Slavery was so large a factor in pre-Christian and early Christian society that a word should be said on its relation to charity. Indirectly it was a cause of poverty and social degradation. Thus in the case of Athens, Slavery. with the achievement of maritime supremacy the number of slaves increased greatly. Manual arts were despised as unbecoming to a citizen, and the slaves carried on the larger part of the agricultural and industrial work of the community; and for a time—until after the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.)—slavery was an economic success. But by degrees the slave, it would seem, dispossessed the citizen and rendered him unfit for competition. The position of the free artisan thus became akin to that of the slave (Arist. Pol. 1260 a, &c.), and slavery became the industrial method of the country. Though Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians spent money in ransoming individual slaves and also enfranchised many, no general abolition of slavery was possible. At last through economic changes the new status of coloni, who paid as rent part of the produce of the land they tilled, superseded the status of slavery (cf. above; the system turned to account by Peisistratus). But this result was only achieved much later, when a new society was being created, when the slaves from the slave prisons (ergastula) of Italy joined its invaders, and the slave-owner or master, as one may suppose, unable any longer to work the gangs, let them become coloni.
In Greece the feeling towards the slave became constantly more humane. Real slavery, Aristotle said, was a cast of mind, not a condition of life. The slave was not to be ordered about, but to be commanded and persuaded like a child. The master was under the strongest obligation to promote his welfare. In Rome, on the other hand, slavery continued to the end a massive, brutal, industrial force—a standing danger to the state. But alike in Greece and Rome the influence of slavery on the family was pernicious. The pompous array of domestic slaves, the transfer of motherly duties to slave nurses, the loss of that homely education which for most people comes only from the practical details of life—all this in later Greece and Italy, and far into Christian times, prevented that permanent invigoration and reform of family life which Jewish and Christian influences might otherwise have produced.
Part III.—Charity in Roman Times
The words that suggest most clearly the Roman attitude towards what we call charity are liberalitas, beneficentia and pietas. The two former are almost synonymous (Cicero, De Offic. i. 7, 14). Liberality lays stress on the mood—that of the liber, the freeborn, and so in a sense the independent and superior; beneficence on the deed and its purpose (Seneca, De Benef. vi. 10). The conditions laid down by Cicero, following Panaetius the Stoic (185-112 B.C.) are three: not to do harm to him whom one would benefit, not to exceed one’s means, and to have regard to merit. The character of the person whom we would benefit should be considered, his feelings towards us, the interest of the community, our social relations in life, and services rendered in the past. The utility of the deed or gift graded according to social relationship and estimated largely from the point of view of ultimate advantage to the doer or donor seems to predominate in the general thought of the book, though (cf. Aristotle, Eth. viii. 3) the idea culminates in the completeness of friendship where “all things are in common.” Pietas has the religious note which the other words lack, loving dutifulness to gods and home and country. Not “piety” only but “pity” derive from it: thus it comes near to our “charity.” Both books, the De Officiis and the De Beneficiis, represent a Roman and Stoical revision of the problem of charity and, as in Stoicism generally, there seems to be a half-conscious attempt to feel the way to a new social standpoint from this side.
As from the point of view of charity the well-being of the community depends upon the vigour of the deep-laid elemental life within it, so in passing to Roman times we consider the family first. The Roman family was unique in its Roman times. completeness, and by some of its conditions the world has long been bound. The father alone had independent authority (sui juris), and so long as he lived all who were under his power—his wife, his sons, and their wives and children, and his unmarried daughters—could not acquire any property of their own. Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry.
The wife, though in law the property of her husband, held a position of honour and influence higher than that of the Greek wife, at least in historic times. She seems to come nearer to the ideal of Xenophon: “the good wife should be the mistress of everything within the house.” “A house of his own and the blessing of children appeared to the Roman citizen as the end and essence of life” (Mommsen, Hist. Rome). The obligation of the father to the sons was strongly felt. The family, past, present and future, was conceived as one and indivisible. Each succeeding generation had a right to the care of its predecessor in mind, body and estate. The training of the sons was distinctly a home and not a school training. Brought up by the father and constantly at his side, they learnt spontaneously the habits and traditions of the family. The home was their school. By their father they were introduced into public life, and though still remaining under his power during his lifetime, they became citizens, and their relation to the state was direct. The nation was a nation of yeomen. Only agriculture and warfare were considered honourable employments. The father and sons worked outdoors on the farm, employing little or no slave labour; the wife and daughters indoors at spinning and weaving. The drudgery of the household was done by domestic slaves. The father was the working head of a toiling household. Their chief gods were the same as those of early Greece—Zeus-Diovis and Hestia-Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and home. Out of this solid, compact family Roman society was built, and so long as the family was strong attachment to the service of the state was intense. The res publica, the common weal, the phrase and the thought, meet one at every turn; and never were citizens more patient and tenacious combatants on their country’s behalf. The men were soldiers in an unpaid militia and were constantly engaged in wars with the rivals of Rome, leaving home and family for their campaigns and returning to them in the winter. With a hardness and closeness inconsistent with—indeed, opposed to—the charitable spirit, they combined the strength of character and sense of justice without which charity becomes sentimental and unsocial. In the development of the family, and thus, indirectly, in the development of charity, they stand for settled obligation and unrelenting duty.
Under the protection of the head of the family “in dependent freedom” lived the clients. They were in a middle position between the freemen and the slaves. The relation between patron and client lasted for several generations; and there were many clients. Their number increased as state after state was conquered, and they formed the plebs, in Rome the plebs urbana, the lower orders of the city.
In relation to our subject the important factors are the family, the plebs and slavery.
Two processes were at work from an early date, before the first agrarian law (486 B.C.): the impoverishment of the plebs and the increase of slavery. The former led to the annona civica, or the free supply of corn to the citizens, and to the sportula or the organized food-supply for poor clients, and ultimately to the alimentarii pueri, the maintenance of children of citizens by voluntary and imperial bounty. The latter (slavery) was the standing witness that, as self-support was undermined, the task of relief became hopeless, and the impoverished citizen, as the generations passed, became in turn dependant, beggar, pauper and slave.
The great patrician families—“an oligarchy of warriors and slaveholders”—did not themselves engage in trade, but, entering on large speculations, employed as their agents their clients, libertini or freedmen, and, later, their slaves. The constant wars, for which the soldiers of a local militia were eventually retained in permanent service, broke up the yeomanry and very greatly reduced their number. Whole families of citizens became impoverished, and their lands were in consequence sold to the large patrician families, members of which had acquired lucrative posts, or prospered in their speculations, and assumed possession of the larger part of the land, the ager publicus, acquired by the state through conquest. The city had always been the centre of the patrician families, the patron of the trading libertini and other dependants. To it now flocked as well the metoeci, the resident aliens from the conquered states, and the poorer citizens, landless and unable for social reasons to turn to trade. There was thus in Rome a growing multitude of aliens, dispossessed yeomen and dependent clients. Simultaneously slavery increased very largely after the second Punic War (202 B.C.). Every conquest brought slaves into the market, for whom ready purchasers were found. The slaves took the place of the freemen upon the old family estates, and the free country people became extinct. Husbandry gave place to shepherding. The estates were thrown into large domains (latifundia), managed by bailiffs and worked by slaves, often fettered or bound by chains, lodged in cells in houses of labour (ergastula), and sometimes cared for when ill in infirmaries (valetudinaria). In Crete and Sparta the slaves toiled that the mass of citizens might have means and leisure. In Rome the slave class was organized for private and not for common ends. In Athens the citizens were paid for their services; at Rome no offices were paid. Thus the citizen at Rome was, one might almost say, forced into a dependence on the public corn, for as the large properties swallowed up the smaller, and the slave dispossessed the citizen, a population grew up unfit for rural toil, disinclined to live by methods that pride considered sordid, unstable and pleasure-loving, and yet a serious political factor, as dependent on the rich for their enjoyments as they were on their patrons or the prefect of the corn in the city for their food.