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

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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 _liberum quaerendorum causa_.

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]