When we admit that slave-labour is wasteful, we mean that its output as compared with that of free labour is not proportionate to the time spent. Having no hope of bettering his condition, the slave does only just enough to escape punishment; having no interest in the profits of the work, he does it carelessly. If, as we know, the free worker paid by time needs constant watching to keep him up to the mark, much more is this true of the slave. Hence a system of piece-work is disliked by the free man and hardly applicable in practice to the case of the slave. But we are not to forget that the slave, having been bought and paid for, draws no money wage. The interest on his prime cost is on the average probably much less than a free man’s wage; but the master cannot pay him off and be rid of him when the job is done. The owned labourer is on his owner’s hands so long as that owner owns him. Against this we must set the very low standard of feeding clothing housing etc allowed in the case of the slave. Nor must we ignore the economic advantage of slavery as ensuring a permanent supply of labour: for the free labourer was (and is) not always to be had when wanted. These were pretty certainly the considerations that underlay the organization described by the Roman writers on res rustica; a regular staff of slaves for everyday work, supplemented by hired labour at times of pressure or for special jobs. And the growing difficulty of getting hired help probably furnished the motive for developing the system of coloni. By letting parcels of an estate to small tenants a landlord could secure the presence of resident freemen in his neighbourhood. These in their spare time could be employed as labourers. At how early a date stipulation for labour in part payment of their rents placed such tenants on a ‘soccage’ footing is not certain. It has rightly or not, been detected in Columella. At all events it contained the germ of predial serfdom.
Now, so long as slave-labour was the permanent and vital element in agriculture, success or failure depended entirely on the efficiency of direction and control. Accordingly the regular organization of a great estate was a complete hierarchy. At the head was the vilicus, having under him foremen skilled in special branches of farm work and head-shepherds and the like. Even among the rank and file of the slaves many had special duties occupying all or part of their time, for it was an object to fix responsibility. But it is clear that the efficiency of the whole organization depended on that of the vilicus. And he was a slave, the chattel of a master who could inflict on him any punishment he chose. The temptation to rob his master[632] for his own profit was probably not nearly so strong as we might on first thoughts suppose. If he had contrived to hoard the fruits of his pilferings in portable cash, what was he to do with it? He was not free to abscond with it. He would be well known in the neighbourhood: if any slave could escape detection as a runaway, it would not be he. And detection meant the loss of all his privileges as steward, with severe punishment to boot. His obvious policy was to cling to his stewardship, to induce his master to let him keep a few beasts of his own (as peculium)[633] on some corner of the estate, and to wait on events. It might be that he looked forward to manumission after long service. But I cannot find any authority for such a supposition, or any concrete instance of a manumitted vilicus. This inclines me to believe that in practice to such a man manumission was no boon. He was in most cases a native of some distant country, where he had long been forgotten. The farm of his lord was the nearest thing he had to a home. I am driven to suppose that as a rule he kept his post as long as he could discharge its duties, and then sank into the position of a quasi-pensioned retainer who could pay for his keep by watching his successor. Ordinary slaves when worn out may have been put to light duties about the farm, care of poultry etc, and he might direct them, so far as the new steward allowed. I am guessing thus only in reference to average cases. The brutal simplicity of selling off worn-out slaves for what they would fetch was apparently not unknown, and is approved[634] by Cato.
It has been briefly hinted above that the steward’s obvious interest lay in preventing his master from expecting too much in the way of returns from the estate. The demand for net income, that is to say the treatment of agriculture as an investment yielding a steady return year in and year out, was economically unsound. A landlord in public life wanted a safe income; interest on good debentures, as we should say. But to guarantee this some capitalist was needed to take the risks of business, of course with the prospect of gaining in good years more than he lost in bad ones. Now the Roman landlord had no such protection. In a business subject to unavoidable fluctuations he was not only entitled to the profits but liable to the losses. Imagine him just arrived from Rome, pledged already to some considerable outlay on shows or simple bribery, and looking for a cash balance larger than that shewn at the last audit. Let the steward meet him with a tale of disaster, and conceive his fury. Situations of this kind must surely have occurred, perhaps not very seldom: and one of the two men was in the absolute power of the other. We need not imagine the immediate[635] sequel. Stewards on estates for miles round would be reminded of their own risks of disgrace and punishment, and would look to their own security. I suggest that the habitual practice of these trusted men was to keep the produce of an estate down to a level at which it could easily be maintained; and, if possible, to represent it as being even less than it really was. Thus they removed a danger from themselves. This policy implied an easygoing management of the staff, but the staff were not likely to resent or betray it. A master like Cato was perhaps not to be taken in by a device of the kind: but Catos were rare, and the old man’s advice to look sharply after your vilicus sounds as if he believed many masters to be habitually fooled by their plausible stewards. If such was indeed the case, here we have at once a manifest cause of the decline of agriculture. The restriction of production would become year by year easier to arrange and conceal, harder and harder to detect. The employment of freemen[636] as stewards seems not to have been tried as a remedy; partly perhaps because they would have insisted on good salaries, partly because they were free to go,—and, if rogues[637], not empty-handed.
The cause to which I have pointed is one that could continue operating from generation to generation, and was likely so to continue until such time as the free farmer should once more occupy the land. The loving care that agriculture needs could only return with him. It was not lack of technical knowledge that did the mischief; Varro’s treatise is enough to prove that. It was the lack of personal devotion in the landlords and motive in the stewards. Principles without practice failed, as they have failed and will fail. Nor must we lay much stress on the disturbances of the revolutionary period. Had these, damaging though they were, been the effective cause of decline, surely the long peace under the early Empire would have led to a solid revival. But, though a court poet might sing of revival to please his master, more serious witnesses tell a different tale. In the middle of the first century AD we have Lucan Columella and the elder Pliny. If Lucan’s pictures of the countryside peopled with slave-gangs, and of the decay of free population, are suspected as rhetorically overdrawn, at least they agree with the evidence of Livy in the time of Augustus, so far as the parts near Rome are concerned. Columella[638] gravely deplores the neglect of agriculture, in particular the delegation of management to slaves. The landlord and his lady have long abdicated their interest in what was once a noble pursuit: it is now a degrading one, and their places are taken by the vilicus and vilica. Yet all he can suggest is a more perfect organization of the slave-staff, and the letting of outlying farms to tenants. Pliny tells the same woeful story. And while he vents his righteous indignation on the latifundia that have ruined Italy, he also mentions instances of great profits[639] made by cultivators of vines and olives on estates of quite moderate size. But these successful men were not of the social aristocracy: they were freedmen or other humble folks who themselves looked sharply after their own business.
Therefore, when we are told[640], and rightly, that with establishment of the Empire the political attraction of Rome was lessened, and that the interest of wealthy landlords became more strictly economic in character, we must not be in haste to identify this change with a return of genuine prosperity. That a sort of labour-crisis followed the restoration of peace is reasonably inferred from the fact that the kidnapping[641] of freemen, and their incorporation in the slave-gangs of great estates, was one of the abominations with which the early Principate had to deal. In a more peaceful world the supply of new slaves fell off, and the price doubtless rose. It would seem that at the same time free wage-earners were scarce, as was to be expected after the civil wars. So the highwayman, probably often a discharged soldier, laid hands on the unprotected wayfarer. After taking his purse, he made a profit of his victim’s person by selling him as a slave to some landowner in need of labourers, who asked no questions. Once in the ergastulum the man had small chance of regaining his freedom unless and until an inspection of these private prisons was undertaken by the government. Such phenomena are not likely to be the inventions of sensational writers; for the government, heavily weighted with other responsibilities, was driven to intervene and put down the scandal. But to do this was not to supply the necessary labour. That problem remained, and in the attempt to solve it an important development in the organization of large estates seems to have taken place. While the regular labour was as before furnished by the slave-staff, and greater care taken[642] to avoid losses by sickness, and while even the breeding of slaves under certain restrictions was found worthy of attention, the need of extra hands at certain seasons was met by an arrangement for retaining potential free labourers within easy reach. This was an extension of the system of tenant coloni. Parcels of the estate were let to small farmers, whose residence was thereby assured. Columella[643] advises a landlord in dealing with his tenants to be more precise in exacting from them work (opus) than rent (pensiones), and Weber[644] takes opus to mean not merely the proper cultivation of their several plots but a stipulated amount of labour on the lord’s farm. The practice of exacting labour from debtors[645] in discharge of their debt was not a new one, and this arrangement seems to be the same in a more systematic form. By taking care to keep the little farm sufficiently small, and fixing the rent sufficiently high, the tenant was pretty certain to be often behind with his rent. In such conditions, even if the tenant did not encumber himself by further borrowing, it is clear that he was very liable to sink into a ‘soccage’ tenant, bound to render regular services without wage. Nominally free, he was practically tied to the soil; while the landlord, nominally but the owner of the soil, gradually acquired what was of more value than a money rent,—the ownership of his tenant’s services. In the growing scarcity of slave labour the lord had a strong motive for insisting on his rights, and so the free worker travelled down the road to serfdom.
In reviewing the history of rustic slavery, and its bearing on the labour-question, from the end of the second Punic war to the time of Marcus Aurelius, it is not necessary to refer to every indication of the discontents that were normal in the miserable slave-gangs. A few actual outbreaks of which we have definite records will serve to illustrate the sort of sleeping volcano, ever liable to explode, on which thousands of Italian landlords were sitting. The writers on agriculture were fully conscious of the peril, and among various precepts designed to promote order (and, so far as possible, contentment) none is more significant than the advice[646] not to have too many slaves of the same race. Dictated by the desire to make rebellious combinations difficult, this advice is at least as old as Plato[647] and Aristotle.
So early as 196 BC we hear[648] of a slave-rising in Etruria, put down with great severity by a military force. In 185 there was a great rising[649] of slave-herdsmen (pastores) in Apulia, put down by the officer then commanding the SE district. In about another half-century we begin the series of slave-wars which troubled the Roman world for some 60 or 70 years and caused a vast destruction of lives and property. It was the growth of the plantation system under a weak and distracted government that made such horrors possible. In 139 we hear of a rising in Sicily, where the plantation system was in full swing. From 135 there was fierce war[650] in the island, not put down till 131 after fearful bloodshed. The war of Aristonicus[651] in the new province of Asia, from 132 to 130, seems to have been essentially a slave-war. In Sicily the old story[652] was repeated 103-99 with the same phenomena and results. And in the last age of the Republic, 73 to 71 BC, Italy was devastated by the bands of Spartacus, a joint force of gladiators[653] and rustic slaves. For many months the country was at their mercy, and their final destruction was brought about more by their own disunion than by the sword of Roman legions. It is recorded[654] to the credit of Catiline that he refused to enlist rustic slaves in the armed force with which he fought and fell at Pistoria, resisting the less scrupulous advice of his confederates in Rome. During the upheaval of the great civil wars the slaves enjoyed unusual license. Many took arms: probably many others escaped from bondage. But the establishment of the Empire, though the supply of slave labour was not equal to the demand, did not put an end to slave-risings. For instance, in 24 AD a former soldier of the Imperial Guard planned an insurrection[655] in the neighbourhood of Brundisium. By promising freedom to the bold slave-herdsmen scattered about the Apennine forests he got together what was evidently a force of considerable strength. The lucky arrival of a squadron of patrol vessels enabled the local quaestor to break up the conspiracy before it could make head. But Tiberius did not dally with so serious a matter: a detachment of troops carried off the ringleader and his chief accomplices to Rome. Tacitus remarks that there was in the city a widespread uneasiness, owing to the enormous growth of slave-gangs while the freeborn population was declining.
These specimens are enough to illustrate a public danger obvious a priori and hardly needing illustration. The letter of Tiberius[656] to the Senate in 22 AD shews how he had brooded over the social and economic condition of Italy. He saw clearly that the appearance of prosperity in a country where parks and mansions multiplied, and where tillage was still giving way to pasturage, was unsound. He knew no doubt that these signs pointed to the decline of the free rural population as still in progress. As an experienced general he could hardly ignore the value of such a free population for recruiting armies to serve the state, or regard its decline with indifference. He refers to the burden of imperial responsibilities. Now the system inherited from Augustus set Italy in a privileged position as the imperial land. Surely Tiberius cannot have overlooked the corresponding liability of Italy to take a full share in the defence of the empire. Yet in present circumstances her supply of vigorous manhood was visibly failing. If the present tendencies continued to act, the present system would inevitably break down. But, however much Tiberius was inclined to do justice to the Provinces, he could not escape his first duty to Italy without a complete change of system: and for this he was not prepared. Such misgivings of course could not be expressed in a letter to the Senate; but that an Emperor, temperamentally prone to worry, did not foresee the coming debility and degradation of Italy, and fret over the prospect, is to me quite incredible.
The movement for checking luxury, which drew this letter from Tiberius, resulted according to Tacitus in a temporary reduction of extravagance in entertainments. The influence of senators brought in from country towns or the Provinces helped in promoting a simpler life. It was example, not legislation, that effected whatever improvement was made. It was the example of Vespasian that did most to reform domestic economy. But the historian was well aware that reforms depending on the lead of individuals are transient. We have no reason to believe that any lasting improvement of agriculture was produced by these fitful efforts. From stray references in Tacitus, from the letters of the younger Pliny, from notices in Juvenal and Martial, it is evident that in the great plain of the Cisalpine and in the Italian hill country farming of one kind or another went on and prospered. In such districts a real country life might be found. But this was no new development: it had never ceased. Two conditions were necessary, remoteness from Rome and difficulty of access, which often coincided. Estates near the city (suburbana) were mostly, if not in all cases, held as resorts for rest or pleasure. If a steward could grow a fair supply of farm-produce, so much the better: but the duty of having all ready for visits of the master and his friends was the first charge on his time and attention. Even at some considerable distance from the city the same condition prevailed, if an estate lay near a main road and thus could be reached without inconvenient exertion.