FullReads

Why did the Romans conquer the Greeks? By why we mean, Upon what principle did the children of Romulus overthrow the children of Ion, Dorus, AEolus? Why did not these overthrow those? We, speak Latino more–Vellem ostenderes quare hi non profligaverint illos? The answer is brief: the Romans were one, the Greeks were many. Whilst no weighty pressure from without had assaulted Greece, it was of particular service to that little rascally system that they were split into sections more than ever we have counted or mean to count. They throve by mutual repulsion, according to the ballad:

When Captain X. kick’d Miss Roe, Miss Roe kick’d Captain X. again.’

Internally, for pleasant little domestic quarrels, the principle of division was excellent; because, as often as the balance tended to degravitation (a word we learned, as Juliet tells her nurse, ‘from one we danc’d withal’), instanter it was redressed and trimmed by some renegade going over to the suffering side. People talk of Athens being beaten by the Spartans in the person of Lysander; and the vulgar notion is, that the Peloponnesian war closed by an eclipse total and central for our poor friend Athens. Nonsense! she had life left in her to kick twenty such donkeys to death; and, if you look a very little ahead, gazettes tell you, that before the peace of Antalcidas, those villains, the Spartans (whom may heaven confound!) had been licked almost too cruelly by the Athenians. And there it is that we insist upon closing that one great intestine [7] war of the Greeks. So of other cases: absolute defeat, final overthrow, we hold to be impossible for a Grecian state, as against a Grecian state, under the conditions which existed from the year 500 B.C. But when a foreign enemy came on, the possibilities might alter. The foreigner, being one, and for the moment at least united, would surely have a great advantage over the crowd of little pestilent villains–right and left–that would be disputing the policy of the case. There lay the original advantage of the Romans; one they were, and one they were to the end of Roman time. Did you ever hear of a Roman, unless it were Sertorius, that fought against Romans? Whereas, scoundrel Greeks were always fighting against their countrymen. Xenophon, in Persia, Alexander, seventy years later, met with their chief enemies in Greeks. We may therefore pronounce with firmness, that unity was one cause of the Roman superiority. What was the other? Better military institutions. These, if we should go upon the plan of rehearsing them, are infinite. But let us confine our view to the separate mode in each people of combining their troops. In Greece, the phalanx was the ideal tactical arrangement; for Rome, the legion. Everybody knows that Polybius, a Greek, who fled from the Peloponnesus to Rome a little before the great Carthaginian war, terminated by Scipio Africanus, has left a most interesting comparison between the two forms of tactical arrangement: and, waiving the details, the upshot is this–that the phalanx was a holiday arrangement, a tournament arrangement, with respect to which you must suppose an excess of luck if it could be made available, unless by mutual consent, under a known possibility of transferring the field of battle to some smooth bowling-green in the neighbourhood. But, on the other hand, the legion was available everywhere. The phalanx was like the organ, an instrument almighty indeed where it can be carried; but it cost eight hundred years to transfer it from Asia Minor to the court of Charlemagne (i.e., Western Europe), so that it travelled at the rate of two miles per annum; but the legion was like the violin, less terrifically tumultuous, but more infinite than the organ, whilst it is in a perfect sense portable. Pitch your camp in darkness, on the next morning everywhere you will find ground for the legion, but for the fastidious phalanx you need as much choice of ground as for the arena of an opera stage.