The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

Army and Treasury

Dio Cassius rightly asserts that the real power of Augustus rested upon two things—the control of the army and of the finances. We have already seen that in the so-called abdications of Augustus there was no surrender of these and no suggestion of their surrender. In view of the present tendency among historians to attach real importance to the restoration of the Republic in 27 B.C. and again in 23 B.C. it is all the more important to remember that the twenty-three legions which with their auxiliaries and reserves formed the entire military force of the Roman Empire took their oath solely to Augustus and were with one exception stationed exclusively in his provinces, fought under his auspices and took their orders from no other but Cæsar and his legates. Beyond these he had a prætorian corps of 9000 men in permanent cantonments within striking distance of Rome, as well as a drilled bodyguard of slaves in his own house. In view of these facts it is absurd to limit our conception of the power of Cæsar to a survey of the constitutional offices which he held. It is only in the language of lawyers and pedants that his authority rested upon consular and tribunician powers. Everybody knew that a letter sealed with Cæsar’s sphinx was backed by the swords of 140,000 legionaries. The military situation of Augustus is therefore of the utmost importance.

Plate XL. AUGUSTUS AND FAMILY OF CÆSARS
CAMEO

Augustus was, as we have seen, a statesman and not a soldier. The stories of his cowardice, repeated by Suetonius, are confessedly drawn from the venomous letters of his enemy, Antony. Augustus had emerged successfully through five civil wars, had crossed tempestuous seas in small boats, had faced mutinous armies and every sort of hardship. But all his instincts were for peace and statecraft. We have seen that it was the need of a standing army at Rome which led to the need of permanent generals, and this to the downfall of the old Roman constitution. When Cæsar built his throne on the ruins of the Republic the plain fact was that the general had become monarch. Thus, in spite of the fact that Augustus was not of a military character, and in spite of all his efforts to prevent it, the monarchy of the Roman Empire was eventually revealed as a military despotism. It was the irony of fate that such a man as Augustus should have founded such a monarchy.

But for the present the ugly fact that the army had bestowed the purple was decently concealed. Augustus from the very beginning of his power did his best to reduce the military element in the state. During the civil wars, and indeed for fifty years before they began, the troops had made and unmade consuls, there had been constant mutinies and blackmail in the army. Cæsar’s own first consulship had been obtained in this way. A centurion had marched into the senate-house and cried, “If you will not make him consul, this”—and he tapped the hilt of his sword—“this shall.” But now the older discipline was revived. Agrippa in particular was a stern disciplinarian of the old school. The soldiers were flattered no longer. No more legionary coins were issued. For an honour a legion was allowed to call itself Augusta, for a punishment the title was revoked. The highest military distinction, the triumph, was gradually reserved for the princeps and the members of his house alone. Even when the title of Imperator was earned by a victorious general it was transferred to him. But it was his aim to see that no private citizen should have the opportunity of securing the high military honours. Agrippa might have been dangerous and accordingly he was brought into the family by marriage with Cæsar’s daughter. But for the rest the conduct of important operations was almost always confided to one of the young princes—to Tiberius, or Drusus, or Germanicus. And they were always victorious. When Quintilius Varus, a general of humbler birth, was allowed to lead a great army he conveniently pointed the moral by a signal failure. No senatorial governor might now levy troops or declare war on his own account.

The only hand that the senate still had in military affairs was that a “senatus consultum” was generally asked for a new levy of troops. This was probably because it concerned the state treasury, but partly also because it served to shift an unpleasant responsibility off the shoulders of the princeps. It is not likely that Augustus had forgone the right to levy.

It still remained the legal duty of every Roman citizen to serve in the army. But since the days of Marius that duty had become obsolete, no one wanted the city riff-raff in the legions. Soldiering had become a profession, and there was never now any general levy of the kind involved in modern conscription. There must have been some compulsion upon the upper classes to serve as officers, for Suetonius tells of a Roman knight who was sold into slavery because he had chopped off his son’s thumbs in order to evade military service. There had been a “City Legion” fighting at Actium, but the army was now mainly recruited from Italy and the imperial provinces. Allied princes like Herod the Great had their own militias, but were also liable to be asked for contributions of trained auxiliaries to the imperial army. From the provinces troops were demanded in proportion to their warlike activity. The Dutch horsemen were famous, and the Batavians supplied large contributions of cavalry. The only people in the East who were enrolled in the legions were the Galatians, who were, of course, Gauls by ancestry. Augustus himself had a bodyguard of German slaves. As a rule only freemen were enrolled in the legions, but at the crisis of the great Pannonian and German revolts,

FIG. 1 STUCCO RELIEF VICTORY	FIG. 2 DECORATIVE ORNAMENT, “ARA PACIS”
FIG. 3. STUCCO RELIEF: BACCHIC FESTIVAL
Plate XLI.

the duty was laid upon rich citizens of equipping and maintaining for six months a certain number of freedmen and slaves who were promised their liberty and citizenship at the end of six months. These would probably consist very largely of gladiators. This fact is evidence of serious military weakness in the Roman Empire. Although there were over four million full Roman citizens, there were only about 140,000 men in the ranks of the legions, and as there was a very long period of service, twenty-five years and more, it follows that only a small number of recruits would be wanted every year. It seems a dangerously small army to hold such vast frontiers.

Augustus was successful in reducing the enormous rate of pay which had prevailed during the civil wars. After the death of Augustus the troops mutinied and demanded an increase of their pay to a denarius (less than a franc) a day. Augustus established a special military chest to provide pensions for his veterans in place of the farms which they were still accustomed to expect.

How greatly—how dangerously—Augustus had reduced the size of the army may be seen from the fact that there were at least fifty legions during the civil wars, and only twenty-five at the death of Augustus. These troops were for the most part stationed along the northern and eastern frontiers.

In Spain	3	legions
Lower Germany	4	”
Upper Germany	4	”
Pannonia	3	”
Dalmatia	2	”
Mœsia	2	”
Syria	3	”
Egypt	3	”
Africa	1	”

To these must be added the 9000 men of the prætorian guard, who enjoyed shorter service (sixteen years) and double pay. The prætorians had to be genuine Italians, and when inside the walls of Rome wore civilian dress. There were also three “urban cohorts” as police—a new and most salutary invention—and a “cohort of watchmen” for the prevention of fire. Obviously with a service of twenty-five years there could be no reserve. But some of the veterans of the prætorian guard were used as paymasters or engineers. There were also colonies of time-expired soldiers planted as garrisons in dangerous country.

The legions themselves were stationed in great fortified camps along the frontiers of their various provinces. There were thus huge spaces of country totally without military forces. For warfare on the shores of the Black Sea troops had to be summoned from Syria. There was no such thing as a readily mobilised striking force in Italy. This was an inconvenience and a danger, but Augustus did not mean to organise a military monarchy. Professor Gardthausen has a clever comparison of the problems before the Roman army with those that face the British Empire. The problems were remarkably similar, for greater speed of transport counteracts the greater distances. Both peoples made great use of the system of drilling native troops and expecting provinces to guard themselves. But the Romans would have been saved much trouble if they had been able to adopt our system of a compact and highly trained expeditionary force backed by a citizen army for home defence. To be sure, the Romans now lived in a state of peace far more profound than any that the world has enjoyed before or since. Their wars were of their own making. Within the circle of the armed frontiers Pax Romana reigned supreme. The Roman citizens hung up their swords for ever.

The creation of a standing fleet was not the least of Cæsar’s achievements. The Mediterranean was now properly policed and commerce was free to circulate. The Italian navy was divided into two flotillas, one for the Western Mediterranean and one for the Adriatic. Great artificial docks were constructed for them, one for the Mediterranean fleet at Misenum by opening up a connection between the Avernian and Lucrine lakes and the sea and thus creating a small land-locked harbour which was used for exercising the rowers in rough weather. The construction of this Portus Julius, which was carried out by Agrippa with a lofty disregard both of the gastronomic fame of the Lucrine oysters and of the mythological celebrity of the lake of Avernus as the gateway to the underworld, excited a wonder which has been reflected both by Horace and Vergil.

Similarly a base for the Adriatic fleet was constructed by great engineering works at Ravenna. A third harbour was created on the coast of Gaul at Fréjus (Forum Julii). The Tiber was dredged and restored to navigation. Flotillas of small vessels were maintained on the Rhine.

The navy, however, did not even in these days attain to anything like the status of the army. It was “my fleet”—the private property of the emperor, equipped and maintained out of his own pocket, and manned chiefly by his slaves. Even the “prefects of the fleet” were generally freedmen and foreigners. A Roman admiral, as Mommsen remarks, ranked below a procurator or a tax-collecter. Thus the Romans never to the end of their days realised the meaning or importance of sea-power. Their navy was only for police work and on several occasions, as for example in the Dalmatian War, they failed to perceive that naval operations might have been of the greatest assistance to their army. It is true that there were no hostile navies in the world, but the empire was so distributed that marine communication might have been of very great value.

The control of finance was a necessary corollary to the control of the troops. The Republic had been shipwrecked on finance almost as much as on the military system, and there is some truth in Mommsen’s epigram: “the Romans had bartered their liberty for the corn-ships of Egypt.” Perhaps the most sinister light in which we can regard the statesmanship of Augustus is that suggested by Tacitus. He was buying the support of all classes in the state systematically. But to that the Republic had already accustomed them.

We must clear our minds of the modern idea of a budget and a coherent public system of finance. The Romans had never paid taxes and their financial administration had rested in the hands of young men just beginning their public career as quæstors. This was because finance was a comparatively recent idea at Rome. It was not part of the mos maiorum at Rome to have a financial policy, and Rome had always been a military and not a commercial state. Even now it was a cheap empire. If we except the corn-supply, the pay of the army was the only large head of expenditure. On the whole, one with another, the provinces were more than self-supporting, and as time went on a prudent policy of development made them extremely profitable. As we shall see later, the encouragement of natural resources and the exploitation of minerals all over the Empire added enormously to the Roman wealth. Officials and magistrates had generally been expected not only to give their services for nothing but even to pay for their honours handsomely with public works and entertainments. Public works undertaken by the state were generally carried out by slaves or soldiers. When marble was needed it was usually requisitioned from Greece or Numidia. But it was inevitable that the man who controlled the army should also possess the revenues. Julius Cæsar had simply appropriated the treasury. Augustus as usual reached the same end by a more devious path.

The enormous treasures which he disbursed were his favourite weapons of statecraft. If he had a friend to get into the senate he would simply make him a present of the necessary income. To retain the goodwill of the commons he scattered those immense largesses which he has recorded on the Ancyran monument. To the Roman plebs he distributed over six millions sterling in eight donations. On another occasion of financial stress he lent more than half a million without interest. When the soldiers had to be rewarded after Actium he was able to save himself from the unpopular necessity of confiscation by finding six millions in cash to buy them land. There was scarcely a town in the empire which had not some splendid building to bear witness of its debt to Cæsar’s generosity, and we shall see how he transformed the whole aspect of the metropolis. In addition to all this he often replenished the state treasury out of his own pocket. Over a million and a half was thus transferred. No wonder that a man who could thus pour his gold into the treasury should come to regard it as his own.

FIG. 1.
FRAGMENT OF AUGUSTAN ALTAR

FIG. 2.
ROMAN RELIEF

Plate XLII.

To the Roman mind it was unbecoming to a free gentleman to be asked to pay taxes in a free country. They held that a tributum was only for slaves to pay. Moreover it was one of the limitations of the power of Augustus that he had no constitutional right to impose taxation on Italy. Twice indeed he proposed to inflict a property-tax on Roman citizens. In A.D. 4 and 13 he took a census of all properties above £2000 as a preliminary measure, but on the second occasion at least it is explained by the historian as a shrewd stroke of diplomacy to make people acquiesce in the existing death-duties. The serious financial embarrassment of these years was caused by the expense of the gratuities paid to time-expired soldiers. The soldier’s daily pay of about sixpence was only pocket-money, he had always expected a farm on his discharge. Under Augustus this allowance of land was commuted for a bounty of about £125 for the legionary, or £185 for the prætorian guard. Of course, with a service of over twenty years and constant fighting, the number of veterans discharged each year must have fallen considerably below the 20,000 recruits enrolled, but still it was a heavy expense. In some cases the veterans were retained under the colours and in some cases land in new countries was still given. But this burden led to the establishment of a new military chest in A.D. 6. This was filled in the first instance by a donation of nearly two millions from Augustus and Tiberius, but it was maintained by two indirect taxes which fell upon the Roman citizens—very much to their annoyance. One was a tax of one per cent. on all objects bought and sold, the other a five per cent. tax on legacies. The latter was not imposed purely for revenue. It was intended, along with other laws, to discourage celibacy, since it only fell upon those who died without heirs of kin. What appears to be a distinct tax is another upon the sale of slaves.

The other large head of expenditure was that of the Roman corn-supply. Two hundred thousand people received free corn and the rest of the citizens always expected to buy it very cheaply. Most of this corn came from Egypt and Sicily as taxation paid in kind. The control of the supply was in the hands of a new department, cura annonæ, but owing to its mismanagement there were several periods of famine, on which occasions either Augustus himself or some member of his family had to step in and put things straight.

The general expenses of administering the Empire were not as great as modern analogies would lead us to suppose. No doubt the imperial legates and procurators received wages out of the imperial fiscus. It is commonly stated that all provincial magistrates now received a fixed salary instead of being left to plunder the provincials. The truth is that the higher magistrates of Rome never had received and did not for a long time yet receive a salary. But they had always claimed an allowance for their travelling expenses technically called “mule and tent money,” and this had been fixed on a generous scale which really amounted in practice to a salary. The only change was that instead of allowing these fees to be subject to contract on the regular contract system of the republican treasury, the governors now received a fixed grant calculated according to the necessary scale of expenses in the various provinces. For the provinces an immense saving was effected in this manner but it must have been more expensive to the central treasury.

Plate XLIII. ALTAR OF AMEMPTUS

The finances of the provinces were gradually brought into order and arranged with consummate skill. The little information that we possess tends to show that nowhere was the Augustan reformation more beneficent or more brilliantly successful. In Gaul the land-tax and property-tax were fixed in 26 on a fairly high scale, it is true, but the development of commerce and agriculture fostered by the Romans made their incidence a light burden in comparison with the rapidly increasing wealth of the province. By this time the state had accepted the theory of tribute which the Roman lawyers had developed upon false principles. Tribute was now regarded, not as a commutation of the liability to military service, which was its real origin, but as a rent paid to Rome for the continued enjoyment of lands which had passed to her by right of conquest. The tribute was everywhere reassessed upon a new valuation systematically conducted. Generally it represented a tithe of the corn harvest and 20 per cent. of liquid products, such as oil and wine. In the senatorial provinces the old system of tax-farming by contractors survived for a time, but in his own provinces Augustus instituted an imperial board of revenue administered by Roman knights or Greek slaves and freedmen as his fiscal procurators. We have, indeed, three known cases of embezzlement by native agents. One, Eros, had advertised his insolent rapacity in Egypt by purchasing a celebrated fighting quail for an immense sum of money, and then cooking it for his dinner. Another, Licinius, a native Gaul set to collect taxes in his own country, disarmed Cæsar’s wrath like the servant in the parable by showing rooms full of silver and gold, which he professed to have stored up in his master’s interest. In this case it is zealous extortion which is charged against him. One of his methods was to extort fourteen months’ taxes in the year by pointing out to the innocent natives that since December was by its very name the tenth month, they had two more monthly contributions to pay before the end of the year. A paymaster, also a slave, who died in Tiberius’s reign, was notorious for the retinue of fourteen persons who attended him on his travels. He had his private cooks and physicians. But these are isolated cases. On the whole it is clear that the provinces were rejoicing at their deliverance from the oppression of the Republic. They were always anxious to be transferred from the senate to Cæsar. If the tax-gatherer was still at their door, he was now a man under independent authority with a master who would listen to petitions and appeals. Moreover, they now had a government which assisted them to pay by intelligently developing their resources.

The public treasury of the senate was no longer entrusted to mere quæstors. Augustus at first instituted prefects for this also. But the dearth of administrative capacity at Rome compelled him to transfer the charge to the prætors. However, he kept an eye upon its administration himself, as is shown by the fact that when he died he left to the state an account of the condition of the treasury.

It is still too early to speak of a definite system of division between the public “ærarium” and the emperor’s private “fiscus.” But the budget of the senate would include:

Revenue	Expenditure
5% legacy duty.	Army and police.
2% or 4% duty on sale of slaves.	Religion.
1% on merchandise.	Corn-supply.
Customs and harbour dues.	Water-supply.
Confiscations from state offenders.	Fire brigade.
Intestate estates.	Administration.
Public lands.
Provincial tribute.
State mines and works.
Mintage of copper.

The budget of the fiscus would include:

Revenue	Expenditure
Tribute of Cæsar’s provinces, especially Egypt and Gaul.	Provincial administration and salaries.
Legacies (£15,000,000 in the last twenty years).	Largess and bounties.
Private domains.	Temples and public buildings.
Family inheritance.
Aurum coronarium (a complimentary gift on accession).	Loans and gifts.
Private mines and works.	The fleets.
Mintage of silver and gold.	Games and shows.

FIG. 1.
THE TEMPLE OF SATURN, FORUM, ROME

FIG. 2.
THE TEMPLE OF MATER MATUTA, ROME

Plate XLIV.