, and no more than may serve for the enlightening of the history to follow, how noble soever those acts have been. Which when he had thus touched, without affection to either side, and not as a lover of his country but of truth; then to have proceeded to the rest with the like indifferency. And to have made an end of writing, where the war ended, which he undertook to write; not producing his history beyond that period, though that which followed were never so admirable and acceptable. All this Thucydides hath observed.

  These two criminations I have therefore set down at large, translated almost verbatim, that the judgment of Dionysius Halicarnassius may the better appear concerning the main and principal virtues of a history. I think there was never written so much absurdity in so few lines. He is contrary to the opinion of all men that ever spake of this subject besides himself, and to common sense. For he makes the scope of history, not profit by writing truth, but delight of the hearer, as if it were a song. And the argument of history, he would not by any means have to contain the calamities and misery of his country; these he would have buried in silence: but only their glorious and splendid actions. Amongst the virtues of an historiographer, he reckons affection to his country; study to please the hearer; to write of more than his argument leads him to; and to conceal all actions that were not to the honour of his country. Most manifest vices. He was a rhetorician; and it seemeth he would have nothing written, but that which was most capable of rhetorical ornament. Yet Lucian, a rhetorician also, in a treatise entitled, How a history ought to be written, saith thus: “that a writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without country, living under his own law only, subject to no king, nor caring what any man will like or dislike, but laying out the matter as it is.”

  The third fault he finds is this: that the method of his history is governed by the time, rather than the periods of several actions: for he declares in order what came to pass each summer and winter, and is thereby forced sometimes to leave the narration of a siege, or sedition, or a war, or other action in the middest, and enter into a relation of somewhat else done at the same time, in another place, and to come to the former again when the time requires it. This, saith he, causes confusion in the mind of his hearer, so that he cannot comprehend distinctly the several parts of the history.

  Dionysius aimeth still at the delight of the present hearer; though Thucydides himself profess that his scope is not that, but to leave his work for a perpetual possession for posterity: and then have men leisure enough to comprehend him thoroughly. But indeed, whosoever shall read him once attentively, shall more distinctly conceive of every action this way than the other. And the method is more natural; forasmuch as his purpose being to write of one Peloponnesian war, this way he has incorporated all the parts thereof into one body; so that there is unity in the whole, and the several narrations are conceived only as parts of that. Whereas the other way, he had sewed together many little histories, and left the Peloponnesian war, which he took for his subject, in a manner unwritten: for neither any part nor the whole could justly have carried such a title.

  Fourthly, he accuseth him for the method of his first book: in that he deriveth Greece from the infancy thereof to his own time: and in that he setteth down the narration of the quarrels about Corcyra and Potidæa, before he entreateth of the true cause of the war; which was the greatness of the Athenian dominion, feared and envied by the Lacedæmonians.

  For answer to this, I say thus. For the mentioning of the ancient state of Greece, he doth it briefly, insisting no longer upon it than is necessary for the well understanding of the following history. For without some general notions of these first times, many places of the history are the less easy to be understood; as depending upon the knowledge of the original of several cities and customs, which could not be at all inserted into the history itself, but must be either supposed to be foreknown by the reader, or else be delivered to him in the beginning as a necessary preface. And for his putting first the narration of the public and avowed cause of this war, and after that the true and inward motive of the same; the reprehension is absurd. For it is plain, that a cause of war divulged and avowed, how slight soever it be, comes within the task of the historiographer, no less than the war itself. For without a pretext, no war follows. This pretext is always an injury received, or pretended to be received. Whereas the inward motive to hostility is but conjectural; and not of that evidence, that a historiographer should be always bound to take notice of it: as envy to the greatness of another state, or fear of an injury to come. Now let any man judge, whether a good writer of history ought to handle, as the principal cause of war, proclaimed injury or concealed envy. In a word, the image of the method used by Thucydides in this point, is this: “The quarrel about Corcyra passed on this manner; and the quarrel about Potidæa on this manner”: relating both at large: “and in both the Athenians were accused to have done the injury. Nevertheless, the Lacedæmonians had not upon this injury entered into a war against them, but that they envied the greatness of their power, and feared the consequence of their ambition.” I think a more clear and natural order cannot possibly be devised.

  Again he says, that he maketh a funeral oration (which was solemnly done on all occasions through the war) for fifteen horsemen only, that were slain at the brooks called Rheiti: and that for this reason only, that he might make it in the person of Pericles, who was then living, but before another the like occasion happened was dead.

  The manner of the Athenians was, that they that were slain the first in any war, should have a solemn funeral in the suburbs of the city. During this war, they had many occasions to put this custom in practice. Seeing therefore it was fit to have that custom and the form of it known, and that once for all, the manner being ever the same; it was the fittest to relate it on the first occasion, what number soever they were that were then buried: which nevertheless is not likely to have been so few as Dionysius saith. For the funeral was not celebrated till the winter after they were slain: so that many more were slain before this solemnity, and may all be accounted amongst the first. And that Pericles performed the office of making their funeral oration, there is no reason alledged by him why it should be doubted.

  Another fault he finds, is this: that he introduceth the Athenian generals, in a dialogue with the inhabitants of the Isle of Melos, pretending openly for the cause of their invasion of that isle, the power and will of the state of Athens; and rejecting utterly to enter into any disputation with them concerning the equity of their cause, which, he saith, was contrary to the dignity of the state.

  To this may be answered, that the proceeding of these generals was not unlike to divers other actions, that the people of Athens openly took upon them: and therefore it is very likely they were allowed so to proceed. Howsoever, if the Athenian people gave in charge to these their captains, to take in the island by all means whatsoever, without power to report back unto them first the equity of the islanders’ cause; as is most likely to be true; I see then no reason the generals had to enter into disputation with them, whether they should perform their charge or not, but only whether they should do it by fair or foul means; which is the point treated of in this dialogue. Other cavils he hath touching the matter and order of this history, but not needful to be answered.

  Then for his phrase, he carpeth at it in infinite places, both for obscure and licentious. He that will see the particular places he reprehendeth, let him read Dionysius himself, if he will: for the matter is too tedious for this place. It is true, that there be some sentences in him somewhat long: not obscure to one that is attentive: and besides that, they are but few. Yet is this the most important fault he findeth. For the rest, the obscurity that is, proceedeth from the profoundness of the sentences; containing contemplations of those human passions, which either dissembled or not commonly discoursed of, do yet carry the greatest sway with men in their public conversation. If then one cannot penetrate into them without much meditation, we are not to expect a man should understand them at the first speaking. Marcellinus saith, he was obscure on purpose; that the common people might not understand him. And not unlikely: for a wise man should so write, (though in words understood by all men), that wise men only should be able to commend him. But this obscurity is not to be in the narrations of things done, nor in the descriptions of places or of battles, in all which Thucydides is most perspicuous: as Plutarch in the words before cited hath testified of him. But in the characters of men’s humours and manners, and applying them to affairs of consequence: it is impossible not to be obscure to ordinary capacities, in what words soever a man deliver his mind. If therefore Thucydides in his orations, or in the description of a sedition, or other thing of that kind, be not easily understood; it is of those only that cannot penetrate into the nature of such things, and proceedeth not from any intricacy of expression. Dionysius further findeth fault with his using to set word against word: which the rhetoricians call antitheta. Which, as it is in some kind of speech a very great vice, so is it not improper in characters: and of comparative discourses, it is almost the only style.

  And whereas he further taxeth him for licentiousness in turning nouns into verbs, and verbs into nouns, and altering of genders, cases, and numbers; as he doth sometimes for the more efficacy of his style, and without solœcism; I leave him to the answer of Marcellinus: who says, “That Dionysius findeth fault with this, as being ignorant” (yet he was a professed rhetorician) “that this was the most excellent and perfect kind of speaking.”

  Some man may peradventure desire to know, what motive Dionysius might have to extenuate the worth of him, whom he himself acknowledgeth to have been esteemed by all men for the best by far of all historians that ever wrote, and to have been taken by all the ancient orators and philosophers for the measure and rule of writing history. What motive he had to it, I know not: but what glory he might expect by it, is easily known. For having first preferred Herodotus, his countryman, a Halicarnassian, before Thucydides, who was accounted the best; and then conceiving that his own history might perhaps be thought not inferior to that of Herodotus: by this computation he saw the honour of the best historiographer falling on himself. Wherein, in the opinion of all men, he hath misreckoned. And thus much for the objections of Denis of Halicarnasse.

  It is written of Demosthenes, the famous orator, that he wrote over the history of Thucydides with his own hand eight times. So much was this work esteemed, even for the eloquence. But yet was this his eloquence not at all fit for the bar; but proper for history, and rather to be read than heard. For words that pass away (as in public orations they must) without pause, ought to be understood with ease, and are lost else: though words that remain in writing for the reader to meditate on, ought rather to be pithy and full. Cicero therefore doth justly set him apart from the rank of pleaders; but withal, he continually giveth him his due for history, (lib. ii. De Oratore): “What great rhetorician ever borrowed any thing of Thucydides? Yet all men praise him, I confess it, as a wise, severe, grave relator of things done: not for a pleader of causes at the bar, but a reporter of war in history. So that he was never reckoned an orator: nor if he had never written a history, had his name therefore not been extant, being a man of honour and nobility. Yet none of them imitate the gravity of his words and sentences; but when they have uttered a kind of lame and disjointed stuff, they presently think themselves brothers of Thucydides.” Again, in his book De Optimo Oratore, he saith thus: “But here will stand up Thucydides: for his eloquence is by some admired; and justly. But this is nothing to the orator we seek: for it is one thing to unfold a matter by way of narration; another thing to accuse a man, or clear him by arguments. And in narrations, one thing to stay the hearer, another to stir him.” Lucian, in his book entitled How a history ought to be written, doth continually exemplify the virtues which he requires in an historiographer by Thucydides. And if a man consider well that whole discourse of his, he shall plainly perceive that the image of this present history, preconceived in Lucian’s mind, suggested unto him all the precepts he there delivereth. Lastly, hear the most true and proper commendation of him from Justus Lipsius, in his notes to his book De Doctrina Civili in these words: “Thucydides, who hath written not many nor very great matters, hath perhaps yet won the garland from all that have written of matters both many and great. Everywhere for elocution grave; short, and thick with sense; sound in his judgments; everywhere secretly instructing and directing a man’s life and actions. In his orations and excursions, almost divine. Whom the oftener you read, the more you shall carry away; yet never be dismissed without appetite. Next to him is Polybius, &c.”

  And thus much concerning the life and history of Thucydides.

  THE FIRST BOOK of the HISTORY OF THUCYDIDES.

  THE PRINCIPAL CONTENTS.

  The estate of Greece, derived from the remotest known antiquity thereof, to the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.—The occasion and pretexts of this war, arising from the controversies of the Athenians with the Corinthians concerning Corcyra and Potidæa.—The Lacedæmonians, instigated by the confederates, undertake the war; not so much at their instigation, as of envy to the greatness of the Athenian dominion.—The degrees by which that dominion was acquired.—The war generally decreed by the confederates at Sparta.—The demands of the Lacedæmonians.—The obstinacy of the Athenians; and their answer by the advice of Pericles.

  To make it appear that this war was greater than any before it, the author showeth the imbecility of former times; describing three periods: 1. From the beginning of the Grecian memory to the war of Troy. 2. The war itself. 3. The time from thence to the present war which he writeth.

  1. Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians as1 they warred against each other, beginning to write as soon as the war was on foot; with expectation it should prove a great one, and most worthy the relation of all that had been before it: conjecturing so much, both from this, that they flourished on both sides in all manner of provision; and also because he saw the rest of Greece siding with the one or the other faction, some then presently and some intending so to do. For this was certainly the greatest commotion that ever happened amongst the Grecians, reaching also to part of the barbarians1 , and, as a man may say, to most nations. For the actions that preceded this, and those again that are yet more ancient, though the truth of them through length of time cannot by any means clearly be discovered; yet for any argument that, looking into times far past, I have yet light on to persuade me, I do not think they have been very great, either for matter of war or otherwise.

  The state of Greece before the Trojan war.

  2. For it is evident that that which now is called Hellas2 , was not of old constantly inhabited; but that at first there were often removals, every one easily leaving the place of his abode to the violence always of some greater number. For whilst traffic was not, nor mutual intercourse but with fear, neither by sea nor land; and every man so husbanded the ground as but barely to live upon it, without any stock of riches3 , and planted nothing; (because it was uncertain when another should invade them and carry all away, especially not having the defence of walls); but made account to be masters, in any place, of such necessary sustenance as might serve them from day to day: they made little difficulty to change their habitations. And for this cause they were of no ability at all, either for greatness of cities or other provision. But the fattest soils were always the most subject to these changes of inhabitants; as that which is now called Thessalia, and Bœotia, and the greatest part of Peloponnesus, except Arcadia; and of the rest of Greece, whatsoever was most fertile. For the goodness of the land increasing the power of some particular men, both caused seditions, whereby they were ruined at home; and withal made them more obnoxious to the insidiation of strangers. From hence it is that Attica1 , from great antiquity for the sterility of the soil free from seditions, hath been inhabited ever by the same people2 . And it is none of the least evidences of what I have said, that Greece3 , by reason of sundry transplantations, hath not in other parts received the like augmentation. For such as by war or sedition were driven out of other places, the most potent of them, as to a place of stability, retired themselves to Athens; where receiving the freedom of the city, they long since so increased the same in number of people, as Attica, being incapable of them itself, they sent out colonies into Ionia.

  The original of the name of Hellas.The name of Hellenes not given to all the Grecians in the time that Homer wrote his poems.The Trojan war was the first enterprise where the Grecians combined their forces.

  3. And to me the imbecility of ancient times is not a little demonstrated also by this [that followeth]. For before the Trojan war nothing appeareth to have been done by Greece in common; nor indeed was it, as I think, called all by that one name of Hellas; nor before the time of Hellen, the son of Deucalion, was there any such name at all. But Pelasgicum1 (which was the farthest extended) and the other parts, by regions, received their names from their own inhabitants. But Hellen and his sons being strong in Phthiotis, and called in for their aid into other cities; these cities, because of their conversing with them, began more particularly to be called Hellenes: and yet could not that name of a long time after prevail upon them all. This is conjectured principally out of Homer. For though born long after the Trojan war, yet he gives them not anywhere that name in general; nor indeed to any but those that with Achilles came out of Phthiotis, and were the first so called: but in his poems he mentioneth Danaans, Argives, and Achæans. Nor doth he likewise use the word barbarians; because the Grecians2 , as it seemeth unto me, were not yet distinguished by one common name of Hellenes, oppositely answerable unto them. The Grecians3 then, neither as they had that name in particular by mutual intercourse, nor after, universally so termed, did ever before the Trojan war, for want of strength and correspondence, enter into any action with their forces joined. And to that expedition they came together by the means of navigation, which the most part1 of Greece had now received.

  Minos, king of Creta, the first that had a navy.

  4. For Minos was the most ancient of all that by report we know to have built a navy. And he made himself master of the now Grecian Sea2 ; and both commanded the isles called Cyclades, and also was the first that sent colonies into most of the same, expelling thence the Carians and constituting his own sons there for governors; and also freed the seas of pirates as much as he could, for the better coming in, as is likely, of his own revenue.

  A digression touching the piracies and robberies of old time; with other notes of savageness.Robbing had in honour.

  5. For the Grecians in old time, and such barbarians as in the continent lived near unto the sea, or else inhabited the islands, after once they began to3 cross over one to another in ships, became thieves, and went abroad under the conduct of their most puissant men, both to enrich themselves and to fetch in maintenance for the weak; and falling upon towns unfortified and scatteringly4 inhabited, rifled them, and made this the best means of their living; being a matter at that time nowhere in disgrace, but rather carrying with it something of glory. This is manifest by some that dwell on the continent, amongst whom, so it be performed nobly, it is still esteemed as an ornament. The same also is proved by some of the ancient poets, who introduce men questioning1 of such as sail by, on all coasts alike, whether they be thieves or not; as a thing neither scorned by such as were asked, nor upbraided by those that were desirous to know. They also robbed one another within the main land. And much of Greece useth that old custom, as the Locrians called Ozolæ2 , the Acarnanians, and those of the continent in that quarter, unto this day. Moreover, the fashion of wearing iron remaineth yet with the people of that continent from their old trade of thieving.

  Continual wearing of armour in fashion.The Athenians grew first civil.

  6. For once they were wont throughout all Greece to go armed, because their houses were unfenced and travelling was unsafe; and accustomed themselves, like the barbarians, to the ordinary wearing of their armour. And the nations of Greece that live so yet, do testify that the same manner of life was anciently universal to all the rest. Amongst whom, the Athenians were the first that laid by their armour, and growing civil, passed into a more tender kind of life. And such of the rich as were anything stepped into years, laid away upon the same3 delicacy, not long after, the fashion of wearing linen coats and golden grasshoppers1 , which they were wont to bind up in the locks of their hair. From whence also the same fashion, by reason of their affinity, remained a long time in use amongst the ancient Ionians. But the moderate2 kind of garment, and conformable to the wearing of these times, was first taken up by the Lacedæmonians; amongst whom also, both in other things and especially in the culture of their bodies, the nobility observed the most equality with the commons. The same were also the first, that when they were to contend in the Olympic games3 , stripped themselves naked4 and anointed their bodies with ointment: whereas in ancient times, the champions did also in the Olympic games use breeches; nor is it many years since this custom ceased. Also there are to this day amongst the barbarians, especially those of Asia, prizes propounded of fighting with fists and of wrestling, and the combatants about their privy parts wear breeches in the exercise. It may likewise by5 many other things be demonstrated, that the old Greeks used the same form of life that is now in force amongst the barbarians of the present age.

  The cities of Greece, how seated, and for what causes.

  7. As for cities, such as are of late foundation and since the increase of navigation, inasmuch as they have had since more plenty of riches, have been walled about and built upon the shore; and have taken up isthmi, [that is to say, necks of land between sea and sea], both for merchandise and for the better strength against confiners. But the old cities, men having been1 in those times for the most part infested by thieves, are built farther up, as well in the islands as in the continent. For others2 also that dwelt on the sea–side, though not seamen, yet they molested one another with robberies. And even to these times, those people are planted up high in the country.

  The Carians and Phœnicians were those that committed the most robberies.

  8. But these robberies were the exercise especially of the islanders, namely, the Carians and the Phœnicians. For by them were the greatest part of the islands3 inhabited; a testimony whereof is this. The Athenians, when in this present war4 they hallowed the isle of Delos and had digged up the sepulchres of the dead, found that more than half of them were Carians5 ; known so to be, both by the armour buried with them, and also by their manner of burial at this day. And1 when Minos his navy was once afloat, navigators had the sea more free. For he expelled the malefactors out of the islands, and in the most of them planted colonies of his own. By which means they who inhabited the sea–coasts, becoming more addicted to riches, grew more constant to their dwellings; of whom some, grown now rich, compassed their towns about with walls. For out of desire of gain, the meaner sort underwent servitude with the mighty; and the mighty with their wealth brought the lesser cities into subjection. And so it came to pass, that rising to power they proceeded afterward to the war against Troy.

  The action of Troy.Peloponnesus, so called from Pelops.The increase of the power of the Pelopians.Atreus king of Mycenæ after the death of Pelops.

  9. And to me it seemeth that Agamemnon2 got together that fleet, not so much for that he had with him the suitors3 of Helena, bound thereto by oath to Tindareus, as for this, that he exceeded the rest in power. For they that by tradition of their ancestors know the most certainty of the acts4 of the Peloponnesians, say that first Pelops, by the abundance of his wealth which he brought with him out of Asia to men in want, obtained such power amongst them, as, though he were a stranger, yet the country was called1 after his name; and that this power was also increased by his posterity. For Euristheus being slain in Attica by the Heracleides2 , Atreus, that was his uncle3 by the mother, and was then abiding4 with him as an exiled person for fear of his father for the death of Chrysippus5 , and to whom Euristheus, when he undertook the expedition, had committed Mycenæ and the government thereof, for that he was his kinsman; when as Euristheus came not back, (the Mycenians being willing to it for fear of the Heracleides, and because he was an able man and made much of the common people), obtained the kingdom of Mycenæ, and of whatsoever else was under Euristheus, for himself; and the power of the Pelopides became greater than that of the Perseides6 . To which greatness Agamemnon7 succeeding, and also far excelling the rest in shipping, took that war in hand, as I conceive it, and assembled the said forces, not so much upon favour as by fear. For it is clear, that he himself both conferred most ships to that action, and that some also he lent to the Arcadians. And this is likewise declared by Homer, (if any think his testimony sufficient); who, at the delivery of the sceptre unto him, calleth him1 , “of many isles and of all Argos King.” Now he could not, living in the continent, have been lord of the islands, other than such2 as were adjacent, which cannot be many, unless he had also had a navy. And by this expedition we are to estimate what were those of the ages before it.

  Mycenæ, though no great city, yet was of great power.The city of Sparta less, and the city of Athens greater, than for the proportion of their power.A survey of the fleetsent to Troy.

  10. Now seeing Mycenæ was3 but a small city, or if any other of that age seem but of light regard, let not any man for that cause, on so weak an argument, think that fleet to have been less than the poets have said, and fame reported it to be4 . For if the city of Lacedæmon were now desolate, and nothing of it left but the temples and floors of the buildings, I think it would breed much unbelief in posterity long hence of their power in comparison of the fame. For although of five parts5 of Peloponnesus it possess two6 , and hath the leading of the rest, and also of many confederates without; yet the city being not close built, and the temples and other edifices not costly, and because1 it is but scatteringly inhabited after the ancient manner of Greece, their power would seem inferior to the report. Again, the same things happening to Athens, one would conjecture, by the sight of their city, that their power were double to what it is. We ought not therefore to be incredulous [concerning the forces that went to Troy], nor have in regard so much the external show of a city as the power: but we are to think, that that expedition was indeed greater than those that went before it, but yet inferior to those of the present age; if in this also2 we may credit the poetry of Homer, who being a poet was like to set it forth to the utmost. And yet even thus it cometh short. For he maketh it to consist of twelve hundred vessels; those that were of Bœotians carrying one hundred and twenty men a–piece, and those which came with Philoctetes fifty: setting forth, as I suppose, both the greatest sort and the least; and therefore of the bigness of any of the rest, he maketh in his catalogue no mention at all: but declareth that they who were3 in the vessels of Philoctetes, served both as mariners and soldiers; for he writes, that they who were at the oar, were all of them archers. And for such as wrought not, it is not likely that many went along, except kings1 and such as were in chief authority; especially being to pass the sea with munition of war, and in bottoms without decks, built after the old and piratical fashion. So then, if by the greatest and least one estimate the mean of their shipping, it will appear that the whole number of men considered as sent jointly from all Greece, were not very many.

  The poverty of the Greeks was the cause why the Trojans could so long hold out.

  11. And the cause hereof was not so much want of men, as of wealth. For, for want of victual they carried the lesser army, and no greater than they hoped2 might both follow the war and also maintain itself. When upon their arrival they had gotten the upper hand in fight, (which is manifest; for else they could not have fortified their camp), it appears that from that time forward they employed not there their whole power, but that for want of victual they betook themselves, part of them to the tillage of Chersonesus, and part to fetch in booties; whereby divided, the Trojans the more easily made that ten years resistance, as being ever a match for so many as remained at the siege. Whereas1 , if they had gone furnished with store of provision, and with all their forces, eased of boot–haling and tillage, since they were masters of the field, they had also easily taken the city. But they strove not with their whole power, but only with such a portion of their army as at the several occasions chanced to be present; when as, if they had pressed the siege, they had won the place both in less time and with less labour. But through want of money, not only they were weak matters, all that preceded this enterprise; but also this, which is of greater name than any before it, appeareth to be in fact beneath the fame and report, which by means of the poets now goeth of it.

  The state of Greece after the Trojan war.A. C. 1124. A. 1m. Ol. 347.Bœotia, more anciently Cadmeis.A. C. 1104. A. 1m. Ol. 327.The Ionians were the colonies of the Athenians.

  12. For also after the Trojan war the Grecians continued still their shiftings and transplantations; insomuch as never resting, they improved not their power. For the late return of the Greeks from Ilium caused not a little innovation; and in most of the cities there arose seditions; and those which were driven out, built2 cities for themselves in other places. For those that are now called Bœotians, in the sixtieth year after the taking of Troy, expelled Arne by the Thessalians, seated themselves in that country, which now Bœotia, was then called Cadmeis. (But there was in the same country a certain portion of that nation before, of whom also were they that went to the warfare of Troy). And in the eightieth year, the Dorians1 together with the Heracleides seized on Peloponnesus. And with much ado, after long time, Greece had constant rest; and shifting their seats no longer, at length sent colonies abroad. And the Athenians planted Ionia and most of the islands; and the Peloponnesians most of Italy1 and Sicily, and also certain parts of the rest of Greece. But these colonies were all planted after the Trojan war.

  The difference between tyranny and regal authority.At Corinth were made the first triremes, or gallies of three tire of oars one above another.A. C. 704. Olymp. 19. 1.A. C. 667. Olymp. 28. 2.The means of the wealth of Corinth.Corinth surnamed the rich.The Ionians had a navy in Cyrus’ time.Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, had a navy in the time of Cambyses.About A. C. 600. Olymp. 45.

  13. But when the power of Greece was now improved, and2 the desire of money withal, their revenues being enlarged, in most of the cities there were erected tyrannies: (for before that time, kingdoms with honours limited were hereditary): and the Grecians built navies, and became more seriously addicted to the affairs of the sea. The Corinthians are said to have been the first that changed the form of shipping3 into the nearest to that which is now in use; and at Corinth are reported to have been made the first4 gallies of all Greece. Now5 it is well known that Aminocles, the ship–wright of Corinth, built four ships at Samos: and from the time that Aminocles went to Samos until the end6 of this present war, are at the most but three hundred years. And the most ancient naval battle that we know of, was fought between the Corinthians and the Corcyræans7 ; and from that battle to the same time, are but two hundred and sixty years. For Corinth, seated on an isthmus, had been always a place of traffic; (because the Grecians of old, from within and without Peloponnesus, trading by land more than by sea, had no other intercourse one to another but through the Corinthians’ territory); and was also wealthy in money, as appears by the1 poets, who have surnamed this town the rich. And after the Grecians had2 commerce also by sea, then likewise having furnished themselves with a navy, they scoured the sea of pirates; and affording traffic both by sea and land, mightily increased their city in revenue of money. After this, the Ionians, in the times of Cyrus first king of the Persians, and of his son Cambyses, got together a great navy; and making war on Cyrus, obtained for a time the dominion of that part of the sea that lieth on their own coast. Also Polycrates3 , who in the time of Cambyses tyrannised in Samos, had a strong navy, wherewith he subdued divers of the islands; and amongst the rest having won Rhenea4 , he consecrated the same to Apollo of Delos. The5 Phocæans likewise, when they were building the city of Marseilles, overcame the Carthaginians6 in a fight at sea.

  The shipping of Greece very mean before this war.A. C. 493. Ol. 71. 4.

  14. These were the greatest navies extant. And yet even these, though many ages after the time of Troy, consisted, as it seems, but of a few galleys, and were made up with vessels1 of fifty oars and with long boats, as well as those of former times. And it was but a little before the Medan war2 and death of Darius, successor of Cambyses in the kingdom of Persia, that the tyrants of Sicily and the Corcyræans had of galleys any number. For these3 last were the only navies worth speaking of in all Greece, before the invasion of the Medes. And the people of Ægina and the Athenians4 had but small ones, and the most of them consisting but of fifty oars a–piece; and that so lately5 , as but from the time that the Athenians making war on Ægina, and withal expecting the coming of the barbarian, at the persuasion of Themistocles built those ships which they used in that war. And these also not all had decks.

  The causes why the Grecians never joined their forces in any great action.

  15. Such were then the navies of the Greeks, both ancient and modern. Nevertheless, such as applied themselves to naval business gained by them no small power, both in revenue of money and in dominion over other people. For with their navies (especially those men that had not sufficient land, where they inhabited, to maintain themselves) they subdued the islands. But as for war by land, such as any state might acquire power by, there was none at all: and such as were, were only between borderer and borderer. For the Grecians had never yet gone out with any army to conquer any nation far from home; because the lesser cities neither brought in their forces to the great ones, as subjects, nor concurred as equals in any common enterprise; but such as were neighbours warred against each other hand to hand. For the war of old between the Chalcideans and the Eretrians1 was it wherein the rest of Greece was most divided and in league with either party.

  The Ionians kept down by the Persians.

  16. As others by other means were kept back from growing great, so also the Ionians by this: that the Persian affairs prospering, Cyrus and the Persian kingdom, after the defeat of Crœsus, made war upon all that lieth from the river Halys to the sea–side, and so subdued all the cities which they possessed in the continent: and Darius afterward, when he had overcome2 the Phœnician fleet, did the like unto them in the islands.

  A. C. 548. Ol. 58. 1.

  17. And as for the tyrants that were in the Grecian cities, who forecasted only for themselves, how with as much safety as was possible to look to their own persons and their own families, they resided for the most part in the cities1 and did no action worthy of memory, unless it were against their neighbours. For as for the tyrants of Sicily2 , they were already arrived at greater power. Thus was Greece for a long time3 hindered, that neither jointly it could do anything remarkable, nor the cities singly be adventurous.

  The Lacedæmonians put down the tyrants through all Greece.A. C. 510. Ol. 67. 2.A. C. 804.A. C. 490. Ol. 72. 3.Olymp. 75. 1.All Greece divided into two leagues; the Lacedæmonians and their league, and the Athenians and their league.

  18. But after that the tyrants, both of Athens4 and of the rest of Greece where tyrannies5 were, were the most and last of them, excepting those of Sicily, put down by the Lacedæmonians; (for Lacedæmon, after that it was built by the Dorians that inhabited6 the same, though it hath been longer troubled with seditions7 than any other city we know, yet hath it had for the longest time good laws, and been also always free8 from tyrants: for it is unto the end of this war four hundred years and something more, that the Lacedæmonians have used one and the same government, and thereby being of power themselves, they also ordered the affairs in the other cities); I say, after the dissolution of tyrannies in Greece, it was not long before the battle was fought by the Medes against the Athenians in the fields of Marathon. And in the tenth year again after that, came the barbarian with the great fleet1 into Greece, to subdue it. And Greece being now in great danger, the leading of the Grecians that leagued in that war was given to the Lacedæmonians, as to the most potent state. And the Athenians, who had purposed so much before and already stowed2 their necessaries, at the coming in of the Medes went a ship–board3 and became seamen. When they had jointly beaten back the barbarian, then did the Grecians, both such as were revolted from the king and such as had in common made war upon him, not long after divide themselves into leagues, one part with the Athenians and the other with the Lacedæmonians; these two cities appearing to be the mightiest; for this had the power by land, and the other by sea. But this confederation lasted but awhile: for afterwards the Lacedæmonians and the Athenians, being at variance4 , warred each on other together with their several confederates. And the rest of Greece, where any discord chanced to arise, had recourse presently to one of these. In so much, that from the war of the Medes to this present war being continually [exercised] somtimees in peace sometimes in war, either one against the other or against revolted confederates, they arrived at this war, both well furnished with military provisions and also expert; because their practice was with danger.

  The manner how the Lacedæmonians dealt with their confederates.The manner how the Athenians handled their confederates.

  19. The Lacedæmonians governed not their confederates so as to make them tributaries, but only drew them by fair means to embrace the oligarchy, convenient to their own policy. But the Athenians, having with time taken into their hands the galleys of all those that stood out, (except the Chians and Lesbians), reigned1 over them, and ordained every of them to pay a certain tribute of money. By which means, their own particular provision was greater in the beginning of this war, than when2 in their flourishing time, the league between them and the rest of Greece remaining whole, it was at the most.

  20. Such then I find to have been the state of things past; hard to be believed3 , though one produce proof for every particular thereof. For1 men receive the report of things, though of their own country, if done before their own time, all alike, from one as from another, without examination.

  Digression to show how negligently men receive the fame of things past, by the example of their error touching the story of Hippias the son of Pisistratus: which it seems he willingly mentions, both here and hereafter, on light occasion.A. C. 514. Ol. 46. 2.

  For the vulgar sort of Athenians think that Hipparchus was the tyrant, and slain by Harmodius and Aristogeiton: and know not that Hippias had the government, as being the eldest son of Pisistratus, and that Hipparchus and Thessalus were his brethren; and that Harmodius and Aristogeiton, suspecting that some of their complices had that day, and at that instant2 , discovered unto Hippias somewhat of their treason, did forbear Hippias as a man forewarned; and desirous to effect somewhat, though with danger, before they should be apprehended, lighting on Hipparchus slew him near the temple called Leocorium, whilst he was setting forth the Panathenaical3 show. And likewise divers other things now extant, and which time hath not yet involved in oblivion, have been conceived amiss by other Grecians; as that the kings of Lacedæmon, in giving their suffrages, had not single4 , but double votes: and5 that Pitanate was a band of soldiers so called there; whereas there was never any such. So impatient of labour are the most men in search of truth, and embrace soonest the things that are next to hand.

  21. Now he1 , that by the arguments here adduced, shall frame a judgment of the things past, and not believe rather that they were such as the poets have sung, or prose–writers have composed, more delightfully to the ear than conformably to the truth, as being things not to be disproved, and by length of time turned for the most part into the nature of fables without credit; but shall think them here searched out by the most evident signs that can be, and sufficiently too, considering their antiquity; he, I say, shall not err. And though men always judge the present war wherein they live to be greatest, and when it is past, admire more those that were before it; yet if they consider of this war by the acts done in the same, it will manifest itself to be greater than any of those before mentioned2 .

  The diligence of the author in the inquiry of the truth of what he wrote: both touching the orations and the actions.

  22. What particular persons have spoken1 when they were about to enter into the war or when they were in it, were hard2 for me to remember exactly; whether they were speeches which I have heard myself, or have received at the second hand. But as any man seemed to me, that knew what was nearest to the sum3 of the truth of all that had been uttered, to speak most agreeably to the matter still in hand, so I have made it spoken here. But of the acts themselves done in the war, I thought not fit to write all that I heard from all authors, nor such as I myself did but think to be true; but only those whereat I was myself present, and those of which with all diligence I had made particular inquiry. And yet even of those things it was hard to know the certainty; because such as were present at every action, spake not all after the same manner; but as they were affected to the parts, or as they could remember.

  The use of this history.

  To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find4 enough herein to make him think it profitable. And it is compiled rather for an everlasting possession1 , than to be rehearsed for a prize.

  The greatness of the present war.Earthquakes, eclipses, famine, pestilence, concomitants of this war.A. C. 415. Ol. 83. 3. The causes of the war.Fear necessitates the war in the Lacedæmonians.

  23. The greatest action before this was that against the Medes2 ; and yet that, by two battles by sea and as many by land, was soon decided. But as for this war, it both lasted long, and the harm it did to Greece was such, as the like in the like space had never been seen before. For neither had there ever been so many cities expugned and made desolate, what by the barbarians3 and what by the Greeks warring on one another4 ; (and some cities there were, that when they were taken changed their inhabitants5 ); nor so much banishing and slaughter, some by the war some by sedition6 , as was in this. And those things which concerning former time there went a fame of, but in fact rarely confirmed, were now made credible: as earthquakes, general to the greatest part of the world, and most violent withal: eclipses of the sun, oftener than is reported of any former time: great droughts in some places, and thereby famine: and that which did none of the least hurt, but destroyed also its part7 , the plague. All8 these evils entered together with this war: which began from the time that the Athenians and Peloponnesians brake the league, which immediately after the conquest of Eubœa had been concluded between them for thirty years. The causes why they brake the same, and their quarrels, I have therefore set down first, because no man should be to seek from what ground so great a war amongst the Grecians could arise. And the truest quarrel1 , though least in speech, I conceive to be the growth of the Athenian power; which putting the Lacedæmonians into fear necessitated the war. But the causes of the breach of the league publicly voiced, were these.

  The first pretext.A. C. 627. Ol. 38. 2.

  24. Epidamnus2 is a city situate on the right hand to such as enter into the Ionian Gulf. Bordering upon it are the Taulantii, barbarians, a people of Illyris3 . This was planted by the Corcyræans4 ; but the captain of the colony was one Phalius, the son of Heratoclidas, a Corinthian of the lineage of Hercules, and, according to an5 ancient custom, called to this charge out of the metropolitan city. Besides that, the colony itself consisted in part of Corinthians, and others1 of the Doric nation. In process of time the city of Epidamnus became great and populous; and2 having for many years together been annoyed with sedition, was by a war, as is reported, made upon them by the confining barbarians, brought low and deprived of the greatest part of their power. But that which was the last accident before this war, was, that the nobility, forced by the commons to fly the city, went and joined with the barbarians, and both by land and sea robbed those that remained within. The Epidamnians that were in the town, oppressed in this manner, sent their ambassadors to Corcyra, as being their mother city, praying the Corcyræans not to see them perish, but to reconcile unto them those whom they had driven forth, and to put an end to the barbarian war. And this they entreated in the form of suppliants3 , sitting down in the temple of Juno. But the Corcyræans, not admitting their supplication, sent them away again without effect.

  The Epidamnians neglected by their mother city Corcyra, procure the protection of the Corinthians.A. C. 436. Ol. 86. 1.A. C. 436. Ol. 85. 4./86. 1.

  25. The Epidamnians now despairing of relief from the Corcyræans, and at a stand how to proceed in their present affairs, sending to Delphi enquired at the oracle, whether it were not best to deliver up their city into the hands of the Corinthians as of their founders, and make trial what aid they should obtain from thence. And when the oracle had answered, that they should deliver it and take the Corinthians for their leaders, they went to Corinth, and according to the advice of the oracle gave their city1 to them, and declared2 how the first founder of it was a Corinthian, and what answer the oracle had given them, entreating their help, and that they would not stand by beholding their destruction. And the Corinthians undertook their defence, not only for the equity of the cause, as thinking them no less their own than the Corcyræans’ colony, but also for hatred of the Corcyræans; who being their colony yet contemned them, and allowed3 them not their due honour in public meetings, nor in the distribution of the sacrifice began at a Corinthian, as was the custom of other colonies; but being equal to the richest Grecians of their time for store of money, and1 strongly furnished with ammunition of war, had them in contempt. Also they sticked not sometimes to boast how much they excelled in shipping; and that Corcyra had been once inhabited by the Phæaces2 , who flourished in glory of naval affairs: which was also the cause why they the rather provided themselves of a navy. And they were indeed not without power that way; for when they began this war, they had one hundred and twenty galleys.

  The Corinthians send inhabitants to Epidamnus.A. C. 436. Ol. 86. 1.The Corcyræans angry at the aids sent by the Corinthians, make war on Epidamnus.A. C. 436. Ol. 86. 1. The Corcyræans besiege Epidamnus.

  26. The Corinthians therefore having all these criminations against them, relieved Epidamnus willingly, not only giving leave to whosoever would to go and dwell there, but also sent thither a garrison of Ambraciots, Leucadians, and of their own citizens. Which succours, for fear the Corcyræans should have hindered their passage by sea, marched by land to Apollonia1 . The Corcyræans, understanding that new inhabitants and a garrison were gone to Epidamnus, and that the colony was delivered to the Corinthians, were vexed extremely at the same; and sailing presently thither with twenty–five galleys, and afterwards with another fleet, in an insolent2 manner commanded them both to recall those whom they had banished, (for these banished3 men of Epidamnus had been now at Corcyra, and pointing to the sepulcres of their ancestors and claiming kindred, had entreated the Corcyræans to restore them), and to send away the garrison and inhabitants sent thither by the Corinthians. But the Epidamnians gave no ear to their commandments. Whereupon the Corcyræans with forty galleys, together with the banished men, (whom they pretended to reduce), and with the Illyrians, whom they had joined to their part, warred upon them; and having laid siege to the city, made proclamation, that such of the Epidamnians as would, and all strangers, might depart safely, or otherwise were to be proceeded against as enemies. But when this prevailed not, the place being an isthmus, they enclosed the city in on every side.

  The Corinthians send an army to relieve it.

  27. The Corinthians, when news was brought from Epidamnus how it was besieged, presently made ready their army: and at the same time caused a proclamation to be made for the sending thither of a colony, and that such as would go should have equal and like privileges1 with those that were there before: and that such as desired to be sharers in the same, and yet were unwilling to go along in person at that present, if they would contribute fifty Corinthian drachmas, might stay behind. And they were very many, both that went and that laid down their silver. Moreover they sent to the Megareans, for fear of being stopped in their passage by the Corcyræans, to aid2 them with some galleys: who accordingly furnished out eight; the citizens of Pale in Cephalonia, four. They also required galleys of the Epidaurians, who sent them five: the citizens of Hermione, one: the Trœzenians, two: the Leucadians, ten: the Ambraciots, eight. Of the Thebans and Phliasians they required money: of the Eleans, both money and empty galleys. And of the Corinthians themselves, there were ready thirty galleys and three thousand men of arms3 .

  A. C. 435. Ol. 86. 2. The Corcyræans offer to stand to arbitrement.The Corinthians unwilling to accept it, and not without cause.

  28. The Corcyræans, advertised of this preparation, went to Corinth in company of the ambassadors of the Lacedæmonians and of the Sicyonians, whom they took with them; and required the Corinthians to recall the garrison and inhabitants which they had sent to Epidamnus, as being a city, they said, wherewith they had nothing to do; or if they had anything to1 allege, they were content to have the cause judicially tried in such cities of Peloponnesus as they should both agree on; and they then should hold the colony, to whom the same should be adjudged. They said also, that they were content to refer their cause to the oracle at Delphi: that war they would make none; but if they must needs have it, they should, by the violence of them, be forced in their own defence to seek out better2 friends than those whom they already had. To this the Corinthians answered, that if they would put off with their fleet and dismiss the barbarians from before Epidamnus, they would then consult of the matter: for before they could not honestly do it; because whilst they should be pleading the case, the Epidamnians should be suffering the misery of a siege. The Corcyræans replied to this, that if they would call back those men of theirs already in Epidamnus, that then they also would do as the Corinthians had required them; or otherwise they were content to let the men on both sides stay where they were, and3 to suspend the war till the cause should be decided.

  A. C. 435. Ol. 86. 2. The Corinthian fleet.A. C. 435. Ol. 86. 2. The Corcyræan fleet.The Corcyræans have the victory at sea, and on the same day take the city.

  29. The Corinthians not assenting to any of these propositions, since1 their galleys were manned and their confederates present, having defied them first by a herald, put to sea with seventy–five galleys and two thousand2 men of arms, and set sail for Epidamnus against the Corcyræans. Their fleet was commanded by Aristeus the son of Pellicas, Callicrates the son of Callias, and Timanor the son of Timanthes: and the land forces by Archetimus the son of Eurytimus, and Isarchidas the son of Isarchus. After they were come as far as Actium, in the territory of Anactorium, (which is a temple of Apollo, and ground consecrated unto him), in the mouth of the Gulf of Ambracia, the Corcyræans sent a herald to them at3 Actium, to forbid their coming on; and in the meantime manned out their fleet; and having repaired4 and made fit for service their old galleys, and furnished5 the rest with things necessary, shipped their munition and went aboard6 . The herald was no sooner returned from the Corinthians with an answer not inclining to peace, but having1 their galleys already manned and furnished to the number of eighty sail, (for forty2 attended always the siege of Epidamnus), they put to sea, and arranging themselves came to a battle: in which the Corcyræans were clearly victors; and on the part of the Corinthians there perished fifteen galleys. And the same day it happened likewise, that they that besieged Epidamnus had the same3 rendered unto them, with conditions, that the strangers therein found should be4 ransomed, and the Corinthians kept in bonds till such time as they should be otherwise disposed of.

  A. C. 435. Ol. 86. 2.The Corcyræans masters of the sea.A. C. 435. Ol. 86. 2.

  30. The battle being ended, the Corcyræans, after they had set up their trophy5 in Leucimna, a promontory of Corcyra, slew their other prisoners, but kept the Corinthians still in bonds. After this, when the Corinthians6 with their vanquished fleet were gone home to Corinth, the Corcyræans, masters now of the whole sea in those parts, went first and wasted the territory of Leucas7 , a Corinthian colony; and then sailed to Cyllene, which is the arsenal of the Eleans, and burnt it, because they had both with money and shipping given aid to the Corinthians. And they were masters of those seas, and infested the confederates of Corinth, for the most part of that year; till such time as in the beginning of the summer1 following the Corinthians sent a fleet and soldiers unto Actium, the which, for the more safe keeping of Leucas and of other cities their friends, encamped about Chimerium in Thesprotis2 : and the Corcyræans, both with their fleet and land soldiers, lay over against them in Leucimna. But neither part stirred against the other; but after they had lyen quietly opposite all the1 summer, they retired in winter both the one side and the other to their cities.

  A. C. 434. 3. Ol. 86. 3. 4. The Corinthians prepare a greater navy.Both Corcyræans and Corinthians send their ambassadors to Athens.A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  31. All this year, as well before as after the battle2 , the Corinthians, being vexed3 at the war with the Corcyræans, applied themselves to the building of galleys and to the preparing of a fleet, the strongest4 they were able to make, and to procure mariners5 out of Peloponnesus and all other parts of Greece. The Corcyræans having intelligence of their preparations, began to fear; and (because they had never6 been in league with any Grecian city, nor were in the roll of the confederates either of the Athenians or Lacedæmonians) thought it best now to send to Athens7 , to see if they could procure any aid from thence. This being perceived by the Corinthians, they also sent their ambassadors to Athens, lest the addition of the Athenian navy to that of the Corcyræans might hinder them from carrying the war as they desired. And the assembly at Athens being met, they came to plead against each other; and the Corcyræans spake to this effect.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4. oration of the ambassadors of corcyra.A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  32. “Men of Athens, it is but justice that such as come to implore the aid of their neighbours, (as now do1 we), and cannot pretend by any great benefit or league some precedent merit, should, before they go any farther, make it appear, principally, that what they seek conferreth profit, or if not so, yet is not prejudicial at least to those that are to grant it: and next, that they will be constantly thankful for the same: and if they cannot do this, then not to take it ill though their suit be rejected. And the Corcyræans being fully persuaded that they can make all this appear on their own parts, have therefore sent us hither, desiring you to ascribe them to the number of your confederates. Now so it is, that we have had a custom, both unreasonable in respect of our suit to you, and also for the present unprofitable to our own estate. For having ever till now been unwilling to admit others into league with us, we are now not only suitors for league to others, but also left destitute by that means of friends in this our war with the Corinthians. And that which before we thought wisdom, namely, not to enter with others into league, because we would not at the discretion of others enter into danger, we now find to have been our weakness and imprudence. Wherefore, though alone we repulsed the Corinthians in the late battle by sea, yet since they are set to invade us with greater preparation out of Peloponnesus and the rest of Greece; and seeing with our own single power we are not able to go1 through; and since also the danger, in case they subdue us, would be very great to all Greece: it is necessary that we seek the succours both of you and of whomsoever else we can; and we are also to be pardoned, though we make bold to cross our former custom of not having to do with other men, proceeding not from malice, but error of judgment.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  33. “Now if you yield unto us in what we request, this coincidence2 on our part of need will on your part be honourable, for many reasons. First, in this respect, that you lend your help to such as have suffered, and not to such as have committed the injustice. And next, considering that you receive into league such as have at stake their whole fortune, you shall so place3 your benefit as to have a testimony of it, if ever any can be so, indelible. Besides this, the greatest navy but your own, is ours. Consider then, what rarer hap, and of greater grief to your enemies, can befal you, than that that power, which you would have prized above any money or other requital, should come voluntarily, and without all danger or cost present itself to your hands; bringing with it reputation amongst most men, a grateful mind from those you defend, and strength to yourselves. All which have not1 happened at once to many. And few there be of those that sue for league, that come not rather to receive strength and reputation, than to confer it. If any here think, that the war wherein we may do you service will not at all be, he is in an error, and seeth not how the Lacedæmonians, through fear of you, are already in labour of the war; and that the Corinthians, gracious with them and enemies to you, making way for their enterprize2 , assault us now in the way to the invasion of you hereafter, that we may not stand amongst the rest of their common enemies, but that they may be sure beforehand3 , either to weaken us, or to strengthen their own estate. It must therefore be your4 part, we offering and you accepting the league, to begin with them, and to anticipate plotting rather than to counterplot against them.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  34. “If they object injustice, in that you receive their colony, henceforth let them learn that all colonies, so long as they receive no wrong from their mother city, so long they honour her; but when they suffer injury from her, they then become alienate; for they are not sent out to be the slaves of them that stay, but to be their equals. That they have done us the injury, is manifest; for when we offered them a judicial trial of the controversy touching Epidamnus, they chose to prosecute their quarrel rather by arms than judgment. Now let that which they have done unto us, who are their kindred, serve you for some argument, not to be seduced1 by their demands, and made their instruments before you be aware. For he lives most secure, that hath fewest benefits bestowed upon him by his enemies to repent of.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  35. “As for the articles between you and the Lacedæmonians, they are not broken by receiving us into your league, because we are in league with neither party. For there2 it is said, that whosoever is confederate of neither party, may have access lawfully to either. And sure it were very unreasonable, that the Corinthians should have the liberty to man their fleet out of the cities comprised in the league, and3 out of any other parts of Greece, and not the least out of places4 in your dominion; and we be denied both the league now propounded, and also all other help from whencesoever. And5 if they impute it to you as a fault, that you grant our request; we shall take it for a greater, that you grant it not. For therein you shall reject us that are invaded, and be none of your enemies; and them, who are your enemies and make the invasion, you shall not only not oppose, but also suffer to raise unlawful1 forces in your dominions. Whereas you ought in truth, either not to suffer them to take up mercenaries in your states, or else to send us succours also, in such manner as you shall think good yourselves; but especially by taking us into your league, and so aiding us. Many commodities2 , as we said in the beginning, we show unto you, but this for the greatest; that whereas they are your enemies, (which is manifest enough), and not weak ones, but able to hurt those that stand up against them, we offer you a naval, not a terrestrial league; and the want of one of these is not as the want of the other. Nay rather, your principal aim, if it could be done, should be to let none at all have shipping but yourselves; or at least, if that cannot be, to make such your friends as are best furnished therewith.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  36. “If any man now think thus, that what we have spoken is indeed profitable, but fears, if it were admitted, the league were thereby broken: let that man consider, that his fear joined with strength will make his enemies fear, and his confidence, having (if he reject us) so much the less strength, will so much the less be1 feared. Let him also remember, that he is now in consultation no less concerning Athens than Corcyra; wherein he forecasteth none of the best, (considering the present state of affairs), that makes a question, whether against a war at hand and only not already on foot, he should join unto it or not that city, which with most important advantages or disadvantages will be2 friend or enemy. For it lieth so conveniently for sailing into Italy and Sicily, that it can both prohibit any fleet to come to Peloponnesus from thence, and convoy any coming from Peloponnesus3 thither: and is also for divers other uses most commodious. And to comprehend all in brief, consider whether we be to be abandoned or not, by this. For Greece having but three navies of any account, yours, ours, and that of Corinth, if you suffer the other two to join in one by letting the Corinthians first seize us, you shall have to fight by sea at one time both against the Corcyræans and the Peloponnesians; whereas by making league with us, you shall, with your1 fleet augmented, have to deal against the Peloponnesians alone.”

  Thus spake the Corcyræans: and after them the Corinthians, thus.

  oration of the ambassadors of corinth.A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  37. “The Corcyræans in their oration having made mention not only of your taking them into league, but also that they are wronged and unjustly warred on; it is also necessary for us first to answer concerning both those points, and then afterwards to proceed to the rest of what we have to say: to the end you may foreknow2 that ours are the safest demands for you to embrace, and that you may upon reason reject the needy3 estate of those others. Whereas they allege in defence of their refusing to enter league with other cities, that the same hath proceeded from modesty, the truth is, that they took up that custom, not from any virtue, but mere wickedness; as4 being unwilling to have any confederate for a witness of their evil actions, and to be put to blush by calling them. Besides, their city being by the situation sufficient within itself, giveth them this point; that when they do any man a wrong, they themselves are the judges of the same, and not men appointed by consent. For going seldom forth against other nations, they intercept such as by necessity are driven into their harbour. And in this consisteth1 their goodly pretext for not admitting confederates, not because they would not be content to accompany others in doing evil, but because they had rather do it alone; that where they were too strong, they might oppress; and when there should be none to observe them, the less of the profit might be shared from them; and that they might escape the shame, when they took any thing. But if they had been honest men, (as they themselves say they are), by how much the less they are obnoxious2 to accusation, so much the more means they have, by giving and taking what is3 due, to make their honesty appear. 38. But they are not such, neither towards others nor towards us. For being our colony, they have not only been ever in revolt; but now they also make war upon us, and say they were not sent out to be injured by us. But we say again, that we did not send them forth to be scorned by them, but to have the leading of them, and to be regarded by them as is fit. For4 our other colonies both honour and love us much: which is an argument, seeing the rest are pleased with our actions, that these have no just cause to be offended alone; and that without some manifest wrong, we should not have had colour1 to war against them. But say we had been in an error, it had been well done in them to have given way to our passion, as it had been also dishonourable in us to have insulted over their modesty. But through pride and wealth they have done wrong, both in many other things, and also in this; that Epidamnus being ours, which whilst it was vexed with wars they never claimed, as soon as we came to relieve it, was forcibly seized by them, and so holden.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.

  39. “They say2 now, that before they took it, they offered to put the cause to trial of judgment. But you are not to think that such a one will stand to judgment, as hath advantage and is sure already of what he offereth to plead for; but rather he, that before the trial will admit equality in the matter itself as well as in the pleading. Whereas contrarily, these men offered not this specious pretence of a judicial trial, before they had besieged the city, but after, when they saw we meant not to put it3 up. And now hither they be come, not content to have been faulty in that business themselves, but to get in you; into their confederacy? no; but into their conspiracy; and to receive them in this name, that they are enemies to us. But they should have come to you then, when they were most in safety; not now, when we have the wrong, and they the danger; and when you, that never1 partaked of their power, must2 impart unto them of your aid, and having been free from their faults, must have an equal share from us of the blame. They should3 communicate their power before hand, that mean to make common the issue of the same; and they that share not in the crimes, ought also to have no part in the sequel of them.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.A. C. 440. Ol. 85. 1.

  40. “Thus it appears, that we come for our parts with arguments of equity and right; whereas the proceedings of these other are nothing else but violence and rapine. And now we shall show you likewise, that you cannot receive them in point of justice. For although it be in the articles4 , that the cities written with neither of the parties may come in to whether of them they please; yet it holds not for such as do so to the detriment of either; but only for those, that having revolted1 from neither part, want protection, and bring not a war with them instead of peace to those (if they be wise2 ) that receive them. For3 you shall not only be auxiliaries unto these; but to us, instead of confederates, enemies. For if you go with them, it follows, they4 must defend themselves not without you. You should do most uprightly, to stand out of both our ways; and if not that, then to take our parts against the Corcyræans; (for between the Corinthians and you there are articles of peace, but with the Corcyræans you never had so much as a truce); and not to constitute a new law, of receiving one another’s rebels. For neither did we give our votes against you, when the Samians revolted, though the rest of Peloponnesus was divided in opinion5 ; but plainly alleged, that it was reason, that every one should have liberty to proceed against their own revolting confederates. And if you shall once receive and aid the doers of wrong, it will be seen that they will come over as fast from you to us; and you shall set up a law, not so much against us, as against yourselves.

  A. C. 433. Ol. 86. 3. 4.A. C. 491. Ol. 72. 2.

  41. “These are the points of justice we had to show you, conformable to the law of the Grecians. And now we come to matter of advice, and claim of favour; which (being not so much your enemies as to hurt you, nor such friends as to surcharge you) we say, ought in the present occasion to be granted us by way of requital. For when you had want of long barks against the Æginetæ, a little before the Medan war, you had twenty lent unto you by the Corinthians; which benefit of ours, and that other against the Samians, when by us it was that the Peloponnesians did not aid them, was the cause both of your victory1 against the Æginetæ, and of the punishment of the Samians. And these things were done for you in a season, when men, going to fight against their enemies, neglect all respects but2 of victory. For3 even a man’s domestic affairs are ordered the worse, through eagerness of present contention.

  A. C. 433. Ol.86.3.4.

  42. “Which benefits considering, and the younger sort taking notice of them from the elder, be you pleased to defend4 us now in the like manner. And have not this thought: that though in what we have spoken there be equity, yet, if the war should arise, the profit would be found in the contrary. For utility followeth those actions most, wherein we do the least wrong; besides that the likelihood of the war, wherewith the Corcyræans frighting you go about to draw you to injustice, is yet obscure, and not worthy to move you to a manifest and present hostility with the Corinthians; but it were rather fit for you, indeed, to take away our former jealousies1 concerning the Megareans. For the last good turn done in season, though but small, is able to cancel an accusation of much greater moment. Neither suffer yourselves to be drawn on by the greatness of the navy which now shall be at your service by this league. For to do no injury to our equals, is a firmer power, than that addition of strength, which, puffed up2 with present shows, men are to acquire with danger.

  43. “And since we be come to this, which once before we said at Lacedæmon, that every one ought to proceed as he shall think good against his own confederates, we claim that liberty now of you; and that you that have been helped by our votes, will not hurt us now by yours, but render like for like; remembering, that now is that occasion, wherein he that aideth us is our greatest friend, and he that opposeth us our greatest enemy: and that you will not receive3 these Corcyræans into league against our wills, nor defend them in their injuries. These things if you grant us, you shall both do as is fit, and also advise the best for the good of your own affairs.”

  This was the effect of what was spoken by the Corinthians.

  A. C. 433. Ol.86.3.4. A league defensive made between the Athenians and Corcyræans.

  44. Both sides having been heard, and the Athenian people twice assembled; in the former assembly they approved no less of the reasons of the Corinthians than of the Corcyræans. But in the latter they changed their minds; not so as to make a league with the Corcyræans both offensive and defensive, that the friends and enemies of the one should be so of the other; (for then, if the Corcyræans should have required them to go against Corinth, the peace had been broken with the Peloponnesians); but made it only defensive, that if any one should invade Corcyra or Athens, or any of their confederates, they were then mutually to assist one another. For they expected that even thus they should grow to war with the Peloponnesians, and were therefore unwilling to let Corcyra, that had so great a navy, to fall into the hands of the Corinthians; but rather, as much as in them lay, desired to break them one against another; that if need required, they might have to do with the Corinthians, and others that had shipping, when they should be weakened to their hands. And the island seemed also to lie conveniently for passing into Italy and Sicily.

  They aid Corcyra with ten galleys.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  45. With this mind the people of Athens received the Corcyræans into league; and when the Corinthians were gone, sent ten galleys not long after to their aid. The commanders of them were Lacedæmonius the son of Cimon, Diotimus the son of Strombichus, and Proteas the son of Epicles; and1 had order not to fight with the Corinthians, unless they invaded Corcyra, or offered to land there or in some other place of theirs: which, if they did, then with all their might to oppose them. This1 they forbad, because they would not break the peace concluded with the Peloponnesians. So these galleys arrived at Corcyra.

  The Corinthian fleet.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  46. The Corinthians, when they were ready, made towards Corcyra with one hundred and fifty sail; of the Eleans ten, of the Megareans twelve, of the Leucadians ten, of the Ambraciots twenty–seven, of the Anactorians one, and ninety of their own. The commanders of these were men chosen out of the said several cities, for the several parts of the fleet which they sent in; and over those of Corinth was Xenocleides the son of Euthicles, with four others. After they were all come2 together upon the coast of the continent over against Corcyra, they sailed from Leucas, and came to Chimerium in the country of Thesprotis. In3 this place is a haven, and above it, farther from the sea, the city of Ephyra, in that part of Thesprotis which is called Elæatis; and near unto it disbogueth into the sea the lake Acherusia, and into that (having first passed through Thesprotis) the river Acheron, from which it taketh the name. Also the river Thyamis runneth here, which divideth Thesprotis from Cestrine4 ; betwixt which two rivers ariseth this promontory of Chimerium. To this part of the continent came1 the Corinthians, and encamped.

  The Corcyræan fleet.

  47. The Corcyræans understanding that they made against them, having ready one hundred and ten galleys under the conduct of Miciades, Æsimides, and Eurybatus, came and encamped in one of the islands called Sybota: and the ten galleys of Athens were also with them. But their land forces stayed in the promontory of Leucimna, and with them one thousand men of arms of the Zacynthians that came to aid them. The Corinthians also had in the continent the aids of many barbarians, which in those quarters have2 been evermore their friends.

  The Corinthians set forward.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  48. The Corinthians, after they were ready and had taken aboard three days’ provision of victual, put off by night from Chimerium with purpose to fight; and about break of day, as they were sailing, descried the galleys of the Corcyræans, which were also put off from Sybota and coming on to fight with the Corinthians3 . As soon as they had sight one of another, they put themselves into order of battle. In the right wing4 of the Corcyræans were placed the galleys of Athens; and the rest being their own5 , were divided into three commands, under the three commanders, one under one. This was the order of the Corcyræans. The Corinthians had in their right wing the galleys of Megara and of Ambracia; in the middle, other their confederates in order; and opposite to the Athenians and right wing of the Corcyræans they were themselves placed, with such galleys as were best of sail, in the left.

  The battle.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.The Corinthians have the better.The Athenians and Corinthians fight.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  49. The standard1 being on either side lift up, they joined battle; having on both parts2 both many men of arms and many archers and slingers, but after the old fashion as yet somewhat unskilfully appointed. The battle was not so artificially as cruelly fought; near unto the manner of a fight at land. For after they had once3 run their galleys up close aboard one of another, they could not for the number and throng be easily gotten asunder again, but relied for the victory especially upon their men of arms, who fought where they stood whilst the galleys remained altogether without motion. Passages4 through each other they made none, but fought it out with courage and strength, rather than with skill. Insomuch as the battle was in every part not without much tumult and disorder: in which the Athenian galleys, being always, where the Corcyræans were oppressed, at hand, kept the enemies in fear, but yet began no assault, because their commanders stood in awe of the prohibition of the Athenian people. The right wing of the Corinthians was in the greatest distress; for the Corcyræans with twenty galleys had made them turn their backs, and chased them dispersed to the continent; and sailing to their very camp, went aland, burnt their abandoned tents and took away their baggage. So that in this part the Corinthians and their confederates were vanquished, and the Corcyræans had the victory. But in the left wing, where the Corinthians were themselves, they were far superior; because the Corcyræans had twenty galleys of their number, which was at first less than that of the Corinthians, absent in the chase of the enemy. And the Athenians, when they saw the Corcyræans were in distress, now aided them manifestly1 ; whereas before, they had abstained from making assault upon any. But when once they fled outright, and that the Corinthians lay sore upon them, then every one fell to the business without making difference any longer: and it came at last to this necessity, that they undertook one another, Corinthians and Athenians.

  Sybota of the continent, a haven.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.A supply of twenty sail from Athens.

  50. The Corinthians, when their enemies fled, staid not to fasten the hulls of the galleys they had sunk1 unto their own galleys, that so they might tow them after; but made after the men, rowing up and down, to kill rather than to take alive; and through ignorance (not knowing that their right wing had been discomfited) slew also some of their own friends. For the galleys of either side being many and taking up a large space at sea, after they were once in the medley they could not easily discern who were of the victors, and who of the vanquished party. For this was the greatest naval battle, for number of ships, that ever had been before of Grecians against Grecians. When2 the Corinthians had chased the Corcyræans to the shore, they returned to take up the broken galleys and bodies of their dead; which for the greatest part they recovered and brought to Sybota, where also lay the land–forces of the barbarians that were come to aid them. This Sybota is a desert haven of Thesprotis. When they had done, they reunited themselves, and made again to the Corcyræans. And they likewise, with such galleys as they had fit for the sea remaining3 of the former battle, together with those of Athens, put forth to meet them, fearing lest they should attempt to land upon their territory. By this time the day was far spent, and the song1 which they used to sing when they came to charge, was ended, when suddenly the Corinthians began to row astern: for they had descried twenty Athenian galleys2 , sent from Athens to second the former ten; for fear lest the Corcyræans (as it also fell out) should be overcome, and those ten galleys of theirs be too few3 to defend them.

  The Corinthians fall off.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  51. When the Corinthians therefore had sight of these galleys, suspecting that they were of Athens and more in number than they were, by little and little they fell off. But the Corcyræans (because the course of these galleys was unto them more out of sight4 ) descried them not, but wondered why the Corinthians rowed astern; till at last some that saw them, said they were enemies5 ; and then retired also the Corcyræans. For by this time it was dark, and the Corinthians had turned about the heads of their galleys and dissolved themselves. And thus were they parted, and the battle ended1 in night. The Corcyræans lying at Leucimna, these twenty Athenian galleys, under the command of Glaucon the son of Leagrus, and Andocides the son of Leogorus, passing through the midst of the floating carcases and wrecks, soon after they were descried arrived at the camp of the Corcyræans in Leucimna. The Corcyræans at first (being night) were afraid they had been enemies, but knew them afterwards; so they2 anchored there.

  The Corcyræans offer battle again.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. The Corinthians expostulate with the Athenians, to sound their purpose.The answer of the Athenians.

  52. The next day, both the thirty galleys of Athens and as many of Corcyra as were fit for service, went to the haven in Sybota, where the Corinthians lay at anchor, to see if they would fight. But the Corinthians, when they had put off from the land and arranged themselves in the wide sea, stood quiet, not meaning of their own accord to begin the battle; both for that they saw the supply of fresh galleys from Athens, and for many difficulties that happened to them, both about the safe custody of their prisoners aboard, and also for that being in a desert place their galleys were not yet3 repaired; but took thought rather how to go home, for fear lest the Athenians, having the peace for already broken in that they had fought against each other, should not suffer them to depart. 53. They therefore thought good to send1 afore unto the Athenians certain men without privilege of heralds, for to sound them, and to say in this manner: “Men of Athens, you do unjustly to begin the war and violate the articles: for whereas we go about to right us on our enemies, you stand in our way and bear arms against us: if therefore you be resolved to hinder our going against Corcyra or whatsoever place else we please, dissolve2 the peace, and laying hands first upon us that are here, use us as enemies.” Thus said they: and the Corcyræans, as many of the army as heard them, cried out immediately to take and kill them. But the Athenians made answer thus: “Men of Peloponnesus, neither do we begin the war nor break the peace; but we bring aid to these our confederates, the Corcyræans: if you please therefore to go any whither else, we hinder you not; but if against Corcyra, or any place belonging unto it, we will not3 suffer you.”

  The Corinthians go home.Both the Corcyræans and Corinthians challenge the victory, and both set up trophies.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  54. When the Athenians had given them this answer, the Corinthians made ready to go home, and set up a trophy in Sybota of the continent. And the Corcyræans also both took up the wreck and bodies of the dead, which carried every way by the waves and the winds that arose the night before, came driving to their hands; and, as if they had had the victory, set up a trophy likewise in Sybota the island. The victory was thus challenged on both sides upon these grounds. The Corinthians did set up a trophy, because in the battle they had the better all day, having1 gotten more of the wreck and dead bodies than the other, and taken no less than a thousand prisoners, and sunk about seventy of the enemies’ galleys. And the Corcyræans set up a trophy, because they had sunk thirty2 galleys of the Corinthians, and had, after the arrival of the Athenians, recovered the wreck and dead bodies that drove to them by reason of the wind; and because the day before, upon sight of the Athenians, the Corinthians had rowed astern and went away from them: and lastly, for that when they3 went to Sybota, the Corinthians came not out to encounter them. Thus each side claimed victory.

  The Corinthians in their way home, take Anactorium, and keep two hundred and fifty of the best men prisoners, being Corcyræans, and use them well.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  55. The Corinthians in their way homeward took in Anactorium, a town seated in the mouth of the Gulf of Ambracia, by deceit; (this town was common to them and to the Corcyræans); and having put into it Corinthians only4 , departed and went home. Of the Corcyræans, eight hundred that were servants5 , they sold; and kept prisoners two hundred and fifty, whom they used with very much favour, that they might be a means, at their return, to bring Corcyra into the power of the Corinthians; the greatest part of these being principal men of the city. And thus was Corcyra delivered1 of the war of Corinth, and the Athenian galleys went from them. This was the first cause that the Corinthians had of war against the Athenians: namely, because they had taken part with the Corcyræans in a battle by sea against the Corinthians, with whom they were comprised in the same articles of peace.

  The second pretext of the war:Potidæa suspected.Potidæa commanded to give hostages, and to pull down part of their wall.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 2.

  56. Presently after this, it came to pass that other differences arose between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, to induce the war. For whilst the Corinthians studied2 to be revenged, the Athenians, who had their hatred in jealousy, commanded the citizens of Potidæa, a city seated in the Isthmus of Pallene3 , a colony of the Corinthians, but confederate and tributary to the Athenians, to pull down that part of the wall of their city that stood towards4 Pallene, and to give them hostages, and also to send away and no more receive the Epidemiurgi5 , (magistrates so called), which were sent unto them year by year from Corinth; fearing lest through the persuasion of Perdiccas1 and of the Corinthians they should revolt, and draw to revolt with them their other confederates in Thrace2 .

  The Athenians give orders to the generals they were sending against Perdiccas, to secure their cities in those parts.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  57. These things against the Potidæans, the Athenians had precontrived presently after the naval battle fought at Corcyra. For the Corinthians and they were now manifestly at difference; and Perdiccas, who before had been their confederate and friend, now warred3 upon them. And the cause why he did so was, that when his brother Philip and Derdas joined in arms against him, the Athenians had made a league with them. And therefore being afraid, he both sent to Lacedæmon to negotiate the Peloponnesian war, and also reconciled himself to the Corinthians the better to procure the revolt of Potidæa. And likewise he practised with the Chalcideans of Thrace, and with the Bottiæans, to revolt with them: for if he could make these confining cities his confederates, with the help of them he thought his war would be the easier. Which the Athenians perceiving, and intending to prevent the revolt of these cities, gave order to the commanders of the fleet, (for they were now sending thirty galleys with a thousand men of arms, under the command of Archestratus the son of Lycomedes, and ten others, into the territories of Perdiccas), both to receive hostages of the Potidæans, and to demolish their walls1 ; and also to have an eye to the neighbouring cities, that they revolted not.

  The Potidæans seek the protection of the Lacedæmonians.The revolt of Potidæa, Bottiæa, and Chalcidice, from the Athenians.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  58. The Potidæans having sent ambassadors to Athens, to try if they could persuade the people not to make any alteration amongst them; by other ambassadors, whom they sent along with the ambassadors of Corinth to Lacedæmon, dealt2 with the Lacedæmonians at the same time, if need required, to be ready to revenge their quarrel. When after long solicitation at Athens and no good done, the fleet was sent away against them no less than against Macedonia: and when the magistrates of Lacedæmon had promised them, if the Athenians went to Potidæa, to invade Attica: then at last they revolted, and together with them the Chalcideans and Bottiæans, all mutually sworn in the same conspiracy. For3 Perdiccas had also persuaded the Chalcideans to abandon and pull down their maritime towns, and to go up and dwell at Olynthus, and that one city to make strong: and unto those that removed, gave part of his own, and part4 of the territory of Mygdonia, about the lake Bolbe, to live on, so long as the war against the Athenians should continue. So when1 they had demolished their cities, and were gone up higher into the country, they prepared themselves to the war.

  The Athenian fleet, finding Potidæa and other cities already lost, go into Macedonia.

  59. The Athenian galleys, when they arrived in Thrace, found Potidæa and the other cities already revolted. And the commanders of the fleet conceiving it to be impossible, with their present forces, to make war both against Perdiccas and the towns revolted, set sail again for Macedonia, against which they had been at first sent out; and there staying, joined with Philip and the brothers of Derdas, that had invaded the country from above.

  The Corinthians send their forces to Potidæa to defend it.

  60. In the meantime after Potidæa was revolted, and whilst the Athenian fleet lay on the coast of Macedonia, the Corinthians, fearing what might become of the city, and making the danger their own, sent unto it, both of their own city2 , and of other Peloponnesians which they hired, to the number of sixteen hundred men of arms and four hundred light3 armed. The charge of these was given to Aristeus the son of Adimantus, for whose sake4 most of the volunteers of Corinth went the voyage: for he had been ever a great favourer of the Potidæans. And they arrived in Thrace after the revolt of Potidæa forty days.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. The Athenians send forces against Potidæa.Veria.

  61. The news of the revolt of these cities was likewise quickly brought to the Athenian people; who hearing withal of the forces sent unto them under Aristeus, sent forth against the places revolted two thousand men of arms and forty galleys, under the conduct of Callias the son of Calliades1 . These coming first into Macedonia, found there the former thousand, who by this time had taken Therme2 , and were now besieging the city of Pydna; and staying, helped for a while to besiege it with the rest. But shortly after they took composition; and having made a necessary3 league with Perdiccas, (urged thereto by the affairs of Potidæa, and the arrival there of Aristeus), departed from Macedonia. Thence coming to Berrhœa4 , they attempted to take it: but when they could not do it, they turned back, and marched towards Potidæa by land. They were of their own number three thousand men of arms, besides many of their confederates; and of Macedonians that had served with Philip and Pausanias, six hundred horsemen. And their galleys, seventy in number, sailing by them along the coast5 , by moderate journeys came in three days to Gigonus, and there encamped.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. The Athenians and those with Aristeus prepare themselves for battle.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. The victory falleth to the Athenians.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  62. The Potidæans and the Peloponnesians under Aristeus, in expectation of the coming of the Athenians, lay now encamped in the isthmus near unto1 Olynthus, and had the market kept for them without2 the city. And the leading of the foot the confederates had assigned to Aristeus, and of the horse to Perdiccas: for he fell off again presently from the Athenians, and having left Iolaus governor in his place, took part with the Potidæans. The purpose of Aristeus was, to have the body of the army with himself within the isthmus3 , and therewith to attend the coming on of the Athenians; and to have the Chalcideans and their confederates without the isthmus, and also the two hundred horse under Perdiccas, to stay in Olynthus, and when the Athenians were4 passed by, to come on their backs and to inclose the enemy betwixt them. But Callias the Athenian general, and the rest that were in commission with him, sent out before them their Macedonian horsemen and some few of their confederates to Olynthus, to stop those within from making any sally from the town; and then dislodging marched on towards Potidæa. When they were come on as far as the isthmus, and saw the enemy make ready to fight, they also did the like; and not long after they joined battle. That wing wherein was Aristeus himself, with the chosen men of the Corinthians and others, put to flight that part of their enemies that stood opposite unto them, and followed execution a great way. But the rest of the army of the Potidæans and Peloponnesians were by the Athenians defeated, and fled into the city. 63. And Aristeus, when he came back from the execution1 , was in doubt what way to take, to Olynthus or to Potidæa. In the end he resolved of the shortest2 way, and with his soldiers about him ran as hard as he was able into Potidæa; and with much ado got in at the pier3 through the sea, cruelly shot at, and with the loss of a few, but the safety of the greatest part of his company. As soon as the battle began4 , they that should have seconded the Potidæans from Olynthus, (for it is at most but sixty furlongs5 off, and in sight), advanced a little way to have aided them; and the Macedonian horse opposed themselves likewise in order of battle, to keep them back. But the Athenians having quickly gotten the victory, and the standards being taken1 down, they retired again; they of Olynthus into that city, and the Macedonian horsemen into the army of the Athenians. So2 that neither side had their cavalry at the battle. After the battle the Athenians erected a trophy, and gave truce to the Potidæans for the taking up of the bodies of their dead. Of the Potidæans and their friends there died somewhat less than three hundred; and of the Athenians themselves one hundred and fifty, with Callias one of their commanders.

  The Athenians begin to besiege Potidæa.The Athenians send Phormio with sixteen hundred men of arms to Potidæa.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Potidæa straightly besieged on all sides.

  64. Presently upon this, the Athenians raised a wall before the city on the part towards3 the isthmus, which they kept with a garrison; but the part to Pallene–ward they left unwalled. For they thought themselves too small a number, both to keep a guard in the isthmus, and withal to go over and fortify in Pallene; fearing lest the Potidæans and their confederates should assault them when divided. When the people of Athens understood that Potidæa was unwalled on the part toward Pallene, not long after they sent thither sixteen hundred men of arms under the conduct of Phormio the son of Asopius: who arriving in Pallene, left4 his galleys at Aphytis, and marching easily to Potidæa wasted the territory as he passed through. And when none came out to give him battle, he raised a wall before the city on that part also that looketh towards Pallene. Thus was Potidæa on both sides strongly besieged; and also from the sea by the Athenian galleys, that came up and rode before it.

  The advice of Aristeus, to carry all the people but five hundred men out of the city, that their victual might the better hold out, refused.Aristeus getteth out of the city, unseen of the Athenians.And staying in Chalcidice, slew certain of the city of Sermylius by ambushment.Phormio wasteth the territories of the Chalcideans and Bottiæans.

  65. Aristeus, seeing the city enclosed on every side, and without hope of safety save what might come from Peloponnesus or some other unexpected way, gave advice to all but five hundred, taking the opportunity of a wind, to go out by sea, that the provision might the longer hold out for the rest; and of them that should remain within offered himself to be one. But when his counsel took not place, being desirous to settle their business1 , and make the best of their affairs abroad, he got out by sea unseen of the Athenian guard; and staying amongst the Chalcideans, amongst other actions of the war2 , laid an ambush before Sermylius and slew many of that city, and solicited the sending of aid from Peloponnesus. And Phormio, after the siege laid to Potidæa, having with him his sixteen hundred men of arms, wasted the territory of the Chalcideans and Bottiæans, and some small towns he took in.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.The solicitation of the war by the Corinthians and other confederates of the Lacedæmonians.Complaints exhibited against the Athenians in the council of Sparta.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  66. These were3 the quarrels between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. The Corinthians quarrelled the Athenians, for besieging Potidæa, and in it the men of Corinth and Peloponnesus. The Athenians quarrelled the Peloponnesians, for causing their confederate and tributary city to revolt; and for that they had come thither, and openly fought against them in the behalf of Potidæa. Nevertheless the war brake not openly forth as yet, and they yet abstained from arms; for this was but a particular action of the Corinthians. 67. But when Potidæa was once besieged, both for their men’s sakes that were within, and also for fear to lose the place, they could no longer hold. But out of hand, they procured1 of their confederates to go to Lacedæmon; and thither also they went themselves with clamours and accusations against the Athenians, that they had broken the league and wronged the Peloponnesians. The Æginetæ, though not openly by ambassadors for fear of the Athenians, yet privily instigated them to the war as much as any; alledging that they were not permitted to govern themselves according to their own laws, as by the articles2 they ought to have been. So the Lacedæmonians having called together the confederates, and whosoever else had any injustice to lay to the charge of the Athenians, in the ordinary council3 of their own state commanded them to speak. Then presented every one his accusation; and amongst the rest the Megareans, besides many other their great differences, laid open this especially, that contrary to the articles they were forbidden the Athenian markets and havens1 . Last of all, the Corinthians, when they had suffered the Lacedæmonians to be incensed first by the rest, came in and said as followeth.

  oration of the ambassadors of corinth.A. C. 432. Ol 87. 1.

  68. “Men of Lacedæmon, your own fidelity, both in matter of estate and conversation, maketh you the less apt to believe us, when we accuse others of the contrary2 . And hereby you gain indeed a reputation of equity3 , but you have less experience in the affairs of foreign states. For although we have oftentimes foretold you, that the Athenians would do us a mischief; yet from time to time when we told it you, you never would take information of it; but have suspected rather, that what we spake hath proceeded from our own private differences. And you have therefore called hither these confederates, not before we had suffered, but now when the evil is already upon us. Before whom our speech must be so much the longer, by how much our objections are the greater, in that we have both by the Athenians been injured, and by you neglected. If the Athenians lurking in some obscure place, had done these wrongs unto the Grecians, we should then have needed to prove the same before you as to men that knew it not. But now what cause have we to use long discourse, when you see already that some1 are brought into servitude, and that they are contriving the like against others2 , and especially against our confederates; and are themselves, in case war should be made against them, long since prepared for it? For else they would never have taken Corcyra, and holden it from us by force, nor have besieged Potidæa; whereof the one was most commodious for any action against Thrace3 , and the other had brought unto the Peloponnesians a most fair navy.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  69. “And of all this you are yourselves the authors, in that you suffered them upon the end of the Persian war to fortify their city, and again afterwards to raise their long walls; whereby you have hitherto deprived of their liberty, not only the states by them already subdued, but also your own confederates. For not he that bringeth into slavery, but he that being able to hinder it neglects the same, is most truly said to do it; especially if they assume the honour to be esteemed the deliverers of Greece [as you do]. And for all that, we are hardly yet come together, and indeed not yet with any certain resolution what to do. For the question1 should not have been put, whether or not we have received injury, but rather in what manner we are to repair it. For they2 that do the wrong, having consulted upon it beforehand, use no delay at all, but come upon them whom they mean to oppress, whilst they be yet irresolute. And we know, not only3 that the Athenians have incroached upon their neighbours, but also by what ways they have done it. And as long as they think they carry it closely through your blindness, they are the less bold: but when they shall perceive that you see, and will not see, they will then press us strongly indeed. For, Lacedæmonians, you are the only men of all Greece, that sitting still defend others, not with your forces, but with promises4 ; and you are also the only men, that love to pull down the power of the enemy, not when it beginneth, but when it is doubled. You have indeed a report5 to be sure; but yet it is more in fame that, than in fact. For we ourselves know, that the Persian came against6 Peloponnesus from the utmost parts of the earth, before you encountered him as became your state. And also now you connive at the Athenians, who are not as the Medes, far off, but hard at hand; choosing rather to defend yourselves from their invasion, than to invade them; and by having to do with them when their strength is greater, to put yourselves upon the chance of fortune. And yet we1 know that the barbarian’s own error, and in our war against the Athenians, their own oversights, more than your assistance, was the thing that gave us victory. For the hope of your aid hath been the destruction of some, that relying on you, made no preparation for themselves by other means. Yet let not any man think that we speak this out of malice, but only by way of expostulation: for expostulation is with friends that err, but accusation against enemies that have done an injury.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  70. “Besides, if there be any that may challenge to exprobate his neighbour, we think ourselves may best do it; especially on so great quarrels as these, whereof you neither seem2 to have any feeling, nor to consider what manner of men, and how different from you in every kind the Athenians be, that you are to contend withal. For they love innovation, and are swift to devise, and also to execute what they resolve on. But you on the contrary are only apt to save your own; not devise any thing new, nor scarce3 to attain what is necessary. They again are bold beyond their strength, adventurous above their own reason, and in danger hope still the best. Whereas your actions are ever beneath your power, and you distrust even what your judgment1 assures; and being in a danger, never think to be delivered. They are stirrers, you studiers; they love to be abroad, and you at home the most of any. For they make account by being abroad to add to their estate; you, if you should go forth against the state of another, would think to impair your2 own. They, when they overcome their enemies advance the farthest, and when they are overcome by their enemies, fall off the least; and as for their bodies, they use them in the service of the commonwealth as if they were none of their own; but their minds, when they would serve the state, are right their own. Unless they take in hand3 what they have once advised on, they account so much lost of their own. And when they take it in hand, if they obtain any thing, they think lightly of it in respect of what they look to win by their prosecution. If they fail in any attempt, they do what is necessary for the present, and enter presently into other hopes.4 For they alone both have and hope for at once whatsoever they conceive, through their celerity in execution of what they once resolve on. And in this manner they labour and toil all the days of their lives. What they have, they have no leisure to enjoy, for continual getting of more: nor holiday esteem they any, but whereon they effect some matter profitable; nor think they ease with nothing to do, a less torment than laborious business. So that, in a word, to say they are men born neither to rest themselves, nor suffer others, is to say the truth. 71. Now notwithstanding, men of Lacedæmon, that this city, your adversary, be such as we have said, yet you still delay time; not knowing, that those only are they to whom it may suffice for the most part of their time to sit still1 , who, though they use not their power to do injustice, yet bewray a mind unlikely to swallow injuries; but placing equity belike in this, that you neither do any harm to others, nor receive it in defending of yourselves. But this is a thing you hardly could attain, though the states about you were of the same2 condition. But, as we have before declared, your customs are in respect of theirs antiquated; and of necessity, as it happeneth in arts, the new ones will prevail. True it is, that for a city living for the most part in peace, unchanged customs are the best; but for such as be constrained to undergo many matters, many devices will be needful. Which is also the reason why the Athenian customs, through much experience, are more new to you than yours are to them3 . Here therefore give a period to your slackness; and4 by a speedy invasion of Attica, as you promised, relieve both Potidæa and the rest: lest otherwise you betray your friends and kindred5 to their cruelest enemies; and lest we and6 others be driven through despair to seek out some other league. Which to do were no injustice, neither against the Gods, judges of men’s oaths, nor against men, the hearers1 of them. For not they break the league, who being abandoned have recourse to others; but they that yield not their assistance to whom they have sworn it. But if you mean to follow the business seriously, we will stay; for else we should do irreligiously, neither should we find any other more conformable to our manners, than yourselves. Therefore deliberate well of these points; and take such a course, that Peloponnesus may not by your leading fall into worse estate, than it was left unto you by your progenitors.”

  The Athenian ambassadors residing in Lacedæmon upon their business, desire to make answer to the oration of the Corinthians.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  72. Thus spake the Corinthians. The Athenian ambassadors, who chanced to be residing at Lacedæmon upon their2 business, when they heard of this oration, thought fit to present themselves before the Lacedæmonians, not to make apology for what they were charged with by the other cities, but to show in general3 , that it was not fit for them in this case to take any sudden resolution, but farther time to consider. Also they desired to lay open the power of their city; to the elder sort, for a remembrance of what they knew already, and to the younger, for an information of what they knew not: supposing, that when they should have spoken, they would incline to quietness rather than to war. And therefore they presented themselves before the Lacedæmonians, saying, that they also, if they might have leave, desired to speak in the assembly; who willed them to come in. And the Athenians went into the assembly and spake to this effect.

  oration of the ambassadors of athens.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  73. “Though our embassage was not to this end, that we should argue against our1 confederates, but about such other affairs as the city was pleased to employ us in; yet having heard of the great exclamation against us, we came into the court, not to make answer to the criminations of the cities, (for to plead before you here, were not to plead before the judges either of them or us), but to the end you may not be drawn away to take the worse resolution at the persuasion of the confederates, in matters of so great importance: and withal, touching the sum of the oration made against us, to inform you that what we possess, we have it justly, and that our city deserveth reputation. But what need we now to speak of matters long past, confirmed more by hearsay, than by the eyes of those that are to hear us relate them? But our actions against the Persian, and such as you yourselves know as well as we, those, though it be tedious2 to hear them ever objected, we must of necessity recite. For when we did them, we hazarded ourselves for some benefit, of which, as you had your parts in the substance3 , so must we have ours (if that be any benefit) in the commemoration. And we shall make recital of them, not by way of deprecation, but of protestation1 and declaration of what a city, in case you take ill advice, you have to enter the list withal. We therefore say, that we not only first and alone hazarded battle against the barbarian in the fields of Marathon, but also afterwards, when he came again, being unable to resist him by land, embarked ourselves, every man that was able to bear arms, and gave him battle amongst the rest by sea at Salamis; which was the cause that kept him back from sailing to Peloponnesus, and laying it waste city after city: for against so many galleys you were not able to give each other mutual succour. And the greatest proof of this is the Persian himself; who when his fleet was overcome, and that he had2 no more such forces, went away in haste with the greatest part of his army.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  74. “Which being so, and evident that the whole state of the Grecians was embarked in their fleet, we conferred to the same3 the three things of most advantage; namely, the greatest number of galleys, the most prudent commander, and the most lively courage. For of four hundred galleys in the whole, our own were few less than two–thirds; and for commander Themistocles, who was the principal cause that the battle was fought in the strait4 , whereby he clearly saved the whole business, and whom, though a stranger, you your selves have honoured for it more than any man that came unto you. And a forwardness we showed more adventurous than any other, in this, that when none of them had aided us by land before, and the rest of the cities, as far as to our own, were brought into servitude, we were nevertheless content both to quit our city and lose our goods; and even in that estate, not to betray the common cause of the confederates, or divided from them to be unuseful, but to put ourselves into our navy and undergo the danger with them; and that without passion against you for not having formerly defended us in the like manner. So that we may say, that we have no less conferred a benefit upon you, than we received it from you. You came indeed to aid us, but it was from cities inhabited, and to the end you might still keep them so; and when you were afraid, not of our danger, but your own. Whereas1 we, coming from a city no more being2 , and putting ourselves into danger for a city3 hopeless ever to be again, saved both you in4 part, and ourselves. But if we had joined with the Persian, fearing (as others did) to have our territories wasted; or afterwards, as men lost, durst not have put ourselves into our galleys, you must not have fought with him by sea, because your fleet had been too small; but his affairs had1 succeeded as he would himself.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of the Atheniaus.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of the Athenians.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of the Athenians.A. C. 432 Ol. 87. 1. Oration of the Athenians.

  75. “Therefore, men of Lacedæmon, we deserve not so great envy of the Grecians2 , for our courage at that time and for our prudence, and for the dominion we hold, as we now undergo. Which dominion we obtained not by violence, but because the confederates, when yourselves would not stay out the relics of the war against the barbarian, came in and entreated us to take the command of their own accord. So that at first we were forced to advance our dominion to what it is, out of the nature of the thing itself; as chiefly for fear, next for honour, and lastly for profit. For when we had the envy of many, and had reconquered some that had already revolted, and seeing you were no more our friends as you had been, but suspected and quarrelled us, we held it no longer a safe course, laying by our power to put ourselves into your danger3 . For the revolts from us, would all have been made to you. Now it is no fault for men in danger, to order their affairs to the best. 76. For you also4 , men of Lacedæmon, have command over the cities of Peloponnesus, and order them to your best advantage. And had you, when the time was1 , by staying it out, been envied in your command, as we know well, you would have been no less heavy to the confederates than we, you must have been constrained to rule imperiously, or to have fallen into danger. So that, though overcome by three the greatest things, honour, fear, and profit, we have both accepted the dominion delivered us and refuse again to surrender it, we have therein done nothing to be wondered at nor beside the manner of men. Nor have we been the first in this kind, but it hath been ever a thing fixed, for the weaker to be kept under by the stronger. Besides, we took the government upon us as esteeming ourselves worthy of the same; and of you also so esteemed, till having computed the commodity, you now fall to allegation of equity; a thing which no man that had the occasion to achieve anything by strength, ever so far preferred as to divert him from his profit. Those men are worthy of commendation, who following the natural inclination of man in desiring2 rule over others, are juster than for their own power they need. And therefore if another had our power, we think it would best make appear our own moderation; and yet our moderation hath undeservedly incurred contempt3 rather than commendation. 77. For1 though in pleas of covenants with our confederates, when in our own city we have allowed them trial by laws equal both to them and us, the judgment hath been given against us, we have then nevertheless been reputed contentious. None of them considering that2 others, who in other places have dominion and are toward their subject states less moderate than we, yet are never upbraided for it. For they that have the power to compel, need not at all to go to law. And yet3 these men having been used to converse with us upon equal terms, if they lose anything which they think they should not, either by sentence or by the power of our government, they are not thankful for the much they retain, but take in worse part the little they forego, than if at first, laying law aside, we had openly taken their goods by violence. For in this kind also4 they themselves cannot deny, but the weaker must give way to the stronger. And men, it seems, are more passionate for injustice, than for violence. For that, coming as from an equal, seemeth rapine; and the other, because from one stronger, but necessity. Therefore when they suffered worse things under the Medes’ dominion, they bore it; but think ours to be rigorous. And good reason; for to men in subjection, the present is ever the worst estate. Insomuch as you also, if you should put us down and reign yourselves, you would soon find a change of the love which they bear you now for fear of us, if you should do again as you did1 for a while, when you were their commanders against the Medes. For not only your own institutions are different2 from those of others, but also when any one of you comes abroad [with charge], he neither useth those of yours, nor yet those of the rest of Greece. 78. Deliberate therefore of this a great while, as of a matter of great importance; and do not upon the opinions and criminations of others procure your own trouble. Consider before you enter, how unexpected the chances of war be. For a long war for the most part endeth in calamity, from which we are equally far off; and whether part it will light on, is to be tried with uncertainty. And men, when they go to war, use many times to fall first to action, the which ought to come behind; and when they have taken harm, then they fall to reasoning. But since we are neither in such error ourselves, nor do find that you are, we advise you, whilst good counsel is in both our elections, not to break the peace nor violate your oaths; but according to the articles, let the controversy be decided by judgment; or else we call the gods you have sworn by to witness, that if you begin the war, we will endeavour to revenge ourselves the same way that you shall walk in before us.”

  The Lacedæmonians amongst themselves take counsel how to proceed.

  79. Thus spake the Athenians. After the Lacedæmonians had heard both the complaints of the confederates against the Athenians, and the Athenians’ answer, they put them every one out of the court1 , and consulted of the business amongst themselves. And the opinions of the greatest part concurred in this; that the Athenians had done unjustly, and ought speedily to be warred on. But Archidamus their king, a man reputed both wise and temperate, spake as followeth.

  oration of archidamus.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.

  80. “Men of Lacedæmon, both I myself have the experience of many wars, and I see you of the same age with me to have the like; insomuch as you2 cannot desire this war either through inexperience, as many do, nor yet as apprehending it to be profitable or safe. And whosoever shall temperately consider the war we now deliberate of, will find it to be no small one. For though in respect of the Peloponnesians and our neighbour states we have equal1 strength, and can quickly be upon them; yet against men whose territory is remote, and are also expert seamen, and with all other things excellently furnished, as money, both private and public, shipping, horses, arms, and number, more than any one part of Greece besides; and that have many confederates paying them tribute: against such, I say, why should we lightly undertake the war? And since we are unfurnished, whereon relying should we make such haste to it? On our navy? But therein we are too weak: and if we will provide2 and prepare against them, it will require time. On our money? But therein also we are more too weak3 ; for neither hath the state any, nor will private men readily contribute. 81. But it may be, some rely on this; that we exceed them in arms and multitude of soldiers, so that we may waste their territories with incursions. But there is much other land under their dominion, and by sea they are able to bring in whatsoever they shall stand in need of. Again, if we essay to alienate their confederates, we must aid them with shipping, because the most of them are islanders. What a war then will this of ours be? For unless we have the better of them in shipping, or take from them their revenue, whereby their navy is maintained, we shall do the most hurt to ourselves. And in this case to let fall the war again, will be no honour for us, when we are chiefly thought to have begun it. As1 for the hope, that if we waste their country, the war will soon be at an end; let that never lift us up: for I fear we shall transmit it rather to our children. For it is likely the Athenians have the spirit not to be slaves to their earth; nor as men without experience, to be astonished at the war. 82. And yet I do not advise that we should stupidly suffer our confederates to be wronged, and not apprehend the Athenians in their plots against them; but only not yet to take up arms, but to send and expostulate with them, making no great show neither of war nor of sufferance: and in the mean time to make our provision, and make friends both of Greeks and barbarians, such as in any place we can get of power either in shipping or money; (nor are they to be blamed, that being laid in wait for, as we are by the Athenians, take unto them not Grecians only, but also barbarians for their safety); and withal to set forth2 our own. If they listen to our ambassadors, best of all; if not, then two or three years passing over our heads, being better appointed, we may war3 upon them if we will. And when they see our preparation4 , and hear words that import no less, they will perhaps relent the sooner; especially having their grounds unhurt, and consulting upon commodities extant and not yet spoiled. For we must think their territory to be nothing but an hostage, and so much the more, by how much the better husbanded. The which we ought therefore to spare as long as we may; lest making them desperate, we make them also the harder to expugn. For if unfurnished as we be, at the instigation of the confederates we waste their territory; consider if1 in so doing we do not make the war both more dishonourable to the Peloponnesians, and also more difficult. For though accusations, as well against2 cities as private men, may be cleared again, a war for the pleasure of some taken up by all, the success whereof cannot be foreseen, can hardly with honour be letten fall again. 83. Now let no man think it cowardice, that being many cities3 , we go not presently and invade that one city. For of confederates that bring them in money, they have more than we; and war is not so much war of arms as war of money, by means whereof arms are useful; especially when it is a war of land–men against sea–men. And therefore let us first provide ourselves of money, and not first raise the war upon the persuasion of the confederates. For we that must be thought the causers of all events, good or bad, have reason also to take some leisure in part to foresee them. 84. As for the slackness and procrastination wherewith5 we are reproached by the confederates, be never ashamed of it; for the more haste you make to the war, you will4 be the longer before you end it, for that you go to it unprovided. Besides, our city hath been ever free and well thought of: and this which they object, is rather to be called a modesty proceeding upon judgment. For by that it is, that we alone are neither arrogant upon good success, nor shrink so much as others in adversity. Nor are we, when men provoke us to it with praise, through the delight thereof moved to undergo danger more than we think fit ourselves; nor when they sharpen us with reprehension, doth the smart thereof a jot the more prevail upon us. And this modesty of ours maketh us both good soldiers, and good counsellors: good soldiers, because shame begetteth1 modesty, and valour is most sensible of shame: good counsellors, in this, that we are brought up more simply than to disesteem the laws, and by severity more modestly than to disobey them: and also in that, we do not, like men exceeding wise in things needless, find fault bravely with the preparation of the enemy and in effect not assault him accordingly; but do think our neighbour’s cogitations like our own, and that the events of fortune cannot be discerned by a speech2 ; and do therefore always so furnish ourselves really against the enemy, as against men well advised. For we are not to build our hopes upon the oversights of them, but upon the safe foresight of ourselves. Nor must we think that there is much difference between man and man; but him only to be the best, that hath been brought up amongst the most difficulties3 . 85. Let us not therefore cast aside the institutions1 of our ancestors, which we have so long retained to our profit; nor let us of many men’s lives, of much money, of many cities, and much honour, hastily resolve in so small a part of one day, but at leisure; the which we have better commodity than any other to do, by reason of our power. Send to the Athenians about the matter of Potidæa; send about that wherein the confederates say they are injured; and the rather, because they be content to refer the cause to judgment; and one that offereth himself to judgment, may not lawfully be invaded as a doer of injury, before the judgment be given. And prepare withal for the war. So shall you take the most profitable counsel for yourselves, and the most formidable to the enemy.”

  Thus spake Archidamus. But Sthenelaidas, then one of the Ephori, stood up last of all and spake to the Lacedæmonians in this manner:

  oration of sthenelaidas.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Sthenelaidas.

  86. “For my part, I understand not the many words used by the Athenians; for though they have been much in their own praises, yet they have said nothing to the contrary but that they have done injury to our confederates and to Peloponnesus. And if they carried themselves well against the Medes, when time was, and now ill against us, they deserve a double punishment; because they are not good as they were, and because they are evil as they were not. Now are we the same we were2 ; and mean not (if we be wise) either to connive at the wrongs done to our confederates, or defer to repair them; for the harm they suffer, is not deferred. Others have much money, many galleys, and many horses; and we have good confederates, not to be betrayed to the Athenians, nor to be defended with words1 , (for they are not hurt in words), but to be aided with all our power and with speed. Let no man tell me, that after we have once received the injury we ought to deliberate. No, it belongs rather to the doers of injury to spend time in consultation. Wherefore, men of Lancedæmon, decree the war, as becometh the dignity of Sparta; and let not the Athenians grow yet greater, nor let us betray our confederates, but in the name of the Gods proceed against the doers of injustice.”

  The Lacedæmonians by question conclude that the Athenians had broken the peace.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  87. Having thus spoken, being himself Ephor, he put it to the question in the assembly of the Lacedæmonians; and saying afterwards, that he could not discern whether was the greater cry, (for they used there to give their votes viva voce, and not with balls2 ), and desiring that it might be evident that their minds were inclined most to the war1 , he put it unto them again, and said, “to whomsoever of you it seemeth that the peace is broken and that the Athenians have done unjustly, let him arise and go yonder,” and withal he showed them a certain place: “and to whomsoever it seemeth otherwise, let him go to the other side”. So they arose and the room was divided; wherein far the greater number were those that held the peace to be broken.

  Then calling in the confederates, they told them, that for their own parts their sentence was that the Athenians had done them wrong: but yet they desired to have all their confederates called together, and then to put it to the question again; that if they would, the war might be decreed by common consent2 . This done, their confederates went home: and so did also afterwards the Athenians, when they had dispatched the business they came about. This decree of the assembly that the peace was broken, was made in the fourteenth year of those thirty years, for which a peace had been formerly concluded after the actions past in Eubœa.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. The true cause of this war being the fear the Lacedæmonians had of the power of Athens, the author digresseth to show how that power grew first up.

  88. The Lacedæmonians gave sentence that the peace was broken and that war was to be made, not so much for the words of the confederates, as for fear the Athenian greatness should still increase. For they saw that a great part of Greece was fallen already into their hands.

  The means by which the Athenians came to have the command of the common forces of Greece against the Persian, by which they raised their empire.The Athenians return to their city.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. They repair their city, and wall it.

  89. Now the manner how the Athenians came to the administration of those affairs by which they so raised themselves, was this. After that the Medes, overcome by sea and land, were departed, and such of them as had escaped by sea to Mycale1 were there also utterly overthrown; Leotychides king of the Lacedæmonians, then commander of the Grecians at Mycale, with their confederates of Peloponnesus went home. But the Athenians with their confederates of Ionia and the Hellespont, as many as were already revolted from the king, staid behind and besieged Sestus, holden then by the Medes; and when they had lain before it all the winter, they took it abandoned by the barbarians2 . And after this they set sail from the Hellespont, every one to his own city. And the body3 of the Athenians, as soon as their territory was clear of the barbarians, went home also, and fetched thither their wives and children, and such goods as they had, from the places where they had been put out to keep; and went about the reparation1 of their city and walls. For there were yet standing some pieces of the circuit of their wall, and likewise a few houses (though the most were down) which the principal of the Persians had reserved for their own lodgings.

  The Lacedæmonians advise them to the contrary for their own ends, pretending the common good.Themistocles adviseth them to build on.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. His subtilty in deluding the Lacedæmonians.The building hastened.Themistocles goeth to Lacedæmon ambassador.He adviseth the Lacedæmonians to send ambassadors to see if the wall went up or not.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. He sendeth letters to Athens secretly, to have those ambassadors stayed till the return of himself and his fellows from Lacedæmon.And hearing that the walls were finished, he justifies it.A. C. 478. Ol. 75. 3.The Lacedæmonians dissembled their dislike.

  90. The Lacedæmonians hearing what they went about, sent thither their ambassadors, partly because they would themselves have been glad that neither the Athenians nor any other had had walls; but principally as incited thereto by their confederates, who feared not only the greatness of their navy, which they had not before, but also their courage showed against the Persians: and entreated them not to build their walls, but rather to join with them in pulling down the walls of what cities soever without Peloponnesus had them yet standing: not discovering their meaning, and the jealousy they had of the Athenians; but pretending this, that if the barbarian returned, he might find no fortified city to make the seat of his war, as he did2 of Thebes: and that Peloponnesus was sufficient for them all whereinto to retire, and from whence to withstand the war. But the Athenians, by the advice of Themistocles, when the Lacedæmonian ambassadors had so said, dismissed them presently with this answer; that they would presently send ambassadors about the business they spake of to Lacedæmon. Now Themistocles willed them to send himself to Lacedæmon for one, and that as speedily as they could; but such as were chosen ambassadors with him, not to send away presently, but to stay them till the walls were so raised as to fight upon them from a sufficient height1 ; and that all the men in the city, in the mean time, both they and their wives and children, sparing neither private nor public edifice that might advance the work, but pulling all down whatsoever, should help to raise it. When he had thus instructed them, adding that he would himself do the rest at Lacedæmon, he took his journey. And when he came to Lacedæmon he went not to the state2 , but delaying the time excused himself; and when any of those that were in office, asked him why he did not present himself to the state, answered, “that he stayed for his fellow–ambassadors, who upon some business that fell out were left behind, but he expected them very shortly and wondered they were not come already”. 91. Hearing this, they gave credit to Themistocles for the love they bore him; but when others coming thence averred plainly that the wall went up, and that it was come to good height already, they could not then choose but believe it. Themistocles, when he saw this, wished them not to be led by reports, but rather to send thither some of their own, such as were honest men, and having informed themselves would relate the truth: which they also did. And Themistocles sendeth privily to the Athenians about the same men, to take order for their stay with as little appearance of it as they could, and not to dismiss them till their own ambassadors were returned: (for by this time were arrived those that were joined with him, namely, Abronychus the son of Lysicles, and Aristides the son of Lysimachus, and brought him word that the wall was of a sufficient height): for he feared lest the Lacedæmonians, when they knew the truth, would refuse to let them go. The Athenians therefore kept there those ambassadors, according as it was written to them to do. Themistocles coming now to his audience before the Lacedæmonians, said plainly, “that the city of Athens was already walled, and that sufficiently for the defence of those within: and that if it shall please the Lacedæmonians1 upon any occasion to send ambassadors unto them, they were to send thenceforward as to men that understood what conduced both to their own, and also to the common good of all Greece. For when they thought it best to quit their city and put themselves into their galleys, he2 said, they were bold to do it without asking the advice of them: and in common counsel, the advice of the Athenians was as good as the advice of them. And now at this time their opinion is, that it will be best, both for themselves in particular and for all the confederates in common, that their city should be walled. For that in strength1 unequal, men cannot alike and equally advise for the common benefit of Greece. Therefore, said he, either must all the confederate cities be unwalled, or you must not think amiss of what is done by us.” The Lacedæmonians when they heard him, though they made no show of being angry with the Athenians; (for they had not sent their ambassadors to forbid them, but by way of advice, to admonish them not to build the wall2 ; besides they bare them affection then, for their courage shown against the Medes); yet they were inwardly offended, because they missed of their will. And the ambassadors returned home of either side without complaint.

  The walls of Athens built in haste.A. C. 473. Ol. 76. 4.Themistocles author to the Athenians of assuming the dominion of the sea, and of fortifying Piræus. A. C. 493. Ol. 71. 4.The reason why Themistocles was most addicted to affairs by sea.A. C. 478. Ol. 75. 3.

  93. Thus the Athenians quickly raised their walls; the structure itself making manifest3 the haste used in the building. For the foundation consisteth of stones of all sorts; and those in some places unwrought, and as they were brought to the place. Many pillars also taken from sepulchres4 , and polished stones were piled together amongst the rest. For the circuit of the city was set every way farther out, and therefore hastening they took alike whatsoever came next to hand. Themistocles likewise persuaded them to build up the rest of Piræus5 ; for it was begun in the year that himself was archon of Athens; as conceiving the place both1 beautiful, in that it had three natural havens, and that being now seamen, it would very much conduce to the enlargement of their power. For he was indeed the first man that durst tell them, that they ought to take upon them the command of the sea, and withal presently helped them in the obtaining it. By his counsel also it was, that they built the wall of that breadth about Piræus which is now to be seen. For two carts carrying stones2 met and passed upon it one by another. And yet within it there was neither rubbish nor mortar [to fill it up], but it was made all of great stones, cut square3 and bound together with iron and lead. But for height, it was raised but to the half, at the most, of what he had intended. For he would have had it able to hold out the enemy both by the height and breadth; and that a few and the less serviceable men might have sufficed to defend it, and the rest have served in the navy. For principally he was addicted to the sea, because, as I think, he had observed that the forces of the king had easier access to invade them by sea than by land; and thought that Piræus was more profitable than the city above. And oftentimes he would exhort the Athenians, that in case they were oppressed4 by land, they should go down thither, and with their galleys make resistance against what enemy soever. Thus the Athenians built their walls, and fitted themselves in other kinds, immediately upon the departure of the Persians.

  Pausanias sent general of the Greeks, to pursue the relics of the Persian war.A. C. 477. Ol. 75. 3.Pausanias growing insolent, the Ionians offended desire the protection of the Athenians.Pausanias sent for home to answer to certain accusations.A. C. 477. Ol. 75. 3. In his absence, the Grecians give the Athenians the leading of them.Pausanias acquit, but sent general no more.The Grecians refuse the command of Dorcis, sent from Sparta to be their general.

  94. In the meantime was Pausanias, the son of Cleombrotus, sent from Lacedæmon commander of the Grecians with twenty galleys out of Peloponnesus; with which went also thirty sail of Athens, besides a multitude of other confederates; and making war on Cyprus, subdued the greatest part of the same: and afterwards, under the same commander, came before Byzantium1 , which they besieged and won. 95. But Pausanias being now grown insolent, both the rest of the Grecians, and especially the Ionians, who2 had newly recovered their liberty from the king, offended with him, came unto the Athenians, and requested them for consanguinity’s3 sake to become their leaders, and to protect them from the violence of Pausanias. The Athenians accepting the motion, applied themselves both to the defence of these, and also to the ordering of the rest of the affairs there in such sort as it should seem best unto themselves. In the mean time the Lacedæmonians sent for Pausanias home, to examine him of such things as they had heard against him. For great crimes had been laid to his charge by the Grecians that came from thence; and his government was rather an imitation of tyranny, than a command in war. And it was his hap to be called home at the same time that the confederates, all but the soldiers of Peloponnesus, out of hatred to him had turned to the Athenians. When he came to Lacedæmon, though he were censured1 for some wrongs done to private men, yet of the greatest matters he was acquit; especially2 of Medising, the which seemed to be the most evident of all. Him therefore they sent general no more; but Dorcis, and some others with him, with no great army; whose command the confederates refused; and they finding that, went their ways likewise. And after that the Lacedæmonians sent no more; because they feared lest such as went out, would prove the worse for the state, as they had seen by Pausanias; and also because they desired to be rid of the Persian war, conceiving the Athenians to be sufficient leaders and at that time their friends.

  A. C. 477. Ol. 75. 4.The Athenians assess their confederates for the sustaining of the war. A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4.The original of the tribute paid to the Athenians.

  96. When the Athenians had thus gotten the command, by the confederates’ own accord for the hatred they bare to Pausanias, they then set down an order, which cities should contribute money for this war against the barbarians, and which galleys. For they pretended to repair the injuries they had suffered, by laying waste the territories of the king. And then first came up amongst the Athenians the office of Treasurers of Greece, who were receivers of the tribute3 ; for so they called this money contributed. And the first tribute that was taxed, came to four hundred and sixty talents4 . The treasury was at Delos1 , and their meetings were kept there in the temple.

  A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4. The history of the time between the Persian and Peloponnesian war, pretermitted by other writers, briefly delivered by Thucydides.

  97. Now using their authority, at first, in such manner as that the confederates lived under their own laws, and were admitted to common council; by [the] war and administration of the common affairs of Greece from the Persian war to this, what against the barbarians, what against their own innovating confederates, and what against such of the Peloponnesians as chanced always in every war to fall in, they effected those great matters following. Which also I have therefore written, both because this place hath been pretermitted by all that have written before me: (for they have either compiled the Grecian acts before the invasion of the Persians, or that invasion only; of which number is Hellanicus, who hath also touched them in his Attic History, but briefly, and without exact mention of the times): and also because they carry with them a demonstration of how the Athenian empire grew up2 .

  The steps of the Athenians towards their great dominion. The Athenians take Eion:A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4. and Scyros:and Carystus: A. C. 467. Ol. 78. 2.and Naxos, their confederate. A. C. 466. Ol. 78. 3.

  98. And first, under the conduct of Cimon the son of Miltiades they took Eion3 upon the river Strymon from the Medes by siege, and carried away1 the inhabitants captives. Then the isle Scyros, in the Ægean sea, inhabited by the Dolopes, the inhabitants whereof they also carried away captives, and planted therein a colony of their own. Likewise they made war on the Carystians alone without the rest of the Eubœans; and those also after a time came in by composition. After this they warred on the revolted Naxians, and brought them in by siege. And this was the first confederate city, which contrary to the ordinance2 they deprived of their free estate; though afterwards, as it came to any of their turns, they did the like by the rest.

  The cause of revolts from the Athenians.A. C. 466. Ol. 78. 3.

  99. Amongst other causes of revolts, the principal was their failing to bring in their tribute and galleys, and their refusing (when they did so) to follow the wars3 . For the Athenians exacted strictly, and were grievous to them, by imposing a necessity of toil which they were neither accustomed nor willing to undergo. They were also otherwise not so gentle in their government as they had been, nor followed the war upon equal terms; and could easily bring back to their subjection such as should revolt. And of this the confederates themselves were the causes. For4 through this refusal to accompany the army, the most of them, to the end they might stay at home, were ordered to excuse their galleys with money, as much as it came to: by which means the navy of the Athenians was increased at the cost of their confederates; and themselves unprovided and without means to make war, in case they should revolt.

  The Athenians defeat the Persian upon the river of Eurymedon.They war on Thasos. A. C. 465. Ol. 78. 3. 4.They take Amphipolis, and afterwards receive a great overthrow at Drabescus in Thrace.A. C. 465. Ol. 78. 3. 4. The Lacedæmonians intending to invade Attica, are hindered by an earthquake.A. C. 465.A. C. 463. Ol. 79. 1. 2. Thasos rendered to the Athenians. The Lacedæmonians send for aid to the Athenians, in their war against Ithome. A. C. 461. Ol. 79. 3. 4.The first dissension between the Lacedæmonians and the Athenians.The Athenians being had in suspicion by the Lacedæmonians, join with the Argives.A. C. 461. Ol. 79. 3. 4.

  100. After this it came to pass that the Athenians and their confederates fought against the Medes, both by land and by water, upon the river of Eurymedon in Pamphilia; and in one and the same day the Athenians had victory in both1 ; and took or sunk all the Phœnician fleet, to the number of two hundred galleys. After this again happened the revolt of Thasos, upon a difference about the places of trade and about the mines they possessed in the opposite parts of Thrace2 . And the Athenians going thither with their fleet, overthrew them in a battle at sea, and landed in the island. But having about the same time sent ten thousand of their own and of their confederates’ people unto the river of Strymon, for a colony to be planted in a place called then the Nine–ways, now Amphipolis; they won the said Nine–ways, which was held by the Eidonians; but advancing farther towards the heart of the country of Thrace, they were defeated3 at Drabescus, a city of the Eidonians, by the whole power of the Thracians, that were enemies to this new–built town of the Nine–ways. 101. The Thasians in the meantime, being overcome in divers battles and besieged, sought aid of the Lacedæmonians, and entreated them to divert the enemy by an invasion of Attica: which, unknown to the Athenians, they promised to do, and also had done it, but by an earthquake that then happened they were hindered. In which earthquake their Helots1 , and of neighbouring towns2 the Thuriatæ and Æthæans, revolted and seized on Ithome. Most of these Helots were the posterity of the ancient Messenians, brought into servitude in former3 times; whereby also it came to pass that they were called all Messenians. Against these had the Lacedæmonians now a war at Ithome. The4 Thasians in the third year of the siege rendered themselves to the Athenians, upon condition to raze their walls; to deliver up their galleys; to pay both the money behind and for the future, as much as they were wont; and to quit both the mines and the continent. 102. The Lacedæmonians, when the war against those in Ithome grew long, amongst other their confederates sent for aid to the Athenians; who also came with no small forces under the command of Cimon. They were sent for principally for their reputation in mural assaults, the long continuance of the siege seeming to require men of ability in that kind; whereby they might perhaps have gotten the place by force1 . And upon this journey, grew the first manifest dissension between the Lacedæmonians and the Athenians. For the Lacedæmonians, when they could not take the place by assault, fearing lest the audacious and innovating humour of the Athenians, whom withal they esteemed of a contrary race2 , might, at the persuasion of those in Ithome, cause some alteration if they staid, dismissed them alone of all the confederates; not discovering their jealousy, but alleging that they had no farther need of their service. But the Athenians perceiving that they were not sent away upon good3 cause, but only as men suspected, made it a heinous matter; and conceiving that they had better deserved at the Lacedæmonians’ hands, as soon as they were gone1 , left the league which they had made with the Lacedæmonians against the Persian, and became confederates with their enemies the Argives; and then both Argives and Athenians took the same oath and made the same league with the Thessalians.

  The Helots in Ithome, after ten years’ siege, compound and quit Peloponnesus. A. C. 455. Ol. 81. 1. 2.The Athenians receive them, and place them in Naupactus.Megara revolteth from the Lacedæmonians to the Athenians.

  103. Those in Ithome, when they could no longer hold out, in the tenth year of the siege rendered the place to the Lacedæmonians, upon condition of security to depart out of Peloponnesus, and that they should no more return; and whosoever should be taken returning, to be the slave of him that should take him. For the Lacedæmonians had before been warned by a certain answer of the Pythian oracle, to let go the suppliant of Jupiter Ithometes. So they came forth, they and their wives and their children. And the Athenians, for hatred they bore2 to the Lacedæmonians, received them and put them into Naupactus; which city they had lately taken from the Locrians of Ozolæ. The Megareans also revolted from the Lacedæmonians and came to the league of the Athenians, because they were holden down by the Corinthians with a war about the limits of their territories. Whereupon Megara and Pegæ were put into the hands of the Athenians; who built for the Megareans the long walls from the city to Nisæa, and maintained them with a garrison of their own. And from hence it was chiefly, that the vehement hatred grew of the Corinthians against the Athenians.

  A. C. 460. Ol. 80. 1. The Athenians send an army into Egypt, to aid the rebels against the king of Persia.Cairo.The Athenians fight by land, against the Corinthians and Epidaurians. A. C. 458. Ol. 80. 2. 3.After that, against the Peloponnesians.Then against the Æginetæ.The Peloponnesians aid Ægina. A. C. 457. Ol. 80. 3. 4.A. C. 457. Ol. 80. 3. 4.The Corinthians receive a great loss in Megaris.A. C. 457. Ol. 80. 3. 4.

  104. Moreover Inarus, the son of Psammetticus, an African1 , king of the Africans that confine on Egypt, making war from Mareia above Pharus, caused the greatest part of Egypt to rebel against the king Artaxerxes; and when he had taken the government of them upon himself, he brought in the Athenians to assist him; who chancing to be then warring on Cyprus with two hundred galleys, part their own and part their confederates, left Cyprus and went to him. And going from the sea up the river of Nilus, after they had made themselves masters of the river and of two parts of the city of Memphis, assaulted the third part, called the White–Wall. Within were of the Medes and Persians, such as had escaped, and of the Egyptians, such as had not revolted amongst the rest. 105. The Athenians came also with a fleet to Halias, and landing their soldiers fought by land with the Corinthians and Epidaurians; and the Corinthians had the victory. After this, the Athenians fought by sea against the fleet of the Peloponnesians at Cecryphaleia, and the Athenians had the victory. After this again, the war being on foot of the Athenians against the Æginetæ, a great battle was fought between them by sea upon the coast of Ægina, the confederates of both sides being at the same, in which the Athenians had the victory; and having taken seventy galleys landed their army and besieged the city, under the conduct of Leocrates the son of Strœbus. After this, the Peloponnesians desiring to aid the Æginetæ, sent over into Ægina itself three hundred men of arms, of the same that had before aided the Corinthians and Epidaurians, and with other forces1 seized on the top of Geraneia. And the Corinthians and their confederates came down from thence into the territory of Megara; supposing that the Athenians, having much of their army absent in Ægina and in Egypt, would be unable to aid the Megareans, or if they did, would be forced to rise from before Ægina. But the Athenians stirred not from Ægina, but those that remained at Athens, both young and old, under the conduct of Myronides went to Megara; and after they had fought with doubtful victory, they parted asunder again, with an opinion on both sides not to have had the worse in the action. And the Athenians, who notwithstanding had rather the better, when the Corinthians were gone away erected a trophy. But the Corinthians having been reviled at their return by the ancient men of the city, about twelve days after came again prepared and set up their trophy likewise, as if the victory had been theirs. Hereupon the Athenians sallying out of Megara with a huge shout2 , both slew those that were setting up the trophy, and charging the rest got the victory. 106. The Corinthians being overcome, went their way; but a good part of them, being hard followed and missing their way, lighted into the enclosed ground of a private man, which fenced with a great ditch had no passage through. Which the Athenians perceiving, opposed them1 at the place by which they entered with their men of arms, and encompassing the ground with their light armed soldiers killed those that were entered with stones. This was a great loss to the Corinthians; but the rest2 of their army got home again.

  The Athenians build their long walls from both sides of the city to the sea.A. C. 457. Ol. 80. 3. 4.The Lacedæmonians fight with the Athenians at Tanagra.A. C. 457. Ol. 80. 4.A. C. 456. Ol. 80. 4. The Athenians overthrow the Bœotians at Œnophyta, [that is to say, the vineyards], and subdue Bœotia and Phocis.Ægina yielded to the Athenians.The Athenians sail round Peloponnesus, and waste it.

  107. About this time the Athenians began the building of their long walls, from the city down to the sea, the one reaching to the haven called Phaleron, the other to Peiræus. The Phoceans also making war upon Bœum, Cytinium, and Erineus, towns that belonged to the Dorians3 , of whom the Lacedæmonians are descended, and having taken one of them, the Lacedæmonians, under the conduct of Nicomedes the son of Cleombrotus, in the place of Pleistoanactes son of king Pausanias, who was yet in his minority, sent unto the aid of the Dorians fifteen hundred men of arms of their own, and of their confederates ten thousand. And when they had forced the Phoceans upon composition to surrender the town they had taken, they went their ways again. Now if they would go home by sea through the Crisæan Gulf, the Athenians going1 about with their fleet would be ready to stop them; and to pass over Geraneia they thought unsafe, because the Athenians had in their hands Megara and Pegæ. For Geraneia was not only a difficult passage of itself, but was also always guarded by the Athenians2 . They thought good therefore to stay amongst the Bœotians, and to consider which way they might most safely go through. Whilst3 they were there, there wanted not some Athenians, that privily solicited them to come to the city, hoping to have put the people out of government, and to have demolished the long walls then building. But the Athenians, with the whole power of their city, and a thousand Argives, and other confederates as they could be gotten together, in all fourteen thousand men, went out to meet them: for4 there was suspicion that they came thither to depose the democracy. There also came to the Athenians5 certain horsemen out of Thessaly, which in the battle turned to the Lacedæmonians. 108. They fought at Tanagra of Bœotia, and the Lacedæmonians had the victory; but the slaughter was great on both sides. Then the Lacedæmonians entering into the territories of Megara, and cutting down the woods before them, returned home by the way of Geraneia and the Isthmus. Upon the two–and–sixtieth day after this battle, the Athenians, under the conduct of Myronides, made a journey against the Bœotians and overthrew them at Œnophyta, and brought the territories of Bœotia and Phocis under their obedience; and withal razed the walls of Tanagra, and took of the wealthiest of the Locrians of Opus a hundred hostages; and finished also at the same time their long walls at home. After this, Ægina also yielded to the Athenians on these conditions: that they should have their walls pulled down, and should deliver up their galleys, and pay their taxed tribute for the time to come. Also the Athenians made a voyage about Peloponnesus1 wherein they burnt the arsenal of the Lacedæmonians’ navy, took Chalcis2 a city of the Corinthians, and landing their forces in Sicyonia overcame in the fight those that made head against them.

  A. C. 456. Ol. 80. 4. The end of the Athenian forces in Egypt.A supply of Athenians going to Egypt, defeated by the forces of the king.A. C. 456. Ol. 80. 4.

  109. All this while the Athenians stayed still in Egypt3 , and saw much variety of war. First the Athenians were masters of Egypt: and the king of Persia sent one Megabazus, a Persian, with money to Lacedæmon, to procure the Peloponnesians to invade Attica, and by that means to draw the Athenians out of Egypt. But when this took no effect, and money was spent to no purpose, Megabazus returned with the money he had left into Asia. And1 then was Megabazus the son of Zopyrus, a Persian, sent into Egypt with great forces, and coming in by land overthrew the Egyptians and their confederates in a battle, drave the Grecians out of Memphis, and finally inclosed them in the isle of Prosopis2 . There he besieged them a year and a half, till such time as having drained the channel and turned the water another way, he made their galleys lie aground and the island for the most part continent, and so came over and won the island with land soldiers. 110. Thus was the army of the Grecians lost after six years’ war; and few of many passing through Africa saved themselves in Cyrene: but the most perished. So Egypt returned to the obedience of the king, except only Amyrtæus, that reigned in the fens. For him they could not bring in, both because the fens are great, and the people of the fens3 of all the Egyptians the most warlike. But Inarus, king of the Africans, and author of all this stir in Egypt, was taken by treason and crucified. The Athenians moreover had sent fifty galleys more into Egypt, for a supply of those that were there already; which putting in at Mendesium, one of the mouths of Nilus, knew nothing of what had happened to the rest: and being assaulted from the land by the army, and from the sea by the Phœnician fleet, lost the greatest part of their galleys, and escaped home again with the lesser part. Thus ended the great expedition of the Athenians and their confederates into Egypt.

  The Athenians invade Thessaly.A. C. 454. Ol. 81. 2. 3. The Athenians under Pericles besiege Œniades.

  111. Also Orestes the son of Echecratidas, king of the Thessalians, driven out of Thessaly, persuaded the Athenians to restore him. And the Athenians, taking with them the Bœotians and Phoceans1 , their confederates, made war against Pharsalus2 , a city of Thessaly; and were masters of the field as far as they strayed not from the army3 , (for the Thessalian horsemen kept them from straggling); but could not win the city nor yet perform anything else of what they came for, but came back again without effect, and brought Orestes with them. Not long after this, a thousand Athenians went aboard the gallies that lay at Pegæ, (for Pegæ was in the hands of the Athenians), under the command of Pericles the son of Xantippus, and sailed into Sicyonia4 , and landing put to flight such of the Sicyonians as made head; and then presently took up forces in Achaia; and putting over made war on Œnias5 , a city of Acarnania, which they besieged. Nevertheless they took it not, but returned home.

  Truce for five years between the Athenians and Peloponnesians.The Athenians war on Cyprus.Cimon dieth. A. C. 449. Ol. 82. 3. 4.The Holy War. A. C. 448. Ol. 82. 4./83. 1.The Athenians recover Chæroneia, taken by the Bœotian outlawsA. C. 448. Ol. 82. 4./83. 1. The Athenians defeated at Coroneia by the outlaws, lose BœotiaEubœa revolteth from the Athenians. A. C. 446. Ol. 83. 2. 3. Megara revolteth Ol. 83. 3.A. C. 445 Ol. 83. 3. Eubœa subdued by the AtheniansPeace for thirty years between the Athenians and Peloponnesians.A. C. 440. Ol. 85. 1.The Athenians war upon Samos.A. C. 440. Ol. 85. 1.A. C. 440. Ol. 85. 1.Samos yielded to the Athenians.A. C. 440. Ol. 85. 1.

  112. Three years after this6 , was a truce made between the Peloponnesians and Athenians for five years. And the Athenians gave over the Grecian war; and with two hundred galleys, part their own, and part confederates, under the conduct of Cimon, made war on Cyprus. Of these there went sixty sail into Egypt, sent for by Amyrtæus that reigned in the fens; and the rest lay at the siege of Citium. But Cimon there dying and a famine arising in the army1 , they left Citium; and when they had passed Salamis2 in Cyprus, fought at once both by sea and land against the Phœnicians, Cyprians, and Cilicians, and having gotten victory in both returned home, and with them the rest of their fleet, now come back from Egypt. After this, the Lacedæmonians took in hand the war called the holy war; and having won the temple at Delphi, delivered the possession thereof to the Delphians3 . But the Athenians afterward, when the Lacedæmonians were gone, came with their army, and regaining it, delivered the possession to the Phoceans. 113. Some space of time after this, the outlaws of Bœotia being seized of Orchomenus and Chæroneia and certain other places of Bœotia, the Athenians made war upon those places, being their enemies, with a thousand men of arms of their own and as many of their confederates as severally came in, under the conduct of Tolmidas the son of Tolmæus. And when they had taken Chæroneia, they carried away the inhabitants4 captives, and leaving a garrison in the city departed. In their return, those outlaws that were in Orchomenus, together with the Locrians of Opus, and the Eubœan outlaws, and others of the same faction, set upon them at Coroneia1 , and overcoming the Athenians in battle some they slew and some they took alive. Whereupon the Athenians relinquished all Bœotia, and made peace with condition to have their prisoners released. So the outlaws and the rest2 returned, and lived again under their own laws. 114. Not long after revolted Eubœa from the Athenians; and when Pericles had already passed over into it with the Athenian army, there was brought him news that Megara was likewise revolted, and that the Peloponnesians were about to invade Attica; and that the Megareans had slain the Athenian garrison, except only such as fled into Nisæa. Now the Megareans, when they revolted, had gotten to their aid the Corinthians, Epidaurians, and Sicyonians. Wherefore Pericles forthwith withdrew his army from Eubœa; and the Lacedæmonians afterward brake into Attica, and wasted the country about Eleusine and3 Thriasium, under the conduct of Pleistoanax the son of Pausanias, king of Lacedæmon, and came no farther on, but so went away. After which the Athenians passed again into Eubœa1 , and totally subdued it: the Hestiæans they put quite out, taking their territory into their own hands; but ordered the rest of Eubœa according to composition made. 115. Being returned from Eubœa, within a while after they made a peace with the Lacedæmonians and their confederates for thirty years; and rendered Nisæa, Achaia2 , Pegæ, and Trœzene, (for these places the Athenians held of theirs), to the Peloponnesians. In the sixth year of this peace fell out the war between the Samians and Milesians, concerning Priene; and the Milesians being put to the worse, came to Athens and exclaimed against the Samians. Wherein also certain private men of Samos itself took part with the Milesians, out of desire to alter the form of government. Whereupon the Athenians went to Samos with a fleet of forty galleys, and set up the democracy there, and took of the Samians fifty boys and as many men for hostages; which when they had put into Lemnos, and set a guard upon them1 , they came home. But certain of the Samians (for some of them not enduring the popular government were fled into the continent) entering into a league with the mightiest of them in Samos, and with Pissuthnes the son of Hystaspes, who then was governor of Sardis, and levying about seven hundred auxiliary soldiers, passed over into Samos in the evening, and first set upon the popular faction, and brought most of them into their power; and then stealing their hostages out of Lemnos, they revolted, and delivered the Athenian guard and such captains as were there2 into the hands of Pissuthnes, and withal prepared to make war against Miletus. With these also revolted the Byzantines. 116. The Athenians, when they heard of these things, sent to Samos sixty galleys, sixteen whereof they did not use; (for some of them went into Caria to observe the fleet of the Phœnicians, and some to fetch in succours from Chios and Lesbos); but with the forty–four that remained, under the command of Pericles and nine others, fought3 with seventy galleys of the Samians, (whereof twenty were such as served for the transport of soldiers), as they were coming altogether from Miletus; and the Athenians had the victory. After this came a supply of forty galleys more from Athens, and from Chios and Lesbos twenty–five. With these having landed their men, they overthrew the Samians in battle, and besieged the city; which they inclosed with a triple wall4 , and shut it up by sea with their galleys. But Pericles taking with him sixty galleys out of the road, made haste towards Caunus and Caria, upon intelligence of the coming against them of the Phœnician fleet. For Stesagoras with five galleys was already gone out of Samos, and others out of other places, to meet the Phœnicians. 117. In the mean time, the Samians coming suddenly forth with their fleet and falling upon the harbour1 of the Athenians, which was unfortified, sunk the galleys that kept watch before it, and overcame the rest2 in fight; insomuch that they became masters of the sea near their coast for about fourteen days together, importing and exporting what they pleased. But Pericles returning shut them up again with his galleys. And after this, there came to him from Athens a supply of forty sail, with Thucydides3 , Agnon, and Phormio, and twenty with Tlepolemus and Anticles; and from Chios and Lesbos thirty more. And though the Samians fought against these a small battle at sea, yet unable to hold out any longer, in the ninth month of the siege they rendered the city upon composition: namely, to demolish their walls, to give hostages, to deliver up their navy, and to repay the money spent by the Athenians in the war at days appointed. And the Byzantines also yielded, with condition to remain subject to them in the same manner as they had been before their revolt.

  The business about Corcyra and Potidæa, before related.Between the Persian and Peloponnesian war, fifty years.The oracle consulted by the Lacedæmonians, encourageth them to the war.A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4.Consultation of the Peloponnesians in general, whether they should enter into a war or not. A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4. / 87. 1.

  118. Now not many years after this happened the matters before related, of the Corcyræans and the Potidæans, and whatsoever other intervenient1 pretext of this war. These things done by the Grecians one against another or against the barbarians, came to pass all within the compass of fifty years at most, from the time of the departure of Xerxes to the beginning of this present war. In which time, the Athenians both assured their government over the confederates, and also much enlarged their own particular wealth. This the Lacedæmonians saw, and opposed not, save now and then a little; but, as men that had ever before been slow to war without necessity, and also for that they were hindered sometimes with domestic war, for the most part of the time stirred not against them: till now at last, when the power of the Athenians was advanced manifestly indeed, and that they had done injury to their confederates, they could forbear no longer; but thought it necessary to go in hand with the war with all diligence, and to pull down, if they could, the Athenian greatness. For which purpose it was2 by the Lacedæmonians themselves decreed, that the peace was broken and that the Athenians had done unjustly: and also having sent to Delphi, and enquired of Apollo, whether they should have the better in the war or not; they received, as it is reported, this answer: “That if they warred with their whole power, they should have victory, and that himself would be on their side, both called and uncalled”. 119. Now when they had assembled their confederates again, they were to put it to the question amongst them, “whether they should make war or not”. And the ambassadors of the several confederates coming in, and the council set, as well the rest spake what they thought fit, most of them accusing the Athenians of injury, and desiring the war; as also the Corinthians, who had before entreated the cities every one severally to give their vote for the war, fearing lest Potidæa should be lost before help came, being then present spake last of all to this effect.

  oration of the ambassadors of corinth.A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4./87. 1. Oration of the Corinthians.A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4./87. 1. Oration of the Corinthians.A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4./87. 1. Oration of the Corinthians.A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4./87. 1. Oration of the Corinthians.

  120. “Confederates, we can no longer accuse the Lacedæmonians, they having both decreed the war themselves1 , and also assembled us to do the same. For it is fit for them who have the command in a common league, as they are honoured of all before the rest, so also (administering their private affairs equally with others) to consider before the rest of the common business. And though as many of us as have already had our turns with the Athenians, need not be taught to beware of them: yet it were good for those that dwell up in the land, and not as we, in places of traffic on the sea side, to know, that unless they defend those below, they shall with a great deal the more difficulty both carry to the sea the commodities of the seasons, and again more hardly receive the benefits afforded to the inland countries from the sea; and also not to mistake1 what is now spoken, as if it concerned them not; but to make account, that if they neglect those that dwell by the sea, the calamity will also reach to themselves; and that this consultation concerneth them no less than us; and therefore not to be afraid to change their peace for war. For though it be the part of discreet men to be quiet, unless they have wrong; yet it is the part of valiant men, when they receive injury, to pass from peace into war, and after success, from war to come again to composition: and neither to swell with the good success of war, nor to suffer injury through pleasure taken in the ease of peace. For he whom pleasure makes a coward, if he sit still, shall quickly lose the sweetness of the ease that made him so. And he that in war is made proud by success, observeth not that his pride is grounded upon unfaithful confidence. For though many things ill advised, come to good effect against enemies worse advised; yet more, thought well advised, have fallen but badly out against well advised enemies2 . For no man comes to execute a thing with the same confidence he premeditates it. For we deliver opinions in safety, whereas in the action itself we fail through fear. 121. As for the war, at this time we raise it, both upon injuries done us and upon other sufficient allegations; and when we have repaired our wrongs upon the Athenians, we will also in due time lay it down. And it is for many reasons probable that we shall have the victory: first, because we exceed them in number1 ; and next, because when we go to any action intimated, we shall be all of one fashion2 . And as for a navy, wherein consisteth the strength of the Athenians, we shall provide it, both out of every one’s particular wealth, and with the money at Delphi and Olympia. For taking this at interest, we shall be able to draw from them their foreign mariners by offer of greater wages. For the forces of the Athenians are rather mercenary than domestic: whereas our own power is less obnoxious to such accidents, consisting more in the persons of men than in money. And if we overcome them but in one battle by sea, in all probability they are totally vanquished. And if they hold out, we also shall with longer time apply ourselves to naval affairs. And when we shall once have made our skill equal to theirs, we shall surely overmatch them in courage. For the valour that we have by nature, they shall never come unto by teaching; but the experience which they exceed us in, that must we attain unto by industry. And the money wherewith to bring this to pass, it must be all our parts to contribute. For else it were a hard case, that the confederates of the Athenians should not stick to contribute to their own servitude; and we should refuse to lay out our money to be revenged of our enemies and for our own preservation, and that the Athenians take not our money from us and even with that do us mischief. 122. We have also many other ways of war; as the revolt of their confederates, which is the principal means of lessening their revenue1 ; the building of forts in their territory2 ; and many other things which one cannot now foresee. For the course of war is guided by nothing less than by the points of our account, but of itself contriveth most things upon the occasion. Wherein he that complies with it with most temper, standeth the firmest; and he that is most passionate, oftenest miscarries. Imagine we had differences each of us about the limits of our territory with an equal adversary; we must undergo them. But now the Athenians are a match for us all at once, and one city after another too strong for us. Insomuch that unless we oppose them jointly, and every nation and city set to it unanimously, they will overcome us asunder without labour. And know, that to be vanquished (though it trouble you to hear it) brings with it no less than manifest3 servitude: which but to mention as a doubt, as if so many cities could suffer under one, were very dishonourable to Peloponnesus. For it must then be thought that we are either punished upon merit, or else that we endure it out of fear, and so appear degenerate from our ancestors. For by them the liberty of all Greece hath been restored: whereas we for our part assure not so much as our own; but claiming the reputation of having deposed tyrants in the several cities, suffer a tyrant city to be established amongst us. Wherein we know not how we can avoid1 one of these three great faults, foolishness, cowardice, or negligence. For certainly you avoid them not by imputing it to that which hath done most men hurt, contempt of the enemy: for contempt, because it hath made too many men miscarry, hath gotten the name of foolishness.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 86. 4./87. 1. Oration of the Corinthians.

  123 “But to what end should we object matters past, more than is necessary to the business in hand? We must now by helping the present, labour for the future2 : for it is peculiar to our country to attain honour by labour. And though you be now somewhat advanced in honour and power, you must not therefore change the custom: for there is no reason that what was gotten in want, should be lost by wealth. But we should confidently go in hand with the war, as for many other causes so also for this, that both the God hath by his oracle advised us thereto and promised to be with us himself: and also for that the rest of Greece, some for fear and some for profit1 , are ready to take our parts. Nor are you they that first break the peace, which the God, inasmuch as he doth encourage us to the war, judgeth violated by them2 ; but you fight rather in defence of the same. For not he breaketh the peace that taketh revenge, but he that is the first invader.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1./86. 4. Oration of the Corinthians.

  124. “So that seeing it will be every way good to make the war, and since in common we persuade the same; and seeing also that both to the cities and to private men it will be the most profitable course, put off no longer neither the defence of the Potidæans; who are Dorians, and besieged (which was wont to be contrary) by Ionians; nor the recovery of the liberty of the rest of the Grecians. For it is a case that admitteth not delay, when they are some of them already oppressed, and others (after it shall be known we met and durst not right ourselves) shall shortly after undergo the like. But think, confederates, you are now at a necessity, and that this is the best advice: and therefore give your votes for the war, not fearing the present danger, but coveting the long peace proceeding from it. For though by war groweth the confirmation of peace; yet for love of ease to refuse the war, doth not likewise avoid the danger. But making account that a tyrant city set up in Greece, is set up alike over all, and reigneth over some already, and the rest in intention, we shall bring it again into order by the war1 ; and not only live for the time to come out of danger ourselves, but also deliver the already enthralled Grecians out of servitude.” Thus said the Corinthians.

  The war decreed by all the confederates.

  125. The Lacedæmonians, when they had heard the opinion of them all, brought the balls to all the confederates present in order, from the greatest state to the least: and the greatest part gave their votes for the war. Now after the war was decreed, though it were impossible for them to go in hand with it presently, because they were unprovided, and every state thought good without delay severally to furnish themselves of what was necessary; yet there passed not fully a year in this preparation before Attica was invaded, and the war openly on foot.

  The Lacedæmonians send embassages to the Athenians about expiation of sacrileges, only to pick better quarrels for the war.A. C. 612. Ol. 42. 1.A. C. 612. Ol. 42. 1.A. C. 612. Ol. 42. 1.

  126. In the mean time they sent ambassadors to the Athenians with certain criminations, to the end that if they would give ear to nothing, they might have all the pretext that could be for raising of the war. And first the Lacedæmonians, by their ambassadors to the Athenians, required them to banish such as were under curse of the goddess Minerva for pollution of sanctuary2 . Which polution was thus. There had been one Cylon an Athenian, a man that had been victor in the Olympian exercises, of much nobility and power amongst those of old time, and that had married the daughter of Theagenes, a Megarean, in those days tyrant of Megara. To this Cylon, asking counsel at Delphi, the God answered, that on the greatest festival day1 he should seize the citadel of Athens. He therefore having gotten forces of Theagenes, and persuaded his friends to the enterprise, seized on the citadel at the time of the Olympic holidays in Peloponnesus, with intention to take upon him the tyranny: esteeming the feast of Jupiter2 to be the greatest, and to touch withal on his particular, in that he had been victor in the Olympian exercises. But whether the feast spoken of were meant to be the greatest in Attica, or in some other place, neither did he himself consider, nor the oracle make manifest3 . For there is also amongst the Athenians the Diasia, which is called the greatest feast of Jupiter Meilichius, and is celebrated without the city; wherein in the confluence of the whole people many men offered sacrifices, not of living creatures, but such as was the fashion of the natives of the place4 . But he, supposing he had rightly understood the oracle, laid hand to the enterprise. And when the Athenians heard of it, they came with all their forces out of the fields, and lying before the citadel besieged it. But the time growing long, the Athenians, wearied with the siege, went most of them away; and left both the guard of the citadel and the whole business to the nine archontes, with absolute authority to order the same as to them it should seem good. For at that time, most of the affairs of the commonweal were administered by those nine archontes1 . Now those that were besieged with Cylon, were for want of both victual and water in very evil estate; and therefore Cylon and a brother of his fled privily out; but the rest, when they were pressed and some of them dead with famine, sat down as suppliants by the altar that is in the citadel. And the Athenians, to whose charge was committed the guard of the place, raising them upon promise to do them no harm, put them all to the sword. Also they had put to death some of those that had taken sanctuary at the altars of the severe Goddesses, as they were going away1 . And from this the Athenians, both themselves and their posterity, were called accursed and sacrilegious persons. Hereupon the Athenians banished those that were under the curse: and Cleomenes, a Lacedæmonian, together with the Athenians in a sedition2 , banished them afterwards again: and not only so, but disinterred and cast forth the bodies of such of them as were dead. Nevertheless there returned of them afterwards again; and there are of their race in the city unto this day.

  A. C. 612. Ol. 42. 1.Pericles always adverse to the Lacedæmonians.

  127. This pollution therefore the Lacedæmonians required them to purge their city of: principally forsooth, as taking part with the gods; but knowing withal, that Pericles the son of Xantippus, was by the mother’s side3 one of that race. For they thought if Pericles were banished, the Athenians would the more easily be brought to yield to their desire. Nevertheless, they hoped not so much that he should be banished, as to bring him into the envy of the city; as if the misfortune of him were in part the cause of the war. For being the most powerful of his time, and having the sway of the state, he was in all things opposite to the Lacedæmonians; not suffering the Athenians to give them the least way, but inciting them to the war.

  The Athenians require the Lacedæmonians to expiate the violation of sanctuary also on their parts.A. C. 466. Ol. 78. 3.The occasion and manner of the death of Pausanias in the temple of Pallas Chalciœca.A. C. 470. Ol. 77. 3.Pausanias practiseth with the king of Persia against the state of Greece. A. C. 478.7. Ol. 75. 3.The Letter of Pausanias to the king.

  128. Contrariwise, the Athenians required the Lacedæmonians to banish such as were guilty of breach of sanctuary at Tænarus. For the Lacedæmonians, when they had caused their Helots, suppliants in the temple of Neptune at Tænarus, to forsake sanctuary, slew them: for which cause they themselves think it was, that the great earthquake happened afterwards at Sparta. Also they required them to purge their city of the pollution of sanctuary in the temple of Pallas Chalciœca; which was thus. After that Pausanias the Lacedæmonian was1 recalled by the Spartans from his charge in Hellespont, and having been called in question by them was absolved, though he was no more sent abroad by the state, yet he went again into Hellespont in a galley of Hermione as a private man, without leave of the Lacedæmonians; to the Grecian war, as he gave out, but in truth to negociate with the king, as he had before begun, aspiring to the principality of Greece. Now the benefit that he had laid up with the king, and the beginning of the whole business, was at first from this. When after his return from Cyprus he had taken Byzantium; when he was there the first time, (which being holden by the Medes, there were taken in it some near to the king, and of his kindred), unknown to the rest of the confederates he sent unto the king those near ones of his which he had taken, and gave out they were run away. This he practised with one Gongylus, an Eretrian, to whose charge he had committed both the town of Byzantium and the prisoners. Also he sent letters unto him, which Gongylus carried, wherein, as was afterwards known, was thus written: “Pausanias, General of the Spartans, being desirous to do thee a courtesy, sendeth back unto thee these men, whom he hath by arms taken prisoners. And I have a purpose, if the same seem also good unto thee, to take thy daughter in marriage, and to bring Sparta and the rest of Greece into thy subjection. These things I account myself able to bring to pass, if I may communicate my counsels with thee. If therefore any of these things do like thee, send some trusty man to the sea–side, by whose mediation we may confer together.”

  A. C. 478.7. Ol. 75. 3.The Letter of Xerxes to Pausanias.

  129. These were the contents of the writing. Xerxes being pleased with the letter, sends away Artabazus the son of Pharnaces to the sea–side, with commandment to take the government of the province of Dascylis1 , and to dismiss Megabates, that was governor there before: and withal, gives him a letter to Pausanias, which he commanded him to send over to him with speed to Byzantium, and to show him the seal, and well and faithfully to perform whatsoever in his affairs he should by Pausanias be appointed to do. Artabazus, after he arrived, having in other things done as he was commanded, sent over the letter; wherein was written this answer: “Thus saith king Xerxes to Pausanias: For the men which thou hast saved and sent over the sea unto me from Byzantium, thy benefit is laid up in our house indelibly registered2 for ever: and I like also of what thou hast propounded. And let neither night nor day make thee remiss in the performance of what thou hast promised unto me. Neither be thou hindered by the expense of gold and silver, or multitude of soldiers requisite, whithersoever it be needful to have them come3 . But with Artabazus, a good man whom I have sent unto thee, do boldly both mine and thine own business, as shall be most fit for the dignity and honour of us both.”

  Pausanias groweth proud upon the receipt of these letters.A. C. 478.7. Ol. 75. 3.

  130. Pausanias having received these letters, whereas he was before in great authority4 for his conduct at Platæa, became now many degrees more elevated; and endured no more to live after the accustomed manner of his country, but went apparelled at Byzantium1 after the fashion of Persia; and when he went through Thrace, had a guard of Medes and Egyptians, and his table likewise after the Persian manner. Nor was he able to conceal his purpose; but in trifles made apparent beforehand the greater matters he had conceived of the future. He became moreover difficult of access; and would be in such choleric2 passions toward all men indifferently, that no man might endure to approach him; which was also none of the least causes why the confederates turned from him to the Athenians.

  A. C. 470. Ol. 77. 3.A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4.Pausanias his ambition, in dedication of the Tripode at Delphi.A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4.

  131 When the Lacedæmonians heard of it, they called him home the first time. And when being gone out the second time without their command in a galley of Hermione, it appeared that he continued still in the same practices; and after he was forced out of Byzantium by siege of the Athenians, returned not to Sparta, but news came that he had seated himself at Colonæ in the country of Troy, practising still with the barbarians, and making his abode there for no good purpose: then the ephori forebore no longer, but sent unto him a public officer with the scytale3 , commanding him not to depart from the officer; and in case he refused, denounced war against him. But he, desiring as much as he could to decline suspicion, and believing that with money he should be able to discharge himself of his accusations, returned unto Sparta the second time. And first he was by the ephori committed to ward; (for the ephori1 have power to do this to their king); but afterwards procuring his enlargement, he came forth, and exhibited himself to justice against such as had any thing to allege against him. 132. And though the Spartans had against him no manifest proof, neither his enemies nor the whole city, whereupon to proceed to the punishment of a man both of the race of their kings, and at that present in great authority: (for Plistarchus the son of Leonidas, being king and as yet in minority, Pausanias, who was his cousin–german, had the tuition of him yet): by his licentious behaviour, and affectation of the barbarian customs, he gave much cause of suspicion that he meant not to live in the equality of the present state2 . They considered also that he differed in manner of life from the discipline established: amongst other things by this, that upon the tripode at Delphi, which the Grecians had dedicated as the best of the spoil of the Medes, he had caused to be inscribed of himself in particular this elegiac verse1 :

  • Pausanias, Greek General,
  • Having the Medes defeated,
  • To Phœbus in record thereof
  • This gift hath consecrated.

  Pausanias accused of practice with the Helots.He sends letters to the king, which are opened by the way.Post A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4.Pausanias by the art of the ephori made to betray himself.

  But the Lacedæmonians then presently defaced that inscription of the tripode, and engraved thereon by name all the cities that had joined in the overthrow of the Medes, and dedicated it so2 . This therefore was numbered amongst the offences of Pausanias, and was thought to agree with his present design, so much the rather for the condition he was now in3 . They had information farther, that he had in hand some practice with the Helots. And so he had: for he promised them, not only manumission, but also freedom of the city, if they would rise with him and co–operate in the whole business. But neither thus, upon some appeachment of the Helots, would they proceed against him, but kept the custom which they have in their own cases, not hastily to give a peremptory sentence against a Spartan without unquestionable proof. Till at length (as it is reported) purposing to send over to Artabazus his last letters to the king, he was bewrayed unto them by a man of Argilus, in time past his minion4 and most faithful to him: who being terrified with the cogitation, that not any of those which had been formerly sent had ever returned, got him a seal like to the seal of Pausanias, (to the end that if his jealousy were false, or that he should need to alter anything in the letter, it might not be discovered), and opened the letter; wherein (as he had suspected the addition of some such clause) he found himself also written down to be murdered. 133. The ephori, when these letters were by him shown unto them, though they believed the matter much more than they did before, yet desirous to hear somewhat themselves from Pausanias his own mouth; the man being upon design1 gone to Tænarus into sanctuary, and having there built him a little room with a partition in which he hid the ephori, and Pausanias coming to him and asking the cause of his taking sanctuary, they plainly heard the whole matter. For the man both expostulated with him for what he had written about him, and from point to point discovered all the practice: saying2 , that though he had never boasted unto him these and these services concerning the king, he must yet have the honour as well as many other of his servants to be slain. And Pausanias himself both confessed the same things, and also bade the man not to be troubled at what was past, and gave him assurance to leave sanctuary, intreating him to go on in his journey with all speed, and not to frustrate the business in hand.

  Post A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4.He flieth into sanctuary.Post A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4.

  134. Now the ephori, when they had distinctly heard him, for that time went their way; and knowing now the certain truth, intended to apprehend him in the city. It is said, that when he was to be apprehended in the street, he perceived by the countenance of one of the ephori coming towards him, what they came for: and when another of them had by a secret beck signified the matter for good will, he ran into the close of the temple1 of Pallas Chalciœca, and got in before they overtook him; (now the temple itself was hard by); and entering into a house belonging to the temple, to avoid the injury of the open air, there staid. They that pursued him, could not then overtake him: but afterwards they took off the roof and the doors of the house, and watching a time when he was within, beset the house and mured him up, and leaving a guard there famished him. When they perceived him about to give up the ghost, they carried him, as he was1 , out of the house, yet breathing; and being out he died immediately. After he was dead, they were about to throw him into the Cæada2 , where they use to cast in malefactors: yet afterwards they thought good to bury him in some place thereabouts. But the oracle of Delphi commanded the Lacedæmonians afterward, both to remove the sepulchre from the place where he died3 ; (so that he lies now in the entry4 of the temple, as is evident by the inscription of the pillar); and also (as having been a pollution of the sanctuary) to render two bodies to the goddess of Chalciœca for that one. Whereupon they set up two brazen statues, and dedicated the same unto her for Pausanias. 135. Now the Athenians, the god himself having judged this a pollution of sanctuary, required the Lacedæmonians to banish out of their city such as were touched with the same.

  Post A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 4. Themistocles in the same treasonThemistocles, pursued by the Athenians and Peloponnesians, flieth to Corcyra.Thence is put over to the main land, and goeth to the king of the Molossians.Post A. C. 469. Ol. 77. 3.

  At the same time that Pausanias came to his end, the Lacedæmonians by their ambassadors to the Athenians accused Themistocles, for that he also had Medised together with Pausanias, having discovered it by proofs against1 Pausanias; and desired that the same punishment might be likewise inflicted upon him. Whereunto consenting, (for he was at this time in banishment by ostracism2 , and though his ordinary residence was at Argos, he travelled to and fro in other places of Peloponnesus), they sent certain men in company of the Lacedæmonians, who were willing to pursue him, with command to bring him in wheresoever they could find him. 136. But Themistocles, having had notice of it beforehand, flieth out of Peloponnesus into Corcyra; to the people of which city he had formerly been beneficial. But the Corcyræans, alleging that they durst not keep him there, for fear of displeasing both the Lacedæmonians and the Athenians, convey him into the opposite continent: and being pursued by the men thereto appointed, asking continually which way he went, he was compelled at a strait to turn in unto Admetus, king of the Molossians, his enemy. The king himself being then from home, he became a suppliant to his wife; and by her was instructed to take their son with him, and sit down at the altar of the house. When Admetus not long after returned, he made himself known to him, and desired him, that though he had opposed him in some suit in Athens, not to revenge it on him now in the time of his flight: saying, that being now the weaker, he must needs suffer under the stronger; whereas noble revenge is of equals upon equal terms: and that he had been his adversary but in matter of profit, not of life; whereas, if he delivered him up, (telling him withal, for what and by whom he was followed), he deprived him of all means of saving his life. Admetus having heard him bade him arise, together with his son whom he held as he sat: which is the most submiss supplication that is1 .

  Thence he is conveyed to Pydna.A. C. 466. Ol. 77. 3.In danger to be cast upon the Athenian fleet at Naxos, he maketh himself known to the master of the ship.A. C. 466. Ol. 78. 3. He arriveth at Ephesus.His Letter to Artaxerxes.

  137. Not long after came the Lacedæmonians and the Athenians: and though they alleged much to have him, yet he delivered him not, but sent him away by land to Pydna upon the other sea, (a city belonging to Alexander), because his purpose was to go to the king: where finding a ship bound for Ionia, he embarked, and was carried by foul weather upon the fleet2 of the Athenians that besieged Naxos. Being afraid, he discovered to the master (for he was unknown) who he was, and for what he fled; and said, that unless he would save him, he meant to say that he had hired him to carry him away for money; and that to save him, there needed no more but this, to let none go out of the ship till the weather served to be gone; to which if he consented, he would not forget to requite him according to his merit. The master did so; and having lain a day and a night at sea upon the fleet3 of the Athenians, he arrived afterwards at Ephesus. And Themistocles having liberally rewarded him with money, (for he received there both what was sent him from his friends at Athens, and also what he had put out at Argos), he took his journey upwards in company of a certain Persian of the low countries, and sent letters to the king Artaxerxes, the son of Xerxes, newly come to the kingdom, wherein was written to this purpose: “I, Themistocles, am coming unto thee, who, of all the Grecians, as long as I was forced to resist thy father that invaded me, have done your house the maniest damages; yet the benefits I did him were more, after once I with safety, he with danger was to make retreat. And both a good turn is already due unto me”, (writing here, how he had forewarned him of the Grecians’ departure1 out of Salamis, and ascribing the then not breaking of the bridge falsely unto himself), “and2 at this time to do thee many other good services, I present myself, persecuted by the Grecians for thy friendship’s sake. But I desire to have a year’s respite, that I may declare unto thee the cause of my coming myself.”

  Post A. C. 466.The praise of Themistocles.His death. Post A. C. 464.

  138. The king, as is reported, wondered what his purpose might be, and commanded him to do as he had said. In this time of respite he learned as much as he could of the language and fashions of the place. And a year after coming to the court, he was great with the king more than ever had been any Grecian before; both for his former dignity, and the hope of Greece, which he promised to bring into his subjection; but especially for the trial he gave of his wisdom. For Themistocles was a man in whom most truly was manifested the strength of natural judgment, wherein he had something worthy admiration different from other men. For by his natural prudence, without the help of instruction before or after, he was both of extemporary matters1 upon short deliberation the best discerner, and also of what for the most part would be their issue the best conjecturer. What he was perfect in, he was able also to explicate: and what he was unpractised in, he was not to seek how to judge of conveniently. Also he foresaw, no man better, what was best or worst in any case that was doubtful. And (to say all in few words) this man, by the natural goodness of his wit, and quickness of deliberation, was the ablest of all men to tell what was fit to be done upon a sudden. But falling sick he ended his life: some say, he died voluntarily by poison, because he thought himself unable to perform what he had promised to the king. His monument is in Magnesia2 in Asia, in the market–place: for he had the government of that country, the king having bestowed upon him Magnesia, which yielded him fifty talents by the year, for his bread; and Lampsacus for his wine, (for this city was in those days thought to have store of wine3 ); and the city of Myus for his meat1 . His bones are said by his kindred, to have been brought home by his own appointment, and buried in Attica unknown to the Athenians: for it was not lawful to bury one there, that had fled for treason. These were the ends of Pausanias the Lacedæmonian, and Themistocles the Athenian; the most famous men of all the Grecians of their time.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1.

  139. And this is that which the Lacedæmonians did command, and were commanded, in their first embassage, touching the banishment of such as were under the curse.

  The Lacedæmonians by ambassadors command the abrogation of the act against the Megareans.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. The last ambassadors from Lacedæmon require the Athenians to lay down their dominion.The Athenians consult what to answer.

  After this they sent ambassadors again to Athens, commanding them to levy the siege from before Potidæa and to suffer Ægina to be free; but principally and most plainly telling them, that the war should not be made in case they would abrogate the act concerning the Megareans: by which act they were forbidden both the fairs of Attica, and all ports within the Athenian dominion. But the Athenians would not obey them, neither in the rest of their commands nor in the abrogation of that act: but recriminated the Megareans for having tilled holy ground and unset out with bounds2 ; and for receiving of their slaves1 that revolted. But at length, when the last ambassadors from Lacedæmon were arrived, namely, Ramphias, Melesippus, and Agesander, and spake nothing of that which formerly they were wont, but only this, that “the Lacedæmonians desire that there should be peace, which may be had if you will suffer the Grecians to be governed by their own laws”: the Athenians called an assembly, and propounding their opinions amongst themselves, thought good, after they had debated the matter, to give them an answer once for all. And many stood forth and delivered their minds on either side, some for the war, and some that this act concerning the Megareans ought not to stand in their way to peace, but to be abrogated. And Pericles the son of Xantippus, the principal man at that time of all Athens, and most sufficient both for speech and action, gave his advice in such manner as followeth.

  Oration of Pericles.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.

  140. “Men of Athens, I am still not only of the same opinion, not to give way to the Peloponnessians; (notwithstanding I know that men have not the same passions in the war itself, which they have when they are incited to it, but change their opinions with the events); but also I see, that I must now advise the same things, or very near to what I have before delivered. And I require of you with whom my counsel shall take place, that if we miscarry in aught, you will either make the best of it, as decreed by common consent; or if we prosper, not to attribute it to your own wisdom only. For it falleth out with the events of actions, no less than with the purposes of man, to proceed with uncertainty: which is also the cause, that when any thing happeneth contrary to our expectation, we use to lay the fault on fortune. That the Lacedæmonians, both formerly and especially now, take counsel how to do us mischief, is a thing manifest. For whereas it is said [in the articles], that in our mutual controversies we shall give and receive trials of judgment, and in the meantime either side hold what they possess; they never yet sought any such trial themselves, nor will accept of the same offered by us. They will clear themselves of their accusations by war, rather than by words: and come hither no more now to expostulate, but to command. For they command us to arise from before Potidæa, and to restore the Æginetæ to the liberty of their own laws, and to abrogate the act concerning the Megareans. And they that come last1 , command us to restore all the Grecians to their liberty. Now let none of you conceive that we shall go to war for a trifle, by not abrogating the act concerning Megara; (yet this by them is pretended most, and that for the abrogation of it war shall stay); nor retain2 a scruple in your minds, as if a small matter moved you to the war. For even this small matter containeth the trial and constancy of your resolution. Wherein if you give them way, you shall hereafter be commanded a greater matter, as men that for fear will obey them likewise in that. But by a stiff denial, you shall teach them plainly to come to you hereafter on terms of more equality. 141. Resolve therefore from this1 occasion, either to yield them obedience before you receive damage; or if we must have war, (which for my part I think is best), be the pretence weighty or light, not to give way, nor keep what we possess in fear. For a great and a little claim, imposed by equals upon their neighbours before judgment by way of command, hath one and the same virtue, to make subject. As for the war, how both we and they be furnished, and why we are not like to have the worse, by hearing the particulars you shall now understand. The Peloponnesians are men that live by their labour2 , without money either in particular or in common stock. Besides, in long wars and by sea they are without experience; for that the wars which they have had one against another, have been but short through poverty. And such men can neither man their fleets, nor yet send out their armies by land very often; because they must be far from their own wealth, and yet by that be maintained3 , and be besides barred the use of the sea. It must be a stock of money, not forced contributions, that support the wars; and such as live by their labour, are more ready to serve the wars with their bodies than with their money. For they make account that their bodies will outlive the danger, but their money they think is sure to be spent1 ; especially if the war (as it is likely) should last. So that the Peloponnesians and their confederates, though for one battle they be able to stand out against all Greece besides, yet to maintain a war against such as have their preparations of another kind, they are not able; inasmuch as not having one and the same counsel, they can speedily perform nothing upon the occasion; and having equality of vote and being of several races2 , every one will press his particular interest; whereby nothing is like to be fully executed. For some will desire to take revenge on some enemy, and others to have their estates least wasted. And being long before they can assemble, they take the lesser part of their time to debate the common business, and the greater to dispatch their own private affairs. And every one supposeth, that his own neglect of the common estate can do little hurt, and that it will be the care of somebody else to look to that for his own good3 : not observing how by these thoughts of every one in several, the common business is jointly ruined. 142. But their greatest hindrance of all, will be their want of money; which being raised slowly, their actions must be full of delay; which the occasions of war will not endure. As for their fortifying here and their navy, they are matters not worthy fear. For it were a hard matter for a city equal to our own in time of peace to fortify in that manner; much less in the country of an enemy, and we no less fortified against them1 . And if they had a garrison here, though they might, by excursions and by the receiving of our fugitives, annoy some part of our territory: yet would not that be enough both to besiege us, and also to hinder us from sallying into their territories and from taking revenge with our fleet; which is the thing wherein our strength lieth. For we have more experience in land–service by use of the sea, than they have in sea–service by use of the land. Nor shall they attain the knowledge of naval affairs easily. For yourselves, though falling to it immediately upon the Persian war, yet have not attained it fully. How then should husbandmen, not seamen, whom also we will not suffer to apply themselves to it by lying continually upon them with so great fleets, perform any matter of value? Indeed, if they should be opposed but with a few ships, they might adventure, encouraging their want of knowledge with store of men: but awed by many, they will not stir that way; and not applying themselves to it, will be yet more unskilful, and thereby more cowardly. For knowledge of naval matters is an art as well as any other, and not to be attended at idle times and on the by; but requiring rather, that whilst it is a–learning, nothing else should be done on the by. 143. But say they should take the money at Olympia and Delphi, and therewith, at greater wages, go about to draw from us the strangers employed in our fleet; this indeed, if going aboard both ourselves and those that dwell amongst us1 , we could not match them, were a dangerous matter. But now we can both do this, and (which is the principal thing) we have steersmen and other necessary men for the service of a ship, both more and better of our own citizens, than are in all the rest of Greece. Besides that, not any of these strangers upon trial2 would be found content to fly his own country, and withal upon less hope of victory, for a few days’ increase of wages, take part with the other side.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.

  “In this manner, or like to this, seemeth unto me to stand the case of the Peloponnesians: whereas ours is both free from what in theirs I have reprehended, and hath many great advantages besides. If they invade our territory by land, we shall invade theirs by sea. And when we have wasted part of Peloponnesus, and they all Attica; yet shall theirs be the greater loss. For they, unless by the sword, can get no other territory instead of that we shall destroy: whereas for us, there is other land both in the islands and continent. For the dominion of the sea is a great matter. Consider but this. If we dwelt in the islands, whether of us then were more inexpugnable? We must therefore now, drawing as near as can be to that imagination, lay aside the care of fields and villages1 ; and not for the loss of them, out of passion, give battle to the Peloponnesians, far more in number than ourselves. For though we give them an overthrow, we must fight again with as many more: and if we be overthrown, we shall lose the help of our confederates, which are our strength; for when we cannot war upon them, they will revolt. Nor bewail ye the loss of fields or houses, but of men’s bodies: for men may acquire these, but these cannot acquire men. And if I thought I should prevail, I would advise you to go out and destroy them yourselves; and show the Peloponnesians, that you will never the sooner obey them for such things as these.

  A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.A. C. 432. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Pericles.

  144. “ There be many other things that give hope of victory, in case you do not2 , whilst you are in this war, strive to enlarge your dominion, and undergo other voluntary dangers; (for I am afraid of our own errors, more than of their designs); but they shall be spoken of at another time, in prosecution of the war itself. For the present, let us send away these men with this answer: ‘that the Megareans shall have the liberty of our fairs and ports, if the Lacedæmonians will also make no banishment of us nor of our confederates as of strangers’: for neither our act concerning Megara, nor their banishment of strangers, is forbidden in the articles1 : ‘also, that we will let the Grecian cities be free, if they were so when the peace was made; and if the Lacedæmonians will also give leave unto their confederates to use their freedom, not as shall serve the turn of the Lacedæmonians, but as they themselves shall every one think good: also that we will stand to judgment according to the articles, and will not begin the war, but be revenged on those that shall’. For this is both just, and for the dignity of the city to answer. Nevertheless you must know, that of necessity war there will be; and the more willingly we embrace it, the less pressing we shall have our enemies; and that out of the greatest dangers, whether to cities or private men, arise the greatest honours. For our fathers, when they undertook the Medes, did from less beginnings, nay abandoning the little they had, by wisdom rather than fortune, by courage rather than strength, both repel the barbarian and advance this state to the height it now is at. Of whom we ought not now to come short, but rather to revenge us by all means upon our enemies; and do our best to deliver the state unimpaired by us to posterity.”

  The answer of the Athenians to the ambassadors of Lacedæmon.

  145. Thus spake Pericles. The Athenians liking best of his advice, decreed as he would have them; answering the Lacedæmonians according to his direction, both in particulars as he had spoken, and generally, “that they would do nothing on command, but were ready1 to answer their accusations upon equal terms by way of arbitrement”. So the ambassadors went home; and after these there came no more.

  146. These were the quarrels and differences on either side, before the war: which quarrels began presently upon the business of Epidamnus and Corcyra. Nevertheless there was still commerce betwixt them, and they went to each other without any herald, though not without jealousy. For the things that had passed were but2 the confusion of the articles, and matter of the war to follow.

  THE SECOND BOOK of the HISTORY OF THUCYDIDES.

  THE PRINCIPAL CONTENTS.

  The entry of the Theban soldiers into Platæa by the treason of some within.—Their repulse and slaughter.—The irruption of the Peloponnesians into Attica.—The wasting of the coast of Peloponnesus by the Athenian fleet.—The public funeral of the first slain.—The second invasion of Attica.—The pestilence in the city of Athens.—The Ambraciotes war against the Amphilochi.—Platæa assaulted: besieged.—The Peloponnesian fleet beaten by Phormio before the strait of the Gulf of Crissa.—The same fleet repaired and reinforced; and beaten again by Phormio before Naupactus.—The attempt of the Peloponnesians on Salamis.—The fruitless expedition of the Thracians against the Macedonians. This in the first three years of the war.

  year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.

  1. The war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians beginneth now from the time1 they had no longer commerce one with another without a herald, and that having once begun it they warred without intermission. And it is written in order by summers and winters, according as from time to time the several matters came to pass.

  year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. Platæa surprised by the Thebans by treason.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.The Thebans execute not the design of the traitors:but offer composition.

  2. The peace, which after the winning of Eubœa, was concluded for thirty years, lasted fourteen years. But in the fifteenth year, being the forty–eighth of the priesthood of Chrysis1 in Argos: Ænesias being then ephor at Sparta, and Pythadorus, archon of Athens, having then two months of his government to come: in the sixth month after the battle at Potidæa and in the beginning of the spring, three hundred and odd2 Thebans, led by Pythangelus the son of Phyleides, and Diemporus the son of Onetoridas, Bœotian rulers3 , about the first watch of the night entered with their arms into Platæa, a city of Bœotia and confederate of the Athenians. They were brought in, and the gates opened unto them, by Naucleides and his complices, men of Platæa, that for their own private ambition intended both the destruction of such citizens as were their enemies, and the putting of the whole city under the subjection of the Thebans. This they negotiated with one Eurymachus the son of Leontiadas, one of the most potent men of Thebes. For the Thebans foreseeing the war, desired to preoccupate Platæa, which was always at variance with them, whilst there was yet peace and the war not openly on foot. By which means they more easily entered undiscovered, there being no order taken before for a watch. And making a stand in their arms1 in the market–place, they did not, as they that gave them entrance would have had them, fall presently to the business, and enter the houses of their adversaries; but resolved rather to make favourable proclamation, and to induce the city to composition and friendship. And the herald proclaimed, “that if any man, according to the ancient custom of all the Bœotians, would enter into the same league of war with them, he should come and bring his arms to theirs”: supposing the city by this means would easily be drawn to their side.

  The Platæans accept it.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.The Platæans take heart:and unite themselves by digging through the common walls of their houses.They assault the Thebans.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The Thebans fly, but cannot get out.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The Thebans penned up in a house, which they entered into by mistaking the door for the city gate.They yield to discretion.

  3. The Platæans, when they perceived that the Thebans were already entered and had surprised the city, through fear, and opinion that more were entered than indeed were, (for they could not see them in the night), came to composition, and accepting the condition rested quiet; and the rather, for that they had yet done no man harm1 . But whilst that these things were treating, they observed that the Thebans were not many; and thought that if they should set upon them, they might easily have the victory. For the Platæan commons were not willing to have revolted from the Athenians. Wherefore it was thought fit to undertake the matter; and they united themselves by digging through the common walls between house and house, that they might not be discovered as they passed the streets. They also placed carts in the streets without the cattle that drew them, to serve them instead of a wall; and every other thing they put in readiness, as they severally seemed necessary for the present enterprise. When all things according to their means were ready, they marched from their houses towards the enemies; taking their time whilst it was yet night, and a little before break of day; because they would not have to charge them when they should be emboldened by the light and on equal terms, but when they should by night be terrified, and inferior to them in knowledge of the places of the city. So they forthwith set upon them, and came quickly up to hand strokes. 4. And the Thebans seeing this, and finding they were deceived, cast themselves into a round figure, and beat2 them back in that part where the assault was made: and twice or thrice they repulsed them. But at last, when both the Platæans themselves charged them with a great clamour, and their wives also and families shouted and screeched from the houses, and withal threw stones and tiles amongst them; the night having been also very wet; they were afraid, and turned their backs and fled here and there about the city; ignorant for the most part, in the dark and dirt, of the ways out by which they should have been saved; (for this accident fell out upon the change of the moon); and pursued by such as were well acquainted with the ways to keep them in: insomuch as the greatest1 part of them perished. The gate by which they entered, and which only was left open, a certain Platæan shut up again with the head2 of a javelin, which he thrust into the staple instead of a bolt: so that this way also their passage was stopped. As they were chased up and down the city, some climbed the walls and cast themselves out, and for the most part died. Some came to a desert gate of the city, and with a hatchet given them by a woman cut the staple3 , and got forth unseen: but these were not many; for the thing was soon discovered. Others again were slain dispersed in several parts of the city. But the greatest part, and those especially who had cast themselves before into a ring, happened into a great edifice adjoining to the wall1 ; the doors whereof, being open, they thought had been the gates of the city, and that there had been a direct way through to the other side. The Platæans seeing them now pent up, consulted whether they should burn them as they were, by firing the house, or else resolve of some other punishment. At length both these, and all the rest of the Thebans that were straggling in the city, agreed to yield themselves and their arms to the Platæans at discretion. And this success had2 they that entered into Platæa.

  The whole power of Thebes come to rescue their fellows.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The Thebans seek to intercept the Platæans in the villages.The Platæans send to the Thebans to be gone, and promise to release their prisoners.The Thebans go off, and the Platæans fetch in their men and goods, and kill their prisoners.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.

  5. But the rest of the Thebans, that should with their whole power have been there before day, for fear the surprise should not succeed with those that were in, came so late with their aid that they heard the news of what was done by the way3 . Now Platæa is from Thebes seventy furlongs, and they marched the slower for the rain which had fallen the same night. For the river Asopus was swollen so high, that it was not easily passable. So that what by the foulness of the way, and what by the difficulty of passing the river, they arrived not till their men were already some slain and some taken prisoners. When the Thebans understood how things had gone, they lay in wait for such of the Platæans as were without: (for there were abroad in the villages both men and household stuff, as was not unlikely, the evil happening unexpectedly and in time of peace): desiring, if they could take any prisoners, to keep them for exchange for those of theirs within, which (if any were so) were saved alive. This was the Thebans’ purpose. But the Platæans, whilst they were yet in council, suspecting that some such thing would be done, and fearing their case without, sent a herald unto the Thebans: whom they commanded to say, that what they had already done, attempting to surprise their city in time of peace, was done wickedly; and to forbid them to do any injury to those without, and that otherwise they would kill all those men of theirs that they had alive; which, if they would withdraw their forces out of their territory, they would again restore unto them. Thus the Thebans say; and that the Platæans did swear it. But the Platæans confess not that they promised to deliver them presently, but upon treaty if they should agree; and deny that they swore it. Upon this the Thebans went out of their territory1 ; and the Platæans, when they had speedily taken in whatsoever they had in the country, immediately slew their prisoners. They that were taken were one hundred and eighty; and Eurymachus2 , with whom the traitors had practised, was one. 6. When they had done they sent a messenger to Athens, and gave truce to the Thebans to fetch away the bodies of their dead; and ordered the city as was thought convenient for the present occasion.

  The Athenians lay hands on such Bœotians as were in Attica.They victual Platæa, and put a garrison into it, and take their unnecessary people.

  The news of what was done coming straightway to Athens, they instantly laid hands on all the Bœotians then in Attica; and sent an officer to Platæa, to forbid their farther proceeding with their Theban prisoners, till such time as they also should have advised of the matter: for they were not yet advertised of their putting to death. For the first messenger was sent away when the Thebans first entered the town; and the second, when1 they were overcome and taken prisoners: but of what followed after they knew nothing. So that the Athenians when they sent, knew not what was done; and the officer arriving found that the men were already slain. After this, the Athenians sending an army to Platæa, victualled it and left a garrison in it; and took thence both the women and children, and also such men as were unserviceable for the war.

  Preparation of both sides for the war.year 1. A. C 431. Ol. 87 1.Prophecies and oracles preceding the war.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.

  7. This action falling out at Platæa, and the peace now clearly dissolved, the Athenians prepared themselves for war; so also did the Lacedæmonians and their confederates; intending on either part to send ambassadors to the king, and to other barbarians, wheresoever they had hope of succours; and contracting leagues with such cities as were not under their own command. The Lacedæmonians2 besides those galleys which they had in Italy and Sicily, of the cities that took part with them there, were ordered to furnish, proportionably to the greatness of their several cities, so many more as the whole number might amount to five hundred sail, and to provide a sum of money assessed; and in other things not to stir farther, but to receive the Athenians coming but with one galley at once, till such time as the same should be ready. The Athenians, on the other side, surveyed their present confederates, and sent ambassadors to those places1 that lay about Peloponnesus, as Corcyra, Cephalonia, Acarnania, and Zacynthus; knowing that as long as these were their friends, they might with the more security2 make war round about upon the coast of Peloponnesus. 8. Neither side conceived small matters, but put their whole strength to the war: and not without reason3 . For all men in the beginnings of enterprises are the most eager. Besides, there were then in Peloponnesus many young men, and many in Athens, who for want of experience not unwillingly undertook the war. And not only the rest of Greece stood at gaze to behold the two principal states in combat; but many prophecies were told, and many sung by the priests of the oracles, both in the cities about to war and in others. There was also a little before this an earthquake in Delos, which in the memory of the Grecians never shook before1 ; and was interpreted for, and seemed to be a sign of what was to come afterwards to pass. And whatsoever thing then chanced of the same nature, it was all sure to be inquired after.

  The affections of the Grecians towards the combatant states.

  But men’s affections for the most part went with the Lacedæmonians; and the rather, for that they gave out they would recover the Grecians’ liberty. And every man, both private and public person2 , endeavoured as much as in them lay both in word and deed to assist them; and thought the business so much hindered, as himself was not present at it. In such passion were most men against the Athenians; some for desire to be delivered from under their government, and others for fear of falling into it. And these were the preparations and affections brought unto the war.

  year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The confederates of the Lacedæmonians.The confederates of the Athenians.

  9. But the confederates of either party, which they had when they began it, were these. The Lacedæmonians had all Peloponnesus within the isthmus, except the Argives and Achæans: (for these were in amity with both, save that the Pellenians at first, only of all Achaia, took their part; but afterwards all the rest did so likewise): and without Peloponnesus, the Megareans, Locrians, Bœotians, Phoceans, Ambraciotes, Leucadians, and Anactorians. Of which the Corinthians, Megareans, Sicyonians, Pellenians, Eleians, Ambraciotes, and Leucadians found shipping: the Bœotians, Phoceans, and Locrians, horsemen: and the rest of the cities footmen. And these were the confederates of the Lacedæmonians. The Athenian confederates were these. The Chians, Lesbians, Platæans, the Messenians in Naupactus, most of the Acarnanians, Corcyræans, Zacynthians, and other cities their tributaries amongst those nations1 ; also that part of Caria which is on the sea–coast, and the Dorians adjoining to them; Ionia, Hellespont, the cities bordering on Thrace2 ; all the islands from Peloponnesus to Crete on the east, and all the rest of the Cyclades, except Melos and Thera3 . Of these the Chians, Lesbians, and Corcyræans found galleys; the rest footmen and money. These were their confederates and the preparation for the war on both sides.

  year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The Lacedæmonian league meet in the isthmus.

  10. The Lacedæmonians, after the business of Platæa, sent messengers presently up and down Peloponnesus, and to their confederates without, to have in readiness their forces, and such things as should be necessary for a foreign expedition, as intending the invasion of Attica. And when they were all ready, they came to the rendezvous in the isthmus at a day appointed, two–thirds of the forces of every city1 . When the whole army was gotten together, Archidamus, king of the Lacedæmonians, general of the expedition, called together the commanders of the several cities, and such as were in authority and most worthy to be present; and spake unto them as followeth:

  the oration of archidamus.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. Oration of Archidamus.

  11. “Men of Peloponnesus and confederates, not only our fathers have had many wars, both within and without Peloponnesus, but we ourselves also, such as are anything in years, have been sufficiently acquainted therewith; yet did we never before set forth with so great a preparation as at this present. And now, not only we are a numerous and puissant army, that invade; but the state also is puissant2 that is invaded by us. We have reason therefore to show ourselves neither worse than our fathers, nor short of the opinion conceived of ourselves. For all Greece is up at this commotion, observing us: and through their hatred to the Athenians, do wish that we may accomplish whatsoever we intend. And therefore, though we seem to invade them with a great army, and to have much assurance that they will not come out against us to battle, yet we ought not for this to march the less carefully prepared; but of every city as well the captain as the soldier, to expect always some danger or other in that part wherein he himself is placed. For the accidents of war are uncertain; and for the most part the onset begins from the lesser number1 and upon passion. And oftentimes the lesser number, being afraid, hath beaten back the greater with the more ease; for that through contempt they have gone unprepared. And in the land of an enemy, though the soldiers ought always to have bold hearts, yet for action, they ought to make their preparations as if they were afraid. For that will give them both more courage to go upon the enemy, and more safety in fighting with him2 . But we invade not now a city that cannot defend itself, but a city every way well appointed. So that we must by all means expect to be fought withal, though not now, because we be not yet there, yet hereafter, when they shall see us in their country wasting and destroying their possessions. For all men, when in their own sight and on a sudden they receive any extraordinary hurt, fall presently into choler; and the less they consider, with the more stomach they assault. And this is likely to hold in the Athenians somewhat more than in the others; for they think themselves worthy to have the command of others, and to invade and waste the territories of their neighbours, rather than to see their neighbours waste theirs. Wherefore, as being to war against a great city, and to procure both to your ancestors and yourselves a great fame, either good or bad as shall be the event; follow your leaders in such sort, as above all things you esteem of order and watchfulness1 . For there is nothing in the world more comely nor more safe, than when many men are seen to observe one and the same order.”

  Archidamus sends before him an ambassador to the Athenians; and tries all other means to right his country, before war.The ambassador from Archidamus convoyed back without conference.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. Archidamus marcheth forward.

  12. Archidamus, having thus spoken and dismissed the council, first sent Melesippus the son of Diacritus, a man of Sparta, to Athens, to try if the Athenians, seeing them now on their journey, would yet in some degree remit of their obstinacy. But the Athenians neither received him into their city, nor presented him to the state: for the opinion of Pericles had already taken place, not to receive from the Lacedæmonians neither herald nor ambassador, as long as their army was abroad. Therefore they sent him back without audience, with commandment to be out of their borders the self–same day; and that hereafter if they would any thing with them, they should return every one to his home, and send their ambassadors from thence. They sent with him also certain persons to convoy him out of the country, to the end that no man should confer with him; who, when he came to the limits and was to be dismissed, uttered these words: “This day is the beginning of much evil unto the Grecians”; and so departed. When he returned to the camp, Archidamus perceiving that they would not relent, dislodged1 and marched on with his army into their territory. The Bœotians with their appointed part and with horsemen aided the Peloponnesians; but with the rest of their forces went and wasted the territory of Platæa.

  Pericles imagining Archidamus might spare his grounds, promiseth, if he did, to give them to the state.The speech of Pericles to the assembly at Athens, touching the means of the war, &c.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The treasure of the people of Athens.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.The length of the walls to which the watchmen were appointed.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.Their galleys.

  13. Whilst the Peloponnesians were coming together in the isthmus, and when they were on their march, before they brake into Attica, Pericles the son of Xantippus, who with nine others was general of the Athenians, when he saw they were about to break in, suspecting that Archidamus, either of private courtesy or by command of the Lacedæmonians to bring him into jealousy, (as they had before for his sake commanded the excommunication), might oftentimes2 leave his lands untouched, told the Athenians beforehand in an assembly, “that though Archidamus had been his guest, it was for no ill to the state; and howsoever, if the enemy did not waste his lands and houses as well as the rest, that then he gave them to the commonwealth”; and therefore desired “that for this he might not be suspected”. Also he advised them concerning the business in hand the same things he had done before; “that they should make preparations for the war, and receive their goods into the city; that they should not go out to battle, but come into the city and guard it; that they should also furnish out their navy, wherein consisted their power, and hold a careful hand over their confederates”: telling them, “how that in the money that came from these lay their strength, and that the victory in war consisted wholly1 in counsel and store of money”. Farther he bade them be confident, “in that there was yearly coming into the state from the confederates for tribute, besides other revenue2 , six hundred talents; and remaining yet then in the citadel six thousand talents of silver coin:” (for the greatest sum there had been, was ten thousand talents wanting three hundred: out of which was taken that which had been expended upon the gate–houses3 of the citadel, and upon other buildings, and for the charges of Potidæa): “besides the uncoined gold and silver of private and public offerings; and all the dedicated vessels belonging to the shows and games, and the spoils of the Persian, and other things of that nature, which amounted to no less than five hundred talents”. He added farther, that “much money might be had out of other temples1 without the city, which they might use; and if they were barred the use of all these2 , they might yet use the ornaments of gold about the goddess herself;” and said that “the image had about it the weight of forty talents of most pure gold, and which might all be taken off; but having made use of it for their safety”, he said, “they were to make restitution of the like quantity again”. Thus he encouraged them touching matter of money. “Men of arms”, he said, “they had thirteen thousand; besides the sixteen thousand that were employed for the guard of the city and upon the walls.” For so many at the first kept watch at the coming in of the enemy3 , young and old together, and strangers that dwelt amongst them as many as could bear arms. For the length of the Phalerian wall, to that part of the circumference of the wall of the city where it joined, was thirty–five furlongs; and that part of the circumference which was guarded, (for some of it was not kept with a watch, namely, the part between the long wall and the Phalerian), was forty–three furlongs. And the length of the long walls down to Piræus, (of which there was a watch only on the outmost4 ), was forty furlongs. And the whole compass of Piræus together with Munychia, was sixty furlongs; whereof that part that was watched, was but half. He said farther, “they had of horsemen, accounting archers on horseback, twelve hundred; and sixteen hundred archers; and of galleys fit for the sea, three hundred.” All this and no less had the Athenians, when the invasion of the Peloponnesians was first in hand, and when the war began. These and other words spake Pericles, as he used to do, for demonstration that they were likely to outlast this war.

  The Athenians fetch in their wives and children and substance into the city.

  14. When the Athenians had heard him, they approved of his words; and fetched into the city their wives and children, and the furniture of their houses, pulling down the very timber of the houses themselves. Their sheep and oxen they sent over into Eubœa, and into the islands over against them. Nevertheless this removal, in respect they had most of them been accustomed to the country life, grieved1 them very much.

  The Athenians accustomed ever to live in the country.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.Theseus first brought the inhabitants of Attica to make Athens their capital city.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.

  15. This custom was from great antiquity more familiar with the Athenians, than any other of the rest of Greece. For in the time of Cecrops and the first kings, down to Theseus, the inhabitants of Attica had their several boroughs, and therein their common halls2 and their governors; and, unless they were in fear of some danger, went not to the king1 for advice, but every city administered their own affairs and deliberated by themselves. And some of them had also their particular wars; as the Eleusinians, who joined with Eumolpus against Erectheus. But after Theseus came to the kingdom, one who besides his wisdom was also a man of very great power, he not only set good order in the country in other respects, but also dissolved the councils and magistracies of the rest of the towns; and assigning them all one hall and one council–house, brought them all to cohabit2 in the city that now is; and constrained them, enjoying their own as before, to use this one for their city, which (now when they all paid their duties to it) grew great, and was by Theseus so delivered to posterity. And from that time to this day, the Athenians keep a holiday at the public charge to the goddess, and call it Synœcia. That which is now the citadel, and the part which is to the south of the citadel, was before this time the city. An argument whereof is this; that the temples of the gods are all set either in the citadel itself; or if without, yet in that quarter: as that of Jupiter Olympius, and of Apollo Pythius1 , and of Tellus, and of Bacchus2 in Limnæ; (in honour of whom the old Bacchanals were3 celebrated on the twelfth day of the month Athesterion, according as the Ionians who are derived from Athens, do still observe them); besides other ancient temples situate in the same part. Moreover, they served themselves with water for the best uses of the fountain, which, now the Nine–pipes, built so by the tyrants4 , was formerly, when the springs were open, called Callirhoe, and was near. And from the old custom, before marriages and other holy rites they ordain the use of the same water to this day. And the citadel, from the ancient habitation of it, is also by the Athenians still called the city.

  The Athenians remove out of the borough towns into the city unwillingly.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.Athens thronged with the coming in of the country.An old prophecy against dwelling in the Pelasgicum.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.

  16. The Athenians therefore had lived a long time governed by laws of their own country towns; and after they were brought into one, were nevertheless (both for the custom which most had, as well of the ancient time as since till the Persian5 war, to live in the country with their whole families; and also especially for that since the Persian war they had already1 repaired their houses and furniture) unwilling to remove. It pressed them likewise, and was heavily taken, besides their houses to leave the things that pertained to their religion, (which, since their old form of government, were become patrial), and to change their manner of life, and to be no better than banished every man his city. 17. After they came into Athens, there was habitation for a few, and place of retire, with some friends or kindred. But the greatest part seated themselves in the empty places of the city, and in temples and in all the chapels of the heroes; saving in such as were in the citadel, and the Eleusinium, and other places strongly shut up. The Pelasgicum2 also under the citadel, though it were a thing accursed to dwell in it, and forbidden by the end of a verse in a Pythian oracle, in these words: Best is the Pelasgicum empty3 : was nevertheless for the present necessity inhabited. And in my opinion, this prophecy now fell out contrary to what was looked for. For the unlawful dwelling there caused not the calamities that befell the city, but the war caused the necessity of dwelling there: which war the oracle not naming, foretold only that it should one day be inhabited unfortunately.

  The Athenians make ready a hundred galleys to send about Peloponnesus.

  Many also furnished the turrets of the walls, and whatsoever other place they could any of them get. For when they were come in, the city had not place for them all: but afterwards they had1 the long walls divided amongst them, and inhabited there, and in most parts of Piræus. Withal they applied themselves to the business of the war, levying their confederates, and making ready a hundred galleys to send about Peloponnesus. Thus were the Athenians preparing.

  The Peloponnesian army assault Œnoe, a frontier town of Attica, in vain.

  18. The army of the Peloponnesians marching forward, came first to Œnoe, a town of Attica, the place where they intended to break in; and encamping before it, prepared with engines and by other means to assault the wall. For Œnoe lying on the confines between Attica and Bœotia, was walled about; and the Athenians kept a garrison in it, for defence of the country when at any time there should be war. For which cause they made preparation for the assault of it; and also spent much time about it otherwise.

  Archidamus taxed of backwardness and favour to the Athenians.year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1.Archidamus with his army entereth into Attica:and comes to Acharnas, and stays there long, cutting down their corn and trees.

  And Archidamus for this was not a little taxed, as thought to have been both slow in gathering together the forces for the war, and also to have favoured the Athenians in that he encouraged not the army to a forwardness in it. And afterwards likewise2 his stay in the isthmus and his slowness in the whole journey was laid to his charge, but especially his delay at Œnoe. For in this time the Athenians retired into the city: whereas it was thought, that the Peloponnesians marching speedily, might but for this delay have taken them all without. So passionate was the army of Archidamus for his stay before Œnoe. But expecting that the Athenians, whilst their territory was yet unhurt, would relent and not endure to see it wasted, for that cause (as it is reported) he held his hand. 19. But after, when they had assaulted Œnoe, and tried all means, but could not take it; and seeing the Athenians sent no herald to them; then at length arising from thence, about eighty days after that which happened to the Thebans that entered Platæa, the summer and corn being now at the highest1 , they fell into Attica, led by Archidamus the son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedæmonians. And when they had pitched their camp, they fell to wasting of the country, first about Eleusis, and then in the plain of Thriasia; and put to flight a few Athenian horsemen at the brooks called Rheiti2 . After this, leaving the Ægaleon on the right hand, they passed through Cecropia3 , till they came unto Acharnas, which is the greatest town in all Attica of those that are called Demoi1 ; and pitching there, both fortified their camp, and staid a great while wasting the country thereabout.

  year 1. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 1. The design of Archidamus in staying so long at Acharnas.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.

  20. Archidamus was said to have staid so long at Acharnas with his army in battle array, and not to have come down all the time of his invasion into the champaign, with this intention. He hoped that the Athenians, flourishing in number of young men, and better furnished for war than ever they were before, would perhaps have come forth against him, and not endured to see their fields cut down and wasted; and therefore seeing they met him not in Thriasia2 , he thought good to try if they would come out against him lying now at Acharnas. Besides3 , the place seemed unto him commodious for the army to lie in; and it was thought also that the Acharnans being a great piece of the city, (for they were three thousand men of arms), would not have suffered the spoiling of their lands, but rather have urged the rest to go out and fight. And if they came not out against him at this invasion, they might hereafter more boldly both waste the champaign country, and come down even to the walls of the city. For the Acharnans, after they should have lost their own, would not be so forward to hazard themselves for the goods of other men: but there would be the thoughts of sedition in one towards another in the city. These were the cogitations of Archidamus, whilst he lay at Acharnas.

  The Athenians hardly contain themselves from going out to fight.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.A skirmish between the Athenian and Bœotian horse.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.

  21. The Athenians, as long as the army of the enemy lay about Eleusis and the fields of Thrius, and as long as they had any hope1 it would come on no farther, remembering that also Pleistoanax the son of Pausanias, king of Lacedæmon, when fourteen years before this war he entered Attica with an army of the Peloponnesians as far as Eleusis and Thriasia, retired again and came no farther; (for which he was also banished Sparta, as thought to have gone back for money); they stirred not. But when they saw the army now at Acharnas but sixty furlongs from the city, then they thought it no longer to be endured; and when their fields were wasted (as it was likely2 ) in their sight: which the younger sort had never seen before, nor the elder but in the Persian war; it was taken for a horrible matter, and thought fit by all, especially by the youth, to go out and not endure it any longer. And holding councils apart one from another, they were at much contention, some to make a sally, and some to hinder it. And the priests of the oracles giving out prophecies of all kinds, every one made the interpretation according to the sway of his own affection. But the Acharnians, conceiving themselves to be no small part of the Athenians1 , were they that, whilst their own lands were wasting, most of all urged their going out. Insomuch as the city was every way in tumult, and in choler against Pericles, remembering nothing of what he had formerly admonished them; but reviled him, for that being their general he refused to lead them into the field, and imputing unto him the cause of all their evil. 22. But Pericles, seeing them in passion for their present loss and ill advised, and being confident he was in the right touching not sallying, assembled them not nor called any council, for fear lest being together they might upon passion rather than judgment commit some error: but looked to the guarding of the city, and as much as he could to keep it in quiet. Nevertheless he continually sent out horsemen, to keep the scouts of the army from entering upon and doing hurt to the fields near the city. And there happened at Phrygii a small skirmish between one troop2 of horse of the Athenians, with whom were also the Thessalians, and the horsemen of the Bœotians. Wherein the Athenians and Thessalians had not the worse, till such time as the Bœotians were aided by the coming in of their men of arms; and then they were put to flight, and a few of the Athenians and Thessalians slain; whose bodies, notwithstanding, they fetched off the same day without leave of the enemy. And the Peloponnesians the next3 day erected a trophy. This aid of the Thessalians was upon an1 ancient league with the Athenians, and consisted of Larissæans, Pharsalians, Parasians, Cranonians, Pyrasians, Gyrtonians, Pheræans. The leaders of the Larissæans were Polymedes and Aristonus, men of contrary factions in their city: of the Pharsalians, Meno: and of the rest, out of the several cities several commanders.

  Archidamus removes from Acharnas.The Athenians send a hundred galleys to infest the sea coast of Peloponnesus.The Peloponnesians go home.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.

  23. The Peloponnesians seeing the Athenians would not come out to fight, dislodging from Acharnas, wasted certain other villages2 between the hills Parnethus and Brelissus. Whilst these were in Attica, the Athenians sent the hundred galleys which they had provided, and in them one thousand men of arms and four hundred archers, about Peloponnesus; the commanders whereof were Charcinus the son of Xenotimus, Proteus the son of Epicles, and Socrates the son of Antigenes; who thus furnished, weighed anchor and went their way. The Peloponnesians, when they had stayed in Attica as long as their provision lasted, went home through Bœotia, not the way they came in; but passing by Oropus, wasted the country called Peiraice3 , which is of the tillage of the Oropians, subjects to the people of Athens. And when they were come back into Peloponnesus, they disbanded and went every man to his own city.

  The Athenians set by 1000 talents and 100 galleys, for defence against an invasion by sea.

  24. When they were gone, the Athenians ordained watches both by sea and land, such as were to continue to the end of the war: and made a decree, to take out a thousand talents of the money in the citadel and set it by, so as it might not be spent, but the charges of the war be borne out of other moneys; and made it capital for any man to move or give his vote1 for the stirring of this money for any other use, but only if the enemy should come with an army by sea to invade the city, for necessity of that defence. Together with this money they likewise set apart one hundred galleys, and those to be every year the best, and captains to be appointed over them; which were to be employed for no other use than the money was, and for the same danger, if need should require.

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The Athenians assault Methone.Brasidas defendeth it.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. They take Pheia, a town of Elis.

  25. The Athenians that were with the hundred galleys about Peloponnesus, and with them the Corcyræans with the aid of fifty sail more, and certain others of the confederates thereabout, amongst other places which they infested in their course landed at Methone, a town of Laconia1 ; and assaulted it, as being but weak and few2 men within. But it chanced that Brasidas the son of Tellis, a Spartan, had a garrison in those parts; and hearing of it, succoured those of the town with one hundred men of arms. Wherewith running through the Athenian army, dispersed in the fields, directly towards the town3 , he put himself into Methone; and with the loss of few of his men in the passage he saved the place, and for this adventure was the first that was praised at Sparta in this war. The Athenians putting off from thence sailed along the coast, and put in at Pheia of Elis, where they spent two days in wasting the country, and in a skirmish overthrew three hundred choice men of the Lower Elis4 , together with other Eleians thereabouts, that came forth to defend it. But the wind arising, and their galleys being tossed by the weather in a harbourless place, the most of them embarked, and sailed about the promontory called Icthys into the haven of Pheia. But1 the Messenians, and certain others that could not get aboard, went by land to the town of Pheia and rifled it2 . And when they had done, the galleys, that now were come about, took them in, and leaving Pheia put forth to sea again. By which time a great army of Eleians was come to succour it; but the Athenians were now gone away, and wasting some other territory.

  26. About the same time the Athenians sent likewise thirty galleys about Locris; which were to serve also for a watch about Eubœa. Of these, Cleopompus the son of Clinias had the conduct; and landing his soldiers in divers parts, both wasted some places of the sea coast, and won the town of Thronium, of which he took hostages: and overcame in fight at Alope the Locrians that came out to aid it.

  The inhabitants of Ægina removed by the Athenians:and received by the Peloponnesians.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.

  27. The same summer, the Athenians put the Æginetæ, man, woman and child, out of Ægina; laying to their charge that they were the principal cause of the present war. And it was also thought the safer course to hold Ægina, being adjacent to Peloponnesus, with a colony of their own people; and not long after they sent inhabitants into the same. When the Æginetæ were thus banished, the Lacedæmonians gave them Thyrea to dwell in3 , and the occupation of the lands belonging unto it to live on: both upon hatred to the Athenians, and for the benefits received at the hands of the Æginetæ in the time of the earthquake and insurrection of the Helotes. This territory of Thyrea is in the border between Argolica and Laconica, and reacheth to the sea–side. So some of them were placed there: and the rest dispersed into other parts of Greece1 .

  Eclipse of the sun: and stars discerned.

  28. Also the same summer, on the first day of the month according to the moon, (at which time it seems only possible), in the afternoon happened an eclipse of the sun. The which, after it had appeared in the form of a crescent, and withal some stars had been discerned, came afterwards again to the former brightness.

  The Athenians seek the favour of Sitalces, king of Thrace, and Perdiccas, king of Macedonia.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.Sadocus the son of Sitalces, king of Thrace, made free of Athens.

  29. The same summer also the Athenians made Nymphodorus the son of Pythos, of the city of Abdera, (whose sister was married to Sitalces, and that was of great power with him), their host2 , though before they took him for an enemy; and sent for him to Athens, hoping by his means to bring Sitalces the son of Teres, king of Thrace, into their league. This Teres, the father of Sitalces, was the first that advanced the kingdom of the Odrysians above the power of the rest of Thrace3 . For much of Thrace consisteth of free states. And Tereus that took to wife out of Athens Procne the daughter of Pandion, was no kin to this Teres, nor of the same part1 of Thrace. But that Tereus was of the city of Daulia in the country now called Phocis, then inhabited by the Thracians. And the fact of the women concerning Itys, was done there; and by the poets, where they mention the nightingale, that bird is also called Daulias. And it is more likely that Pandion matched his daughter to this man, for vicinity and mutual succour, than with the other, that was so many days’ journey off as Odrysæ. And Teres (which is also another name) was the first that seized on the kingdom of Odrysæ2 . Now Sitalces, this man’s son, the Athenians got into their league, that they might have the towns lying on Thrace and Perdiccas to be of their party3 . Nymphodorus, when he came to Athens, made this league between them and Sitalces, and caused Sadocus the son of Sitalces, to be made free of Athens; and also undertook to end the war in Thrace. For he would persuade Sitalces to send unto the Athenians a Thracian army of horsemen and targettiers. He likewise reconciled Perdiccas to the Athenians, and procured of4 him the restitution of Therme. And Perdiccas presently aided the Athenians and Phormio in the war against the Chalcideans. Thus were Sitalces the son of Teres, king of Thrace, and Perdiccas the son of Alexander, king of Macedonia, made confederates with the Athenians.

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The Athenians take Solium and A stacus, and the island of Cephalonia.

  30. The Athenians being yet with their hundred galleys about Peloponnesus, took Solium, a town that belonged to the Corinthians, and put the Palærenses only, of all the Acarnanians, into the possession both of the town and territory. Having also by force taken Astacus from the tyrant Euarchus, they drave him thence, and joined the place to their league. From thence they sailed to Cephalonia, and subdued it without battle: (this Cephalonia is an island lying over against Acarnania and Leucas; and hath in it these four cities, the Pallenses, Cranii, Samæi, and Pronæi1 :) and not long after returned with their fleet to Athens.

  The Athenians invade Megaris.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.The Athenians’ greatest army.The Athenians duly once a year invade Megaris.

  31. About the end of the autumn of this summer, the Athenians, both themselves and the strangers that dwelt amongst them2 , with the whole power of the city, under the conduct of Pericles the son Xantippus, invaded the territory of Megara. And those Athenians likewise that had been with the hundred galleys about Peloponnesus, in their return, being now at Ægina, hearing that the whole power of the city was gone into Megaris, went and joined them. And this was the greatest army that ever the Athenians had together in one place before1 ; the city being now in her strength, and the plague not yet amongst them. For the Athenians themselves were no less than ten thousand men of arms, besides the three thousand at Potidæa: and the strangers that dwelt amongst them, and accompanied them in this invasion, were no fewer that three thousand men of arms more; besides other great numbers of light–armed soldiers. And when they had wasted the greatest part of the country, they went back to Athens. And afterwards, year after year during this war, the Athenians often2 invaded Megaris, sometimes with their horsemen and sometimes with their whole army, until such time as they had won Nisæa.

  The end of the first summer.

  32. Also in the end of this summer they fortified Atalante, an island lying upon the Locrians of Opus, desolate till then; for a garrison against thieves, which passing over from Opus and other parts of Locris might annoy Eubœa. These were the things done this summer after the retreat of the Peloponnesians out of Attica.

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. Euarchus the tyrant recovereth Astacus.

  33. The winter following, Euarchus of Acarnania, desirous to return to Astacus, prevaileth with the Corinthians to go thither with forty galleys and fifteen hundred men of arms, to re–establish him; to which he hired also certain other mercenaries for the same purpose. The commanders of this army were Euphamidas the son of Aristonymus, Timoxenes the son of Timocrates, and Eumachus the son of Chrysis. When they had re–established him, they endeavoured to draw to their party some other places on the sea–coast of Acarnania; but missing their purpose, they set sail homeward. As they passed by the coast of Cephalonia, they disbarked in the territory of the Cranii; where, under colour of composition, they were deceived, and lost some part of their forces1 . For the assault made upon them by the Cranii being unexpected, they got off with much ado, and went home.

  The manner of the Athenians in burying the bones of the first slain in the wars.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2.

  34. The same winter the Athenians, according to their ancient custom, solemnized a public funeral of the first slain in this war, in this manner. Having set up a tent, they put into it2 the bones of the dead three days before the funeral: and every one bringeth whatsoever he thinks good to his own. When the day comes of carrying them to their burial, certain cypress1 coffins are carried along in carts, for every tribe one, in which are the bones of the men of every tribe by themselves. There is likewise borne an empty hearse covered over, for such as appear not, nor were found amongst the rest when they were taken up. The funeral is accompanied by any that will2 , whether citizen or stranger; and the women of their kindred are also by at the burial, lamenting and mourning. Then they put them into a3 public monument, which standeth in the fairest suburbs of the city; in which place they have ever interred all that died in the wars, except those that were slain in the field of Marathon; who, because their virtue was thought extraordinary, were therefore buried thereright. And when the earth is thrown over them, some one thought to exceed the rest in wisdom and dignity, chosen by the city, maketh an oration, wherein he giveth them such praises as are fit: which done, the company depart. And this is the form of that burial: and for the whole time of the war, whensoever there was occasion, they observed the same4 . For these first, the man chosen to make the oration was Pericles the son of Xantippus: who when the time served, going out of the place of burial into a high pulpit, to be heard the farther off by the multitude about him, spake unto them in this manner:

  the funeral oration made by pericles.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.

  35. “Though most that have spoken formerly in this place, have commended the man that added this oration to the law, as honourable for those that die in the wars; yet to me it seemeth sufficient, that they who have showed their valour by action, should also by an action have their honour1 , as now you see they have, in this their sepulture performed by the state; and not to have the virtue of many hazarded on one, to be believed as that one shall make a good or bad oration. For to speak of men in a just measure, is a hard matter: and though one do so, yet he shall hardly get the truth firmly believed2 . The favourable hearer, and he that knows what was done, will perhaps think what is spoken short of what he would have it, and what it was3 : and he that is ignorant, will find somewhat on the other side which he will think too much extolled; especially if he hear aught above the pitch of his own nature. For to hear another man praised finds patience so long only, as each man shall think he could himself have done somewhat of that he hears. And if one exceed in their praises, the hearer presently through envy thinks it false. But since our ancestors have so thought good, I also, following the same ordinance, must endeavour to be answerable to the desires and opinions of every one of you, as far forth as I can.

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.He glanceth at the Lacedæmonians, because they ever looked sourly on soft and loose behaviour.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.

  36. “I will begin at our ancestors: being a thing both just and honest1 , that to them first be given the honour of remembrance in this kind. For they, having been always the inhabitants of this region2 , by their valour have delivered the same to succession of posterity, hitherto in the state of liberty. For which they deserve commendation, but our fathers deserve yet more: for that besides what descended on them, not without great labour of their own they have purchased this our present dominion, and delivered the same over to us that now are. Which in a great part also we ourselves, that are yet in the strength of our age here present, have enlarged; and so furnished the city with every thing, both for peace and war, as it is now all–sufficient in itself. The actions of war whereby all this was attained, and the deeds of arms both of ourselves and our fathers in valiant opposition to the barbarians or Grecians in their wars against us, amongst you that are well acquainted with the sum, to avoid prolixity I will pass over. But by what3 institutions we arrived at this, by what form of government and by what means we have advanced the state to this greatness, when I shall have laid open this, I shall then descend to these men’s praises. For I think they are things both fit for the purpose in hand, and profitable to the whole company, both of citizens and strangers, to hear related. 37. We have a form of government, not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states; (nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us); which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few, but to the multitude, is called a democracy. Wherein, though there be an equality amongst all men in point of law for their private controversies; yet1 in conferring of dignities one man is preferred before another to public charge, and that according to the reputation, not of his house, but of his virtue; and is not put back through poverty for the obscurity of his person, as long as he can do good service to the commonwealth. And we live not only free in the administration of the state, but also one with another void of jealousy touching each other’s daily course of life2 ; not offended at any man for following his own humour, nor casting on any man censorious looks, which though they be no punishment, yet they grieve. So that conversing one with another for the private without offence, we stand chiefly in fear to transgress against the public; and are obedient always to those that govern and to the laws, and principally to such laws as are written for protection against injury, and such unwritten, as bring undeniable shame to the transgressors. 38. We have also found out many ways to give our minds recreation from labour, by public institution of games and sacrifices for all the days of the year, with a decent pomp and furniture of the same by private men; by the daily delight whereof we expel sadness. We have this farther by the greatness of our city, that all things from all parts of the earth are imported hither; whereby we no less familiarly enjoy the commodities of all other nations, than our own. 39. Then in the studies of war, we excel1 our enemies in this. We leave our city open to all men; nor was it ever seen, that by banishing of strangers2 we denied them the learning or sight of any of those things, which, if not hidden, an enemy might reap advantage by; not relying on secret preparation and deceit, but upon our own courage in the action. They, in their discipline, hunt after valour presently from their youth with laborious exercise3 ; and yet we that live remissly, undertake as great dangers as they. For example; the Lacedæmonians invade not our dominion by themselves alone, but with the aid of all the rest. But when we invade our neighbours, though we fight in hostile ground, against such as in their own ground fight in defence of their own substance, yet for the most part we get the victory1 . Never enemy yet fell into the hands of our whole forces at once; both because we apply ourselves much to navigation, and by land also send many of our men into divers countries abroad2 . But when fighting with a part of it, they chance to get the better, they boast they have beaten the whole; and when they get the worse, they say they are beaten by the whole. And yet when from ease rather than studious labour, and upon natural rather than doctrinal valour, we come to undertake any danger, we have this odds by it, that we shall3 not faint beforehand with the meditation of future trouble, and in the action we shall appear no less confident than they that are ever toiling; 40. procuring admiration to our city as well in this as in divers other things. For we also give ourselves to bravery1 , and yet with thrift; and to philosophy, and yet without mollification of the mind. And we use riches rather for opportunities of action, than for verbal ostentation: and hold it not a shame to confess poverty, but not to have avoided it. Moreover there is in the same men, a care both of their own and the public affairs; and a sufficient knowledge of state matters2 , even in those that labour with their hands. For we only think one that is utterly ignorant therein, to be a man, not that meddles with nothing, but that is good for nothing. We3 likewise weigh what we undertake, and apprehend it perfectly in our minds; not accounting words for a hindrance of action, but that it is rather a hindrance to action to come to it without instruction of words before. For also in this we excel4 others; daring to undertake as much as any, and yet examining what we undertake; whereas with other men, ignorance makes them dare, and consideration dastards. And they are most rightly reputed valiant, who though they perfectly apprehend both what is dangerous and what is easy, are never the more thereby diverted from adventuring. Again, we are contrary to most men in matter of bounty. For we purchase our friends, not by receiving, but by bestowing benefits. And he that bestoweth a good turn, is ever the most constant friend; because1 he will not lose the thanks due unto him from him whom he bestowed it on. Whereas the friendship of him that oweth a benefit, is dull and flat, as knowing his benefit not to be taken for a favour, but for a debt. So that we only do good to others, not upon computation of profit, but freeness of trust2 .

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.

  41. “In sum it may be said, both that the city is in general a school of the Grecians, and that the men here have, every one in particular, his person disposed to most diversity of actions, and yet all with grace and decency3 . And that this is not now rather a bravery of words upon the occasion, than real truth, this power of the city, which by these institutions4 we have obtained, maketh evident. For it is the only power now, found greater in proof than fame; and the only power, that neither grieveth the invader, when he miscarries, with the quality of those he was hurt by, nor giveth cause to the subjected states to murmur, as being in subjection to men unworthy. For both with present and future ages we shall be in admiration, for a power not without testimony, but made evident by great arguments; and which needeth not either a Homer to praise it, or any other such, whose poems may indeed for the present bring delight, but the truth will afterwards confute the opinion conceived of the actions. For we have opened unto us by our courage all seas and lands, and set up eternal monuments on all sides, both of the evil we have done to our enemies, and the good we have done to our friends.

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.

  “Such is the city for which these men, thinking it no reason to lose it, valiantly fighting have died. And it is fit that every man of you that be left, should be like minded to undergo any travail for the same. 42. And I have therefore spoken so much concerning the city in general, as well to show you that the stakes between us and them, whose city is not such, are not equal; as also to make known by effects, the worth of these men I am to speak of; the greatest part of their praises being therein already delivered. For what I have spoken of the city, hath by these, and such as these, been achieved. Neither would praises and actions appear so levelly concurrent in many other of the Grecians, as they do in these: the present revolution1 of these men’s lives seeming unto me an argument of their virtues, noted in the first act thereof, and in the last confirmed. For even such of them as were worse than the rest, do nevertheless deserve, that for their valour shown in the wars for defence of their country they should be preferred before the rest2 . For having by their good actions abolished the memory of their evil, they have profited the state thereby more than they have hurt it by their private behaviour. Yet there was none of these, that preferring the further fruition of his wealth, was thereby grown cowardly; or that for hope to overcome his poverty at length and to attain to riches, did for that cause withdraw himself from the danger. For1 their principal desire was not wealth, but revenge on their enemies; which esteeming the most honourable cause of danger, they made account through it both to accomplish their revenge and to purchase wealth withal; putting the uncertainty of success to the account of their hope; but for that which was before their eyes, relying upon themselves in the action; and therein choosing rather to fight and die, than to shrink and be saved, they fled from shame, but with their bodies they stood out the battle; and so in a moment, whilst fortune inclineth neither way, left their lives not in fear, but in opinion of victory.

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.

  43. “Such were these men, worthy of their country. And for you that remain, you may pray for a safer fortune, but you ought not to be less venturously minded against the enemy; not weighing the profit by an oration only, which any man amplifying, may recount, to you that know as well as he, the many commodities that arise by fighting valiantly against your enemies; but contemplating the power of the city in the actions of the same from day to day performed1 , and thereby becoming enamoured of it. And when this power of the city shall seem great to you, consider then, that the same was purchased by valiant men, and by men that knew their duty, and by men that were sensible of dishonour when they were in fight; and by such men, as though they failed of their attempt, yet would not be wanting to the city with their virtue, but made unto it a most honourable contribution. For2 having every one given his body to the commonwealth, they receive in place thereof an undecaying commendation and a most remarkable sepulchre; not wherein they are buried so much, as wherein their glory is laid up, upon all occasions both of speech and action to be remembered for ever. For to famous men all the earth is a sepulchre: and their virtues shall be testified, not only by the inscription in stone at home, but3 by an unwritten record of the mind, which more than of any monument will remain with every one for ever. In imitation therefore of these men, and placing happiness in liberty, and liberty in valour, be forward to encounter the dangers of war. For the miserable and desperate men, are not they that have the most reason to be prodigal of their lives; but rather such men, as if they live, may expect a change of fortune, and whose losses are greatest if they miscarry in aught. For to a man of any spirit, death, which is without sense, arriving whilst he is in vigour and common hope, is nothing so bitter as after a tender life to be brought into misery1 .

  year i. A. C. 431. Ol. 87. 2. The funeral oration made by Pericles.

  44. “Wherefore I will not so much bewail, as comfort you, the parents, that are present, of these men. For you know that whilst they lived, they were obnoxious to manifold calamities. Whereas whilst you are in grief, they only are happy that die honourably, as these have done2 : and to whom it hath been granted, not only to live in prosperity, but to die in it. Though it be a hard matter to dissuade you from sorrow for the loss of that, which the happiness of others, wherein you also when time was rejoiced yourselves, shall so often bring into your remembrance; (for sorrow is not for the want of a good never tasted, but for the privation of a good we have been used to); yet such of you as are of the age to have children, may bear the loss of these in the hope of more. For the later children will both draw on with some the oblivion of those that are slain, and also doubly conduce to the good of the city, by population and strength. For it is not likely that they should equally give good counsel to the state, that have not children to be equally exposed to danger in it. As for you that are past having of children3 , you are to put the former and greater part of your life1 to the account of your gain; and supposing the remainder of it will be but short, you shall have the glory of these for a consolation of the same. For the love of honour never groweth old: nor doth that unprofitable part of our life take delight (as some have said) in gathering of wealth, so much as it doth in being honoured. 45. As for you that are the children or brethren of these men, I see you shall have a difficult task of emulation. For every man useth to praise the dead; so that with odds of virtue you will hardly get an equal reputation, but still be thought a little short. For men envy their competitors in glory, while they live; but to stand out of their way, is a thing honoured with an affection free from opposition2 . And since I must say somewhat also of feminine virtue, for you that are now widows, I shall express it in this short admonition. It will be much for your honour not to recede from your sex3 : and to give as little occasion of rumour amongst the men, whether of good or evil, as you can.

  year i. A. C 431. Ol. 87. 2.

  46. “Thus4 also have I, according to the prescript of the law, delivered in word what was expedient; and those that are here interred, have in fact been already honoured; and further, their children5 shall be maintained till they be at man’s estate at the charge of the city; which hath therein propounded both to these, and them that live, a profitable garland in their matches of valour1 . For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there live the worthiest men. So now having lamented every one his own, you may be gone.”

  47. Such was the funeral made this winter; which ending, ended the first year of this war.

  year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. The second invasion of Attica by the Lacedæmonians.The plague at Athens.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2.It began in Æthiopia.The Peloponnesians supposed to have poisoned their wells.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. The author sick of this disease.

  In the very beginning of summer, the Peloponnesians and their confederates, with two thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica under the conduct of Archidamus the son of Zeuxidamas, king of Lacedæmon: and after they had encamped themselves, wasted the country about them. They had not been many days in Attica, when the plague first began amongst the Athenians, said also to have seized2 formerly on divers other parts, as about Lemnos and elsewhere; but so great a plague and mortality of men was never remembered to have happened in any place before. For at first neither were the physicians able to cure it, through ignorance of what it was1 , but died fastest themselves, as being the men that most approached the sick; nor any other art of man availed whatsoever. All supplications to the gods, and enquiries of oracles, and whatsoever other means they used of that kind, proved all unprofitable; insomuch as subdued with the greatness of the evil, they gave them all over. 48. It began, by report, first in that part of Æthiopia that lieth upon Egypt; and thence fell down into Egypt and Africa, and into the greatest part of the territories of the king. It invaded Athens on a sudden; and touched first upon those that dwelt in Peiræus; insomuch as they reported that the Peloponnesians had cast poison into their wells2 ; (for springs there were not any in that place). But afterwards it came up into the high city, and then they died a great deal faster. Now let every man, physician or other, concerning the ground of this sickness, whence it sprung, and what causes he thinks able to produce so great an alteration, speak according to his own knowledge. For my own part, I will deliver but the manner of it, and lay open only such things, as one may take his mark by to discover the same, if it come again; having been both sick of it myself, and seen others sick of the same.

  The description of the disease:ache of the head: redness of the eyes: sore throat: unsavoury breath:vomitings:hickyexe:year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. livid pustules: extreme heat of their bodies:insatiate thirst:want of sleep:after seven or ten days, death:disease in the belly:looseness:year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. loss of the parts where the disease brake out:oblivion of all things done before their sickness:birds and beasts perished that fed on carcases.

  49. This year, by confession of all men, was of all other, for other diseases, most free and healthful. If any man were sick before, his disease turned to this1 ; if not, yet suddenly, without any apparent cause preceding and being in perfect health, they were taken first with an extreme ache2 in their heads, redness and inflammation of the eyes; and then inwardly, their throats and tongues grew presently bloody, and their breath noisome and unsavoury. Upon this followed a sneezing and hoarseness, and not long after the pain, together with a mighty cough, came down into the breast. And when once it was settled in the stomach, it caused vomit3 , and with great torment came up all manner of bilious purgation that physicians ever named. Most of them had also the hickyexe4 , which brought with it a strong convulsion, and in some ceased quickly, but in others was long before it gave over. Their bodies outwardly to the touch were neither very hot nor pale; but reddish, livid, and beflowered with little pimples and whelks1 ; but so burned inwardly, as not to endure any the lightest clothes or linen garment to be upon them, nor anything but mere nakedness; but rather most willingly to have cast themselves into the cold water. And2 many of them that were not looked to, possessed with insatiate thirst, ran unto the wells; and to drink much or little was indifferent, being still from ease and power to sleep as far as ever. As long as the disease was at its height, their bodies wasted not, but resisted the torment beyond all expectation; insomuch as the most of them either died of their inward burning3 in nine or seven days, whilst they had yet strength; or if they escaped that, then the disease falling down into their bellies, and causing there great exulcerations and immoderate4 looseness, they died many of them afterwards through weakness. For the disease, which took first the head, began above, and came down and passed through the whole body; and he that overcame the worst of it, was yet marked with the loss of his extreme parts1 ; for breaking out both at their privy members, and at their fingers and toes, many with the loss of these escaped: there were also some that lost their eyes. And many, that presently upon their recovery were taken with such an oblivion of all things whatsoever, as they neither knew themselves nor their acquaintance. 50. For this was a kind of sickness which far surmounted all expression of words, and both exceeded human nature in the cruelty wherewith it handled each one; and appeared also otherwise to be none of those diseases that are bred amongst us, and that especially by this. For all, both birds and beasts, that use to feed on human flesh, though many men lay abroad unburied, either came not at them, or tasting perished2 . An argument whereof as touching the birds, is the manifest defect of such fowl; which were not then seen, neither about the carcases or any where else. But by the dogs, because they are familiar with men, this effect was seen much clearer.

  year ii. A C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. Want of attendance.Dejection of mind.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. No man sick of it mortally the second time.

  51. So that this disease, (to pass over many strange particulars of the accidents that some had differently from others), was in general such as I have shown3 ; and for other usual sicknesses, at that time no man was troubled with any1 . Now they died, some for want of attendance, and some again with all the care and physic that could be used. Nor was there any, to say certain medicine, that applied must have helped them2 ; for if it did good to one, it did harm to another. Nor any difference of body, for strength or weakness, that was able to resist it; but it carried all away, what physic soever was administered. But the greatest misery of all, was the dejection of mind in such as found themselves beginning to be sick: (for they grew presently desperate, and gave themselves over without making any resistance): as also their dying thus like sheep, infected by mutual visitation; for the greatest mortality proceeded that way. For if men forebore to visit them for fear, then they died forlorn; whereby many families became empty, for want of such as should take care of them. If they forbore not, then they died themselves, and principally the honestest3 men. For out of shame they would not spare themselves, but went in unto their friends; especially after it was come to this pass, that even their domestics, wearied with the lamentations of them that died, and overcome with the greatness of the calamity, were no longer moved therewith. But those that were recovered, had much4 compassion both on them that died, and on them that lay sick; as having both known the misery themselves, and now no more subject to the danger. For this disease never took any man the second time, so as to be mortal. And these men were both by others counted happy; and they also themselves, through excess of present joy, conceived a kind of light hope never to die of any other sickness hereafter.

  Men died in the streets.Disorder in their funerals.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2.Licentiousness of life justified.Neglect of religion and law.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2.

  52. Besides the present affliction, the reception of the country people and of their substance into the city, oppressed both them, and much more the people themselves that so came in. For having no houses, but dwelling at that time1 of the year in stifling booths, the mortality was now without all form; and dying2 men lay tumbling one upon another in the streets, and men half–dead about every conduit through desire of water. The temples also where they dwelt in tents, were all full of the dead that died within them. For oppressed with the violence of the calamity, and not knowing what to do, men grew careless both of holy and profane things alike. And the laws which they formerly used touching funerals, were all now broken; every one burying where he could find room3 . And many for want of things necessary, after so many deaths before, were forced to become impudent in the funerals of their friends. For when one had made a funeral pile, another getting before him would throw on his dead, and give it fire. And when one was in burning, another would come, and having cast thereon him whom he carried, go his way again. 53. And the great licentiousness, which also in other kinds was1 used in the city, began at first from this disease. For that which a man before would dissemble, and not acknowledge to be done for voluptuousness, he durst now do freely; seeing before his eyes such quick revolution, of the rich2 dying, and men worth nothing inheriting their estates. Insomuch as they justified a speedy fruition of their goods, even3 for their pleasure; as men that thought they held their lives but by the day. As for pains, no man was forward in any action of honour to take any; because they thought it uncertain whether they should die or not before they achieved it. But what any man knew to be delightful, and to be profitable to pleasure4 , that was made both profitable and honourable. Neither the fear of the gods, nor laws of men, awed any man: not the former, because they concluded it was alike to worship or not worship, from seeing that alike they all perished: nor the latter, because no man expected that lives would last till he received punishment of his crimes by judgment. But they thought, there was now over their heads some far greater judgment decreed against them; before which fell, they thought to enjoy some little part of their lives.

  Predictions called to mind.

  54. Such was the misery, into which the Athenians being fallen were much oppressed; having not only their men killed by the disease within, but the enemy also laying waste their fields and villages without. In this sickness also, (as it was not unlikely they would), they called to mind this verse, said also of the elder sort to have been uttered of old:

  • A Doric war shall fall,
  • And a great plague1withal.

  An ambiguous prophecy expounded by the event.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2.

  Now were men at variance about the word, some saying it was not λοιμός that was by the ancients mentioned in that verse, but λιμός. But upon the present occasion the word λοιμός deservedly obtained. For as men suffered, so they made the verse to say. And I think, if after this there shall ever come another Doric war, and with it a famine, they are like to recite the verse accordingly. There was also reported by such as knew, a certain2 answer given by the oracle to the Lacedæmonians, when they inquired whether they should make this war or not: that if they warred with all their power, they should have the victory; and that the God3himself would take their parts. And thereupon they thought the present misery to be a fulfilling of that prophecy. The Peloponnesians were no sooner entered Attica, but the sickness presently began; and never came into Peloponnesus, to speak of, but reigned principally in Athens, and in such other places afterwards as were most populous. And thus much of this disease.

  Pericles with 100 sail of Athenians about Peloponnesus.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2.

  55. After the Peloponnesians had wasted the champagne country, they fell upon the territory called Paralos1 , as far as to the mountain Laurius, where the Athenians had silver mines; and first wasted that part of it which looketh towards Peloponnesus, and then that also which lieth toward Andros and Eubœa. And Pericles, who was also then general, was still of the same mind he was of in the former invasion, that the Athenians ought not to go out against them to battle. 56. Whilst2 they were yet in the plain, and before they entered into the maritime country, he furnished a hundred galleys to go about Peloponnesus, and as soon as they were ready, put to sea. In these galleys he had four thousand men of arms; and in vessels then purposely first made to carry horses3 , three hundred horsemen. The Chians and Lesbians joined likewise with him with fifty galleys. This fleet of the Athenians, when it set forth, left the Peloponnesians still in Paralia; and coming before Epidaurus, a city of Peloponnesus1 , they wasted much of the country thereabout, and assaulting the city had a hope to take it, though it succeeded not. Leaving Epidaurus, they wasted the territories about of Trœzene, Halias, and Hermione, places all on the sea–coast of Peloponnesus. Putting off from hence, they came to Prasiæ, a small maritime city of Laconia; and both wasted the territory about it, and took and razed2 the town itself. And having done this, came home, and found the Peloponnesians not now in Attica, but gone back.

  The Peloponnesians depart out of Attica.

  57. All the while the Peloponnesians were in the territory of the Athenians, and the Athenians abroad with their fleet, the sickness, both in the army and city, destroyed many; insomuch as it was said that the Peloponnesians fearing the sickness, (which they knew to be in the city, both by fugitives and by seeing the Athenians burying3 their dead), went the sooner away out of the country. And yet they stayed there longer in this invasion than they had done any time before4 ; and wasted even the whole territory: for they continued in Attica almost forty days.

  year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3. The Athenian fleet returned from Peloponnesus, go to Potidæa with ill success by reason of the sickness.

  58. The same summer Agnon the son of Nicias, and Cleopompus the son of Clinias, who were joint commanders with Pericles, with that army which he had employed before, went presently and made war upon the Chalcideans of Thrace, and against Potidæa, which was yet besieged. Arriving, they presently applied engines, and tried all means possible to take it; but neither the taking of the city, nor any thing else, succeeded worthy so great preparation. For the sickness coming amongst them, afflicted them mightily indeed, and even devoured the army. And the Athenian soldiers which were there before and in health, catched the sickness from those that came with Agnon. As for Phormio and his sixteen hundred, they were not now amongst the Chalcideans. And Agnon therefore came back with his fleet, having of four thousand men in less than forty days lost one thousand and fifty of the plague. But the soldiers that were there before, stayed upon the place and continued the siege of Potidæa.

  The Athenian people vexed at once both with the war and pestilence, grow impatient toward Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3.

  59. After the second invasion of the Peloponnesians, the Athenians having their fields now the second time wasted, and both the sickness and war falling upon them at once, changed their minds, and accused Pericles1 as if by his means they had been brought into these calamities, and desired earnestly to compound with the Lacedæmonians; to whom also they sent certain ambassadors, but they returned without effect. And being then at their wits’ end, they kept a stir at Pericles. And he seeing them vexed with their present calamity and doing all those things which he had before expected, called an assembly (for he was yet general1 ) with intention to put them again into heart, and assuaging their passion, to reduce their minds to a more calm and less dismayed temper. And standing forth, he spake unto them in this manner:

  Oration of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3. Oration of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3. Oration of Pericles.

  60. “Your anger towards me cometh not unlooked for; for the cause of it I know. And I have called this assembly therefore, to remember you, and reprehend you for those things wherein you have either been angry with me, or given way to your adversity, without reason. For I am of this opinion, that the public prosperity of the city is better for private men, than if the private men themselves were in prosperity and the public wealth in decay. For a private man, though in good estate, if his country come to ruin, must of necessity be ruined with it; whereas he that miscarrieth in a flourishing commonwealth, shall much more easily be preserved. Since then the commonwealth is able to bear the calamities of private men, and every one2 cannot support the calamities of the commonwealth, why should not every one strive to defend it: and not, as you now, astonished with domestic misfortune, forsake the common safety, and fall a censuring both me that counselled the war, and yourselves that decreed the same as well as I? And it is I you are angry withal: one, as I think myself, inferior to none, either in knowing what is requisite, or in expressing what I know, and a lover of my country and superior to money. For he that hath good thoughts and cannot clearly express them, were as good to have thought nothing at all. He that can do both, and is ill affected to his country, will likewise1 not give it faithful counsel. And he that will do that too, yet if he be superable by money, will for that alone set all the rest to sale. Now if you followed my advice in making this war, as esteeming these virtues to be in me somewhat above the rest, there is sure no reason that I should now be accused of doing you wrong. 61. For though to such as have it in their own election, (being otherwise in good estate), it were madness to make choice of war; yet when we must of necessity either give way, and so without more ado be subject to our neighbours, or else save ourselves from it by danger; he is more to be condemned that declineth the danger, than he that standeth to it. For mine own part, I am the man I was, and of the mind I was; but you are changed, won to the war when you were entire, but repenting it upon the damage, and condemning my counsel in the weakness of your own judgment. The reason of this is, because you feel already every one in particular that which afflicts you; but the evidence of the profit to accrue to the city in general, you see not yet. And your minds dejected with the great and sudden alteration, cannot constantly2 maintain what you have before resolved. For that which is sudden and unexpected, and contrary to what one hath deliberated, enslaveth the spirit; which by this disease principally, in the neck of the other incommodities, is now come to pass in you. But you that are born in a great city, and with education suitable, how great soever the affliction be, ought not to shrink at it and eclipse your reputation; (for men do no less condemn those that through cowardice lose the glory they have, than hate those that through impudence arrogate the glory they have not); but to set aside the grief of your private losses, and lay your hands to the common safety.

  year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3. Oration of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3. Oration of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3. Oration of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol 87. 2. 3. Oration of Pericles.

  62. “As for the toil of the war, that it may perhaps be long and we in the end never the nearer to victory, though that may suffice which I have demonstrated1 at other times touching your causeless suspicion that way; yet this I will tell you moreover, touching the greatness of your means for dominion, which neither you yourselves seem ever to have thought on, nor I touched in my former orations; nor would I also have spoken it now2 , but that I see your minds dejected more than there is cause for. That though you take your dominion to extend only to your confederates, I affirm that of the two parts of the world of manifest use, the land and the sea, you are of one of them entire masters; both of as much of it as you make use of, and also of as much more as you shall think fit yourselves. Neither is there any king or nation whatsoever of those that now are, that can impeach your navigation with the fleet and strength you now go1 . So that you must not put the use of houses and lands, wherein now you think yourselves deprived of a mighty matter, into the balance with such a power as this, nor take the loss of these things heavily in respect of it; but rather set little by them, as but a light ornament and embellishment of wealth; and think that our liberty as long as we hold fast that, will easily recover unto us these things again; whereas subjected once to others, even that which we possess besides will be diminished. Show not yourselves both ways inferior to your ancestors; who not only held this, (gotten by their own labours, not left them), but have also preserved and delivered the same unto us: (for2 it is more dishonour to lose what one possesseth, than to miscarry in the acquisition of it): and encounter the enemy not only with magnanimity, but also with disdain. For a coward may have a high mind upon a prosperous ignorance; but he that is confident upon judgment to be superior to his enemy, doth also disdain him; which is now our case. And3 courage, in equal fortune, is the safer for our disdain of the enemy, where a man knows what he doth: for he trusteth less to hope, which is of force only in uncertainties, and more to judgment upon certainties, wherein there is a more sure foresight. 63. You have reason besides to maintain the dignity the city hath gotten for1 her dominion, in which you all triumph: and either not decline the pains, or not also pursue the honour. And you must not think the question is now of your liberty and servitude only. Besides the loss of your rule over others, you must stand the danger you have contracted by offence given in the administration of it. Nor can you now give it over: (if any fearing at this present that that may come to pass, encourage himself with the intention of not to meddle hereafter2 ): for already your government is in the nature of a tyranny, which is both unjust for you to take up and unsafe to lay down. And such men as these, if they could persuade others to it, or lived in a free city by themselves, would quickly overthrow it. For the quiet life can never be preserved, if it be not ranged with the active life: nor is it a life conducible to a city that reigneth, but to a subject city, that it may safely serve. 64. Be not therefore seduced by this sort of men, nor angry with me, together with whom yourselves did decree this war, because the enemy invading you hath done what was likely he would, if you obeyed him not. And as for the sickness, the only thing that exceeded the imagination of all men, it was unlooked for: and I know you hate me somewhat the more for that; but unjustly, unless when anything falleth out above your expectation fortunate, you will also dedicate unto me that. Evils that come from heaven, you must bear necessarily; and such as proceed from your enemies, valiantly; for so it hath been the custom of this city to do heretofore, which custom let it not be your part to reverse. Knowing that this city hath a great name amongst all people for not yielding to adversity, and for the mighty power it yet hath after the expense of so many lives and so much labour in the war1 : the memory whereof, though we should now at length miscarry, (for all things are made with this law, to decay again), will remain with posterity for ever. How that being Grecians, most of the Grecians were our subjects; that we have abidden the greatest wars against them, both universally and singly, and have inhabited the greatest and wealthiest city. Now this, he with the quiet life will condemn; the active man will emulate; and they that have not attained to the like, will envy. But to be hated and to displease, is a thing that happeneth for the time to whosoever he be that hath the command of others; and he does well, that undergoeth hatred for matters of great consequence. For the hatred lasteth not; and is recompensed both with a present splendour and an immortal glory hereafter. Seeing then you foresee2 both what is honourable for the future, and not dishonourable for the present, procure both the one and the other by your courage now. Send no more heralds to the Lacedæmonians, nor let them know the evil present does any way afflict you; for they whose minds least feel, and whose actions most oppose a calamity, both among states and private persons are the best.”

  Pericles fined in a sum of money.Athens at the greatest in the time of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3.The death of Pericles. Sept A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 4.The commendation of Pericles.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 2. 3.

  65. In this speech did Pericles endeavour to appease the anger of the Athenians towards himself, and withal to withdraw their thoughts from the present affliction. But they, though for the state in general they were won, and sent to the Lacedæmonians no more, but rather1 inclined to the war; yet they were every one in particular grieved for their several losses: the poor, because entering the war with little, they lost that little; and the rich, because they had lost fair possessions, together with goodly houses and costly furniture in them, in the country; but the greatest matter of all was, that they had war instead of peace. And altogether, they deposed not their anger till they had first fined him in a sum of money. Nevertheless, not long after (as is the fashion of the multitude) they made him general again, and committed the whole state to his administration2 . For the sense of their domestic losses was now dulled; and for the need of the commonwealth, they prized him more than any other whatsoever. For as long as he was in authority in the city in time of peace3 , he governed the same with moderation, and was a faithful watchman of it; and in his time it was at the greatest. And after the war was on foot, it is manifest that he therein also foresaw what it could do. He lived after the war began two years and six months. And his foresight in the war was best known after his death1 . For he told them, that if they would be quiet, and look to their navy, and during this war seek no further dominion, nor hazard the city itself, they should then have the upper hand. But they did contrary in all: and in such other things besides as seemed not to concern the war2 , managed the state, according to their private ambition and covetousness, perniciously both for themselves and their confederates. What succeeded well, the honour and profit of it came most to private men; and what miscarried, was to the city’s detriment in the war. The reason whereof was this: that being a man of great power both for his dignity and wisdom, and for bribes manifestly the most incorrupt, he freely controled the multitude; and was not so much led by them, as he led them. Because, having gotten his power by no evil arts, he would not humour them in his speeches, but out of his authority durst anger them with contradiction. Therefore, whensoever he saw them out of season insolently bold, he would with his orations put them into a fear; and again, when they were afraid without reason, he would likewise erect their spirits and embolden them. It was in name, a state democratical; but in fact, a government of the principal man. But they that came after, being more equal amongst themselves, and affecting every one to be the chief, applied themselves to the people and let go the care of the commonwealth1 . From whence amongst many other errors, as was likely in a great and dominant city, proceeded also the voyage into Sicily; which2 was not so much upon mistaking those whom they went against, as for want of knowledge in the senders of what was necessary for those that went the voyage. For through private quarrels about who should bear the greatest sway with the people, they both abated the vigour of the army, and then also first troubled the state at home with division. Being overthrown in Sicily, and having lost, besides other ammunition, the greatest part of their navy, and the city being then in sedition; yet they held out three years3 , both against their first enemies and the Sicilians with them, and against most of their revolted confederates besides, and also afterwards against Cyrus the king’s son, who took part with, and sent money to the Peloponnesians to maintain their fleet; and never shrunk till they had overthrown themselves with private dissensions. So much was in Pericles above other men at that time, that he could foresee by what means the city might easily have outlasted the Peloponnesians in this war1 .

  The Lacedæmonians war against Zacynthus.

  66. The Lacedæmonians and their confederates made war the same summer with one hundred galleys against Zacynthus, an island laying over against Elis. The inhabitants whereof were a colony of Achæans of Peloponnesus, but confederates of the people of Athens. There went in this fleet a thousand men of arms, and Cnemus a Spartan for admiral; who landing, wasted the greatest part of the territory. But they of the island not yielding, they put off again and went home.

  A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 3. The Lacedæmonian ambassadors taken by the Athenian ambassadors in Thrace, and sent to Athens.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 3.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 3. The Athenians put them to death

  67. In the end of the same summer, Aristeus of Corinth, and Aneristus, Nicolaus, Stratodemus, and Timagorus of Tegea, ambassadors of the Lacedæmonians, and Pollis of Argos, a private man2 , as they were travelling into Asia to the king, to get money of him and to draw him into their league, took Thrace in their way, and came unto Sitalces the son of Teres, with a desire to get him also, if they could, to forsake the league with Athens, and to send his forces to Potidæa, which the Athenian army now besieged, and not to aid the Athenians any longer1 : and withal to get leave to pass through his country to the other side of the Hellespont, to go, as they intended, to Pharnabazus the son of Pharnaces, who would convoy them to the king. But the ambassadors of Athens, Learchus the son of Callimachus, and Ameiniades the son of Philemon, then resident with Sitalces, persuaded Sadocus the son of Sitalces, who was now a citizen of Athens, to put them into their hands, that they might not go to the king, and do hurt to the city whereof he himself was now a member2 . Whereunto condescending, as they journeyed through Thrace to take ship to cross the Hellespont, he apprehended them3 before they got to the ship by such others as he sent along with Learchus and Ameiniades, with command to deliver them into their hands. And they, when they had them, sent them away to Athens. When they came thither, the Athenians, fearing Aristeus, lest escaping he should do them further mischief, (for he was manifestly the author4 of all the business of Potidæa and about Thrace), the same day put them all to death, unjudged and desirous to have spoken, and threw them into the pits; thinking it but just to take revenge of the Lacedæmonians that began it, and had slain and thrown into pits the merchants of the Athenians and their confederates, whom they took sailing in merchant–ships1 about the coast of Peloponnesus. For in the beginning of the war, the Lacedæmonians slew as enemies whomsoever they took at sea, whether confederates of the Athenians or neutral, all alike.

  The Ambraciotes war on Acarnania.year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 3.The end of the second summer.

  68. About the same time, in the end of summer, the Ambraciotes2 , both they themselves and divers barbarian nations by them raised, made war against Argos of Amphilochia, and against the rest of that territory. The quarrel between them and the Argives, arose first from hence. This Argos and the rest of Amphilochia was planted by Amphilochus the son of Amphiaraus, after the Trojan war; who at his return, misliking the then state of Argos, built this city in the Gulf of Ambracia, and called it Argos, after the name of his own country. And it was the greatest city, and had the most wealthy inhabitants of all Amphilochia. But many generations after, being fallen into misery, they communicated their city with the Ambraciotes, bordering upon Amphilochia: and then they first learned the Greek language now used from the Ambraciotes that lived among them. For the rest of the Amphilochians were barbarians1 . Now the Ambraciotes in process of time drave out the Argives, and held the city by themselves. Whereupon the Amphilochians submitted themselves to the Acarnanians, and both together called in the Athenians; who sent thirty galleys to their aid, and Phormio for general. Phormio being arrived, took Argos by assault, and making slaves of the Ambraciotes, put the town into the joint possessions of the Amphilochians and Acarnanians2 . And this was the beginning of the league between the Athenians and Acarnanians. The Ambraciotes therefore, deriving their hatred to the Argives from this their captivity, came in with an army, partly of their own, and partly raised amongst the Chaonians and other neighbouring barbarians, now in this war. And coming to Argos, were masters of the field; but when they could not take the city by assault, they returned, and disbanding went every nation to his own. These were the acts of the summer.

  year ii. A. C. 430. Ol. 87. 3.

  69. In the beginning of the winter, the Athenians sent twenty galleys about Peloponnesus under the command of Phormio; who coming to lie at Naupactus1 , guarded the passage, that none might go in or out from Corinth and the Crisæan gulf. And other six galleys under the conduct of Melesander, they sent into Caria and Lycia; as well to gather tribute in those parts, as also to hinder the Peloponnesian pirates, lying on those coasts2 , from molesting the navigation of such merchant–ships as they expected to come to them from Phaselis, Phœnicia, and that part of the continent. But Melesander, landing in Lycia with such forces of the Athenians and their confederates as he had aboard, was overcome in battle and slain, with the loss of a part of his army.

  A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3. Potidæa rendered to the Athenians.year ii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3.

  70. The same winter, the Potidæans unable any longer to endure the siege, seeing the invasion of Attica by the Peloponnesians could not make them rise, and seeing their victual failed, and that they were forced, amongst divers other things done by them for necessity of food, to eat one another, propounded at length to Xenophon the son of Euripides, Hestiodorus the son of Aristocleidas, and Phanomachus the son of Callimachus, the Athenian commanders that lay before the city, to give the same into their hands. And they, seeing both that the army was already afflicted by laying in that cold place, and that the state had already spent two thousand talents upon the siege, accepted of it. The conditions agreed on were these: “to depart, they and their wives and children, and their auxiliar soldiers, every man with one suit of clothes1 , and every woman with two; and to take with them every one a certain sum of money for his charges by the way.” Hereupon a truce was granted them to depart; and they went, some to the Chalcideans, and others to other places, as they could get to. But the people of Athens called the commanders in question for compounding without them; conceiving that they might have gotten the city to discretion: and sent afterwards a colony to Potidæa of their own citizens. These were the things done in this winter. And so ended the second year of this war, written by Thucydides.

  year iii. The siege of Platæa.The Platæans’ Speech to Archidamus.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3. The Platæans’ speech to Archidamus.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3. The Answer of Archidamus to the Platæans.The Reply of the Platæans.The Answer of Archidamus to their Reply.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3.The Platæans reply again, and desire to know the pleasure of the people of Athens.The Athenians’ message to the Platæans.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3. The Platæans’ last Answer to Archidamus from the wall.Archidamus’ Protestation.

  71. The next summer, the Peloponnesians and their confederates came not into Attica, but turned their arms against Platæa, led by Archidamus the son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedæmonians; who having pitched his camp, was about to waste the territory thereof. But the Platæans sent ambassadors presently unto him, with words to this effect: “Archidamus, and you Lacedæmonians, you do neither justly, nor worthy yourselves and ancestors, in making war upon Platæa. For Pausanias of Lacedæmon, the son of Cleombrotus, having, together with such Grecians as were content to undergo the danger of the battle that was fought in this our territory, delivered all Greece from the slavery of the Persians, when he offered sacrifice in the market–place of Platæa to Jupiter the deliverer, called together all the confederates, and granted to the Platæans this privilege: that their city and territory should be free1 : that none should make any unjust war against them, nor go about to subject them: and if any did, the confederates then present should to their utmost ability revenge their quarrel. These privileges your fathers granted us for our valour and zeal in those dangers. But now do you the clean contrary; for you join with our greatest enemies, the Thebans, to bring us into subjection. Therefore calling to witness the gods then sworn by, and the gods both of your and our country2 , we require you, that you do no damage to the territory of Platæa, nor violate those oaths; but that you suffer us to enjoy our liberty in such sort as was allowed us by Pausanias.” 72. The Platæans having thus said, Archidamus replied and said thus: “Men of Platæa, if you would do as ye say, you say what is just. For as Pausanias hath granted to you, so also be you free; and help to set free the rest, who having been partakers of the same dangers then, and being comprised in the same oath with yourselves, are now brought into subjection by the Athenians. And this so great preparation and war, is only for the deliverance of them and others; of which if you will especially participate, keep your oaths; at least (as we have also advised you formerly) be quiet, and enjoy your own in neutrality; receiving both sides in the way of friendship, neither side in the way of faction1 .” Thus said Archidamus. And the ambassadors of Platæa, when they had heard him, returned to the city: and having communicated his answer to the people, brought word again to Archidamus: “that what he had advised, was impossible for them to perform without leave of the Athenians, in whose keeping were their wives and children; and that they feared also for the whole city, lest when the Lacedæmonians were gone, the Athenians should come and take the custody of it out of their hands2 ; or that the Thebans, comprehended in the oath of receiving both sides, should again attempt to surprise it.” But Archidamus to encourage them, made this answer: “Deliver you unto us Lacedæmonians your city and your houses, show us the bounds of your territory, give us your trees by tale, and whatsoever else can be numbered: and depart yourselves whither you shall think good, as long as the war lasteth: and when it shall be ended, we will deliver it all unto you again. In the mean time we will keep them as deposited, and will cultivate your ground, and pay you rent for it, as much as shall suffice for your maintenance.” 73. Hereupon the ambassadors went again into the city, and having consulted with the people, made answer “that they would first acquaint the Athenians with it, and if they would consent, they would then accept the conditions: till then, they desired a suspension of arms, and not to have their territory wasted.” Upon this he granted them so many days truce, as was requisite for their return: and for so long forebore to waste their territory. When the Platæan ambassadors were arrived at Athens, and had advised on the matter with the Athenians, they returned to the city with this answer: “The Athenians say thus: that neither in former times, since we were their confederates, did they ever abandon us to the injuries of any; nor will they now neglect us, but give us their utmost assistance. And they conjure us by the oath of our fathers, not to make any alienation1 touching the league.” 74. When the ambassadors had made this report, the Platæans resolved in their councils not to betray the Athenians; but rather to endure, if it must be, the wasting of their territory before their eyes, and to suffer whatsoever misery could befall them; and no more to go forth, but from the walls to make this answer: “that it was impossible for them to do as the Lacedæmonians had required.” When they had answered so, Archidamus, the king, first made a protestation to the gods and heros of the country, saying thus: “All ye Gods and Heros, protectors of Platæis1 , be witnesses, that we neither invade this territory (wherein our fathers after their vows unto you overcame the Medes, and which you made propitious for the Grecians to fight in) unjustly now in the beginning; because they have first broken the league they had sworn: nor what we shall further do, will be any injury; because, though we have offered many and reasonable conditions, they have yet been all refused: assent ye also to the punishment of the beginners of injury, and to the revenge of those that bear lawful arms.” 75. Having made this protestation to the gods, he made ready his army for the war.

  A mount raised against Platæa.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3.The Platæans raise their wall higher against the mount by a frame of timber, in which they laid their bricks.The Platæans’ device to draw the earth from the mount, thro’ the wall.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3. The Peloponnesians remedy that evil.The Platæans fetch the earth away from under the mount by a mine.The Platæans make another wall within that which was to the mount.The Peloponnesians assault the wall with enginesyear iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3. The Platæans’ defence against the engines.The Peloponnesians throw faggots and fire into the town from the mount.A great fire.year iii. A. C. 429. Ol. 87. 3.

  And first having felled trees, he therewith made a palisado about the town, that none might go out. That done, he raised a mount against the wall2 , hoping with so great an army all at work at once, to have quickly taken it. And having cut down wood in the hill Cithæron, they built a frame of timber, and wattled it about on either side, to serve instead of walls, to keep the earth from falling too much away3 ; and cast into it stones, and earth, and whatsoever else would serve to fill it up. Seventy days and nights continually they poured on, dividing the work between them for rest in such manner, as some might be carrying, whilst others took their sleep and food. And they were urged to labour by the Lacedæmonians that commanded the mercenaries of the several cities