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THE LAW OF
CIVILIZATION AND DECAY
An Essay on History
BY
BROOKS ADAMS
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1897
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1896,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped September, 1896. Reprinted February,
September, 1897.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co. Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
In offering to the public a second edition of _The Law of Civilization
and Decay_ I take the opportunity to say emphatically that such value
as the essay may have lies in its freedom from any preconceived bias.
All theories contained in the book, whether religious or economic, are
the effect, and not the cause, of the way in which the facts unfolded
themselves. I have been passive.
The value of history lies not in the multitude of facts collected, but
in their relation to each other, and in this respect an author can have
no larger responsibility than any other scientific observer. If the
sequence of events seems to indicate the existence of a law governing
social development, such a law may be suggested, but to approve or
disapprove of it would be as futile as to discuss the moral bearings of
gravitation.
Some years ago, when writing a sketch of the history of the colony of
Massachusetts Bay, I became deeply interested in certain religious
aspects of the Reformation, which seemed hardly reconcilable with
the theories usually advanced to explain them. After the book had
been published, I continued reading theology, and, step by step,
was led back, through the schoolmen and the crusades, to the revival
of the pilgrimage to Palestine, which followed upon the conversion
of the Huns. As ferocious pagans, the Huns had long closed the road
to Constantinople; but the change which swept over Europe after the
year 1000, when Saint Stephen was crowned, was unmistakable; the West
received an impulsion from the East. I thus became convinced that
religious enthusiasm, which, by stimulating the pilgrimage, restored
communication between the Bosphorus and the Rhine, was the power which
produced the accelerated movement culminating in modern centralization.
Meanwhile I thought I had discovered not only that faith, during
the eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries, spoke by
preference through architecture, but also that in France and Syria,
at least, a precise relation existed between the ecclesiastical and
military systems of building, and that the one could not be understood
without the other. In the commercial cities of the same epoch, on
the contrary, the religious idea assumed no definite form of artistic
expression, for the Gothic never flourished in Venice, Genoa, Pisa,
or Florence, nor did any pure school of architecture thrive in the
mercantile atmosphere. Furthermore, commerce from the outset seemed
antagonistic to the imagination, for a universal decay of architecture
set in throughout Europe after the great commercial expansion of the
thirteenth century; and the inference I drew from these facts was,
that the economic instinct must have chosen some other medium by
which to express itself. My observations led me to suppose that the
coinage might be such a medium, and I ultimately concluded that, if the
development of a mercantile community is to be understood, it must be
approached through its money.
Another conviction forced upon my mind, by the examination of long
periods of history, was the exceedingly small part played by conscious
thought in moulding the fate of men. At the moment of action the human
being almost invariably obeys an instinct, like an animal; only after
action has ceased does he reflect.
These controlling instincts are involuntary, and divide men into
species distinct enough to cause opposite effects under identical
conditions. For instance, impelled by fear, one type will rush upon an
enemy, and another will run away; while the love of women or of money
has stamped certain races as sharply as ferocity or cunning has stamped
the lion or the fox.
Like other personal characteristics, the peculiarities of the mind
are apparently strongly hereditary, and, if these instincts be
transmitted from generation to generation, it is plain that, as the
external world changes, those who receive this heritage must rise or
fall in the social scale, according as their nervous system is well
or ill adapted to the conditions to which they are born. Nothing is
commoner, for example, than to find families who have been famous
in one century sinking into obscurity in the next, not because the
children have degenerated, but because a certain field of activity
which afforded the ancestor full scope, has been closed against his
offspring. Particularly has this been true in revolutionary epochs such
as the Reformation; and families so situated have very generally become
extinct.
When this stage had been reached, the Reformation began to wear a new
aspect, but several years elapsed before I saw whither my studies led.
Only very slowly did a sequence of cause and effect take shape in my
mind, a sequence wholly unexpected in character, whose growth resembled
the arrangement of the fragments of an inscription, which cannot be
read until the stones have been set in a determined order. Finally, as
the historical work neared an end, I perceived that the intellectual
phenomena under examination fell into a series which seemed to
correspond, somewhat closely, with the laws which are supposed to
regulate the movements of the material universe.
Theories can be tested only by applying them to facts, and the facts
relating to successive phases of human thought, whether conscious or
unconscious, constitute history; therefore, if intellectual phenomena
are evolved in a regular sequence, history, like matter, must be
governed by law. In support of such a conjecture, I venture to offer
an hypothesis by which to classify a few of the more interesting
intellectual phases through which human society must, apparently,
pass, in its oscillations between barbarism and civilization, or, what
amounts to the same thing, in its movement from a condition of physical
dispersion to one of concentration. The accompanying volume contains
the evidence which suggested the hypothesis, although, it seems hardly
necessary to add, an essay of this size on so vast a subject can only
be regarded as a suggestion.
The theory proposed is based upon the accepted scientific principle
that the law of force and energy is of universal application in nature,
and that animal life is one of the outlets through which solar energy
is dissipated.
Starting from this fundamental proposition, the first deduction is,
that, as human societies are forms of animal life, these societies must
differ among themselves in energy, in proportion as nature has endowed
them, more or less abundantly, with energetic material.
Thought is one of the manifestations of human energy, and among the
earlier and simpler phases of thought, two stand conspicuous--Fear and
Greed. Fear, which, by stimulating the imagination, creates a belief
in an invisible world, and ultimately develops a priesthood; and Greed,
which dissipates energy in war and trade.
Probably the velocity of the social movement of any community
is proportionate to its energy and mass, and its centralization
is proportionate to its velocity; therefore, as human movement
is accelerated, societies centralize. In the earlier stages of
concentration, fear appears to be the channel through which energy
finds the readiest outlet; accordingly, in primitive and scattered
communities, the imagination is vivid, and the mental types produced
are religious, military, artistic. As consolidation advances, fear
yields to greed, and the economic organism tends to supersede the
emotional and martial.
Whenever a race is so richly endowed with the energetic material that
it does not expend all its energy in the daily struggle for life,
the surplus may be stored in the shape of wealth; and this stock of
stored energy may be transferred from community to community, either by
conquest, or by superiority in economic competition.
However large may be the store of energy accumulated by conquest, a
race must, sooner or later, reach the limit of its martial energy,
when it must enter on the phase of economic competition. But, as the
economic organism radically differs from the emotional and martial,
the effect of economic competition has been, perhaps invariably, to
dissipate the energy amassed by war.
When surplus energy has accumulated in such bulk as to preponderate
over productive energy, it becomes the controlling social force.
Thenceforward, capital is autocratic, and energy vents itself through
those organisms best fitted to give expression to the power of capital.
In this last stage of consolidation, the economic, and, perhaps, the
scientific intellect is propagated, while the imagination fades,
and the emotional, the martial, and the artistic types of manhood
decay. When a social velocity has been attained at which the waste of
energetic material is so great that the martial and imaginative stocks
fail to reproduce themselves, intensifying competition appears to
generate two extreme economic types,--the usurer in his most formidable
aspect, and the peasant whose nervous system is best adapted to thrive
on scanty nutriment. At length a point must be reached when pressure
can go no further, and then, perhaps, one of two results may follow: A
stationary period may supervene, which may last until ended by war, by
exhaustion, or by both combined, as seems to have been the case with
the Eastern Empire; or, as in the Western, disintegration may set in,
the civilized population may perish, and a reversion may take place to
a primitive form of organism.
The evidence, however, seems to point to the conclusion that, when
a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of
economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been
exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the
power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain
inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of
barbarian blood.
BROOKS ADAMS.
Quincy, August 20, 1896.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
The Romans 1
CHAPTER II
The Middle Age 48
CHAPTER III
The First Crusade 79
CHAPTER IV
The Second Crusade 103
CHAPTER V
The Fall of Constantinople 124
CHAPTER VI
The Suppression of the Temple 152
CHAPTER VII
The English Reformation 186
CHAPTER VIII
The Suppression of the Convents 220
CHAPTER IX
The Eviction of the Yeomen 243
CHAPTER X
Spain and India 286
CHAPTER XI
Modern Centralization 313
CHAPTER XII
Conclusion 352
Index 385
CIVILIZATION AND DECAY
CHAPTER I
THE ROMANS
When the Romans first emerged from the mist of fable, they were already
a race of land-owners who held their property in severalty, and, as the
right of alienation was established, the formation of relatively large
estates had begun. The ordinary family, however, held, perhaps, twelve
acres, and, as the land was arable, and the staple grain, it supported
a dense rural population. The husbandmen who tilled this land were
of the martial type, and, probably for that reason, though supremely
gifted as administrators and soldiers, were ill-fitted to endure
the strain of the unrestricted economic competition of a centralized
society. Consequently their conquests had hardly consolidated before
decay set in, a decay whose causes may be traced back until they are
lost in the dawn of history.
The Latins had little economic versatility; they lacked the instinct
of the Greeks for commerce, or of the Syrians and Hindoos for
manufactures. They were essentially land-owners, and, when endowed with
the acquisitive faculty, usurers. The latter early developed into a
distinct species, at once more subtle of intellect and more tenacious
of life than the farmers, and on the disparity between these two types
of men, the fate of all subsequent civilization has hinged. At a remote
antiquity Roman society divided into creditors and debtors; as it
consolidated, the power of the former increased, thus intensifying the
pressure on the weak, until, when centralization culminated under the
Cæsars, reproduction slackened, disintegration set in, and, after some
centuries of decline, the Middle Ages began.
The history of the monarchy must probably always remain a matter of
conjecture, but it seems reasonably certain that the expulsion of
the Tarquins was the victory of an hereditary monied caste, which
succeeded in concentrating the functions of government in a practically
self-perpetuating body drawn from their own order.[1] Niebuhr has
demonstrated, in one of his most striking chapters, that usury was
originally a patrician privilege; and some of the fiercest struggles
of the early republic seem to have been decided against the oligarchy
by wealthy plebeians, who were determined to break down the monopoly
in money-lending. At all events, the conditions of life evidently
favoured the growth of the instinct which causes its possessor to suck
the vitality of the economically weak; and Macaulay, in the preface to
_Virginia_, has given so vivid a picture of the dominant class, that
one passage at least should be read entire.
“The ruling class in Rome was a monied class; and it made and
administered the laws with a view solely to its own interest.
Thus the relation between lender and borrower was mixed up
with the relation between sovereign and subject. The great
men held a large portion of the community in dependence by
means of advances at enormous usury. The law of debt, framed
by creditors, and for the protection of creditors, was the
most horrible that has ever been known among men. The liberty,
and even the life, of the insolvent were at the mercy of
the patrician money-lenders. Children often became slaves in
consequence of the misfortunes of their parents. The debtor was
imprisoned, not in a public gaol under the care of impartial
public functionaries, but in a private workhouse belonging
to the creditor. Frightful stories were told respecting these
dungeons.”
But a prisoner is an expense, and the patricians wanted money. Their
problem was to exhaust the productive power of the debtor before
selling him, and, as slaves have less energy than freemen, a system was
devised by which the plebeians were left on their land, and stimulated
to labour by the hope of redeeming themselves and their children from
servitude. Niebuhr has explained at length how this was done.
For money weighed out a person could pledge himself, his family, and
all that belonged to him. In this condition he became _nexus_, and
remained in possession of his property until breach of condition,
when the creditor could proceed by summary process.[2] Such a contract
satisfied the requirements, and the usurers had then only to invent a
judgment for debt severe enough to force the debtor to become _nexus_
when the alternative was offered him. This presented no difficulty.
When an action was begun the defendant had thirty days of grace, and
was then arrested and brought before the prætor. If he could neither
pay nor find security, he was fettered with irons weighing not less
than fifteen pounds, and taken home by the plaintiff. There he was
allowed a pound of corn a day, and given sixty days in which to settle.
If he failed, he was taken again before the prætor and sentenced.
Under this sentence he might be sold or executed, and, where there
were several plaintiffs, they might cut him up among them, nor was
any individual liable for carving more than his share.[3] A man so
sentenced involved his descendants, and therefore, rather than submit,
the whole debtor class became _nexi_, toiling for ever to fulfil
contracts quite beyond their strength, and year by year sinking more
hopelessly into debt, for ordinarily the accumulated interest soon
raised “the principal to many times its original amount.”[4] Niebuhr
has thus summed up the economic situation:--
“To understand the condition of the plebeian debtors, let the
reader, if he is a man of business, imagine that the whole of
the private debts in a given country were turned into bills
at a year, bearing interest at twenty per cent or more; and
that the non-payment of them were followed on summary process
by imprisonment, and by the transfer of the debtor’s whole
property to his creditor, even though it exceeded what he
owed. We do not need those further circumstances, which are
incompatible with our manners, the personal slavery of the
debtor and of his children, to form an estimate of the fearful
condition of the unfortunate plebeians.”[5]
Thus the usurer first exhausted a family and then sold it; and as his
class fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as
ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable
when contracted. One characteristic device was the power given the
magistrate of fining for “offences against order.” Under this head “men
might include any accusations they pleased, and by the higher grades
in the scale of fines they might accomplish whatever they desired.”[6]
As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had
the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.
Nevertheless, the stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which
down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy.
Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment,
to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business
was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country
was subjected to a levy unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich
speculators. “Ubi publicanus est,” said Livy, quoting the Senate, “ibi
aut jus publicum vanum, aut libertatem sociis nullam esse.”[7]
Usury was the cream of this business. The custom was to lend to
defaulters at such high rates of interest that insolvency was nearly
certain to follow; then the people were taken on execution, and
slave-hunting formed a regular branch of the revenue service. In
Cicero’s time whole provinces of Asia Minor were stripped bare by the
traffic. The effect upon the Latin society of the fifth century before
Christ was singularly destructive. Italy was filled with petty states
in chronic war, the troops were an unpaid militia, which comprised the
whole able-bodied population, and though the farms yielded enough for
the family in good times, when the males were with the legions labour
was certain to be lacking. The campaigns therefore brought want, and
with want came the inability to pay taxes.
As late as the Tunic War, Regulus asked to be relieved from his
command, because the death of his slave and the incompetence of his
hired man left his fields uncared for; and if a general and a consul
were pinched by absence, the case of the men in the ranks can be
imagined. Even in victory the lot of the common soldier was hard
enough, for, beside the chance of wounds and disease, there was the
certain loss of time, for which no compensation was made. Though the
plebeians formed the whole infantry of the line, they received no part
of the conquered lands, and even the plunder was taken from them, and
appropriated by the patricians to their private use.[8] In defeat, the
open country was overrun, the cattle were driven off or slaughtered,
the fruit trees cut down, the crops laid waste, and the houses burned.
In speaking of the Gallic invasion, Niebuhr has pointed out that the
ravaging of the enemy, and the new taxes laid to rebuild the ruined
public works, led to general insolvency.[9]
Such conditions fostered the rapid propagation of distinct types of
mind, and at a very early period Romans had been bred destitute of the
martial instinct, but more crafty and more tenacious of life than the
soldier. These were the men who conceived and enforced the usury laws,
and who held to personal pledges as the dearest privilege of their
order; nor does Livy attempt to disguise the fact “that every patrician
house was a gaol for debtors; and that in seasons of great distress,
after every sitting of the courts, herds of sentenced slaves were led
away in chains to the houses of the nobless.”[10]
Of this redoubtable type the Claudian family was a famous specimen,
and the picture which has been drawn by Macaulay of the great usurer,
Appius Claudius, the decemvir, is so brilliant that it cannot be
omitted.
“Appius Claudius Crassus ... was descended from a long line of
ancestors distinguished by their haughty demeanour, and by the
inflexibility with which they had withstood all the demands
of the plebeian order. While the political conduct and the
deportment of the Claudian nobles drew upon them the fiercest
public hatred, they were accused of wanting, if any credit
is due to the early history of Rome, a class of qualities
which, in a military commonwealth, is sufficient to cover a
multitude of offences. The chiefs of the family appear to have
been eloquent, versed in civil business, and learned after the
fashion of their age; but in war they were not distinguished
by skill or valour. Some of them, as if conscious where their
weakness lay, had, when filling the highest magistracies, taken
internal administration as their department of public business,
and left the military command to their colleagues. One of them
had been entrusted with an army, and had failed ignominiously.
None of them had been honoured with a triumph....
“His grandfather, called, like himself, Appius Claudius, had
left a name as much detested as that of Sextus Tarquinius. This
elder Appius had been consul more than seventy years before
the introduction of the Licinian Laws. By availing himself
of a singular crisis in public feeling, he had obtained the
consent of the commons to the abolition of the tribuneship, and
had been the chief of that Council of Ten to which the whole
direction of the State had been committed. In a few months
his administration had become universally odious. It had been
swept away by an irresistible outbreak of popular fury; and
its memory was still held in abhorrence by the whole city. The
immediate cause of the downfall of this execrable government
was said to have been an attempt made by Appius Claudius upon
the chastity of a beautiful young girl of humble birth. The
story ran that the Decemvir, unable to succeed by bribes and
solicitations, resorted to an outrageous act of tyranny. A vile
dependant of the Claudian house laid claim to the damsel as his
slave. The cause was brought before the tribunal of Appius.
The wicked magistrate, in defiance of the clearest proofs,
gave judgment for the claimant. But the girl’s father, a brave
soldier, saved her from servitude and dishonour by stabbing her
to the heart in the sight of the whole Forum. That blow was the
signal for a general explosion. Camp and city rose at once; the
Ten were pulled down; the tribuneship was re-established; and
Appius escaped the hands of the executioner only by a voluntary
death.”[11]
Virginia was slain in 449 B.C., just in the midst of the long
convulsion which began with the secession to the Mons Sacer, and ended
with the Licinian Laws. During this century and a quarter, usury
drained the Roman vitality low. Niebuhr was doubtless right in his
conjecture that the mutinous legions were filled with nexi to whom
the continuance of the existing status meant slavery, and Mommsen also
pointed out that the convulsions of the third and fourth centuries, in
which it seemed as though Roman society must disintegrate, were caused
by “the insolvency of the middle class of land-holders.”[12]
Had Italy been more tranquil, it is not inconceivable that the small
farmers might even then have sunk into the serfdom which awaited them
under the Empire, for in peace the patricians might have been able
to repress insurrection with their clients; but the accumulation of
capital had hardly begun, and several centuries were to elapse before
money was to take its ultimate form in a standing army. Meanwhile,
troops were needed almost every year to defend the city; and, as the
legions were a militia, they were the enemy and not the instrument of
wealth. Until the organization of a permanent paid police they were,
however, the highest expression of force, and, when opposed to them,
the monied oligarchy was helpless, as was proved by the secession to
the Mons Sacer. The storm gathered slowly. The rural population was
ground down under the usury laws, and in 495 B.C. the farmers refused
to respond to the levy. The consul Publius Servilius had to suspend
prosecutions for debt and to liberate debtors in prison; but at the
end of the campaign the promises he had made in the moment of danger
were repudiated by Appius Claudius, who rigorously enforced the usury
legislation, and who was, for the time, too strong to be opposed.
That year the men submitted, but the next the legions had again to be
embodied; they again returned victorious; their demands were again
rejected; and then, instead of disbanding, they marched in martial
array into the district of Crustumeria, and occupied the hill which
ever after was called the Sacred Mount.[13] Resistance was not even
attempted; and precisely the same surrender was repeated in 449. When
Virginius stabbed his daughter he fled to the camp, and his comrades
seized the standards and marched for Rome. The Senate yielded at once,
decreed the abolition of the Decemvirate, and the triumphant cohorts,
drawn up upon the Aventine, chose their tribunes.
Finally, in the last great struggle, when Camillus was made dictator
to coerce the people, he found himself impotent. The monied oligarchy
collapsed when confronted with an armed force; and Camillus, reduced
to act as mediator, vowed a temple to Concord, on the passage of
the Licinian Laws.[14] The Licinian Laws provided for a partial
liquidation, and also for an increase of the means of the debtor class
by redistribution of the public land. This land had been seized in war,
and had been monopolized by the patricians without any particular legal
right. Licinius obtained a statute by which back payments of interest
should be applied to extinguishing the principal of debts, and balances
then remaining due should be liquidated in three annual instalments.
He also limited the quantity of the public domain which could be held
by any individual, and directed that the residue which remained after
the reduction of all estates to that standard should be distributed in
five-acre lots.
Pyrrhus saw with a soldier’s eye that Rome’s strength did not lie in
her generals, who were frequently his inferiors, but in her farmers,
whom he could not crush by defeat, and this was the class which was
favoured by the Licinian Laws. They multiplied greatly when the usurers
capitulated, and, as Macaulay remarked, the effect of the reform
was “singularly happy and glorious.” It was indeed no less than the
conquest of Italy. Rome, “while the disabilities of the plebeians
continued ... was scarcely able to maintain her ground against the
Volscians and Hernicans. When those disabilities were removed, she
rapidly became more than a match for Carthage and Macedon.”[15]
But nature’s very bounty to the Roman husbandman and soldier proved
his ruin. Patient of suffering, enduring of fatigue, wise in council,
fierce in war, he routed all who opposed him; and yet the vigorous mind
and the robust frame which made him victorious in battle, were his
weakness when at peace. He needed costly nutriment, and when brought
into free economic competition with Africans and Asiatics, he starved.
Such competition resulted directly from foreign conquests, and came
rapidly when Italy had consolidated, and the Italians began to extend
their power over other races. Nearly five centuries intervened between
the foundation of the city and the defeat of Pyrrhus, but within little
more than two hundred years from the victory of Beneventum, Rome was
mistress of the world.
Indeed, beyond the peninsula, there was not much, save Carthage, to
stop the march of the legions. After the death of Alexander, in 323
B.C., Greece fell into decline, and by 200, when Rome attacked Macedon,
she was in decrepitude. The population of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt
was not martial, and had never been able to cope in battle with the
western races; while Spain and Gaul, though inhabited by fierce and
hardy tribes, lacked cohesion, and could not withstand the onset of
organized and disciplined troops. Distance, therefore, rather than
hostile military force, fixed the limit of the ancient centralization,
for the Romans were not maritime, and consequently failed to absorb
India or discover America. Thus their relatively imperfect movement
made the most material difference between the ancient and modern
economic system.
By conquest the countries inhabited by races of a low vitality and
great tenacity of life were opened both for trade and slaving, and
their cheap labour exterminated the husbandmen of Italy. Particularly
after the annexation of Asia Minor this labour overran Sicily, and the
cultivation of the cereals by the natives became impossible when the
island had been parcelled out into great estates stocked by capitalists
with eastern slaves who, at Rome, undersold all competitors. During
the second century the precious metals poured into Latium in a flood,
great fortunes were amassed and invested in land, and the Asiatic
provinces of the Empire were swept of their men in order to make
these investments pay. No data remain by which to estimate, even
approximately, the size of this involuntary migration, but it must
have reached enormous numbers, for sixty thousand captives were the
common booty of a campaign, and after provinces were annexed they were
depopulated by the publicans.
The best field hands came from the regions where poverty had always
been extreme, and where, for countless generations, men had been
inured to toil on scanty food. Districts like Bithynia and Syria, where
slaves could be bought for little or nothing, had always been tilled
by races far more tenacious of life than any Europeans. After Lucullus
plundered Pontus, a slave brought only four drachmæ, or, perhaps,
seventy cents.[16] On the other hand, competition grew sharper among
the Italians themselves. As capital accumulated in the hands of the
strongest, the poor grew poorer, and pauperism spread. As early as the
Marsian War, in 90 B.C., Lucius Marcius Philippus estimated that there
were only two thousand wealthy families among the burgesses. In about
three hundred years nature had culled a pure plutocracy from what had
been originally an essentially martial race.
The primitive Roman was a high order of husbandman, who could only when
well fed flourish and multiply. He was adapted to that stage of society
when the remnants of caste gave a certain fixity of tenure to the
farmer, and when prices were maintained by the cost of communication
with foreign countries. As the world centralized, through conquest,
these barriers were swept away. Economic competition became free,
land tended to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, and this land was
worked by eastern slaves, who reduced the wages of labour to the lowest
point at which the human being can survive.
The effect was to split society in halves, the basis being servile, and
the freemen being separated into a series of classes, according to the
economic power of the mind. Wealth formed the title to nobility of the
great oligarchy which thus came to constitute the core of the Empire.
At the head stood the senators, whose rank was hereditary unless they
lost their property, for to be a senator a man had to be rich. Augustus
fixed $48,000 as the minimum of the senatorial fortune, and made up the
deficiency to certain favoured families,[17] but Tiberius summarily
ejected spendthrifts.[18] All Latin literature is redolent of money.
Tacitus, with an opulent connection, never failed to speak with disdain
of the base-born, or, in other words, of the less prosperous. “Poppæus
Sabinus, a man of humble birth,” raised to position by the caprice of
two emperors;[19] “Cassius Severus, a man of mean extraction”;[20] and,
in the poetry of antiquity, there are few more famous lines than those
in which Juvenal has described the burden of poverty:
“Haud facile emergunt, quorum virtutibus obstat
Res angusta domi.”[21]
Perhaps no modern writer has been so imbued with the spirit of the
later Empire as Fustel de Coulanges, and on this subject he has been
emphatic. Not only were the Romans not democratic, but at no period of
her history did Rome love equality. In the Republic rank was determined
by wealth. The census was the basis of the social system. Every citizen
had to declare his fortune before a magistrate, and his grade was then
assigned him. “Poverty and wealth established the legal differences
between men.”
The first line of demarcation lay between those who owned land and
those who did not. The former were _assidui_: householders rooted in
the soil. The latter were _proletarians_. The _proletarians_ were equal
in their poverty; but the _assidui_ were unequal in their wealth, and
were consequently divided into five classes. Among these categories all
was unequal--taxes, military service, and political rights. They did
not mix together.
“If one transports oneself to the last century of the Republic ...
one finds there an aristocracy as strongly consolidated as the ancient
patrician.... At the summit came the senatorial order. To belong to it
the first condition was to possess a great fortune.... The Roman mind
did not understand that a poor man could belong to the aristocracy, or
that a rich man was not part of it.”[22]
Archaic customs lingered late in Rome, for the city was not a centre
of commercial exchanges; and long after the death of Alexander, when
Greece passed its meridian, the Republic kept its copper coinage.
Regulus farmed his field with a single slave and a hired servant,
and there was, in truth, nothing extraordinary in the famous meeting
with Cincinnatus at the plough, although such simplicity astonished
a contemporary of Augustus. Advancing centralization swept away these
ancient customs, a centralization whose march is, perhaps, as sharply
marked by the migration of vagrants to the cities, as by any single
phenomenon. Vagrant paupers formed the proletariat for whose relief
the “Frumentariæ Leges” were framed; and yet, though poor-laws in some
form are considered a necessity in modern times, few institutions of
antiquity have been more severely criticised than those regulating
charity. From the time of Cato downward, the tendency has been to
maintain that at Rome demagogues fed the rabble at the cost of the
lives of the free-holders.
Probably the exact converse is the truth; the public gifts of food
appear to have been the effect of the ruin of agriculture, and not
its cause. After the Italian husbandmen had been made insolvent by
the competition of races of lower vitality, they flocked starving to
the capital, but it was only reluctantly that the great speculators in
grain, who controlled the Senate, admitted the necessity of granting
State aid to the class whom they had destroyed.
Long before the Punic Wars the Carthaginians had farmed Sicily on
capitalistic principles; that is to say, they had stocked domains with
slaves, and had traded on the basis of large sales and narrow profits.
The Romans when they annexed the island only carried out this system to
its logical end. Having all Asia Minor to draw upon for labour, they
deliberately starved and overworked their field-hands, since it was
cheaper to buy others than to lose command of the market. The familiar
story of the outbreak of the Servile War, about 134 B.C., shows how far
the contemporaries of the Sicilian speculators believed them capable of
going.
Damophilus, an opulent Sicilian landlord, being one day implored by his
slaves to have pity on their nakedness and misery, indignantly demanded
why they went hungry and cold, with arms in their hands, and the
country before them. Then he bound them to stakes and flayed them with
the lash.[23]
The reduction of Syracuse by Marcellus broke the Carthaginian power
in the island, and, after the fall of Agrigentum in 210 B.C., the
pacification of the country went on rapidly. Probably from the outset,
even in the matter of transportation, the provinces of the mainland
were at a disadvantage because of the cheapness of sea freights, but
at all events the opening of the Sicilian grain trade had an immediate
and disastrous effect on Italy. The migration of vagrants to Rome began
forthwith, and within seven years, 203 B.C., a public distribution of
wheat took place, probably by the advice of Scipio. Nevertheless the
charity was private and not gratuitous. On the contrary, a charge of
six sesterces, or twenty-five cents the bushel, was made, apparently
near half the market rate, a price pretty regularly maintained on such
occasions down to the Empire. This interval comprehended the whole
period of the Sicilian supremacy in the corn trade, for in 30 B.C.
Egypt was annexed by Augustus.
The distress which followed upon free trade with Egypt finally broke
down the resistance of the rich to gratuitous relief for the poor.
Previously the opposition to State aid had been so stubborn that until
123 B.C. no legal provision whatever was made for paupers; and yet the
account left by Polybius of the condition of Lombardy toward the middle
of the second century shows the complete wreck of agriculture.
“The yield of corn in this district is so abundant that wheat is
often sold at four obols a Sicilian medimnus [about eight cents by
the bushel, or a little less than two sesterces], barley at two, or
a metretes of wine for an equal measure of barley.... The cheapness
and abundance of all articles of food may also be clearly shown from
the fact that travellers in these parts, when stopping at inns, do not
bargain for particular articles, but simply ask what the charge is per
head for board. And for the most part the innkeepers are content” with
half an as (about half a cent) a day.[24]
These prices indicate a lack of demand so complete, that the debtors
among the peasantry must have been ruined, and yet tax-payers remained
obdurate. Gratuitous distributions were tried in 58 B.C. by the Lex
Clodia, but soon abandoned as costly, and Cæsar applied himself to
reducing the outlay on the needy. He hoped to reach his end by cutting
down the number of grain-receivers one-half, by providing that no
grain should be given away except on presentation of a ticket, and by
ordering that the number of ticket-holders should not be increased. The
law of nature prevailed against him, for the absorption of Egypt in the
economic system of the Empire, marked, in the words of Mommsen “the end
of the old and the beginning of a new epoch.”[25]
Among the races which have survived through ages upon scanty nutriment,
none have, perhaps, excelled the Egyptian fellah. Even in the East no
peasantry has probably been so continuously overworked, so under-paid,
and so taxed.
“If it is the aim of the State to work out the utmost possible
amount from its territory, in the Old World the Lagids were
absolutely the masters of statecraft. In particular they
were in this sphere the instructors and the models of the
Cæsars.”[26]
In the first century Egypt was, as it still is, preeminently a land
of cheap labour; but it was also something more. The valley of the
Nile, enriched by the overflow of the river, returned an hundred-fold,
without manure; and this wonderful district was administered, not like
an ordinary province, but like a private farm belonging to the citizens
of Rome. The emperor reserved it to himself. How large a revenue he
drew from it is immaterial; it suffices that one-third of all the
grain consumed in the capital came from thence. According to Athenæus,
some of the grain ships in use were about 420 feet long by 57 broad,
or nearly the size of a modern steamer in the Atlantic trade.[27]
From the beginning of the Christian era, therefore, the wages of the
Egyptian fellah regulated the price of the cereals within the limits
where trade was made free by Roman consolidation, and it is safe to
say that, thenceforward, such of the highly nourished races as were
constrained to sustain this competition, were doomed to perish. It
is even extremely doubtful whether the distributions of grain by the
government materially accelerated the march of the decay. Spain should
have been far enough removed from the centre of exchanges to have had
a certain local market of her own, and yet Martial, writing about 100
A.D., described the Spanish husbandman eating and drinking the produce
he could not sell, and receiving but four sesterces the bushel for his
wheat, which was the price paid by paupers in the time of Cicero.[28]
Thus by economic necessity great estates were formed in the hands of
the economically strong. As the value of cereals fell, arable land
passed into vineyards or pasture, and, the provinces being unable to
sustain their old population, eviction went on with gigantic strides.
Had the Romans possessed the versatility to enable them to turn
to industry, factories might have afforded a temporary shelter to
this surplus labour, but manufactures were monopolized by the East;
therefore the beggared peasantry were either enslaved for debt, or
wandered as penniless paupers to the cities, where gradually their
numbers so increased as to enable them to extort a gratuitous dole.
Indeed, during the third century, their condition fell so low that they
were unable even to cook the food freely given them, and Aurelian had
their bread baked at public ovens.[29]
As centralization advanced with the acceleration of human movement,
force expressed itself more and more exclusively through money, and
the channel in which money chose to flow was in investments in land.
The social system fostered the growth of large estates. The Romans
always had an inordinate respect for the landed magnate, and a contempt
for the tradesman. Industry was reputed a servile occupation, and,
under the Republic, the citizen who performed manual labour was almost
deprived of political rights. Even commerce was thought so unworthy
of the aristocracy that it was forbidden to senators. “The soil was
always, in this Roman society, the principal source and, above all, the
only measure of wealth.”
A law of Tiberius obliged capitalists to invest two-thirds of their
property in land. Trajan not only exacted of aspirants to office that
they should be rich, but that they should place at least one-third
of their fortune in Italian real estate; and, down to the end of the
Empire, the senatorial class “was at the same time the class of great
landed proprietors.”[30]
The more property consolidated, the more resistless the momentum
of capital became. Under the Empire small properties grew steadily
rarer, and the fewer they were, the greater the disadvantage at which
their owners stood. The small farmer could hardly sustain himself
in competition with the great landlord. The grand domain of the
capitalist was not only provided with a full complement of labourers,
vine-dressers, and shepherds, but with the necessary artisans. The
poor farmer depended on his rich neighbour even for his tools. “He was
what a workman would be to-day who, amidst great factories, worked
alone.”[31] He bought dearer and sold cheaper, his margin of profit
steadily shrunk; at last he was reduced to a bare subsistence in good
years, and the first bad harvest left him bankrupt.
The Roman husbandman and soldier was doomed, for nature had turned
against him; the task of history is but to ascertain his fate, and
trace the fortunes of his country after he had gone.
Of the evicted, many certainly drifted to the cities and lived upon
charity, forming the proletariat, a class alike despised and lost to
self-respect: some were sold into slavery, others starved; but when all
deductions have been made, a surplus is left to be accounted for, and
there is reason to suppose that these stayed on their farms as tenants
to the purchasers.
In the first century such tenancies were common. The lessee remained
a freeman, under no subjection to his landlord, provided he paid his
rent; but in case of default the law was rigorous. Everything upon the
land was liable as a pledge, and the tenant himself was held in pawn
unless he could give security for what he owed. In case, therefore,
of prolonged agricultural depression, all that was left of the ancient
rural population could hardly fail to pass into the condition of serfs,
bound to the land by debts beyond the possibility of payment.
That such a depression actually occurred, and that it extended through
several centuries, is certain. Nor is it possible that its only cause
was Egyptian competition, for had it been so, an equilibrium would have
been reached when the African exchanges had been adjusted, whereas a
continuous decline of prices went on until long after the fall of the
Western Empire. The only other possible explanation of the phenomenon
is that a contraction of the currency began soon after the death of
Augustus, and continued without much interruption down to Charlemagne.
Between the fall of Carthage and the birth of Christ, the Romans
plundered the richest portions of the world west of the Indus; in the
second century, North Africa, Macedon, Spain, and parts of Greece and
Asia Minor; in the first, Athens, Cappadocia, Syria, Gaul, and Egypt.
These countries yielded an enormous mass of treasure, which was brought
to Rome as spoil of war, but which was not fixed there by commercial
exchanges, and which continually tended to flow back to the natural
centres of trade. Therefore, when conquests ceased, the sources of
new bullion dried up, and the quantity held in Italy diminished as the
balance of trade grew more and more unfavourable.
Under Augustus the precious metals were plenty and cheap, and the
prices of commodities were correspondingly high; but a full generation
had hardly passed before a dearth began to be felt, which manifested
itself in a debasement of the coinage, the surest sign of an
appreciation of the currency.
Speaking generally, the manufactures and the more costly products of
antiquity came from countries to the east of the Adriatic, while the
West was mainly agricultural; and nothing is better established than
that luxuries were dear under the Empire, and food cheap.[32] Therefore
exchanges were unfavourable to the capital from the outset; the exports
did not cover the imports, and each year a deficit had to be made good
in specie.
The Romans perfectly understood the situation, and this adverse balance
caused them much uneasiness. Tiberius dwelt upon it in a letter to the
Senate as early as 22 A.D. In that year the ædiles brought forward
proposals for certain sumptuary reforms, and the Senate, probably
to rid itself of a delicate question, referred the matter to the
executive. Most of the emperor’s reply is interesting, but there is one
particularly noteworthy paragraph. “If a reform is in truth intended,
where must it begin? and how am I to restore the simplicity of ancient
times?... How shall we reform the taste for dress?... How are we to
deal with the peculiar articles of female vanity, and, in particular,
with that rage for jewels and precious trinkets, which drains the
Empire of its wealth, and sends, in exchange for bawbles, the money
of the Commonwealth to foreign nations, and even to the enemies of
Rome?”[33] Half a century later matters were, apparently, worse, for
Pliny more than once returned to the subject. In the twelfth book of
his Natural History, after enumerating the many well-known spices,
perfumes, drugs, and gems, which have always made the Eastern trade
of such surpassing value, he estimated that at the most moderate
computation 100,000,000 sesterces, or about $4,000,000 in coin, were
annually exported to Arabia and India alone; and at a time when silk
was worth its weight in gold, the estimate certainly does not seem
excessive. He added, “So dear do pleasures and women cost us.”[34]
The drain to Egypt and the Asiatic provinces could hardly have been
much less serious. Adrian almost seems to have been jealous of the
former, for in his letter to Servianus, after having criticised the
people, he remarked that it was also a rich and productive country
“in which no one was idle,” and in which glass, paper and linen were
manufactured.[35] The Syrians were both industrial and commercial.
Tyre, for example, worked the raw silk of China, dyed and exported
it. The glass of Tyre and Sidon was famous; the local aristocracy were
merchants and manufacturers, “and, as later the riches acquired in the
East flowed to Genoa and Venice, so then the commercial gains of the
West flowed back to Tyre and Apamea.”[36]
Within about sixty years from the final consolidation of the Empire
under Augustus, this continuous efflux of the precious metals began
to cause the currency to contract, and prices to fall; and the first
effect of shrinking values appears to have been a financial crisis in
33 A.D. Probably the diminution in the worth of commodities relatively
to money, had already made it difficult for debtors to meet their
liabilities, for Tacitus has prefaced his story by pointing out that
usury had always been a scourge of Rome, and that just previous to
the panic an agitation against the money-lenders had begun with a view
to enforcing the law regarding interest. As most of the senators were
deep in usury they applied for protection to Tiberius, who granted what
amounted to a stay of proceedings, and then, as soon as the capitalists
felt themselves safe, they proceeded to take their revenge. Loans were
called, accommodation refused, and mortgagors were ruthlessly sold
out. “There was great scarcity of money ... and, on account of sales
on execution, coin accumulated in the imperial, or the public treasury.
Upon this the Senate ordered that every one should invest two-thirds of
his capital on loan, in Italian real estate; but the creditors called
in the whole, nor did public opinion allow debtors to compromise.”
Meanwhile there was great excitement but no relief, “as the usurers
hoarded for the purpose of buying low. The quantity of sales broke the
market, and the more liabilities were extended, the harder liquidation
became. Many were ruined, and the loss of property endangered
social station and reputation.”[37] The panic finally subsided, but
contraction went on and next showed itself, twenty-five years later,
in adulterated coinage. From the time of the Punic Wars, about two
centuries and a half before Christ, the silver denarius, worth nearly
seventeen cents, had been the standard of the Roman currency, and it
kept its weight and purity unimpaired until Nero, when it diminished
from 1⁄84 to 1⁄96 of a pound of silver, the pure metal being mixed with
1⁄10 of copper.[38] Under Trajan, toward 100 A.D., the alloy reached
twenty per cent; under Septimius Severus a hundred years later it had
mounted to fifty or sixty per cent, and by the time of Elagabalus,
220 A.D., the coin had degenerated into a token of base metal, and was
repudiated by the government.
Something similar happened to the gold. The aureus, though it kept its
fineness, lost in weight down to Constantine. In the reign of Augustus
it equalled one-fortieth of a Roman pound of gold, in that of Nero
one forty-fifth, in that of Caracalla but one-fiftieth, in that of
Diocletian one-sixtieth, and in that of Constantine one seventy-second,
when the coin ceased passing by tale and was taken only by weight.[39]
The repudiation of the denarius was an act of bankruptcy; nor did
the financial position improve while the administration remained at
Rome. Therefore the inference is that, toward the middle of the third
century, Italy had lost the treasure she had won in war, which had
gradually gravitated to the centre of exchanges. This inference is
confirmed by history. The movements of Diocletian seem to demonstrate
that after 250 A.D. Rome ceased to be either the political or
commercial capital of the world.
Unquestionably Diocletian must have lived a life of intense activity at
the focus of affairs, to have raised himself from slavery to the purple
at thirty-nine; and yet Gibbon thought he did not even visit Rome until
he went thither to celebrate his triumph, after he had been twenty
years upon the throne. He never seemed anxious about the temper of the
city. When proclaimed emperor he ignored Italy and established himself
at Nicomedia on the Propontis, where he lived until he abdicated in
305. His personal preferences evidently did not influence him, since
his successors imitated his policy; and everything points to the
conclusion that he, and those who followed him, only yielded to the
same resistless force which fixed the economic capital of the world
upon the Bosphorus. In the case of Constantine the operation of this
force was conspicuous, for it was not only powerful enough to overcome
the habit of a lifetime, but to cause him to undertake the gigantic
task of building Constantinople.
Constantine was proclaimed in Britain in 306, when only thirty-two.
Six years later he defeated Maxentius, and then governed the West alone
until his war with Licinius, whom he captured in 323 and afterward put
to death. Thus, at fifty, he returned to the East, after an absence of
nearly twenty years, and his first act was to choose Byzantium as his
capital, a city nearly opposite Nicomedia.
The sequence of events seems plain. Very soon after the insolvency
of the government at Rome, the administration quitted the city and
moved toward the boundary between Europe and Asia; there, after some
forty years of vacillation, it settled permanently at the true seat of
exchanges, for Constantinople remained the economic centre of the earth
for more than eight centuries.
Similar conclusions may be drawn from the fluctuations of the currency.
At Rome the coin could not be maintained at the standard, because of
adverse exchanges; but when the political and economic centres had come
to coincide, at a point upon the Bosphorus, depreciation ceased, and
the aureus fell no further.
This migration of capital, which caused the rise of Constantinople,
was the true opening of the Middle Ages, for it occasioned the
gradual decline of the rural population, and thus brought about the
disintegration of the West. Victory carried wealth to Rome, and wealth
manifested its power in a permanent police; as the attack in war
gained upon the defence, and individual resistance became impossible,
transportation grew cheap and safe, and human movement was accelerated.
Then economic competition began, and intensified as centralization
advanced, telling always in favour of the acutest intellect and the
cheapest labour. Soon, exchanges became permanently unfavourable,
a steady drain of bullion set in to the East, and, as the outflow
depleted the treasure amassed at Rome by plunder, contraction began,
and with contraction came that fall of prices which first ruined, then
enslaved, and finally exterminated, the native rural population of
Italy.
In the time of Diocletian, the ancient silver currency had long
been repudiated, and, in his well-known edict, he spoke of prices as
having risen ninefold, when reckoned in the denarii of base metal;
the purchasing power of pure gold and silver had, however, risen
very considerably in all the western provinces. Nor was this all. It
appears to be a natural law that when social development has reached
a certain stage, and capital has accumulated sufficiently, the class
which has had the capacity to absorb it shall try to enhance the
value of their property by legislation. This is done most easily by
reducing the quantity of the currency, which is a legal tender for the
payment of debts. A currency obviously gains in power as it shrinks
in volume, and the usurers of Constantinople intuitively condensed to
the utmost that of the Empire. After the insolvency under Elagabalus,
payments were exacted in gold by weight, and as it grew scarcer its
value rose. Aurelian issued an edict limiting its use in the arts; and
while there are abundant reasons for inferring that silver also gained
in purchasing power, gold far outstripped it. Although no statistics
remain by which to establish, with any exactness, the movement of
silver in comparison with commodities, the ratio between the precious
metals at different epochs is known, and gold appears to have doubled
between Cæsar and Romulus Augustulus.
47 B.C. gold stood to silver as 1 : 8.9
1 A.D. under Augustus, “ “ “ 1 : 9.3
100–200, Trajan to Severus, “ “ “ 1 : 9–10
310, Constantine, “ “ “ 1 : 12.5
450, Theodosius II., “ “ “ 1 : 18
As gold had become the sole legal tender, this change of ratio
represents a diminution, during the existence of the Western Empire, of
at least fifty per cent in the value of property in relation to debt,
leaving altogether out of view the appreciation of silver itself, which
was so considerable that the government was unable to maintain the
denarius.[40]
Resistance to the force of centralized wealth was vain. Aurelian’s
attempt to reform the mints is said to have caused a rebellion, which
cost him the lives of seven thousand of his soldiers; and though his
policy was continued by Probus, and Diocletian coined both metals
again at a ratio, expansion was so antagonistic to the interests of the
monied class that, by 360, silver was definitely discarded, and gold
was made by law the only legal tender for the payment of debts.[41]
Furthermore, the usurers protected themselves against any possible
tampering with the mints by providing that the solidus should pass by
weight and not by tale; that is to say, they reserved to themselves
the right to reject any golden son which contained less than one
seventy-second of a pound of standard metal, the weight fixed by
Constantine.[42]
Thus, at a time when the exhaustion of the mines caused a failure in
the annual supply of bullion, the old composite currency was split
in two, and the half retained made to pass by weight alone, so as to
throw the loss by clipping and abrasion upon the debtor. So strong a
contraction engendered a steady fall of prices, a fall which tended
rather to increase than diminish as time went on. But in prolonged
periods of decline in the market value of agricultural products,
farmers can with difficulty meet a money rent, because the sale of
their crops leaves a greater deficit each year, and finally a time
comes when insolvency can no longer be postponed.
In his opening chapter Gibbon described the Empire under the Antonines
as enjoying “a happy period of more than fourscore years” of peace and
prosperity; and yet nothing is more certain than that this halcyon age
was in reality an interval of agricultural ruin. On this point Pliny
was explicit, and Pliny was a large land-owner.
He wrote one day to Calvisius about an investment, and went at length
into the condition of the property. A large estate adjoining his own
was for sale, and he was tempted to buy, “for the land was fertile,
rich, and well watered,” the fields produced vines and wood which
promised a fair return, and yet this natural fruitfulness was marred by
the misery of the husbandmen. He found that the former owner “had often
seized the ‘pignora,’ or pledges [that is, all the property the tenants
possessed]; and though, by so doing, he had temporarily reduced their
arrears, he had left them” without the means of tilling the soil. These
tenants were freemen, who had been unable to meet their rent because of
falling prices, and who, when they had lost their tools, cattle, and
household effects, were left paupers on the farms they could neither
cultivate nor abandon. Consequently the property had suffered, the
rent had declined, and for these reasons and “the general hardness of
the times,” its value had fallen from five million to three million
sesterces.[43]
In another letter he explained that he was detained at home making new
arrangements with his tenants, who were apparently insolvent, for “in
the last five years, in spite of great concessions, the arrears have
increased. For this reason most [tenants] take no trouble to diminish
their debt, which they despair of paying. Indeed, they plunder and
consume what there is upon the land, since they think they cannot
save for themselves.” The remedy he proposed was to make no more money
leases, but to farm on shares.[44]
The tone of these letters shows that there was nothing unusual in all
this. Pliny nowhere intimated that the tenants were to blame, or that
better men were to be had. On the contrary, he said emphatically that
in such hard times money could not be collected, and therefore the
interest of the landlord was to cultivate his estates on shares, taking
the single precaution to place slaves over the tenants as overseers and
receivers of the crops.
In the same way the digest referred to such arrears as habitual.[45] In
still another letter to Trajan, Pliny observed, “Continuæ sterilitates
cogunt me de remissionibus cogitare.”[46] Certainly these insolvent
farmers could have held no better position when working on shares than
before their disasters, for as bankrupts they were wholly in their
creditors’ power, and could be hunted like slaves, and brought back in
fetters if they fled. They were tied to the property by a debt which
never could be paid, and they and their descendants were doomed to stay
for ever as _coloni_ or serfs, chattels to be devised or sold as part
of the realty. In the words of the law, “they were considered slaves
of the land.”[47] The ancient martial husbandman had thus “fallen
from point to point, from debt to debt, into an almost perpetual
subjection.”[48] Deliverance was impossible, for payment was out of the
question. He was bound to the soil for his life, and his children after
him inherited his servitude with his debt.
The customs, according to which the _coloni_ held, were infinitely
varied; they differed not only between estates, but between the hands
on the same estate. On the whole, however, the life must have been
hard, for the serfs of the Empire did not multiply, and the scarcity of
rural labour became a chronic disease.
Yet, relatively, the position of the _colonus_ was good, for his wife
and children were his own; slavery was the ulcer which ate into the
flesh, and the Roman fiscal system, coupled as it was with usury, was
calculated to enslave all but the oligarchy who made the laws.
The taxes of the provinces were assessed by the censors and then sold
for cash to the publicans, who undertook the collection. Italy was at
first exempted, but after her bankruptcy she shared the common fate.
Companies were formed to handle these ventures. The knights usually
subscribed the capital and divided the profits, which corresponded
with the severity of their administration; and, as the Roman conquests
extended, these companies grew too powerful to be controlled. The
only officials in a position to act were the provincial governors,
who were afraid to interfere, and preferred to share in the gains of
the traffic, rather than to run the risk of exciting the wrath of so
dangerous an enemy.[49]
According to Pliny the collection of a rent in money had become
impossible in the reign of Trajan. The reason was that with a
contracting currency prices of produce fell, and each year’s crop
netted less than that of the year before; therefore a rent moderate in
one decade was extortionate in the next. But taxes did not fall with
the fall in values; on the contrary, the tendency of centralization is
always toward a more costly administration. Under Augustus, one emperor
with a moderate household sufficed; but in the third century Diocletian
found it necessary to reorganize the government under four Cæsars, and
everything became specialized in the same proportion.
In this way the people were caught between the upper and the nether
millstone. The actual quantity of bullion taken from them was
greater, the lower prices of their property fell, and arrears of taxes
accumulated precisely as Pliny described the accumulation of arrears
of rent. These arrears were carried over from reign to reign, and even
from century to century; and Petronius, the father-in-law of Valens, is
said to have precipitated the rebellion of Procopius, by exacting the
tribute unpaid since the death of Aurelian a hundred years before.
The processes employed in the collection of the revenue were severe.
Torture was freely used,[50] and slavery was the fate of defaulters.
Armed with such power, the publicans held debtors at their mercy.
Though usury was forbidden, the most lucrative part of the trade
was opening accounts with the treasury, assuming debts, and charging
interest sometimes as high as fifty per cent. Though, as prices fell,
the pressure grew severer, the abuses of the administration were never
perhaps worse than toward the end of the Republic. In his oration
against Verres, Cicero said the condition of the people had become
intolerable: “All the provinces are in mourning, all the nations that
are free are complaining; every kingdom is expostulating with us about
our covetousness and injustice.”[51]
The well-known transactions of Brutus are typical of what went on
wherever the Romans marched. Brutus lent the Senate of Salaminia at
forty-eight per cent a year. As the contract was illegal, he obtained
two decrees of the Senate at Rome for his protection, and then to
enforce payment of his interest, Scaptius, his man of business,
borrowed from the governor of Cilicia a detachment of troops. With
this he blockaded the Senate so closely that several members starved
to death. The Salaminians, wanting at all costs to free themselves from
such a load, offered to pay off both interest and capital at once; but
to this Brutus would not consent, and to impose his own terms upon the
province he demanded from Cicero more troops, “only fifty horse.”[52]
When at last, by such proceedings, the debtors were so exhausted
that no torment could wring more from them, they were sold as slaves;
Nicodemus, king of Bithynia, on being reproached for not furnishing his
contingent of auxiliaries, replied that all his able-bodied subjects
had been taken by the farmers of the revenue.[53] Nor, though the
administration doubtless was better regulated under the Empire than
under the Republic, did the oppression of the provinces cease. Juvenal,
who wrote about 100, implored the young noble taking possession
of his government to put some curb upon his avarice, “to pity the
poverty of the allies. You see the bones of kings sucked of their very
marrow.”[54] And though the testimony of Juvenal may be rejected as
savouring too much of poetical licence, Pliny must always be treated
with respect. When Maximus was sent to Achaia, Pliny thought it well
to write him a long letter of advice, in which he not only declared
that to wrest from the Greeks the shadow of liberty left them would be
“durum, ferum, barbarumque;” but adjured him to try to remember what
each city had been, and not to despise it for what it was.[55]
Most impressive, perhaps, of all, is the statement of Dio Cassius that
the revolt led by Boadicea in Britain in 61 A.D., which cost the Romans
seventy thousand lives, was provoked by the rapacity of Seneca, who,
having forced a loan of ten million drachmas ($1,670,000) on the people
at usurious interest, suddenly withdrew his money, thereby inflicting
intense suffering.[56] As Pliny said with bitterness and truth, “The
arts of avarice were those most cultivated at Rome.”[57]
The stronger type exterminated the weaker; the money-lender killed out
the husbandman; the race of soldiers vanished, and the farms, whereon
they had once flourished, were left desolate. To quote the words
of Gibbon: “The fertile and happy province of Campania ... extended
between the sea and the Apennines from the Tiber to the Silarus. Within
sixty years after the death of Constantine, and on the evidence of an
actual survey, an exemption was granted in favour of three hundred and
thirty thousand English acres of desert and uncultivated land; which
amounted to one-eighth of the whole surface of the province.”[58]
It is true that Gibbon, in this paragraph, described Italy as she
was in the fourth century, just before the barbarian invasions, but a
similar fate had overtaken the provinces under the Cæsars. In the reign
of Domitian, according to Plutarch, Greece had been almost depopulated.
“She can with much difficulty raise three thousand men, which
number the single city of Megara sent heretofore to the battle
of Platæa.... For of what use would the oracle be now, which
was heretofore at Tegyra or at Ptous? For scarcely shall you
meet, in a whole day’s time, with so much as a herdsman or
shepherd in those parts.”[59]
Wallon has observed that Rome, “in the early times of the Republic,
was chiefly preoccupied with having a numerous and strong population of
freemen. Under the Empire she had but one anxiety--taxes.”[60]
To speak with more precision, force changed the channel through which
it operated. Native farmers and native soldiers were needless when
such material could be bought cheaper in the North or East. With money
the cohorts could be filled with Germans; with money, slaves and serfs
could be settled upon the Italian fields; and for the last century,
before the great inroads began, one chief problem of the imperial
administration was the regulation of the inflow of new blood from
without, lacking which the social system must have collapsed.
The later campaigns on the Rhine and the Danube were really slave-hunts
on a gigantic scale. Probus brought back sixteen thousand men from
Germany, “the bravest and most robust of their youth,” and distributed
them in knots of fifty or sixty among the legions. “Their aid was
now become necessary.... The infrequency of marriage, and the ruin
of agriculture, affected the principles of population; and not only
destroyed the strength of the present, but intercepted the hope of
future generations.”[61]
His importations of agricultural labour were much more considerable. In
a single settlement in Thrace, Probus established one hundred thousand
Bastarnæ; Constantius Chlorus is said to have made Gaul flourish by
the herds of slaves he distributed among the landlords; in 370, large
numbers of Alemanni were planted in the valley of the Po, and on the
vast spaces of the public domain there were barbarian villages where
the native language and customs were preserved.
Probably none of these Germans came as freemen. Many, of course,
were captives sold as slaves, but perhaps the majority were serfs.
Frequently a tribe, hard pressed by enemies, asked leave to pass
the frontier, and settle as tributaries, that is to say as _coloni_.
On one such occasion Constantius II. was nearly murdered. A body of
Limigantes, who had made a raid, surrendered, and petitioned to be
given lands at any distance, provided they might have protection. The
emperor was delighted at the prospect of such a harvest of labourers,
to say nothing of recruits, and went among them to receive their
submission. Seeing him alone, the barbarians attacked him, and he
escaped with difficulty. His troops slaughtered the Germans to the last
man.
This unceasing emigration gradually changed the character of the
rural population, and a similar alteration took place in the army.
As early as the time of Cæsar, Italy was exhausted; his legions were
mainly raised in Gaul, and as the native farmers sank into serfdom or
slavery, and then at last vanished, recruits were drawn more and more
from beyond the limits of the Empire. At first they were taken singly,
afterwards in tribes and nations, so that, when Aëtius defeated Attila
at Châlons, the battle was fought by the Visigoths under Theodoric, and
the equipment of the Romans and Huns was so similar that when drawn up
the lines “presented the image of civil war.”
This military metamorphosis indicated the extinction of the martial
type, and it extended throughout society. Rome not only failed to
breed the common soldier, she also failed to produce generals. After
the first century, the change was marked. Trajan was a Spaniard,
Septimius Severus an African, Aurelian an Illyrian peasant, Diocletian
a Dalmatian slave, Constantius Chlorus a Dardanian noble, and the son
of Constantius, by a Dacian woman, was the great Constantine.
All these men were a peculiar species of military adventurer, for
they combined qualities which made them, not only effective chiefs
of police, but acceptable as heads of the civil bureaucracy, which
represented capital. Severus was the type, and Severus has never been
better described than by Machiavelli, who said he united the ferocity
of the lion to the cunning of the fox. This bureaucracy was the core
of the consolidated mass called the Empire; it was the embodiment of
money, the ultimate expression of force, and it recognized and advanced
men who were adapted to its needs. When such men were to be found, the
administration was thought good; but when no one precisely adapted for
the purple appeared, and an ordinary officer had to be hired to keep
the peace, friction was apt to follow, and the soldier, even though of
the highest ability, was often removed. Both Stilicho and Aëtius were
murdered.
The monied oligarchy which formed this bureaucracy was a growth as
characteristic of the high centralization of the age, as a sacred
caste is characteristic of decentralization. Perhaps the capitalistic
class of the later Empire has been better understood and appreciated by
Fustel de Coulanges than by any other historian.
“All the documents which show the spirit of the epoch show
that this noblesse was as much honoured by the government as
respected by the people.... It was from it that the imperial
government chose ordinarily its high functionaries.”
These functionaries were not sought among the lower classes. The high
offices were not given as a reward of long and faithful service; they
belonged by prescriptive right to the great families. The Empire made
the wealthy, senators, prætors, consuls, and governors; all dignities,
except only the military, were practically hereditary in the opulent
class.
“This class is rich and the government is poor. This class is
mistress of the larger part of the soil; it is in possession
of the local dignities, of the administrative and judicial
functions. The government has only the appearance of power, and
an armed force which is continually diminishing....
“The aristocracy had the land, the wealth, the distinction,
the education, ordinarily the morality of existence; it did
not know how to fight and to command. It withdrew itself from
military service; more than that, it despised it. It was one of
the characteristic signs of this society to have always placed
the civil functions not on a level with, but much above, the
grades of the army. It esteemed much the profession of the
doctor, of the professor, of the advocate; it did not esteem
that of the officer and the soldier, and left it to men of low
estate.”[62]
This supremacy of the economic instinct transformed all the relations
of life, the domestic as well as the military. The family ceased
to be a unit, the members of which cohered from the necessity of
self-defence, and became a business association. Marriage took the form
of a contract, dissoluble at the will of either party, and, as it was
somewhat costly, it grew rare. As with the drain of their bullion to
the East, which crushed their farmers, the Romans were conscious, as
Augustus said, that sterility must finally deliver their city into the
hand of the barbarians.[63] They knew this and they strove to avert
their fate, and there is little in history more impressive than the
impotence of the ancient civilization in its conflict with nature.
About the opening of the Christian era the State addressed itself
to the task. Probably in the year 4 A.D., the emperor succeeded in
obtaining the first legislation favouring marriage, and this enactment
not proving effective, it was supplemented by the famous Leges Julia
and Papia Poppæa of the year 9. In the spring, at the games, the
knights demanded the repeal of these laws, and then Augustus, having
called them to the Forum, made them the well-known speech, whose
violence now seems incredible. Those who were single were the worst
of criminals, they were murderers, they were impious, they were
destroyers of their race, they resembled brigands or wild beasts. He
asked the _equites_ if they expected men to start from the ground to
replace them, as in the fable; and declared in bitterness that while
the government liberated slaves for the sole purpose of keeping up the
number of citizens, the children of the Marcii, of the Fabii, of the
Valerii, and the Julii, let their names perish from the earth.[64]
In vain celibacy was made almost criminal. In vain celibates were
declared incapable of inheriting, while fathers were offered every
bribe, were preferred in appointments to office, were even given the
choice seats at games; in the words of Tacitus, “not for that did
marriage and children increase, for the advantages of childlessness
prevailed.”[65] All that was done was to breed a race of informers, and
to stimulate the lawyers to fresh chicane.[66]
When wealth became force, the female might be as strong as the male;
therefore she was emancipated. Through easy divorce she came to stand
on an equality with the man in the marriage contract. She controlled
her own property, because she could defend it; and as she had power,
she exercised political privileges. In the third century Julia Domna,
Julia Mamæa, Soæmias, and others, sat in the Senate, or conducted the
administration.
The evolution of this centralized society was as logical as every other
work of nature. When force reached the stage where it expressed itself
exclusively through money, the governing class ceased to be chosen
because they were valiant or eloquent, artistic, learned, or devout,
and were selected solely because they had the faculty of acquiring and
keeping wealth. As long as the weak retained enough vitality to produce
something which could be absorbed, this oligarchy was invincible; and
for very many years after the native peasantry of Gaul and Italy had
perished under the load, new blood injected from more tenacious races
kept the dying civilization alive.
The weakness of the monied class lay in their very power, for they not
only killed the producer, but in the strength of their acquisitiveness
they failed to propagate themselves. The State feigned to regard
marriage as a debt, and yet the opulent families died out. In the reign
of Augustus all but fifty of the patrician houses had become extinct,
and subsequently the emperor seemed destined to remain the universal
heir through bequests of the childless.
With the peasantry the case was worse. By the second century barbarian
labour had to be imported to till the fields, and even the barbarians
lacked the tenacity of life necessary to endure the strain. They ceased
to breed, and the population dwindled. Then, somewhat suddenly, the
collapse came. With shrinking numbers, the sources of wealth ran dry,
the revenue failed to pay the police, and on the efficiency of the
police the life of this unwarlike civilization hung.
In early ages every Roman had been a land-owner, and every land-owner
had been a soldier, serving without pay. To fight had been as essential
a part of life as to plough. But by the fourth century military service
had become commercial; the legions were as purely an expression of
money as the bureaucracy itself.
From the time of the Servian constitution downward, the change in the
army had kept pace with the acceleration of movement which caused the
economic competition that centralized the State. Rome owed her triumphs
over Hannibal and Pyrrhus to the valour of her infantry, rather than to
the genius of her generals; but from Marius the census ceased to be the
basis of recruitment, and the rich refused to serve in the ranks.
This was equivalent in itself to a social revolution; for, from the
moment when the wealthy succeeded in withdrawing themselves from
service, and the poor saw in it a trade, the citizen ceased to be a
soldier, and the soldier became a mercenary. From that time the army
could be used for “all purposes, provided that they could count on
their pay and their booty.”[67]
The administration of Augustus organized the permanent police, which
replaced the mercenaries of the civil wars, and this machine was the
greatest triumph and the crowning glory of capital. Dio Cassius has
described how the last vestige of an Italian army passed away. Up to
the time of Severus it had been customary to recruit the Prætorians
either from Italy itself, from Spain, Macedonia, or other neighbouring
countries, whose population had some affinity with that of Latium.
Severus, after the treachery of the guard to Pertinax, disbanded it,
and reorganized a corps selected from the bravest soldiers of the
legions. These men were a horde of barbarians, repulsive to Italians
in their habits, and terrible to look upon.[68] Thus a body of
wage-earners, drawn from the ends of the earth, was made cohesive by
money. For more than four hundred years this corps of hirelings crushed
revolt within the Empire, and regulated the injection of fresh blood
from without, with perfect promptitude and precision; nor did it fail
in its functions while the money which vitalized it lasted.
But a time came when the suction of the usurers so wasted the life
of the community that the stream of bullion ceased to flow from the
capital to the frontiers; then, as the sustaining force failed, the
line of troops along the Danube and the Rhine was drawn out until it
broke, and the barbarians poured in unchecked.
The so-called invasions were not conquests, for they were not
necessarily hostile; they were only the logical conclusion of a process
which had been going on since Trajan. When the power to control the
German emigration decayed, it flowed freely into the provinces.
By the year 400 disintegration was far advanced; the Empire was
crumbling, not because it was corrupt or degenerate, but because the
most martial and energetic race the world had ever seen had been so
thoroughly exterminated by men of the economic type of mind, that petty
bands of sorry adventurers might rove whither they would, on what had
once been Roman soil, without meeting an enemy capable of facing them,
save other adventurers like themselves. Goths, not Romans, defeated
Attila at Châlons.
The Vandals, who, in the course of twenty years, wandered from the Elbe
to the Atlas, were not a nation, not an army, not even a tribe, but a
motley horde of northern barbarians, ruined provincials, and escaped
slaves--a rabble whom Cæsar’s legions would have scattered like chaff,
had they been as many as the sands of the shore; and yet when Genseric
routed Boniface and sacked Carthage, in 439, he led barely fifty
thousand fighting men.