copied from Oriental, particularly Egyptian, conditions. The convenience
of permanent tenants and the ever-pressing need of food-supply are
enough to account for the general aim, and experience of the East would
naturally help to mature the policy. The establishment of the Empire
made it possible. But we must plainly note the significance of new ideas
in respect of residence and cultivation. In the Roman land-system of
Italy private ownership was the rule, and the general assumption that
the owner cultivated on his own account: stewards and slave-gangs were
common but not essential phenomena. It is true that the practice of
letting farms to cultivating tenants existed, and that in the first two
centuries of the Empire it was on the increase, probably promoted by
the comparative scarcity of slaves in times of peace. But tenancy was a
contract-relation, and the law, while protecting the tenant, gave to the
landlord ample means of enforcing regular and thorough cultivation. And
this automatically ensured the tenant’s residence in any conditions short
of final despair. We shall see that as agriculture declined in Italy it
became more and more difficult to find and keep satisfactory tenants: but
the tenant was in the last resort free to go, and the man who had to be
compelled to cultivate properly was just the man on whom the use of legal
remedies was least likely to produce the desired practical effect. Now
on the imperial domains abroad we find a growing tendency to insist on
residence, as a rule imposed from above. The emperor could not leave his
_coloni_ simply at the mercy of his head-tenants. He was very ready to
protect them, but to have them flitting at will was another matter. And
this tendency surely points to Egyptian analogies; naturally too, as the
Empire was becoming more definitely a Monarchy.
We shall also find reason to think that both in Italy and in the
Provinces there was a tendency to reduce farm-tenants to a considerable
degree of _de facto_ dependence by manipulation of economic relations.
A landlord could let a farm on terms apparently favourable but so
arranged that it was easy for the tenant to fall into arrears and
become his debtor. The exploitation of debtors’ necessities[824] was a
practice traditionally Roman from very early times. True, it was seldom
politic to sell up a defaulting tenant in the declining state of Italian
agriculture. But the gradual acceptance of a liability to small burdens
in lieu of cash payment might rob him of his effective independence
before he was well aware of the change in his position. On a great
provincial domain, the emperor being far away, a head-tenant could deal
with the sub-tenants on much the same lines. A trifling requirement,
just exceeding what was actually due, would be submitted to as not worth
the trouble and risk of setting the appeal-machinery in motion. Further
encroachments, infinitesimal but cumulative, might reduce the _colonus_
to a semi-servile condition: and, the poorer he became, the less his
prospect of protection from the emperor’s local agents, too often men
of itching palms. Still the _coloni_ were freemen, and we have evidence
that they sometimes appealed to their imperial lord, and with success.
It seems that in some respects _coloni Caesaris_ were at an advantage
as compared with _coloni_ of private landlords, at least in the means
of protection. Roman law was very chary of interference with matters of
private contract, and the principles guiding the courts were well known.
An astute landlord could see to it that his encroachments on a tenant’s
freedom did not entitle the man to a legal remedy. But the imperial
domains abroad were often, if not always, governed by administrative
procedure under the emperor’s own agents; and these gentry could quickly
be brought to order, and compelled to redress grievances, by a single
word from headquarters. That the word was forthcoming on occasion is
not wonderful. The policy of an emperor was to cherish and encourage
the patient farmers whose economic value was a sound imperial asset,
while the head-tenant was only a convenient middleman. But the private
landowner had no imperial interest to guide him, and looked only to his
own immediate profit.
In tracing the influences that changed the condition of the working
farmer we must not forget the establishment of a new military system.
The standing army created by Augustus was an absolute necessity for
imperial defence. At the same time it was a recognition of the fact
that the old system of temporary levies, long proved inadequate, must
henceforth be abandoned. Frontier armies could not be formed by simply
mobilizing free peasants for a campaign. The strength of the armies lay
in military skill, not in numbers. Long service and special training made
them uniformly professional, and provision was duly made for regular
conditions of retirement. The Italian peasant-farmers, much fewer than of
yore, and no longer all potential soldiers, were left to become simply
professional farmers. That agriculture nevertheless did not really
prosper was due to causes beyond their control; but that they, both
tenant _coloni_ and any remaining small owners, should tend to become a
purely peasant class was inevitable. Augustus may have wished to rebuild
Italian agriculture on a sound foundation of the peasant-elements,
but circumstances were too contrary for the successful prosecution of
any such design. Meanwhile the marked differentiation[825] of soldier
and farmer, and the settlement of veterans on allotments of land,
mainly in frontier Provinces, was proceeding. Analogies from the East,
particularly from Egypt, where such arrangements[826] were traditional,
can hardly have been ignored. In ancient Egypt the division of military
and farming classes had been so marked as to present the appearance of a
caste-system. But this was not peculiar to Egypt. It was in full vigour
in ancient India, where it impressed[827] Greek observers, to whom the
general absence of slaves, there as in Egypt, seemed one of its notable
phenomena.
I do not venture to suggest that Roman emperors set themselves
deliberately to substitute a fixed attachment of working farmers to
the soil for a failing system of rustic slave-labour. But it is not
likely that, as labour-problems from time to time arose, the well-known
Oriental solutions were without some influence on their policy. We
must not forget that Greek thinkers had long ago approved the plan of
strict differentiation of functions in ideal states, and that such
notions, popularized in Latin, were common property in educated circles.
Tradition[828] even pointed to the existence of some such differentiation
in primitive Rome. Therefore, when we find under the later Empire a
rigid system of castes and gilds, and the _coloni_ attached to the soil
with stern penalties to hinder movement, we must not view the situation
with modern eyes. The restraint, that to us seems a cruel numbing of
forces vital to human progress, would come as no great shock to the world
of the fourth century, long prepared for the step by experience not
encountered by theory. To us it is a painful revolution that, instead
of the land belonging to the cultivator, the cultivator had become an
appendage of the land. But it was the outcome of a long process: as for
progress in any good sense, it had ceased. Government had become a series
of vain expedients to arrest decay. And the rule of fixed _origo_, a
man’s officially fixed domicile, was nothing more than the doctrine of
the ἰδία long prevalent in the East.
The true significance of the change binding the tiller to the soil he
tilled is to be found in the fact that it was a desperate effort to
solve a labour-question. To secure a sufficient supply of food had
been a cause of anxiety to the imperial government from the first. The
encouragement of increased production had become an important part of
imperial policy in the second century. It looked to the small working
farmers as the chief producing agency, men who provided all or most
of the labour on their farms, and in at least some cases a certain
amount of task-work[829] on the larger farms of the head-tenants. But
in the wars and utter confusion of the third century the strain on the
system was too great. The peaceful and prosperous parts of the empire
suffered from increased demands on their resources to make good the
deficiencies of the Provinces troubled with invasions or rebellions.
And there can be no doubt that the working of governmental departments
was interrupted and impeded by the general disorder. In such times as
those of Gallienus and the so-called Thirty Tyrants the protection of
the small farmers by intervention of the central authority must have
been pitifully ineffective. Naturally enough, we do not get direct
record of this failure, but the change of conditions that followed on
the restoration of order by Diocletian shews what had been happening.
The increase of taxation, rendered necessary by the costly machinery
of the new government, led to increased pressure on the farmers, and
evasions had to be checked by increased restraints. In a few years the
facts were recognized and stereotyped by the law of Constantine, and
the _coloni_ were henceforth bound down to the soil by an act of state.
Another notable change[830] was introduced by requiring payment of dues
to be made in kind. The motive of this was to provide a certain means of
supporting the armies and the elaborate civil service; for the currency,
miserably debased in the course of the third century, was a quite
unsuitable medium for the purpose. That Diocletian, in these institutions
of a new model, was not consciously applying oriental usage to the empire
generally, is hardly credible. It only remained to reduce Italy to the
common level by subjecting Italian land to taxation. This he did, and the
new Oriental Monarchy was complete.
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_
_quinque bonos solitum Variam dimittere patres,_
thus rendered by Howes
Dear Bailiff of the woody wild domain
Whose peace restores me to myself again,—
(A sprightlier scene, it seems, thy taste requires,
To Varia though it send five sturdy sires
The lords of five good households)—
and the question at once arises, what sort of persons are meant by these
‘five good fathers.’ In agreement with the excellent note of Wilkins I
hold that they are free heads of households, and that they are persons
existing in the then present time, not imagined figures of a former
age. It seems also clear that they were living on the modest estate
(_agellus_) of Horace. If so, then they can hardly be other than tenants
of farms included therein. Therefore it has naturally been inferred that
the estate consisted of a _villa_ with a home-farm managed by a steward
controlling the staff of eight slaves of whom we hear elsewhere: and that
the outlying portions were let to free farmers[848] on terms of money
rent or shares of produce. Horace would thus be the landlord of five
_coloni_, and his relations with them would normally be kept up through
the agency of the resident slave-steward of the home-farm. All this
agrees perfectly with other evidence as to the customary arrangements
followed on rural estates; and I accept it as a valuable illustration
of a system not new but tending to become more and more prevalent as
time went on. But it is well to note that the case is one from a hill
district, and that we must not from it draw any inference as to how
things were moving on the great lowland estates, the chief latifundial
farm-areas of Italy.
The _patres_ referred to are virtually _patres familias_[849], free
responsible persons, probably Roman citizens, but tenants, not landowning
yeomen of the ancient type. Whether their visits to Varia (Vicovaro)
were to bear their part in the local affairs of their market-town, or
to buy and sell, or for both purposes, is not quite clear; nor does it
here concern us. But we should much like to know whether these five
farmers, or some of them, employed[850] any slaves. I do not see how this
curiosity is to be gratified. Perhaps we may argue that their assumed
liberty to come and go points to the employment of some labour other
than their own: but would this labour be slave or free? If we assume (as
I think we fairly may) that the labour needed would be mainly regular
routine-work and not occasional help, this points rather to slave-labour.
Nor is there any general reason for distrusting that conclusion; only it
would probably mean slave-labour on a small scale. There is moreover no
reason to think that free wage-labourers for regular routine work were
plentiful in the Sabine hills. And these small farmers were not likely to
be creditors, served by debtors (_obaerati_) working off arrears of debt,
a class of labour which according to Varro seems to have been no longer
available in Italy. There I must leave this question, for I can add no
more.
It remains to ask whether the identification of _patres_ with _patres
familias_ exhausts the full meaning of the word. In the _Aeneid_ (XII
520) a combatant slain is described as by craft a poor fisherman
of Lerna, no dependant of the wealthy, and then follow the words
_conductaque pater tellure serebat_. Now most commentators and
translators seem determined to find in this a reference to the man’s
father, which is surely flat and superfluous. The stress is not on
_pater_ but on _conducta_. Is not _pater_ an honourable quality-term,
referring to the man[851] himself? He would not be always fishing in the
lake. He had a dwelling of some sort, most probably a patch of land, to
grow his vegetables. The point is that even this was not his own, but
hired from some landowner. I would render ‘and the land where the honest
man used to grow a crop from seed was rented from another.’ That _pater_
(Aeneas etc) is often used as a complimentary prefix, is well known,
and I think it delicately expresses the poet’s kindly appreciation of
the poor but honest and independent rustic. In the passage of Horace I
am inclined to detect something of the same flavour. Some have supposed
that the five ‘fathers’ were decurions of the local township of Varia,
who went thither to meetings of the local senate. I shrink from reading
this into the words of Horace, all the more as Nissen[852] has shewn good
reason for doubting whether Varia was anything more than a subordinate
hamlet (_vicus_) of Tibur.