But we must not forget that the creditors in 200 BC are made to press for their money on the ground that they wanted to invest it in land, of which there was plenty then in the market. This may be a detail added by Livy himself: but surely it is more likely that he is repeating what he found in his authorities. In any case the land referred to can hardly be other than the derelict farms belonging to those who had suffered by the war. In earlier times we have traditions of men losing their lands through inability to pay the debts for which they stood pledged. In a somewhat later time we hear[610] of small farmers being bought out cheaply by neighbouring big landlords, and bullied if they made difficulty about leaving their farms. The present case is different, arising directly out of the war. The father of a family might be dead, or disinclined to go back to monotonous toil after the excitements of military life, or unable to find the extra labour for reclaiming a wasted and weed-grown farm, or means of restocking it. He or his heir would probably not have capital to tide him over the interval before the farm was again fully productive: his immediate need was probably ready money. No wonder that farms were in the market, and at prices that made a land-grabber’s mouth water. The great war certainly marked a stage in the decay of the small-farm agriculture, the healthy condition of which had hitherto been the soundest element of Roman strength.
Before we leave the traditions of the early period it is necessary to refer to the question of free wage-earning labour. Have we any reason to think that under the conditions of early Rome there was any considerable class of rustic[611] wage-earners? Nearly all the passages that suggest an affirmative answer are found in the work of Dionysius, who repeatedly uses[612] the Greek word θητεύειν of this class of labour. It is represented as being practically servile, for it meant working with slaves or at least doing the work which according to the writer[613] was (even in the regal period) done by slaves. The poor Plebeians appear as loathing such service: their desire is for plots of land on which each man can work freely for himself. This desire their protectors, kings or tribunes, endeavour to gratify by allotments as occasion serves. Now that there was land-hunger from the earliest times, and that agriculture was in itself an honourable trade, we have no good reason for doubting. But that the dislike of wage-earning labour as such was the main motive of land-hunger is a more doubtful proposition. It may be true, but it sounds very like an explanation supplied by a learned but rhetorical historian. We know that Dionysius regarded Rome as a city of Greek origin. The legends of early Attica were doubtless familiar to him. We may grant that there was probably some likeness between the labour-conditions of early Rome and early Athens. But historians are ever tempted to detect analogies in haste and remodel tradition at leisure. I suspect that the two features of the same picture, the prevalence of rustic slavery and also of rustic wage-earning, are taken from different lines of tradition, and both overdrawn.
In connexion with this question it is necessary to turn back to a remarkable passage[614] of Livy referring to the year 362 BC. The famous L Manlius the martinet (imperiosus) was threatened with a public prosecution by a tribune for misuse of his powers as dictator in the year just past. To create prejudice against the accused, the prosecutor further alleged that he had treated his son Titus with cruel severity. The young man was slow of wit and speech, but no wrongdoing had been brought home to him. Yet his father had turned him out of his city home, had cut him off from public life and the company of other youths, and put him to servile work, shutting him up in what was almost a slaves’ prison (ergastulum). The daily affliction of such a life was calculated to teach the dictator’s son that he had indeed a martinet for his father. To keep his son among the flocks in the rustic condition and habit of a country boor was to intensify any natural defects of his own offspring, conduct too heartless for even the brute beasts. But the young Manlius upset all calculations. On hearing what was in contemplation he started for Rome with a knife, made his way into the tribune’s presence in the morning and made him solemnly swear to drop the prosecution by a threat of killing him then and there if he did not take the oath. The tribune swore, and the trial fell through. The Roman commons were vexed to lose the chance of using their votes to punish the father for his arbitrary and unfeeling conduct, but they approved the dutiful act of the son, and took the first opportunity of electing him a military officer. This young man was afterwards the renowned T Manlius Torquatus, who followed his father’s example of severity by putting to death his own son for a breach of military discipline.
The story is a fine specimen of the edifying legends kept in circulation by the Romans of later days. That the greatness of Rome was above all things due to their grim old fathers who endured hardness and sacrificed all tender affections to public duty, was the general moral of these popular tales. Exaggeration grew with repetition, and details became less and less authentic. In particular the circumstances of their own time were foisted in by narrators whose imagination did not suffice to grasp the difference of conditions in the past. In the above story we have a reference to ergastula, the barracoons in which the slave-gangs on great estates were confined when not actually at work. Now the system of which these private prisons were a marked feature certainly belongs to a later period, when agriculture on a large scale was widely practised, not to make a living for a man and his family, but to make a great income for a single individual by the labour of many. Here then we have a detail clearly not authentic, which throws doubt on the whole setting of the story. Again, we have agricultural labour put before us as degrading (opus servile). It is a punishment, banishing a young Roman from his proper surrounding in the life of Rome, and dooming him to grow up a mere clodhopper. There may have been some points in the original story of which this is an exaggerated version: for it is evident that from quite early days of the Republic men of the ruling class found it necessary to spend much time in or quite close to the city. But the representation of agriculture as a servile occupation is grossly inconsistent with the other legends glorifying the farmer-heroes of yore. It is of course quite impossible to prove that no isolated cases of a young Roman’s banishment to farm life ever occurred. But that such a proceeding was so far ordinary as fairly to be reckoned typical, is in the highest degree improbable. That later writers should invent or accept such colouring for their picture, is no wonder. In the Attic New Comedy, with which Roman society was familiarized[615] in the second century BC, this situation was found. The later conditions of Roman life, in city and country, tended to make the view of agriculture as a servile trade, capable of being rendered penal, more and more intelligible to Romans. Accordingly we find this view cynically accepted[616] by Sallust, and warmly protested against[617] by Cicero. In order to weaken the case of his client Sextus Roscius, it was urged that the young man’s father distrusted him and sent him to live the life of a boor on his farm in Umbria. Cicero, evidently anxious as to the possible effect of this construction of facts on the coming verdict, was at great pains to counter it by maintaining that the father’s decision was in truth a compliment: in looking for an honest and capable manager of his rustic estate he had found the right man in this son. The orator surely did not enlarge on this point for nothing. And it is to be noted that in insisting on the respectability of a farmer’s life he sees fit to refer to the farmer-consuls of the olden time. He feels, no doubt, that unsupported assertions[618] as to the employment of sons in agriculture by his contemporaries were not likely to carry much weight with the jury.
After the above considerations I come to the conclusion that Livy’s representation of agriculture as a servile occupation in the case of Manlius is a coloured utterance of no historical value. A minute consistency is not to be looked for in the writings of an author to whom picturesqueness of detail appeals differently at different moments. For Livy was in truth deeply conscious of the sad changes in Italian country life brought about by the transition to large-scale agriculture. Under the year 385 he is driven to moralize[619] on the constant renewal of Volscian and Aequian wars. How ever did these two small peoples find armies for the long-continued struggle? He suggests possible answers to the question, the most significant of which is that in those days there was a dense free population in those districts,—districts which in his own time, he says, would be deserted but for the presence of Roman slaves. To describe vividly the decay of free population, he adds that only a poor little nursery of soldiers is left (vix seminario exiguo militum relicto) in those parts. The momentous results of the change of system are not more clearly grasped by Lucan or Pliny himself. Livy then is not to be cited as a witness to the existence of great numbers of rustic slaves in Italy before the second Punic war, nor even then for the highly-organized gang-system by which an industrial character was given to agriculture.
One more story, and a strange one, needs to be considered, for it bears directly on the labour-question. The time in which it is placed is the latter part of the period of the Roman conquest of Italy. In a fragment[620] of one of his later books Dionysius tells us of the arbitrary doings of a consul Postumius, a Patrician of high rank who had already been twice consul. After much bullying he made his colleague, a Plebeian of recent nobility, resign to him the command in the Samnite war. This was an unpopular act, but he went on to worse. From his army he drafted some 2000 men on to his own estate, and set them to cut away brushwood without providing cutting tools (ἄνευ σιδήρου). And he kept them there a long time doing the work of wage-earners or slaves (θητῶν ἔργα καὶ θεραπόντων ὑπηρετοῦντας). Into the tale of his further acts of arbitrary insolence we need not enter here, nor into the public prosecution and condemnation to a heavy fine that awaited him at the end of his term of office. Suffice it that the story is in general confirmed[621] by Livy, and that the hero of it seems to have been remembered in Roman tradition as a classic instance of self-willed audacity and disregard of the conventions that were the soul of Roman public life. So far as the labour is concerned, it seems to me that what was objected to in the consul’s conduct was the use of his military supreme power (imperium) for his own private profit. He treated a fatigue-party as a farm labour-gang. Freemen might work on their own land side by side with their slaves: they might work for wages on another man’s land side by side with his slaves. Any objection they might feel would be due to the unwelcome pressure of economic necessity. But to be called out for military service (and in most cases from their own farms), and then set to farm-labour on another man’s land under military discipline, was too much. We must bear in mind that a Roman army of the early Republic was not composed of pauper adventurers who preferred a life of danger with hopes of loot and licence to hard monotonous toil. The very poor were not called out, and the ranks were filled with citizens who had at least some property to lose. Therefore it might easily happen that a soldier set to rough manual labour by Postumius had to do for him the service that was being done at home for himself by a wage-earner or a slave. He was a soldier because he was a free citizen; he was being employed in place of a slave because he was a soldier under martial law. In no free republic could such a wrong be tolerated. The words of the epitome of Livy state the case with sufficient precision. L Postumius consularis, quoniam cum exercitui praeesset opera militum in agro suo usus erat, damnatus est. It is remarkable that, among the other epitomators and collectors of anecdotes who drew from the store of Livy, not one, not even Valerius Maximus, records this story. To Livy it must have seemed important, or he would not have laid enough stress on it to attract the attention of the writer of the epitome. So too the detailed version of Dionysius, probably drawn from the same authority as that of Livy, struck the fancy of a maker of extracts and caused his text to be preserved to us. It surely descends, like many other of the old stories, in a line of Plebeian tradition, and is recorded as an illustration of the survival of Patrician insolence in a headstrong consul after the two Orders had been politically equalized by the Licinian laws.
Beside these fragments of evidence there are in the later Roman literature many passages in which writers directly assert that their forefathers lived a life of simple frugality and worked with their own hands on their own little farms. But as evidence the value of such passages is not very great. They testify to a tradition: but in most cases the tradition is being used for the purposes of moralizing rhetoric. Now the glorification of ‘good old times’ has in all ages tempted authors to aim rather at striking contrast between past and present than at verification of their pictures of the past. To impute this defect to satirists is a mere commonplace. But those who are not professed satirists are often exposed to the same influence in a less degree. The most striking phenomenon in this kind is the chorus of poets in the Augustan age. The Emperor, aware that the character of Reformer is never a very popular one, preferred to pose as Restorer. The hint was given, and the literary world acted on it. Henceforth the praises of the noble and efficient simplicity of the ancients formed a staple material of Roman literature.
XXI. ABSTRACT OF CONCLUSIONS.
In reference to the early period down to 201 BC I think we are justified in coming to the following conclusions.
1. The evidence, consisting of fragmentary tradition somewhat distorted and in some points exaggerated by the influence of moral purpose on later writers, is on the whole consistent and credible.