The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 06

by Unknown

To add a greater attraction to this emigration beyond sea the colonies were as a rule endowed with the full rights of Roman citizenship, and rendered capable of a free and dignified political existence. They were exempted from the jurisdiction of the local governor, they elected their own town council and magistrates in common assembly, their suits were decided according to Roman law, and in short the colony was a Rome in miniature, a daughter plantation, where the language, religion, customs, and social habits of the mother city grew up in wholesome soil, and the various elements of the population united under the ægis of equality of political and civil rights to form a single municipal community.

If the foreign element preponderated in any provincial town, or if, for other reasons, it was undesirable or impracticable to rank it among Roman colonial cities, it was admitted to the status of a municipium. These latter possessed the rights of Roman citizenship and were assigned to a tribus like the colonies, but they differed from them in their municipal and magisterial system and sought justice according to their local laws and legal formulæ and not according to Roman institutions. They were free cities in which few Romans lived, if any. As a rule their constitution was based on that of the Italian municipal organisation. In every province there were municipia of this character, and in organising them local tradition was treated with the utmost consideration. They promoted the civilisation of the natives, disposed them favourably towards Roman institutions, and familiarised them with Roman life.

Everywhere imperial Rome was sedulous to transmit to the provinces the organisation, constitution, and legal system which had been perfected in Italy through the course of centuries, and to gain over the various communities by granting them a privileged position before the law, exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local governor, or lightening the burden of taxation. In Spain, Gaul, and other less civilised countries she endeavoured to bind the several communities to their allegiance to Rome by enrolling them among the municipia, or exempting them from the land tax by the bestowal of the jus Italicum, or by admitting them under the “Latin law” which insured to the communal magistrates the honorary freedom of the dominant city and conferred on such communities the rights of ownership over the soil, freedom of commerce and autonomous municipal administration. On the other hand, the Greek cities in Hellas, which prized highly the glorious names of liberty and autonomy even after they had long become empty sounds, were won over by being elevated to the rank of “free cities,” a distinction flattering to their national vanity, which privileged them to manage their own municipal affairs, to elect their own magistrates, and to maintain their national laws and judicial procedure, while it relieved them of the burden of maintaining garrisons and having soldiers billeted upon them and secured to them the right of coinage and the ownership of the soil.

Thus were the provinces compassed about with a network of varying conditions, which linked them to Rome by every kind of tie. Even if the old policy of “divide et impera” lay at the bottom of this diversity of legal status, better conditions being held out as the reward of loyalty, devotion, and service to the supreme government, as a means of attaching the influential and ambitious to the Roman interest, yet this provincial organisation was a logical outcome of the political and juridical system developed under the republic.

The Roman government did not aim at uniformity or centralisation. Augustus and his immediate successors merely transferred to their provincial dominions the typical organisation evolved by the senate for the races and communities of Italy, and the relations of the various communities with Rome were ordered according to their conduct and loyalty by contracts and concessions. Every grade of political rank was represented, from the full rights of Roman citizenship in the colonies and municipia to the Italian and Latin law of the emancipated communes and the status of the subject cities, which last were under the jurisdiction of the local governor in all public affairs, whether administrative or judicial. Even these retained a shadow of self-government and independence in the right of electing their civic magistrates, subject to certain restrictions, in the unhindered continuance of religious and communal associations, and the ownership of municipal property.

Thus in all parts of the provinces we come upon evidences of revived prosperity, a well-ordered state of things in legal matters, and a society animated by interests of commerce, industry, and art. Where writers are mute, the splendid monuments of architecture, the remains of temples and public halls, theatres and amphitheatres, baths and aqueducts, bear witness with no uncertain voice.

It was otherwise in the capital and in Italy. Here also the monarchy succeeded to the heritage of the republic, but found a condition of social disorder past remedy. Agrarian distress and conflict, which had been at work since the days of the Gracchi, consumed the vigour, prosperity, and vital spirits of the races of middle and lower Italy. The civil wars with their proscriptions and confiscations, the settlement of brutalised soldiers, unfit for agriculture and the labours of peace, in the most beautiful and fertile regions, the cultivation of the fields by hordes of slaves, and the absorption of large districts into private estates or latifundia, had almost annihilated the free peasant class of earlier times and had filled the peninsula with an alien population, bound to the soil by no ties of affection or association, linked by no natural piety to the paternal roof or the inherited acres. The honest, industrious, and thrifty peasantry of primitive times had vanished, the ownership of the soil had passed, in part, into the hands of the rich, who transformed the arable land into parks and gardens, groves and fish-ponds, for the adornment of their country-seats, or who, from greed of gain, used them as pasture for their flocks and herds, or as vineyards and olive gardens, with a view to the trade in wool, wine, or oil; in part, they had been assigned to veterans as a recompense for military service. In the places where free peasant families had led a quiet life in numerous villages and homesteads, and had cultivated their cornfields with assiduous industry, might now be seen the dungeon-like lodgings of purchased slaves or the half-ruinous dwellings of foreign legionaries, who reluctantly and sullenly applied themselves to unfamiliar labours and cares.

To add to the general wretchedness, numerous robber bands infested the country, and constituted a danger to liberty, life, and property. In the fair and fruitful valley of the Po alone, but recently incorporated into the Roman body politic, prosperity and security prevailed amidst settled conditions, and trade and industry flourished in populous cities. Patavium, Cremona, Placentia, and Parma provided Italy with woollen cloth and carpets, and supplied the army with salt meat.

The state of things in the capital was no more satisfactory. More than half of the inhabitants—estimated at this time at about two millions—belonged to the slave class, and were dispersed in the houses and villas of the wealthy, where they performed the various offices indispensable in a great household. These included not merely the tasks and services which fall to the share of domestics and menials among ourselves, but such functions as in modern times are left to artisans; such as the making of clothes, the preparation of food-stuffs, building, and the manufacture of household utensils. This multitude of slaves ministered to the luxury and ease of the senatorial or knightly families. The number of the latter can at no time have amounted to more than ten thousand, and many of them, in all likelihood, did not possess much more than the fortune required by law—1,200,000 sesterces [£6,912 or $34,560] for a senator, and the third part of this sum for a member of the knightly class.