The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) Read Online Free

legal fictions by which the Republic was transformed into an empire.
    This was the background of the Rome of Julius Caesar and Cicero—Cicero, a conservative by inclination and connections, and Caesar, the ambitious young politician, nephew by marriage of Marius. Sulla was dead, after putting through some conservative reforms, but the struggle went on and broke out into violence in such affairs as the conspiracy of Catiline. Catiline was a ruined noble, ruined, like so many nobles before and since, partly by his own dissipation, partly by the change from a land economy and from a rural to an urban culture. In the early days of the Republic, land-owners had been content to live on their holdings; when they wished to live in the city, they borrowed on their lands, and the interest on the mortgages soon outran the income from the estates. Catiline and a group of others first tried to push through a law containing the simple and revolutionary measure of an arbitrary reduction of all debts; and when he failed in this, gathered a private army and plotted to murder the leading members of the government, and increase the confusion by firing their houses. Cicero got wind of the conspiracy, denounced it, and secured passage of the emergency decrees: “Let the Consuls see to it that the Republic take no harm”—the last legitimate use of the old. limited dictatorship; and after the arrest of the conspirators Cicero himself was guilty of an unconstitutional act in having them strangled without giving them the right to appeal against the death penalty to the assembly of the people.
    The conspiracy of Catiline was followed by others, by riots and the use of private armies of gangsters on one side and the other. The situation had become desperate through the failure of the executive, and the only hope seemed to be to invest one man with full power to make the laws and see that they were obeyed—then, perhaps, they could go back to constitutional government. For this position there were two obvious candidates, the two successful generals Pompey and Julius Cæsar. Pompey was backed by the Senate and the old land-owning class; Cæsar by the opposition. When their rivalry led to a civil war in which Pompey was defeated, Cæsar was the only man in Rome. He consolidated his position by following the example of Sulla: he was Dictator, Pontifex Maximus or Supreme Head of the Church, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and, like Pooh-Bah, several minor officials as well. Of all these, the most important was commander-in-chief; witness the fact that the Latin word for it, imperator, gave us the title “emperor.” Cæsar was killed by a group of conspirators who hoped to restore the Republic; but it was too late for that.
    The great prose writers of this time were two of the great actors in it, Caesar and Cicero. There were also two poets, who, like most great poets, are not of an age but for all time, Lucretius and Catullus. Lucretius’ work is that unique epic of thought, On the Nature of Things. It is very different from the brilliant speculations and myths of the Greeks. Zeno of Elea, for instance, maintained that if Achilles, the swiftest of mortals, tried to overtake a tortoise, he could never catch it, since before he could go the whole distance he must go half, and there would always be half of some distance remaining; this and a series of other paradoxes had a serious purpose, to show that the very natures of time, space, and motion were self-contradictory. Plato explains love by saying that we are all made double and split apart, and one wonders how far to believe him. The Roman Lucretius looks straight at the world and tries to see how it is made. In his own way he is no less astonishing than Plato. The atomic theory, organic evolution and the Mendelian principle, the origin of kingship with a foreshadowing of Rousseau, a theory of dreams—they are all here. And here is the triumphant, rapturous denial of immortality, stated with such