But though the curse of Providence seems to have fallen on the land, so far as the human race is concerned, it is otherwise with the power of physical nature. Vegetation yearly springs up with undiminished vigour. It is undecayed since the days of Cincinnatus and the Sabine farm. Every spring the expanse is covered with a carpet of flowers, which enamel the turf and conceal the earth with a profusion of varied beauty. So rich is the herbage which springs up with the alternate heats and rains of summer, that it becomes in most places rank, and the enormous herds which wander over the expanse are unable to keep it down. In autumn this rich grass becomes russet-brown, and a melancholy hue clothes the slopes which environ the Eternal City. The Alban Mount, when seen from a distance, clothed as it is with forests, vineyards, and villas, resembles a green island rising out of a sombre waste of waters. In the Pontine marshes, where the air is so poisonous in the warm months that it is dangerous, and felt as oppressive even by the passing traveller, the prolific powers of nature are still more remarkable. Vegetation there springs up with the rapidity, and flourishes with the luxuriance, of tropical climates. Tall reeds, in which the buffaloes are hid, in which a rhinoceros might lie concealed, spring up in the numerous pools or deep ditches with which the dreary flat surface is sprinkled. Wild grapes of extraordinary fecundity grow in the woods, and ascend in luxuriant clusters to the tops of the tallest trees. Nearer the sea, a band of noble chestnuts and evergreen oaks attests the riches of the soil, which is capable of producing such magnificent specimens of vegetable life; and over the whole plain the extraordinary richness of the herbage, and luxuriance of the aquatic plants, bespeaks a region which, if subjected to a proper culture and improvement, would, like the Delta of Egypt, reward eighty and an hundred fold the labours of the husbandman.
It was not thus in former times. The Campagna now so desolate, the Pontine marshes now so lonely, were then covered with inhabitants. Veiæ, long the rival of Rome, and which was only taken after a siege as protracted as that of Troy by Camillus at the head of fifty thousand men, stood only ten miles from the Capitol. The Pontine marshes were inhabited by thirty nations. The freehold of Cincinnatus, the Sabine farm, stood in the now desolate plain at the foot of the Alban Mount. So rich were the harvests, so great the agricultural booty to be gathered in the plains around Rome, that for two hundred years after the foundation of the city, it was the great object of their foreign wars to gain possession of it, and on that account they were generally begun in autumn. Montesquieu has observed, that it was the long and desperate wars which the Romans carried on for three centuries with the Sabines, Latines, Veientes, and other people in their neighbourhood, which by slow degrees gave them the hardihood and discipline which enabled them afterwards to subdue the world. The East was an easy conquest, the Gauls themselves could be repelled, Hannibal in the end overcome, after the tribes of Latium had been vanquished. But the district in which the hardy races dwelt, who so long repelled, and maintained a doubtful conflict with the future masters of the world, is now a desert. It could not in its whole extent furnish men to fill a Roman cohort. Rome has emerged from its long decay after the fall of the Western Empire; the terrors of the Vatican, the shrine of St Peter, have again attracted the world to the Eternal City; and the most august edifice ever raised by the hands of man to the purposes of religion, has been reared within its walls. But the desolate Campagna is still unchanged.
Novelists and romance-writers have for centuries exhausted their imaginative and descriptive powers in developing the feelings which this extraordinary phenomenon, in the midst of the classic land of Italy, awakens. They have spoken of desolation as the fitting shroud of departed greatness; of the mournful feelings which arise on approaching the seat of lost empire; of the shades of the dead alone tenanting the scene of so much glory. Such reflections arise unbidden in the mind; the most unlettered traveller is struck with the melancholy impression. An eloquent Italian has described this striking spectacle:—"A vast solitude, stretching for miles, as far as the eye can reach. No shelter, no resting-place, no defence for the wearied traveller; a dead silence, interrupted only by the sound of the wind which sweeps over the plain, or the trickling of a natural fountain by the wayside; not a cottage nor the curling of smoke to be seen; only here and there a cross on a projecting eminence to mark the spot of a murder; and all this in gentle slopes, dry and fertile plains, and up to the gates of great city."[17] The sight of the long lines of ruined aqueducts traversing the deserted Campagna, of the tombs scattered along the lines of the ancient chaussées across its dreary expanse, of the dome of St Peter's alone rising in solitary majesty over its lonely hills, forcibly impress the mind, and produce an impression which no subsequent events or lapse of time are able to efface. At this moment the features of the scene, the impression it produces, are as present to the mind of the writer as when they were first seen thirty years ago.
But striking as these impressions are, the Roman Campagna is fraught with instruction of a more valuable kind. It stands there, not only a monument of the past, but a beacon for the future. It is fraught with instruction, not only to the ancient but the modern world. The most valuable lessons of political wisdom which antiquity has bequeathed to modern times, are to be gathered amidst its solitary ruins.
In investigating the causes of this extraordinary desolation of a district, in ancient times the theatre of such busy industry, and which, for centuries, maintained so great and flourishing a rural population, there are several observations to be made on the principle, as logicians call it, of exclusion, in order to clear the ground before the real cause is arrived at.
The first of these is, that the causes, whatever they are, which produced the desolation of the Campagna, had begun to operate, and their blasting effect was felt, in ancient times, and long before a single squadron of the barbarians had crossed the Alps. In fact, the Campagna was a scene of active agricultural industry only so long as Rome was contending with its redoubtable Italian neighbours—the Latins, the Etruscans, the Samnites, and the Cisalpine Gauls. From the time that, by the conquest of Carthage, they obtained the mastery of the shore of the Mediterranean, agriculture in the neighbourhood of Rome began to decline. Pasturage was found to be a more profitable employment of estates; and the vast supplies of grain, required for the support of the citizens of Rome, were obtained by importation from Lybia and Egypt, where they could be raised at a less expense. "At, Hercule," says Tacitus, "olim ex Italia legionibus longinquas in provincias commeatus portabantur; nec nunc infecunditate laboratur: sed Africam potius et Egyptum exercemus, navibusque et casibus vita populi Romani permissa est."[18] The expense of cultivating grain in a district where provisions and wages were high because money was plentiful, speedily led to the abandonment of tillage in the central parts of Italy, when the unrestrained importation of grain from Egypt and Lybia, where it could be raised at less expense in consequence of the extension of the Roman dominions over those regions, took place. "More lately," says Sismondi, "the gratuitous distributions of grain made to the Roman people, rendered the cultivation of grain in Italy still more unprofitable: it then became absolutely impossible for the little proprietors to maintain themselves in the neighbourhood of Rome; they became insolvent, and their patrimonies were sold to the rich. Gradually the abandonment of agriculture extended from one district to another. The true country of the Romans—central Italy—had scarcely achieved the conquest of the globe, when it found itself without an agricultural population. In the provinces peasants were no longer to be found to recruit the legions; as few corn-fields to nourish them. Vast tracts of pasturage, where a few slave shepherds conducted herds of thousands of horned cattle, had supplanted the nations who had brought their greatest triumphs to the Roman people."[19] These great herds of cattle were then, as now, in the hands of a few great proprietors. This was loudly complained of, and signalized as the cancer which would ruin the Roman empire, even so early as the time of Pliny. "Verumque confitentibus," says he, "latifunda perdidêre Italiam; imo ac provincias."[20]
All the historians of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, have concurred in ascribing to these two causes—viz. the decay of agriculture and ruin of the agricultural population in Italy, and consequent engrossing of estates in the hands of the rich—the ruin of its mighty dominion. But it is not generally known how wide-spread had been the desolation thus produced; how deep and incurable the wounds inflicted on the vitals of the state—by the simple consequences of its extension, which enabled the grain growers of the distant provinces of the empire to supplant the cultivators of its heart by the unrestricted admission of foreign corn, before the invasion of the northern nations commenced. In fact, however, the evil was done before they appeared on the passes of the Alps; it was the weakness thus brought on the central provinces which rendered them unable to contend with enemies whom they had often, in former times, repelled and subdued. A few quotations from historians of authority, will at once establish this important proposition.
"Since the age of Tiberius," says Gibbon, "the decay of agriculture had been felt in Italy; and it was a just subject of complaint, that the laws of the Roman people depended on the accidents of the winds and the waves. In the division and decline of the empire, the tributary harvests of Egypt and Africa were withdrawn; the numbers of the inhabitants continually diminished with the means of subsistence; and the country was exhausted by the irretrievable losses of war, pestilence and famine. Pope Gelasius was a subject of Odoacer, and he affirms, with strong exaggeration, that in Emilia, Tuscany, and the adjacent provinces, the human species was almost extirpated."[21] Again the same accurate author observes in another place—"Under the emperors the agriculture of the Roman provinces was insensibly ruined; and the government was obliged to make a merit of remitting tributes which their subjects were utterly unable to pay. Within sixty years of the death of Constantine, and on the evidence of an actual survey, an exemption was granted in favour of three hundred and thirty thousand English acres of desert and uncultivated land in the fertile and happy Campania, which amounted to an eighth of the whole province. As the footsteps of the barbarians had not yet been seen in Italy, the cause of this amazing desolation, which is recorded in the laws,[22] can be ascribed only to the administration of the Roman emperors."[23]
The two things which, beyond all question, occasioned this extraordinary decline of domestic agriculture in Italy before the invasion of the barbarians commenced, were the weight of direct taxation, and the decreasing value of agricultural produce, owing to the constant importation of grain from Egypt and Lybia, where, owing to the cheapness of labour and the fertility of the soil in those remote provinces, so burdensome did the first become, that Gibbon tells us that, in the time of Constantine, in Gaul it amounted to nine pounds sterling of gold on every freeman.[24] The periodical distribution of grain to the populace of Rome, all of which, from its greater cheapness, was brought by the government from Egypt and Africa, utterly extinguished the market for corn to the Italian farmers, though Rome, at its capture by Alaric, still contained 1,200,000 inhabitants. "All the efforts of the Christian emperors," says Michelet, "to arrest the depopulation of the country, were as nugatory as those of their heathen predecessors had been. Sometimes alarmed at the depopulation, they tried to mitigate the lot of the farmer, to shield him against the landlord; upon this the proprietor exclaimed, he could no longer pay the taxes. At other times they strove to chain the cultivators to the soil; but they became bankrupts or fled, and the land became deserted. Pertinax granted an immunity of taxes to such cultivators from distant provinces as would occupy the deserted lands of Italy. Aurelian did the same. Probus, Maximian, and Constantine, were obliged to transport men and oxen from Germany to cultivate Gaul. But all was in vain. The desert extended daily. The people in the fields surrendered themselves in despair, as a beast of burden lies down beneath his load and refuses to rise."[25]
Gibbon has told us what it was which occasioned this constant depopulation of the country, and ruin of agriculture in the Italian provinces. "The Campagna of Rome," says he, "about the close of the sixth century, was reduced to a state of dreary wilderness, in which the air was infectious, the land barren, and the waters impure. Yet the number of citizens still exceeded the measure of subsistence; their precarious food was supplied from the harvests of Lybia and Egypt; and the frequent recurrence of famine, betrayed the inattention of the emperor at Constantinople to the wants of a distant province."[26] Nor was Italy the only province in the heart of the empire which was ruined by those foreign importations. Greece suffered not less severely under it. "In the latter stages of the empire," says Michelet, "Greece was supported almost entirely by corn raised in the plains of Poland."[27]