Had the state-contractors stood alone, or had not they engaged in varied

enterprises for which their official character offered a favourable

point of vantage, the numbers and influence of the individuals who had

embarked their capital in commercial enterprise would have been far

smaller than they actually were. But, in addition to the publican, we

must take account of the business man (_negotiator_) who lent money on

interest or exercised the profession of a banker. Such men had pecuniary

interests which knew no geographical limits, and in all broad questions

of policy were likely to side with the state-contractor.[149] The

money-lender (_fenerator_) represented one of the earliest, most

familiar and most courted forms of Roman enterprise--one whose intrinsic

attractions for the grasping Roman mind had resisted every effort of the

legislature by engaging in its support the wealthiest landowner as well

as the smallest usurer. It is true that a taint clung to the trade--a

taint which was not merely a product of the mistaken economic conception

of the nature of the profits made by the lender, but was the more

immediate outcome of social misery and the fulminations of the

legislature. Cato points to the fact that the Roman law had stamped the

usurer as a greater curse to society than the common thief, and makes

the dishonesty of loans on interest a sufficient ground for declining a

form of investment that was at once safe and profitable.[150] Usury, he

had also maintained, was a form of homicide.[151] But to the majority of

minds this feeling of dishonour had always been purely external and

superficial. The proceedings were not repugnant to the finer sense if

they were not made the object of a life-long profession and not

blatantly exhibited to the eyes of the public. A taint clung to the

money-lender who sat in an office in the Forum, and handed his loans or

received his interest over the counter;[152] it was not felt by the

capitalist who stood behind this small dealer, by the nobleman whose

agent lent seed-corn to the neighbouring yeomen, by the investor in the

state-contracts who perhaps hardly realised that his profits represented

but an indirect form of usury. But, whatever restrictions public opinion

may have imposed on the money-lender as a dealer in Rome and with

Romans, such restrictions were not likely to be felt by the man who had

the capital and the enterprise to carry his financial operations beyond

the sea. Not only was he dealing with provincials or foreigners, but he

was dealing on a scale so grand that the magnitude of the business

almost concealed its shame. Cities and kings were now to be the

recipients of loans and, if the lender occupied a political position

that seemed inconsistent with the profession of a usurer, his

personality might be successfully concealed under the name of some local

agent, who was adequately rewarded for the obloquy which he incurred in

the eyes of the native populations, and the embarrassing conflicts with

the Roman government which were sometimes entailed by an excess of zeal.

Cato had swept both principals and agents out of his province of

Sardinia;[153] but he was a man who courted hostility, and he lived

before the age when the enmity of capital would prove the certain ruin

of the governor and a source of probable danger to the senate. In the

operations of the money-lender we find the most universal link between

the Forum and the provinces. There was no country so poor that it might

not be successfully exploited, and indeed exploitation was often

conditioned by simplicity of character, lack of familiarity with the

developed systems of finance, and the lack of thrift which amongst

peoples of low culture is the source of their constant need. The

employment of capital for this purpose was always far in advance of the

limits of Roman dominion. A protectorate might be in the grasp of a

group of private individuals long before it was absorbed into the

empire, the extension of the frontiers was conditioned by considerations

of pecuniary, not of political safety, and the government might at any

moment be forced into a war to protect the interests of capitalists

whom, in its collective capacity as a government, it regarded as the

greatest foes of its dominion.

A more beneficent employment of capital was illustrated by the

profession of banking which, like most of the arts which exhibit the

highest refinement of the practical intellect, had been given to the

Romans by the Greeks.[154] It had penetrated from Magna Graecia to

Latium and from Latium to Rome, and had been fully established in the

city by the time of the Second Punic War.[155] The strangers, who had

introduced an art which so greatly facilitated the conduct of business

transactions, had been welcomed by the government, and were encouraged

to ply their calling in the shops rented from the State on the north and

south sides of the Forum. These _argentarii_ satisfied the two needs of

the exchange of foreign money, and of advances in cash on easier terms

than could be gained from the professional or secret usurer, to citizens

of every grade[156] who did not wish, or found it difficult, to turn

their real property into gold. Similar functions were at a somewhat

later period usurped by the money-testers (_nummularii_), who perhaps

entered Rome shortly after the issue of the first native silver coinage,

and competed with the earlier-established bankers in most of the

branches of their trade.[157] Ultimately there was no department of

business connected with the transference and circulation of money which

the joint profession did not embrace. Its representatives were concerned

with the purchase and sale of coin, and the equalisation of home with

foreign rates of exchange; they lent on credit, gave security for

others' loans, and received money on deposit; they acted as

intermediaries between creditors and debtors in the most distant places

and gave their travelling customers circular notes on associated houses

in foreign lands; they were equally ready to dissipate by auction an

estate that had become the property of a congress of creditors or a

number of legatees. Their carefully kept books improved even the

methodical habits of the Romans in the matter of business entries, and

introduced the form of "contract by ledger" (_litterarum obligatio_),

which greatly facilitated business operations on an extended scale by

substituting the written record of obligation for other bonds more

difficult to conclude and more easy to evade.

The business life of Rome was in every way worthy of her position as an

imperial city, and her business centre was becoming the greatest

exchange of the commercial world of the day. The forum still drew its

largest crowds to listen to the voice of the lawyer or the orator; but

these attractions were occasional and the constant throng that any day

might witness was drawn thither by the enticements supplied by the

spirit of adventure, the thirst for news and the strain of business

life. The comic poet has drawn for us a picture of the shifting crowd

and its chief elements, good and bad, honest and dishonest. He has shown

us the man who mingles pleasure with his business, lingering under the

Basilica in extremely doubtful company; there too is a certain class of

business men giving or accepting verbal bonds. In the lower part of the

Forum stroll the lords of the exchange, rich and of high repute; under

the old shops on the north sit the bankers, giving and receiving loans

on interest.[158]

The Forum has become in common language the symbol of all the ups and

downs of business life,[159] and the moralist of later times could refer

all students, who wish to master the lore of the quest and investment of

money, to the excellent men who have their station by the temple of

Janus.[160] The aspect of the market place had altered greatly to meet

the growing needs. Great Basilicae--sheltered promenades which probably

derived their names from the Royal Courts of the Hellenic East--had

lately been erected. Two of the earliest, the Porcian and Sempronian,

had been raised on the site of business premises which had been bought

up for the purpose,[161] and were meant to serve the purposes of a

market and an exchange.[162] Their sheltering roofs were soon employed

to accommodate the courts of justice, but it was the business not the

legal life of Rome that called these grand edifices into existence.

The financial activity which centred in the Forum was a consequence, not

merely of the contract-system encouraged by the State and of the

business of the banker and the money-lender, but of the great foreign

trade which supplied the wants and luxuries of Italy and Rome. This was

an import trade concerned partly with the supply of corn for a nation

that could no longer feed itself, partly with the supply of luxuries

from the East and of more necessary products, including instruments of

production, from the West. The Eastern trade touched the Euxine Sea at

Dioscurias, Asia Minor chiefly at Ephesus and Apamea, and Egypt at

Alexandria. It brought Pontic fish, Hellenic wines, the spices and

medicaments of Asia and of the Eastern coast of Africa, and countless

other articles, chiefly of the type which creates the need to which it

ministers. More robust products were supplied by the West through the

trade-routes which came down to Gades, Genua and Aquileia. Hither were

brought slaves, cattle, horses and dogs; linen, canvas and wool; timber

for ships and houses, and raw metal for the manufacture of implements

and works of art. Neither in East nor West was the product brought by

the producer to the consumer. In accordance with the more recent

tendencies of Hellenistic trade, great emporia had grown up in which the

goods were stored, until they were exported by the local dealers or

sought by the wholesale merchant from an Italian port. As the Tyrrhenian

Sea became the radius of the trade of the world, Puteoli became the

greatest staple to which this commerce centred; thence the goods which

were destined for Rome were conveyed to Ostia by water or by land, and

taken by ships which drew no depth of water up the Tiber to the

city.[163] But it must not be supposed that this trade was first

controlled by Romans and Italians when it touched the shores of Italy.

Groups of citizens and allies were to be found in the great staples of

the world, receiving the products as they were brought down from the

interior and supplying the shipping by which they were transferred to

Rome.[164] They were not manufacturers, but intermediaries who reaped a

larger profit from the carrying trade than could be gained by any form

of production in their native land. The Roman and Italian trader was to

be inferior only to the money-lender as a stimulus and a stumbling-block

to the imperial government; he was, like the latter, to be a cause of

annexation and a fire-brand of war, and serves as an almost equal

illustration of the truth that a government which does not control the

operations of capital is likely to become their instrument.[165]

If we descend from the aristocracy of trade to its poorer

representatives, we find that time had wrought great changes in the lot

of the smaller manufacturer and artisan. It is true that the old

trade-gilds of Rome, which tradition carried back to the days of Numa,

still maintained their existence. The goldsmiths, coppersmiths,

builders, dyers, leather-workers, tanners and potters[166] still held

their regular meetings and celebrated their regular games. But it is

questionable whether even at this period their collegiate life was not

rather concerned with ceremonial than with business, whether they did

not gather more frequently to discuss the prospects of their social and

religious functions than to consider the rules and methods of their

trades. We shall soon see these gilds of artificers a great political

power in the State--one that often alarmed the government and sometimes

paralysed its control of the streets of Rome. But their political

activity was connected with ceremonial rather than with trade; it was as

religious associations that they supported the demagogue of the moment

and disturbed the peace of the city. They made war against any

aristocratic abuse that was dangled for the moment before their eyes;

but they undertook no consistent campaign against the dominance of

capital. Their activity was that of the radical caucus, not of the

trade-union. But, if even their industrial character had been fully

maintained and trade interests had occupied more of their attention than

street processions and political agitation, they could never have posed

as the representatives of the interests of the free-born sons of Rome.

The class of freedmen was freely admitted to their ranks, and the

freedman was from an economic point of view the greatest enemy of the

pure-blooded Italian. We shall also see that the freedman was usually

not an independent agent in the conduct of the trade which he professed.

He owed duties to his patron which limited his industrial activity and

rendered a whole-hearted co-operation with his brother-workers

impossible. It is questionable whether any gild organisation could have

stood the shock of the immense development of industrial activity of

which the more fortunate classes at Rome were now reaping the fruits.

The trades represented by Numa's colleges would at best have formed a

mere framework for a maze of instruments which formed the complex

mechanism needed to satisfy the voracious wants of the new society. The

gold-smithery of early times was now complicated by the arts of chasing

and engraving on precious stones; the primitive builder, if he were

still to ply his trade with profit, must associate it with the skill of

the men who made the stuccoed ceilings, the mosaic pavements, the

painted walls. The leather-worker must have learnt to make many a kind

of fashionable shoe, and the dyer to work in violet, scarlet or saffron,

in any shade or colour to which fashion had given a temporary vogue.

Tailoring had become a fine art, and the movable decorations of houses

demanded a host of skilled workmen, each of whom was devoted to the

speciality which he professed. It would seem as though the very

weaknesses of society might have benefited the lower middle class, and

the siftings of the harvest given by the spoils of empire might have

more than supplied the needs of a parasitic proletariate. It is an

unquestioned fact that the growing luxury of the times did benefit trade

with that doubtful benefit which accompanies the diversion of capital

from purposes of permanent utility to objects of aesthetic admiration or

temporary display; but it is an equally unquestioned fact that this

unhealthy nutriment did not strengthen to any appreciable extent such of

the lower classes as could boast pure Roman blood. The military

conscription, to which the more prosperous of these classes were

exposed, was inimical to the constant pursuit of that technical skill

which alone could enable its possessor to hold the market against freer

competitors. Such of the freedmen and the slaves as were trained to

these pursuits--men who would not have been so trained had they not

possessed higher artistic perception and greater deftness in execution

than their fellows--were wholly freed from the military burden which

absorbed much of the leisure, and blunted much of the skill, possessed

by their free-born rivals. The competition of slaves must have been

still more cruel in the country districts and near the smaller country

towns than in the capital itself. At Rome the limitations of space must

have hindered the development of home-industries in the houses of the

nobles, and, although it is probable that much that was manufactured by

the slaves of the country estate was regularly supplied to the urban

villa, yet for the purchase of articles of immediate use or of goods

which showed the highest qualities of workmanship the aristocratic

proprietor must have been dependent on the competition of the Roman

market. But the rustic villa might be perfectly self-supporting, and the

village artificer must have looked in vain for orders from the spacious

mansion, which, once a dwelling-house or farm, had become a factory as

well. Both in town and country the practice of manumission was

paralysing the energies of the free-born man who attempted to follow a

profitable profession. The frequency of the gift of liberty to slaves is

one of the brightest aspects of the system of servitude as practised by

the Romans; but its very beneficence is an illustration of the

aristocrat's contempt for the proletariate; for, where the ideal of

citizenship is high, manumission--at least of such a kind as shall give

political rights, or any trading privileges, equivalent to those of the

free citizen--is infrequent. In the Rome of this period, however, the

liberation of a slave showed something more than a mere negative neglect

of the interests of the citizen. The gift of freedom was often granted

by the master in an interested, if not in a wholly selfish, spirit. He

was freed from the duty of supporting his slave while he retained his

services as a freedman. The performance of these services was, it is

true, not a legal condition of manumission; but it was the result of the

agreement between master and slave on which the latter had attained his

freedom. The nobleman who had granted liberty to his son's tutor, his

own doctor or his barber, might still bargain to be healed, shaved or

have his children instructed free of expense. The bargain was just in so

far as the master was losing services for which he had originally paid,

and juster still when the freedman set up business on the _peculium_

which his master had allowed him to acquire during the days of his

servitude. But the contracting parties were on an unequal footing, and

the burden enforced by the manumittor was at times so intolerable that

towards the close of the second century the praetor was forced to

intervene and set limits to the personal service which might be expected

from the gratitude of the liberated slave.[167] The performance of such

gratuitous services necessarily diminished the demand for the labour of

the free man who attempted to practise the pursuit of an art which

required skill and was dependent for its returns on the custom of the

wealthier classes; and even such needs as could not be met by the

gratuitous services of freedmen or the purchased labour of slaves, were

often supplied, not by the labour of the free-born Roman, but by that of

the immigrant _peregrinus_. The foreigner naturally reproduced the arts

of his own country in a form more perfect than could be acquired by the

Roman or Italian, and as Rome had acquired foreign wants it was

inevitable that they should be mainly supplied by foreign hands. We

cannot say that most of the new developments in trade and manufacture

had slipped from the hands of the free citizens; it would be truer to

maintain that they had never been grasped by them at all. And, worse

than this, we must admit that there was little effort to attain them.

Both the cause and the consequence of the monopoly of trade and

manufacture of a petty kind by freedmen and foreigners is to be found in

the contempt felt by the free-born Roman for the "sordid and illiberal

sources of livelihood." [168] This prejudice was reflected in public law,

for any one who exercised a trade or profession was debarred from office

at Rome.[169] As the magistracy had become the monopoly of a class, the

prejudice might have been little more than one of the working principles

of an aristocratic government, had not the arts which supplied the

amenities of life actually tended to drift into the hands of the

non-citizen or the man of defective citizenship. The most abject Roman

could in his misery console himself with the thought that the hands,

which should only touch the plough and the sword, had never been stained

by trade. His ideal was that of the nobleman in his palace. It differed

in degree but not in kind. It centred round the Forum, the battlefield

and the farm.

For even the most lofty aristocrat would have exempted agriculture from

the ban of labour;[170] and, if the man of free birth could still have

toiled productively on his holding, his contempt for the rabble which

supplied the wants of his richer fellow-citizens in the towns would have

been justified on material, if not on moral, grounds. He would have held

the real sources of wealth which had made the empire possible and still

maintained the actual rulers of that empire. Italian agriculture was

still the basis of the brilliant life of Rome. Had it not been so, the

epoch of revolution could not have been ushered in by an agrarian law.

Had the interest in the land been small, no fierce attack would have

been made and no encroachment stoutly resisted. We are at the

commencement of the epoch of the dominance of trade, but we have not

quitted the epoch of the supremacy of the landed interest.

The vital question connected with agriculture was not that of its

failure or success, but that of the individuals who did the work and

shared the profits. The labourer, the soil, the market stand in such

close relations to one another that it is possible for older types of

cultivation and tenure to be a failure while newer types are a brilliant

success. But an economic success may be a social failure. Thus it was

with the greater part of the Italian soil of the day which had passed

into Roman hands. Efficiency was secured by accumulation and the smaller

holdings were falling into decay.

A problem so complex as that of a change in tenure and in the type of

productive activity employed on the soil is not likely to yield to the

analysis of any modern historian who deals with the events of the

ancient world. He is often uncertain whether he is describing causes or

symptoms, whether the primary evil was purely economic or mainly social,

whether diminished activity was the result of poverty and decreasing

numbers, or whether pauperism and diminution of population were the

effects of a weakened nerve for labour and of a standard of comfort so

feverishly high that it declined the hard life of the fields and induced

its possessors to refuse to propagate their kind. But social and

economic evils react so constantly on one another that the question of

the priority of the one to the other is not always of primary

importance. A picture has been conjured up by the slight sketches of

ancient historians and the more prolonged laments of ancient writers on

agriculture, which gives us broad outlines that we must accept as true,

although we may refuse to join in the belief that these outlines

represent an unmixed and almost incurable evil. These writers even

attempt to assign causes, which convince by their probability, although

there is often a suspicion that the ultimate and elusive truth has not

been grasped.

The two great symptoms which immediately impress our imagination are a

decline, real or apparent, in the numbers of the free population of

Rome, and the introduction of new methods of agriculture which entailed

a diminution in the class of freehold proprietors who had held estates

of small or moderate size. The evidence for an actual decline of the

population must be gathered exclusively from the Roman census

lists.[171] At first sight these seem to tell a startling tale. At the

date of the outbreak of the First Punic War (265 B.C.) the roll of Roman

citizens had been given as 382,284,[172] at a census held but three

years before the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus (136 B.C.) the numbers

presented by the list were 307,833.[173] In 129 years the burgess roll

had shrunk by nearly 75,000 heads of the population. The shrinkage had

not always been steadily progressive; sometimes there is a sudden drop

which tells of the terrible ravages of war. But the return of peace

brought no upward movement that was long maintained. In the interval of

comparative rest which followed the Third Macedonian War the census

rolls showed a decrease of about 13,000 in ten Years.[174] Seven years

later 2,000 more have disappeared,[175] and a slight increase at the

next _lustrum_ is followed by another drop of about 14,000.[176] The

needs of Rome had increased, and the means for meeting them were

dwindling year by year. This must be admitted, however we interpret the

meaning of these returns. A hasty generalisation might lead us to infer

that a wholesale diminution was taking place in the population of Rome

and Italy. The returns may add weight to other evidence which points

this way; but, taken by themselves, they afford no warrant for such a

conclusion. The census lists were concerned, not only purely with Roman

citizens, but purely with Roman citizens of a certain type. It is

practically certain that they reproduce only the effective fighting

strength of Rome,[177] and take no account of those citizens whose

property did not entitle them to be placed amongst the _classes_.[178]

But, if it is not necessary to believe that an actual diminution of

population is attested by these declining numbers, the conclusion which

they do exhibit is hardly less serious from an economic and political

point of view. They show that portions of the well-to-do classes were

ceasing to possess the property which entitled them to entrance into the

regular army, and that the ranks of the poorer proletariate were being

swelled by their impoverishment. It is possible that such impoverishment

may have been welcomed as a boon by the wearied veterans of Rome and

their descendants. It meant exemption from the heavier burdens of

military service, and, if it went further still, it implied immunity

from the tribute as long as direct taxes were collected from Roman

citizens.[179] As long as service remained a burden on wealth, however

moderate, there could have been little inducement to the man of small

means to struggle up to a standard of moderately increased pecuniary

comfort, which would certainly be marred and might be lost by the

personal inconvenience of the levy.

The decline in the numbers of the wealthier classes is thus attested by

the census rolls. But indications can also be given which afford a

slight probability that there was a positive diminution in the free

population of Rome and perhaps of Italy. The carnage of the Hannibalic

war may easily be overemphasised as a source of positive decline. Such

losses are rapidly made good when war is followed by the normal

industrial conditions which success, or even failure, may bring. But, as

we shall soon see reason for believing that these industrial conditions

were not wholly resumed in Italy, the Second Punic War may be regarded

as having produced a gap in the population which was never entirely

refilled. We find evidences of tracts of country which were not annexed

by the rich but could not be repeopled by the poor. The policy pursued

by the decaying Empire of settling foreign colonists on Italian soil had

already occurred to the statesmen of Rome in the infancy of her imperial

expansion. In 180 B.C. 40,000 Ligurians belonging to the Apuanian people

were dragged from their homes with their wives and children and settled

on some public land of Rome which lay in the territory of the Samnites.

The consuls were commissioned to divide up the land in allotments, and

money was voted to the colonists to defray the expense of stocking their

new farms.[180] Although the leading motive for this transference was

the preservation of peace amongst the Ligurian tribes, yet it is

improbable that the senate would have preferred the stranger to its

kindred had there been an outcry from the landless proletariate to be

allowed to occupy and retain the devastated property of the State.

But moral motives are stronger even than physical forces in checking the

numerical progress of a race. Amongst backward peoples unusual

indulgence and consequent disease may lead to the diminution or even

extinction of the stock; amongst civilised peoples the motives which

attain this result are rather prudential, and are concerned with an

ideal of life which perhaps increases the efficiency of the individual,

but builds up his healthy and pleasurable environment at the expense of

the perpetuity of the race. The fact that the Roman and Italian physique

was not degenerating is abundantly proved by the military history of the

last hundred years of the Republic. This is one of the greatest periods

of conquest in the history of the world. The Italy, whom we are often

inclined to think of as exhausted, could still pour forth her myriads of

valiant sons to the confines marked by the Rhine, the Euphrates and the

Sahara; and the struggle of the civil wars, which followed this

expansion, was the clash of giants. But this vigour was accompanied by

an ideal, whether of irresponsibility or of comfort, which gave rise to

the growing habit of celibacy--a habit which was to stir the eloquence

of many a patriotic statesman and finally lead to the intervention of

the law. When the censor of 131 uttered the memorable exhortation "Since

nature has so ordained that we cannot live comfortably with a wife nor

live at all without one, you should hold the eternal safety of the State

more dear than your own brief pleasure," [181] it is improbable that he

was indulging in conscious cynicism, although there may have been a

trace of conscious humour in his words. He was simply bending to the

ideal of the people whom he saw, or imagined to be, before him. The

ideal was not necessarily bad, as one that was concerned with individual

life. It implied thrift, forethought, comfort--even efficiency of a

kind, for the unmarried man was a more likely recruit than the father of

a family. But it sacrificed too much--the future to the present; it

ignored the undemonstrable duty which a man owes to the permanent idea

of the State through working for a future which he shall never see. It

rested partly on a conviction of security; but that feeling of security

was the most perilous sign of all.

The practice of celibacy generally leads to irregular attachments

between the sexes. In a society ignorant of slavery, such attachments,

as giving rise to social inconveniences far greater than those of

marriage, are usually shunned on prudential grounds even where moral

motives are of no avail. But the existence in Italy of a large class of

female dependants, absolutely outside the social circle of the citizen

body, rendered the attachment of the master to his slave girl or to his

freedwoman fatally easy and unembarrassing. It was unfortunately as

attractive as it was easy. Amidst the mass of servile humanity that had

drifted to Italy from most of the quarters of the world there was

scarcely a type that might not reproduce some strange and wonderful

beauty. And the charm of manner might be secured as readily as that of

face and form. The Hellenic East must often have exhibited in its women

that union of wit, grace and supple tact which made even its men so

irresistible to their Roman masters. The courtesans of the capital,

whether of high or low estate,[182] are from the point of view which we

are considering not nearly so important as the permanent mistress or

"concubine" of the man who might dwell in any part of Italy. It was the

latter, not the former, that was the true substitute for the wife. There

is reason to believe that it was about this period that "concubinage"

became an institution which was more than tolerated by society.[183] The

relation which it implied between the man and his companion, who was

generally one of his freedwomen, was sufficiently honourable. It

excluded the idea of union with any other woman, whether by marriage or

temporary association; it might be more durable than actual wedlock, for

facilities for divorce were rapidly breaking the permanence of the

latter bond; it might satisfy the juristic condition of "marital

affection" quite as fully as the type of union to which law or religion

gave its blessing. But it differed from marriage in one point of vital

importance for the welfare of the State. Children might be the issue of

_concubinatus_, but they were not looked on as its end. Such unions were

not formed _liberûm quaerendorum causâ_.

The decline, or at least the stationary character, of the population may

thus be shown to be partly the result of a cause at once social and

economic; for this particular social evil was the result of the economic

experiment of the extended use of slavery as a means of production. This

extension was itself partly the result of the accidents of war and

conquest, and in fact, throughout this picture of the change which was

passing over Italy, we can never free ourselves from the spectres of

militarism and hegemony. But an investigation of the more purely

economic aspects of the industrial life of the period affords a clear

revelation of the fact that the effects of war and conquest were merely

the foundation, accidentally presented, of a new method of production,

which was the result of deliberate design and to some extent of a

conscious imitation of systems which had in turn built up the colossal

wealth, and assisted the political decay, of older civilisations with

which Rome was now brought into contact. The new ideal was that of the

large plantation or _latifundium_ supervised by skilled overseers,

worked by gangs of slaves with carefully differentiated duties, guided

by scientific rules which the hoary experience of Asia and Carthage had

devised, but, in unskilled Roman hands, perhaps directed with a reckless

energy that, keeping in view the vast and speedy returns which could

only be given by richer soils than that of Italy, was as exhaustive of

the capacities of the land as it was prodigal of the human energy that

was so cheaply acquired and so wastefully employed. The East, Carthage

and Sicily had been the successive homes of this system, and the Punic

ideal reached Rome just at the moment when the tendency of the free

peasantry to quit their holdings as unprofitable, or to sell them to pay

their debts, opened the way for the organisation of husbandry on the

grand Carthaginian model.[184] The opportunity was naturally seized with

the utmost eagerness by men whose wants were increasing, whose incomes

must be made to keep pace with these wants, and whose wealth must

inevitably be dependent mainly on the produce of the soil. Yet we have

no warrant for accusing the members of the Roman nobility of a

deliberate plan of campaign stimulated by conscious greed and

selfishness. For a time they may not have known what they were doing.

Land was falling in and they bought it up; domains belonging to the

State were so unworked as to be falling into the condition of rank

jungle and pestilent morass. They cleared and improved this land with a

view to their own profit and the profit of the State. Free labour was

unattainable or, when attained, embarrassing. They therefore bought

their labour in the cheapest market, this market being the product of

the wars and slave-raids of the time. They acted, in fact, as every

enlightened capitalist would act under similar circumstances. It seemed

an age of the revival of agriculture, not of its decay. The official

class was filled with a positive enthusiasm for new and improved

agricultural methods. The great work of the Carthaginian Mago was

translated by order of the senate.[185] Few of the members of that body

would have cared to follow the opening maxim of the great expert, that

if a man meant to settle in the country he should begin by selling his

house in town;[186] the men of affairs did not mean to become gentlemen

farmers, and it was the hope of profitable investment for the purpose of

maintaining their dignity in the capital, not the rustic ideal of the

primitive Roman, that appealed to their souls. But they might have hoped

that most of the golden precepts of the twenty-eight books, which

unfolded every aspect of the science of the management of land, would be

assimilated by the intelligent bailiff, and they may even have been

influenced by a patriotic desire to reveal to the small holder

scientific methods of tillage, which might stave off the ruin that they

deplored as statesmen and exploited as individuals. But the lessons were

thrown away on the small cultivator; they probably presupposed the

possession of capital and labour which were far beyond his reach; and

science may have played but little part even in the accumulations of the

rich, although the remarkable spectacle of small holdings, under the

personal supervision of peasant proprietors, being unable to hold their

own against plantations and ranches managed by bailiffs and worked by

slaves, does suggest that some improved methods of cultivation were

adopted on the larger estates. The rapidity with which the plantation

system spread must have excited the astonishment even of its promoters.

Etruria, in spite of the fact that three colonies of Roman citizens had

lately been founded within its borders,[187] soon showed one continuous

series of great domains stretching from town to town, with scarcely a

village to break the monotonous expanse of its self-tilled plains.

Little more than forty years had elapsed since the final settlement of

the last Roman colony of Luna when a young Roman noble, travelling along

the Etruscan roads, strained his eyes in vain to find a free labourer,

whether cultivator or shepherd.[188] In this part of Italy it is

probable that Roman enterprise was not the sole, or even the main, cause

of the wreckage of the country folk. The territory had always been

subject to local influences of an aristocratic kind; but the Etruscan

nobles had stayed their hand as long as a free people might help them to

regain their independence.[189] Now subjection had crushed all other

ambition but that of gain and personal splendour, while the ravages of

the Hannibalic war had made the peasantry an easy victim of the

wholesale purchaser. Farther south, in Bruttii and Apulia, the hand of

Rome had co-operated with the scourge of war to produce a like result.

The confiscations effected in the former district as a punishment for

its treasonable relations with Hannibal, the suitability of the latter

for grazing purposes, which had early made it the largest tract of land

in Italy patrolled by the shepherd slave,[190] had swept village and

cultivator away, and left through whole day's journeys but vast

stretches of pasture between the decaying towns.

For barrenness and desolation were often the results of the new and

improved system of management. There were tracts of country which could

not produce cereals of an abundance and quality capable of competing

with the corn imported from the provinces; but even on territories where

crops could be reared productively, it was tempting to substitute for

the arduous processes of sowing and reaping the cheaper and easier

industry of the pasturage of flocks. We do not know the extent to which

arable land in fair condition was deliberately turned into pasturage;

but we can imagine many cases in which the land recently acquired by

capitalists, whether from the State or from smaller holders, was in such

a condition, either from an initial lack of cultivation or from neglect

or from the ravages of war, that the new proprietor may well have shrunk

from the doubtful enterprise of sinking his capital in the soil, for the

purpose of testing its productive qualities. In such cases it was

tempting to treat the great domain as a sheep-walk or cattle-ranch. The

initial expenses of preparation were small, the labour to be employed

was reduced to a minimum, the returns in proportion to the expenses were

probably far larger than could be gained from corn, even when grown

under the most favourable conditions. The great difficulty in the way of

cattle-rearing on a large scale in earlier times had been the treatment

of the flocks and herds during the winter months. The necessity for

providing stalls and fodder for this period must have caused the

proprietor to limit the heads of cattle which he cared to possess. But

this constraint had vanished at once when a stretch of warm coast-line

could be found, on which the flocks could pasture without feeling the

rigour of the winter season. Conversely, the cattle-rearer who possessed

the advantage of such a line of coast would feel his difficulties

beginning when the summer months approached. The plains of the Campagna

and Apulia could have been good neither for man nor beast during the

torrid season. The full condition which freed a grazier from all

embarrassment and rendered him careless of limiting the size of his

flocks, was the combined possession of pastures by the sea for winter

use, and of glades in the hills for pasturage in summer.[191] Neither

the men of the hills nor the men of the plains, as long as they formed

independent communities, could become graziers on an extensive scale,

and it has been pointed out that even a Greek settlement of the extent

of Sybaris had been forced to import its wool from the Black Sea through

Miletus.[192] But when Rome had won the Apennines and extended her

influence over the coast, there were no limits to the extent to which

cattle rearing could be carried.[193] It became perhaps the most

gigantic enterprise connected with the soil of Italy. Its cheapness and

efficiency appealed to every practical mind. Cato, who had a sentimental

attachment to agriculture, was bound in honesty to reply to the question

"What is the best manner of investment?" by the words "Good pasturage."

To the question as to the second-best means he answered "Tolerable

pasturage." When asked to declare the third, he replied "Bad pasturage."

To ploughing he would assign only the fourth place in the descending

Scale.[194] Bruttii and Apulia were the chief homes of the ranch and the

fold. The Lucanian conquest of the former country must, even at a time

preceding the Roman domination, have formed a connection between the

mountains and the plains, and pasturage on a large scale in the mountain

glades of the Bruttian territory may have been an inheritance rather

than a creation of the Romans; but the ruin caused in this district by

the Second Punic War, the annexation to the State of large tracts of

rebel land,[195] and the reduction of large portions of the population

to the miserable serf-like condition of _dediticii_,[196] must have

offered the capitalists opportunities which they could not otherwise

have secured; and both here and in Apulia the tendency to extend the

grazing system to its utmost limits must have advanced with terrible

rapidity since the close of the Hannibalic war. It was the East coast of

Southern Italy that was chiefly surrendered to this new form of

industry, and we may observe a somewhat sharp distinction between the

pastoral activity of these regions and the agricultural life which still

continued, although on a diminished scale, in the Western

districts.[197]

We have already made occasional reference to the accidents on which the

new industrial methods that created the _latifundia_ were designedly

based. It is now necessary to examine these accidents in greater detail,

if only for the purpose of preparing the ground for a future estimate of

the efficacy of the remedies suggested by statesmen for a condition of

things which, however naturally and even honestly created, was

deplorable both on social and political grounds. The causes which had

led to the change from one form of tenure and cultivation to another of

a widely different kind required to be carefully probed, if the

Herculean task of a reversion to the earlier system was to be attempted.

The men who essayed the task had unquestionably a more perfect knowledge

of the causes of the change than can ever be possessed by the student of

to-day; but criticism is easier than action, and if it is not to become

shamelessly facile, every constraining element in the complicated

problem which is at all recoverable (all those elements so clearly seen

by the hard-headed and honest Roman reformers, but known by them to

possess an invulnerability that we have forgotten) must be examined by

the historian in the blundering analysis which is all that is permitted

by his imperfect information, and still more imperfect realisation, of

the temporary forces that are the millstones of a scheme of reform.

The havoc wrought by the Hannibalic invasion[198] had caused even

greater damage to the land than to the people. The latter had been

thinned but the former had been wasted, and in some cases wasted, as

events proved, almost beyond repair. The devastation had been especially

great in Southern Italy, the nations of which had clung to the Punic

invader to the end. But such results of war are transitory in the

extreme, if the numbers and energy of the people who resume possession

of their wrecked homes are not exhausted, and if the conditions of

production and sale are as favourable after the calamity as they were

before. The amount of wealth which an enemy can injure, lies on the mere

surface of the soil, and is an insignificant fraction of that which is

stored in the bosom of the earth, or guaranteed by a favourable

commercial situation and access to the sea. Carthage could pay her war

indemnity and, in the course of half a century, affright Cato by her

teeming wealth and fertility. Her people had resumed their old habits,

bent wholeheartedly to the only life they loved, and the prizes of a

crowded haven and bursting granaries were the result. If a nation does

not recover from such a blow, there must be some permanent defect in its

economic life or some fatal flaw in its administrative system. The

devastation caused by war merely accelerates the process of decay by

creating a temporary impoverishment, which reveals the severity of the

preceding struggle for existence and renders hopeless its resumption.

Certainly the great war of which Italy had been the theatre did mark

such an epoch in the history of its agricultural life. A lack of

productivity began to be manifested, for which, however, subsequent

economic causes were mainly responsible. The lack of intensity, which is

a characteristic of slave labour, lessened the returns, while the

secondary importance attached to the manuring of the fields was a

vicious principle inherent in the agricultural precepts of the

time.[199] But it is probable that from this epoch there were large

tracts of land the renewed cultivation of which was never attempted; and

these were soon increased by domains which yielded insufficient returns

and were gradually abandoned. The Italian peasant had ever had a hard

fight with the insalubrity of his soil. Fever has always been the

dreaded goddess of the environs of Rome. But constant labour and

effective drainage had kept the scourge at bay, until the evil moment

came when the time of the peasant was absorbed, and his energy spent, in

the toils of constant war, when his land was swallowed up in the vast

estates that had rapid profits as their end and careless slaves as their

cultivators. Then, the moist fields gave out their native pestilence,

and malaria reigned unchecked over the fairest portion of the Italian

plain.[200]

One of the leading economic causes, which had led to the failure of a

certain class of the Italian peasant-proprietors, was the competition to

which they were exposed from the provinces. Rome herself had begun to

rely for the subsistence of her increasing population on corn imported

from abroad, and many of the large coast-towns may have been forced to

follow her example. The corn-producing powers of the Mediterranean lands

had now definitely shifted from the regions of the East and North to

those of the South.[201] Greece, which had been barely able to feed

itself during the most flourishing period of its history, could not

under any circumstances have possessed an importance as a country of

export for Italy; but the economic evils which had fallen on this

unhappy land are worthy of observation, as presenting a forecast of the

fate which was in store for Rome. The decline in population, which could

be attributed neither to war nor pestilence, the growing celibacy and

childlessness of its sparse inhabitants,[202] must have been due to an

agricultural revolution similar to that which was gradually being

effected on Italian soil. The plantation system and the wholesale

employment of slave labour must have swept across the Aegean from their

homes in Asia Minor. Here their existence is sufficiently attested by

the servile rising which was to assume, shortly after the tribunate of

Tiberius Gracchus, the pretended form of a dynastic war; and the

troubles which always attended the collection of the Asiatic tithes, in

the days when a Roman province had been established in those regions,

give no favourable impression of the agricultural prosperity of the

countries which lay between the Taurus and the sea. As far south as

Sicily there was evidence of exhaustion of the land, and of unnatural

conditions of production, which excluded the mass of the free

inhabitants from participation both in labour and profits. But even

Sicily had learned from Carthage the evil lesson that Greece had

acquired from Asia; the plantation system had made vast strides in the

island, and the condition of the _aratores_, whether free-holders or

lessees, was not what it had been in the days of Diocles and Timoleon.

The growing economic dependence of Rome on Sicily was by no means wholly

due to any exceptional productive capacities in the latter, but was

mainly the result of proximity, and of administrative relations which

enabled the government and the speculator in corn to draw definite and

certain supplies of grain from the Sicilian cultivators. This was true

also, although to a smaller degree, of Sardinia. But Sicily and Sardinia

do mark the beginning of the Southern zone of lands which were capable

of filling the markets of the Western world. It was the Northern coast

of Africa which rose supreme as the grain-producer of the time. In the

Carthaginian territory the natural absence of an agricultural peasantry

amidst a commercial folk, and the elaboration of a definite science of

agriculture, had neutralised the ill effects which accompanied the

plantation system amongst other peoples less business-like and

scientific; the cultivators had shown no signs of unrest and the soil no

traces of exhaustion. It has been inferred with some probability that

the hostility of Cato, the friend of agriculture and of the Italian

yeoman, to the flourishing Punic state was directed to some extent by

the fear that the grain of Africa might one day drive from the market

the produce of the Italian fields;[203] and, if this view entered into

the calculations which produced the final Punic War, the very

short-sightedness of the policy which destroyed a state only to give its

lands to African cities and potentates or to Roman speculators, who

might continue the methods of the extinct community, is only too

characteristic of that type of economic jealousy which destroys an

accidental product and leaves the true cause of offence unassailed. The

destruction of Carthage had, as a matter of fact, aggravated the danger;

for the first use which Masinissa of Numidia made of the vast power with

which Rome had entrusted him, was an attempt to civilise his people by

turning them into cultivators;[204] and the virgin soil of the great

country which stretched from the new boundaries of Carthage to the

confines of the Moors, was soon reckoned amongst the competing elements

which the Roman agriculturist had to fear.

But the force of circumstances caused the Sicilian and Sardinian

cultivator to be the most formidable of his immediate competitors. The

facility of transport from Sicily to Rome rendered that island superior

as a granary to even the more productive portions of the Italian

mainland. Sicily could never have revealed the marvellous fertility of

the valley of the Po, where a bushel and a half of wheat could be

purchased for five pence half-penny, and the same quantity of barley was

sold for half this price;[205] but it was easier to get Sicilian corn to

Rome by sea than to get Gallic corn to Rome by land; and the system of

taxation and requisitions which had grown out of the provincial

organisation of the island, rendered it peculiarly easy to place great

masses of corn on the Roman market at very short notice. Occasionally

the Roman government enforced a sale of corn from the province

(_frumentum emptum_),[206] a reasonable price being paid for the grain

thus demanded for the city or the army; but this was almost the only

case in which the government intervened to regulate supplies. In the

ordinary course of things the right to collect the tithes of the

province was purchased by public companies, who paid money, not grain,

into the Roman treasury, and these companies placed their corn on the

market as best they could. The operations of the speculators in grain

doubtless disturbed the price at times. But yet the certainty, the

abundance and the facilities for transport of this supply were such as

practically to shut out from competition in the Roman market all but the

most favourably situated districts of Italy. Their chance of competition

depended mainly on their accidental possession of a good road, or their

neighbourhood to the sea or to a navigable river.[207] The larger

proprietors in any part of Italy must have possessed greater facilities

for carrying their grain to a good market than were enjoyed by the

smaller holders. The Clodian law on trade permitted senators to own

sea-going ships of a certain tonnage; they could, therefore, export

their own produce without any dependence on the middle-man, while the

smaller cultivators would have been obliged to pay freight, or could

only have avoided such payment by forming shipping-companies amongst

themselves. But such combination was not to be looked for amongst a

peasant class, barely conscious even of the external symptoms of the

great revolution which was dragging them to ruin, and perhaps almost

wholly oblivious of its cause.

It required less penetration to fathom the second of the great reasons

for the accumulation of landed property in the hands of the few; for

this cause had been before the eyes of the Roman world, and had been

expounded by the lips of Roman statesmen, for generations or, if we

credit a certain class of traditions,[208] even for centuries. This

cause of the growing monopoly of the land by the few was the system of

possession which the State had encouraged, for the purpose of securing

the use and cultivation of its public domain. The policy of the State

seems to have changed from time to time with reference to its treatment

of this particular portion of its property, which it valued as the most

secure of its assets and one that served, besides its financial end, the

desirable purpose of assisting it to maintain the influence of Rome

throughout almost every part of Italy. When conquered domain had first

been declared "public," the government had been indifferent to the type

of occupier which served it by squatting on this territory and

reclaiming land that had not been divided or sold chiefly because its

condition was too unattractive to invite either of these processes.[209]

It had probably extended its invitation even to Latin allies,[210] and

looked with approval on any member of the burgess body who showed his

enterprise and patriotism by the performance of this great public

service. If the State had a partiality, it was probably for the richer

and more powerful classes of its citizens. They could embrace a greater

quantity of land in their grasp, and so save the trouble which attended

an estimate of the returns of a great number of small holdings; they

possessed more effective means of reclaiming waste or devastated land,

for they had a greater control of capital and labour; lastly, through

their large bands of clients and slaves, they had the means of

efficiently protecting the land which they had occupied, and this must

have been an important consideration at a time when large tracts of the

_ager publicus_ lay amidst foreign territories which were barely

pacified, and were owned by communities that often wavered in their

allegiance to Rome. But, whatever the views of the government, it is

tolerably clear that the original occupiers must have chiefly

represented men of this stamp. These were the days when the urban and

the rustic tribes were sharply divided, as containing respectively the

men of the town and the men of the country, and when there were

comparatively few of the latter folk that did not possess some holding

of their own. It was improbable that a townsman would often venture on

the unfamiliar task of taking up waste land; it was almost as improbable

that a small yeoman would find leisure to add to the unaided labour on

his own holding the toil of working on new and unpromising soil, except

in the cases where some unclaimed portion of the public domain was in

close proximity to his estate.

We may, therefore, infer that from very early times the wealthier

classes had asserted themselves as the chief occupiers of the public

domain. And this condition of things continued to be unchallenged until

a time came[211] when the small holders, yielding to the pressure of

debt and bankruptcy, sought their champions amongst the tribunes of the

Plebs. The absolute control of the public domain by the State, the

absolute insecurity of the tenure of its occupants, furnished an

excellent opportunity for staving off schemes of confiscation and

redistribution of private property, such as had often shaken the

communities of Greece, and even for refusing to tamper with the existing

law of debtor and creditor.[212] It was imagined that bankrupt yeomen

might be relieved by being allowed to settle on the public domain, or

that the resumption or retention of a portion of this domain by the

State might furnish an opportunity for the foundation of fresh colonies,

and a law was passed limiting the amount of the _ager publicus_ that any

individual might possess. The enactment, whatever its immediate results

may have been, proved ineffective as a means of checking the growth of

large possessions. No special commission was appointed to enforce

obedience to its terms, and their execution was neglected by the

ordinary magistrates. The provisions of the law were, indeed, never

forgotten, but as a rule they were remembered only to be evaded. Devious

methods were adopted of holding public land through persons who seemed

to be _bonâ fide_ possessors in their own right, but were in reality

merely agents of some planter who already held land up to the permitted

limit.[213] Then came the agricultural crisis which followed the Punic

Wars. The small freeholds, mortgaged, deserted or selling for a fraction

of their value, began to fall into the meshes of the vast net which had

spread over the public domain. In some cases actual violence is said to

have been used to the smaller yeomen by their neighbouring tyrants,[214]

and we can readily imagine that, when a holding had been deserted for a

time through stress of war or military service, it might be difficult to

resume possession in the face of effective occupation by the bailiff of

some powerful neighbour. The _latifundium_--acquired, as it was

believed, in many cases by force, fraud and shameless violation of the

law--was becoming the standard unit of cultivation throughout

Italy.[215] When we consider the general social and economic

circumstances of the time, it is possible to imagine that large

properties would have grown in Italy, as in Greece, had Rome never

possessed an inch of public domain; but the occupation of _ager

publicus_ by the rich is very important from two points of view. On the

one hand, it unquestionably accelerated the process of the formation of

vast estates; and a renewed impulse had lately been given to this

process by the huge confiscations in the South of Italy, and perhaps by

the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul; for it is improbable that the domain

possessed by the State in this fertile country had been wholly parcelled

out amongst the colonies of the northern frontier.[216] But on the other

hand, the fact that the kernel of these estates was composed of public

land in excess of the prescribed limit seemed to make resumption by the

State and redistribution to the poor legally possible. The _ager

publicus_, therefore, formed the basis for future agitation and was the

rallying point for supporters and opponents of the proposed methods of

agricultural reform.

But it was not merely the negligence of the State which led to the

crushing of the small man by the great; the positive burdens which the

government was forced to impose by the exigencies of the career of

conquest and hegemony into which Rome had drifted, rendered the former

an almost helpless competitor in the uneven struggle. The conscription

had from early days been a source of impoverishment for the commons and

of opportunity for the rich. The former could obey the summons of the

State only at the risk of pledging his credit, or at least of seeing his

homestead drift into a condition of neglect which would bring the

inevitable day when it could only be rehabilitated by a loan of seed or

money. The lot of the warrior of moderate means was illustrated by the

legend of Regulus. He was believed to have written home to the consuls

asking to be relieved of his command in Africa. The bailiff whom he had

left on his estate of seven _jugera_ was dead, the hired man had stolen

the implements of agriculture and run away; the farm lay desolate and,

were its master not permitted to return, his wife and children would

lack the barest necessaries of existence.[217] The struggle to maintain

a household in the absence of its head was becoming more acute now that

corn-land was ceasing to pay, except under the most favourable

conditions, and now that the demand for conscripts was sometimes heavier

and always more continuous than it had ever been before. Perhaps

one-tenth of the adult male population of Rome was always in the

field;[218] the units came and went, but the men who bore the brunt of

the long campaigns and of garrison duty in the provinces were those to

whom leisure meant life--the yeomen who maintained their place in the

census lists by hardy toil, and who risked their whole subsistence

through the service that had been wrested from them as a reward for a

laborious career. When they ceased to be owners of their land, they

found it difficult to secure places even as labourers on some rich man's

property. The landholder preferred the services of slaves which could

not be interrupted by the call of military duty.[219]

The economic evils consequent on the conscription must have been felt

with hardly less severity by such of the Italian allies as lived in the

regions within which the _latifundia_ were growing up. To these were

added the pecuniary burdens which Rome had been forced to impose during

the Second Punic War. These burdens were for the most part indirect, for

Rome did not tax her Italian _socii_, but they were none the less

severe. Every contingent supplied from an allied community had its

expenses, except that of food during service, defrayed from the treasury

of its own state,[220] and ten continuous years of conscription and

requisition had finally exhausted the loyalty even of Rome's Latin

kindred.[221] It is true that the Italians were partially, although not

wholly, free from the economic struggle between the possessors of the

public land and the small freeholders; but there is no reason for

supposing that those of Western Italy were exempt from the consequences

of the reduction in price that followed the import of corn from abroad,

and the drain on their incomes and services which had been caused by war

could scarcely have fitted them to stand this unexpected trial. Rome's

harsh dealings with the treasonable South, although adopted for

political motives, was almost unquestionably a political blunder. She

confiscated devastated lands, and so perpetuated their devastation. She

left ruined harbours and cities in decay. She crippled her own resources

to add to the pastoral wealth of a handful of her citizens. In the East

of Italy there was a far greater vitality than elsewhere in agriculture

of the older type. The Samnites in their mountains, the Peligni,

Marrucini, Frentani and Vestini between the Apennines and the sea still

kept to the system of small freeholds. Their peasantry had perhaps

always cultivated for consumption rather than for sale; their

inhabitants were rather beyond the reach of the ample supply from the

South; and for these reasons the competition of Sicilian and African

corn did not lead them to desert their fields. They were also less

exposed than the Romans and Latins to the aggressions of the great

_possessor_; for, since they possessed no _commercium_ with Rome, the

annexation of their property by legal means was beyond the reach even of

the ingenious cupidity of the times.[222] The proof of the existence of

the yeoman in these regions is the danger which he caused to Rome. The

spirit which had maintained his economic independence was to aim at a

higher goal, and the struggle for equality of political rights was to

prove to the exclusive city the prowess of that class of peasant

proprietors which she had sacrificed in her own domains.

But, although this sacrifice had been great, we must not be led into the

belief that there was no hope for the agriculturist of moderate means

either in the present or in the future. Even in the present there were

clear indications that estates of moderate size could under careful

cultivation hold their own. The estate of Lucius Manlius, which Cato

sketches in his work on agriculture,[223] was far from rivalling the

great demesnes of the princes of the land. It consisted of 240 _jugera_

devoted to the olive and of 100 _jugera_ reserved for the vine.

Provision was made for a moderate supply of corn and for pasturage for

the cattle that worked upon the fields. But the farm was on the whole a

representative of the new spirit, which saw in the vine and the olive a

paying substitute for the decadent culture of grain. Even on an estate

of this size we note as significant that the permanent and even the

higher personnel of the household (the latter being represented by the

_villici_ and the _villicae_) was composed of slaves; yet hirelings were

needed for the harvest and the corn was grown by cottagers who held

their land on a _métayer_ tenure. But such an estate demanded unusual

capital as well as unusual care. On the tiny holdings, which were all

that the poorest could afford, the scanty returns might be eked out by

labour on the fields of others, for the small allotment did not demand

the undivided energies of its holder.[224] There was besides a class of

_politores_[225] similar to that figured as cultivating the Cornland on

the estate of Manlius, who received in kind a wage on which they could

at least exist. They were nominally _métayer_ tenants who were provided

with the implements of husbandry by their landlord; but the quantity of

grain which they could reserve to their own use was so small, varying as

it did from a ninth to a fifth of the whole of the crop which they had

reaped,[226] that their position was little better than that of the

poorest labourer by the day.[227] The humblest class of freemen might

still make a living in districts where pasturage did not reign supreme.

But it was a living that involved a sacrifice of independence and a

submission to sordid needs that were unworthy of the past ideal of Roman

citizenship. It was a living too that conferred little benefit on the

State; for the day-labourers and the _politores_ could scarcely have

been in the position on the census list which rendered them liable to

the conscription.

If it were possible to lessen the incidence of military service and to

secure land and a small amount of capital for the dispossessed, the

prospects for the future were by no means hopeless. The smaller culture,

especially the cultivation of the vine and the olive, is that to which

portions of Italy are eminently suited. This is especially true of the

great volcanic plain of the West extending from the north of Etruria to

the south of Campania and comprising, besides these territories, the

countries of the Latins, the Sabines, the Volsci and the Hernici. The

lightness and richness of the alluvion of this volcanic soil is almost

as suited to the production of cereals as to that of the vine and the

olive or the growth of vegetables.[228] But, even on the assumption that

corn-growing would not pay, there was nothing to prevent, and everything

to encourage the development of the olive plantation, the vineyard and

the market garden throughout this region. It was a country sown with

towns, and the vast throat of Rome alone would cry for the products of

endless labour. Even Cato can place the vine and the olive before

grazing land and forest trees in the order of productivity,[229] and

before the close of the Republic the government had learnt the lesson

that the salvation of the Italian peasantry depended on the cultivation

of products like these. The conviction is attested by the protective

edict that the culture of neither the vine nor the olive was to be

extended in Transalpine Gaul.[230] Market gardening was also to have a

considerable future, wherever the neighbourhood of the larger towns

created a demand for such supplies.[231] A new method of tenure also

gave opportunities to those whose capital or circumstances did not

enable them to purchase a sufficient quantity of land of their own.

Leaseholds became more frequent, and the _coloni_ thus created[232]

began to take an active share in the agricultural life of Italy. Like

the _villici_, they were a product, of the tendency to live away from

the estate; but they gained ground at the expense of the servile

bailiffs, probably in consequence of their greater trustworthiness and

keener interest in the soil.

But time was needed to effect these changes. For the present the reign

of the capitalist was supreme, and the plantation system was dominant

throughout the greater part of Italy. The most essential ingredient in

this system was the slave,--an alien and a chattel, individually a thing

of little account, but reckoned in his myriads the most powerful factor

in the economic, and therefore in the political, life of the times, the

gravest of the problems that startled the reformer. The soil of Italy

was now peopled with widely varied types, and echoes of strange tongues

from West and East could be heard on every hand. Italy seemed a newly

discovered country, on which the refuse of all lands had been thrown to

become a people that could never be a nation. The home supply of slaves,

so familiar as to seem a product of the land, was becoming a mere trifle

in comparison with the vast masses that were being thrust amongst the

peasantry by war and piracy. At the time of the protest of Tiberius

Gracchus against the dominance of slave labour in the fields scarcely

two generations had elapsed since the great influx had begun. The Second

Punic War had spread to every quarter of the West; Sicily, Sardinia,

Cisalpine Gaul and Spain all yielded their tribute in the form of human

souls that had passed from the victor to the dealer, from the dealer to

the country and the town. Only one generation had passed since a great

wave had swept from Epirus and Northern Greece over the shores of Italy.

In Epirus alone one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners had been

sold.[233] Later still the destruction of Carthage must have cast vast

quantities of agricultural slaves upon the market.[234] Asia too had

yielded up her captives as the result of Roman victories; but the

Oriental visages that might be seen in the streets of Rome or the plains

of Sicily, were less often the gift of regular war than of the piracy

and the systematised slave-hunting of the Eastern Mediterranean. Rome,

who had crushed the rival maritime powers that had attempted, however

imperfectly, to police the sea, had been content with the work of

destruction, and seemed to care nothing for the enterprising buccaneers

who sailed with impunity as far west as Sicily. The pirates had also

made themselves useful to the Oriental powers which still retained their

independence; they had been tolerated, if they had not been employed, by

Cyprus and Egypt when these states were struggling against the Empire of

the Seleucids.[235] But another reason for their immunity was the view

held in the ancient world that slave-hunting was in itself a legitimate

form of enterprise.[236] The pirate might easily be regarded as a mere

trader in human merchandise. As such, he had perhaps been useful to

Carthage;[237] and, as long as he abstained from attacking ports or

nationalities under the protectorate of Rome, there was no reason why

the capitalists in power should frown on the trade by which they

prospered. For the pirates could probably bring better material to the

slave market than was usually won in war.[238] A superior elegance and

culture must often have been found in the helpless victims on whom they

pounced; beauty and education were qualities that had a high marketable

value, and by seizing on people of the better class they were sure of

one of two advantages--either of a ransom furnished by the friends of

the captives, or of a better price paid by the dealer. There was

scarcely a pretence that the traders were mere intermediaries who bought

in a cheap market and sold in a dear. They were known to be raiders as

well, and numbers of the captives exhibited in the mart at Side in

Pamphylia were known to have been freemen up to the moment of the

auction.[239] The facility for capture and the proximity of Delos, the

greatest of the slave markets which connected the East with the West,

rendered the supply enormous; but it was equalled by the demand, and

myriads of captives are said to have been shipped to the island and to

have quitted it in a single day. The ease and rapidity of the business

transacted by the master of a slave-ship became a proverb;[240] and

honest mercantile undertakings with their tardy gains must have seemed

contemptible in comparison with this facile source of wealth.

An abundant supply and quick returns imply reasonable prices; and the

cheapness of the labour supplied by the slave-trade, whether as a

consequence of war or piracy, was at once a necessary condition of the

vitality of the plantation system and a cause of the recklessness and

neglect with which the easily replaced instruments might be used. Cato,

a shrewd man of business, never cared to pay more than fifteen hundred

denarii for his slaves.[241] This must have been the price of the best

type of labourer, of a man probably who was gifted with intelligence as

well as strength. Ordinary unskilled labour must have fetched a far

smaller sum; for the prices which are furnished by the comic poetry of

the day--prices which are as a rule conditioned by the value of personal

services or qualities of a particular kind, by the attractions of sex

and the competition for favours--do not on the average far exceed the

limit fixed by Cato.[242] For common work newly imported slaves were

actually preferred, and purchasers were shy of the _veterator_ who had

seen long service.[243] Employment in the fashionable circles of the

town doubtless enhanced the value of a slave, when he was known to have

been in possession of some peculiar gift, whether it were for cookery,

medicine or literature; but the labours of the country could easily be

drilled into the newest importation, and prices diminished instead of

rising with the advancing age and experience of the rustic slave.[244]

The cheapened labour which was now spread over Italy presented as many

varieties of moral as of physical type, and these came to be well known

to the prospective owner, not because he aimed at being a moral

influence, but because he objected to being worried by the vagaries of

an eccentric type. Sardinians were always for sale, not because they

were specially abundant, but because they showed an indocility that

rendered them a sorry possession.[245] The passive Oriental, the

Spaniard fierce and proud, required different methods of management and

inspired different precautions; yet experience soon proved that the

hellenised sons of the East had a better capacity for organising revolt

than their fellow-sufferers from the North and West, and much of the

harshness of Roman slavery was prompted by the panic which is the

nemesis of the man who deals in human lives. But more of it was due to

the indifference which springs from familiarity, and from the cold

practical spirit in which the Roman always tended to play with the pawns

of his business game, even when they were freemen and fellow-citizens. A

man like Cato, who had sense and honesty enough to look after his own

business, elaborated a machine-like system for governing his household,

the aim of which was the maximum of profit with the minimum amount of

humanity which is consistent with the attainment of such an end. The

element of humanity is, however, accidental. There is no conscious

appeal to such a feeling. The slaves seem to be looked on rather as

automata who perform certain mental and physical processes analogous to

those of men. Cato's servants were never to enter another house except

at his bidding or at that of his wife, and were to express utter

ignorance of his domestic history to all inquirers; their life was to

alternate between working and sleeping, and the heavy sleeper was valued

as presumably a peaceful character; little bickerings between the

servants were to be encouraged, for unanimity was a matter for suspicion

and fear; the death sentence pronounced on any one of them by the law

was carried out in the presence of the assembled household, so as to

strike a wholesome terror into the rest. If they wished to propagate

their kind, they must pay for the privilege, and a fixed sum was

demanded from the slave who desired to find a mate amongst his

fellow-servants.[246] The rations were fixed and only raised at the

people's festivals of the Saturnalia and Compitalia;[247] a sick slave

was supposed to need less than his usual share[248]--perhaps an

excellent hygienic maxim, but one scarcely adopted on purely hygienic

grounds. Such a life was an emphatic protest against the indulgence of

the city, the free and careless intercourse which often reversed the

position of master and slave and formed part of the stock-in-trade of

the comedian. Yet, even when the bond between the man of fashion and his

artful Servants had merely a life of pleasure and of mischief as its

end, we Are at least lifted by such relations into a human sphere, and

it is exceedingly questionable whether the warped humanity of the city

did mark so low a level as the brutalised life of the estate over which

Cato's fostering genius was spread. If we develop Cato's methods but a

little, if we admit a little more rigour and a little less

discrimination, we get the dismal barrack-like system of the great

plantations--a barrack, or perhaps a prison, nominally ruled by a

governor who might live a hundred miles away, really under the control

of an anxious and terrified slave, who divided his fears between his

master who wanted money and his servants who wanted freedom. The

_villicus_ had been once the mere intendant of the estate on which his

master lived; he was now sole manager of a vast domain for his absent

lord,[249] sole keeper of the great _ergastulum_ which enclosed at

nightfall the instruments of labour and disgorged them at daybreak over

the fields. The gloomy building in which they were herded for rest and

sleep showed but its roof and a small portion of its walls above the

earth; most of it lay beneath the ground, and the narrow windows were so

high that they could not be reached by the hands of the inmates.[250]

There was no inspection by the government, scarcely any by the

owners.[251] There was no one to tell the secrets of these dens, and if

the unwary traveller were trapped and hidden behind their walls, all

traces of him might be for ever lost.[252] When the slaves were turned

out into the fields, the safety of their drivers was secured by the

chains which bound their limbs, but which were so adjusted as not to

interfere with the movements necessary to their work.[253] Some whose

spirit had been broken might be left unbound, but for the majority bonds

were the only security against escape or vengeance.[254]

There was, however, one type of desperate character who was permitted to

roam at large. This was the guardian of the flocks, who wandered

unrestrained over the mountains during the summer months and along the

prairies in the winter season. These herdsmen formed small bands. It was

reckoned that there should be one for every eighty or hundred sheep and

two for every troop of fifty horses.[255] It was sometimes found

convenient that they should be accompanied by their women who prepared

their meals--women of robust types like the Illyrian dames to whom

child-birth was a mere incident in the daily toils.[256] Such a life of

freedom had its attractions for the slave, but it had its drawbacks too.

The landowner who preferred pasturage to tillage, saved his capital, not

only by the small number of hands which the work demanded, but also by

the niggardly outlay which he expended on these errant serfs. It was not

needful to provide them with the necessaries of life when they could

take them for themselves. When Damophilus of Enna was entreated by his

slaves to give them something better than the rags they wore, his answer

was: "Do travellers then travel naked through the land? Have they

nothing for the man who wants a coat?" [257] Brigandage, in fact, was an

established item In the economic creed of the day.

The desolation of Italy was becoming dangerous, and the master of the

lonely villa barred himself in at nights as though an enemy were at his

gates. On one occasion Scipio Africanus was disturbed in his retreat at

Liternum by a troop of bandits. He placed his armed servants on the roof

and made every preparation for repelling the assault. But the visitors

proved to be pacific. They were the very _élite_ of the fraternity of

brigands and had merely come to do honour to the great man. They sent

back their troops, threw down their arms, laid presents before his door

and departed in joyous mood.[258] The immunity of such bands proved that

a slave revolt might at any moment imperil every life and every dwelling

in some unprotected canton. It was indeed the epoch of peace, when Roman

and Phoenician armies no longer held the field in Italy, that first

suggested the hope of liberation to the slave. Hannibal would have

imperilled his character of a protector of Italian towns had he

encouraged a slave revolt, even if the Phoenician had not shrunk from a

precedent so fatal to his native land. But one of the unexpected results

of the Second Punic War was to kindle a rising in the very heart of

Latium, and it was the African slave, not the African freeman, that

stirred the last relics of the war in Italy. At Setia were guarded the

noble Carthaginians who were a pledge of the fidelity of their state.

These hostages, the sons of merchant princes, were allowed to retain the

dignity of their splendid homes, and a vast retinue of slaves from

Africa attended on their wants. The number of these was swelled by

captive members of the same nationalities whom the people of Setia had

acquired in the recent war.[259] A spirit of camaraderie sprung up

amongst men who understood one another's language and had acquired the

spurious nationality that comes from servitude in the same land. Their

numbers were obvious, the paucity of the native Setians was equally

clear, and no military force was close at hand. They planned to increase

their following by spreading disaffection amongst the servile

populations of the neighbouring country towns, and emissaries were sent

to Norba in the North and Circei in the South. Their project was to wait

for the rapidly approaching games of the Setian folk and to rush on the

unarmed populace as they were gazing at the show; when Setia had been

taken, they meant to seize on Norba and Circei. But there was treason in

their ranks. The urban praetor was roused before dawn by two slaves who

poured the whole tale of the impending massacre into his ear. After a

hasty consultation of the senate he rushed to the threatened district,

gathering recruits as he swept with his legates through the country

side, binding them with the military oath, bidding them arm and follow

him with all speed. A hasty force of about two thousand men was soon

gathered; none knew his destination till he reached the gates of Setia.

The heads of the conspiracy were seized, and such of their followers as

learnt the fact fled incontinently from the town. From this point onward

it was only a matter of hunting down the refugees by patrols sent round

the country districts. Southern Latium was freed from its terror; but it

was soon found that the evil had spread almost to the gates of Rome. A

rumour had spread that Praeneste was to be seized by its slaves, and it

was sufficient to stimulate a praetor to execute nearly five hundred of

the supposed delinquents.[260]

Two years later a rising, which almost became a war, shook the great

plantation lands of Etruria.[261] Its suppression required a legion and

a pitched battle. The leaders were crucified; others of the slaves who

had escaped the carnage were restored to their masters. But these

disturbances, that may have seemed mere sporadic relics of the havoc and

exhaustion left by the Hannibalic war, were only quelled for the moment.

It was soon found that the seeds of insecurity were deeply planted in

the settlement that was called a peace. During the year 185 the

shepherds of Apulia were found to have formed a great society of

plunder, and robbery with violence was of constant occurrence on the

grazing lands and public roads. The praetor who was in command at

Tarentum opened a commission which condemned seven thousand men. Many

were executed, although a large number of the criminals escaped to other

regions.[262]

These movements in Italy were but the symptoms of a spirit that was

spreading over the Mediterranean lands. The rising of the serfs only

just preceded the great awakening of the masses of the freemen.[263]

Both classes were ground down by capital; both would make an effort to

shake the burden from their shoulders; and, as regards the methods of

assertion, it is a matter of little moment whether they took the form of

a national rising against a government or a protectorate, a sanguinary

struggle in the Forum against the dominance of a class, or an attack by

chattels, not yet brutalised by serfdom but full of the traditions and

spirit of freemen, against the cruelty and indifference of their owners.

In one sense the servile movements were more universal, and perhaps

better organised, than those of the men to whom, free birth gave a

nominal superiority. A sympathy for each other's sufferings pervaded the

units of the class who were scattered in distant lands. Sometimes it was

a sympathy based on a sense of nationality, and the Syrian and Cilician

in Asia would feel joy and hope stirring in his heart at the doings of

his brethren who had been deported to the far West. The series of

organised revolts in the Roman provinces and protectorate which commence

shortly after the fall of Carthage and close for the moment with the war

of resistance to the Romans in Asia, forms a single connected chain.

Dangerous risings had to be repressed at the Italian coast towns of

Minturnae and Sinuessa; at the former place four hundred and fifty

slaves were crucified, at the latter four thousand were crushed by a

military force; the mines of Athens, the slave market of Delos,

witnessed similar outbreaks,[264] and we shall find a like wave of

discontent spreading over the serf populations of the countries of the

Mediterranean just before the second great outbreak in Sicily which

darkens the close of the second century. The evil fate which made this

island the theatre of the two greatest of the servile wars is explicable

on many grounds. The opportunity offered by the sense of superiority in

numbers was far ampler here than in any area of Italy of equal size. For

Sicily was a wheat-growing country, and the cultivated plains demanded a

mass of labour which was not needed in more mountainous or less fertile

lands, where pasturage yielded a surer return than the tilling of the

soil. The pasture lands of Sicily were indeed large, but they had not

yet dwarfed the agriculture of the island. The labour of the fields was

in the hands of a vast horde of Asiatics, large numbers of whom may

conceivably have been shipped from Carthage across the narrow sea, when

that great centre of the plantation system had been laid low and the

fair estates of the Punic nobles had been seized and broken up by their

conquerors.[265] In the history of the great Sicilian outbreaks Syrians

and Cilicians meet us at every turn. These Asiatic slaves had different

nationalities and they or their fathers had been citizens of widely

separated towns. But there were bonds other than a common suffering

which produced a keen sense of national union and a consequent feeling

of ideal patriotism in the hearts of all. They were the products of the

common Hellenism of the East; they or their fathers could make a claim

to have been subjects of the great Seleucid monarchy; many, perhaps most

of them, could assert freedom by right of birth and acknowledged slavery

only as a consequence of the accidents of war or piracy. The mysticism

of the Oriental, the political ideal of the Hellene, were interwoven in

their moral nature--a nature perhaps twisted by the brutalism of slavery

to superstition in the one direction, to licence in the other, but none

the less capable of great conceptions and valiant deeds. The moment for

both would come when the prophet had appeared, and the prophet would

surely show himself when the cup of suffering had overflowed.[266]

The masters who worked this human mechanism were driving it at a pace

which must have seemed dangerous to any human being less greedy, vain

and confident than themselves. The wealth of these potentates was

colossal, but it was equalled by their social rivalry and consequent

need of money. A contest in elegance was being fought between the

Siceliot and the Italian.[267] The latter was the glass of fashion, and

the former attempted to rival, first his habits of domestic life and, as

a consequence, the economic methods which rendered these habits

possible. Here too, as in Italy, whole gangs of slaves were purchased

like cattle or sheep; some were weighed down with fetters, others ground

into subordination by the cruel severity of their tasks. All without

exception were branded, and men who had been free citizens in their

native towns, felt the touch of the burning iron and carried the stigma

of slavery to their graves.[268] Food was doled out in miserable

quantities,[269] for the shattered instrument could so easily be

replaced. On the fields one could see little but abject helplessness, a

misery that weakened while it tortured the soul. But in some parts of

Sicily bodily want was combined with a wild daring that was fostered by

the reckless owners, whose greed had overcome all sense of their own

security or that of their fellow-citizens. The treatment of pastoral

slaves which had been adopted by the Roman graziers was imitated

faithfully by the Italians and Siceliots of the island. These slaves

were turned loose with their flocks to find their food and clothing

where and how they could. The youngest and stoutest were chosen for this

hard, wild life: and their physical vigour was still further increased

by their exposure to every kind of weather, by their seldom finding or

needing the shelter of a roof, and by the milk and meat which formed

their staple food. A band of these men presented a terrifying aspect,

suggesting a scattered invasion of some warlike barbarian tribe. Their

bodies were clad in the skins of wolves and boars; slung at their sides

or poised in their hands were clubs, lances and long shepherds' staves.

Each squadron was followed by a pack of large and powerful hounds.

Strength, leisure, need, all suggested brigandage as an integral part of

their profession. At first they murdered the wayfarer who went alone or

with but one companion. Then their courage rose and they concerted

nightly attacks on the villas of the weaker residents. These villas they

stormed and plundered, slaying any one who attempted to bar their way.

As their impunity increased, Sicily became impracticable to travellers

by night, and residence in the country districts became a tempting of

providence. There was violence, brigandage or murder on every hand. The

governors of Sicily occasionally interposed, but they were almost

powerless to check the mischief. The influence of the slave-owners was

such that it was dangerous to inflict an adequate punishment.[270]

The proceedings of these militant shepherds must have opened the eyes of

the mass of the slaves to the possibilities of the position. Secret

meetings began to be held at which the word "revolt" was breathed. An

occasion, a leader, a divine sanction were for the moment lacking. The

first requisite would follow the other two, and these were soon found

combined in the person of Eunus. This man was a Syrian by birth, a

native of Apamea, and he served Antigenes of Enna. He was more than a

believer in the power of the gods to seize on men and make them the

channel of their will; he was a living witness to it in his own person.

At first he saw shadows of superhuman form and heard their voices in his

dreams. Then there were moments when he would be seized with a trance;

he was wrapt in contemplation of some divine being. Then the words of

prophecy would come; they were not his utterance but the bidding of the

great Syrian goddess. Sometimes the words were preceded by a strange

manifestation of supernatural power; smoke, sparks or flame would issue

from his open mouth.[271] The clairvoyance may have been a genuine

mental experience, the thaumaturgy the type of fiction which the best of

_media_ may be tempted to employ; but both won belief from his fellows,

eager for any light in the darkness, and a laughing acceptance from his

master, glad of a novelty that might amuse his leisure. As a matter of

fact, Eunus's predictions sometimes came true. People forgot (as people

will) the instances of their falsification, but applauded them heartily

when they were fulfilled. Eunus was a good enough _medium_ to figure at

a fashionable _séance_. His latest profession was the promise of a

kingdom to himself; it was the Syrian goddess who had held out the

golden prospect. The promise he declared boldly to his master, knowing

perhaps the spirit in which the message would be received. Antigenes was

delighted with his prophet king. He showed him at his own table, and

took him to the banquets given by his friends. There Eunus would be

questioned about his kingdom, and each of the guests would bespeak his

patronage and clemency. His answers as to his future conduct were given

without reserve. He promised a policy of mercy, and the quaint

earnestness of the imposture would dissolve the company in laughter.

Portions of food were handed him from the board, and the donors would

ask that he should remember their kindness when he came into his

kingdom. These were requests which Eunus did not forget.

With such an influence in its centre, Enna seemed destined to be the

spring of the revolt. But there was another reason which rendered it a

likely theatre for a deed of daring. The broad plateau on which the town

was set was thronged with shepherds in the winter season,[272] and some

of the great graziers of Enna owned herds of these bold and lawless men.

Conspicuous amongst these graziers for his wealth, his luxury and his

cruelty was one Damophilus, the man who had formulated the theory that

the shepherd slave should keep himself by robbing others. Damophilus was

a Siceliot, but none of the Roman magnates of the island could have

shown a grander state than that which he maintained. His finely bred

horses, his four-wheeled carriages, his bodyguard of slaves, his

beautiful boys, his crowd of parasites, were known all over the broad

acres and huge pasture lands which he controlled. His town house and

villas displayed chased silverwork, rich carpets of purple dye and a

table of royal elegance. He surpassed Roman luxury in the lavishness of

his expense, Roman pride in his sense of complete independence of

circumstance, and Roman niggardliness and cruelty in his treatment of

his slaves. Satiety had begotten a chronic callousness and even savagery

that showed itself, not merely in the now familiar use of the

_ergastulum_ and the brand, but in arbitrary and cruel punishments which

were part of the programme of almost every day. His wife Megallis,

hardened by the same influences, was the torment of her maidens and of

such domestics as were more immediately under her control. The servants

of this household had one conviction in common--that nothing worse than

their present evils could possibly be their lot.

This is the conviction that inspires acts of frenzy; but the madness of

these slaves was of the orderly, systematic and therefore dangerous

type. They would not act without a divine sanction to their whispered

plans. Some of them approached Eunus and asked him if their enterprise

was permitted by the gods. The prophet first produced the usual

manifestations which attested his inspiration and then replied that the

gods assented, if the plan were taken in hand forthwith. Enna was the

destined place; it was the natural stronghold of the whole island; it

was foredoomed to be the capital of the new race that would rule over

Sicily.[273] Heartened by the belief that Heaven was aiding their

efforts, the leaders then set to work. They secretly released such of

Damophilus's household as were in bonds; they gathered others together,

and soon a band to the number of about four hundred were mustered in a

field in the neighbourhood of Enna. There in the early hours of the

night they offered a sacrifice and swore their solemn compact. They had

gathered everything which could serve as a weapon, and when midnight was

approaching they were ready for the first attempt. They marched swiftly

to the sleeping town and broke its stillness with their cries of

exhortation. Eunus was at their head, fire streaming from his mouth

against the darkness of the night. The streets and houses were

immediately the scene of a pitiless massacre. The maddened slaves did

not even spare the children at the breast; they dragged them from their

mothers' arms and dashed them upon the ground. The women were the

victims of unspeakable insult and outrage.[274] Every slave had his own

wrongs to avenge, for the original assailants had now been joined by a

large number of the domestics of the town. Each of these wreaked his own

peculiar vengeance and then turned to take his share in the

general massacre.

Meanwhile Eunus and his immediate following had learnt news of the

arch-enemy Damophilus, He was known to be staying in his pleasance near

to the city. Thence he and his wife were fetched with every mark of

ignominy, and the unhappy pair were dragged into the town with their

hands bound behind their backs. The masters of the city now mustered in

the theatre for an act of justice; but Damophilus did not lose his wits

even when he scanned that sea of hostile faces and accusing eyes. He

attempted a defence and was listened to in silence--nay, with approval,

for many of his auditors were visibly stirred by his words. But some

bolder spirits were tired of the show or fearful of its issue. Hermeias

and Zeuxis, two of his bitterest enemies, shouted out that he was an

Impostor[275] and rushed upon him. One of the two thrust a sword through

his side, the other smote his head off with an axe. It was then the

women's turn. Megallis's female slaves were given the power to treat her

as they would. They first tortured her, then led her up to a high place

and dashed her to the ground. Eunus avenged his private wrongs by the

death of his own masters, Antigenes and Python. The scene in the theatre

had perhaps revealed more than the desire for a systematised revenge. It

may have shown that there was some sense of justice, of order in the

savage multitude. And indeed vengeance was not wholly indiscriminate.

Eunus concealed and sent secretly away the men who had given him meat

from their tables.[276] Even the whole house of Damophilus did not

perish. There was a daughter, a strange product of such a home, a maiden

with a pure simplicity of character and a heart that melted at the sight

of pain. She had been used to soothe the anguish of those who had been

scourged by her parents and to relieve the necessities of such as were

put in bonds. Hence the abounding love felt for her by the slaves, the

pity that thrilled them when her home was doomed. An escort was selected

to convey her in safety to some relatives at Catana. Its most devoted

member was Hermeias,[277] perhaps the very man whose hands were stained

by her father's blood.

The next step in the progress of the revolt was to form a political and

military organisation that might command the respect of the countless

slaves who were soon to break their bonds in the other districts of

Sicily. Eunus was elected king. His name became Antiochus, his subjects

were "Syrians." [278] It was not the first time that a slave had assumed

the diadem; for was it not being worn for the moment by Diodotus

surnamed Tryphon, the guardian and reputed murderer of Alexander of

Syria?[279] The elevation of Eunus to the throne was due to no belief in

his courage or his generalship. But he was the prophet of the movement,

the cause of its inception, and his very name was considered to be of

good omen for the harmony of his subjects. When he had bound the diadem

on his brow and adopted regal state, he elevated the woman who had been

his companion (a Syrian and an Apamean like himself) to the rank of

queen. He formed a council of such of his followers as were thought to

possess wits above the average, and he set himself to make Enna the

adequate centre of a lengthy war. He put to death all his captives in

Enna who had no skill in fashioning arms; the residue he put in bonds

and set to the task of forging weapons.

Eunus was no warrior, but he had the regal gift of recognising merit.

The soul of the military movement which spread from Enna was

Achaeus,[280] a man pre-eminent both in counsel and in action,[281] one

who did not permit his reason to be mastered by passion and whose anger

was chiefly kindled by the foolish atrocities committed by some of his

followers.[282] Under such a leader the cause rapidly advanced. The

original four hundred had swelled in three days to six thousand; it soon

became ten thousand. As Achaeus advanced, the _ergastula_ were broken

open and each of these prison-houses furnished a new multitude of

recruits.[283] Soon a vast addition to the available forces was effected

by a movement in another part of the island. In the territory of

Agrigentum one Cleon a Cilician suddenly arose as a leader of his

fellows. He was sprung from the regions about Mount Taurus and had been

habituated from his youth to a life of brigandage. In Sicily he was

supposed to be a herdsman of horses. He was also a highwayman who

commanded the roads and was believed to have committed murders of varied

types. When he heard of the success of Eunus, he deemed that the moment

had come for raising a revolt on his own account. He gathered a band of

followers, overwhelmed the city of Agrigentum and ravaged the

surrounding territory.[284]

The terrified Siceliots, and perhaps some of the slaves themselves,

believed that this dual movement might ruin the servile cause. There

were daily expectations that the armies of Eunus and Cleon would meet in

conflict. But such hopes or fears were disappointed. Cleon put himself

absolutely under the authority of Eunus and performed the functions of a

general to a king. The junction of the forces occurred about thirty days

after the outbreak at Enna, and the Cilician brought five thousand men

to the royal standard. The full complement of the slaves when first they

joined battle with the Roman power amounted to twenty thousand men;

before the close of the war their army numbered over sixty

thousand.[285]

The Roman government exhibited its usual slowness in realising the

gravity of the situation; yet it may be excused for believing that it

had only to deal with local tumults such as those which had been so

easily suppressed in Italy. The force of eight thousand men which it put

into the field under the praetor Lucius Hypsaeus may have seemed more

than sufficient. Yet it was routed by the insurgent army, now numbering

twenty thousand men, and in the skirmishes which followed the balance of

success inclined to the rebels. The immediate progress of the struggle

cannot be traced in any detail, but there is a general record of the

storming of Roman camps and the flight of Roman generals.[286]

The theatre of the war was certainly extending at an alarming rate. The

rebels had first controlled the centre and some part of the South

Western portion of the island, the region between Enna and Agrigentum;

but now they had pushed their conquests up to the East, had reached the

coast and had gained possession of Catana and Tauromenium.[287] The

devastation of the conquered districts is said to have been more

terrible than that which followed on the Punic War.[288] But for this

the slaves were not wholly, perhaps not mainly, responsible. The rebel

armies, looking to a settlement in the future when they should enjoy the

fruit of their victories, left the villas standing, their furniture and

stores uninjured, and did no harm to the implements of husbandry. It was

the free peasantry of Sicily that now showed a savage resentment at the

inequality of fortune and of life which severed them from the great

landholders. Under pretext of the servile war[289] they sallied out, and

not only plundered the goods of the conquered, but even set fire to

their villas.

The words of Eunus when, at the beginning of the revolt, he claimed Enna

as the metropolis of the new nation, and the conduct of his followers in

sparing the grandeur and comfort which had fallen into their hands, are

sufficient proofs that the revolted slaves, in spite of their possession

of the seaports of Catana and Tauromenium, had no intention of escaping

from Sicily. Perhaps even if they had willed it, such a course might

have been impossible. They had no fleet of their own; the Cilician

pirates off the coast might have refused to accept such dangerous

passengers and to imperil their reputation as honest members of the

slave trade. And, if the fugitives crossed the sea, what homes had they

to which they could return? To their own cities they were dead, and the

long arm of Rome stretched over her protectorates in the East.[290]

It was therefore with a power which intended a permanent settlement in

Sicily, that the Roman government had to cope. Its sense of the gravity

of the situation was seen in the despatch of consular armies. The first

under Caius Fulvius Flaccus seems to have effected little.[291] The

second under Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the consul of the following year,

laid siege to Enna,[292] and captured a stronghold of the rebels. Eight

thousand of the slaves were slain by the sword, all who could be seized

were nailed to the cross.[293] The crowning victories, and the nominal

pacification of the island, remained for Piso's successor, Publius

Rupilius. He drove the rebels into Tauromenium and sat down before the

city until they were reduced to unspeakable straits by famine. The town

was at length yielded through treachery; Sarapion a Syrian betrayed the

acropolis, and the Roman commander found a multitude of starving men at

his mercy, He was pitiless in his use of victory. The captives were

first tortured, then taken up to a high place and dashed downwards to

the ground. The consul then moved on Enna. The rebels defended their

last stronghold with the utmost courage and persistence. Achaeus seems

to have already fallen, but the brave Cilician leaders still held out

with all the native valour of their race. Cleon made a sortie from the

town and fought heroically until he fell covered with wounds. Cleon's

brother Coma[294] was captured during the siege and brought before

Rupilius, who questioned him about the strength and the plans of the

remaining fugitives. He asked for a moment to collect his thoughts,

covered his head with his cloak, and died of suffocation, in the hands

of his guard and in sight of the general, before a compromising word had

passed his lips. King Eunus was not made of such stern stuff. When Enna,

impregnable in its natural strength, had been taken by treachery, he

fled with his bodyguard of a thousand men to still more precipitous

regions. His companions, knowing that it was impossible to escape their

fate (for Rupilius was already moving) fell on each others swords. But

Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he

was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court--his cook,

his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some

reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death.

He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died shortly afterwards

of disease.

It is said that by the date of the fall of Enna more than twenty

thousand slaves had perished.[295] Even without this slaughter, the

capture of their seaport and their armoury would have been sufficient to

break the back of the revolt.[296] It only remained to scour the country

with picked bands of soldiers for organised resistance to be shattered,

and even for the curse of brigandage to be rooted out for a while. Death

was no longer meted out indiscriminately to the rebels. Such of the

slave-owners as survived would probably have protested against wholesale

crucifixion, and the destruction of all of the fugitives would have

impaired the resources of Sicily. Thus many were spared the cross and

restored to their bonds.[297] The extent to which reorganisation was

needed before the province could resume its normal life, is shown by the

fact that the senate thought it worth while to give Sicily a new

provincial charter. Ten commissioners were sent to assist Rupilius in

the work, which henceforth bore the proconsul's name.[298] The work, as

we know it, was of a conservative character; but it is possible that no

complete charter had ever existed before, and the war may have revealed

defects in the arrangements of Sicily that had heretofore been

unsuspected.

A climax of the type of the servile war in Sicily was perhaps needed to

bring the social problem home to thinking men in Rome. Not that it by

any means sufficed for all who pondered on the public welfare or

laboured at the business of the State. The men who measured happiness by

wealth and empire might still have retained their unshaken confidence in

the Fortune of Rome. Had a Capys of this class arisen, he might have

given a thrilling picture of the immediate future of his city, dark but

grimly national in its emergence from trial to triumph. He might have

seen her conquering arms expanding to the Euphrates and the Rhine, and

undreamed sources of wealth pouring their streams into the treasury or

the coffers of the great. If there was blood in the picture, when had it

been absent from the annals of Rome? Even civil strife and a new Italian

war might be a hard but a necessary price to pay for a strong government

and a grand mission. If an antiquated constitution disappeared in the

course of this glorious expansion, where was the loss?

But there were men in Rome who measured human life by other canons: who

believed that the State existed for the individual at least as much as

the individual for the State: who, even when they were imperialists, saw

with terror the rotten foundations on which the empire rested, and with

indignation the miserable returns that had been made to the men who had

bought it with their blood. To them the brilliant present and the

glorious future were veiled by a screen that showed the ghastly spectres

of commercial imperialism. It showed luxury running riot amongst a

nobility already impoverished and ever more thievishly inclined, a

colossal capitalism clutching at the land and stretching out its

tentacles for every source of profitable trade, the middle class fleeing

from the country districts and ousted from their living in the towns,

and the fair island that was almost a part of their Italian home, its

garden and its granary, in the throes of a great slave war.