districts over questions of disputed right is fully illustrated in the
speeches[763] delivered in cases of private law. The fact was openly
recognized in the legal remedies provided, for instance in the various
_interdicta_ framed to facilitate the trial and settlement of disputes
as to _possessio_. The forms contemplated the probability of slaves
being engaged in assailing or defending possession on behalf of their
masters, and the wording even varied according as the force in question
had been used by men armed or unarmed. Counsel of course made much or
little of the happenings in each case according to the interest of their
clients. But that bloodshed occurred at times in these fights is certain.
And there was no regular police force to keep order in remote corners
of the land. When slaves were once armed and set to fight, they would
soon get out of hand, and a slaveowner might easily lose valuable men.
Nay more, an epidemic of local brigandage might result, particularly in
a time of civil war and general unrest, and none could tell where the
mischief would end. We can only form some slight notion of the effect of
such conditions as these on the prospects of peaceful agriculture. The
speech _pro Quinctio_ belongs to 81 BC, the _pro Tullio_ to 71, the _pro
Caecina_ to 69. When we reflect that the slave rising under Spartacus
lasted from 73 to 71, and swept over a large part of Italy, we may fairly
conclude that this period was a bad one for farming.
The most striking picture of the violence sometimes used in the disputes
of rustic life meets us in the mutilated speech _pro Tullio_, of which
enough remains to make clear all that concerns us. First, the form of
action employed in the case was one of recent[764] origin, devised
to check the outrages committed by bands of armed slaves, which had
increased since the disturbances of the first civil war. The need for
such a legal remedy must have been peculiarly obvious at the time of the
trial, for the rising of Spartacus had only just been suppressed. Cicero
refers to the notorious scandal of murders committed by these armed
bands, a danger to individuals and even to the state, that had led to the
creation of the new form of action at law. In stating the facts of the
case, of course from his client’s point of view, he gives us details[765]
which, true or not, were at least such as would not seem incredible to a
Roman court. Tullius owned an estate in southern Italy. That his title
to it was good is taken for granted. But in it was reckoned a certain
parcel of land which had been in undisputed possession of his father.
This strip, which was so situated as to form a convenient adjunct to a
neighbouring estate, was the cause of trouble. The neighbouring estate
had been bought by two partners, who had paid a fancy price for it.
The bargain was a bad one, for the land proved to be derelict and the
farmsteads all burnt down. One of the partners induced the other to buy
him out. In stating the area of the property he included the border strip
of land claimed by Tullius as his own. In the process of settlement of
boundaries for the transfer to the new sole owner he would have included
the disputed ground, but Tullius instructed[766] his attorney and his
steward to prevent this: they evidently did so, and thus the ownership
of the border strip was left to be determined by process of law. The
sequel was characteristic of the times. The thwarted claimant armed a
band of slaves and took possession[767] of the land by force, killing the
slaves who were in occupation on behalf of Tullius, and committing other
murders and acts of brigandage by the way. We need not follow the case
into the law-court. What concerns us is the evidence of unfortunate land
speculation, of land-grabbing, of boundary-disputes, and of the prompt
use of violence to supersede or hamper the legal determination of rights.
The colouring and exaggeration of counsel is to be allowed for; but we
can hardly reject the main outlines of the picture of armed slave-bands
and bloodshed as a rural phenomenon of the sorely tried South of Italy.
The speech _pro Caecina_ shews us the same state of things existing in
Etruria. The armed violence alleged in this case is milder in form: at
least the one party fled, and nobody was killed. Proceedings were taken
under a possessory interdict issued by a praetor, and Cicero’s artful
pleading is largely occupied with discussion of the bearing and effect of
the particular formula employed. Several interesting transactions[768]
are referred to. A man invests his wife’s dowry in a farm, land being
cheap, owing to bad times, probably the result of the Sullan civil war.
Some time after, he bought some adjoining land for himself. After his
death and that of his direct heir, the estate had to be liquidated for
purpose of division among legatees. His widow, advised to buy in the
parcel of land adjoining her own farm, employed as agent a man who had
ingratiated himself with her. Under this commission the land was bought.
Cicero declares that it was bought for the widow, who paid the price,
took possession, let it to a tenant, and held it till her death. She
left her second husband Caecina heir to nearly all her property, and
it was between him and the agent Aebutius that troubles now arose. For
Aebutius declared that the land had been bought by him for himself, and
that the lady had only enjoyed the profits of it for life in usufruct
under her first husband’s will. This was legally quite possible. At the
same time he suggested that Caecina had lost the legal capacity of taking
the succession at all. For Sulla had degraded the citizens belonging
to Volaterrae, of whom Caecina was one. Cicero is more successful in
dealing with this side-issue than in establishing his client’s claim
to the land. The dispute arising out of that claim, the armed violence
used by Aebutius to defeat Caecina’s attempt to assert possession, and
the interdict granted to Caecina, were the stages by which the case came
into court. Its merits are not certain. But the greedy characters on both
sides, the trickery employed by one side or other (perhaps both), and the
artful handling of the depositions of witnesses, may incline the reader
to believe that the great orator had but a poor case. At all events
farming in Etruria appears as bound up with slave labour and as liable to
be disturbed by the violence of slaves in arms.
In the above cases it suited Cicero’s purpose to lay stress on the
perils that beset defenceless persons who were interested in farms in
out-of-the-way[769] places. Yet the use of armed force was probably
most habitual on the waste uplands, and his references to the lawless
doings of the brigand slave-bands fully confirm the warnings of Varro.
His tone varies according to the requirements of his client’s case, but
he has to admit[770] that wayfarers were murdered and bloody affrays
between rival bands ever liable to occur. He can on occasion[771] boldly
charge a political opponent with deliberate reliance on such forces
for revolutionary ends. Thus of C Antonius he asserts ‘he has sold all
his live stock and as good as parted with his open pastures, but he is
keeping his herdsmen; and he boasts that he can mobilize these and start
a slave-rebellion whenever he chooses.’ There was no point in saying
this if it had been absurdly incredible. Another glimpse of the utter
lawlessness prevalent in the wilds appears in the story[772] of murders
committed in Bruttium. Suspicion rested on the slaves employed by the
company who were exploiting the pitch-works in the great forest of Sila
under lease from the state. Even some of the free agents of the company
were suspected. The case, which was dealt with by a special criminal
tribunal, belongs to the year 138 BC, and attests the long standing of
such disorders. And it is suggestive of guilty complicity on the part of
the lessees that, though they eventually secured an acquittal, it was
only after extraordinary exertions on the part of their counsel.
Indeed these great gangs of slaves in the service of _publicani_ were
in many parts of Italy and the Provinces a serious nuisance. Wherever
the exploitation of state properties or the collection of dues was
farmed out to contractors, a number of underlings would be needed. The
lower grades were slaves: a few rose to higher posts as freedmen of the
various companies. Now some of the enterprises, such as mines quarries
woodlands and the collection of grazing dues on the public pastures,
were generally in direct contact with rural life, and employed large
staffs of slaves. The managers of a company were concerned to produce a
high dividend for their shareholders: so long as this resulted from the
labours of their men, it was a matter of indifference to them whether
neighbouring farmers were robbed or otherwise annoyed. That we hear
little or nothing of such annoyances is probably owing to the practice
of locking up slave-labourers at night in an _ergastulum_, for fear of
their running away, not to keep them from doing damage. Runaways do not
appear singly as a rustic pest. But in bands there was no limit to the
harm that _fugitivi_ might do; witness the horrors of the slave-wars. In
short, wherever slaves were employed in large numbers, the possibility
of violence was never remote. Their masters had always at hand a force
of men, selected for bodily strength and hardened by labour, men with
nothing but hopeless lives to lose, and nothing loth to exchange dreary
toil for the dangers of a fight in which something to their advantage
might turn up. No doubt the instances of slaves called to arms in rustic
disputes were far more numerous than those referred to by Cicero: he only
speaks of those with which he was at the moment concerned.
Is it then true that in the revolutionary period farming depended on
slave-labour while its security was ever menaced by dangers that arose
directly out of the slave-system? I fear it is true, absurd though the
situation may seem to us. Between the great crises of disturbance were
spells of comparative quiet, in which men could and did farm profitably
in the chief agricultural districts of Italy. But it must be remembered
that many an estate changed hands in consequence of civil war, and that
many new landlords profited economically by appropriating the capital
sunk in farms by their predecessors. The case of Sextus Roscius of Ameria
gives us some light on this point. The picture drawn[773] by Cicero of
the large landed estate of the elder Roscius, of his wealth and interest
in agriculture, of his jealous and malignant relatives, of the reasons
why he kept his son Sextus tied to a rustic life, is undoubtedly full
of colouring and subtle perversions of fact. Let it go for what it may
be worth. The accused was acquitted of the crime laid to his charge
(parricide), but there is no sign that he was ever able to recover the
estate and the home from which his persecutors had driven him. They had
shared the plunder with Chrysogonus the favoured freedman of Sulla, who
himself bought the bulk of the property at a mere fraction of its market
value, and it is practically certain that the rogues kept what they got.
It was easy to make agriculture pay on such terms. But what of the former
owners of such properties, on whose ruin the new men’s prosperity was
built? Can we believe that genuine agricultural enterprise was encouraged
by a state of things in which the fruits of long patience and skill were
liable to sudden confiscation?
In Cicero, as in other writers, we find evidence of a wage-earning
class living by bodily labour alongside of the slave-population. But in
passages where he speaks[774] of _mercennarii_ it is often uncertain
whether freemen serving for hire, or slaves hired from another owner,
are meant. In his language the associations[775] of the word are mean.
It is true that you may buy for money not only the day’s-work (_operae_)
of unskilled labourers but the skill (_artes_) of craftsmen. In the
latter case even Roman self-complacency will admit a certain dignity;
for men of a certain social status[776] such professions are all very
well. But the mere ‘hand’ is the normal instance; and for the time of his
employment he is not easily distinguished from a slave. Therefore Cicero
approves[777] a Stoic precept, that justice bids you to treat slaves as
you would hirelings—don’t stint their allowances (food etc), but get your
day’s-work out of them. In passages[778] where the word _mercennarius_ is
not used, but implied, there is the same tone of contempt, and it is not
always clear whether the workers are free or slaves. In short the word is
not as neutral as _operarius_, which connotes mere manual labour, whether
the labourer be free or not, and is figuratively used[779] to connote a
merely mechanical proficiency in any art. Our ‘journeyman’ is sometimes
similarly used.
There are other terms in connexion with land-management the use of
which by Cicero is worth noting. Thus a landlord may have some order to
give in reference to the cultivation of a farm. If he gives it to his
_procurator_[780], it is as an instruction, a commission authorizing him
to act; if to his _vilicus_, it is simply a command. For the former is a
free attorney, able at need to represent his principal even in a court
of law: the latter is a slave steward, the property of his master. The
_procurator_ is hardly a ‘manager’: he seldom occurs in connexion with
agriculture, and seems then to be only required when the principal is a
very ‘big man,’ owning land on a large scale, and probably in scattered
blocks. In such cases it would be convenient for (say) a senator to
give a sort of ‘power of attorney’ to an agent and let him supervise
the direction of a number of farms, each managed by a steward. I take
this policy to be just that against which the writers on agriculture
warn their readers. It sins against the golden rule, that nothing is a
substitute for the Master’s eye. Whether the agent referred to in the
speech _pro Tullio_, who as well as the steward received[781] written
instructions from Tullius, was guilty of any neglect or blunder, we
cannot tell. That any act done to a _procurator_ or by him was legally
equivalent to the same done to or by his principal, is a point pressed in
the _pro Caecina_, no doubt because it was safe ground and an excuse for
not dwelling on weak points in a doubtful case.
The _colonus_ as a tenant[782] farmer, whom we find mentioned in Varro
but not in Cato, appears in Cicero. In the _pro Caecina_ we read[783]
that the widow lady took possession of the farm and let it (_locavit_);
also that the tenant was after her death still occupying the farm, and
that a visit of Caecina, in which he audited the accounts of the tenant,
is a proof that Caecina himself was now in possession. That is, by
asserting control of the sitting tenant Caecina made the man his agent so
far as to retain possession through the presence of his representative.
If the facts were as Cicero states them, the contention would be legally
sound. For, as he points out in another passage, any representative[784]
will serve for these purposes of keeping or losing possession. If the
interdict-formula only says ‘attorney’ (_procurator_), this does not
mean that only an attorney in the technical sense, a plenipotentiary
agent appointed by an absentee principal with full legal formalities, is
contemplated. No, the brief formula covers agency of any kind: it will
apply to your tenant your neighbour your client or your freedman, in
short to any person acting on your behalf. In the great indictment of
Verres[785] we find a good instance of tenancy in Sicily, where it seems
to have been customary for large blocks of land to be held on lease from
the state by tenants-in-chief (_aratores_) who sometimes sublet parcels
to _coloni_. In this case the trouble arose out of the tithe to which the
land was liable. Verres, in order to squeeze an iniquitous amount out
of a certain farm, appointed a corrupt court charged to inquire whether
the (arable) acreage had been correctly returned by the _colonus_. Of
course they were instructed to find that the area had been fraudulently
understated. But the person against whom judgment was to be given was not
the _colonus_, but Xeno, who was not the owner of the farm. He pleaded
that it belonged to his wife, who managed her own affairs; also that he
had not been responsible for the cultivation (_non arasse_). Nevertheless
he was not only compelled to pay a large sum of money to meet the
unfair damages exacted, but subjected to further extortion under threat
of corporal punishment. The returns on which the tithes were assessed
would seem to have been required from the actual cultivators, and the
lessees of the year’s tithe to have had a right of action against the
owners or chief-tenants of the land, if the tenant farmer defaulted in
any particular. So far we are able to gather that tenant farmers were
no exception at this time, though perhaps not a numerous class; and
that they were not persons of much social importance. That they were to
a considerable extent dependent on their landlords is probable, though
not actually attested by Cicero, for we have seen evidence of it in a
passage of Caesar. Cicero’s reference[786] to the case of a lady who
committed adultery with a _colonus_ is couched in such terms as to imply
the man’s social inferiority. In another passage[787] we hear of a man in
the Order of _equites equo publico_ being disgraced by a censor taking
away his state-horse, and of his friends crying out in protest that he
was _optimus colonus_, thrifty and unassuming. Here we have a person of
higher social quality, no doubt: but I conceive _colonus_ to be used in
the original sense of ‘cultivator.’ To say ‘he is a good farmer’ does
not imply that he is a mere tenant, any more than it does in the notable
passage of Cato.
The _vilicus_ generally appears in Cicero as the slave steward familiar
to us from other writers. In one place[788] he is contrasted with
the _dispensator_, who seems to be a sort of slave clerk charged
with registering stores and serving out rations clothing etc. As this
functionary seldom meets us in the rustic system of the period, we may
perhaps infer that only large estates, where the _vilicus_ had no time
to spare from purely agricultural duties, required such extra service.
In saying that he can read and write (_litteras scit_) Cicero may seem
to imply that this is not to be expected from the _vilicus_: but the
inference is not certain, for the agricultural writers require stewards
to read at least. In another passage[789] we read that in choosing a
slave for the post of steward the one thing to be kept in view is not
technical skill but the moral qualities, honesty industry alertness.
Here it is plain that the orator is warping the truth in order to suit
his argument: Varro would never have disregarded technical skill. For
Cicero’s point is that what the state needs most in its ‘stewards’ (that
is, magistrates) is good moral qualities. On the same lines he had some
16 years before compared[790] Verres to a bad steward, who has ruined
his master’s farm by dishonest and wasteful management, and is in a fair
way to be severely punished for his offence. The tone of this passage is
exactly that of old Cato, put in the rhetorical manner of an advocate.
A few words must be said on the subject of manumission. In his defence
of Rabirius, accused of high treason, Cicero launches[791] out into a
burst of indignation at the attempted revival of an obsolete barbarous
procedure designed for his client’s destruction. The cruel method of
execution to which it points, long disused, is repugnant to Roman
sentiment, utterly inconsistent with the rights of free humanity. Such a
prospect[792] would be quite unendurable even to slaves, unless they had
before them the hope of freedom. For, as he adds below, when we manumit
a slave, he is at once freed thereby from fear of any such penalties as
these. Taken by itself, this passage is better evidence of the liability
of slaves to cruel punishment than of the frequent use of manumission.
But we know from Cicero’s letters and from other sources that freedmen
were numerous. And from a sentence[793] in one of the _Philippics_ we
may gather that it was not unusual for masters to grant freedom to
slaves after six years of honest and painstaking service. I suspect that
this utterance, in the context in which it occurs, should not be taken
too literally. That Romans of wealth and position liked to surround
themselves with retainers, humble and loyal, bound to their patron by
ties of gratitude and interest, is certain: and early manumissions were
naturally promoted by this motive. But the most pleasing instances
were of course those in which a community of pursuits developed a real
sympathy, even affection between owner and owned, as in the case of
Tiro, on whose manumission[794] Quintus Cicero wrote to congratulate his
brother. In all these passages, however, there is one thing to be noted.
They do not look to the conditions of rustic life; and, so far as the
evidence of Cicero goes, they do not shake my conviction that manumission
was a very rare event on country estates.
A topic of special interest is the evidence of the existence of farmers
who, whether employing slaves or not, worked on the land in person. What
does Cicero say as to αὐτουργία, in his time? It has been pointed out
above that, when it suits his present purpose, he not only enlarges on
the homely virtues of country folk but refers to the old Roman tradition
of farmer-citizens called from the plough to guide and save the state in
hours of danger. He made full use of this topic in his defence of Sextus
Roscius, and represented his client as a simple rustic, reeking of the
farmyard,—how far truly, is doubtful. But he does not go so far as to
depict him ploughing or digging or carting manure. It is reasonable to
suppose that the slaves to whom he refers[795] did the rough farm-work
under his orders. When he can make capital out of the wrongs of the
humble labouring farmer, the orator does not shrink from doing so. One
of the iniquities laid to the charge[796] of Verres is that he shifted
the burden of taking legal proceedings from the lessees of the Sicilian
tithes (_decumani_) to the tithe-liable lessees of the land (the
_aratores_). Instead of the tithe-farmer having to prove that his demand
was just, the land-farmer had to prove that it was unjust. Now this was
too much even for those farming on a large scale: it meant in practice
that they had to leave their farms and go off to make their appeals at
Syracuse. But the hardship was far greater in the case of small farmers
(probably sub-tenants), of whom he speaks thus: ‘And what of those whose
means of tillage[797] consist of one yoke of oxen, who labour on their
farms with their own hands—in the days before your governorship such
men were a very numerous class in Sicily—when they have satisfied the
demands of Apronius, what are they to do next? Are they to leave their
tillages, leave their house and home, and come to Syracuse, in the hope
of reasserting their rights at law against an Apronius[798] under the
impartial government of a Verres?’ No doubt the most is made of these
poor men and their wrongs. But we need not doubt that there were still
some small working farmers in Sicily. In the half-century or so before
the time of Verres we hear[799] of free Sicilians who were sorely
disturbed by the great servile rebellions and even driven to make common
cause with the insurgent slaves. Some such ‘small men’ were evidently
still to be found wedged in among the big plantations.