The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  North of Carthage was her ancient mother and implacable rival, Utica (Utique). We catch a hint of its Roman opulence when we learn that in 46 B.C.. 300 Roman bankers and wholesalers had branch offices there.11 Its territory reached northward to Hippo Diarrhytus, now Bizerte; thence a road led along the coast westward to Hippo Regius (Bone), soon to be Augustine’s episcopal see. South and inland lay Cirta (Constantine), capital of the province of Numidia. Westward lay Thamugadi (Timgad), almost as well preserved as Pompeii, with paved and colonnaded streets, covered drains, an elegant arch, a forum, senate house, basilica, temples, baths, theater, library, and many private homes. On the pavement of the forum is a checkerboard engraved with the words, Venari, lavari, ludere, ridere, hoc est vivere—“to hunt, bathe, play, and laugh, this is to live.”12 Thamugadi was founded about A.D. 117 by the Third Legion, sole guard of the African provinces. About 123 the legion took up more permanent headquarters a few miles to the west, and raised the city of Lambaesis (Lambèse). The soldiers married and settled there, and lived in their homes more than in the camp; but even their praetorium was a stately and ornate edifice, whose baths were as fine as any in Africa. Outside the camp they helped to build a capitol, temples, triumphal arches, and an amphitheater where struggle and death might mitigate the monotony of their peaceful lives.

  That a single legion could protect all north Africa from the marauding tribes of the interior was made possible by a network of roads, military in purpose but commercial in result, binding Carthage with the Atlantic, and the Sahara with the Mediterranean. The main road went westward through Cirta to Caesarea, capital of Mauretania (Morocco). Here King Juba II taught civilization to the Mauri or Moors from whom the province took its ancient and modern names. Son of the Juba who had died at Thapsus, he had been taken as a child to grace Caesar’s triumph in Rome; he was spared, remained as a student, and became one of the most learned scholars of his time. Augustus made him client king of Mauretania and bade him spread among his people the classic culture he had so zealously acquired. He succeeded, being favored with a long reign of forty-eight years; his subjects marveled that a man could write books and yet rule so well. His son and heir was brought to Rome and starved to death by Caligula. Claudius annexed the kingdom and divided it into two provinces: Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana, named from its capital Tingis—our Tangier.

  In these African cities there were many schools, open to the poor as well as to the rich. We hear of courses in stenography,13 and Juvenal calls Africa nutricula causidicorum—the nurse of barristers.14 It produced in this period one minor and one major author—Fronto and Apuleius; only in its Christian heyday would African literature lead the world. Lucius Apuleius was a strange and picturesque character, far more than Montaigne “undulant and diverse.” Born at Madaura of high family (A.D. 124), he studied there, at Carthage, and in Athens, spent a large inheritance recklessly, wandered from city to city and from faith to faith, had himself initiated into various religious mysteries, played with magic, wrote many works on subjects ranging from theology to tooth powder, lectured at Rome and elsewhere on philosophy and religion, returned to Africa, and married at Tripoli a lady considerably richer than himself in both purse and years. Her friends and heirs-apparent sued to annul the marriage, charging that he had persuaded the widow by magic arts; he defended himself before the court in an Apologia that has come down to us in refurbished form. He won his case and bride, but the people persisted in believing him a magician, and their pagan posterity sought to belittle Christ by recounting the miracles of Apuleius. He spent the remainder of his days at Madaura and Carthage, practicing law and medicine, letters and rhetoric. Most of his writings were on scientific and philosophical subjects; his native city raised a monument to him labeled Philosophus Platonicus; and he would be chagrined, if he could return, to find himself remembered only for his Golden Ass.

  It is a work akin to the Satyricon of Petronius and even more bizarre. Originally entitled Metamorphoseon Libri XI—Eleven Books of Transformations—it expanded fantastically a story that Lucius of Patras had told of a man changed into an ass. It is a loose concatenation of adventures, descriptions, and extraneous episodes, seasoned with magic, horror, ribaldry, and deferred piety. The Lucius of the tale tells how he wandered into Thessaly, amused himself with various maidens, and sensed everywhere around him an atmosphere of sorcery.

  As soon as night was past and a new day began to spring, I fortuned to awake, and rose out of my bed as half amazed, and indeed desirous to know and see some strange and marvelous things. . . . Neither was there anything which I saw that I did believe to be the same which it was indeed, but everything seemed to me transformed into other shapes by the wicked power of enchantment, in so much that I thought the stones against which I might stumble were indurate and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees and the running waters were changed into such feathers and leaves and fountains. And further I thought that the statues and images would by and by move, and that the walls would talk, and the kine and other brute beasts would speak and tell strange news, and that immediately I should hear some oracle from heaven and from the ray of the sun.15

  Ready now for any adventure, Lucius rubs himself with a magic ointment, meanwhile mightily wishing to be changed into a bird; but as he rubs he becomes a perfect ass. Thenceforth the story records the tribulations of an ass with “the sense and understanding of a man.” His single consolation lies in his “long ears, whereby I might hear all things that were even afar off.” He will be restored to human shape, he is told, if he can find and eat a rose. He achieves this consummation after a long Asineid of vicissitudes. Disenamored of life, he turns first to philosophy, then to religion, and composes a prayer of thanksgiving to Isis astonishingly like a Christian apostrophe to the Mother of God.16 He shaves his head, is received into the third order of Isiac initiates, and paves a road back to earth by revealing a dream in which Osiris, “greatest of the gods,” bids him go home and practice law.

  Few books embrace so much nonsense, but fewer still have phrased it so pleasantly. Apuleius tries every manner of style and manages each successfully; he loves most a rich and fanciful verbiage ornate with alliteration and assonance, picturesque slang and archaic speech, sentimental diminutives, rhythmic and sometimes poetic prose. An Oriental warmth of coloring accompanies here an Oriental mysticism and sensuality. Perhaps Apuleius wished to suggest, from the background of his experience, that sensual indulgence is an intoxicating ferment which changes us into beasts, and that we can become human again only through the rose of wisdom and piety. He is at his best in the incidental stories caught by his powerful and perambulating ears; so an old woman comforts a kidnaped maiden by recounting the romance of Cupid and Psyche—17 how the son of Venus fell in love with a pretty maid, gave her every joy but that of seeing him, aroused his mother to cruel jealousy, and came to a happy ending in the skies. No artist’s brush in many an effort, has bettered the hoar shrew’s tongue in telling the ancient tale.

  III. SPAIN

  Crossing the straits from Tangier, we pass from one of the newest to one of the oldest provinces of Rome. Standing strategically at the door of the Mediterranean, blessed and cursed with precious minerals that soaked her soil with the blood of greed, crossed with mountain ranges that hindered communications, assimilation, and unity, Spain has felt the full fever of life from the days when Old Stone Age artists painted bisons on the cave walls of Altamira down to our own disordered time. For thirty centuries the Spaniards have been a proud and warlike people, lean and tough, stoically brave, passionate and obstinate, sober and melancholy, frugal and hospitable, courteous and chivalrous, easily provoked to hatred, more easily to love. When the Romans came they found a population even then inextricably diverse: Iberians from Africa (?), Ligurians from Italy, Celts from Gaul, and a layer of Carthaginians at the top. If we may believe their conquerors, the pre-Roman Spaniards were close to barbarism, some living
in towns and houses, some in hamlets and huts and caves, sleeping on the floor or the earth, and washing their teeth with urine carefully aged.18 The men wore black cloaks, the women “long mantles and gay-colored gowns.” In some parts, Strabo reprovingly adds, “the women dance promiscuously with men, taking hold of their hands.”19

  As early as 2000 B.C.. the inhabitants of southeastern Spain—Tartessus, the Phoenician “Tarshish”—had developed a bronze industry whose products were sold throughout the Mediterranean. On this basis Tartessus evolved in the sixth century B.C.. a literature and art that claimed an antiquity of 6000 years. Little remains of it except a few crude statues and a strange polychrome bust in sandstone, The Lady of Elche, carved on Greek models in a strong and flowing Celtic style. About 1000 B.C.. the Phoenicians began to tap the mineral wealth of Spain, and by 800 they had taken Cádiz and Malaga, and built great temples there. Towards 500 B.C.. Greek colonists settled along the northeastern coast. About the same time the Carthaginians, summoned by their Phoenician kin to help suppress a revolt, conquered Tartessus and all south and eastern Spain. The rapid exploitation of the peninsula by Carthage between the First and Second Punic Wars opened the eyes of the Romans to the resources of what they then called “Iberia,” and the passage of Hannibal into Italy was finally outweighed by the movement of the Scipios into Spain. The disunited tribes fought fiercely for their independence; women killed their children rather than let them fall into Roman hands, and captive natives sang their war songs while dying on the cross.20 The conquest took two centuries, but once completed it proved more fundamental than in most other provinces. The Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus changed the Republic’s policy of ruthlessness to one of courtesy and consideration, with good and lasting results. Romanization proceeded rapidly; Latin was adopted and adapted, the economy expanded and prospered, and soon Spain was contributing poets, philosophers, senators, and emperors to Rome.

  From Seneca to Aurelius Spain was the economic mainstay of the Empire. Having enriched Tyre and then Carthage, Spanish minerals now enriched Rome; Spain became to Italy what Mexico and Peru would be to Spain. Gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead were mined with modern thoroughness; at Rio Tinto one may still see Roman shafts sunk to great depths through solid quartz, and Roman slag with an astonishingly low percentage of copper left in it.21 In these mines slaves and prisoners worked day after day, in many cases never seeing the light of the sun for months.22 Great metallurgical industries rose near the mines. Meanwhile the soil of Spain, despite mountains and arid wastes, produced esparto grass for cord, rope, baskets, bedding, and sandals, nourished prize sheep and a renowned woolen industry, and gave to the Empire the best olives, oil, and wine that antiquity knew. The Guadalquivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, and lesser streams helped a web of Roman roads to carry the products of Spain to her ports and innumerable towns.

  Indeed, the most remarkable and characteristic result of Roman rule, here as elsewhere, was the multiplication or expansion of cities. In the province of Baetica (Andalusia) were Carteia (Algeciras), Munda, Malaca, Italica (birthplace of Trajan and Hadrian), Corduba, Hispalis (Seville), and Gades (Cádiz). Corduba, founded 152 B.C.. was a literary center famous for its schools of rhetoric; here were born Lucan, the Senecas, and Saint Paul’s Gallio; this tradition of scholarship would last through the Dark Ages and make Cordova the most learned city in Europe. Gades was the most populous of Spanish towns, and notoriously rich; situated at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, it commanded the Atlantic trade with western Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Britain. Its sensuous dancing girls (puellae Gaditanae) contributed modestly to its fame.

  Rome knew Portugal as the province of Lusitania, and Lisbon as Olisipo. At Norba Caesarina, to which the Arabs gave its present name of Alcantara (The Bridge), Trajan’s engineers threw across the Tagus the most perfect of existing Roman bridges; its majestic arches, 100 feet wide and 180 above the stream, still carry a busy four-lane road. The capital of Lusitania was Emerita (Mérida), which boasted many temples, three aqueducts, a circus, a theater, a naumachia, and a bridge 2500 feet long. Farther east, in the province of Tarraconensis, Segovia still enjoys the pure water brought in by an aqueduct built in Trajan’s reign. South of it was Toletum (Toledo), known in Roman times for its ironworks. On the eastern coast rose the great city of Nova Carthago (Cartagena), rich with mining, fisheries, and trade. Out in the Mediterranean lay the Baleares, where Palma and Pollentia were already old and flourishing cities. Northward on the coast were Valentia, Tarraco (Tarragona), Barcino (Barcelona), and, just below the Pyrenees, the old Greek town of Emporiae. A short sail around the eastern end of the mountains, and the traveler found himself in Gaul.

  IV. GAUL

  In those days, when all ships were of moderate draught, even ocean-going vessels could navigate the Rhone from Marseilles to Lyons; smaller boats could continue to within thirty miles of the upper Rhine; after-a short haul over level land goods could sail by a hundred cities and a thousand villas into the North Sea. Similar overland leaps led from the Rhone and the Saône to the Loire and the Atlantic, from the Aude to the Garonne and Bordeaux, from the Saone to the Seine and the English Channel. Trade followed these waterways and created cities at their meeting points. France, like Egypt, was the gift of her streams.

  In a sense French civilization began with “Aurignacian man” 30,000 years before Christ; for even then, as the caves of Montignac attest, there were artists capable of rich color and vivid line. From that Old Stone Age of hunting and herding, France passed, about 12,000 B.C., to the settled life and tillage of the Neolithic Age, and, after ten long millenniums, to the Age of Bronze. About 900 B.C.. a new race, “Alpine” and roundheaded, began to filter in from Germany and spread across France to Britain and Ireland and down into Spain. These “Celts” brought with them the Halstatt iron culture of Austria, and about 550 B.C.. they imported from Switzerland the more developed iron technology of La Tene. When Rome became conscious of France she named it Celtica; only in Caesar’s time was this changed to Gallia, Gaul.

  The immigrants displaced some native groups and settled down in independent tribes whose names still lurk in the cities they built.I The Gauls, said Caesar, were tall, muscular, and strong;23 they combed their rich blond hair back over their heads and down the nape of their necks; some had beards, many had powerful mustaches curling around their mouths. They had brought from the East, perhaps from the ancient Iranians, the custom of wearing breeches; to these they added tunics dyed in many colors and embroidered with flowers, and striped cloaks fastened at the shoulders. They loved jewelry and wore gold ornaments—even if nothing else—in war.24 They liked abundant meat, beer, and undiluted wine, being “intemperate by nature” if we may believe Appian.25 Strabo calls them “simple and high-spirited, boastful . . . insufferable when victorious, scared out of their wits when defeated”; 26 but it is not always a boon that our enemies should write a book. Poseidonius was shocked to find that they hung the severed heads of their foes from the necks of their horses.27 They were easily aroused to argument and combat, and sometimes, to amuse themselves at banquets, they fought duels to the death. “They were,” says Caesar, “our equals in valor and warlike zeal.”28 Ammianus Marcellinus describes them as

  at all ages fit for military service. The old man marches out on a campaign with courage equal to that of the man in the prime of life. ... In fact a whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one Gaul if he call in his wife, who is usually far stronger and fiercer than he, above all when she swells her neck, gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge arms, begins to rain down blows and kicks like shots from a catapult.29

  The Gauls believed in a variety of gods, now too dead to mind anonymity. Belief in a pleasant life after death was so keen as to be in Caesar’s judgment an important source of Gallic bravery. On the strength of it, says Valerius Maximus, men lent money to be repaid in heaven; and Poseidonius claimed to have seen Gauls at a funeral write letters to their friends in the other world and throw them
upon the pyre so that the dead man might deliver them;30 we should enjoy a Gaul’s opinion of these Roman tales. A priestly class, the Druids, controlled all education and vigorously inculcated religious belief. They conducted a colorful ritual, in sacred groves more often than in temples; and to appease the gods they offered human sacrifice of men condemned to death for crime; the custom will appear barbarous to those who have not seen an electrocution. The Druids were the only learned, perhaps the only literate, part of the community. They composed hymns, poems, and historical records; they studied “the stars and their movements, the size of the universe and the earth, and the order of nature,”31 and formulated a practicable calendar. They served as judges and had great influence at the courts of the tribal kings. Pre-Roman, like medieval, Gaul was a political feudalism clothed in theocracy.

  Under these kings and priests Celtic Gaul reached its zenith in the fourth century B.C. Population expanded with the productivity of the La Tène techniques, and the result was a series of wars for land. About 400 B.C. the Celts, who already held most of central Europe as well as Gaul, conquered Britain, Spain, and north Italy. In 390 they pushed south to Rome; in 278 they pillaged Delphi and conquered Phrygia. A century later their vigor began to wane, partly through the softening influence of wealth and Greek ways, partly through the political atomism of feudal barons. Just as in medieval France the kings broke the power of the barons and established a unified state, conversely, in the century before Caesar, the lords of the manors broke the power of the kings and left Gaul more fragmentary than before. The Celtic front was pushed back everywhere except in Ireland; the Carthaginians subdued the Celts in Spain, the Romans drove them out of Italy, the Cimbri and Teutones overran them in Germany and southern Gaul. In 125 B.C.. the Romans, eager to control the road to Spain, conquered southern Gaul and made it a Roman province. In 58 B.C. the Gallic leaders begged Caesar to help them repel a German invasion. Caesar complied and named his own reward.