Dioscurias, Asia Minor chiefly at Ephesus and Apamea, and Egypt at Alexandria. It brought Pontic fish, Hellenic wines, the spices and medicaments of Asia and of the Eastern coast of Africa, and countless other articles, chiefly of the type which creates the need to which it ministers. More robust products were supplied by the West through the trade-routes which came down to Gades, Genua and Aquileia. Hither were brought slaves, cattle, horses and dogs; linen, canvas and wool; timber for ships and houses, and raw metal for the manufacture of implements and works of art. Neither in East nor West was the product brought by the producer to the consumer. In accordance with the more recent tendencies of Hellenistic trade, great emporia had grown up in which the goods were stored, until they were exported by the local dealers or sought by the wholesale merchant from an Italian port. As the Tyrrhenian Sea became the radius of the trade of the world, Puteoli became the greatest staple to which this commerce centred; thence the goods which were destined for Rome were conveyed to Ostia by water or by land, and taken by ships which drew no depth of water up the Tiber to the city.[163] But it must not be supposed that this trade was first controlled by Romans and Italians when it touched the shores of Italy. Groups of citizens and allies were to be found in the great staples of the world, receiving the products as they were brought down from the interior and supplying the shipping by which they were transferred to Rome.[164] They were not manufacturers, but intermediaries who reaped a larger profit from the carrying trade than could be gained by any form of production in their native land. The Roman and Italian trader was to be inferior only to the money-lender as a stimulus and a stumbling-block to the imperial government; he was, like the latter, to be a cause of annexation and a fire-brand of war, and serves as an almost equal illustration of the truth that a government which does not control the operations of capital is likely to become their instrument.[165]
If we descend from the aristocracy of trade to its poorer representatives, we find that time had wrought great changes in the lot of the smaller manufacturer and artisan. It is true that the old trade-gilds of Rome, which tradition carried back to the days of Numa, still maintained their existence. The goldsmiths, coppersmiths, builders, dyers, leather-workers, tanners and potters[166] still held their regular meetings and celebrated their regular games. But it is questionable whether even at this period their collegiate life was not rather concerned with ceremonial than with business, whether they did not gather more frequently to discuss the prospects of their social and religious functions than to consider the rules and methods of their trades. We shall soon see these gilds of artificers a great political power in the State–one that often alarmed the government and sometimes paralysed its control of the streets of Rome. But their political activity was connected with ceremonial rather than with trade; it was as religious associations that they supported the demagogue of the moment and disturbed the peace of the city. They made war against any aristocratic abuse that was dangled for the moment before their eyes; but they undertook no consistent campaign against the dominance of capital. Their activity was that of the radical caucus, not of the trade-union. But, if even their industrial character had been fully maintained and trade interests had occupied more of their attention than street processions and political agitation, they could never have posed as the representatives of the interests of the free-born sons of Rome. The class of freedmen was freely admitted to their ranks, and the freedman was from an economic point of view the greatest enemy of the pure-blooded Italian. We shall also see that the freedman was usually not an independent agent in the conduct of the trade which he professed. He owed duties to his patron which limited his industrial activity and rendered a whole-hearted co-operation with his brother-workers impossible. It is questionable whether any gild organisation could have stood the shock of the immense development of industrial activity of which the more fortunate classes at Rome were now reaping the fruits. The trades represented by Numa’s colleges would at best have formed a mere framework for a maze of instruments which formed the complex mechanism needed to satisfy the voracious wants of the new society. The gold-smithery of early times was now complicated by the arts of chasing and engraving on precious stones; the primitive builder, if he were still to ply his trade with profit, must associate it with the skill of the men who made the stuccoed ceilings, the mosaic pavements, the painted walls. The leather-worker must have learnt to make many a kind of fashionable shoe, and the dyer to work in violet, scarlet or saffron, in any shade or colour to which fashion had given a temporary vogue. Tailoring had become a fine art, and the movable decorations of houses demanded a host of skilled workmen, each of whom was devoted to the speciality which he professed. It would seem as though the very weaknesses of society might have benefited the lower middle class, and the siftings of the harvest given by the spoils of empire might have more than supplied the needs of a parasitic proletariate. It is an unquestioned fact that the growing luxury of the times did benefit trade with that doubtful benefit which accompanies the diversion of capital from purposes of permanent utility to objects of aesthetic admiration or temporary display; but it is an equally unquestioned fact that this unhealthy nutriment did not strengthen to any appreciable extent such of the lower classes as could boast pure Roman blood. The military conscription, to which the more prosperous of these classes were exposed, was inimical to the constant pursuit of that technical skill which alone could enable its possessor to hold the market against freer competitors. Such of the freedmen and the slaves as were trained to these pursuits–men who would not have been so trained had they not possessed higher artistic perception and greater deftness in execution than their fellows–were wholly freed from the military burden which absorbed much of the leisure, and blunted much of the skill, possessed by their free-born rivals. The competition of slaves must have been still more cruel in the country districts and near the smaller country towns than in the capital itself. At Rome the limitations of space must have hindered the development of home-industries in the houses of the nobles, and, although it is probable that much that was manufactured by the slaves of the country estate was regularly supplied to the urban villa, yet for the purchase of articles of immediate use or of goods which showed the highest qualities of workmanship the aristocratic proprietor must have been dependent on the competition of the Roman market. But the rustic villa might be perfectly self-supporting, and the village artificer must have looked in vain for orders from the spacious mansion, which, once a dwelling-house or farm, had become a factory as well. Both in town and country the practice of manumission was paralysing the energies of the free-born man who attempted to follow a profitable profession. The frequency of the gift of liberty to slaves is one of the brightest aspects of the system of servitude as practised by the Romans; but its very beneficence is an illustration of the aristocrat’s contempt for the proletariate; for, where the ideal of citizenship is high, manumission–at least of such a kind as shall give political rights, or any trading privileges, equivalent to those of the free citizen–is infrequent. In the Rome of this period, however, the liberation of a slave showed something more than a mere negative neglect of the interests of the citizen. The gift of freedom was often granted by the master in an interested, if not in a wholly selfish, spirit. He was freed from the duty of supporting his slave while he retained his services as a freedman. The performance of these services was, it is true, not a legal condition of manumission; but it was the result of the agreement between master and slave on which the latter had attained his freedom. The nobleman who had granted liberty to his son’s tutor, his own doctor or his barber, might still bargain to be healed, shaved or have his children instructed free of expense. The bargain was just in so far as the master was losing services for which he had originally paid, and juster still when the freedman set up business on the _peculium_ which his master had allowed him to acquire during the days of his servitude. But the contracting parties were on an unequal footing, and the burden enforced by the manumittor was at times so intolerable that towards the close of the second century the praetor was forced to intervene and set limits to the personal service which might be expected from the gratitude of the liberated slave.[167] The performance of such gratuitous services necessarily diminished the demand for the labour of the free man who attempted to practise the pursuit of an art which required skill and was dependent for its returns on the custom of the wealthier classes; and even such needs as could not be met by the gratuitous services of freedmen or the purchased labour of slaves, were often supplied, not by the labour of the free-born Roman, but by that of the immigrant _peregrinus_. The foreigner naturally reproduced the arts of his own country in a form more perfect than could be acquired by the Roman or Italian, and as Rome had acquired foreign wants it was inevitable that they should be mainly supplied by foreign hands. We cannot say that most of the new developments in trade and manufacture had slipped from the hands of the free citizens; it would be truer to maintain that they had never been grasped by them at all. And, worse than this, we must admit that there was little effort to attain them. Both the cause and the consequence of the monopoly of trade and manufacture of a petty kind by freedmen and foreigners is to be found in the contempt felt by the free-born Roman for the “sordid and illiberal sources of livelihood.” [168] This prejudice was reflected in public law, for any one who exercised a trade or profession was debarred from office at Rome.[169] As the magistracy had become the monopoly of a class, the prejudice might have been little more than one of the working principles of an aristocratic government, had not the arts which supplied the amenities of life actually tended to drift into the hands of the non-citizen or the man of defective citizenship. The most abject Roman could in his misery console himself with the thought that the hands, which should only touch the plough and the sword, had never been stained by trade. His ideal was that of the nobleman in his palace. It differed in degree but not in kind. It centred round the Forum, the battlefield and the farm.
For even the most lofty aristocrat would have exempted agriculture from the ban of labour;[170] and, if the man of free birth could still have toiled productively on his holding, his contempt for the rabble which supplied the wants of his richer fellow-citizens in the towns would have been justified on material, if not on moral, grounds. He would have held the real sources of wealth which had made the empire possible and still maintained the actual rulers of that empire. Italian agriculture was still the basis of the brilliant life of Rome. Had it not been so, the epoch of revolution could not have been ushered in by an agrarian law. Had the interest in the land been small, no fierce attack would have been made and no encroachment stoutly resisted. We are at the commencement of the epoch of the dominance of trade, but we have not quitted the epoch of the supremacy of the landed interest.
The vital question connected with agriculture was not that of its failure or success, but that of the individuals who did the work and shared the profits. The labourer, the soil, the market stand in such close relations to one another that it is possible for older types of cultivation and tenure to be a failure while newer types are a brilliant success. But an economic success may be a social failure. Thus it was with the greater part of the Italian soil of the day which had passed into Roman hands. Efficiency was secured by accumulation and the smaller holdings were falling into decay.
A problem so complex as that of a change in tenure and in the type of productive activity employed on the soil is not likely to yield to the analysis of any modern historian who deals with the events of the ancient world. He is often uncertain whether he is describing causes or symptoms, whether the primary evil was purely economic or mainly social, whether diminished activity was the result of poverty and decreasing numbers, or whether pauperism and diminution of population were the effects of a weakened nerve for labour and of a standard of comfort so feverishly high that it declined the hard life of the fields and induced its possessors to refuse to propagate their kind. But social and economic evils react so constantly on one another that the question of the priority of the one to the other is not always of primary importance. A picture has been conjured up by the slight sketches of ancient historians and the more prolonged laments of ancient writers on agriculture, which gives us broad outlines that we must accept as true, although we may refuse to join in the belief that these outlines represent an unmixed and almost incurable evil. These writers even attempt to assign causes, which convince by their probability, although there is often a suspicion that the ultimate and elusive truth has not been grasped.
The two great symptoms which immediately impress our imagination are a decline, real or apparent, in the numbers of the free population of Rome, and the introduction of new methods of agriculture which entailed a diminution in the class of freehold proprietors who had held estates of small or moderate size. The evidence for an actual decline of the population must be gathered exclusively from the Roman census lists.[171] At first sight these seem to tell a startling tale. At the date of the outbreak of the First Punic War (265 B.C.) the roll of Roman citizens had been given as 382,284,[172] at a census held but three years before the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus (136 B.C.) the numbers presented by the list were 307,833.[173] In 129 years the burgess roll had shrunk by nearly 75,000 heads of the population. The shrinkage had not always been steadily progressive; sometimes there is a sudden drop which tells of the terrible ravages of war. But the return of peace brought no upward movement that was long maintained. In the interval of comparative rest which followed the Third Macedonian War the census rolls showed a decrease of about 13,000 in ten Years.[174] Seven years later 2,000 more have disappeared,[175] and a slight increase at the next _lustrum_ is followed by another drop of about 14,000.[176] The needs of Rome had increased, and the means for meeting them were dwindling year by year. This must be admitted, however we interpret the meaning of these returns. A hasty generalisation might lead us to infer that a wholesale diminution was taking place in the population of Rome and Italy. The returns may add weight to other evidence which points this way; but, taken by themselves, they afford no warrant for such a conclusion. The census lists were concerned, not only purely with Roman citizens, but purely with Roman citizens of a certain type. It is practically certain that they reproduce only the effective fighting strength of Rome,[177] and take no account of those citizens whose property did not entitle them to be placed amongst the _classes_.[178] But, if it is not necessary to believe that an actual diminution of population is attested by these declining numbers, the conclusion which they do exhibit is hardly less serious from an economic and political point of view. They show that portions of the well-to-do classes were ceasing to possess the property which entitled them to entrance into the regular army, and that the ranks of the poorer proletariate were being swelled by their impoverishment. It is possible that such impoverishment may have been welcomed as a boon by the wearied veterans of Rome and their descendants. It meant exemption from the heavier burdens of military service, and, if it went further still, it implied immunity from the tribute as long as direct taxes were collected from Roman citizens.[179] As long as service remained a burden on wealth, however moderate, there could have been little inducement to the man of small means to struggle up to a standard of moderately increased pecuniary comfort, which would certainly be marred and might be lost by the personal inconvenience of the levy.
The decline in the numbers of the wealthier classes is thus attested by the census rolls. But indications can also be given which afford a slight probability that there was a positive diminution in the free population of Rome and perhaps of Italy. The carnage of the Hannibalic war may easily be overemphasised as a source of positive decline. Such losses are rapidly made good when war is followed by the normal industrial conditions which success, or even failure, may bring. But, as we shall soon see reason for believing that these industrial conditions were not wholly resumed in Italy, the Second Punic War may be regarded as having produced a gap in the population which was never entirely refilled. We find evidences of tracts of country which were not annexed by the rich but could not be repeopled by the poor. The policy pursued by the decaying Empire of settling foreign colonists on Italian soil had already occurred to the statesmen of Rome in the infancy of her imperial expansion. In 180 B.C. 40,000 Ligurians belonging to the Apuanian people were dragged from their homes with their wives and children and settled on some public land of Rome which lay in the territory of the Samnites. The consuls were commissioned to divide up the land in allotments, and money was voted to the colonists to defray the expense of stocking their new farms.[180] Although the leading motive for this transference was the preservation of peace amongst the Ligurian tribes, yet it is improbable that the senate would have preferred the stranger to its kindred had there been an outcry from the landless proletariate to be allowed to occupy and retain the devastated property of the State.
But moral motives are stronger even than physical forces in checking the numerical progress of a race. Amongst backward peoples unusual indulgence and consequent disease may lead to the diminution or even extinction of the stock; amongst civilised peoples the motives which attain this result are rather prudential, and are concerned with an ideal of life which perhaps increases the efficiency of the individual, but builds up his healthy and pleasurable environment at the expense of the perpetuity of the race. The fact that the Roman and Italian physique was not degenerating is abundantly proved by the military history of the last hundred years of the Republic. This is one of the greatest periods of conquest in the history of the world. The Italy, whom we are often inclined to think of as exhausted, could still pour forth her myriads of valiant sons to the confines marked by the Rhine, the Euphrates and the Sahara; and the struggle of the civil wars, which followed this expansion, was the clash of giants. But this vigour was accompanied by an ideal, whether of irresponsibility or of comfort, which gave rise to the growing habit of celibacy–a habit which was to stir the eloquence of many a patriotic statesman and finally lead to the intervention of the law. When the censor of 131 uttered the memorable exhortation “Since nature has so ordained that we cannot live comfortably with a wife nor live at all without one, you should hold the eternal safety of the State more dear than your own brief pleasure,” [181] it is improbable that he was indulging in conscious cynicism, although there may have been a trace of conscious humour in his words. He was simply bending to the ideal of the people whom he saw, or imagined to be, before him. The ideal was not necessarily bad, as one that was concerned with individual life. It implied thrift, forethought, comfort–even efficiency of a kind, for the unmarried man was a more likely recruit than the father of a family. But it sacrificed too much–the future to the present; it ignored the undemonstrable duty which a man owes to the permanent idea of the State through working for a future which he shall never see. It rested partly on a conviction of security; but that feeling of security was the most perilous sign of all.
The practice of celibacy generally leads to irregular attachments between the sexes. In a society ignorant of slavery, such attachments, as giving rise to social inconveniences far greater than those of marriage, are usually shunned on prudential grounds even where moral motives are of no avail. But the existence in Italy of a large class of female dependants, absolutely outside the social circle of the citizen body, rendered the attachment of the master to his slave girl or to his freedwoman fatally easy and unembarrassing. It was unfortunately as attractive as it was easy. Amidst the mass of servile humanity that had drifted to Italy from most of the quarters of the world there was scarcely a type that might not reproduce some strange and wonderful beauty. And the charm of manner might be secured as readily as that of face and form. The Hellenic East must often have exhibited in its women that union of wit, grace and supple tact which made even its men so irresistible to their Roman masters. The courtesans of the capital, whether of high or low estate,[182] are from the point of view which we are considering not nearly so important as the permanent mistress or “concubine” of the man who might dwell in any part of Italy. It was the latter, not the former, that was the true substitute for the wife. There is reason to believe that it was about this period that “concubinage” became an institution which was more than tolerated by society.[183] The relation which it implied between the man and his companion, who was generally one of his freedwomen, was sufficiently honourable. It excluded the idea of union with any other woman, whether by marriage or temporary association; it might be more durable than actual wedlock, for facilities for divorce were rapidly breaking the permanence of the latter bond; it might satisfy the juristic condition of “marital affection” quite as fully as the type of union to which law or religion gave its blessing. But it differed from marriage in one point of vital importance for the welfare of the State. Children might be the issue of _concubinatus_, but they were not looked on as its end. Such unions were not formed _liberûm quaerendorum causâ_.
The decline, or at least the stationary character, of the population may thus be shown to be partly the result of a cause at once social and economic; for this particular social evil was the result of the economic experiment of the extended use of slavery as a means of production. This extension was itself partly the result of the accidents of war and conquest, and in fact, throughout this picture of the change which was passing over Italy, we can never free ourselves from the spectres of militarism and hegemony. But an investigation of the more purely economic aspects of the industrial life of the period affords a clear revelation of the fact that the effects of war and conquest were merely the foundation, accidentally presented, of a new method of production, which was the result of deliberate design and to some extent of a conscious imitation of systems which had in turn built up the colossal wealth, and assisted the political decay, of older civilisations with which Rome was now brought into contact. The new ideal was that of the large plantation or _latifundium_ supervised by skilled overseers, worked by gangs of slaves with carefully differentiated duties, guided by scientific rules which the hoary experience of Asia and Carthage had devised, but, in unskilled Roman hands, perhaps directed with a reckless energy that, keeping in view the vast and speedy returns which could only be given by richer soils than that of Italy, was as exhaustive of the capacities of the land as it was prodigal of the human energy that was so cheaply acquired and so wastefully employed. The East, Carthage and Sicily had been the successive homes of this system, and the Punic ideal reached Rome just at the moment when the tendency of the free peasantry to quit their holdings as unprofitable, or to sell them to pay their debts, opened the way for the organisation of husbandry on the grand Carthaginian model.[184] The opportunity was naturally seized with the utmost eagerness by men whose wants were increasing, whose incomes must be made to keep pace with these wants, and whose wealth must inevitably be dependent mainly on the produce of the soil. Yet we have no warrant for accusing the members of the Roman nobility of a deliberate plan of campaign stimulated by conscious greed and selfishness. For a time they may not have known what they were doing. Land was falling in and they bought it up; domains belonging to the State were so unworked as to be falling into the condition of rank jungle and pestilent morass. They cleared and improved this land with a view to their own profit and the profit of the State. Free labour was unattainable or, when attained, embarrassing. They therefore bought their labour in the cheapest market, this market being the product of the wars and slave-raids of the time. They acted, in fact, as every enlightened capitalist would act under similar circumstances. It seemed an age of the revival of agriculture, not of its decay. The official class was filled with a positive enthusiasm for new and improved agricultural methods. The great work of the Carthaginian Mago was translated by order of the senate.[185] Few of the members of that body would have cared to follow the opening maxim of the great expert, that if a man meant to settle in the country he should begin by selling his house in town;[186] the men of affairs did not mean to become gentlemen farmers, and it was the hope of profitable investment for the purpose of maintaining their dignity in the capital, not the rustic ideal of the primitive Roman, that appealed to their souls. But they might have hoped that most of the golden precepts of the twenty-eight books, which unfolded every aspect of the science of the management of land, would be assimilated by the intelligent bailiff, and they may even have been influenced by a patriotic desire to reveal to the small holder scientific methods of tillage, which might stave off the ruin that they deplored as statesmen and exploited as individuals. But the lessons were thrown away on the small cultivator; they probably presupposed the possession of capital and labour which were far beyond his reach; and science may have played but little part even in the accumulations of the rich, although the remarkable spectacle of small holdings, under the personal supervision of peasant proprietors, being unable to hold their own against plantations and ranches managed by bailiffs and worked by slaves, does suggest that some improved methods of cultivation were adopted on the larger estates. The rapidity with which the plantation system spread must have excited the astonishment even of its promoters. Etruria, in spite of the fact that three colonies of Roman citizens had lately been founded within its borders,[187] soon showed one continuous series of great domains stretching from town to town, with scarcely a village to break the monotonous expanse of its self-tilled plains. Little more than forty years had elapsed since the final settlement of the last Roman colony of Luna when a young Roman noble, travelling along the Etruscan roads, strained his eyes in vain to find a free labourer, whether cultivator or shepherd.[188] In this part of Italy it is probable that Roman enterprise was not the sole, or even the main, cause of the wreckage of the country folk. The territory had always been subject to local influences of an aristocratic kind; but the Etruscan nobles had stayed their hand as long as a free people might help them to regain their independence.[189] Now subjection had crushed all other ambition but that of gain and personal splendour, while the ravages of the Hannibalic war had made the peasantry an easy victim of the wholesale purchaser. Farther south, in Bruttii and Apulia, the hand of Rome had co-operated with the scourge of war to produce a like result. The confiscations effected in the former district as a punishment for its treasonable relations with Hannibal, the suitability of the latter for grazing purposes, which had early made it the largest tract of land in Italy patrolled by the shepherd slave,[190] had swept village and cultivator away, and left through whole day’s journeys but vast stretches of pasture between the decaying towns.
For barrenness and desolation were often the results of the new and improved system of management. There were tracts of country which could not produce cereals of an abundance and quality capable of competing with the corn imported from the provinces; but even on territories where crops could be reared productively, it was tempting to substitute for the arduous processes of sowing and reaping the cheaper and easier industry of the pasturage of flocks. We do not know the extent to which arable land in fair condition was deliberately turned into pasturage; but we can imagine many cases in which the land recently acquired by capitalists, whether from the State or from smaller holders, was in such a condition, either from an initial lack of cultivation or from neglect or from the ravages of war, that the new proprietor may well have shrunk from the doubtful enterprise of sinking his capital in the soil, for the purpose of testing its productive qualities. In such cases it was tempting to treat the great domain as a sheep-walk or cattle-ranch. The initial expenses of preparation were small, the labour to be employed was reduced to a minimum, the returns in proportion to the expenses were probably far larger than could be gained from corn, even when grown under the most favourable conditions. The great difficulty in the way of cattle-rearing on a large scale in earlier times had been the treatment of the flocks and herds during the winter months. The necessity for providing stalls and fodder for this period must have caused the proprietor to limit the heads of cattle which he cared to possess. But this constraint had vanished at once when a stretch of warm coast-line could be found, on which the flocks could pasture without feeling the rigour of the winter season. Conversely, the cattle-rearer who possessed the advantage of such a line of coast would feel his difficulties beginning when the summer months approached. The plains of the Campagna and Apulia could have been good neither for man nor beast during the torrid season. The full condition which freed a grazier from all embarrassment and rendered him careless of limiting the size of his flocks, was the combined possession of pastures by the sea for winter use, and of glades in the hills for pasturage in summer.[191] Neither the men of the hills nor the men of the plains, as long as they formed independent communities, could become graziers on an extensive scale, and it has been pointed out that even a Greek settlement of the extent of Sybaris had been forced to import its wool from the Black Sea through Miletus.[192] But when Rome had won the Apennines and extended her influence over the coast, there were no limits to the extent to which cattle rearing could be carried.[193] It became perhaps the most gigantic enterprise connected with the soil of Italy. Its cheapness and efficiency appealed to every practical mind. Cato, who had a sentimental attachment to agriculture, was bound in honesty to reply to the question “What is the best manner of investment?” by the words “Good pasturage.” To the question as to the second-best means he answered “Tolerable pasturage.” When asked to declare the third, he replied “Bad pasturage.” To ploughing he would assign only the fourth place in the descending Scale.[194] Bruttii and Apulia were the chief homes of the ranch and the fold. The Lucanian conquest of the former country must, even at a time preceding the Roman domination, have formed a connection between the mountains and the plains, and pasturage on a large scale in the mountain glades of the Bruttian territory may have been an inheritance rather than a creation of the Romans; but the ruin caused in this district by the Second Punic War, the annexation to the State of large tracts of rebel land,[195] and the reduction of large portions of the population to the miserable serf-like condition of _dediticii_,[196] must have offered the capitalists opportunities which they could not otherwise have secured; and both here and in Apulia the tendency to extend the grazing system to its utmost limits must have advanced with terrible rapidity since the close of the Hannibalic war. It was the East coast of Southern Italy that was chiefly surrendered to this new form of industry, and we may observe a somewhat sharp distinction between the pastoral activity of these regions and the agricultural life which still continued, although on a diminished scale, in the Western districts.[197]
We have already made occasional reference to the accidents on which the new industrial methods that created the _latifundia_ were designedly based. It is now necessary to examine these accidents in greater detail, if only for the purpose of preparing the ground for a future estimate of the efficacy of the remedies suggested by statesmen for a condition of things which, however naturally and even honestly created, was deplorable both on social and political grounds. The causes which had led to the change from one form of tenure and cultivation to another of a widely different kind required to be carefully probed, if the Herculean task of a reversion to the earlier system was to be attempted. The men who essayed the task had unquestionably a more perfect knowledge of the causes of the change than can ever be possessed by the student of to-day; but criticism is easier than action, and if it is not to become shamelessly facile, every constraining element in the complicated problem which is at all recoverable (all those elements so clearly seen by the hard-headed and honest Roman reformers, but known by them to possess an invulnerability that we have forgotten) must be examined by the historian in the blundering analysis which is all that is permitted by his imperfect information, and still more imperfect realisation, of the temporary forces that are the millstones of a scheme of reform.
The havoc wrought by the Hannibalic invasion[198] had caused even greater damage to the land than to the people. The latter had been thinned but the former had been wasted, and in some cases wasted, as events proved, almost beyond repair. The devastation had been especially great in Southern Italy, the nations of which had clung to the Punic invader to the end. But such results of war are transitory in the extreme, if the numbers and energy of the people who resume possession of their wrecked homes are not exhausted, and if the conditions of production and sale are as favourable after the calamity as they were before. The amount of wealth which an enemy can injure, lies on the mere surface of the soil, and is an insignificant fraction of that which is stored in the bosom of the earth, or guaranteed by a favourable commercial situation and access to the sea. Carthage could pay her war indemnity and, in the course of half a century, affright Cato by her teeming wealth and fertility. Her people had resumed their old habits, bent wholeheartedly to the only life they loved, and the prizes of a crowded haven and bursting granaries were the result. If a nation does not recover from such a blow, there must be some permanent defect in its economic life or some fatal flaw in its administrative system. The devastation caused by war merely accelerates the process of decay by creating a temporary impoverishment, which reveals the severity of the preceding struggle for existence and renders hopeless its resumption. Certainly the great war of which Italy had been the theatre did mark such an epoch in the history of its agricultural life. A lack of productivity began to be manifested, for which, however, subsequent economic causes were mainly responsible. The lack of intensity, which is a characteristic of slave labour, lessened the returns, while the secondary importance attached to the manuring of the fields was a vicious principle inherent in the agricultural precepts of the time.[199] But it is probable that from this epoch there were large tracts of land the renewed cultivation of which was never attempted; and these were soon increased by domains which yielded insufficient returns and were gradually abandoned. The Italian peasant had ever had a hard fight with the insalubrity of his soil. Fever has always been the dreaded goddess of the environs of Rome. But constant labour and effective drainage had kept the scourge at bay, until the evil moment came when the time of the peasant was absorbed, and his energy spent, in the toils of constant war, when his land was swallowed up in the vast estates that had rapid profits as their end and careless slaves as their cultivators. Then, the moist fields gave out their native pestilence, and malaria reigned unchecked over the fairest portion of the Italian plain.[200]
One of the leading economic causes, which had led to the failure of a certain class of the Italian peasant-proprietors, was the competition to which they were exposed from the provinces. Rome herself had begun to rely for the subsistence of her increasing population on corn imported from abroad, and many of the large coast-towns may have been forced to follow her example. The corn-producing powers of the Mediterranean lands had now definitely shifted from the regions of the East and North to those of the South.[201] Greece, which had been barely able to feed itself during the most flourishing period of its history, could not under any circumstances have possessed an importance as a country of export for Italy; but the economic evils which had fallen on this unhappy land are worthy of observation, as presenting a forecast of the fate which was in store for Rome. The decline in population, which could be attributed neither to war nor pestilence, the growing celibacy and childlessness of its sparse inhabitants,[202] must have been due to an agricultural revolution similar to that which was gradually being effected on Italian soil. The plantation system and the wholesale employment of slave labour must have swept across the Aegean from their homes in Asia Minor. Here their existence is sufficiently attested by the servile rising which was to assume, shortly after the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, the pretended form of a dynastic war; and the troubles which always attended the collection of the Asiatic tithes, in the days when a Roman province had been established in those regions, give no favourable impression of the agricultural prosperity of the countries which lay between the Taurus and the sea. As far south as Sicily there was evidence of exhaustion of the land, and of unnatural conditions of production, which excluded the mass of the free inhabitants from participation both in labour and profits. But even Sicily had learned from Carthage the evil lesson that Greece had acquired from Asia; the plantation system had made vast strides in the island, and the condition of the _aratores_, whether free-holders or lessees, was not what it had been in the days of Diocles and Timoleon. The growing economic dependence of Rome on Sicily was by no means wholly due to any exceptional productive capacities in the latter, but was mainly the result of proximity, and of administrative relations which enabled the government and the speculator in corn to draw definite and certain supplies of grain from the Sicilian cultivators. This was true also, although to a smaller degree, of Sardinia. But Sicily and Sardinia do mark the beginning of the Southern zone of lands which were capable of filling the markets of the Western world. It was the Northern coast of Africa which rose supreme as the grain-producer of the time. In the Carthaginian territory the natural absence of an agricultural peasantry amidst a commercial folk, and the elaboration of a definite science of agriculture, had neutralised the ill effects which accompanied the plantation system amongst other peoples less business-like and scientific; the cultivators had shown no signs of unrest and the soil no traces of exhaustion. It has been inferred with some probability that the hostility of Cato, the friend of agriculture and of the Italian yeoman, to the flourishing Punic state was directed to some extent by the fear that the grain of Africa might one day drive from the market the produce of the Italian fields;[203] and, if this view entered into the calculations which produced the final Punic War, the very short-sightedness of the policy which destroyed a state only to give its lands to African cities and potentates or to Roman speculators, who might continue the methods of the extinct community, is only too characteristic of that type of economic jealousy which destroys an accidental product and leaves the true cause of offence unassailed. The destruction of Carthage had, as a matter of fact, aggravated the danger; for the first use which Masinissa of Numidia made of the vast power with which Rome had entrusted him, was an attempt to civilise his people by turning them into cultivators;[204] and the virgin soil of the great country which stretched from the new boundaries of Carthage to the confines of the Moors, was soon reckoned amongst the competing elements which the Roman agriculturist had to fear.
But the force of circumstances caused the Sicilian and Sardinian cultivator to be the most formidable of his immediate competitors. The facility of transport from Sicily to Rome rendered that island superior as a granary to even the more productive portions of the Italian mainland. Sicily could never have revealed the marvellous fertility of the valley of the Po, where a bushel and a half of wheat could be purchased for five pence half-penny, and the same quantity of barley was sold for half this price;[205] but it was easier to get Sicilian corn to Rome by sea than to get Gallic corn to Rome by land; and the system of taxation and requisitions which had grown out of the provincial organisation of the island, rendered it peculiarly easy to place great masses of corn on the Roman market at very short notice. Occasionally the Roman government enforced a sale of corn from the province (_frumentum emptum_),[206] a reasonable price being paid for the grain thus demanded for the city or the army; but this was almost the only case in which the government intervened to regulate supplies. In the ordinary course of things the right to collect the tithes of the province was purchased by public companies, who paid money, not grain, into the Roman treasury, and these companies placed their corn on the market as best they could. The operations of the speculators in grain doubtless disturbed the price at times. But yet the certainty, the abundance and the facilities for transport of this supply were such as practically to shut out from competition in the Roman market all but the most favourably situated districts of Italy. Their chance of competition depended mainly on their accidental possession of a good road, or their neighbourhood to the sea or to a navigable river.[207] The larger proprietors in any part of Italy must have possessed greater facilities for carrying their grain to a good market than were enjoyed by the smaller holders. The Clodian law on trade permitted senators to own sea-going ships of a certain tonnage; they could, therefore, export their own produce without any dependence on the middle-man, while the smaller cultivators would have been obliged to pay freight, or could only have avoided such payment by forming shipping-companies amongst themselves. But such combination was not to be looked for amongst a peasant class, barely conscious even of the external symptoms of the great revolution which was dragging them to ruin, and perhaps almost wholly oblivious of its cause.
It required less penetration to fathom the second of the great reasons for the accumulation of landed property in the hands of the few; for this cause had been before the eyes of the Roman world, and had been expounded by the lips of Roman statesmen, for generations or, if we credit a certain class of traditions,[208] even for centuries. This cause of the growing monopoly of the land by the few was the system of possession which the State had encouraged, for the purpose of securing the use and cultivation of its public domain. The policy of the State seems to have changed from time to time with reference to its treatment of this particular portion of its property, which it valued as the most secure of its assets and one that served, besides its financial end, the desirable purpose of assisting it to maintain the influence of Rome throughout almost every part of Italy. When conquered domain had first been declared “public,” the government had been indifferent to the type of occupier which served it by squatting on this territory and reclaiming land that had not been divided or sold chiefly because its condition was too unattractive to invite either of these processes.[209] It had probably extended its invitation even to Latin allies,[210] and looked with approval on any member of the burgess body who showed his enterprise and patriotism by the performance of this great public service. If the State had a partiality, it was probably for the richer and more powerful classes of its citizens. They could embrace a greater quantity of land in their grasp, and so save the trouble which attended an estimate of the returns of a great number of small holdings; they possessed more effective means of reclaiming waste or devastated land, for they had a greater control of capital and labour; lastly, through their large bands of clients and slaves, they had the means of efficiently protecting the land which they had occupied, and this must have been an important consideration at a time when large tracts of the _ager publicus_ lay amidst foreign territories which were barely pacified, and were owned by communities that often wavered in their allegiance to Rome. But, whatever the views of the government, it is tolerably clear that the original occupiers must have chiefly represented men of this stamp. These were the days when the urban and the rustic tribes were sharply divided, as containing respectively the men of the town and the men of the country, and when there were comparatively few of the latter folk that did not possess some holding of their own. It was improbable that a townsman would often venture on the unfamiliar task of taking up waste land; it was almost as improbable that a small yeoman would find leisure to add to the unaided labour on his own holding the toil of working on new and unpromising soil, except in the cases where some unclaimed portion of the public domain was in close proximity to his estate.
We may, therefore, infer that from very early times the wealthier classes had asserted themselves as the chief occupiers of the public domain. And this condition of things continued to be unchallenged until a time came[211] when the small holders, yielding to the pressure of debt and bankruptcy, sought their champions amongst the tribunes of the Plebs. The absolute control of the public domain by the State, the absolute insecurity of the tenure of its occupants, furnished an excellent opportunity for staving off schemes of confiscation and redistribution of private property, such as had often shaken the communities of Greece, and even for refusing to tamper with the existing law of debtor and creditor.[212] It was imagined that bankrupt yeomen might be relieved by being allowed to settle on the public domain, or that the resumption or retention of a portion of this domain by the State might furnish an opportunity for the foundation of fresh colonies, and a law was passed limiting the amount of the _ager publicus_ that any individual might possess. The enactment, whatever its immediate results may have been, proved ineffective as a means of checking the growth of large possessions. No special commission was appointed to enforce obedience to its terms, and their execution was neglected by the ordinary magistrates. The provisions of the law were, indeed, never forgotten, but as a rule they were remembered only to be evaded. Devious methods were adopted of holding public land through persons who seemed to be _bonâ fide_ possessors in their own right, but were in reality merely agents of some planter who already held land up to the permitted limit.[213] Then came the agricultural crisis which followed the Punic Wars. The small freeholds, mortgaged, deserted or selling for a fraction of their value, began to fall into the meshes of the vast net which had spread over the public domain. In some cases actual violence is said to have been used to the smaller yeomen by their neighbouring tyrants,[214] and we can readily imagine that, when a holding had been deserted for a time through stress of war or military service, it might be difficult to resume possession in the face of effective occupation by the bailiff of some powerful neighbour. The _latifundium_–acquired, as it was believed, in many cases by force, fraud and shameless violation of the law–was becoming the standard unit of cultivation throughout Italy.[215] When we consider the general social and economic circumstances of the time, it is possible to imagine that large properties would have grown in Italy, as in Greece, had Rome never possessed an inch of public domain; but the occupation of _ager publicus_ by the rich is very important from two points of view. On the one hand, it unquestionably accelerated the process of the formation of vast estates; and a renewed impulse had lately been given to this process by the huge confiscations in the South of Italy, and perhaps by the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul; for it is improbable that the domain possessed by the State in this fertile country had been wholly parcelled out amongst the colonies of the northern frontier.[216] But on the other hand, the fact that the kernel of these estates was composed of public land in excess of the prescribed limit seemed to make resumption by the State and redistribution to the poor legally possible. The _ager publicus_, therefore, formed the basis for future agitation and was the rallying point for supporters and opponents of the proposed methods of agricultural reform.
But it was not merely the negligence of the State which led to the crushing of the small man by the great; the positive burdens which the government was forced to impose by the exigencies of the career of conquest and hegemony into which Rome had drifted, rendered the former an almost helpless competitor in the uneven struggle. The conscription had from early days been a source of impoverishment for the commons and of opportunity for the rich. The former could obey the summons of the State only at the risk of pledging his credit, or at least of seeing his homestead drift into a condition of neglect which would bring the inevitable day when it could only be rehabilitated by a loan of seed or money. The lot of the warrior of moderate means was illustrated by the legend of Regulus. He was believed to have written home to the consuls asking to be relieved of his command in Africa. The bailiff whom he had left on his estate of seven _jugera_ was dead, the hired man had stolen the implements of agriculture and run away; the farm lay desolate and, were its master not permitted to return, his wife and children would lack the barest necessaries of existence.[217] The struggle to maintain a household in the absence of its head was becoming more acute now that corn-land was ceasing to pay, except under the most favourable conditions, and now that the demand for conscripts was sometimes heavier and always more continuous than it had ever been before. Perhaps one-tenth of the adult male population of Rome was always in the field;[218] the units came and went, but the men who bore the brunt of the long campaigns and of garrison duty in the provinces were those to whom leisure meant life–the yeomen who maintained their place in the census lists by hardy toil, and who risked their whole subsistence through the service that had been wrested from them as a reward for a laborious career. When they ceased to be owners of their land, they found it difficult to secure places even as labourers on some rich man’s property. The landholder preferred the services of slaves which could not be interrupted by the call of military duty.[219]
The economic evils consequent on the conscription must have been felt with hardly less severity by such of the Italian allies as lived in the regions within which the _latifundia_ were growing up. To these were added the pecuniary burdens which Rome had been forced to impose during the Second Punic War. These burdens were for the most part indirect, for Rome did not tax her Italian _socii_, but they were none the less severe. Every contingent supplied from an allied community had its expenses, except that of food during service, defrayed from the treasury of its own state,[220] and ten continuous years of conscription and requisition had finally exhausted the loyalty even of Rome’s Latin kindred.[221] It is true that the Italians were partially, although not wholly, free from the economic struggle between the possessors of the public land and the small freeholders; but there is no reason for supposing that those of Western Italy were exempt from the consequences of the reduction in price that followed the import of corn from abroad, and the drain on their incomes and services which had been caused by war could scarcely have fitted them to stand this unexpected trial. Rome’s harsh dealings with the treasonable South, although adopted for political motives, was almost unquestionably a political blunder. She confiscated devastated lands, and so perpetuated their devastation. She left ruined harbours and cities in decay. She crippled her own resources to add to the pastoral wealth of a handful of her citizens. In the East of Italy there was a far greater vitality than elsewhere in agriculture of the older type. The Samnites in their mountains, the Peligni, Marrucini, Frentani and Vestini between the Apennines and the sea still kept to the system of small freeholds. Their peasantry had perhaps always cultivated for consumption rather than for sale; their inhabitants were rather beyond the reach of the ample supply from the South; and for these reasons the competition of Sicilian and African corn did not lead them to desert their fields. They were also less exposed than the Romans and Latins to the aggressions of the great _possessor_; for, since they possessed no _commercium_ with Rome, the annexation of their property by legal means was beyond the reach even of the ingenious cupidity of the times.[222] The proof of the existence of the yeoman in these regions is the danger which he caused to Rome. The spirit which had maintained his economic independence was to aim at a higher goal, and the struggle for equality of political rights was to prove to the exclusive city the prowess of that class of peasant proprietors which she had sacrificed in her own domains.
But, although this sacrifice had been great, we must not be led into the belief that there was no hope for the agriculturist of moderate means either in the present or in the future. Even in the present there were clear indications that estates of moderate size could under careful cultivation hold their own. The estate of Lucius Manlius, which Cato sketches in his work on agriculture,[223] was far from rivalling the great demesnes of the princes of the land. It consisted of 240 _jugera_ devoted to the olive and of 100 _jugera_ reserved for the vine. Provision was made for a moderate supply of corn and for pasturage for the cattle that worked upon the fields. But the farm was on the whole a representative of the new spirit, which saw in the vine and the olive a paying substitute for the decadent culture of grain. Even on an estate of this size we note as significant that the permanent and even the higher personnel of the household (the latter being represented by the _villici_ and the _villicae_) was composed of slaves; yet hirelings were needed for the harvest and the corn was grown by cottagers who held their land on a _métayer_ tenure. But such an estate demanded unusual capital as well as unusual care. On the tiny holdings, which were all that the poorest could afford, the scanty returns might be eked out by labour on the fields of others, for the small allotment did not demand the undivided energies of its holder.[224] There was besides a class of _politores_[225] similar to that figured as cultivating the Cornland on the estate of Manlius, who received in kind a wage on which they could at least exist. They were nominally _métayer_ tenants who were provided with the implements of husbandry by their landlord; but the quantity of grain which they could reserve to their own use was so small, varying as it did from a ninth to a fifth of the whole of the crop which they had reaped,[226] that their position was little better than that of the poorest labourer by the day.[227] The humblest class of freemen might still make a living in districts where pasturage did not reign supreme. But it was a living that involved a sacrifice of independence and a submission to sordid needs that were unworthy of the past ideal of Roman citizenship. It was a living too that conferred little benefit on the State; for the day-labourers and the _politores_ could scarcely have been in the position on the census list which rendered them liable to the conscription.
If it were possible to lessen the incidence of military service and to secure land and a small amount of capital for the dispossessed, the prospects for the future were by no means hopeless. The smaller culture, especially the cultivation of the vine and the olive, is that to which portions of Italy are eminently suited. This is especially true of the great volcanic plain of the West extending from the north of Etruria to the south of Campania and comprising, besides these territories, the countries of the Latins, the Sabines, the Volsci and the Hernici. The lightness and richness of the alluvion of this volcanic soil is almost as suited to the production of cereals as to that of the vine and the olive or the growth of vegetables.[228] But, even on the assumption that corn-growing would not pay, there was nothing to prevent, and everything to encourage the development of the olive plantation, the vineyard and the market garden throughout this region. It was a country sown with towns, and the vast throat of Rome alone would cry for the products of endless labour. Even Cato can place the vine and the olive before grazing land and forest trees in the order of productivity,[229] and before the close of the Republic the government had learnt the lesson that the salvation of the Italian peasantry depended on the cultivation of products like these. The conviction is attested by the protective edict that the culture of neither the vine nor the olive was to be extended in Transalpine Gaul.[230] Market gardening was also to have a considerable future, wherever the neighbourhood of the larger towns created a demand for such supplies.[231] A new method of tenure also gave opportunities to those whose capital or circumstances did not enable them to purchase a sufficient quantity of land of their own. Leaseholds became more frequent, and the _coloni_ thus created[232] began to take an active share in the agricultural life of Italy. Like the _villici_, they were a product, of the tendency to live away from the estate; but they gained ground at the expense of the servile bailiffs, probably in consequence of their greater trustworthiness and keener interest in the soil.
But time was needed to effect these changes. For the present the reign of the capitalist was supreme, and the plantation system was dominant throughout the greater part of Italy. The most essential ingredient in this system was the slave,–an alien and a chattel, individually a thing of little account, but reckoned in his myriads the most powerful factor in the economic, and therefore in the political, life of the times, the gravest of the problems that startled the reformer. The soil of Italy was now peopled with widely varied types, and echoes of strange tongues from West and East could be heard on every hand. Italy seemed a newly discovered country, on which the refuse of all lands had been thrown to become a people that could never be a nation. The home supply of slaves, so familiar as to seem a product of the land, was becoming a mere trifle in comparison with the vast masses that were being thrust amongst the peasantry by war and piracy. At the time of the protest of Tiberius Gracchus against the dominance of slave labour in the fields scarcely two generations had elapsed since the great influx had begun. The Second Punic War had spread to every quarter of the West; Sicily, Sardinia, Cisalpine Gaul and Spain all yielded their tribute in the form of human souls that had passed from the victor to the dealer, from the dealer to the country and the town. Only one generation had passed since a great wave had swept from Epirus and Northern Greece over the shores of Italy. In Epirus alone one hundred and fifty thousand prisoners had been sold.[233] Later still the destruction of Carthage must have cast vast quantities of agricultural slaves upon the market.[234] Asia too had yielded up her captives as the result of Roman victories; but the Oriental visages that might be seen in the streets of Rome or the plains of Sicily, were less often the gift of regular war than of the piracy and the systematised slave-hunting of the Eastern Mediterranean. Rome, who had crushed the rival maritime powers that had attempted, however imperfectly, to police the sea, had been content with the work of destruction, and seemed to care nothing for the enterprising buccaneers who sailed with impunity as far west as Sicily. The pirates had also made themselves useful to the Oriental powers which still retained their independence; they had been tolerated, if they had not been employed, by Cyprus and Egypt when these states were struggling against the Empire of the Seleucids.[235] But another reason for their immunity was the view held in the ancient world that slave-hunting was in itself a legitimate form of enterprise.[236] The pirate might easily be regarded as a mere trader in human merchandise. As such, he had perhaps been useful to Carthage;[237] and, as long as he abstained from attacking ports or nationalities under the protectorate of Rome, there was no reason why the capitalists in power should frown on the trade by which they prospered. For the pirates could probably bring better material to the slave market than was usually won in war.[238] A superior elegance and culture must often have been found in the helpless victims on whom they pounced; beauty and education were qualities that had a high marketable value, and by seizing on people of the better class they were sure of one of two advantages–either of a ransom furnished by the friends of the captives, or of a better price paid by the dealer. There was scarcely a pretence that the traders were mere intermediaries who bought in a cheap market and sold in a dear. They were known to be raiders as well, and numbers of the captives exhibited in the mart at Side in Pamphylia were known to have been freemen up to the moment of the auction.[239] The facility for capture and the proximity of Delos, the greatest of the slave markets which connected the East with the West, rendered the supply enormous; but it was equalled by the demand, and myriads of captives are said to have been shipped to the island and to have quitted it in a single day. The ease and rapidity of the business transacted by the master of a slave-ship became a proverb;[240] and honest mercantile undertakings with their tardy gains must have seemed contemptible in comparison with this facile source of wealth.
An abundant supply and quick returns imply reasonable prices; and the cheapness of the labour supplied by the slave-trade, whether as a consequence of war or piracy, was at once a necessary condition of the vitality of the plantation system and a cause of the recklessness and neglect with which the easily replaced instruments might be used. Cato, a shrewd man of business, never cared to pay more than fifteen hundred denarii for his slaves.[241] This must have been the price of the best type of labourer, of a man probably who was gifted with intelligence as well as strength. Ordinary unskilled labour must have fetched a far smaller sum; for the prices which are furnished by the comic poetry of the day–prices which are as a rule conditioned by the value of personal services or qualities of a particular kind, by the attractions of sex and the competition for favours–do not on the average far exceed the limit fixed by Cato.[242] For common work newly imported slaves were actually preferred, and purchasers were shy of the _veterator_ who had seen long service.[243] Employment in the fashionable circles of the town doubtless enhanced the value of a slave, when he was known to have been in possession of some peculiar gift, whether it were for cookery, medicine or literature; but the labours of the country could easily be drilled into the newest importation, and prices diminished instead of rising with the advancing age and experience of the rustic slave.[244]
The cheapened labour which was now spread over Italy presented as many varieties of moral as of physical type, and these came to be well known to the prospective owner, not because he aimed at being a moral influence, but because he objected to being worried by the vagaries of an eccentric type. Sardinians were always for sale, not because they were specially abundant, but because they showed an indocility that rendered them a sorry possession.[245] The passive Oriental, the Spaniard fierce and proud, required different methods of management and inspired different precautions; yet experience soon proved that the hellenised sons of the East had a better capacity for organising revolt than their fellow-sufferers from the North and West, and much of the harshness of Roman slavery was prompted by the panic which is the nemesis of the man who deals in human lives. But more of it was due to the indifference which springs from familiarity, and from the cold practical spirit in which the Roman always tended to play with the pawns of his business game, even when they were freemen and fellow-citizens. A man like Cato, who had sense and honesty enough to look after his own business, elaborated a machine-like system for governing his household, the aim of which was the maximum of profit with the minimum amount of humanity which is consistent with the attainment of such an end. The element of humanity is, however, accidental. There is no conscious appeal to such a feeling. The slaves seem to be looked on rather as automata who perform certain mental and physical processes analogous to those of men. Cato’s servants were never to enter another house except at his bidding or at that of his wife, and were to express utter ignorance of his domestic history to all inquirers; their life was to alternate between working and sleeping, and the heavy sleeper was valued as presumably a peaceful character; little bickerings between the servants were to be encouraged, for unanimity was a matter for suspicion and fear; the death sentence pronounced on any one of them by the law was carried out in the presence of the assembled household, so as to strike a wholesome terror into the rest. If they wished to propagate their kind, they must pay for the privilege, and a fixed sum was demanded from the slave who desired to find a mate amongst his fellow-servants.[246] The rations were fixed and only raised at the people’s festivals of the Saturnalia and Compitalia;[247] a sick slave was supposed to need less than his usual share[248]–perhaps an excellent hygienic maxim, but one scarcely adopted on purely hygienic grounds. Such a life was an emphatic protest against the indulgence of the city, the free and careless intercourse which often reversed the position of master and slave and formed part of the stock-in-trade of the comedian. Yet, even when the bond between the man of fashion and his artful Servants had merely a life of pleasure and of mischief as its end, we Are at least lifted by such relations into a human sphere, and it is exceedingly questionable whether the warped humanity of the city did mark so low a level as the brutalised life of the estate over which Cato’s fostering genius was spread. If we develop Cato’s methods but a little, if we admit a little more rigour and a little less discrimination, we get the dismal barrack-like system of the great plantations–a barrack, or perhaps a prison, nominally ruled by a governor who might live a hundred miles away, really under the control of an anxious and terrified slave, who divided his fears between his master who wanted money and his servants who wanted freedom. The _villicus_ had been once the mere intendant of the estate on which his master lived; he was now sole manager of a vast domain for his absent lord,[249] sole keeper of the great _ergastulum_ which enclosed at nightfall the instruments of labour and disgorged them at daybreak over the fields. The gloomy building in which they were herded for rest and sleep showed but its roof and a small portion of its walls above the earth; most of it lay beneath the ground, and the narrow windows were so high that they could not be reached by the hands of the inmates.[250] There was no inspection by the government, scarcely any by the owners.[251] There was no one to tell the secrets of these dens, and if the unwary traveller were trapped and hidden behind their walls, all traces of him might be for ever lost.[252] When the slaves were turned out into the fields, the safety of their drivers was secured by the chains which bound their limbs, but which were so adjusted as not to interfere with the movements necessary to their work.[253] Some whose spirit had been broken might be left unbound, but for the majority bonds were the only security against escape or vengeance.[254]
There was, however, one type of desperate character who was permitted to roam at large. This was the guardian of the flocks, who wandered unrestrained over the mountains during the summer months and along the prairies in the winter season. These herdsmen formed small bands. It was reckoned that there should be one for every eighty or hundred sheep and two for every troop of fifty horses.[255] It was sometimes found convenient that they should be accompanied by their women who prepared their meals–women of robust types like the Illyrian dames to whom child-birth was a mere incident in the daily toils.[256] Such a life of freedom had its attractions for the slave, but it had its drawbacks too. The landowner who preferred pasturage to tillage, saved his capital, not only by the small number of hands which the work demanded, but also by the niggardly outlay which he expended on these errant serfs. It was not needful to provide them with the necessaries of life when they could take them for themselves. When Damophilus of Enna was entreated by his slaves to give them something better than the rags they wore, his answer was: “Do travellers then travel naked through the land? Have they nothing for the man who wants a coat?” [257] Brigandage, in fact, was an established item In the economic creed of the day.
The desolation of Italy was becoming dangerous, and the master of the lonely villa barred himself in at nights as though an enemy were at his gates. On one occasion Scipio Africanus was disturbed in his retreat at Liternum by a troop of bandits. He placed his armed servants on the roof and made every preparation for repelling the assault. But the visitors proved to be pacific. They were the very _élite_ of the fraternity of brigands and had merely come to do honour to the great man. They sent back their troops, threw down their arms, laid presents before his door and departed in joyous mood.[258] The immunity of such bands proved that a slave revolt might at any moment imperil every life and every dwelling in some unprotected canton. It was indeed the epoch of peace, when Roman and Phoenician armies no longer held the field in Italy, that first suggested the hope of liberation to the slave. Hannibal would have imperilled his character of a protector of Italian towns had he encouraged a slave revolt, even if the Phoenician had not shrunk from a precedent so fatal to his native land. But one of the unexpected results of the Second Punic War was to kindle a rising in the very heart of Latium, and it was the African slave, not the African freeman, that stirred the last relics of the war in Italy. At Setia were guarded the noble Carthaginians who were a pledge of the fidelity of their state. These hostages, the sons of merchant princes, were allowed to retain the dignity of their splendid homes, and a vast retinue of slaves from Africa attended on their wants. The number of these was swelled by captive members of the same nationalities whom the people of Setia had acquired in the recent war.[259] A spirit of camaraderie sprung up amongst men who understood one another’s language and had acquired the spurious nationality that comes from servitude in the same land. Their numbers were obvious, the paucity of the native Setians was equally clear, and no military force was close at hand. They planned to increase their following by spreading disaffection amongst the servile populations of the neighbouring country towns, and emissaries were sent to Norba in the North and Circei in the South. Their project was to wait for the rapidly approaching games of the Setian folk and to rush on the unarmed populace as they were gazing at the show; when Setia had been taken, they meant to seize on Norba and Circei. But there was treason in their ranks. The urban praetor was roused before dawn by two slaves who poured the whole tale of the impending massacre into his ear. After a hasty consultation of the senate he rushed to the threatened district, gathering recruits as he swept with his legates through the country side, binding them with the military oath, bidding them arm and follow him with all speed. A hasty force of about two thousand men was soon gathered; none knew his destination till he reached the gates of Setia. The heads of the conspiracy were seized, and such of their followers as learnt the fact fled incontinently from the town. From this point onward it was only a matter of hunting down the refugees by patrols sent round the country districts. Southern Latium was freed from its terror; but it was soon found that the evil had spread almost to the gates of Rome. A rumour had spread that Praeneste was to be seized by its slaves, and it was sufficient to stimulate a praetor to execute nearly five hundred of the supposed delinquents.[260]
Two years later a rising, which almost became a war, shook the great plantation lands of Etruria.[261] Its suppression required a legion and a pitched battle. The leaders were crucified; others of the slaves who had escaped the carnage were restored to their masters. But these disturbances, that may have seemed mere sporadic relics of the havoc and exhaustion left by the Hannibalic war, were only quelled for the moment. It was soon found that the seeds of insecurity were deeply planted in the settlement that was called a peace. During the year 185 the shepherds of Apulia were found to have formed a great society of plunder, and robbery with violence was of constant occurrence on the grazing lands and public roads. The praetor who was in command at Tarentum opened a commission which condemned seven thousand men. Many were executed, although a large number of the criminals escaped to other regions.[262]
These movements in Italy were but the symptoms of a spirit that was spreading over the Mediterranean lands. The rising of the serfs only just preceded the great awakening of the masses of the freemen.[263] Both classes were ground down by capital; both would make an effort to shake the burden from their shoulders; and, as regards the methods of assertion, it is a matter of little moment whether they took the form of a national rising against a government or a protectorate, a sanguinary struggle in the Forum against the dominance of a class, or an attack by chattels, not yet brutalised by serfdom but full of the traditions and spirit of freemen, against the cruelty and indifference of their owners. In one sense the servile movements were more universal, and perhaps better organised, than those of the men to whom, free birth gave a nominal superiority. A sympathy for each other’s sufferings pervaded the units of the class who were scattered in distant lands. Sometimes it was a sympathy based on a sense of nationality, and the Syrian and Cilician in Asia would feel joy and hope stirring in his heart at the doings of his brethren who had been deported to the far West. The series of organised revolts in the Roman provinces and protectorate which commence shortly after the fall of Carthage and close for the moment with the war of resistance to the Romans in Asia, forms a single connected chain. Dangerous risings had to be repressed at the Italian coast towns of Minturnae and Sinuessa; at the former place four hundred and fifty slaves were crucified, at the latter four thousand were crushed by a military force; the mines of Athens, the slave market of Delos, witnessed similar outbreaks,[264] and we shall find a like wave of discontent spreading over the serf populations of the countries of the Mediterranean just before the second great outbreak in Sicily which darkens the close of the second century. The evil fate which made this island the theatre of the two greatest of the servile wars is explicable on many grounds. The opportunity offered by the sense of superiority in numbers was far ampler here than in any area of Italy of equal size. For Sicily was a wheat-growing country, and the cultivated plains demanded a mass of labour which was not needed in more mountainous or less fertile lands, where pasturage yielded a surer return than the tilling of the soil. The pasture lands of Sicily were indeed large, but they had not yet dwarfed the agriculture of the island. The labour of the fields was in the hands of a vast horde of Asiatics, large numbers of whom may conceivably have been shipped from Carthage across the narrow sea, when that great centre of the plantation system had been laid low and the fair estates of the Punic nobles had been seized and broken up by their conquerors.[265] In the history of the great Sicilian outbreaks Syrians and Cilicians meet us at every turn. These Asiatic slaves had different nationalities and they or their fathers had been citizens of widely separated towns. But there were bonds other than a common suffering which produced a keen sense of national union and a consequent feeling of ideal patriotism in the hearts of all. They were the products of the common Hellenism of the East; they or their fathers could make a claim to have been subjects of the great Seleucid monarchy; many, perhaps most of them, could assert freedom by right of birth and acknowledged slavery only as a consequence of the accidents of war or piracy. The mysticism of the Oriental, the political ideal of the Hellene, were interwoven in their moral nature–a nature perhaps twisted by the brutalism of slavery to superstition in the one direction, to licence in the other, but none the less capable of great conceptions and valiant deeds. The moment for both would come when the prophet had appeared, and the prophet would surely show himself when the cup of suffering had overflowed.[266]
The masters who worked this human mechanism were driving it at a pace which must have seemed dangerous to any human being less greedy, vain and confident than themselves. The wealth of these potentates was colossal, but it was equalled by their social rivalry and consequent need of money. A contest in elegance was being fought between the Siceliot and the Italian.[267] The latter was the glass of fashion, and the former attempted to rival, first his habits of domestic life and, as a consequence, the economic methods which rendered these habits possible. Here too, as in Italy, whole gangs of slaves were purchased like cattle or sheep; some were weighed down with fetters, others ground into subordination by the cruel severity of their tasks. All without exception were branded, and men who had been free citizens in their native towns, felt the touch of the burning iron and carried the stigma of slavery to their graves.[268] Food was doled out in miserable quantities,[269] for the shattered instrument could so easily be replaced. On the fields one could see little but abject helplessness, a misery that weakened while it tortured the soul. But in some parts of Sicily bodily want was combined with a wild daring that was fostered by the reckless owners, whose greed had overcome all sense of their own security or that of their fellow-citizens. The treatment of pastoral slaves which had been adopted by the Roman graziers was imitated faithfully by the Italians and Siceliots of the island. These slaves were turned loose with their flocks to find their food and clothing where and how they could. The youngest and stoutest were chosen for this hard, wild life: and their physical vigour was still further increased by their exposure to every kind of weather, by their seldom finding or needing the shelter of a roof, and by the milk and meat which formed their staple food. A band of these men presented a terrifying aspect, suggesting a scattered invasion of some warlike barbarian tribe. Their bodies were clad in the skins of wolves and boars; slung at their sides or poised in their hands were clubs, lances and long shepherds’ staves. Each squadron was followed by a pack of large and powerful hounds. Strength, leisure, need, all suggested brigandage as an integral part of their profession. At first they murdered the wayfarer who went alone or with but one companion. Then their courage rose and they concerted nightly attacks on the villas of the weaker residents. These villas they stormed and plundered, slaying any one who attempted to bar their way. As their impunity increased, Sicily became impracticable to travellers by night, and residence in the country districts became a tempting of providence. There was violence, brigandage or murder on every hand. The governors of Sicily occasionally interposed, but they were almost powerless to check the mischief. The influence of the slave-owners was such that it was dangerous to inflict an adequate punishment.[270]
The proceedings of these militant shepherds must have opened the eyes of the mass of the slaves to the possibilities of the position. Secret meetings began to be held at which the word “revolt” was breathed. An occasion, a leader, a divine sanction were for the moment lacking. The first requisite would follow the other two, and these were soon found combined in the person of Eunus. This man was a Syrian by birth, a native of Apamea, and he served Antigenes of Enna. He was more than a believer in the power of the gods to seize on men and make them the channel of their will; he was a living witness to it in his own person. At first he saw shadows of superhuman form and heard their voices in his dreams. Then there were moments when he would be seized with a trance; he was wrapt in contemplation of some divine being. Then the words of prophecy would come; they were not his utterance but the bidding of the great Syrian goddess. Sometimes the words were preceded by a strange manifestation of supernatural power; smoke, sparks or flame would issue from his open mouth.[271] The clairvoyance may have been a genuine mental experience, the thaumaturgy the type of fiction which the best of _media_ may be tempted to employ; but both won belief from his fellows, eager for any light in the darkness, and a laughing acceptance from his master, glad of a novelty that might amuse his leisure. As a matter of fact, Eunus’s predictions sometimes came true. People forgot (as people will) the instances of their falsification, but applauded them heartily when they were fulfilled. Eunus was a good enough _medium_ to figure at a fashionable _séance_. His latest profession was the promise of a kingdom to himself; it was the Syrian goddess who had held out the golden prospect. The promise he declared boldly to his master, knowing perhaps the spirit in which the message would be received. Antigenes was delighted with his prophet king. He showed him at his own table, and took him to the banquets given by his friends. There Eunus would be questioned about his kingdom, and each of the guests would bespeak his patronage and clemency. His answers as to his future conduct were given without reserve. He promised a policy of mercy, and the quaint earnestness of the imposture would dissolve the company in laughter. Portions of food were handed him from the board, and the donors would ask that he should remember their kindness when he came into his kingdom. These were requests which Eunus did not forget.
With such an influence in its centre, Enna seemed destined to be the spring of the revolt. But there was another reason which rendered it a likely theatre for a deed of daring. The broad plateau on which the town was set was thronged with shepherds in the winter season,[272] and some of the great graziers of Enna owned herds of these bold and lawless men. Conspicuous amongst these graziers for his wealth, his luxury and his cruelty was one Damophilus, the man who had formulated the theory that the shepherd slave should keep himself by robbing others. Damophilus was a Siceliot, but none of the Roman magnates of the island could have shown a grander state than that which he maintained. His finely bred horses, his four-wheeled carriages, his bodyguard of slaves, his beautiful boys, his crowd of parasites, were known all over the broad acres and huge pasture lands which he controlled. His town house and villas displayed chased silverwork, rich carpets of purple dye and a table of royal elegance. He surpassed Roman luxury in the lavishness of his expense, Roman pride in his sense of complete independence of circumstance, and Roman niggardliness and cruelty in his treatment of his slaves. Satiety had begotten a chronic callousness and even savagery that showed itself, not merely in the now familiar use of the _ergastulum_ and the brand, but in arbitrary and cruel punishments which were part of the programme of almost every day. His wife Megallis, hardened by the same influences, was the torment of her maidens and of such domestics as were more immediately under her control. The servants of this household had one conviction in common–that nothing worse than their present evils could possibly be their lot.
This is the conviction that inspires acts of frenzy; but the madness of these slaves was of the orderly, systematic and therefore dangerous type. They would not act without a divine sanction to their whispered plans. Some of them approached Eunus and asked him if their enterprise was permitted by the gods. The prophet first produced the usual manifestations which attested his inspiration and then replied that the gods assented, if the plan were taken in hand forthwith. Enna was the destined place; it was the natural stronghold of the whole island; it was foredoomed to be the capital of the new race that would rule over Sicily.[273] Heartened by the belief that Heaven was aiding their efforts, the leaders then set to work. They secretly released such of Damophilus’s household as were in bonds; they gathered others together, and soon a band to the number of about four hundred were mustered in a field in the neighbourhood of Enna. There in the early hours of the night they offered a sacrifice and swore their solemn compact. They had gathered everything which could serve as a weapon, and when midnight was approaching they were ready for the first attempt. They marched swiftly to the sleeping town and broke its stillness with their cries of exhortation. Eunus was at their head, fire streaming from his mouth against the darkness of the night. The streets and houses were immediately the scene of a pitiless massacre. The maddened slaves did not even spare the children at the breast; they dragged them from their mothers’ arms and dashed them upon the ground. The women were the victims of unspeakable insult and outrage.[274] Every slave had his own wrongs to avenge, for the original assailants had now been joined by a large number of the domestics of the town. Each of these wreaked his own peculiar vengeance and then turned to take his share in the general massacre.
Meanwhile Eunus and his immediate following had learnt news of the arch-enemy Damophilus, He was known to be staying in his pleasance near to the city. Thence he and his wife were fetched with every mark of ignominy, and the unhappy pair were dragged into the town with their hands bound behind their backs. The masters of the city now mustered in the theatre for an act of justice; but Damophilus did not lose his wits even when he scanned that sea of hostile faces and accusing eyes. He attempted a defence and was listened to in silence–nay, with approval, for many of his auditors were visibly stirred by his words. But some bolder spirits were tired of the show or fearful of its issue. Hermeias and Zeuxis, two of his bitterest enemies, shouted out that he was an Impostor[275] and rushed upon him. One of the two thrust a sword through his side, the other smote his head off with an axe. It was then the women’s turn. Megallis’s female slaves were given the power to treat her as they would. They first tortured her, then led her up to a high place and dashed her to the ground. Eunus avenged his private wrongs by the death of his own masters, Antigenes and Python. The scene in the theatre had perhaps revealed more than the desire for a systematised revenge. It may have shown that there was some sense of justice, of order in the savage multitude. And indeed vengeance was not wholly indiscriminate. Eunus concealed and sent secretly away the men who had given him meat from their tables.[276] Even the whole house of Damophilus did not perish. There was a daughter, a strange product of such a home, a maiden with a pure simplicity of character and a heart that melted at the sight of pain. She had been used to soothe the anguish of those who had been scourged by her parents and to relieve the necessities of such as were put in bonds. Hence the abounding love felt for her by the slaves, the pity that thrilled them when her home was doomed. An escort was selected to convey her in safety to some relatives at Catana. Its most devoted member was Hermeias,[277] perhaps the very man whose hands were stained by her father’s blood.
The next step in the progress of the revolt was to form a political and military organisation that might command the respect of the countless slaves who were soon to break their bonds in the other districts of Sicily. Eunus was elected king. His name became Antiochus, his subjects were “Syrians.” [278] It was not the first time that a slave had assumed the diadem; for was it not being worn for the moment by Diodotus surnamed Tryphon, the guardian and reputed murderer of Alexander of Syria?[279] The elevation of Eunus to the throne was due to no belief in his courage or his generalship. But he was the prophet of the movement, the cause of its inception, and his very name was considered to be of good omen for the harmony of his subjects. When he had bound the diadem on his brow and adopted regal state, he elevated the woman who had been his companion (a Syrian and an Apamean like himself) to the rank of queen. He formed a council of such of his followers as were thought to possess wits above the average, and he set himself to make Enna the adequate centre of a lengthy war. He put to death all his captives in Enna who had no skill in fashioning arms; the residue he put in bonds and set to the task of forging weapons.
Eunus was no warrior, but he had the regal gift of recognising merit. The soul of the military movement which spread from Enna was Achaeus,[280] a man pre-eminent both in counsel and in action,[281] one who did not permit his reason to be mastered by passion and whose anger was chiefly kindled by the foolish atrocities committed by some of his followers.[282] Under such a leader the cause rapidly advanced. The original four hundred had swelled in three days to six thousand; it soon became ten thousand. As Achaeus advanced, the _ergastula_ were broken open and each of these prison-houses furnished a new multitude of recruits.[283] Soon a vast addition to the available forces was effected by a movement in another part of the island. In the territory of Agrigentum one Cleon a Cilician suddenly arose as a leader of his fellows. He was sprung from the regions about Mount Taurus and had been habituated from his youth to a life of brigandage. In Sicily he was supposed to be a herdsman of horses. He was also a highwayman who commanded the roads and was believed to have committed murders of varied types. When he heard of the success of Eunus, he deemed that the moment had come for raising a revolt on his own account. He gathered a band of followers, overwhelmed the city of Agrigentum and ravaged the surrounding territory.[284]
The terrified Siceliots, and perhaps some of the slaves themselves, believed that this dual movement might ruin the servile cause. There were daily expectations that the armies of Eunus and Cleon would meet in conflict. But such hopes or fears were disappointed. Cleon put himself absolutely under the authority of Eunus and performed the functions of a general to a king. The junction of the forces occurred about thirty days after the outbreak at Enna, and the Cilician brought five thousand men to the royal standard. The full complement of the slaves when first they joined battle with the Roman power amounted to twenty thousand men; before the close of the war their army numbered over sixty thousand.[285]
The Roman government exhibited its usual slowness in realising the gravity of the situation; yet it may be excused for believing that it had only to deal with local tumults such as those which had been so easily suppressed in Italy. The force of eight thousand men which it put into the field under the praetor Lucius Hypsaeus may have seemed more than sufficient. Yet it was routed by the insurgent army, now numbering twenty thousand men, and in the skirmishes which followed the balance of success inclined to the rebels. The immediate progress of the struggle cannot be traced in any detail, but there is a general record of the storming of Roman camps and the flight of Roman generals.[286]
The theatre of the war was certainly extending at an alarming rate. The rebels had first controlled the centre and some part of the South Western portion of the island, the region between Enna and Agrigentum; but now they had pushed their conquests up to the East, had reached the coast and had gained possession of Catana and Tauromenium.[287] The devastation of the conquered districts is said to have been more terrible than that which followed on the Punic War.[288] But for this the slaves were not wholly, perhaps not mainly, responsible. The rebel armies, looking to a settlement in the future when they should enjoy the fruit of their victories, left the villas standing, their furniture and stores uninjured, and did no harm to the implements of husbandry. It was the free peasantry of Sicily that now showed a savage resentment at the inequality of fortune and of life which severed them from the great landholders. Under pretext of the servile war[289] they sallied out, and not only plundered the goods of the conquered, but even set fire to their villas.
The words of Eunus when, at the beginning of the revolt, he claimed Enna as the metropolis of the new nation, and the conduct of his followers in sparing the grandeur and comfort which had fallen into their hands, are sufficient proofs that the revolted slaves, in spite of their possession of the seaports of Catana and Tauromenium, had no intention of escaping from Sicily. Perhaps even if they had willed it, such a course might have been impossible. They had no fleet of their own; the Cilician pirates off the coast might have refused to accept such dangerous passengers and to imperil their reputation as honest members of the slave trade. And, if the fugitives crossed the sea, what homes had they to which they could return? To their own cities they were dead, and the long arm of Rome stretched over her protectorates in the East.[290]
It was therefore with a power which intended a permanent settlement in Sicily, that the Roman government had to cope. Its sense of the gravity of the situation was seen in the despatch of consular armies. The first under Caius Fulvius Flaccus seems to have effected little.[291] The second under Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the consul of the following year, laid siege to Enna,[292] and captured a stronghold of the rebels. Eight thousand of the slaves were slain by the sword, all who could be seized were nailed to the cross.[293] The crowning victories, and the nominal pacification of the island, remained for Piso’s successor, Publius Rupilius. He drove the rebels into Tauromenium and sat down before the city until they were reduced to unspeakable straits by famine. The town was at length yielded through treachery; Sarapion a Syrian betrayed the acropolis, and the Roman commander found a multitude of starving men at his mercy, He was pitiless in his use of victory. The captives were first tortured, then taken up to a high place and dashed downwards to the ground. The consul then moved on Enna. The rebels defended their last stronghold with the utmost courage and persistence. Achaeus seems to have already fallen, but the brave Cilician leaders still held out with all the native valour of their race. Cleon made a sortie from the town and fought heroically until he fell covered with wounds. Cleon’s brother Coma[294] was captured during the siege and brought before Rupilius, who questioned him about the strength and the plans of the remaining fugitives. He asked for a moment to collect his thoughts, covered his head with his cloak, and died of suffocation, in the hands of his guard and in sight of the general, before a compromising word had passed his lips. King Eunus was not made of such stern stuff. When Enna, impregnable in its natural strength, had been taken by treachery, he fled with his bodyguard of a thousand men to still more precipitous regions. His companions, knowing that it was impossible to escape their fate (for Rupilius was already moving) fell on each others swords. But Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court–his cook, his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death. He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died shortly afterwards of disease.
It is said that by the date of the fall of Enna more than twenty thousand slaves had perished.[295] Even without this slaughter, the capture of their seaport and their armoury would have been sufficient to break the back of the revolt.[296] It only remained to scour the country with picked bands of soldiers for organised resistance to be shattered, and even for the curse of brigandage to be rooted out for a while. Death was no longer meted out indiscriminately to the rebels. Such of the slave-owners as survived would probably have protested against wholesale crucifixion, and the destruction of all of the fugitives would have impaired the resources of Sicily. Thus many were spared the cross and restored to their bonds.[297] The extent to which reorganisation was needed before the province could resume its normal life, is shown by the fact that the senate thought it worth while to give Sicily a new provincial charter. Ten commissioners were sent to assist Rupilius in the work, which henceforth bore the proconsul’s name.[298] The work, as we know it, was of a conservative character; but it is possible that no complete charter had ever existed before, and the war may have revealed defects in the arrangements of Sicily that had heretofore been unsuspected.
A climax of the type of the servile war in Sicily was perhaps needed to bring the social problem home to thinking men in Rome. Not that it by any means sufficed for all who pondered on the public welfare or laboured at the business of the State. The men who measured happiness by wealth and empire might still have retained their unshaken confidence in the Fortune of Rome. Had a Capys of this class arisen, he might have given a thrilling picture of the immediate future of his city, dark but grimly national in its emergence from trial to triumph. He might have seen her conquering arms expanding to the Euphrates and the Rhine, and undreamed sources of wealth pouring their streams into the treasury or the coffers of the great. If there was blood in the picture, when had it been absent from the annals of Rome? Even civil strife and a new Italian war might be a hard but a necessary price to pay for a strong government and a grand mission. If an antiquated constitution disappeared in the course of this glorious expansion, where was the loss?
But there were men in Rome who measured human life by other canons: who believed that the State existed for the individual at least as much as the individual for the State: who, even when they were imperialists, saw with terror the rotten foundations on which the empire rested, and with indignation the miserable returns that had been made to the men who had bought it with their blood. To them the brilliant present and the glorious future were veiled by a screen that showed the ghastly spectres of commercial imperialism. It showed luxury running riot amongst a nobility already impoverished and ever more thievishly inclined, a colossal capitalism clutching at the land and stretching out its tentacles for every source of profitable trade, the middle class fleeing from the country districts and ousted from their living in the towns, and the fair island that was almost a part of their Italian home, its garden and its granary, in the throes of a great slave war.
CHAPTER II
A cause never lacks a champion, nor a great cause one whom it may render great. Failure is in itself no sign of lack of spirit and ability, and when a vast reform is the product of a mean personality, the individual becomes glorified by identification with his work. From this point of view it mattered little who undertook the task of the economic regeneration of the Roman world. Any senator of respectable antecedents and moderate ability, who had a stable following amongst the ruling classes, might have succeeded where Tiberius Gracchus failed; it was a task in which authority was of more importance than ability, and the sense that the more numerous or powerful elements of society were united in the demand for reform, of more value than individual genius or honesty of purpose. This was the very circumstance that foreshadowed failure, for the men of wide connections and established fame had shrunk from an enterprise with which they sympathised in various degrees. In the proximate history of the Republic there had been three men who showed an unwavering belief in the Italian farmer and the blessings of agriculture. These were M. Porcius Cato, P. Cornelius Scipio and Ti. Sempronius Gracchus. But the influence of Cato’s house had become extinct with its first founder. The elder son, an amiable man and an accomplished jurist, had not out-lived his father; the second still survived, but seems to have inherited little of the fighting qualities of the terrible censor. The traditions of a Roman house needed to be sustained by the efforts of its existing representative, and the “newness” of the Porcii might have necessitated generations of vigorous leaders to make them a power in the land. Scipionic traditions were now represented by Aemilianus, and the glow of the luminary was reflected in paler lights, who received their lustre from moving in that charmed orbit. One of these, the indefatigable henchman Laelius, had risen to the rank of consul, and stimulated by the vigorous theorisings of his hellenised environment, he contemplated for a moment the formation of a plan which should deal with some of the worst evils of the agrarian question. But he looked at the problem only to start back in affright. The strength and truculency of the vested interests with which he would have to deal were too much for a man whose nerve was weakened by philosophy and experience, and Laelius by his retreat justified, if he did not gain, the soubriquet which proclaimed his “sapience”.[299] But why was Scipio himself idle? The answer is to be found both in his temperament and in his circumstances. With all his dash and energy, he was something of a healthy hedonist. As the chase had delighted him in his youth, so did war in his manhood. While hating its cruelties, he gloried in its excitement, and the discipline of the camp was more to his mind than the turbulence of an assembly. His mind, too, belonged to that class which finds it almost impossible to emancipate itself from traditional politics. His vast knowledge of the history of other civilisations may have taught him, as it taught Polybius, that Rome was successful because she was unique.[300] Here there was to be no break with the past, no legislator posing as a demi-god, no obedience to the cries of the masses who, if they once got loose, might turn and rend the enlightened few, and reproduce on Italian soil the shocking scenes of Greek socialistic enterprise. As things were, to be a reformer was to be a partisan, and Scipio loved the prospect of his probable supporters as little as that of his probable opponents. The fact of the Empire, too, must have weighed heavily with a man who was no blind imperialist. Even though economic reform might create an added efficiency in the army, Scipio must have known, as Polybius certainly knew, that soldiers are but pawns in the great game, and that the controlling forces were the wisdom of the conservative senator, the ambition of the wealthy noble, and the capital of the enterprising knight. The wisdom of disturbing their influence, and awakening their resentment, could scarcely appeal to a mind so perfectly balanced and practical as Scipio’s. Circumstances, too, must have had their share in determining his quiescence. The Scipios had been a power in Rome in spite of the nobility. They were used because they were needed, not because they were loved, and the necessary man was never in much favour with the senate. Although there was no tie of blood between Aemilianus and the elder Scipio, they were much alike both in fortune and in temperament. They had both been called upon to save military situations that were thought desperate; their reputation had been made by successful war; and though neither was a mere soldier, they lacked the taste and the patience for the complicated political game, which alone made a man a power amidst the noble circles and their immediate dependants at Rome.
But the last generation had seen in Tiberius Gracchus a man whose political influence had been vast, a noble with but scant respect for the indefeasible rights of the nobility and as stern as Cato in his animadversions on the vices of his order, a man whose greatest successes abroad had been those of diplomacy rather than of war, one who had established firm connections and a living memory of himself both in West and East, whose name was known and loved in Spain, Sardinia, Asia and Egypt. It would have been too much to hope that this honest old aristocrat would attempt to grapple with the evils which had first become manifest during his own long lifetime; but it was not unnatural that people should look to a son of his for succour, especially as this son represented the blood of the Scipios as well as of the Gracchi. The marriage of the elderly Gracchus with the young Cornelia had marked the closing of the feud, personal rather than political, which had long separated him from the elder Scipio: and a further link between the two families was subsequently forged by the marriage of Sempronia, a daughter of Cornelia, to Scipio Aemilianus. The young Tiberius Gracchus may have been born during one of his father’s frequent absences on the service of the State.[301] Certainly the elder Gracchus could have seen little of his son during the years of his infancy. But the closing years of the old man’s life seem to have been spent uninterruptedly in Italy, and Tiberius must have been profoundly influenced by the genial and stately presence that Rome loved and feared. But he was little more than a boy when his father died, and the early influences that moulded his future career seem to have been due mainly to his mother. Cornelia would have been the typical Roman matron, had she lived a hundred years earlier; she would then have trained sons for the battlefield, not for the Forum. As it was, the softening influences of Greek culture had tempered without impairing her strength of character, had substituted rational for purely supernatural sanctions, and a wide political outlook for a rude sense of civic duty. Herself the product of an education such as ancient civilisations rarely bestowed upon their women, she wrote and spoke with a purity and grace which led to the belief that her sons had learnt from her lips and from her pen their first lessons in that eloquence which swayed the masses and altered the fortunes of Rome.[302] But her gifts had not impaired her tenderness. Her sons were her “Jewels,” and the successive loss of nine of the children which she had borne to Gracchus must have made the three that remained doubly dear. The two boys had a narrow escape from becoming Eastern princes: for the hand of the widow Cornelia was sought in marriage by the King of Egypt.[303] Such an alliance with the representative of the two houses of the Gracchi and the Scipios might easily seem desirable to a protected king, although the attractions of Cornelia may also have influenced his choice. She, however, had no aspirations to share the throne of the Lagidae, and the hellenism of Tiberius and of his younger brother Caius, though deep and far-reaching, was of a kind less violent than would have been gained by transportation to Alexandria. They were trained in rhetoric by Diophanes an exile from Mitylene, and in philosophy by Blossius of Cumae, a stoic of the school of Antipater of Tarsus.[304] Many held the belief that Tiberius was spurred to his political enterprise by the direct exhortation of these teachers; but, even if their influence was not of this definite kind, there can be little doubt that the teaching of the two Greeks exercised a powerful influence on the political cast of his mind. Ideals of Greek liberty, speeches of Greek statesmen who had come forward as champions of the oppressed, stories of social ruin averted by the voice and hand of the heaven-sent legislator, pictures of self-sacrifice and of resigned submission to a standard of duty–these were lessons that may have been taught both by rhetorician and philosopher. Nor was the teaching of history different. In the literary environment in which the Gracchi moved, ready answers were being given to the most vital questions of politics and social science. Every one must have felt that the approaching struggle had a dual aspect, that it was political as well as social. For social conservatism was entrenched behind a political rampart: and if reform, neglected by the senate, was to come from the people, the question had first to be asked, Had the people a legal right to initiate reform? The historians of that and of the preceding generation would have answered this question unhesitatingly in the affirmative. The _de facto_ sovereignty of the senate had not even received a sanction in contemporary literature, while to that of the immediate past it was equally unknown. The Roman annalists from the time of the Second Punic War had revealed the sovereignty of the people as the basis of the Roman constitution,[305] and the history of the long struggle of the Plebs for freedom made the protection of the commons the sole justification of the tribunate. From the lips of Polybius himself Tiberius may have heard the impression which the Roman polity made on the mind of the educated Greek: and the fact that this was a Greek picture did not lessen its validity; for the Greek was moulding the orthodox history of Rome, and the victims of his genius were the best Roman intellects of the day. He might have learnt how in this mixed constitution the people still retained their inalienable rights, how they elected, ratified, and above all how they punished.[306] He might have gathered that the identification of the tribunate with the interests of the nobility was a perversion of its true and vital function: that the tribune exists but to assist the commons and can be subject to no authority but the people’s will, whether expressed directly by them or indirectly through his colleagues.[307] The history of the Punic wars did indeed reveal, in the fate of a Varro or a Minucius, how popular insubordination might be punished, when its end was wrong. Polybius’s own voice was raised in prophetic warning against a possible demagogy of the future.[308] But that history showed the healthy discipline of a healthy people–a people that had vanquished genius through subordination, a peasant class whose loyalty and tenacity were as great as those of its leaders, and without whom those leaders would have been helpless. Where was such a class to be found now? Change the subject or turn the page, and the Greek statesman and historian could point to the dreadful reverse of this picture.[309] He could show a Greek nation, gifted with political genius but doomed to political decay–a nation whose sons accumulated money, lived in luxury with little forethought for the future, and refused to beget children for the State: a nation with a wealthy and cultured upper class, but one that was literally perishing for the lack of men.[310] Was this the fate in store for Rome? A temperament that was merely vigorous and keen might not have been affected by such reflections. One that was merely contemplative might have regarded them only as a subject for curious study. But Tiberius’s mind ran to neither of these two extremes. He was a thoughtful and sensitive man of action. Sweet in temper, staid in deportment, gentle in language, he attracted from his dependants a loyalty that knew no limits, and from his friends a devotion that did not even shrink from death on his behalf. Even in his pure and polished oratory passion revealed itself chiefly in appeals to pity, not in the harsher forms of invective or of scorn. His mode of life was simple and restrained, but apparently with none of the pedantic austerity of the stoic. In an age that was becoming dissolute and frivolous he was moral and somewhat serious.[311] But his career is not that of the man who burdens society with the impression that he has a solemn mission to perform. Such men are rarely taken as seriously as they take themselves; they do not win aged men of experience to support their cause; the demeanour that wearies their friends is even likely to be found irksome by the mob.
Roman society must have seen much promise in his youth, for honours came early. A seat at the augural board was regarded as a tribute to his merit rather than his birth;[312] and indeed the Roman aristocrats, who dispensed such favours, were too clever to be the slaves of a name, when political manipulation was in question and talent might be diverted to the true cause. His marriage was a more important determinant in his career. The bride who was offered him was the daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher, a man of consular and censorian rank and now Princeps of the senate,[313] a clever representative of that brilliant and eccentric house, that had always kept liberalism alive in Rome. Appius had already displayed some of the restless individuality of his ancestors. When the senate had refused him a triumph after a war with the Salassi, he had celebrated the pageant at his own expense, while his daughter, a vestal, walked beside the car to keep at bay the importunate tribune who attempted to drag him off.[314] A similar unconventionality was manifested in the present betrothal. The story runs that Appius broached the question to Tiberius at an augural banquet. The proposition was readily accepted, and Appius in his joy shouted out the news to his wife as he entered his own front door. The lady was more surprised than annoyed. “What need for all this haste,” she said, “unless indeed you have found Tiberius Gracchus for our girl?” [315] Appius, hasty as he was, was probably in this case not the victim of a sudden inspiration. The restless old man doubtless pined for reform; but he was weighed down by years, honours and familiarity with the senate. He could not be the protagonist in the coming struggle; but in Tiberius he saw the man of the future.
The chances of the time favoured a military even more than a political career; the chief spheres of influence were the province and the camp, and it was in these that the earliest distinctions of Tiberius were won. When a lad of fifteen he had followed his brother-in-law Scipio to Africa, and had been the first to mount the walls of Carthage in the vain assault on the fortress of Megara.[316] He had won the approval of the commander by his discipline and courage, and left general regret amongst the army when he quitted the camp before the close of the campaign. But an experience as potent for the future as his first taste of war, must have been those hours of leisure spent in Scipio’s tent.[317] If contact with the great commander aroused emulation, the talk on political questions of Scipio and his circle must have inspired profound reflection. Here he could find aspirations enough; all that was lacking was a leader to translate them into deeds. The quaestorship, the first round of the higher official ladder, found him attached to the consul Mancinus and destined for the ever-turbulent province of Spain. It was a fortunate chance, for here was the scene of his father’s military and diplomatic triumphs. But the sequel was unexpected. He had gone to fulfil the duties of a subordinate; he suddenly found himself performing those of a commander-in-chief or of an accredited representative of the Roman people. The Numantines would treat only with a Gracchus, and the treaty that saved Roman lives but not Roman honour was felt to be really his work. In a moment he was involved in a political question that agitated the whole of Rome. The Numantine treaty was the topic of the day. Was it to be accepted or, if repudiated, should the authors of the disaster, the causes of the breach of faith, be surrendered in time-honoured fashion to the enemy as an expiation for the violated pledge? On the first point there was little hesitation; the senate decided for the nullity of the treaty, and it was likely that this view would be accepted by the people, if the measures against the ratifying officials were not made too stringent. For on this point there was a difference of opinion. The poorer classes, whose sons and brothers had been saved from death or captivity by the treaty, blamed Mancinus as the cause of the disaster, but were grateful to Tiberius as the author of the agreement. Others who had less to lose and could therefore afford to stand on principle, would have enforced the fullest rigour of the ancient rules and have delivered up the quaestor and tribunes with the defaulting general.[318] It was thought that the influence of Scipio, always great with the agricultural voters, might have availed to save even Mancinus, nay that, if he would, he might have got the peace confirmed.[319] But his efforts were believed to have been employed in favour of Tiberius. The matter ended in an illogical compromise. The treaty was repudiated, but it was decreed that the general alone should be surrendered.[320] A breach in an ancient rule of religious law had been made in favour of Tiberius.
But, in spite of this mark of popular favour, the experience had been disheartening and its effect was disturbing. Although it is impossible to subscribe to the opinion of later writers, who, looking at the matter from a conservative and therefore unfavourable aspect, saw in this early check the key to Tiberius’s future action,[321] yet anger and fear leave their trace even on the best regulated minds. The senate had torn up his treaty and placed him for the moment in personal peril. It was to the people that he owed his salvation. If circumstances were to develop an opposition party in Rome, he was being pushed more and more into its ranks. And a coolness seems to have sprung up at this time between him and the man who had been his great _exemplar_. Tiberius took no counsel of Scipio before embarking on his great enterprise; support and advice were sought elsewhere. He may have already tested Scipio’s lack of sympathy with an active propaganda; shame might have kept back the hint of a plan that might seem to imply a claim to leadership. But it is possible that there was some feeling of resentment against the warrior now before Numantia, who had done nothing to save the last Numantine treaty and the honour of the name of Gracchus.
His reticence could scarcely have been due to ignorance of his own designs; for his brother Caius left it on record that it was while journeying northward from Rome on his way to Numantia that Tiberius’s eyes were first fully opened to the magnitude of the malady that cried aloud for cure.[322] It was in Etruria, the paradise of the capitalist, that he saw everywhere the imported slave and the barbarian who had replaced the freeman. It was this sight that first suggested something like a definite scheme. A further stimulus was soon to be found in scraps of anonymous writing which appeared on porches, walls and monuments, praying for his succour and entreating that the public land should be recovered for the poor.[323] The voiceless Roman people was seeking its only mode of utterance, a tribune who should be what the tribune had been of old, the servant of the many not the creature of the few. To Gracchus’s mother his plans could hardly have been veiled. She is even said to have stimulated a vague craving for action by the playful remark that she was still known as the mother-in-law of Scipio, not as the mother of the Gracchi.[324]
But there was need of serious counsel. Gracchus did not mean to be a mere demagogue, coming before the people with a half-formed plan and stirring up an agitation which could end merely in some idle resolution. There were few to whom he could look for advice, but those few were of the best. Three venerable men, whose deeds and standing were even greater than their names, were ready with their support. There was the chief pontiff, P. Licinius Crassus Mucianus, the man who was said to combine in a supreme degree the four great blessings of wealth, birth, eloquence and legal lore;[325] there was the brother of Crassus, P. Mucius Scaevola,[326] the greatest lawyer of his age and already destined to the consulship for the following year; lastly there was Tiberius’s father-in-law, the restless Appius, now eagerly awaiting the fulfilment of a cherished scheme by the man of his own choice.[327]
Thus fortified, Tiberius Gracchus entered on his tribunate, and formulated the measure which was to leave large portions of the public domain open for distribution to the poor. In the popular gatherings with which he opened his campaign, he dwelt on the nature of the evils which he proposed to remedy. It was the interest of Italy, not merely of the Roman proletariate, that was at stake.[328] He pointed out how the Italian peasantry had dwindled in numbers, and how that portion of it which still survived had been reduced to a poverty that was irremediable by their own efforts. He showed that the slave gangs which worked the vast estates were a menace, not a help, to Rome. They could not be enlisted for service in the legions; their disaffection to their masters was notorious; their danger was being proved even now by the horrible condition of Sicily, the fate of its slave-owning landlords, the long, difficult and eventful war which had not even yet been brought to a close.[329] Sometimes the language of passion replaced that of reason in his harangues to the crowds that pressed round the Rostra. “The beasts that prowl about Italy have holes and lurking-places where they may make their beds. You who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of air and light. These alone are your heritage. Homeless, unsettled, you wander to and fro with your wives and children. Our generals are in the habit of inspiring their soldiers to the combat by exhorting them to repel the enemy in defence of their tombs and ancestral shrines. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar, you have no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world; yet there is no clod of earth that you can call your own.” [330]
The proposal, which was ushered in by these stirring appeals, seemed at first sight to be of a moderate and somewhat conservative character. It professed to be the renewal of an older law, which had limited the amount of domain land which an individual might possess to five hundred _jugera_;[331] it professed, that is, to reinforce an injunction which had been persistently disobeyed, for this enactment restricting possession had never been repealed. The extent to which a proposal of this kind is a re-enactment, in the spirit as well as in the letter, depends entirely on the length of time which has elapsed since the original proposal has begun to be violated. A political society, which recognises custom as one of the bases of law, must recognise desuetude as equally valid. A law, which has not been enforced for centuries, would, by the common consent of the courts of such nations as favour progressive legislation, be regarded as no law at all. Again, the age of an ordinance determines its suitability to present conditions. It may be justifiable to revive an enactment that is centuries old; but the revival should not necessarily dignify itself with that name. It must be regarded as a new departure, unless the circumstances of the old and the new enactment can be proved to be approximately the same. Our attempts to judge the Gracchan law by these considerations are baffled by our ignorance of the real date of the previous enactment, the stringency of whose measures he wished to renew. If it was the Licinian law of the middle of the fourth century,[332] this law must have been renewed, or must still have continued to be observed, at a period not very long anterior to the Gracchan proposal; for Cato could point his argument against the declaration of war with Rhodes by an appeal to a provision attributed to this measure[333]–an appeal which would have been pointless, had the provision fallen into that oblivion which persistent neglect of an enactment must bring to all but the professed students of law. We can at least assert that the charge against Gracchus of reviving an enactment so hoary with age as to be absurdly obsolete, is not one of the charges to be found even in those literary records which were most unfriendly to his legislation.[334]
The general principle of the measure was, therefore, the limitation to five hundred _jugera_ of the amount of public land that could be “possessed” by an individual. The very definition of the tenure immediately exempted large portions of the State’s domain from the operation of this rule.[335] The Campanian land was leased by the State to individuals, not merely possessed by them as the result of an occupation permitted by the government; it, therefore, fell outside the scope of the measure;[336] but, as it was technically public land and its ownership was vested in the State, it would have been hazardous to presume its exemption; it seems, therefore, to have been specifically excluded from the operation of the bill, and a similar exception was probably made in favour of many other tracts of territory held under a similar tenure.[337] Either Gracchus declined to touch any interest that could properly describe itself as “vested,” even though it took merely the form of a leasehold, or he valued the secure and abundant revenue which flowed into the coffers of the State from these domains. There were other lands strictly “public” where the claim of the holders was still stronger, and where dispossession without the fullest compensation must have been regarded as mere robbery. We know from later legislation that respect was had to such lands as the Trientabula, estates which had been granted by the Roman government at a quit rent to its creditors, as security for that portion of a national debt which had never been repaid. It is less certain what happened in the case of lands of which the usufruct alone had been granted to communities of Roman citizens or Latin colonists. Ownership in this case still remained vested in the Roman people, and if the right of usufruct had been granted by law, it could be removed by law. In the case of Latin communities, however, it was probably guaranteed by treaty, which no mere law could touch: and so similar were the conditions of Roman and Latin communities in this particular, that it is probable that the land whose use was conferred on whole communities by these ancient grants, was wholly spared by the Gracchan legislation. In the case of those commons which were possessed by groups of villagers for the purposes of pasturage (_ager compascuus_),[338] it is not likely that the group was regarded as the unit: and therefore, even in the case of such an aggregate possessing over five hundred _jugera_, their occupation was probably left undisturbed.
All other possessors must vacate the land which exceeded the prescribed limit. Such an ordinance would have been harsh, had no compensation been allowed, and Gracchus proposed certain amends for the loss sustained. In the first place, the five hundred _jugera_ retained by each possessor were to be increased by half as much again for each son that he might possess: although it seems that the amount retained was not to exceed one thousand _jugera_.[339] Secondly, the land so secured to existing possessors was not to be held on a merely precarious tenure, and was not to be burdened by the payment of dues to the State; even if ownership was not vested in its holders, they were guaranteed gratuitous undisturbed possession in perpetuity.[340] Thirdly, the bill as originally drafted even suggested some monetary compensation for the land surrendered.[341] This compensation was probably based on a valuation of stock, buildings, and recent permanent improvements, which were to be found on the territory now reverting to the State. It must have applied for the most part only to arable land, and practically amounted to a purchase by the State of items to which it could lay no legal claim; for it was the soil alone, not the buildings on the soil, over which its lordship could properly be asserted.
The object of reclaiming the public land was its future distribution amongst needy citizens. This distribution might have taken either of two forms. Fresh colonies might have been planted, or the acquired land