Debt
It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture, so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices, that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate melt away in a short time, and even those, who only for credit's sake joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined. The canvass for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin for houses of distinction; and nearly the same description applies to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant, doubtless, but expensive pursuits. The princely wealth of that period is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities; Caesar owed about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces (250,000 pounds); Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), fourteen years afterwards 40,000,000 (400,000 pounds); Curio owed 60,000,000 (600,000 pounds); Milo 70,000,000 (700,000 pounds). That those extravagant habits of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit, is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing of the different competitors for the consulship. Insolvency, instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged by the debtor as much as possible; instead of selling his property and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo, in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent of the sums for which they ranked. Amidst this startlingly rapid transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling, nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give and refuse credit. The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times of the social crises of the fifth century; the nominal landowners held virtually by sufferance of their creditors; the debtors were either in servile subjection to their creditors, so that the humbler of them appeared like freedmen in the creditor's train and those of higher rank spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord; or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself, and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid of them by conspiracy and civil war. On these relations was based the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections—whose motto was "a clear sheet"-of Cinna(54) and still more definitely of Catilina, of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated the Hellenic world.(55) That amidst so rotten an economic condition every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need hardly mention that the usual phenomena—the disappearance of capital, the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies, and an almost universal insolvency—made their appearance now during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social and Mithradatic wars.(56)
Immortality
Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society. To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime: for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom; the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath is called "the plaster for debts." Men had forgotten what honesty was; a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as a personal foe. The criminal statistics of all times and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture of crimes—so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural—which the trial of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most respected families of an Italian country town.
Friendship
But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship. All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close—a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy; "friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.
Women
An equally characteristic feature in the brilliant decay of this period was the emancipation of women. In an economic point of view the women had long since made themselves independent;(57) in the present epoch we even meet with solicitors acting specially for women, who officiously lend their aid to solitary rich ladies in the management of their property and their lawsuits, make an impression on them by their knowledge of business and law, and thereby procure for themselves ampler perquisites and legacies than other loungers on the exchange. But it was not merely from the economic guardianship of father or husband that women felt themselves emancipated. Love-intrigues of all sorts were constantly in progress. The ballet-dancers (-mimae-) were quite a match for those of the present day in the variety of their pursuits and the skill with which they followed them out; their primadonnas, Cytheris and the like, pollute even the pages of history. But their, as it were, licensed trade was very materially injured by the free art of the ladies of aristocratic circles. Liaisons in the first houses had become so frequent, that only a scandal altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk; a judicial interference seemed now almost ridiculous. An unparalleled scandal, such as Publius Clodius produced in 693 at the women's festival in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, although a thousand times worse than the occurrences which fifty years before had led to a series of capital sentences,(58) passed almost without investigation and wholly without punishment. The watering-place season—in April, when political business was suspended and the world of quality congregated in Baiae and Puteoli— derived its chief charm from the relations licit and illicit which, along with music and song and elegant breakfasts on board or on shore, enlivened the gondola voyages. There the ladies held absolute sway; but they were by no means content with this domain which rightfully belonged to them; they also acted as politicians, appeared in party conferences, and took part with their money and their intrigues in the wild coterie-doings of the time. Any one who beheld these female statesmen performing on the stage of Scipio and Cato and saw at their side the young fop—as with smooth chin, delicate voice, and mincing gait, with headdress and neckerchiefs, frilled robe, and women's sandals he copied the loose courtesan— might well have a horror of the unnatural world, in which the sexes seemed as though they wished to change parts. What ideas as to divorce prevailed in the circles of the aristocracy may be discerned in the conduct of their best and most moral hero Marcus Cato, who did not hesitate to separate from his wife at the request of a friend desirous to marry her, and as little scrupled on the death of this friend to marry the same wife a second time. Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially among the upper classes. While among these marriage had for long been regarded as a burden which people took upon them at the best in the public interest,(59) we now encounter even in Cato and those who shared Cato's sentiments the maxim to which Polybius a century before traced the decay of Hellas,(60) that it is the duty of a citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget too many children. Where were the times, when the designation "children-producer" (-proletarius-) had been a term of honour for the Roman?
Depopulation of Italy
In consequence of such a social condition the Latin stock in Italy underwent an alarming diminution, and its fair provinces were overspread partly by parasitic immigrants, partly by sheer desolation. A considerable portion of the population of Italy flocked to foreign lands. Already the aggregate amount of talent and of working power, which the supply of Italian magistrates and Italian garrisons for the whole domain of the Mediterranean demanded, transcended the resources of the peninsula, especially as the elements thus sent abroad were in great part lost for ever to the nation. For the more that the Roman community grew into an empire embracing many nations, the more the governing aristocracy lost the habit of looking on Italy as their exclusive home; while of the men levied or enlisted for service a considerable portion perished in the many wars, especially in the bloody civil war, and another portion became wholly estranged from their native country by the long period of service, which sometimes lasted for a generation. In like manner with the public service, speculation kept a portion of the landholders and almost the whole body of merchants all their lives or at any rate for a long time out of the country, and the demoralising itinerant life of trading in particular estranged the latter altogether from civic existence in the mother country and from the various conditions of family life. As a compensation for these, Italy obtained on the one hand the proletariate of slaves and freedmen, on the other hand the craftsmen and traders flocking thither from Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, who flourished chiefly in the capital and still more in the seaport towns of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.(61) In the largest and most important part of Italy however, even such a substitution of impure elements for pure; but the population was visibly on the decline. Especially was this true of the pastoral districts such as Apulia, the chosen land of cattle-breeding, which is called by contemporaries the most deserted part of Italy, and of the region around Rome, where the Campagna was annually becoming more desolate under the constant reciprocal action of the retrograde agriculture and the increasing malaria. Labici, Gabii, Bovillae, once cheerful little country towns, were so decayed, that it was difficult to find representatives of them for the ceremony of the Latin festival. Tusculum, although still one of the most esteemed communities of Latium, consisted almost solely of some genteel families who lived in the capital but retained their native Tusculan franchise, and was far inferior in the number of burgesses entitled to vote even to small communities in the interior of Italy. The stock of men capable of arms in this district, on which Rome's ability to defend herself had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people read with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of the annals— sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they stood— respecting the Aequian and Volscian wars. Matters were not so bad everywhere, especially in the other portions of Central Italy and in Campania; nevertheless, as Varro complains, "the once populous cities of Italy," in general "stood desolate."
Italy under the Oligarchy
It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.
Reforms of Caesar
These evils, under which the national economy of Italy lay prostrate, were in their deepest essence irremediable, and so much of them as still admitted of remedy depended essentially for its amendment on the people and on time; for the wisest government is as little able as the more skilful physician to give freshness to the corrupt juices of the organism, or to do more in the case of the deeper-rooted evils than to prevent those accidents which obstruct the remedial power of nature in its working. The peaceful energy of the new rule even of itself furnished such a preventive, for by its means some of the worst excrescences were done away, such as the artificial pampering of the proletariate, the impunity of crimes, the purchase of offices, and various others. But the government could do something more than simply abstain from harm. Caesar was not one of those over-wise people who refuse to embank the sea, because forsooth no dike can defy some sudden influx of the tide. It is better, if a nation and its economy follow spontaneously the path prescribed by nature; but, seeing that they had got out of this path, Caesar applied all his energies to bring back by special intervention the nation to its home and family life, and to reform the national economy by law and decree.
Measures against Absentees from ItalyMeasures for the Elevation of the Family
With a view to check the continued absence of the Italians from Italy and to induce the world of quality and the merchants to establish their homes in their native land, not only was the term of service for the soldiers shortened, but men of senatorial rank were altogether prohibited from taking up their abode out of Italy except when on public business, while the other Italians of marriageable age (from the twentieth to the fortieth year) were enjoined not to be absent from Italy for more than three consecutive years. In the same spirit Caesar had already, in his first consulship on founding the colony of Capua kept specially in view fathers who had several children;(62) and now as Imperator he proposed extraordinary rewards for the fathers of numerous families, while he at the same time as supreme judge of the nation treated divorce and adultery with a rigour according to Roman ideas unparalleled.
Laws Respecting Luxury
Nor did he even think it beneath his dignity to issue a detailed law as to luxury—which, among other points, cut down extravagance in building at least in one of its most irrational forms, that of sepulchral monuments; restricted the use of purple robes and pearls to certain times, ages, and classes, and totally prohibited it in grown-up men; fixed a maximum for the expenditure of the table; and directly forbade a number of luxurious dishes. Such ordinances doubtless were not new; but it was a new thing that the "master of morals" seriously insisted on their observance, superintended the provision-markets by means of paid overseers, and ordered that the tables of men of rank should be examined by his officers and the forbidden dishes on them should be confiscated. It is true that by such theoretical and practical instructions in moderation as the new monarchical police gave to the fashionable world, hardly more could be accomplished than the compelling luxury to retire somewhat more into concealment; but, if hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue, under the circumstances of the times even a semblance of propriety established by police measures was a step towards improvement not to be despised.
The Debt Crisis
The measures of Caesar for the better regulation of Italian monetary and agricultural relations were of a graver character and promised greater results. The first question here related to temporary enactments respecting the scarcity of money and the debt-crisis generally. The law called forth by the outcry as to locked-up capital—that no one should have on hand more than 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds) in gold and silver cash—was probably only issued to allay the indignation of the blind public against the usurers; the form of publication, which proceeded on the fiction that this was merely the renewed enforcing of an earlier law that had fallen into oblivion, shows that Caesar was ashamed of this enactment, and it can hardly have passed into actual application. A far more serious question was the treatment of the pending claims for debt, the complete remission of which was vehemently demanded from Caesar by the party which called itself by his name. We have already mentioned, that he did not yield to this demand;(63) but two important concessions were made to the debtors, and that as early as 705. First, the interest in arrear was struck off,(64) and that which was paid was deducted from the capital. Secondly, the creditor was compelled to accept the moveable and immoveable property of the debtor in lieu of payment at the estimated value which his effects had before the civil war and the general depreciation which it had occasioned. The latter enactment was not unreasonable; if the creditor was to be looked on de facto as the owner of the property of his debtor to the amount of the sum due to him, it was doubtless proper that he should bear his share in the general depreciation of the property. On the other hand the cancelling of the payments of interest made or outstanding— which practically amounted to this, that the creditors lost, besides the interest itself, on an average 25 per cent of what they were entitled to claim as capital at the time of the issuing of the law—was in fact nothing else than a partial concession of that cancelling of creditors' claims springing out of loans, for which the democrats had clamoured so vehemently; and, however bad may have been the conduct of the usurers, it is not possible thereby to justify the retrospective abolition of all claims for interest without distinction. In order at least to understand this agitation we must recollect how the democratic party stood towards the question of interest. The legal prohibition against taking interest, which the old plebeian opposition had extorted in 412,(65) had no doubt been practically disregarded by the nobility which controlled the civil procedure by means of the praetorship, but had still remained since that period formally valid; and the democrats of the seventh century, who regarded themselves throughout as the continuers of that old agitation as to privilege and social position,(66) had maintained the illegality of payment of interest at any time, and even already practically enforced that principle, at least temporarily, in the confusion of the Marian period.(67) It is not credible that Caesar shared the crude views of his party on the interest question; the fact, that, in his account of the matter of liquidation he mentions the enactment as to the surrender of the property of the debtor in lieu of payment but is silent as to the cancelling of the interest, is perhaps a tacit self-reproach. But he was, like every party-leader, dependent on his party and could not directly repudiate the traditional maxims of the democracy in the question of interest; the more especially when he had to decide this question, not as the all-powerful conqueror of Pharsalus, but even before his departure for Epirus. But, while he permitted perhaps rather than originated this violation of legal order and of property, it is certainly his merit that that monstrous demand for the annulling of all claims arising from loans was rejected; and it may perhaps be looked on as a saving of his honour, that the debtors were far more indignant at the—according to their view extremely unsatisfactory—concession given to them than the injured creditors, and made under Caelius and Dolabella those foolish and (as already mentioned) speedily frustrated attempts to extort by riot and civil war what Caesar refused to them.
New Ordinance as to Bankruptcy
But Caesar did not confine himself to helping the debtor for the moment; he did what as legislator he could, permanently to keep down the fearful omnipotence of capital. First of all the great legal maxim was proclaimed, that freedom is not a possession commensurable with property, but an eternal right of man, of which the state is entitled judicially to deprive the criminal alone, not the debtor. It was Caesar, who, perhaps stimulated in this case also by the more humane Egyptian and Greek legislation, especially that of Solon,(68) introduced this principle—diametrically opposed to the maxims of the earlier ordinances as to bankruptcy— into the common law, where it has since retained its place undisputed. According to Roman law the debtor unable to pay became the serf of his creditor.(69) The Poetelian law no doubt had allowed a debtor, who had become unable to pay only through temporary embarrassments, not through genuine insolvency, to save his personal freedom by the cession of his property;(70) nevertheless for the really insolvent that principle of law, though doubtless modified in secondary points, had been in substance retained unaltered for five hundred years; a direct recourse to the debtor's estate only occurred exceptionally, when the debtor had died or had forfeited his burgess-rights or could not be found. It was Caesar who first gave an insolvent the right—on which our modern bankruptcy regulations are based— of formally ceding his estate to his creditors, whether it might suffice to satisfy them or not, so as to save at all events his personal freedom although with diminished honorary and political rights, and to begin a new financial existence, in which he could only be sued on account of claims proceeding from the earlier period and not protected in the liquidation, if he could pay them without renewed financial ruin.
Usury Laws
While thus the great democrat had the imperishable honour of emancipating personal freedom in principle from capital, he attempted moreover to impose a police limit on the excessive power of capital by usury-laws. He did not affect to disown the democratic antipathy to stipulations for interest. For Italian money-dealing there was fixed a maximum amount of the loans at interest to be allowed in the case of the individual capitalist, which appears to have been proportioned to the Italian landed estate belonging to each, and perhaps amounted to half its value. Transgressions of this enactment were, after the fashion of the procedure prescribed in the republican usury-laws, treated as criminal offence and sent before a special jury-commission. If these regulations were successfully carried into effect, every Italian man of business would be compelled to become at the same time an Italian landholder, and the class of capitalists subsisting merely on their interest would disappear wholly from Italy. Indirectly too the no less injurious category of insolvent landowners who practically managed their estates merely for their creditors was by this means materially curtailed, inasmuch as the creditors, if they desired to continue their lending business, were compelled to buy for themselves. From this very fact besides it is plain that Caesar wished by no means simply to renew that naive prohibition of interest by the old popular party, but on the contrary to allow the taking of interest within certain limits. It is very probable however that he did not confine himself to that injunction—which applied merely to Italy—of a maximum amount of sums to be lent, but also, especially with respect to the provinces, prescribed maximum rates for interest itself. The enactments— that it was illegal to take higher interest than 1 per cent per month, or to take interest on arrears of interest, or in fine to make a judicial claim for arrears of interest to a greater amount than a sum equal to the capital—were, probably also after the Graeco-Egyptian model,(71) first introduced in the Roman empire by Lucius Lucullus for Asia Minor and retained there by his better successors; soon afterwards they were transferred to other provinces by edicts of the governors, and ultimately at least part of them was provided with the force of law in all provinces by a decree of the Roman senate of 704. The fact that these Lucullan enactments afterwards appear in all their compass as imperial law and have thus become the basis of the Roman and indeed of modern legislation as to interest, may also perhaps be traced back to an ordinance of Caesar.
Elevation of Agriculture
Hand in hand with these efforts to guard against the ascendency of capital went the endeavours to bring back agriculture to the path which was most advantageous for the commonwealth. For this purpose the improvement of the administration of justice and of police was very essential. While hitherto nobody in Italy had been sure of his life and of his moveable or immoveable property, while Roman condottieri for instance, at the intervals when their gangs were not helping to manage the politics of the capital, applied themselves to robbery in the forests of Etruria or rounded off the country estates of their paymasters by fresh acquisitions, this sort of club-law was now at an end; and in particular the agricultural population of all classes must have felt the beneficial effects of the change. The plans of Caesar for great works also, which were not at all limited to the capital, were intended to tell in this respect; the construction, for instance, of a convenient high-road from Rome through the passesof the Apennines to the Adriatic was designed to stimulate the internal traffic of Italy, and the lowering the level of the Fucine lake to benefit the Marsian farmers. But Caesar also sought by more direct measures to influence the state of Italian husbandry. The Italian graziers were required to take at least a third of their herdsmen from freeborn adults, whereby brigandage was checked and at the same time a source of gain was opened to the free proletariate.
Distribution of Land
In the agrarian question Caesar, who already in his first consulship had been in a position to regulate it,(72) more judicious than Tiberius Gracchus, did not seek to restore the farmer-system at any price, even at that of a revolution—concealed under juristic clauses—directed against property; by him on the contrary, as by every other genuine statesman, the security of that which is property or is at any rate regarded by the public as property was esteemed as the first and most inviolable of all political maxims, and it was only within the limits assigned by this maxim that he sought to accomplish the elevation of the Italian small holdings, which also appeared to him as a vital question for the nation. Even as it was, there was much still left for him in this respect to do. Every private right, whether it was called property or entitled heritable possession, whether traceable to Gracchus or to Sulla, was unconditionally respected by him. On the other hand, Caesar, after he had in his strictly economical fashion— which tolerated no waste and no negligence even on a small scale— instituted a general revision of the Italian titles to possession by the revived commission of Twenty,(73) destined the whole actual domain land of Italy (including a considerable portion of the real estates that were in the hands of spiritual guilds but legally belonged to the state) for distribution in the Gracchan fashion, so far, of course, as it was fitted for agriculture; the Apulian summer and the Samnite winter pastures belonging to the state continued to be domain; and it was at least the design of the Imperator, if these domains should not suffice, to procure the additional land requisite by the purchase of Italian estates from the public funds. In the selection of the new farmers provision was naturally made first of all for the veteran soldiers, and as far as possible the burden, which the levy imposed on the mother country, was converted into a benefit by the fact that Caesar gave the proletarian, who was levied from it as a recruit, back to it as a farmer; it is remarkable also that the desolate Latin communities, such as Veii and Capena, seem to have been preferentially provided with new colonists. The regulation of Caesar that the new owners should not be entitled to alienate the lands received by them till after twenty years, was a happy medium between the full bestowal of the right of alienation, which would have brought the larger portion of the distributed land speedily back into the hands of the great capitalists, and the permanent restrictions on freedom of dealing in land which Tiberius Gracchus(74) and Sulla (75) had enacted, both equally in vain.
Elevation of the Municipal System
Lastly while the government thus energetically applied itself to remove the diseased, and to strengthen the sound, elements of the Italian national life, the newly-regulated municipal system— which had but recently developed itself out of the crisis of the Social war in and alongside of the state-economy(76)—was intended to communicate to the new absolute monarchy the communal life which was compatible with it, and to impart to the sluggish circulation of the noblest elements of public life once more a quickened action. The leading principles in the two municipal ordinances issued in 705 for Cisalpine Gaul and in 709 for Italy,(77) the latter of which remained the fundamental law for all succeeding times, are apparently, first, the strict purifying of the urban corporations from all immoral elements, while yet no trace of political police occurs; secondly, the utmost restriction of centralization and the utmost freedom of movement in the communities, to which there was even now reserved the election of magistrates and an—although limited—civil and criminal jurisdiction. The general police enactments, such as the restrictions on the right of association,(78) came, it is true, into operation also here.
Such were the ordinances, by which Caesar attempted to reform the Italian national economy. It is easy both to show their insufficiency, seeing that they allowed a multitude of evils still to exist, and to prove that they operated in various respects injuriously by imposing restrictions, some of which were very severely felt, on freedom of dealing. It is still easier to show that the evils of the Italian national economy generally were incurable. But in spite of this the practical statesman will admire the work as well as the master-workman. It was already no small achievement that, where a man like Sulla, despairing of remedy, had contented himself with a mere formal reorganization, the evil was seized in its proper seat and grappled with there; and we may well conclude that Caesar with his reforms came as near to the measure of what was possible as it was given to a statesman and a Roman to come. He could not and did not expect from them the regeneration of Italy; but he sought on the contrary to attain this in a very different way, for the right apprehension of which it is necessary first of all to review the condition of the provinces as Caesar found them.
Provinces
The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number:seven European—the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul,Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily,Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic—Asia, Bithynia and Pontus,Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African—Cyrene and Africa.To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two newgovernorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constitutingIllyricum a province by itself.(80)
Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy
In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy performances in this line, no second government has ever attained at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this rests not on the Romans alone. Almost everywhere before their day the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty belonging to better times. It was doubtless bad, that every accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g. when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers to be laid at his feet. It was doubtless bad, that no rule of morality or of criminal law bound either the Roman administrators or their retinue, and that violent outrages, rapes, and murders with or without form of law were of daily occurrence in the provinces. But these things were at least nothing new; almost everywhere men had long been accustomed to be treated like slaves, and it signified little in the long run whether a Carthaginian overseer, a Syrian satrap, or a Roman proconsul acted as the local tyrant. Their material well-being, almost the only thing for which the provincials still cared, was far less disturbed by those occurrences, which although numerous in proportion to the many tyrants yet affected merely isolated individuals, than by the financial exactions pressing heavily on all, which had never previously been prosecuted with such energy.
The Romans now gave in this domain fearful proof of their old master of money-matters. We have already endeavoured to describe the Roman system of provincial oppression in its modest and rational foundations as well as in its growth and corruption as a matter of course, the latter went on increasing. The ordinary taxes became far more oppressive from the inequality of their distribution and from the preposterous system of levying them than from their high amount. As to the burden of quartering troops, Roman statesmen themselves expressed the opinion that a town suffered nearly to the same extent when a Roman army took up winter quarters in it as when an enemy took it by storm. While the taxation in its original character had been an indemnification for the burden of military defence undertaken by Rome, and the community paying tribute had thus a right to remain exempt from ordinary service, garrison-service was now—as is attested e. g. in the case of Sardinia—for the most part imposed on the provincials, and even in the ordinary armies, besides other duties, the whole heavy burden of the cavalry-service was devolved on them. The extraordinary contributions demanded—such as, the deliveries of grain for little or no compensation to benefit the proletariate of the capital; the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast- defences in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art, wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in the theatre and the chase; the military requisitions in case of war— were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable. A single instance may show how far things were carried. During the three years' administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motuca from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80; so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily 59 per cent of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow than to cultivate them under such government. And these landholders were, as their small number itself shows and as is expressly stated, by no means small farmers, but respectable planters and in great part Roman burgesses!
In the Client-States
In the client-states the forms of taxation were somewhat different, but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse, since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came those of the native courts. In Cappadocia and Egypt the farmer as well as the king was bankrupt; the former was unable to satisfy the tax-collector, the latter was unable to satisfy his Roman creditor. Add to these the exactions, properly so called, not merely of the governor himself, but also of his "friends," each of whom fancied that he had as it were a draft on the governor and a title accordingly to come back from the province a made man. The Roman oligarchy in this respect completely resembled a gang of robbers, and followed out the plundering of the provincials in a professional and business-like manner; capable members of the gang set to work not too nicely, for they had in fact to share the spoil with the advocates and the jurymen, and the more they stole, they did so the more securely. The notion of honour in theft too was already developed; the big robber looked down on the little, and the latter on the mere thief, with contempt; any one, who had been once for a wonder condemned, boasted of the high figure of the sums which he was proved to have exacted. Such was the behaviour in the provinces of the successors of those men, who had been accustomed to bring home nothing from their administration but the thanks of the subjects and the approbation of their fellow-citizens.
The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces
But still worse, if possible, and still less subject to any control was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed property and the whole commercial and monetary business in the provinces were concentrated in their hands. The estates in the transmarine regions, which belonged to Italian grandees, were exposed to all the misery of management by stewards, and never saw their owners; excepting possibly the hunting-parks, which occur as early as this time in Transalpine Gaul with an area amounting to nearly twenty square miles. Usury flourished as it had never flourished before. The small landowners in Illyricum, Asia, and Egypt managed their estates even in Varro's time in great part practically as the debtor-slaves of their Roman or non-Roman creditors, just as the plebeians in former days for their patrician lords. Cases occurred of capital being lent even to urban communities at four per cent per month. It was no unusual thing for an energetic and influential man of business to get either the title of envoy(81) given to him by the senate or that of officer by the governor, and, if possible, to have men put at his service for the better prosecution of his affairs; a case is narrated on credible authority, where one of these honourable martial bankers on account of a claim against the town of Salamis in Cyprus kept its municipal council blockaded in the town-house, until five of the members had died of hunger.
Robberies and Damage by War
To these two modes of oppression, each of which by itself was intolerable and which were always becoming better arranged to work into each other's hands, were added the general calamities, for which the Roman government was also in great part, at least indirectly, responsible. In the various wars a large amount of capital was dragged away from the country and a larger amount destroyed sometimes by the barbarians, sometimes by the Roman armies. Owing to the worthlessness of the Roman land and maritime police, brigands and pirates swarmed every where. In Sardinia and the interior of Asia Minor brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain it became necessary to fortify all buildings constructed outside of the city-enclosures with walls and towers. The fearful evil of piracy has been already described in another connection.(82) The panaceas of the prohibitive system, with which the Roman governor was wont to interpose when scarcity of money or dearth occurred, as under such circumstances they could not fail to do— the prohibition of the export of gold or grain from the province— did not mend the matter. The communal affairs were almost everywhere embarrassed, in addition to the general distress, by local disorders and frauds of the public officials.
The Conditions of the Provinces Generally
Where such grievances afflicted communities and individuals not temporarily but for generations with an inevitable, steady, and yearly-increasing oppression, the best regulated public or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations from the Tagus to the Euphrates. "All the communities," it is said in a treatise published as early as 684, "are ruined"; the same truth is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul, the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor even towns like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become, according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves, weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer. Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.
Caesar and the Provinces
The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person to inspect his "farms" one after the other; in reality the condition of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency. The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care that they might be so healed, and that there should be no fresh inflictions.
The Caesarian Magistrates
The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled. The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control; those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master, who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces among the competitors depended solely on him,(83) they were in reality bestowed by the Imperator. The functions also of the governors were practically restricted. The superintendence of the administration of justice and the administrative control of the communities remained in their hands; but their command was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants associated with the governor,(84) and the raising of the taxes was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially to imperial officials,(85) so that the governor was thenceforward surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline. While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions, the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch. The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar had already in his first consulate made more stringent, was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter; and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time were wont to atone.
Regulation of Burdens
The extraordinary public burdens were reduced to the right proportion and the actual necessity; the ordinary burdens were materially lessened. We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation;(86) the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials. That Caesar after the example of one of his greatest democratic predecessors, Sertorius,(87) wished to free the subjects from the burden of quartering troops and to insist on the soldiers erecting for themselves permanent encampments resembling towns, cannot indeed be proved; but he was, at least after he had exchanged the part of pretender for that of king, not the man to abandon the subject to the soldier; and it was in keeping with his spirit, when the heirs of his policy created such military camps, and then converted them into towns which formed rallying-points for Italian civilization amidst the barbarian frontier districts.
Influence on the Capitalist System
It was a task far more difficult than the checking of official irregularities, to deliver the provincials from the oppressive ascendency of Roman capital. Its power could not be directly broken without applying means which were still more dangerous than the evil; the government could for the time being abolish only isolated abuses— as when Caesar for instance prohibited the employment of the title of state-envoy for financial purposes—and meet manifest acts of violence and palpable usury by a sharp application of the general penal laws and of the laws as to usury, which extended also to the provinces;(88) but a more radical cure of the evil was only to be expected from the reviving prosperity of the provincials under a better administration. Temporary enactments, to relieve the insolvency of particular provinces, had been issued on several occasions in recent times. Caesar himself had in 694 when governor of Further Spain assigned to the creditors two thirds of the income of their debtors in order to pay themselves from that source. Lucius Lucullus likewise when governor of Asia Minor had directly cancelled a portion of the arrears of interest which had swelled beyond measure, and had for the remaining portion assigned to the creditors a fourth part of the produce of the lands of their debtors, as well as a suitable proportion of the profits accruing to them from house-rents or slave-labour. We are not expressly informed that Caesar after the civil war instituted similar general liquidations of debt in the provinces; yet from what has just been remarked and from what was done in the case of Italy,(89) it can hardly be doubted that Caesar likewise directed his efforts towards this object, or at least that it formed part of his plan.
While thus the Imperator, as far as lay within human power, relieved the provincials from the oppressions of the magistrates and capitalists of Rome, it might at the same time be with certaint expected from the government to which he imparted fresh vigour, that it would scare off the wild border-peoples and disperse the freebooters by land and sea, as the rising sun chases away the mist. However the old wounds might still smart, with Caesar there appeared for the sorely-tortured subjects the dawn of a more tolerable epoch, the first intelligent and humane government that had appeared for centuries, and a policy of peace which rested not on cowardice but on strength. Well might the subjects above all mourn along with the best Romans by the bier of the great liberator.
The Beginning of the Helleno-Italic State
But this abolition of existing abuses was not the main matter in Caesar's provincial reform. In the Roman republic, according to the view of the aristocracy and democracy alike, the provinces had been nothing but—what they were frequently called—country-estates of the Roman people, and they were employed and worked out as such. This view had now passed away. The provinces as such were gradually to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all; the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy. These ideas, as is well known, were not new. The emigration from Italy to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy. The first who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy, the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies of Carthage and Narbo. Then the second statesman of genius produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute founded by him in Osca. When Caesar entered on the government, a large Italian population—though, in great part, lacking stability and concentration—already existed in all the provinces and client- states. To say nothing of the formally Italian towns in Spain and southern Gaul, we need only recall the numerous troops of burgesses raised by Sertorius and Pompeius in Spain, by Caesar in Gaul, by Juba in Numidia, by the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre—ill-tuned doubtless— on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language, which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published shortly after Caesar's death.
On the other hand the interpenetration of the Latin and Hellenic character was, we might say, as old as Rome. On occasion of the union of Italy the conquering Latin nation had assimilated to itself all the other conquered nationalities, excepting only the Greek, which was received just as it stood without any attempt at external amalgamation. Wherever the Roman legionary went, the Greek schoolmaster, no less a conqueror in his own way, followed; at an early date we find famous teachers of the Greek language settled on the Guadalquivir, and Greek was as well taught as Latin in the institute of Osca. The higher Roman culture itself was in fact nothing else than the proclamation of the great gospel of Hellenic manners and art in the Italian idiom; against the modest pretension of the civilizing conquerors to proclaim it first of all in their own language to the barbarians of the west the Hellene at least could not loudly protest. Already the Greek every where— and, most decidedly, just where the national feeling was purest and strongest, on the frontiers threatened by barbaric denationalization, e. g. in Massilia, on the north coast of the Black Sea, and on the Euphrates and Tigris—descried the protector and avenger of Hellenism in Rome; and in fact the foundation of towns by Pompeius in the far east resumed after an interruption of centuries the beneficent work of Alexander.
The idea of an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages and a single nationality was not new—otherwise it would have been nothing but a blunder; but the development of it from floating projects to a firmly-grasped conception, from scattered initial efforts to the laying of a concentrated foundation, was the work of the third and greatest of the democratic statesmen of Rome.
The Ruling NationsThe Jews
The first and most essential condition for the political and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian existing by their side. In a certain sense we might no doubt name along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar. We speak of the Jews. This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere and nowhere powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole Roman empire. Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct, not unlike the "Jews' quarters" of our towns, but with a freer position and superintended by a "master of the people" as superior judge and administrator. How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population was already before Caesar's time, and how closely at the same time the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous for a governor to offend the Jews, in his province, because he might then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace of the capital. Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews was trade; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish, by the side of the Roman, merchants. At this period too we encounter the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs. This Judaism, although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things, which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible. While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism, did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges, and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman as well as against the Greek local priests. The two great men of course did not contemplate placing the Jewish nationality on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic. But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora's gift of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself up to a certain degree to foreign habits—the Jew was for this very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality. Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world, and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.
Hellenism
But the Latin and Hellenic nationalities continued to be exclusively the positive elements of the new citizenship. The distinctively Italian state of the republic was thus at an end; but the rumour that Caesar was ruining Italy and Rome on purpose to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk— very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly—of the angry nobility. On the contrary in Caesar's organizations the Latin nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin, although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were at the same time issued in Greek. In general he arranged the relations of the two great nations in his monarchy just as his republican predecessors had arranged them in the united Italy; the Hellenic nationality was protected where it existed, the Italian was extended as far as circumstances permitted, and the inheritance of the races to be absorbed was destined for it. This was necessary, because an entire equalizing of the Greek and Latin elements in the state would in all probability have in a very short time occasioned that catastrophe which Byzantinism brought about several centuries later; for the Greek element was superior to the Roman not merely in all intellectual aspects, but also in the measure of its predominance, and it had within Italy itself in the hosts of Hellenes and half-Hellenes who migrated compulsorily or voluntarily to Italy an endless number of apostles apparently insignificant, but whose influence could not be estimated too highly. To mention only the most conspicuous phenomenon in this respect, the rule of Greek lackeys over the Roman monarchs is as old as the monarchy. The first in the equally long and repulsive list of these personages is the confidential servant of Pompeius, Theophanes of Mytilene, who by his power over his weak master contributed probably more than any one else to the outbreak of the war between Pompeius and Caesar. Not wholly without reason he was after his death treated with divine honours by his countrymen; he commenced, forsooth, the -valet de chambre- government of the imperial period, which in a certain measure was just a dominion of the Hellenes over the Romans. The government had accordingly every reason not to encourage by its fostering action the spread of Hellenism at least in the west. If Sicily was not simply relieved of the pressure of the -decumae- but had its communities invested with Latin rights, which was presumably meant to be followed in due time by full equalization with Italy, it can only have been Caesar's design that this glorious island, which was at that time desolate and had as to management passed for the greater part into Italian hands, but which nature has destined to be not so much a neighbouring land to Italy as rather the finest of its provinces, should become altogether merged in Italy. But otherwise the Greek element, wherever it existed, was preserved and protected. However political crises might suggest to the Imperator the demolition of the strong pillars of Hellenism in the west and in Egypt, Massilia and Alexandria were neither destroyed nor denationalized.
Latinizing
On the other hand the Roman element was promoted by the government through colonization and Latinizing with all vigour and at the most various points of the empire. The principle, which originated no doubt from a bad combination of formal law and brute force, but was inevitably necessary in order to freedom in dealing with the nations destined to destruction—that all the soil in the provinces not ceded by special act of the government to communities or private persons was the property of the state, and the holder of it for the time being had merely an heritable possession on sufferance and revocable at any time—was retained also by Caesar and raised by him from a democratic party-theory to a fundamental principle of monarchical law.
Cisalpine Gaul
Gaul, of course, fell to be primarily dealt with in the extension of Roman nationality. Cisalpine Gaul obtained throughout— what a great part of the inhabitants had long enjoyed— political equalization with the leading country by the admission of the Transpadane communities into the Roman burgess-union, which had for long been assumed by the democracy as accomplished,(90) and was now (705) finally accomplished by Caesar. Practically this province had already completely Latinized itself during the forty years which had elapsed since the bestowal of Latin rights. The exclusives might ridicule the broad and gurgling accent of the Celtic Latin, and miss "an undefined something of the grace of the capital" in the Insubrian or Venetian, who as Caesar's legionary had conquered for himself with his sword a place in the Roman Forum and even in the Roman senate-house. Nevertheless Cisalpine Gaul with its dense chiefly agricultural population was even before Caesar's time in reality an Italian country, and remained for centuries the true asylum of Italian manners and Italian culture; indeed the teachers of Latin literature found nowhere else out of the capital so much encouragement and approbation.
The Province of Narbo
While Cisalpine Gaul was thus substantially merged in Italy, the place which it had hitherto occupied was taken by the Transalpine province, which had been converted by the conquests of Caesar from a frontier into an inland province, and which by its vicinity as well as by its climate was fitted beyond all other regions to become in due course of time likewise an Italian land. Thither principally, according to the old aim of the transmarine settlements of the Roman democracy, was the stream of Italian emigration directed. There the ancient colony of Narbo was reinforced by new settlers, and four new burgess-colonies were instituted at Baeterrae (Beziers) not far from Narbo, at Arelate (Aries) and Arausio (Orange) on the Rhone, and at the new seaport Forum Julii (Frejus); while the names assigned to them at the same time preserved the memory of the brave legions which had annexed northern Gaul to the empire.(91) The townships not furnished with colonists appear, at least for the most part, to have been led on toward Romanization in the same way as Transpadane Gaul in former times(92) by the bestowal of Latin urban rights; in particular Nemausus (Nimes), as the chief place of the territory taken from the Massiliots in consequence of their revolt against Caesar,(93)was converted from a Massiliot village into a Latin urban community, and endowed with a considerable territory and even with the right of coinage.(94) While Cisalpine Gaul thus advanced from the preparatory stage to full equality with Italy, the Narbonese province advanced at the same time into that preparatory stage; just as previously in Cisalpine Gaul, the most considerable communities there had the full franchise, the rest Latin rights.
Northern Gaul
In the other non-Greek and non-Latin regions of the empire, which were still more remote from the influence of Italy and the process of assimilation, Caesar confined himself to the establishment of several centres for Italian civilization such as Narbo had hitherto been in Gaul, in order by their means to pave the way for a future complete equalization. Such initial steps can be pointed out in all the provinces of the empire, with the exception of the poorest and least important of all, Sardinia. How Caesar proceeded in Northern Gaul, we have already set forth;(95) the Latin language there obtained throughout official recognition, though not yet employed for all branches of public intercourse, and the colony of Noviodunum (Nyon) arose on the Leman lake as the most northerly town with an Italian constitution.
Spain
In Spain, which was presumably at that time the most densely peopled country of the Roman empire, not merely were Caesarian colonists settled in the important Helleno-Iberian seaport town of Emporiae by the side of the old population; but, as recently-discovered records have shown, a number of colonists probably taken predominantly from the proletariate of the capital were provided for in the town of Urso (Osuna), not far from Seville in the heart of Andalusia, and perhaps also in several other townships of this province. The ancient and wealthy mercantile city of Gades, whose municipal system Caesar even when praetor had remodelled suitably to the times, now obtained from the Imperator the full rights of the Italian -municipia-(705) and became—what Tusculum had been in Italy(96)—the first extra-Italian community not founded by Rome which was admitted into the Roman burgess-union. Some years afterwards (709) similar rights were conferred also on some other Spanish communities, and Latin rights presumably on still more.
Carthage
In Africa the project, which Gaius Gracchus had not been allowed to bring to an issue, was now carried out, and on the spot where the city of the hereditary foes of Rome had stood, 3000 Italian colonists and a great number of the tenants on lease and sufferance resident in the Carthaginian territory were settled; and the new "Venus-colony," the Roman Carthage, throve with amazing rapidity under the incomparably favourable circumstances of the locality. Utica, hitherto the capital and first commercial town in the province, had already been in some measure compensated beforehand, apparently by the bestowal of Latin rights, for the revival of its superior rival. In the Numidian territory newly annexed to the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97) obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies. The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes, and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period; but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.
CorinthThe East
In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu), busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth. Not only was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho- Saronic gulf. Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea, for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants; on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus, which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt, where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island commanding the harbour of Alexandria.
Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces
Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been previously the case. The communities of full burgesses—that is, all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies and burgess-municipia—scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere— were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction; while on the other hand the more important processes came before the Roman authorities competent to deal with them—as a rule the governor of the province.(98) The formally autonomous Latin and the other emancipated communities-thus including all those of Sicily and of Narbonese Gaul, so far as they were not burgess-communities, and a considerable number also in the other provinces—had not merely free administration, but probably unlimited jurisdiction; so that the governor was only entitled to interfere there by virtue of his— certainly very arbitrary—administrative control. No doubt even earlier there had been communities of full burgesses within the provinces of governors, such as Aquileia, and Narbo, and whole governors' provinces, such as Cisalpine Gaul, had consisted of communities with Italian constitution; but it was, if not in law, at least in a political point of view a singularly important innovation, that there was now a province which as well as Italy was peopled solely by Roman burgesses,(99) and that others promised to become such.
Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level
With this disappeared the first great practical distinction that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second—that ordinarily no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed in the provinces—was likewise in the course of disappearing; troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended, and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case, such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name. The formal contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according to martial law had for long been practically coincident, and the different titles of the magistrates signified little after the one Imperator was over all.
In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances— which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution, to Caesar—a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized district might expect to be placed on an equal footing by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself. On the threshold of full national and political equalization with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized. In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities—Emporiae, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria— now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire. The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated on civilization. While the destruction of the two greatest marts of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands, the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political equality, to union in a genuine state. Well might Caesar bestow on the city of Corinth in addition to its far-famed ancient name the new one of "Honour to Julius" (-Lavs Jvli-).
Organization of the New Empire
While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character, which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature, it further had need of unity in those institutions which express the general life of nations—in constitution and administration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights; as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character were quite compatible with essential union. In all these departments we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future, and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building of centuries. But of the lines, which the great man drew in these departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins of the nationalities.