There was no enemy now left on the coast lands of the Mediterranean to dispute the sovereignty of Rome. Nine provinces, each fit to be a kingdom, owned her sway, and poured yearly taxes into her revenue. The kings of Asia Minor, of Syria, of Egypt, were her obedient vassals.
FIRST SLAVE WAR IN SICILY
[134-133 B.C.]
While Numantia was yet defying the Roman generals, a war broke out near home of a more dreadful kind than any distant contest with foreigners could be—the insurrection of the slaves in Sicily. Some remarks have already been made on the rapid increase in the number of slaves which attended the career of Roman conquest; and it was observed that, while domestic slaves usually were well treated, the agricultural slaves were thrust down to a condition worse than that of the oxen which laboured on the land. The evils which such oppression might engender were now proved by terrible experience.
Every one knows that in the early times of Rome the work of the farm was the only kind of manual labour deemed worthy of a free citizen. This feeling long survived, as may be seen from the praise bestowed on agriculture by Cicero, whose enthusiasm was caught from one of his favourite heroes, old Cato the censor, whose Treatise on Agriculture has been noticed. The taste for books on farming continued. Varro the antiquarian, a friend of Cicero, has left an excellent treatise on the subject. A little later came the famous Georgics of Virgil, followed at no long interval by Pliny’s notices, and then by the elaborate Dissertations of Columella, who refers to a great number of Roman writers on the same subject. It is manifest that the subject of agriculture possessed a strong and enduring charm for the Roman mind.
But, from the times of the Hannibalic War, agriculture lost ground in Italy. When Cato was asked what was the most profitable kind of farming, he said, “Good grazing.” What next? “Tolerable grazing.” What next? “Bad grazing.” What next? “Corn-growing.” Later writers, with one accord, deplore the diminished productiveness of land.
This result was due in part, no doubt, to war, but much more to other causes. Corn could be imported with facility from the southern lands of Sicily, from Egypt, and from Numidia, while a great part of Italy was little suited for the production of grain-crops. These causes found a powerful assistant in the growth of large estates, and the profitable employment of slaves as shepherds and herdsmen.
A few examples will show the prodigious number of slaves that must have been thrown into the market after the Second Punic War. To punish the Bruttians for the fidelity with which they adhered to the cause of Hannibal, the whole nation were made slaves; 150,000 Epirots were sold by Æmilius Paulus; fifty thousand captives were sent home from Carthage. These numbers are accidentally preserved; and if, according to this scale, we calculate the hosts of unhappy men sold into slavery during the Syrian, Macedonian, Illyrian, Grecian, and Spanish wars, we shall be prepared to hear that slaves fit only for unskilled labour were plentiful and cheap.
There was also a slave trade regularly carried on in the East. The barbarous tribes on the coasts of the Black Sea were always ready to sell their own flesh and blood; Thrace and Sarmatia were the Guinea Coast of the Romans. The entrepôt of this trade was Delos, which had been made a free port by Rome after the conquest of Macedonia. Strabo tells us that in one day ten thousand slaves were sold there in open market. Such were the vile uses to which was put the Sacred Island, once the treasury of Greece, when her states were banded together to secure their freedom against the Persian.
It is evident that hosts of slaves, lately free men, and many of them soldiers, must become dangerous to the owners. Nor was their treatment such as to conciliate. They were turned out upon the hills, made responsible for the safety of the cattle put under their charge, and compelled to provide themselves with the common necessaries of life. A body of these wretched men asked their master for clothing: “What,” he asked, “are there no travellers with clothes on?” The atrocious hint was soon taken; the shepherd slaves of lower Italy became banditti, and to travel through Apulia without an armed retinue was a perilous adventure. From assailing travellers, the marauders began to plunder the smaller country houses; and all but the rich were obliged to desert the country and flock into the towns. So early as the year 185 B.C., seven thousand slaves in Apulia were condemned for brigandage by a prætor sent specially to restore order in that land of pasturage. When they were not employed upon the hills, they were shut up in large prison-like buildings (ergastula), where they could talk together of their wrongs, and form schemes of vengeance.