ROME—THE EMPIRE
That the position of the working farmer in the fourth and fifth centuriesADwas very different from what it had been in the early days of the Roman Republic, is hardly open to question. That in the last two centuries of the Republic his position had been gravely altered for the worse in a large (and that in general the best) part of Italy, is not less certain. This period, from 241 to 31BC, had seen the subjection to Rome of the Mediterranean countries, and the Italian peninsula was an imperial land. It was inevitable that from a dominion so vast and various there should be some sort of reaction on its mistress, and reaction there had been, mostly for evil, on the victorious Roman state. The political social and moral effects of this reaction do not concern us here save only in so far as the economic situation was affected thereby. For instance, the plunder of the Provinces by bad governors and the extortions practised by subordinate officials, the greed of financiers and their agents, were the chief sources of the immense sums of money that poured into Italy. The corruption promoted by all this ill-gotten wealth expressed itself in many forms; but in no way was it more effective than in degradation of agriculture. It was not merely that it forwarded the movement towards great aggregations oflatifundia. It supplied the means of controlling politics by bribery and violence and rendering nugatory all endeavours to reform the land-system and give legislative remedies a fair trial. The events of the revolutionary period left nearly all the land of Italy in private ownership, most of it in the hands of large owners. The Sullan and Triumviral confiscations and assignations were social calamities and economic failures. Of their paralysing effect on agriculture we can only form a general notion, but it is clear that no revival of a free farming peasantry took place.
Changes there had been in agriculture, due to influences from abroad. Farming on a large scale and organization of slave labour had given it an industrial turn. The crude and brutal form in which this at first appeared had probably been somewhat modified by experience. The great plantations clumsily adapted from Punic models were not easily made to pay. More variety in crops became the fashion, and the specializing of labour more necessary. In this we may surely traceGreek and Greco-oriental influences, and the advance in this respect is reflected in the more scientific precepts of Varro as compared with those of Cato. But, so long as the industrial aim, the raising of large crops for the urban market, prevailed, this change could not tend to revive the farming peasantry, whose aim was primarily an independent subsistence, and who lacked the capital needed for agricultural enterprise on industrial lines. Meanwhile there was the large-scale slavery system firmly established, and nothing less than shrinkage of the supply of slaves was likely to shake it.
But the course of Roman conquest and formation of Provinces had brought Italy into contact with countries in which agriculture and its relation to governments stood on a very different footing from that traditional in Roman Italy. The independent peasant farmer living by his own labour on his own land, a double character of citizen and soldier, untroubled by official interference, was a type not present to the eyes of Romans as they looked abroad. Tribal ownership, still common in the West, had been outgrown in Italy. The Carthaginian system, from which much had been learnt, was an exploitation-system, as industrial as a government of merchant princes could make it. In Sicily it met a Hellenistic system set up by the rulers of Syracuse, and the two seem to have blended or at least to have had common characteristics. The normal feature was the payment of a tithe of produce (δεκάτη) to the State. For the State claimed the property of the land, and reserved to itself a regular 10% in acknowledgement thereof. This royal title had passed to Rome, and Rome accordingly levied her normaldecumae, exemption from which was a special favour granted to a few communities. Now the principle that the ultimate ownership of land is vested in the King[816]was well known in the East, and is to be traced in several of the monarchies founded by the Successors of Alexander. In the Seleucid and Attalid kingdoms there have been found indications of it, though the privileges of cities and temples checked its general application. But in Egypt it existed in full vigour, and had done so from time immemorial. It was in fact the most essential expression of oriental ideas of sovranty. Combined with it was the reservation of certain areas as peculiarly ‘royal lands’ the cultivators of which were ‘royal farmers,’ βασιλικοὶ γεωργοί, standing in a direct relation to the King and controlled by his administrative officials. The interest of the sovran was to extract a regular revenue from the crown-lands: hence it was the aim of government to secure the residence of itsfarmers and the continuous cultivation of the soil. The object was attained by minute regulations applied to a submissive people of small needs.
It is evident that agriculture under conditions such as these was based on ideas fundamentally different from those prevalent in Italy. There private ownership was the rule, and by the end of the Republic it was so more than ever. Thelatifundiahad grown by transfers of property[817]in land, whether the holdings so absorbed were original small freeholds or allotments of state land granted under agrarian laws. Present estates, whether large or small, were normally held under a full proprietary title; and the large ones at least were valued as an asset of social and political importance rather than as a source of economic profit. The owner could do what he would with his own, and in Italy[818]there was no tax-burden on his land. We may ask how it came about that the Italian and Provincial systems stood thus side by side, neither assimilating the other. The answer is that the contrast suited the interests of the moneyed classes who controlled the government of Rome. To exploit the regal conditions taken over by the Republic abroad was for them a direct road to riches, and the gratification of their ambitions was achieved by the free employment of their riches at home. The common herd of poor citizens, pauperized in Rome or scattered in country towns and hamlets, had no effective means of influencing policy, even if they understood what was going on and had (which they had not) an alternative policy of their own. So the Empire took over from the Republic a system existing for the benefit of hostile aristocrats and capitalists, with whom it was not practicable to dispense and whom it was not easy to control.
We cannot suppose that the classes concerned with agriculture had any suspicion how far-reaching were the changes destined to come about under the new government. They could not look centuries ahead. For the present, the ruler spared no pains to dissemble his autocratic power and pose as a preserver and restorer of the Past. Caution and a judicious patronage inspired literature to praise the government and to observe a discreet silence on unwelcome topics. The attitude of Augustus towards agriculture will be discussed below. Here it is only necessary to remark that the first aim of his policy in this as in other departments was to set the machine working with the least possible appearance of change. As the republican magistracies were left standing, and gradually failed through the incompetence of senatorial guidance, so no crude agrarian schemes were allowed to upset existing conditions,and development was left to follow the lines of changing economic and political needs. It is well to take a few important matters and see very briefly how imperial policy set going tendencies that were in course of time to affect profoundly the position of agriculture.
In the first place it was clear that no stable reconstruction was possible without a large and steady income. To this end a great reform of the old methods of revenue-collection was necessary. The wasteful system of tax-farmers practically unchecked in their exactions was exchanged for collection by officials of the state or of municipalities. In the case of land-revenue this change was especially momentous, for in no department had the abuses and extortions ofpublicanibeen more oppressive. And it was in the Emperor’s Provinces that this reform was first achieved. Agriculture was by far the most widespread occupation of the subject peoples; and the true imperial interest was, not to squeeze the most possible out of them at a given moment, but to promote their continuous wellbeing as producers of a moderate but sure revenue. That this wise policy was deliberately followed is indicated by the separate[819]treatment of Egypt. Augustus did not present his new acquisition to the Roman state. He stepped into the position of the late Ptolemies, and was king there without the name. As he found the cash of Ptolemaic treasure a means of paying off debts and avoiding initial bankruptcy, so by keeping up the existing financial system he enjoyed year by year a large income entirely at his own disposal, and avoided the risk of disturbing institutions to which the native farmers had been used from time immemorial. The possession of this vast private revenue undoubtedly had much to do with the successful career of Augustus in establishing the empire.
So long as the empire was secure from invasion, and the collection of taxes on a fair and economical plan afforded sufficient and regular returns, general prosperity prevailed over a larger area than ever before. The boon of peace was to the subject peoples a compensation for the loss of an independence the advantages of which were uncertain and in most cases probably forgotten. If the benumbing of national feelings was in itself not a good thing, the central government was able to pay its way, and emperors could at need appear as a sort of benign providence, by grants of money or temporary remissions of taxation in relief of extraordinary calamities. And yet, as we can now see in retrospect, the establishment of the new monarchy had set in motion tendencies that were destined to upset the social and economic structure and eventually to give it a more Oriental character. Italy long remained afavoured metropolitan land. But the great landowning nobles no longer ruled it and the Provinces also. No dissembling could conceal the truth that their political importance was gone. It may be[820]that some of the great landlords gave more attention to their estates as economic units. It is much more certain that large-scale landholding abroad[821]was more attractive than that in Italy. It was not a new thing, and under the republican government great provincial Roman landlords had enjoyed a sort of local autocratic position, assured by their influence in Rome. But an emperor’s point of view was very different from that of the old republican Senate. He could not allow the formation of local principalities in the form of great estates under no effective control. These landlords had been bitter opponents of Julius Caesar: Augustus had been driven to make away with some of them: the uneasiness of his successors at length found full vent in the action of Nero, who put to death six great landlords in Africa, and confiscated their estates. Half Africa, the Province specially affected, thus passed into the category of Imperial Domains, under the control of a departmental bureau, and later times added more and more to thesepraedia Caesarisin many parts of the empire.
The convenient simplicity of having great areas of productive land administered by imperial agents more or less controlled by the officials of a central department, into which the yearly dues were regularly paid, cannot have escaped the notice of emperors. But the advantages of such a system had been a part of their actual experience[822]from the first in the case of Egypt. Egypt too was the special home of finance based on a system of regulated agriculture and hereditary continuity of occupation. In particular, the interest of the government in the maintenance and extension of cultivation was expressed in minute rules for land-tenure and dues payable, and the care taken to keep the class of ‘royal farmers’ in a prosperous condition. Thus there was recognized a sort of community of interest between peasant and king. That middlemen should not oppress the former or defraud the latter was a common concern of both. Now in the Roman empire we note the growth of a system resembling this in its chief features. We find the tillage of imperial domains[823]carried on by small farmers holding parcels of land,generally as sub-tenants of tenants-in-chief holding direct from the emperor. These small farmers were evidently workers, whether they to some extent used slave-labour or not. Imperial policy favoured these men as steady producers turning the land to good account, and thus adding to the resources of the empire without being (like great landlords) a possible source of danger. Hence great care was taken to protect thecoloni Caesarisfrom oppression by middlemen: and, so long as head-tenants and official agents did not corruptly combine to wrong the farmers, the protection seems to have been effective. Moreover, the advantage of retaining the same tenants on the land whose conditions they understood by experience, and of inducing them to reclaim and improve further portions of the waste, was kept clearly in view. A policy of official encouragement in these directions was in full swing in the second centuryADand may perhaps have been initiated by Vespasian.
It is not necessary to assume that these arrangements were directly copied from Oriental, particularly Egyptian, conditions. The convenience of permanent tenants and the ever-pressing need of food-supply are enough to account for the general aim, and experience of the East would naturally help to mature the policy. The establishment of the Empire made it possible. But we must plainly note the significance of new ideas in respect of residence and cultivation. In the Roman land-system of Italy private ownership was the rule, and the general assumption that the owner cultivated on his own account: stewards and slave-gangs were common but not essential phenomena. It is true that the practice of letting farms to cultivating tenants existed, and that in the first two centuries of the Empire it was on the increase, probably promoted by the comparative scarcity of slaves in times of peace. But tenancy was a contract-relation, and the law, while protecting the tenant, gave to the landlord ample means of enforcing regular and thorough cultivation. And this automatically ensured the tenant’s residence in any conditions short of final despair. We shall see that as agriculture declined in Italy it became more and more difficult to find and keep satisfactory tenants: but the tenant was in the last resort free to go, and the man who had to be compelled to cultivate properly was just the man on whom the use of legal remedies was least likely to produce the desired practical effect. Now on the imperial domains abroad we find a growing tendency to insist on residence, as a rule imposed from above. The emperor could not leave hiscolonisimply at the mercy of his head-tenants. He was very ready to protect them, but to have them flitting at will was another matter. And this tendency surely points to Egyptian analogies; naturally too, as the Empire was becoming more definitely a Monarchy.
We shall also find reason to think that both in Italy and in the Provinces there was a tendency to reduce farm-tenants to a considerable degree ofde factodependence by manipulation of economic relations. A landlord could let a farm on terms apparently favourable but so arranged that it was easy for the tenant to fall into arrears and become his debtor. The exploitation of debtors’ necessities[824]was a practice traditionally Roman from very early times. True, it was seldom politic to sell up a defaulting tenant in the declining state of Italian agriculture. But the gradual acceptance of a liability to small burdens in lieu of cash payment might rob him of his effective independence before he was well aware of the change in his position. On a great provincial domain, the emperor being far away, a head-tenant could deal with the sub-tenants on much the same lines. A trifling requirement, just exceeding what was actually due, would be submitted to as not worth the trouble and risk of setting the appeal-machinery in motion. Further encroachments, infinitesimal but cumulative, might reduce thecolonusto a semi-servile condition: and, the poorer he became, the less his prospect of protection from the emperor’s local agents, too often men of itching palms. Still thecoloniwere freemen, and we have evidence that they sometimes appealed to their imperial lord, and with success. It seems that in some respectscoloni Caesariswere at an advantage as compared withcoloniof private landlords, at least in the means of protection. Roman law was very chary of interference with matters of private contract, and the principles guiding the courts were well known. An astute landlord could see to it that his encroachments on a tenant’s freedom did not entitle the man to a legal remedy. But the imperial domains abroad were often, if not always, governed by administrative procedure under the emperor’s own agents; and these gentry could quickly be brought to order, and compelled to redress grievances, by a single word from headquarters. That the word was forthcoming on occasion is not wonderful. The policy of an emperor was to cherish and encourage the patient farmers whose economic value was a sound imperial asset, while the head-tenant was only a convenient middleman. But the private landowner had no imperial interest to guide him, and looked only to his own immediate profit.
In tracing the influences that changed the condition of the working farmer we must not forget the establishment of a new military system. The standing army created by Augustus was an absolute necessity for imperial defence. At the same time it was a recognition of the fact that the old system of temporary levies, long proved inadequate, must henceforth be abandoned. Frontier armies could not be formed bysimply mobilizing free peasants for a campaign. The strength of the armies lay in military skill, not in numbers. Long service and special training made them uniformly professional, and provision was duly made for regular conditions of retirement. The Italian peasant-farmers, much fewer than of yore, and no longer all potential soldiers, were left to become simply professional farmers. That agriculture nevertheless did not really prosper was due to causes beyond their control; but that they, both tenantcoloniand any remaining small owners, should tend to become a purely peasant class was inevitable. Augustus may have wished to rebuild Italian agriculture on a sound foundation of the peasant-elements, but circumstances were too contrary for the successful prosecution of any such design. Meanwhile the marked differentiation[825]of soldier and farmer, and the settlement of veterans on allotments of land, mainly in frontier Provinces, was proceeding. Analogies from the East, particularly from Egypt, where such arrangements[826]were traditional, can hardly have been ignored. In ancient Egypt the division of military and farming classes had been so marked as to present the appearance of a caste-system. But this was not peculiar to Egypt. It was in full vigour in ancient India, where it impressed[827]Greek observers, to whom the general absence of slaves, there as in Egypt, seemed one of its notable phenomena.
I do not venture to suggest that Roman emperors set themselves deliberately to substitute a fixed attachment of working farmers to the soil for a failing system of rustic slave-labour. But it is not likely that, as labour-problems from time to time arose, the well-known Oriental solutions were without some influence on their policy. We must not forget that Greek thinkers had long ago approved the plan of strict differentiation of functions in ideal states, and that such notions, popularized in Latin, were common property in educated circles. Tradition[828]even pointed to the existence of some such differentiation in primitive Rome. Therefore, when we find under the later Empire a rigid system of castes and gilds, and thecoloniattached to the soil with stern penalties to hinder movement, we must not view the situation with modern eyes. The restraint, that to us seems a cruel numbing of forces vital to human progress, would come as no great shock to the world ofthe fourth century, long prepared for the step by experience not encountered by theory. To us it is a painful revolution that, instead of the land belonging to the cultivator, the cultivator had become an appendage of the land. But it was the outcome of a long process: as for progress in any good sense, it had ceased. Government had become a series of vain expedients to arrest decay. And the rule of fixedorigo, a man’s officially fixed domicile, was nothing more than the doctrine of the ἰδία long prevalent in the East.
The true significance of the change binding the tiller to the soil he tilled is to be found in the fact that it was a desperate effort to solve a labour-question. To secure a sufficient supply of food had been a cause of anxiety to the imperial government from the first. The encouragement of increased production had become an important part of imperial policy in the second century. It looked to the small working farmers as the chief producing agency, men who provided all or most of the labour on their farms, and in at least some cases a certain amount of task-work[829]on the larger farms of the head-tenants. But in the wars and utter confusion of the third century the strain on the system was too great. The peaceful and prosperous parts of the empire suffered from increased demands on their resources to make good the deficiencies of the Provinces troubled with invasions or rebellions. And there can be no doubt that the working of governmental departments was interrupted and impeded by the general disorder. In such times as those of Gallienus and the so-called Thirty Tyrants the protection of the small farmers by intervention of the central authority must have been pitifully ineffective. Naturally enough, we do not get direct record of this failure, but the change of conditions that followed on the restoration of order by Diocletian shews what had been happening. The increase of taxation, rendered necessary by the costly machinery of the new government, led to increased pressure on the farmers, and evasions had to be checked by increased restraints. In a few years the facts were recognized and stereotyped by the law of Constantine, and thecoloniwere henceforth bound down to the soil by an act of state. Another notable change[830]was introduced by requiring payment of dues to be made in kind. The motive of this was to provide a certain means of supporting the armies and the elaborate civil service; for the currency, miserably debased in the course of the third century, was a quite unsuitable medium for the purpose. That Diocletian, in these institutions of a new model, was not consciously applying oriental usage to the empire generally, is hardly credible. It only remained to reduce Italyto the common level by subjecting Italian land to taxation. This he did, and the new Oriental Monarchy was complete.
That a labour-question underlay the policy of attaching thecolonito the land, is to be gathered from the following considerations. The development of the plan of promoting small tenancies, particularly on the imperial domains, was undoubtedly calculated to take the place of large-scale cultivation by slave labour. It was a move in the direction of more intensive tillage, and economically sound. So long as a firm hand was kept on large head-tenants and imperial officials, the plan seems to have been on the whole a success. But all depended on the protection of the small working farmers, and of course on the moderation of government demands. The disorders of the third century tended to paralyse the protection while they increased demands. Therefore the head-tenants, aided by the slackness or collusion of officials, gained a predominant power, which imperial policy had been concerned to prevent. By the time of Diocletian their position was far stronger than it had been under Hadrian. To restore the former relations by governmental action would be certainly difficult, perhaps impossible. As middlemen, through whose agency the collection of dues in non-municipal areas could be effected, they were useful. It was a saving of trouble to deal with a comparatively small number of persons, and those men of substance. The remodelling of the disordered Empire was no doubt a complicated and laborious business, and anything that promised to save trouble would be welcomed. So the government accepted[831]the changed position as accomplished fact, and left thecoloni, its former clients, to the mercies of the men of capital. But the big men, controlling ever more lands, whether as possessors or as imperial head-tenants or as ‘patrons’ of helpless villagers, could not meet their obligations to the government without having the disposal of a sufficient and regular supply of labour. And to the authorities of the later Empire, deeply committed to a rigid system of castes and gilds, no way of meeting the difficulty seemed open but to extend the system of fixity to the class of toilers on the land. The motive was a financial one, naturally. Non-industrial, and so unable to pay for imports by export of its own manufactures, the civilization of the empire was financially based upon agriculture. Looking back on the past, we can see that the deadening of hope and enterprise in the farming population was a ruinous thing. But the empire drifted into it as the result of circumstances and influences long operative and eventually irresistible. To displace the free peasant by the slave, then the slave by the small tenant, only to end by converting the small tenant into a serf, was a part of the Roman fate.