Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/71

Rh L U D L U 1) was for recalling him, and seemed to think little of his splendid successes ; and his little army, which one might have been supposed would have been proud of their general, was on the verge of mutiny. One can hardly understand how under such circumstances Lucullus should have per sisted in marching his men northwards from Tigranocerta over the high table-land of central Armenia, with the enemy s cavalry and innumerable mounted archers hanging on his columns, in the hope of reaching the distant Artaxata on the Araxes. The vexation of his troops broke out into an open mutiny, which compelled him to recross the Tigris into the Mesopotamia!! valley. Here, on a dark tem pestuous night, he surprised and stormed Nisibis, the capital of the Armenian district of Mesopotamia, and in this city, which yielded him a rich booty, he found satis factory winter quarters. Meantime Mithridates was again in Pontus, and the Roman forces which had been left there were soon over whelmed. In one disastrous engagement at Ziela the Roman camp was taken and the army slaughtered to a man. Lucullus was still thwarted by the mutinous spirit of his troops, and after all his brilliant achievements he was obliged to pursue his retreat into Asia Minor with the full knowledge that Tigranes and Mithridates were the unresisted masters of Pontus and Cappadocia. The work of eight years of war was undone. Commissioners sent from Rome to settle the affairs of the East had to report to the senate that a large part of Asia Minor was in the enemy s hands. In the year 66 B.C. Lucullus was recalled, and superseded in his command by Pompey. He hid indeed fairly earned by his brilliant victories the honour of a triumph, but he had powerful enemies at Rome, and charges of maladministration, to which no doubt his immense wealth gave no unreasonable colour, caused it to be deferred for three years. In 63 B.C., however, it was celebrated with extraordinary magnificence. By this time Lucullus seems to have felt that he had done his work. He had little taste for the increasingly turbulent political contests of the time, and, with the exception of occasional appearances in public life, he gave himself up to elegant luxury, with which, however, he combined a sort of dilettante pursuit of philosophy, literature, and art. Cicero, who was on terms of close intimacy with him, always speaks of him with enthusiasm and in terms of the highest praise. Lucullus is with him a vir fortissimus et clarissimus, and a man too of the highest and most refined intellectual culture. As a provincial governor, in his humane consideration for the conquered and his statesmanlike discernment of what was best suited to their circumstances, he was a man after Cicero s own heart. In this respect he reminds us of the younger Pliny. Very possibly Cicero may have spoken too flatteringly of him, but we cannot think his praise was altogether undeserved. As a soldier, considering what he achieved and the victories he won with but small forces under peculiarly unfavourable conditions, he must have been a man of no ordinary capacity. It is true that he does not seem to have hid the confidence of his troops to the extent to which a great general ought to possess it, and it is just possible that he may have erred on the side of an excessive aristocratic hauteur, which to his men may have looked like a selfish indifference to their hardships. But it is also possible that out of a strict regard to the lives and property of the provincials he may have been too strict a discipli narian for the taste of the soldiers. Some of his unpopu larity, it is pretty certain, was due to the restraints which he had put on the rapacity of the capitalists, who thought themselves aggrieved if they could not make rapid and enormous fortunes by farming the revenue of the rich pro vinces of the East. We can hardly doubt that with very decided aristocratic feeling and thorough devotion to his political party Lucullus combined much generous upright ness and kindliness of heart. His name calls up before the mind visions of boundless luxury and magnificence, and among the Roman nobles who revelled in the newly acquired riches of the East Lucullus, it is certain, stood pre-eminent. His park and pleasure grounds in the immediate vicinity of the capital were the wonder and admiration of his own and of the succeeding age. Pompey is said to have styled him the Roman Xerxes, in allusion, not only to his splendour, but also to the costly and laborious works to be seen in his parks and villas at Tusculum, near Naples, where rocks and hills had been pierced at an almost infinite expense. On one of his luxurious entertainments he is said to have spent upwards of X2000. Far the most pleasing trait in his character is the liberal patronage which he gave more especially to Greek philosophers and men of letters, and the fact that he collected a vast and valuable library, to which such men had free access. On the whole we may tak&amp;lt;} Lucullus to have been a man who in many respects rose above his age, and was a decidedly favourable speci men of a great Roman noble. Of his latter years but little is recorded. He had, as we have seen, almost wholly retired from public life. It appears that he sank into a condition of mental feebleness and imbecility some years before his death, and was obliged to surrender the management of his affairs to his brother Marcus. The usual funeral panegyric was pronounced on him in the Forum, and the people would have had him buried by the side of the great Sulla in the Campus Martius, but he was laid at his brother s special request in his splendid villa at Tusculum. The best account of Lucullus s campaign in the East is to be found in Momnisen s History of Rome, bk. v. chap. 2. Our knowledge of him is drawn mainly from Plutarch, Appian s Mithridatic War, the epitomes of the lost books of Livy, and very frequent allusions to him in Cicero s works. (W. J. B. ) LUDDITES, THE, were organized bands of rioters for the destruction of machinery, who made their first ap pearance in Nottingham and the neighbouring midland districts of England about the end of 1811. The origin of the name is curious, and is given as follows in the Life of Lord Sid mouth (vol. iii. p. 80). In 1779 there lived in a village in Leicestershire a person of weak intellect, called Ned Lud, who was the butt of the boys of the village. On one occasion Lud pursued one of his tormentors into a house where were two of the frames used in the stocking manufacture, and, not being able to catch the. boy, vented his anger on the frames. Afterwards, when ever any frames were broken, it became a common saying that Lud had done it. It is curious also that the leader of the riotous bands took the name of General Lud. The Luddite riots arose out of the severe distress caused by commercial depression and the consequent want of employ ment. They were specially directed against machinery because of the widespread prejudice that its use directly operated in producing a scarcity of labour. Apart from the prejudice, it was inevitable that the economic and social revolution implied in the change from manual work to work by machinery should give rise to great misery by upsetting all the old industrial habits and arrangements. The riots began at Nottingham, in November 1811, with the destruction of stocking and lace frames, and, continu ing through the winter and following spring, spread into- Yorkshire and Lancashire. They were met by severe repressive legislation, a notable feature in the opposition to it being Lord Byron s speech in the House of Lords, the first which he delivered there. In 1816 the rioting was resumed, through the fearful depression that followed on the European peace, aggravated by one of the worst of XV. 8