A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge

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The moral control exercised by the magistrate and the sumptuary or
criminal ordinances expressed in acts of Parliament might serve as
temporary palliatives to certain pronounced evils of the moment; but
they were powerless to check the extravagance of an expenditure which
was sanctioned by custom and in some respects actually enforced by law.
One of the greatest of the practical needs of the new Roman was to
increase his income in every way that might be deemed legitimate by a
society which, even in its best days, had never been overscrupulous in
its exploitation of the poor and had been wont to illustrate the
sanctity of contract by visible examples of grinding oppression. The
nature and intensity of the race for wealth differed with the needs of
the anxious spendthrift; and in respect both to needs and to means of
satisfaction the upper middle class was in a far more favourable
position than its noble governors. It could spend its unfettered
energies in the pursuit of the profits which might be derived from
public contracts, trade, banking and money-lending, while it was not
forced to submit to the drain created by the canvass for office and the
exorbitant demands made by the electorate on the pecuniary resources of
the candidate. The brilliancy of the life of the mercantile class, with
its careless luxury and easy indifference to expenditure, set a standard
for the nobility which was at once galling and degrading. They were
induced to apply the measure of wealth even to members of their own
order, and regarded it as inevitable that any one of their peers, whose
patrimony had dwindled, should fill but a subordinate place both in
politics and society;[98] while the means which they were sometimes
forced to adopt in order to vie with the wealth of the successful
contractor and promoter were, if hardly less sound from a moral point of
view, at least far more questionable from a purely legal standpoint.

A fraction of the present wealth which was in the possession of some of
the leading families of the nobility may have been purely adventitious,
the result of the lucky accident of command and conquest amidst a
wealthy and pliant people. The spoils of war were, it is true, not for
the general but for the State; yet he exercised great discretionary
power in dealing with the movable objects, which in the case of Hellenic
or Asiatic conquest formed one of the richest elements in the prize, and
the average commander is not likely to have displayed the self-restraint
and public spirit of the destroyer of Corinth. Public and military
opinion would permit the victor to retain an ample share of the fruits
of his prowess, and this would be increased by a type of contribution to
which he had a peculiar and unquestioned claim. This consisted in the
honorary offerings made by states, who found themselves at the feet of
the victor and were eager to attract his pity and to enlist on their
behalf his influence with the Roman government. Instances of such
offerings are the hundred and fourteen golden crowns which were borne in
the triumph of Titus Quinctius Flamininus,[99] those of two hundred and
twelve pounds' weight shown in the triumph of Manlius,[100] and the
great golden wreath of one hundred and fifty pounds which had been
presented by the Ambraciots to Nobilior.[101] But the time had not yet
been reached when the general on a campaign, or even the governor of a
district which was merely disturbed by border raids, could calmly demand
hard cash as the equivalent of the precious metal wrought into this
useless form, and when the "coronary gold" was to be one of the regular
perquisites of any Roman governor who claimed to have achieved military
success.[102] Nor is it likely that the triumphant general of this
period melted down the offerings which he might dedicate in temples or
reserve for the gallery of his house, and we must conclude that the few
members of the nobility who had conducted the great campaigns were but
slightly enriched by the offerings which helpless peoples had laid at
their feet. It would be almost truer to say that the great influx of the
precious metals had increased the difficulties of their position; for,
if the gold or silver took the form of artistic work which remained in
their possession, it but exaggerated the ideal to which their standard
of life was expected to conform; and if it assumed the shape of the
enormous amount of specie which was poured into the coffers of the State
or distributed amongst the legionaries, its chief effects were the
heightening of prices and a showy appearance of a vast increase of
wealth which corresponded to no real increase in production.

But, whatever the effects of the metallic prizes of the great campaigns,
these prizes could neither have benefited the members of the nobility as
a whole nor, in the days of comparative peace which had followed the
long epoch of war with wealthy powers, could they be contemplated as a
permanent source of future capital or income. When the representative of
the official caste looked round for modes of fruitful investment which
might increase his revenues, his chances at first sight appeared to be
limited by legal restrictions which expressed the supposed principles of
his class. A Clodian law enacted at the beginning of the Second Punic
War had provided that no senator or senator's son should own a ship of a
burden greater than three hundred amphorae. The intention of the measure
was to prohibit members of the governing class from taking part in
foreign trade, as carriers, as manufacturers, or as participants in the
great business of the contract for corn which placed provincial grain on
the Roman market; and the ships of small tonnage which they were allowed
to retain were intended to furnish them merely with the power of
transporting to a convenient market the produce of their own estates in
Italy.[103] The restriction was not imposed in a self-regarding spirit;
it was odious to the nobility, and, as it was supported by Flaminius,
must have been popular with the masses, who were blind to the fact that
the restriction of a senator's energies to agriculture would be
infinitely more disastrous to the well-being of the average citizen than
the expenditure of those energies in trade. The restriction may have
received the support of the growing merchant class, who were perhaps
pleased to be rid of the competition of powerful rivals, and it
certainly served, externally at least, to mark the distinction between
the man of large industrial enterprises and the man whose official rank
was supported by landed wealth--a distinction which, in the shape of the
contrast drawn between knights and senators, appears at every turn in
the history of the later Republic. But, whatever the immediate motives
for the passing of the measure, a great and healthy principle lay behind
it. It was the principle that considerations of foreign policy should
not be directly controlled or hampered by questions of trade, that the
policy of the State should not become the sport of the selfish vagaries
of capital. The spirit thus expressed was directly inimical to the
interests of the merchant, the contractor and the tax-farmer. How
inimical it was could not yet be clearly seen; for the transmarine
interests of Rome had not at the time attained a development which
invited the mastery of conquered lands by the Roman capitalist. But,
whether this Clodian law created or merely formulated the antithesis
between land and trade, between Italian and provincial profits, it is
yet certain that this antithesis was one of the most powerful of the
animating factors of Roman history for the better part of the two
centuries which were to follow the enactment. It produced the conflict
between a policy of restricted enterprise, pursued for the good of the
State and the subject, and a policy of expansion which obeyed the
interests of capital, between a policy of cautious protection and that
madness of imperialism which is ever associated with barbarism,
brigandage or trade.

But, if we inquire whether this enactment attained its ostensible object
of completely shutting out senators from the profits of any enterprise
that could properly be described as commercial, we shall find an
affirmative answer to be more than dubious. The law was a dead letter
when Cicero indicted Verres,[104] but its demise may have been reached
through a long and slow process of decline. But, even if the provisions
of the law had been adhered to throughout the period which we are
considering, the avenue to wealth derived from business intercourse with
the provinces would not necessarily have been closed to the official
class. We shall soon see that the companies which were formed for
undertaking the state-contracts probably permitted shares to be held by
individuals who never appeared in the registered list of partners at
all, and we know that to hold a share in a great public concern was
considered one of the methods of business which did not subject the
participant to the taint of a vulgar commercialism.[105] And, if the
senator chose to indulge more directly in the profits of transmarine
commerce, to what extent was he really hindered by the provisions of the
law? He might not own a ship of burden, but his freedmen might sail to
any port on the largest vessels, and who could object if the returns
which the dependant owed his lord were drawn from the profits of
commerce? Again there was no prohibition against loans on bottomry, and
Cato had increased his wealth by becoming through his freedman a member
of a maritime company, each partner in which had but a limited liability
and the prospect of enormous gains.[106] The example of this energetic
money-getter also illustrates many ways in which the nobleman of
business tastes could increase his profits without extending his
enterprises far from the capital. It was possible to exploit the growing
taste in country villas, in streams and lakes and natural woods; to buy
a likely spot for a small price, let it at a good rental, or sell it at
a larger price. The ownership of house property within the town, which
grew eventually into the monopoly of whole blocks and streets by such a
man as Crassus,[107] was in every way consistent with the possession of
senatorial rank. It was even possible to be a slave-dealer without loss
of dignity, at least if one transacted the sordid details of the
business through a slave. The young and promising boy required but a
year's training in the arts to enable the careful buyer to make a large
profit by his sale.[108] Yet such methods must have been regarded by the
nobility as a whole as merely subsidiary means of increasing their
patrimony: and, in spite of the fact that Cato took the view that
agriculture should be an amusement rather than a business,[109] there
can be no doubt that the staple of the wealth of the official class was
still to be found in the acres of Italy. It was not, however, the wealth
of the moderate homestead which was to be won from a careful tillage of
the fields; it was the wealth which, as we shall soon see, was
associated with the slave-capitalist, the overseer, a foreign method of
cultivation on the model of the grand plantation-systems of the East,
and a belief in the superior value of pasturage to tillage which was to
turn many a populous and fertile plain into a wilderness of danger and
desolation.

But, strive as he would, there was many a nobleman who found that his
expenditure could not be met by dabbling in trade where others plunged,
or by the revenues yielded by the large tracts of Italian soil over
which he claimed exclusive powers. The playwright of the age has figured
Indigence as the daughter of Luxury;[110] and a still more terrible
child was to be born in the Avarice which sprang from the useless
cravings and fierce competitions of the time.[111] The desire to get and
to hold had ever been a Roman vice; but, it had also been the unvarying
assumption of the Roman State, and the conviction of the Roman
official--a conviction so deeply seated and spontaneous as to form no
ground for self-congratulation that the lust for acquisition should
limit itself to the domain of private right, and never cross the rigid
barrier which divided that domain from the sphere of wealth and power
which the city had committed to its servant as a solemn trust. The
better sort of overseer was often found in the crabbed man of
business--a Cato, for example--who would never waive a right of his own
and protected those of his dependants with similar tenacity and passion.
The honour which prevailed in the commercial code at home was considered
so much a matter of course in all dealings with the foreign world, that
the State scorned to scrutinise the expenditure of its ministers and was
spared the disgrace of a system of public audit. Even in this age, which
is regarded by the ancient historians as marking the beginning of the
decline in public virtue, Polybius could contrast the attitude of
suspicion towards the guardians of the State, which was the
characteristic of the official life of his own unhappy country, with the
well-founded confidence which Rome reposed in the honour of her
ministers, and could tell the world that "if but a talent of money were
entrusted to a magistrate of a Greek state, ten auditors, as many seals
and twice as many witnesses are required for the security of the bond;
yet even so faith is not observed; while the Roman in an official or
diplomatic post, who handles vast sums of money, adheres to his duty
through the mere moral obligation of the oath which he has sworn"; that
"amongst the Romans the corrupt official is as rare a portent as is the
financier with clean hands amongst other peoples".[112] When the elder
Africanus tore up the account books of his brother--books which recorded
the passage of eighteen thousand talents from an Asiatic king to a Roman
general and from him to the Roman State[113]--he was imparting a lesson
in confidence, which was immediately accepted by the senate and people.
And it seems that, so far as the expenditure of public moneys was
concerned, this confidence continued to be justified. It is true that
Cato had furiously impugned the honour of commanders in the matter of
the distribution of the prizes of war amongst the soldiers and had drawn
a bitter contrast between private and official thieves. "The former," he
said, "pass their lives in thongs and iron fetters, the latter in purple
and gold." [114] But there were no fixed rules of practice which guided
such a distribution, and a commander, otherwise honest, might feel no
qualms of conscience in exercising a selective taste on his own behalf.
On the other hand, deliberate misappropriation of the public funds seems
to have been seldom suspected or at least seldom made the subject of
judicial cognisance, and for many years after a standing court was
established for the trial of extortion no similar tribunal was thought
necessary for the crime of peculation.[115] Apart from the long,
tortuous and ineffective trial of the Scipios,[116] no question of the
kind is known to have been raised since Manius Acilius Glabrio, the
conqueror of Antiochus and the Aetolians, competed for the censorship.
Then a story, based on the existence of the indubitable wealth which he
was employing with a lavish hand to win the favour of the people, was
raked up against him by some jealous members of the nobility. It was
professed that some money and booty, found in the camp of the king, had
never been exhibited in the triumph nor deposited in the treasury. The
evidence of legates and military tribunes was invited, and Cato, himself
a competitor for the censorship, was ready to testify that gold and
silver vases, which he had seen in the captured camp, had not been
visible in the triumphal procession. Glabrio waived his candidature, but
the people were unwilling to convict and the prosecution was
abandoned.[117] Here again we are confronted by the old temptation of
curio-hunting, which, the nobility deemed indecent in so "new" a man as
Glabrio; the evidence of Cato--the only testimony which proved
dangerous--did not establish the charge that money due to the State had
been intercepted by a Roman consul.

But the regard for the property of the State was unfortunately not
extended to the property of its clients. Even before the provinces had
yielded a prey rendered easy by distance and irresponsibility, Italian
cities had been forced to complain of the violence and rapacity of Roman
commanders quartered in their neighbourhood,[118] and the passive
silence with which the Praenestines bore the immoderate requisitions of
a consul, was a fatal guarantee of impunity which threatened to alter
for ever the relations of these free allies to the protecting
power.[119] But provincial commands offered greater temptations and a
far more favourable field for capricious tyranny; for here the exactions
of the governor were neither repudiated by an oath of office nor at
first even forbidden by the sanctions of a law. Requisitions could be
made to meet the needs of the moment, and these needs were naturally
interpreted to suit the cravings and the tastes of the governor of the
moment.[120] Cato not only cut down the expenses that had been
arbitrarily imposed on the unhappy natives of Sardinia,[121] but seems
to have been the author of a definite law which fixed a limit to such
requisitions in the future.[122] But it was easier to frame an ordinance
than to guarantee its observation, and, at a time when the surrounding
world was seething with war, the regulations made for a peaceful
province could not touch the actions of a victorious commander who was
following up the results of conquest. Complaints began to pour in on
every hand--from the Ambraciots of Greece, the Cenomani of Gaul[123]
--and the senate did its best, either by its own cognisance or by the
creation of a commission of investigation, to meet the claims of the
dependent peoples. A kind of rude justice was the result, but it was
much too rude to meet an evil which was soon seen to be developing into
a trade of systematic oppression. A novel step was taken when in 171
delegates from the two Spains appeared in the Curia to complain of the
avarice and insolence of their Roman governors. A praetor was
commissioned to choose from the senatorial order five of such judges as
were wont to be selected for the settlement of international disputes
(_recuperatores_), to sit in judgment on each of the indicted
governors,[124] and the germ of a regular court for what had now become
a regular offence was thus developed. The further and more shameful
confession, that the court should be permanent and interpret a definite
statute, was soon made, and the Calpurnian law of 149[125]was the first
of that long series of enactments for extortion which mark the futility
of corrective measures in the face of a weak system of legal, and a
still weaker system of moral, control. Trials for extortion soon became
the plaything of politics, the favourite arena for the exercise of the
energies of a young and rising politician, the favourite weapon with
which old family feuds might be at once revenged and perpetuated. They
were soon destined to gain a still greater significance as furnishing
the criteria of the methods of administration which the State was
expected to employ, as determining the respective rights of the
administrator and the capitalist to guide the destinies of the
inhabitants of a dependent district. Their manifold political
significance destroys our confidence in their judgments, and we can
seldom tell whether the acquittal or the condemnation which these courts
pronounced was justified on the evidence adduced. But there can be no
question of the evil that lay behind this legislative and judicial
activity. The motive which led men to assume administrative posts abroad
was in many cases thoroughly selfish and mean,--the desire to acquire
wealth as rapidly as was consistent with keeping on the safe side of a
not very exacting law. No motive of this kind can ever be universal in a
political society, and in Rome we cannot even pronounce it to be
general. Power and distinction attracted the Roman as much as wealth,
and some governors were saved from temptation by the colossal fortunes
which they already possessed. But how early it had begun to operate in
the minds of many is shown by the eagerness which, as we shall see, was
soon to be displayed by rival consuls for the conduct of a war that
might give the victor a prolonged control over the rich cities which had
belonged to the kingdom of Pergamon, if it is not proved by the strange
unwillingness which magistrates had long before exhibited to assume some
commands which had been entrusted to their charge.[126]

A suspicion of another type of abuse of power, more degrading though not
necessarily more harmful than the plunder of subjects, had begun to be
raised in the minds of the people and the government. It was held that a
Roman might be found who would sell the supposed interests of his
country to a foreign potentate, or at any rate accept a present which
might or might not influence his judgment, A commissioner to Illyria had
been suspected of pocketing money offered him by the potentates of that
district in 171,[127] and the first hint was given of that shattering of
public confidence in the integrity of diplomatists which wrought such
havoc in the foreign politics of the period which forms the immediate
subject of our work. The system of the Protectorate, which Rome had so
widely adopted, with its secret diplomatic dealings and its hidden
conferences with kings, offered greater facilities for secret
enrichment, and greater security for the enjoyment of the acquired
wealth, even than the plunder of a province. The proof of the committal
of the act was difficult, in most cases impossible. We must be content
to chronicle the suspicion of its growing frequency, and the suspicion
is terrible enough. If the custom of wringing wealth from subjects and
selling support to potentates continued to prevail, the stage might soon
be reached at which it could be said, with that element of exaggeration
which lends emphasis to a truth, that a small group of men were drawing
revenues from every nation in the world.[128]

Such were the sources of wealth that lay open to men, to whom commerce
was officially barred and who were supposed to have no direct interest
in financial operations. Far ampler spheres of pecuniary enrichment,
more uniformly legal if sometimes as oppressive, were open to the class
of men who by this time had been recognised as forming a kind of second
order in the State. The citizens who had been proved by the returns at
the census to have a certain amount of realisable capital at their
disposal--a class of citizens that ranged from the possessors of a
moderate patrimony, such as society might employ as a line of
demarcation between an upper and a lower middle class, to the
controllers of the most gigantic fortunes--had been welded into a body
possessing considerable social and political solidarity. This solidarity
had been attained chiefly through the community of interest derived from
the similar methods of pecuniary investment which they employed, but
also through the circumstance (slight in itself but significant in an
ancient society which ever tended to fall into grades) that all the
members of this class could describe themselves by the courtesy title of
"Knights"--a description justified by the right which they possessed of
serving on their own horses with the Roman cavalry instead of sharing
the foot-service of the legionary. A common designation was not
inappropriate to men who were in a certain sense public servants and
formed in a very real sense a branch of the administration. The knight
might have many avocations; he might be a money-lender, a banker, a
large importer; but he was preeminently a farmer of the taxes. His
position in the former cases was simply that of an individual, who might
or might not be temporarily associated with others; his position in the
latter case meant that he was a member of a powerful and permanent
corporation, one which served a government from which it might wring
great profits or at whose hands it might suffer heavy loss--a government
to be helped in its distress, to be fought when its demands were
overbearing, to be encouraged when its measures seemed progressive, to
be hindered when they seemed reactionary from a commercial point of
view. A group of individuals or private firms could never have attained
the consistency of organisation, or maintained the uniformity of policy,
which was displayed by these societies of revenue-collectors; even a
company must have a long life before it can attain strength and
confidence sufficient to act in a spirited manner in opposition to the
State; and it seems certain that these societies were wholly exempted
from the paralysing principle which the Roman law applied to
partnership--a principle which dictated that every partnership should be
dissolved by the death or retirement of one of the associates.[129] The
State, which possessed no civil service of its own worthy of the name,
had taken pains to secure permanent organisations of private
share-holders which should satisfy its needs, to give them something of
an official character, and to secure to each one of them as a result of
its permanence an individual strength which, in spite of the theory that
the taxes and the public works were put up to auction, may have secured
to some of these companies a practical monopoly of a definite sphere of
operations. But a company, at Rome as elsewhere, is powerful in
proportion to the breadth of its basis. A small ring of capitalists may
tyrannise over society as long as they confine themselves to securing a
monopoly over private enterprises, and as long as the law permits them
to exercise this autocratic power without control; but such a ring is
far less capable of meeting the arbitrary dictation of an aristocratic
body of landholders, such as the senate, or of encountering the
resentful opposition of a nominally all-powerful body of consumers, such
as the Comitia, than a corporation which has struck its roots deeply in
society by the wide distribution of its shares. We know from the
positive assurance of a skilled observer of Roman life that the number
of citizens who had an interest in these companies was particularly
large.[130] This observer emphasises the fact in order to illustrate the
dependence of a large section of society on the will of the senate,
which possessed the power of controlling the terms of the agreements
both for the public works which it placed in the hands of contractors
and for the sources of production which it put out to lease;[131] but it
is equally obvious that the large size of the number of shareholders
must have exercised a profoundly modifying influence on the arbitrary
authority of a body such as the senate which governed chiefly through
deference to public opinion; and we know that, in the last resort, an
appeal could be made to the sovereign assembly, if a magistrate could be
found bold enough to carry to that quarter a proposal that had been
discountenanced by the senate.[132] In such crises the strength of the
companies depended mainly on the number of individual interests that
were at stake; the shareholder is more likely to appear at such
gatherings than the man who is not profoundly affected by the issue, and
it is very seldom that the average consumer has insight enough to see,
or energy enough to resist, the sufferings and inconveniences which
spring from the machinations of capital. It may have been possible at
times to pack a legislative assembly with men who had some financial
interest, however slight, in a dispute arising from a contract calling
for decision; and the time was soon to come when such questions of
detail would give place to far larger questions of policy, when the
issues springing from a line of foreign activity which had been taken by
the government might be debated in the cold and glittering light of the
golden stakes the loss or gain of which depended upon the policy
pursued. Nor could it have been easy even for the experienced eye to see
from the survey of such a gathering that it represented the army of
capital. Research has rendered it probable that the companies of the
time were composed of an outer as well as of an inner circle; that the
mass of shareholders differed from those who were the promoters,
managers and active agents in the concern, that the liability of the
former at least was limited and that their shares, whether small or
great, were transmissible and subject to the fluctuations of the
market.[133] But, even if we do not believe that this distinction
between _socii_ and _participes_ was legally elaborated, yet there were
probably means by which members of the outside public could enter into
business relations with the recognised partners in one of these concerns
to share its profits and its losses.[134] The freedman, who had invested
his small savings in the business of an enterprising patron, would
attach the same mercantile value to his own vote in the assembly as
would be given to his suffrage in the senate by some noble peer, who had
bartered the independence of his judgment for the acquisition of more
rapid profits than could be drawn from land.