ROME—EARLY PERIOD
When we turn to Roman agriculture, and agricultural labour in particular, we have to deal with evidence very different in character from that presented by the Greek world. This will be most clearly seen if we accept the very reasonable division of periods made by Wallon in hisHistory of Slavery—the first down to 201BC, the end of the second Punic war, the second to the age of the Antonine emperors, 200BCto the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180AD, and the third that of the later Empire. For of the first we have no contemporary or nearly contemporary pictures surviving. Traditions preserved by later writers, notes of antiquaries on words and customs long obscured by time and change, are the staple material at hand. Even with the help of a few survivals in law, inference from such material is unavoidably timid and incomplete. In collecting what the later Romans believed of their past we get vivid impressions of the opinions and prejudices that went to form the Roman spirit. But it does not follow that we can rely on these opinions as solid evidence of facts. An instance may be found in the assertion[574]that a clause requiring the employment of a certain proportion of free labourers to slaves was included in the Licinian laws of 367BC. This used to be taken as a fact, and inferences were drawn from it, but it is now with reason regarded as an ‘anticipation,’ transferring the fact of a later attempt of the kind to an age in which the slave-gangs were not as yet an evident economic and social danger. In the second period, that of Roman greatness, we have not only contemporary witness for much of the time in the form of references and allusions in literature, but the works of the great writers on agriculture, Cato Varro and Columella, not to mention the great compiler Pliny, fall within it, and give us on the whole a picture exceptionally complete. We know more of the farm-management and labour-conditions in this period than we do of most matters of antiquity. The last period sees the development of a change the germs of which are no doubt to be detected in the preceding one. The great strain on the Empire, owing to the internal decay and the growing pressure of financial necessities, made the change inevitable; economic freedom and proprietary slavery died down, and we have before us the transition to predial serfdom, the system of the unfree tenant bound to the soil. The record of this change is chiefly preserved in the later Roman Law.
My first business is therefore to inquire what the tradition of early times amounts to, and how far it may reasonably be taken as evidence of fact. And it must be borne in mind that my subject is not the technical details of agriculture in general, but the nature of the labour employed in agriculture. In ages when voluntary peace between empires and peoples onbona fideequal terms was never a realized fact, and as yet hardly a dream, the stability of a state depended on the strength of its military forces,—their number, efficiency, and means of renewal. Mere numbers[575]were tried and failed. The hire of professional soldiers of fortune[576]might furnish technical skill, but it was politically dangerous. Their leaders had no personal sentiment in favour of the state employing them, and their interest or ambition disposed them rather to support a tyrant, or to become tyrants themselves, than to act as loyal defenders of the freedom of the state. Mercenaries[577]hired in the mass, barbarians, were less skilled but not less dangerous. That a well-trained army of citizens was the most trustworthy organ of state-protection, was not disputed: the combination of loyalty with skill made it a most efficient weapon. The ratio of citizen enthusiasm to the confidence created by exact discipline varied greatly in the Greek republics of the fifth centuryBC. But these two elements were normally present, though in various proportions. The common defect, most serious in those states that played an active part, was the smallness of scale that made it difficult to keep up the strength of citizen armies exposed to the wastage of war. A single great disaster might and did turn a struggle for empire into a desperate fight for existence. The constrained transition to employment of mercenary troops as the principal armed force of states was both a symptom and a further cause of decay in the Greek republics. For the sturdy soldiers of fortune were generally drawn from the rustic population of districts in which agriculture filled a more important place than political life. There is little doubt that a decline of food-production in Greece was the result: and scarcity of food had long been a persistent difficulty underlying and explaining most of the doings of the Greeks. The rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander proved the military value of a national army of trained rustics, and reasserted the superiority of such troops to the armed multitudes of the East. But Alexander’s career did not leave the world at peace. His empire broke up in a period of dynastic wars; for to supply an imperial army strong enough to support a single control and guarantee internal peace was beyond the resources of Macedonia.
If an army of considerable strength, easily maintained and recruited, loyal, the servant of the state and not its master, was necessary fordefence and as an instrument of foreign politics, there was room for a better solution of the problem than had been found in Greece or the East. It was found in Italy on the following lines. An increase of scale could only be attained by growth. Growth, to be effective, must not consist in mere conquest: it must be true expansion, in other words it must imply permanent occupation. And permanent occupation implied settlement of the conquering people on the conquered lands. A growing population of rustic citizens, self-supporting, bound by ties of sentiment and interest to the state of which they were citizens, conscious of a duty to uphold the state to which they owed their homesteads and their security, supplied automatically in response to growing needs the growing raw material of power. Nor was Roman expansion confined to the assignation of land-allotments to individuals (viritim). Old towns were remodelled, and new ones founded, under various conditions as settlements (coloniae). Each settler in one of these towns received an allotment of land in the territory of the township, and was officially speaking a tiller of the soil (colonus). The effect of these Colonies was twofold. Their territories added to the sum of land in occupation of Romans or Roman Allies: so far the gain was chiefly material. But they were all bound to Rome and subjected to Roman influences. In their turn they influenced the conquered peoples among whom they were planted, and promoted slowly and steadily the Romanizing of Italy. Being fortified, they had a military value from the first, as commanding roads and as bases of campaigns. But their moral effect in accustoming Italians to regard Rome as the controlling centre of Italy was perhaps of even greater importance.
We must not ignore or underrate the advantages of Rome’s position from a commercial point of view. Little though we hear of this in tradition, it can hardly be doubted that it gave Rome a marked superiority in resources to her less happily situated neighbours, and enabled her to take the first great step forward by becoming dominant in central Italy. But the consolidation and completion of her conquest of the peninsula was carried out by means of an extended Roman agriculture. It was this that gave to Roman expansion the solid character that distinguished republican Rome from other conquering powers. What she took, that she could keep. When the traditional story of early Rome depicts the Roman commons as hungry for land, and annexation of territory as the normal result of conquest, it is undoubtedly worthy of belief. When it shews us the devastation of their enemies’ lands as a chief part—sometimes the whole—of the work of a campaign, it is in full agreement with the traditions of all ancient warfare. When we read[578]that the ruin of farms by raids of the enemy brought sufferingfarmers into debt, and that the cruel operation of debt-laws led to serious internal troubles in the Roman state, the story is credible enough. The superior organization of Rome enabled her to overcome these troubles, not only by compromises and concessions at home, but still more by establishing her poorer citizens on farms at the cost of her neighbours. As the area under her control was extended, the military force automatically grew, and she surpassed her rivals in the cohesion and vitality of her power. At need, her armies rose from the soil. So did those of other Italian peoples. But in dealing with them she enjoyed the advantage of unity as compared with the far less effective cooperation of Samnite cantons or Etruscan cities. Even the capture of Rome by the Gauls could not destroy her system, and she was able to strengthen her moral position by proving herself the one competent defender of Italy against invasion from the North. When the time came for the struggle with Carthage, she had to face a different test. But no blundering on the part of her generals, no strategy of Hannibal, could avail to nullify the solid superiority of her military strength. And this strength was in the last resort derived from the numbers and loyalty of the farm-population: it was in fact the product of the plough rather than the sword.
The agricultural conditions of early Rome[579]are a subject, and have been the subject, of special treatises. Only a few points can be noticed here. That a communal system of some kind once existed, whether in the form of the associations known to inquirers as Village Communities or on a gentile basis as Clan-estates, is a probable hypothesis. But the evidence for it is slight, and, however just the general inferences may be, they can hardly be said to help us much in considering the labour-question. It may well be true that lands[580]were held by clans, that they were cultivated in common, that the produce was divided among the households, that parcels of the land were granted to the dependants (clientes) of the clan as tenants at will (precario) on condition of paying a share of their crops. Or it may be that the normal unit was a village in which the members were several freeholders of small plots, with common rights over the undivided common-land, the waste left free for grazing and miscellaneous uses. And it is possible that at some stage or other of social development both these systems may have existed side by side. In later times we find Rome the mistress of a vast territory in Italy, a large part of which was reserved as state-domain (ager publicus populi Romani), the mismanagement of which was a source ofgrave evils. But in Rome’s early days there cannot have been any great amount of such domain-land. That there was land-hunger, a demand for several allotments in full ownership, on which a family might live, is not to be doubted. And the formation of communities, each with its village centre and its common pasture, was a very natural means to promote mutual help and protection. That men so situated worked with their own hands, and that the labour was mainly (and often wholly) that of the father and his family, is as nearly certain as such a proposition can be. But this does not imply or suggest that no slave-labour was employed on the farms. It merely means that farms were not worked on a system in which all manual labour was performed by slaves. We have to inquire what is the traditional picture of agricultural conditions in the early days of Rome, and how far that picture is worthy of our belief.
Now it so happens that, three striking figures stand out in the traditional picture of the Roman farmer-soldiers of the early Republic. Others fill in certain details, but the names of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, Manius Curius Dentatus, and Gaius Fabricius Luscinus, were especially notable in Roman legend as representing the strenuous patriotic and frugal lives of the heroes of old. The story of Cincinnatus[581]is told by Cicero Livy Dionysius and Pliny the elder, and often referred to by other writers. The hero is a Patrician of the old simple frugal patriotic masterful type, the admiration and imitation of which these edifying legends seek to encourage. He had owned seveniugeraof land, but had been driven to pledge or sell three of these[582]in order to provide bail for his son, who had been brought to trial for disturbance of the public peace and had sought safety in flight. The forfeit imposed on the father left him with only fouriugera. This little farm, on the further side of the Tiber, he was cultivating, when deputies from the Senate came to announce that he had been named Dictator to deal with a great emergency. They found him digging or ploughing, covered with dust and sweat: and he would not receive them till he had washed and gowned himself. Then he heard their message, took up the duties of the supreme office, and of course saved the state. It is to be noted that he chose as his Master of the Horse (the Dictator’s understudy) a man of the same[583]sort, Patrician by birth, poor, but a stout warrior. We may fairly suspect that a definite moral purpose has been at work, modelling and colouring this pretty story. In a later age, when the power of moneyed interests was overriding the prestige of Patrician blood, the reaction of an ‘old-Roman’ party was long a vigorous forcein Roman life, as we see from the career of the elder Cato. Cato was a Plebeian, but any Plebeian who admired the simple ways of early Rome was bound to recognize that Patricians were the nobility of the olden time.
Now the fact of Cincinnatus working with his own hands is the one material point in the story. We need not doubt that there were many such men, and that a name (perhaps correct) was necessary in order to keep the story current and to impress later generations with the virtues of their ancestors. But, if the man had under him a slave or slaves, the fact would be quite unimportant for the purpose of the legend. Therefore it is no wonder that the versions of the story in general say nothing of slaves. It is more remarkable that in the version of Dionysius we read that Cincinnatus, after selling off most of his property to meet the liabilities incurred through his son, ‘kept for himself one small farm beyond the Tiber, on which there was a mean cabin: there he was living a life of toil and hardship, tilling the soil with a few slaves.’ That Dionysius was a rhetorician with an eye for picturesque detail, and liable to overdraw a picture, is certain: but it is not evident how the mention of the slaves is to be accounted for by this tendency. The impression of the hero’s poverty and personal labour is rather weakened by mention of slaves. The writer derived his story from Roman sources. Now, did the original version include the slaves or not? Did Livy and the rest leave them out, or did Dionysius put them in? Were they omitted as useless or embarrassing for the uses of edifying, or were they casually inserted owing to the prepossessions of a Greek familiar only with a developed slave-system, to whom ‘with a few slaves’ would fitly connote poverty? To answer these questions with confidence is perhaps unwise. But to me it seems far more likely that Roman writers left the detail out than that a Greek student put it in.
If the tradition of the early wars is of any value at all, it may give a general support to this opinion through the frequent references to the existence of rustic slavery. The devastation of an enemy’s country is the normal occupation of hostile armies. The capture of slaves[584], as of flocks and herds and beasts of burden, is a common item in the tale of booty from the farms. That writers of a later age may have exaggerated the slave-element in the farm-labour of early times is highly probable. The picturesque was an object, and it was natural to attempt it with the use of touches suggested by daily circumstances of the world in which they were living. But that they so completely misrepresented the conditions of a past age as to foist into the picture so important a figure as the slave, without authority or probability, is hardly to be believed, unless there is good reason for thinking thatslavery was unknown in the age and country of which they speak. And the contrary is the case. The dawn of Roman history shews us a people already advanced in civilization to the stage of family and clan organization, and the tradition allows for the presence of the slave in thefamiliafrom the first. True, he does not appear as the despised human chattel of later times, but as a man whom misfortune has placed in bondage. His master is aware that fortune may turn, and that his bondman is quite capable of resuming his former position if restored in freedom to his native home. The slave seems to be normally an Italian[585], a captive in some war; he may have passed by sale from one owner to another. But he is not a mere foreign animal, good bad or indifferent, a doubtful purchase from a roguish dealer. He bears a name[586]that connects him with his master,Publipor Lucipor Marcipor Oliporand so on, formed by adding the suffixporto the forename of Publius Lucius Marcus or Aulus. But, granting that all households might include a slave or two, and that many so did, also that agriculture was a common and honourable pursuit,—is it likely that a farming owner would himself plough or dig and leave his slave[587]to look on? I conclude therefore that the age was one in which agriculture prevailed and that the ordinary farmer worked himself and employed slave-labour side by side with his own so far as his means allowed. All was on a small scale. Passages of Livy or Dionysius that imply the presence of great slave-gangs, and desertions on a large scale in time of war are falsely coloured by ‘anticipation’ of phenomena well known from the experience of more recent times. But, on however small a scale, slavery was there. Until there came an impulse of an ‘industrial’ kind, prompting men to engage in wholesale production for a large market, the slave remained essentially a domestic, bearing a considerable share of the family labours, whatever the nature of those labours might be.
As there is no difficulty in believing that Cincinnatus and others of his type in the fifth centuryBCworked with slaves beside them, so it is evident that Curius and Fabricius in the first half of the third century are meant to illustrate the same frugal life and solid patriotism. In both cases the story lays particular stress on the hero’s incorruptibility and cheerful endurance of poverty. A well-known scene[588]represents Curius at his rustic villa eating a dinner of herbs and refusing a gift of gold from Samnite ambassadors. He is an honest farmer-citizen of the good old sort. Fabricius is another, famed especially for his calmdefiance of the threats and cajolery of Pyrrhus, and impervious to bribes. Both these traditions received much legendary colouring in course of time. The passage bearing most directly on my present inquiry is a fragment[589]of Dionysius, in which Fabricius is spurning the offers of king Pyrrhus, who is very anxious to secure the good man’s services as his chief minister on liberal terms. He says ‘nor need I tell you of my poverty, that I have but a very small plot of land with a mean cottage, and that I get my living neither from money at interest (ἀπὸ δανεισμάτων) nor from slaves (ἀπ’ ἀνδÏαπόδων).’ Below he declares that living under Roman conditions he holds himself a happy man, ‘for with industry and thrift I find my poor little farm sufficient to provide me with necessaries.’ And his constitution (φÏσις) does not constrain him to hanker after unnecessary things. Here we have a good specimen of the moral stories with which the later rhetoricians edified their readers. But what does ‘from slaves’ mean? Is Fabricius denying that he employs slave-labour on his farm? If so, I confess that I do not believe the denial as being his own genuine utterance. I take it to be put into his mouth by Dionysius, writing under the influence of the agricultural conditions of a much later time, when great slaveowners drew large incomes from the exploitation of slave-labour on great estates. But I am not sure that Dionysius means him to be saying more than ‘I am not a big capitalist farming on a large scale by slave-gangs.’ How far this writer really understood the state of things in the third centuryBC, is hard to say. In any case he is repeating what he has picked up from earlier writers and not letting it suffer in the repetition. Taken by himself, he is no more a sufficient witness to the practice of Fabricius than to that of Cincinnatus. That there was slavery is certain: that Fabricius had scruples against employing slaves is hardly credible.
In the ages during which Rome gradually won her way to the headship of Italy the Roman citizen was normally both farmer and soldier: the soldier generally a man called up from his farm for a campaign, the farmer of military age always potentially a soldier. This state of things was evidently not peculiar to Rome. What makes it striking in the case of Rome is the well-considered system by which the military machine was kept in working order. The development of fortress colonies and extension of roads gave to Roman farmers in the border-lands more security than any neighbouring power could give to its own citizens on its own side of the border. Mobilization was more prompt and effective on the Roman side under a central control: the fortresses served as a hindrance to hostile invaders, as refuges to the rustics at need, and as bases for Roman armies. It is no great stretchof imagination to see in this organization a reason for the prosperity of Roman agriculture. Farms were no doubt laid waste on both sides of the border, but the balance of the account was in the long run favourable to Rome. Among the numerous legends that gathered round the name of king Pyrrhus is a story[590]that in reply to some discontent on the part of his Italian allies, to whom his strategy seemed over-cautious, he said ‘the mere look of the country shews me the great difference between you and the Romans. In the parts subject to them are all manner of fruit-trees and vineyards: the land is cultivated and the farm-establishments are costly: but the estates of my friends are so laid waste that all signs of human occupation have disappeared.’ The saying may be not authentic or merely overdrawn in rhetorical transmission. But it probably contains the outlines of a true picture of the facts. It was the power of giving to her farmer-settlers a more effective protection than her rivals could give to their own farmers that enabled Rome to advance steadily and continuously. The organization was simple enough: the sword was ready to guard the plough, and the plough to occupy and hold the conquests of the sword.
From the time of the first Punic war we have a remarkable story relating to M Atilius Regulus, the man around whose name so much patriotic legend gathered. He appears as one of the good old farmer-heroes. His farm[591]of seveniugeralay in an unhealthy part of the country, and the soil was poor. His advice to agriculturists, not to buy good land in an unhealthy district nor bad land in a healthy one, was handed down as the opinion of a qualified judge. We are told[592]that after his victory in Africa he desired to be relieved and return home; but the Senate did not send out another commander, and so he had to stay on. He wrote and complained of his detention. Among other reasons he urged in particular his domestic anxiety. In the epitome of LivyXVIIIthis appears as ‘that his little farm had been abandoned by the hired men.’ In Valerius Maximus[593]we find a fuller account, thus ‘that the steward in charge of his little farm (seveniugerain thePupinia) had died, and the hired man (mercennarium) had taken the opportunity to decamp, taking with him the farm-stock: therefore he asked them to relieve him of his command, for he feared his wife and children would have nothing to live on now the farm was abandoned.’ On hearing this, the Senate ordered that provision should at once bemade at the cost of the state (a) for cultivation of his farm[594]by contract (b) for maintenance of his wife and children (c) for making good the losses he had suffered. The reference of Pliny[595]rather confirms the details of Valerius, who by himself is not a very satisfactory witness. Livy is probably the source of all these versions. They are part of the Roman tradition of the first Punic war. Polybius, whose narrative is from another line of tradition, says not a word of this story. Indeed, he declares[596]that Regulus, so far from wishing to be relieved, wanted to stay on, fearing that he might hand over the credit of a final victory to a successor. The two traditions cannot be reconciled as they stand. Probably neither is complete. If we suppose the account of Polybius to be true, it does not follow as a matter of course that the other story is a baseless fiction. In any case, the relation of Regulus to the agriculture of his day, as represented by the story, seemed credible to Romans of a later age, and deserves serious consideration.
We are told that in the middle of the third centuryBCa man of such position and recognized merit that he was specially chosen to fill the place of a deceased consul in the course of a great war was a farmer on an estate of seveniugera, from which he was supporting his wife and family. In his absence on public duty he had left the farm in charge of avilicus. The only reference to the labour employed there speaks of hired men (wage-earners,mercennarii). It does not say that there were no slaves. But the natural inference is that thevilicushad the control of a staff consisting wholly or largely of free labourers. Now that a slavevilicusmight in the ordinary run of business be left in control of labourers, slave or free, seems clear from directions given by Cato[597]in the next century. Thevilicusin this story was therefore probably a slave, as they were generally if not always. His death left the hired men uncontrolled, and they took the opportunity of robbing their employer. Roused by the absent consul’s complaints (whether accompanied by a request for relief or not), the Senate took up the matter and arranged to secure him against loss. We do not hear of the punishment of the dishonest hirelings, or even of a search for them. This may be merely an omitted detail: at any rate they had probably left the neighbourhood. The curious thing is that we hear nothing of the wife of Regulus: that a Roman matron submitted tamely to such treatment is hard to believe. Was it she who made the complaints and set the Senate in motion? The general outcome of the story is a conclusion that hired labour was freely employed in this age, not to exclusion of slave labour, but combined with it: that is, that the wage-earningwork of landless men, such as appears in the earlier traditions, still went on. It was not yet overlaid by the plantation-system, and degraded by the associations of the slave-gang and theergastulum.
When we pass on to the second Punic war, of which we have a fuller and less legendary record, we find the circumstances somewhat changed, but the importance of the Roman farmer’s grip of the land is recognized as clearly as before. It is not unlikely that since the time of the Pyrrhic war the practise of large-scale farming with slave-labour had begun to appear[598]in Italy, but it can hardly as yet have been widespread. Large or small, the farms in a large part of the country had suffered from the ravages of Hannibal, and it would be the land of Romans and their faithful allies that suffered most. Many rustics had to seek shelter in walled towns, above all in Rome, and their presence was no doubt in many ways embarrassing. Naturally, as the failure of Hannibal became manifest, the Roman Senate was desirous of restoring these refugees to the land and relieving the pressure on the city. Livy, drawing no doubt from an earlier annalist, tells us[599]that in 206BCthe Senate instructed the consuls, before they left for the seat of war, to undertake the bringing back of the common folk (plebis) on to the land. They pointed out that this was desirable, and possible under the better conditions now prevailing. ‘But it was for the people (populo) not at all an easy matter; for the free farmers (cultoribus) had perished in the war, there was a shortage of slaves (inopia servitiorum), the live stock had been carried off, and the farmsteads (villis) wrecked or burnt. Yet under pressure from the consuls a good many did go back to the land.’ He adds that what had raised the question at this particular juncture was the appeal of a deputation from Placentia and Cremona. These two Latin colonies, founded twelve years before as fortresses to hold the region of the Po, had suffered from Gaulish raids and had no longer a sufficient population, many settlers having gone off elsewhere. The Roman commander in the district was charged to provide for their protection, and the truant colonists ordered to return to their posts. It was evidently thought that with full numbers and military support there would be an end to the derelict condition of their territories, and that the two colonies would soon revive.
This attempt to reestablish the rustic population lays stress upon the general identity of farmer and soldier and the disturbance of agriculture by the ravages of war. But most notable is the mention of the shortage of slave-labour as a hindrance to resumption of workon derelict farms. It has been held[600]that this clause refers only to large estates worked by slave-gangs, while the free farmers stand for the men on small holdings, who presumably employed no slaves. Now it is quite conceivable that this contrast may have been in Livy’s mind as he wrote in the days of Augustus. That it was the meaning of the older author from whom he took the facts is not an equally probable inference. No doubt lack of slaves would hinder or prevent the renewal of tillage on a big estate. But what of a small farm whose owner had fallen in the war? The absence of the father in the army would be a most serious blow to the efficient working of the farm. If the raids of the enemy drove his family to take refuge in Rome, and the farm was let down to weeds, more labour than ever would be needed to renew cultivation. When there was no longer any hope of his return, the supply of sufficient labour was the only chance of reviving the farm. Surely there must have been many cases in which the help of one or two slaves was the obvious means of supplying it. Therefore, if we recognize that slave-labour had long been a common institution in Roman households, we shall not venture to assert that only large estates are referred to. That such estates, worked by slave-gangs, were numerous in 206BC, is not likely: that small farmers often (not always) eked out their own labour with the help of a slave, is far more so. The actual shortage of slaves[601]had been partly brought about by the employment of many in military service. Some had no doubt simply run away. And the period of great foreign conquests and a full slave-market had yet to come.
I do not venture to dispute that the accumulation of capital in the form of ready money available for speculation in state leases, farming of revenues, and other contracts, had already begun at Rome in the age of the great Punic wars. In the second war, contracts for the supply of necessaries to the armed forces played a considerable part, and we hear of contractors[602]who practised shameless frauds on the state. Greed was a plant that throve in the soil of Roman life: the scandals of the later Republic were merely the sinister developments of an old tendency favoured by opportunities. Land-grabbing in particular was, if consistent tradition may be believed, from early times a passion of Roman nobles: and the effect of a law[603]forbidding them to become ship-owners and engage in commerce was to concentrate their enterprise on the acquisition of great landed estates. Another notable fact is the large voluntary loans[604]which the government wasable to raise in the critical period of the great war. In the year 210, when the financial strain was extreme, a very large contribution of the kind took place. In 204 the Senate arranged a scheme[605]for repayment in three instalments. In 200 the lenders, apparently alarmed by the delay in paying the second instalment, became clamorous. The Punic war was at an end, and war with Philip of Macedon just declared: they wanted to get their money back. We are told[606]that the state was not able to find the cash, and that the cry of many creditors was ‘there are plenty of farms for sale, and we want to buy.’ The Senate devised a middle way of satisfying them. They were to be offered the chance of acquiring the state domain-land within fifty miles of Rome at a valuation fixed by the consuls. This seems to mean, up to the amount of the instalment then in question. But they were not thereby to receive the land in full private[607]property. A quit-rent of oneaswas to be set on eachiugerum, in evidence that the property still belonged to the state. Thus, when the state finances should admit, they might get back their ready money if they preferred it and give back the land to the state. The offer was gladly accepted, and the land taken over on these terms was called ‘third-part land’ (trientabulum) as representing ⅓ of the money lent. The final instalment appears to have been paid in cash[608]in the year 196.
That these patriotic creditors were men with a keen eye for a bargain, and that they made a good one in the above arrangement, is pretty clear. This is the only occasion on which we hear of thetrientabulaplan of settling a money claim by what was in effect a perpetual lease at a nominal rent terminable by reconversion into a money claim at the pleasure of the lessee. No doubt the valuation was so made as to give the creditor a good margin of security over and above the sum secured. There was therefore no temptation to call for the cash and surrender the land. From the reference[609]totrientabulain the agrarian law of 111BCit would seem that some at least of these beneficial tenancies were still in existence after the lapse of nearly 90 years. They would pass by inheritance or sale as the ordinarypossessionesof state domains did, and eventually become merged in the private properties that were the final result of the land-legislation of the revolutionary age. For the capitalists, already powerful in 200BC, became more and more powerful as time went on. And this use of public land to discharge public debts was undoubtedly a step tending to promote the formation of the great estates (latifundia) which were the ruin ofthe wholesome old land-system in a great part of Italy. With this tendency the wholesale employment of slave-labour went hand in hand.
But we must not forget that the creditors in 200BCare made to press for their money on the ground that they wanted to invest it in land, of which there was plenty then in the market. This may be a detail added by Livy himself: but surely it is more likely that he is repeating what he found in his authorities. In any case the land referred to can hardly be other than the derelict farms belonging to those who had suffered by the war. In earlier times we have traditions of men losing their lands through inability to pay the debts for which they stood pledged. In a somewhat later time we hear[610]of small farmers being bought out cheaply by neighbouring big landlords, and bullied if they made difficulty about leaving their farms. The present case is different, arising directly out of the war. The father of a family might be dead, or disinclined to go back to monotonous toil after the excitements of military life, or unable to find the extra labour for reclaiming a wasted and weed-grown farm, or means of restocking it. He or his heir would probably not have capital to tide him over the interval before the farm was again fully productive: his immediate need was probably ready money. No wonder that farms were in the market, and at prices that made a land-grabber’s mouth water. The great war certainly marked a stage in the decay of the small-farm agriculture, the healthy condition of which had hitherto been the soundest element of Roman strength.
Before we leave the traditions of the early period it is necessary to refer to the question of free wage-earning labour. Have we any reason to think that under the conditions of early Rome there was any considerable class of rustic[611]wage-earners? Nearly all the passages that suggest an affirmative answer are found in the work of Dionysius, who repeatedly uses[612]the Greek word θητεÏειν of this class of labour. It is represented as being practically servile, for it meant working with slaves or at least doing the work which according to the writer[613]was (even in the regal period) done by slaves. The poor Plebeians appear as loathing such service: their desire is for plots of land on which each man can work freely for himself. This desire their protectors, kings or tribunes, endeavour to gratify by allotments as occasion serves.Now that there was land-hunger from the earliest times, and that agriculture was in itself an honourable trade, we have no good reason for doubting. But that the dislike of wage-earning labour as such was the main motive of land-hunger is a more doubtful proposition. It may be true, but it sounds very like an explanation supplied by a learned but rhetorical historian. We know that Dionysius regarded Rome as a city of Greek origin. The legends of early Attica were doubtless familiar to him. We may grant that there was probably some likeness between the labour-conditions of early Rome and early Athens. But historians are ever tempted to detect analogies in haste and remodel tradition at leisure. I suspect that the two features of the same picture, the prevalence of rustic slavery and also of rustic wage-earning, are taken from different lines of tradition, and both overdrawn.
In connexion with this question it is necessary to turn back to a remarkable passage[614]of Livy referring to the year 362BC. The famous L Manlius the martinet (imperiosus) was threatened with a public prosecution by a tribune for misuse of his powers as dictator in the year just past. To create prejudice against the accused, the prosecutor further alleged that he had treated his son Titus with cruel severity. The young man was slow of wit and speech, but no wrongdoing had been brought home to him. Yet his father had turned him out of his city home, had cut him off from public life and the company of other youths, and put him to servile work, shutting him up in what was almost a slaves’ prison (ergastulum). The daily affliction of such a life was calculated to teach the dictator’s son that he had indeed a martinet for his father. To keep his son among the flocks in the rustic condition and habit of a country boor was to intensify any natural defects of his own offspring, conduct too heartless for even the brute beasts. But the young Manlius upset all calculations. On hearing what was in contemplation he started for Rome with a knife, made his way into the tribune’s presence in the morning and made him solemnly swear to drop the prosecution by a threat of killing him then and there if he did not take the oath. The tribune swore, and the trial fell through. The Roman commons were vexed to lose the chance of using their votes to punish the father for his arbitrary and unfeeling conduct, but they approved the dutiful act of the son, and took the first opportunity of electing him a military officer. This young man was afterwards the renowned T Manlius Torquatus, who followed his father’s example of severity by putting to death his own son for a breach of military discipline.
The story is a fine specimen of the edifying legends kept in circulationby the Romans of later days. That the greatness of Rome was above all things due to their grim old fathers who endured hardness and sacrificed all tender affections to public duty, was the general moral of these popular tales. Exaggeration grew with repetition, and details became less and less authentic. In particular the circumstances of their own time were foisted in by narrators whose imagination did not suffice to grasp the difference of conditions in the past. In the above story we have a reference toergastula, the barracoons in which the slave-gangs on great estates were confined when not actually at work. Now the system of which these private prisons were a marked feature certainly belongs to a later period, when agriculture on a large scale was widely practised, not to make a living for a man and his family, but to make a great income for a single individual by the labour of many. Here then we have a detail clearly not authentic, which throws doubt on the whole setting of the story. Again, we have agricultural labour put before us as degrading (opus servile). It is a punishment, banishing a young Roman from his proper surrounding in the life of Rome, and dooming him to grow up a mere clodhopper. There may have been some points in the original story of which this is an exaggerated version: for it is evident that from quite early days of the Republic men of the ruling class found it necessary to spend much time in or quite close to the city. But the representation of agriculture as a servile occupation is grossly inconsistent with the other legends glorifying the farmer-heroes of yore. It is of course quite impossible to prove that no isolated cases of a young Roman’s banishment to farm life ever occurred. But that such a proceeding was so far ordinary as fairly to be reckoned typical, is in the highest degree improbable. That later writers should invent or accept such colouring for their picture, is no wonder. In the Attic New Comedy, with which Roman society was familiarized[615]in the second centuryBC, this situation was found. The later conditions of Roman life, in city and country, tended to make the view of agriculture as a servile trade, capable of being rendered penal, more and more intelligible to Romans. Accordingly we find this view cynically accepted[616]by Sallust, and warmly protested against[617]by Cicero. In order to weaken the case of his client Sextus Roscius, it was urged that the young man’s father distrusted him and sent him to live the life of a boor on his farm in Umbria. Cicero, evidently anxious as to the possible effect of this construction of facts on the coming verdict, was at great pains to counter it by maintaining that the father’s decision was in truth a compliment: in looking for an honest and capable manager of his rustic estate he had found the right man in this son. The orator surelydid not enlarge on this point for nothing. And it is to be noted that in insisting on the respectability of a farmer’s life he sees fit to refer to the farmer-consuls of the olden time. He feels, no doubt, that unsupported assertions[618]as to the employment of sons in agriculture by his contemporaries were not likely to carry much weight with the jury.
After the above considerations I come to the conclusion that Livy’s representation of agriculture as a servile occupation in the case of Manlius is a coloured utterance of no historical value. A minute consistency is not to be looked for in the writings of an author to whom picturesqueness of detail appeals differently at different moments. For Livy was in truth deeply conscious of the sad changes in Italian country life brought about by the transition to large-scale agriculture. Under the year 385 he is driven to moralize[619]on the constant renewal of Volscian and Aequian wars. How ever did these two small peoples find armies for the long-continued struggle? He suggests possible answers to the question, the most significant of which is that in those days there was a dense free population in those districts,—districts which in his own time, he says, would be deserted but for the presence of Roman slaves. To describe vividly the decay of free population, he adds that only a poor little nursery of soldiers is left (vix seminario exiguo militum relicto) in those parts. The momentous results of the change of system are not more clearly grasped by Lucan or Pliny himself. Livy then is not to be cited as a witness to the existence of great numbers of rustic slaves in Italy before the second Punic war, nor even then for the highly-organized gang-system by which an industrial character was given to agriculture.
One more story, and a strange one, needs to be considered, for it bears directly on the labour-question. The time in which it is placed is the latter part of the period of the Roman conquest of Italy. In a fragment[620]of one of his later books Dionysius tells us of the arbitrary doings of a consul Postumius, a Patrician of high rank who had already been twice consul. After much bullying he made his colleague, a Plebeian of recent nobility, resign to him the command in the Samnite war. This was an unpopular act, but he went on to worse. From his army he drafted some 2000 men on to his own estate, and set them to cut away brushwood without providing cutting tools (ἄνευ σιδήÏου). And he kept them there a long time doing the work of wage-earners or slaves (θητῶν á¼”Ïγα καὶ θεÏαπόντων ὑπηÏετοῦντας). Into the tale of his further acts of arbitrary insolence we need not enter here, nor intothe public prosecution and condemnation to a heavy fine that awaited him at the end of his term of office. Suffice it that the story is in general confirmed[621]by Livy, and that the hero of it seems to have been remembered in Roman tradition as a classic instance of self-willed audacity and disregard of the conventions that were the soul of Roman public life. So far as the labour is concerned, it seems to me that what was objected to in the consul’s conduct was the use of his military supreme power (imperium) for his own private profit. He treated a fatigue-party as a farm labour-gang. Freemen might work on their own land side by side with their slaves: they might work for wages on another man’s land side by side with his slaves. Any objection they might feel would be due to the unwelcome pressure of economic necessity. But to be called out for military service (and in most cases from their own farms), and then set to farm-labour on another man’s land under military discipline, was too much. We must bear in mind that a Roman army of the early Republic was not composed of pauper adventurers who preferred a life of danger with hopes of loot and licence to hard monotonous toil. The very poor were not called out, and the ranks were filled with citizens who had at least some property to lose. Therefore it might easily happen that a soldier set to rough manual labour by Postumius had to do for him the service that was being done at home for himself by a wage-earner or a slave. He was a soldier because he was a free citizen; he was being employed in place of a slave because he was a soldier under martial law. In no free republic could such a wrong be tolerated. The words of the epitome of Livy state the case with sufficient precision.L Postumius consularis, quoniam cum exercitui praeesset opera militum in agro suo usus erat, damnatus est.It is remarkable that, among the other epitomators and collectors of anecdotes who drew from the store of Livy, not one, not even Valerius Maximus, records this story. To Livy it must have seemed important, or he would not have laid enough stress on it to attract the attention of the writer of the epitome. So too the detailed version of Dionysius, probably drawn from the same authority as that of Livy, struck the fancy of a maker of extracts and caused his text to be preserved to us. It surely descends, like many other of the old stories, in a line of Plebeian tradition, and is recorded as an illustration of the survival of Patrician insolence in a headstrong consul after the two Orders had been politically equalized by the Licinian laws.
Beside these fragments of evidence there are in the later Roman literature many passages in which writers directly assert that their forefathers lived a life of simple frugality and worked with their own hands on their own little farms. But as evidence the value of suchpassages is not very great. They testify to a tradition: but in most cases the tradition is being used for the purposes of moralizing rhetoric. Now the glorification of ‘good old times’ has in all ages tempted authors to aim rather at striking contrast between past and present than at verification of their pictures of the past. To impute this defect to satirists is a mere commonplace. But those who are not professed satirists are often exposed to the same influence in a less degree. The most striking phenomenon in this kind is the chorus of poets in the Augustan age. The Emperor, aware that the character of Reformer is never a very popular one, preferred to pose as Restorer. The hint was given, and the literary world acted on it. Henceforth the praises of the noble and efficient simplicity of the ancients formed a staple material of Roman literature.
In reference to the early period down to 201BCI think we are justified in coming to the following conclusions.
1. The evidence, consisting of fragmentary tradition somewhat distorted and in some points exaggerated by the influence of moral purpose on later writers, is on the whole consistent and credible.
2. From it we get a picture of agriculture as an honourable trade, the chief occupation of free citizens, who are in general accustomed to work with their own hands.
3. The Roman citizen as a rule has an allotment of land as his own, and an early classification of citizens (the ‘Servian Constitution’) was originally based on landholding, carrying with it the obligation to military service.
4. The Roman family had a place for the slave, and the slave, a domestic helper, normally an Italian, was not as yet the despised alien chattel of whom we read in a later age.
5. As a domestic he bore a part in all the labours of the family, and therefore as a matter of course in the commonest of all, agriculture.
6. In this there was nothing degrading. Suggestions to that effect are the echoes of later conditions.
7. Under such relations of master and slave it was quite natural that manumission should (as it did) operate to make the slave not only free but a citizen. That this rule led to very troublesome results in a later period was owing to change of circumstances.
8. Slavery then was, from the earliest times of which we have any tradition, an integral part of the social and economic system, as much in Italy as in Greece. It was there, and only needed the stimulusof prospective economic gain for capitalists to organize it on a crudely industrial basis, without regard to considerations of humanity or the general wellbeing of the state.
9. Of wage-earning labour on the part of freemen we have little trace in tradition. The reported complaints of day-labour performed for Patrician nobles in early times are probably not unconnected with the institution of clientship, and in any case highly coloured by rhetoric.