Emperor’s Edicts, and seems to have shared with the Master of the Offices
the duty of replying to the humble petitions of his subjects. A bundle
of these petitions and a box, which looks like a pillar post-office,
inscribed ‘Leges Salutares,’ appear on his page of the _Notitia_ among
the emblems of the Quaestor’s dignity.
[Sidenote: _Comes Sacrarum Largitionum._]
[Sidenote: _Comes Privatarum Rerum._]
The Illustrious COUNT OF THE SACRED LARGESSES and COUNT OF THE
PRIVATE DOMAINS were the two great financial ministers of the State.
Theoretically the first might have been expected to discharge only the
duties of a Grand Almoner, in supervising the Imperial Charities.
Practically, however, he had to superintend the collection of revenue
from Illyrian silver mines and Egyptian corn-fields, from the
manufacturers of linen, and the traders in salt. The Count of the Private
Domains similarly superintended the vast estates belonging to the Crown
in the various provinces of the Empire, defended them from squatters,
urged the claims of his sovereign to the land of a subject dying without
natural heirs, and received the reports of the stud-masters who watched
over the troops of horses reared for the Emperor in the plains of Thrace
and Cappadocia. The pictures denoting the functions of these two officers
are nearly alike, both representing money-chests, sacks fat with gold and
silver, and great bowls filled with round masses of bullion.
[Sidenote: _Merits and defects of the Imperial Bureaucracy._]
Such is a very brief outline of the system of civil and military
administration as arranged by Diocletian and Constantine. This
Bureaucracy (I know no pure English word which expresses the idea)
carried on the government of the Eastern Empire for more than a thousand
years. It had great faults—it was grasping, repressive, too often
corrupt. At the beginning of the fifth century, if we may believe a poet
of the Opposition[13], an Eunuch, who by Imperial favour had climbed up
into the high place of Praetorian Prefect, dared to open an auction mart
in his private chamber for the actual sale of provincial governorships to
the highest bidder. And even where there was not positive corruption,
there can be little doubt that the rule of the Byzantine officials was
generally impoverishing and exhausting to the provinces, paying but
little heed to their just complaints, and bent on screwing out of them
the uttermost farthing for the Emperor, if not for the officials’ own
private benefit. Still the officialism of the Empire had some great
merits, without which it could never have subsisted so long as it did.
The regular gradation of offices, the scientific division of powers, the
career opened by the civil service to intellect, irrespective of noble
birth or warlike prowess—all these things made of the administrative
hierarchy of the Roman Empire a great engine of civilisation in those dim
mediaeval centuries, and one which contrasted favourably in many respects
with the rough barbaric forces that were everywhere else struggling for
supremacy. If the student wishes to know how it was that the Empire of
Constantine, notwithstanding all its degeneracy, lasted on in the East
for 1120 years, let him study that curious and interesting document, the
_Notitia Imperii_.
[Sidenote: _Social condition of the Empire._]
Passing from the political, I will make a few remarks on the social state
of the Empire in the fourth century after Christ. Our information on this
subject is very imperfect. We have no authors who, like the comedians
of Athens, or like Horace and Juvenal in Rome, enable us to reconstruct
a picture of the manners and customs of those far-off times, almost as
vivid as is furnished by the Miss Austens and the Anthony Trollopes of
the nineteenth century. Still we have something. Ammianus Marcellinus,
the great historian of Julian and Valentinian, possessed the eye and
hand of a satirist; and St. Jerome, even in denouncing the vices of
fashionable society in Rome, brings us into nearer acquaintance with its
good as well as its evil qualities.
[Sidenote: _Division between classes._]
Taking a broad survey, we may say that the characteristic of Roman social
life in the later Empire, was the gulf (a far wider and more bridgeless
gulf than exists in our own day) between the very rich and the very
poor. The Roman did not take naturally either to manufacturing or to
retail shop-keeping. He was (perhaps I should rather say, he had been)
essentially a warrior. The rich Roman was still lawyer, civil servant,
money-lender, and land owner. The poor Roman was tiller of the soil—often
under very hard conditions—or else ‘loafer’ (no other word will express
my meaning) in the cities. What was true of the dweller in Rome was true
also to some extent of the Romanised population of the provinces. Now,
if we consider what these statements amount to, and if we consider also
the invariable influence of slavery in crushing out the better class of
free artisans, we shall see that we have here a society from which the
middle class and the more independent portion of the lower class are
perpetually tending to disappear; in other words, a society composed of
the very rich and of the _employés_ of the State at one end, and of the
proletariat[14] at the other, with only weak and insufficient padding
between.
[Sidenote: _Roman fortunes._]
We have some interesting information as to the fortunes of wealthy
Romans about the year 420, after the distress caused by the invasion
of the barbarians had begun. In the first families in Rome it was not
unusual for the master of the household to have an income of £160,000 a
year, besides the produce of vineyards and corn-lands, which was worth
quite £50,000 more[15]. Wealthy families of the second class were worth
from £40,000 to £60,000 a year. A Senator named Probus, when his son
was made Praetor about 423, spent £48,000 on the shows which it was
still customary for that functionary to exhibit to the people. Some
fifteen years before, ere Rome had yet been taken by the barbarians,
Symmachus the orator, a man who was deemed to possess only a moderate
fortune, had spent £80,000 on similar exhibitions; while Maximus, who
was considered one of the very rich citizens of Rome, lavished £160,000
upon the festivities, which, notwithstanding this prodigious expenditure,
only lasted seven days. At this time the palace of every Roman nobleman
had spacious baths, forum, hippodrome, fountains, temples (or churches)
within its enclosure, so that a stranger visiting Rome cried out with
enthusiasm
‘Every house is a town, Rome holds a myriad of cities.’
St. Jerome tells us that the devout lady Paula, who claimed descent on
the paternal side from Agamemnon, and on the maternal from the Scipios,
was possessed of vast wealth, and that the whole city of Nicopolis
(founded by Augustus to commemorate the battle of Actium) belonged to her
alone.
[Sidenote: _Habits of wealthy Romans._]
The men who owned these enormous fortunes seemed to Ammianus to be for
the most part cold-hearted and effeminate dandies, unworthy of the
great name of Rome, whose foremost citizens they were. A lofty chariot
would be one man’s sign of distinction, another covered himself with a
multitude of cloaks of finest silken texture, each one fastened round
his neck by a jewelled clasp, and perpetually wriggled his body about
or waved his hand in order to call the attention of the bystanders to
the gay fringes of his robe or the figures of animals embroidered upon
it in divers colours of needle-work. Others strutted along the street
followed by a whole army of retainers, and when they entered the public
baths attended by at least fifty slaves, at once began to shout out in a
voice that was meant to strike awe into all humbler visitors, ‘Where are
my people?’ A contemptuous toss of the head was all that they vouchsafed
to an acquaintance; to the fawning flatterer who was hungering for their
smile they would contemptuously offer a hand or a knee to kiss. But all
this affectation of aristocratic _hauteur_ vanished when some woman of
doubtful reputation drew near, or when news was brought to them of the
arrival of some fresh horses or charioteers of extraordinary skill. The
banquet was to these men a time of dull and solemn sensuality. When the
panting slave placed on the table a fish or a turkey of unusual size,
they would send for the scales and order it to be weighed, and then one
of the crowd of hungry secretaries standing by would be called upon to
record the prodigy on his tablets. Beyond this kind of employment for the
pen, their ideas either of literature or of science hardly soared.
[Sidenote: _The poorer citizens of Rome._]
[Sidenote: _Bread distribution._]
Thus empty and frivolous appeared to a contemporary satirist the lives of
the Roman nobility. Of the lives of the poorer citizens he gives us fewer
details, but we can see that for them as for their ancestors the interest
of life was summed up in three words ‘_Panem et Circenses_’—bread and
circus-shows. By a well-understood bargain between the Roman mob and
the Roman Emperor—a bargain which lasted through all the centuries from
Julius to Augustulus—he was bound to provide them with at least food
enough to keep them from starving, and with a proper amount of excitement
in the form of games, chariot races, and fights of gladiators and
wild beasts; and if he failed in this, the first duty of a ruler, his
diadem and his life were both forfeit. The elaborate provisions of the
Theodosian code enable us to understand how the duty of feeding the mob
was performed. We see the householders of Rome seated on broad flights
of stairs throughout the fourteen regions of the City, and receiving
from the slaves who obeyed the orders of the Superintendent of Supply
(_Praefectus Annonae_) their loaves of fine wheaten flour, each weighing
about a pound and a half[16], and in addition, a certain quantity of oil.
[Sidenote: _Games._]
And then as to the games. The history of Ammianus and the letters of
Cassiodorus show us these same unemployed citizens flocking to the
stately Colosseum, or the spacious Hippodrome, and shouting themselves
hoarse with the name of some favourite gladiator or charioteer. The
chariot races especially, stirred the people to a frenzy of excitement,
surpassing that of a contested election or an Irish faction-fight. The
two colours, blue and green, flaunted by one set of charioteers or the
other, stirred the citizens both of Rome and Constantinople to the very
madness of triumph or disappointment. ‘The green charioteer flashes by:
part of the people is in despair. The blue gets ahead: a larger part
of the city is in misery. They cheer frantically when they have gained
nothing: they are cut to the heart when they have received no loss: and
they plunge with as much eagerness into these empty contests as if the
whole welfare of the imperilled fatherland was at stake[17].’
[Sidenote: _Slave-system._]
In such a round of ignoble excitements, in such an attitude of
dishonourable dependence on the feeding power of the State—pauperism
disguised under high-sounding names—the mob of Rome and of
Constantinople, apparently also of Antioch and Alexandria, spent their
lazy lives. Meanwhile the agricultural population and the inhabitants of
the smaller provincial towns were daily sinking lower into the gulf of
hopeless poverty, toiling, yet scarce able with all their labour to keep
famine from their doors. At the base of the social pyramid were of course
to be found the Slaves, those unhappy beings who, shut up at night in the
huge and gloomy _ergastula_ (slave-barracks), worked all day under the
hot Italian sun, cultivating the land of some wealthy master, unknown,
unseen, only represented by a hard, relentless _villicus_ (steward),
himself a slave, but delighting to make the more miserable creatures
under him feel his power. These were the kind of establishments which, a
hundred years or more before the Republic fell, had replaced the happy
home-steads of the Latin or Sabine farmer: and it was the sight of this
spreading plague-spot of servile agriculture which in the first century
of the Christian era forced from Pliny the well-known cry of lamentation,
‘Large estates have been the ruin of Italy and are now causing the ruin
of the provinces[18].’ Yet perhaps in the fifth century the slave was not
the most miserable of the rural inhabitants. Christianity had already
introduced some betterment into his condition. The _ergastulum_ was
prohibited by law, if we may not think that it had entirely disappeared
in fact: and decrees were beginning to be issued, earnestly protesting
against that breaking up of families which is one of the most cruel
characteristics of predial slavery[19]. And at any rate the slave, in all
ordinary circumstances, was safe from death by starvation, a security
which was not always enjoyed by his social superiors.
[Sidenote: _Coloni._]
Next above the slave, and often hardly to be distinguished from him,
was the _colonus_ or serf, a man over whom his lord had no power of
life and death, but who was bound—as were his children after him—to
cultivate a particular piece of ground for the owner, at a rent which
seems to have been practically unchanged from generation to generation.
He had therefore no power of changing his condition nor of choosing a
better landlord, but on the other hand he had practically a kind of
tenant-right which he transmitted, with the corresponding liability,
to his children. This class of compulsory cultivators seems to have
sprung out of freeholders who were weighed down by hopeless debt, and
who by process of law became _coloni_ of their creditors[20]; but it
was probably enormously increased during the troubles of the third and
fourth centuries, when men finding freedom with starvation a burden too
heavy to be borne, voluntarily lowered their condition, and becoming
_coloni_ accepted the helping but degrading hand of a _dominus_. In times
of peace and plenty the condition of a _colonus_, notwithstanding his
bounded horizon and his depressing round of unvarying toil, was perhaps
not altogether to be pitied: but war, famine, and pestilence must have
terribly reduced his narrow margin of profit.
[Sidenote: _Curiales._]
Of all classes of the community, however, none seem to me so truly to
be commiserated as the _curiales_, the vestrymen and town-councillors
of the provinces. These were the descendants of the men by whom the
local self-government of the Empire had formerly been carried on, the
representatives of a once flourishing and happy middle class. Their
ancestors had been men of importance in their little world, and the
letters D E C (for Decurio, or town-councillor) carved on their tombs had
shown their right to a coveted dignity. But as they bore rule in their
little commonwealth, so they were responsible for its contributions to
the public revenue; and as the Empire grew older, as it became divided,
as there came to be three or four Imperial Courts to support instead of
one, and as heavier sums had to be paid to buy off or to fight off the
barbarians, so the pressure of the tax-gatherer became more severe, while
the privileges of the town-councillor became more shadowy. At last the
truth was openly confessed: the _curialis_ was a mere bond-slave of the
Empire, bound to fulfil his ‘curial obligations,’ that is, to bear an
ever-increasing burden of local rates and imperial taxes, transmitting
this sad necessity to his children, compelled if the land next to him
fell out of cultivation to take it up and cultivate it for the benefit of
the Imperial Treasury, forbidden to become a priest or even a slave, lest
by either process he might escape from his bondage to the _curia_. One or
two ways of escape from this bitter servitude were indeed left open, but
they were narrow, thorny, and difficult. Practically the chief liberator
of the _curialis_ and his kindest friend was Death.
The sketch which I have thus offered you of the social condition of the
Empire in the fourth century is certainly a gloomy one. Like all such
sketches it can only be approximately true. Doubtless there were at Rome
many nobles unlike the effeminate dandies whom Ammianus has described
to us: doubtless there was in the provinces many a cultivator of the
soil, whether _colonus_ or _curialis_, who glided happily enough through
life, not crushed by the burdens and the despairs which seem to us so
terrible. Yes: though I cannot accept the proposition that the sum of
human happiness is a constant quantity throughout the centuries, I doubt
not that in the saddest periods of the history of the world there has
been more individual happiness, and in the happiest of such periods more
individual suffering, than the historian pourtrays to us. But upon the
whole we may confidently say that the Roman World, at the time when the
barbarian invasion began in earnest, was not happy or flourishing. Large
tracts of land within the _Limes Imperii_ were going out of cultivation,
population both in Italy and the provinces was dwindling, and I think
Hope was unusually absent from the hearts and minds of men. In short, the
Empire was sinking under the weight of its official administration, even
as I fear that after ages will see that many fair states of Europe are
now sinking under the weight of the terrible armaments with which mutual
suspicion has led them to array themselves.
§ 2. THE TEUTON.
From the highly-developed life of the Empire, with its signs of
exhaustion and decay, we turn to that of our German forefathers and
their kindred—a life rough, untrained, undisciplined, but already
utterly different from that of mere savages, and bearing within it the
seeds of many noble institutions. The German peoples (to speak of them
in the language of Rome), the _Deutsche_ (as they have in more recent
times called themselves), or the Teutonic[21] race (which is the term
now generally used in contrast to Celts and Slaves), occupied, broadly
speaking, the territory from the Rhine to the Danube, and along the
northern shore of the Danube to the Black Sea. There were settlements,
however, of the Teutons on the west of the Rhine, and in the east of
Europe Sclavonic nations were mingled with Teutons in a confusion which
it is now impossible to disentangle. Of their ethnological relations,
however, I shall have a little more to say in my next lecture. At present
my object is to give a slight sketch of the inner life of these Teutonic
peoples, in its social and political aspects.
[Sidenote: _The Germans at the end of the first century after Christ not
a nomadic people._]
The first detailed information that we possess as to the customs of
the Germans is given us by Julius Caesar, who describes the state of
things which prevailed about 55 years before Christ. Our next and by
far our fullest information comes from Tacitus, who wrote his priceless
monograph, the _Germania_, in 98 A.D., that is, about a century and a
half after Caesar. During that interval it is clear that an important
change had come over the habits of the Germans. From being a pastoral
people, living chiefly on milk and cheese and the flesh of their cattle,
they had become, to a large extent, tillers of the soil. They still
kept their flocks and herds, and wealth among them was still measured
chiefly by these possessions; but bread was now a staple article of
food, and perhaps that upon which the slaves and the poorer freemen
chiefly subsisted. This change in diet involved a necessary change in
the habits of the people. The shepherd and the herdsman are essentially
wanderers; the varied needs of their dumb companions in winter and
summer, make frequent change of abode not only easy but profitable,
while the agriculturist of course must remain stationary to watch the
growth of the corn which he has sown. It seems probable that Caesar’s
conquest of Gaul, Tiberius’s victories in Switzerland and the Tyrol,
and the strong restraining hand of Augustus upon all the tribes beyond
the Rhine and the Danube, were partly the cause of this change in the
habits of the Germans. Cooped within narrower limits, and no longer able
to overrun at their pleasure the fair lands of Gaul and Pannonia, they
betook themselves of necessity to a more careful cultivation of their
restricted territory, and practised the arts of a rude husbandry—rude
indeed, but incomparably less wasteful of the earth’s resources than the
nomadic life of the grazier and the sheep-master. In its turn this change
in their habits reacted on their character. It made the maintenance of
peace between them and the Empire possible for two or three generations
at a time, and it so far fixed the bounds of the habitations of the
Germanic peoples themselves, that the map of Germany which is drawn to
illustrate the text of Tacitus will serve, without many changes, for the
distribution of the tribes in the time of Constantine.
[Sidenote: _A German village-settlement._]
Let us try to understand what the life of these German farmers looked
like in a time of peace during the second and third centuries of the
Christian era. Their settlements, like those of a Canadian backwoodsman,
were for the most part clearings in the midst of ‘the forest primeval.’
Here, then, with a girdle of woodland round them, was planted the cluster
of scattered houses which made up the village. The Romans called it a
_vicus_, the modern Germans call it a _dorf_ (a word akin to our own
_thorp_); our Saxon and Anglian ancestors called it sometimes a _ton_[22]
(town), sometimes a _ham_[23]; while their Danish invaders gave to the
same kind of settlement the name of a _by_ or a _wick_[24]. The houses
in the German village were built of timber, and if Tacitus is correct in
saying that tiles were unknown among them, we must, I suppose, conclude
that the straw thatches which are still common in rural England were
the roofs chiefly used by our German ancestors. One feature of a German
village which struck the eye of a Roman observer, and in which it
probably differed even from a Celtic town, was that there were in it no
rows of contiguous houses. Each dwelling, whether large or small, stood
surrounded by its own plot of ground, and thus fires were less dangerous
than where the lines of buildings were continuous. The description of
such a _vicus_ given by Tacitus reminds one of a Swiss village, say
Meyringen, Grindelwald, or Altdorf, if we can imagine all the changes
which have been wrought therein by the tide of summer tourists done away.
And the great belt of woodland which seems always to have surrounded the
German _vicus_, and which was to a certain extent the common property
of the villagers, who possessed rights of collecting fuel, and probably
also of hunting game in these encircling forests, reminds me of several
modern German villages which I have seen, but especially of Schwalbach,
which is environed by just such a belt of trees, chiefly beech-trees. In
this beautiful green girdle, which is from one to two miles in depth,
the poor of the village are still employed during the winter in felling
and carrying wood for the benefit of the _Gemeinde_, and the wages paid
to them for this work seem to supply the place of what is called with us
‘out-door relief.’
[Sidenote: _Distinction of classes in a German village._]