In close connection with the roads were the twenty-eight military colonies established by Augustus in Italy. Of these seven were along the line of the Flaminia, or near it; one of them (Bononia) was the point where the main roads to Rome converge. Others guarded the entrances to the Alpine passes, or the road through Venetia to Istria—which Augustus included in Italy—while another group protected the main roads through Campania. Thus these colonies were not only centres of loyalty to the Empire, but served to keep open the great routes. The object of the division of Italy into eleven regions, the exact date of which is not known, was probably for the purpose of the census, and the taxation which was connected with it, but it was also for other administrative purposes, as for the regulation of the military service of the young men in each of them.[293] The regions followed the natural divisions of the country and of nationalities, but the importance of the roads in connection with them is shown by the fact that before long they became known in many cases by the name of the chief road that traversed them, as Æmilia, Flaminia, and others. What Augustus was doing for Italy his legates under his authority were doing for the most important provinces. Great roads—viæ Augustæ—were being laid everywhere. We have evidence of them from inscribed tablets in Dalmatia, Pisidia, and Cilicia, Bætica, Northern Spain, Gallia Narbonensis, and elsewhere.[294] These works went on throughout his reign, but in B.C. 20 he commemorated his formal appointment as head commissioner of all roads by placing a pillar covered with gilded bronze in the forum near the temple of Saturn, with the distances of all the chief places along the great roads from one of the thirty-seven city gates from which these roads branch out. The base of this milliarium aureum is still in its place.
The collegia.
Another source of mischief were the collegia, or guilds. Under cover of promoting the interests of certain trades and professions these guilds were used, or were believed to be used, for all kinds of illegal purposes. Some of them were of great antiquity, but they had come to be so often misused for political terrorism (especially the collegia opificum) that the Senate had suppressed many of them in B.C. 63. But Clodius shortly afterwards got a law passed authorising their meetings, and he employed them freely for promoting his own riotous proceedings. Iulius Cæsar had dissolved all except the most ancient and respectable, but during the civil wars they seem to have revived. Under a law passed in B.C. 22 Augustus held a visitation of them. Some were dissolved and some reformed, and a licence was henceforth required from Senate and Emperor for their meetings.
Feeding the city.
In the city itself the first need was food. It depended very largely on imported corn. Again and again we hear of dearth and famine prices at Rome. The people, often, no doubt, rightly, believed that this dearness of provisions arose from artificial causes. When Sextus Pompeius and his confederates were scouring the seas and pouncing upon corn-ships the cause was clear enough, and the gratitude to Augustus for crushing him was very natural. But even when there was no such evident danger great distress was often caused by sudden rise of prices. The idea had always been in such times to appoint some powerful man præfectus annonæ, with a naval force enabling him to secure that the corn fleets should have free passage to Italy, should be able to unload their cargoes without difficulty, and dispose of them at a moderate price. A well-known instance of this was the appointment of Pompey in B.C. 57. But in less troublous times a separate commissioner was appointed to watch the several places of corn export, Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa. These were not posts of very great dignity, and Brutus and Cassius in B.C. 44 looked upon their nomination to them as a kind of insult. But besides the dangers of the sea and of pirates certain merchants had hit upon means—practised long before at Athens—of artificially raising the price. They made what we should call “a corner” in corn. Either they bought it up and kept it back from the market, or they contrived various ways of delaying the ships and producing a panic among the dealers. As in all difficulties, the people looked to Augustus for help, and in B.C. 22 begged him to accept the office of præfectus annonæ, “chief commissioner of the corn market.” While declining the dictatorship offered him at the same time with passionate vehemence, he accepted this commissionership; and the law which he caused to be passed now or some time later on shews how necessary some State interference was. By this law penalties were inflicted on any one “who did anything to hinder the corn supply, or entered into any combination with the object of raising its price; or who hindered the sailing of a corn-ship, or did anything of malice propense whereby its voyage was delayed.”[295]
Distribution of corn free or below market value.
But besides a free and unmolested corn market, the Roman populace had long come to look for another means of support—a distribution of corn either altogether free or considerably below the market price. Detached instances of this practice occur in the earlier history of Rome, the corn sometimes coming as a present from some foreign sovereign, sometimes being distributed by private liberality. It had always been objected to by the wiser part of the Senate, and had laid the donors open to the charge of trying to establish a tyranny. It was reserved for the tribune Gaius Gracchus to make it into a system (B.C. 122). Since his time it had been submitted to as a matter of course by nearly all magistrates. Sulla, indeed, seems to have suspended it for a time, but the first measure of the counter revolution that followed his death was to re-establish it. Iulius Cæsar had restricted it to citizens below a certain census, but had not the courage to abolish it. It was, indeed, a kind of poor-law relief, but of the worst possible sort. It not only induced a number of idle and useless people to prefer the chances of city life to labour in the country, but it unnaturally depressed the price of corn, and therefore discouraged the Italian farmer, already nearly ruined by the competition of foreign corn; it exhausted the treasury, and, after all, did not relieve the poor. Livy regards it as one of the causes which denuded Italy of free cultivators, and left all the work to slaves. Cicero always denounced it on much the same grounds, and Appian points out how it brought the indigent, careless, and idle flocking into the city.[296] The system, moreover, was open to gross abuses, slaves being manumitted that they might take their share, under contract to transfer it to their late masters. Augustus saw that by these distributions injustice was done both to farmers and merchants, and that agriculture in Italy was being depressed by it. He says in his memoirs[297] that he had at one time almost resolved to put a stop to the practice, but refrained from doing so because he felt sure that the necessity of courting the favour of the populace would induce his successors to restore it. However unsound this reasoning may be, it would no doubt have been an heroic measure for one in his position to have carried out the half-formed resolution. As a matter of fact, his distributions were on a large scale, and in times of distress were entirely gratis. Tesseræ, or tickets, entitling the holders to a certain amount of corn or money, were distributed again and again. The value of the corn tickets was generally supplied from the fiscus or his private revenue; but that after all was only a question of accounts, it did not affect the economical or moral results in any way.
State loans.
A better economical measure was a system of State loans. Immediately after the end of the civil war the transference to the Roman treasury of the enormous wealth in money and jewels of the Ptolemies at Alexandria caused the price of money to go down and the money value of landed property consequently to go up. For a time at least the common rate of interest sank from 12 to 4 per cent. Augustus took advantage of this state of things to relieve landowners who were in difficulties, by lending them money free of interest, if they could show property of double the value as security for repayment.
The Tiber.