Part 22

Trajan, however, was not yet able to make up his mind what to do. He then set about the conquest of Arabia. From inscriptions and coins, and from the things there which had not existed until his time, we may conclude that he made Arabia Petræa on the eastern coast of the Red Sea down to the Gulf of Acaba—even as far as Medina, if Medina were not included—a Roman province, and received the homage of the Arab tribes between the Euphrates and Syria. He had in the treaty of peace caused the Parthians to give up to him the supremacy over Osroëne, Mesopotamia, and Kurdistan: Edessa likewise was incorporated into the empire. Thus he reserved for himself the groundwork for a future war, just as Napoleon did: he undoubtedly meant, should he live long enough, to extend the frontier as far as to India; or at least, to leave the conquest for his successor.

Nubia, between Egypt and the upper cataract, was likewise subjected in the reign of Trajan to the Roman sway, under which it remained for a hundred and fifty years. Moreover Fezzan between Tripoli and the town of Bornu on the Niger were Roman; which is proved by the inscriptions at Gharma.

Whilst Trajan could not make up his mind to leave the East, he also stayed for a considerable period in Cilicia; and there he fell sick at Selinus, which was afterwards called Trajanopolis, and died in the sixty-first, or sixty-fourth year of his life, A. D. 117. His ashes were brought to Rome, and enshrined there in a golden urn beneath the triumphal pillar. In the last months of his life, he had adopted Hadrian; or Plotina had spread a report of his having done so. This was undoubtedly a happy thing for Rome: for although Hadrian in his after life was guilty of sad misdeeds, it was owing to his ill state of health; so that he was hardly accountable for them. He was a near kinsman of Trajan and a most able man.

ART AND LITERATURE UNDER TRAJAN.

Trajan’s buildings are works, which are not only to be noticed in the topography of Rome, but belong to history as great achievements. Apollodorus of Damascus was his great architect, whose likeness I had the pleasure of discovering: it is the figure of a man in a Greek dress, presenting to the Emperor, who is seated, a drawing on a scroll; and it is on the bas reliefs of the arch of Constantine, the upper part of which is undoubtedly taken from the arch of Trajan. In the early times of the republic, art had the finish of the Etruscan school, owing to Etruscan artists; before the first Punic War, painting also flourished in Rome. Then followed the imitation of the Greeks, of which we cannot give a positive opinion. In the reign of Augustus, the material began to be of paramount importance, notwithstanding which the style was still grand: instead of the good freestone from the quarries of the neighbourhood, people would have nothing but marble. In the temple of Mars Ultor, all the columns are of marble. Otherwise Augustus, on the whole, still built many great works of the stone of the country; and this was yet done even as late as Claudius. But in the course of time, the taste for foreign marbles became more and more decided: Phrygian, Numidian, and other marbles were now used. In Nero’s days, Greek architecture with marble pillars was in fashion; and the material was looked upon as the chief thing, which in architecture is perfectly absurd. With the exception of the Colosseum, all the buildings of Titus and Domitian’s time are overdone; though highly finished, they want distinctness of character: the impression of grandeur is quite lost. Under Trajan, architecture acquires new splendour and dignity; which was owing to that Greek whom we have named: in a new form, it went to work with the treasures of the whole of the immense empire; so that it never signified whether it cost some millions more or less. Trajan either made or completed noble highways; he paved the Via Appia from Capua to Brundusium with basalt; he drained the Pontine marshes as far as they can be drained, and built the harbour of Centumcellæ (Civita Vecchia); the conviction must even then have been come to, that the Tiber was continually filling the harbours of Ostia and Portus with silt. He built baths at the hot springs of Civita Vecchia, and made the mole and harbour of Ancona: for the Tyrrhenian maritime towns were entirely destroyed, though it is not known when. The greatest of his buildings are at Rome, such as the _Forum Ulpium_ and therein the _Columna Cochlis_. The slope of the Quirinal Hill, which reached almost as far as the Capitol, was for a considerable length lowered upwards of a hundred and forty feet (it may be that I do not quite remember the exact measure[47]): this height is marked by the pillar. It was his object to place the government offices in his Forum. The _Forum Ulpium_, like the _Forum Augusti_ before it, was not, as formerly, an open space, which now would no longer have had any meaning: we know for certain, that the finance department, and all that belonged to it, had its offices there: the whole was like a city of palaces. In the middle stood the column, round which was twined a representation of the two Dacian wars of Trajan in bas relief. Although these bas reliefs have suffered from fire and lightning, they are still quite excellent, as this branch of the art was then at its height: they are in exquisite taste. These figures are also of value in an historical and antiquarian point of view, as they give us representations of weapons, armour, dresses, and buildings of which otherwise we should not have known anything. Within, there are steps which lead to the top; and beneath, there is a vault in which the ashes of Trajan were laid: of the latter nothing more is to be found. On the top was the bronze statue of Trajan: this was taken down in the times of barbarism, and Sixtus V. replaced it by a statue of St. Peter. In the Forum round it, two gigantic buildings in the form of _basilicæ_ have been brought to light by the clearings made by the French. The magnificence of these, beggars all description: among other things, there are floors in them of the most beautiful Numidian marble. At the entrances of the Forum, there arose triumphal arches; which we only know from coins: it may be that Constantine despoiled one of these, and had a piece of it patched into his own triumphal arch.

Under Hadrian also, costly buildings were erected; as for instance, the temple of Venus and Roma: but unluckily he had no taste, and following his own whims, he exercised a baneful influence. Of the time of Antoninus Pius, we have ruins which are much less beautiful; and under M. Antoninus, there remains of sculpture only the art of casting in bronze: his bronze statue is excellent; but the sculptures on the arch of Antoninus are far inferior to those of Trajan’s reign. In the triumphal arch of Severus, a most dreadful falling off is to be seen: even the proportions are neglected, as people were no longer able to draw. The spread of Christianity is unjustly reproached with having driven out the fine arts: they had already died away before that.

But Trajan’s age was just as great in literature. Tacitus, it is true, stands quite alone; he is one of those mighty minds which are no creatures of any age. Yet even the mightiest souls feel the influence of their age, which still gives them their tone and their impulses, though it does not make them what they are. It is quite useless to ask Who was Tacitus’ teacher?—he was taught by the sorrows of his times. His great soul was deeply wounded by the horrors of Domitian’s reign, the distress of which was followed under Nerva and Trajan by a refreshing period. The first edition of the Agricola was written by him in the latter years of Domitian, as he says in the wretchedly corrupted beginning of the second chapter: (of the correctness of my emendation I have not the least doubt.[48]) He afterwards revised the work. One may see here all the greatness of the man, though it is struggling with the difficulty in finding utterance, which arises from a decided aversion to diffuseness,—from a striving after terseness without any affectation, from a wish to express with the greatest conciseness nothing but the thought itself, nor even to waste a word, notwithstanding a great richness of ideas, This is most displayed in Tacitus’ earlier writings; in the life of Agricola, and in his Germany. He did not want to write large books, but only small treatises; and yet he wished to take in them the complete description of his subject, all the fulness of his thoughts was to be laid before his future reader. The real work of his life, which he began later,—evidently later even than the _Germania_,—are the _Historiæ_, the most finished performance of his that we know of: had we them entire, we should see him passing through all the various styles of history. There he did not condense; but he told his story at full length, and with much detail: there is no reason to doubt that these histories comprised the whole of the thirty books mentioned by St. Jerome. After he had finished this work, he wrote the Annals besides, so as to give a full account of the times of the Cæsars from the completion and establishment of the _principatus_, after the farce of the republican forms had been put an end to. These he wrote concisely, throwing out some particular parts only in bold relief: the nearer he approached the _Historiæ_, the more diffuse he must have become. At the latter end of Nero, he certainly went as much into detail as in the _Historiæ_. Tacitus is not difficult to understand when one has once entered into his way of thinking: it is pitiful to hear people complain of him and Sallust for affectation and mannerism. If we compare the wonderful symmetry in Tacitus and Sallust with Livy, we see that they for their times were far greater masters of style than the latter; for whenever he takes upon himself to be argumentative, as in the preface and in the passage on the triumph of Cornelius Cossus in the fourth book, he becomes infinitely harder than any part of Tacitus. Livy wishes there to be short and pithy, and he is unintelligible: the last named passage is the most difficult which I know of in the good Latin prose. Wherever he is not trying to be concise, he is very easy.

At the side of Tacitus, who stands quite alone,—as did Æschylus and Sophocles, as did many a lyric poet, and as did Lessing, who among our German prose writers has not found his equal,—but whose transcendent merits were not acknowledged by his age, as men were glad to soothe their feelings by placing a number of people on a par with him; Pliny the Younger was mentioned in his day. Pliny’s letters are psychologically most interesting; they give one much insight into the human mind. He was one of the most good natured of men, but exceedingly vain: before the eyes of the public, he had a strong feeling of his own greatness and classicality. Although in conversation with his friends, he certainly used to criticise Tacitus, and to deplore his defects; in his letters to him, he is full of humility, and makes himself infinitely small, just that Tacitus might be favourably disposed towards him, and extol him highly: he would say that the public always named him and Tacitus together; but that he himself was well aware how much indeed Tacitus was his superior. His letters are most instructive, and give us an invaluable picture of the times; and we recognise in Pliny himself a benevolent and useful man, who makes a very good use of his large fortune, one who was an excellent civil governor, but never free from childish vanity: he always tells his friends the good which he does, of course in the strictest confidence, and these letters are afterwards published. Notwithstanding all this, he is a man of much understanding and talent, being strikingly like the Parisian writers of the eighteenth century: whole phrases in him are quite French, as the late Mr. Spalding has rightly observed. He is therefore hardly to be translated into German; but he may be rendered most beautifully into French. One may see from these letters, that a sort of current coin of intellect had then come into use; and this was indeed a matter of course in a time which had been preceded by a host of eminent men: a great many thoughts had become common property, so as to belong to the whole generation, and a chord which had once been struck by a man like Tacitus, could not but vibrate for a long time. Moreover, it was an age of comfort and of cheerfulness after long depression. Every thing in it had thus been brought to a level of mediocrity, and the self-same persons, under different circumstances, would in all likelihood have been very little indeed. We may judge of them in some measure from Florus, who lived in the reign of Trajan. The earlier history was already so far behind them, that people only wanted to have a general notion of it. The book is quite a book of the time; insufferably frivolous, and displaying a shocking want of taste, and an utter ignorance of the actual state of things.

Before Trajan’s time, Greek literature had long been dead; in the reign of Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus was accomplished as a critic and as an historian; in that of Tiberius, Strabo was eminent for his practical turn for history. Yet these stand quite alone. Under Domitian, Greek literature began to be restored by the schools of the rhetoricians, who assume quite a different character. Dio Chrysostom of Prusa is really an author of uncommon talent, whose speeches for the most part painfully impress us by the triflingness of the matter of which they treat: everywhere we find in him an excellence of language, a pure, though acquired Atticism, over which he has a wonderful mastery. There is not a more amiable mind than his: he is not vain, like a rhetorician, and yet he is conscious of his powers. He was an unaffected Platonist whose whole soul was in Athens: by-gone Athens was all the world to him, and for it he forgets Rome and its rulers.

He is succeeded by Plutarch of Chæronea, whose amiability every one must know and appreciate, although it is easy enough to see his defects as an historian, and the weakness of his eclectic philosophy. Notwithstanding this, there is no saying how much we owe him; and it is impossible to read him but with the highest pleasure. His language is far less perfect than that of Dio.

By these two men, Greek literature was raised again; and though they had no successors to equal them, yet we may date from them a new era. The real Alexandrine literature must be deemed to end with the death of Eratosthenes in the reign of Ptolemy Evergetes: the period from Aristarchus to Dio, is an intermediate one which has no distinct character. In Rome under Augustus, a bad Greek literature became in vogue, the Greek “_abbés_” (or language-masters) having corrupted every body’s taste, as the French did ours in the last century: Livy stands forth like a great man in that age. The fancy for what was Greek, even though this had no longer a literature, spoiled Rome until the time of Seneca: much mischief was also done by the fondness for sophistry. Then follows Quintilian as the restorer of pure taste in Roman literature: from him to Tacitus, there is a new classic era. Yet this epoch did not last: the Greek school raises its head again, and fascinates the Romans anew. Under Hadrian, the Greek language once more becomes prevalent, and is generally written by all persons of education; under the Antonines, all is hellenized.—The taste is changed; the antiquarian fondness for the quaint and for Grecian phraseology, becomes the ruling fashion of the day.

HADRIAN. T. ANTONINUS PIUS. M. AURELIUS ANTONINUS.

Hadrian was married to the niece of Trajan, the daughter of his sister Marciana; which was the cause of his election. Even if Plotina forged the deed of Hadrian’s adoption by Trajan, she did no harm: at all events, that the election was not contrary to the wishes of Trajan, everything tends to prove. Of Hadrian it was said by those who came after him, that it was uncertain whether he should be classed among the good princes or the bad ones. He committed cruelties which cast a foul stain on his memory; but, on the other hand, he did an immense deal of good. But if we keep before us as an excuse for these cruelties, the state of mind into which he was thrown by his last illness, there is scarcely any other reign which was so beneficial to the Roman world as his. No prince before him had looked upon himself as the emperor of the whole Roman empire, but as the sovereign of Rome, or at most of Italy: in the provinces, the care of the Cæsars extended only to military affairs. This was in some measure the case even under Trajan.

Hadrian had properly speaking no war, or at most petty wars on the frontiers: there were also some disturbances from the Moors; but these were soon quelled. For the sake of preserving peace, he first of the Roman emperors gave subsidies to the border nations. Of Trajan’s conquests, he only kept Dacia; those which had been gained from the Parthians, he abandoned. The twenty-two years of his reign were free from any calamity worth mentioning. One of his first acts was to remit 900,000,000 sesterces (45,000,000 dollars) of arrears of taxes; whether this was to his subjects directly, or to the publicans, has not been made out. Much remains to be done for the history of the Roman financial system; for that of the land-tax, Savigny has done a great deal, and done it well.

Hadrian extended his benefits over all the countries of the Roman empire: he travelled over the provinces, from the cataracts of Egypt to the Scottish borders. There is not, perhaps, a province which he did not visit.

The outbreak of the Jews in Cyprus and Cyrene, where great numbers of them were settled, was a very fierce one. They had made an attempt before; but now the struggle was carried on with unbridled fury by Barkochba: the Jews fought with the greatest courage, though it was only for vengeance, as they knew all the while that they should perish at last. All that remained of that hapless nation in Palestine was extirpated, with the exception of the Samaritans, and Jerusalem was rebuilt as a military colony under the name of Ælia Capitolina, a name which, remarkably enough, has been kept up to this day: the Arab writers do not call the place Jerusalem, but either the Holy City or Ilia. No Jew was allowed to come near it, not even so much as to get a sight of Mount Moriah.

Whilst travelling through the provinces, Hadrian built everywhere great works. In Britain he erected the wall against the Caledonians for the protection of the province, which now already began to be Romanized, though indeed the Gaelic and Cymric elements of the population were likewise preserved. But above all, it was on Athens, which he enthusiastically loved, as well as on Greece in general, that he showered his benefits. He adorned Athens with works, the like of which had not been wrought for the city since the times of Pericles; he finished the Olympiëum, built a theatre and an entire new town, and even had himself invested with the dignity of an _Archon Eponymus_. In the last years of his life, he fell into a state of melancholy; and then, on the one hand, he sought for aid to secure the succession of the empire, and on the other, he gave way to sudden outbursts of anger and to mistrust, and was thus led to put many persons to death. He was an enemy to the Roman senate, which, however, in all likelihood was a set of presumptuous, overbearing, disagreeable people, who besides were enormously rich: it had now already come to pass, that in these wealthy families the senatorial dignity was handed down as an inheritance from father to son. Then it was that Hadrian first adopted a young man named Ælius Verus, in whom, however, he was unaccountably mistaken. On this occasion an immense _congiarium_ was given to the people. Most happily for Rome, this unworthy fellow died a short time afterwards; on which Hadrian chose T. Antoninus (Pius), whom he had already thought of before, a grandson of Arrius Antoninus, the friend of Nerva, and an altogether blameless man.

Among the remarkable features of Hadrian’s reign, is the foundation of the system of Roman jurisprudence in its later form, the drawing up of the _edictum perpetuum_, and the further development of the law by means of imperial edicts. It is a new epoch in Roman jurisprudence; the _responsa prudentum_, now that they were given in the name of the emperor, acquired a real authority. The emperors had even since Augustus had a sort of council of state; but Hadrian put the _consistorium Principis_ on a surer footing: a regularly settled form that body never had. The _præfectus prætorio_ henceforth is a lawyer and not a military man, a strange combination in the manner of the East.