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

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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 _bona 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 _metayer_ 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 _metayer_ 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.