The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

If we consider this evolution purely as a play of domestic political forces, we recognise it from first to last as a simple conflict of class needs and interests, partially modified at times by movements of true public spirit on the part of such men as the patricians who supported the Licinian laws, and such men as the Gracchi. The State-organism is the result of the struggles and pressures of its elements. What happened in the chronic readjustments was never a democratisation of the State, but at most an institutional protection of the poorer plebeians, and an admission of the richer to something like equal status with the optimates. Never was the "people" really united by any common home interest beyond the need of extorting some privileges. Only to that extent were the richer plebeians at one with the poorer; and there can be little doubt that as soon as the former secured the privileges they craved they tended to abuse them as the patricians had done. There was no personnel adequate to the effective working of the Licinian laws in face of a perpetual process of conquest which infallibly evoked always the instinct of acquisition, and never the science which might have controlled it. The early division of the State-territory into twenty-five tribes (495), of whom twenty-one were rural, determined the limitation of the political problem to the simple sharing of land; and every effort of public-spirited men to arrest the aggregation of lands in the hands of a few meant a convulsive explosion of resistance by the wealthy.

From the Polonian prattle of Cicero to his son we can gather how all schemes of reconstruction were viewed by the ruling class, whether in retrospect or prospect. The slaying of Tiberius Gracchus by Scipio Nasica is a standing theme of praise;[43] the lesson of the course of things social towards a steep sunderance of "haves" and "have-nots" is angrily evaded. Cicero knew as well as any the need for social reconstruction in Rome;[44] and he repeatedly records the sagacity of Lucius Marcus Philippus, who had been tribune and consul in Cicero's boyhood. As consul, Philippus had resisted the attempts of M. Livius Drusus to reform the Senate and provide for the poorer citizens and the Italians; but inasmuch as he had during his tribuneship avowed the fact that there were not left two thousand men in the State who owned property, Cicero denounces the avowal as pernicious.[45] The ideal aristocratic course was to resist all political change and slay those who attempted it—Drusus as the Gracchi before him. It was as a consummation of that policy that there exploded the so-called Marsian or Social War, in which Rome and the Italian States around her grappled and tore for years together like their ancestors of the tribal period; whereafter Marians and Sullans in turn rent Rome, till Sulla's iron dictatorship, restoring class supremacy, marked the beginning of the end of self-governing institutions, and prepared for the day of autocracy, which was not to come without another agony of long-protracted civil war. It is the supreme proof of the deadliness of the path of conquest that for most Romans the end of Roman "freedom" was a relief.

§ 3

The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here plain. On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and slavery by their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the patrician's lands are worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their distress is met by a share in the lands conquered; and after the soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they are more and more ready to join in conquest. Not only is popular discontent put off by the prospect of foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of aggressive war, while tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators who make the army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister fraternity of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when the primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total strength. There is no lesson that men are slower to learn—and this naturally, because they see the success of unjust conquest—yet there is no truth easier to prove from history. Early Rome was strong as against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred, but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws: the reciprocal sense of recognised rights sustained public spirit at the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and the "have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained for a time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature of society that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting. Men whose main discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become simply incapable of strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue either internecine strife or the degradation of the weaker elements, or a sequence of these results.

This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of public bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being the chief of these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in the modern manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canvassing by candidates[47] (lex de ambitu) suggests the recognition of electoral corruption; and later there followed a whole series of futile vetoes—futile because the social conditions grew always morally worse. The lex Æmilia Bæbia (182 B.C.) forbade all money gifts by candidates; and twenty-three years later another law decreed that offenders should be exiled. This also failing, there followed the leges tabellariæ, establishing the ballot (139-137). Still the disease persisted, because there was no stop now possible to the career of conquest, which had undermined the very instincts whereon law depends; and on the treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman ruling class had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters, as did the Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels of despotism and civil war were substantially the same.

The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and men and classes become the fools of their animosities. The wars of faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Crassus, Conservatives and Democrats, Cæsar and Pompey, the pandemonium on Cæsar's death, all in turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more arrogant and hardened, the free farmer class has in large part disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]

The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling—or, let us say, of social science—that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from, or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly evolved of the Greeks.[49] As wealth and luxury, pride and power accumulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.

It was doubtless a partial recognition of this that motived, in Cicero's day, the large number of affranchisements of slaves (Wallon, Hist. de l'Esclavage, ii, 409). But fresh enslavements went on; the amelioration consisted in the brevity of the period of enslavement in cases of good conduct. And the evil was in the main a product of conquest. It is fairly established by Dureau de la Malle (Écon. polit. des Romains, 1840, vol. i, liv. ii, ch. 2) that down to the second Punic War Roman slaves were few. They would be for the most part nexi, victims of debt. As conquests multiplied prisoners, the class increased rapidly. Broadly speaking, the house servants were all slaves, as were the bulk of the shepherds in the great latifundia, the crews of the galleys, and many of the artisans. The total number has doubtless been greatly exaggerated, both in ancient and modern times, as has been the population of the imperial city. Athenæus is responsible for many wild estimates. (Cp. Letronne, as cited by Dureau, liv. ii, ch. 4.) Dureau arrives by careful calculation at an estimate of an Italian population of some five millions about the year 529 A.U.C., of whom some two and three quarter millions were free and some two and a quarter millions were slaves or metæci, aliens without political rights (i, 296). The population of Rome as late as Aurelian he puts at between 500,000 and 600,000 (i, 368). (See Prof. Bury's note in his ed. of Gibbon, iii, 308, for different views. Gibbon, Bunsen, and Hodgkin put the figure at about a million.) The exact proportion of slaves to free is not of the essence of the problem. A society with nine slaves for every eleven free was sufficiently committed to degeneration.

But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs in Spain and Southern Gaul (121—the first great successes since the fall of Carthage), illustrate the general principle that a ruling class or house may always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular self-assertion by turning the animal energies of the people to animal strife with another nation, in which case union correlates with strife. Wars imply comradeship and the putting aside of domestic strife for the time being; and a war with Illyria was made the pretext for suspending the operation of the new land law passed by the elder Gracchus when the younger later sought to carry it out. The triumphs of Marius, again, over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed nothing to unify the parties in the State, or to secure his own. In democratising the army by drawing on a demoralised demos, he did but make it a more facile tool for the general, a thing more detached from the body politic.[50] The tendency of all classes in Rome to unite against the claims of the outside Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the democrats within Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest, in the period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the Marians, gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the position of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu very justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give it a formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51] But this again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where there is no general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and systematic militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.

One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism. Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans—so often their accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself. Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen Italian towns to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.