A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate

by A. H. J. Greenidge

The havoc wrought by the Hannibalic invasion[198] had caused even greater damage to the land than to the people. The latter had been thinned but the former had been wasted, and in some cases wasted, as events proved, almost beyond repair. The devastation had been especially great in Southern Italy, the nations of which had clung to the Punic invader to the end. But such results of war are transitory in the extreme, if the numbers and energy of the people who resume possession of their wrecked homes are not exhausted, and if the conditions of production and sale are as favourable after the calamity as they were before. The amount of wealth which an enemy can injure, lies on the mere surface of the soil, and is an insignificant fraction of that which is stored in the bosom of the earth, or guaranteed by a favourable commercial situation and access to the sea. Carthage could pay her war indemnity and, in the course of half a century, affright Cato by her teeming wealth and fertility. Her people had resumed their old habits, bent wholeheartedly to the only life they loved, and the prizes of a crowded haven and bursting granaries were the result. If a nation does not recover from such a blow, there must be some permanent defect in its economic life or some fatal flaw in its administrative system. The devastation caused by war merely accelerates the process of decay by creating a temporary impoverishment, which reveals the severity of the preceding struggle for existence and renders hopeless its resumption. Certainly the great war of which Italy had been the theatre did mark such an epoch in the history of its agricultural life. A lack of productivity began to be manifested, for which, however, subsequent economic causes were mainly responsible. The lack of intensity, which is a characteristic of slave labour, lessened the returns, while the secondary importance attached to the manuring of the fields was a vicious principle inherent in the agricultural precepts of the time.[199] But it is probable that from this epoch there were large tracts of land the renewed cultivation of which was never attempted; and these were soon increased by domains which yielded insufficient returns and were gradually abandoned. The Italian peasant had ever had a hard fight with the insalubrity of his soil. Fever has always been the dreaded goddess of the environs of Rome. But constant labour and effective drainage had kept the scourge at bay, until the evil moment came when the time of the peasant was absorbed, and his energy spent, in the toils of constant war, when his land was swallowed up in the vast estates that had rapid profits as their end and careless slaves as their cultivators. Then, the moist fields gave out their native pestilence, and malaria reigned unchecked over the fairest portion of the Italian plain.[200]

One of the leading economic causes, which had led to the failure of a certain class of the Italian peasant-proprietors, was the competition to which they were exposed from the provinces. Rome herself had begun to rely for the subsistence of her increasing population on corn imported from abroad, and many of the large coast-towns may have been forced to follow her example. The corn-producing powers of the Mediterranean lands had now definitely shifted from the regions of the East and North to those of the South.[201] Greece, which had been barely able to feed itself during the most flourishing period of its history, could not under any circumstances have possessed an importance as a country of export for Italy; but the economic evils which had fallen on this unhappy land are worthy of observation, as presenting a forecast of the fate which was in store for Rome. The decline in population, which could be attributed neither to war nor pestilence, the growing celibacy and childlessness of its sparse inhabitants,[202] must have been due to an agricultural revolution similar to that which was gradually being effected on Italian soil. The plantation system and the wholesale employment of slave labour must have swept across the Aegean from their homes in Asia Minor. Here their existence is sufficiently attested by the servile rising which was to assume, shortly after the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, the pretended form of a dynastic war; and the troubles which always attended the collection of the Asiatic tithes, in the days when a Roman province had been established in those regions, give no favourable impression of the agricultural prosperity of the countries which lay between the Taurus and the sea. As far south as Sicily there was evidence of exhaustion of the land, and of unnatural conditions of production, which excluded the mass of the free inhabitants from participation both in labour and profits. But even Sicily had learned from Carthage the evil lesson that Greece had acquired from Asia; the plantation system had made vast strides in the island, and the condition of the aratores, whether free-holders or lessees, was not what it had been in the days of Diocles and Timoleon. The growing economic dependence of Rome on Sicily was by no means wholly due to any exceptional productive capacities in the latter, but was mainly the result of proximity, and of administrative relations which enabled the government and the speculator in corn to draw definite and certain supplies of grain from the Sicilian cultivators. This was true also, although to a smaller degree, of Sardinia. But Sicily and Sardinia do mark the beginning of the Southern zone of lands which were capable of filling the markets of the Western world. It was the Northern coast of Africa which rose supreme as the grain-producer of the time. In the Carthaginian territory the natural absence of an agricultural peasantry amidst a commercial folk, and the elaboration of a definite science of agriculture, had neutralised the ill effects which accompanied the plantation system amongst other peoples less business-like and scientific; the cultivators had shown no signs of unrest and the soil no traces of exhaustion. It has been inferred with some probability that the hostility of Cato, the friend of agriculture and of the Italian yeoman, to the flourishing Punic state was directed to some extent by the fear that the grain of Africa might one day drive from the market the produce of the Italian fields;[203] and, if this view entered into the calculations which produced the final Punic War, the very short-sightedness of the policy which destroyed a state only to give its lands to African cities and potentates or to Roman speculators, who might continue the methods of the extinct community, is only too characteristic of that type of economic jealousy which destroys an accidental product and leaves the true cause of offence unassailed. The destruction of Carthage had, as a matter of fact, aggravated the danger; for the first use which Masinissa of Numidia made of the vast power with which Rome had entrusted him, was an attempt to civilise his people by turning them into cultivators;[204] and the virgin soil of the great country which stretched from the new boundaries of Carthage to the confines of the Moors, was soon reckoned amongst the competing elements which the Roman agriculturist had to fear.

But the force of circumstances caused the Sicilian and Sardinian cultivator to be the most formidable of his immediate competitors. The facility of transport from Sicily to Rome rendered that island superior as a granary to even the more productive portions of the Italian mainland. Sicily could never have revealed the marvellous fertility of the valley of the Po, where a bushel and a half of wheat could be purchased for five pence half-penny, and the same quantity of barley was sold for half this price;[205] but it was easier to get Sicilian corn to Rome by sea than to get Gallic corn to Rome by land; and the system of taxation and requisitions which had grown out of the provincial organisation of the island, rendered it peculiarly easy to place great masses of corn on the Roman market at very short notice. Occasionally the Roman government enforced a sale of corn from the province (frumentum emptum),[206] a reasonable price being paid for the grain thus demanded for the city or the army; but this was almost the only case in which the government intervened to regulate supplies. In the ordinary course of things the right to collect the tithes of the province was purchased by public companies, who paid money, not grain, into the Roman treasury, and these companies placed their corn on the market as best they could. The operations of the speculators in grain doubtless disturbed the price at times. But yet the certainty, the abundance and the facilities for transport of this supply were such as practically to shut out from competition in the Roman market all but the most favourably situated districts of Italy. Their chance of competition depended mainly on their accidental possession of a good road, or their neighbourhood to the sea or to a navigable river.[207] The larger proprietors in any part of Italy must have possessed greater facilities for carrying their grain to a good market than were enjoyed by the smaller holders. The Clodian law on trade permitted senators to own sea-going ships of a certain tonnage; they could, therefore, export their own produce without any dependence on the middle-man, while the smaller cultivators would have been obliged to pay freight, or could only have avoided such payment by forming shipping-companies amongst themselves. But such combination was not to be looked for amongst a peasant class, barely conscious even of the external symptoms of the great revolution which was dragging them to ruin, and perhaps almost wholly oblivious of its cause.

It required less penetration to fathom the second of the great reasons for the accumulation of landed property in the hands of the few; for this cause had been before the eyes of the Roman world, and had been expounded by the lips of Roman statesmen, for generations or, if we credit a certain class of traditions,[208] even for centuries. This cause of the growing monopoly of the land by the few was the system of possession which the State had encouraged, for the purpose of securing the use and cultivation of its public domain. The policy of the State seems to have changed from time to time with reference to its treatment of this particular portion of its property, which it valued as the most secure of its assets and one that served, besides its financial end, the desirable purpose of assisting it to maintain the influence of Rome throughout almost every part of Italy. When conquered domain had first been declared "public," the government had been indifferent to the type of occupier which served it by squatting on this territory and reclaiming land that had not been divided or sold chiefly because its condition was too unattractive to invite either of these processes.[209] It had probably extended its invitation even to Latin allies,[210] and looked with approval on any member of the burgess body who showed his enterprise and patriotism by the performance of this great public service. If the State had a partiality, it was probably for the richer and more powerful classes of its citizens. They could embrace a greater quantity of land in their grasp, and so save the trouble which attended an estimate of the returns of a great number of small holdings; they possessed more effective means of reclaiming waste or devastated land, for they had a greater control of capital and labour; lastly, through their large bands of clients and slaves, they had the means of efficiently protecting the land which they had occupied, and this must have been an important consideration at a time when large tracts of the ager publicus lay amidst foreign territories which were barely pacified, and were owned by communities that often wavered in their allegiance to Rome. But, whatever the views of the government, it is tolerably clear that the original occupiers must have chiefly represented men of this stamp. These were the days when the urban and the rustic tribes were sharply divided, as containing respectively the men of the town and the men of the country, and when there were comparatively few of the latter folk that did not possess some holding of their own. It was improbable that a townsman would often venture on the unfamiliar task of taking up waste land; it was almost as improbable that a small yeoman would find leisure to add to the unaided labour on his own holding the toil of working on new and unpromising soil, except in the cases where some unclaimed portion of the public domain was in close proximity to his estate.

We may, therefore, infer that from very early times the wealthier classes had asserted themselves as the chief occupiers of the public domain. And this condition of things continued to be unchallenged until a time came[211] when the small holders, yielding to the pressure of debt and bankruptcy, sought their champions amongst the tribunes of the Plebs. The absolute control of the public domain by the State, the absolute insecurity of the tenure of its occupants, furnished an excellent opportunity for staving off schemes of confiscation and redistribution of private property, such as had often shaken the communities of Greece, and even for refusing to tamper with the existing law of debtor and creditor.[212] It was imagined that bankrupt yeomen might be relieved by being allowed to settle on the public domain, or that the resumption or retention of a portion of this domain by the State might furnish an opportunity for the foundation of fresh colonies, and a law was passed limiting the amount of the ager publicus that any individual might possess. The enactment, whatever its immediate results may have been, proved ineffective as a means of checking the growth of large possessions. No special commission was appointed to enforce obedience to its terms, and their execution was neglected by the ordinary magistrates. The provisions of the law were, indeed, never forgotten, but as a rule they were remembered only to be evaded. Devious methods were adopted of holding public land through persons who seemed to be bonâ fide possessors in their own right, but were in reality merely agents of some planter who already held land up to the permitted limit.[213] Then came the agricultural crisis which followed the Punic Wars. The small freeholds, mortgaged, deserted or selling for a fraction of their value, began to fall into the meshes of the vast net which had spread over the public domain. In some cases actual violence is said to have been used to the smaller yeomen by their neighbouring tyrants,[214] and we can readily imagine that, when a holding had been deserted for a time through stress of war or military service, it might be difficult to resume possession in the face of effective occupation by the bailiff of some powerful neighbour. The latifundium—acquired, as it was believed, in many cases by force, fraud and shameless violation of the law—was becoming the standard unit of cultivation throughout Italy.[215] When we consider the general social and economic circumstances of the time, it is possible to imagine that large properties would have grown in Italy, as in Greece, had Rome never possessed an inch of public domain; but the occupation of ager publicus by the rich is very important from two points of view. On the one hand, it unquestionably accelerated the process of the formation of vast estates; and a renewed impulse had lately been given to this process by the huge confiscations in the South of Italy, and perhaps by the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul; for it is improbable that the domain possessed by the State in this fertile country had been wholly parcelled out amongst the colonies of the northern frontier.[216] But on the other hand, the fact that the kernel of these estates was composed of public land in excess of the prescribed limit seemed to make resumption by the State and redistribution to the poor legally possible. The ager publicus, therefore, formed the basis for future agitation and was the rallying point for supporters and opponents of the proposed methods of agricultural reform.

But it was not merely the negligence of the State which led to the crushing of the small man by the great; the positive burdens which the government was forced to impose by the exigencies of the career of conquest and hegemony into which Rome had drifted, rendered the former an almost helpless competitor in the uneven struggle. The conscription had from early days been a source of impoverishment for the commons and of opportunity for the rich. The former could obey the summons of the State only at the risk of pledging his credit, or at least of seeing his homestead drift into a condition of neglect which would bring the inevitable day when it could only be rehabilitated by a loan of seed or money. The lot of the warrior of moderate means was illustrated by the legend of Regulus. He was believed to have written home to the consuls asking to be relieved of his command in Africa. The bailiff whom he had left on his estate of seven jugera was dead, the hired man had stolen the implements of agriculture and run away; the farm lay desolate and, were its master not permitted to return, his wife and children would lack the barest necessaries of existence.[217] The struggle to maintain a household in the absence of its head was becoming more acute now that corn-land was ceasing to pay, except under the most favourable conditions, and now that the demand for conscripts was sometimes heavier and always more continuous than it had ever been before. Perhaps one-tenth of the adult male population of Rome was always in the field;[218] the units came and went, but the men who bore the brunt of the long campaigns and of garrison duty in the provinces were those to whom leisure meant life—the yeomen who maintained their place in the census lists by hardy toil, and who risked their whole subsistence through the service that had been wrested from them as a reward for a laborious career. When they ceased to be owners of their land, they found it difficult to secure places even as labourers on some rich man's property. The landholder preferred the services of slaves which could not be interrupted by the call of military duty.[219]

The economic evils consequent on the conscription must have been felt with hardly less severity by such of the Italian allies as lived in the regions within which the latifundia were growing up. To these were added the pecuniary burdens which Rome had been forced to impose during the Second Punic War. These burdens were for the most part indirect, for Rome did not tax her Italian socii, but they were none the less severe. Every contingent supplied from an allied community had its expenses, except that of food during service, defrayed from the treasury of its own state,[220] and ten continuous years of conscription and requisition had finally exhausted the loyalty even of Rome's Latin kindred.[221] It is true that the Italians were partially, although not wholly, free from the economic struggle between the possessors of the public land and the small freeholders; but there is no reason for supposing that those of Western Italy were exempt from the consequences of the reduction in price that followed the import of corn from abroad, and the drain on their incomes and services which had been caused by war could scarcely have fitted them to stand this unexpected trial. Rome's harsh dealings with the treasonable South, although adopted for political motives, was almost unquestionably a political blunder. She confiscated devastated lands, and so perpetuated their devastation. She left ruined harbours and cities in decay. She crippled her own resources to add to the pastoral wealth of a handful of her citizens. In the East of Italy there was a far greater vitality than elsewhere in agriculture of the older type. The Samnites in their mountains, the Peligni, Marrucini, Frentani and Vestini between the Apennines and the sea still kept to the system of small freeholds. Their peasantry had perhaps always cultivated for consumption rather than for sale; their inhabitants were rather beyond the reach of the ample supply from the South; and for these reasons the competition of Sicilian and African corn did not lead them to desert their fields. They were also less exposed than the Romans and Latins to the aggressions of the great possessor; for, since they possessed no commercium with Rome, the annexation of their property by legal means was beyond the reach even of the ingenious cupidity of the times.[222] The proof of the existence of the yeoman in these regions is the danger which he caused to Rome. The spirit which had maintained his economic independence was to aim at a higher goal, and the struggle for equality of political rights was to prove to the exclusive city the prowess of that class of peasant proprietors which she had sacrificed in her own domains.

But, although this sacrifice had been great, we must not be led into the belief that there was no hope for the agriculturist of moderate means either in the present or in the future. Even in the present there were clear indications that estates of moderate size could under careful cultivation hold their own. The estate of Lucius Manlius, which Cato sketches in his work on agriculture,[223] was far from rivalling the great demesnes of the princes of the land. It consisted of 240 jugera devoted to the olive and of 100 jugera reserved for the vine. Provision was made for a moderate supply of corn and for pasturage for the cattle that worked upon the fields. But the farm was on the whole a representative of the new spirit, which saw in the vine and the olive a paying substitute for the decadent culture of grain. Even on an estate of this size we note as significant that the permanent and even the higher personnel of the household (the latter being represented by the villici and the villicae) was composed of slaves; yet hirelings were needed for the harvest and the corn was grown by cottagers who held their land on a métayer tenure. But such an estate demanded unusual capital as well as unusual care. On the tiny holdings, which were all that the poorest could afford, the scanty returns might be eked out by labour on the fields of others, for the small allotment did not demand the undivided energies of its holder.[224] There was besides a class of politores[225] similar to that figured as cultivating the Cornland on the estate of Manlius, who received in kind a wage on which they could at least exist. They were nominally métayer tenants who were provided with the implements of husbandry by their landlord; but the quantity of grain which they could reserve to their own use was so small, varying as it did from a ninth to a fifth of the whole of the crop which they had reaped,[226] that their position was little better than that of the poorest labourer by the day.[227] The humblest class of freemen might still make a living in districts where pasturage did not reign supreme. But it was a living that involved a sacrifice of independence and a submission to sordid needs that were unworthy of the past ideal of Roman citizenship. It was a living too that conferred little benefit on the State; for the day-labourers and the politores could scarcely have been in the position on the census list which rendered them liable to the conscription.

If it were possible to lessen the incidence of military service and to secure land and a small amount of capital for the dispossessed, the prospects for the future were by no means hopeless. The smaller culture, especially the cultivation of the vine and the olive, is that to which portions of Italy are eminently suited. This is especially true of the great volcanic plain of the West extending from the north of Etruria to the south of Campania and comprising, besides these territories, the countries of the Latins, the Sabines, the Volsci and the Hernici. The lightness and richness of the alluvion of this volcanic soil is almost as suited to the production of cereals as to that of the vine and the olive or the growth of vegetables.[228] But, even on the assumption that corn-growing would not pay, there was nothing to prevent, and everything to encourage the development of the olive plantation, the vineyard and the market garden throughout this region. It was a country sown with towns, and the vast throat of Rome alone would cry for the products of endless labour. Even Cato can place the vine and the olive before grazing land and forest trees in the order of productivity,[229] and before the close of the Republic the government had learnt the lesson that the salvation of the Italian peasantry depended on the cultivation of products like these. The conviction is attested by the protective edict that the culture of neither the vine nor the olive was to be extended in Transalpine Gaul.[230] Market gardening was also to have a considerable future, wherever the neighbourhood of the larger towns created a demand for such supplies.[231] A new method of tenure also gave opportunities to those whose capital or circumstances did not enable them to purchase a sufficient quantity of land of their own. Leaseholds became more frequent, and the coloni thus created[232] began to take an active share in the agricultural life of Italy. Like the villici, they were a product, of the tendency to live away from the estate; but they gained ground at the expense of the servile bailiffs, probably in consequence of their greater trustworthiness and keener interest in the soil.

But time was needed to effect these changes. For the present the reign of the capitalist was supreme, and the plantation system was dominant throughout the greater part of Italy. The most essential ingredient in this system was the slave,—an alien and a chattel, individually a thing of little account, but reckoned in his myriads the most powerful factor in the economic, and therefore in the political, life of the times, the gravest of the problems that startled the reformer. The soil of Italy was now peopled with widely varied types, and echoes of strange tongues from West and East could be heard on every hand. Italy seemed a newly discovered country, on which the refuse of all lands had been thrown to become a people that could never be a nation. The home supply of slaves, so familiar as to seem a product of the land, was becoming a mere trifle in comparison with the vast masses that were being thrust amongst the peasantry by war and piracy. At the time of the protest of Tiberius Gracchus against the dominance of slave labour in the fields scarcely two generations had elapsed since the great influx had begun. The Second Punic War had spread to every quarter of the West; Sicily, Sardinia, Cisalpine Gaul and Spain all yielded their tribute in the form of human souls that had passed from the victor to the dealer, from the dealer to the country and the town. Only one generation had passed since a great wave had swept from Epirus and Northern Greece over the shores of Italy. In Epirus alone one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners had been sold.[233] Later still the destruction of Carthage must have cast vast quantities of agricultural slaves upon the market.[234] Asia too had yielded up her captives as the result of Roman victories; but the Oriental visages that might be seen in the streets of Rome or the plains of Sicily, were less often the gift of regular war than of the piracy and the systematised slave-hunting of the Eastern Mediterranean. Rome, who had crushed the rival maritime powers that had attempted, however imperfectly, to police the sea, had been content with the work of destruction, and seemed to care nothing for the enterprising buccaneers who sailed with impunity as far west as Sicily. The pirates had also made themselves useful to the Oriental powers which still retained their independence; they had been tolerated, if they had not been employed, by Cyprus and Egypt when these states were struggling against the Empire of the Seleucids.[235] But another reason for their immunity was the view held in the ancient world that slave-hunting was in itself a legitimate form of enterprise.[236] The pirate might easily be regarded as a mere trader in human merchandise. As such, he had perhaps been useful to Carthage;[237] and, as long as he abstained from attacking ports or nationalities under the protectorate of Rome, there was no reason why the capitalists in power should frown on the trade by which they prospered. For the pirates could probably bring better material to the slave market than was usually won in war.[238] A superior elegance and culture must often have been found in the helpless victims on whom they pounced; beauty and education were qualities that had a high marketable value, and by seizing on people of the better class they were sure of one of two advantages—either of a ransom furnished by the friends of the captives, or of a better price paid by the dealer. There was scarcely a pretence that the traders were mere intermediaries who bought in a cheap market and sold in a dear. They were known to be raiders as well, and numbers of the captives exhibited in the mart at Side in Pamphylia were known to have been freemen up to the moment of the auction.[239] The facility for capture and the proximity of Delos, the greatest of the slave markets which connected the East with the West, rendered the supply enormous; but it was equalled by the demand, and myriads of captives are said to have been shipped to the island and to have quitted it in a single day. The ease and rapidity of the business transacted by the master of a slave-ship became a proverb;[240] and honest mercantile undertakings with their tardy gains must have seemed contemptible in comparison with this facile source of wealth.