acquisition of Asia. At first the incompetence due to the inexperience
of the governors and their staffs was the chief failing of the system.
But when Asia with its stored-up capital, its possibilities of
exploitation, and its extreme helplessness, fell to Rome, traders and
money-lenders swarmed down upon it, so that there were 80,000 Italians
there when Mithradates ordered his famous massacre. Thus money poured
into the capital, and there was an unseemly scramble for wealth. But
for the present we are only concerned with the system of provincial
government as it was in the beginning. I think we may conclude that it
started with the best intentions, but with two inherent defects, both
due to the conservatism of the Roman character. Their constitution
was municipal and their outlook parochial. Their empire-building was
precisely of the narrow-minded, well-intentioned character that one
would expect if the Marleybone Borough Council suddenly found itself
presented with Ireland, France, and half Spain, and asked to govern
them.
THE IMPERIAL CITY
A poor man cannot become a millionaire without at least altering his
way of living, and a little backward provincial town cannot find
itself the mistress of a great empire without undergoing very profound
modifications. In 208 B.C. Rome was struggling for her life with a
foreign enemy raging at her gates. Fifty years later she was mistress
in the Mediterranean, and owner of more land than she could conceive.
One of the effects of the change was a prodigious influx of wealth
into the city. In war indemnities alone six or seven millions sterling
must have flowed into the coffers of a state which had till recently
conducted its business with lumps of copper. In loot Rome was said to
have gained above two millions in the Syrian War, and about the same in
the Third Macedonian. Vast tracts of public land were gained, and there
was a steady influx of tributary corn and money: public mines, such
as those in Spain, must be added. There never had been regular direct
taxation in the city: a Roman paid his dues in the form of personal
service, and a _tributum_ was the mark of defeat. But now all taxation
ceased at Rome except an indirect tariff on salt and the customs at
the ports. Henceforth Rome was living on her empire and growing fat
upon it. It is true that expenditure was also increasing. In the
earliest days there had been no public finance. A war was conducted
by a citizen army, who marched out for a few days’ campaigning in the
neighbourhood, wearing their own armour and carrying a commissariat
provided by their wives. The only public expense was the religious duty
of providing beasts for sacrifice, and even that was largely defrayed
by fines paid to the treasury. But now expeditions cost money, armies
soldiering for months in distant lands had to be fed and maintained,
ships had to be built, equipment and machines provided. Nevertheless,
with wise financial administration the treasury ought to have had a
decent surplus. But wisdom in finance was lacking: although we are
assured that book-keeping was one of the points in which the old
Roman paterfamilias especially took pride, yet the public treasury of
Rome, which had the temple of Saturn for its bank, was managed by the
quæstors, the lowest grade of Roman official life, consisting of young
men just beginning a public career. That fact alone will show how far
more important the Romans regarded warfare than finance, and how far
wrong are those historians who make Roman greatness dependent upon
economic advantages. The maladministration of finance was not due to
dishonesty at first: Polybius, the Greek historian, who was brought up
in the heart of Greek politics under Aratus, the cunning chief of the
Achæan League, and came to Rome in the second century as a hostage, was
genuinely astonished at Roman honesty. Their financial errors were due
to sheer inexperience in the handling of large sums of money.
Little of this vast influx of money was spent upon public works. To
begin with, there was not the taste for fine architecture at Rome, nor
indeed for art of any sort. The private houses were still mainly built
of unbaked bricks or tiles, often with thatched or shingled roofs:
the interiors of the bare simplicity of a country farm-house. And
then Roman religion, which, as we have seen, was always somewhat cold
towards the high Olympian gods, offering its real devotion to obscurer
rustic powers, made little claim for temples and stately shrines.
Temples had been built under the Etruscan domination in the fifth
century B.C. But thereafter for a period of four centuries there is an
almost complete blank in the annals of Roman archæology. If anything
was built between Tarquin and Sulla it was generally of wood and brick
or rubble with no architectural pretensions. Augustus swept it all away
with contempt. Of course it was the fashion for Cato and the old Roman
party to say they preferred good old Roman temples with the painted
terra-cotta ornaments to all the new-fashioned fripperies of Greece;
but that is only the spleen of the outraged Philistine. These centuries
of growth are empty of art.
What the _nouveaux riches_ of the second century B.C. found to spend
their money on it is hard to say. In 218 B.C. the people passed a
resolution as the Lex Claudia forbidding senators to engage in foreign
commerce. It is very unlikely that the senate would have allowed
that if they had already been deeply involved in business. But this
enactment checked the only fruitful use of wealth: it turned, and was
possibly intended to turn, the money of the great houses into land
speculation. This was followed by disastrous results. The Punic Wars
had thrown millions of acres out of cultivation. That land which had
belonged to rebels passed to the Roman state as public land and the
scramble for it was the cause of momentous political conflicts in the
succeeding generation. But rich senators acquired enormous estates
without any deep interest in their economic productiveness. Like the
old English squire the old Roman senator was not a professional nor
even a very serious landowner, and moreover he was an absentee. Thus
large tracts of Central Italy became the estates of rich men who added
park to park and villa to villa rather as a hobby than for any good
reason. The common notion of Italy before the Punic Wars as a vast
smiling cornfield, dotted with little farm-houses and country cottages
full of stalwart husbandmen, is both unhistorical and ungeographical.
The Italian farmer lived--like the mediæval European farmer--mostly
in townships which he called “cities,” and it was only the plain-land
in the vicinity of a town which was regularly ploughed and sown. A
glance at the map will show how little of Central Italy is suited for
cereal cultivation. But, if the records are true, 400 Italian townships
had been destroyed in the great wars and that meant, perhaps, 400,000
acres out of cultivation. And what had become of their inhabitants?
Thousands, of course, had left their bones on Roman battlefields, but
thousands more, when their term of service was done, went to swell
the proletariat of Rome. There they herded in ill-built, ill-drained
quarters on the low ground of the city. Physically and morally they
declined. What is perhaps worse, they could not perpetuate their breed
under the new conditions. It takes generations for the human animal to
adapt itself to new conditions. Modern Europe has seen the enormous
influx into towns accompanied by a decline in the birth-rates, and the
swollen town-populations are only maintained by constant influx from
the country. It has truly been said that the future rests with the
race which can most readily adapt itself to such new conditions. But
the Romans never could. The humbler quarters of the city, though they
grew more and more populous, grew, it seems, by immigration and not
by natural increase. Thus the populace of Rome became more and more
cosmopolitan, less and less Roman. These generalisations are apparently
well founded, but it must not be forgotten that we know scarcely
anything of the free poor at Rome. A nation of orators generally
forgets to speak of the butcher, the baker, and his colleagues. It
is as impossible to believe that all trade and industry at Rome was
carried on by slaves as that the poor of a city can live by bread
alone. “Bread and the circus” is a respectable phrase, as true as
epigrams ever are, but it cannot be the whole truth.
[Illustration: Map of Italy, showing ground over 1000 feet high]
As we have seen in the case of Greece, all ancient city-states
undertook duties which the modern individualistic community regards,
up to the present at least, as private and not public. The city-state
regarded it as part of its business to see that its shareholders did
not starve, therefore the supply of corn and the price of it was always
a matter of state supervision. From the earliest days of Roman history
there had been officers charged with the duty of securing the city’s
corn-supply at reasonable charges. Now the corn was beginning to arrive
in the form of tribute from Sicily and Africa. Soon we shall have the
agrarian laws and all the disorder that resulted from them. But it is
important to observe that the depopulation of the Italian countryside
resulted from war and politics as well as from economic causes. Of
course economic causes kept it depopulated. Nature never intended
Central Italy for a wheat-growing land; the vine, the olive, and the
fig are its best products. Now that the seas were open for free imports
it no longer paid to plough and sow the stony upland farms.
So the land passed out of cultivation. As in England, grazing was found
to be cheaper, easier, and more profitable than agriculture. Oxen were
used for ploughing or reserved for sacrifice. The Italians, like the
Greeks, seldom ate meat and then little but smoked bacon, but as all
Romans wore the woollen toga sheep-farming was profitable. In summer
the sheep grazed on the Sabine hills, in winter on the Latin plain
among the stubble of the cornfields or beneath the olive-trees. Wild
slave-shepherds tended them.
Slavery was the canker at the root of ancient civilisation. It assumed
more awful proportions at Rome than in Greece owing to the hard
materialism of the Roman character. Of course it had existed from the
earliest times as the common lot of the prisoner of war. The sturdy
Roman farmer, so dear to Roman rhetoric, was after all little more than
a sturdy slave-driver. The actual field labour had always been in the
hands of slaves. As early as 367 B.C., if we may believe the records
of that age, legislation had attempted to fix a certain proportion of
free labour on country estates. From the first, too, the slave had been
the merest chattel, a colleague of the dog, a little lower even than
the wife or daughter of the Roman house-father. It was cheaper to buy
slaves than to let them breed, cheaper to sell them for what they would
fetch when they grew old than to keep them. You could dodge the gods,
who enjoined holidays even for slaves, by giving your slaves work
indoors on feast-days--such are some of the maxims of the venerable
Cato, who is the type of the old Roman squire, and who personally
attended to the scourging of his slaves after dinner. Now slaves were
becoming more numerous and cheaper than ever--you might have to pay as
much as £1000 for a pretty boy or girl--but a wild Sardinian or Gaul or
Spaniard cost very little. Hence began the really pernicious system of
specialised slavery. A wealthy Roman moved neither hand nor foot for
himself. To have only ten slaves was contemptible poverty. Each slave
was trained simply for one special task--cook, barber, footman, bearer,
lacquey, or schoolmaster. The shepherds and gladiators might retain
their manhood, as indeed they did, and showed it in frightful revolts
during this and the succeeding generation. But the domestic slaves of
the capital had no hope but to cringe and wheedle their way into favour
by flattering and corrupting their masters. One alleviation of the
slave’s lot there was: it was easier for a slave to earn his freedom at
Rome than in Greece. But this type of person when liberated, and his
children after him, made the worst type of citizen, and tended still
further to corrupt the tone of the proletariat. Worse than domestic
slavery was the plantation system, which during all this period was
growing in the country. At its worst it meant huge slave barracks, in
which the slaves lived in dungeons underground and worked by day in
gangs, chained night and day. It was a profitable system of agriculture
and it rapidly ousted free labour. In the city too, in the merchant
ships and the mines, a cruel and vicious system of servitude was
destroying free industry. Truly the hollowest of historic frauds was
the eighteenth-century view of an idealised Roman republic of citizens,
free, equal, and fraternal. It inspired the Convention and coloured the
periods of Mirabeau, but so far as the records prove, the virtuous and
liberal old Roman never existed.
Equality beyond the name was certainly unknown at Rome. All government
was in the hands of a close circle of aristocrats whose stronghold
was in the senate. By virtue of the client system the great houses of
the Claudii, the Cornelii, the Fabii, the Livii, the Flaminii, the
Julii, and a dozen others kept the high offices of state exclusively
in their hands. By this time the censors drew up the senate-lists
chiefly from the ranks of ex-magistrates, and the magistracies became
a graduated course. It required extraordinary pushfulness or wealth or
patronage for a new man to insinuate himself into the charmed circle.
The old patriciate had gone, politically at least, and only survived
for religious purposes, but Rome still remained a thrall to aristocracy
of a far more dangerous type, an aristocracy of office. One of the
troubles of Rome lay in the fact that this aristocracy was daily
becoming less warlike and less competent.
A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the luxury of the
Romans as one of the causes of their decline. Even Mommsen relates
with shocked emotion that they imported anchovies from the Black Sea
and wine from Greece. Two hot meals a day they had and “frivolous
articles” including bronze-mounted couches. There were professional
cooks, and actually bakers’ shops began to appear about 171 B.C. It is
true that all this luxury would pale into insignificance before the
modern artisan’s breakfast-table with bread from Russia, bacon from
America, tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, sugar from Jamaica,
and eggs from Denmark. Cato would have swooned at the sight of our
picture-frames coated with real gold, for he publicly stigmatised a
senator who had £30 worth of silver plate. The truth is that Rome
having grown rich was just beginning to grow civilised. It is the
everlasting misfortune of Rome that events occurred in that order.
In conquering Macedon Rome had become acquainted with civilisation.
At that date civilisation meant Hellenism slightly tinctured with
Orientalism, a culture which, though still alive and still original
and creative, was certainly past its prime. The Hellenistic period of
Greek art has been unjustly depreciated in comparison with the more
youthful and virile age of Pericles. But it could still boast of great
scholars, scientists, and philosophers, both at Alexandria and Athens.
Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus form a group of original poets who are
really great, and an art that could produce the lovely Aphrodite of
Melos cannot with justice be termed decadent. Politically, morally,
and physically Greece was no doubt long past the vigour of her youth,
but intellectually she was still well qualified to play the part of
schoolmistress to the lusty young barbarian of the West. We have seen
that in very remote times Rome had come under Etruscan influences
which were closely akin to Greek. There had been some interchange, if
tradition may be trusted, of Greek and Etruscan art and artists. Greek
painters had worked in Rome at a very early date. Then came perhaps two
centuries of relapse in the cultural sense while Rome was busy with
warfare and conquest. In 300 B.C. she was almost entirely destitute
of accomplishments, and even, if we may except law, politics, and
military skill, of civilisation. The war with Pyrrhus, the conquest of
Tarentum and then of Sicily brought in Greek slaves, and semi-Greek
South-Italian citizens who were bound to have some influence. Then came
direct dealings with Greece in the three Macedonian wars, and every
Roman who had fought with Flamininus or Paulus returned to Rome if not
an apostle of culture at any rate a man who had seen civilisation with
his own eyes and could no longer regard old Roman ways as sufficient
for man’s happiness. How could eyes that had seen the Zeus of Pheidias
at Olympia glowing with ivory and gold be content with the old
vermilion Jove of his native temple?
Nevertheless it was very slowly that culture filtered in. All through
the third century and for the first half of the second Rome was
still incessantly occupied with war. Her tastes were brutalised and
demoralised by it. When drama painfully began, the dramatists sadly
lamented that their audiences would desert the theatre for the sight
of a rope-dancer or a beast-baiting or, better still, a pair of
gladiators. From the first it was vain to attempt the creation of
a national drama for a people whose craving was for the sight of
blood. Gladiatoral combats are said to have been of Etruscan origin.
They first appeared at Rome in the early part of the third century
in connection with funeral displays. From every African expedition
wild beasts were brought home to be slaughtered in the Roman
amphitheatres. These bloody shows indicate the real tastes of the
Romans from the earliest times. They are no spurious growth of the
so-called “degenerate Empire.” On one occasion, when the music of some
Greek flute-players failed to please a Roman audience, the presiding
magistrate ordered the unlucky artists to fight one another, and the
hoots of the crowd were instantly transformed to rapturous applause.
All the arts were held in contempt, all were entrusted to slaves or the
poorest kind of citizens. Thus Hellenic civilisation was transported
to Rome under a double disadvantage. Not only was Greek civilisation
itself already past its prime, but it was interpreted largely by
slaves. Every Roman of position had Greeks among his retinue--not,
of course, the citizens of famous cities like Athens or Alexandria,
which were still free, but low-caste, half-barbarian wretches from the
great market at Delos or from the southern towns of Italy--for clerks,
accountants, scribes, jesters, procurers, physicians, pedagogues,
flute-players, philosophers, cooks, concubines, and schoolmasters. We
may be sure that it was not the most favourable type of Hellenism that
would creep into Rome by such channels as these. But it was precisely
in this manner that Roman literature began. The noble general M. Livius
Salinator brought from Tarentum in about 275 B.C. a Greek slave named
Andronikos, as a tutor for his sons. This man received his liberty, and
as Livius Andronicus set up a school. For his school he required books,
and as there was no other text-book in Latin but the XII Tables, he
undertook the translation of Homer’s Odyssey into the native Italian
measure of Saturnian verse. His work was, of course, very indifferently
performed, but it remained a primer of education down to the schooldays
of Horace. Emboldened by this success he proceeded to supply the Roman
stage with translations of Greek tragedies.
Such was the beginning; the sequel was not much more promising. Nævius
was a Campanian who translated Greek comedies and tragedies. In the
former he attempted the old Greek custom of political allusions, but
speedily found that there was no such liberty of speech in Rome as had
prevailed in the palmy days of Athenian comedy. An allusion to the
Metellus family brought the famous and thoroughly old Roman poetical
retort:
dabunt malum Metelli Nævio poetæ,
and was fulfilled by the imprisonment of the dramatist. Thus the
beginnings of literature at Rome were by no means easy. The dramatists
were hampered by severe police restrictions as well as by the barbarity
of their public. It is interesting to note that both these poets also
attempted the epic style. Livius Andronicus was actually commissioned
by the priests to celebrate the victory of Sena in verse, and Nævius
wrote an account of the First Punic War.
For comedy the Romans appear to have had some natural taste. It seems
that a very rude and barbaric form of dramatic dialogue mixed with
buffoonery was native to Italy in the Fescennine Songs, though even
these are said to have been of Etruscan invention. So the Romans at
their festivals were content to listen to comedies if the humour was
obvious enough, if there was plenty of horseplay. The setting was
wretched indeed. Instead of the magnificent marble theatres of Greece,
wooden booths were temporarily erected in the amphitheatre, and a noisy
disorderly audience listened with good-humoured contempt to the efforts
of the actors who tried to amuse them. Sometimes the chorus would be
sung by trained musicians, while the actors on the stage illustrated
the inaudible words by pantomimic gestures. It was utterly crude and
inartistic from beginning to end, and in deplorable contrast to the
beginnings of Drama in Greece. There it had been a national service of
worship to the gods. Here it was a trivial amusement in the hands of
slaves and foreigners.