A Criminal History of Mankind (28 page)

The robber chief makes a long speech after their meal, in which he describes some of their exploits. These are designed to emphasise the bravery and toughness of their band. Their former leader had carved a hole in a door, and was groping around inside to find the handle, when the owner of the house took a hammer and nailed the robber’s hand to the door. To escape, they were forced to hack off his arm at the elbow. In the chase, he began to lag behind; and since being caught would mean crucifixion, he committed suicide with his sword. His companions, deeply moved, wrapped his body in a cloak and consigned it to the river.

Another bandit had got into the bedroom of an old woman and, instead of strangling her, threw all her belongings out of the window to his companions below. Then he tried to throw out her bedding, and the old woman tricked him into thinking he had been throwing the goods into her neighbour’s back yard. The bandit leaned out of the window, and the old woman pushed him out; he broke his ribs on a block of stone, and coughed up his life. But there is no mention of the other bandits rushing upstairs to avenge their comrade; they only consign him to the river, like the robber chief.

Later, the bandits go out marauding and capture a beautiful girl. There is no suggestion of rape. They tell her: ‘You are perfectly safe, madam. We have no intention of hurting you or showing you any discourtesy...’ It is true that Apuleius’s bandit troupe has a distinctly operatic air; but Apuleius takes so much delight in a kind of brutal realism that it seems unlikely that he has deliberately toned down the picture.

What emerges from Apuleius is that the bandits regarded themselves as adventurers, making a living as best they could. They strangle old ladies, cut throats, and even make use of torture - to extort information; but then, they are crucified when caught, much as rustlers were lynched in a later century. In fact, accounts of robbery and piracy in this period remind us constantly of the Wild West. They are no longer more-or-less respectable, as they had been in the good old days. One historian tells us:

...as the growing City State became more powerful, it learnt how to extend its strong arm over the haunts of the robber folk. It explored and cleared their mountain fastnesses - those great limestone caves so common in Greece, sometimes mere indistinguishable slits in the hillside, but leading down through difficult ways into high and spacious halls. Here, where the robbers of old had lived and caroused and carved altars to their gods, quiet citizens from below, shepherds with their flocks in the summer pastures, now met to talk and pipe and sleep... And the sea robbers, too, had to leave their old established hiding places. The rocky island across the bay, with its one little cove, so convenient for small boats, and its famous spring of clear water, became just an extra piece of the city’s pasture ground, very useful in winter when there was snow on the heights... Only some bold spirits resisted and moved farther afield, where as yet law could not follow. Thus the gap slowly widened between the adventurer and the honest citizen...

Alfred Zimmern:
The Greek Commonwealth
, Part 3, chapter 4.

For now, in the centuries that followed the golden age of Athens, the slow spread of civilisation in the Mediterranean was making the profession of ‘adventurer’ almost impossible. The Greeks were carrying their arts of civilisation everywhere. They carried them, for example, to some barbarous tribes who lived on the green plains of a peninsula called Vitelliu - ‘calf-land’ - a word that later dropped its first and last letters and became Italy. The tribes were called Latins - after their country, Latium - and they had founded their city upon low hills as long ago as 900 B.C. They had learned much from a mysterious Asiatic people called the Etruscans, northern neighbours who once conquered their seven-hilled city and later vanished from history as mysteriously as they came into it.

This city would be the chief instrument of human progress for the next thousand years. But whether it could really be called progress is another matter. If a god could have watched the course of human history, from the building of the cities and the foundations of the great empires - Egyptian, Akkadian, Minoan, Assyrian, Macedonian - he might have felt that the evolution of humanity was proceeding in a tortuous but, on the whole, satisfactory manner. The gamble of ‘double consciousness’ was paying off.

With the coming of the Romans, history seemed to take a wrong turn. Everything that
could
go wrong with double consciousness went wrong. And when they vacated the scene, around 500 A.D., they left behind a strange double legacy of civilisation and criminality.

NO MEAN CITY

These citizens of Rome - as they called their town - were temperamentally similar to the Spartans: hard-headed, practical, disciplined. But they were overawed by Greek culture and Greek subtlety, and set out to learn all they could from them. They adopted the Greek gods, changing Zeus to Jupiter, Eros to Cupid. They even paid them the compliment of adopting a little of their history, claiming that Rome was founded by Aeneas, the Trojan prince who fled from the Greeks after the fall of Troy. Another version of early Roman history, as recounted by Winwood Reade, declares that ‘a rabble of outlaws and runaway slaves banded together, built a town, fortified it strongly, and offered it as an asylum to all fugitives. To Rome fled the over-beaten slave, the thief with his booty, the murderer with blood red hands. This city of refuge became a war town... its citizens alternately fought and farmed; it became the dread and torment of the neighbourhood.’ And because their city had no females, they kidnapped the women of the nearby Sabine tribe. It is an interesting story; for this tale of the founding of Rome by slaves and murderers helps to explain a certain fatal deficiency in the Roman soul - a curious insensitivity and literal-mindedness. The Romans never learned to inhabit the world of imagination.

It is as a result of their materialistic outlook that the history of Rome contains more crime and violence than that of any other city in world history; to read the story of Rome from the early struggles between the plebs and patricians (common people and aristocracy) to its downfall under Romulus Augustulus is to feel that this is a magnified version of Calhoun’s ‘behavioural sink’. The poet Robert Graves was one of the first to recognise its possibilities for sensational fiction, and his novels
I, Claudius
and
Claudius the God
give an impression of non-stop murder, assassination, intrigue, promiscuity and sexual perversion. One is left with the feeling that life under Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula must have been far more dangerous than in Chicago in the days of Al Capone; and, allowing for the exaggeration which springs from the novelist’s selectivity and compression, this impression is not inaccurate. Rome typifies what can go wrong when human evolution is restricted to the purely material level.

It is true that, on this level, the achievement of Rome was very remarkable indeed. Roman engineering created roads and aqueducts from Scotland to Africa, and the Roman armies carried the ideals of Greek civilisation over millions of square miles. But in Rome itself there was a continual bitter power struggle. The Greeks invented the democratic system of election. The Romans have the dubious distinction of having invented the homicidal system of election - the deliberate development of murder as a political engine. Most historians date this from the murder of the tribune (or people’s representative) Tiberius Gracchus in 133 B.C. and state that the Emperor Augustus put a stop to it about a century later; in fact, it started in the early days of republican Rome and continued until its downfall in the fifth century A.D. By then it had become such a tradition that it continued intermittently down the ages, so that the history of the popes often reads like pages of
I, Claudius
.

The real history of Rome begins from the period when the last of the Etruscan conquerors was expelled, about 509 B.C.; then Rome, like Athens, became a republic. At the time when Athens was fighting for its life against Persian invaders, Rome was demonstrating its own peculiar originality by staging the first strike in history; in 494 B.C., the plebeians, angry at class-injustice, all marched out of Rome up the Tiber and declared that they would simply found another city unless they were given their rights. This mass withdrawal of organised labour had the desired effect, and the patricians were forced to grant the people their own representatives. But when in 486 B.C. a patrician named Spurius Cassius proposed to grant the plebs the right to public land, the patricians rose as one man; Cassius was accused of wanting to become tyrant and executed. And when, in 440, a rich plebeian named Spurius Maelius tried to become a popular leader during a famine and lowered the price of his corn, he was summoned before a hastily appointed dictator and murdered. To pacify the people, his corn was distributed free; those who talked of avenging his death were quietly disposed of. Rome was learning the arts of gangster rule. But at least it was administered with an air of public concern worthy of Orwell’s Big Brother. Marcus Manlius was a national hero who had been responsible for saving the Capitol during the occupation of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C. (every schoolboy used to know the story of how the geese sounded the alarm). Saddened by the spectacle of brave ex-soldiers being thrown in jail for debt, Manlius began freeing debtors with his own private fortune. Aghast at this spectacle of demoralising altruism, the patricians accused him of wanting to become tyrant and incited the plebs to sentence him to death. Manlius was thrown from the Tarpeian rock.

Perhaps it was the occupation by the Gauls that shocked the Romans into a new kind of unity. At all events, Roman expansion now continued steadily for century after century; little more than a hundred years after the execution of Manlius Rome ruled all Italy. Conquered citizens were not regarded as mere subjects but were made citizens of Rome, with full voting privileges. Understandably, most of them preferred this new status to that of enemy.

At this point, Mediterranean piracy played a decisive part in history and started the Romans on their conquest of the world. The only city in the Mediterranean whose power compared with that of Rome was Carthage in North Africa (what is now Tunisia). It had started as a Phoenician trading post, which had swiftly expanded - rather like modern Hong Kong - until it became a melting pot of nationalities. And since the Mediterranean was not only full of pirates but also of predatory Greeks, Macedonians, Lydians, Syrians, Etruscans and Romans, Carthage had also become a maritime power. For a while, Carthage united with Rome against the Greek general Pyrrhus, king of Epirus (282-272), but when Pyrrhus withdrew he left the allies facing each other across the straits of Sicily - too close for comfort.

Carthage fought its wars with mercenaries, and in 289 B.C. these included an Italian tribe who called themselves Mamertines. Out-of-work mercenaries are always a public danger, and on their way home from a war against Syracuse (in Sicily), these mercenaries took a great liking to a pleasant little Greek town called Messana (modern Messina) which had offered them hospitality. In the middle of the night they rose from their beds, slit the throats of the men and seized the women. And, being adventurers, they decided that they preferred piracy to farming and trade. For the next twenty-five years they were the scourge of the area, preying largely on ships from Syracuse and Carthage.

At Rhegium, in the toe of Italy, another Mamertine regiment heard about this exploit and decided to imitate it; they slaughtered their hosts and seized the town. But since they were supposed to be a Roman garrison, the Romans sent an army against them. They took the town by siege and proceeded to a mass execution of the rebels, four hundred of them. They were aided by a Greek ruler named Hiero of Syracuse, who then decided to go and smoke out the nest of pirates in Messana. The Carthagians agreed this was an excellent idea and sent help. And the Messanian pirates had the remarkable impudence to send to Rome for aid. They were in luck. Although the Roman senate said it would be absurd to help pirates - especially after punishing the rebels at Rhegium - the plebs scented plunder and conquest and overruled the senate. It was, as the German historian Mommsen called it, ‘a moment of the deepest significance in the history of the world’, for it was the first step towards the Roman Empire. H. G. Wells says indignantly in his
Outline of History
(Book 5): ‘So began the first of the most wasteful and disastrous series of wars that has ever darkened the history of mankind.’ He is convinced that this decision was the moral turning point in Roman history - that it was the beginning of that epoch of slaughter, cruelty, vice and betrayal that has made the name of Rome a synonym for decadence.

There is an element of simplification in this view - as if Rome were a character in a Victorian melodrama who takes the ‘wrong turning’ and slips into vice and ruin. The tragedy of Rome was more complex. The Romans were an eminently practical and sensible people - the compromises between plebs and patricians show that. They lacked Greek subtlety and Greek intellectuality and, unlike Alexander, were not even worried about the lack. Like some simple and good-tempered country lad, they had the temperament to be happy and uncomplicated. The first Punic war (
punic
meaning Phoenician), which dragged on for a quarter of a century and which almost brought Rome to its knees, forced them to develop a new set of qualities: ruthless determination, intense patriotism; above all, aggressiveness. And nations are like individuals: once they have developed such qualities, they are stuck with them.

In 1935 a remarkable novel called
No Mean City
, by A. MacArthur and A. Kingsley Long was published. It was about the Glasgow slums, of which the authors obviously had first-hand knowledge. The title refers to St Paul’s ‘I am a citizen of no mean city’, and the novel is the story of a simple and ordinary youth, Johnnie Stark, who is forced to learn the arts of self-defence, and who is so successful that he becomes known as the ‘Razor king’. But this kind of success is in itself a trap; like an actor who cannot escape a certain type of role, he is forced by the nature of his self-image to go on radiating aggression and violence. There is no way in which he can relax into a more productive frame of mind. Inevitably, he dies in a street fight. Johnnie Stark is a symbol of the Roman Empire.