That a labour-question underlay the policy of attaching the coloni to the land, is to be gathered from the following considerations. The development of the plan of promoting small tenancies, particularly on the imperial domains, was undoubtedly calculated to take the place of large-scale cultivation by slave labour. It was a move in the direction of more intensive tillage, and economically sound. So long as a firm hand was kept on large head-tenants and imperial officials, the plan seems to have been on the whole a success. But all depended on the protection of the small working farmers, and of course on the moderation of government demands. The disorders of the third century tended to paralyse the protection while they increased demands. Therefore the head-tenants, aided by the slackness or collusion of officials, gained a predominant power, which imperial policy had been concerned to prevent. By the time of Diocletian their position was far stronger than it had been under Hadrian. To restore the former relations by governmental action would be certainly difficult, perhaps impossible. As middlemen, through whose agency the collection of dues in non-municipal areas could be effected, they were useful. It was a saving of trouble to deal with a comparatively small number of persons, and those men of substance. The remodelling of the disordered Empire was no doubt a complicated and laborious business, and anything that promised to save trouble would be welcomed. So the government accepted[831] the changed position as accomplished fact, and left the coloni, its former clients, to the mercies of the men of capital. But the big men, controlling ever more lands, whether as possessors or as imperial head-tenants or as ‘patrons’ of helpless villagers, could not meet their obligations to the government without having the disposal of a sufficient and regular supply of labour. And to the authorities of the later Empire, deeply committed to a rigid system of castes and gilds, no way of meeting the difficulty seemed open but to extend the system of fixity to the class of toilers on the land. The motive was a financial one, naturally. Non-industrial, and so unable to pay for imports by export of its own manufactures, the civilization of the empire was financially based upon agriculture. Looking back on the past, we can see that the deadening of hope and enterprise in the farming population was a ruinous thing. But the empire drifted into it as the result of circumstances and influences long operative and eventually irresistible. To displace the free peasant by the slave, then the slave by the small tenant, only to end by converting the small tenant into a serf, was a part of the Roman fate.
ROME—AUGUSTUS TO NERO
XXIX. HORACE AND VERGIL.
For literary evidence bearing on agriculture in the time of Augustus we naturally look to Vergil and Horace. Now these two witnesses, taken separately and construed literally, might convey very different, even inconsistent, impressions of farm life and labour in the world around them. And Vergil is the central figure of Roman literature, the poet who absorbed the products of the past and dominated those of many generations to come. His quality as a witness to the present is what concerns us here. I have tried to discuss this problem thoroughly and fairly in a special section. In order to do this, it has been necessary to deal pari passu with most of the evidence of Horace, the rest of which can be treated first by itself.
Horace, the freedman’s son, himself an illustration of the way in which the ranks of Roman citizenship were being recruited from foreign sources, yields to none in his admiration of the rustic Romans of old[832] and the manly virtues of the genuine stock. In the dialogue between himself and his slave Davus the latter is made to twit him with his praises of the simple life and manners of the commons of yore, though he would never be content to live as they did. A palpable hit, as Horace knew: but he did not change his tone. With due respect he speaks of the farmers of olden time, men of sturdy mould and few wants. It was as poor men on small hereditary farms[833] that M’ Curius and Camillus grew to be champions of Rome. In those far-off days the citizen might have little of his own, but the public treasury[834] was full; a sharp contrast to present selfishness and greedy land-grabbing. Those old farmer folk put their own hand to the work. Their sons were brought up to a daily round of heavy tasks, and the mother of such families[835] was a strict ruler and an active housewife. For the scale of all their operations was small, and personal labour their chief means of attaining limited ends. They are not represented as using slave labour, nor is the omission strange. For the military needs of the great world-empire were never far from the minds of the Augustan writers, conscious as they were of their master’s anxieties on this score. Now the typical peasant of old time was farmer and soldier too, and it is of the rusticorum mascula militum proles that Horace is thinking. There was no need to refer to farm-slaves even in the case of Regulus[836], whom tradition evidently assumed to have been a slaveowner. But, when he refers to circumstances of his own day, the slave meets us everywhere; not only in urban life and the domestic circle, but on the farm and in the contractor’s[837] labour-gang. We then hear of great estates, of great blocks of land mostly forest (saltus)[838] bought up by the rich, of the sumptuous villae of the new style, all implying masses of slave labour: also of the great estates outside[839] Italy, from which speculators were already drawing incomes.
Side by side with these scenes of aggressive opulence, we find occasional mention of a poorer class, farming small holdings, who are sometimes represented[840] as cultivators of land inherited from their forefathers. How far we are to take these references literally, that is as evidence that such persons were ordinary figures in the rustic life of Italy, may be doubted. The poet in need of material for contrasts, which are inevitably part of his stock-in-trade, has little in common with the statistician or even the stolid reporter. Nor can we be sure that the man who ‘works his paternal farm with oxen of his own’ or ‘delights to cleave his ancestral fields with the mattock,’ are workers doing the bodily labour in person. Even Horace, inclined though he is to realism, cannot be trusted so far: such words[841] as arat and aedificat for instance do not necessarily mean that the man guides the plough or is his own mason or carpenter. When he speaks of ‘all that the tireless Apulian[842] ploughs’—that is, the harvests he raises by ploughing—he does not seem to have in mind the small farmer. For the context clearly suggests corn raised on a large scale. And yet elsewhere[843] he gives us a picture of an Apulian peasant whose hard toil is cheered and eased by the work and attentions of his sunburnt wife, a little ideal scene of rural bliss. Apulia is a large district, and not uniform[844] in character, so we need not assume that either of these passages misrepresents fact. And there is a noticeable difference between the style of the Satires and Epistles on the one hand and that of the Odes on the other. In vocabulary, as in metre and rhythm, the former enjoy an easy license denied to the severer lyric poems on which he stakes his strictly poetic reputation. In the Odes[845] for instance colonus bears the old general sense ‘tiller of the soil’: in the Satires we find it in the legal sense of ‘tenant-farmer’ as opposed to ‘owner,’ dominus. He refers in both groups of poems to the military colonists[846] pensioned by Augustus with grants of land. In neither place is the word coloni used; this is natural enough. We need only note the care with which the court-poet refers to the matter. His master doubtless had many an anxious hour over that settlement: the poet refers to the granting of lands, and does not touch on the disturbance caused thereby. Nor is Horace peculiar in this respect. The caution that marks the utterances of all the Augustan writers is very apt to mislead us when we try to form a notion of the actual situation. The general truth seems to be that the beginning of the Empire was a time of unrest tempered by exhaustion, and that things only calmed down gradually as the sufferers of the elder generation died out. Wealth was now the one aim of most ambitions, and the race to escape poverty was extreme. The merchant[847] in Horace is a typical figure. For a while he may have had enough of seafaring perils and turn with joy to the rural quiet of his country town: but to vegetate on narrow means is more than he can stand, and he is off to the seas again. He is contrasted with the farmer content to till his ancestral fields, whom no prospect of gain would tempt to face the dangers of the deep: and he is I believe a much more average representative of the age than the acquiescent farmer.
One passage in the works of Horace calls for special discussion by itself, for the value of its evidence depends on the interpretation accepted, and opinions have differed. In the fourteenth epistle of the first book the poet expresses his preference for country life in the form of an address to the steward of his Sabine estate, beginning with these lines
Vilice silvarum et mihi me reddentis agelli,
quem tu fastidis habitatum quinque focis et