form of ready money available for speculation in state leases, farming
of revenues, and other contracts, had already begun at Rome in the age
of the great Punic wars. In the second war, contracts for the supply of
necessaries to the armed forces played a considerable part, and we hear
of contractors[602] who practised shameless frauds on the state. Greed
was a plant that throve in the soil of Roman life: the scandals of the
later Republic were merely the sinister developments of an old tendency
favoured by opportunities. Land-grabbing in particular was, if consistent
tradition may be believed, from early times a passion of Roman nobles:
and the effect of a law[603] forbidding them to become ship-owners and
engage in commerce was to concentrate their enterprise on the acquisition
of great landed estates. Another notable fact is the large voluntary
loans[604] which the government was able to raise in the critical period
of the great war. In the year 210, when the financial strain was extreme,
a very large contribution of the kind took place. In 204 the Senate
arranged a scheme[605] for repayment in three instalments. In 200 the
lenders, apparently alarmed by the delay in paying the second instalment,
became clamorous. The Punic war was at an end, and war with Philip of
Macedon just declared: they wanted to get their money back. We are
told[606] that the state was not able to find the cash, and that the cry
of many creditors was ‘there are plenty of farms for sale, and we want
to buy.’ The Senate devised a middle way of satisfying them. They were
to be offered the chance of acquiring the state domain-land within fifty
miles of Rome at a valuation fixed by the consuls. This seems to mean,
up to the amount of the instalment then in question. But they were not
thereby to receive the land in full private[607] property. A quit-rent of
one _as_ was to be set on each _iugerum_, in evidence that the property
still belonged to the state. Thus, when the state finances should admit,
they might get back their ready money if they preferred it and give back
the land to the state. The offer was gladly accepted, and the land taken
over on these terms was called ‘third-part land’ (_trientabulum_) as
representing ⅓ of the money lent. The final instalment appears to have
been paid in cash[608] in the year 196.
That these patriotic creditors were men with a keen eye for a bargain,
and that they made a good one in the above arrangement, is pretty clear.
This is the only occasion on which we hear of the _trientabula_ plan
of settling a money claim by what was in effect a perpetual lease at
a nominal rent terminable by reconversion into a money claim at the
pleasure of the lessee. No doubt the valuation was so made as to give
the creditor a good margin of security over and above the sum secured.
There was therefore no temptation to call for the cash and surrender the
land. From the reference[609] to _trientabula_ in the agrarian law of 111
BC it would seem that some at least of these beneficial tenancies were
still in existence after the lapse of nearly 90 years. They would pass
by inheritance or sale as the ordinary _possessiones_ of state domains
did, and eventually become merged in the private properties that were the
final result of the land-legislation of the revolutionary age. For the
capitalists, already powerful in 200 BC, became more and more powerful as
time went on. And this use of public land to discharge public debts was
undoubtedly a step tending to promote the formation of the great estates
(_latifundia_) which were the ruin of the wholesome old land-system in
a great part of Italy. With this tendency the wholesale employment of
slave-labour went hand in hand.
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.
2. From it we get a picture of agriculture as an honourable trade, the
chief occupation of free citizens, who are in general accustomed to work
with their own hands.
3. The Roman citizen as a rule has an allotment of land as his own, and
an early classification of citizens (the ‘Servian Constitution’) was
originally based on landholding, carrying with it the obligation to
military service.
4. The Roman family had a place for the slave, and the slave, a domestic
helper, normally an Italian, was not as yet the despised alien chattel of
whom we read in a later age.
5. As a domestic he bore a part in all the labours of the family, and
therefore as a matter of course in the commonest of all, agriculture.
6. In this there was nothing degrading. Suggestions to that effect are
the echoes of later conditions.
7. Under such relations of master and slave it was quite natural that
manumission should (as it did) operate to make the slave not only free
but a citizen. That this rule led to very troublesome results in a later
period was owing to change of circumstances.
8. Slavery then was, from the earliest times of which we have any
tradition, an integral part of the social and economic system, as much
in Italy as in Greece. It was there, and only needed the stimulus of
prospective economic gain for capitalists to organize it on a crudely
industrial basis, without regard to considerations of humanity or the
general wellbeing of the state.
9. Of wage-earning labour on the part of freemen we have little trace in
tradition. The reported complaints of day-labour performed for Patrician
nobles in early times are probably not unconnected with the institution
of clientship, and in any case highly coloured by rhetoric.
ROME—MIDDLE PERIOD
XXII. INTRODUCTORY GENERAL VIEW.
The overthrow of Carthage put an end to a period of terrible anxiety
to the Roman government, and the first feeling was naturally one of
relief. But the sufferings of the war-weary masses had produced an
intense longing for peace and rest. It might be true that a Macedonian
war was necessary in the interest of the state: but it was only with
great difficulty that the Senate overcame opposition to a forward policy.
For the sufferings of the people, more particularly the farmers, were
not at an end. The war indemnities from Carthage might refill the empty
treasury, and enable the state to discharge its public obligations to
contractors and other creditors. So far well: but receipts of this
kind did little or nothing towards meeting the one vital need, the
reestablishment of displaced peasants on the land. The most accessible
districts, generally the best suited for tillage, had no doubt suffered
most in the disturbances of war; and the future destinies of Rome and
Italy were depending on the form that revival of agriculture would
take. The race of small farmers had been hitherto the backbone of Roman
power. But the wars of the last two generations had brought Rome into
contact with an agricultural system of a very different character. Punic
agriculture[622] was industrial: that is, conducted for profit on a large
scale and directed by purely economic considerations. Cheap production
was the first thing. As the modern large farmer relies on machinery, so
his ancient predecessor relied on domesticated animals; chiefly on the
animal with hands, the human slave.
It is to be borne in mind that during the second Punic war the Roman
practice of employing contractors for all manner of state services
(_publica_) had been greatly developed. Companies of _publicani_ had
played an active part and had thriven on their enterprises. These
companies were probably already, as they certainly were in later times,
great employers of slaves. In any case they represented a purely
industrial and commercial view of life, the ‘economic’ as opposed to the
‘national’ set of principles. Their numbers were beyond all doubt greater
than they had ever been before. With such men the future interests of the
state would easily be obscured by immediate private interests, selfish
appetite being whetted by the recent taste of profits. If a large
section of the farmer class seemed in danger of extinction through the
absorption of their farms in great estates, legislation to prevent it was
not likely to have the warm support of these capitalists. That financial
interests were immensely powerful in the later Roman Republic is
universally admitted, but I do not think sufficient allowance is made for
their influence in the time of exhaustion at the very beginning of the
second century BC. The story of the _trientabula_, discussed above, is
alone enough to shew how this influence was at work; and it was surely no
isolated phenomenon. We have therefore reason to believe that many of the
farmers dispossessed by the war never returned to their former homes, and
we naturally ask what became of them. Some no doubt were unsettled and
unfitted for the monotonous toil of rustic life by the habits contracted
in campaigning. Such men would find urban idleness, or further military
service with loot in prospect, more to their taste: some of these would
try both experiences in turn. We trace their presence in the growth of a
city mob, and in the enlistment of veterans to give tone and steadiness
to somewhat lukewarm armies in new wars. But it is not to be assumed
that this element constituted the whole, or even the greater part, of
those who did not go back to their old farms. The years 200-180 saw the
foundation of 19 new _coloniae_, and it is reasonable to suppose that
the _coloni_ included a number of the men unsettled by the great war.
The group founded in 194-2 were designed to secure the coast of southern
Italy against attack by an Eastern power controlling large fleets. Those
of 189-1 were in the North, the main object being to strengthen the Roman
grip of Cisalpine Gaul. But already in 198-5 it had been found necessary
to support the colonies on the Po (Placentia and Cremona) against attacks
of the Gauls, and in 190 they were reinforced with contingents of fresh
colonists. For the firm occupation of northern Italy was a policy
steadily kept in view, and only interrupted for a time by the strain of
Eastern wars.