Rome During the Later Republic (Serapis Classics)

A. H. J. Greenridge

• Publisher: Serapis Classics
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783963134463
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

The period of Roman history on which we now enter is, like so many that had preceded it, a period of revolt, directly aimed against the existing conditions of society and, through the means taken to satisfy the fresh wants and to alleviate the suddenly realised, if not suddenly created, miseries of the time, indirectly affecting the structure of the body politic. The difference between the social movement of the present and that of the past may be justly described as one of degree, in so far as there was not a single element of discontent visible in the revolution commencing with the Gracchi and ending with Caesar that had not been present in the earlier epochs of social and political agitation...

CHAPTER I

The period of Roman history on which we now enter is, like so many that had preceded it, a period of revolt, directly aimed against the existing conditions of society and, through the means taken to satisfy the fresh wants and to alleviate the suddenly realised, if not suddenly created, miseries of the time, indirectly affecting the structure of the body politic. The difference between the social movement of the present and that of the past may be justly described as one of degree, in so far as there was not a single element of discontent visible in the revolution commencing with the Gracchi and ending with Caesar that had not been present in the earlier epochs of social and political agitation. The burden of military service, the curse of debt, the poverty of an agrarian proletariate, the hunger for land, the striving of the artisan and the merchant after better conditions of labour and of trade—the separate cries of discontent that find their unison in a protest against the monopoly of office and the narrow or selfish rule of a dominant class, and thus gain a significance as much political as social—all these plaints had filled the air at the time when Caius Licinius near the middle of the fourth century, and Appius Claudius at its close, evolved their projects of reform. The cycle of a nation's history can indeed never be broken as long as the character of the nation remains the same. And the average Roman of the middle of the second century before our era[1] was in all essential particulars the Roman of the times of Appius and of Licinius, or even of the epoch when the ten commissioners had published the Tables which were to stamp its perpetual character on Roman law. He was in his business relations either oppressor or oppressed, either hammer or anvil. In his private life he was an individualist whose sympathies were limited to the narrow circle of his dependants; he was a trader and a financier whose humanitarian instincts were subordinated to a code of purely commercial morality, and who valued equity chiefly because it presented the line of least resistance and facilitated the conduct of his industrial operations. Like all individualists, he was something of an anarchist, filled with the idea, which appeared on every page of the record of his ancestors and the history of his State, that self-help was the divinely given means of securing right, that true social order was the issue of conflicting claims pushed to their breaking point until a temporary compromise was agreed on by the weary combatants; but he was hampered in his democratic leanings by the knowledge that democracy is the fruit of individual self-restraint and subordination to the common will—qualities of which he could not boast and symbols of a prize which he would not have cared to attain at the expense of his peculiar ideas of personal freedom—and he was forced, in consequence of this abnegation, to submit to an executive government as strong, one might almost say as tyrannous, as any which a Republic has ever displayed—a government which was a product of the restless spirit of self-assertion and self-aggrandisement which the Roman felt in himself, and therefore had sufficient reason to suspect in others.

The Roman was the same; but his environment had changed more startlingly during the last fifty or sixty years than in all the centuries that had preceded them in the history of the Republic. The conquest of Italy had, it Is true, given to his city much that was new and fruitful in the domains of religion, of art, of commerce and of law. Bat these accretions merely entailed the fuller realisation of a tendency which had been marked from the earliest stage of Republican history—the tendency to fit isolated elements in the marvellous discoveries made by the heaven-gifted race of the Greeks into a framework that was thoroughly national and Roman. Ideas had been borrowed, and these ideas certainly resulted in increased efficiency and therefore in increased wealth. But the gross material of Hellenism, whether as realised in intellectual ideas or (the prize that appealed more immediately to the practical Roman with his concrete mind) in tangible things, had not been seized as a whole as the reward of victory: and no great attempt had been made in former ages to assimilate the one or to enjoy the other. The nature of the material rewards which had been secured by the epochs of Italian conquest had indeed made such assimilation or enjoyment impossible. They would have been practicable only in a state which possessed a fairly complete urban life; and the effect of the wars which Rome waged with her neighbours in the peninsula had been to make the life of the average citizen more purely agricultural than it had been in the early Republic, perhaps even in the epoch of the Kings. The course of a nation's political, social and intellectual history is determined very largely by the methods which it adopts for its own expansion at the inevitable moment when its original limits are found to be too narrow to satisfy even the most modest needs of a growing population. The method chosen will depend chiefly on geographical circumstances and on the military characteristics of the people which are indissolubly connected with these. When the city of Old Greece began to feel the strength of its growing manhood, and the developing hunger which was both the sign and the source of that strength, it looked askance at the mountain line which cut it off from the inland regions, it turned hopeful eyes on the sea that sparkled along its coasts; it manned its ships and sent its restless youth to a new and distant home which was but a replica of the old. The results of this maritime adventure were the glories of urban life and the all-embracing sweep of Hellenism. The progress of Roman enterprise had been very different. Following the example of all conquering Italian peoples,[2] and especially of the Sabellian invaders whose movements immediately preceded their own, the Romans adopted the course of inland expansion, and such urban unity as they had possessed was dissipated over the vast tract of territory on which the legions were settled, or to which the noble sent his armed retainers, nominally to keep the land as the public domain of Rome, in reality to hold it for himself and his descendants. At a given moment (which is as clearly marked in Roman as in Hellenic history) the possibility of such expansion ceased, and the necessity for its cessation was as fully exhibited in the policy of the government as in the tastes of the people. No Latin colony had been planted later than the year 181, no Roman colony later than 157,[3] and the senate showed no inclination to renew schemes for the further assignment of territory amongst the people. There were many reasons for this indifference to colonial enterprise. In the first place, although colonisation had always been a relief to the proletariate and one of the means regularly adopted by those in power for assuaging its dangerous discontent, yet the government had always regarded the social aspect of this method of expansion as subservient to the strategic.[4] This strategic motive no longer existed, and a short-sighted policy, which looked to the present, not to the future, to men of the existing generation and not to their sons, may easily have held that a colony, which was not needed for the protection of the district in which it was settled, injuriously affected the fighting-strength of Rome. The maritime colonies which had been established from the end of the great Latin war down to the close of the second struggle with Carthage claimed, at least in many cases, exemption from military service,[5] and a tradition of this kind tends to linger when its justification is a thing of the past. But, even if such a view could be repudiated by the government, it was certain that the levy became a more serious business the greater the number of communities on which the recruiting commander had to call, and it was equally manifest that the veteran who had just been given an allotment on which to establish his household gods might be inclined to give a tardy response to the call to arms. The Latin colony seemed a still greater anachronism than the military colony of citizens. The member of such a community, although the state which he entered enjoyed large privileges of autonomy, ceased to be a Roman citizen in respect to political rights, and even at a time when self-government had been valued almost more than citizenship, the government had only been able to carry out its project of pushing these half-independent settlements into the heart of Italy by threatening with a pecuniary penalty the soldier who preferred his rights as a citizen to the benefits which he might receive as an emigrant.[6] Now that the great wars had brought their dubious but at least potential profits to every member of the Roman community, and the gulf between the full citizens and the members of the allied communities was ever widening, it was more than doubtful whether a member of the former class, however desperate his plight, would readily condescend to enroll himself amongst the latter. But, even apart from these considerations, it must have seemed very questionable to any one, who held the traditional view that colonisation should subserve the purposes of the State, whether the landless citizen of the time could be trusted to fulfil his duties as an emigrant. As early as the year 186 the consul Spurius Postumius, while making a judicial tour in Italy, had found to his surprise that colonies on both the Italian coasts, Sipontum on the Upper, and Buxentum on the Lower Sea, had been abandoned by their inhabitants: and a new levy had to be set on foot to replace the faithless emigrants who had vanished into space.[7] As time went on the risk of such desertion became greater, partly from the growing difficulty of maintaining an adequate living on the land, partly from the fact that the more energetic spirits, on whom alone the hopes of permanent settlement could depend, found a readier avenue to wealth and a more tempting sphere for the exercise of manly qualities in the attractions of a campaign that seemed to promise plunder and glory, especially when these prizes were accompanied by no exorbitant amount of suffering or toil. Thus when it had become known that Scipio Africanus would accompany his brother in the expedition against Antiochus, five thousand veterans, both citizens and allies, who had served their full time under the command of the former, offered their voluntary services to the departing consul,[8] and nineteen' years later the experience which had been gained of the wealth that might be reaped from a campaign in Macedonia and Asia drew many willing recruits to the legions which were to be engaged in the struggle with Perseus.[9] The semi-professional soldier was in fact springing up, the man of a spirit adventurous and restless such as did not promise contentment with the small interests and small rewards of life in an Italian outpost. But, if the days of formal colonisation were over, why might not the concurrent system be adopted of dividing conquered lands amongst poorer citizens without the establishment of a new political settlement or any strict limitation of the number of the recipients? This 'viritane' assignation had always run parallel to that which assumed the form of colonisation; it merely required the existence of land capable of distribution, and the allotments granted might be considered merely a means of affording relief to the poorer members of existing municipalities. The system was supposed to have existed from the times of the Kings; it was believed to have formed the basis of the first agrarian law, that of Spurius Cassius in 486;[10] it had been employed after the conquest of the Volscians in the fourth century and that of the Sabines in the third;[11] it had animated the agrarian legislation of Flaminius when in 232 he romanised the ager Gallicus south of Ariminum without planting a single colony in this region;[12] and a date preceding the Gracchan legislation by only forty years had seen the resumption of the method, when some Gallic and Ligurian land, held to be the spoil of war and declared to be unoccupied, had been parcelled out into allotments, of ten jugera to Roman citizens and of three to members of the Latin name.[13] But to the government of the period with which we are concerned the continued pursuance of such a course, if it suggested itself at all, appealed in the light of a policy that was unfamiliar, difficult and objectionable. It is probable that this method of assignment, even in its later phases, had been tinctured with the belief that, like the colony, it secured a system of military control over the occupied district: and that the purely social object of land-distribution, if it had been advanced at all, was considered to be characteristic rather of the demagogue than the statesman. From a strategic point of view such a measure was unnecessary; from an economic, it assumed, not only a craving for allotments amongst the poorer class, of which there was perhaps little evidence, but a belief, which must have been held to be sanguine in the extreme, that these paupers, when provided for, would prove to be efficient farmers capable of maintaining a position which many of them had already lost. Again, if such an assignment was to be made, it should be made on land immediately after it had passed from the possession of the enemy to that of Rome; if time had elapsed since the date of annexation, it was almost certain that claims of some kind had been asserted over the territory, and shadowy as these claims might be, the Roman law had, in the interest of the State itself, always tended to recognise a de facto as a de jure right. The claims of the allies and the municipalities had also to be considered; for assignments to Roman citizens on an extensive scale would inevitably lead to difficult questions about the rights which many of these townships actually possessed to much of the territory whose revenue they enjoyed. If the allies and the municipal towns did not suffer, the loss must fall on the Roman State itself, which derived one of its chief sources of stable and permanent revenue—the source which was supposed to meet the claims for Italian administration[14]—from its domains in Italy, on the contractors who collected this revenue, and on the Enterprising capitalists who had put their wealth and energy into the waste places to which they had been invited by the government, and who had given these devastated territories much of the value which they now possessed. Lastly, these enterprising possessors were strongly represented in the senate; the leading members of the nobility had embarked on a new system of agriculture, the results of which were inimical to the interest of the small farmer, and the conditions of which would be undermined by a vast system of distribution such as could alone suffice to satisfy the pauper proletariate. The feeling that a future agrarian law was useless from an economic and dangerous from a political point of view, was strengthened by the conviction that its proposal would initiate a war amongst classes, that its failure would exasperate the commons and that its success would inflict heavy pecuniary damage on the guardians of the State.

Thus the simple system of territorial expansion, which had continued in an uninterrupted course from the earliest days of conquest, might be now held to be closed for ever. From the point of view of the Italian neighbours of Rome it was indeed ample time that such a closing period should be reached. If we possessed a map of Italy which showed the relative proportions of land in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul which had been seized by Rome or left to the native cities or tribes, we should probably find that the possessions of the conquering State, whether occupied by colonies, absorbed by the gift of citizenship, or held as public domain, amounted to nearly one half of the territory of the whole peninsula.[15] The extension of such progress was clearly impossible unless war were to be provoked with the Confederacy which furnished so large a proportion of the fighting strength of Rome; but, if it was confessed that extension on the old lines was now beyond reach of attainment and yet it was agreed that the existing resources of Italy did not furnish an adequate livelihood to the majority of the citizens of Rome, but two methods of expansion could be thought of as practicable in the future. One was agrarian assignation at the expense either of the State or of the richer classes or of both; the other was enterprise beyond the sea. But neither of these seemed to deserve government intervention, or regulation by a scheme which would satisfy either immediate or future wants. The one was repudiated, as we have already shown, on account of its novelty, its danger and its inconvenience; the other seemed emphatically a matter for private enterprise and above all for private capital. It could never be available for the very poor unless it assumed the form of colonisation, and the senate looked on transmarine colonisation with the eye of prejudice.[16] It took a different view of the enterprise of the foreign speculator and merchant; this it regarded with an air of easy indifference. Their wealth was a pillar on which the State might lean in times of emergency, but, until the disastrous effects of commercial enterprise on foreign policy were more clearly seen, it was considered to be no business of the government either to help or to hinder the wealthy and enterprising Roman in his dealings with the peoples of the subject or protected lands.

Rome, if by this name we mean the great majority of Roman citizens, was for the first time for centuries in a situation in which all movement and all progress seemed to be denied. The force of the community seemed to have spent itself for the time; as a force proceeding from the whole community it had perhaps spent itself for ever. A section of the nominally sovereign people might yet be welded into a mighty instrument that would carry victory to the ends of the earth, and open new channels of enterprise both for the men who guided their movements and for themselves. But for the moment the State was thrown back upon itself; it held that an end had been attained, and the attainment naturally suggested a pause, a long survey of the results which had been reached by these long years of struggle with the hydra-headed enemy abroad. The close of the third Macedonian war is said by a contemporary to have brought with it a restful sense of security such as Rome could not have felt for centuries.[17] Such a security gave scope to the rich to enjoy the material advantages which their power had acquired; but it also gave scope to the poor to reflect on the strange harvest which the conquest of the great powers of the world had brought to the men whose stubborn patience had secured the peace which they were given neither the means nor the leisure to enjoy. The men who evaded or had completed their service in the legions lacked the means, although they had the leisure; the men who still obeyed the summons to arms lacked both, unless the respite between prolonged campaigns could be called leisure, or the booty, hardly won and quickly squandered, could be described as means. Even after Carthage had been destroyed Rome, though doubly safe, was still busy enough with her legions; the government of Spain was one protracted war, and proconsuls were still striving to win triumphs for themselves by improving on their predecessors' work.[18] But such war could not absorb the energy or stimulate the interest of the people as a whole. The reaction which had so often followed a successful campaign, when the discipline of the camp had been shaken off and the duties of the soldier were replaced by the wants of the citizen, was renewed on a scale infinitely larger than before—a scale proportioned to the magnitude of the strain which had been removed and the greatness of the wants which had been revived. The cries for reform may have been of the old familiar type but their increased intensity and variety may almost be held to have given them a difference of quality. There is a stage at which a difference of degree seems to amount to one of kind: and this stage seems certainly to have been reached in the social problems presented by the times. In the old days of the struggle between the orders the question of privilege had sometimes overshadowed the purely economic issue, and although a close scrutiny of those days of turmoil shows that the dominant note in the conflict was often a mere pretext meant to serve the personal ambition of the champions of the Plebs, yet the appearance rather than the reality of an issue imposes on the imagination of the mob, and political emancipation had been thought a boon even when hard facts had shown that its greater prizes had fallen to a small and selfish minority. Now, however, there could be no illusion. There was nothing but material wants on one side, there was nothing but material power on the other. The intellectual claims which might be advanced to justify a monopoly of office and of wealth, could be met by an intellectual superiority on the part of a demagogue clamouring for confiscation. The ultimate basis of the life of the State was for the first time to be laid bare and subjected to a merciless scrutiny; it remained to be seen which of the two great forces of society would prevail; the force of habit which had so often blinded the Roman to his real needs; or the force of want which, because it so seldom won a victory over his innate conservatism, was wont, when that victory had been won, to sweep him farther on the path of reckless and inconsistent reform than it would have carried a race better endowed with the gift of testing at every stage of progress the ends and needs of the social organism considered as a whole.

An analysis of social discontent at any period of history must take the form of an examination of the wants engendered by the age, and of the adequacy or inadequacy of their means of satisfaction. If we turn our attention first to the forces of society which were in possession of the fortress and were to be the object of attack, we shall find that the ruling desires which animated these men of wealth and influence were chiefly the product of the new cosmopolitan culture which the victorious city had begun to absorb in the days when conquest and diplomacy had first been carried across the seas. To this she fell a willing victim when the conquered peoples, bending before the rude force which had but substituted a new suzerainty for an old and had scarcely touched their inner life, began to display before the eyes of their astonished conquerors the material comfort and the spiritual charm which, in the case of the contact of a potent but narrow civilisation with one that is superbly elastic and strong in the very elegance of its physical debility, can always turn defeat into victory. But the student who begins his investigation of the new Roman life with the study of Roman society as it existed in the latter half of the second century before our era, cannot venture to gather up the threads of the purely intellectual and moral influences which were created by the new Hellenistic civilisation. He feels that he is only at the beginning of a process, that he lacks material for his picture, that the illustrative matter which he might employ is to be found mainly in the literary records of a later age, and that his use of this matter would but involve him in the historical sins of anticipation and anachronism. Of some phases of the war between the old spirit and the new we shall find occasion to speak; but the culminating point attained by the blend of Greek with Roman elements is the only one which is clearly visible to modern eyes. This point, however, was reached at the earliest only in the second half of the next century. It was only then that the fusion of the seemingly discordant elements gave birth to the new "Romanism," which was to be the ruling civilisation of Italy and the Western provinces and, in virtue of the completeness of the amalgamation and the novelty of the product, was itself to be contrasted and to live for centuries in friendly rivalry with the more uncompromising Hellenism of Eastern lands. But some of the economic effects of the new influences claim our immediate attention, for we are engaged in the study of the beginnings of an economic revolution, and an analysis must therefore be attempted of some of the most pressing needs and some of the keenest desires which were awakened by Hellenism, either in the purer dress which old Greece had given it or in the more gorgeous raiment which it had assumed during its sojourn in the East.

A tendency to treat the city as the home, the country only as a means of refreshment and a sphere of elegant retirement during that portion of the year when the excitement of the urban season, its business and its pleasure, were suspended, began to be a marked feature of the life of the upper classes. The man of affairs and the man of high finance were both compelled to have their domicile in the town, and, if agriculture was still the staple or the supplement of their wealth, the needs of the estate had to be left to the supervision of the resident bailiff.[19] This concentration of the upper classes in the city necessarily entailed a great advance in the price and rental of house property within the walls. It is true that the reckless prices paid for houses, especially for country villas, by the grandees and millionaires o...

Table of contents

• CHAPTER I
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• CHAPTER V
• CHAPTER VI
• CHAPTER VII
• CHAPTER VIII
• FOOTNOTES: