Post relacionado anterior:
https://seclusao.art.blog/2017/04/07/history-of-the-romans-under-the-empire-vol-vii-subterfugio-polemicas-judias/
PREFACES
“The portion of this history now offered to the public embraces the period from the first Triumvirate to the death of Julius Caesar.” “Caesar prostrated the Roman oligarchy, and laid the foundations of the Empire in the will of the middle classes. He levelled the barriers of municipality, and infused provincial blood into the senate and people of Rome. Preceding imperators had annexed provinces, Caesar began to organize the conquests of the commonwealth.” “The Career of Caesar is the prelude to the history of four centuries.”
“and the crowning event which obliterates the last vestige of Roman sentiments, the establishment of Christianity, was in fact the conquest of Rome by her own subjects.”
“At the same time, the remarkable deficiency of our recent literature in any complete narrative of the most interesting period of Roman annals, has constantly tempted me to expatiate; and I have been unwilling to forego the opportunity of supplying it substantially, in case circumstances should prevent the further prosecution of my general design.”
“The volumes of Michelet, Amedée, Thierry, Duruy, Hoeck, Abeken, and others, have lain open before me throughout the course of my own studies; and the elaborate work of Drumann, in which he has amassed every notice of antiquity, and connected them all together with admirable ingenuity and judgment, has supplied me with a storehouse of references, to which I have not scrupled to resort freely.”
“Of the reasons which have induced me to terminate my labours with the death of M. Aurelius, I have spoken at the conclusion of the final chapter. But, while I allow the preface to my first volumes, which held out larger expectations, to stand, I will take the opportunity of issuing an edition of the complete work, to speak somewhat more particularly of the object with which it was undertaken.”
“The political institutions of England, France, and Germany are still in action and progress, while their ultimate effect on the destinies of mankind is lost in an unfathomable future. The great interest of Greek and Roman history consists in this, that we can trace them with singular completeness in both these respects. The interior, or active political history of the Greeks ceases with the subjugation of their country by Alexander, or at least by the Romans; but it is from this very point that the history of their exterior influence may be said almost to commence.”
“The struggles of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, the siege of Syracuse, the battle of Chaeronea, sink into insignificance beside the moral revolutions effected by Plato and Aristotle, by the Sophists and the Rhetoricians, by the poets and painters, the architects and sculptors, by the early converts of Paul and Polycarp, by the fathers of the Christian Church, the Clements, Origens, and Chrysostoms.”
“I know of no work, in any language, on what has always seemed to me the noblest of all historical subjects, the action of Grecian ideas upon the East and the West,—upon the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Jews on the one hand, and upon the Romans on the other,—in the development of modem philosophy and religion, as well as of art and science. To trace these causes to their latest effects would be indeed a task of enormous scope and variety; but a history of the Greeks, or of the Greeks under the Roman Empire, as distinguished from the narrow and familiar curriculum of the <history of Greece>, might not have been too unwieldy for the comprehensive grasp of some of our recent historians.”
“With the subjugation of the Eastern provinces, or with the civil wars which followed, and the establishment of a despotic monarchy, the interest of domestic affairs at Rome languishes or ceases; and comparatively little attention has been paid to the new interest which now begins to attach to her influence on the world around her and beneath her.”
“From Catulus and Lucullus to M. Aurelius, the series may be said to be entire. There is not one, perhaps, of the whole number of statesmen and warriors who fills an important place in the period, whose moral lineaments are not preserved for us in vivid relief by our remaining historians and biographers. And to these political celebrities may be added a list, hardly less complete, of men of letters, in whose works, still preserved, we may trace a clear impress of their social habits and intellectual training. We may picture to ourselves the characters of Virgil and Horace, Lucan and Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, and the elder and younger Pliny, almost as accurately as those of Caesar and Pompeius, Augustus and Tiberius. It is only by knowing the leading minds of an age that we can truly gauge the spirit of the age itself; and in this respect we have, I think, as good means of throwing ourselves into the epoch of Augustus and of Trajan as of almost any modem period prior to our own generation, and that of our immediate predecessors. Assuredly we have no such advantages for studying the character of any other portion of antiquity. Such are the grounds on which I have thought that an account of the Romans under the Empire might be a welcome addition to the stores of English literature.”
CHAPTER 1/10: VISÃO GERAL DO MUNDO ROMANO & GUERRAS CIVIS E REBELIÕES DAS PROVÍNCIAS CONTRA A ARISTOCRACIA PRÉ-IMPERIAL
“For myself, I am constrained to admit that there is scarcely one particular of importance throughout 3 centuries of 4 pretended annals on the exact truth of which we can securely rely. Nevertheless, the history of Rome must not be written without the relation of these particulars, as they have been handed down to us by the ancients. They were accepted as historical by the Romans themselves, and as so accepted they played their part in forming the character of the people and even in directing its career. They sank deeply into the heart and moulded the genius of the Roman race. They constitute the basis of half the best Roman poetry, and swayed thereby the imagination of both conquerors and rulers. Virgil and Ovid more especially can be but half-understood by anyone who is not conversant with the poetic myths of Livy; the course of Roman thought and action can be but imperfectly appreciated by those who are not aware how strongly they were influenced by the legends which taught the people that they were the favourites of the gods [//JUDEUS], and that this favour had been manifested to them on 100 imaginay battlefields.”
“The Brutus, the Cassius, the Antony of the historians stand apart from one another as clearly on their pages as in the tragic scenes of the most illustrious master of human character. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, has made no attempt to delineate any leading personage of the Grecian annals. Of all the heroes of Athens and Sparta there was none presented to him to whom, as a painter of human portraits, he felt his genius attracted.”
“After the 2nd century of fourth era the political history of the times becomes imperfect and fragmentary. The writers who have professed to transmit it have no grasp of the actual connexion of events.”
“Nor am I unware that a history of the dissolution of Paganism and the development of Christian usage and doctrine should be the work of the philosopher rather than of the historian (…) that, as it seems to me to be the worthiest object of all literary ambition, so it is perhaps the most delicate and difficult of any.”
“They chose between a career of conquest and plunder, and of discovery and commerce. Romulus founded Rome, Remus might have founded a Carthage.”
“All conquering nations instinctively resent this sacrifice of pride and immediate interest; all struggle blindly against it; the more readily they submit to the necessity, the longer do they retain the vitality of their institutions, and repel the natural advances of decay. The obstinacy with which the Dorian conquerors of Sparta resisted this necessity checked their career of aggrandizement, and brought their political existence to a premature termination.”
“The divided throne of Romulus and Tatius was a type of the double chairs of the patrician and plebeian consuls, and of the successive extension of the Roman franchise to the Latins, the Italians, and the Provincials.”
“Romulus shared his throne with the king of the Sabines. Tullus transplanted to Rome the citizens of Alba. The most ancient enumerations of the Roman people seem to indicate, by their rapid increase, that they carried out this policy systematically as long as they were governed by kings. But (…) the Tarquins displayed the opposite tendency congenial to a more jealous polity.”
“The patricians and plebeians of Rome represent, at this early period, 2 races of diferent origin, the former of which has admitted the other, whether on compulsion or by concession, after a fruitless resistance, or by spontaneous arrangement, to a certain prescribed share in the privileges of government and the rights of conquest.” “the Latin was not deemed worthy to mingle his blood with the Roman, and the child of a mixed marriage became a Latin, and not a Roman citizen.”
“Undoubtedly many families of the plebs were as noble and as wealthy as any of the patrician order; but the latter were all ennobled by birth and station, and the political advantages, of which they enjoyed so large a share, had as yet allowed few to descend into poverty. The mass of the plebeians, on the other hand, comprehended all the citizens of obscurer birth, and nearly all of inferior means. Accordingly, when a struggle arose between the upper and lower classes, old names and old jealousies were appealed to on both sides”
“The attraction was not universal; many of the richer plebeians fell into the ranks of the patrician aristocracy which generally opposed these claims; and in the subsequent phases which the contest assumed, individuals were found to fluctuate reciprocally from the one side to the other. But the struggles of the privileged and the unprivileged continued to be described by the old party designations, and the popular faction might be astonished at triumphing under the leadership of the patrician Julius, while the nobles accepted with distaste and reluctance the services of a plebeian Porcius and Pompeius.”
“Tiberius Gracchus, alarmed at the progressive depopulation of Italy, and perceiving how the enormous disproportion of properties was tending to extirpate the mass of the free citizens, fixed his eye upon these obsolete enactments as the legitimate means of restoring the balance between the rich and poor. His immediate object was, not the enrichment or elevation of the plebeians, but simply the restoration of the needier citizens to a state of honourable independence.”
“The senates of the Italian towns were at this time even more aristocratic than that of Rome itself; for amidst all the popular modifications to which her own constitution was subjected, it had always been the policy of the republic to stifle democratic movements in her dependencies.”
“What was the cause, says Tacitus, of the fall of the Lacedemnonians and Athenians, other that, powerful as they were in arms, they spumed[/spunned?] their subjects from them as aliens?”
“The idea of popular representation was altogether foreign to the habits of the age: it was not till a later generation that it first glimmered upon the mind of the wariest of Roman legislators (Suetônio).”
“The return of Sulla, the champion of the nobility, with his veteran legions from Asia, surprised them without plans or resources. The younger Marius threw himself into the arms of the Samnites, still the implacable enemies of Rome, and offered to transfer to their country the seat of empire. The views of Sulla, on the other hand, were thoroughly national. The massacres by which he decimated the Italian races, the proscriptions by which he, swept off the leaders of the popular party in the city, together with his vigorous exercise of the extraordinary powers which the gratitude of the triumphant nobles conferred upon him, in abrogating laws which had fixed, for more than a generation, the balance of the constitution, all tended to the same end, the restoration and defence of the Roman oligarchy. Even his introduction of a multitude of soldiers and slaves to the franchise, revolutionary as it was in principle, found its excuse in the aim he had in view, that of counteracting the suffrages of the Italians, which even he dared not absolutely annul. (…) The popular party was cowed, and the nobles promised themselves a long enjoyment of the new oligarchical constitution. Their gratitude for his services, together with the devotion of his veterans, and the terror of his own name, maintained the dictator in undisputed power, and continued to protect his person after his abdication.”
“We must now extend a cursory glance beyond the limits of Italy, and estimate, from the condition of her subject territories, the good fortune of Rome, which had thus acquired new strength and resources in a momentous crisis of her external affairs.”
“The Gaulish province was divided into two districts by the river Padus, or Po, from whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they lay within or beyond that boundary. But the whole of this rich and extensive region was placed under the command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on the other hand, though tranquil and contented, and requiring but a small force to control it, was important to the republic from the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among its provinces in proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which the former also furnished Italy with corn; but both were rude and imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth, population, and intelligence. The first province which the Romans had acquired beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connexion between Rome and her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while the wide territory which intervenes between the Alps and the Pyrenees was still occupied by numerous free and jealous communities.”
“The Adriatic and the Ionian Straits separated Italy from her eastern acquisitions. The great provinces of Illyricum and Macedonia comprised the whole expanse of territory from the Adriatic to the Aegean Sea, and were divided from one another by the long mountain-ridges of Boion and Scardus. Ancient Greece, from Thermopylae to Cape Malea, constituted a single command under the title of Achaia. With Asia Rome communicated principally by sea, the route of the Hellespont being insecure, and the barbarous tribes of Thrace but imperfectly subjected. The republic had constituted a province in the western portion of Asia Minor, and controlled the dependent potentates of Bithynia, Cilicia and Cappadocia. But her supremacy in these regions was contested by Mithridates, the great king of Pontus, and her acquisitions more than once seemed lost to her forever.”
“The various relations in which the different classes of the provincial population stood to the ruling city, have been compared with the Rome constitution of a Roman household. The colonies of Roman citizens planted in the provinces, enjoying the full exercise of their national rights, and presenting a miniature of the metropolis herself, held the position of the son towards the paterfamilias” “Some cities or nations had voluntarily sought a connexion with Rome on terms of alliance, but with acknowledged inferiority; others, again, stood on a more independent footing, offering a mutual interchange of good offices and of citizenship; and lastly, there were some which entered into confederacy with the republic with perfect equality of rights on both sides.” Aliança, acordos mútuos e confederação: 3 institutos diferentes. “But, after all, the mass of the provincial population belonged to the class of dediticii, that is, those who had originally submitted without conditions, the slaves, [4º instituto: colônia consumada] as they may be termed, of the great Roman family. These were subjected to the severest fiscal and other burdens, enhanced by the rapacity of their rulers, who, from the consul or praetor to the lowest of their officers, preyed upon them without remorse and without satiety.”
“It was the general rule that the consuls and praetors, after serving their year of office in the city, should proceed to administer for one or sometimes three years the affairs of a province. The state placed large standing armies at their disposal, threw enormous patronage still retained by the more favoured classes of the provincials into their hands, and their ambition, avarice, or mutual rivalry, far more than any sense of the public interests, impelled them to exert themselves, during their brief career, in reducing frontier tribes, in quelling insurrections which their own injustice excited, and whenever they could find an excuse for it, in annihilating the ancient liberties and privileges still retained by the more favoured classes of the provincials. Surrounded by an army of officials, all creatures of their own, all engaged in the same work of carving out fortunes for themselves, and abetting their colleagues, the proconsuls had little sense of responsibility to the central government, and glutted their cupidity without restraint. Of all the provinces the Cisalpine and Macedonia, and latterly Syria, were the richest and most amply furnished with military armaments, and on both these accounts they were generally coveted by the consuls, and distributed between them by lot.”
DE DEVEDOR A VERADOR, E DE VEREADOR A GOVERNADOR: “A man of ruined fortune looked to the office of proconsul as the sole means of retrieving his affairs. To obtain it, he allied himself with the chief or the party by whose influence he might hope to rise successively through the various steps which led to the consulship. He first sued for the post of quaestor, after a due interval he might hope to be elected aedile, next praetor, and ultimately consul. His grand object was then obtained, for upon the expiration of his term of office he departed as governor to a consular province; from the emoluments of which he calculated on repaying the expenses of his various contests, on liquidating the debt of gratitude to his adherents, and accumulating a vast fortune for his own gratification, or the advancement of his party.”
A CLASSE MÉDIA COMO BOMBA ATÔMICA DE TODAS AS SOCIEDADES: “All the legal rights of citizenship had been conceded, but the old oligarchic families, dignified by historic associations, and revelling in the wealth accumulated by centuries of conquest, still hoped to maintain their grasp of the larger share of honours and emoluments which they had contrived to make generally accessible only to the richest. They still looked with scorn themselves, and infused the same sentiment into their inferiors, on the New Men, the men of talents and education, but of moderate origin and fortune, who were striving on all sides to thrust themselves into public notice.”
“This was the battlefield to which, as we shall see, the instinct of the orator led Cicero to transfer the contest; and when, by a concurrence of fortunate circumstances, he found the means of revealing in one amazing instance the glaring iniquity of the system, the nobles were forced to surrender, if not their prerogatives, at least their impunity in abusing them.”
“The ingenuity of the Greeks in the art of fiscal extortion is signalized in a long series of instances in the second book of the Aeconomica, which, though perhaps wrongly attributed to Aristotle, may be fairly referred to as an authority on this subject.”
“The retirement of Sulla proved how necessary his energy and reputation had been to sustain the weight of the empire upon the various slender basis of the oligarchical faction. In the west the whole Spanish nation rose against its oppressors. In the farthest east the ability of Mithridates was seconded by the good will of the conquered races of Asia Minor.”
“At the same time the oppression of the conquerors of the world had driven thousands from honest and peaceful occupations to resort to piracy for vengeance or subsistence. The roving corsairs of the Cilician coast found their resources multiplied by the conflux of these restless and discontented adventurers, and their vessels penetrated all the gulfs, and insulted every harbour in the Mediterranean, with a system of organization coextensive with the great sphere of maritime traffic. It was not till these various combinations of her foes and subjects against her were successively suppressed, that the power of Rome was finally established throughout her dominions.”
“Plutarch’s life of Sertorius, to which the reader is referred, is one of his most interesting biographies. The character of the hero is perhaps the most romantic in all Roman history, and the traits of humanity and natural feeling which distinguish it are such as the mild philosopher most loved to paint.”
A Península Ibérica era um dos inimigos mais encarniçados da República Romana. Pela primeira vez sinto um orgulho ancestral desta terra dos colonizadores, outrora colonizados!
“The sway of Sertorius was studiously mild and conciliatory. His views were comprehensive, and not content with his present elevation, he looked forward to the establishment of a permanent sovereignty. He detained the children of the nobles as hostages for their fidelity; but at the same time he educated them in Roman arts and manners, and proposed to breed up a generation which should understand and wield the principles of enlightened government.”
“He surrounded himself with the nucleus of a new senate from among his Roman adherents; he aimed at a triumphant return to the imperial city, together with the restoration of his party and their principles, and he began to treat his Iberian followers rather as faithful allies than as his adopted countrymen. Accordingly, when Mithridates sent ambassadors to him to negotiate a combined attack upon Italy and a partition of her provinces (for Rome, he said, cannot withstand the union of the new Pyrrhus with the new Hannibal), Sertorius haughtily rejected his alliance, and declared he would never allow a barbarian to possess an inch of Roman territory, beyond Bithynia and Cappadocia, miserable countries which had always been ruled by kings, and the sovereignty of which he cared not to dispute.” “Mithridates, according to Plutarch, was content to famish Sertorius with 3000 talents and 40 ships, in return for this empty acknowledgment of his claim to Bithynia and Cappadocia. The circumstantial account which this writer gives of the whole transaction seems more worthy of credit than Appian’s loose assertion that Sertorius surrendered to Mithridates the whole of the Roman province of Asia.” Plutarco reabilitado?
“The two generals could not long maintain the field against an enemy who possessed all the communications of the country, and the skill to avail himself of them. Metellus was compelled to retire into Gaul to recruit his forces, while Pompeius took up a defensible position in the country of the Vaccaei, and addressed urgent letters to the senate for further supplies.”
“The influence which Sertorius acquired over the Iberians was unbounded. When, with their usual fickleness and mutual distrust, some tribes were inclined to return to their obedience to Rome, he confirmed their fidelity to himself by playing upon their imaginations. He trained a milk-white hind [corça, veado-fêmea] to follow and caress him like a dog, and pretended that it was a gift of Diana, and his familiar counsellor and protectress.”
“His lieutenant Perperna intrigued against him, and in the midst of the dissensions spreading in the camp, was enabled to assassinate him with impunity. The traitor assumed his victim’s place at the head of the allied armies, but their strength was daily weakened by the desertion of the Iberians.” “Perperna was put to death and his forces entirely broken up, the barbarians submitting once more to the dominion which they had so nearly succeeded in overthrowing.”
“The enthusiasm with which Mithridates was received marks the excessive hatred that yoke had inspired. It is evident that even the capricious tyranny of Oriental despotism was preferred to all the benefits of European civilization, blighted as they were by the systematic rapacity of the Roman governors.”
“We know of no native documents which they could have consulted, and the memoirs of Sulla himself, the personal opponent of Mithridates, were doubtless deemed by the Romans the most authentic records of the contest between them. We have, however, too many proofs of the malignity of their writers to pay any respect to their estimate of the character of their enemies. The abilities which the Eastern despot exhibited may justly raise a prejudice in his favour; and when we consider in addition the magnanimity he repeatedly displayed, we shall be the more inclined to look for other explanations of the crimes imputed to him than the natural barbarity to which our authorities complacently refer them.” “It is worth observing, as an illustration of the carelessness of the Romans in reporting groundless calumnies, that Plutarch (Pomp. 37.), speaking of this very subject, mentions Theophanes, a literary contemporary of Cicero, as having asserted that Pompeius discovered among the papers of Mithridates a letter from a certain Rutilius, urging him to the perpetration of this massacre, whereas it appears incidentally from a passage of Cicero (pro Rabir. Post 10.), that it was only by a stratagem that Rutilius himself escaped being made a victim.”
“It seems, even from the accounts of the Romans themselves, that during the years that followed, while Sulla was enjoying his supremacy in Rome, the generals to whom the defence of the Asiatic frontier was committed acted with much perfidy in their transactions with Mithridates, trying for their own glory or emolument, to provoke him again to war.”
“Lucullus strove in vain to repress the impatience of his officers, who despised his prudential measures, and were eager to oppose force to force. The arms of the republic sustained some partial losses; these were magnified perhaps by the classes interested in provincial oppression, till the Senate began to murmur against the Fabian policy of their general. Though he obtained eminent successes, and restored the domination of Rome upon a more solid footing than before, he was charged with delaying, for personal objects, the consummation of his victories, and finally superseded in his command. The brilliant and decisive operations of Pompeius, to whom the conduct of the war was next intrusted, might seem to justify his predecessors disgrace. But if Pompeius had greater military talents than Lucullus, or if his influence over a soldiery demoralized by alternate rout and plunder was more efficient for the restoration of discipline, the views of the other were certainly both nobler and wiser.”
“The great traffic which flourished for centuries between Greece, Egypt, and Syria presented a brilliant lure to the habits of piracy which have prevailed in those seas from the earliest times. The father of history traces the origin of European and Asiatic hostility to the predatory enterprises of lawless adventurers (Heródoto).”
“Under such circumstances, the recesses of every bay formed retreats for piratical adventurers, in which to repair their vessels, enjoy their booty, and riot away the intervals of repose. The policy of the Romans did not allow the provincials to maintain an effective military force to destroy these nests of marauders” “The commerce between Italy, Greece, Syria and Egypt, was in a great measure an interchange of necessaries, which war and even anarchy could not exterminate.”
“Antonia, the daughter of the orator M. Antonius, was seized by these pirates on a high road in Italy and ransomed at great cost.” Mesmo Júlio César e Cláudio foram feitos prisioneiros pelos piratas destes tempos.
“400 cities, according to Plutarch, fell into their hands; they possessed 1000 vessels; their pride and audacity, the splendour of their equipments, and their insolent ostentation, were more galling to the Romans than even their violence. Many of the principal temples, the treasuries of the Greek communities, which had escaped the cupidity of so many conquerors, were plundered by these unscrupulous robbers. In some places they established within their walls the rites of Mithras and secret Oriental mysteries, as if they wished to defy the religion no less than the civilization of Europe.”
“Pompeius distributed his armament in 3 divisions so as to sweep the whole of the Mediterranean, and surprised the world by reducing the squadrons of the pirates, together with their strongholds in Cilicia, within the space of 3 months.” “As a memorial of the exploit he changed to Pompeiopolis the name of Soli, which he rebuilt for their occupation.”
Spartacus teria sido um ex-soldado romano que desertou para liderar a revolta dos escravos, durante 3 anos, chegando a comandar 100 mil homens. “At the height of his success he was not deceived as to his real weakness, and urged his followers to effect their escape across the Alps, and betake themselves to their own homes in Gaul and Thrace, to which countries most of them belonged. But the plunder of all Italy seemed within their reach, and was too tempting to be relinquished in the first flush of victory. The senate was now seriously alarmed, and sent the 2 consuls, Gellius and Lentulus, with ampler forces to confront the public enemy. The danger had not even yet reached its height: both the consuls were ignominiously defeated. They were deposed from their commands, and Crassus, the most eminent of the citizens, was appointed to continue the war.”
“Retracing his steps from the north of Italy, Spartacus now contemplated transporting his followers into Sicily, and there reviving the servile war which within a quarter of a century had set that island in a blaze.” “Crassus was now in full pursuit of the insurgents, whom he drove into the town of Rhegium, and there blockaded. By a skilful manoeuvre Spartacus made his escape, but only with a portion of his forces; this, however, was enough to terrify his adversary, who feared that the enemy would outstrip him, and pounce upon Rome itself before he could be overtaken. Crassus entreated the senate to recall to its defence Lucullus from Asia, and Pompeius from Spain”
“But Spartacus was destitute of means to attack the capital, and the Italian states continued immovable. He defended himself with obstinate bravery; but after alternate victories and defeats, he was slain in a final and decisive battle. The remnant of his followers was exterminated by Pompeius, who arrived in time to put the finishing stroke to the war, and to reap, from the partiality of his countrymen, a disproportioned share of the reward. Crassus lavished upon the multitude 1/10 of his immense wealth; he feasted them at 10,000 tables, and fed the citizens at free cost for 3 months.”
“Cicero allows that the venality of the judices, who presided at the quastiones perpetua, permanent tribunals for inquiring, into political or other specified offences; cast a stigma upon the whole order. <Totus ordo pauconun improbitate et audacia premitur, et urgetur infamia judiciorum.>” Toda a ordem é gradualmente degradada pela impiedade, audácia e infâmia dos juízes, que só cresce.
“Not unfrequently mere violence took the place of bribery: disturbances were purposely created; mobs were formed and drilled, and battles ensued. In the confusion the consuls interfered, and broke up the proceedings. The great public magistracies were left vacant for many months, from the impossibility of conducting the elections with even a show of legitimate order.”
“Too proud to work where labour was the mark of the slave, a multitude of free men, without occupation or social position, were content to subsist in idleness upon the annual sale of their prerogative, and presented ready instruments for any political adventurer who promised either present pay or prospective rapine. But the Romans had a natural genius for the arts by which money is made and accumulated.”
“The great mass of official writing was conducted originally by slaves or freedmen below the class of citizens. (Niebuhr, Hist of Rome, iii. 299). There can be no doubt that the unfortunate institution of slavery deprived the state of that large class of citizens, of moderate tastes and conservative tendencies, who contribute so much, as inferior dependents on government, to the stability of modem politics.”
“The patriotic statesmen might hope through their influence to place the commonwealth upon a new and permanent basis; the selfish adventurer might combine with him to advance their interests, with the hope of forging them into instruments for his own ends. The course of this history will show how the principal leaders of party leaned successively upon the support of this body, and how important was the part it played in the conversion of the republic to a monarchical form of government. The rise of this middle class, hostile to both the higher and lower, and resolved to control them equally, exerted from within an active influence upon that revolution of affairs. One further glance at the provinces will reveal to us a second force cooperating from without, and destined to form the other main support of the imperial Colossus.”
“The reduction of Macedonia by Aemilius Paullus, in the year 585 of the city, supplied such abundant resources to the treasury, that the public domains in the occupation of Roman proprietors were from thenceforth released from the payment of the land tax: and, in general, the indulgence which the state evinced to her citizens, as regarded their public contributions, perpetuated an invidious distinction between them and the inferior class of subjects. Accordingly, as the pressure fell more and more upon the provinces, the anxiety to escape from it became proportionally urgent. At the same time this anxiety on the one side was met by ample reasons of policy on the other. The diminution of the free population of Italy was the most notorious evil of the times; and it was viewed with the greater alarm, as the extension of the dominions of the state rendered the permanent augmentation of her armies indispensable. The most important evidence regarding this depopulation of Italy may be found at the beginning of Appian’s history of the civil war. There is no subject on which there is such a complete consent of the original authorities.”
“As the people became gradually aware that the great revolution of the social war had brought with it more good and less evil than had been anticipated, the extension of the rights of the metropolis to the distant provinces lost the character of an inconsistency and anomaly in the constitution. Local prejudices died away in the familiar contemplation of the vastness of the empire and the mutual relationship of its several members. The mind of the nation expanded to the conception of infusing unity of sentiment into a body, which was wielded by a single effort, and from a common centre. One after another there arose political crises, which demanded the combination of all the powers of the state in a single hand. The success of each experiment became an argument for its repetition, till the idea of submission to the permanent rule of one man first ceased to shock, and was finally hailed with acclamation. The monarchy was at first veiled under the old republican forms. Gradually the veil was dropped. Lastly, the theory of a republic was dismissed from men’s minds, and fell into the same oblivion into which its real forces had already sunk. Under the supremacy of a single ruler all varieties of class became merged together; and when the citizens ceased to be discriminated among one another, there seemed no reason for maintaining distinctions between the constituent races of which the empire was composed.”
“The East was roused to a fervid anticipation of the advent of some universal conqueror who should melt all mankind into a crude, inorganic mass. Accustomed from its infancy to a succession of monarchical dynasties, it was uneasy under the republican organization and individual development which followed upon the Roman conquest. It sighed for the coming of another Cyrus or Alexander. But these sounds found a responsive chord in the West also.” “The sublime vaticinations of the Virgilian Sibyl, bringing the predictions of the Hebrew prophets home to the breasts of the Italians, foreshadowed a reign of peace, equality, and unity, whether under a political or a moral law. At last, with the birth of the monarchy, there sprang up the germ of the greatest of social revolutions, the religion of Christ. It was this dispensation which seized and developed, with intuition and energy truly divine, the latent yearnings of mankind for social combination. Its essence, from a human point of view, consisted in the doctrine of the fundamental equality of men. As it marched along, it trod under foot all prejudices of race and caste. Persecution might check the growth of its numbers, but only made its principles more conspicuous; and when it counted its converts by thousands, its unconscious disciples were already millions. I wish to trace the expansion of the Roman people, together with the development of the ideas of unity and monarchy among them, from the last days of the republic to the era of Constantine. I commence with a period when the senate still fondly imagined that the government of the world was the destined privilege of one conquering race, whose life-source was enshrined in the curia of Romulus and Camillus.”
CHAPTER 2/10: A CRISE DA NOBREZA: DA MORTE DE SULA ÀS VIDAS DOS CONTEMPORÂNEOS POMPEU E CÍCERO
“A history of the Romans under the empire, the imperium, that is, or military sovereignty, may commence with the period when Pompeius returned to Rome from the overthrow of Mithridates and the final subjugation of western Asia. This event took place in the year of the city 693, following the computation of Varro, which is most commonly received, and this date corresponds with the year 61 b.C.”
“The spirit moreover which had dictated the concession to him of autocratic powers in the provinces, was not less prepared to submit even within the city to the assumption of military rule. Before proceeding, however, to the narration of events, it will be necessary to review the position of political parties, between the abdication of Sulla and the era above indicated”
“The reforms by which the dictator had sought to control the future aggressions of the commons, related in the first instance to the senatorial order, the power and consideration of which he had studied to revive by supplying its thinned benches with the noblest scions of the equestrian families, and placing in its hands the sole initiation of legislative measures. The commons, mortified and insulted by this jealous enactment, were still more indignant at the restrictions Sulla placed upon their champions the tribunes, whose legislative functions he annulled, whose veto upon the proceedings of the senate he materially modified, and even whose prerogative in convening the popular assemblies he ventured to abridge. The confinement of the judicia to the senators alone was felt as a reproach and an injury; it cut off the knights from indirect advantages which they had long enjoyed, and it exposed them to the wanton injustice of their hereditary enemies.”
“Sulla resigned the dictatorship in the year 675, and died in 676.”
“If we would form to ourselves an idea of what was the number of the nobility of Rome, and upon what their influence rested, we must refer for a moment to the origin of the patrician houses, and their subdivision into families. In the earliest form of the commonwealth the patres were divided into 3 tribes, 30 curies, and 300 gentes, clans or houses.”
“About half a century later, in the time of Augustus, it was remarked that the number of families of the highest antiquity was not more than 50. This, however, was after a long and bloody period of civil war, proscription, and massacre. (…) This claim to Trojan descent was of course a mere pretence; but it would not have been popularly conceded except to families of real antiquity, such as the Julii, Sergii, and others.”
“Those among them, however, which continued to flourish, spread into many branches bearing the name of the parent stock, such as the Cornelian and Aemilian; and these branches were distinguished from one another by the cognomen, or surname, only. Thus, among the Cornelii were Scipios and Cinnas, Sullas and Lentuli; while the Aemilii bore the surnames of a Lepidus, a Scaurus, or a Paullus. At this period the name Cornelius becomes indefinitely multiplied, in consequence of the indiscriminate admission into his own house which Sulla conceded to his soldiers and dependents.”
“The curule magistracies, so called from the chair of state, or stool, mounted with ivory, appropriated to them, were those of the consul, the praetor, the aedile, and the censor; the dictator, and his master of the horse, (?) were also curule magistrates.”
“Catulus was the most moderate and truly disinterested of all the great men of his day. The history indeed of the commonwealth presents us, perhaps, with no character which deserved more general esteem, or obtained more blameless distinction in political life.”
“The name of this Marcus Crassus became in after times proverbial among his countrymen as the richest of the Romans: the evaluation of his treasures has been preserved, and the head grows dizzy in estimating them in the minute denominations of the national coinage.”
“when, at the age of 24, Pompeius returned victorious from Africa, where he had crushed the remnant of the Marians with their Numidian auxiliaries, the dictator hailed him with the appellation of Magnus, or the Great”
“The illustration of his family dated only from his father, a successful adventurer in the hazards of the civil war; and he knew that his own fortunes, like those of Pompeius Strabo, must rest upon his personal abilities rather than the love or sympathy of the dominant party. He saw, moreover, the fact, to which that party obstinately blinded itself, that its foundations were too narrow for the permanent maintenance of its power. Conscious of his own strength, he struck out a course of policy independent of the trammels in which the oligarchs would have confined him.”
“With this view, Pompeius did not hesitate to place himself in direct opposition to the nobles on points which they deemed essential to their ascendency. He supported the much contested measure of restoring to the knights their ancient judicial prerogative, which they continued ardently to covet, and which might contribute to relieve the nobles themselves from a weight of odium which threatened to overwhelm them. In carrying out this policy he was gradually removing the superstructure of his own fortunes from the basis of the oligarchy to that of his own personal adherents, and shifting his ground to a position in which he might defy the control of the senate.”
“C. Gracchus legem tulerat, ut equites Rom. judicarent. Judicaverunt per annos xxxx sine infamia.” Referência aos 40 anos dourados em que o judiciário romano não era corrupto.
“Upon the expiration of his consulship Pompeius did not accept, as was usual, the government of a province. He had already attained the highest ordinary honours of the state, and pure as he was in his private conduct and moderate in his habits, the emoluments of the proconsulate offered no temptation to him.” “He remained accordingly at Rome, affecting the reserve and retirement of one who would only deign henceforward to serve the state when weaker hands had failed; but he foresaw that the perils which menaced the commonwealth must soon call him forth amidst redoubled acclamations.”
“The skill and vigour he displayed, the confidence he presently restored, the rapid influx of supplies into the capital, all seemed to mark the expediency of this political stroke. After a brief interval for making his dispositions, dividing his forces and securing the most important communications, Pompeius set sail with a well-appointed fleet for the principal resorts of his roving adversaries. In 2 months the wound was staunched, in 6 it was healed over by the establishment of the marauders in continental colonies; health and strength returned in the natural order of events.”
“Pompeius was supported by the favour of the citizens, by the intrigues of his friends and creatures in the senate, by Crassus and another craftier than Crassus, who countenanced for their private ends these successive inroads upon established usage; and he might command the spirited declamation of Cicero, who, now rising rapidly in fame and popularity, resolved at once to throw his fortunes into the wake of the great conqueror’s.”
Cícero, o primeiro grande general “da paz”.
“In the restoration of the popular party Cicero could not fail to anticipate the overthrow of the ancient jurisprudence, and the discouragement of the formal studies in which he most delighted, and which he made the basis of his own practical philosophy. Doubtless it cost him a severe struggle to take the side of the reformers: but he perceived instinctively that the talents of Pompeius, all-sufficient in the field, must require in the city the co-operation of the orator and the jurist; and he hoped, by making himself necessary to the military chief of the government, to command his support in return, and scale the summit of political distinction.”
“The leader of the senate, the patron of the knights, the favourite of the people, Pompeius appeared to unite all suffrages. The republic seemed to await the pressure of his hand to receive her bias and direction. Cicero felt, with unsuppressed exultation, that his services were understood by the hero of the day, and his genius he believed was appreciated by him.”
“Nor was his political course warped like that of his leader Pompeius by any impatience of the restraints of law, such as might naturally arise in the breast of a military commander, nor by the criminal desire to rise above them, which the child of Strabo and the lieutenant of Sulla might be supposed to inherit.” “He succeeded in attaining the consulship, and as consul he performed a service for his country as brilliant as any recorded in her annals. But his career of patriotism and loyal service was cut short by the jealousy of his associates and the selfishness of his early patron. Intoxicated by success, he had allowed himself to forget how unnatural and precarious his elevation really was; and assailed as he was from various quarters, his own vanity contributed in no slight degree to his fall. The nobles were willing to prove to the world the inherent weakness of any man, however splendid his abilities, who had not the legitimate basis of birth and wealth to rely on; and Pompeius selected Cicero for the victim of his ungenerous policy, when he wished to display his power and hurl defiance at the senate, yet did not venture to inflict upon it a wound which should really smart.”
“Pompeius awaited at a distance the result of the impending commotion, not displeased perhaps at being removed from the city, where his presence would have stifled it in its birth: for he was assured that, whatever might be the immediate issue, substantial power resided in his camp, and the triumph must ultimately be his alone. But the nobles viewed with redoubled anxiety both the chance of a revolution and the means of its suppression. While they shuddered at the prospect of a sedition which might involve the city and the laws in a common destruction, they apprehended hardly less sensibly the restoration of order by the sword of a military dictator.”
“The same temper which made the elder Cato a severe master, a frugal housekeeper, the cultivator of his own acres, the man of maxims and proverbs, converted the younger into a pedantic politician and a scholastic formalist. Private life had become absorbed in the sphere of public occupations; the homely experience of the individual was lost in the recorded wisdom of professional instruction. The character of the Censor had been simple and true to nature; that of his descendant was a system of elaborate though perhaps unconscious affectations.”
“The pictures of vice which the writers of the age have left us are principally derived from the manners of the highest nobility; and the coarseness which could be plausibly attributed to a Piso and a Gabinius leaves no doubt of the gross habits prevalent among their class.”
“The introduction of Grecian models of intellectual cultivation, which had so honourably distinguished the age of Laelius and Scipio, produced in fact a very imperfect effect upon the progress of the national mind.”
“Each succeeding generation became more immersed in war than its predecessor; the turbid stream of military habits never ran itself clear; the camp continued to pour its sanguine flood into the silver current of humanity and letters. Even those among the Romans who were most renowned for their love of polite literature were seldom wholly absorbed in their devotion to it. Their philosophers and historians, no less than their orators, were public men, and courted the muses in the intervals of toil and danger.” “The purity even of Cicero’s taste may be called in question. There is an ostentatious prodigality even in his use of words, akin to the vastness of his ambition and the sumptuousness of his style of living.”
“One after another the nobles sank into a lethargy almost without a parallel. The writers of a later period have associated the proudest names of the martial republic with the idlest amusements and the most preposterous novelties. A Gabinius, a Caelius, a Crassus, were immortalized by the elegance of their dancing. A Lucullus, a Hortensius, a Marcius Philippus, estimated one another, not by their eloquence, their courage, or their virtue, but by the perfection of their fish-ponds, and the singularity of the breeds they nourished. They seemed to touch the sky with their finger, says their mortified advocate, if they had stocked their preserves with bearded mullets, and taught them to recognise their masters’ voices, and come to be fed from their hands.”
“But the introduction of dancing among the relaxations of the Roman nobility was of much earlier date, and provoked the indignant animadversion of Scipio Africanus and the elder Cato. Nevertheless it continued to prevail; Sulla himself danced.”
“They had not learned from experience the inevitable requital of blood for blood; and they breathed nothing but vengeance and destruction against everyone who ventured to cross their path. They would govern the commonwealth by impeachments and assassinations. They would bring back the days of Sullan ascendency; and certainly nothing but a permanent military dictatorship could spring out of their anarchical policy. These were that bloody-minded youth, of whom Cicero speaks with such aversion and fear, who hired bands of ruffians to attend them in the forum, nor travelled beyond the gates of the city without an armed retinue. Such demonstrations on the one side begat, of course, rival violence on the other. Quarrels and collisions occurred, which there was no efficient police to control; the elections were repeatedly suspended by riotous interference; the legitimate proceedings of the people were interrupted by the clang of arms; the sacred privileges of the tribunes were violated, and the most august personages of the state driven from their posts by blows and menaces. We shall see that the leaders of every party, Pompeius and Cicero, Cato and Caesar, all suffered alike and in turn, from the unbridled ferocity of such men as Clodius and Milo, as Nepos and Curio.”
“Marius abolished the qualification of property, which was originally required of every citizen who offered to enlist. A sufficient motive for this grave innovation might be the peril of the state from foreign invasion, coupled with the growing concentration of property in a smaller class. But its direct effect was to degrade the principles of the legionary, and wean [desmamar] him from his devotion to the state.”
“No class was more ready for tumult and revolt than the veterans of Sulla, settled recently in ease and apparent contentment throughout Italy.”
CHAPTER 3/10: CÉSAR E SUA LENTA PORÉM FIRME ASCENSÃO
“his talents for war were, perhaps the highest the world has ever witnessed; his intellectual powers were almost equally distinguished in the closet, the forum, and the field; his virtues, the very opposite to those of Cato, have been not less justly celebrated.” “the perfect simplicity of his own character gave him tact to appreciate the real circumstances and tendencies of public affairs, to which his contemporaries were signally blind.”
“He neither indulged himself in sloth like Lucullus, nor wavered like Pompeius, nor shifted like Cicero, nor, like Cato, wrapped himself in impracticable pride”
“Caius Julius Caesar, the greatest name in history, was descended from a genuine Roman family of the highest antiquity.(*) He seems to have been himself the first to claim descent from the hero Iulus, the offspring of Aeneas, and through him from the goddess Venus; a legendary genealogy which the poets adopted with ardour, and rendered universally familiar [Apiano, Dion, Ovídio, Festus, Virgílio, Plínio, Isidoro, etc.]. The name Julius Julus occurs several times in the list of the earlier consuls, but this branch of the house seems to have become extinct; while that from which Caius himself sprang could also boast of more than one consulship, and a large share of other public honours.
(*) The Julii were both patrician and plebeian: the branch which bore the surname of Caesar, belonged to the former class. A Julius Proculus played a memorable part in the story of Romulus.”
“[His relatives] seem, for the most part, to have taken the side of the aristocracy in the civil wars, and more than one of them were slain by Fimbria among the enemies of Marius and Cinna. But Marius himself was married to a Julia, sister to the father of Caius; and the nephew inherited from his uncle the championship of the popular party, his connexion with which he further cemented in early youth by espousing the daughter of Cinna, Cornelia, by whom he had his only daughter Julia.”
“Romanos odere omnes, dominosque gravantur
Quos novere magis.” Lucano
“He foresaw that the genuine Roman race would be overwhelmed by the pressure of its alien subjects; but he conceived the magnificente idea, far beyond the ordinary comprehension of his time, of reducing the whole of this mighty mass, in its utmost confusion, to that obedience to the rule of a single chieftain which it scorned to render to an exhausted nation. (…) with a firm grasp of his means, a hand so steady could deal no uncertain or unpremeditated blows.”
“Sulla, suspicious of the youthful nephew of his rival, and urged perhaps to destroy him by some of his own adherents, but restrained by some lurking feeling of mercy or sympathy with a kindred genius, required him to divorce his wife Cornelia, and thus loosen his connexion with the Marians. (…) yet, though now only in his 18th year, he refused to comply with the dictator’s command. Sulla was staggered by his boldness, and still refrained from striking. At the tyrant’s decree even Pompeius, the rising favourite of the senate, had abandoned his consorte Antistia, while Piso had divorced Annia, the widow of Cinna. But the dictator, it would seem, was growing weary of power. (…) he entertained, as he proved by his abdication, a feeling of magnanimous confidence in the stability of his work; and, in a moment of generosity or wanton defiance, he spared the life of one from whose genius he anticipated a brilliant career.” “Nor was the Young Marian allowed to escape altogether with impunity. He paid for his constancy by the loss of his place in the priesthood and of his wife’s fortune. He was himself compelled to seek an asylum at a distance from Rome, beyond the immediate observation of his enemies; and until his pardon was assured, he lurked in disguise among the Sabine mountains. He was pardoned at the intercessions of the Vestal virgins, of Mamercus Aemilius and Aurelius Cotta (Suetônio). The friends of Caesar had represented to the dictator his youth, his careless habits, his insignificance, as reasons why he might be spared with safety. (…) Sulla had the acuteness to know how much energy and power of application is frequently concealed in youth under an exterior of thoughtless dissipation.”
Se o Direito romano não existisse, seria preciso inventá-lo, já dizia o ditado…
“At this period the generals of the republic in the East were intently occupied in recovering the authority in the provinces which Mithridates had wrested from her in his first contest. Caesar learned the first rudimentos of warfare at the siege of Mytilene, which had revolted from the republic. He profited by the opportunity of a mission to the court of Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, to gain the personal as well as the political friendship of that monarch, who eventually bequeathed his possessions to the Roman people.”
“Upon the abdication of Sulla no one had dared to assail his disposition of political power, such was the terror which the monster, disarmed and decrepit as he was, still continued to inspire. Upon his death, the young aspirant manifested his self-control in holding aloof from the premature movement of Lepidus. Suet.: “Et Lepidi quidem societate, quanquam magnis conditionibus invitaretur, abstinuit, quam ingenio ejus diffisus, tum ocasione quam minorem opinione offenderat.”
“He undertook the impeachment of Dolabella, a distinguished noble, for malversation in his province; and, although the senators succeeded, as judges, in screening the delinquent, his accuser was rewarded by the unbounded applause of the people. The provinces hailed him as the patron of the subject against the citizen, and rejoiced in every blow aimed at the prerogatives of the dominant faction.”
“It had been, from early times, the practice of the Roman magnates to educate their young men for the bar and the forum, by observation of the orators of the day, their own friends and relations. The school was a noble one; its models lived and breathed, and transacted the real business of the state. All their words had a meaning, and might be traced to effective results. But this practice nourished exclusive views of state-policy, and tended to confine the management of affairs in the hands of the favoured class who had private access to the discussions and exercises of the nobility. The sullen patricians of the imperial times looked back with regret to the period when the halls of the Greek rhetoricians had not yet become the resort of political adventurers, and pointed, with bitter triumph, to the sarcasm of Cicero, who had once called them schools of impudence. Yet Cicero himself, the young municipal, to whom, doubtless, the statecraft of the Roman senators was far from freely communicated, had acquired the first rudiments of his own skill and experience in the lecture room, which, when himself ennobled, he thus harshly stigmatized. And Caesar also may have been compelled to learn the business of the forum, in some degree, from the mouths of the sophists, while he was urged, no less by his own views and inclination, to bring their studies into fashion by his example, and throw wide the portals of political education. Predisposed as he was to imbibe liberal and cosmopolitan ideas, his personal observation of the men of Greece and their modes of thinking may have contributed to enlarge his views, and shake to their foundations the prejudices held sacred by his countrymen. The school of Molo, the resort of the ardent and enlightened youth of all nations, may have prepared the way for his senate of Gauls, Spaniards, and Africans.”
“During his retirement in the East, he fell into the hands of the Cilician pirates, who were wont to parade their defiance of Rome by murdering the officers of the republic whom they captured. Fortunately the name of Caesar was not yet enrolled in the annals of the magistracy; but his birth and the wealth of his family were well known, and the ruffians were satisfied with demanding a ransom. The imagination of the narrators has added some romantic embellishments to the story, in accordance with the reckless magnanimity with which Roman tradition loved to invest her favourite hero. He disdained, it was said, to purchase his liberty at so mean a price as 20 talents, and offered his captors 50. At the same time he threatened them with his vengeance, and pledged himself to return with a fleet, arrest the pirates, and crucify them as common robbers.(*) His vengeance, indeed, did not slumber. After his release, he collected some forces, attacked and overcame his captors. He was content, however, with offering to send them to Junius Silanus, the proconsul of Asia, under whose military authority he was acting, that they might suffer condign punishment at his hands. The proconsul, in reply, ordered him to sell them as slaves, but Caesar resented, as an insult to himself, the lenity or avarice which could dictate such a proceeding. He boldly disregarded the command, and sentenced his prisoners to the cross, the death of slaves and robbers:¹ but the historians thought it worth recording, as an instance of the clemency always attributed to Caesar in comparison with his contemporaries, that he allowed them to be put to death by a less painful process, before he inflicted upon their bodies the last indignity of the law.
(*) Plutarch gives a graphic account of the way in which Caesar is supposed to have passed his time among the pirates while waiting for his ransom. He spent 28 days among them, not so much like a prisoner as a prince surrounded by his guards, and he joined in their sports and exercises. He read his verses and speeches to them, and scoffed at their bad taste if they did not applaud them. [him?]”
¹ Qual dos dois era Jesus: escravo ou ladrão?
“He borrowed of all his friends, and even of his rivals; he pledged his future fortunes; he held out the lure of places and provinces to the wealthier of his own faction; the last reward of their fidelity could be obtained only by placing him, at whatever cost, on the pinnacle of public honours. The preeminence of his genius, however, was soon discovered by his own party; as he rose, his adherents must rise with him. Accordingly, he was supported and impelled forwards by the combined efforts of all who had money to stake upon the great game he was playing for their common advancement”
“Pompeius, from the secure elevation of his military ascendency, might despise the arts of seduction which he had never needed; while Caesar might look with equal scorn on the lofty pretensions to purity which had never been tested by temptation. Whether from policy, or from the irrepressible openness of his temper, Caesar on his part affected no concealment of his designs, as far at least as they had yet dawned upon his own mind. His projects of counter-revolution became more frankly avowed everyday, and it was only a misplaced contempt for one whom he regarded as a clever profligate that could suffer Pompeius to view them with such unconcern.”
“Caesar came forward once more as an orator; he pleaded the cause of his wife’s brother, Cornelius Cinna, proscribed for his connexion with Sertorius, and obtained his rehabilitation with that of other Marian exiles. The reputation of his eloquence was established. Caesar’s style of oratory was grave, forcible, and practical. He charmed the acute ears of his countrymen by the accuracy of his language; but though possessed of all the aids of rhetoric and technical learning, his plain native sense was never overlaid by acquired accomplishments.”
“Sulla had attempted, in the wantonness of power, to obliterate all remembrance of his rival [Marius]. No monuments were allowed to rise in his honour. The public exhibition of his bust was forbidden. But this decree Caesar boldly violated”
(*) “On the death of his wife Cornelia, about the same time, Ceesar delivered also a funeral oration over her. It was not the custom to bestow this honour upon young married women, and Caesar obtained credit by this act for peculiar kindness and affection to the memory of his wife.”
“From the effigies of the dead the Romans were wont to derive incentives to every noble sentiment; they crowded the apartments of the living with busts of their deceased ancestors, and on every occasion of funeral pomp these waxen memorials were drawn forth from their receptacles, and the glories of the family displayed to the gaze of the citizens. The effect upon the fervid passions of an Italian populace was often, as in this case, electric; and from that moment, perhaps, the popular party began to regard Caesar as the representative of their lost chieftain, and the heir to their favour and affections.”
“In this share in the administration of the province [of Spain] he obtained the praise of industry and vigour. The sophists of a later age, who were wont to vaunt him as a striking instance of the conversion of a dissolute youth to the noblest aims and virtues, imagined a sudden change to have taken place in his character at this time, and ascribed it to his reflections on beholding a statue of Alexander the Great at Gades, and to a dream of auspicious interpretation.” Um retórico engana muita gente. Um retórico num livro engana muito, muito mais.
Um retórico, político, estratego, filósofo e escritor num homem só, algo impossível para nós.
“The gladiatorial shows with which he celebrated the memory of his father were peculiarly splendid. ‘Omni apparatu arenae argenteo usus est.’ (Plínio. História natural, 33.) He had prevailed upon his colleague Bibulus, a wealthy noble, to furnish the sums requisite for this lavish expenditure, for his own private resources were exhausted, and his debts amounted to 1,300 talents.”
“He had chosen to connect himself, by a second marriage, with a branch of the Pompeian house (…) Pompeia, Caesar’s second wife, was the daughter of Q. Pompeius Rufus, consul with Sulla A.U. 666.”
“The exhibition of the bust of Marius in a funeral procession had already irritated the nobles; but now a greater insult was inflicted upon them. Among his other acts of munificence as aedile, Caesar had decorated the forum, the basilicas, and the Capitol with pictures and statues; he had enlarged them with additional porticoes for the gratification of the people, and these also he had adorned with monuments of taste and luxury. One morning there suddenly appeared among the new ornaments of the Capitol the statue of Marius surrounded by the trophies of his Cimbric and Jugurthine victories. The people shouted with delight; the nobles scowled with indignation. (…) Catulus, now replaced at the head of his party, determined to bring the offender to punishment for this breach of the law. His bitterness was aggravated by the remembrance of his father who had been one of the most distinguished victims of the Marian proscription. He accused Caesar of throwing off the mask from his ulterior designs; of no longer subverting the republic with mines, but of assailing it with the battering-ram. Caesar defended himself before the senate, and succeeded in foiling his accuser; but his triumph was not owing to the favour of his audience, but to the temper of the people, upon which the nobles dared not make an experiment. It would appear, from the historians, that the trophies of Marius retained possession of their conspicuous place in front of the Capitol, an indication of the popular strength, which must have shaken the nerves even of Cato himself.”
(*) “The antiquaries of modem Rome thought they had discovered a portion of these identical trophies in the monument now placed at the top of the steps which lead to the Campidoglio; But the illusion has been dispelled by the greater acuteness of later critics.”
“Egypt was a golden soil in the imagination of the Romans; and, in the execution of his trust, a political agent might justly hope to amass unbounded treasures. The senate was blind perhaps to this covert object. In its jealousy of Pompeius, and of all who appeared to side with him, it conceived that Caesar proposed to strengthen its general’s hands by adding to his enormous powers the control of one of the granaries [armazéns] of the city. Accordingly, it peremptorily rejected the demand, and proceeded, in addition to this insult, for the demand was plausible, to aim a more direct blow against its antagonist’s interests. A tribune of the people named Papius, under the direction of the senate, proposed and carried a decree for removing all aliens from the city.(*) It was pretended that strangers from the provinces flocked into the city and interfered with the elections, the immense number of the genuine voters rendering it impossible to exercise due caution in taking the suffrages. But this harsh measure was really aimed against the Transpadane Gauls, who were anxious to exchange their Latin franchise for that of Rome. Caesar, while passing through their country on his return from Spain, had listened affably to their solicitations, and they had gladly connected themselves with him as their patron and political adviser.
(*) This was called the Lex Papia de peregrinis or de civitate Romana.”
“When the frontiers of Rome were but a few miles from her gates, and the advance of the Etruscans behind the barrier of the Vatican and Janiculan hills was frequently sudden and unexpected, watch was kept upon an eminence beyond the Tiber, to give notice of the approach of an enemy, whenever the people were occupied with the transaction of business in the Campus Martius. (…) The old custom remained in force for centuries among a people more than usually retentive of antique observances.”
BANDEIRA BRANCA, AMOOR! “Alii album et roseum vexillum tradunt, et roseum bellorum, album comitiorum signum fuisse.” “Others deliver the white and pink flag: pink meaning war, the white elections.”
“Indefatigable in harassing the oligarchy, the leaders of the popular party had already undertaken to support the agrarian law proposed in the previous year by one of the tribunes, Servilius Rullus. The author of the bill urged the appointment of commissioners to carry into effect 3 great popular measures. The first of these was the division among the commonalty of all the public land beyond Italy which had been acquired by the republic since the consulship of Sulla and Pompeius Rufus in the year 666. This domain embraced a large portion of the conquests of Lucullus and Pompeius in the East; for all conquered territories, which were neither assigned to Roman colonies nor restored upon their submission to the natives, accrued to the State itself, and were granted in occupation to favoured citizens on easy terms, but with no right of property. In Italy, also, the event of the Social war had thrown the lands of the vanquished into the possession of the republic; and these had either been given to the Sullan veterans as colonists, or let to them as tenants. But this portion of the public domains, although acquired since the period assigned by him, the tribune excepted from his law, and did not venture to touch. However popular such interference might have been, it would doubtless have been dangerous. Cicero declares that it would have involved the kindred of the tribune himself in the common ruin of the men who had benefited by the dictator’s liberality. But it would have been, no doubt, a great boon to the clamorous poverty of the urban populace to receive assignments of public territory in the east, whatever its amount may have been, which we have no means of estimating.”
“Pompeius himself, such was the gratitude and delicacy of the Republic, was to be exempted from this restitution: but the account of others was to be made retrospective; even inherited property, it seems, was to be swept into the net; and it was from Faustus Sulla, the son of the dictator, that the amplest return was anticipated.
A third provision of the law was, that a tax should be imposed upon all public lands excepted from the sale. The moneys thence accruing might be used by the commissioners in making such purchases of land for division as they should judge desirable. But the point upon which Cicero, who resolutely opposed the measure throughout, lays the greatest stress, as the most arbitrary and dangerous of all, was the proposed division among the people of certain domains in Campania, and the drafting of colonies to Capua and neighbouring places. (…) he enlarges upon the dangers which were apprehended from that city in the time of Hannibal; he expatiates upon the pride and viciousness attributed in all ages to its inhabitants, and denounces the scheme as one which must infallibly create a great rival power in the centre of Italy. During the progress of the Social war the allies had threatened to destroy Rome, and plant at Corfinium the capital of an Italian confederacy.
(*) Caput imperii sui Corfinium elegerant quod appellarant Italicum.”
“The orator’s speeches against the agrarian law of Rullus were amongst the most specious triumphs of his art. In 3 successive harangues he first convinced the senate of the impolicy of the proposal, then persuaded the people that it would be of no advantage to their interests, and, finally, defended himself against the tribune’s insinuation that his opposition had been grounded on personal views.” “Cicero had just reached the summit of his ambition, first by the advocacy of certain popular claims, under the shelter of Pompeius, and again by persuading the nobles that he had been an aristocrat throughout at heart, that his liberal tendencies had been misunderstood, and that he was, in fact, entirely devoted to their interests. The bill of Rullus was a test of his real policy which he could not evade. It was one of those decisive measures which try the mettle of the adherents of party; no man could support it and profess himself an oligarch; no man could oppose it and retain the affections of the people. It was an ingenious device of the Marians to compel Cicero to break with the people, whom he had thus far cajoled and, as they deemed, betrayed to the senate. Cicero, indeed, was most reluctant to pronounce openly in favour of the aristocratic party, though it was to their cause that he doubtless proposed from henceforth to devote himself. The effort he made to the last to convince both parties that he was really advocating their interests could deceive neither, and the noisy declamations he vented about the imaginary dangers of his new Carthage were only meant to cover his ignominious retreat from a position which was no longer tenable.”
“When it was asked upon what military resources the rash intriguers relied, it was answered that Calpurnius Piso, who had acquired the command of one of the Iberian provinces, was charged to organize an armed force in that quarter, with which to balance the legions of the senate under Pompeius. The scheme, it was alleged, was opportunely detected; the chief conspirators were discovered and marked. Piso shortly afterwards was cut off in his province by banditti, or possibly by assassins: but the proceedings with which the culprits were menaced by the government were stayed by the intervention of a tribune, and the circumstances of the plot were never formally revealed.”
“The character of the arch-conspirator [Catilina] is painted for us in the gloomiest colours. Cruel and voluptuous, bankrupt in means and reputation, he supported his extravagance by pandering to the vices of headstrong and prodigal youth. His courage had been conspicuous in his early years in the wars of Marius and Sulla, and in manhood his audacity was fearless as it was unscrupulous. Nor was the cunning, we are assured, less remarkable, with which he cajoled many of the best and wisest citizens. These qualities had placed him at the head of a cabal comprising personages of mark and dignity. His last chance of disentangling himself from his embarrassments was through the consulship, and its reversionary province. His friends, creditors, and dependants, combined to thrust him into this coveted position. His means were formidable; and bankrupt as he was, he could engage the aid of Cicero himself, who was prepared for the sake of his alliance, in their common competition for the consulship, to defend his cause against Clodius.” “Catilina escaped condemnation through the favour of his judges, and possibly the corruption of his accuser; while on the other hand he failed in his suit for the consulship, which fell to Cicero himself in conjunction with a third candidate, Caius Antonius. Cicero’s mouth was unsealed, and a few months later he could stand forth without a blush, and denounce his contemplated client as the foulest monster, the most universal culprit of the age.”
O PERDÃO DE TODAS AS DÍVIDAS, DE ONTEM ATÉ A ETERNIDADE PASSADA: “All ages have their cant term for the cherished anticipation of an era of legalized insolvency. The young Roman prodigals invoked new tables, or a clear balance sheet; and it cannot be doubted that their aims were rather personal than political, that they yearned for the extinction of their debts first, and the division of public offices afterwards.”
“The consuls were at once invested with summary powers for the protection of the commonwealth. But in the suppression of so formidable a conspiracy, every step was hazardous. The lives of the noblest Romans were involved in it; the spirit of the populace was questionable or adverse, and their leaders ever on the watch to profit by a false move.”
“Cicero succeeded in securing, with letters on their persons, certain agents employed by the conspirators in the city. Having made himself master of these documents, he caused the culprits to be suddenly arrested. They were produced successively before the senate, and confronted with their own messengers, and the evidence of their own hands and seals. The senate in secret session investigated the charges, and pondered the disclosures of their accomplices. From these private sources it might learn the particular business assigned to each of the associates; which of them should assassinate the consul, which seize the public treasure, which set fire to the city; together with the signals concerted between them, and the contemplated division of the spoil. But in the speech which Cicero addressed to the people, upon the close of the examination, and the conviction of the prisoners, he submitted to them no judicial proof of the existence of such designs. He contented himself with declaring the evidence upon which they had been convicted to be their correspondence with Catilina, a public enemy, and their intercourse with certain envoys of the Allobroges, a Gaulish clan, objects at that moment of popular apprehension. This sufficed to brand them as pledged to succour an invader, to harbour him within the city, and to deliver Borne to the violence of Etrurians and Gauls. This was enough to justify all the frightful vaticinations of fire and slaughter with which Cicero had kept the ears of the people tingling. But to prove their ulterior designs would have involved the disclosure of the degrading means to which the consul had been compelled to resort, his intercourse with the basest of men and women; it would have been unbecoming the dignity of the government, and, above all, inconsistent with the politic reserve of an aristocratic assembly.” “The reserve which Cicero maintained was not unnoticed by his contemporaries; but if it was afterwards made a subject of attack by Clodius, it met with the full approbation of graver and better citizens.”
“The insinuation that a Crassus and a Caesar had combined with the common enemy, was so obvious and natural, that neither then nor since has the rumour been easily discredited. The statement that these chieftains were so deeply concerned in the earlier plot, as to have actually designated themselves the one as dictator, the other as his master of the horse, may be dismissed as a glaring exaggeration. It is, however, far from impossible that they may have secretly favoured the scheme, with the hope of profiting by the explosion.”
“it must at least add to the embarrassments of the oligarchy; it must tend to precipitate the republic along the path which sloped towards revolution, and render the popular mind familiar with the fatal conviction that the old system of administration could not be worked much longer. But the nobles sought to implicate Caesar still deeper. Catulus and C. Piso had urged Cicero to include the leaders of the Marians in the impeachments of the presumed delinquents: the plot was ripe, witnesses were forthcoming, the blow was ready to fall; nothing perhaps but the firmness of Cicero, who saw that Caesar’s popularity would in fact screen from justice every culprit with whom he was associated, saved him from standing before the bar of the senate on a charge of life and death.”
“Sed iisdem temporibus Q. Catulus et C. Piso neque precibus neque gratia Ciceronem impellere potuerunt, uti per Allobroges aut per alium indicem C. Caesar false nominaretur.” Sallust
“But at the same time, Q. Catulus and C. Piso could neither persuade Cicero by entreaty nor favor, that C. Caesar should be named falsely by the Allobroges or by another list.”
“Nine of the traitors had been convicted; of these, 5 were in confinement; the nature of their punishment remained for decision. The law of the republic, as interpreted at least by the patricians, invested the chief magistrate with power of life and death as soon as the senate should issue its ultimate decree (…) But Cicero was aware that the commons had never consented to such a stretch of prerogative (…) There existed also a conflicting principle in the Roman law, according to which no citizen could be put to death except by a vote of the tribes. But the senate still hesitated to appeal to the people, by which course they would risk the failure of justice and vengeance altogether. Nor by delegating their own authority to the consul would they secure his impunity, should he venture to act upon it.” “He appealed once more to the senate itself. He restored to the assembly the sword it had thrust into his hand. The fathers met in the Temple of Concord, the ground-plan of which may yet be traced beneath the brow of the Capitoline; and from the memorials still preserved to us, we may picture to ourselves a vivid representation of the debate which ensued. Compare Cicero’s fourth Catilinarian oration. How near the language which Sallust ascribes to his speakers approaches the words they really uttered it is impossible to conjecture; but Plutarch mentions that the speech of Cato alone was preserved, having been taken down in short-hand at the time by Cicero’s direction.”
“Caesar sought to save the culprit’s lives; but his motive was a public and not a personal one. He contended for the manifest interests of his party; for the advancement of his policy, for the embarrassment of the senate, for the renown of clemency and public spirit. Had he been conscious of complicity in the crime, his first aim must have been to bury the evidence in the graves of his associates. It is fair also to conclude, from his general character, that he shrank from the atrocity of shedding Roman blood on the scaffold, where it had rarely flowed except at the mandate of tyrants. He avowed that the culprits were justly liable to the severest penalty; but to free and high-minded men, banishment, he contended, or imprisonment, would be even worse than death. These punishments the law allowed; the infringement of this law had embittered the rivalry of political factions. The murders of the Gracchi and Saturninus had roused the people to direful vengeance. The proscriptions of Marius had already provoked retaliation.” “Death accordingly was decreed by a large majority of the assembly; and the culprits, five in number, were forthwith strangled in the public prison, or in the houses where they were kept in custody.”
“Cicero soon learned that the services he had performed could secure him no effective control over a party which despised its benefactor, and was resolved to depreciate his merits.” “with the best intentions and the truest loyalty he damaged his own cause: he spoke as one who dwelt in the commonwealth of Plato, and not amidst the dregs of Romulus.”
“The temper of the Roman people at this crisis of their history required the guidance of a mind of more vigorous grasp than was possessed by a Cicero or a Pompeius, whose talents as public men were limited to a capacity for administration, but who could neither understand nor grapple with the great evil of the Sullan revolution, which had checked the natural progress of reform and enfranchisement, and restored the landmarks of a constitution which was no longer the legitimate exponent of the national character.”
“M. Lepidus, the consul in the year of Sulla’s death, erected the most magnificent dwelling that had been seen up to his day in Rome; within 35 years it was outshone by not fewer than 100 mansions. The same was the case with the extension of the territorial possessions of the nobility, their accumulation of plate, jewels, and every other article of luxury, and no less the multiplication of their slaves and dependants. The immoderate interest which ready money commanded shows that the opening of new channels to enterprise outstripped even the rapid multiplication of wealth. The national prejudice against trade still drove the capitalist from the secure and regular pursuits of commerce to gamble in perilous speculations.” “instead of spreading over the face of the empire, the treasures of the world were accumulated in a few rapacious hands.” “Men laughed at the narrow notions of their parents and even of their own earlier years. It is only once or twice in the course of ages, as on the discovery of a new continent, or the overthrow of a vast spiritual dominion, that the human imagination springs, as it were, to the full proportion of its gigantic stature.”
“When the mind of a nation is thus excited and intoxicated by its fervid aspirations, it seeks relief from its own want of definite aims in hailing the appearance of a leader of clearer views and more decisive action. It wants a hero to applaud and to follow, and is ready to seize upon the first that presents himself as an object for its admiration, and to carry him forward on his career in triumph. Marius, Sulla and Pompeius, each in his turn, claimed this eager homage of the multitude; but the two former had passed away with his generation, and the last lived to disappoint the hopes of his admirers, for whom he was not capable of extending the circuit of the political horizon. For a moment the multitude was dazzled by the eloquence and activity of Cicero, but neither had he the intellectual gifts which are fitted to lead a people onward. The Romans hailed him as the saviour and father of his country, as another Romulus or Camillus”
“It was still to the future that their eyes were constantly directed; and it was not till the genius of Caesar burst upon them, with all the rapidity and decision of its movements, that they could recognize in any of the aspirants to power the true captain and lawgiver and prophet of the age.”
CHAPTER 4/10: O OCASO DE POMPEU, O CONTRA-ATAQUE DE POMPEU ATRAVÉS DO TRIUNVIRATO CESÁREO, CÉSAR CÔNSUL, A QUEDA E O EXÍLIO DE CÍCERO, INTRODUÇÃO GEOGRÁFICO-HISTÓRICA À ESPANHA
“Catilina received considerable addition to his forces from among that desperate class which rejoiced in the prospect of an impending revolution, and now rushed to share the peril and the spoil without any previous concert with the conspirators.”
“Antonius himself showed great tardiness and indecision; his conduct was open to the suspicion of sympathy, if not of concert, with the enemy he was sent to subdue. But, fortunately for the republic, his lieutenants were men of vigour and activity.”
“Among these traitors to the State was a youth, A. Fulvius, the son of a senator, who, being arrested on his way and brought back, was put to death by his father’s order.”
“if Catilina could have burst from the toils by which he was surrounded, he might have taken advantage of the winter season to rouse rebellion throughout Italy, and have collected resources for another year’s campaign.”
“Catilina’s undisciplined bands had no chance against their opponents as soon as they met in the field; yet they fought to the last with the ferocity of wild beasts, unless, indeed, their devotion to their leader deserves a nobler title. Three thousand of their number were slain in the combat, and each man fell on the spot on which he had been marshalled for the battle. The body of Catilina himself was found far in advance of the line, among the corpses of the enemy, and the expression of his dying countenance still corresponded to the passions which had animated him in life.”
“the leaders of the senate allowed themselves to quarrel among one another, as if they had no one to fear either within or without the city. The election of consuls for the ensuing year had fallen upon D. Junius Silanius and L. Licinius Murena. We have seen that Catilina had presumed to offer himself; but a worthier candidate, the great jurist Sulpicius, was also disappointed, and, resenting the notorious bribery employed by his rivals, had rushed to the prosecution of Murena. Cato, blinded by his hatred of corruption, or swayed by the self-appointed duty of chastising all political offenders, rashly consented to support the charge. It can hardly be supposed that the unsuccessful candidate had abstained from similar means, or came into court with clean hands. At all events, in the existing crisis of affairs, it was most important, that the executive should not be paralysed by depriving Silanus of his appointed colleague, and withdrawing his attention from the care of the public interests to the harassing duties incident to a fresh election. This Cicero saw, and immediately stepped forward to defend Murena, who, to his other claims on the confidence of his party, added the reputation, most valuable at such a moment, of a military commander.”
CÍCERO E SEUS DISCURSOS DE DOIS GUMES: “from the disparagement he throws, on the one hand, upon the legal science for which Sulpicius was justly celebrated, and upon the Stoic philosophy, on the other, of which Cato was the advocate and the pattern. In a subsequent work of more pretensions to sober argument Cicero alludes to this speech, and acknowledges that he had purposely adapted his rhetoric to the superficial understanding of the judges. But this curious effusion of untimely levity must be ascribed to the intoxication of success. Cicero did not abstain from indulging his vanity in the arch-depreciation of the chiefmen of his own party. Cato, who, with all his outward austerity, was a man of singular good-humour, smiled at his opponent, and quietly remarked to those about him how witty a consul the republic enjoyed.
In the midst of their contentions for the highest office, the nobles had allowed Caesar to obtain one of the 2nd places in the scale of power, the praetorship, which he held in conjunction with M. Calpurnius Bibulus, the candidate of the opposite party.”
“On the 1st of January, when the consuls entered upon their duties it was customary for all the chiefmen and dignitaries of the State to proceed to the Capitol, and there offer them their solemn greetings. We find this custom alluded to a 150 years later by Pliny [Epístola 9]. Caesar, however, instead of assisting in this act of official courtesy, took advantage of the absence of his colleagues and rivals to address the people in the forum, and to propose that Catulus should be deprived by their vote of the honours due to him as the restorer of the temple Jupiter, which was now on the point of completion. That august edifice, the glory of the City and the Empire, had suffered severely in the conflagration which took place during the conflict of Sulla and Marius. (…) Caesar audaciously brought a charge of peculation against him, and demanded the production of his accounts; while at the same time he insisted that he should not be permitted to put the finishing hand to the work, but that the burden and the glory should be transferred to Pompeius. This attack was, perhaps, not seriously meant to succeed. It answered the purpose of enraging and alarming the nobles, of thwarting a personal enemy, above all of menacing the aristocracy with the vengeance of the chieftain they distrusted. It was also an overture of more cordial alliance between the pretended friends. (…) The name of Lutatius Catulus was duly inscribed upon the noblest monument of the national pride, and bore witness to the glory of the most blameless hero of the aristocracy until the temple was again destroyed by fire in the civil wars of Vitellius and Vespasian.”
“Three sons and 3 daughters Mithridates put do death to secure his throne, but another of his children named Pharnaces, whom he had destined for his successor, eager to defeat the wild enterprise he meditated, and thus gain the favour of the Romans, revolted against him. Deserted by his troops and people, Mithridates prepared to embrace a voluntary death. His system, it was affirmed, had been fortified against poison by the habitual use of antidotes; he was compelled to require the services of a Gaulish attendant, and fell upon the sword reluctantly presented to him. § The treason of Pharnaces was rewarded with the kingdom of the Bosporus, and he was received by Pompeius into the friendship and alliance of the Republic.”
“The Jews, as of old, wished to have a king to reign over them. They defended their freedom of choice, and the object whom they had chosen, with all the valour and obstinacy of their race. For 3 months their temple-citadel held out against the skill and patience of the Romans: but the fanaticism of the people, which was kindled by the excitement of patriotism, proved their ruin; for, as on former occasions, their presumptuous confidence tempted them to omit the requisite means of defence, and their fastness was surprised during a season of unguarded ceremonial. The victor replaced Hyrcanus in the high-priesthood and abolished the royal title. He made the country dependent upon Rome; but though he violated the Holy of Holies by his profane presence, he appears to have acted with more than usual moderation in sparing the sacred furniture and treasures of the temple. (…) The spoliation of the temple of Jerusalem was reserved for Crassus.”
“The basis upon which the edifice of social order had been established by Lucullus remained unshaken after his successor had left Asia. § The zeal with which the nobles had rushed to the defence of Catulus could not fail to mortify the jealous temper of Pompeius, and their statesmen might regard the death of Mithridates with alarm rather than satisfaction, for nothing now remained to delay the conqueror’s return to take account of their proceedings in his absence. In vain had Cato sneered at the feeble resistance of the Asiatics, and asserted that the successes of their conqueror were merely victories over women. The power and ability of so great a captain were not to be charmed away by empty taunts.”
“On the first day of the new year, when the consul was about to lay down his office and to make the customary oration to the people, the tribune offered to impose silence upon him, declaring it unfit that the murderer of Roman citizens should address an assembly of free men. Amidst the uproar which this act excited, Cicero could only exclaim, with a solemn adjuration, that he had saved the State, and the general acclamations of the people overwhelmed every opposing whisper. Plutarch (Cic.) attributes the favour with which Cicero was received to the good offices of Cato, who was the first to address him as the ‘Father of his country’. Plutarch is not correct, perhaps, in saying that Cicero was the first who received this honourable distinction; at all events, he was the last, while the voice of the Roman people continued really free” Plutarco foi um péssimo historiador, por tudo que encontramos sobre sua historiografia hoje, mas excelente ensaísta/romancista.
“The part Caesar was playing now became manifest. He appeared as the counsellor and confidant of the demagogue, whose violence was destroying all hope of reconciliation between the oligarchs and their former leader [Pompeu, longe de Roma a serviço, nesse ínterim].”
“Caesar and Nepos were sitting side by side. Cato advanced and took his seat directly between them, to interrupt their private communications. Nepos [Metellus] directed the clerk to read the proposed resolution aloud; Cato forbade him. Nepos took the paper himself; Cato snatched it from his hand, and tore it in the face of the multitude. This boldness warmed the people in his favour, when Nepos, furious at being thus thwarted, began to recite the resolution from memory. Thermus, another of the tribunes and an adherent of the nobles, raised his hand to the speaker’s mouth. This was a violent way of interposing the official veto, the means of control which each tribune legally possessed over his colleagues; but it hit the humour of the excited multitude, and was crowned with tumultuous acclamation. A scene of riot and disorder followed, which prevented the adoption of any measure under the sanction of legal forms; and although it was necessary for the friends of Cato to hurry him from the strife, and to secure his safety, hard by in the temple of Castor and Pollux, the object of Nepos was defeated, and a great triumph obtained for the insulted senate.” A única diferença para o Brasil é a séria questão da inviolabilidade do templo!
“But the aristocratic party was fated always to push its victories too far. The senate, elated by the unaccustomed sounds of popular applause, ventured to suspend both Nepos and Caesar from the functions to which they had been duly elected. (…) Caesar, with greater resolution, threw himself upon the protection of his allied and adherents, and continued to administer his praetorial functions in defiance of every hostile menace. He refused to quit his tribunal till compelled by a military force, whereupon he dismissed the lictors who attended upon him, divested himself of his official insignia, and retired with dignity to his private dwelling. The populace now assembled to avenge the insult offered to their favourite. A riot ensued, which compelled the consuls to retrace their steps, not without the most obsequious expressions of respect and deference towards him. But this incident is omitted by all authorities but Suetonius, and Plutarch expressly declares that no tumults occurred in Caesar’s praetorship.”
“Vettius declared that he could produce letters from Caesar to Catilina; Curius only professed to have ascertained his guilt from the mouth of their common leader. It is hardly credible that these wretches would have ventured to assail the popular champions, whose courage and resources were so well known, had not they received direct encouragement from some chiefs of the senate. Caesar, with his usual decision, went straightway to Cicero, and engaged him to remove any suspicion of his criminality. The late consul declared publicly that it was by Caesar himself that the 1st intimation of the danger had been made to him. Whether this had really been the fact does not appear; but, at all events, the testimony of Cicero could not be discredited. Not only was Caesar acquitted, but the reward recently assigned to Curius as the supposed revealer of the plot was taken from him, and handed to the object of his calumny. Vettius was sacrificed to the wrath of the people, and thrown into prison; nor did Novius the quaestor, who had allowed his superior magistrate to be cited before his tribunal, escape a similar chastisement.”
“The Bona Dea, an old Italian divinity, whom the antiquaries of superstition sought to identify with various Greek and Latin goddesses, enjoyed the honour of a peculiar festival, at which none but women were allowed to attend. The presence of any of the male sex was deemed a pollution, and expected to bring a curse upon the nation. The intruder, it was once devoutly believed, would be visited with the loss of his sight; but no instance had yet been known of the wrath of the goddess being tempted to this extremity. The festival was held in the month of December, in the mansion of one of the consuls or praetors, and the mistress of the house was entitled to preside at it. The matrons of Rome were assembled at night under the roof of Pompeia [mulher de César], in the official dwelling of the chief pontiff, at the foot of the Platine hill, a spot which may still be traced by the 2 half-buried columns of the temple of Romulus and Remus, which stood directly over against it. The beardless gallant introduced himself into the house in the garb of a female musician; he had corrupted one of the maids, and sent her to acquaint Pompeia of his arrival. The appointment had probably been concerted. But meanwhile he incautiously allowed himself to be seen by another attendant. Being addressed, his person or his voice immediately betrayed him. The alarm was given and the utmost consternation prevailed. Aurelia, the mother of Caesar, a Roman matron of the ancient stamp, who professed to keep strict watch over the virtue of her daughter-in-law, speedily threw a veil over the mysteries of the goddess, and rushed through the house, a torch in her hand, to discover the intruder. He was surrounded and recognised, but allowed to escape. The matrons who had assembled to assist at the ceremony dispersed to their homes, and none of them failed to inform her husband that night of the interruption of the rites and the pollution of the city. The next day the story was bruited far and wide, and the cry of indignation and fear resounded over the 7 hills.
Such a moment of general panic presented the advisers of the aristocracy with a golden opportunity, and it was with no religious feeling, for Cicero himself scoffs at the goddess who failed to strike the impious intruder blind, that they consulted the pontiffs and the Vestal virgins, from whom they received a formal assurance that the crime demanded signal expiation. Caesar, as the chief of the pontifical college, could not abstain from coinciding in this solemn declaration. His guilty consort he publicly repudiated; but he denied all knowledge of her gallant, and refused to proceed against the intriguer, whom the city unanimously denounced. This was the point at which his enemies were aiming. A man of Caesar’s influence might have insured the criminal’s conviction; at all events, it was obvious that, by invoking punishment upon Clodius, he would incense many of their common friends, and during a long and bitter struggle a thousand incidents might occur to widen the breach in their party. But though disappointed in this hope, the nobles would not let their victim escape. According to the ordinary mode of procedure in cases which were confined to questions of fact, the judges were selected by lot for the decision of each particular cause from the list of 105, previously drawn by lot also from the 3 orders of senators, knights, and aerarian tribunes. But, whether the charge against Clodius was one for which there was no exact precedent, or whether its importance might be held to justify a departure from the usual course, the senate wished the judges to be assigned by the direct appointment of the praetor. This also was a method not unknown to the constitution; and though the advantage it offered to the nobles seems obvious, we do not hear that it was regarded by their opponents as unjust or invidious. Accordingly, the new consuls, Pupius Piso and Messala, were enjoined to invoke the people to sanction this mode of procedure. Messala engaged in the business with good faith; but his colleague was easily won over by the enectment which he himself proposed. Cato pushed the matter forward with his usual promptitude;¹ Cicero joined in the general outcry, always hoping to be floated to the top in every current of popular opinion; but he dared not commit himself to active measures. Pompeius was expected daily with his army at the gates of Rome; all parties were intriguing with him, but no one yet know what his judgment in the matter might be; it was the part of prudent men not to put themselves too prominently forward at too critical a moment.
[¹ Estranho estóico este!]
Before the close of the 1st month in the year 693 [da República], the conqueror of the east reached the shores of Italy. No sooner did he touch the land than he falsified the apprehensions of the city by disbanding his host of veterans, with the promise of ample rewards, which he felt secure of obtaining from the senate and people. The Senate received the news with surprise, gratification and premature contempt. But there was neither difficulty nor dishonour in affecting gratitude, and the great captain was escorted into the city with the liveliest demonstrations of respect and joy. The reception of Pompeius and the whole proceedings in Clodius’s trial are related with great liveliness by Cicero in 2 of his letters to Atticus, i. 13, 16. His entry into Rome was the celebration, it was said, of a triumph, not over the kings of Asia, but over himself, the heir of Sulla, the child of the proscriptions. When the pageant was over, the proconsul required time to cast his eyes around him, and assure himself that he comprehended the posture of affairs. Meanwhile, his conduct in every respect was studiously moderate. Every word he uttered was noted and treasured up by innumerable years, every movement was watched and criticized; all parties hung in suspense, and awaited in silence the declaration of his sentiments. But amongst all parties he found no friend; perhaps he sought none: his coldness and vanity were equally repulsive, and he was too fearful of committing himself by premature disclosures to court the intimacy of anyone. Among the number of those who crowded about him and tendered advice and service, it is probable that Caesar acquired his usual ascendency, unsettling his views and shaking his resolutions.”
“On his appearance there, Fufius demanded of him, in direct terms, whether he approved the rogation of the consuls, by which the judges in the forthcoming trial were to be assigned by the praetor. Pompeius parried the thrust: his answer, as Cicero triumphantly proclaimed, was that of a true aristocrat; he made a laboured speech, with many unmeaning words, in which he magnified the authority and majesty of the senate, and professed to regard it with devout veneration. The consul Messala was encouraged by this apparent overture to ask his opinion, when he next presented himself in the senate, on the affair of Clodius and the proceedings of the government. But the crafty dissembler again shrank within himself; his reply was courteous but vague, and was limited to a general approbation of the behaviour of the nobles. He then turned to Cicero, and expressed a hope that he had said enough on that point. The applause with which even this guarded language was received, induced Crassus to rise and deliver a studied panegyric [um crasso panegírico] upon the conduct of Cicero in the grave affairs of his recent consulship.”
“He rose to take advantage of the favourable moment, and enlarged, with his usual copious rhetoric, on the dangers from which the State had been preserved, and his own share in the glory of the deed. He spoke, as he alone could speak, of the dignity of the senatorial order, the good feeling of the knights, the favourable attitude of the Italians, the paralysis of every element of disaffection, the cheapness of provisions, the security of the commonwealth. The senate responded, to the speaker’s entire satisfaction; it was the crowning day of Cicero’s vanity; yet one triumph was wanting to it. Pompeius would not be drawn into any further indication of his views.”
“Clodius’s addresses met with no other success than that of raising a laugh against Cicero, whom the oligarchs were never displeased to see made ridiculous.”
“56 judges were chosen by lot, a mode of selection which no doubt in itself admitted of much false play; at all events, there were many among them whose poverty and bad character cast equal suspicion on their honesty. The friends of Clodius strained every nerve to seduce them: money was showered upon them, promises were lavished without stint; the noblest and fairest women of Rome were induced to grant them their favours; the corruption of this infamous tribunal became a by-word to succeeding generations.”
“Atqui dati judicibus nummi sunt; et quod hac etiam nunc pactione turpius est, stupra insuper matronarum et adolescentulorum nobelium salarii loco exacta sunt.” Sêneca, Epístola 97
“But the money given to the judges was; and what is even more disgraceful than this agreement now, moreover, the rapes of the matrons and young nobles are exacted instead of their salaries.”
“Yet the testimony which was produced against the accused seemed to make his escape impossible; his own plea, that he was absent at Interamna on the night in question, was refuted by the direct evidence of Cicero; the mother of the injured husband asserted her knowledge of his guilt; the slaves of the house confessed it under torture: one word from Caesar would have sufficed to settle the matter; but that word nothing could extort from him. Then why divorce Pompeia? cried the nobles in their vexation; the reply was adroit and spirited: The wife of Caesar must be above suspicion.”
“The cause was at last decided in favour of Clodius by 31 suffrages against 25, a less proportion, perhaps, than might have been expected from the composition of the tribunal. The nobles consoled themselves as they best might, by the evidence so narrow a majority gave to the substantial justice of their cause, and to the bias of public opinion; but they were more sorely disappointed at failing to create that dissension between Caesar and his friends which they had fondly anticipated. It was upon Cicero, however, that the real force of the blow rebounded. He had made an implacable enemy of one with whom he had hitherto cultivated terms of amity: and from henceforth Clodius seemed to devote every faculty he possessed to the prosecution of a memorable revenge.
Caesar could afford to smile at the impotent machinations of his enemies; the praetorship had opened to him the path to the high fortune he coveted. Thus far he had succeeded in every political step. He had obtained the civic honours in succession, and he wielded at the moment almost unequalled influence. But his rivals were powerful in the field: Lucullus and Crassus, as well as Pompeius, were experienced general; they had gained the attachment of armies; they could raise troops with a stamp of the foot; and when raised they could lead them to victory. Caesar, on the other hand, had neither veterans at his command, nor means to levy recruits. His name was unknown in war, and was no watchword to the aspirants either for plunder or for glory. But now his turn was come. (…) he determined to retire to the Further Spain, the province which had been assigned to him on the expiration of his late office, there put himself at the head of a Roman army, and store his coffers with the spoils accruing whether from war or peace. But such were his private embarrassments that he could not even leave Rome for his destination without one more extraordinary effort. His private means had been long exhausted. The friends who had continued to supply his necessities had seemed to pour their treasures into a bottomless gulf; so vast was his expenditure in shows, canvasses and bribes; so long and barren the career of public service, through which this ceaseless profusion must be maintained. At this period when the bold gamester was about to throw his last die, he could avow that he wanted 250 millions of sesterces to be worth nothing. Before he could enter upon the administration of his province he had pressing creditors to satisfy and expensive preparations to make. (…) Caesar could apply to Crassus for a loan. The wealthiest of the Romans hated the great captain Pompeius, and he saw in Caesar the readiest instrument for lowering his estimation. He held in pawn the treasures of Iberia. The sum required was 830 talents, and this was placed at once in Caesar’s hands.”
“Spain; Hispania, Iberia: the former name was given by the Carthaginians to the south-western extremity of the peninsula, and was probably a Phoenician word. The rough breathing and sibilation [?] are characteristic of their appellations; comp. Hasdrubal, Hiempsal, Thapsus, Ruspina, Hispalis, Hispania, Hesperia (?). The Romans adopted the name from them. On the other hand, the Greek geographers gave the country the name of Iberia, which may have been derived, through the Massilian traders, from the river Iberus. But it is probable that the earliest population of all the north and centre called themselves Iberians. Plin. H.N. iii. 3.: <Iberus—amnis, quem propter universam Hispaniam Graeci appellavere Iberiam.>”
“The coast of the Mediterranean and the valley of the Baetis were the abodes of wealth and luxury, of art and science; but even these favoured districts were liable to the sudden attacks of savage neighbours, and the vigilance of the provincial government was constantly exercised in protecting the central retreats of peaceful civilization.”
“The tribes of Lusitania, beyond the Tagus, had never yet accepted the Roman yoke, and behind them lay the mountains of Gallicia, which harboured a race to whom even the name of the republic was almost unknown. The provincial governors lived in a state of almost perpetual warfare with the petty chieftains, whose nominal dependence was marked by the imposition of a tribute, seldom paid except when exacted by arms. The necessity of self-defence might excuse the repeated incursions by which they restrained the hungry wanderers on their frontiers. But Caesar was not satisfied with the mere avowal of submission; he required a guarantee for its permanence: he carried war into the fastnesses of the mountains, and drove the enemy from his retreats into the open plains. Nor was he diverted from his purpose by the booty which the natives craftily threw in his way; he thrust home at the main body of his opponents, pursued them over broad rivers, drove them to the borders of the sea, and into islands on the coasts. He collected vessels from Gades, and with their assistance finally reduced these last strongholds. He thus effected the complete subjugation of the districts of Lusitania north of the Tagus, including the wild fastnesses of the Herminian mountains and the rapid waters of the Durius. Brigantium in Gallicia, protected on the land side by the difficult character of the surrounding country, he attacked with a naval armament, and erected his victorious standard at the furthest extremity of his province.
Brigantium seems to have been either the modem Ferrol or Coruña. Mannert decides for the former, but the remains of an old Roman tower near the latter place may remind us that Brigantium was celebrated for its lighthouse. The 2 modern towns, however, lie nearly opposite to each other across a bay, and the lighthouse might serve as a beacon to vessels bound for either destination. The Mons Herminius is supposed by both Drumann and Mannert to have lain south of the Tagus, but it would rather appear from Dion’s account to have been situated near the Douro. It may probably be identified with the Sierra d’Estrella in the province of Beira. The authorities for the history of this campaign, important only as a prelude to Caesar’s great military achievements, are Plutarch and Dion.”
“But as capitalists [the colonizers] they were prompt in accommodating the natives with usurious loans, and thus extricating them from immediate difficulties at an enormous eventual sacrifice. The revenues, not of individuals only, but of cities and States, became mortgaged beyond the possibility of redemption. The persons of the debtors and of their families were liable to be seized and sold into slavery. When the affair came to this point, we may imagine how ready a refuge was offered to the victim by the bands of brigands in the mountains. The administration of Caesar was directed to the abolition of this cause of perennial warfare. He effected an adjustment by which these debts were to be liquidated by instalments, and is said to have conciliated, by his wisdom and prudence, the good-will of either party. The tribute which had been imposed upon the province by Metellus Pius, during the Sertorian war, was remitted by the senate at the propraetor’s instance; upon which service he founded a just claim to the gratitude of the Spanish people. But meanwhile the main object of his own visit to the country was not neglected. He amassed a considerable treasure for himself, and took care to satisfy the cupidity of his followers and soldiers in due proportion. The army saluted him on the field with the title of Imperator.”
During the absence of Caesar, Pompeius continued slowly and irresolutely to press upon the senate the ramification of his acts in the eastern wars. He had expended large sums of money in the service of the State, he had conferred privileges upon cities and crowns upon political partisans.” “Lucullus, more particularly, grudged the distinctions of his rival and successor in the eastern command, and insinuated that he had been himself the first to break the power of Mithridates, leaving him an easy prey to a fresh adversary with augmented resources. And the tyrant had, after all, escaped from his pursuer, and robbed the pretended conqueror of half his glory by a voluntary death. § The senate listened with approbation to these petulant objections, and gradually recovered its courage in the presence of one who had so lately been the master of its legions.”
“Pompeius was content with the simple appellation of Magnus, the Great, which had been sanctioned by the popular voice at an earlier period, and which, in a single word, more than comprised all local designations.” “The treasures of Mithridates, collected from the plunder of Greece, were not restored to the sufferers, but reserved to enrich the friends of the latest victor. Works of painting and statuary were eclipsed by vast hoards of plate, and the novel luxury of gems, pearls and crystal vases.” “Sulla had demanded estates for his veterans; why should not Pompeius extort a similar gratification? But the copy had not the boldness of the original” “He had secured, by the ordinary methods of corruption, the election of 2 consuls for the year 694, on whose political or private sentiments he ventured to rely. But the one, L. Afranius, was a mere cypher among statesmen, one, says Cicero, who did not know the value of the thing he had bought, and who understood dancing better than politics. The other, Metellus Celer, had received a personal affront from his patron, who had divorced his sister Mucia immediately upon his return to Rome.”
“Pompeius is the first Roman who can be confidently charged with the bad taste of allowing himself to be represented by a naked statue. This was the fashion which the Greeks applied to the representation of deities and heroes, and it consorted suitably with features of ideal beauty and majesty. In the Roman emperors the combination of the naked figure with the ordinary human head, trimmed and curled according to the fashion of the day, is generally ludicrous. The emperors, however, who claimed kindred with the divinities, were not altogether inconsistent. But a naked figure of a Roman citizen, before the age of apotheoses, was preposterous and unmeaning. Pompeius was probably misled by personal vanity, for he was one of the handsomest men of his day. (Plutarch, Pliny, etc.) The famous statue in the Palazzo Spada at Rome, which is supposed to represent him, and to be that beneath which Caesar was assassinated, can hardly be presumed genuine; but another also naked, preserved in the Villa Castellazzo near Milan, has a better claim to our confidence. See Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst (História da Arte), 11:1.”
“A revolution in Gaul was always a matter of deep alarm at Rome.” “The imminence of this Gallic war cooled down whatever interest the agrarian bill had excited.”
“The people, it would seem, were hardly less jealous of their national champion than the senate itself. They conceived that his plan for enriching the rabble of the forum by grants of public land was no better than a cover to his designs upon their liberty. § It was a great descent for Pompeius, from giving the word of command to consuls and consulars, to wield, as his instruments, the most turbulent of the tribunes and popular demagogues.” “The dread of mob-rule, and of the violence of demagogues, would ultimately prevail, as nearer and more urgent, over the apprehension of dictatorial despotism; and the author of the confusion would alone be able to disentangle it.” “His virtues were sobriety and moderation, and these he possessed in an eminent degree. But when these qualities are not the result of resolute self-control, but arise from a deficiency in animation and the sense of enjoyment, they have little attraction for men of warmer temperaments, and exercise still less command over their imaginations. Accordingly, no man was so constantly deceived in the persons he selected for his instruments” “The distance he affected in his intercourse with those about him arose partly from natural coldness, but more perhaps from his own distrust of his power over them. They mistook it at first for greatness of soul; but when they approached nearer to the self-proclaimed hero, they found with disgust of what ordinary clay he was formed.”
“Utque ferae tigres nunquam posuere furorem,
Quas nemore Hyrcano, matrum dum lustra sequuntur,
Altus caesorum pavit cruor armentorum;
Sic et Syllanum solito tibi lambere ferrum
Durat, Magne, sitis.”
Lucano, i. 327 (sobre o instinto sanguinário de Pompeu) “Lucan had no dramatic spirit. This is not what Caesar might have said, but what his contemporaries did say.”
“Adolescentulus carnifex” – o jovem carrasco
“neither friend nor enemy could rely on his actions corresponding with the sentiments he expressed. Rome might have yielded to a chieftain who demanded her submission with the drawn sword, but it was too much to expect that she should put herself voluntarily in the power of one who affected to ask it as a favour to have the lives and liberties of her children placed in his hands.”
“Jus licet in jugulos nostros sibi fecerit ense
Sylla potens, Mariusque ferox, et Cinna cruentus,
Caesareseque domus series, cui tanta potestas
Concessa est.”
Lucano, iv.
“in Caesar Pompeius had already discovered, as he thought, abundant alacrity to serve him. Such an ally, he conceived, had no consideration to lose in the eyes of the nobility, of whose opinion he stood himself so much in awe; while his temper and necessities seemed equally to encourage him to defy the consequences of the most daring aggressions. We may suppose further, that in the view of a man so decorous and correct as Pompeius, the character of the profligate Marian appeared so bad, that he might expect to be able at any time to shake off and disown the connexion with impunity. The return of Caesar from his province was opportune for the views of both parties, and they lost no time in coming to the show of a mutual understanding. It is at this period that the name of Caesar first occurs in the letters of Cicero, and is introduced to us with the ominous words: Caesar cujus nunc venti valde sunt secondi. (ad Atticus, ii. 1.)” César, que vive agora em maré de sorte.
“One obstacle intervened. The jealousy of the law forbade the Imperator to enter the city before the day of his triumph, while the vanity of the people demanded the appearance in the forum on 3 stated occasions, of every candidate for their suffrages. It was true that the senate had frequently obtained for its favourites a dispensation from this latter regulation. Marius had been raised to the consulship, Lucullus to the aedileship, each in their absence. A few years later we shall find Cato himself the foremost to propose a similar indulgence to Pompeius, while holding the proconsulate of Spain, and forbidden accordingly to enter the city. But on the present occasion the nobles were rejoiced to throw an impediment in the way of a man they hated; they conceded the triumph on Caesar on purpose to exclude him from the consulship.”
“Doubtless the nobles expected that Caesar would forego the uncertain contest for the consulship; but on the contrary he relinquished the triumph, and hastily leaving his province before the arrival of his successor, appeared in Rome in due season to solicit the votes of the citizens. To exhibit this preference of their honours before those of the senate was a compliment to the majesty of the people; but in Caesar’s eyes the value of the one outweighed a hundred times the empty glory of the other. He formed a coalition with a wealthy candidate Lucceius; the nobles put forth all their strength on behalf of Bibulus, and contributed an immense sum to bribe the centuries. Even Cato joined in this open avowal of corruption, and set his seal to the universal acknowledgment that law was impotent and revolution inevitable.”
“Thus did the 3 competitors for supreme power combine to form a league among themselves for their mutual advancement. They convenanted that no proceedings should be allowed to take place in the commonwealth without the consent of each of the 3 contracting parties.”
“The prodigious alliance of Pompeius, Caesar and Crassus might be branded by statesmen as a Cerberus or Chimaera, the triple monsters of ancient legend; but the popular voice was content to designate it as a triumvirate, merely implying, in political language, an extraordinary public commission. § The curtain now draws up for the commencement of another act in the great drama, and discloses to us a new development of the history of the Roman people. The blood of the Roman and the Italian has mingled in one common current; the counter-revolution has obliterated all traces of the Sullan reform; the contest has ended in raising individual statesmen to a position in which they can array their own private ambition against the general weal.” Creio que Napoleão seja apenas César reeditado.
“The triumvirs are now leagued together to undermine the old form of government; by-and-by they will fly asunder, and challenge each other to mortal duel.” “the shadows of a popular and a patrician party will again face each other on the field of Pharsalia; but the real contest will be between a Caesar and a Pompeius, no longer between the commons and the nobility.”
“Asinius Pollio commenced his history of the civil wars with the consulship of Afranius and Metellus: ‘Motum ex Metello consule civicum.’”
“The effects of this triple union soon became apparent. The election of Caesar to the consulship was carried by acclamation; the nobles could only succeed in thrusting in Bibulus as his colleague. This was the 2nd time that these reluctant yoke-fellows had been joined together in public office, and there was little prospect of their bearing their honourable burdens with decent unanimity.”
“The nobles had recently defeated the agrarian bill of Rullus: Caesar brought forward a measure substantially the same. He provided lands for the Pompeian veterans, and thus secured the cooperation of Pompeius himself. He also assigned estates to large numbers of the citizens, and proposed to plant 20,000 colonists in the public domain in Campania. Commissioners were to be appointed to execute the division of lands, and the patronage of these lucrative and influential appointments remained in the hands of the consul himself. The people hailed the announcement of this popular measure with acclamations; but it was requisite to obtain the sanction of the senate, before the consul could offer it to the centuries. The nobles felt the danger of rejecting or mutilating it. Cicero hesitated to renew the combat in the face of both Crassus and Pompeius: but his party saw the fatal influence Caesar would gain by it, and put forward Cato, not to contest or cavil at the bill itself, but simply to protest against all innovation. The consul ventured to treat this manoeuvre as an illegitimate artifice. He ordered his lictors to seize his antagonist, as it were for contempt, and carry him off to prison. The fathers rose in consternation: many followed their fellow-senator to the place of confinement. Petreius, a blunt soldier, vowed that chains with Cato were better than the presence of the oppressor Caesar. The consul, it is said, was moved to shame: he caused Cato to be set free, and at the same time dismissed the assembly, with the declaration that it was illegal to refuse to entertain a measure moved by the chief magistrate, and with a threat that henceforth he would dispense with the senatorial decree altogether, and bring his projects of law at once before the people.” “the Hortensian law (…) had shown that enactments could be passed without the concurrent action of the senate. Caesar, however, did not yet despair of influencing the nobles in their own assembly.”
“In vain had Bibulus bared his throat to the populace, and deprecated their violence by exposing himself most freely to it. Even Lucullus, old and feeble as he was, suffered personal maltreatment, and only saved his life, it was said, by casting himself at Caesar’s feet.”
“Much of the violence and apparent bitterness of the statesmen of the day which we have witnessed hitherto may be attributed to the excitability of the Italian character, prone to the most exaggerated expression of its feelings. The politicians of Rome continued notwithstanding to converse in private with much harmony and good temper: their public feuds were often forgotten in the relaxation of social intercourse. Their conduct was rather that of rival gamesters than of deadly enemies. But at this crisis an event occurred which served to sow dark suspicions among honourable opponents, and reminded men once more of the use of the dagger, not unfamiliar to them in a ruder age of the republic. Vettius, whose name has already received dishonourable mention, either attempted, or pretended that he had been suborned to attempt, the lives of Caesar and Pompeius. He was arrested with a poniard upon his person, which he declared had been furnished him for the deed by the consul Bibulus. This story is given in detail by Cicero. Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Lucan and Bobiana agree in insinuating that the plot was a fabrication of Caesar’s.”
“The criminal was thrown into prison, and was found some days afterwards dead in his bed. His death was attributed to suicide, but the rumour prevailed that he had been despatched for the convenience of others. Many persons may have wished his death. At every fresh examination he had denounced new names: the noble Lucullus was implicated in his reckless disclosures no less than a Domitius, a Lentulus, a Piso and a Brutus. The discoverer or fabricator of the plot was a tribune in the interest of Caesar, named Vatinius.”
“Bibulus did not venture forth again in public during the remainder of his term of office. Caesar continued to administer the affairs of the commonwealth without the aid or opposition of his colleague. The release of the knights from the rigour of the terms on which they farmed the revenues of Asia was another of his measures; a wise one in itself, and at the same time conducive to his own interests (…) The increased influence which the consul acquired by these proceedings he took care to confirm and extend by a great display of munificence in his shows and entertainments.”
“Pompeius offered his hand to Julia, his confederate’s daughter, and this alliance was regarded as a pledge of their fidelity to each other in their scheme of common advancement. Caesar, at the same time, married Calpurnia, the daughter of L. Calpurnius Piso.”
“After vacating the consulship at the commencement of the year 696, and taking the command of his legions, Caesar still continued to linger outside the walls to watch events. The new consuls were A. Gabinius and L. Calpurnius Piso, both adherents of the triumvirs (…) They seem both to have been equally notorious as men of depraved characters and dangerous dispositions, though Piso displayed an almost cynical affectation of republican virtue. (…) But it must be borne in mind that our knowledge of them, especially of Piso, is derived principally from their enemy, and that he at an earlier time had spoken more favourably of both.”
“We have already seen how rapidly Cicero fell in general estimation and influence after the eventful period of his consulship. (…) The virulence of the great contending factions had thrown both equally beyond the reach of his moderate counsels, and the superior lustre of the triumvirs had cast his services and abilities entirely into the shade.”
“Caesar, indeed, with his natural kindness and friendly feeling, would have spared Cicero the humiliation of a public disgrace. He offered him a place in the list of commissioners for dividing the Campanian lands; a post of honour, inasmuch as it was coveted for lucre’s sake by the greatest personages, and still more one of influence, in which he might have surrounded himself with a host of friends and expectants. When Cicero refused this offer, Caesar pressed him to become one of his lieutenants in Gaul, which would at least have removed him from the scene of the machinations in progress against him. But the orator seems to have considered this appointment beneath his dignity, and he would not consent to be withdrawn from the sphere in which he conceived his political importance to lie.”
“It appears from a letter to Atticus (ii. 3.), that the orator was expecting the offer of a mission to Egypt, of which he speaks with much affected coyness [reserva afetada; falsa modéstia]. It does not appear whether the offer was ever made, but probably not.”
“It was not till he found every solicitation rejected with increasing marks of distrust, that Caesar seems to have determined to abandon to his fate the inveterate opponent of his policy. As he saw the crisis approach, he hovered about the city with the troops he had collected, and was evidently in a better position than either of his colleagues for seizing the dictatorship, if, in the midst of these impending convulsions the state should lose its balance.”
“Even Publius Crassus, the triumvir’s son, a devoted admirer of Cicero as a statesman and philosopher, assumed the costume of fear and sorrow in which no fewer than 20,000 of the citizens arrayed themselves. The consuls issued an edict to forbid this token of sympathy [vestir-se de preto]. Clodius and his agents were unabashed (…) They made a jest of the mourners, raised tumults in the streets, and assailed both Cicero and his adherents with mud and stones.”
“The laws allowed a Roman citizen to escape capital punishment by voluntary exile; but in such case they permitted the confiscation of his property, and inflicted upon him civil incapacity to the fullest extent.”
Middleton, Life of Cicero
CHAPTER 5/10: EXPANSÃO ROMANA & O POVO GAULÊS
“Of all the nations with which Rome had come into collision, two alone could boast of having reduced her to submission: the Etruscans had extorted hostages at her gates; the Gauls had encamped within her walls, and carried off the ransom of her existence. (…) Pliny states that the treaty which Porsena concluded with the Romans forbade them the use of iron except for implements of husbandry. The surrender of the city to Porsena, attested by the most veracious of her historians, had spread an expiring gleam over the annals of the Etruscan nation, already declining from its highest power, and doomed to speedy decay and entire subjugation. The victorious attack of Brennus, in the 4th century of her career, marks the era at which the tide of Gaulish conquest was at its full. About that period the name of the Gauls was more terrible, throughout Europe and Western Asia, than that of any other conquerors. They had occupied almost every part of Spain, and might still be traced in the remotest corners of the Peninsula. The Gallaeci or Callaici, in Gallicia, and the Celtici near the mouth of the Guadiana, were of Gaulish descent. The indigenous Iberians had been compelled either to amalgamate with them, or to make their escape through the passes of the Pyrenees. In a series of repeated immigrations, they had succeeded in establishing themselves throughout the north of Italy, overthrowing the languid power of the Etruscans in that region, and re-peopling its half-deserted cities with colonists of a new race. From the central recesses of the parent country vast swarms were still incessantly issuing. One horde established a Gallic sovereignty on the banks of the Danube. A second penetrated into Illyria, and prepared the way for the successive waves which spread over Paeonia, and Macedonia, which broke against the defiles of Thermopylae, and were at last shivered to atoms in the gorges of Delphi. Another band, still more adventurous, succeeded in crossing the Thracian Bosporus, and made itself master of the greater part of Asia Minor. The populous coasts of the Aegean Sea, with all the fair cities of Ionia, were overrun by these barbarians in the 3rd century before our era; and after many vicissitudes of fortune in their wars against the kings of Syria, they still left their name impressed upon a province of Asia, and became, as mercenary troops, the main defence of the thrones of their conquerors. See Amedée Thierry’s Histoire des Gaulois, partie I, 1:4:10. I shall have frequent occasion to refer to this admirable work, as also to the same writer’s Histoire de la Gaule sous l’Administration Romaine. The one I shall cite under the title ‘Gaulois’, the other under that of ‘Gaule’.
However much the Romans might strive to disguise the full extent of their disgrace, the taking of the city by the Gauls left a deep and permanent impression upon their minds. War with the Gauls was thenceforth regarded with peculiar alarm and horror. It was designated not by the ordinary term of War, but as a Tumult; an era of dismay and confusion, when the customary regulations of the State must be suspended, and the usual immunities from service overruled. The defeat of the Allia continued to be commemorated in the calendar as an anniversary of evil omen; and a special hoard of treasure was deposited in the Capitol, never to be touched except for the purpose of repelling a Gallic invasion. The strength and the stature of the barbarians, so much exceeding those of the Italian races, made it necessary for the Roman generals to improve the equipment of the legionaries. Camillus introduced the helmet of brass or iron, and fortified the shield with a rim of metal, to turn the edge of the heavy but untampered Gaulish sword; he furnished his soldiers also with a long pike, to keep the gigantic enemy at a distance. These pikes were probably massive and heavy, and not adapted for throwing. The famous pilum was a modification of this pike, shortened to 6 feet, and used principally as a missile. (Gaulois, 1:3)
For a while the Gauls passed annually under the walls of Rome, in quest of booty from Latium or Campania. At last the Romans took courage, and ventured to issue from their retreat and obstruct the march of the depredators. The tactics of the generals of the Republic were signalized by caution no less than by bravery, and the result of more than one well-fought campaign was the final deliverance of central Italy from these periodical ravages. The popular stories by which the events of this conflict were embellished, of the golden collar won by Manlius, and of the raven which aided Valerius in his unequal combat, evince the long-continued interest with which the Romans regarded this desperate struggle.”
“In the year of the city 455, a new swarm of barbarians issued from the defiles of the Alps, and threatened to overthrow the earlier establishments of their own countrymen within that barrier. The Cisalpine Gauls diverted them from this unnatural enterprise by pointing to the riches of the south, and opening to them a passage to the frontiers of Etruria. Some of the elder migration also offered to accompany the newcomers. (Lívio e Políbio) The Etruscans were engaged at the moment in the secret preparation of a mighty armament against Rome. Alarmed and disconcerted at the arrival of the strangers, demanding lands as the price of peace, they sought to enlist them on their own side by the amplest promises of Roman plunder. Meanwhile they offered an immediate donative in money. The price was stipulated and paid down, when the Gauls treacherously refused to move without the more substantial present of a fixed territorial settlement. Give us lands, they exclaimed, and we will be your allies now and hereafter; otherwise we will retrace our steps with the treasures we have already extorted. Deceived and baffled, the Etruscans deliberated, and determined, with becoming spirit, to have no further dealings with such perfidious and dangerous allies. The Gauls kept their word, and recrossed the Apennines; but discord soon arose between the Transalpine and Cisalpine divisions of their army, and the greater part of both perished together in the furious encounters which resulted from their disputes.”
“The Samnites and Umbrians united with the Etruscans; and, strong as they were in their native confederacy, the allies determined to enlist the Cisalpine Gauls also in the common enterprise. The Romans flew to arms with undaunted spirit. The struggle that ensued was terrific, and seldom had the republic been brought into more signal peril. The imprudence of Fabius and the devotion of Decius were among the events by which this war was signalized. The Gauls, in their turn, complained that they were betrayed by the Etruscans, who were induced to desert their allies by a judicious movement of the Roman forces, which carried fire and sword into their defenceless territories. The fatal day of Sentinum ended with the defeat and immense slaughter of the Gauls and Samnites, more especially of the former. When the Gauls were once more engaged by the Etruscans to combine with them, the Samnites were incapacitated from joining the new coalition. In this war the Romans were uniformly successful, and the contest was terminated by the great battle at the Vadimonian Lake, where the Boii and Senones, the flower of the Cisalpine forces, were entirely defeated. The Romans could boast for the first time of having reduced their most formidable enemy to sue for peace. The solicitations of the vanquished, however, were not made, or not listened to, till the nation of the Senones had been almost exterminated by Drusus, and their capital, Sena, transferred to the conquerors, who established a Roman colony within its walls. The victorious legions returned to the city with the actual treasure, as they fondly boasted, which had been surrendered by their ancestors as the ransom of the Capitol. (Suetônio)
These disasters effectually broke the strength of the Cisalpine Gauls, nor did they again venture to threaten the republic with invasion and conquest.”
“The arrival of Hannibal presented an opportunity of deliverance and revenge. (…) He obtained succours from the Gauls, indeed, as from other nations of Italy, but not in such overwhelming numbers, nor with such zeal and confidence”
“while the Romans continued to strengthen their position on the Po by colonies and fortified works, the indignation of the natives frequently broke out in desultory and fruitless resistance.”
“Towards the end of the 6th century of the city, the whole region between the Rubicon and the Alps was reduced to the form of a Roman province, secured by numerous garrisons and watched with unremitting vigilance. The name of Gallia Cisalpina still remained, as a memorial of the people in whom the republic had found her most dangerous and most inveterate enemy; and every year, after the completion of his term of office, one of the consuls went forth with a numerous army to govern the province”
“The mercantile genius of Greece, which had migrated from Athens to Rhodes and Corinth, was impaired by internal weakness, and repressed by the harassing activity of the pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean. Accordingly, Massilia [Marselha] reigned for a considerable period without a rival in the career of commerce. She opened regular communication with the interior of Gaul, and from thence with the ocean and the British isles; thus substituting a direct and safer route for the perilous circumnavigation of the Phoenician coasting vessels. The wines and other produce of the south found their way up the Rhone and Saone, then by a short portage to the Seine and Loire, or across the plains of Languedoc, to the Garonne, and so to the coasts of the Atlantic. The interchange of commodities between Gaul and Britain was constant and regular, producing a close moral and intellectual connexion between those distant regions. The riches which gradually accumulated in the emporium of all this traffic disposed the Massilians to cultivate the arts and enjoy the luxuries of their mother country; and their learned leisure was crowned with a reputation hardly anywhere exceeded beyond the bounds of Greece itself. Strabo remarks that Massilia became a place of resort for the purpose of liberal education, not only to the Gauls, but even to the Romans themselves. But the jealousy of the maritime tribes of Southern Gaul was not appeased by the blandishments of commerce and social refinement. The Ligurians especially, the rudest and most restless of the number, were engaged in almost constant hostility with the Greek colonists. The position occupied by this people commanded the most practicable of the Alpine passes, where the mountains descend into the Mediterranean. The Romans had no object more at heart than to obtain possession of this key to Gaul; and the claims upon their assistance which their new ally was constantly making could not fail to afford them a pretext for seizing it.
The first interference of the Romans in the affairs of the Massilians occurred in the year of the city 600. Antipolis (Antibes) and Nicaea (Nice), two offsets from the original Hellenic stem, were beleaguered by the Ligurians, in the midst of whose territory they lay, and were on the point of surrendering. The arrogant Republic sent ambassadors to require the assailants to desist from an enterprise against the dependencies of an ally. But the mountaineers refused to listen to their representations, nor even allowed them to land. In making the attempt, Flaminius, the principal commissioner, was severely injured, and some lives were lost in the encounter. The deputation sailed away to Massilia, where the wounds of Flaminius were assiduously tended, while the news of the violence done to him was conveyed to Rome. The outrage was denounced as a violation of the law of nations, and so specious a pretext for decisive hostilities was embraced with eagerness. (…) Aegitna, the offending town, was taken and sacked, and the armies of the audacious barbarians defeated after an ineffectual resistance. The consul gave up their territory to the Massilians, and compelled the rest of their kindred tribes to surrender hostages for their good behaviour.
This first campaign of the Romans beyond the Alps had been short and easy, nor did its success contribute to the territorial aggrandisement of the Republic. In the epitomes of the national history it was not thought worthy of mention. In the year 629 a second occasion presented itself for pushing an army into Gaul.” “From this moment wars succeeded one another with rapidity. The Republic had now an interest of its own in the country to preserve and extend.”
“Fabius Maximus defeated with immense slaughter the forces of the Arverni and Allobroges near the banks of the Isere; his colleague Domitius inveigled Bituitus into his camp, treacherously cast him into chains, and sent him to Rome.” “The territory of the Salluvii and Allobroges, comprehending the modern Savoy, was absorbed, together with that of many smaller tribes, in this extensive conquest, and the whole district received, by way of eminence, the appellation of the Province.”
“Strabo describes the dependencies of the Arverni as extending to Narbo and the frontiers of the Massilian possessions in the south, but the centre of their power lay in the mountainous district of Auvergne. They were received, like the Aedui, into the alliance and friendship of Rome. Tacitus says that the Aedui alone of all the Gaulish nations were honoured by the Romans with the title of brothers. It is probable that Lucan, when he gives the Arverni a claim to this distinction confuses them with the Aedui, both nations in his time being equally Romanized. It is remarkable that in his enumeration of the Gaulish nations, he omits all mention of the latter people.”
“The final subjugation of certain Alpine tribes by Marcius, the completion of the Domitian road along the coast of the Mediterranean, and the occupation of the Graian and Cottian passes afforded means of rapid access from Italy to every part of its transalpine possessions.”
“The movement of the Cimbri and Teutones, at the beginning of the 7th century of the city, which enfeebled Gaul, while it stimulated the aggressive spirit of the Romans, was more carefully noticed and more accurately detailed. The Cimbric peninsula seems to have been adopted as a place of refuge by a remnant of the mighty nation known by the cognate names of Cimmerii, Cimbri, or Kymry, left behind in the course of its westward progress, and cut off from the rear of the advancing host by the rapid influx of the Teutonic races behind it. (The Cimbri are designated as Gauls by Salust. Plutarch, on the other hand, terms them Germans.) The Cimbric is generally recognised as one branch of the great Celtic family, and a broad line has always been drawn by ethnologists between this and the Teutonic. The union of the offspring of such inveterate foes in any common enterprise of magnitude has been pronounced impossible, and various conjectures have been hazarded to reconcile the statements of history with the supposed nature of things. Certain cantons in the mountains about Vicenza and Verona have been supposed from the peculiarity of their language to be peopled by the descendants of the Cimbri who penetrated into Italy. It is said that a Danish prince visited them and recognized the dialect as that of his own country. The language has indeed been proved to be German by M. Edwards (Lettre à Am. Thierry); but an Italian writer, Count Giovanelli, has discovered in Ennodius and Cassiodorus the fact of the establishment of a German colony in that district in the time of Theodoric, and it is to this immigration that their origin may be ascribed.”
“among the Celtic populations of Gaul, we shall observe a Gaelic, a Cimbric, and perhaps a Belgic variety, each with peculiar characteristics, yet all blended together and maintaining a common affinity through various points of contact. To Caesar’s observation the connexion between the Celtic Belgians and the Teutonic Germans seemed more close than that between the different races of the same Celtic family. This view is no doubt essentially erroneous; but the fact that so accurate an observer should have made the mistake may suffice to convince us how powerfully the accidents of intercourse and proximity may operate in sundering kindred and amalgamating independent elements. There seems therefore no objection to the supposition that the Celtic tribe, isolated, as has been described, from the rest of its brethren, and closely pressed by the vicinity of a Teutonic population, gradually assimilated itself to its immediate neighbours.”
“There is reason to believe that the low countries between the Elbe and the Baltic, which were the seats of the Cimbri and the Teutones, were harassed, in the early part of the 7th century, by a series of destructive inundations, followed by scarcity, famine and pestilence.(*) The inhabitants of the neighbouring shores of Friesland and Holland might have combated these enemies with courage and industry, and by their persevering labour have kept their footing in the country. But the Cimbri and their neighbours had no local attachment, and little of local interest to bind them to the soil they occupied. Nations are slow in losing the habit of movement, and the confidence with which their fathers had repeatedly wandered forth in quest of new settlements had not abated in the later generations. The Cimbri and Teutones made a joint resolution to migrate in one mass, and seek new abodes in the south, wherever fortune might permit them to establish themselves. The inhabitants of Northern Germany were thinly scattered, without fortresses or fixed habitations; they offered no resistance to the progress of the invader, nor inducements to his stay. The central regions of the continent were, indeed, for the most part covered with forests and unoccupied by man. (…) the Romans rushed forward to stem the torrent, the character of which they had been taught to fear by experience at their own doors. They seized the passes of the mountains, and commanded the invaders to retire from the territories of a people whom the great republic entitled her friends. The barbarians were appalled by this bold defiance from an enemy whom they had never yet seen, but whose fame was bruited throughout Europe. They paused in their career, and offered to apologize for an insult committed in ignorance.(**) The Roman general, Papirius Carbo, suddenly attacked their camp, while he delayed the return of the envoys they had sent to wait upon him. But neither his perfidy nor his arms succeeded in averting the danger. The bloody combat which ensued terminated in the defeat of the Romans with such loss, that they would have been unable at the moment to retain possession of the passes, had the enemy had presence of mind to follow up his victory. But the barbarians were yet undecided as to their future course. They contented themselves with spoiling the undefended countries south of the Danube, until, having gorged themselves with booty during a 3-years’ sojourn, they changed the direction of their march towards Gaul, and entered it with the favour and cooperation of the most powerful of the Helvetic tribes.
(*) Appian says that the country of the Cimbri was afflicted by earthquakes and pestilence. Strabo alludes to a report that their migration was caused by an inundation of the waters of the sea. He is disposed to doubt the truth of this account, but gives no satisfactory reason for disputing it.
(**) It may be conjectured that the apology of the Teutones was a pretence, and that while they promised to abstain from injuring the Noricans, they had no intention of quitting the neighbourhood, where their position necessarily gave umbrage to Rome.”
“In the Province they declared their intention of taking up their abode, and here they boldly demanded an assignment of lands from the proconsul Silanus. He refused contemptuously, and proceeded confidently to the attack. But the ponderous masses of the barbarians overpowered the skill and science of the legionaries; and it was chiefly by its natural barriers that the Province was protected from invasion, till a 2nd army could be sent into the field. The arrival, indeed, of these fresh forces only brought with it new defeats. Cassius was routed with one army, himself slain, and the remnant of his legions compelled to pass under the yoke. (…) The Cimbri deliberated whether they should not at once cross the Alps and carry their arms into Italy; but scared by their captive’s resolute defiance, they preferred securing their position in the Province, and reducing the town in the interior, a difficult and laborious task to an unskilled and undisciplined multitude. Rome put forth her resources, and assembled another powerful army to cover the cities of the Mediterranean. But now her generals Caepio and Manlius did not act in concert; the jealous pretensions of the one ruined both himself and his colleague. The 2 camps were forced one after the other on the same day; the rout [derrota, debandada] was more complete, and the slaughter more overwhelming, than had befallen the Republic since the fields of Cannae and the Allia. On the one hand, the Province, with all its wealthy colonies and commercial establishments, lay defenceless at the feet of the invaders; on the other the Alps were unguarded, and a bold advance might carry desolation into the heart of Italy. Rome trembled at the name of the Cimbri (…) Never did fortune better deserve the offerings of her favourite worshippers than when she averted both these impending dangers, and directed the more enterprising of the barbarian hordes towards the frontiers of Spain, while she engaged the remainder in the enjoyment of ease and luxury on the spot where they had won their triumphs.”
(*) “The figure of the Cimbrian warrior which Marius painted in derision on a shield, and set up in a conspicuous part of the forum (if Mariano be not a corruption for Manliano, cf. Cic.), was an imitation of a similar mockery of a much earlier date, commemorating probably the victory of Manlius over the gigantic Gaul. The terms Cimbri and Galli were used by the Romans of that day as synonymous; the precise distinction between them will be shown presently.”
“The barbarians had now resolved to invade Italy. They divided their armament, with the view of crossing the mountains simultaneously from the west and the north, and meeting at an appointed spot on the banks of the Po. The Cimbri and Helvetii took the longer circuit; the Teutones and Ambrones were to cut their way through Marius’s legions and penetrate the Cottian or the Maritime Alps.
The events of the short campaign which followed, as preserved in Plutarch’s picturesque narrative, are more than usually striking. (…) After the unprecedented series of 6 successive defeats sustained by the Romans in conflict with their formidable enemy, they here gained a victory which retrieved all their former losses. The barbarians were totally exterminated, the survivors of that bloody day falling one by one under the vengeance of the provincials, while vainly endeavouring to escape northwards. The enumeration of the slain is given with great variations by the different historians. The whole horde was, in fact, annihilated; and the dead, lying unburied upon the field, gave to it the frightful appellation of the Putrid Plain, which seems still to be retained in the name of Pourrières, a village which marks the spot.”
(*) “The Mont Sainte Victoire, on the side of which the army of Marius was arrayed, evidently derives its name from the battle. The people of the neighbourhood have kept festival there from time immemorial, and the addition of the term Saint, together with the Christian exterior given to the solemnities, may be ascribed to the pious policy of the medieval church. (…) « Arrivés sur les sommet, après une journée de marche par des Chemins peu praticables, ils campent en plein air; et dès que la nuit commence, ils mettent le feu à un grand morceau de broussailles, sautant tout autour en signe d’allégresse. Répété à Pertius, aussitôt que la flamme y est aperçue, ils font entendre réciproquement, au lointain, à cris redoublés, ces paroles dignes de remarque, ‘Victoire, Victore!’ » ”
“When the cloud of danger had passed away, the Romans might have remembered with gratitude the fidelity with which the provincials had resisted the temptation to join the invaders. With the single exception of the Volcae Tectosages, whose apparent connexion with the Belgians may have caused them to symphatize with the Cimbri, the Gallic tribes of the south gave intruders no encouragement. But their constancy was attributed to timidity, and the exactions of the oppressor were restrained neither by fear nor remorse. The victorious soldiers demanded lands; the plundered citizens clamoured for compensation. It was decreed that the districts of the Province which the strangers had occupied should not be restored to their original proprietors, but divided among the claimants of the ruling nation. When the Gauls ventured to complain, it was coldly replied that their lands having been lost to the Cimbri, the Republic had acquired, by reconquest, a right to their possession. Such was the notion of the relations of ruler and subject which found favour among the governors of a State proud alike of its principles of jurisprudence and of its military prowess. (…) the event of the Social War, which drove the proscribed adherents of Marius in great numbers into this region, the cradle of his glory and the adopted home of many of his veterans, found the Gauls disposed to embrace the invitations of their shattered party, and avenge its cause upon the Roman government.”
“Fonteius continued to exercise the functions of proconsul, and organized throughout the country a system of tyranny, which may be sufficiently appreciated even from the pleadings of Cicero in its defence. (…) Cicero’s apology is indeed a more instructive exposition of the horrors of provincial suffering than any hostile impeachment. The contumelious indifference it breathes to the rights of a foreign subject implies much more than a consciousness of the guilt of the accused. It shows how frightfully even a sage’s mind could be warped by national prejudice and the pride of dominion; it further indicates what was the temper of the senatorial body presiding on the bench, before whom such an overt denial of justice could be vaunted. (…) Not only was Fonteius acquitted but his system of oppression continued unrelaxed. Another governor of the province, Calpurnius Piso, was accused of similar tyranny, again defended by Cicero, and again acquitted by the judges. Among the atrocities which, on another occasion, Cicero imputed to P. Clodius were his extortions in Gaul as quaestor.”
“We have thus traced step by step the slow and indignant retreat of Gallic independence from the Apennines and the Tiber to the Garonne and Cevennes. Civilization has triumphed over barbarism: the one gave union to the Romans, and a distinct object as well as method to their policy; while the other, notwithstanding the external cultivation of their principal tribes, still kept the Gauls asunder by petty jealousies and divisions. (…) The conquest of Gaul is one of the most complete and distinct episodes in Roman history; but its interest and value as a portion of human annals must be lost to those who fail to discriminate between the various elements of which the vanquished race consisted. When Caesar distinguished so carefully between the different populations of Gaul, it was not merely in the spirit of the antiquarian that he placed his information on record. He wrote as the practical warrior and statesman, who had thoroughly scanned their means of resistance and estimated with sagacity the moral and material resources from which he had the fairest province of his empire to form.
The original authorities from which we learn the main facts regarding the ethnology and character of the Gauls are, as is well known, principally two, Caesar himself and Strabo. The first lived for 9 years in the heart of the country, and spoke of the state of things which he himself witnessed, with all the advantages of acute observation and consummate literary ability; the second, better acquainted in his own person with the East than the West, depended partly upon the accumulated knowledge of a century later, and partly on the accounts of Posidonius, who had travelled in Gaul in the time of Marius. A careful criticism may employ the one of these authorities to explain or correct the other; and their respective statements, where apparently conflicting, may possibly be reconciled by the consideration of the different circumstances under which they wrote.” “I have been principally guided by Thierry’s elaborate history: see particularly the Introduction, which has been much enlarged in the 3rd edition, Paris, 1845.”
“The population of that large portion of the European continent which was known to the ancients by the name of Gallia was distributed in 4 principal divisions, varying more or less in origin, in language and institutions.
I. Southern Gaul, from the Garonne to the Pyrenees, and along the coast of the Mediterranean, was mainly occupied by a race altogether distinct from their Gallic neighbours. Under the name of Iberi, they have generally been considered as a remnant of a family of nations which occupied much of the southern part of Europe before the arrival of the great Celtic race in the West. The Iberians, it is supposed, were originally thrust out of Gaul into Spain, and many of them were again driven back to their old homes, when the Celtic race first penetrated through the Pyreneees.” “The Celtiberi, a people widely spread in the Spanish peninsula, were said to be of a mixed race of conquerors and conquered.” O velho mito do brasileiro como raça da harmonia de senhores e escravos já “atacando” nossos ancestrais…
“They became known in the West and the East respectively by the names of Aquitani and Ligures.”
“II. The Gauls, properly so called, the Galatae of the Greeks, the Galli of the Romans, and the Gael of modern history, formed the van of the great Celtic migration(*) which had poured westward at various intervals during many hundred years. Their origin, as well as the causes and events of their early movements, is lost in the night of ages.
(*) The term Celtae, Celts, which is now generally adopted as the generic appellation of one of the principal families of the human race, was confined by the ancients to the Gauls, and seems to have had originally a still more limited signification, as the designation of certain tribes in the neighbourhood of Marseilles.”
“The Arverni, whose name is retained in the modern appellation of Auvergne, occupied a large district in the middle and south of Gaul, and were surrounded by tributary or dependent clans. The Aedui lay more to the north and east”
“III. It will be seen that the limits thus assigned to that portion of the ancient Celtic population of Gaul which is appropriately designated by the term Galli, embrace at least the whole centre and east of the country. Beyond the Seine and Marne, the northeast was occupied by a race whom Caesar characterizes as not less different from the Galli in language, manners and institutions, than were the Iberi, whom modern ethnologers represent as belonging to a distinct family. To this race he gives the name of Belgae, and informs us that in their own estimation they were principally descended from a Herman stock, the offspring of some early migration across the Rhine. According to Caesar’s view, the Gallic race extended much further than the limits above assigned to it, and included the people of the northwest, from the mouth of the Loire to that of the Seine; whereas Strabo, following probably the information of Posidonius, gives the whole of Gaul north of the Loire to the Belgae.”
“This fact of the division of the Gauls into races is one of great importance in the history of the Celtic family, though its announcement seems to have been left to very modern times. I believe Thierry was the first to discuss it scientifically. The introduction to the 3rd edition of the Hist. des Gaulois notices a hint of the same view in his lectures on Roman history. Niebuhr gave a hint of the same view in his lectures on Roman history, delivered before Thierry’s work, but published since. On the other hand, Arnold criticizes and hesitates to adopt it.”
“[O idioma Gaélico foi extinto.] In Gaul there remain at the present day vestiges of only one of these languages, the Kymric, which is still spoken in some portion of Brittany, a district included, as we have seen, in the Belgica of Strabo. The common theory, that the population of this country is the offspring of certain immigrations from the opposite coast, is wholly untenable.”
“The campaigns of Caesar bring us successively into acquaintance with distinct confederacies existing in different parts of the country, with little intercourse between them. The first is that of the Arverni, Aedui, Sequani, and other central and eastern tribes: beyond them the Belgica of Caesar forms a separate cluster of nations, closely connected among themselves, but maintaining no political relations with their southern neighbours. The tribes of Normandy and Maine hang, as it were, loosely upon the skirts of the Belgians proper, and though less intimately united with them, are easily induced to join in a common cause.”
“In short there exists a certain homogeneity throughout the whole Belgica of Strabo. Even to the south of the Loire it may be suspected that the Santones and Pictones belong to the same race with the communities to the north.”
O LADO RUIM DA CIVILIZAÇÃO: “Political power among the Gaelic tribes had fallen, for the most part, into the hands of the commonalty, but public virtue had withered almost before it blossomed; for the communities whose institutions were the most liberal and condition the most advanced, were precisely those which submitted most readily to the Roman domination.”
“The places which we find dignified by the names of towns, or oppida, were for the most part merely entrenched fastnesses on lofty eminences or in woody coverts, whither a whole tribe might retreat in case of attack with all its moveables and cattle. On this point here is much diversity of opinion. A writer in the Mém. Soc. Antiq. de France argues – 1. That the term civitas, when applied to the Gaulish barbarians by Caesar, never means a city, but always a State; 2. That the designation of urbs is used only 2 or 3 times; of Avaricum, Gergovia, Alcsia; 3. That oppidum is always a place of refuge and defence merely. He urges that Caesar’s description of the oppida implies that they were almost empty spaces; large armies manoeuvred in them, as at Avaricum 40,000 Gauls assembled ‘in foro et locis patentioribus’, VII:28. In the oppidum of Vesontio Caesar’s officers dwelt in tents. Critognatus speaks of it as a great calamity, that on the invasion of the Cimbri the Gauls were compelled to resort to their oppida, VII:22. (…) He asserts that in the ancient Celtic languages, the Low-Breton for instance, there is no word for a city in our sense. The assemblies of the people were held not in cities, but in the open air, at the common frontiers of several nations, VI:13. So religious ceremonies were performed in forests and on mountains, etc. The argument is pushed too far, and should be confined at least to the northern parts of the country; but Walckenaer (Géographie des Gaules) is, I think, too sweeping in his rejection of it.”
“The theological system known to us by the name of Druidism, from the appellation of its priests, was claimed by the Kymry of Britain as their own invention. (…) Druidism was preserved in its purest and most systematic form in our own island”
“It was in the northern and western parts of the country that the Druids seem to have exercised the greatest influence in political affairs; it was there that they continued to animate successive revolts against Rome, till they drew down an inveterate persecution upon themselves and their religion.” “The character of the system was essentially Oriental, and forms another link in the chain which connects the Kymry of the West with the Cimmerii of the Euxine shores, and through them with the primitive hives of Asia. It corresponded in many important particulars with the simple and comparatively spiritual character of the Persian theosophy; it taught the purity of the Godhead as a metaphysical abstraction, and the eternity of the soul’s existence by transmigration, but there seems no reason to suppose that the Druidical dogma maintained, like that of Pythagoras, the transmigration of the human soul into the bodies of animals. (…) Lucan and Mela only assert a belief in its immortality, implying the existence of a future state. See an essay by Chiniac de la Bastide, in Leber, Coll. de Pièces relatives à l’Histoire de France, p. iii.”
“it made use of natural phenomena as means to elevate the mind to the comprehension of a first cause, glided from thence into the frivolous delusions of astrology, and finally degenerated into the impieties and horrors of belief in magic.” Mas que historiador preconceituoso! “Hence its addiction to human sacrifices, the last resort of superstitious terror endeavouring to extort the secrets of futurity from a reluctant power, and to control the course of destiny.”
“The Roman sceptic was surprised to find the barbarians adoring, as he supposed, the same divinities whom his own critical acuteness had rejected. Jupiter and Apollo, and the rest of the host of Olympus, were recognized in the consistory of the Gallic deities: Mercurius seemed to hold the highest place among them, under the name of Teutates, and was venerated as the patron of all their civilization; the sun, or Apollo, was worshipped by the name of Belenus; Taranis represented the thunderer Jupiter; and Hesus was their Mars, the god of battles. We may ascribe the worship of Belenus and Teutates to the traditions imported into Gaul by the Phoenicians. (…) Belenus is connected with Baal. Teutates may still be recognized in many local names in England. The Greek colonists of the coast may also have had their share in moulding the western polytheism to the shape of the eastern; but it must still remain a question how far this form of heathenism was independent of Druidism, and how far, on the other hand, it was a degeneration from that more spiritual system, in accordance with the sensual tendencies of the period and the people. [?]”
“In the north-western angle of Gaul, comprised between the lower Loire and Seine, the region in which the Kymry seem to have been most unmixed, there exist at the present day about 90 remains of Celtic monuments, all probably of religious significance. They abound equally on the rocky coasts of Brittany, and the wooded hills of Normandy, in the meadows of Anjou, and the plains of the Orleanois. This various monuments are almost universally cromlechs, dolmens or rocking-stones.”
“In Aquitania the presence of the Celt is attested by only one or two monuments of his religion, and the antiquity of these may possibly remount to the earliest period of Gaulish history. But in the district between the Gironde and the lower Loire they are hardly less numerous than in Brittany and Maine, and are there scattered indiscriminately over hill, plain and valley, in token of the general diffusion and security of the worship which they subserved.”
“The Rhine, which formed the geographical boundary between Gaul and Germany, was never a barrier capable of restraining the migratory propensities of the northern races, or preventing the repeated transit of invaders from the right to the left bank. Accordingly, the Kymric population, which had spread over the northern region of Gaul, was constantly harassed by the Teutonic hordes, which pressed hungrily on its rear. (…) Such were the Eburones, Treviri and Nervii, the Segni, Caeresi and Paemani, who dwelt apart from the Kymry, with distinct habits and institutions. But it is to the whole of this population, thus fused and intermingled, that Caesar applies the name of Belgae; a name, however, which can be shown not to be properly generic, but to be appropriated in strictness, like that of Celt originally, to certain particular tribes. (Thierry, Gaulois) (…) We may readily believe that this mixed people had lost much of the genuine manners, language, and religion of its Celtic ancestors; and this may account for the paucity of its sacerdotal monuments, as well as for the difference which Caesar so strongly marks between its language and that of the Gael.”
“The Morini and Menapii fed entirely on fish and the eggs of wild fowl; they dwelt in the recesses of their woods and morasses, with no more sense of cleanliness and comfort than the Teutonic Eburones and Nervii. The Belgians were noted for the use of the scythed chariot, one of the rudest and earliest implements of war. (…) Caesar, however, makes no mention of scythed chariots among the Gauls or Britons. (Cluver, Germ. Ant.)”
“If the numbers of their fighting men are represented as enormous, we must remember that war was the only occupation of the people of the north, and that at least ¼ of each nation was ready at any moment to start up in arms.” “In the Pannonian revolt the total number of insurgent tribes is stated generally at 800,00, that of the warriors at 200,000.”
“Caesar himself boasted, as we learn from Plutarch [fonte nunca lá muito confiável…], that he had combated 3 millions of men”
CHAPTER 6/10: O INÍCIO DAS GRANDES CAMPANHAS DE CÉSAR: CÉSAR E OS GAULESES CONTRA DUAS ETNIAS GERMÂNICAS
O ADVENTO DOS HEADBANGERS OU DO COQUE SAMURAI? “Some figures on the column of Trajan (see Fabretti, Columna Trajana, p. 16) represent the mode of wearing the hair adopted by this people and their kindred tribes, as described by Tacitus (Germ. 38): ‘Insigne gentis obliquare crinem nodoque substringere . . . apud Suevos horrentem capillum retro sequuntur.’ The front hair is gathered back in a large knot or [horrenda] ball on the top of the forehead.”
“their enterprises were undertaken rather for plunder than with a view to a permanent change of abode, and they were not in the habit of going forth to war with their wives and children, betraying in that, as in other respects, a want of definite purpose which marks the lowest scale in human progress.
In the year of Rome 693 the forces of Ariovistus, the king of the Suevic nation, were standing on the German side of the middle Rhine, ready to obey the first invitation to cross it. They formed a compact body of warriors, 15,000 strong, unencumbered with baggage or followers, accustomed to a life of ceaseless activity, and despising every appliance of luxury or comfort.”
GAULESES EM MAUS LENÇÓIS: “The resources of the German tribe were undefined and unknown, but their proximity was imminent, the terror of their name was great, and their neighbours made the fatal mistake of fancying that they could counterbalance the hostility of Rome.”
“Possibly the Aedui, conscious of their own recent treachery, were ashamed to call upon their allies for aid; perhaps the republic was well-pleased to leave them for once to fight their own battle upon unequal terms. The contest quickly terminated in their complete discomfiture, and the conditions which they were compelled to accept were highly disadvantageous and disgraceful.”
“Cum his Aeduos eorumque clientes semel atque iterum armis contendisse, magnam calamitatem pulsos accepisse, omnem nobilitatem, omnem senatum, omnem equitatum amisisse.” Caesar
“The Aedui and their occasional allies [clients] again and again contended in arms; they received a great calamity and lost all the nobility, all the senate [corpo político da assembléia dos guerreiros?] and all the cavalry.”
“Divitiacus [o edil derrubado, que buscou refúgio em Roma] belonged to the Druidical caste, and was well versed in all the lore it boasted. As an expounder of the mysteries which already attracted the curiosity of the Roman sages, his society was peculiarly agreeable to Cicero, who has enshrined in his immortal pages the memory of their friendly intercourse. The recommendation of so illustrious a patron secured for the wanderer of the north more than ordinary respect. When he appeared in the senate to plead the cause of his countrymen, the allies and brothers of the Republic, he was requested to take his seat among the assembled nobles. But this honour he modestly declined, and delivered his address leaning on his shield. The story is recorded by Eumenius, a native of Autun, and we may conjecture that it was preserved traditionally among the Aedui. (…) Livy (38:21) describes the Gaulish shield as a long, narrow, and flat plank: ‘Scuta longa, caeterum ad amplitudinem corporum parum lata, et ea ipsa plana, male tegebant Gallos [mal serviam para cobrir os corpos dos gauleses].’” “[Caesar also] engaged in an intimacy with the Gaulish chieftain” “From conversation with Divitiacus, who became his constant companion in his Gallic campaigns, he derived, we may suppose, much of the acquaintance he manifests with the history and institutions of his adversaries.” “As far as the senate was concerned, the solicitations of Divitiacus fell upon unwilling ears.”
“While Divitiacus was still at Rome, the government bestowed upon his rival the titles of friend and ally, and presented him with magnificent tokens of its regard. If the senate could have had its own way, it would have continued to balance the 2 parties one against the other, and tried by these means to prevent aggression on either side. But it was with the people, after all, that the determination of the matter really lay; and when they insisted, shortly afterwards, upon the appointment of Caesar to his Gallic command, with such extensive and permanent powers, it was a distinct declaration of the national will in favour of a decisive and war-like policy beyond the Alps.”
“The Helvetii, who inhabited a great part of modern Switzerland, had grown impatient of the narrow limits in which they were crowded together, and harassed at the same time by the encroachments of the advancing German tide. The account which was commonly given of this people and their migration is that they were a pastoral tribe, abounding in wealth and of a peaceful disposition; it was the example of the Cimbri and Teutones, with whom they came in contact, that corrupted their natural simplicity, and suggested visions of conquest and rapine. (…) But Caesar says they were the bravest of the Gauls, from their constant warfare with the Germans on their frontier.”
“The Alps and Jura formed barriers to their diffusion on the south and west, and the population thus confined outgrew the scanty means of support afforded by its mountain valleys. One swarm indeed separated from the main body not many years before, uniting itself with the Cimbri and Teutones, and penetrating into Gaul by the northern outlet of their territory. But the German tribes, whose increasing numbers had closed against them the old Gaulish route to the east of Europe, had now settled themselves on the left bank of the Rhine also; and the Helvetii, who felt some contempt perhaps for their Gallic neighbours, were the less disposed to assail an enemy so formidable as the Suevi, and at the same time so poor. The western outlet, therefore, where the Rhone [há realmente um rio Rhone além de Rhine ou seria erro na conversão dos caracteres?][*] rushes out of the lake of Geneva and threads a narrow defile on its way into France, was the point to which their eyes were directed. (…) Orgetorix (…) suggestion that the entire nation should transplant itself to a foreign soil was received with universal approbation.”
[*] Realmente existe um Rhône que atravessa França e Suíça, cuja descrição bate com a de Merivale. Fica esclarecida a relação (wikia): “The Rhine is one of the four major rivers taking their source in the Gotthard region, along with the Ticino, Rhône and Reuss.”
“This enterprise, extravagant as it may appear, was no more than what the Cimbri might in all probability have accomplished, had they kept it steadily in view, and at a later period it was not the mere dream of a visionary.” “Dumnorix, the brother of Divitiacus, who had succeeded him in the office of vergobretus, and was anxious to extend the authority and duration of his office, was won over by the crafty Helvetian by promised of assistance and the bribe of his daughter in marriage. Casticus, the son of Catamantaledes, late king of the Sequani, had failed in obtaining the succession upon his father’s death and was burning with indignation at the affront.” “Orgetorix was summoned to appear before the popular assembly, and challenged to defend himself against the charge of aspiring to the tyranny. According to the custom of the barbarians, who seem never to have contemplated the possible innocence of an accused party, he was to plead his cause in chains, and, if unsuccessful, the penalty was death by fire. The culprit accepted the conditions, and the day was appointed: in the interval, however, he collected all his friends and dependants to the number of 10,000, and effected his escape. The nation flew to arms to recover the person of the fugitive, but his sudden death arrested their indignation. Disappointment and despair, it was rumoured, had driven the guilty intriguer to put an end to his existence. [pouco provável]”
“Allobroges qui nuper pacati erant.” Cícero – os bárbaros Alobroges já estavam pacificados então.
“We have seen that Caesar, on the expiration of his consulship, obtained the government of the 2 Gauls, together with Illyricum, and that the people were so strongly impressed with the military importance of these provinces in the impending crisis, as to confer the command upon him for a term of 5 years.” “The proconsul was content to watch the barbarian foes from a distance during the first months of the year. The prosecution of his own political schemes still required his proximity to Rome” “he overawed the deliberations of the nobles by fixing his camp before the gates of the city, at the same time that he communicated with his lieutenants beyond the Alps, and kept a vigilant eye upon the movements of the Helvetic tribes. The course of 3 months witnessed the success of all his schemes.” “The triumph of Clodius over the nobility was also completely effected in this short interval. (…) The power of the triumvirate was established upon an unassailable basis, while Caesar had secured by the marriage of his daughter an ascendancy in the counsels of his rival Pompeius.”
“They cut themselves off from the means of retreat by giving ruthlessly to the flames every city and village of their land; 12 of the one class and 400 of the other were thus sacrificed, and with them all their superfluous stores, their furniture, arms and implements.” [!!]
“The march of a Roman army was ordinarily 20 miles a day”
“The Helvetii were startled at the proconsul’s sudden appearance, and his determination to forbid their progress. They attempted conciliation, [depois de queimarem centenas das suas próprias cidades – que covardes imbecis!] and despatched a deputation to the Roman quarters, with instructions to represent their designs as innocent and peaceable, and to request a passage through the territories of the Republic, that they might explore some land of refuge in the farthest extremities of the West. They bound themselves in the most solemn manner to respect the property of the provincials on their march. But it was not consistent with the views of the Roman government to allow of such manifold disturbance as the contemplated movement would produce.”
“The tribe of the Tigurini,(*) constituting ¼ of the whole confederacy, had not yet crossed the Saone, when Caesar came up with them, and instantly gave them battle with 3 legions. This was the same tribe which had destroyed L. Cassius and his army exactly 15 years before. Among the Romans who had fallen on that day was the grandfather of Piso, Caesar’s father-in-law, and the energy of the Roman general was stimulated by the recollection of both a public and a private calamity. The barbarians were incommoded by the mass of baggage which had been placed under their care as forming the rearguard of the combined armament. The attack was totally unexpected. They were easily routed, and, also outnumbered, they suffered immense slaughter (…) The fugitives were allowed to make their escape unmolested, while Caesar proceeded to build a bridge with the greatest expedition, and transferred his army to the right bank of the Saone. The Helvetii were alarmed at the rapidity of his movements.
(*) The pagus Tigurinus may be the Canton of Zug or of Uri. Turicum, the name of Zurich in the Middle Ages, is proved to have been its Roman appellation also by an inscription, ‘sta(tio) Turicen(sis)’, found there in 1741. Walckenaer, 1:312.”
“Accordingly, they sent a deputation to confer with him, and while they offered to submit their destination to his direction, and seek their future residence in any quarter that he should indicate, they attempted to disguise their apprehensions of a collision with his forces by reminding him of their former successes against the Republic.”
“It may be remarked that though Divitiacus had been 2 or 3 years resident in Rome, he was unable to express himself in the Latin tongue; a circumstance the more surprising considering the admiration with which he regarded the life and manners of the civilized south. (…) Dumnorix, his traitor brother, was spared; but the proconsul gave him to understand the peril into which he had thrown himself, and placed his actions under vigilant observation.”
“The Lingones had no sympathy with the unwelcome intruders, and being secure of Caesar’s support, they wanted no further inducement to engage them to refuse the wanderers a passage. Disheartened and famishing the remnant of the crumbling host were soon compelled to surrender, and submit to any terms which the victor should be pleased to impose upon them. His measures were indeed sufficiently lenient, but for this he had a political object. The laws of war as interpreted by the Romans placed an enemy, when captured with arms in his hands, entirely at the disposal of the conqueror. Sometimes the whole nation was sold into slavery, sometimes it was even put indiscriminately to the sword, if vengeance or policy seemed to demand it. But Caesar, inflexible as was his severity whenever he deemed it fitting, accepted on this occasion the surrender of his helpless enemies as an act of voluntary submission, and contented himself with commanding them to return in a body to their own country. It was important the space which they had left vacant should be peopled again, as otherwise it would have attracted a colony of Germans, and brought a new and restless neighbor to the very doors of the Province. He laid upon the Allobroges the burden of furnishing the survivors of the horde with the necessary provisions, until they could rebuild their habitations and restore their soil to cultivation. A small body of 6,000 men had escaped from this convention, and were trying to cut their way into Germany. They were brought back to the Roman camp by the zeal of the Gaulish tribes through whom they had to pass, and these the proconsul, as he tells us, treated as enemies; a phrase of fearful import, which leaves us only uncertain whether they were put to the sword or sold as slaves. The tribe of the Boii were allowed to remain in the interior of Gaul, at the instance of the Aedui themselves, who admired their military prowess, and wished to settle them as allies and defenders in some districts of their own country. The whole number of those who returned to their homes amounted to 110,000 souls. Caesar caused a census to be taken.”
Já nessa época César recorria à “criptografia de guerra”: seus documentos estratégicos e urgentes eram despachados em letras ou ao menos em língua grega, pois os bárbaros não tinham conhecimento do grego e nem acesso a tradutores facilmente, caso interceptassem as cartas (ou os gauleses, caso decidissem trair a República). “In publicis privatisque rationibus Graecis utuntur literis”
“The Gauls were penetrated with surprise and admiration at the power of the Republic, which, at this distance from its home, had struck down an enemy before whom their own concentrated energies had quailed. The ability of the leader and the constancy of his legions through all the fatigues of so long a march, and the pressure of so many difficulties, impressed them with a higher sense of the character of their ancient rivals than national vanity had hitherto allowed them to entertain. They began at last to recognize the Romans as a superior race. Every State hastened to vie with its neighbours in strains of respect and adulation. Deputations crowded one upon another, congratulating the proconsul on his success, expressing the thanks of the Gaulish people for a deliverance such as they dared least expect from a stranger, so recently their deadly foe.”
“With whatever hopes of amity the senate might have amused Ariovistus, he could not but feel assured that the intentions of the proconsul, whom it had sent to manage the affairs of Gaul with absolute power, were decidedly hostile to his views.”
“Quid es Caesar? si vult, veniat: quid ad illum quid agat nostra Germania? num ego me interpono Romanis?” Florus
“Who is Caesar? If he wills, let he come to us! What is our Germany doing to him? Shall I myself go to the Romans?”
César ainda precisava subjugar Ariovistus e sua tribo, os últimos bárbaros a invadir os domínios romanos depois dos Helvetii. Na conferência diplomática pré-paz ou pré-guerra (a 1ª era impossível, de acordo com os comentadores, pois Ariovistus não cederia), César estava acompanhado de filhos dos grandes nobres romanos, que geralmente são enviados na juventude para adquirir experiência militar, fora da capital: “The hardships and perils of a Gallic campaign, against savage foes and in an ungenial climate, were more appalling to their imaginations than the service to which their fathers had devoted themselves in Asia, the land of luxuries and pleasures. The name of the Gauls indeed had been stripped of much of its ancient terror; but the Republic had not encountered the Germanic races since the invasion of the Teutones, and the hard-won victory of Marius had failed to obliterate the remembrance of her last great panic. Accordingly, when the Sequani were interrogated about the Germans, and described them as the most terrible of men, of tremendous stature, of hideous form, of savage cruelty, warriors who had not slept under a roof for 14 years, the shattered nerves of the dissolute patricians gave way. From these effeminate volunteers the alarm spread to the veterans, and pervaded the camp. Many sought leave of absence and fled from the danger; others, whom a sense of honour retained at their standards, were yet unable to conceal their fears, and did even more harm by remaining. It required all Caesar’s address and patience to make head against the growing spirit of dismay. He advised men and officers in private, he harangued them in public, and when at last every counsel and consolation failed, he threw himself with the tact of an old general, upon their feelings of pride and emulation. No commander, he said, had ever been ruined, unless by the desertion of his fortune or his own injustice. He declared his reliance upon the fortune which had already so conspicuously attached itself to him; at the same time he was no less animated by the consciousness of his rectitude. Such was his confidence, that he was resolved to go through with the affair he had undertaken, though with no more than a single legion. The 10th legion he knew he could trust, and with the services of all the rest, if they chose to desert him, he could afford to dispense. To the 10th legion the defence of the Province had been committed at the commencement of Caesar’s procunsulate. It was the same, perhaps, which had rendered Lucius Pomptinus victorious over the Allobroges, and it had more recently maintained the line of the Rhone against the threatened invasion of the Helvetti. The favoured division received the compliment with acclamations, while the rest of the army, stung with remorse, determined to wipe off the stain of cowardice and declared their readiness to dare the worst.”
“Nevertheless, he was anxious to conduct the quarrel, if possible, to a peaceable issue, and accordingly he proposed a conference to the German chieftain. They met on a hill rising from the centre of a plain, where they could be observed by either army, and the openness of the ground offered no lurking-place for an ambuscade.” “Caesar had no Roman cavalry, nor could he safely confide in his Gaulish auxiliaries” “It will be remembered that our accounts of these transactions, drawn almost entirely from Caesar’s own narrative, are ordinarily unchecked by any independent authority. The Romans themselves questioned Caesar’s candour; nevertheless, it would seem that their self-love forbade them to refute his statements.”
“The women had consulted together, according to the prescribed forms of divination, and declared that their countrymen could not conquer if they engaged before the new moon.”
“The manuscripts of Caesar read quinque, which agrees with the old Greek translation. But Plutarch makes the distance 400 stadia, or 50 miles. The context gives little assistance towards determining between these accounts. We only know that Caesar marched 7 days after leaving Besançon, and made a circuit of 50 miles. The distance of Besançon from the Rhine, in a direct line, is about 80 miles. Adopting the reading of our text, the field of battle would probably lie between Bâsle and Muhlhausen.”
“Ariovistus succeeded in crossing by means of a boat: not many of his followers were equally fortunate. Some swam the stream, but a far greater number were overtaken and put to the sword. The women shared perhaps the fate of the combatants. Two wives of the German king perished; of their daughters one was slain, another captured.”
“It would be worthwhile to point out, once for all, the extreme carelessness of many of the later writers in going over Caesar’s ground, although they must have had his commentaries in their hands. The only work which could have come into competition with his, for the author’s means of personal knowledge, was the history of his own times by Asinius Pollio, but we are not informed whether that writer entered into the details of the Gaulish campaigns.”
“The soil of Gaul was thus delivered from the German invaders, and its security in that quarter seemed at least for a time to be sufficiently assured.” “Having accomplished both his immediate objects in 2 campaigns and a single season, Caesar retired for the winter into the Hither Gaul, and convened the annual assembly of that province.”
“Caesar brought into the field javelinmen from Numidia, bowmen from Crete, and slingers from the Balearic isles.” “Nor, when the magnitude of his operations required fresh succours, did he restrict himself even to this number.” “These troops, composed partly of veterans, but principally of new conscripts, were gradually inured to equal discipline and bravery, and vied with each other in feats of prowess and devotion to their commander. Their great leader was not insensible how much he owed to their faithful services. No general was ever more lavish of his praises than he who recorded his soldiers’ achievements in his own commentaries on his wars.” “Caesar betrayed no jealousy of the merits of Labienus, the foremost of that renowned band [the 10th legion]. (…) The proconsul carried with him Quintus, the brother of Marcus Cicero, and Publius, the son of the triumvir Crassus: both of them became good officers under his eye. Cotta and Sabinus, Trebonius and Decimus Brutus, obtained distinction under the same auspices. The 2 former were cut off by the sudden attack of an overwhelming enemy, the 2 latter survived to conspire against their generous commander, the founder of their fame and fortunes. Guischard (Mémoires Militaires, 3:46) gives a complete list of Caesar’s officers, as far as they are known to us (…) Most of these personages we shall find distinguished in various ways in the eventful years which followed.”
CHAPTER 7/10: AS SEGUNDAS E TERCEIRAS CAMPANHAS GAULESAS DE CÉSAR E A PACIFICAÇÃO TERMINAL DO TERRITÓRIO GAULÊS
“The Remi were the most powerful of the Belgian tribes. They envied the position to which the chief States of southern Gaul had attained as leaders of numerous confederacies, and rejoiced in succeeding to a part at least of the influence lately enjoyed by the Sequani. They also were in turn distrusted by the other Belgic states, which hastened to form an alliance among themselves, while the Remi haughtily kept aloof.”
“Eo tum statu res erat, ut longe principes haberentur Aedui, secundum locum dignitatis Remi obtinerent.” César
O estado das coisas era tal que muitos líderes (romanos) tinham mais influência nos negócios dos Remi que o próprio edil (seu líder).
“Under the sway of a chieftain named Divitiacus, the Suessiones had recently become the most flourishing and powerful of the Belgian states and had extended their sovereignty over a part of Britain.” Caesar
“The Belgians had met in a general conference; the Suessiones, the Nervii, the Bellovaci, the Atrebates, the Ambiani, the Morini, the Menapii, the Caletes, the Velocasses, the Veromandui, all the nations between the mouths of the Meuse and the Seine, together with those of the interior. These names are identified with the following modem places and districts respectively, Soissons, Hainault, Beauvais, Artois, Amiens, the coast of the Pas du Calais and West Flanders, East Flanders, Pays de Caux in Normandy, the Vexin, the Vermandois.”
“the numbers and skill of the Romans were invincible, and the day was spent in merciless carnage rather than conflict.”
“Plurimum inter eos Bellovacos et virtute et auctoritate et hominum numero valere.” “They boasted that they could bring 100,000 warriors into the field.”
“Caesar describes (ii. 17) the peculiar mode which the Nervii adopted for impeding the progress of cavalry by forming hedges of thorns, brushwood, and the twisted branches of trees.”
“But the Belgians had not fought against the Romans long enough to understand their tactics.”
REAÇÃO RÁPIDA AO ATAQUE SURPRESA DOS BÁRBAROS: “Caesar, indeed, well knew his duty as a general to abstain from personal exposure in combat; but on such an occasion as this he could throw off all restraint, and fight in the first rank with the meanest of the soldiery. When his men saw him thus measuring himself with the enemy hand to hand, armed with a buckler [broquel, escudo] which he had snatched from a soldier of the hindmost rank; [peba] when they heard him encouraging their centurions by name, and acquitting himself among them as their equal and fellow, every hand was nerved with new vigour, every order he could utter was obeyed with ardour or anticipated by instinct, and a few minutes sufficed to clear a space in which the 2 legions could spread their ranks and place themselves in a position for mutual support and defence.”
“But the cool intrepidity of the sturdy legionary, with his thorough command of his cut-and-thrust sword of unfailing temper, was more than a match, man to man, for the German with his ponderous falchion, which embarrassed the slow and heavy movements of its bearer.”
“The narrative of Caesar, which forms an instructive and interesting guide through the whole course of his policy and tactics in Gaul, is in general so concise, and enters so little into technical details, as to foil [frustrar] the military critics who profess to study in it the art of war.”
“the small stature of the Italians was always a matter of derision to the northern barbarians”
“so universal was the feeling of insecurity among the Gallic tribes, their jealousy of each other and sense of mutual injuries. This was, no doubt, the secret of the speedy dissolution of the formidable confederacy which the Belgians had formed at the beginning of the year.”
“On the southern shore of Armorica dwelt the Veneti, the most formidable of all the nations which composed the western division of the Kymric population of Gaul. These, together with the Aulerci, Rhedones, Carnutes, Audi and Turones, occupied the whole space between the lower Seine and the lower Loire, and were apparently closely united among themselves, while at the same time the traditional recollection of a common origin made them look not without feelings of sympathy upon the fate of the Belgians in the East.”
“The small force which Crassus [tenente de César, já mencionado, filho de outro Crassus contemporâneo de César, também já bastante citado] led was sufficient to terrify them, one after another, into submission.”
“The senate, however hostile and jealously disposed, was dazzled by the brilliancy of his achievements, or unable to stem the torrent of popular acclamation. It decreed a thanksgiving of 15 days in honour of his victories, a duration exceeding that of any previous festival of the kind.”
“While the counsels of the Gauls were wasted by manifold jealousies, and by their independent mode of carrying on the war, even after they had been brought into alliance, the Romans enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a single head to plan, and an army disciplined as a single hand to execute. The senate allowed their general uncontrolled power in the administration of his province, and the resources he could command by taxation or plunder, were generally sufficient to bring into action as many troops as he could supply or manoeuvre. On the other hand, the personal qualities of the Gauls, their courage and bodily strength, were at least equal to those of their opponents; in size and stature they were individually superior, though wanting in that compactness of limb and power of endurance which at this time so eminently distinguished the natives of southern Europe. The composition of Csesar’s legions will be considered more particularly on a future occasion; his soldiers were for the most part Roman citizens of the Gallic provinces on either side of the Alps. These might be either of Roman or of Gaulish extraction. The contempt expressed by the Belgians for their diminutive stature is an additional proof of the great diversity of race among the inhabitants of different parts of Gaul.”
RELATIVA IMUNIDADE A DOENÇAS EPIDÊMICAS (MERIVALE CONTRASTA ESSA SAÚDE DAS LEGIÕES COM A PRECARIEDADE DOS ALOJAMENTOS DE SOLDADOS DAS GUERRAS MODERNAS): “Csesar’s troops quartered in the neighbourhood of Brundisium in the autumn of the year 705 suffered from the malaria of the Apulian coast, but these were composed, to a great extent, of recruits from the northern parts of Gaul.”
“It is a well known remark that the Italian soldiers in Napoleon’s Russian campaign suffered less from the cold than the Germans.”
“unusual or superabundant food is hardly less detrimental to the soldier than intoxication, and the barbarian armies which entered Italy frequently melted away through careless and indulgent living.”
“Vigorous in frame, and elastic in constitution, they bore the standards of the Republic through Asia and Africa without sickening; while at this day the French are consumed by thousands in Algeria, and fevers decimate the British regiments in the East and West Indies.”
“With modern infantry, the closer the array, the deadlier is the fire of their musketry, [a arte das armas de curto alcance] the steadier the advanced points of their bayonets. [Nos tempos modernos a baioneta é uma lâmina acoplável à ponta do rifle] In such an emergency the long pike of the phalanx was a formidable protection to the Macedonian infantry; but that weapon was too cumbrous for general service, and never adopted by the active and independent Roman, who put all his trust in his sword.” “Every Roman soldier required a space of 3 feet on each side of him for the free movement of his arms. But when room was cleared for a moment, the legion immediately extended its front again and separated its battalions.”
“There was, properly speaking, no distinction between heavy and light cavalry in the Roman armies (Guischard, Mém. Mil. iii.42.), but the equipment of that service would bring it generally under the latter denomination, according to our notions.”
“Gallis gladii praelongi et sine mucronibus.” Lívio
O gládio (espada) gaulês era comprido e sem corte.
“Thierry asserts that the Gauls long resisted the use of defensive armour as an unworthy innovation. I find no express authority for this statement; but Livy (xxii. 46., xxxviii. 21.) represents the Gauls as fighting naked, and stripping themselves for the combat. In the time of Louis XIV it was necessary to issue repeated ordinances to prevent the French officers from throwing off their armour in the field. The motive, perhaps, in both cases was partly vaingloriousness and partly laziness. Probably the custom of wearing armour among the Gauls did not extend beyond the nobles. Their helmets, generally the skins of animal’s heads, their corslets, chainmail, and the ornaments with which they covered themselves, are described by Diodorus, Sic. v. 30.; Varro, L.L. iv.; Strabo and others. Compare Cluvier, Germ. Ant. I.”
O VERDADEIRO MODERN WARFARE, LONGE DO PLAYSTATION: “The great disproportion, indeed, between the numbers slain in these battles on either side is an ordinary characteristic of ancient warfare. In modern engagements the greater part of the carnage is caused by the artillery, which may frequently be served with nearly equal precision and effect by both parties, until the superiority of one, being ascertained, the day is decided by the general advance of its lines.”
“When Caesar quitted the Further Gaul for his Cisalpine province, he did not leave his soldiers unoccupied. To inure them to constant exercise, to find new objects for their cupidity, to extend in every quarter the terror of his arms, there were sufficient motives for fresh and unprovoked hostilities. Some tribes about the waters of the Upper Rhone had not joined the great Helvetic migration. Their cities were still standing; their wealth, whatever it might be, was still intact. Caesar directed his lieutenant Galba to occupy the territories of the Nantuates, Veragri, and Seduni, with the 12th legion and a body of horse.”
“And now for the first time the name of the Britanni appears in the records of Roman history, for the Veneti drew both ships and men from the opposite coast of the channel.”
“The rapidity with which the flame of resistance spread through so many nations and such an extent of country convinced Caesar how fallacious was his reliance on the submission which had followed upon his last campaign.”
“Caesar seems to admit the inferiority of his own seamen in skill and boldness.” “The Veneti used vessels with flatter bottoms and higher sides than those of the Romans’; they built them also of greater strength, as men who had ample experience of the winds and waves of the Atlantic. On the other hand, their sails were clumsy and made of skins; they scarcely availed themselves of oars, and their movements were much slower than those of their rivals. But when once the 2 came in collision, the Venetian vessel was so firmly compacted as to withstand the stroke of the Roman’s beak, and its deck so high as to place its combatants on a ground of vantage.”
“The loss of the Veneti was overwhelming. Their whole naval force had been collected together. It bore the mass of their youth, their nobility, and their senate, who had hastily embarked to escape from the advancing foe, already so near to their city as to witness the naval combat from the shore.”
“The submission of only 2 nations now remained to complete the pacification of Gaul for the 2nd time. The Morini, farthest of mankind, as Virgil designates them, occupied the coast of the Northern Ocean, from the straits to the mouth of the Scheldt. The Menapii also inhabited a land of woods and marshes on the banks of the lower Meuse. In their distant and little envied recesses these 2 tribes had not yet experienced the keenness of the Roman sword”
“After the defeat of the Veneti the summer was drawing to a close; but Caesar, determined to inflict chastisement upon every nation, however remote, which had dared to join the northern confederacy, crossed the centre of Gaul to aim a blow at these last enemies.” “When at last the bad season set in it was necessary to recall the soldiers from their fruitless labour, and thus, at the close of Caesar’s 3rd campaign, the only members of the Gaulish race who retained their liberty were the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees and the amphibious wanderers of the Wahal and the Scheldt.”
CHAPTER 8/10: O EXÍLIO DE CÍCERO, A ASCENSÃO DE CLODIUS & A VOLTA ACLAMADA DE CÍCERO
“It might indeed have been possible to seize the person of the demagogue by force, to defy the clamorous imputation of sacrilege, and crush the mutinous spirit of the mob which served him. But Clodius had proclaimed that Cicero must either perish or conquer twice.” Cf. Cíc., Sestius 16-20.
“How many difficulties would have stood in the way of a legal attack upon him may be conceived from the fictions and evasions to which his enemy was compelled to resort in order to obtain his condemnation even when absent.”
“It was only by the blunder of Cicero’s friends, who sought to mitigate the sentence by inserting a clause to limit the distance of his banishment to 400 miles from the city, that the brand of exile was legally fixed upon him.”
(*) “The nature of the decree of Sextus Clodius is to be gathered principally from the speeches Pro Domo sua and Post Reditum ad Quirites. It is well known that the 4 orations attributed to Cicero upon his return from banishment lie under suspicion of spuriousness. Their genuineness was first questioned by Markland in the middle of the last century [XVIII], assailed still more vehemently by Wolf, and has been tacitly surrendered by Orelli. (…) The objections to them, however, seem far from conclusive, and in any case their value as historical documents is little impeached by them. It is known that Cicero delivered speeches on the occasions to which they refer, and that he was well pleased with them as specimens of his oratorical powers; we may conclude therefore that they were published, and obtained notoriety in Rome. (…) It is clear, therefore, that if they are not Cicero’s, the writer must have had the originals before him, and kept the facts and details distinctly in view.”
“Possibly Pompeius or Caesar controlled its execution from a distance, and let it be understood that the safety of the exile should not be compromised, that his friends should be treated with forbearance, and the crime of entertaining him in his banishment connived at. Cicero was well received at Brundisium, within the bounds of Italy, no less than beyond the sea.” “The sphere of Clodius’s power was, after all, confined to Rome.”
“The consuls divided the spoils of the Palatine house and the villa at Tusculum, the favourite retreat of the statesman and philosopher. The tribune seized for his own share the remnant of the site of the former, which, with that purpose, he had left unconsecrated, and attached it to his own residence, which lay contiguous.”
“En age, namque oculis amota nube perumper
Cernere cuncta dabo, surgit qua celsus ad auras,
Adspice, montis apex, vocitata Palatia Regi
Parrhasio plena tenet et resonante pharetra,
Intenditque arcum et pugnas meditatur Apollo.
At qua vicinis tendit se collibus altae
Molis Aventinus, viden’ ut Latonia virgo
Accensas quatiat Phlegethontis gurgite taedas,
Exsertos avide pugnae nudata lacertos.
Parte alia cerne quo saevis Gradivus in armis
Implerit dictum proprio de nomine campum.
Hinc Janus movet arma manu, movet inde Quirinus,
Quisque suo de colle Deus…”
Silius, Punic., XII
“Come on, for the cloud has been removed from your eyes
I will give you a glimpse of everything, which rises high to the winds,
Look, on the top of the mountain, the King’s Palace it is called
Parrasius holds a full and resounding quiver,
Apollo aimed his bow and planned the battles.
But the neighbors tend to the high hills
On the Aventine hill, see the virgin Latonia
Let Phlegethon’s gurgling embers shake,
The naked lizards were eager to fight.
On the other side, see how the savage Gradivus is in arms
Fills in the proper name of the field.
From here Janus moves his arms with his hand, Quirinus moves from there,
Each God in his own hill…”
(*) “The Tusculam villa is the spot in which Cicero laid the scene of his dialogue De Divinatione and the Tusculanae Disputationes, and it was there, we may presume, that he composed them.”
“Gabinius received on his part, full powers to make war upon any of the foreign potentates whose frontiers bordered upon Syria, upon the Arabians, the Persians and the Babylonians. Egypt indeed was carefully excepted from the States against which he was permitted to lead the legions of the Republic. But Egypt, it will appear, was precisely the point of attack which offered the greatest temptation to the ambition or cupidity of a proconsul in the East, and it could hardly be expected that one who had profited so much by successful violence should hesitate to grasp at the only prize forbidden him.”
“There was yet another enemy both of Clodius and the triumvirs, the inflexible and magnanimous Cato, whom it was essential to their objects to remove from the scene of their intrigues.” “The means they adopted for this purpose were craftily contrived to undermine his influence by throwing suspicions upon his integrity. Ptolemaeus, king of Cyprus, was the younger brother of Ptolemaeus Auletes, who occupied the throne of Egypt. The elder had been acknowledged as the ally of the Roman people; the younger had obtained the complimentary designation of their friend. No evil designs were imputed to him; the safety or tranquillity of the empire demanded no sacrifice of him; the pretence that he abetted [instigou] piratical depredations was paltry as well as false.(*) But it was known that he had accumulated large treasures, and the Roman government under the guidance of 2 unscrupulous consuls, proposed to deprive him of his kingdom and confiscate his possessions to the public service. A Roman officer of conspicuous mark and dignity was to be sent to demand the surrender; the edict had gone forth, and no other discretion was left to the instrument of the Republic than to manage the affair with violence or mildness, according to the bent of his own disposition. Of all the principal men in Rome at the time, it might be thought that to Cato the execution of an act of such glaring injustice would be least palatable. For this very reason perhaps the high-minded philosopher was selected to enforce it. It was rightly calculated in the councils of the dominant cabal that his principles of strict obedience to the will of the State would not allow him to decline the commission; but it was hoped that the acceptance of so ignoble an office under the direction of the enemies of his party would tend to lower his estimation among them. Possibly it was surmised that the handling of such a mass of treasure might have some effect in corrupting even his sturdy morality; at least it would furnish a pretext for blackening his character. The tribune accordingly brought forward a rogation to this effect, which he fortified by producing Caesar’s written approval. Pompeius was well pleased, for his own part, that the odium of the extraordinary commissions with which he had himself been charged, which he sometimes felt to be galling, should be shared by a leader of that very party which had most vehemently opposed his own schemes of aggrandisement. He considered it a master-stroke of policy thus to stay the clamours of his fiercest enemy, and he readily joined the tribune in urging the adoption of the rogation and the appointment of Cato as the commissioner.
(*) Clodius had a personal enmity against Ptolemaeus; for having once been captured by the pirates, he had applied to him to obtain a sum of money for his ransom. The king, it seems, sent him 2 talents for the purpose, and Clodius held himself affronted by the moderate value thus set upon him. It appears, however, that the pirates themselves did not consider it adequate.”
“Cato, however, immediately perceived that the offer was meant not as a favour but as an insult and a snare, and rejected it with indignation. The tone of Clodius instantly changed from coaxing to menace, and, presenting himself before the assembly, he obtained a decree for the appointment of the refractory patriot. It was asserted that neither ship, nor attendants, nor military force were furnished to him; every chance of failure was purposely given to the enterprise. This account is given by Plutarch. [ou seja, provavelmente é mentira] Cato attained the object of his mission without the employment of force; but it is not likely that he was really left without the means.”
“And to this service Clodius caused another, not less scandalous, to be annexed, the restoration, namely, to their city of certain persons whom the free State of Byzantium had expelled for sedition and breach of the public peace.”
“Having undertaken the service, he seems to have performed it with as much forbearance as its nature admitted. He forbore to intrude himself into the presence of the unfortunate king; perhaps he was ashamed to transact so foul a business in person. Remaining himself at Rhodes, he sent a lieutenant to deliver the decree of the Roman people, and to promise the injured monarch a rich and honourable compensation in the priesthood of the Paphian Aphrodite. Ptolemaeus made no attempt at resistance; but his royal spirit scorned to descend to a private station, or accept a favour from the hands of treacherous enemies. Fortunately for Cato, as Plutarch remarks, [ih…] he preferred to embrace a voluntary death. His vacant throne was immediately overturned, his subjects placed under the rule of a Roman governor, and the fatal treasures which he had amassed poured with the strictest fidelity into the coffers of the State. It would be well for the character of the most illustrious model of republican virtue if the narrative of this event could stop here; but it must be remarked that Cato, having thus performed what he might consider no more than his duty as a citizen, so far from protesting afterwards against the injustice of the decree, seems rather to have prided himself upon his mission, as redounding to his honour no less than to his advancement. As Clodius had probably foreseen, he became the defender of the acts of his patron’s tribunate. He not only repudiated the excuses which Cicero afterwards suggested for his submission, but openly withstood the attempts of the orator, after his return from banishment, to fasten a stigma upon the administration of his baffled persecutor.”
“Cato was accompanied on his mission by his nephew, M. Brutus, a young man of noble birth, of high and ambitious aspirations, but whose public career had hitherto been confined to serving as lieutenant to Caesar in his government of Spain. The important part which he was destined to act in the closing scenes of the Roman Republic, and the peculiar celebrity attached to his name, make us the more anxious to investigate the minuter actions of his life, and acquire a complete view of his character.”
“The shocking suspicion,¹ however, it may be here remarked, that Brutus became the murderer of the man to whom he owed his existence is a mere invention of the Roman anecdotists.”
¹ Não parece que com isso Merivale isente Bruto de ser o principal conspirador, ou um dos, mas apenas o de ter sido o homicida direto de César, i.e., de ter dado a punhalada, ou a 1ª punhalada, e de ter ouvido de sua boca “Até tu!”. (O que César poderia ter dito a todos que estavam ao seu redor, de qualquer modo.) Além disso, nesse contexto se refere a uma outra motivação lendária para tê-lo assassinado: não o poder, mas o fato de que espalhavam sobre sua mãe boatos vis de que seria uma amante de César! O assassinato político mais célebre de todos os tempos como um crime passional de “ter comido a mãe do assassino”!
“[Embora os rumores fossem falsos] Caesar’s intimacy with Servilia Bruto was, it may be presumed, a principal cause of the marked favour with which he distinguished her offspring.” Além disso, aventa-se a teoria edipiana, como sempre nestes casos: porém Bruto era apenas 15 anos mais jovem e não podia, de qualquer maneira que se concebesse, ser filho de César! Ademais, a História diz que César desonrou a filha mesma desta Servília, meia-irmã de Bruto (mais uma motivação fantástica para a conta?).
“The elder Brutus being cut off prematurely, when his son was only 8, the care of his education fortunately passed from the hands of an intriguing mother into those of his uncle Cato; and the youth became early initiated in the maxims of the Stoic philosophy, and learned to regard his preceptor, whose daughter Porcia he married, as the purest model of practical and abstract virtue. But, together with many honourable and noble sentiments, he imbibed also from him that morose strictness in the exaction as well as the discharge of legal obligations, which, while it is often mistaken for a guarantee of probity, is not incompatible with actual laxity of principle. [estoicismo pela metade, ou em terça parte…] Accordingly, we find that while, on the one hand, he refrained as a provincial officer from extorting by fraud or violence the objects of his cupidity, he was, on the other, not the less unscrupulous in demanding exorbitant interest for loans advanced to the natives, and enforcing payment with rigid pertinacity. [ah, a agilidade do interesse pessoal, sempre acima da do interesse público!] His base transactions with the magistrates of Salamis, as also with Ariobarzanes, king of Cappadocia, are detailed in Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus.” “The bitter reflections which Cicero makes upon the conduct of Brutus mark the strong contrast between the tried and practical friend of virtue and the pedantic aspirant to philosophic renown.” A exata repetição da tragédia de Platão e Dionísio II (sem uma vítima fatal, mas a que preço – a ruína de um Estado).
O JÂNIO QUADROS DELES: “The character of this illustrious exile is fully and curiously developed to us in the very complete collection we possess of his letters at this period. They exhibit the writhings of a mind which wreaks upon friends the torments of self-dissatisfaction. The writer begins early to think he has made a false step, and to throw the blame upon those who advised, or at least did not actively dissuade him from it.” “In these words he seems to point more particularly to Hortensius, whom he might fancy to be jealous of him as a rival in eloquence” Retiro o que disse sobre compará-la nalgum sentido a Platão! Não existe ninguém tão abnegado em Roma.
“Those to whom I believed my safety was dearest have treated me as the most cruel enemies; when they saw me despond only a little, they played upon my fears, and urged me to my ruin.”
“Nor does he spare Atticus himself, even while heaping upon him the strongest assurances of confidence. At length he works himself to such a pitch of irritation as to broach the question of suicide, and so arrays his arguments as to leave his friends under some apprehension lest his troubles should be brought to a violent termination.”
“He does himself much injustice, probably, in the overcharged picture he has drawn of his own imbecility.” Hahahaha!
“The political history of the times makes little mention of T. Pomponius Atticus, familiar as his name is to scholars, from the confidential intercourse with which Cicero honoured him.” “A follower, from temper as well as from reflection, of the philosophy of Epicurus, he vaunted the consistency of his life with his professions. [Epicuro > Sêneca] In the most stirring age of the commonwealth, he abstained from all political action;(*) though closely connected with the oligarchy, he attached himself to no party; nor would he undertake the discharge of any public functions at home or abroad. He refused even the safe and easy dignities upon the friends who followed in their retinue; nor would he employ his abilities and attainments in the career of an advocate, to which every Roman gentleman deemed himself born.
(*) He wrote an epitome of Roman history, a history of Cicero’s consulship in Greek, and drew up genealogical tables of the principal Roman families. Cf. Nepos, Att. 6, 8.”
“He never proferred an accusation against anyone himself, though such display of zeal for the public interests was the beaten road of honourable distinction; nor would he subscribe his name to the charges promoted by a friend. (…) Yet Atticus was not ungenerous in his care for Cicero, and afterwards for Brutus” “it deserves to be remarked that the factions of Rome were always extremely tolerant of neutral parties.”
“The friend of Sulla, Cicero, Brutus and Agrippa, Atticus outlived several generations of contemporary statesmen.”
“Not indeed that there was much actual danger to a woman abandoned by her legitmate protector, even in the midst of his political enemies. The Roman women in the olden times had been bred on a system which disabled them from taking any part in politics.” “It may be remarked, as an exception to this contemptuons generosity, that Licinia, the wife of C. Gracchus, was deprived of her dowry. Merimée, i. 81. note.”
“With the advance of civilization the manners of antiquity relaxed; the Roman matrons, the Cornelias, the Porcias and Aurelias, became not unfrequently the counsellors of their husbands and the intructors of their children”
“Nevertheless, the situation of Terentia, the wife of Cicero, demanded the solicitude of his friends. The confiscation of her husband’s fortune reduced her at once to poverty.”
(*) “Pliny (HN, iii. 23.) calls Dyrrhachium a Roman colony, but the great importance of the place as an emporium of commerce had given it probably the means of claiming autonomy. It had been famous for its hospitality to strangers, from whence it may have derived its ancient name of Epidamnus. See Perizon, ad Aelium. V.H. xiii. 16. There was a popular story that the Romans changed the name to Dyrrhachium, ‘Ominis causa, quasi in damnum ituri.’ Mela, ii. 2.” Por causa do oráculo.
“The elections for the ensuing year had already proved favourable to the prospect that the decrees against Cicero would be speedily reversed. This was chiefly owing to the sudden change in Pompeius’s disposition towards Clodius.” “It was reported indeed that Clodius had contrived a plot to assassinate the triumvir. All the circumstances requisite to substantiate the report were vouched for: one of the tribune’s slaves was seized at Pompeius’s door; he had a dagger upon him; he confessed that he had been placed there by his master to commit the murder.”
“The consuls commenced their career by mobing the question of the orator’s recall. They were baffled in the first instance by the veto of Serranus, one of the tribunes. A 2nd attempt issued in a furious and bloody tumult excited by Clodius, and carried through by the armed clients and paid adherents by whom he was constantly attended. Rome was abandoned for an instant to brute violence. Clodius, blind with rage, set fire with his own hands to the temple of the Nymphs, and consumed the registers of the censorship; he attacked the houses of the principal nobles, and filled the forum with the corpses of the slain. Such a scene had not been witnessed within the walls since the contest of Cinna and Octavius. At last Annius Milo, on the part of the senate, collected a body of gladiators under arms, and patrolled the streets to prevent his opponent’s followers from assembling”
“Nevertheless, the forms of the constitution gave such obstructive power to the factious and unscrupulous that Clodius still contrived to suspend for several months the carrying of a law for his restoration. The refractory tribunes, through whose vetoes he acted, for he had ceased to belong to the college himself, saw themselves gradually deserted by all their principal supporters, and were at last bought off or wearied out by the inflexible determination of the senate.”
“in September the exilé reappeared in the city, after an absence of 16 months.” “He was received on the Capitol with such acclamations as had rarely fallen to the lot of the greatest conquerors”
CHAPTER 9/10. OS TUMULTOS DE ROMA ANTES DA VOLTA DE CÉSAR. CÍCERO VOLTA À POLÍTICA E TROCA DE LADO. A MORTE DE JÚLIA E SUAS REPERCUSSÕES.
“On the very day upon which the law was passed in favour of Cicero’s recall, a sudden fall was remarked in the price of corn. The partisans of the banished man hailed this circumstance as a manifest token of divine approbation. True it was that the markets rose again almost immediately”
“The Clodian party took this opportunity of throwing the blame of this rise upon Cicero, whose friends had filled the city with strangers to secure his recall. Cicero was thus driven to promote Pompeius’ interests in his own defence. Clodins therenpon attacked Pompeius as the real author of the famine.”
“That august body had listened to the speeches of Cicero on his return with commiseration, the people with shame and contrition. All possible reparation was to be made to the injured patriot. The site of his house on the Palatine was restored to him, cleared of the new builings which Clodius had begun to erect upon it, and relieved from the effect of the act of consecration, which was now disregarded as informal. Sums of money were also voted to him in compensation for his pecuniary losses. The next object was to institute proceedings against the demagogue [Clodius] for the violence and illegality of his conduct. The validity of his original election to the tribuneship he had so abused might be brought into question, for high authorities pronounced the mode of his adoption into a plebeain house illegitimate.”
“It was soon found, indeed, that even the pursuit of a common enemy was not a matter of interest sufficiently intense to subdue the private jealousies of a triumphant faction.”
“For a moment all other party interests were abandoned, and political leaders rushed together into the arena to compete for this brilliant preferment.”
“the fate of Pompeius, when he was afterwards murdered on the shore of Egypt, was attributed to his neglect of its warning, [do oráculo, ainda por cima politicamente forjado!] in venturing merely to land upon the beach and seek and asylum for his broken army.”
“The triumvirs, regardless of their common interest, could no longer dissemble their mutual jealousy. Pompeius openly accused his associate of designs against his life, while Crassus thwarted with vigilant activity every scheme for his rival’s aggrandisement. Obscure as were the sources of the power which Crassus wielded, every day proved how deeply it was seated, and how great was the weight of the moneyed class by which he was principally supported. The result of a series of petty intrigues gradually narrowed the contest to one between Pompeius and Lentulus, but the increasing violence of the popular demagogues made its decision impossible.” “The statue of Jupiter on the summit of the Alban mount was struck by lightning, a portent which excited a general panic, and raised a cry for rescinding the appointment of Lentulus.”
“The wheels of the constitution were locked.” “By getting himself elected aedile, Clodius had for the present averted the danger of judicial impeachment. The influence he still continued to wield at this crisis, bankrupt as he was in character, and destitute of the ordinary resources of great party leaders, must be referred to the secret support he received from personages of more importance than himself. Pompeius indeed had cast him off in a fit of spleen; yet the ends for which the triumvir was secretly working could only be realized through the confusion to which the demagogue’s proceedings were obviously tending.”
“The consuls for the year just commencing were men of more than common resolution; such at least was Lentulus Marcellinus, and his superior force of character carried Marcius Philippus, his colleague, along with him.”
“Domitius Ahenobarbus openly declared that his 1st act in office should be to propose Caesar’s recall from his province, and he was actuated no doubt by a similar spirit of hostility towards Caesar’s allies. (…) to him the deprivation of his command would be something much more serious than a mere temporary frustration of his ambitious projects. It would be no less than a summons to appear before his enemies at Rome, unarmed and defenceless. The moment he should descend from power, banishment or even death, in all probability, awaited him. Caesar’s position was, indeed, exceedingly critical. The reversal of the sentence on Cicero came too soon for his policy. He had assented to it with reluctance. It had been extorted from him by the impatience of Pompeius; for he had doubtless looked to the continuance of Clodius’ ascendancy until he could obtain certain further concessions from the terrified senate.”
“The proconsul of Gaul was never more actively engaged than during the intervals between the campaigns by which his attention was for the time engrossed. After the apparent submission of the Transalpine nations in the autumn of 697, he had betaken himself to the Hither province, where he had 2 objects in view; the 1st, and more ostensible, was to convene the national assembly of the Cisalpine communities, through which he regulated the internal affairs of his government, levied contributions and recruited his legions; the 2nd was to confer with the friends whom he had left in the city, who flocked to him at Lucca, bringing in their main political agents of every shade of party, spies, enemies and admirers.” “In lavishing upon his flatterers the spoils of his successful wars, he was preparing to thrust his hands into the public treasury, for the payment of the armies he had led to victory.”
“even of the best and gravest many bowed beneath the ascendancy of his character, in which they beheld the last pledge of public order, energy and security.
The enmity between Pompeius and Crassus was felt by Caesar, who had so much use to make of both, to be highly disadvantageous to his interests. He was anxious to effect a reconciliation between them before he left Italy to resume the command of his armies. He obtained interviews with them separetely, with Crassus at Ravenna, afterwards with Pompeius at Lucca, where he eventually succeeded in bringing them together. The winter had passed, and he had not yet torn himself from the scene of his intrigues, when at the commencement of the month of April he was assailed by a direct attack on the part of the oligarchs. The onset was led my Cicero himself. [coitado] The orator, after the 1st outburst of vanity and exultation, had learned to take a juster view of his own position. The glory which surrounds him in the eyes of posterity, for the splendour of his genius and the dignity of his character, has blinded too many historians to the moderate estimation in which he was held by his own contemporaries. Among the statesmen of his party Cicero occupied only a secondary place. The brand of ignoble birth was upon him; his ascent to power was obstructed, his retention of it thwarted by his own allies; it was only when his services were essential that they consented to place him at their head. Cicero, for his part, had discovered that a man who could be so easily overthrown ought not to aspire to command. The nobles had blandly waived his invitation to take them under his wing. The sneering tone in which he continues to speak of them may lead us to infer that he keenly felt the disparagement they cast upon him. But he bowed to circumstances. Through the first 3 months of the year he displayed himself very little on the stage of public affairs. But suddenly, in the beginning of April, he startled the city by stepping prominently forward, and attacking Caesar’s law for the division of lands in Campania. The government had recently been obliged to place a large sum, 40 millions of sesterces, at the disposal of its high commissioner for the supply of the city. The treasury was drained, and it was easy to assert that there were no means forthcoming for the purchase of lands, according to the tenor of the late agrarian enactment. Now the nobles had need of boldness and eloquence. At their instigation Cicero proposed that the law should be altogether repealed; and the senate, full, he assures us, of admiration at his manoeuvre, which it pretended to ascribe to himself alone, received the motion with acclamations, such as were oftener heard in a popular assembly than in the deliberations of so august a council.”
“The election of Domitius must be defeated, and Caesar urged his colleagues to present themselves as candidates in opposition to him. If successful, he depended on them to secure him in his military command, ands to enlarge his powers to any extent he might choose to demand. Should the senate persist in preventing the people from assembling, he was confident that it must ultimately be tired out, or frightened from its course by the fear of a dictatorship. Meanwhile, Pompeius should use every endeavour to detach Cicero from the enemy, and assist in procuring the prolongation of Caesar’s command, together with the other indulgences which he required.”
CÍCERO, UM GATINHO INDEFENSO: “No sooner had the orator delivered his speech against Caesar’s agrarian law than he had hastened to pay a visit to Pompeius, who was on the point of leaving Rome for Sardinia, with the hope of eliciting from him some tokens of approbation. But the crafty dissembler was impenetrably reserved; he did not even mention that he expected to meet Caesar at Lucca on his way. Cicero probably augured no good from this taciturnity. He had already revolved in his mind the rashness of the move he had made; he had balanced the disastrous consequences of a breach with the triumvirs against the slender support he could expect from the weak and wavering faction to which he had renewed his devotion. He was relieved perhaps from a weight of anxiety when he received letters from his brother expostulating with him on his hostility to Caesar, urging the policy of concession, and still assuring him that the triumvirs, though offended, were not implacable. We discover immediately an entire change in the tone of the orator’s correspondence.(*) He abandons resentfully the cause of the oligarchs, against whose faithlessness and frivolity he lashes himself into indignation. They no longer love him, he says, and he must now transfer his regard to others who do so. He paints to himself in glowing colours the merits of the great chiefs of the Republic, and argues from the maxims of wise men of old that the simple citizen should conform his views to those of the best and noblest. He deprecates the charge of inconstancy in tones which seem to admit its justice, and finally resigns himself in despair to the irresistible current of circumstances.
(*) Compare Cicero’s letters ad Att. iv. 5, ad Div. i. 7 and more particularly that to Lentulus ad Div. i. 9, in which he reviews his political course at this period.”
A verdade é que Cícero não tinha o direito de aconselhar ninguém…
“Cicero indeed was spared the disgrace of refuting in May the arguments which he had alleged against Caesar’s law in the month preceding. The senate, abandoned by its spokesman, allowed the matter to drop.”
“All the speakers, except Servilius, had declared themselves in favour of depriving the Gallic proconsul of one or more of the governments he held in conjunction, when Cicero stepped forward in his defence, with a speech of peculiar dignity and spirit. He pointed with just enthusiasm to the extent and rapidity of Caesar’s conquests; he had broken the Helvetians, he had repulsed the Germans, he had received submission and hostages from every state of Gaul. Cicero urged the expediency of allowing him to complete and consolidate the work he had thus successfully begun; a work which should relieve Rome henceforth from any dread of foreign invasion. By an artful panegyric on Pompeius, the victor of the East, the orator insinuated the importance of fostering the genius of an ambitious rival. He claimed it as a merit that he had prevailed on the senate to increase the number of Caesar’s lieutenants, and to grant him the pecuniary supplies which the war demanded.” “But Cicero had not missed the opportunity of avenging himself on the consuls who had consented to his banishment. He showed with his usual felicity how strongly the Sempronian law condemned the appointment of Piso and Gabinius to Macedonia and Syria, and he even succeeded in effecting their recall. The latter, however, did not relinquish his government till M. Crassus came to supersede him, A.U. 700. Piso was summoned home without delay, and his province banded over to the praetor Q. Ancharius.”
“The new consuls, Pompeius and Crassus, having obtained their own appointment by violating every principle of justice and law, proceeded to employ similar means to secure the other magistracies for creatures on whom they could rely.”
“Nor indeed did the sworn defenders of the public tranquillity carry their point in all cases without bloodshed. But quiet was eventually restored; they were feared for their vigour, if not respected, and Rome settled down for a time in exhaustion and disgust under the tyranny of her new rulers.
When Pompeius looked back upon his own career, from the time of his return from Asia, in the enjoument of unexampled glory, and with the prospect of exerting almost boundless influence, he could not fail to observe that he had fallen from the summit of dignity which he then occupied, and that Caesar, a younger aspirant, was threatening to outclimb him at no distant day. He might remark how different had been the course they had respectively pursued. The one had awaited in proud inaction the offer of fresh honours and powers; the other had seized and secured them with his own hands. The one had studied to increase the confusion of public affairs, by balancing faction against faction; the other had attached himself, without wavering, to the party with which he was hereditarily connected. The one had hoped that the necessities of the State would at last combine all men in the common policy of elevating him to the dictatorship; the other had applied himself steadily to the task of reducing his opponents to insignificance, and throwing the creation of a supreme ruler into the hands of his own devoted adherents. Pompeius seems to have now determined to alter his previous course, and imitate that of his more audacious competitor, by bolder and more hazardous steps, such as he had not shrunk from himself in earlier times, when his position was still to be won. With this view he had grasped at the consulship, and obtained it by means which the nobles could never forgive. He wanted, as we have seen, to secure the reversion of a province, and to place himself again at the head of an army.” “As a military chieftain, he might enact again the crowning triumphs of his master Sulla, whom he had imitated in the outset of his career with such fidelity and success. But the toils in which Caesar had entangled him, by the connexion he had so dexterously formed between them, confined his movements on every side, and disabled him from the free use of the victory he had gained.”
“The consuls began their career with an outward show of moderation, affecting to be content with their brilliant position, and to look for no ulterior advantages. But C. Trebonius, one of their tribunitian allies, came forward in their service, and, no doubt, at their own suggestion, with a proposal that the governments of Spain and Syria should be conferred upon them respectively, at the expiration of their year of office, for a term of 5 years, together with extensive powers for making war and levying armies. The friends of Caesar were immediately roused. A renewal of the lease of his own proconsulate was the object at which Caesar was aiming. His original term was now only in the course of its 4th year, but his plans required several more for their full development. There must be fresh campaigns to complete the training of his soldiers; new resources must be discovered to gorge the cupidity of his officers. Gaul, he might urge, once conquered, had risen again in arms; Germany and Britain loomed obscurely in the distance; the mere proximity of freedom furnished a dangerous example to unsettled and discontented subjects. The excuse was plausible, but it was only a pretence; the real objects of the proconsul were not such as could be revealed in the Roman forum.”
“The consuls were compelled reluctantly to recede from their own exclusive pretensions, and it was signified to Trebonius, as their wish, that he should propose another law for the prolongation of Caesar’s command also.”
(*) “Vell.[?] ii. 46: ‘Caesari lege, quam Pompeius ad populum tulit, prorogatae in idem spatium temporis provinciae.’”
OS TIRANOS X CÉSAR X OS NOBRES (OLIGARCAS)
Facções que hoje é difícil olhar como sendo diferentes, mas eram, e bastante!
“No sooner, therefore, were these motions made, than the nobles arrayed themselves for another struggle.”
“M. Cato, the influence of whose grave consistency had been almost obliterated by daily collision with violence and vulgarity, and Favonius, a party brawler, rather than a political champion, were the most active leaders of the oligarchy.” “Favonius, being limited to an harangue of a single hour, consumed the whole of it in remonstrating against the shortness of the time allotted him. Cato, to whom a double space was conceded, launched forth into a general invective against the conduct of his opponents, tracking their violence and treachery through the whole sequence of political events, so that his time also was exhausted before he had arrived at the real point of discussion. Such were the infirmities of the men to whose discretion the indolence or despair of the nobles had now consigned their cause.”
“it was the custom, derived from simpler times, to allow private persons to take the precedence in discussion, that they might not be unduly biassed by the superior authority of those who spoke from official seats. Cato had gained his point so far as to retard the discussion by 24 hours.” “Aquilius, fearing now that his opponents’ exasperation might induce them to use violence to prevent his appearance in the forum in the morning passed the night in one of the curias on the spot. His ingenuity, however, was of little avail. Trebonius caused the doors of the building to be blocked up, and kept his colleague in durance [confinado] through the greater part of the ensuing day. At the same time he obstructed the passages which led to the forum, and excluded with a high hand Ateius, Cato, Favonius, and all the most notable men of their party.” “Cato and Ateius were lifted upon men’s shoulders, and from that unsteady elevation the voice of the tribune was heard above the din, proclaiming that the auspices were adverse, the proceedings illegal, and the assembly formally dissolved.” “Such were the tumultuary proceedings by which the triumvirs secured a pretended ratification of their schemes.”
“In such scenes as these, the consuls themselves did not scruple to take part openly. Not long before, at the election of aediles, the robe of Pompeius had been sprinkled with the blood of a victim of popular ferocity. This accident was eventually attended by the most fatal consequences (Dion). On his return home, thus disfigured, he was met at his door by his wife Julia, suddenly informed of the fray, and hastening to welcome her husband on his safe arrival. The youthful matron, devotedly attached to her spouse, and far advanced in pregnancy, was so much alarmed at the sight, that she was seized with premature labour. The event gave a shock to her constitution, from which, as will appear, she never wholly recovered.”
“In vain did Pompeius study to ingratiate himself with the populace as Caesar had done before him, by the magnificance of his public exhibitions. The splendour, indeed, even of Caesar’s aedilship was eclipsed by the opening of his rival’s gorgeous theatre, the 1st edifice of the kind at Rome constructed of stone, and designed for permanence. Within the circuit of its walls it could accommodate 40,000 spectators, no small portion of the resident population of the city (Dion, 39, 38; Lucan, 1, 133).” Fonte contemporânea sobre esta construção: Drumann, 4, 521.
“The ceremony of consecration was attended with a display of music, with chariot races and all the games of the palaestra. In the course of 5 successive days, 500 lions were sent forth to be hunted and slaughtered in the arena. Eighteen elephants were made to fight with trained bands of gladiators; but the populace was seized with a fit of unusual sensibility, and the cries and agonies of these half-reasoning animals damped even the excitement of such a spectacle with pity and disgust.” “After all, the liberality, as averred by the great man’s detractors, was not Pompeius’s own. The building had been raised by the taste and munificence of Demetrius, one of his freedmen, who had thus devoted to the entertainment of the public the treasures he had accumulated in following his patron’s fortunes. He had considerately bestowed upon it the name of Pompeius, to screen from the invidious gaze of the citizens the enormous amount of his own private gains.”
“The overwhelming preponderance of the triumvirs in the scales of power reduced Cicero to a state of political inactivity. He studied to secure the friendship or, in other words, the protection both of Caesar and Pompeius, while at the same time he shrank from joining systematically in the defence of their policy, the only condition on which they would freely impart it.” “He submits his poetical compositions to the judgment of the accomplished captain, and is highly delighted with the flattery he receives in return.” “Towards Crassus, however, whose person and character he always regarded with aversion, Cicero made no advances” “the advice of his friend Atticus was probably the wisest that could be offered, in urging him, at this crisis, to abandon the political life.” Ora, ora, resulta que Cícero não era aquele que oferecia conselhos por cartas, mas quem os recebia!
(*) “It was in the course of this year that Cicero wrote, or at least completed his dialogue de Oratore, the most elaborate and interesting perhaps of his works.”
“Caesar had asserted that the kingdom of Egypt had been bequeathed to the Roman people by Alexander I. That sovereign had left one daughter, Berenice, and 2 illegitimate sons, afterwards kings of Egypt and Cyprus. The daughter died, and Auletes, the elder of the brothers, experienced great difficulty in establishing his claim to the succession. The jealousy of the senate saved him from the aggression meditated by Caesar, and he spent 6,000 talents in winning over the nobles whom he principally feared. (Suetonius; Dion)”
“The Alexandrian populace, however violent and reckless of their lives in tumults and seditions, were not fit subjects for military discipline, and formed a contemptible soldiery. Gabinius entered the city after one or two skirmishes and effected the revolution to which he had pledged himself. Ptolemaeus reascended his throne, and his first act was to put his daughter to death, to gratify his vengeance or ensure his safety, and the next massacre [was over] the noblest and richest of her adherents, in order to amass the enormous sum which he had promised as the price of his restoration (10,000 talents, above 2 millions of our money). [Com certeza um PIB de país, à época.] In such a matter we may readily suspect exaggeration. The celebrated wealth of Crassus, at the highest computation (Plinius), was not more than about 8,300 talents.” “Gabinius was allowed to remain unmolested in Syria; but the approach of Crassus, as his successor in the administration of that province, robbed him of this retreat, and constrained him to prepare for meeting his enemies in Rome. The intrigues of the triumvirs had prevented the election of new consuls till the close of the year.”
“Appius Claudius Pulcher [novo cônsul ao lado de Domitius] was the brother of P. Clodius, the infamous tribune. He was closely connected with Pompeius by the marriage of his daughter with a son of the triumvir; and though he appears to have been on this account regarded with more consideration by Cicero, he was generally disliked and feared by the senatorial party. His career was distinguished even in that corrupt age by its unblushing venality.”
(*) “Another instance of the cupidity of Appius appears in his proceedings respecting Antiochus, king of Commagene. This district, on the right bank of the Euphrates, formed a small dependent sovereignty. Antiochus, its ruler, had receired from Caesar, during his consulship, permission to wear the Roman toga, and was now petitioning the senate to confirm this honourable distinction, which had been disregarded, perhaps, by the neighbouring proconsuls, Lentulus or Gabinius. Appius had received presents to induce him to regard this suit with favour. Cicero attacked and ridiculed the pretensions of the kingling, apparently from mere levity, for it could not have been part of his deliberate policy to insult the obscurest of Caesar’s clients. Appius did every thing in his power to conciliate the orator, fearing that if the dependent kings should be deterred from suing to the Roman statesmen, it would dry up a most lucrative source of emolument.”
“Matters had changed since Gabinius had left Rome. The senate, instead of cowering under the blows directed against its ancient champion (Cicero), as in the triumphant days of the Clodian tribunate, rose to a man in his defence, and crowded around him, showering upon him expressions of applause and gratitude with all the enthusiasm of the period of his consulship. The influence of Pompeius, indeed, was interposed to screen Gabinius from its exasperation; but more than one accusation was impending over him, and L. Lentulus was first appointed to bring him to trial on the charge of majestas. The act of a military officer who made war without the express order of the government was defined as treason against the Republic. In ordinary cases such an excess of zeal might meet with no severe condemnation; but the crime of Gabinius was of an aggravated character, for he had assailed Egypt in direct contravention of his orders. He defended himself on the plea, that, notwithstanding the decree of the senate to forbid the restoration of Ptolemaeus, another resolution had obtained the suffrages of the tribes, by which it had been expressly enjoined. Whether any hasty and irregular measures of Clodius had given a colour of legitimacy to this line of defence, or whether Gabinius relied upon a forgery, for the falsification of such a public instrument was neither impossible nor unexampled, or whether, again, the plea rested merely upon an audacious fiction, the senate refused to admit it for a moment. But Cicero’s opposition had already cooled down, the judges had been successfully tampered with, and, in spite of the hostility professed at least by both of the consuls, and the imprecations of the multitude, the criminal was acquitted upon the main charge, and the response of the Sybil was evasively interpreted to refer to circumstances altogether different. [que se Roma atacasse o Egito ocorreria uma desgraça sem precedentes] The acquiescence however of the people was not so easily secured, and the occurrence of a violent inundation of the Tiber armed their superstition with new arguments against the victim who had not yet escaped them.”
“strange to say, the most high-minded of his enemies, Cicero, had been induced by Pompeius to undertake his defence. The triumvir himself, who had been absent from the neighbourhood of the city during the 1st trial, engaged to keep close at hand and redouble all his efforts to save him. But it was these very efforts, to all appearance, that lost him his cause. It was intolerable to hear Cicero maintain, at the beck of a veteran intriguer, the assertion of the Alexandrian witnesses, that Gabinius had received no bribe from the king of Egypt, when the fact was so notorious, that the same orator, in the very next cause that he pleads, admits it without hesitation. Indeed, there can be no doubt that Cicero’s character suffered severely on this occasion in the estimation of his friends: his own account of the affair gives no plausible excuse for this inconsistency. (…) His accepting from Pompeius a lieutenancy in Spain almost at the same moment was both indecent and indiscreet. Nor were the judges better pleased, perhaps, at the officious interference of Caesar, from whom Cicero produced a letter strongly urging the acquittal of the accused. To the surprise of both his friends and enemies, to the amazement probably of himself, the trial ended with the condemnation of Gabinius, and he was compelled to retire into banishment. His property was confiscated to the State, in liquidation of the fine which the judges proportioned to the amount of his acquisitions.” Cícero foi uma espécie de Fernando Gabeira de Roma. Acontece que, no caso clássico, ele era situação, quando Roma era uma República, e virou um acelerador ou fomentador da queda da mesma República, i.e., sua nêmese, contra o status quo da coisa pública e pró-ditadura. Quem sabe se vivesse outra vida o Império não teria tardado mais uma ou duas gerações a chegar?
“Cicero [now befriending him] was the first to insult Crassus, by giving all the glory of the destruction of Spartacus to his rival; he had deeply offended him by allowing suspicion to rest upon him with regard to his supposed participation in the councils of Catilina. On the other hand, the machinations of Clodius against the orator’s dignity had been covertly encouraged by Crassus, no less than by the other triumvirs; and when we consider how little there was in the character of the sordid usurer to attract or dazzle the scholar and the sage, it is impossible to suppose that Cicero was as sincere in his forgiveness of Crassus as in his reconciliation with Caesar or even with Pompeius.” “He offered his services as a pleader to defend Messius, another of Caesar’s leitenants, who left his general’s camp at the summons of the senate to take his trial.”
“the proconsuls, who had originally been sent to the provinces to break their fall from the highest office of the State, now returned, year by year, from their governments with wealth too great for a private station, with ambition whetted by conquest or plunder, and with a retinue of followers enriched in their service, and devoted to their interest in defiance of patriotic or party ties. Lastly, they tried direct bribeiy, in buying the suffrages of the popular assemblies, or of the judges in political trials; but in this field also they were met by the enormous resources of private speculators, who outbid them in largesses, and still more in promises. The unbridled licentiousness of private citizens had still an advantage over the most unscrupulous government. The proceedings of the consular candidates for the year 701 afforded an instance of this licentiousness beyond all former example.”
“The candidates were 4: Memmius, Domitius Calvinus, Aemilius Scaurus and Valerius Messala. The first 2 formed a coalition, and made an engagement with the actual consuls, to procure for them, if elected, whatever provinces they desired as the price of their influence. (…) But Pompeius, anxious to break up an alliance which threatened to carry everything before it, found means to induce Memmius to disclose this infamous transaction, and, when he had thus ruinously compromised his associates, to abandon his own views and adopt the policy of the triumvirs.” A verdade é que todos os candidatos e seus patrocinadores eram grandes corruptos.
“The interest which money fetched, on so unprecedented a demand, rose at once from 4%, a rate sufficiently exorbitant, to 8% per month. Scaevola interposed to prevent any assembly of the comitia for the election of consuls, and the year passed without the appointment of any chief magistrates for that which was to follow. Nothing could be more favourable to the views of Pompeius.”
“Some great measure of State reform seemed evidently to be required, and the circumstances of the time, no less than the well-known practice of the commonwealth, pointed to the selection of a single personage, the foremost in the State, a man of approved judgment and courage, a man of acknowledged popularity, to whom so responsible a charge should be freely confided. But while the progress of events, as far as they were susceptible of being directed or moulded by dexterity and cunning, was thus quietly advancing the cherished views of the triumvir [Pompeius], other incidents beyond his control were preparing the way for new combinations, never yet forecast in his counsels, and fatal to all his calculations. It was in the year 699, as has been already mentioned, that a sudden alarm gave a shock to his wife Julia, which brought on premature labour, and broke the strength of her constitution. In the summer of the year 700(*) she died in childbed, nor did the infant survive to perpetuate the union of the Pompeian and Julian houses. The Romans long turned with fond regret to the memory of one who might have mediated between the father and his son-in-law, and assuaged the personal rivalry which overthrew their national liberties. Their sorrow, brooding over its object and playing with its own moody fancies, remembered the ancient legend of the Sabine women,(**) who saved the state by rushing between the armed ranks of their fathers and their husbands. It is natural and becoming for parents to acquiesce in the wishes of their children, and yield with the dignity of age to the more passionate decisions of youth. But in the present case all such feelings were reversed. The father was the younger in years, and inferior in position; [César, o sogro de Pompeu] the passion and spirit of movement were his: the husband could yield the more easily and the more gracefully of the two. The only result we can contemplate from the prolonged existence and fruitfulness of this ill-fated union is that Pompeius would have gradually succumbed under Caesar’s influence, instead of throwing himself repentantly, when once released from the rash connexion, into the arms of the aristocracy he had outraged.
(*) A letter might travel, it appears, between Britain and Rome in 20 days. Accordingly, Julia must have died at least 40 days before Caesar’s letter above mentioned could reach Cicero, that is, not later than August 9, A.U. 700, or July 16 B.C. 54. Plutarch is evidently wrong [NÃO DIGA!] (…) It may be well to remind the reader that in the unreformed calendar August (Sextilis) had 29 days, and September a like number.
(**) ‘Concordiae pignus Julia.’ Lucan., i., 114 (apud Vell., ii, 47): [O sacramento de Júlia]
“Quod si tibi fata dedissent [E daí que digam que o futuro é todo seu]
Majores in luce moras, tu sola furentem [Se os antigos continuam iluminados, e você consumida pela fúria,]
Inde virum poteras, atque hinc retinere parentem; [Única maneira de manter pai e marido]
Armatasque manus excusso jungero ferro, [Os dois por quem eu devo brandir a espada]
Ut generos soceris mediae junxere Sabinae.” [E um dia reencontrar, no Olimpo, o nobre sogro de Sabina]
“The ferocity of his earlier years however much it was tempered by the prosperity of his middle age, would hardly allow us to suppose him so amiable in domestic life as appears in the account we have received of his intercourse with Julia. Though celebrated for her beauty as well as her accomplishments, and younger than her husband by 23 years, she devoted herself to him with rare affection, while his attachment to her was engrossing even to weakness. Such an instance of conjugal fidelity was rare, and might deserve to be commemorated by unusual distinctions. But it afforded the citizens an opportunity for displaying their devotion to Caesar; and it was perhaps with no other view that they forbade the remains of Julia to rest in the mausoleum of her Alban villa, and insisted upon honouring them with public obsequies in the Field of Mars.(*)
(*) The consul Domitius attempted to prevent this pretended tribute of regard to the deceased, which he evidently considered was meant to reflect honour upon her father; but the people were not to be controlled even by the interdict of the tribunes. Dion, 39, 64.”
CHAPTER 10/10. A 4ª, 5ª E 6ª CAMPANHAS CESÁREAS. QUINTO CÍCERO, O IRMÃO DE MARCO TÚLIO, COMO TENENTE DE CÉSAR. A PACIFICAÇÃO DA BÉLGICA NO ANO 701 DA CIDADE DE ROMA.
“The moderation which Caesar displayed, supported as it was by his known character for uncompromising resolution, cooled the fervid audacity of the German orators. They agreed to lay his proposals before the council of their tribe, and contented themselves with requiring that he, on his part, should suspend his advance for 3 days, until an answer could be returned. But Caesar sternly refused even this short respite.”
“Relying on the faith of the treaty, they were totally unprepared for the onset, and easily thrown into confusion even by a handful of assailants. Defending themselves feebly and partially they suffered a loss of 74 men, and were routed and pursued as far as the head of the advancing columns of the main army. Caesar, affecting just indignation at this flagrant infringement of the truce, determined to take signal vengeance on its perpetrators. He would no longer consent to an instant’s delay, which he was now convinced was only held out as a lure to entrap him. He was aware, moreover, how injurious an effect the report of this check, however slight, would have upon his Gaulish auxiliaries and upon the nations in his rear. Betrayed himself, he scrupled not, for the safety of his army and the province, to requite the barbarians with treachery deeper and more destructive than their own. Accordingly, when, the next morning, the German deputation, consisting of a large number of their chieftains, met him with protestations of regret for the occurrence of the day before, and with disclaimers of their error or their guilt, he threw them at once into irons, and gave orders for immediate advance against the enemy, unprepared for combat and deprived of their commanders. The Germans, thus taken by surprise, had not time even to form their rude array.”
“They sent off their women and children in all haste, in the hope that they at least might escape the fury of an enemy whom they despaired of overcoming. But Caesar, perceiving this movement, ordered his cavalry to pursue and attack the unarmed fugitives, and as there were but few German horses to oppose them, his directions were carried into effect with ease and with ruthless ferocity. At the sight of this carnage the barbarians lost all heart, broke their ranks, and betook themselves to flight. Their rear being occupied by the Roman cavalry, it would seem that they must have escaped from the field on their left flank, on which side the Rhine lay, apparently at no great distance. Their flight was arrested by that deep and rapid stream at the point of its confluence with another, the Meuse, according to Caesar’s text, but more probably the Moselle.(*)
(*) There is great difficulty in fixing the site of this battle. Caesar’s text undoubtedly speaks of the confluence of the Rhine and Meuse (Mosa); but the Germans, it will be remembered, only required 3 days to send a message to the Ubii (on the right bank of the Rhine, between Cologne and Coblenz), and receive their deliberate answer, which is quite inconsistent with such an explanation. They had penetrated at least to the frontiers of the Treviri, according to Caesar and Dion (29, 47), and there is no reason to suppose that they made any retreat before the advance of the Romans. Cluverius thought that we should read Mosella fur Mosa; and, notwithstanding Mannert’s criticism, I am disposed to believe either that our text is in fault, or that the author of the Commentaries committed a slip of memory. Mannert allows that the junction of the Meuse and Wahal took place at the same spot formerly as it does now, only 80 miles from the sea (2, 1, 192.). The country in that neighbourhood was at this time quite inaccessible to the Romans.”
“The Romans had only a few men wounded, not one was killed. The great mass of the Germans, not less probably than 180,000 in number, perished, we are assured, altogether.”
“Caesar sent the news of this signal triumph to Rome, and the senate, after reading his despatch, decreed with acclamation a supplicatio, or national thanksgiving to the gods. Cato rose indignantly to deprecate the bestowal of such honours on an occasion so unworthy. He denounced the conduct of Caesar as perfidious and degrading to the Roman name. He described his treatment of the Germans as a violation of the pledged faith of the Republic, and proposed rather a national humiliation to avert the wrath of heaven, and to prove to the barbarians that the Romans disowned treachery in their generals even when successful. He declared that Caesar ought to be given up to the Germans in expiation of the national crime. Examples of such a course were not altogether wanting. At least twice: the one when Q. Fabius and Cn. Apronius were delivered over to the Apolloniatae for having slain their ambassadors; the other, when L. Minucius and L. Manlius were surrendered to the Carthaginians in atonement for a similar crime. (Livius, Dion, Valerius Maximus) But however it might have been in the sterner days of the Republic, it was neither to the public virtue of the senate nor to its religious feelings that such an appeal could at this period be seriously addressed.”
“Caesar was determined that the German people should know what had become of this last swarm of invaders, how the 2 tribes had fallen in one great day of slaughter, and who were the fatal enemies who had thus cut short their career. His authority in Gaul depended in no slight degree upon his checking the roving spirit of the free men beyond the Rhine, and convincing the discontented within that boundary that the arm of the Republic was long enough to reach their most distant auxiliaries.”
“It was the business of a Roman proconsul always to put forth a legitimate pretext for an act of aggression; but the real motive was often kept in the background, and doubtless Caesar on the present occasion had further and deeper views, when he resolved to cross the frontier and show himself in all the majesty of Roman military array to the proud warriors before whom the tribes of the Rhine were trembling.”
(*) “The author of the Précis des Guerres de César, p. 61, compares this bridge with that which Bertrand threw across the Danube near Vienna for Napoleon in 1809. He shows the great superiority of the modern engineers, both as regards the difficulty of the undertaking, and the speed with which it was completed. Napoleon’s bridge required 10 times the amount of labour, and was finished in only twice the number of days. This author supposes Caesar to have crossed at Cologne. Among his motives for this expedition may be reckoned the advantage of keeping his army in training and occupation. The building of the bridge may have been undertaken as an exercise in engineering, and a wholesome employment.”
(*) “Caesar was the 1st Roman who crossed the Rhine. Suet. Jul. 25; Dion, 39, 50.”
“[What follows is] no other than the famous invasion of Britain, an enterprise to which we owe our first introduction into the history of Europe and of the world. § The campaigns of Caesar in Belgium could not fail to make him acquainted with the existence and character of the inhabitants of the great island which lay within sight of its coasts.”
“The Belgians, who were the latest settlers on the British shore, seem to have been easily reclaimed from the wild habits of their forest life by the civilizing influences of the coast and a navigable river. Caesar remarks that the inhabitants of the corner nearest to Gaul [mais a oeste] were the farthest advanced in social cultivation, and the extraordinary rapidity with which the eastern ports sprang into commercial celebrity discovers a natural aptitude in the race which their subsequent history has so fully confirmed.”
“A century earlier a proconsular army had turned back with reverence or dismay from the shores of the Atlantic. They had reached, it was surmised, the verge of the habitable world, and profanely approached the frontiers of night and oblivion. But Caesar’s legions and Caesar himself were alike inaccessible to such feelings; the general sought an arena for martial exercises, the soldier dreamed of hoarded gold and jewels; and if the temper of either admitted of finer sensibilities, the billows of the Western Ocean might inspire him with ambition rather than with awe.
(*) ‘Decimus Brutus aliquanto latius Celticos Lusitanosque et omnes Gallaeciae populos, formidatumque militibus flumen Oblivionis (comp. Liv. Epit. 55.); [Outrora, Décimo Bruto temia os celtas e lusitanos ou qualquer outra população da Gália, afora este grande rio pavoroso, que chamaram de Rio do Esquecimento, repetindo o mito (falam do Oceano Atlântico)] peragratoque victor Oceani litore, non prius signa convertit, quam cadentem in maria solem, obrutumque aquis ignem non sine quodam sacrilegii metu et horrore deprehendit.’ Florus, 2. 17. [E mal o conquistador vitorioso olhou para trás, logo após chegar ao extremo do litoral, percebeu então o sol afundando nas águas, o que não deixou de causar-lhe uma sensação ominosa de sacrilégio contra os deuses.] The Romans ridiculed Ceesar’s vanity in dignifying the shallow straits with the name of the Ocean. Lucan, ii. 571.
‘Oceanumque vocans incerti stagna profundi
Territa quaesitis ostendit terga Britannis.’”
E, chamando de Oceano o profundo lago da incerteza,
Espantado, apontou [César] as costas da Bretanha.
* * *
WIKIA (OCEANO, TITÃ, MAIS VELHO DOS FILHOS DE URANO E GAIA, E PAI DE MAIS DE 3 MIL DIVINDADES MENORES COM NOMES DE RIOS; COM SUA MÃE, PRODUZIU AS HARPIAS): “According to M.L. West, the etymology of Oceanus is ‘obscure’ and ‘cannot be explained from Greek’. The use by Pherecydes of Syros of the form ‘Ogenos’ (Ὠγενός) for the name lends support for the name being a loanword. However, according to West, no ‘very convincing’ foreign models have been found. A Semitic derivation has been suggested by several scholars, while R.S.P. Beekes has suggested a loanword from the Aegean Pre-Greek non-Indo-European substrate. Nevertheless, Michael Janda sees possible Indo-European connections.”
MAIS: “Passages in a section of the Iliad called the Deception of Zeus, suggest the possibility that Homer knew a tradition in which Oceanus and Tethys (rather than Uranus and Gaia, as in Hesiod) were the primeval parents of the gods. (…) However, as Timothy Gantz points out, ‘mother’ could simply refer to the fact that Tethys was Hera’s foster mother for a time, as Hera tells us in the lines immediately following, while the reference to Oceanus as the genesis of the gods ‘might be simply a formulaic epithet indicating the numberless rivers and springs descended from Okeanos’ (compare with Iliad 21.195–197). But, in a later Iliad passage, Hypnos also describes Oceanus as ‘genesis for all’, which, according to Gantz, is hard to understand as meaning other than that, for Homer, Oceanus was the father of the Titans.”
“Plato, in his Timaeus, provides a genealogy (probably Orphic) which perhaps reflected an attempt to reconcile this apparent divergence between Homer and Hesiod, in which Uranus and Gaia are the parents of Oceanus and Tethys, and Oceanus and Tethys are the parents of Cronus and Rhea and the other Titans, as well as Phorcys. (…) Plato’s apparent inclusion of Phorcys as a Titan (being the brother of Cronus and Rhea), and the mythographer Apollodorus‘s inclusion of Dione, the mother of Aphrodite by Zeus, as a 13th Titan, suggests an Orphic tradition in which the Titan offspring of Oceanus and Tethys consisted of Hesiod’s 12 Titans, with Phorcys and Dione taking the place of Oceanus and Tethys.”
“Sometime after the war [a Titanomaquia], Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, has Oceanus visit his nephew the enchained Prometheus, who is being punished by Zeus for his theft of fire. Oceanus arrives riding a winged steed, saying that he is sympathetic to Prometheus’ plight and wishes to help him if he can. But Prometheus mocks Oceanus, asking him: ‘How did you summon courage to quit the stream that bears your name and the rock-roofed caves you yourself have made?’ Oceanus advises Prometheus to humble himself before the new ruler Zeus, and so avoid making his situation any worse. But Prometheus replies: ‘I envy you because you have escaped blame for having dared to share with me in my troubles.’”
“Both Hesiod and Homer call Oceanus ‘backflowing’ (ἀψορρόου), since, as the great stream encircles the earth, it flows back into itself. [//Ouroboros na mitologia nórdica]”
* * *
“the mere rumour of his intended invasion of the island raised among them such a notion of his boldness and power that they hastened, for the most part, at once to make a voluntary submission. The Roman general was well pleased to receive them into favour, and obtain from them the assistance and information he needed.”
“The rumour of his preparations had already alarmed the Belgians in the south of Britain, and various embassies from them reached his camp, with the offer of hostages for their good-will and fidelity.”
“The season had already advanced too far to allow the Roman general to contemplate the conquest of any part of the island in this campaign, if indeed he entertained any such ulterior view.”
“For his immediate designs it seemed sufficient to collect a force of 2 legions and a few hundred cavalry. The former were destined to embark in 80 transports at the Portus Itius,(*) the latter at a spot 8 miles further to the East.
(*) (…) With regard to the orthography of the Roman name, the mss. of Caesar read Itius (…) The form Iccius is a corruption of later writers. Bast, 50. 100.”
“The sea is described here as running up into the land by a narrow creek overhung by heights, which completely commanded every approach,(*) and were already crowded with the natives in arms.
(*) Caes. B.G. iv. 23. His expressions evidently describe a creek or estuary, and cannot refer to the promontory of the South Foreland. There is an ancient tradition at Dover that the sea formerly ran 5 or 6 miles up into the land there.”
* * *
(*) “Caes. 50. 100.: ‘Ventum et aestum nactus secundum.’ It has been much disputed whether the spot at which Caesar landed lay to the east or west of Dover, at Deal or Hythe; but a close examination of his language seems to settle the question decisively. He came to Britain a little before the end of summer (exigua parte aestatis reliqua), and left it before the equinox. From Halley’s calculations (see Phil. Trans. No. 193.) it is ascertained that there were 2 full moons in August of the year BC 55, on the 1st at noon, and on the 30th at midnight.” Full moon at noon, what?! “The latter then must have been that which Caesar noticed on the 4th night after his arrival. If the tide was at its height at midnight (30th—31st), it must have been so about 8 p.m. on the 26th. Accordingly, the tide began to flow on the afternoon of the 26th at 2 p.m., and this must have been the tide with which Caesar left his moorings off Dover. As the flood-tide flows to the northward, such must have been the direction which he took, and a run of 7 or 8 miles would bring him precisely to the flat beach of Deal or Walnier. (…) The discussion this subject has undergone, since the first publication of my work, by Prof. Airy, Mr. Lewin, and others, would induce me to speak now far less confidently upon it. I leave it, however, to the settlement which may be expected from the forthcoming Life of Caesar, by the Emperor Napoleon, [The Third? why’d it take so much time for publication if it were Napoleon the First?] who is said to have caused it to be thoroughly examined.—Jan. 1865.” Por sinal, o mais cômico de Napoleão III é que ele também caiu numa guerra ao leste! Ele faleceu em janeiro de 1873 aos 64 anos, o que permite que estivesse trabalhando na obra citada, ainda durante seu reinado – e Merivale fala Emperor. Outra faceta notável é que ele tentou 2 golpes infrutíferos ainda antes de ser eleito democraticamente e, portanto, muitos anos antes de se autodeclarar imperador (troisième coup).
IRONIAS DO DESTINO (+ WIKIA!): “His book Extinction du paupérisme, which he wrote while imprisoned at the Fort of Ham in 1844, contributed to his popularity among the working classes and thus his election in 1848. (…) Among other things, the Emperor granted the right to strike to French workers in 1864, despite intense opposition from corporate lobbies.” E aqui, por fim, a resposta a minha dúvida (já nem tão dúvida assim): “History of Julius Caesar – a historical work he wrote during his reign. He drew an analogy between the politics of Julius Caesar and his own, [HAHA!] as well as those of his uncle.” Livro no HD da CAPES e archive.org.
* * *
Cof, cof… Continuando…
“The sea was too shallow to admit of the larger vessels approaching the land, and the barbarians rushed into the surge to reach their invaders. The war-galleys which drew less water were ordered to the flanks to dispel the host of assailants, and when they opened their batteries of missiles the Britons were thrown into disorder. The Romans, however, in the confusion incident to a mode of fighting with which they were not familiar, showed little alacrity in attacking the enemy, until the standard-bearer of the 10th legion leaped with his eagle into the waves, and summoned his comrades to the rescue.” “The fame of Caesar and his legions had gone before him, and when the Britons found themselves engaged hand-to-hand with the conquerors of Gaul, their courage failed. But the Romans, destitute as they were of cavalry, might have suffered severely from the vigorous attack of chariots and horsemen; and, however feeble was the resistance opposed to their landing, they were not in a condition to pursue, but hastened to secure the spot on which they had planted themselves by throwing up their earthworks. Before, however, even these 1st defences were completed, an embassy arrived from the Britons, with the offer of hostages and humble protestations of submission.”
“The war-vessels drawn up on the beach were covered with the waves and dashed in pieces, while the transports at anchor were torn from their moorings, and hurled upon the coast or against one another.”
“The Britons, who had noticed the smallness of the Roman force, and its want of supplies, now conceived the hope of cutting it off by famine, presuming that the entire loss of an army with its general would deter the Romans from repeating the enterprise. But they did not execute their plans skilfully. They made a sudden attack upon the 7th legion, which had been sent to forage, but was not yet beyond reach of assistance from the camp. Caesar rushed forth to its rescue, and repulsed the assailants; but his experience of the treachery of the enemy, and the peril to which he was now daily exposed, made him the more anxious to withdraw from the island without delay. The equinox was also fast approaching, and the tempestuous weather which generally accompanies it. He was well pleased therefore at receiving a new offer of submission from the vacillating barbarians. He contented himself with imposing upon them double the number of hostages they had originally promised. Since the night of the storm he had laboured assiduously to refit his vessels, destroying, for the want of fresh materials, the most damaged, in order to repair the rest.”
“The Britons, as soon as they learned that the Romans had left their shores, neglected, with the exception of 2, only, of their tribes, to send the promised hostages. But at Rome the news of Caesar’s victories called forth unbounded acclamations, especially the vaunted success of his attack upon an unknown island, which struck their imaginations as an heroic exploit, while it inflamed their cupidity with the hopes of new and incalculable plunder. The avaricious dreams of the Romans ascribed hoards of plate and jewels to the rudest barbarians of the ancient world. Britain was reported to be rich in mines, at least of the inferior metals. Above all, the pearls of the Rutupian coast were celebrated for their supposed abundance and splendour, and became objects of especial desire. The breastplate set with these costly brilliants, which the conqueror afterwards dedicated to Venus Genetrix, the patroness and mother of his race, was no less agreeable to the eyes of the young nobility than to those of the goddess herself. A thanksgiving of 20 days was decreed in his honour, while he hastened, as usual, to the frontier of his province, to confer with his friends from Rome. Early, however, in the next year he visited Illyricum, the further district of his province, beset by predatory hordes, which had crossed the upper waters of the Save and Drave, and penetrated its Alpine boundary.”
“During Caesar’s absence, preparations were in progress in the ports and camps of Northern Gaul for a 2nd invasion of Britain with a more powerful force.” “The whole armament was appointed to assemble at the Portus Itius; and Caesar employed this short interval in menacing the Treviri, with whom he was incensed for their neglecting to attend the general meeting of the States, and intriguing with the Suevi.” “The spring had not yet passed when the Roman armament sailed for Britain. It consisted of 5 legions, and a proportionate number of cavalry, the importance of which force had been proved in the late expedition. Three legions were left under Labienus, to provide for the security of Gaul.”
“This was the foundation, in all probability, of the famous station of Rutupiae, or Richborough. The ruins of its gigantic defences attest to this day the extent and solidity of the Roman military works in our island. [nem só de Stonehenge se vive na Ilha!] The Britons still declined to oppose the invaders; it was not till the army had advanced to the Banks of the Stour, 12 miles distant from its encampment, that it [caused/forced…? /ilegível/] a foe arrayed to dispute its further progress.”
“A storm, as in the preceding expedition, had severely injured his vessels. It took several days of incessant labour to repair the damage, and then, at last, it was determined to draw up the whole armament on shore, and extend and strengthen the fortifications which defended it on the land side.”
“The British method of fighting was almost wholly on horseback or from chariots. The dexterity with which the barbarians managed these ponderous vehicles, the weight of their onset, and the rapidity of their retreat, baffled through the day the skill and vigour of the invaders.”
“The Britons lost the bravest of their combatants, together with their cumbrous materials of war. From that day the Britons never ventured again to attack Csesar’s legions in regular battle, but scattered themselves through the country, in the hope of wearing out their strength by repeated and desultory skirmishes. [guerra de guerrilha!]”
“A place known by the name of Coway Stakes, near the mouth of the Wey, is supposed to have derived its appellation from the palisades with which the Britons obstructed the bed and bank of the Thames, the remains of which were still visible, according to the testimony of Bede, in the 8th century. The spot accords also sufficiently well with the distance of 80 miles from the sea, at which Caesar places the frontier of Cassivellaunus’ dominions.”
“The Trinobantes, over whom Cassivellaunus had usurped authority by the murder of its sovereign, were disposed to treat with the conqueror and abandon the tyrant to his fate. Their example was followed by several other States, enumerated under the names of Cenimagni, Segontiaci, Ancalitae, and Bibroci, occupying apparently the counties of Berks and Buckingham, and the neighbourhood of Henley and Bray.”
“Caesar was anxious to return to Gaul, where rumours of projected insurrection were more rife than ever. He retained no territory in Britain, nor left any stronghold or garrison; and when he quitted its shore, with the nugatory assurance of a trifling tribute, he must have felt himself baffled in his enterprise. Even the hopes of plunder were totally unfulfilled. Cicero, who corresponded, as we have seen, with his brother Quintus, serving under the proconsul in his British campaign, assures us that nothing was to he obtained from the poverty of the natives. No silver plate could be extorted from them, nor booty of any kind acquired, except perhaps slaves; and these were not of the refined and educated class, such as the conquests of Lucullus and Pompeius had poured into Rome from Asia, ingenious artisans or professors of literature and music, but the rough uncouth children of woods and mountains, whom their masters would be ashamed to employ beyond the limits of some distant farm.” “These short campaigns against the Germans and Britons sufficed to occupy the intervals during which Caesar was wathing the conflict of parties in Rome”
“The assembly of the Gaulish states was convened at Samarobriva (Amiens), and Csesar employed, according to his system, the authority of the deputies among their own tribes to give a colour of national will to the decrees which in reality issued from his own mouth alone. The council was dissolved before the end of autumn, and its members returned each to his own city, bearing with him the mandates of the conqueror, by which the internal polity of the province was regulated, and new contributions, both of money and men, were assessed. Unpalatable as these requisitions were to the proud and jealous chieftains, circumstances contributed at the moment to give a chance of success to a combined attack upon the enemy from whom they emanated. The summer had been excessively dry and it was found impossible to maintain the great mass of the Roman forces in one locality.”
(*) “Cassar seems anxious to extenuate the extent to which he dispersed his forces, where he says that all his divisions, except that quartered among the Essui in Normandy, where there was no apprehension of disturbance, were posted within a distance of 100 miles. But the distance from Aduatuca to the frontiers of the Bellovaci (100. 46.) is little less than 200 miles.”
“Caes. B.G., 5. 27.; Dion, 40. 5, 6. This writer follows the Commentaries of Caesar very closely, and it is important to remark that they still formed the text-book for this period of history after an interval of 250 years. It may be inferred also that the charges of treachery which Csesar makes against the Gauls had not been discredited by subsequent authorities.”
“Sabinus, while attempting to discuss the forms of a capitulation, was treacherously slain; and Cotta, who had refused to parley with an armed enemy, met a more honourable death in the front of his slender ranks. The Roman army was almost entirely destroyed; the few that escaped through the forests in the darkness of the night were merely stragglers, without baggage, arms, or ensigns.
This destruction of 2 complete legions with their generals was the signal for a widespread defection throughout central Belgium. The Eburones, Nervii and Aduatuci were reinforced by numerous but less conspicuous tribes. Ambiorix, able and energetic, and crowned with the glory of a triumph which reminded men of the ancient days of Gaulish renown, was the soul of the confederacy. He marched immediately upon the camp of Q. Cicero, whose single legion was quartered in the Nervian territory. Letters were despatched from the camp to Csesar, but these were intercepted, and for many days the proconsul was left in entire ignorance of the movements of the enemy, and the dangers to which his troops were exposed.
The correspondence of the orator, M. Cicero, represents him throughout in the light of an adviser, almost of a tutor or guardian, to his younger brother Quintus, and the character of the latter has been overshadowed by the greater celebrity and higher merits of the former. But Q. Cicero, though he cannot aspire to be numbered in the first class of the statesmen of his day, holds nevertheless a prominent place among the men of tried services and abilities, and also contributed to stamp the national character upon the Roman administration at home and abroad. Rising upon the wave of his brother’s fortunes, and supported by his own talents and good conduct, he had served various public offices of distinction. In the ordinary career of honours, he had arrived at the praetorship, in which he was colleague to Caesar in the year 692. Thence he had succeeded to the government of Asia, where his term of office was prolonged to a 2nd, and again to a 3rd year, principally at the instance of M. Cicero, who employed him in the task of upholding the equestrian order, and conciliating the affections of the provincials by justice and moderation. Brilliant abilities could have little scope in a province so peaceful, and amidst a society so thoroughly moulded and matured; but it was no slight merit in Quintus, it might be of no small advantage to the reforming party to which he belonged, that it could be said of him that, in a region so full of objects attractive to a man of elegance and taste, he had refrained from the undue acquisition of a single monument of art.” Ou era muito virtuoso ou muito tosco.
“Nor must we forget that Caesar’s lieutenant was in his turn supported by troops whose courage and endurance were never exceeded. The romantic rivalry of Pulfio and Varenus seems to elicit a spark of fire from the coldest of all militaiy narratives. When the besieged legion was at last relieved by the triumphant arrival of the proconsul in person, it was found that not 1 man in 10 had escaped without a wound. The Gauls had made rapid progress in learning and applying the Roman methods of attack. They had surrounded the camp with a ditch and rampart, they had propelled their towers to the foot of the wall, had reduced all the interior to ashes by inflammable missiles, and had succeeded for many days in cutting off communication between the besieged and the nearest quarters. They kept all the Roman detachments in such constant alarm that Labienus dared not venture from his post, and Caesar was forced to leave a legion at Samarobriva to protect the treasure, magazines, and public documents. The proconsul could muster no more than 2 legions to lead against the enemy, and these were reduced to a meagre remnant of 7,000 men.” “The Gauls broke up from their lines and marched, 60,000 strong, to confront the enemy.” “…and thus Quintus Cicero with his little band, harassed and weakened as it had been, was saved from the fate which had overtaken his colleagues.”
“Indutiomarus retreated from before the camp of Labienus, and sought an asylum among the Treviri.”
“The proconsul collected 3 legions around Samarobriva, and took up his station there again for the rest of the winter, fully occupied with watching the affairs of Belgium. Excepting the Remi and the Aedui, who had devoted themselves without reserve to the interests of the Republic, there was hardly a State to which grave suspicions of disaffection did not attach. Slow and timid as the Gauls were in the beginning of a movement, from their want of mutual communication and reliance, yet, once begun, all were ready to join it with heart and hand, and the open defection of 2 nations whose valour they were most accustomed to respect, exasperated their resolution and embittered their defiance, in proportion as it heightened the danger of their cause.”
“But the followers of Ariovistus had been disheartened by the disasters they had already experienced in collision with the Roman arms, and the fate of the Usipetes and their allies, together with the subsequent invasion of their own soil, had terrified the rest of the Germans.”
“Indutiomarus persisted in moving the Gauls to revolt. He had acquired great personal influence throughout their tribes by the friends he had attached to himself by gifts and promises. He now stepped boldly forward, claimed the leadership of the whole confederacy, and convened an armed council of their chiefs. The severity of the national institutions demanded, it is said, that whoever was last to attend such a summons should be publicly put to death with tortures and infamy. In this assembly Indutiomarus denounced his rival Cingetorix as the enemy of the common cause, and the latter was not slow to avenge himself by divulging to Labienus the schemes of his accuser. It was against Labienus himself that the first outbreak was directed. A numerous host of Gaulish cavalry careered round his works, taunting his soldiers with insults and menaces. But the legate, fore-warned, had formed his plan of defence. He suffered the enemy to exhaust their energies by a long and fruitless endeavour to draw him forth to an engagement, and it was not till he had collected all the auxiliary forces within reach, and thoroughly wearied his assailants, that he threw open his gates and gave the signal for a sally. He issued strict orders that the person of Indutiomarus himself should be the object of every soldier’s aim. He forbade them to engage with any one of the enemy until the leader had been taken and slain. The Gauls offered little resistance to this vigorous onslaught, and Indutiomarus was overtaken in crossing a ford. His death completed the easy victory of the Romans; the Nervii and Eburones fled precipitately to their homes, and the confederacy rapidly dissolved.”
“The close of the year brought a short period of respite for the Roman soldiery, but the winter months were hardly less full of solicitude to their officers, especially to Caesar, who now clearly saw that he had before him the task of completely reconquering the country.”
“Orders were issued for raising 2 fresh legions, and the proconsul obtained a 3rd as a loan from
Pompeius, who did not hesitate to transfer to him a portion of the forces which the Republic had assigned to himself. This legion had indeed been levied in Cisalpine Gaul by a special decree of the senate, and might seem therefore to belong of right rather to Caesar than to his rival. But that Pompeius should have thus consented to strengthen the hands of a competitor of whom he had long been jealous, shows how secure he deemed himself in the exercise of the new powers he had obtained on the expiration of his consulship, and the reliance he placed on the friends and adherents with whom he had doubtless officered the new legion. The transaction displays also in a striking manner how independent the chiefs of the commonwealth felt themselves to be, when they ventured thus to lend and borrow troops among themselves, without even consulting, as far as appears, the superior authorities of the State.” “O Estado/Kaiser sou eu. Eu me autorizo.”
(*) “We shall find that a few years later, when the struggle was about to commence between Caesar and Pompeius, the latter demanded his legion to be restored to him, and the other made no attempt to retain it (B.G., 8. 54.).”
“Caesar’s levies proceeded rapidly, and it was his policy as well as his pride to show how speedily Rome could repair her military losses, and pour legion after legion into the field.”
“everything portended a general insurrection in the northeast of Gaul, when Caesar, before the winter had yet passed, anticipated the approaching movement by pushing 4 legions into the country of the Nervii. A few rapid marches and energetic proclamations daunted successively the spirit of these people, of the Senones, the Camutes and others. But the Treviri constituted the main strength of the disaffected, and the loss of all these auxiliaries was supplied by the assistance of various German tribes, together with the Menapii and Eburones, who joined in their revolt, and distracted the attention of the Roman generals. While Caesar pursued the Menapii into their fastnesses, Labienus overcame the Treviri in a battle to which he enticed them by a feigned retreat.”
“The Segni and Condrusi, Germanic tribes, sent in their submission, with loud assertions of the constancy with which they had refused to aid the confederates. The conqueror was not unwilling to accept their excuses.”
“The Menapii, lately reduced, were again in arms, and it required the presence of 3 legions under Labienus to check their adventurous reprisals.”
“He circulated a proclamation through the neighbouring States, declaring the Eburones traitors to Rome and outlaws from the human race, offering at the same time their lives and their goods as a common prey to any one who would venture to take them. (Dion 40. 32.)” “It put arms into the hands of every adventurer, whether Gaulish or German, who might choose to enrich himself by rapine and murder. Such, it seems, was the state of mutual hostility in which the Gaulish tribes dwelt among one another, that an announcement of this kind sufficed to break all the late-cemented ties of interest and friendship, and to enlist overwhelming multitudes in the work of destruction. The Eburones, it must be remembered, were an alien people, descendants of the Cimbri and Teutones of old.” “But from whatever quarter it flowed, it was the blood of enemies, and the Romans looked on coolly and securely while the ranks of the assailants were thinned, and while the whole clan of the Eburones was butchered and their very name obliterated from the map of Gaul.”
“Modern warfare rarely presents such frightful scenes as must have marked the annihilation of the Eburones; nor did the Romans often allow themselves to display such terrible examples of their vengeance.” “The religious pretensions of the Romans were not altogether nugatory. They demanded in every case an apparent cause of war, as well as the observation of due forms of warfare.” “But the laws of nations, as held by the encroaching Republic, might neither be regarded nor known by some of its rude opponents.” “Even in the purest ages of the commonwealth the infliction of pain and death had never disturbed a Roman general in the discharge of his public duty. But civil war is the worst corrupter both of honour and humanity. Fraud and violence conspired to brutalize the national character.” “They dealt to their foes the same measure they were trained themselves to expect, and it can hardly be said that they held an enemy’s blood much cheaper than their own. Still the aggressions of the Romans, with all their enormity, were conducted for the most part on certain recognized principles.” “It was the Gauls themselves who rushed, at a foe’s bidding, to destroy their own compatriots; their lust of plunder overcame both sympathy and prudence.” “The conquests of the Republic were, on the whole, a career of human improvement, and conduced to the diffusion of juster views and milder sentiments than prevailed among the barbarians it subdued.”
“The death of Julia had occurred during the period of Caesar’s 2nd invasion of Britain. He had felt his bereavement with the keenness of genuine affection”
“O me solicitum, quantum ego dolui in Caesaris suavissimis litteris!” “Ah querido, quanto não sofri lendo as ternas cartas de César!” Cícero
“The tie which bound him, however loosely and precariously, to Pompeius, was now rudely severed.” “He might fear to be precipitated into a struggle with the oligarchy at home [Home ‘n’ Rome!], while Gaul was yet unconquered, and the basis of his future operations unsecured. But other catastrophes followed, which could not fail to widen the breach, and poison the sources of disunion. Our next chapter [volume 2] will record the expedition of Crassus into Asia, and its final termination. The triple league was definitively dissolved by the death of the triumvir, whose peculiar position and personal qualities marked him as best fitted to hold the balance between his jealous colleagues; or constituted him, in the language of the poet, the isthmus which forbade the collision of 2 encroaching oceans. (Lucan)”
TO BE CONTINUED!
