as the Carthaginian at the time of Hannibal. The governing classes
furnished only the officers; the subjects, plebeians and provincials,
formed the army. The general was, financially and militarily,
almost independent of the central government, and, whether
in fortune or misfortune, substantially left to himself
and to the resources of his province. Civic and even national spirit
had vanished from the army, and the esprit de corps was alone
left as a bond of inward union. The army had ceased to be
an instrument of the commonwealth; in a political point of view
it had no will of its own, but it was doubtless able to adopt
that of the master who wielded it; in a military point of view
it sank under the ordinary miserable leaders into a disorganized
useless rabble, but under a right general it attained a military
perfection which the burgess-army could never reach. The class
of officers especially had deeply degenerated. The higher ranks,
senators and equites, grew more and more unused to arms.
While formerly there had been a zealous competition for the posts
of staff officers, now every man of equestrian rank, who chose to serve,
was sure of a military tribuneship, and several of these posts
had even to be filled with men of humbler rank; and any man
of quality at all who still served sought at least to finish
his term of service in Sicily or some other province where
he was sure not to face the enemy. Officers of ordinary bravery
and efficiency were stared at as prodigies; as to Pompeius especially,
his contemporaries practised a military idolatry which in every
respect compromised them. The staff, as a rule, gave the signal
for desertion and for mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence
of the commanders proposals for the cashiering of officers of rank
were daily occurrences. We still possess the picture--
drawn not without irony by Caesar's own hand--of the state of matters
at his own headquarters when orders were given to march
against Ariovistus, of the cursing and weeping, and preparing
of testaments, and presenting even of requests for furlough.
In the soldiery not a trace of the better classes could any longer
be discovered. Legally the general obligation to bear arms
still subsisted; but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting,
took place in the most irregular manner; numerous persons
liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once levied
were retained thirty years and longer beneath the eagles.
The Roman burgess-cavalry now merely vegetated as a sort of mounted
noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite high-bred horses
only played a part in the festivals of the capital; the so-called
burgess-infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together
from the lowest ranks of the burgess-population; the subjects furnished
the cavalry and the light troops exclusively, and came to be
more and more extensively employed also in the infantry. The posts
of centurions in the legions, on which in the mode of warfare
of that time the efficiency of the divisions essentially depended,
and to which according to the national military constitution the soldier
served his way upward with the pike, were now not merely regularly
conferred according to favour, but were not unfrequently sold
to the highest bidder. In consequence of the bad financial management
of the government and the venality and fraud of the great majority
of the magistrates, the payment of the soldiers was extremely
defective and irregular.
The necessary consequence of this was, that in the ordinary
course of things the Roman armies pillaged the provincials,
mutinied against their officers, and ran off in presence of the enemy;
instances occurred where considerable armies, such as the Macedonian army
of Piso in 697,(33) were without any proper defeat utterly ruined,
simply by this misconduct. Capable leaders on the other hand,
such as Pompeius, Caesar, Gabinius, formed doubtless out of the existing
materials able and effective, and to some extent exemplary,
armies; but these armies belonged far more to their general
than to the commonwealth. The still more complete decay
of the Roman marine--which, moreover, had remained an object
of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized--
scarcely requires to be mentioned. Here too, on all sides,
everything that could be ruined at all had been reduced to ruin
under the oligarchic government.
Its Reorganization by Caesar
The reorganization of the Roman military system by Caesar
was substantially limited to the tightening and strengthening
of the reins of discipline, which had been relaxed under the negligent
and incapable supervision previously subsisting. The Roman military
system seemed to him neither to need, nor to be capable of,
radical reform; he accepted the elements of the army, just as Hannibal
had accepted them. The enactment of his municipal ordinance that,
in order to the holding of a municipal magistracy or sitting
in the municipal council before the thirtieth year, three years' service
on horseback--that is, as officer--or six years' service on foot
should be required, proves indeed that he wished to attract
the better classes to the army; but it proves with equal clearness
that amidst the ever-increasing prevalence of an unwarlike spirit
in the nation he himself held it no longer possible to associate
the holding of an honorary office with the fulfilment of the time
of service unconditionally as hitherto. This very circumstance
serves to explain why Caesar made no attempt to re-establish
the Roman burgess-cavalry. The levy was better arranged,
the time of service was regulated and abridged; otherwise matters
remained on the footing that the infantry of the line were raised
chiefly from the lower orders of the Roman burgesses, the cavalry
and the light infantry from the subjects. That nothing was done
for the reorganization of the fleet, is surprising.
Foreign Mercenaries
Adjutants of the Legion
It was an innovation--hazardous beyond doubt even in the view
of its author--to which the untrustworthy character of the cavalry
furnished by the subjects compelled him,(34) that Caesar
for the first time deviated from the old Roman system of never fighting
with mercenaries, and incorporated in the cavalry hired foreigners,
especially Germans. Another innovation was the appointment of adjutants
of the legion (-legati legionis-). Hitherto the military tribunes,
nominated partly by the burgesses, partly by the governor concerned,
had led the legions in such a way that six of them were placed
over each legion, and the command alternated among these;
a single commandant of the legion was appointed by the general
only as a temporary and extraordinary measure. In subsequent times
on the other hand those colonels or adjutants of legions appear
as a permanent and organic institution, and as nominated no longer
by the governor whom they obey, but by the supreme command in Rome;
both changes seem referable to Caesar's arrangements connected
with the Gabinian law.(35) The reason for the introduction
of this important intervening step in the military hierarchy
must be sought partly in the necessity for a more energetic
centralization of the command, partly in the felt want of capable
superior officers, partly and chiefly in the design of providing
a counterpoise to the governor by associating with him one or more
colonels nominated by the Imperator.
The New Commandership-in-Chief
The most essential change in the military system consisted
in the institution of a permanent military head in the person
of the Imperator, who, superseding the previous unmilitary
and in every respect incapable governing corporation, united
in his hands the whole control of the army, and thus converted it
from a direction which for the most part was merely nominal
into a real and energetic supreme command. We are not properly informed
as to the position which this supreme command occupied towards
the special commands hitherto omnipotent in their respective spheres.
Probably the analogy of the relation subsisting between the praetor
and the consul or the consul and the dictator served generally
as a basis, so that, while the governor in his own right retained
the supreme military authority in his province, the Imperator
was entitled at any moment to take it away from him and assume it
for himself or his delegates, and, while the authority of the governor
was confined to the province, that of the Imperator, like the regal
and the earlier consular authority, extended over the whole empire.
Moreover it is extremely probable that now the nomination
of the officers, both the military tribunes and the centurions,
so far as it had hitherto belonged to the governor,(36) as well as
the nomination of the new adjutants of the legion, passed directly
into the hands of the Imperator; and in like manner even now
the arrangement of the levies, the bestowal of leave of absence,
and the more important criminal cases, may have been submitted
to the judgment of the commander-in-chief. With this limitation
of the powers of the governors and with the regulated control
of the Imperator, there was no great room to apprehend
in future either that the armies might be utterly disorganized
or that they might be converted into retainers personally devoted
to their respective officers.
Caesar's Military Plans
Defence of the Frontier
But, however decidedly and urgently the circumstances pointed
to military monarchy, and however distinctly Caesar took the supreme
command exclusively for himself, he was nevertheless not at all
inclined to establish his authority by means of, and on, the army.
No doubt he deemed a standing army necessary for his state,
but only because from its geographical position it required
a comprehensive regulation of the frontiers and permanent frontier
garrisons. Partly at earlier periods, partly during the recent
civil war, he had worked at the tranquillizing of Spain,
and had established strong positions for the defence of the frontier
in Africa along the great desert, and in the north-west of the empire
along the line of the Rhine. He occupied himself with similar plans
for the regions on the Euphrates and on the Danube. Above all
he designed an expedition against the Parthians, to avenge the day
of Carrhae; he had destined three years for this war, and was resolved
to settle accounts with these dangerous enemies once for all
and not less cautiously than thoroughly. In like manner
he had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae,
who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube,(37)
and of protecting Italy in the north-east by border-districts
similar to those which he had created for it in Gaul. On the other hand
there is no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander
a career of victory extending indefinitely far; it is said indeed
that he had intended to march from Parthia to the Caspian
and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores
to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as
the Northern Ocean--which according to the notions of that time was not
so very distant from the Mediterranean--and to return home through Gaul;
but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence
of these fabulous projects. In the case of a state which, like the Roman
state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult
to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough
to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their
military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders
far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition
of Alexander. Judging both from Caesar's conduct in Britain
and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs
of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable that Caesar
with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire,
but to preserve it, and that his schemes of conquest restricted
themselves to a settlement of the frontier--measured, it is true,
by his own great scale--which should secure the line of the Euphrates,
and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary
of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible
the line of the Danube.
Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism
But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not
to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander
and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest
his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally
to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate
it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil
commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of a military state,
those old and far-famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved
just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps
with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated
in newly-founded urban communities. The soldiers presented
by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not,
like those of Sulla, settled together--as it were militarily--
in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy,
were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the peninsula;
it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land
that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers
of Caesar could not be avoided. Caesar sought to solve
the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army
within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former
arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service,
and not a service strictly constant, that is, uninterrupted
by any discharge; partly by the already-mentioned shortening of the term
of service, which occasioned a speedier change in the personal
composition of the army; partly by the regular settlement
of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists;
partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy
and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life
of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points,
where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone,
in his place--to the frontier stations, that he might ward off
the extraneous foe.
Absence of Corps of Guards
The true criterion also of the military state--the development of,
and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards--
is not to be met with in the case of Caesar. Although as respects
the army on active service the institution of a special bodyguard
for the general had been already long in existence,(38) in Caesar's
system this fell completely into the background; his praetorian
cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly
officers or non-military attendants, and never to have been
in the proper sense a select corps, consequently never an object
of jealousy to the troops of the line. While Caesar even as general
practically dropped the bodyguard, he still, less as king tolerated
a guard round his person. Although constantly beset by lurking
assassins and well aware of it, he yet rejected the proposal
of the senate to institute a select guard; dismissed,
as soon as things grew in some measure quiet, the Spanish escort
which he had made use of at first in the capital; and contented himself
with the retinue of lictors sanctioned by traditional usage
for the Roman supreme magistrates.
Impracticableness of Ideal
However much of the idea of his party and of his youth--
to found a Periclean government in Rome not by virtue of the sword,
but by virtue of the confidence of the nation--Caesar had been obliged
to abandon in the struggle with realities, he retained even now
the fundamental idea--of not founding a military monarchy--
with an energy to which history scarcely supplies a parallel.
Certainly this too was an impracticable ideal--it was the sole illusion,
in regard to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind
was more powerful than its clear judgment. A government, such as Caesar
had in view, was not merely of necessity in its nature highly personal,
and so liable to perish with the death of its author just as
the kindred creations of Pericles and Cromwell with the death
of their founders; but, amidst the deeply disorganized state
of the nation, it was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome
would succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven predecessors
had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of law and justice,
and as little probable that he would succeed in incorporating
the standing army--after it had during the last civil war
learned its power and unlearned its reverence--once more
as a subservient element in civil society. To any one who calmly
considered to what extent reverence for the law had disappeared
from the lowest as from the highest ranks of society, the former hope
must have seemed almost a dream; and, if with the Marian reform
of the military system the soldier generally had ceased
to be a citizen,(39) the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field
of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support
which the army now lent to the law. Even the great democrat
could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers
which he had unchained; thousands of swords still at his signal
flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready
upon that signal to return to the sheath. Fate is mightier than genius.
Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth,
and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred;
he overthrew the regime of aristocrats and bankers in the state,
only to put a military regime in their place, and the commonwealth
continued as before to be tyrannized and worked for profit
by a privileged minority. And yet it is a privilege of the highest
natures thus creatively to err. The brilliant attempts of great men
to realize the ideal, though they do not reach their aim,
form the best treasure of the nations. It was owing to the work
of Caesar that the Roman military state did not become a police-state
till after the lapse of several centuries, and that the Roman Imperators,
however little they otherwise resembled the great founder
of their sovereignty, yet employed the soldier in the main
not against the citizen but against the public foe, and esteemed
both nation and army too highly to set the latter as constable
over the former.
Financial Administration
The regulation of financial matters occasioned comparatively
little difficulty in consequence of the solid foundations
which the immense magnitude of the empire and the exclusion
of the system of credit supplied. If the state had hitherto found itself
in constant financial embarrassment, the fault was far from chargeable
on the inadequacy of the state revenues; on the contrary these had
of late years immensely increased. To the earlier aggregate income,
which is estimated at 200,000,000 sesterces (2,000,000 pounds),
there were added 85,000,000 sesterces (850,000 pounds)
by the erection of the provinces of Bithynia-Pontus and Syria;
which increase, along with the other newly opened up or augmented
sources of income, especially from the constantly increasing produce
of the taxes on luxuries, far outweighed the loss of the Campanian rents.
Besides, immense sums had been brought from extraordinary sources
into the exchequer through Lucullus, Metellus, Pompeius, Cato,
and others. The cause of the financial embarrassments rather la
partly in the increase of the ordinary and extraordinary expenditure,
partly in the disorder of management. Under the former head,
the distribution of corn to the multitude of the capital claimed
almost exorbitant sums; through the extension given to it
by Cato in 691(40) the yearly expenditure for that purpose amounted
to 30,000,000 sesterces (300,000 pounds) and after the abolition
in 696 of the compensation hitherto paid, it swallowed up even
a fifth of the state revenues. The military budget also had risen,
since the garrisons of Cilicia, Syria, and Gaul had been added
to those of Spain, Macedonia, and the other provinces.
Among the extraordinary items of expenditure must be named
in the first place the great cost of fitting out fleets, on which,
for example, five years after the great razzia of 687, 34,000,000
sesterces (340,000 pounds) were expended at once. Add to this
the very considerable sums which were consumed in wars and warlike
preparations; such as 18,000,000 sesterces (180,000 pounds)
paid at once to Piso merely for the outfit of the Macedonian army,
24,000,000 sesterces (240,000 pounds) even annually to Pompeius
for the maintenance and pay of the Spanish army, and similar sums
to Caesar for the Gallic legions. But considerable as were
these demands made on the Roman exchequer, it would still have
beenable probably to meet them, had not its administration once
so exemplary been affected by the universal laxity and dishonesty
of this age; the payments of the treasury were often suspended
merely because of the neglect to call up its outstanding claims.
The magistrates placed over it, two of the quaestors--young men
annually changed--contented themselves at the best with inaction;
among the official staff of clerks and others, formerly so justly held
in high esteem for its integrity, the worst abuses now prevailed,
more especially since such posts had come to be bought and sold.
Financial Reforms of Caesar
Leasing of the Direct Taxes Abolished
As soon however as the threads of Roman state-finance were concentrated
no longer as hitherto in the senate, but in the cabinet of Caesar,
new life, stricter order, and more compact connection at once pervaded
all the wheels and springs of that great machine. the two institutions,
which originated with Gaius Gracchus and ate like a gangrene
into the Roman financial system--the leasing of the direct taxes,
and the distributions of grain--were partly abolished,
partly remodelled. Caesar wished not, like his predecessor,
to hold the nobility in check by the banker-aristocracy
and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver
the commonwealth from all parasites whether of high or lower rank;
and therefore he went in these two important questions
not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla. The leasing system
was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which
it was very old and--under the maxim of Roman financial administration,
which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying
of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable--
absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes
were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African
and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, as contributions
in kind to be directly supplied to the state, or converted,
like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed money payments,
in which case the collection of the several sums payable
was entrusted to the tax-districts themselves.
Reform of the Distribution of Corn
The corn-distributions in the capital had hitherto been looked on
as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled and,
because it ruled, had to be fed by its subjects. This infamous
principle was set aside by Caesar; but it could not be overlooked
that a multitude of wholly destitute burgesses had been protected
solely by these largesses of food from starvation. In this aspect
Caesar retained them. While according to the Sempronian ordinance
renewed by Cato every Roman burgess settled in Rome had legally
a claim to bread-corn without payment, this list of recipients,
which had at last risen to the number of 320,000, was reduced
by the exclusion of all individuals having means or otherwise
provided for to 150,000, and this number was fixed once for all
as the maximum number of recipients of free corn; at the same time
an annual revision of the list was ordered, so that the places vacated
by removal or death might be again filled up with the most needful
among the applicants. By this conversion of the political privilege
into a provision for the poor, a principle remarkable in a moral
as well as in a historical point of view came for the first time
into living operation. Civil society but slowly and gradually
works its way to a perception of the interdependence of interests;
in earlier antiquity the state doubtless protected its members
from the public enemy and the murderer, but it was not bound to protect
the totally helpless fellow-citizen from the worse enemy, want,
by affording the needful means of subsistence. It was the Attic
civilization which first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian
legislation, the principle that it is the duty of the community
to provide for its invalids and indeed for its poor generally
and it was Caesar that first developed what in the restricted compass
of Attic life had remained a municipal matter into an organic
institution of state, and transformed an arrangement,
which was a burden and a disgrace for the commonwealth,
into the first of those institutions--in modern times as countless
as they are beneficial--where the infinite depth of human compassion
contends with the infinite depth of human misery.
The Budget of Income
In addition to these fundamental reforms a thorough revision
of the income and expenditure took place. The ordinary sources
of income were everywhere regulated and fixed. Exemption from taxation
was conferred on not a few communities and even on whole districts,
whether indirectly by the bestowal of the Roman or Latin franchise,
or directly by special privilege; it was obtained e. g. by all
the Sicilian communities(41) in the former, by the town of Ilion
in the latter way. Still greater was the number of those whose
proportion of tribute was lowered; the communities in Further Spain,
for instance, already after Caesar's governorship had on his suggestion
a reduction of tribute granted to them by the senate, and now
the most oppressed province of Asia had not only the levying of its
direct taxes facilitated, but also a third of them wholly remitted.
The newly-added taxes, such as those of the communities subdued
in Illyria and above all of the Gallic communities--which latter
together paid annually 40,000,000 sesterces (400,000 pounds)--
were fixed throughout on a low scale. It is true on the other hand
that various towns such as Little Leptis in Africa, Sulci in Sardinia,
and several Spanish communities, had their tribute raised by way
of penalty for their conduct during the last war. The very lucrative
Italian harbour-tolls abolished in the recent times of anarchy
were re-established all the more readily, that this tax fell
essentially on luxuries imported from the east. To these new
or revived sources of ordinary income were added the sums
which accrued by extraordinary means, especially in consequence
of the civil war, to the victor--the booty collected in Gaul;
the stock of cash in the capital; the treasures taken from the Italian
and Spanish temples; the sums raised in the shape of forced loan,
compulsory present, or fine, from the dependent communities
and dynasts, and the pecuniary penalties imposed in a similar way
by judicial sentence, or simply by sending an order to pay,
on individual wealthy Romans; and above all things the proceeds
from the estate of defeated opponents. How productive these sources
of income were, we may learn from the fact, that the fine
of the African capitalists who sat in the opposition-senate alone
amounted to 100,000,000 sesterces (1,000,000 pounds) and the price paid
by the purchasers of the property of Pompeius to 70,000,000 sesterces
(700,000 pounds). This course was necessary, because the power
of the beaten nobility rested in great measure on their colossal wealth
and could only be effectually broken by imposing on them the defrayment
of the costs of the war. But the odium of the confiscations
was in some measure mitigated by the fact that Caesar directed
their proceeds solely to the benefit of the state,
and, instead of overlooking after the manner of Sulla any act of fraud
in his favourites, exacted the purchase-money with rigour
even from his most faithful adherents, e. g. from Marcus Antonius.
The Budget of Expenditure
In the expenditure a diminution was in the first place obtained
by the considerable restriction of the largesses of grain.
The distribution of corn to the poor of the capital which was retained,
as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar
for the Roman baths, were at least in great part charged once for all
on the contributions in kind from Sardinia and especially from Africa,
and were thereby wholly or for the most part kept separate
from the exchequer. On the other hand the regular expenditure
for the military system was increased partly by the augmentation
of the standing army, partly by the raising of the pay of the legionary
from 480 sesterces (5 pounds) to 900 (9 pounds) annually.
Both steps were in fact indispensable. There was a total want
of any real defence for the frontiers, and an indispensable preliminary
to it was a considerable increase of the army. The doubling
of the pay was doubtless employed by Caesar to attach his soldiers
firmly to him,(42) but was not introduced as a permanent innovation
on that account. The former pay of 1 1/3 sesterces (3 1/4 pence)
per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had
an altogether different value from that which it had in the Rome
of Caesar's day; it could only have been retained down to a period
when the common day-labourer in the capital earned by the labour
of his hands daily on an average 3 sesterces (7 1/2 pence),
because in those times the soldier entered the army not for the sake
of the pay, but chiefly for the sake of the--in great measure illicit--
perquisites of military service. The first condition in order
to a serious reform in the military system, and to the getting rid
of those irregular gains of the soldier which formed a burden
mostly on the provincials, was an increase suitable to the times
in the regular pay; and the fixing of it at 2 1/2 sesterces (6 1/2 pence)
may be regarded as an equitable step, while the great burden
thereby imposed on the treasury was a necessary, and in its consequences
a beneficial, course.
Of the amount of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar
had to undertake or voluntarily undertook, it is difficult
to form a conception. The wars themselves consumed enormous sums;
and sums perhaps not less were required to fulfil the promises
which Caesar had been obliged to make during the civil war.
It was a bad example and one unhappily not lost sight of in the sequel,
that every common soldier received for his participation in the civil war
20,000 sesterces (200 pounds), every burgess of the multitude
in the capital for his non-participation in it 300 sesterces
(3 pounds) as an addition to his aliment; but Caesar, after having once
under the pressure of circumstances pledged his word, was too much
of a king to abate from it. Besides, Caesar answered innumerable
demands of honourable liberality, and put into circulation
immense sums for building more especially, which had been
shamefully neglected during the financial distress of the last times
of the republic--the cost of his buildings executed partly during
the Gallic campaigns, partly afterwards, in the capital was reckoned
at 160,000,000 sesterces (1,600,000 pounds). The general result
of the financial administration of Caesar is expressed in the fact that,
while by sagacious and energetic reforms and by a right combination
of economy and liberality he amply and fully met all equitable claims,
nevertheless already in March 710 there lay in the public treasury
700,000,000 and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together
8,000,000 pounds)--a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash
in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic.(43)
Social Condition of the Nation
But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnishing
the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution,
an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult as it was,
was not the most difficult part of Caesar's work. If the Italian nation
was really to be regenerated, it required a reorganization
which should transform all parts of the great empire--Rome, Italy,
and the provinces. Let us endeavour here also to delineate
the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new
and more tolerable time.
The Capital
The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared
from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case,
that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp
more quickly than any subordinate community. There the upper classes
speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find
their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city;
there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating
population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass
of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt,
and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble. All this preeminently
applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house
merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted
into imperial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly
of burgesses of the empire; and when smaller self-governing tribal
or other associations were not tolerated within the capital:
all proper communal life ceased for Rome. From the whole compass
of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation,
for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime,
or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.
The Populace There
These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature
of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave
were associated with them. There has never perhaps existed a great city
so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation
on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other,
rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there.
The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics
of antiquity in general--the slave-system--were more conspicuous
in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses
of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families
or of wealthy upstarts. Nowhere were the nations of the three
continents mingled as in the slave-population of the capital--
Syrians, Phrygians and other half-Hellenes with Libyans and Moors,
Getae, and Iberians with the daily-increasing influx of Celts
and Germans. The demoralization inseparable from the absence
of freedom, and the terrible inconsistency between formal
and moral right, were far more glaringly apparent in the case
of the half or wholly cultivated--as it were genteel--city-slave than,
in that of the rural serf who tilled the field in chains
like the fettered ox. Still worse than the masses of slaves were those
who had been de jure or simply de facto released from slavery--
a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves
and not yet fully burgesses, economically and even legally dependent
on their master and yet with the pretensions of free men;
and these freedmen made their way above all towards the capital,
where gain of various sorts was to be had and the retail traffic
as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands.
Their influence on the elections is expressly attested;
and that they took a leading part in the street riots, is very evident
from the ordinary signal by means of which these were virtually
proclaimed by the demagogues--the closing of the shops
and places of sale.
Relations of the Oligarchy to the Populace
Moreover, the government not only did nothing to counteract
this corruption of the population of the capital, but even encouraged it
for the benefit of their selfish policy. The judicious rule of law,
which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offence
from dwelling in the capita, was not carried into effect
by the negligent police. The police-supervision--so urgently required--
of association on the part of the rabble was at first neglected,
and afterwards(44) even declared punishable as a restriction inconsistent
with the freedom of the people. The popular festivals had been allowed
so to increase that the seven ordinary ones alone--the Roman,
the Plebeian, those of the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo,
of Flora(45) and of Victoria--lasted altogether sixty-two days;
and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous other
extraordinary amusements. The duty of providing grain at low prices--
which was unavoidably necessary with such a proletariate living wholly
from hand to mouth--was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity,
and the fluctuations in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous
and incalculable description.(46) Lastly, the distribution of grain
formed an official invitation to the whole burgess-proletariate
who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up
their abode in the capital.
Anarchy of the Capital
The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded. The system
of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, the worship of Isis
and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root
in this state of things. People were constantly in prospect
of a dearth, and not unfrequently in utter famine. Nowhere was a man
less secure of his life than in the capital; murder professionally
prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it;
the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary
to his assassination; no one ventured into the country
in the vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue.
Its outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization,
and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government.
Nothing was done for the regulation of the stream of the Tiber;
excepting that they caused the only bridge, with which they still
made shift,(47) to be constructed of stone at least as far as
the Tiber-island. As little was anything done toward the levelling
of the city of the Seven Hills, except where perhaps the accumulation
of rubbish had effected some improvement. The streets ascended
and descended narrow and angular, and were wretchedly kept; the footpaths
were small and ill paved. The ordinary houses were built of bricks
negligently and to a giddy height, mostly by speculative builders
on account of the small proprietors; by which means the former
became vastly rich, and the latter were reduced to beggary.
Like isolated islands amidst this sea of wretched buildings
were seen the splendid palaces of the rich, which curtailed the space
for the smaller houses just as their owners curtailed the burgess-
rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars
and Greek statues the decaying temples, with their images of the gods
still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure.
A police-supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building
was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all
about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses
which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the state-
theologians their report and advice regarding the true import
of such signs and wonders. If we try to conceive to ourselves
a London with the slave-population of New Orleans, with the police
of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome,
and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris in 1848,
we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory,
the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their
sulky letters deplore.
Caesar's Treatment of Matters in the Capital
Caesar did not deplore, but he sought to help so far as help
was possible. Rome remained, of course, what it was--
a cosmopolitan city. Not only would the attempt to give to it
once more a specifically Italian character have been impracticable;
it would not have suited Caesar's plan. Just as Alexander found
for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic,
Jewish, Egyptian, and above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria,
so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic universal empire,
situated at the meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be
not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital
of many nations. For this reason Caesar tolerated the worship
of the newly-settled Egyptian gods alongside of Father Jovis, and granted
even to the Jews the free exercise of their strangely foreign ritual
in the very capital of the empire. However offensive was the motley
mixture of the parasitic--especially the Helleno-Oriental--
population in Rome, he nowhere opposed its extension; it is significant,
that at his popular festivals for the capital he caused dramas
to be performed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other
languages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish.
Diminution of the Proletariate
But, if Caesar accepted with the full consciousness of what he was doing
the fundamental character of the capital such as he found it,
he yet worked energetically at the improvement of the lamentable
and disgraceful state of things prevailing there. Unhappily
the primary evils were the least capable of being eradicated.
Caesar could not abolish slavery with its train of national calamities;
it must remain an open question, whether he would in the course of time
have attempted at least to limit the slave-population in the capital,
as he undertook to do so in another field. As little could Caesar
conjure into existence a free industry in the capital;
yet the great building-operations remedied in some measure
the want of means of support there, and opened up to the proletariate
a source of small but honourable gain. On the other hand Caesar
laboured energetically to diminish the mass of the free proletariate.
The constant influx of persons brought by the corn-largesses
to Rome was, if not wholly stopped,(48) at least very materially
restricted by the conversion of these largesses into a provision
for the poor limited to a fixed number. The ranks of the existing
proletariate were thinned on the one hand by the tribunals
which were instructed to proceed with unrelenting rigour
against the rabble, on the other hand by a comprehensive transmarine
colonization; of the 80,000 colonists whom Caesar sent beyond the seas
in the few years of his government, a very great portion
must have been taken from the lower ranks of the population
of the capital; most of the Corinthian settlers indeed were freedmen.
When in deviation from the previous order of things, which precluded
the freedmen from any urban honorary office, Caesar opened to them
in his colonies the doors of the senate-house, this was doubtless done
in order to gain those of them who were in better positions to favour
the cause of emigration. This emigration, however, must have been
more than a mere temporary arrangement; Caesar, convinced like every
other man of sense that the only true remedy for the misery
of the proletariate consisted in a well-regulated system of colonization,
and placed by the condition of the empire in a position to realize it
to an almost unlimited extent, must have had the design
of permanently continuing the process, and so opening up a constant means
of abating an evil which was constantly reproducing itself.
Measures were further taken to set bounds to the serious fluctuations
in the price of the most important means of subsistence in the markets
of the capital. The newly-organized and liberally-administered
finances of the state furnished the means for this purpose,
and two newly-nominated magistrates, the corn-aediles(49) were charged
with the special supervision of the contractors and of the market
of the capital.
The Club System Restricted
The club system was checked, more effectually than was possible
through prohibitive laws, by the change of the constitution;
inasmuch as with the republic and the republican elections and tribunals
the corruption and violence of the electioneering and judicial
-collegia---and generally the political Saturnalia of the -canaille---
came to an end of themselves. Moreover the combinations called
into existence by the Clodian law were broken up, and the whole system
of association was placed under the superintendence of the governing
authorities. With the exception of the ancient guilds and associations,
of the religious unions of the Jews, and of other specially excepted
categories, for which a simple intimation to the senate seems
to have sufficed, the permission to constitute a permanent society
with fixed times of assembling and standing deposits was made dependent
on a concession to be granted by the senate, and, as a rule,
doubtless only after the consent of the monarch had been obtained.
Street Police
To this was added a stricter administration of criminal justice
and an energetic police. The laws, especially as regards the crime
of violence, were rendered more stringent; and the irrational enactment
of the republican law, that the convicted criminal was entitled
to withdraw himself from a part of the penalty which he had incurred
by self-banishment, was with reason set aside. The detailed regulations,
which Caesar issued regarding the police of the capital,
are in great part still preserved; and all who choose may convince
themselves that the Imperator did not disdain to insist
on the house-proprietors putting the streets into repair
and paving the footpath in its whole breadth with hewn stones,
and to issue appropriate enactments regarding the carrying of litters
and the driving of waggons, which from the nature of the streets
were only allowed to move freely through the capital in the evening
and by night. The supervision of the local police remained as hitherto
chiefly with the four aediles, who were instructed now at least,
if not earlier, each to superintend a distinctly marked-off
police district within the capital.
Buildings of the Capital
Lastly, building in the capital, and the provision
connected therewith of institutions for the public benefit,
received from Caesar--who combined in himself the love for building
of a Roman and of an organizer--a sudden stimulus, which not merely
put to shame the mismanagement of the recent anarchic times,
but also left all that the Roman aristocracy had done in their best days
as far behind as the genius of Caesar surpassed the honest endeavours
of the Marcii and Aemilii. It was not merely by the extent
of the buildings in themselves and the magnitude of the sums
expended on them that Caesar excelled his predecessors;
but a genuine statesmanly perception of what was for the public good
distinguishes what Caesar did for the public institutions of Rome
from all similar services. He did not build, like his successors,
temples and other splendid structures, but he relieved the marketplace
of Rome--in which the burgess-assemblies, the seats of the chief courts,
the exchange, and the daily business-traffic as well as
the daily idleness, still were crowded together--at least
from the assemblies and the courts by constructing for the former
a new -comitium-, the Saepta Julia in the Campus Martius,
and for the latter a separate place of judicature, the Forum Julium
between the Capitol and Palatine. Of a kindred spirit is the arrangement
originating with him, by which there were supplied to the baths
of the capital annually three million pounds of oil, mostly from Africa,
and they were thereby enabled to furnish to the bathers gratuitously
the oil required for the anointing of the body--a measure
of cleanliness and sanitary policy which, according
to the ancient dietetics based substantially on bathing and anointing,
was highly judicious.
But these noble arrangements were only the first steps towards
a complete remodelling of Rome. Projects were already formed
for a new senate-house, for a new magnificent bazaar, for a theatre
to rival that of Pompeius, for a public Latin and Greek library
after the model of that recently destroyed at Alexandria--
the first institution of the sort in Rome--lastly for a temple of Mars,
which was to surpass all that had hitherto existed in riches and glory.
Still more brilliant was the idea, first, of constructing a canal
through the Pomptine marshes and drawing off their waters
to Tarracina, and secondly, of altering the lower course of the Tiber
and of leading it from the present Ponte Molle, not through
between the Campus Vaticanus and the Campus Martius, but rather
round the Campus Vaticanus and the Janiculum to Ostia,
where the miserable roadstead was to give place to an adequate
artificial harbour. By this gigantic plan on the one hand
the most dangerous enemy of the capital, the malaria of the neighbourhood
would be banished; on the other hand the extremely limited facilities
for building in the capital would be at once enlarged by substituting
the Campus Vaticanus thereby transferred to the left bank of the Tiber
for the Campus Martius, and allowing the latter spacious field
to be applied for public and private edifices; while the capital
would at the same time obtain a safe seaport, the want of which
was so painfully felt. It seemed as if the Imperator would remove
mountains and rivers, and venture to contend with nature herself.
Much however as the city of Rome gained by the new order of things
in commodiousness and magnificence, its political supremacy was,
as we have already said, lost to it irrecoverably through
that very change. The idea that the Roman state should coincide
with the city of Rome had indeed in the course of time become
more and more unnatural and preposterous; but the maxim had been
so intimately blended with the essence of the Roman republic,
that it could not perish before the republic itself. It was only
in the new state of Caesar that it was, with the exception perhaps
of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the community
of the capital was placed legally on a level with all other
municipalities; indeed Caesar--here as everywhere endeavouring not merely
to regulate the thing, but also to call it officially by the right name--
issued his Italian municipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely,
at once for the capital and for the other urban communities. We may add
that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character
as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities
of the imperial period. The republican Rome was a den of robbers,
but it was at the same time the state; the Rome of the monarchy,
although it began to embellish itself with all the glories
of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble,
was yet nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection
with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.
Italy
Italian Agriculture
While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid
of palpable evils by police ordinances on the greatest scale,
it was a far more difficult task to remedy the deep disorganization
of Italian economics. Its radical misfortunes were those which
we previously noticed in detail--the disappearance of the agricultural,
and the unnatural increase of the mercantile, population--
with which an endless train of other evils was associated.
The reader will not fail to remember what was the state
of Italian agriculture. In spite of the most earnest attempts
to check the annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry
was scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy
during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception
perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi. As to
the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible
between the Catonian system formerly set forth(50) and that
described to us by Varro, except that the latter shows the traces
for better and for worse of the progress of city-life on a great scale
in Rome. "Formerly," says Varro, "the barn on the estate was larger
than the manor-house; now it is wont to be the reverse." In the domains
of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Tarracina and Baiae--
where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped--
there now rose in barren splendour the villas of the Roman nobles,
some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their
appurtenances of garden-grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds
for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes,
nurseries of snails and slugs, game-preserves for keeping hares,
rabbits, stags, roes, and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes
and peacocks were kept. But the luxury of a great city enriches also
many an industrious hand, and supports more poor than philanthropy
with its expenditure of alms. Those aviaries and fish-ponds
of the grandees were of course, as a rule, a very costly indulgence.
But this system was carried to such an extent and prosecuted
with so much keenness, that e. g. the stock of a pigeon-house
was valued at 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds); a methodical system
of fattening had sprung up, and the manure got from the aviaries
became of importance in agriculture; a single bird-dealer
was able to furnish at once 5000 fieldfares--for they knew how
to rear these also--at three denarii (2 shillings) each, and a single
possessor of a fish-pond 2000 -muraenae-; and the fishes left behind
by Lucius Lucullus brought 40,000 sesterces (400 pounds).
As may readily be conceived, under such circumstances any one
who followed this occupation industriously and intelligently
might obtain very large profits with a comparatively small outlay
of capital. A small bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-
garden not larger than an acre in the neighbourhood of Falerii
honey to an average annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces
(100 pounds). The rivalry of the growers of fruit was carried so far,
that in elegant villas the fruit-chamber lined with marble
was not unfrequently fitted up at the same time as a dining-room,
and sometimes fine fruit acquired by purchase was exhibited there
as of home growth. At this period the cherry from Asia Minor
and other foreign fruit-trees were first planted in the gardens of Italy.
The vegetable gardens, the beds of roses and violets in Latium
and Campania, yielded rich produce, and the "market for dainties"
(-forum cupedinis-) by the side of the Via Sacra, where fruits,
honey, and chaplets were wont to be exposed for sale,
played an important part in the life of the capital. Generally
the management of estates, worked as they were on the planter-system,
had reached in an economic point of view a height scarcely
to be surpassed. The valley of Rieti, the region round the Fucine lake,
the districts on the Liris and Volturnus, and indeed Central Italy
in general, were as respects husbandry in the most flourishing condition;
even certain branches of industry, which were suitable accompaniments
of the management of an estate by means of slaves, were taken up
by intelligent landlords, and, where the circumstances were favourable,
inns, weaving factories, and especially brickworks were constructed
on the estate. The Italian producers of wine and oil in particular
not only supplied the Italian markets, but carried on also
in both articles a considerable business of transmarine exportation.
A homely professional treatise of this period compares Italy
to a great fruit-garden; and the pictures which a contemporary poet
gives of his beautiful native land, where the well-watered meadow,
the luxuriant corn-field, the pleasant vine-covered hill are fringed
by the dark line of the olive-trees--where the "ornament" of the land,
smiling in varied charms, cherishes the loveliest gardens
in its bosom and is itself wreathed round by food-producing trees--
these descriptions, evidently faithful pictures of the landscape
daily presented to the eye of the poet, transplant us
into the most flourishing districts of Tuscany and Terra di Lavoro.
The pastoral husbandry, it is true, which for reasons formerly explained
was always spreading farther especially in the south and south-east
of Italy, was in every respect a retrograde movement; but it too
participated to a certain degree in the general progress of agriculture;
much was done for the improvement of the breeds, e. g. asses for breeding
brought 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds), 100,000 (1000 pounds),
and even 400,000 (4000 pounds). The solid Italian husbandry
obtained at this period, when the general development of intelligence
and abundance of capital rendered it fruitful, far more brilliant results
than ever the old system of small cultivators could have given;
and was carried even already beyond the bounds of Italy,
for the Italian agriculturist turned to account large tracts
in the provinces by rearing cattle and even cultivating corn.
Money-Dealing
In order to show what dimensions money-dealing assumed by the side
of this estate-husbandry unnaturally prospering over the ruin
of the small farmers, how the Italian merchants vying with the Jews
poured themselves into all the provinces and client-states
of the empire, and how all capital ultimately flowed to Rome,
it will be sufficient, after what has been already said, to point
to the single fact that in the money-market of the capital the regular
rate of interest at this time was six per cent, and consequently
money there was cheaper by a half than it was on an average
elsewhere in antiquity.
Social Disproportion
In consequence of this economic system based both in its agrarian
and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation,
there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution
of wealth. The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth
composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere
so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic;
and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state--
that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves
is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour
of his hands is necessarily vulgar--been recognized with so terrible
a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public
and private intercourse.(51) A real middle class in our sense
of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist
in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were
a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed
of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated
or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere
of their activity and to keep aloof from public life. Of the men
of business--a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other
upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing
the man of quality--there were not very many who showed so much judgment.
A model of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned
in the accounts of this period. He acquired an immense fortune
partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy
and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout
Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at the same time
he continued to be throughout the simple man of business,
did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office
or even into monetary transactions with the state,
and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal
and burdensome luxury of his time--his table, for instance,
was maintained at a daily cost of 100 sesterces (1 pound)--
contented himself with an easy existence appropriating to itself
the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse
with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments
of literature and art.
More numerous and more solid were the Italian landholders
of the old type. Contemporary literature preserves in the description
of Sextus Roscius, who was murdered amidst the proscriptions of 673,
the picture of such a rural nobleman (-pater familias rusticanus-);
his wealth, estimated at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds),
is mainly invested in his thirteen landed estates; he attends
to the management of it in person systematically and with enthusiasm;
he comes seldom or never to the capital, and, when he does appear there,
by his clownish manners he contrasts not less with the polished senator
than the innumerable hosts of his uncouth rural slaves
with the elegant train of domestic slaves in the capital.
Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan
culture and the mercantile class at home everywhere and nowhere,
these landlords and the "country towns" to which they essentially
gave tone (-municipia rusticana-) preserved as well the discipline
and manners as the pure and noble language of their fathers.
The order of landlords was regarded as the flower of the nation;
the speculator, who has made his fortune and wishes to appear among
the notables of the land, buys an estate and seeks, if not to become
himself the squire, at any rate to rear his son with that view.
We meet the traces of this class of landlords, wherever a national
movement appears in politics, and wherever literature puts forth
any fresh growth; from it the patriotic opposition to the new monarchy
drew its best strength; to it belonged Varro, Lucretius, Catullus;
and nowhere perhaps does the comparative freshness of this landlord-life
come more characteristically to light than in the graceful Arpinate
introduction to the second book of Cicero's treatise De Legibus--
a green oasis amidst the fearful desert of that equally empty
and voluminous writer.
The Poor
But the cultivated class of merchants and the vigorous order
of landlords were far overgrown by the two classes that gave
tone to society--the mass of beggars, and the world of quality proper.
We have no statistical figures to indicate precisely the relative
proportions of poverty and riches for this epoch; yet we may
here perhaps again recall the expression which a Roman statesman
employed some fifty years before(52)--that the number of families
of firmly-established riches among the Roman burgesses did not
amount to 2000. The burgess-body had since then become different;
but clear indications attest that the disproportion between
poor and rich had remained at least as great. The increasing
impoverishment of the multitude shows itself only too plainly
in their crowding to the corn-largesses and to enlistment in the army;
the corresponding increase of riches is attested expressly
by an author of this generation, when, speaking of the circumstances
of the Marian period, he describes an estate of 2,000,000 sesterces
(20,000 pounds) as "riches according to the circumstances
of that day"; and the statements which we find as to the property
of individuals lead to the same conclusion. The very rich
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus promised to twenty thousand soldiers
four -iugera- of land each, out of his own property; the estate
of Pompeius amounted to 70,000,000 sesterces (700,000 pounds);
that of Aesopus the actor to 20,000,000 (200,000 pounds); Marcus Crassus,
the richest of the rich, possessed at the outset of his career,
7,000,000 (70,000 pounds), at its close, after lavishing enormous
sums on the people, 170,000,000 sesterces (1,700,000 pounds).
The effect of such poverty and such riches was on both sides
an economic and moral disorganization outwardly different, but at bottom
of the same character. If the common man was saved from starvation
only by support from the resources of the state, it was the necessary
consequence of this mendicant misery--although it also reciprocally
appears as a cause of it--that he addicted himself to the beggar's
laziness and to the beggar's good cheer. The Roman plebeian
was fonder of gazing in the theatre than of working; the taverns
and brothels were so frequented, that the demagogues found their
special account in gaining the possessors of such establishments
over to their interests. The gladiatorial games--which revealed,
at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization
of the ancient world--had become so flourishing that a lucrative business
was done in the sale of the programmes for them; and it was at this time
that the horrible innovation was adopted by which the decision
as to the life or death of the vanquished became dependent,
not on the law of duel or on the pleasure of the victor,
but onthe caprice of the onlooking public, and according to its signal
the victor either spared or transfixed his prostrate antagonist.
The trade of fighting had so risen or freedom had so fallen in value,
that the intrepidity and the emulation, which were lacking
on the battle fields of this age, were universal in the armies
of the arena and, where the law of the duel required, every gladiator
allowed himself to be stabbed mutely and without shrinking; that in fact
free men not unfrequently sold themselves to the contractors for board
and wages as gladiatorial slaves. The plebeians of the fifth century
had also suffered want and famine, but they had not sold their freedom;
and still less would the jurisconsults of that period have lent
themselves to pronounce the equally immoral and illegal contract
of such a gladiatorial slave "to let himself be chained, scourged,
burnt or killed without opposition, if the laws of the institution
should so require" by means of unbecoming juristic subtleties
as a contract lawful and actionable.
Extravagance
In the world of quality such things did not occur, but at bottom
it was hardly different, and least of all better. In doing nothing
the aristocrat boldly competed with the proletarian; if the latter
lounged on the pavement, the former lay in bed till far on
in the day. Extravagance prevailed here as unbounded as it was
devoid of taste. It was lavished on politics and on the theatre,
of course to the corruption of both; the consular office was purchased
at an incredible price--in the summer of 700 the first voting-division
alone was paid 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds)--
and all the pleasure of the man of culture in the drama was spoilt
by the insane luxury of decoration. Rents in Rome appear to have been
on an average four times as high as in the country-towns;
a house there was once sold for 15,000,000 sesterces (150,000 pounds).
The house of Marcus Lepidus (consul in 676) which was at the time
of the death of Sulla the finest in Rome, did not rank a generation
afterwards even as the hundredth on the list of Roman palaces.
We have already mentioned the extravagance practised in the matter
of country-houses; we find that 4,000,000 sesterces (40,000 pounds)
were paid for such a house, which was valued chiefly for its fishpond;
and the thoroughly fashionable grandee now needed at least two villas--
one in the Sabine or Alban mountains near the capital, and a second
in the vicinity of the Campanian baths--and in addition if possible
a garden immediately outside of the gates of Rome. Still more irrational
than these villa-palaces were the palatial sepulchres, several of which
still existing at the present day attest what a lofty pile of masonry
the rich Roman needed in order that he might die as became his rank.
Fanciers of horses and dogs too were not wanting; 24,000 sesterces
(240 pounds) was no uncommon price for a showy horse. They indulged
in furniture of fine wood--a table of African cypress-wood
cost 1,000,000 sesterces (10,000 pounds); in dresses of purple stuffs
or transparent gauzes accompanied by an elegant adjustment of their folds
before the mirror--the orator Hortensius is said to have brought
an action of damages against a colleague because he ruffled his dress
in a crowd; in precious stones and pearls, which first at this period
took the place of the far more beautiful and more artistic
ornaments of gold--it was already utter barbarism, when at the triumph
of Pompeius over Mithradates the image of the victor appeared
wrought wholly of pearls, and when the sofas and the shelves
in the dining-hall were silver-mounted and even the kitchen-utensils
were made of silver. In a similar spirit the collectors of this period
took out the artistic medallions from the old silver cups,
to set them anew in vessels of gold. Nor was there any lack
of luxury also in travelling. "When the governor travelled,"
Cicero tells us as to one of the Sicilian governors, "which of course
he did not in winter, but only at the beginning of spring--
not the spring of the calendar but the beginning of the season of roses--
he had himself conveyed, as was the custom with the kings of Bithynia,
in a litter with eight bearers, sitting on a cushion of Maltese gauze
stuffed with rose-leaves, with one garland on his head, and a second
twined round his neck, applying to his nose a little smelling bag
of fine linen, with minute meshes, filled with roses; and thus
he had himself carried even to his bed chamber."
Table Luxury
But no sort of luxury flourished so much as the coarsest of all--
the luxury of the table. The whole villa arrangements and the whole
villa life had ultimate reference to dining; not only had they
different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served
in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary,
or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which,
when the bespoken "Orpheus" appeared in theatrical costume
and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated.
Such was the care bestowed on decoration; but amidst all this
the reality was by no means forgotten. Not only was the cook
a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted
as the instructor of his cooks. The roast had been long ago
thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters; now the Italian
river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian
delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar.
Now even at the popular festivals there were distributed,
besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine--Sicilian,
Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient
even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once; in the cellar
of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of 10,000 jars
(at 33 quarts) of foreign wine. It was no wonder that the Italian
wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines
from the Greek islands. No naturalist could ransack land and sea
more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day
ransacked them for new culinary dainties.(53) The circumstance
of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences
of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise.
Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated
that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving
as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory
and practice of vice.
Debt
It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture,
so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans
were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves
to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more
exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours
his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these
mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices,
that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate
melt away in a short time, and even those, who only for credit's sake
joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited
and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined. The canvass
for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin
for houses of distinction; and nearly the same description applies
to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant,
doubtless, but expensive pursuits. The princely wealth of that period
is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities;
Caesar owed about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces
(250,000 pounds); Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four
6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), fourteen years afterwards
40,000,000 (400,000 pounds); Curio owed 60,000,000 (600,000 pounds);
Milo 70,000,000 (700,000 pounds). That those extravagant habits
of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit,
is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once
suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing
of the different competitors for the consulship. Insolvency,
instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors
or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters
once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged
by the debtor as much as possible; instead of selling his property
and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow
and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became
the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo,
in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent
of the sums for which they ranked. Amidst this startlingly rapid
transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling,
nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give
and refuse credit. The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned
almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times
of the social crises of the fifth century; the nominal landowners
held virtually by sufferance of their creditors; the debtors were either
in servile subjection to their creditors, so that the humbler of them
appeared like freedmen in the creditor's train and those of higher rank
spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord;
or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself,
and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid
of them by conspiracy and civil war. On these relations was based
the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections--whose motto
was "a clear sheet"-of Cinna(54) and still more definitely of Catilina,
of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those
who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated
the Hellenic world.(55) That amidst so rotten an economic condition
every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful
confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need
hardly mention that the usual phenomena--the disappearance of capital,
the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies,
and an almost universal insolvency--made their appearance now
during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social
and Mithradatic wars.(56)
Immortality
Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality
and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks
of society. To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace
and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime:
for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom;
the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had
for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person
as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries
had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath
is called "the plaster for debts." Men had forgotten what honesty was;
a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man,
but as a personal foe. The criminal statistics of all times
and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture
of crimes--so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural--which the trial
of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most
respected families of an Italian country town.
Friendship
But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus
constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply,
so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface,
overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship.
All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality
it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning
for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally
by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only
to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted
partly in groups, partly en masse at the close--a distinction
which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy,
is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy
was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy;
"friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had
neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper
and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter
is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner,
the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested
of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials;
even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions
to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability
he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as
in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy
of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished
from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business
and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes
which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality
came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship,"
which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits
brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.
Women
An equally characteristic feature in the brilliant decay of this period
was the emancipation of women. In an economic point of view
the women had long since made themselves independent;(57)
in the present epoch we even meet with solicitors acting specially
for women, who officiously lend their aid to solitary rich ladies
in the management of their property and their lawsuits,
make an impression on them by their knowledge of business and law,
and thereby procure for themselves ampler perquisites and legacies
than other loungers on the exchange. But it was not merely
from the economic guardianship of father or husband that women
felt themselves emancipated. Love-intrigues of all sorts were constantly
in progress. The ballet-dancers (-mimae-) were quite a match
for those of the present day in the variety of their pursuits
and the skill with which they followed them out; their primadonnas,
Cytheris and the like, pollute even the pages of history.
But their, as it were, licensed trade was very materially injured
by the free art of the ladies of aristocratic circles. Liaisons
in the first houses had become so frequent, that only a scandal
altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk;
a judicial interference seemed now almost ridiculous.
An unparalleled scandal, such as Publius Clodius produced in 693
at the women's festival in the house of the Pontifex Maximus,
although a thousand times worse than the occurrences which fifty years
before had led to a series of capital sentences,(58) passed
almost without investigation and wholly without punishment.
The watering-place season--in April, when political business
was suspended and the world of quality congregated in Baiae and Puteoli--
derived its chief charm from the relations licit and illicit which,
along with music and song and elegant breakfasts on board or on shore,
enlivened the gondola voyages. There the ladies held absolute sway;
but they were by no means content with this domain which rightfully
belonged to them; they also acted as politicians, appeared in party
conferences, and took part with their money and their intrigues
in the wild coterie-doings of the time. Any one who beheld
these female statesmen performing on the stage of Scipio
and Cato and saw at their side the young fop--as with smooth chin,
delicate voice, and mincing gait, with headdress and neckerchiefs,
frilled robe, and women's sandals he copied the loose courtesan--
might well have a horror of the unnatural world, in which the sexes
seemed as though they wished to change parts. What ideas as to divorce
prevailed in the circles of the aristocracy may be discerned
in the conduct of their best and most moral hero Marcus Cato,
who did not hesitate to separate from his wife at the request
of a friend desirous to marry her, and as little scrupled
on the death of this friend to marry the same wife a second time.
Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially
among the upper classes. While among these marriage had for long
been regarded as a burden which people took upon them at the best
in the public interest,(59) we now encounter even in Cato and those
who shared Cato's sentiments the maxim to which Polybius
a century before traced the decay of Hellas,(60) that it is the duty
of a citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget
too many children. Where were the times, when the designation
"children-producer" (-proletarius-) had been a term of honour
for the Roman?
Depopulation of Italy
In consequence of such a social condition the Latin stock in Italy
underwent an alarming diminution, and its fair provinces were overspread
partly by parasitic immigrants, partly by sheer desolation.
A considerable portion of the population of Italy flocked
to foreign lands. Already the aggregate amount of talent
and of working power, which the supply of Italian magistrates
and Italian garrisons for the whole domain of the Mediterranean
demanded, transcended the resources of the peninsula, especially
as the elements thus sent abroad were in great part lost for ever
to the nation. For the more that the Roman community grew
into an empire embracing many nations, the more the governing aristocracy
lost the habit of looking on Italy as their exclusive home;
while of the men levied or enlisted for service a considerable portion
perished in the many wars, especially in the bloody civil war,
and another portion became wholly estranged from their native country
by the long period of service, which sometimes lasted for a generation.
In like manner with the public service, speculation kept
a portion of the landholders and almost the whole body
of merchants all their lives or at any rate for a long time
out of the country, and the demoralising itinerant life of trading
in particular estranged the latter altogether from civic existence
in the mother country and from the various conditions of family life.
As a compensation for these, Italy obtained on the one hand
the proletariate of slaves and freedmen, on the other hand
the craftsmen and traders flocking thither from Asia Minor, Syria,
and Egypt, who flourished chiefly in the capital and still more
in the seaport towns of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.(61)
In the largest and most important part of Italy however,
even such a substitution of impure elements for pure;
but the population was visibly on the decline. Especially
was this true of the pastoral districts such as Apulia, the chosen land
of cattle-breeding, which is called by contemporaries the most deserted
part of Italy, and of the region around Rome, where the Campagna
was annually becoming more desolate under the constant reciprocal
action of the retrograde agriculture and the increasing malaria.
Labici, Gabii, Bovillae, once cheerful little country towns,
were so decayed, that it was difficult to find representatives of them
for the ceremony of the Latin festival. Tusculum, although still
one of the most esteemed communities of Latium, consisted almost solely
of some genteel families who lived in the capital but retained
their native Tusculan franchise, and was far inferior in the number
of burgesses entitled to vote even to small communities
in the interior of Italy. The stock of men capable of arms
in this district, on which Rome's ability to defend herself
had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people read
with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of the annals--
sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they stood--
respecting the Aequian and Volscian wars. Matters were not so bad
everywhere, especially in the other portions of Central Italy
and in Campania; nevertheless, as Varro complains, "the once populous
cities of Italy," in general "stood desolate."
Italy under the Oligarchy
It is a dreadful picture--this picture of Italy under the rule
of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften
the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world
of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast
was felt on both sides--the giddier the height to which riches rose,
the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned--the more frequently,
amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard,
were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again
from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds
were externally divided, the more completely they coincided
in the like annihilation of family life--which is yet the germ
and core of all nationality--in the like laziness and luxury,
the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence,
the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal
demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property.
Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy,
and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly
with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar
to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state
has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world
in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common
sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch
resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly
the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion
the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade
and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a--
hypocritically whitewashed--moral and political corruption of the nation.
All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation
and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior
to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man,
be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until
the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again
similar fruits to reap.
Reforms of Caesar