Bab Bab 1 · 德国故事

CHAPTER 1

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 of the next

generation,[20] had not yet been reached; but the indications with which

we are furnished of the general rise of prices for everything in Rome

that could be deemed desirable by a cultivated taste,[21] show that the

better class of house property must already have yielded large returns,

whether it were sold or let, and we know that poor scions of the

nobility, if business or pleasure induced them to spend a portion of the

year in Rome, had soon to climb the stairs of flats or lodgings.[22] The

pressure for room led to the piling of storey on storey. On The roof of

old houses new chambers were raised, which could be reached by an

outside stair, and either served to accommodate the increased retinue of

the town establishment or were let to strangers who possessed no

dwelling of their own;[23] the still larger lodging-houses or "islands,"

which derived their name from their lofty isolation from neighbouring

buildings,[24] continued to spring up, and even private houses soon came

to attain a height which had to be restrained by the intervention of the

law. An ex-consul and augur was called on by the censors of 125 to

explain the magnitude of a villa which he had raised, and the altitude

of the structure exposed him not only to the strictures of the guardians

of morals but to a fine imposed by a public court.[25] Great changes

were effected in the interior structure of the houses of the

wealthy--changes excused by a pardonable desire for greater comfort and

rendered necessary both by the growing formality of life and the large

increase in the numbers of the resident household, but tending, when

once adopted, to draw the father of the family into that most useless

type of extravagance which takes the form of a craze for building. The

Hall or Atrium had once been practically the house. It opened on the

street. It contained the family bed and the kitchen fire. The smoke

passed through a hole in the roof and begrimed the family portraits that

looked down on the members of the household gathered round the hearth

for their common meal. The Hall was the chief bedroom, the kitchen, the

dining-room and the reception room, and it was also the only avenue from

the street to the small courtyard at the back. The houses of the great

had hitherto differed from those of the poor chiefly in dimensions and

but very slightly in structure. The home of the wealthy patrician had

simply been on a larger scale of primitive discomfort; and if his large

parlour built of timber could accommodate a vast host of clients, the

bed and the cooking pots were still visible to every visitor. The chief

of the early innovations had been merely a low portico, borrowed from

the Greeks by the Etruscans and transmitted by them to Rome, which ran

round the courtyard, was divided into little cells and chambers, and

served to accommodate the servants of the house.[26] But now fashion

dictated that the doorway should not front the street but should be

parted from it by a vestibule, in which the early callers gathered

before they were admitted to the hall of audience. The floor of the

Atrium was no longer the common passage to the regions at the back, but

a special corridor lying either on one or on both sides of the Hall[27]

led past the Study or Tablinum, immediately behind it, to the inner

court beyond. Even the sanctity of the nuptial couch could not continue

to give it the publicity which was irksome to the taste of an age which

had acquired notions of the dignity of seclusion, of the comfort that

was to be found in retirement, and of the convenience of separating the

chambers that were used for public from those which were employed for

merely private purposes. The chief bedrooms were shifted to the back,

and the sides of the courtyard were no longer the exclusive abode of the

dependants of the household. The common hearth could no longer serve as

the sphere of the culinary operations of an expensive cook with his

retinue of menials; the cooking fire was removed to one of the rooms

near the back-gate of the house, which finally became an ample kitchen

replete with all the imported means of satisfying the growing luxury of

the table; and the member of the family loitering in the hall, or the

visitor admitted through its portals, was spared the annoyances of

strong smells and pungent smoke. The Roman family also discovered the

discomfort of dining in a large and scantily furnished room, not too

well lit and accessible to the intrusions of the chance domestic and the

caller. It was deemed preferable to take the common meal in a light and

airy upper chamber, and the new type of Coenaculum satisfied at once the

desire for personal comfort and for that specialisation in the use of

apartments which is one of the chief signs of an advancing material

civilisation. The great hall had become the show-room of the house, but

even for this purpose its dimensions proved too small. Such was the

quantity of curios and works of art collected by the conquering or

travelled Roman that greater space was needed for the exhibition of

their rarity or splendour. This space was gained by the removal from the

Atrium of all the domestic obstacles with which it had once been

cumbered. It might now be made slightly smaller in its proportion to the

rest of the house and yet appear far more ample than before. The space

by which its sides were diminished could now be utilised for the

building of two wings or Alae, which served the threefold purpose of

lighting the hall from the sides, of displaying to better advantage, as

an oblong chamber always does, the works of art which the lord of the

mansion or his butler[28] displayed to visitor or client, and lastly of

serving as a gallery for the family portraits, which were finally

removed from the Atrium, to be seen to greater advantage and in a better

light on the walls of the wings. These now displayed the family tree

through painted lines which connected the little shrines holding the

inscribed _imagines_ of the great ancestors of the house.[29] It is also

possible that the Alae served as rooms for more private audiences than

were possible in the Atrium.[30] From the early morning crowd which

thronged the hall individuals or groups might have been detached by the

butler, and led to the presence of the great statesman or pleader who

paced the floor in the retirement of one of these long side-galleries.

[31] Business of a yet more private kind was transacted in the still

greater security of the Tablinum, the archive room and study of the

house. Here were kept, not only the family records and the family

accounts, but such of the official registers and papers as a magistrate

needed to have at hand during his year of office.[32] The domestic

transaction of official business was very large at Rome, for the State

had given its administrators not even the skeleton of a civil service,

and it was in this room that the consul locked himself up with his

quaestor and his scribes, as it was here that, as a good head of the

family and a careful business man, he carefully perused the record of

income and expenditure, of gains and losses, with his skilled Greek

accountant.

The whole tendency of the reforms in domestic architecture was to

differentiate between the public and private life of the man of business

or affairs. His public activity was confined to the forepart of the

house; his repose, his domestic joys, and his private pleasures were

indulged in the buildings which lay behind the Atrium and its wings. As

each of the departments of life became more ambitious, the sphere for

the exercise of the one became more magnificent, and that which fostered

the other the scene of a more perfect, because more quiet, luxury. The

Atrium was soon to become a palatial hall adorned with marble

colonnades;[33] the small yard with its humble portico at the back was

to be transformed into the Greek Peristyle, a court open to the sky and

surrounded by columns, which enclosed a greenery of shrubs and trees and

an atmosphere cooled and freshened by the constant play of fountains.

The final form of the Roman house was an admirable type of the new

civilisation. It was Roman and yet Greek[34]--Roman in the grand front

that it, presented to the world, Greek in the quiet background of

thought and sentiment.

The growing splendour of the house demanded a number and variety in its

human servitors that had not been dreamed of in a simpler age. The slave

of the farm, with his hard hands and weather-beaten visage, could no

longer be brought by his elegant master to the town and exhibited to a

fastidious society as the type of servant that ministered to his daily

needs. The urban and rustic family were now kept wholly distinct; it was

only when some child of marked grace and beauty was born on the farm,

that it was transferred to the mansion as containing a promise that

would be wasted on rustic toil.[35] In every part of the establishment

the taste and wealth of the owner might be tested by the courtliness and

beauty of its living instruments. The chained dog at the gate had been

replaced by a human janitor, often himself in chains.[36] The visitor,

when he had passed the porter, was received by the butler in the hall,

and admitted to the master's presence by a series of footmen and ushers,

the show servants of the fore-part of the house, men of the impassive

dignity and obsequious repose that servitude but strengthens in the

Oriental mind.[37] In the penetralia of the household each need created

by the growing ideal of comfort and refinement required its separate

band of ministers. The body of the bather was rubbed and perfumed by

experts in the art; the service of the table was in the hands of men who

had made catering and the preparation of delicate viands the sole

business of their lives. The possession of a cook, who could answer to

the highest expectations of the age, was a prize beyond the reach of all

but the most wealthy; for such an expert the sum of four talents had to

be paid;[38] he was the prize of the millionaire, and families of more

moderate means, if they wished a banquet to be elegantly served, were

forced to hire the temporary services of an accomplished artist.[39] The

housekeeper,[40] who supervised the resources of the pantry, guided the

destinies of the dinner in concert with the _chef_; and each had under

him a crowd of assistants of varied names and carefully differentiated

functions.[41] The business of the outer world demanded another class of

servitors. There were special valets charged with the functions of

taking notes and invitations to their masters' friends; there was the

valued attendant of quick eye and ready memory, an incredibly rich

store-house of names and gossip, an impartial observer of the ways and

weaknesses of every class, who could inform his master of the name and

attributes of the approaching stranger. There were the lackeys who

formed the nucleus of the attendant retinue of clients for the man when

he walked abroad, the boys of exquisite form with slender limbs and

innocent faces, who were the attendant spirits of the lady as she passed

in her litter down the street. The muscles of the stouter slaves now

offered facilities for easy journeying that had been before unknown. The

Roman official need not sit his horse during the hot hours of the day as

he passed through the hamlets of Italy, and the grinning rustic could

ask, as he watched the solemn and noiseless transit of the bearers,

whether the carefully drawn curtains did not conceal a corpse.[42]

The internal luxury of the household was as fully exhibited in lifeless

objects as in living things. Rooms were scented with fragrant perfumes

and hung with tapestries of great price and varied bloom. Tables were

set with works of silver, ivory and other precious material, wrought

with the most delicate skill. Wine of moderate flavour was despised;

Falernian and Chian were the only brands that the true connoisseur would

deem worthy of his taste. A nice discrimination was made in the

qualities of the rarer kinds of fish, and other delicacies of the table

were sought in proportion to the difficulty of their attainment. The

fashions of dress followed the tendency of the age; the rarity of the

material, its fineness of texture, the ease which it gave to the body,

were the objects chiefly sought. Young men were seen in the Forum in

robes of a material as soft as that worn by women and almost transparent

in its thinness. Since all these instruments of pleasure, and the luxury

that appealed to ambition even more keenly than to taste, were pursued

with a ruinous competition, prices were forced up to an incredible

degree. An amphora of Falernian wine cost one hundred denarii, a jar of

Pontic salt-fish four hundred; a young Roman would often give a talent

for a favourite, and boys who ranked in the highest class for beauty of

face and elegance of form fetched even a higher price than this.[43] Few

could have been inclined to contradict Cato when he said in the

senate-house that Rome was the only city in the world where a jar of

preserved fish from the Black Sea cost more than a yoke of oxen, and a

boy-favourite fetched a higher price than a yeoman's farm.[44] One of

the great objects of social ambition was to have a heavier service of

silver-plate than was possessed by any of one's neighbours. In the good

old days,--days not so long past, but severed from the present by a gulf

that circumstances had made deeper than the years--the Roman had had an

official rather than a personal pride in the silver which he could

display before the respectful eyes of the distinguished foreigner who

was the guest of the State; and the Carthaginian envoys had been struck

by the similarity between the silver services which appeared at the

tables of their various hosts. The experience led them to a higher

estimate of Roman brotherhood than of Roman wealth, and the silver-plate

that had done such varied duty was at least responsible for a moral

triumph.[45] Only a few years before the commencement of the first war

with Carthage Rufinus a consular had been expelled from the senate for

having ten pounds of the wrought metal in his keeping,[46] and Scipio

Aemilianus, a man of the present age, but an adherent of the older

school, left but thirty-two pounds' weight to his heir. Less than forty

years later the younger Livius Drusus was known to be in possession of

plate that weighed ten thousand pounds,[47] and the accretions to the

primitive hoard which must have been made by but two or three members of

this family may serve as an index of the extent to which this particular

form of the passion for display had influenced the minds and practice of

the better-class Romans of the day.

There were other objects, valued for their intrinsic worth as much as

for the distinction conveyed by their possession, which attracted the

ambition and strained the revenues of the fashionable man. Works of art

must once have been cheap on the Roman market; for, even if we refuse to

credit the story of Mummius' estimate of the prize which fallen Corinth

had delivered into his hands,[48] yet the transhipment of cargoes of the

priceless treasures to Rome is at least an historic fact, and the

Gracchi must themselves have seen the trains of wagons bearing their

precious freight along the Via Sacra to the Capitol. The spoils of the

generous conqueror were lent to adorn the triumphs, the public buildings

and even the private houses, of others; but much that had been yielded

by Corinth had become the property neither of the general nor of the

State. Polybius had seen the Roman legionaries playing at draughts on

the Dionysus of Aristeides and many another famous canvas which had been

torn from its place and thrown as a carpet upon the ground;[49] but many

a camp follower must have had a better estimate of the material value of

the paintings of the Hellenic masters, and the cupidity of the Roman

collector must often have been satisfied at no great cost to his

resources. The extent to which a returning army could disseminate its

acquired tastes and distribute its captured goods had been shown some

forty years before the fall of Corinth when Manlius brought his legions

back from the first exploration of the rich cities of Asia. Things and

names, of which the Roman had never dreamed, soon gratified the eye and

struck the ear with a familiar sound. He learnt to love the bronze

couches meant for the dining hall, the slender side tables with the

strange foreign name, the delicate tissues woven to form the hangings of

the bed or litter, the notes struck from the psalter and the harp by the

fingers of the dancing-women of the East.[50] This was the first

irruption of the efflorescent luxury of Eastern Hellenism; but some

five-and-twenty years before this date Rome had received her first

experience of the purer taste of the Greek genius in the West. The whole

series of the acts of artistic vandalism which marked the footsteps of

the conquering state could be traced back to the measures taken by

Claudius Marcellus after the fall of Syracuse. The systematic plunder of

works of art was for the first time given an official sanction, and the

public edifices of Rome were by no means the sole beneficiaries of this

new interpretation of the rights of war. Much of the valuable plunder

had found its way into private houses,[51] to stimulate the envious

cupidity of many a future governor who, cursed with the taste of a

collector and unblessed by the opportunity of a war, would make subtle

raids on the artistic treasures of his province a secret article of his

administration. When the ruling classes of a nation have been

familiarised for the larger part of a century with the easy acquisition

of the best material treasures of the world, things that have once

seemed luxuries come to fill an easy place in the category of accepted

wants. But the sudden supply has stopped; the market value, which

plunder has destroyed or lessened, has risen to its normal level;

another burden has been added to life, there is one further stimulus to

wealth and, so pressing is the social need, that the means to its

satisfaction are not likely to be too diligently scrutinised before they

are adopted.

More pardonable were the tastes that were associated with the more

purely intellectual elements in Hellenic culture--with the influence

which the Greek rhetor or philosopher exercised in his converse with the

stern but receptive minds of Rome, the love of books, the new lessons

which were to be taught as to the rhythmic flow of language and the

rhythmic movement of the limbs. The Greek adventurer was one of the most

striking features of the epoch which immediately followed the close of

the great wars. Later thinkers, generally of the resentfully national,

academic and pseudo-historical type, who repudiated the amenities of

life which they continued to enjoy, and cherished the pleasing fiction

of the exemplary _mores_ of the ancient times, could see little in him

but a source of unmixed evil;[52] and indeed the Oriental Greek of the

commoner type, let loose upon the society of the poorer quarters, or

worming his way into the confidence of some rich but uneducated master,

must often have been the vehicle of lessons that would better have been

unlearnt. But Italy also saw the advent of the best professors of the

age, golden-mouthed men who spoke in the language of poetry, rhetoric

and philosophy, and who turned from the wearisome competition of their

own circles and the barren fields of their former labours to find a

flattering attention, a pleasing dignity, and the means of enjoying a

full, peaceful and leisured life in the homes of Roman aristocrats,

thirsting for knowledge and thirsting still more for the mastery of the

unrivalled forms in which their own deeds might be preserved and through

which their own political and forensic triumphs might be won. Soon towns

of Italy--especially those of the Hellenic South--would be vying with

each other to grant the freedom of their cities and other honours in

their gift to a young emigrant poet who hailed from Antioch, and members

of the noblest houses would be competing for the honour of his

friendship and for the privilege of receiving him under their roof.[53]

The stream of Greek learning was broad and strong;[54] it bore on its

bosom every man and woman who aimed at a reputation for elegance, for

wit or for the deadly thrust in verbal fence which played so large a

part in the game of politics; every one that refused to float was either

an outcast from the best society, or was striving to win an eccentric

reputation for national obscurantism and its imaginary accompaniment of

honest rustic strength.

Acquaintance with professors and poets led to a knowledge of books; and

it was as necessary to store the latter as the former under the

fashionable roof. The first private library in Rome was established by

Aemilius Paulus, when he brought home the books that had belonged to the

vanquished Perseus;[55] and it became as much a feature of conquest

amongst the highly cultured to bring home a goodly store of literature

as to gather objects of art which might merely please the sensuous taste

and touch only the outer surface of the mind.[56]

But it was deemed by no means desirable to limit the influences of the

new culture to the minds of the mature. There was, indeed, a school of

cautious Hellenists that might have preferred this view, and would at

any rate have exercised a careful discrimination between those elements

of the Greek training which would strengthen the young mind by giving it

a wider range of vision and a new gallery of noble lives and those which

would lead to mere display, to effeminacy, nay (who could tell?) to

positive depravity. But this could not be the point of view of society

as a whole. If the elegant Roman was to be half a Greek, he must learn

during the tender and impressionable age to move his limbs and modulate

his voice in true Hellenic wise. Hence the picture which Scipio

Aemilianus, sane Hellenist and stout Roman, gazed at with astonished

eyes and described in the vigorous and uncompromising language suited to

a former censor. "I was told," he said, "that free-born boys and girls

went to a dancing school and moved amidst disreputable professors of the

art. I could not bring my mind to believe it; but I was taken to such a

school myself, and Good Heavens! What did I see there! More than fifty

boys and girls, one of them, I am ashamed to say, the son of a candidate

for office, a boy wearing the golden boss, a lad not less than twelve

years of age. He was jingling a pair of castanets and dancing a step

which an immodest slave could not dance with decency." [57] Such might

have been the reflections of a puritan had he entered a modern

dancing-academy. We may be permitted to question the immorality of the

exhibition thus displayed, but there can be no doubt as to the social

ambition which it reveals--an ambition which would be perpetuated

throughout the whole of the life of the boy with the castanets, which

would lead him to set a high value on the polish of everything he called

his own--a polish determined by certain rigid external standards and to

be attained at any hazard, whether by the ruinous concealment of honest

poverty, or the struggle for affluence even by the most

questionable means.

But the burdens on the wealth of the great were by no means limited to

those imposed by merely social canons. Political life at Rome had always

been expensive in so far as office was unpaid and its tenure implied

leisure and a considerable degree of neglect of his own domestic

concerns in the patriot who was willing to accept it. But the State had

lately taken on itself to increase the financial expenditure which was

due to the people without professing to meet the bill from the public

funds. The 'State' at Rome did not mean what it would have meant in such

a context amongst the peoples of the Hellenic world. It did not mean

that the masses were preying on the richer classes, but that the richer

classes were preying on themselves; and this particular form of

voluntary self-sacrifice amongst the influential families in the senate

was equivalent to the confession that Rome was ceasing to be an

Aristocracy and becoming an Oligarchy, was voluntarily placing the

claims of wealth on a par with those of birth and merit, or rather was

insisting that the latter should not be valid unless they were

accompanied by the former. The chief sign of the confession that

political advancement might be purchased from the people in a legitimate

way, was the adoption of a rule, which was established about the time of

the First Punic War, that the cost of the public games should not be

defrayed exclusively by the treasury.[58] It was seldom that the people

could be brought to contribute to the expenses of the exhibitor by

subscriptions collected from amongst themselves;[59] they were the

recipients, not the givers of the feast, and the actual donors knew that

the exhibition was a contest for favour, that reputations were being won

or lost on the merits of the show, and that the successful competitor

was laying up a store-house of gratitude which would materially aid his

ascent to the highest prizes in the State. The personal cost, if it

could not be wholly realised on the existing patrimony of the

magistrate, must be assisted by gifts from friends, by loans from

money-lenders at exorbitant rates of interest and, worst but readiest of

all methods, by contributions, nominally voluntary but really enforced,

from the Italian allies and the provincials. As early as the year 180

the senate had been forced to frame a strong resolution against the

extravagance that implied oppression;[60] but the resolution was really

a criticism of the new methods of government; the roots of the evil (the

burden on the magistracy, the increase in the number of the regularly

recurring festivals) they neither cared nor ventured to remove. The

aedileship was the particular magistracy which was saddled with this

expenditure on account of its traditional connection with the conduct of

the public games; and although it was neither in its curule nor plebeian

form an obligatory step in the scale of the magistracies, yet, as it was

held before the praetorship and the consulship, it was manifest that the

brilliant display given to the people by the occupant of this office

might render fruitless the efforts of a less wealthy competitor who had

shunned its burdens.[61] The games were given jointly by the respective

pairs of colleagues,[62] the _Ludi Romani_ being under the guidance of

the curule,[63] the _Ludi Plebeii_ under that of the plebeian

aediles.[64] Had these remained the only annual shows, the cost to the

exhibitor, although great, would have been limited, But other festivals,

which had once been occasional, had lately been made permanent. The

games to Ceres (_Cerialia_), the remote origins of which may have dated

back to the time of the monarchy, first appear as fully established in

the year 202;[65] the festival to Flora (_Floralia_) dates from but 238

B.C.,[66] but probably did not become annual until 173;[67] while the

games to the Great Mother (_Megalesia_) followed by thirteen years the

invitation and hospitable reception of that Phrygian goddess by the

Romans, and became a regular feature in their calendar in 191.[68] This

increase in the amenities of the people, every item of which falls

within a term of fifty years, is a remarkable feature of the age which

followed Rome's assumption of imperial power. It proved that the Roman

was willing to bend his austere religion to the purposes of

gratification, when he could afford the luxury, that the enjoyment of

this luxury was considered a happy means of keeping the people in good

temper with itself and its rulers, and that the cost of providing it was

considered, not merely as compatible with the traditions of the existing

regime, but as a means of strengthening those traditions by closing the

gates of office to the poor.

The types of spectacle, in which the masses took most delight, were also

new and expensive creations. These types were chiefly furnished by the

gladiatorial shows and the hunting of wild beasts. Even the former and

earlier amusement had had a history of little more than a hundred years.

It was believed to be a relic of that realistic view of the after life

which lingered in Italy long after it had passed from the more spiritual

civilisation of the Greeks. The men who put each other to the sword

before the eyes of the sorrowing crowd were held to be the retinue which

passed with the dead chieftain beyond the grave, and it was from the

sombre rites of the Etruscans that this custom of ceremonial slaying was

believed to have been transferred to Rome. The first year of the First

Punic War witnessed the earliest combat that accompanied a Roman

funeral,[69] and, although secular enjoyment rapidly took the place of

grim funereal appreciation, and the religious belief that underlay the

spectacle may soon have passed away, neither the State nor the relatives

were supposed to have done due honour to the illustrious dead if his own

decease were not followed by the death-struggle of champions from the

rival gladiatorial schools, and men who aspired to a decent funeral made

due provision for such combats in their wills. The Roman magistrate

bowed to the prevalent taste, and displays of gladiators became one of

the most familiar features of the aediles' shows. Military sentiment was

in its favour, for it was believed to harden the nerves of the race that

had sprung from the loins of the god of war,[70] and humane sentiment

has never in any age been shocked at the contemporary barbarities which

it tolerates or enjoys. But a certain element of coarseness in the

sport, and perhaps the very fact that it was of native Italian growth,

might have given it a short shrift, had the cultured classes really

possessed the power of regulating the amusements of the public. Leaders

of society would have preferred the Greek _Agon_ with its graceful

wrestling and its contests in the finer arts. But the Roman public would

not be hellenised in this particular, and showed their mood when a

musical exhibition was attempted at the triumph of Lucius Anicius Gallus

in 167. The audience insisted that the performers should drop their

instruments and box with one another.[71] This, although not the best,

was yet a more tolerable type of what a contest of skill should be. It

was natural, therefore, that the professional fighting man should become

a far more inevitable condition of social and political success than the

hunter or the race-horse has ever been with us. Some enterprising

members of the nobility soon came to prefer ownership to the hire system

and started schools of their own in which the _lanista_ was merely the

trainer. A stranger element was soon added to the possessions of a Roman

noble by the growing craze for the combats of wild beasts. The first

recorded "hunt" of the kind was that given in 186 by Marcus Fulvius at

the close of the Aetolian war when lions and panthers were exhibited to

the wondering gaze of the people.[72] Seventeen years later two curule

aediles furnished sixty-three African lions and forty bears and

elephants for the Circensian games.[73] These menageries eventually

became a public danger and the curule aedile (himself one of the chief

offenders) was forced to frame an edict specifying the compensation for

damage that might be committed by wild beasts in their transit through

Italy or their residence within the towns.[74] The obligation of wealth

to supply luxuries for the poor--a splendid feature of ancient

civilisation in which it has ever taken precedence of that of the modern

world--was recognised with the utmost frankness in the Rome of the day;

but it was an obligation that had passed the limits at which it could be

cheerfully performed as the duty of the patriot or the patron; it had

reached a stage when its demoralising effects, both to giver and to

receiver, were patent to every seeing eye, but when criticism of its

vices could be met by the conclusive rejoinder that it was a vital

necessity of the existing political situation.[75]

The review which we have given of the enormous expenditure created by

the social and political appetites of the day leads up to the

consideration of two questions which, though seldom formulated or faced

in their naked form, were ever present in the minds of the classes who

were forced to deem themselves either the most responsible authors, or

the most illustrious victims, of the existing standards both of politics

and society. These questions were "Could the exhausting drain be

stopped?" and "If it could not, how was it to be supplied?" A city in a

state of high fever will always produce the would-be doctor; but the

curious fact about the Rome of this and other days is that the doctor

was so often the patient in another form. Just as in the government of

the provinces the scandals of individual rule were often met by the

severest legislation proceeding from the very body which had produced

the evil-doers, so when remedies were suggested for the social evils of

the city, the senate, in spite of its tendency to individual

transgression, generally displayed the possession of a collective

conscience. The men who formulated the standard of purity and

self-restraint might be few in number; but, except they displayed the

irritating activity and the uncompromising methods of a Cato, they

generally secured the support of their peers, and the sterner the

censor, the more gladly was he hailed as an ornament to the order. This

guardian of morals still issued his edicts against delicacies of the

table, foreign perfumes and expensive houses;[76] as late as the year

169 people would hastily put out their lights when it was reported that

Tiberius Sempronius Graccus was coming up the street on his return from

supper, lest they should fall under the suspicion of untimely

revelry,[77] and the sporadic activity of the censorship will find ample

illustration in the future chapters of our work. Degradation from the

various orders of the State was still a consequence of its

animadversions; but a milder, more universal and probably far more

efficacious check on luxury--the system, pursued by Cato, of adopting an

excessive rating for articles of value[78] and thus of shifting the

incidence of taxation from the artisan and farmer to the shoulders of

the richest class[79]--had been taken out of its hands by the complete

cessation of direct imposts after the Third Macedonian War.[80]

Meanwhile sumptuary laws continued to be promulgated from the Rostra and

accepted by the people. All that are known to have been initiated or to

have been considered valid after the close of the great wars have but

one object--an attack on the expenses of the table, a form of sensuous

enjoyment which, on account of the ease and barbaric abundance with

which wealth may vaunt itself in this domain, was particularly in vogue

amongst the upper classes in Rome. Other forms of extravagance seem for

the time to have been left untouched by legislation, for the Oppian law

which had been due to the strain of the Second Punic War had been

repealed after a fierce struggle in 193, and the Roman ladies might now

adorn themselves with more than half an ounce of gold, wear robes of

divers colours and ride in their carriages through any street they

pleased.[81] The first enactment which attempted to control the

wastefulness of the table was an Orchian law of 181, limiting the number

of guests that might be invited to entertainments. Cato was consistent

in opposing the passing of the measure and in resisting its repeal. He

recognised a futile law when he saw it, but he did not wish this

futility to be admitted.[82] Twenty years later[83] a Fannian law grew

out of a decree of the senate which had enjoined that the chief men

(_principes_) of the State should take an oath before the consuls not to

exceed a certain limit of expense in the banquets given at the

Megalesian Games. Strengthened with a measure which prescribed more

harassing details than the Orchian law. The new enactment actually

determined the value and nature of the eatables whose consumption was

allowed. It permitted one hundred asses to be spent on the days of the

Roman Games, the Plebeian Games and the Saturnalia, thirty asses on

certain other festival occasions, and but ten asses (less than twice the

daily pay of a Roman soldier) on every other meal throughout the year;

it forbade the serving of any fowl but a single hen, and that not

fattened; it enjoined the exclusive consumption of native wine.[84] This

enactment was strengthened eighteen years later by a Didian law, which

included in the threatened penalties not only the giver of the feast

which violated the prescribed limits, but also the guests who were

present at such a banquet. It also compelled or induced the Italian

allies to accept the provisions of the Fannian law[85]--an unusual step

which may show the belief that a luxury similar to that of Rome was

weakening the resources of the confederacy, on whose strength the

leading state was so dependent, or which may have been induced by the

knowledge that members of the Roman nobility were taking holiday trips

to country towns, to enjoy the delights which were prohibited at home

and to waste their money on Italian caterers.[86]

The frequency of such legislation, which we shall find renewed once

again before the epoch of the reforms of Sulla[87] seems to prove its

ineffectiveness,[88] and indeed the standard of comfort which it desired

to enjoin was wholly incompatible with the circumstances of the age. The

desire to produce uniformity[89] of standard had always been an end of

Roman as of Greek sumptuary regulation, but what type of uniformity

could be looked for in a community where the extremes of wealth and

poverty were beginning to be so strongly marked, where capital was

accumulating in the hands of the great noble and the great trader and

being wholly withdrawn from those of the free-born peasant and artisan?

The restriction of useless consumption was indeed favourable to the more

productive employment of capital; but we shall soon see that this

productive use, which had as its object the deterioration of land by

pasturage and the purchase of servile labour, was as detrimental to the

free citizen as the most reckless extravagance could have been. There is

no question, however, that both the sumptuary laws and the censorian

ordinances of the period did attempt to attain an economic as well as a

social end; and, however mistaken their methods may have been, they

showed some appreciation of the industrial evils of the time. The

provision of the Fannian law in favour of native wines suggests the

desire to help the small cultivator who had substituted vine-growing for

the cultivation of cereals, and foreshadows the protective legislation

of the Ciceronian period.[90] Much of this legislation, too, was

animated by the "mercantile" theory that a State is impoverished by the

export of the precious metals to foreign lands[91]--a view which found

expression in a definite enactment of an earlier period which had

forbidden gold or silver to be paid to the Celtic tribes in the north of

Italy in exchange for the wares or slaves which they sold to Roman

merchants.[92]

Another series of laws aimed at securing the purity of an electorate

exposed to the danger of corruption by the overwhelming influence of

wealth. Laws against bribery, unknown in an earlier period,[93] become

painfully frequent from the date at which Rome came into contact with

the riches of the East. Six years after the close of the great Asiatic

campaign the people were asked, on the authority of the senate, to

sanction more than one act which was directed against the undue

influence exercised at elections;[94] in 166 fresh scandals called for

the consideration of the Council of State;[95] and the year 159 saw the

birth of another enactment.[96] Yet the capital penalty, which seems to

have been the consequence of the transgression of at least one of these

laws,[97] did not deter candidates from staking their citizenship on

their success. The still-surviving custom of clientship made the object

of largesses difficult to establish, and the secrecy of the ballot,

which had been introduced for elections in 139, made it impossible to

prove that the suspicious gift had been effective and thus to construct

a convincing case against the donor.

The moral control exercised by the magistrate and the sumptuary or

criminal ordinances expressed in acts of Parliament might serve as

temporary palliatives to certain pronounced evils of the moment; but

they were powerless to check the extravagance of an expenditure which

was sanctioned by custom and in some respects actually enforced by law.

One of the greatest of the practical needs of the new Roman was to

increase his income in every way that might be deemed legitimate by a

society which, even in its best days, had never been overscrupulous in

its exploitation of the poor and had been wont to illustrate the

sanctity of contract by visible examples of grinding oppression. The

nature and intensity of the race for wealth differed with the needs of

the anxious spendthrift; and in respect both to needs and to means of

satisfaction the upper middle class was in a far more favourable

position than its noble governors. It could spend its unfettered

energies in the pursuit of the profits which might be derived from

public contracts, trade, banking and money-lending, while it was not

forced to submit to the drain created by the canvass for office and the

exorbitant demands made by the electorate on the pecuniary resources of

the candidate. The brilliancy of the life of the mercantile class, with

its careless luxury and easy indifference to expenditure, set a standard

for the nobility which was at once galling and degrading. They were

induced to apply the measure of wealth even to members of their own

order, and regarded it as inevitable that any one of their peers, whose

patrimony had dwindled, should fill but a subordinate place both in

politics and society;[98] while the means which they were sometimes

forced to adopt in order to vie with the wealth of the successful

contractor and promoter were, if hardly less sound from a moral point of

view, at least far more questionable from a purely legal standpoint.

A fraction of the present wealth which was in the possession of some of

the leading families of the nobility may have been purely adventitious,

the result of the lucky accident of command and conquest amidst a

wealthy and pliant people. The spoils of war were, it is true, not for

the general but for the State; yet he exercised great discretionary

power in dealing with the movable objects, which in the case of Hellenic

or Asiatic conquest formed one of the richest elements in the prize, and

the average commander is not likely to have displayed the self-restraint

and public spirit of the destroyer of Corinth. Public and military

opinion would permit the victor to retain an ample share of the fruits

of his prowess, and this would be increased by a type of contribution to

which he had a peculiar and unquestioned claim. This consisted in the

honorary offerings made by states, who found themselves at the feet of

the victor and were eager to attract his pity and to enlist on their

behalf his influence with the Roman government. Instances of such

offerings are the hundred and fourteen golden crowns which were borne in

the triumph of Titus Quinctius Flamininus,[99] those of two hundred and

twelve pounds' weight shown in the triumph of Manlius,[100] and the

great golden wreath of one hundred and fifty pounds which had been

presented by the Ambraciots to Nobilior.[101] But the time had not yet

been reached when the general on a campaign, or even the governor of a

district which was merely disturbed by border raids, could calmly demand

hard cash as the equivalent of the precious metal wrought into this

useless form, and when the "coronary gold" was to be one of the regular

perquisites of any Roman governor who claimed to have achieved military

success.[102] Nor is it likely that the triumphant general of this

period melted down the offerings which he might dedicate in temples or

reserve for the gallery of his house, and we must conclude that the few

members of the nobility who had conducted the great campaigns were but

slightly enriched by the offerings which helpless peoples had laid at

their feet. It would be almost truer to say that the great influx of the

precious metals had increased the difficulties of their position; for,

if the gold or silver took the form of artistic work which remained in

their possession, it but exaggerated the ideal to which their standard

of life was expected to conform; and if it assumed the shape of the

enormous amount of specie which was poured into the coffers of the State

or distributed amongst the legionaries, its chief effects were the

heightening of prices and a showy appearance of a vast increase of

wealth which corresponded to no real increase in production.

But, whatever the effects of the metallic prizes of the great campaigns,

these prizes could neither have benefited the members of the nobility as

a whole nor, in the days of comparative peace which had followed the

long epoch of war with wealthy powers, could they be contemplated as a

permanent source of future capital or income. When the representative of

the official caste looked round for modes of fruitful investment which

might increase his revenues, his chances at first sight appeared to be

limited by legal restrictions which expressed the supposed principles of

his class. A Clodian law enacted at the beginning of the Second Punic

War had provided that no senator or senator's son should own a ship of a

burden greater than three hundred amphorae. The intention of the measure

was to prohibit members of the governing class from taking part in

foreign trade, as carriers, as manufacturers, or as participants in the

great business of the contract for corn which placed provincial grain on

the Roman market; and the ships of small tonnage which they were allowed

to retain were intended to furnish them merely with the power of

transporting to a convenient market the produce of their own estates in

Italy.[103] The restriction was not imposed in a self-regarding spirit;

it was odious to the nobility, and, as it was supported by Flaminius,

must have been popular with the masses, who were blind to the fact that

the restriction of a senator's energies to agriculture would be

infinitely more disastrous to the well-being of the average citizen than

the expenditure of those energies in trade. The restriction may have

received the support of the growing merchant class, who were perhaps

pleased to be rid of the competition of powerful rivals, and it

certainly served, externally at least, to mark the distinction between

the man of large industrial enterprises and the man whose official rank

was supported by landed wealth--a distinction which, in the shape of the

contrast drawn between knights and senators, appears at every turn in

the history of the later Republic. But, whatever the immediate motives

for the passing of the measure, a great and healthy principle lay behind

it. It was the principle that considerations of foreign policy should

not be directly controlled or hampered by questions of trade, that the

policy of the State should not become the sport of the selfish vagaries

of capital. The spirit thus expressed was directly inimical to the

interests of the merchant, the contractor and the tax-farmer. How

inimical it was could not yet be clearly seen; for the transmarine

interests of Rome had not at the time attained a development which

invited the mastery of conquered lands by the Roman capitalist. But,

whether this Clodian law created or merely formulated the antithesis

between land and trade, between Italian and provincial profits, it is

yet certain that this antithesis was one of the most powerful of the

animating factors of Roman history for the better part of the two

centuries which were to follow the enactment. It produced the conflict

between a policy of restricted enterprise, pursued for the good of the

State and the subject, and a policy of expansion which obeyed the

interests of capital, between a policy of cautious protection and that

madness of imperialism which is ever associated with barbarism,

brigandage or trade.

But, if we inquire whether this enactment attained its ostensible object

of completely shutting out senators from the profits of any enterprise

that could properly be described as commercial, we shall find an

affirmative answer to be more than dubious. The law was a dead letter

when Cicero indicted Verres,[104] but its demise may have been reached

through a long and slow process of decline. But, even if the provisions

of the law had been adhered to throughout the period which we are

considering, the avenue to wealth derived from business intercourse with

the provinces would not necessarily have been closed to the official

class. We shall soon see that the companies which were formed for

undertaking the state-contracts probably permitted shares to be held by

individuals who never appeared in the registered list of partners at

all, and we know that to hold a share in a great public concern was

considered one of the methods of business which did not subject the

participant to the taint of a vulgar commercialism.[105] And, if the

senator chose to indulge more directly in the profits of transmarine

commerce, to what extent was he really hindered by the provisions of the

law? He might not own a ship of burden, but his freedmen might sail to

any port on the largest vessels, and who could object if the returns

which the dependant owed his lord were drawn from the profits of

commerce? Again there was no prohibition against loans on bottomry, and

Cato had increased his wealth by becoming through his freedman a member

of a maritime company, each partner in which had but a limited liability

and the prospect of enormous gains.[106] The example of this energetic

money-getter also illustrates many ways in which the nobleman of

business tastes could increase his profits without extending his

enterprises far from the capital. It was possible to exploit the growing

taste in country villas, in streams and lakes and natural woods; to buy

a likely spot for a small price, let it at a good rental, or sell it at

a larger price. The ownership of house property within the town, which

grew eventually into the monopoly of whole blocks and streets by such a

man as Crassus,[107] was in every way consistent with the possession of

senatorial rank. It was even possible to be a slave-dealer without loss

of dignity, at least if one transacted the sordid details of the

business through a slave. The young and promising boy required but a

year's training in the arts to enable the careful buyer to make a large

profit by his sale.[108] Yet such methods must have been regarded by the

nobility as a whole as merely subsidiary means of increasing their

patrimony: and, in spite of the fact that Cato took the view that

agriculture should be an amusement rather than a business,[109] there

can be no doubt that the staple of the wealth of the official class was

still to be found in the acres of Italy. It was not, however, the wealth

of the moderate homestead which was to be won from a careful tillage of

the fields; it was the wealth which, as we shall soon see, was

associated with the slave-capitalist, the overseer, a foreign method of

cultivation on the model of the grand plantation-systems of the East,

and a belief in the superior value of pasturage to tillage which was to

turn many a populous and fertile plain into a wilderness of danger and

desolation.

But, strive as he would, there was many a nobleman who found that his

expenditure could not be met by dabbling in trade where others plunged,

or by the revenues yielded by the large tracts of Italian soil over

which he claimed exclusive powers. The playwright of the age has figured

Indigence as the daughter of Luxury;[110] and a still more terrible

child was to be born in the Avarice which sprang from the useless

cravings and fierce competitions of the time.[111] The desire to get and

to hold had ever been a Roman vice; but, it had also been the unvarying

assumption of the Roman State, and the conviction of the Roman

official--a conviction so deeply seated and spontaneous as to form no

ground for self-congratulation that the lust for acquisition should

limit itself to the domain of private right, and never cross the rigid

barrier which divided that domain from the sphere of wealth and power

which the city had committed to its servant as a solemn trust. The

better sort of overseer was often found in the crabbed man of

business--a Cato, for example--who would never waive a right of his own

and protected those of his dependants with similar tenacity and passion.

The honour which prevailed in the commercial code at home was considered

so much a matter of course in all dealings with the foreign world, that

the State scorned to scrutinise the expenditure of its ministers and was

spared the disgrace of a system of public audit. Even in this age, which

is regarded by the ancient historians as marking the beginning of the

decline in public virtue, Polybius could contrast the attitude of

suspicion towards the guardians of the State, which was the

characteristic of the official life of his own unhappy country, with the

well-founded confidence which Rome reposed in the honour of her

ministers, and could tell the world that "if but a talent of money were

entrusted to a magistrate of a Greek state, ten auditors, as many seals

and twice as many witnesses are required for the security of the bond;

yet even so faith is not observed; while the Roman in an official or

diplomatic post, who handles vast sums of money, adheres to his duty

through the mere moral obligation of the oath which he has sworn"; that

"amongst the Romans the corrupt official is as rare a portent as is the

financier with clean hands amongst other peoples".[112] When the elder

Africanus tore up the account books of his brother--books which recorded

the passage of eighteen thousand talents from an Asiatic king to a Roman

general and from him to the Roman State[113]--he was imparting a lesson

in confidence, which was immediately accepted by the senate and people.

And it seems that, so far as the expenditure of public moneys was

concerned, this confidence continued to be justified. It is true that

Cato had furiously impugned the honour of commanders in the matter of

the distribution of the prizes of war amongst the soldiers and had drawn

a bitter contrast between private and official thieves. "The former," he

said, "pass their lives in thongs and iron fetters, the latter in purple

and gold." [114] But there were no fixed rules of practice which guided

such a distribution, and a commander, otherwise honest, might feel no

qualms of conscience in exercising a selective taste on his own behalf.

On the other hand, deliberate misappropriation of the public funds seems

to have been seldom suspected or at least seldom made the subject of

judicial cognisance, and for many years after a standing court was

established for the trial of extortion no similar tribunal was thought

necessary for the crime of peculation.[115] Apart from the long,

tortuous and ineffective trial of the Scipios,[116] no question of the

kind is known to have been raised since Manius Acilius Glabrio, the

conqueror of Antiochus and the Aetolians, competed for the censorship.

Then a story, based on the existence of the indubitable wealth which he

was employing with a lavish hand to win the favour of the people, was

raked up against him by some jealous members of the nobility. It was

professed that some money and booty, found in the camp of the king, had

never been exhibited in the triumph nor deposited in the treasury. The

evidence of legates and military tribunes was invited, and Cato, himself

a competitor for the censorship, was ready to testify that gold and

silver vases, which he had seen in the captured camp, had not been

visible in the triumphal procession. Glabrio waived his candidature, but

the people were unwilling to convict and the prosecution was

abandoned.[117] Here again we are confronted by the old temptation of

curio-hunting, which, the nobility deemed indecent in so "new" a man as

Glabrio; the evidence of Cato--the only testimony which proved

dangerous--did not establish the charge that money due to the State had

been intercepted by a Roman consul.

But the regard for the property of the State was unfortunately not

extended to the property of its clients. Even before the provinces had

yielded a prey rendered easy by distance and irresponsibility, Italian

cities had been forced to complain of the violence and rapacity of Roman

commanders quartered in their neighbourhood,[118] and the passive

silence with which the Praenestines bore the immoderate requisitions of

a consul, was a fatal guarantee of impunity which threatened to alter

for ever the relations of these free allies to the protecting

power.[119] But provincial commands offered greater temptations and a

far more favourable field for capricious tyranny; for here the exactions

of the governor were neither repudiated by an oath of office nor at

first even forbidden by the sanctions of a law. Requisitions could be

made to meet the needs of the moment, and these needs were naturally

interpreted to suit the cravings and the tastes of the governor of the

moment.[120] Cato not only cut down the expenses that had been

arbitrarily imposed on the unhappy natives of Sardinia,[121] but seems

to have been the author of a definite law which fixed a limit to such

requisitions in the future.[122] But it was easier to frame an ordinance

than to guarantee its observation, and, at a time when the surrounding

world was seething with war, the regulations made for a peaceful

province could not touch the actions of a victorious commander who was

following up the results of conquest. Complaints began to pour in on

every hand--from the Ambraciots of Greece, the Cenomani of Gaul[123]

--and the senate did its best, either by its own cognisance or by the

creation of a commission of investigation, to meet the claims of the

dependent peoples. A kind of rude justice was the result, but it was

much too rude to meet an evil which was soon seen to be developing into

a trade of systematic oppression. A novel step was taken when in 171

delegates from the two Spains appeared in the Curia to complain of the

avarice and insolence of their Roman governors. A praetor was

commissioned to choose from the senatorial order five of such judges as

were wont to be selected for the settlement of international disputes

(_recuperatores_), to sit in judgment on each of the indicted

governors,[124] and the germ of a regular court for what had now become

a regular offence was thus developed. The further and more shameful

confession, that the court should be permanent and interpret a definite

statute, was soon made, and the Calpurnian law of 149[125]was the first

of that long series of enactments for extortion which mark the futility

of corrective measures in the face of a weak system of legal, and a

still weaker system of moral, control. Trials for extortion soon became

the plaything of politics, the favourite arena for the exercise of the

energies of a young and rising politician, the favourite weapon with

which old family feuds might be at once revenged and perpetuated. They

were soon destined to gain a still greater significance as furnishing

the criteria of the methods of administration which the State was

expected to employ, as determining the respective rights of the

administrator and the capitalist to guide the destinies of the

inhabitants of a dependent district. Their manifold political

significance destroys our confidence in their judgments, and we can

seldom tell whether the acquittal or the condemnation which these courts

pronounced was justified on the evidence adduced. But there can be no

question of the evil that lay behind this legislative and judicial

activity. The motive which led men to assume administrative posts abroad

was in many cases thoroughly selfish and mean,--the desire to acquire

wealth as rapidly as was consistent with keeping on the safe side of a

not very exacting law. No motive of this kind can ever be universal in a

political society, and in Rome we cannot even pronounce it to be

general. Power and distinction attracted the Roman as much as wealth,

and some governors were saved from temptation by the colossal fortunes

which they already possessed. But how early it had begun to operate in

the minds of many is shown by the eagerness which, as we shall see, was

soon to be displayed by rival consuls for the conduct of a war that

might give the victor a prolonged control over the rich cities which had

belonged to the kingdom of Pergamon, if it is not proved by the strange

unwillingness which magistrates had long before exhibited to assume some

commands which had been entrusted to their charge.[126]

A suspicion of another type of abuse of power, more degrading though not

necessarily more harmful than the plunder of subjects, had begun to be

raised in the minds of the people and the government. It was held that a

Roman might be found who would sell the supposed interests of his

country to a foreign potentate, or at any rate accept a present which

might or might not influence his judgment, A commissioner to Illyria had

been suspected of pocketing money offered him by the potentates of that

district in 171,[127] and the first hint was given of that shattering of

public confidence in the integrity of diplomatists which wrought such

havoc in the foreign politics of the period which forms the immediate

subject of our work. The system of the Protectorate, which Rome had so

widely adopted, with its secret diplomatic dealings and its hidden

conferences with kings, offered greater facilities for secret

enrichment, and greater security for the enjoyment of the acquired

wealth, even than the plunder of a province. The proof of the committal

of the act was difficult, in most cases impossible. We must be content

to chronicle the suspicion of its growing frequency, and the suspicion

is terrible enough. If the custom of wringing wealth from subjects and

selling support to potentates continued to prevail, the stage might soon

be reached at which it could be said, with that element of exaggeration

which lends emphasis to a truth, that a small group of men were drawing

revenues from every nation in the world.[128]

Such were the sources of wealth that lay open to men, to whom commerce

was officially barred and who were supposed to have no direct interest

in financial operations. Far ampler spheres of pecuniary enrichment,

more uniformly legal if sometimes as oppressive, were open to the class

of men who by this time had been recognised as forming a kind of second

order in the State. The citizens who had been proved by the returns at

the census to have a certain amount of realisable capital at their

disposal--a class of citizens that ranged from the possessors of a

moderate patrimony, such as society might employ as a line of

demarcation between an upper and a lower middle class, to the

controllers of the most gigantic fortunes--had been welded into a body

possessing considerable social and political solidarity. This solidarity

had been attained chiefly through the community of interest derived from

the similar methods of pecuniary investment which they employed, but

also through the circumstance (slight in itself but significant in an

ancient society which ever tended to fall into grades) that all the

members of this class could describe themselves by the courtesy title of

"Knights"--a description justified by the right which they possessed of

serving on their own horses with the Roman cavalry instead of sharing

the foot-service of the legionary. A common designation was not

inappropriate to men who were in a certain sense public servants and

formed in a very real sense a branch of the administration. The knight

might have many avocations; he might be a money-lender, a banker, a

large importer; but he was preeminently a farmer of the taxes. His

position in the former cases was simply that of an individual, who might

or might not be temporarily associated with others; his position in the

latter case meant that he was a member of a powerful and permanent

corporation, one which served a government from which it might wring

great profits or at whose hands it might suffer heavy loss--a government

to be helped in its distress, to be fought when its demands were

overbearing, to be encouraged when its measures seemed progressive, to

be hindered when they seemed reactionary from a commercial point of

view. A group of individuals or private firms could never have attained

the consistency of organisation, or maintained the uniformity of policy,

which was displayed by these societies of revenue-collectors; even a

company must have a long life before it can attain strength and

confidence sufficient to act in a spirited manner in opposition to the

State; and it seems certain that these societies were wholly exempted

from the paralysing principle which the Roman law applied to

partnership--a principle which dictated that every partnership should be

dissolved by the death or retirement of one of the associates.[129] The

State, which possessed no civil service of its own worthy of the name,

had taken pains to secure permanent organisations of private

share-holders which should satisfy its needs, to give them something of

an official character, and to secure to each one of them as a result of

its permanence an individual strength which, in spite of the theory that

the taxes and the public works were put up to auction, may have secured

to some of these companies a practical monopoly of a definite sphere of