CHAPTER VII

The Subjugation of the West

The Romanizing of the West

When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness, which fought its battles in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch of Rome should be called Gnaeus, Gaius, or Marcus, we may well be allowed—­on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—­to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be apprehended in their bearing on the general history of the world.

By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage—­ by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much a law of nature as the law of gravity—­the Italian nation (the only one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political development and a superior civilization, though it presented the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the east which were ripe for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades of culture in the west—­Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans—­by means of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled, and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian countries with the impress of its nationality.  The Roman aristocracy had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task—­ the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always regarded the extra-Italian conquests either as simply a necessary evil, or as a fiscal possession virtually beyond the pale of the state.  It is the imperishable glory of the Roman democracy or monarchy—­for the two coincide—­to have correctly apprehended and vigorously realized this its highest destination.  What the irresistible force of circumstances had paved the way for, through the senate establishing against its will the foundations of the future Roman dominion in the west as in the east; what thereafter the Roman emigration to the provinces—­which came as a public calamity, no doubt, but also in the western regions at any rate as a pioneer of a higher culture—­pursued as matter of instinct; the creator of the Roman democracy, Gaius Gracchus, grasped and began to carry out with statesmanlike clearness and decision.  The two fundamental ideas of the new policy—­to reunite the territories under the power of Rome, so far as they were Hellenic,