ROME—EARLY PERIOD
XX. THE TRADITIONS COMBINED AND DISCUSSED.
When we turn to Roman agriculture, and agricultural labour in particular, we have to deal with evidence very different in character from that presented by the Greek world. This will be most clearly seen if we accept the very reasonable division of periods made by Wallon in his History of Slavery—the first down to 201 BC, the end of the second Punic war, the second to the age of the Antonine emperors, 200 BC to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, and the third that of the later Empire. For of the first we have no contemporary or nearly contemporary pictures surviving. Traditions preserved by later writers, notes of antiquaries on words and customs long obscured by time and change, are the staple material at hand. Even with the help of a few survivals in law, inference from such material is unavoidably timid and incomplete. In collecting what the later Romans believed of their past we get vivid impressions of the opinions and prejudices that went to form the Roman spirit. But it does not follow that we can rely on these opinions as solid evidence of facts. An instance may be found in the assertion[574] that a clause requiring the employment of a certain proportion of free labourers to slaves was included in the Licinian laws of 367 BC. This used to be taken as a fact, and inferences were drawn from it, but it is now with reason regarded as an ‘anticipation,’ transferring the fact of a later attempt of the kind to an age in which the slave-gangs were not as yet an evident economic and social danger. In the second period, that of Roman greatness, we have not only contemporary witness for much of the time in the form of references and allusions in literature, but the works of the great writers on agriculture, Cato Varro and Columella, not to mention the great compiler Pliny, fall within it, and give us on the whole a picture exceptionally complete. We know more of the farm-management and labour-conditions in this period than we do of most matters of antiquity. The last period sees the development of a change the germs of which are no doubt to be detected in the preceding one. The great strain on the Empire, owing to the internal decay and the growing pressure of financial necessities, made the change inevitable; economic freedom and proprietary slavery died down, and we have before us the transition to predial serfdom, the system of the unfree tenant bound to the soil. The record of this change is chiefly preserved in the later Roman Law.
My first business is therefore to inquire what the tradition of early times amounts to, and how far it may reasonably be taken as evidence of fact. And it must be borne in mind that my subject is not the technical details of agriculture in general, but the nature of the labour employed in agriculture. In ages when voluntary peace between empires and peoples on bona fide equal terms was never a realized fact, and as yet hardly a dream, the stability of a state depended on the strength of its military forces,—their number, efficiency, and means of renewal. Mere numbers[575] were tried and failed. The hire of professional soldiers of fortune[576] might furnish technical skill, but it was politically dangerous. Their leaders had no personal sentiment in favour of the state employing them, and their interest or ambition disposed them rather to support a tyrant, or to become tyrants themselves, than to act as loyal defenders of the freedom of the state. Mercenaries[577] hired in the mass, barbarians, were less skilled but not less dangerous. That a well-trained army of citizens was the most trustworthy organ of state-protection, was not disputed: the combination of loyalty with skill made it a most efficient weapon. The ratio of citizen enthusiasm to the confidence created by exact discipline varied greatly in the Greek republics of the fifth century BC. But these two elements were normally present, though in various proportions. The common defect, most serious in those states that played an active part, was the smallness of scale that made it difficult to keep up the strength of citizen armies exposed to the wastage of war. A single great disaster might and did turn a struggle for empire into a desperate fight for existence. The constrained transition to employment of mercenary troops as the principal armed force of states was both a symptom and a further cause of decay in the Greek republics. For the sturdy soldiers of fortune were generally drawn from the rustic population of districts in which agriculture filled a more important place than political life. There is little doubt that a decline of food-production in Greece was the result: and scarcity of food had long been a persistent difficulty underlying and explaining most of the doings of the Greeks. The rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander proved the military value of a national army of trained rustics, and reasserted the superiority of such troops to the armed multitudes of the East. But Alexander’s career did not leave the world at peace. His empire broke up in a period of dynastic wars; for to supply an imperial army strong enough to support a single control and guarantee internal peace was beyond the resources of Macedonia.
If an army of considerable strength, easily maintained and recruited, loyal, the servant of the state and not its master, was necessary for defence and as an instrument of foreign politics, there was room for a better solution of the problem than had been found in Greece or the East. It was found in Italy on the following lines. An increase of scale could only be attained by growth. Growth, to be effective, must not consist in mere conquest: it must be true expansion, in other words it must imply permanent occupation. And permanent occupation implied settlement of the conquering people on the conquered lands. A growing population of rustic citizens, self-supporting, bound by ties of sentiment and interest to the state of which they were citizens, conscious of a duty to uphold the state to which they owed their homesteads and their security, supplied automatically in response to growing needs the growing raw material of power. Nor was Roman expansion confined to the assignation of land-allotments to individuals (viritim). Old towns were remodelled, and new ones founded, under various conditions as settlements (coloniae). Each settler in one of these towns received an allotment of land in the territory of the township, and was officially speaking a tiller of the soil (colonus). The effect of these Colonies was twofold. Their territories added to the sum of land in occupation of Romans or Roman Allies: so far the gain was chiefly material. But they were all bound to Rome and subjected to Roman influences. In their turn they influenced the conquered peoples among whom they were planted, and promoted slowly and steadily the Romanizing of Italy. Being fortified, they had a military value from the first, as commanding roads and as bases of campaigns. But their moral effect in accustoming Italians to regard Rome as the controlling centre of Italy was perhaps of even greater importance.
We must not ignore or underrate the advantages of Rome’s position from a commercial point of view. Little though we hear of this in tradition, it can hardly be doubted that it gave Rome a marked superiority in resources to her less happily situated neighbours, and enabled her to take the first great step forward by becoming dominant in central Italy. But the consolidation and completion of her conquest of the peninsula was carried out by means of an extended Roman agriculture. It was this that gave to Roman expansion the solid character that distinguished republican Rome from other conquering powers. What she took, that she could keep. When the traditional story of early Rome depicts the Roman commons as hungry for land, and annexation of territory as the normal result of conquest, it is undoubtedly worthy of belief. When it shews us the devastation of their enemies’ lands as a chief part—sometimes the whole—of the work of a campaign, it is in full agreement with the traditions of all ancient warfare. When we read[578] that the ruin of farms by raids of the enemy brought suffering farmers into debt, and that the cruel operation of debt-laws led to serious internal troubles in the Roman state, the story is credible enough. The superior organization of Rome enabled her to overcome these troubles, not only by compromises and concessions at home, but still more by establishing her poorer citizens on farms at the cost of her neighbours. As the area under her control was extended, the military force automatically grew, and she surpassed her rivals in the cohesion and vitality of her power. At need, her armies rose from the soil. So did those of other Italian peoples. But in dealing with them she enjoyed the advantage of unity as compared with the far less effective cooperation of Samnite cantons or Etruscan cities. Even the capture of Rome by the Gauls could not destroy her system, and she was able to strengthen her moral position by proving herself the one competent defender of Italy against invasion from the North. When the time came for the struggle with Carthage, she had to face a different test. But no blundering on the part of her generals, no strategy of Hannibal, could avail to nullify the solid superiority of her military strength. And this strength was in the last resort derived from the numbers and loyalty of the farm-population: it was in fact the product of the plough rather than the sword.
The agricultural conditions of early Rome[579] are a subject, and have been the subject, of special treatises. Only a few points can be noticed here. That a communal system of some kind once existed, whether in the form of the associations known to inquirers as Village Communities or on a gentile basis as Clan-estates, is a probable hypothesis. But the evidence for it is slight, and, however just the general inferences may be, they can hardly be said to help us much in considering the labour-question. It may well be true that lands[580] were held by clans, that they were cultivated in common, that the produce was divided among the households, that parcels of the land were granted to the dependants (clientes) of the clan as tenants at will (precario) on condition of paying a share of their crops. Or it may be that the normal unit was a village in which the members were several freeholders of small plots, with common rights over the undivided common-land, the waste left free for grazing and miscellaneous uses. And it is possible that at some stage or other of social development both these systems may have existed side by side. In later times we find Rome the mistress of a vast territory in Italy, a large part of which was reserved as state-domain (ager publicus populi Romani), the mismanagement of which was a source of grave evils. But in Rome’s early days there cannot have been any great amount of such domain-land. That there was land-hunger, a demand for several allotments in full ownership, on which a family might live, is not to be doubted. And the formation of communities, each with its village centre and its common pasture, was a very natural means to promote mutual help and protection. That men so situated worked with their own hands, and that the labour was mainly (and often wholly) that of the father and his family, is as nearly certain as such a proposition can be. But this does not imply or suggest that no slave-labour was employed on the farms. It merely means that farms were not worked on a system in which all manual labour was performed by slaves. We have to inquire what is the traditional picture of agricultural conditions in the early days of Rome, and how far that picture is worthy of our belief.
Now it so happens that, three striking figures stand out in the traditional picture of the Roman farmer-soldiers of the early Republic. Others fill in certain details, but the names of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, Manius Curius Dentatus, and Gaius Fabricius Luscinus, were especially notable in Roman legend as representing the strenuous patriotic and frugal lives of the heroes of old. The story of Cincinnatus[581] is told by Cicero Livy Dionysius and Pliny the elder, and often referred to by other writers. The hero is a Patrician of the old simple frugal patriotic masterful type, the admiration and imitation of which these edifying legends seek to encourage. He had owned seven iugera of land, but had been driven to pledge or sell three of these[582] in order to provide bail for his son, who had been brought to trial for disturbance of the public peace and had sought safety in flight. The forfeit imposed on the father left him with only four iugera. This little farm, on the further side of the Tiber, he was cultivating, when deputies from the Senate came to announce that he had been named Dictator to deal with a great emergency. They found him digging or ploughing, covered with dust and sweat: and he would not receive them till he had washed and gowned himself. Then he heard their message, took up the duties of the supreme office, and of course saved the state. It is to be noted that he chose as his Master of the Horse (the Dictator’s understudy) a man of the same[583] sort, Patrician by birth, poor, but a stout warrior. We may fairly suspect that a definite moral purpose has been at work, modelling and colouring this pretty story. In a later age, when the power of moneyed interests was overriding the prestige of Patrician blood, the reaction of an ‘old-Roman’ party was long a vigorous force in Roman life, as we see from the career of the elder Cato. Cato was a Plebeian, but any Plebeian who admired the simple ways of early Rome was bound to recognize that Patricians were the nobility of the olden time.