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

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The farmers of the revenue fell into three broad classes. First there
were the contractors for the creation, maintenance and repair of the
public works possessed or projected by the State, such as roads,
aqueducts, bridges, temples and other public buildings. Gigantic profits
were not possible in such an enterprise, if the censors and their
advisers acted with knowledge, impartiality and discretion; for the
lowest possible tender was obtained for such contracts and the results
might be repudiated if inspection proved them to be unsatisfactory.
Secondly there were the companies which leased sources of production
that were owned by the State such as fisheries, salt-works, mines and
forest land. In some particular cases even arable land had been dealt
with in this way, and the confiscated territories of Capua and Corinth
were let on long leases to _publicani_. Thirdly there were the
societies, which did not themselves acquire leases but acted as true
intermediaries between the State and individuals[135] who paid it
revenue whether as occupants of its territory, or as making use of sites
which it claimed to control, or as owing dues which had been prescribed
by agreement or by law. These classes of debtors to the State with whom
the middlemen came into contact may be illustrated respectively by the
occupants of the domain land of Italy, the ship-masters who touched at
ports, and the provincials such as those of Sicily or Sardinia who were
burdened with the payment of a tithe of the produce of their lands.[136]
If we consider separately the characteristics of the three classes of
state-farmers, we find that the first and the second are both direct
employers of labour, the third reaping only indirect profits from the
production controlled by others. It was in this respect, as employers of
labour, that the societies of the time were free from the anxieties and
restrictions that beset the modern employment of capital. Except in the
rare case where the contractors had leased arable land and sublet it to
its original occupants,--the treatment which seems to have been adopted
for the Campanian territory[137]--there can be no question that the
work which they controlled was done mainly by the hands of slaves. They
were therefore exempt from the annoyance and expense which might be
caused by the competition and the organised resistance of free labour.
The slaves employed in many of these industries must have been highly
skilled; for many of these spheres of wealth which the State had
delegated to contractors required peculiar industrial appliances and
unusual knowledge in the foremen and leading artificers. The weakness of
slave-labour,--its lack of intelligence and spirit--could not have been
so keenly felt as it was on the great agricultural estates, which
offered employment chiefly for the unskilled; and the difficulties that
might arise from the lack of strength or interest, from the possession
of hands that were either feeble or inert, were probably overcome in the
same uncompromising manner in the workshop of the contractor and on the
domains of the landed gentry. The maxim that an aged slave should be
sold could not have been peculiar to the dabbler in agriculture, and the
_ergastulum_ with its chained gangs must have been as familiar to the
manufacturer as to the landed proprietor.[138] As to the promoters and
the shareholders of these companies, it could not be expected that they
should trace in imagination, or tremble as they traced, the heartless,
perhaps inhuman, means by which the regular returns on their capital
were secured.[139] Nor is it probable that the government of this period
took any great care to supervise the conditions of the work or the lot
of the workman. The partner desired quick and great returns, the State
large rents and small tenders. The remorseless drain on human energy,
the waste of human life, and the practical abeyance of free labour which
was flooding the towns with idlers, were ideas which, if they ever
arose, were probably kept in the background by a government which was
generally in financial difficulties, and by individuals animated by all
the fierce commercial competition of the age.

The desire of contractors and lessees for larger profits naturally took
the form of an eagerness to extend their sphere of operations. Every
advance in the Roman sphere of military occupation implied the making of
new roads, bridges and aqueducts; every extension of this sphere was
likely to be followed by the confiscation of certain territories, which
the State would declare to be public domains and hand over to the
company that would guarantee the payment of the largest revenue. But the
sordid imperialism which animated the contractor and lessee must have
been as nothing to that which fed the dreams of the true
state-middleman, the individual who intervened between the taxpayer and
the State, the producer and the consumer. Conquest would mean fresh
lines of coast and frontier, on which would be set the toil-houses of
the collectors with their local directors and their active "families" of
freedmen and slaves. It might even mean that a more prolific source of
revenue would be handed over to the care of the publican. The spectacle
of the method in which the land-tax was assessed and collected in Sicily
and Sardinia may have already inspired the hope that the next instance
of provincial organisation might see greater justice done to the
capitalists of Rome. When Sicily had been brought under Roman sway, the
aloofness of the government from financial interests, as well as its
innate conservatism, justified by the success of Italian organisation,
which dictated the view that local institutions should not be lightly
changed, had led it to accept the methods for the taxation of land which
it found prevalent in the island at the time of its annexation. The
methods implied assessment by local officials and collection by local
companies or states.[140] It is true that neither consequence entirely
excluded the enterprise of the Roman capitalists; they had crossed the
Straits of Messina on many a private enterprise and had settled in such
large numbers in the business centres of the island that the charter
given to the Sicilian cities after the first servile war made detailed
provision for the settlement of suits between Romans and natives.[141]
It was not to be expected that they should refrain from joining in, or
competing with, the local companies who bid for the Sicilian tithes, nor
was such association or competition forbidden by the law. But the
scattered groups of capitalists who came into contact with the Sicilian
yeomen did not possess the official character and the official influence
of the great companies of Italy. No association, however powerful, could
boast a monopoly of the main source of revenue in the island. But what
they had done was an index of what they might do, if another opportunity
and a more complaisant government could be found. Any individual or any
party which could promise the knights the unquestioned control of the
revenues of a new province would be sure of their heartiest sympathy
and support.

And it would be worth the while of any individual or party which
ventured to frame a programme traversing the lines of political
orthodoxy, to bid for the co-operation of this class. For recent history
had shown that the thorough organisation of capital, encouraged by the
State to rid itself of a tiresome burden in times of peace and to secure
itself a support in times of need, might become, as it pleased, a
bulwark or a menace to the government which had created it. The useful
monster had begun to develop a self-consciousness of his own. He had his
amiable, even his patriotic moments; but his activity might be
accompanied by the grim demand for a price which his nominal master was
not prepared to pay. The darkest and the brightest aspects of the
commercial spirit had been in turn exhibited during the Second Punic
War. On the one hand we find an organised band of publicans attempting
to break up an assembly before which a fraudulent contractor and wrecker
was to be tried;[142] on the other, we find them meeting the shock of
Cannae with the offer of a large loan to the beggared treasury, lent
without guarantee and on the bare word of a ruined government that it
should be met when there was money to meet it.[143] Other companies came
forward to put their hands to the public works, even the most necessary
of which had been suspended by the misery of the war, and told the
bankrupt State that they would ask for their payment when the struggle
had completely closed.[144] A noble spectacle! and if the positions of
employer and employed had been reversed only in such crises and in such
a way, no harm could come of the memory either of the obligation or the
service. But the strength shown by this beneficence sometimes exhibited
itself in unpleasant forms and led to unpleasant consequences. The
censorships of Cato and of Gracchus had been fierce struggles of
conservative officialdom against the growing influence and (as these
magistrates held) the swelling insolence of the public companies; and in
both cases the associations had sought and found assistance, either from
a sympathetic party within the senate, or from the people. Cato's
regulations had been reversed and their vigorous author had been
threatened with a tribunician prosecution before the Comitia;[145] while
Gracchus and his colleague had actually been impeached before a popular
court.[146] The reckless employment of servile labour by the companies
that farmed the property of the State had already proved a danger to
public security. The society which had purchased from the censors the
right of gathering pitch from the Bruttian forest of Sila had filled the
neighbourhood with bands of fierce and uncontrolled dependants, chiefly
slaves, but partly men of free birth who may have been drawn from the
desperate Bruttians whom Rome had driven from their homes. The
consequences were deeds of violence and murder, which called for the
intervention of the senate, and the consuls had been appointed as a
special commission to inquire into the outrages.[147] Nor were
complaints limited to Italy; provincial abuses had already called for
drastic remedies. A proof that this was the case is to be found in the
striking fact that on the renewed settlement of Macedonia in 167 it was
actually decreed that the working of the mines in that country, at least
on the extended scale which would have required a system of contract,
should be given up. It was considered dangerous to entrust it to native
companies, and as to the Roman-their mere presence in the country would
mean the surrender of all guarantees of the rule of public law or of the
enjoyment of liberty by the provincials.[148] The State still preferred
the embarrassments of poverty to those of overbearing wealth; its choice
proved its weakness; but even the element of strength displayed in the
surrender might soon be missed, if capital obtained a wider influence
and a more definite political recognition. As things were, these
organisations of capital were but just becoming conscious of their
strength and had by no means reached even the prime of their vigour. The
opening up of the riches of the East were required to develop the
gigantic manhood which should dwarf the petty figure of the agricultural
wealth of Italy.

Had the state-contractors stood alone, or had not they engaged in varied
enterprises for which their official character offered a favourable
point of vantage, the numbers and influence of the individuals who had
embarked their capital in commercial enterprise would have been far
smaller than they actually were. But, in addition to the publican, we
must take account of the business man (_negotiator_) who lent money on
interest or exercised the profession of a banker. Such men had pecuniary
interests which knew no geographical limits, and in all broad questions
of policy were likely to side with the state-contractor.[149] The
money-lender (_fenerator_) represented one of the earliest, most
familiar and most courted forms of Roman enterprise--one whose intrinsic
attractions for the grasping Roman mind had resisted every effort of the
legislature by engaging in its support the wealthiest landowner as well
as the smallest usurer. It is true that a taint clung to the trade--a
taint which was not merely a product of the mistaken economic conception
of the nature of the profits made by the lender, but was the more
immediate outcome of social misery and the fulminations of the
legislature. Cato points to the fact that the Roman law had stamped the
usurer as a greater curse to society than the common thief, and makes
the dishonesty of loans on interest a sufficient ground for declining a
form of investment that was at once safe and profitable.[150] Usury, he
had also maintained, was a form of homicide.[151] But to the majority of
minds this feeling of dishonour had always been purely external and
superficial. The proceedings were not repugnant to the finer sense if
they were not made the object of a life-long profession and not
blatantly exhibited to the eyes of the public. A taint clung to the
money-lender who sat in an office in the Forum, and handed his loans or
received his interest over the counter;[152] it was not felt by the
capitalist who stood behind this small dealer, by the nobleman whose
agent lent seed-corn to the neighbouring yeomen, by the investor in the
state-contracts who perhaps hardly realised that his profits represented
but an indirect form of usury. But, whatever restrictions public opinion
may have imposed on the money-lender as a dealer in Rome and with
Romans, such restrictions were not likely to be felt by the man who had
the capital and the enterprise to carry his financial operations beyond
the sea. Not only was he dealing with provincials or foreigners, but he
was dealing on a scale so grand that the magnitude of the business
almost concealed its shame. Cities and kings were now to be the
recipients of loans and, if the lender occupied a political position
that seemed inconsistent with the profession of a usurer, his
personality might be successfully concealed under the name of some local
agent, who was adequately rewarded for the obloquy which he incurred in
the eyes of the native populations, and the embarrassing conflicts with
the Roman government which were sometimes entailed by an excess of zeal.
Cato had swept both principals and agents out of his province of
Sardinia;[153] but he was a man who courted hostility, and he lived
before the age when the enmity of capital would prove the certain ruin
of the governor and a source of probable danger to the senate. In the
operations of the money-lender we find the most universal link between
the Forum and the provinces. There was no country so poor that it might
not be successfully exploited, and indeed exploitation was often
conditioned by simplicity of character, lack of familiarity with the
developed systems of finance, and the lack of thrift which amongst
peoples of low culture is the source of their constant need. The
employment of capital for this purpose was always far in advance of the
limits of Roman dominion. A protectorate might be in the grasp of a
group of private individuals long before it was absorbed into the
empire, the extension of the frontiers was conditioned by considerations
of pecuniary, not of political safety, and the government might at any
moment be forced into a war to protect the interests of capitalists
whom, in its collective capacity as a government, it regarded as the
greatest foes of its dominion.

A more beneficent employment of capital was illustrated by the
profession of banking which, like most of the arts which exhibit the
highest refinement of the practical intellect, had been given to the
Romans by the Greeks.[154] It had penetrated from Magna Graecia to
Latium and from Latium to Rome, and had been fully established in the
city by the time of the Second Punic War.[155] The strangers, who had
introduced an art which so greatly facilitated the conduct of business
transactions, had been welcomed by the government, and were encouraged
to ply their calling in the shops rented from the State on the north and
south sides of the Forum. These _argentarii_ satisfied the two needs of
the exchange of foreign money, and of advances in cash on easier terms
than could be gained from the professional or secret usurer, to citizens
of every grade[156] who did not wish, or found it difficult, to turn
their real property into gold. Similar functions were at a somewhat
later period usurped by the money-testers (_nummularii_), who perhaps
entered Rome shortly after the issue of the first native silver coinage,
and competed with the earlier-established bankers in most of the
branches of their trade.[157] Ultimately there was no department of
business connected with the transference and circulation of money which
the joint profession did not embrace. Its representatives were concerned
with the purchase and sale of coin, and the equalisation of home with
foreign rates of exchange; they lent on credit, gave security for
others' loans, and received money on deposit; they acted as
intermediaries between creditors and debtors in the most distant places
and gave their travelling customers circular notes on associated houses
in foreign lands; they were equally ready to dissipate by auction an
estate that had become the property of a congress of creditors or a
number of legatees. Their carefully kept books improved even the
methodical habits of the Romans in the matter of business entries, and
introduced the form of "contract by ledger" (_litterarum obligatio_),
which greatly facilitated business operations on an extended scale by
substituting the written record of obligation for other bonds more
difficult to conclude and more easy to evade.

The business life of Rome was in every way worthy of her position as an
imperial city, and her business centre was becoming the greatest
exchange of the commercial world of the day. The forum still drew its
largest crowds to listen to the voice of the lawyer or the orator; but
these attractions were occasional and the constant throng that any day
might witness was drawn thither by the enticements supplied by the
spirit of adventure, the thirst for news and the strain of business
life. The comic poet has drawn for us a picture of the shifting crowd
and its chief elements, good and bad, honest and dishonest. He has shown
us the man who mingles pleasure with his business, lingering under the
Basilica in extremely doubtful company; there too is a certain class of
business men giving or accepting verbal bonds. In the lower part of the
Forum stroll the lords of the exchange, rich and of high repute; under
the old shops on the north sit the bankers, giving and receiving loans
on interest.[158]

The Forum has become in common language the symbol of all the ups and
downs of business life,[159] and the moralist of later times could refer
all students, who wish to master the lore of the quest and investment of
money, to the excellent men who have their station by the temple of
Janus.[160] The aspect of the market place had altered greatly to meet
the growing needs. Great Basilicae--sheltered promenades which probably
derived their names from the Royal Courts of the Hellenic East--had
lately been erected. Two of the earliest, the Porcian and Sempronian,
had been raised on the site of business premises which had been bought
up for the purpose,[161] and were meant to serve the purposes of a
market and an exchange.[162] Their sheltering roofs were soon employed
to accommodate the courts of justice, but it was the business not the
legal life of Rome that called these grand edifices into existence.

The financial activity which centred in the Forum was a consequence, not
merely of the contract-system encouraged by the State and of the
business of the banker and the money-lender, but of the great foreign
trade which supplied the wants and luxuries of Italy and Rome. This was
an import trade concerned partly with the supply of corn for a nation
that could no longer feed itself, partly with the supply of luxuries
from the East and of more necessary products, including instruments of
production, from the West. The Eastern trade touched the Euxine Sea at
Dioscurias, Asia Minor chiefly at Ephesus and Apamea, and Egypt at
Alexandria. It brought Pontic fish, Hellenic wines, the spices and
medicaments of Asia and of the Eastern coast of Africa, and countless
other articles, chiefly of the type which creates the need to which it
ministers. More robust products were supplied by the West through the
trade-routes which came down to Gades, Genua and Aquileia. Hither were
brought slaves, cattle, horses and dogs; linen, canvas and wool; timber
for ships and houses, and raw metal for the manufacture of implements
and works of art. Neither in East nor West was the product brought by
the producer to the consumer. In accordance with the more recent
tendencies of Hellenistic trade, great emporia had grown up in which the
goods were stored, until they were exported by the local dealers or
sought by the wholesale merchant from an Italian port. As the Tyrrhenian
Sea became the radius of the trade of the world, Puteoli became the
greatest staple to which this commerce centred; thence the goods which
were destined for Rome were conveyed to Ostia by water or by land, and
taken by ships which drew no depth of water up the Tiber to the
city.[163] But it must not be supposed that this trade was first
controlled by Romans and Italians when it touched the shores of Italy.
Groups of citizens and allies were to be found in the great staples of
the world, receiving the products as they were brought down from the
interior and supplying the shipping by which they were transferred to
Rome.[164] They were not manufacturers, but intermediaries who reaped a
larger profit from the carrying trade than could be gained by any form
of production in their native land. The Roman and Italian trader was to
be inferior only to the money-lender as a stimulus and a stumbling-block
to the imperial government; he was, like the latter, to be a cause of
annexation and a fire-brand of war, and serves as an almost equal
illustration of the truth that a government which does not control the
operations of capital is likely to become their instrument.[165]

If we descend from the aristocracy of trade to its poorer
representatives, we find that time had wrought great changes in the lot
of the smaller manufacturer and artisan. It is true that the old
trade-gilds of Rome, which tradition carried back to the days of Numa,
still maintained their existence. The goldsmiths, coppersmiths,
builders, dyers, leather-workers, tanners and potters[166] still held
their regular meetings and celebrated their regular games. But it is
questionable whether even at this period their collegiate life was not
rather concerned with ceremonial than with business, whether they did
not gather more frequently to discuss the prospects of their social and
religious functions than to consider the rules and methods of their
trades. We shall soon see these gilds of artificers a great political
power in the State--one that often alarmed the government and sometimes
paralysed its control of the streets of Rome. But their political
activity was connected with ceremonial rather than with trade; it was as
religious associations that they supported the demagogue of the moment
and disturbed the peace of the city. They made war against any
aristocratic abuse that was dangled for the moment before their eyes;
but they undertook no consistent campaign against the dominance of
capital. Their activity was that of the radical caucus, not of the
trade-union. But, if even their industrial character had been fully
maintained and trade interests had occupied more of their attention than
street processions and political agitation, they could never have posed
as the representatives of the interests of the free-born sons of Rome.
The class of freedmen was freely admitted to their ranks, and the
freedman was from an economic point of view the greatest enemy of the
pure-blooded Italian. We shall also see that the freedman was usually
not an independent agent in the conduct of the trade which he professed.
He owed duties to his patron which limited his industrial activity and
rendered a whole-hearted co-operation with his brother-workers
impossible. It is questionable whether any gild organisation could have
stood the shock of the immense development of industrial activity of
which the more fortunate classes at Rome were now reaping the fruits.
The trades represented by Numa's colleges would at best have formed a
mere framework for a maze of instruments which formed the complex
mechanism needed to satisfy the voracious wants of the new society. The
gold-smithery of early times was now complicated by the arts of chasing
and engraving on precious stones; the primitive builder, if he were
still to ply his trade with profit, must associate it with the skill of
the men who made the stuccoed ceilings, the mosaic pavements, the
painted walls. The leather-worker must have learnt to make many a kind
of fashionable shoe, and the dyer to work in violet, scarlet or saffron,
in any shade or colour to which fashion had given a temporary vogue.
Tailoring had become a fine art, and the movable decorations of houses
demanded a host of skilled workmen, each of whom was devoted to the
speciality which he professed. It would seem as though the very
weaknesses of society might have benefited the lower middle class, and
the siftings of the harvest given by the spoils of empire might have
more than supplied the needs of a parasitic proletariate. It is an
unquestioned fact that the growing luxury of the times did benefit trade
with that doubtful benefit which accompanies the diversion of capital
from purposes of permanent utility to objects of aesthetic admiration or
temporary display; but it is an equally unquestioned fact that this
unhealthy nutriment did not strengthen to any appreciable extent such of
the lower classes as could boast pure Roman blood. The military
conscription, to which the more prosperous of these classes were
exposed, was inimical to the constant pursuit of that technical skill
which alone could enable its possessor to hold the market against freer
competitors. Such of the freedmen and the slaves as were trained to
these pursuits--men who would not have been so trained had they not
possessed higher artistic perception and greater deftness in execution
than their fellows--were wholly freed from the military burden which
absorbed much of the leisure, and blunted much of the skill, possessed
by their free-born rivals. The competition of slaves must have been
still more cruel in the country districts and near the smaller country
towns than in the capital itself. At Rome the limitations of space must
have hindered the development of home-industries in the houses of the
nobles, and, although it is probable that much that was manufactured by
the slaves of the country estate was regularly supplied to the urban
villa, yet for the purchase of articles of immediate use or of goods
which showed the highest qualities of workmanship the aristocratic
proprietor must have been dependent on the competition of the Roman
market. But the rustic villa might be perfectly self-supporting, and the
village artificer must have looked in vain for orders from the spacious
mansion, which, once a dwelling-house or farm, had become a factory as
well. Both in town and country the practice of manumission was
paralysing the energies of the free-born man who attempted to follow a
profitable profession. The frequency of the gift of liberty to slaves is
one of the brightest aspects of the system of servitude as practised by
the Romans; but its very beneficence is an illustration of the
aristocrat's contempt for the proletariate; for, where the ideal of
citizenship is high, manumission--at least of such a kind as shall give
political rights, or any trading privileges, equivalent to those of the
free citizen--is infrequent. In the Rome of this period, however, the
liberation of a slave showed something more than a mere negative neglect
of the interests of the citizen. The gift of freedom was often granted
by the master in an interested, if not in a wholly selfish, spirit. He
was freed from the duty of supporting his slave while he retained his
services as a freedman. The performance of these services was, it is
true, not a legal condition of manumission; but it was the result of the
agreement between master and slave on which the latter had attained his
freedom. The nobleman who had granted liberty to his son's tutor, his
own doctor or his barber, might still bargain to be healed, shaved or
have his children instructed free of expense. The bargain was just in so
far as the master was losing services for which he had originally paid,
and juster still when the freedman set up business on the _peculium_
which his master had allowed him to acquire during the days of his
servitude. But the contracting parties were on an unequal footing, and
the burden enforced by the manumittor was at times so intolerable that
towards the close of the second century the praetor was forced to
intervene and set limits to the personal service which might be expected
from the gratitude of the liberated slave.[167] The performance of such
gratuitous services necessarily diminished the demand for the labour of
the free man who attempted to practise the pursuit of an art which
required skill and was dependent for its returns on the custom of the
wealthier classes; and even such needs as could not be met by the
gratuitous services of freedmen or the purchased labour of slaves, were
often supplied, not by the labour of the free-born Roman, but by that of
the immigrant _peregrinus_. The foreigner naturally reproduced the arts
of his own country in a form more perfect than could be acquired by the
Roman or Italian, and as Rome had acquired foreign wants it was
inevitable that they should be mainly supplied by foreign hands. We
cannot say that most of the new developments in trade and manufacture
had slipped from the hands of the free citizens; it would be truer to
maintain that they had never been grasped by them at all. And, worse
than this, we must admit that there was little effort to attain them.
Both the cause and the consequence of the monopoly of trade and
manufacture of a petty kind by freedmen and foreigners is to be found in
the contempt felt by the free-born Roman for the "sordid and illiberal
sources of livelihood." [168] This prejudice was reflected in public law,
for any one who exercised a trade or profession was debarred from office
at Rome.[169] As the magistracy had become the monopoly of a class, the
prejudice might have been little more than one of the working principles
of an aristocratic government, had not the arts which supplied the
amenities of life actually tended to drift into the hands of the
non-citizen or the man of defective citizenship. The most abject Roman
could in his misery console himself with the thought that the hands,
which should only touch the plough and the sword, had never been stained
by trade. His ideal was that of the nobleman in his palace. It differed
in degree but not in kind. It centred round the Forum, the battlefield
and the farm.