Chapter I (2)

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 operations. But a company, at Rome as elsewhere, is powerful in proportion to the breadth of its basis. A small ring of capitalists may tyrannise over society as long as they confine themselves to securing a monopoly over private enterprises, and as long as the law permits them to exercise this autocratic power without control; but such a ring is far less capable of meeting the arbitrary dictation of an aristocratic body of landholders, such as the senate, or of encountering the resentful opposition of a nominally all-powerful body of consumers, such as the Comitia, than a corporation which has struck its roots deeply in society by the wide distribution of its shares. We know from the positive assurance of a skilled observer of Roman life that the number of citizens who had an interest in these companies was particularly large.[130] This observer emphasises the fact in order to illustrate the dependence of a large section of society on the will of the senate, which possessed the power of controlling the terms of the agreements both for the public works which it placed in the hands of contractors and for the sources of production which it put out to lease;[131] but it is equally obvious that the large size of the number of shareholders must have exercised a profoundly modifying influence on the arbitrary authority of a body such as the senate which governed chiefly through deference to public opinion; and we know that, in the last resort, an appeal could be made to the sovereign assembly, if a magistrate could be found bold enough to carry to that quarter a proposal that had been discountenanced by the senate.[132] In such crises the strength of the companies depended mainly on the number of individual interests that were at stake; the shareholder is more likely to appear at such gatherings than the man who is not profoundly affected by the issue, and it is very seldom that the average consumer has insight enough to see, or energy enough to resist, the sufferings and inconveniences which spring from the machinations of capital. It may have been possible at times to pack a legislative assembly with men who had some financial interest, however slight, in a dispute arising from a contract calling for decision; and the time was soon to come when such questions of detail would give place to far larger questions of policy, when the issues springing from a line of foreign activity which had been taken by the government might be debated in the cold and glittering light of the golden stakes the loss or gain of which depended upon the policy pursued. Nor could it have been easy even for the experienced eye to see from the survey of such a gathering that it represented the army of capital. Research has rendered it probable that the companies of the time were composed of an outer as well as of an inner circle; that the mass of shareholders differed from those who were the promoters, managers and active agents in the concern, that the liability of the former at least was limited and that their shares, whether small or great, were transmissible and subject to the fluctuations of the market.[133] But, even if we do not believe that this distinction between _socii_ and _participes_ was legally elaborated, yet there were probably means by which members of the outside public could enter into business relations with the recognised partners in one of these concerns to share its profits and its losses.[134] The freedman, who had invested his small savings in the business of an enterprising patron, would attach the same mercantile value to his own vote in the assembly as would be given to his suffrage in the senate by some noble peer, who had bartered the independence of his judgment for the acquisition of more rapid profits than could be drawn from land.

The farmers of the revenue fell into three broad classes. First there were the contractors for the creation, maintenance and repair of the public works possessed or projected by the State, such as roads, aqueducts, bridges, temples and other public buildings. Gigantic profits were not possible in such an enterprise, if the censors and their advisers acted with knowledge, impartiality and discretion; for the lowest possible tender was obtained for such contracts and the results might be repudiated if inspection proved them to be unsatisfactory. Secondly there were the companies which leased sources of production that were owned by the State such as fisheries, salt-works, mines and forest land. In some particular cases even arable land had been dealt with in this way, and the confiscated territories of Capua and Corinth were let on long leases to _publicani_. Thirdly there were the societies, which did not themselves acquire leases but acted as true intermediaries between the State and individuals[135] who paid it revenue whether as occupants of its territory, or as making use of sites which it claimed to control, or as owing dues which had been prescribed by agreement or by law. These classes of debtors to the State with whom the middlemen came into contact may be illustrated respectively by the occupants of the domain land of Italy, the ship-masters who touched at ports, and the provincials such as those of Sicily or Sardinia who were burdened with the payment of a tithe of the produce of their lands.[136] If we consider separately the characteristics of the three classes of state-farmers, we find that the first and the second are both direct employers of labour, the third reaping only indirect profits from the production controlled by others. It was in this respect, as employers of labour, that the societies of the time were free from the anxieties and restrictions that beset the modern employment of capital. Except in the rare case where the contractors had leased arable land and sublet it to its original occupants,--the treatment which seems to have been adopted for the Campanian territory[137]--there can be no question that the work which they controlled was done mainly by the hands of slaves. They were therefore exempt from the annoyance and expense which might be caused by the competition and the organised resistance of free labour. The slaves employed in many of these industries must have been highly skilled; for many of these spheres of wealth which the State had delegated to contractors required peculiar industrial appliances and unusual knowledge in the foremen and leading artificers. The weakness of slave-labour,--its lack of intelligence and spirit--could not have been so keenly felt as it was on the great agricultural estates, which offered employment chiefly for the unskilled; and the difficulties that might arise from the lack of strength or interest, from the possession of hands that were either feeble or inert, were probably overcome in the same uncompromising manner in the workshop of the contractor and on the domains of the landed gentry. The maxim that an aged slave should be sold could not have been peculiar to the dabbler in agriculture, and the _ergastulum_ with its chained gangs must have been as familiar to the manufacturer as to the landed proprietor.[138] As to the promoters and the shareholders of these companies, it could not be expected that they should trace in imagination, or tremble as they traced, the heartless, perhaps inhuman, means by which the regular returns on their capital were secured.[139] Nor is it probable that the government of this period took any great care to supervise the conditions of the work or the lot of the workman. The partner desired quick and great returns, the State large rents and small tenders. The remorseless drain on human energy, the waste of human life, and the practical abeyance of free labour which was flooding the towns with idlers, were ideas which, if they ever arose, were probably kept in the background by a government which was generally in financial difficulties, and by individuals animated by all the fierce commercial competition of the age.