Rome

by W. Warde Fowler

The fact is that the Romans were now coming under the influence of a new idea of life, in which the individual played a more important part than ever before at Rome. The Roman of the past had grown up modelled on a type and fixed in a group, so that the individual had little chance of asserting himself; but now we find him asserting himself in every direction, and in every class of society. To think for oneself, even in matters of religion; to speak from personal motives in the senate or law-courts; to aim at one’s own advancement in position or wealth—all this seemed natural and inevitable to the men of that day. And so by degrees the individual became the mainspring of action instead of the State. There were some noble exceptions, but most of the leading men played their own game, and often won it at the expense of the State. Many a general hurried on operations towards the close of his command so as not to be superseded before he could earn a triumph, and pass in splendid procession up to the temple on the Capitol, with chained captives following his chariot. And the small men became more and more unwilling to serve as soldiers in distant lands, and more and more rebellious against discipline. In little more than half-a-century after Hannibal had left Italy the Roman armies were beginning to be incapable of their work.

Along with this too rapid growth of the individual, we have to take account of the sudden incoming of wealth and growth of capital. The old Roman family group had no capital except its land and stock. But now, as the result of plunder and extortion in the provinces, most men of the upper classes had some capital in money, and this was almost always invested in public works and State undertakings of all kinds, e.g. the raising of taxes and the fitting out of fleets and armies. These things were all done by contract, and the contracts were taken by companies, in which every man was a shareholder who had anything to invest. Thus the inflow of wealth brought with it the desire of making money, and the forum of Rome became a kind of stock-exchange in which the buying and selling of shares was always going on, and where every man was trying to outwit his neighbour. Of a really productive use of capital in industry or commerce we hear very little; and it would seem that the Roman of that day had no idea of using his means or opportunities in ways likely to produce well-being in the world.

If we turn to rural Italy, the prospect is hardly less dreary. Incalculable damage had been done to agriculture in the great war, and agriculture, in the broad sense of the word, was almost the only Italian industry. Corn, wine, oil, wool and leather had formerly been produced in sufficient quantities to keep the inhabitants in food and clothing, each community growing what it needed, as in mediæval England. But this simple form of agricultural economy must have suffered a severe shock, not only from the ravages of armies, but from the decrease of the working population owing to war and pestilence.

In order to restore a decaying industry you must have the men to work it. Depopulation as the result mainly of war was a disease epidemic in the Mediterranean in this age; and in Italy we know for certain how rife it was, for we have the records of the census of the body of Roman citizens, which show a steady falling-off in this period, and we must suppose that the same causes were at work among the non-Roman population of the peninsula. There was, indeed, a remedy, but it was almost worse than the disease—I mean the vast numbers of slaves now available for labour. The unskilled slaves, captured or kidnapped in Spain, Gaul, Epirus, Thrace or Asia Minor, were cheap in the Roman market, and would do well enough to run a farm with, especially if that farm were chiefly a pastoral one, with flocks and herds needing no great experience or skill to look after. This cheapness, and the physical conditions of rural life in a mountainous country, made cattle-running and sheep-tending a profitable industry. Large districts of Italy, especially in the centre and south, became covered in this period with huge estates owned by capitalists, and worked by rough and often savage slaves, who were locked up at night in underground prisons and treated simply as “living tools.” No ray of hope ever broke in on these miserable beings; no free citizen gave a thought either to their condition or the economic danger of the system; philanthropy and political economy were unknown in the Roman world, for imagination and reflection were alike foreign to the Roman mental habit

Even on the estates of moderate size which were not entirely pastoral, slave-labour was the rule. We know something of such a farm from the treatise on agriculture written by Cato at this time, which has come down to us entire; and it is plain from what he says that though free labour might be employed at certain seasons, e.g. at harvest, the economic basis of the business was slave-labour. There is no doubt that all over Italy the small farm and the free cultivator were fast disappearing, with the rapid growth of capital and the cheapness of slaves. In the city of Rome, now beginning to harbour a vast population of many races, the number of domestic slaves tended constantly to increase; they were employed in every capacity by men of wealth and business. Many of them were cultivated men, Greeks for example, who could act as clerks, secretaries or teachers, and these had a fair chance of earning their freedom in time; but great numbers were low and vicious beings, who had no moral standard but that of obedience to a master, no moral sanction except punishment.

Thus, though the shrinkage of the free population was evil enough, the remedy for it was even worse. The slave, plucked up by the roots from the soil in which he had flourished in his native land, deprived of family, property, religion, must in the majority of cases become a demoralised and hopeless being. In the plays of Plautus, which date from this period, the slave is a liar and a thief, and apparently without a conscience. For the slave-owner, too, the moral results were bad enough, though not so obvious at first sight. A man who is served by scores of fellow-creatures who are absolutely at his mercy is liable to have his sense of duty gradually paralysed. Towards them he has no obligations, only rights; and thus his sense of duty towards his free fellow-citizens is apt to be paralysed too. A habit of mind acquired in dealing with one set of men naturally extends itself and affects all human relations. And so the Roman character, naturally hard enough, came in the later days of the Republic to be harder than ever. In our next two chapters we shall meet with unmistakable proofs of this. Incredible cruelty, recklessness of human life, callousness in dealing with the vanquished and the subject peoples, meet us at every turn in that dark age of Mediterranean history. Under the baleful influence of slavery the hard Roman nature had become brutalised; and we have to wait for the Christian era before we find any sign of sympathy with that vast mass of suffering humanity with which the Roman dominion was populated.

We must glance in the last place at the change brought about by the wars in another department of Roman life, viz. in the working of the constitution. The reader will remember that in early Rome the salient feature in that constitution was the imperium of the magistrate, just as in private life the salient feature was the discipline of the family under the rule of the head of the household. The man who held the imperium was irresistible so long as he held it, though a wise custom made it necessary for him to seek the advice of his council, the Senate, in all questions of grave importance. But now the long wars took the consul and his imperium away from the city for long periods, and as the Empire began to grow up and include provinces beyond sea, those periods became longer and longer. There were, indeed, always two magistrates with imperium in Rome, the prætors, who for long past had been elected yearly to help the consuls in judicial business; but the prestige of their imperium never reached the level of that of the consuls. And even when a consul returned home, though the majesty of the imperium was present in his person as ever, it was not his hand that was really on the helm. The decision of great questions did not lie with him, but with his Council, whose knowledge of affairs and whose “courage never to submit or yield,” had carried Rome safely through a long series of unexampled trials.

In the period after the war with Hannibal, the Senate, not the imperium, is clearly the paramount power in the working of the constitutional machinery. To take a single instance: when the people declined to sanction the war with Philip of Macedon, the Senate directed the consul to convince them that they were wrong, and both consul and people bowed to its will. They had other agents in the tribunes of the people, if the consuls failed them, and would now and then even coerce a consul by means of the power of the tribune. But what chiefly gave the Senate its power was the fact that it was the only permanent part of the government. A senator held office for life unless ejected by the Censor for immorality, while all the magistrates were elected for a year only. In the Senate there sat for life every man who had held high office and done the State good service, and as there were some three hundred of these, it was almost impossible for the yearly holders of imperium to resist their deliberate judgments. And for those judgments the Senate was responsible to no man.

Probably no assembly has ever comprised so much practical wisdom and experience as the Roman Senate of this period; but that wisdom and that experience was limited to the working of the constitution, the control of foreign affairs, and the direction and supply of armies. As has already been hinted, when it came to providing remedies for economic and moral evils such as I have been sketching, the Senators were useless; they had no training in the art of the State physician, and no desire to learn how to diagnose disease. They were almost all men of the same type, and with the same public and private interests. They belonged, in fact, to a few noble families, and new blood was seldom to be found in their ranks; for though they had all at one time or other been elected to office by the people, the choice of the people almost always fell upon members of the old tried families. The principle that the son of a family that has done good service to the State will be likely himself to do such service, seems to have taken firm hold of the mind of the Roman voter; and thus it came about that the Senate, in spite of its great capacity for business, gradually became an oligarchical body—the mouthpiece of one class of society. The principle is by no means a bad one in some stages of social growth, but it is sure in the long run to produce the vices as well as the virtues of oligarchy—the dislike of any kind of change, the narrow view of social life, the want of sympathy with other classes and of the desire to understand their needs. We shall see in the next two chapters how these oligarchical weaknesses brought the Senatorial government to an ignominious end. It had saved the State from its deadliest enemy; it had laid the foundations of the Roman Empire; but it failed utterly when called on to do the nobler work of justice and humanity.

This aptly brings us to our last point in this chapter. As the Roman oligarchy stood to the people, so Rome herself stood as an oligarchy to the populations of her Empire. The Roman citizen was the one most highly privileged person in the civilised world of that day. The great prize of his citizenship was not, as we might suppose it would be, the right to vote in the assemblies, to choose magistrates and pass or reject laws, nor the right to hold office if elected, for to that distinction very few could aspire; it was really the legal protection of his person and his property wherever he might be in the Empire. No one could maltreat his person with impunity; a fact well illustrated in the life of St. Paul (Acts xxii. 25 foll.). He could do business everywhere with the certainty that his sales, purchases, contracts, would be recognised and defended by Roman law, while the non-citizen had no such guarantees for his transactions. No other city in the Mediterranean had a citizenship to compare with this in practical value, for the Roman law was gradually becoming the only system of law with a real force behind it. To live a life of security and prosperity you must be a Roman citizen.