A.D. 379-395.
It is certain, however, that laws pressing heavily on the merchant were now greatly modified in favour of those who followed maritime pursuits—a remarkable fact, as contrasted with the former legislation of Rome and the contempt in which seafaring persons had been previously held. The emperors Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius exempted the ship-owners and the sailors who navigated their vessels, from the payment of taxes, on the ground that the merchant was enriched by foreign trade, while the mariners had all the trouble and risk. The fifth title of the thirteenth book of the Theodosian code referred exclusively to their interests; while the ninth law under that head, enacted by the emperors Constans and Julian, further shelters them from personal injuries and protects them “from all costs of violent proceedings, as well as extortions, ordinary and extraordinary.” Nearly two hundred years afterwards the Emperor Justinian considered it politic to incorporate this law into his celebrated code;[338] the same exemptions being granted by that emperor, in his fourth and fifth law under the same table as the Theodosian code. The laws of the emperors Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian, embodied in the Code of Justinian, likewise forbid, on pain of death, that any one should insult the persons of mariners, while the special enactments of Arcadius, Honorius, and Theodosius treated them with the like respect. The same code furnishes another law of Gratian, Valentinian, and Theodosius, wherein these privileges are confirmed and ordered to be continued for ever.
Such extraordinary privileges conferred on the seafaring population of the empire—privileges unknown in any other country or in any other age—were probably enacted in order to revive the nautical spirit which had been so long practically treated with contempt. No doubt, special bounties were needed to ensure the import of corn and the construction of vessels adapted to this purpose. Indeed, the necessity of a constant and steady supply of food sufficient to meet the wants of the people, and to prevent the tumults which too frequently arose whenever there was a prospect of a scarcity of corn, sufficiently accounts for the encouragement afforded to this particular trade. But in the later days it was found necessary to create laws to raise further in the social scale the seafaring classes. Indeed this seems the only reason why the emperors Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius should have issued ordinances to prevent persons adopting the sea as a profession who had previously exercised any mean and disgraceful employment;[339] endeavouring thus, so far as laws could do so, to counteract the deep-rooted prejudice against seafaring pursuits. By the decrees of Constantine and Julian, sailors were even raised to the dignity of knighthood; while Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian enjoined that persons filling the functions of mariners should be admitted into the society of men of the most honourable and aristocratic parentage, and even into the senate.
Produce of certain lands applied to the sea service.
But while the Roman laws enacted at the new capital conceded so many privileges to persons who adopted the sea as a profession, the state also required the possessors of certain lands (making this, indeed, the condition of the grant) to perform the functions of public mariners; but this arrangement was so contrived that actual personal service was not enforced, although the expense of substitutes was charged on the lands. The nature of this scheme is fully explained in the Theodosian Code,[340] where the rights of the state and of the parties are defined. When these lands were sold, the law enforced the same obligations upon the purchasers; and the emperors Valentinian and Valens enacted, that if they passed into the hands of strangers, they should revert to “mariners,” on conditions regulated by the experience and practice of the previous fifty years. On the other hand, those persons who were employed in the service of the state were not permitted, in such voyages, to carry any private merchandise; moreover, the owners of vessels engaged in certain trades were required to hold them at the disposal of the state. In spite, however, of all these laws, the encouragement proposed or provided by them came too late.
Neglect and decline of commerce, and sufferings of the people.
But while a new life was being gradually infused into the empire by the creation of Constantinople, overgrown wealth and luxury, with the evils following in their train, indolence, waste, and extravagance, were only too surely working out the downfall of old Rome. Capital, which ought to have been used as a provision for fresh channels of employment for an increasing population, was devoted to pleasure and folly; while no middle class arose to create fresh capital by its industry and to supply the place of the annual waste. In no age or country have the extremes of wealth and poverty been so great; even the provincial merchants came not to the capital to increase its wealth, but rather to waste their own substance. They sought to rival, in display, the ancient noblesse; they rented their palaces to enjoy their society, and were ready to spend fortunes derived from commerce to win a ready entrance into their salons.
So early as the Augustan age, Livy and Pliny have alluded to the then enormous accumulation of wealth in Rome; the former describing the mass of treasure accumulated there as something fabulous;[341] the latter stating that there were side-boards in his time groaning under more solid silver than had been transported by Scipio from vanquished Carthage. Besides all this removable wealth in the shape of plate, there was, no doubt, a still greater supply in jewels and precious stones, in gold ornaments and in the current metallic coin of the empire. Unlike their poor and invincible ancestors, who were not distinguished from the meanest of the soldiers by the delicacy of their food or the splendour of their apparel, the nobles of Rome, in its latter days, were not merely fond of the most ostentatious display, but magnified the rent rolls of their estates, too frequently living in accordance with their imaginary rather than with their actual incomes. The “Satires” of Juvenal portray but too distinctly the corruption of manners which had in his time (the reign of Domitian) extended to the female portion of the population.[342]
History, it has been truly said, repeats itself; and the reading of the lengthened description Ammianus has given of the extravagance of Rome reminds us of too many of the gay assemblies so frequently met with in our own time. Nor is his description of the manners of the Roman nobility wholly unlike what may too frequently be now seen in the conduct of those persons who measure their importance by their wealth and gay equipages, or who, by their rapid acquisition of large fortunes, and their method of dealing with them, used to be known in England as “Nabobs,” but who now bear a less flattering name.
While such was the state of the upper, the middle classes, who derived their subsistence from their skill and industry, and who, in all communities, constitute the mainstay of a nation, had become comparatively insignificant, the still lower orders being reduced, in most instances, to abject poverty. Large allowances of bread were daily served out at the public expense; and, in one year, three millions six hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds of bacon are said to have been distributed to the needy masses, as well as oil, indispensable alike for the lamp and the bath, to the extent of three hundred thousand English gallons; but the poor citizens had become almost as indolent and depraved as their rulers. In the baths, constructed in every part of the city with imperial magnificence for the indiscriminate use of the senators and the people, the meanest Romans idled away their time. For a small copper coin[343] they could there purchase the daily enjoyment of a scene of pomp and luxury which might well have excited the envy of princes. Baths, the extent of which we can now scarcely comprehend, surrounded with granite pillars from the quarries of Egypt and adorned with the precious green marble of Numidia, with streams of ever-running hot water from mouths of bright and massive silver, were the hourly resort of dirty and ragged plebeians without shoes or mantles.