The History of Rome, Book V - The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

Theodor Mommsen

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• Publié par: guhiv
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 41
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The History of Rome, Book V, by Theodor Mommsen, Translated by William Purdie
Dickson
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Title: The History of Rome, Book V
Author: Theodor Mommsen
Release Date: September 13, 2004 [eBook #10705] Most recently updated March 16, 2005
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF ROME, BOOK V***
E-text prepared by David Ceponis
Note: A compilation of all five volumes of this work is also available individually in the Project Gutenberg library. See
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10706
The original German version of this work, Roemische Geschichte, Fuenftes Buch: Die Begruendung der
Militaermonarchie, is in the Project Gutenberg E-Library as E-book #3064. See http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3064THE HISTORY OF ROME, BOOK V
The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
by
THEODOR MOMMSEN
Translated with the Sanction of the Author
by
William Purdie Dickson, D.D., LL.D.
Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow
A New Edition Revised throughout and Embodying Recent Additions
Preparer's Notes
This work contains many literal citations of and references to words, sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from
many languages, including Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek. This English language Gutenberg
edition, constrained within the scope of 7-bit ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:
1) Words and phrases regarded as "foreign imports", italicized in the original text published in 1903; but which in the
intervening century have become "naturalized" into English; words such as "de jure", "en masse", etc. are not given
any special typographic distinction.
2) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do not refer to texts cited as academic references,
words that in the source manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single preceding, and a single following
dash; thus, -xxxx-.
3) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents, are rendered with a preceding and a following
double-dash; thus, —xxxx—. Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as xxx-xxxx, and
is rendered as —xxx-xxx—
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juxtaposed to another one of lowercase. Also, a construct such as —"id:E" indicates a symbol that in graphic form
most closely resembles an ASCII uppercase "E", but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.
6) The numerous subheading references, of the form "XX. XX. Topic" found in the appended section of endnotes are
to be taken as "proximate" rather than topical indicators. That is, the information contained in the endnote indicates
primarily the location in the main text of the closest indexing "handle", a subheading, which may or may not echo
congruent subject matter.
The reason for this is that in the translation from an original paged manuscript to an unpaged "cyberscroll", page
numbers are lost. In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing "handles" of sub-chapter scale.
Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages.
Therefore, it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper by adopting a shortest path
method to indicate the desired reference.
7) The attentive reader will notice occasional typographic or syntactic anomalies and errors. In almost all cases this
conscious and due to an editorial decision for the first Gutenberg edition to transmit transparently all but the mostegregious flaws found in the source text Scribner edition of 1903. Furthermore, a number of sentences may be
virtually unintelligible to the English reader due to the architecture of relative clauses, prepositions, and verbs as
carried over from the original German. It is the preparer's ambition for a second Gutenberg edition of the History of
Rome to reconstruct and clarify the most turgid specimens.
8) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.; that is, from the founding of Rome,
conventionally taken to be 753 B. C. To the end of each volume is appended a table of conversion between the two
systems.CONTENTS
BOOK V: The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
CHAPTER
I. Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
II. Rule of the Sullan Restoration
III. The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
IV. Pompeius and the East
V. The Struggle of Parties during the Absence of Pompeius
VI. Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders
VII. The Subjugation of the West
VIII. The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar
IX. Death of Crassus—Rupture between the Joint Rulers
X. Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus
XI. The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
XII. Religion, Culture, Literature, and ArtBOOK FIFTH
The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
Wie er sich sieht so um und um,
Kehrt es ihm fast den Kopf herum,
Wie er wollt' Worte zu allem finden?
Wie er mocht' so viel Schwall verbinden?
Wie er mocht' immer muthig bleiben
So fort und weiter fort zu schreiben?
Goethe.Chapter I
Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
The Opposition
Jurists
Aristocrats Friendly to Reform
Democrats
When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state;
but, as it had been established by force, it still needed force to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and
open foes. It was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly expressed and under leaders distinctly
acknowledged, but by a mass of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless under the general name of the
popular party, but in reality opposing the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds and with
very different designs. There were the men of positive law who neither mingled in nor understood politics, but who
detested the arbitrary procedure of Sulla in dealing with the lives and property of the burgesses. Even during Sulla's
lifetime, when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists resisted the regent; the Cornelian laws, for example,
which deprived various Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated in judicial decisions as null and
void; and in like manner the courts held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold into slavery
during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited. There was, further, the remnant of the old liberal minority in the
senate, which in former times had laboured to effect a compromise with the reform party and the Italians, and was
now in a similar spirit inclined to modify the rigidly oligarchic constitution of Sulla by concessions to the Populares.
There were, moreover, the Populares strictly so called, the honestly credulous narrow-minded radicals, who staked
property and life for the current watchwords of the party-programme, only to discover with painful surprise after the
victory that they had been fighting not for a reality, but for a phrase. Their special aim was to re-establish the
tribunician power, which Sulla had not abolished but had divested of its most essential prerogatives, and which
exercised over the multitude a charm all the more mysterious, because the institution had no obvious practical use
and was in fact an empty phantom—the mere name of tribune of the people, more than a thousand years later,
revolutionized Rome.
Transpadanes
Freedmen
Capitalists
Proletarians of the Capital
The Dispossessed
The Proscribed and Their Adherents
There were, above all, the numerous and important classes whom the Sullan restoration had left unsatisfied, or
whose political or private interests it had directly injured. Among those who for such reasons belonged to the
opposition ranked the dense and prosperou