Assuredly nothing more pitiable befell in the First Punic War than that the Romans were so utterly defeated that even the famous Regulus was taken captive—the man of whom we made mention in the first and second books—a truly great man, and formerly the conqueror and subduer of the Carthaginians, who would even have brought that first Punic War itself to an end, had he not, out of an excessive greed for praise and glory, imposed upon the exhausted Carthaginians harsher terms than they could bear. If that man's utterly unforeseen captivity, his most shameful servitude, his most faithful keeping of his oath, and his most cruel death do not compel those gods to blush, then it is true that they are of air and have no blood. Nor, at that time, were the gravest calamities lacking within the walls.
For when the river Tiber overflowed far beyond its wont, almost all the low-lying parts of the city were laid waste, some places dashed down by its onrush as by a torrent, others soaked and undermined as by a long-standing marsh. Then followed a still more destructive plague of fire, which, seizing upon all the higher buildings about the Forum, did not spare even the temple of Vesta, its most familiar haunt, where those virgins, not so much honoured as condemned, were wont to grant it as it were perpetual life by most diligently replacing the wood. There, however, the fire not only lived; it even raged.
Terrified by its onrush, the virgins, since they could not rescue from that conflagration those fateful sacred objects which had already been the safeguard of three cities in which they had been kept, the pontiff Metellus, forgetting in a manner his own safety, rushed in and snatched them away half-burned. For neither did the fire recognize even him, nor indeed was there any deity present there—which, even had it been present, would not have failed to flee. Thus a man was able to be of more use to the sacred things of Vesta than they to a man. But if they could not repel the fire from themselves, what could they avail against those floods and flames to help the city, whose safety they were supposed to guard? As indeed the very outcome made plain that they could avail nothing whatever.
These things we would by no means cast in their teeth, if they were to say that those sacred rites had been instituted not for the safeguarding of these temporal goods, but for the signifying of eternal ones; and that therefore, when it happened that these objects perished because they were bodily and visible, nothing was thereby diminished of those realities for the sake of which they had been instituted, and that they could be restored anew for the same uses. But as it is, in a strange blindness they suppose that, through those sacred objects which could perish, it could come to pass that the earthly welfare and temporal felicity of the city could not perish. Accordingly, since it is shown that even while the sacred things remained, either ruin of welfare or misfortune broke in, they blush to change an opinion which they cannot defend.
[XIX] But as for the Second Punic War, it would be too long to recount the disasters of the two peoples fighting each other so far and so wide, so that, even by the admission of those who set out not so much to narrate the Roman wars as to praise the Roman empire, he who conquered was more like one conquered. For when Hannibal rose up from Spain, and, having surmounted the Pyrenees, having overrun Gaul, and having burst through the Alps, poured down like a torrent upon the passes of Italy, with forces increased through so long a march, laying waste or subduing everything—how bloody were the battles fought, how often were the Romans overcome! how many towns went over to the enemy, how many were taken and crushed! how dread were the combats, and so often glorious for Hannibal through Roman disaster!
And as for the wondrously horrible calamity at Cannae, what shall I say, where Hannibal, cruel as he was, is nevertheless reported to have given orders that mercy be shown, sated with so vast a slaughter of his most bitter foes? Whence he sent three pecks of golden rings to Carthage, by which men understood that so great a dignity of the Roman order had fallen in that battle that a measure could reckon it more easily than a count; and hence the carnage of the rest of the throng—all the more numerous as it was of lower rank, which lay there without rings—was reckoned rather to be guessed at than reported. In short, so great a scarcity of soldiers followed that the Romans enrolled men guilty of crimes by promising them impunity, gave freedom to slaves, and thereby not so much replenished as newly constituted a shameful army.
Thus for slaves—or rather, that we may do them no wrong, now freedmen—about to fight for the Roman commonwealth, weapons were lacking. They were taken down from the temples, as though the Romans were saying to their gods: 'Lay aside what you have so long held to no purpose, in case our chattels can perhaps make some useful thing of it, whereof our deities could make nothing.' Then also, when the treasury had failed for the meeting of the soldiers' pay, private wealth came into public use, everyone contributing what he had, so that, apart from single rings and single bullae—the pitiable insignia of rank—the Senate itself, much less the other orders and tribes, left themselves no gold at all.
Who could endure these men, if in our times they were reduced to such want, when we can scarcely endure them even now, since for the sake of superfluous pleasure more is given to actors than was then contributed to the legions for the sake of ultimate safety? [XX] But among all these evils of the Second Punic War, nothing was more pitiable, nor more worthy of a pitiable lament, than the destruction of the people of Saguntum. For this city of Spain, most friendly to the Roman people, while keeping faith with that same people, was overthrown. For it was from here that Hannibal, having broken the treaty, sought pretexts by which to provoke the Romans to war. He was therefore fiercely besieging Saguntum; and when this was heard at Rome, envoys were sent to Hannibal to make him withdraw from the siege of it.
Being scorned, they proceeded to Carthage and lodged their complaint of the broken treaty, and, the business unaccomplished, returned to Rome. While these delays were being spun out, that wretched city, most wealthy, most dear to its own commonwealth and to Rome, was destroyed by the Carthaginians in the eighth or ninth month. To read of its ruin, much more to write of it, is a thing of horror. Yet I shall recount it briefly; for it bears much upon the matter in hand. First it wasted away with famine; for it is even reported to have been fed by some upon the corpses of their own people. Then, weary of all things, lest even as captive it should come into the hands of Hannibal, it built a huge pyre at public cost, into which, while it blazed, they cast themselves and their own, some even first slain by the sword.
Here let those gluttonous and worthless gods do something—those gods who gape after the fat of sacrifices and deceive men by the fog of lying divinations; here let them do something, let them come to the aid of the city most friendly to the Roman people, let them not suffer to perish one that was perishing through the keeping of faith. They themselves surely presided as intermediaries when it was bound to the Roman commonwealth by the treaty interposed. And so, faithfully guarding what it had joined by a compact under those very patrons, had bound by faith, had made fast by an oath, it was besieged, oppressed, and consumed by a treacherous foe. If those same gods afterwards terrified Hannibal, when he was very near the walls of Rome, with tempest and lightning, and drove him far off, then let them have done some such thing first.
For I dare to say that they might more honourably have raged with a tempest on behalf of the friends of the Romans, who were then in peril precisely lest they should break faith with the Romans, and who then had no help, than on behalf of the Romans themselves, who were fighting for their own and were, against Hannibal, wealthy. If, therefore, they were the guardians of Roman felicity and glory, they would have averted from it so grievous a reproach as that of the Saguntine calamity. But as it is, how foolishly it is believed that, with those gods for defenders, Rome did not perish when Hannibal was victor, seeing that they could not come to the aid of the city of Saguntum, that it might not perish for the sake of its friendship!
If the people of Saguntum had been Christian, and had suffered something of this sort for the evangelical faith, then, although they would not have destroyed themselves with sword or fire—yet if they had suffered destruction for the evangelical faith, they would have suffered it in that hope by which they had believed in Christ, not for the reward of the very shortest time, but of an unending eternity. But on behalf of these gods, who are said to be worshipped, who are sought out to be worshipped, precisely for this end—that the felicity of these fleeting and passing things may be secure—what will their defenders and excusers answer us concerning the perishing Saguntines, except what they answered concerning that Regulus who was put to death? This much difference there is: that he was a single man, this a whole city; yet in both cases the cause of destruction was the keeping of faith.
For it was on account of this that the one wished to return to the enemy, and the other refused to go over to it. Does faith kept, then, provoke the wrath of the gods? Or can there perish, even with the gods propitious, not only individual men, but even whole cities? Let them choose which they will. For if those gods are angry at faith kept, let them seek out the treacherous by whom they may be worshipped; but if, even with them propitious, men and cities can perish, afflicted with many and grievous torments, then they are worshipped with no fruit of this felicity. Let them therefore cease to be indignant, who suppose that they have been made unhappy by the loss of the sacred rites of their gods.
For they might, not only with those gods abiding, but even with them favouring, not merely murmur about misery as they now do, but, as Regulus and the Saguntines did then, be horribly tortured and even utterly perish.
[XXI] Further, between the second and the last Carthaginian war, at the time when Sallust said that the Romans conducted themselves with the best morals and the greatest concord—for I pass over much, mindful of the measure of the work I have undertaken—at that very time, then, of the best morals and greatest concord, that famous Scipio, the liberator of Rome and Italy, and the illustrious and wondrous finisher of that Second Punic War, so horrible, so ruinous, so perilous, the conqueror of Hannibal and subduer of Carthage, whose life from youth is described as devoted to the gods and nurtured in the temples, yielded to the accusations of his enemies and, deprived of the fatherland which by his own valour he had rendered safe and free, spent and completed the rest of his life in the town of Liternum, after his notable triumph seized by no longing for that city, so that he is reported even to have given orders that no funeral should be held for him, even in death, in his ungrateful fatherland.
Then, for the first time, through Gnaeus Manlius, the proconsul triumphing over the Gallo-Greeks, Asiatic luxury—worse than any enemy—crept into Rome. Then, it is reported, were first seen bronze-inlaid couches and precious coverlets; then were brought into banquets girl-harpists and other wanton profligacy. But now I have undertaken to speak of those evils which men suffer unwillingly, not of those which they do gladly. Hence that which I have recalled concerning Scipio pertains rather to the present discussion—that, yielding to his enemies, he died outside the fatherland which he had freed—because the Roman deities, from whose temples he turned away Hannibal, did not repay him in turn, they who are worshipped solely for the sake of that felicity.
But because Sallust said that at that time the morals there were the best, for this reason I have thought fit to make mention of this Asiatic luxury, so that it may be understood that even that was said by Sallust in comparison with other times, in which times the morals were assuredly worse amid the gravest discords. For at that time, that is, between the second and the last Carthaginian war, that Voconian law was even passed, that no one should make a woman his heir, not even an only daughter. Than which law I know not what more iniquitous could be said or conceived. Yet, nevertheless, throughout all that interval between the two Punic wars, the unhappiness was more tolerable. The army only was worn down by wars abroad, but was consoled by victories;
but at home no discords raged, as at other times. But in the last Punic war, by a single onset of the other Scipio—who for this very reason himself also earned the surname of Africanus—the rival of the Roman empire was destroyed from its very root; and then the Roman commonwealth was overwhelmed by such heaps of evils that, by prosperity and security of affairs—whence, through morals excessively corrupted, those evils were heaped up—Carthage, so quickly overthrown, is shown to have done more harm than it had earlier done for so long by being an adversary.
Throughout all this time, up to Caesar Augustus—who is seen to have wrested from the Romans in every way a liberty no longer glorious even in their own opinion, but contentious and ruinous and now plainly enervated and languid, and to have recalled all things to regal arbitration, and, as it were, to have restored and renewed the commonwealth that had collapsed as with a diseased old age—throughout all that time, then, I pass over the wars and disasters arising from ever new causes, and the treaty of Numantia stained with dreadful ignominy: for the chickens had flown from the coop and, as they say, had made a bad augury for the consul Mancinus;
as though, throughout so many years during which that tiny city had harried and afflicted the Roman army that had beset it, and had now begun to be a terror to the Roman commonwealth itself, others had gone forth against it under a different augury. [XXII] But these things, I say, I pass over—though I would by no means keep silent about this: that Mithridates, king of Asia, ordered that Roman citizens sojourning everywhere in Asia, an innumerable multitude intent on their own business, be killed in a single day; and it was done. What a pitiable spectacle of things that was—that each man, suddenly, wherever he happened to be found, in the field, on the road, in the town, at home, in the village, in the forum, in the temple, in bed, at banquet, was unexpectedly and impiously slaughtered!
What groans of the dying there were, what tears of the onlookers—perhaps even of those who struck the blows! How harsh the necessity of hosts, not only to behold those abominable slaughters in their own homes, but even to perpetrate them, their countenances suddenly changed from that soft courtesy of humanity to the transaction of a hostile business in the midst of peace—yea, by mutual wounds, I would say altogether, since the smitten was struck in body and the smiter in soul! Had all these too despised the auguries? Had they no household and public gods, whom they might consult, when they set out from their own abodes upon that journey from which there was no return? If this is so, these men have no cause to complain, in this matter, about our times: of old the Romans despise these vain things.
But if they did consult them, let it be answered: what did these things profit, seeing that, at least under human laws, with no one forbidding, they were permitted? [XXIII] But let us now briefly, as far as we can, recount those evils which, the more inward they were, the more wretched they proved to be: civil, or rather uncivil, discords, and now no longer mere seditions, but even urban wars themselves, where so much blood was poured out, where the zeal of the factions raged against one another no longer with the dissensions of assemblies and varied outcries, but now plainly with sword and arms; social wars, servile wars, civil wars—how much Roman blood they shed, how great a devastation and desolation of Italy they wrought!
For before the allied Latium bestirred itself against Rome, all the animals subjected to human uses—dogs, horses, asses, oxen, and whatever other cattle were under the dominion of men—suddenly grew wild and, forgetting their domestic tameness, abandoned their shelters and roamed at large, and shunned the approach not only of others but even of their own masters, not without destruction or danger to any that ventured, if anyone pressed upon them from close by. What a sign of great evil this was, if this was a sign—since it was so great an evil, if it was even a sign at all! Had this happened in our times, we should have to endure these men as more rabid than their own beasts were. [XXIV] Now the beginning of the civil evils was the seditions of the Gracchi, stirred up by the agrarian laws.
For they wished to divide among the people the lands which the nobility wrongfully possessed. But to dare to uproot an inveterate injustice was most perilous—nay rather, as the event itself taught, most ruinous. What deaths ensued when the elder Gracchus was slain! What deaths too, when his brother, after no long interval of time! For it was not by laws and the order of the magistracies, but by mobs and the clashes of arms, that noble and ignoble alike were being slain.
After the killing of the other Gracchus, the consul Lucius Opimius, who had taken up arms against him within the City, and, when he had been crushed and destroyed together with his allies, had wrought an enormous slaughter of citizens—when he held an inquiry, now prosecuting the rest by judicial investigation, is reported to have put three thousand men to death. From which it can be understood how great a multitude of deaths the turbulent clash of arms could produce, when the ostensibly weighed cognizance of the courts produced so many. The slayer of Gracchus himself sold his head, weighty as it was, for a weight of gold to match, to the consul; for this bargain had preceded the murder. In it, too, was slain, together with his sons, the ex-consul Marcus Fulvius.
[XXV] By a truly elegant decree of the Senate, on that very spot where that funereal tumult had been enacted, where so many citizens of every order had fallen, a temple of Concord was built, so that, as a witness of the Gracchi's punishment, it might strike the eyes of those addressing the assembly and prick their memory. But what else was this than a mockery of the gods—to build a temple to that goddess who, had she been in the city, would not have crumbled, torn apart by such great dissensions? Unless, perchance, Concord, being guilty of this crime, because she had deserted the minds of the citizens, deserved to be shut up in that temple as in a prison. For why, if they wished it to accord with the events, did they not rather build there a temple of Discord?
Or is any reason given why Concord should be a goddess, and Discord not be a goddess, so that, according to Labeo's distinction, the one is good and the other indeed evil? Nor does he himself seem to have followed anything other than what he observed—that at Rome a temple had been established to Fever as well as to Health. In that way, then, one ought to have been established not only to Concord but also to Discord. Perilously, therefore, did the Romans choose to live with so evil a goddess enraged, nor did they recall that the destruction of Troy had taken its origin from her offence. For she indeed, because she had not been invited among the gods, devised the strife of the three goddesses by the underhand offer of the golden apple; whence came the brawl of the deities, and Venus victorious, and Helen carried off, and Troy destroyed.
Wherefore, if perchance she was indignant that among the gods in the City she had merited no temple, and for that reason was now troubling the city with such great tumults, how much more savagely could she have been provoked, when in the very place of that slaughter—that is, in the place of her own work—she saw a temple set up to her adversary! At these vain things, while we laugh at them, those learned and wise men fume; and yet the worshippers of good and evil deities do not extricate themselves from this question of Concord and Discord—whether they have neglected the cult of these goddesses and preferred to them Fever and Bellona, to whom of old they made shrines, or whether they have also worshipped these, seeing that thus, with Concord departing, savage Discord led them all the way to civil wars.
[XXVI] They thought, indeed, that a splendid barrier against sedition was to be set before those addressing the assembly—a temple of Concord, witness of the slaughter and punishment of the Gracchi. How much they profited from this, the worse things that followed make plain. For thereafter the popular orators strove, not to avoid the example of the Gracchi, but to surpass their design—Lucius Saturninus, tribune of the plebs, and Gaius Servilius, praetor, and, much later, Marcus Drusus—by whose seditions there blazed up first already at that time the gravest slaughters, and then the social wars, by which Italy was violently afflicted and brought to a marvellous devastation and desolation. Then followed the servile war, and civil wars.
What battles were fought, what blood was shed, so that almost all the peoples of Italy, over whom the Roman empire was especially predominant, should be subdued as though they were a savage barbarism! Now, from a very few gladiators—that is, fewer than seventy—in what manner the servile war was drawn out, to how great a number and to how keen and fierce a pitch it came, what generals of the Roman people that number overcame, what cities and regions it laid waste, and in what fashion—scarcely have those who wrote the history been able sufficiently to explain. Nor was that the only servile war, but slaves first depopulated the province of Macedonia, and afterwards Sicily and the sea-coast.
How great, too, and how horrible were the depredations they committed—first robberies, then the mighty wars of the pirates—who could tell in proportion to the magnitude of the events? [XXVII] But when Marius, already stained with civil blood, having slain many of the party opposed to him, was defeated and had fled from the City, the state scarcely breathing again for a little, to use Tully's words, 'afterwards Cinna, together with Marius, gained the upper hand. Then indeed, with most illustrious men slain, the lights of the state were extinguished. Sulla afterwards avenged the cruelty of this victory, with what diminution of citizens and what calamity to the commonwealth it is needless even to say.' For concerning this vengeance, which was more ruinous than if the crimes that were being punished had been left unpunished, Lucan too says:
'The remedy exceeded due measure and followed too far whither the disease had led its hand. The guilty perished; but by now, when only the guilty could survive.' In that Marian and Sullan war, apart from those who fell abroad in the battle-line, in the City itself the streets, squares, forums, theatres, and temples were filled with corpses, so that it was hard to judge when the victors had produced more dead—whether earlier, that they might conquer, or afterwards, because they had conquered;
for when the Marian victory came first, when Marius restored himself from exile, apart from the slaughters wrought everywhere on every side, the head of the consul Octavius was set upon the Rostra; the Caesars were butchered by Fimbria in their own houses; the two Crassi, father and son, were slain in each other's sight; Baebius and Numitorius, dragged by a hook, perished with their entrails scattered; Catulus withdrew himself from the hands of his enemies by draining poison; Merula, the priest of Jupiter, having cut his veins, made an offering to Jupiter with his very own blood. And before the very eyes of Marius himself, those were struck down on the spot to whom, when they greeted him, he had refused to extend his right hand.
[XXVIII] But the Sullan victory that followed, the avenger, forsooth, of this cruelty, after so much citizen blood, by whose shedding it had been procured, when the war was now finished but the enmities still living, raged more cruelly in peace. For now, after the earlier and most recent slaughters of the elder Marius, others yet graver had been added by the young Marius and by Carbo, of the same Marian party, who, with Sulla threatening, despairing not only of victory but even of their very safety, filled all things with slaughters of their own of others. For besides the carnage spread far and wide through diverse places, the Senate too being besieged, men were led forth to the sword from the very Senate-house, as from a prison.
Mucius Scaevola the pontiff, since nothing among the Romans was held more sacred than the temple of Vesta, was slain embracing the very altar, and almost extinguished with his own blood that fire which, by the perpetual care of the virgins, was always burning. Then Sulla the victor entered the City—he who, in the Villa Publica, no longer with war but with peace itself raging, had laid low seven thousand men who had surrendered (and were therefore certainly unarmed), not by fighting but by command. In the whole City, moreover, each Sullan struck down whomever he pleased, so that the funerals could not be numbered at all, until it was suggested to Sulla that some ought to be allowed to live, that there might be those over whom the victors could rule.
Then at last that licence of butchery, which was being carried hither and thither everywhere in frenzy, was checked, and that list was posted with great congratulation, which contained two thousand of men to be killed and proscribed from each splendid order—that is, the equestrian and the senatorial. The number saddened, but the limit consoled; nor was there so much grief because so many were falling, as there was joy because the rest were no longer afraid. But among some of those who had been ordered to die, that very security of the rest, cruel though it was, groaned at the refined kinds of death. For the hands of those tearing a certain man limb from limb rent him without steel—men more savagely rending a man alive than beasts are wont to tear a cast-off corpse.
Another, with his eyes gouged out and his limbs amputated bit by bit, was forced to live long—or rather to die long—amid such great torments. Certain noble cities too were put up for auction, as though they were farm-estates; and one indeed was ordered to be butchered entire, just as a single defendant is ordered to be led to execution. These things were done in peace, after the war—not that victory might be hastened in the gaining, but that, once gained, it might not be held in contempt. Peace vied with war in cruelty, and conquered. For war laid low the armed, but peace the disarmed. War was such that he who was struck should, if he could, strike back; but peace was such, not that he who had escaped should live, but that the dying man should not resist. [XXIX] What frenzy of foreign nations, what savagery of barbarians can be compared with this victory of citizens over citizens?
What did Rome see more deadly, more foul, more bitter—whether of old the irruption of the Gauls, and a little before that of the Goths, or the ferocity of Marius and Sulla and other most illustrious men on their sides, as of Rome's own lights, against her own members? The Gauls indeed butchered the Senate—whatever of it they could find in the whole City, except the Capitoline citadel, which alone was somehow defended; but on that hill they at least sold life for gold to those there stationed—life which, though they could not seize it by the sword, they could nonetheless consume by siege. The Goths, however, spared so many senators that it is more to be wondered at that they slew any at all.
But Sulla, while Marius was still living, as victor took his seat upon the very Capitol—which had been safe from the Gauls—to decree slaughters; and when Marius had slipped away in flight, about to return more ferocious and more bloody, the former, on the Capitol, even by a decree of the Senate, deprived many of life and property. But on the Marian side, in Sulla's absence, what was there so sacred that they would spare it, when they did not spare Mucius—a citizen, a senator, a pontiff—as, wretched, he clasped in his embraces the very altar where, as they say, the destiny of Rome resided? And that last Sullan list, to say nothing of countless other deaths, butchered more senators than the Goths were even able to despoil.
With what face, then, with what heart, with what shamelessness, with what folly, or rather with what madness, do they not charge these things upon their own gods, and yet charge these upon our Christ?