Ancient Rome at Work

An Economic History of Rome From the Origins to the Empire

Paul Louis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136603587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Originally published in 1927 this volume includes an economic history of Rome from the origins to the Empire, with four illustrations and six maps. It is the fourth volume to appear in a section on ancient Rome. A period of nearly 1200 years is covered, tracing the economic life of Rome from the age of primitive industry and pastoral life to the organised labour and complex civilisation of the late Empire. The economic aspect of Roman history, neglected though it has been, is in truth the basis of its political, diplomatic, and military history.

PART ONE
FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE PUNIC WARS
753 TO 264 B.C.

IT is natural to adopt the chronological order in following in the Roman world the development of agriculture, industry, commerce, navigation, public works, credit, the monetary system—everything, in short, which constitutes the history of labour; and nothing is easier than to adopt the usual division into three phases.

In the first period, Rome asserted her domination over the Italian peninsula, which she subjected in a series of armed encounters, and the two extreme dates are 753 and 264 B.C., that of the legendary foundation and that of the beginning of the Punic Wars. This period comprises 244 years under the Kings and 245 years under the Republic.

The second period is from 264 to 30 B.C., that is to say until the triumph of Octavius over Antony, which marks the commencement of the Imperial era. Rome, having conquered Carthage, Macedonia and Syria, and having defeated Jugurtha. Mithridates and Vercingetorix, made herself mistress of practically the whole of the known world.

The third period extends from 30 B.C. to 395 A.D., the date of the death of Theodosius and the definite division of the Empire into two parts, East and West. At first, Rome enriched herself by new conquests under the restored monarchist regime, then her security was threatened by the hordes of barbarians who were assaulting her frontiers and had already penetrated into the majority of the provinces and whose successive invasions were to bring about an unprecedented cataclysm.

The periods of this history of labour are thus divided off by political events, for political events have exact dates, whereas economic developments are rarely marked by salient facts on the surface of things. Their activity increases with their depth. Here, as elsewhere, we shall find them playing a part in the preparation of campaigns of annexation and in civil strife, to find their full development later in the field prepared for them by these varied struggles.

CHAPTER I

PRIMITIVE ROME

NO clear data have come down to us as to the beginnings of Rome. Not indeed that there is any lack of legend, for all the historians of antiquity busied themselves with relating, embellishing and adding to the myths that existed. That of Romulus is hardly an account which satisfies the reason. Are we to believe that a band of brigands established themselves upon a rock which they used as a base from which to rob passers-by? Or that peasants decided to group themselves together for their better protection against possible aggression, choosing as refuges those natural features which offered an easy defence? Did Rome grow from a number of neighbouring family units or out of the fusion of little ethnical groups? Was she at first a stronghold or a trade centre—the site of some kind of market or periodical fair? The problem has little importance in its bearing upon the questions which we are about to study. What is certain is that if the first Romans had brigands in their ranks they were nevertheless for the greater part agriculturists whose fields lay in the neighbourhood of the hills which are to-day more or less levelled by the deposits of centuries and transformed by the labour of generations.

Rome was, at the beginning, a village or, if one prefers, a country town similar to many others of the period. Its value as a site might be questioned in the light of modern ideas if history had not demonstrated the futility of such a controversy. But the men who raised up Rome in the midst of the valleys of Latium, about twelve miles from the sea and from the Alban Hills, never dreamed that they were creating the capital of the world—nor indeed had they any choice.

Rome was the instinctive creation of a people in course of formation. More powerful groups than that which composed Rome in her early years developed in the North and the South. Rome was girt by an immense fan of nations: the more or less confederated Etruscans with their cities Volsinii (now Bolsena), Clusium (Chiusi), Tarquinii and others, the Sabines hidden away in the Central Apennines, the Vestini, the Marsi, the Aequi and the Volsci in citadels perched on sheer rocks and on peaks standing apart from the main chain: then further away the Samnites, one of the great peoples of the Peninsula. The Tyrrhenian Sea, into which at no great distance the Tiber flowed, did not shield the Romans from foreign incursions. What is marvellous is that they should have subjugated and annexed all the land between the Alps and the Gulf of Tarentum. This first period in their history is not the least curious.

CHAPTER II

THE CONQUEST OF THE ITALIAN PENINSULA

IT would be out of place to discuss here point by point the conquest of the Italian Peninsula. Since we are restricting ourselves to tracing the limits within which the institutions connected with labour developed, we shall merely sketch the chief outlines.

At the time of the first king, Romulus, the Sabines were already associated with the Romans. The third king, Tullus Hostilius, seized in the middle of the seventh century B.C. the important city of Alba, situated at the edge of the volcanic ridge which rises to the south-east of Rome about twelve miles from the Capitol. The fourth king, Ancus Marcius, extended the territory to the sea and founded the port of Ostia.

We do not know how Tarquinius Priscus, who since he came from Tarquinii was an Etruscan by domicile if not by birth, usurped the throne at the death of Ancus. He conquered several small mountainous districts. Tarquinius Superbus thrust back the Volsci and established mastery over the Latin League, in which were grouped the smaller States of Latium.

The Republic, which in 509 succeeded the rule of the kings, had at first many struggles to sustain. An Etruscan chief, Porsena, seized Rome and assured for himself a passage towards Campania, across the Tiber plain. In 506 however he was driven out by contingents from the Greek colonies, who had hastened from the South.

Thenceforward Roman expansion continued with increasing force. In 493, after the battle of Lake Regillus, the consuls placed themselves in command of all the Latin troops. Then, during a century the Aequi, the Volsci and the Etruscans felt the weight of the arms of their bellicose neighbours. Veii, one of the chief cities of Etruria, was taken by Camillus in 395 after a siege which lasted ten years. At this time one of the darkest episodes in the history of Rome took place—the Gallic invasion of 390.

For nearly half a century the vanquished were occupied in recuperating their strength; subsequently armed expansion again began, for land had to be appropriated in order to provide subsistence and to occupy the masses of the people, who were incessantly clamouring for the sharing-out of the soil. The first Samnite War lasted from 343 to 341. It was immediately followed by the Latin War, which was waged for the possession of the rich land of Campania. The Latins suffered final defeat in 338 and their League was dissolved. The second Samnite War, marked by the humiliating defeat of the Caudine Forks, was waged from 328 to 312. In 311 the third Samnite War began; in it the Etruscans, the Lucanians, the Umbrians and even Gallic contingents from the shores of the Adriatic took part—a general coalition was beginning to form against Rome whose ambitions seemed to menace the whole of Italy. It was this campaign of more than thirty years’ duration which determined the preponderance of the city of Romulus, for she crushed one by one all the nations gathered against her and when she had finished this round of enterprises the Greek colonies, still populated and flourishing, surrendered to her generals. Among these colonies were Cumae, Dicaearchia, Naples and Paestum. Tarentum, the most prosperous and the most industrially active, whose commerce extended furthest, was the only one of them to remain independent. This city appealed to Pyrrhus, who, after fighting the legions at Heraclea, Asculum and Beneventum, regained his kingdom and left his temporary Allies to their fate. On the eve of the great clash before Carthage, Rome after quelling the new rising of the Samnites, had brought under her authority an area the extent of which we will now outline.

According to Beloch, at the beginning of the Republic the extent of the Roman territories was slightly less than a thousand square kilometres (about 400 square miles), or less than one-sixth of the area of a modern French département. In 340, it was 3,096 square kilometres and 6,039 in 328. It rose to 7,688 in 295, and jumped at the end of the period which we are now studying to 27,000, as a result of the incorporation of the Samnian mountains and the fertile plains of the South. At that time it still represented only about one-tenth of the area covered by the present Kingdom of Italy.

When the Monarchy collapsed, the population, again according to Beloch, comprised 130,000 citizens: the number increased steadily during the first centuries of the Republic, rising to 165,000 in 340 and 282,000 in 264. These statistics, of course, like all statistics regarding Ancient Rome, are contested and are only based upon conjecture. We reproduce them, however, because they have at least a relative value. The 165,000 cives of 340 are regarded as corresponding to 500,000 persons of free condition, whose numbers in 264 are believed to have exceeded a million. In the interval the density had fallen from 80 free inhabitants to the square kilometre to 40, and the annexation of the mountainous regions of the Central Apennines was hardly compensated for by that of Campania—although certain regions thereof, it is true, had as many as a hundred or more inhabitants to the square kilometre—and of Southern Etruria, where populated regions alternated with forests and marshes.

CHAPTER III

THE GROWTH OF POLITICAL RIGHTS

ROME was at first, in respect of the development of political rights, nothing more than an agglomeration of gentes, that is to say of enlarged families, which included all those who had descended from a common ancestor and honoured the same dead. In his Cité Antique, Fustel de Coulanges has laid stress upon this early religious constitution. To the patricians forming the gens were subordinated the clientes, a kind of serfs who remained under the authority of the father of the family. They lived with him or around him and cultivated the fields in common. The clientes never owned the land on which they worked; they did not even own the movable articles with which their cabins were furnished or which were necessary to their work, their peculium, or savings, even, could be taken from them, and when the community of the land came to an end their servitude was not thereby lessened; they remained holders, with a precarious title and paying rent.

At the beginning of its history, the city of Rome held the only members of the gentes, both patricians and clientes; they alone could take part in the common deliberations by sitting in the assemblies of the curiae or wards, each ward comprising severalg entes. These curiae were to some extent topographical divisions incorporating religious units.

Heads of families had access to the Senate, the members of which increased in a short space of time from one hundred to three hundred. The Senate served as a council for the King and at his death chose a new sovereign, the office of King being elective and not hereditary.

The weight of all this political machinery, which remained almost unchanged from the time of Romulus to that of Servius Tullius—that is, from 753 to 534—was borne by the masses, an unorganized and despised rabble which had duties but was not permitted rights. This plebs, upon the growth of which historians are far from agreeing, seems to have been composed of very mixed elements. Fustel de Coulanges believes that it was recruited from former clientes who had left the gentes and from fugitives from neighbouring districts. Bouché-Leclerc considers that the peasants conquered during the reigns of the first Kings were absorbed into it, thus swelling its numbers with some rapidity. Although deprived of all prerogatives, this mass of men soon became a menace to the social order which pressed hardly upon them. The fourth monarch, Ancus Marcius, made an attempt to obtain their help against the Senate and the aristocracy, who were impeding the accomplishment of his plans, but he did not venture to give them political rights repugnant to the spirit of the time. The plebeians, ignored by the ceremonious and rigid civil law of those early ages, could not acquire property, make binding contracts, or even legally marry among themselves. They were not slaves but their condition was hardly higher than that of slaves. They lived outside the people like pariahs, for indeed nothing attached them to the Roman State.

The reform instituted by Servius Tullius, who reigned from 578 to 534, improved their condition. The successive transformations of the common law cannot be passed over in silence, for everything in history is linked up—institutions act and react upon one another and the system of private property is at every stage closely connected with the progress and the decline of the different classes.

With Servius Tullius the plebeians entered into the existence of the city. They were admitted because Rome had become larger, because her ambitions were growing, because she laid claim to wider lands and because, in order to conquer them, she felt the need of increasing her army. Until that time only the gentes had carried arms, but their contingent was no longer sufficient. Only by calling upon the plebeians could they be adequately reinforced. The plebeians were enrolled, but they were thereby brought into the nation, for how and why should they defend it if they were to continue to be outcasts? Servius Tullius gave them a country to protect and the principle of the reforms associated with his name lies in this fact; moreover he ingeniously arranged his system so that the poor should not be tempted to reverse the existing political organization. All the inhabitants of Rome were distributed among four “tribes” and birth ceased to be the only sign of distinction. Nor was religion any longer the essential test in dividing mankind into classes. Nevertheless, men without estates or flocks were regarded with suspicion and the aristocracy of wealth which furnished the cavalry and the most completely equipped soldiers remained in possession of public authority. The few plebeians who had succeeded in amassing wealth entered this plutocracy on an equality with the heads of the gentes. The organization—particularly the military organization—which Servius introduced gave the State a new political system constructed on similar lines.

It would perhaps be more correct to say that the military organization gradually grew into a political one. According to Livy the citizens—to the number of 80,000—were divided not only into four tribes according to their domicile, but into seven categories according to the value of their property: the equites first and the common people last, the intervening classes being divided into five representing the owners of land valued respectively at 100,000, 75,000, 50,000, 25,000 and 11,000 “asses”, and it should be noted that historians in converting these figures into modern equivalents are far from arriving at the same results. Mommsen regards 11,000 asses as corresponding to forty pounds sterling and Belot puts the figure as high as £224. We can, in any case, state with certitude that Servius drew up a hierarchy of wealth, and that he gave the highest position to those who had most. Of this army transformed into a political assembly, the equites and the first class together, with their subdivisions into eighteen and eighty centuries respectively, disposed of ninety-eight votes whilst the other classes and the common people, with its single vote, were reduced to a total of 95.

The numerous researches which have been made into the constitution of Servius have not succeeded in elucidating all the details. They have however made clear to us that Rome was far from being democratically...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Ancient Rome at Work
• The History of Civilization
• Original Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I From the origins to the punic wars 264 To B.C.753
• Part II From the punic wars to the empire 264–30 B.C.
• Part III The empire
• Bibliography
• Index 1: subjects
• Index 2: persons and places