XXXII. LUCAN, PETRONIUS, AND OTHERS.
Lucan, Seneca’s nephew, has a few interesting references in his poem on the great civil war. Thus, in the eloquent passage[959] lamenting the decay of Roman vital strength, a long process to be disastrously completed in the great Pharsalian battle, he dwells on the shrinkage of free Roman population in Italy. The towns and the countryside alike are empty, houses deserted, and it is by the labour of chained[960] slaves that Italian crops are raised. Elsewhere[961] he looks further back, and traces this decay to the effect of luxury and corruption caused by the influx of vast wealth, the spoils of Roman conquests. Among the symptoms of disease he notes the latifundia, which it was now becoming the fashion to denounce, the land-grabbing passion that prompted men to monopolize great tracts of land and incorporate in huge estates, worked by cultivators unknown[962] to them, farms that once had been ploughed and hoed by the rustic heroes of old. But all such utterances are merely a part of a declaimer’s stock-in-trade. We may fairly guess that they are echoes of talk heard in the literary circle of his uncle Seneca. That they are nevertheless consistent with the land-system of this period, is to be gathered from other sources, such as Petronius and Columella. It remains to note that the word colonus is used by Lucan in the senses of ‘cultivator’ and ‘farmer,’ rather suggesting ownership, and of ‘military colonist,’ clearly implying it. That of ‘tenant’ does not occur: there was no need for it in the poem. Again, he has servire servilis and servitium, but servus occurs only in a suspected[963] line, and as an adjective. His regular word for ‘slave’ is famulus.
The bucolic poems of this period are too manifestly artificial to serve as evidence of value. For instance, when Calpurnius declares[964] that in this blessed age of peace and prosperity the fossor is not afraid to profit by the treasure he may chance to dig up, we cannot infer that a free digger is meant, though it is hardly likely that a slave would be suffered to keep treasure-trove.
Petronius, in the curious mixed prose-verse satire of which part has come down to us, naturally says very little bearing directly on agriculture. But in depicting the vulgar freedman-millionaire Trimalchio he refers pointedly to the vast landed estates belonging to this typical figure of the period. He owns estates ‘far as the kites[965] can fly.’ This impression is confirmed in detail by a report delivered by the agent for his properties. It is a statement[966] of the occurrences in a domain of almost imperial proportions during a single day. So many children, male and female, were born: so many thousand bushels of wheat were stocked in the granary: so many hundred oxen broken in: a slave was crucified for disloyalty to his lord: so many million sesterces were paid in to the chest, no opening for investment presenting itself. On one park-estate (hortis) there was a great fire, which began in the steward’s house. Trimalchio cannot recall the purchase of this estate, which on inquiry turns out to be a recent acquisition not yet on the books. Then comes the reading of notices issued by officials[967] of the manors, of wills[968] made by rangers, of the names of his stewards; of a freedwoman’s divorce, the banishment of an atriensis, the committal of a cashier for trial, and the proceedings in court in an action between some chamberlains. Of course all this is not to be taken seriously, but we can form some notion of the state of things that the satirist has in mind. Too gross an exaggeration would have defeated his purpose. The book is full of passages bearing on the history of slavery, but it is domestic slavery, and that often of the most degrading character.