ROMAN ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

By singling out one set of the forces of aggregation and disintegration touched on in the foregoing general view, it is possible to get a more concrete idea of what actually went on in the Roman body politic. It is always useful in economic science, despite protests to the contrary, to consider bare processes irrespectively of ethical feeling; and the advantage accrues similarly in the "economic interpretation of history."[160] We have sufficiently for our purpose considered Roman history under the aspects of militarism and class egoism: it remains to consider it as a series of economic phenomena.

As we have first traced them, the Romans are a cluster of agricultural and pastoral tribes, chronically at war with their neighbours, and centring round certain refuge-fortresses on one or two of the "Seven Hills." Whether before or after conquest by monarchic Etruscans, these tribes tended normally to fall into social grades in which relative wealth and power tended to go together. The first source of subsistence for all was cattle-breeding and agriculture, and that of the richer was primarily slave labour, a secondary source being usury. Slaves there were in the earliest historic times. But from the earliest stages wealth was in some degree procured through war, which yielded plunder in the form of cattle,[161] the principal species of riches in the ages before the precious metals stood for the command of all forms of wealth. Thus the rich tended to grow richer even in that primitive community, their riches enabling them specially to qualify themselves for war, so getting more slaves and cattle, and to acquire fresh slave labour in time of peace, while in time of war the poor cultivator ran a special risk of being himself reduced to slavery at home, in that his farm was untilled, while that of the slave-owner went on as usual.[162] Long before the ages described as decadent, the lapse of the poor into slavery was a frequent event. "The law of debt, framed by creditors, and for the protection of creditors, was the most horrible that has ever been known among men."[163] When the poorer cultivator borrowed stock or seed from the richer, he had first to pay a heavy interest; and when in bad years he failed to meet that liability he could be at once sold up and finally enslaved with his family, so making competition all the harder for the other small cultivators. As against the plainly disintegrating action of such a system, however, wars of conquest and plunder became to some extent a means of popular salvation, the poorer having ultimately their necessary share in the booty, and, as the State grew, in the conquered lands. Military expansion was thus an economic need.

In such an inland community, commerce could grow but slowly, the products being little adapted for distant exchange. The primitive prejudice of landholders against trade, common to Greece and Rome, left both handicraft and commerce largely to aliens and pariahs.[164] The traders, as apart from the agriculturists and vine-and olive-growers, would as a rule be foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political rights; and their calling was from the first held in low esteem by the richer natives, were it only because in comparison it was always apt to involve some overreaching of the agriculturist,[165] which as between man and man could be seen to be a bad thing by moralists who had no scruples about usury and enslavement for debt. And as the scope of the State increased from age to age, the patrician class found ready to its hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less trouble than was involved in commerce. The prejudice against trade was no bar to brigandage.

On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities, taxation, was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the outset. The payment of the tributum or occasional special tax for military purposes was a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far the patricians were all burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were not. But this contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was repaid when the times improved."[166] And there were other compensations. The use of the public pastures (which seem at one time to have been the sole source of the State's revenue[167]), and the cultivation of public land, were operations which could be so conducted as to pay the individual without paying the State. It is clear that frauds in this connection were at all times common: the tithes and rents due on the ager publicus were evaded, and the land itself appropriated wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called public property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have conquered lands divided, and not kept as ager publicus; while the landless men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard their migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they argued, had not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and treated the lands which they leased at a nominal rental as their own, there would have been enough land at home to divide among those who had been ruined while serving their country in arms."[169]

But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it could still be made ager publicus and rented to its own inhabitants; and the collection of this and other exactions from subject provinces gradually grew to be a main source of Roman wealth. For the mere cattle-looting of the early days there was substituted the systematic extortion of tribute. "In antiquity conquest meant essentially the power to impose a tribute upon the conquered";[170] and "until the time of Augustus the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and squandering the accumulated [bullion] capital hoarded by all the nations of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper classes were directly or indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the time of the conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus Emilius brought from the sack of Hellas so enormous a treasure in bullion, as well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the tributum from Roman citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and henceforth, until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy sponged undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] CÆsar's expeditions were simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason for his speedy retreat from Britain, for which there have been framed so many superfluous explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero in which he tells of the news sent him from Britain by his brother—"no hope of plunder."[173] But the supreme need was a regular annual tribute, preferably in bullion, but welcome as corn. On the one hand the exacted revenue supported the military and the bureaucracy; on the other hand, the business of collecting taxes and tribute was farmed out in the hands of companies of publicani, mainly formed of the so-called knights, the equites of the early days; in whose hands rich senators, in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital sums for investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were free to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman administration was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in the interest of the Roman moneyed classes;[176] and the ruthless skill with which the possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps even now not fully realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute upon tribute by lending to a subject city or State the money demanded of it by the government, and charge as much interest on the loan as the borrowers could well pay. We know that the notoriously conscientious Brutus, of sacred memory, thus lent, or backed a friend who lent, money to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or at least demanded 48 per cent. on his loans, and sought to use the power of the executive to extort the usury.[177]

All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious, of agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale turning of arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives followed, though the rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece. But Italy had ceased to be self-supporting. The produce she imported was far in excess of her power of export;[178] so that in sheer factitiousness the revenue of Rome is without parallel in history. Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its coal in manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a share in the national and municipal debts of all other countries—England is stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures, which also earn imports and constitute loans. So with the recent exploitation of German iron; though in that case there has been much of sheer national waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping" prices in times of trade depression. But the history of Rome was a progressive paralysis of Italian production; and the one way in which the administration can be said to have counteracted the process—as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and olive-culture and to slave manufactures—was by forcing more-or-less unprofitable mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus giving what stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh bullion on the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to an illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to standfor public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for tribute, Spain in particular being prized for her mining resources. As a necessary sequence, therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C. 269), and silver finally, after a long transition period, by gold, about the time of Severus.[179] The silver had been repeatedly debased when the treasury was in difficulties;[180] and in the later days of the Empire it seems to have been base beyond all historic parallel,[181] though a large revenue was extorted till the end. Between revenue and tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the Roman moneyed class must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the tributaries were not exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for—(a) foods, spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by the more prosperous provinces; (b) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl, raised chiefly on the estates run by their own class; (c) some wares of home production; and (d) services[182] from artists, architects, master craftsmen, slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose economic demand in turn would as far as possible go in the same directions.

As for the mass of the town people, slave or free, which ought on common-sense principles to have been employed either in industry or on the land, it was by a series of hand-to-mouth measures on the part of the government, and by the operation of ordinary self-interest on the part of the rich class, made age by age more unproductive industrially and more worthless politically. Despite such a reform as the Licinian law of 367 B.C.,[183] which for a time seems to have restored a yeoman class to the State and greatly developed its fighting power, the forces of outside competition and of capitalism gradually ousted the yeomen cultivators all over Italy, leaving the land mainly in the hands of the patricians and financiers of the city, who exploited it either by slave labour or by grinding down the former cultivators as tenants. Even on this footing, a certain amount of industry would be forced on the towns. But not only was that also largely in the hands of slave-masters, with the result that demotic life everywhere was kept on the lowest possible plane: the emperors gradually adopted on humane grounds a policy which demoralised nearly all that was left of sound citizenship.

As of old, monarchy in the hands of the more rational and conscientious men tended to seek for the mass of the people some protection as against the upper class; and the taxes and customs laid on by Augustus, to the disgust of the Senate, were an effort in this direction. But this was rather negative than positive protection, and the effort inevitably went further. In the last rally of what may be termed conscientious aristocratic republicanism, such as it was, we find Caius Gracchus, as tribune, helping the plebs by causing grain to be sold at a half or a fourth of its market value—an expedient pathetically expressive of the hopeless distance that then lay between public spirit and social science. Both of the Gracchi sought by violent legal measures to wring the appropriated public lands from the hands of the rich, with the inevitable result of raising against themselves a host of powerful enemies. The needed change could not be so effected. But even if it had been, it could not have endured. The Greek advisers of Tiberius Gracchus, Blossius of CumÆ and Diophanes of Mitylene,[184] looked solely to redistribution, taking for granted the permanence of slavery, the deadliest of all inequalities. The one way, if there were any, in which the people could be saved was by a raising of their social status; and that was impossible without an arrest of slavery and a cessation of extorted tribute. But no Roman thinker save the Gracchi and their predecessors and imitators seems ever to have dreamt of the former, and no one contemplated the latter remedy. Least of all were the Roman ruling class likely to think of either; and though Tiberius Gracchus did avowedly seek to substitute free for slave labour,[185] and wrought to that end; and though Caius Gracchus did in his time of power employ a large amount of free labour on public works, one such effort counted for nothing against the normal attitude of the patriciate. In order to fight the Senate he had to conciliate the publicani and money-lenders as well as the populace, and the reforms of the two brothers came to nothing.[186]

There is no record that in the contracts between the treasury and the companies of publicani any stipulation was ever made as to their employing free labour, or in any way considering the special needs of the populations among whom they acted.[187] Thus a mere cheapening of bread could do nothing to aid free labour as against capitalism using slaves. On the contrary, such aids would tend irresistibly to multiply the host of idlers and broken men who flocked to Rome from all its provinces, on the trail of the plunder. Industrial life in Rome was for most of them impossible, even were they that way inclined;[188] and the unceasing inward flow would have been a constant source of public danger had the multitude not been somehow pacified. The method of free or subsidised distribution of grain,[189] however, was so easy a way of keeping Rome quiet, in the period of rapidly spreading conquest and mounting tribute, that in spite of the resistance of the moneyed classes[190] it was adhered to. Sulla naturally checked the practice, but still it was revived; and CÆsar, after his triumph in Africa, found the incredible number of 320,000 citizens in receipt of regular doles of cheapened or gratis corn. He in turn, though he had been concerned in extending it,[191] took strong measures to check the corrosion, reducing the roll to 150,000;[192] but even that was in effect a confession that the problem was past solution by the policy, so energetically followed by him, of re-colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul. And if CÆsar sought to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have outgone his predecessors in his provision of the other element in the popular ideal—the circus; his shows being bloodier as well as vaster than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus treated to sport must needs have cheap food as well.

Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the depression of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or given away by the administration was of course bought or taken in the cheapest markets—those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and Gaul—and importation once begun would be carried to the utmost lengths of commercialism. Italian farms, especially those at a distance from the capital,[194] could not compete with the provinces save by still further substituting large slave-tilled farms for small holdings, and grinding still harder the face of the slave. When finally Augustus,[195] definitely establishing the system of lowered prices and doles, subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed his populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the cheapest foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and even of parts of some provinces, was practically destroyed.

It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196] the latifundia, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin the provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces, notably Sicily, undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged competition of Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African provinces, undersold the produce of most of the other regions, and would have done so equally had their agriculture remained in the hands of small farmers. The latifundia were themselves effects of the policy of conquest and annexation. The theory that "those large pastoral estates, and that slave-cultivation, which had so powerful and so deleterious an influence over Italian husbandry and population, may be principally ascribed to the confiscations and the military colonies of Sulla and his successors," is clearly wide of the mark.

Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time of Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage, where they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to have hurt agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the other hand, the Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to restore a free farming population. In Italy the disease was older than Sulla. When Tiberius Gracchus was passing through Etruria on his way from Spain, fifty years before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free labourers, but only slaves in chains.[199] The true account of the matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their competition could not have come to pass as it did; for any imports in that case would have had to be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing adequate to export. It was the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the appropriation of conquered territory as estates by the nobles,[200] that upset the economic balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or free food—which was extended to other large Italian cities—but because corn was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the tribute came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came in bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on farming at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula was thus finally a mere shell, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more and more strictly factitious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire, as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the upper classes had done; and though their popular measures must have exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]

We may perhaps better understand the case by supposing a certain economic development to take place in England in the distant future. At present we remain, as we are likely long to remain, economically advantaged or beneficed for manufacture by our coalfields, which are unequalled in Europe, though Germany, through the invention which made her phosphoric iron workable, has a larger store of the chief industrial metal. In return for our coal and manufactures and our shipping services, we import foods and goods that otherwise we could not pay for; and the additional revenue from British investments in foreign debts and enterprises further swells the food and raw material import, thus depressing to a considerable extent our agriculture under a system of large farms. When in the course of centuries the coalfields are exhausted, unless it should be found that the winds and tides can be made to yield electric power cheaply enough, our manufacturing population will probably dwindle. Either the United States will supersede us with their stores of coal, or—if, as may well be, their stores are already exhausted by a vaster exploitation—China may take the lead. The chief advantage left us would be the skill and efficiency of our industrial population—an important but incalculable factor.[205] A "return to the land," if not achieved beforehand, might in that case be assumed to be inevitable; but should Australian, Indian, and North and South American wheat-production continue (as it may or may not) to have the same relative advantages of soil, our remaining city populations would continue to buy foreign corn; and the land might still be largely turned to pasture. That remaining city population, roughly speaking, would in the terms of the case consist of (a) those persons drawing incomes from foreign investments; (b) those workmen, tradesmen, and professional people who could still be successfully employed in manufactures, or whom the interest-drawing classes employed to do their necessary home-work, as the Romans perforce employed to the last many workmen and doctors and scribes, slave or free; (c) those who might earn incomes by seafaring; and (d) the official class—necessarily reduced, like every other. Until the incomes from foreign investments had in some measure disappeared, the country could not gravitate down to an economically stable recommencement in agriculture.

We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is exhausted the whole social structure will be modified; and it is conceivable that the idle class may have been eliminated. But we are supposing a less progressive evolution for illustration's sake. Suffice it that such a development would be in a measure economically analogous to what took place in ancient Rome. If the upper-class population of such a hypothetical future in England, instead of receiving only dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from the revenue of India, were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and other dominions, the parallel would be so much the closer. What held together the Roman Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed military and juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the other hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or an Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage. As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political anÆmia; and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all its burden of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though precarious ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare, at least for men who had lost the spirit of reasoned political self-assertion.

Under good emperors, the system worked imposingly enough; and Mommsen, echoing Gibbon, not unwarrantably bids us ask ourselves whether the south of Europe has ever since been better governed than it was under the Antonines.[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by governors under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure restricted. But, to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the economic evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors and bad, and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten society. So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian life; but when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all its classes, taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were in the terms of the case as Roman as the capital; and there was no special reason, save the principle of concentration, why the later emperors should reside there. Where of old the provincial governors had extorted from their subjects fortunes for themselves, to be spent in Rome like the public tribute, they would now tend to act as permanent dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the palace was set up elsewhere, the accessories of administration inevitably followed; and the transference of official and other population would partly balance the restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian corn-tribute to Constantinople—a loss that had to be made good by a drain on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens the Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose main source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into financial straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his reign three costly wars—one to recover Britain, one to repel the Alemanni from Gaul, one to recover Africa from Firmus; and it was apparently the drain on revenue thus set up, aggravated by an African famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his accession to the step of confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So great was the State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore the pagan revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military; and we shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval Italy, the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while Italy thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be less impoverished.

Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian soil, always considerable. The three temples to the Goddess Fever in Rome were the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every overflow of the Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the land. But when the great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous area was in constant process of reduction by agriculture and drainage; and the inhabitants had become in large part immune to infection.[212] In the early, the "Social" and the later civil wars it was devastated and depopulated to such an extent that Pliny[213] could enumerate fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples," and could cite the record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now were the Pontine marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216] but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest was a twofold process, direct and indirect.

In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a leprosy. Thus CÆsar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the "principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.

[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]