Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) Read Online Free Page B

thoroughly corrupted by it, instead of using his new treasures with moderation and understanding, as a better instructed man would have done.
    However, there can be no doubt of the success with which the arts of war were cultivated. Rome lived by and for her army; she made it the most perfect instrument of war that the world had ever seen, and, while she sometimes used it with brutal cruelty, it proved also, many a time, the school of all those virtues of steadfastness, and devotion to duty, and impregnable courage, which we have learned to associate with the Roman name. Her army, nine times out of ten, showed all that was best in Rome; only very rarely did it show the worst.
    Further, we must realize that it was really the army that did the work. For, though Rome was so great a military power, her generals were very rarely of the first class. Julius Caesar, of course, will always stand beside Alexander and Hannibal and Napoleon as one of the world's supreme captains, but no other Roman can be named as worthy to hold place beside him. The successful Roman general was usually a competent soldier, and little more; given competency, his magnificent infantry attended to the rest. The unsuccessful Roman general was very often a miracle of incompetency—indeed, he must have been, to make so miserable a use of his splendid material. Nor was the incompetent general by any means a rarity, as the many bloody defeats sustained by the legions, in spite of their steady valour, clearly show. In fact, Rome, like Britain, generally began her wars badly. By-and-by, muddling through by that stubborn determination of hers, she weeded out the incompetents and trained the likely men; and the legions, once they got a fair chance, turned the scale. But never in all her long wars of the Republic did Rome produce a captain to be named in the same breath with such a man as her great Carthaginian enemy Hannibal, until, at the very last gasp of the Republic, Julius Cæsar began to make war at an age when most men are thinking of laying aside the sword.
    So if we want to know how Rome made herself mistress of the world, we have not to think so much of a few great captains with a heaven-sent genius for war, but rather of a great silent army, the most steadfast, the most enduring, the most adaptable tool of warfare that perhaps the world has ever seen, handled, on the whole, by merely average men, with here and there an unusually competent commander, and, not uncommonly, an unusually incompetent one. And in this chapter we want to take a peep at this great army which stood for all that was real and strong in Rome, which made Rome's Empire, and which saved it again and again.
    Let us suppose, then, that we are to have the privilege of paying a visit to the camp of the two Consuls, Marius and Catulus, at Vercellæ, in the Northern Plain of Italy, just before the great battle in which they are to meet the invading hosts of the Cimbri. You could not have a finer chance of seeing a Roman army at its best, for the 32,000 men who are under the command of Marius (Catulus has 22,300) have been trained to the very highest point by the most patient and careful of commanders, and are, indeed, the first professional army that Rome has ever had. In all her great wars hitherto her army was really just a citizen militia, the infantry made up of the men who could afford a suit of armour, and the cavalry of the wealthier citizens who could maintain one of the horses which the State supplied. Each Consul levied his own army for the spring campaign, and the legions were disbanded whenever the campaign was over.
    Now, however, Marius has changed all that. He promises pay to his men on discharge, and so he has got recruits who could never have afforded to serve in the old days; and he never seems to have any difficulty in getting as many more as he wants. His legions are never disbanded. The whole establishment of each legion, with its name, its number, and its traditions, is