newly conquered territory. Near every important garrison _canabae_,
or settlements of merchants and camp-followers, sprang up. Many of
the auxiliaries married native women, who made their homes in these
villages. At the end of their term of service these foreign soldiers
were made Roman citizens. Their marriages with native women were
legalized, and they settled down in these communities on the frontier,
to introduce Roman ideas and Roman institutions in the surrounding
country. When we remember that there were probably 200,000 auxiliary
troops in the second century, we can readily understand what a great
influence their settlement in the provinces must have had. In this
connection it is convenient to speak of the “organizations of Roman
citizens,” or the _conventus civium Romanorum_, as they were called.
As soon as a new province had been acquired, Roman bankers, merchants,
ship-owners, and publicans went to it and settled in the important
cities. They quickly formed an organization of their own in the
community where they lived, because it was natural for Romans to form
a political or social organization, and because certain rights and
privileges which they had set them off from the rest of the community.
They made up the aristocracy of the towns where they lived, and many
natives must have been spurred on to accept Roman ideas and attain
Roman citizenship for the sake of being enrolled in the _conventus_.
The trade which these merchants carried on, and which a fine system of
roads made possible, had a levelling influence throughout the Empire.
Italy and Gaul sent their pottery and bronze utensils, Syria its silk
and linen, Egypt its cotton goods and ivory, and Arabia its gums and
spices to all the great centres of the world. The articles of everyday
use and many articles of luxury were, therefore, the same in all the
provinces, and must have had a great influence in making the daily life
of all the people under Roman rule uniform. Trade usually “followed the
flag,” but in some cases enterprising Roman merchants went in advance
of it. Trajan found them in the capital of Parthia when he took that
city, and there was an “organization of Roman citizens” in Alexandria
long before Rome established a protectorate over Egypt.
In his _Ancient and Modern Imperialism_ Lord Cromer remarks: “Modern
Imperialist nations have sought to use the spread of their language in
order to draw political sympathy to themselves. This has been notably
the case as regards the French in the basin of the Mediterranean,
and--though perhaps less designedly--as regards the English in India.
I do not think that either nation is likely to attain any great
measure of success in this direction. They will certainly be much
less successful than the Romans. Neither in French, British, nor, I
think I may add, Russian possessions is there the least probability
that the foreign will eventually supplant the vernacular languages.”
Elsewhere he says: “(My) conclusion is that the great proficiency
in some European language often acquired by individuals amongst the
subject races of the modern Imperialist Powers in no way tends to
inspire political sympathy with the people to whom that language is
their mother tongue.... Indeed, in some ways, it (i.e., language)
rather tends to disruption, inasmuch as it furnishes the subject races
with a very powerful arm against their alien rulers.” This frank
confession by a competent authority that the languages of the dominant
nations are not making much progress among the subject races, and that
proficiency in them tends often to alienate the conquered people from
their rulers, a fact which we have seen illustrated lately in the case
of the leaders of the revolutionary movements in India, brings into
striking relief not only the remarkable success which the Romans had
in making Latin the common language of the western world but also
the effective use which they made of it in unifying the Empire. In
two chapters of my book on _The Common People of Ancient Rome_ I have
tried to show what the nature of this language was and how it spread
through the Empire.[27] In Dacia, or modern Roumania, for instance, a
province beyond the Danube, which the Romans held for only one hundred
and seventy-five years, Latin was so firmly established that it has
persisted in its modern form to the present day. In his _Romanization
of Roman Britain_ Haverfield has shown for this remote province from a
study of the ephemeral inscriptions on bricks and tiles that “Latin was
employed freely in the towns of Britain, not only on serious occasions
or by the upper classes, but by servants and work-people for the most
accidental purposes.” The missionaries who carried it throughout the
ancient world were the soldier, the colonist, the trader, and the
official. It surprises one to find out, also, that all classes could
not only speak Latin, but could read and write it. Across the Empire
from Britain to Dacia it is the same story. On the tombstones of the
petty merchant and the freedman, as well as on the bronze tablets
which contain laws and decrees, the language is Latin, and essentially
the same Latin as one would hear in the city of Rome. It is clear that
modern Imperialist states have much to learn from the methods which
Rome employed so successfully in furthering the use of her language
by subject races. Lord Cromer regrets the fact that acquaintance
with the tongue of the ruling people often becomes in modern times a
weapon which is turned against that people. In the Roman provinces it
conferred distinction, opened the way to fuller rights and privileges
and made the possessor of it a stronger supporter of the Roman régime.
Nothing brings out better the great contrast between the individualism
of modern times and the solidarity of the Roman commonwealth than a
comparison of the methods followed now and two thousand years ago in
settling an undeveloped country.[28] Reports of the great resources of
Alaska come to Oregon and Colorado and New York. Men from all quarters
hurry there indiscriminately. On some promising location a village
grows up, almost over night. It has no magistrates, no common council.
Some of the more public-spirited citizens gradually band themselves
together to preserve order and dispense a rude justice. In time a
municipal government is organized. The Roman method of occupying a
new territory was far different from this. It consisted primarily in
the establishment of colonies in the new region. The most desirable
locations for strategic and commercial reasons were picked out, and a
law was passed in the popular assembly authorizing the establishment
of a colony, and providing for commissioners to found it. From three
hundred to several thousand colonists were then enrolled, and marched
out in military order to the chosen site. The commissioners assigned
the allotments, drew up a charter for the new community, and appointed
its first magistrates and the members of the local senate. This compact
and highly organized community of Romans served as a military outpost
and a centre for the extension of Roman civilization. The complete
pacification and Romanization of Italy was largely due to the influence
of these colonies. More than four hundred and forty such communities
were established in Italy and the provinces. Modern empires have much
to learn from this feature of Roman policy, and it would almost
seem as if we were beginning to appreciate its value. The State of
California has in late years adopted a system of colonization closely
resembling the Roman. It selects a site, appoints experts to subdivide
the land, chooses the colonists carefully, and sends the colony out
under a board of directors. Under a measure proposed by the United
States Secretary of the Interior, Secretary Lane, a year or two ago,
but not yet adopted by the Congress, similar settlements were to be
established on government land by the coöperation of the federal and
state governments. An interesting experiment along Roman lines, but
under private auspices, was made in July, 1921, when an organized band
of selected colonists set out from Brooklyn to found a settlement in
Idaho, with the coöperation of that state.[29] The advantages which the
Roman plan has over our ordinary method of settling a new region are
apparent at once.
A discussion of this feature of the policy which the Romans followed
in a newly acquired territory naturally leads us to speak of their
attitude toward native communities. Lord Cromer remarks that the Roman
provinces did not have self-government. It is true that Spain and Gaul
did not have their own legislatures and chief magistrates, but the real
administrative units with which Rome dealt in making her arrangements
were the city-states of Spain and Gaul, and they had a large measure
of self-government conferred on them by their charters. In a province
like Spain one finds communities in all the different stages of
advancement from the position of a dependent village to a free city or
a Roman colony, and one may well ask if the Roman system was not a more
practical one than ours. We treat Porto Rico, for instance, as a unit.
All the villages or cities in the island are put on the same legal
basis, no matter what the state of civilization of the different towns
may be. The Romans would have granted the full rights of citizenship to
one or two of them, and advanced the others from their more lowly state
as they became more civilized and prosperous. In this way they held
before native communities a prize which those communities were always
eager to attain, and from the first century of our era we find one town
after another advancing to a fuller enjoyment of civic rights. The
same policy was applied to individuals. Roman citizenship was often
granted to selected persons in a community. Such a grant identified the
interests of these provincial leaders with those of Rome, and enlisted
their support for the Roman régime.
The agencies which the Empire used so successfully in Romanizing the
provinces, that is to say the establishment of law and order, the
retention of local self-government, the liberal grants of citizenship
to qualified individuals and cities, the development of a good civil
service, the building of roads, the construction of public works, the
introduction of the Latin language and of Roman law, and the unifying
influence in the later period of the Church, engendered a feeling of
solidarity throughout the Western World, which was one of the most
valuable legacies handed down by the Romans to later times. Even
Claudian, the last important Roman poet, writing after the crushing
defeat of Valens by the barbarians at Adrianople, saw clearly that, in
spite of all the disasters which had overtaken Rome, the sense of unity
still persisted throughout the Western World. He writes in sorrow of
the goddess, Roma:
“H_er voice is weak, and slow her steps; her
eyes_
D_eep sunk within; her cheeks are gone;
her arms_
A_re shrivelled up with wasting leanness_,”
but at another moment he cries triumphantly: “We who drink of
the Rhone and the Orontes are all one nation.” The feeling which
Claudian expresses persisted throughout the Middle Ages. The German
states in Italy recognized it by putting the portrait of the Eastern
Emperor on their coins. As Poole remarks in his _Illustrations of
the History of Mediaeval Thought_: “The Empire of Charlemagne was
no mere resuscitation of the extinct empire of the West. It was the
continuation of that universal empire, whose seat Constantine had
established at Byzantium, but whose existence there was now held to
have terminated by the succession of a woman, the empress Irene....
The empire, therefore, went back to its rightful seat, and its title
devolved on Charlemagne.” All the minor rulers also throughout the
civilized parts of Europe thought of their authority as coming to
them from the Roman Empire. This feeling of unity was kept up by
the use of the old Roman highways of commerce, by the employment of
the Latin language as the _lingua franca_ of Europe, by the Church,
and by the continued use of Roman law. Roman law in particular was
a stabilizing influence for many centuries after the dissolution of
the Empire. In the East and in the portions of Italy controlled by
Justinian’s successors the _Code_ of Justinian was in force. Roman law
entered largely also into the _Breviary_ of Alaric, the laws of the
Burgundians, the edict of Theodoric, and the French capitularies. The
law of Justinian was taught in the schools of Rome and Ravenna without
much interruption from the sixth to the eleventh century, and with the
revival of commerce which followed the Crusades, there was a vigorous
development of Roman mercantile law. After the tenth century “the trend
was toward unity within certain areas and the political separation
of these great areas from each other.” This drift toward nationalism
reached its climax at the time of the Reformation. The spirit of a
larger unity, which earlier centuries had taken over from the Roman
Empire, disappeared in great measure, but the longing for it and the
need of it and the knowledge that it once existed and may be called to
life again, find expression today in the organization of the League
of Nations. How disastrous has been its displacement by the present
intense nationalistic spirit is recognized on all sides. It would
almost seem as if Philip Kerr, who had served as Confidential Secretary
of Lloyd George at the Peace Conference in Paris, was thinking of
the irreparable loss which Europe has suffered in this respect, when
he said in his address at the Williamstown Conference in 1922: “What
is the fundamental cause of war? I do not say the only cause of war,
but the most active and constant cause. It is not race or religion or
color or nationality or despotism, or progress, or any of the causes
usually cited. It is the division of humanity into separate states. The
proposition which I am concerned to establish today is the division
of humanity into separate states, each owing loyalty to itself, each
recognizing no law higher than its own will, each looking at every
problem from its own point of view, which is the fundamental cause
of war.” Rome welded the particularism of the ancient Mediterranean
world into the unity of her Empire. Only by a similar recognition of
the solidarity of the interests of all civilized peoples can we hope to
emerge from the conditions which threaten us today.
III. SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS COMMON TO THE ROMANS AND TO
MODERN PEOPLES
The political and social problems which confronted Rome are those which
America, England, and France face today, and nothing brings out more
clearly the close relation which our civilization bears to hers than
the identity of these ancient and modern problems. In no respect may we
profit more by a study of her history than in contemplating the means
which Rome employed in solving them. Her successes may guide us, and
her failures warn us. Some of the difficulties which beset her have
come to the surface in discussing certain topics in the two preceding
chapters, and of the others we can speak briefly of only a few, and
mainly by way of illustration.
1. THE COLOR AND THE LABOR QUESTIONS
Two of our most serious social and political questions do not come
to the surface in Roman history, at least not in the form in which
they present themselves today. I mean the “color question” and the
labor question. Lord Cromer in the book to which reference has already
been made ventures the opinion that “antipathy based on differences
of colour is a plant of comparatively recent growth.” He connects
its development with the fact that in modern times the white man has
enslaved only the black man. Out of this relation the hostility of the
two races has developed, and has extended its scope so as to determine
in some measure the attitude of the white man toward the brown and
yellow man. The Roman had both white and black slaves. All foreigners
were on the same plane below himself. Consequently he did not have that
difficulty in dealing with the dark races which some modern nations
experience.
In the towns and villages of the Roman Empire we find inscriptions
attesting the existence of nearly five hundred different
trade-guilds.[30] Industry was carried to a high degree of
specialization. We find organizations of carpenters, joiners,
gold-smiths, silver-smiths, sandal-makers, bakers, skippers, actors,
gladiators, and of men in almost every conceivable occupation. Yet
we have no record of an industrial strike in Roman history,[30a]
nor of the intrusion of the labor question into politics. The Roman
trade-guilds do not seem to have tried to raise wages or to improve
working conditions, in spite of their great numbers and their large
membership. They were primarily benevolent and social societies. Most
of the laborers worked in their own homes or in small shops, and not in
large factories where common conditions develop class consciousness and
a sense of solidarity. Furthermore, the great majority of the manual
laborers were either slaves or freedmen, and joint action to improve
their condition would have been well nigh impossible.
2. VOTING AND ELECTIONS
Passing now to a discussion of some of the political and social
problems which the Romans and modern peoples _do_ have in common, we
may conveniently begin a comparative study of these questions by saying
a word about the way in which the Romans tried to suppress the evils
connected with canvassing for votes and conducting the elections. The
simplicity and strictness of the olden time is well illustrated by the
earliest corrupt-practices acts, which forbade candidates for public
office to whiten their togas or to go about among the farmers on market
days. Next we hear of an edict to prevent two candidates from combining
against a rival. Not until the second century B.C., when wealth from
the provinces began to pour into Rome, do we find laws against bribery
on the statute books. From this time on proof multiplies that fraud
and force were used at the elections. Between 67 and 52 B.C. no less
than six bills were brought in to suppress political corruption. The
two evils which were most prevalent were the formation of corrupt
political clubs and the excessive expenditure of money by candidates.
Aspirants for office spent enormous sums in giving gladiatorial games
and public banquets. We hear a great deal about political clubs in the
_Candidate’s Handbook_ which Quintus Cicero addressed to his brother
in 64 B.C., when Marcus was a candidate for the consulship. These
organizations were formed by ambitious politicians for the purpose
of controlling the elections by bribery or the use of force. They
broke up the political meetings held by candidates of the opposite
party, blocked up the entrances to the polling booths, gave out only
ballots of their own party, and openly canvassed for voters who could
be bribed. The Romans had even less success in combatting these evils
by means of legislation than we have had. Not until the elections had
been transferred from the people to the senate did they disappear.
The remedies which helped most in holding them in check were the
introduction of the secret ballot, the establishment of a special court
to hear cases of bribery, with the power to inflict severe penalties,
and the suppression of all political clubs. This last measure was very
helpful, but it was easier of adoption in Rome, where the right of
association was limited, than it would be today. Cicero’s contemporary,
Cato, made the interesting proposal that all newly chosen magistrates
should be required to appear in court and prove that they had been
elected by legitimate means, but this bill failed of passage.
Money was freely used by unscrupulous aspirants for office, but it is
not probable that capital played the important part in directing the
policy of the state which certain modern writers ascribe to it. The
suppression of piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the restoration
of order in Asia Minor by Pompey were undoubtedly brought about by the
influence of the bankers and tax-farmers, but two or three important
considerations make it reasonably certain that “big business” did
not have the political power in Rome which it has with us today.[31]
The amount of money invested in public contracts was comparatively
small. Even under the Republic only a small part of the revenue from
the provinces was collected by private Roman companies, and under
the Empire, as we have already noticed, the collection of taxes was
taken over more and more by the state. Finally, there do not seem to
have been many large financial corporations, and there is little, if
any, evidence to show that they combined to bring pressure to bear
on the government. In fact, Roman business and trade were largely
individualistic.
3. THE POLITICAL BOSS
In the last century B.C. political and social conditions were ideal
for the development of the political boss, and in many respects they
resemble our own. In the first place, Rome, as is the case with many
of our large cities today, was filled with foreigners. We shall have
occasion later to discuss in greater detail the social and economic
effect of the presence in Italy and Rome of this foreign population.
For our present purpose it is sufficient to note that Professor Frank
in a recent number of the _American Historical Review_[32] has shown
that nearly 90 per cent. of the population permanently resident at Rome
in the Empire were of foreign extraction. Most of these foreigners
were of course slaves, but many were freedmen who had the right to
vote. They were ignorant of Roman political traditions. Many of them
made a precarious living, and their votes could probably be had for
money or through the influence of their patrons. Of such men the
guilds and political clubs of the late Republic were largely made up.
To them we must add the freemen who were driven out of the country
districts by the decline of agriculture, or who drifted to the city
because of the attractions which it could offer. These classes of
people naturally fell under the leadership of political bosses. It
happened too that several of the political bosses of this period had
been or were still in command of large armies. Veterans who had served
under these commanders and had settled in Italy naturally accepted
the political leadership of their former officers. We are familiar in
this country with the great influence exerted at the end of several of
our wars by compact organizations of ex-service men. Furthermore, in
Rome there were no permanent party organizations. Voters followed a
leader, rather than a political principle. All these facts contributed
to strengthen the hands of the boss, and the political history of
the last half century of the Republic centres about the activity of
such men as Marius, Crassus, Caesar, Milo, and Clodius. Indeed the
First Triumvirate, which controlled Rome for ten years, had no legal
basis. It rested upon a personal agreement between Caesar, Pompey, and
Crassus for the division of the political spoils. In a certain degree
Augustus continued this tradition, for his power rested largely upon
the fact that the candidates for office favored by him were certain
to be elected and would do his bidding after the election, and thus
the measures supported by him were sure to be adopted. The Roman boss
differed from most political bosses of today in his willingness to take
office and assume the responsibility which the holding of an office
entails.