THE CONQUERED PEOPLES
THE PROVINCIALS
=The Provinces.=--The inhabitants of conquered countries did not enter
into Roman citizenship, but remained strangers (peregrini), while yet
subjects of the Roman empire. They were to pay tribute--the tithe of
their crops, a tax in silver, a capitation tax. They must obey Romans
of every order. But as the Roman people could not itself administer
the province, it sent a magistrate in its place with the mission of
governing. The country subject to a governor was called _province_
(which signifies mission).
At the end of the republic (in 46), there were seventeen provinces:
ten in Europe, five in Asia, two in Africa--the majority of these very
large. Thus the entire territory of Gaul constituted but four
provinces, and Spain but two. "The provinces," said Cicero, "are the
domains of the Roman people"--if it made all these peoples subjects,
it was not for their advantage, but for its own. Its aim was not to
administer, but to exploit them.
=The Proconsuls.=--For the administration of a province the Roman
people always appointed a magistrate, consul or praetor, who was just
finishing the term of his office, and whose prerogative it
prolonged.[126] The proconsul, like the consul, had absolute power
and he could exercise it to his fancy, for he was alone in his
province;[127] there were no other magistrates to dispute the power
with him, no tribunes of the people to veto his acts, no senate to
watch him. He alone commanded the troops, led them to battle, and
posted them where he wished. He sat in his tribunal (praetorium),
condemning to fine, imprisonment, or death. He promulgated decrees
which had the force of law. He was the sole authority over himself for
he was in himself the incarnation of the Roman people.
=Tyranny and Oppression of the Proconsuls.=--This governor, whom no
one resisted, was a true despot. He made arrests, cast into prison,
beat with rods, or executed those who displeased him. The following is
one of a thousand of these caprices of the governor as a Roman orator
relates it: "At last the consul came to Termini, where his wife took a
fancy to bathe in the men's bath. All the men who were bathing there
were driven out The wife of the consul complained that it had not been
done quickly enough and that the baths were not well prepared. The
consul had a post set up in a public place, brought to it one of the
most eminent men of the city, stripped him of his garments, and had
him beaten with rods."
The proconsul drew from the province as much money as he wanted; thus
he regarded it as his private property. Means were not wanting to
exploit it. He plundered the treasuries of the cities, removed the
statues and jewels stored in the temples, and made requisitions on
the rich inhabitants for money or grain. As he was able to lodge
troops where he pleased, the cities paid him money to be exempt from
the presence of the soldiers. As he could condemn to death at will,
individuals gave him security-money. If he demanded an object of art
or even a sum of money, who would dare to refuse him? The men of his
escort imitated his example, pillaging under his name, and even under
his protection. The governor was in haste to accumulate his wealth as
it was necessary that he make his fortune in one year. After he
returned to Rome, another came who recommenced the whole process.
There was, indeed, a law that prohibited every governor from accepting
a gift, and a tribunal (since 149) expressly for the crime of
extortion. But this tribunal was composed of nobles and Roman knights
who would not condemn their compatriot, and the principal result of
this system was, according to the remark of Cicero, to compel the
governor to take yet more plunder from the province in order to
purchase the judges of the tribunal.
It cannot surprise one that the term "proconsul" came to be a synonym
for despot. Of these brigands by appointment the most notorious was
Verres, propraetor of Sicily, since Cicero from political motives
pronounced against him seven orations which have made him famous. But
it is probable that many others were as bad as he.
=The Publicans.=--In every province the Roman people had considerable
revenues--the customs, the mines, the imposts, the grain-lands, and
the pastures. These were farmed out to companies of contractors who
were called publicans. These men bought from the state the right of
collecting the impost in a certain place, and the provincials had to
obey them as the representatives of the Roman people. And so in every
province there were many companies of publicans, each with a crowd of
clerks and collectors. These people carried themselves as masters,
extorted more than was due them, reduced the debtors to misery,
sometimes selling them as slaves. In Asia they even exiled the
inhabitants without any pretext. When Marius required the king of
Bithynia to furnish him with soldiers, the king replied that, thanks
to the publicans, he had remaining as citizens only women, children,
and old people. The Romans were well informed of these excesses.
Cicero wrote to his brother, then a governor, "If you find the means
of satisfying the publicans without letting the provincials be
destroyed, it is because you have the attributes of a god." But the
publicans were judged in the tribunals and the proconsuls themselves
obeyed them. Scaurus, the proconsul of Asia, a man of rigid
probity,[128] wished to prevent them from pillaging his province; on
his return to Rome they had him accused and condemned.
The publicans drove to extremities even the peaceable and submissive
inhabitants of the Orient: in a single night, at the order of
Mithradates, 100,000 Romans were massacred. A century later, in the
time of Christ, the word "publican" was synonymous with thief.
=The Bankers.=--The Romans had heaped up at home the silver of the
conquered countries. And so silver was very abundant in Rome and
scarce in the provinces. At Rome one could borrow at four or five per
cent.; in the provinces not less than twelve per cent. was charged.
The bankers borrowed money in Rome and loaned it in the provinces,
especially to kings or to cities. When the exhausted peoples could not
return the principal and the interest, the bankers imitated the
procedure of the publicans. In 84 the cities of Asia made a loan to
pay an enormous war-levy; fourteen years later, the interest alone had
made the debt amount to six times the original amount. The bankers
compelled the cities to sell even their objects of art; parents sold
even their children. Some years later one of the most highly esteemed
Romans of his time, Brutus, the Stoic, loaned to the city of Salamis
in Cyprus a sum of money at forty-eight per cent. interest (four per
cent. a month). Scaptius, his business manager, demanded the sum with
interest; the city could not pay; Scaptius then went in search of the
proconsul Appius, secured a squadron of cavalry and came to Salamis to
blockade the senate in its hall of assembly; five senators died of
famine.
=Defencelessness of the Provincials.=--The provincials had no redress
against all these tyrants. The governor sustained the publicans, and
the Roman army and people sustained the governor. Admit that a Roman
citizen could enter suit against the plunderers of the provinces: a
governor was inviolable and could not be accused until he had given up
his office; while he held his office there was nothing to do but to
watch him plunder. If he were accused on his return to Rome, he
appeared before a tribunal of nobles and of publicans who were more
interested to support him than to render justice to the provincials.
If, perchance, the tribunal condemned him, exile exempted him from all
further penalty and he betook himself to a city of Italy to enjoy his
plunder. This punishment was nothing to him and was not even a loss to
him. And so the provincials preferred to appease their governor by
submission. They treated him like a king, flattered him, sent
presents, and raised statues to him. Often, indeed, in Asia they
raised altars to him,[129] built temples to him, and adored him as a
god.
SLAVERY
=The Sale of Slaves.=--Every prisoner of war, every inhabitant of a
captured city belonged to the victor. If they were not killed, they
were enslaved. Such was the ancient custom and the Romans exercised
the right to the full. Captives were treated as a part of the booty
and were therefore either sold to slave-merchants who followed the
army or, if taken to Rome, were put up at auction.[130] After every
war thousands of captives, men and women, were sold as slaves.
Children born of slave mothers would themselves be slaves. Thus it was
the conquered peoples who furnished the slave-supply for the Romans.
=Condition of the Slave.=--The slave belonged to a master, and so was
regarded not as a person but as a piece of property. He had, then, no
rights; he could not be a citizen or a proprietor; he could be neither
husband nor father. "Slave marriages!" says a character in a Roman
comedy;[131] "A slave takes a wife; it is contrary to the custom of
every people." The master has full right over his slave; he sends him
where he pleases, makes him work according to his will, even beyond
his strength, ill feeds him, beats him, tortures him, kills him
without accounting to anybody for it. The slave must submit to all the
whims of his master; the Romans declare, even, that he is to have no
conscience, his only duty is blind obedience. If he resists, if he
flees, the state assists the master to subdue or recover him; the man
who gives refuge to a fugitive slave renders himself liable to the
charge of theft, as if he had taken an ox or a horse belonging to
another.
=Number of Slaves.=--Slaves were far more numerous than free men. Rich
citizens owned 10,000 to 20,000 of them,[132] some having enough of
them to constitute a real army. We read of Caecilius Claudius Isidorius
who had once been a slave and came to possess more than 4,000 slaves.
Horace, who had seven slaves, speaks of his modest patrimony. Having
but three was in Rome a mark of poverty.
=Urban Slaves.=--The Roman nobles, like the Orientals of our day,
delighted in surrounding themselves with a crowd of servants. In a
great Roman house lived hundreds of slaves, organized for different
services. There were slaves to care for the furniture, for the silver
plate, for the objects of art; slaves of the wardrobe, valets and
chambermaids, the troop of cooks, the slaves of the bath, the master
of the house and his aids, the slaves to escort the master and
mistress on the street, the litter-carriers, coachmen and grooms,
secretaries, readers, copyists, physicians, teachers, actors,
musicians, artisans of every kind, for in every great house grain was
ground, flax was spun, and garments were woven. Others, gathered in
workshops, manufactured objects which the master sold to his profit.
Others were hired out as masons or as sailors; Crassus had 500
carpenter-slaves. These classes of slaves were called "slaves of the
city."
=Rural Slaves.=--Every great domain was tilled by a band of slaves.
They were the laborers, the shepherds, the vine-dressers, the
gardeners, the fishermen, grouped together in squads of ten. An
overseer, himself a slave, superintended them. The proprietor made it
a matter to produce everything on his lands: "He buys nothing;
everything that he consumes he raises at home," this is the compliment
paid to the rich. The Roman, therefore, kept a great number of
country-slaves, as they were called. A Roman domain had a strong
resemblance to a village; indeed it was called a "villa." The name has
been preserved: what the French call "ville" since the Middle Ages is
only the old Roman domain increased in size.
=Treatment of Slaves.=--The kind of treatment the slaves received
depended entirely on the character of the master. Some enlightened and
humane masters may be enumerated, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny,
who fed their slaves well, talked with them, sometimes had them sit
at table with them, and permitted them to have families and small
fortunes (the peculium).
But other masters are mentioned who treated their slaves as animals,
punished them cruelly, and even had them put to death for a whim.
Examples of these are not lacking. Vedius Pollio, a freedman of
Augustus, used to keep some lampreys in his fish-pond: when one of his
slaves carelessly broke a vase, he had him thrown into the fish-pond
as food for the lampreys. The philosopher Seneca paints in the
following words the violent cruelty of the masters: "If a slave coughs
or sneezes during a meal, if he pursues the flies too slowly, if he
lets a key fall noisily lo the floor, we fall into a great rage. If he
replies with too much spirit, if his countenance shows ill humor, have
we any right to have him flogged? Often we strike too hard and shatter
a limb or break a tooth." The philosopher Epictetus, who was a slave,
had had his ankle fractured in this way by his master. Women were no
more humane. Ovid, in a compliment paid to a woman, says, "Many times
she had her hair dressed in my presence, but never did she thrust her
needle into the arm of the serving-woman."
Public opinion did not condemn these cruelties. Juvenal represents a
woman angry at one of her slaves. "Crucify him," says she. "By what
crime has the slave merited this punishment? Blockhead! Is a slave,
then, a man? It may be that he has done nothing. I wish it, I order
it, my will is reason enough."
The law was no milder than custom. As late as the first century after
Christ, when a master was assassinated in his house, all the slaves
were put to death. When some wished to abolish this law, Thraseas,
one of the philosophers of high repute, rose to address the Senate to
demand that the law be maintained.
=The Ergastulum.=--A subterranean prison, lighted by narrow windows so
high that they could not be reached by the hand, was called the
ergastulum. The slaves who had displeased their master spent the night
there; during the day they were sent to work loaded with heavy chains
of iron. Many were branded with a red-hot iron.
=The Mill.=--The ancients had no mills run by machinery; they had the
grain ground by slaves with hand-mills. It was the most difficult kind
of work and was usually inflicted as a punishment. The mill of
antiquity was like a convict-prison. "There," says Plautus, "moan the
wicked slaves who are fed on polenta; there resound the noise of whips
and the clanking of chains." Three centuries later, in the second
century, Apuleius the novelist, depicts the interior of a mill as
follows: "Gods! what poor shrunken up men! with white skin striped
with blows of the whip, ... they wear only the shreds of a tunic; bent
forward, head shaved, the feet held in a chain, the body deformed by
the heat of the fire, the eyelids eaten away by the fumes, everything
covered with grain-dust."
=Character of the Slaves.=--Subjected to crushing labor or to enforced
idleness, always under the threat of the whip or of torture, slaves
became, according to their nature, either melancholy and savage, or
lazy and subservient. The most energetic of them committed suicide;
the others led a life that was merely mechanical. "The slave," said
Cato the Elder, "ought always to work or to sleep." The majority of
them lost all sense of honor. And so they used to call a mean act
"servile," that is, like a slave.
=Slave Revolts.=--The slaves did not write and so we do not know from
their own accounts what they thought of their masters. But the masters
felt themselves surrounded by hate. Pliny the Younger, learning that a
master was to be assassinated at the bath by his slaves, made this
reflection, "This is the peril under which we all live." "More
Romans," says another writer, "have fallen victims to the hate of
their slaves than to that of tyrants."
At different times slave revolts flamed up (the servile wars), almost
always in Sicily and south Italy where slaves were armed to guard the
herds. The most noted of these wars was the one under Spartacus. A
band of seventy gladiators, escaping from Capua, plundered a chariot
loaded with arms, and set themselves to hold the country. The slaves
escaped to them in crowds to unite their fortunes with theirs, and
soon they became an army.
The slaves defeated three Roman armies sent in succession against
them.
Their chief Spartacus wished to traverse the whole peninsula of Italy
in order to return to Thrace, from which country he had been brought
as a prisoner of war to serve as a gladiator. But at last these
ill-disciplined bands were shattered by the army of Crassus. The
revolutionists were all put to death. Rome now prohibited the slaves
from carrying arms thereafter, and it is reported that a shepherd was
once executed for having killed a boar with a spear.
=Admission to Citizenship.=--Rome treated its subjects and its slaves
brutally, but it did not drive them out, as the Greek cities did.
The alien could become a Roman citizen by the will of the Roman
people, and the people often accorded this favor, sometimes they even
bestowed it upon a whole people at once. They created the Latins
citizens at one stroke; in 89 it was the turn of the Italians; in 46
the people of Cisalpine Gaul entered the body of citizens. All the
inhabitants of Italy thus became the equals of the Romans.
The slave could be manumitted by his master and soon became a citizen.
This is the reason why the Roman people, gradually exhausting
themselves, were renewed by accessions from the subjects and the
slaves. The number of the citizens was increased at every census; it
rose from 250,000 to 700,000. The Roman city, far from emptying itself
as did Sparta, replenished itself little by little from all those whom
it had conquered.
FOOTNOTES:
[126] In the smallest provinces the title of the governor was
_propraetor_.
[127] In the oriental countries Rome left certain little kings (like
King Herod in Judaea), but they paid tribute and obeyed the governor.
[128] This estimate of the character of Scaurus is too favorable.--ED.
[129] Cicero speaks of the temples which were raised to him by the
people of Cilicia, of which county he was governor.
[130] Every important town had its market for slaves as for cattle and
horses. The slave to be sold was exhibited on a platform with a label
about his neck indicating his age, his better qualities and his defects.
[131] In the Casina of Plautus.
[132] Athenaeus, who makes this statement, is probably guilty of
exaggeration.--ED.