Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/204

 i84 A Short History of The World of Spartacus, came a phase in which Lucullus and Pompey the Great and Crassus and Julius Caesar were the masters of armies and dominated affairs. It was Crassus who defeated Spartacus. Lucullus conquered Asia Minor and penetrated to Armenia, and retired with great wealth into private life. Crassus, thrusting farther, invaded Persia and was defeated and slain by the Parthians. After a long rivalry Pompey was defeated by Julius Caesar (48 B.C.) and murdered in Egypt, leaving Julius Caesar sole master of the Roman world. The figure of Julius Caesar is one that has stirred the human im- agination out of all proportion to its merit or true importance. He has become a legend and a symbol. For us he is chiefly important as marking the transition from the phase of military adventurers to the beginning of the fourth stage in Roman expansion, the Early Empire. For in spite of the profoundest economic and political convulsions, in spite of civil war and social degeneration, throughout all this time the boundaries of the Roman state crept outward and continued to creep outward to their maximum about a.d. 100. There had been something like an ebb during the doubtful phases of the Second Punic War, and again a manifest loss of vigour before the reconstruction of the army by Marius. The revolt of Spartacus marked a third phase. Julius Caesar made his reputation as a military leader in Gaul, which is now France and Belgium. (The chief tribes inhabiting this country belonged to the same Celtic people as the Gauls who had occupied north Italy for a time, and who had afterwards raided into Asia Minor and settled down as the Galatians.) Caesar drove back a German invasion of Gaul and added all that country to the empire, and he twice crossed the Straits of Dover into Britain (55 and 54 b.c.) where however he made no permanent conquest. Meanwhile Pompey the Great was consolidat- ing Roman conquests that reached in the east to the Caspian Sea. At this time, the middle of the first century B.C., the Roman senate was still the nominal centre of the Roman government, appointing consuls and other officials, granting powers and the like ; and a number of politicians, among whom Cicero was an outstanding figiure, were struggling to preserve the great traditions of republican Rome and to maintain respect for its laws. But the spirit of citizenship had gone from Italy. with the wasting away of the free farmers ; it was a land now of slaves and impoverished men with neither the understand- ing nor the desire for freedom. There was nothing whatever behind these republican leaders in the senate, while behind the great adven-