4

mand. Four-and-thirty times have my generals rewarded me for bravery, and six civic crowns have been given me for having saved the lives of Roman citizens in battle. Altogether, I have served for two-and-twenty years, and am now past fifty years old. So, then, I might be excused, I think, from any further duty, especially as I have four sons in the army; but I trust you will take my words for what they are meant, when I say, that, as long as any one who holds a levy thinks me fit for service, I will never shirk the call, and will always try, too, that no better soldier shall be found in the whole army.' The boast of valor and the promise of devotion which mark the veteran's harangue may be joined with the image he presents of the father, twenty-two years absent from his home, educating his children to spend their lives, as he had done, in arms; and the Roman soldier stands before us, in his hand the drawn sword, on his lips the vaunt of bravery, and highest in his heart the hope of crowns and public admiration. Of such stuff were they who, trained in freedom, went forth to conquer the uncultivated or the exhausted nations by whom they were surrounded.

The character of the individual, formed under the circumstances observed throughout our history, was confirmed by the tone and the discipline of the army, the constitution of which at once enforced obedience and encouraged self-respect. No offences could be visited with more dreadful punishment than those

4 Liv., XLII. 34.

of the deserter or the factious soldier; but, on the other hand, no honors could be greater than those showered upon the valiant, no matter what their rank might be, — while the triumph of the general was esteemed the acme of mortal joy and grandeur. A law, taking its name of the Porcian, as is supposed, from a Tribune of the next year after the renewal of the foreign wars, and protecting the Roman citizen from being scourged or slain," reads as if it had been intended to remove the only possible objection to military service, by abolishing the penalties most dreaded by the unfortunate or the unfaithful soldier. But if it were put forward as an inducement to enlist that the life and the dignity of the Roman should be respected, the discipline of the armies was still maintained, as the safeguard against the trials which even the victorious nation could not escape in its marches and its voyages across the ancient world.

The wars of the present period may be divided into two great masses; the one consisting of those with civilized, and the other of those with uncivilized nations. The expeditions to the East against the shattered states of Greece and of Alexander were very different, as all who have read them know, from the battles in which the Gauls beneath the Alps and the Spanish tribes beyond the Pyrenees resisted the legions with the freshness and the ferocity of barbari

5 A. C. 199. Liv., X. 9. Sallust., Cat., 51. Cicero, however, speaks of "leges Porciæ, quæ tres sunt trium Porciorum," and says,

66

neque quidquam præter sanctionem attulerunt novi." De Rep., II. 31. Cf. his oration Pro C. Rab., 3, 4.

ans. It must be our part to obtain some sketch of these great strifes, that shall enable us, not only to comprehend the situation of the conquered, but that, likewise, of the conquerors.

6

The clouds that we long ago saw gathering over Greece had descended with more dismal prospect of desolation, when the Romans first crossed the sea to Illyria, or when, again, they entered upon the war with the fifth Philip of Macedonia. In vain had Agis and Cleomenes, the kings of Sparta, endeavoured to restore the ruined laws and the fallen spirits of their countrymen. The Achæan league was equally unsuccessful in the North of the Peloponnesus, though it gained many members, and obtained for a chief Philopomen, the last hero, as his biographer exclaims, whom Greece brought forth in her age,7 a man fitter, it would seem, to succeed than to fail. On the mainland, as it was called, in contradistinction to the peninsula, the only governments left were those of the Etolian league and of Macedonia, both really sinking, however strong they might have appeared, beneath the ceaseless disputes in which they were involved. Beyond the Egean, Antiochus, the third Syrian king of that name, and so distinguished in the East by his comparative prosperity as to be called the Great, was in possession of Asia Minor and meditating the conquest of the Grecian states, his

6 Agis reigned from A. C. 244 to 240; Cleomenes from 236 to 220. See Plutarch's Lives.

7 Plut., Philop., 1. Philopomen

lived from A. C. 252 to 183. Aratus preceded and Lycortas followed him in the same hopeless cause.

designs upon which were disclosed by his invasion of the Thracian Chersonesus, then a frontier province of Macedonia. of Macedonia. He was soon to be taught that there was little space for his dominion, not only in the lands he coveted, but in those he had already gained.

For upon Antiochus, as upon Macedonia, Ætolia, Achaia, Sparta, and the whole of Greece, the Roman armies broke with blows that could scarcely be an instant parried, much less for any time endured. The second war with Macedonia, begun immediately after the peace with Carthage, and decided within four years by the battle at Cynoscephalæ, cut off that kingdom from its hold upon the rest of Greece, to whose helpless people the famous proclamation of liberty was made at the following Isthmian games.9 A half-century succeeded, the early and the latter years alone of which were marked by any traces of the spirit that once had lived and toiled in Homer, Solon, and Socrates, where men were now waiting to see the triumph of their enemies. The Etolians, though supported by Antiochus, were soon humbled; 10 and the Syrian himself, overcome at Thermopyla" and Magnesia,12 was glad to obtain peace by surrendering his dominions in Asia Minor.13 One more skirmish with Macedonia, under its new king,

Perseus, was the end of independence there; 14 and when, Illyria and Epirus being already subdued,15 the southern countries were overrun in what was called the Achæan war,16 the very name of Greece disappeared in the provinces of Macedonia and Achaia.

Such mere rumors of war after war convey but a faint idea of the manner in which the few remaining monuments of liberty in Greece were overswept as by the sand-waves of a fierce simoom. One city, long since deprived of freedom, but wearing a magnificent and unblushing mien, stood at the head of the Peloponnesus, between the seas which rolled on either side of the isthmus. It was Corinth, the beautiful, the opulent," and once the noble city, that, in the convulsive years through which we have just now passed, essayed to put away its habits of revelry and licentiousness and bear a prominent part in the struggles of the Achæan league. But on the appearance of the Consul, Lucius Mummius, before the walls, they

14 At Pydna, A. C. 168. Liv., XLIV. 41 et seq. Two pretenders to the throne, twenty and twentyfive years afterwards, were easily overthrown.

15 A. C. 168-167. Liv., XLIV. 30, 32, XLV. 18, 26. The dreadful account of the ravages committed in Epirus by Æmilius Paullus, one of the great heroes of the times, is in Plut., Æm. Paull., 29; Liv., XLV. 34.

16 A. C. 147-146. See the following narrative of the fall of Corinth.

Florus (II. 16), "Græciæ decus, inter duo maria, Ionium et Ægæum, quasi spectacula exposita."

"Urbs toto tunc orbe," wrote Orosius (V. 3), “longe omnium opulentissima; quippe quæ velut officina omnium artificum atque artificiorum et emporium commune Asiæ atque Europæ per multa retro secula fuit.”

Paulus Orosius, born in Tarragona about A. D. 390, was a disciple and a friend of St. Augustine and St. Jerome, to the former of whom he dedicated his "Histories against the Pagans," in which he describes

17 "Achaia caput," exclaims the calamities of heathenism.