No More Learning

104/), were without any proper defeat utterly ruined, simply by this misconduct Capable leaders on the other hand, such as Pompeius, Caesar, Gabinius, formed doubt less out of the existing materials able and effective, and to some extent exemplary, armies ; but these armies belonged far more to their general than to the common wealth. — The still more complete decay of the Roman marine which, moreover, had remained an object of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized — scarcely requires to be mentioned. Here too, on all sides, everything that could be ruined at all had been reduced to ruin under the oligarchic govern ment
The reorganization of the Roman military system by Caesar was substantially limited to the tightening and strengthening of the reins of discipline, which had been relaxed under the negligent and incapable supervision previously subsisting. The Roman military system seemed to him neither to need, nor to be capable of, radical reform ; he accepted the elements of the army, just as Hannibal had accepted them. The enactment of his municipal ordinance that, in order to the holding of a
municipal magistracy or sitting in the municipal council
provincials,
67.
VOU T
156
I&reor- S"^^^
Foreign mercen aries.
Adjutants of the legion.
before the thirtieth year, three years' service on horseback —that as officer—or six years' service on foot should be required, proves indeed that he wished to attract the better classes to the army but proves with equal clearness that amidst the ever-increasing prevalence of an unwarlike spirit in the nation he himself held no longer possible to associate the holding of an honorary office with the fulfil ment of the time of service unconditionally as hitherto. This very circumstance serves to explain why Caesar made no attempt to re-establish the Roman burgess-cavalry. The levy was better arranged, the time of service was regulated and abridged otherwise matters remained on the footing that the infantry of the line were raised chiefly from the lower orders of the Roman burgesses, the cavalry and the light infantry from the subjects. That nothing was done for the reorganization of the fleet, surprising.
It was an innovation —hazardous beyond doubt even in the view of its author —to which the untrustworthy character of the cavalry furnished the subjects compelled him (p. 77), that Caesar for the first time deviated from the old Roman system of never fighting with mercenaries, and in corporated in the cavalry hired foreigners, especially Germans. Another innovation was the appointment of adjutants of the legion (legati legionis). Hitherto the military tribunes, nominated partly the burgesses, partly the governor concerned, had led the legions in such way that six of them were placed over each legion, and the command alternated among these single commandant of the legion was appointed by the general only as temporary and extraordinary measure. In subsequent times on the other hand those colonels or adjutants of legions appear as permanent and organic institution, and as nominated no longer by the governor whom they obey, but by the supreme command in Rome both changes seem referable to Caesar's arrangements connected with the Gabinian law
354
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK V
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chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
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The reason for the introduction of this important intervening step in the military hierarchy must be sought partly in the necessity for a more energetic centralization of the command, partly in the felt want of capable superior officers, partly and chiefly in the design of providing a counterpoise to the governor by associating with him one or more colonels nominated by the Imperator.
The most essential change in the military system con- The sisted in the institution of a permanent military head in the 1^^°TM. person of the Imperator, who, superseding the previous ship-in- unmilitary and in every respect incapable governing cor
poration, united in his hands the whole control of the
army, and thus converted it from a direction which for
the most part was merely nominal into a real and energetic
supreme command. We are not properly informed as to the
position which this supreme command occupied towards the
special commands hitherto omnipotent in their respective
spheres. Probably the analogy of the relation subsisting
between the praetor and the consul or the consul and
the dictator served generally as a basis, so that, while the governor in his own right retained the supreme military
authority in his province, the Imperator was entitled at
any moment to take it away from him and assume it for
himself or his delegates, and, while the authority of the
governor was confined to the province, that of the Im
perator, like the regal and the earlier consular authority, extended over the whole empire. Moreover it is ex
tremely probable that now the nomination of the officers,
both the military tribunes and the centurions, so far as it
had hitherto belonged to the governor,1 as well as the nomi
nation of the new adjutants of the legion, passed
into the hands of the Imperator ; and in like manner even
now the arrangement of the levies, the bestowal of leave of
1 With the nomination of a part of the military tribunes by the burgesses (iit. 13) Caesar —in this also a democrat— did not meddle.
(iv. 388).
directly
Caesar's plans.
Defence frontfer
absence, and the more important criminal cases, may have been submitted to the judgment of the commander-in- chief. With this limitation of the powers of the governors and with the regulated control of the Imperator, there was no great room to apprehend in future either that the armies might be utterly disorganized or that they might be con verted into retainers personally devoted to their respective officers.
But, however decidedly and urgently the circumstances pointed to military monarchy, and however distinctly Caesar took the supreme command exclusively for himself, he was nevertheless not at all inclined to establish his authority by means of, and on, the army. No doubt he deemed a standing army necessary for his state, but only because from its geographical position it required a comprehensive regulation of the frontiers and permanent frontier garrisons. Partly at earlier periods, partly during the recent civil war, he had worked at the tranquillizing of Spain, and had established strong positions for the defence of the frontier in Africa along the great desert, and in the north-west of the empire along the line of the Rhine. He occupied himself with similar plans for the regions on the Euphrates and on the Danube. Above all he designed an expedition against the Parthians, to avenge the day of Carrhae ; he had destined three years for this war, and was resolved to settle accounts with these dangerous enemies once for all and not less cautiously than thoroughly. In like manner he had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae, who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube 06), and of protecting Italy the north-east by border-districts similar to those which he had created for in Gaul. On the other hand there no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander
career of victory extending indefinitely far; said indeed that he had intended to march from Parthia to
356
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
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it
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(p. 1
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
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the Caspian and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as the Northern Ocean—which according to the notions of that time was not so very distant from the Mediterranean —and to return home through Gaul ; but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence of these fabulous projects. In the case of a state which, like the Roman state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition of Alexander. Judging both from Caesar's conduct in Britain and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable that Caesar with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire, but to preserve
and that his schemes of conquest restricted themselves to settlement of the frontier — measured, true, by his own great scale —which should secure the line of the Euphrates and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible the line of the Danube.
But, remains mere probability that Caesar ought
not to be designated world-conqueror in the same sense ° c&e^r as Alexander and Napoleon, quite certain that his military
design was not to rest his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate with, and as far as possible subordinate to, the civil commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of military state, those old and far- famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps
"P0115"1-
Attempts
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if it
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it,
358
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated in newly-founded urban communi ties. The soldiers presented by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not, like those of Sulla, settled together—as it were militarily —in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy, were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the penin sula ; it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers of Caesar could not be avoided. Caesar sought to solve the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service, and not a service strictly constant, that uninterrupted by any discharge partly by the already- mentioned shortening of the term of service, which occasioned speedier change in the personal composition of the army partly the regular settlement of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points, where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone in his place —to the frontier stations, that he might ward off the extraneous foe.
The true criterion also of the military state —the develop- ^J2* °* ment of, and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards — not to be met with in the case of Caesar.
Although as respects the army on active service the institu tion of special bodyguard for the general had been already long in existence (iii. 460), in Caesar's system this fell completely into the background his praetorian cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly officers or non-military attendants, and never to have been in the
Absence
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chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
359
proper sense a select corps, consequently never an object of jealousy to the troops of the line. While Caesar even as general practically dropped the bodyguard, he still less as king tolerated a guard round his person. Although constantly, beset by lurking assassins and well aware of
he yet rejected the proposal of the senate to institute a select guard dismissed, as soon as things grew in some measure quiet, the Spanish escort which he had made use of at first in the capital and contented himself with the retinue of lictors sanctioned by traditional usage for the Roman supreme magistrates.
However much of the idea of his party and of his youth Impracti- —to found Periclean government in Rome not by virtue SSS" of the sword, but by virtue of the confidence of the nation —Caesar had been obliged to abandon in the struggle with
realities, he retained even now the fundamental idea — of
not founding military monarchy —with an energy to which
history scarcely supplies parallel. Certainly this too was
an impracticable ideal— was the sole illusion, in regard
to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind was
more powerful than its clear judgment. government,
such as Caesar had in view, was not merely of necessity
in its nature highly personal, and so liable to perish with
the death of its author just as the kindred creations of
Pericles and Cromwell with the death of their founders
but, amidst the deeply disorganized state of the nation,
was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome would
succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven prede
cessors had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of
law and justice, and as little probable that he would suc
ceed in incorporating the standing army—after had during
the last civil war learned its power and unlearned its rever ence—once more as subservient element in civil society.
To any one who calmly considered to what extent reverence
for the law had disappeared from the lowest as from the
a
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it a
;
a
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;
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*
Financial admm1stra-
highest ranks of society, the former hope must have seemed almost a dream ; and, if with the Marian reform of the military system the soldier generally had ceased to be a citizen (iii. 461), the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support which the army now lent to the law. Even the great democrat could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers which he had unchained ; thousands of swords still at his signal flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready upon that signal to return to the sheath. Fate is mightier
* than genius. Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth, and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred ; he overthrew the rtgime of aristocrats and bankers in the state, only to put a military rtgime in their place, and the common wealth continued as before to be tyrannized and worked for profit by a privileged minority. And yet it is a privilege of the highest natures thus creatively to err. The brilliant attempts of great men to realize the ideal, though they do not reach their aim, form the best treasure of the nations. It was owing to the work of Caesar that the Roman military state did not become a police-state till after the lapse of several centuries, and that the Roman Imperators, however little they otherwise resembled the great founder of their sovereignty, yet employed the soldier in the main not against the citizen but against the public foe, and esteemed both nation and army too highly to set the latter as constable over the former.
3«o
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
The regulation of financial matters occasioned compara- jjveiy little difficulty in consequence of the solid foundations which the immense magnitude of the empire and the exclusion of the system of credit supplied. If the state had hitherto found itself in constant financial embarrass ment, the fault was far from chargeable on the inadequacy
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
361
of the state revenues'; on the contrary these had of late years immensely increased. To the earlier aggregate income, which is estimated at 200,000,000 sesterces
there were added 85,000,000 sesterces (,£850,000) by the erection of the provinces of Bithynia-
Pontus and Syria ; which increase, along with the other newly opened up or augmented sources of income, especi
ally from the constantly increasing produce of the taxes
on luxuries, far outweighed the loss of the Campanian rents. Besides, immense sums had been brought from extraordinary sources into the exchequer through Lucullus, Metellus, Pompeius, Cato and others. The cause of the financial embarrassments rather lay partly in the increase v of the ordinary and extraordinary expenditure, partly in
the disorder of management. Under the former head, the distribution of corn to the multitude of the capital claimed almost exorbitant sums ; through the extension given
to it by Cato in 691 (iv. 490) the yearly expenditure for 63. that purpose amounted to 30,000,000 sesterces (. £300,000) and after the abolition in 696 of the compensation hitherto 68. paid, it swallowed up even a fifth of the state revenues.
The military budget also had risen, since the garrisons
of Cilicia, Syria, and Gaul had been added to those of Spain, Macedonia, and the other provinces. Among the extraordinary items of expenditure must be named in the first place the great cost of fitting out fleets, on which,
for example, five years after the great razzia of 687, 67. 34,000,000 sesterces (^340,000) were expended at once. Add to this the very considerable sums which were consumed in wars and warlike preparations ; such as 18,000,000 sesterces (,£180,000) paid at once to Piso merely for the outfit of the Macedonian army, 24,000,000 sesterces (,£240,000) even annually to Pompeius for the maintenance and pay of the Spanish army, and similar sums to Caesar for the Gallic legions. But considerable
(£2,000,000),
Financial reforms of Caesar.
as were these demands made on the Roman exchequer, it would still have been able probably to meet them, had not its administration once so exemplary been affected by the universal laxity and dishonesty of this age ; the payments of the treasury were often suspended merely because of the neglect to call up its outstanding claims. The magistrates placed over two of the quaestors— young men annually changed—contented themselves at the best with inaction; among the official staff of clerks and others, formerly so justly held in high esteem for its in tegrity, the worst abuses now prevailed, more especially since such posts had come to be bought and sold.
As soon however as the threads of Roman state-finance were concentrated no longer as hitherto in the senate, but in the cabinet of Caesar, new life, stricter order, and more
compact connection at once pervaded all the wheels and springs of that great machine. The two institutions, which originated with Gaius Gracchus and ate like gangrene into the Roman financial system —the leasing of the direct taxes, and the distributions of grain—were partly abolished, partly remodelled. Caesar wished not, like his predecessor, to hold the nobility in check by the banker-aristocracy and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver the commonwealth from all parasites whether of high or lower rank and therefore he went in these two important questions not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla. The leasing system was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which was very old and— under the maxim of Roman financial administration, which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable —absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, aa contributions in kind to be directly supplied to the state,
Leasing of
tales'1 abolished,
368
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
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chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
363
or converted, like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed
in which case the collection of the several sums payable was entrusted to the tax - districts
themselves.
The corn-distributions in the capital had hitherto been Reform of
looked on as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled and, because ruled, had to be fed by its com. subjects. This infamous principle was set aside by Caesar
but could not be overlooked that multitude of wholly destitute burgesses had been protected solely by these largesses of food from starvation. In this aspect Caesar retained them. While according to the Sempronian ordinance renewed by Cato every Roman burgess settled
in Rome had legally claim to bread-corn without payment, this list of recipients, which had at last risen to
the number of 320,000, was reduced the exclusion of
all individuals having means or otherwise provided for to
150,000, and this number was fixed once for all as the maximum number of recipients of free corn at the same time an annual revision of the list was ordered, so that the places vacated by removal or death might be again filled up with the most needful among the applicants. By this conversion of the political privilege into provision for the poor, principle remarkable in moral as well as in historical point of view came for the first time into living operation. Civil society but slowly and gradually works its way to perception of the interdependence of interests earlier antiquity the state doubtless protected its members from the public enemy and the murderer, but was not bound to protect the totally helpless fellow-citizen from the worse enemy, want, by affording the needful means of subsistence. was the Attic civilization which first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian legislation, the principle that the duty of the community to provide for its invalids and indeed for its poor generally and was
money payments,
it
;
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is
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The budget of income.
Caesar that first developed what in the restricted compass of Attic life had remained a municipal matter into an organic institution of state, and transformed an arrangement, which was a burden and a disgrace for the commonwealth, into the first of those institutions —in modern times as count less as they are beneficial —where the infinite depth of human compassion contends with the infinite depth of human misery.
In addition to these fundamental reforms a thorough revision of the income and expenditure took place. The ordinary sources of income were everywhere regulated and fixed. Exemption from taxation was conferred on not a few communities and even on whole districts, whether indirectly by the bestowal of the Roman or Latin franchise, or directly by special privilege ; it was obtained e. g. by all the Sicilian communities 1 in the former, by the town of Uion in the latter way. Still greater was the number of those whose proportion of tribute was lowered ; the com munities in Further Spain, for instance, already after Caesar's governorship had on his suggestion a reduction of tribute granted to them by the senate, and now the most oppressed province of Asia had not only the levying of its direct taxes facilitated, but also a third of them remitted. The newly- added taxes, such as those of the communities subdued in Illyria and above all of the Gallic communities —which latter together paid annually 40,000,000 sesterces (^400,000) —were fixed throughout on a low scale. It is true on the other hand that various towns such as Little Leptis in Africa, Sulci in Sardinia, and several Spanish communities, had their tribute raised by way of penalty for their conduct during the last war. The very
1 Varro attests the discontinuance of the Sicilian decumat in a treatise published after Cicero's death (De R. R. a fraef. ) where he names —as the corn - provinces whence Rome derives her subsistence — only Africa and Sardinia, no longer Sicily. The Latinita], which Sicily obtained, must thus doubtless have included this immunity (comp. Staatsrecht, iii. 684).
364
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
wholly
char xi THE NEW MONARCHY
3«5
lucrative Italian harbour-tolls abolished in the recent times of anarchy (iv. 502) were re-established all the more readily, that this tax fell essentially on luxuries imported from the east To these new or revived sources of ordinary income were added the sums which accrued by
extraordinary means, especially in consequence of the civil war, to the victor —the booty collected in Gaul ; the stock of cash in the capital; the treasures taken from the Italian and
Spanish temples ; the sums raised in the shape of forced loan, compulsory present, or fine, from the dependent communities and dynasts, and the pecuniary penalties imposed in a similar way by judicial sentence, or simply by sending an order to pay, on individual wealthy Romans ; and above all things the proceeds from the estate of defeated opponents. How productive these sources of income were, we may learn from the fact, that the fine of the African capitalists who sat in the opposition-senate alone amounted to 100,000,000 sesterces (,£1,000,000) and the price paid by the purchasers of the property of
to 70,000,000 sesterces (,£700,000). This course was necessary, because the power of the beaten nobility rested in great measure on their colossal wealth and could only be effectually broken by imposing on them the defrayment of the costs of the war. But the odium of the confiscations was in some measure mitigated by the fact that Caesar directed their proceeds solely to the benefit of the state, and, instead of overlooking after the manner of Sulla any act of fraud in his favourites, exacted the
Pompeius
with rigour even from his most faithful adherents, e. g. from Marcus Antonius.
In the expenditure a diminution was in the first place The obtained by the considerable restriction of the largesses of budg^'
purchase -money
The distribution of corn to the poor of the capital tura. which was retained, as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar for the Roman baths, were at least
grain.
366
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
in great part charged once for all on the contributions in kind from Sardinia and especially from Africa, and were thereby wholly or for the most part kept separate from the exchequer. On the other hand the regular expenditure for the military system was increased partly by the augmenta tion of the standing army, partly by the raising of the pay of the legionary from 480 sesterces (£5) to 900 (,£g)
Both steps were in fact indispensable. There was a total want of any real defence for the frontiers, and an indispensable preliminary to it was a considerable increase of the army. The doubling of the pay was doubtless employed by Caesar to attach his soldiers firmly to him 199), but was not introduced as a permanent innovation on that account The former pay of sesterces Jd. ) per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had an altogether different value from that which had in the Rome of Caesar's day could only have been retained down to period when the common day-labourer in the capital earned the labour of his hands daily on an average sesterces
because in those times the soldier entered the army not for the sake of the pay, but chiefly for the sake of the —in great measure illicit —perquisites of military service. The first condition in order to serious reform in the military system, and to the getting rid of those irregular gains of the soldier which formed burden mostly on the provincials, was an increase suitable to the times in the regular pay and the fixing of at sesterces id. ) may be regarded as an equitable step, while the great burden thereby imposed on the treasury was a necessary, and in its con sequences beneficial, course.
Of the amount of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar had to undertake or voluntarily undertook, difficult to form conception. The wars themselves consumed enormous sums; and sums perhaps not less
annually.
J«. i-
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2
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chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
367
were required to fulfil the promises which Caesar had been obliged to make during the civil war. It was a bad example and one unhappily not lost sight of in the sequel, that every common soldier received for his partici pation in the civil war 20,000 sesterces (^200), every burgess of the multitude in the capital for his non-participa
tion in it 300 sesterces (jCz) as an addition to his aliment ; but Caesar, after having once under the pressure of circumstances pledged his word, was too much of a king to abate from it Besides, Caesar answered innumerable demands of honourable liberality, and put into circulation immense sums for building more especially, which had been shamefully neglected during the financial distress of the last times of the republic —the cost of his buildings executed partly during the Gallic campaigns, partly after wards, in the capital was reckoned at 160,000,000 sesterces (^1,600,000). The general result of the financial administration of Caesar is expressed in the fact that, while by sagacious and energetic reforms and by a right combination of economy and liberality he amply and fully met all equitable claims, nevertheless already in March 710 there lay in the public treasury 700,000,000 44. and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together ^8,000,000) —a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic
(iii. 23).
But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnish- Social
ing the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitu- "^j"*0* tion, an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult nation,
as it was, was not the most difficult part of Caesar's work.
If the Italian nation was really to be regenerated, it
required a reorganization which should transform all parts of the great empire — Rome, Italy, and the provinces. Let us endeavour here also to delineate the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new and more tolerable time.
Th» **'
The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case, that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp more quickly than any subor dinate community. There the upper classes speedily with draw from urban public life, in order to find their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city ; there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctu ating population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt, and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble. All this pre-eminently applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted into im perial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly of burgesses of the empire ; and when smaller self-governing tribal or other associations were not tolerated within the capital : all proper communal life ceased for Rome. From the whole compass of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation, for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime, or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.
These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave were associated with them. There has never perhaps existed a great city so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other, rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there. The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics of antiquity in general— the slave-system —were more conspicuous in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families or of wealthy upstarts. Nowhere were the nations of the
The
Jjjjjjj °*
368
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
369
three continents mingled as in the slave -population of the capital — Syrians, Phrygians and other half- Hellenes with Libyans and Moors, Getae and Iberians with the daily-increasing influx of Celts and Germans. The demoralization inseparable from the absence of freedom, and the terrible inconsistency between formal and moral right, were far more glaringly apparent in the case of the half or wholly cultivated — as it were genteel — city-slave than in that of the rural serf who tilled the field in chains like the fettered ox. Still worse than the masses of slaves
were those who had been dc jure or simply de facto released from slavery—a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves and not yet fully bur gesses, economically and even legally dependent on their master and yet with the pretensions of free men ; and these freedmen made their way above all towards the capital, where gain of various sorts was to be had and the retail traffic as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands. Their influence on the elections is expressly attested; and that they took a leading part in the street riots, is very evident from the ordinary signal by means of which these were virtually proclaimed by the demagogues — the closing of the shops and places of sale.
Moreover, the government not only did nothing to coun-
teract this corruption of the population of the capital, but
even encouraged it for the benefit of their selfish policy, to the
pop
The judicious rule of law, which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offence from dwelling in the capital, was not carried into effect by the negligent police. The police-supervision —so urgently required —of associa tion on the part of the rabble was at first neglected, and afterwards 1n) even declared punishable as restriction inconsistent with the freedom of the people. The popular festivals had been allowed so to increase that the seven ordinary ones alone—the Roman, the Plebeian, those of
VOL. . ,17
Relations
"i^ch-
V
(p.
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370
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo, of Flora (iii. 125) and of Victoria —lasted altogether sixty-two days ; and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous
other extraordinary amusements. The duty of providing grain at low prices — which was unavoidably necessary with such a proletariate living wholly from hand to mouth —was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity, and the fluctuations in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous and incalculable description. 1 Lastly, the distributions of grain formed an official invitation to the whole burgess- proletariate who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up their abode in the capital.
Anarchy of
the capital. The system of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics,
The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded.
the worship of Isis and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root in this state of things. People were constantly in prospect of a dearth, and not unfre- quently in utter famine. Nowhere was a man less secure of his life than in the capital ; murder
professionally prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it; the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary to his assassination ; no one ventured into the country in the
vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue. Its out ward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization, and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government Nothing was done for the regulation of the stream of the Tiber ; excepting that they caused the only bridge, with which they still made shift (iv. 169), to be constructed of stone at least as far as the Tiber-island. As little was anything done toward the levelling of the city of the Seven Hills, except where perhaps the accumulation of rubbish had effected some improvement The streets ascended and
1 In Sicily, the country of production, the modiut was sold within a few years at two and at twenty sesterces ; from this we may guess what must have been the fluctuations of price in Rome, which subsisted on transmarine corn and was the seat of speculators.
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
371
descended narrow and angular, and were wretchedly kept ; the footpaths were small and ill paved. The ordinary houses were built of bricks negligently and to a giddy height, mostly by speculative builders on account of the small proprietors ; by which means the former became vastly rich, and the latter were reduced to beggary. Like isolated islands amidst this sea of wretched buildings were seen the splendid palaces of the rich, which curtailed the space for the smaller houses just as their owners curtailed the burgess-rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars and Greek statues the
decaying temples, with their images of the gods still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure. A police-
supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the state-theologians their report and advice regarding the true import of such signs and wonders. If we try to conceive to ourselves a London with the slave-population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome, and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris in 1848, we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.
Caesar did not deplore, but he sought to help so far as
help was possible. Rome remained, of course, what it was
—a cosmopolitan city. Not only would the attempt to in the give to it once more a specifically Italian character have czpaa1' been impracticable ; it would not have suited Caesar's plan.
Just as Alexander found for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic, Jewish, Egyptian, and
above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria, so the capital of the
new Romano-Hellenic universal empire, situated at the
Caesar's t"satI°TMt
-
Diminution teuriawT*"
meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital of many nations. For this reason Caesar tolerated the worship of the newly-settled Egyptian gods alongside of Father Jovis, and granted even to the Jews the free exercise of their strangely foreign ritual in the very capital of the empire. However offensive was the motley mixture of the parasitic — especially the Helleno-Oriental — population in Rome, he nowhere opposed its extension ; it is significant, that at his popular festivals for the capital he caused dramas to be per formed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other lan guages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish.
But, if Caesar accepted with the full consciousness of w^at ne was doing tne fundamental character of the capital such as he found he yet worked energetically at the improvement of the lamentable and disgraceful state of things prevailing there. Unhappily the primary evils were the least capable of being eradicated. Caesar could not abolish slavery with its train of national calamities must remain an open question, whether he would in the course of time have attempted at least to limit the slave-population in the capital, as he undertook to do so in another field. As little could Caesar conjure into existence free industry in the capital yet the great building-operations remedied in some measure the want of means of support there, and opened up to the proletariate source of small but honour able gain. On the other hand Caesar laboured energetically to diminish the mass of the free proletariate. The constant influx of persons brought by the corn-largesses to Rome was, not wholly stopped,1 at least very materially restricted
It a net not without interest that a political writer of later date but much judgment, the author of the letters addressed in the name of Sallust to Caesar, advises the latter to transfer the corn-distribution of the capital to the several mtinicipia. There good sense in the admonition as indeed similar ideas obviously prevailed in the noble municipal provision for orphans under Trajan.
372
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
is
;
1 is
if
a
;
a
; it
it,
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
373
by the conversion of these largesses into a provision for the poor limited to a fixed number. The ranks of the existing proletariate were thinned on the one hand by the tribunals which were instructed to proceed with unrelenting rigour against the rabble, on the other hand by a compre hensive transmarine colonization ; of the 80,000 colonists whom Caesar sent beyond the seas in the few years of his government, a very great portion must have been taken from the lower ranks of the population of the capital ; most of the Corinthian settlers indeed were freedmen. When in deviation from the previous order of things, which precluded the freedmen from any urban honorary office, Caesar opened to them in his colonies the doors of the senate- house, this was doubtless done in order to gain those of them who were in better positions to favour the cause of emi gration. This emigration, however, must have been more than a mere temporary arrangement; Caesar, convinced like every other man of sense that the only true remedy for the misery of the proletariate consisted in a well-regulated system of colonization, and placed by the condition of the empire in a position to realize it to an almost unlimited extent, must have had the design of permanently continuing the process, and so opening up a constant means of abating an evil which was constantly reproducing itself. Measures were further taken to set bounds to the serious fluctuations in the price of the most important means of subsistence in the markets of the capital. The newly-organized and liberally- administered finances of the state furnished the means for
this purpose, and two newly-nominated magistrates, the corn-aediles 346) were charged with the special supervi sion of the contractors and of the market of the capital.
The club system was checked, more effectually than was The club possible through prohibitive laws, by the change of the con- 222L* stitution inasmuch as with the republic and the republican
elections and tribunals the corruption and violence of the
;
(p.
Street
electioneering and judicial collegia —and generally the politi cal Saturnalia of the canaille—came to an end of themselves. Moreover the combinations called into existence by the Clodian law were broken up, and the whole system of association was placed under the superintendence of the governing authorities. With the exception of the ancient guilds and associations, of the religious unions of the Jews, and of other specially excepted categories, for which a simple intimation to the senate seems to have sufficed, the permission to constitute a permanent society with fixed times of assembling and standing deposits was made dependent on a concession to be granted by the senate, and, as a rule, doubtless only after the consent of the monarch had been obtained.
To this was added a stricter administration of criminal justice and an energetic police. The laws, especially as regards the crime of violence, were rendered more strin gent ; and the irrational enactment of the republican law, that the convicted criminal was entitled to withdraw himself from a part of the penalty which he had incurred by self- banishment, was with reason set aside. The detailed regulations, which Caesar issued regarding the police of the capital, are in great part still preserved ; and all who choose may convince themselves that the Imperator did not disdain to insist on the house-proprietors putting the streets into repair and paving the footpath in its whole breadth with hewn stones, and to issue appropriate enact ments regarding the carrying of litters and the driving of waggons, which from the nature of the streets were only allowed to move freely through the capital in the evening and by night The supervision of the local police remained as hitherto chiefly with the four aediles, who were instructed now at least, if not earlier, each to superintend a distinctly marked-off police district within the capital.
Lastly, building in the capital, and the orovision con*
374
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
375
nected therewith of institutions for the public benefit, received from Caesar — who combined in himself the love for building of a Roman and of an organizer—a sudden stimulus, which not merely put to shame the mismanage ment of the recent anarchic times, but also left all that the Roman aristocracy had done in their best days as far behind as the genius of Caesar surpassed the honest endeavours of the Marcii and Aemilii. It was not merely by the extent of the buildings in themselves and the magnitude of the sums expended on them that Caesar excelled his prede cessors ; but a genuine statesmanly perception of what was for the public good distinguishes what Caesar did for the public institutions of Rome from all similar services. He did not build, like his successors,
Buildingi ,^5°^
temples and other splendid structures, but he relieved the market
place of Rome—in which the burgess-assemblies, the seats of the chief courts, the exchange, and the daily business- traffic as well as the daily idleness, still were crowded together—at least from the assemblies and the courts by constructing for the former a new comitium, the Saepta Julia in the Campus Martius, and for the latter a separate place of judicature, the Forum Julium between the Capitol and Palatine. Of a kindred spirit is the arrangement originat ing with him, by which there were supplied to the baths of the capital annually three million pounds of oil, mostly from Africa, and they were thereby enabled to furnish to the bathers gratuitously the oil required for the anoint ing of the body —a measure of cleanliness and sanitary polio2 which, according to the ancient dietetics based substantially on bathing and anointing, was highly judi cious.
But these noble arrangements were only the first steps towards a complete remodelling of Rome.
Projects were already formed for a new senate-house, for a new magnifi cent bazaar, for a theatre to rival that of Pompeius, for a
37«
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
public Latin and Greek library after the model of that recently destroyed at Alexandria —the first institution of the sort in Rome — lastly for a temple of Mars, which was to surpass all that had hitherto existed in riches and glory. Still more brilliant was the idea, first, of construct ing a canal through the Pomptine marshes and drawing off their waters to Tarracina, and secondly, of altering the lower course of the Tiber and of leading it from the present Ponte Molle, not through between the Campus Vaticanus and the Campus Martius, but rather round the Campus Vaticanus and the Janiculum to Ostia, where the miserable roadstead was to give place to an adequate arti ficial harbour. By this gigantic plan on the one hand the most dangerous enemy of the capital, the malaria of the neighbourhood would be banished ; on the other hand the extremely limited facilities for building in the capital would be at once enlarged by substituting the Campus Vaticanus thereby transferred to the left bank of the Tiber for the Campus Martius, and allowing the latter spacious field to be applied for public and private edifices ; while the capital would at the same time obtain a safe seaport, the want of which was so painfully felt. It seemed as if the Imperator would remove mountains and rivers, and venture to contend with nature herself.
Much however as the city of Rome gained by the new order of things in commodiousness and magnificence, its political supremacy was, as we have already said, lost to it irrecoverably through that very change. The idea that the Roman state should coincide with the city of Rome had in deed in the course of time become more and more unnatural and preposterous ; but the maxim had been so intimately blended with the essence of the Roman republic, that it could not perish before the republic itself. It was only in
the new state of Caesar that it was, with the exception per haps of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
377
community of the capital was placed legally on a level with all other municipalities ; indeed Caesar—here as everywhere endeavouring not merely to regulate the thing, but also to call it officially by the right name —issued his Italian muni cipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely, at once for the capital and for the other urban communities. We may add thai Rome, just because it was incapable of a living com munal character as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities of the imperial period. The re publican Rome was a den of robbers, but it was at the same time the state ; the Rome of the monarchy, although it began to embellish itself with all the glories of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble, was yet
in the state but a royal residence in connec tion with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary eviL
While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid of palpable evils by police ordinances on the great est scale, it was a far more difficult task to remedy the
nothing
of Italian economics. Its radical misfortunes were those which we previously noticed in
deep disorganization
detail — the disappearance of the agricultural, and the un
natural increase of the mercantile, population —with which
an endless train of other evils was associated. The reader
will not fail to remember what was the state of Italian agri
culture. In spite of the most earnest attempts to check the Italian "** annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry was "^ scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy
during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi. As to the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible between the Catonian system for merly set forth (iii. 64-73) a"d that described to us by Varro, except that the latter shows the traces for better and for worse of the progress of city-life on a great scale in Rome. " Formerly," says Varro, " the barn on the estate was larger
Italy,
378
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
than the manor-house ; now it is wont to be the reverse. " In the domains of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Tarracina and Baiae — where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped — there now rose in barren splendour the villas of the Roman nobles, some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their appurtenances of garden-grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes, nurseries of snails and slugs, game- preserves for keeping hares, rabbits, stags, roes, and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes and peacocks were kept But the luxury of a great city enriches also many an industrious hand, and supports more poor than philanthropy with its expenditure of alms. Those aviaries and fish-ponds of the grandees were of course, as a rule, a very costly indulgence. But this system was carried to such an extent and prosecuted with so much keenness, that eg. the stock of a pigeon-house was valued at 100,000 sesterces (,£1000); a methodical system of fattening had sprung up, and the manure got from the aviaries became of importance in agriculture ; a single bird-dealer was able to furnish at once 5000 fieldfares—for they knew how to rear these also — at three denarii (2s. ) each, and a single possessor of a fish-pond 2000 muraenae ; and the fishes left behind by Lucius Lucullus brought 40,000 sesterces
As may readily be conceived, under such cir cumstances any one who followed this occupation industri ously and intelligently might obtain very large profits with a comparatively small outlay of capital. A small bee- breeder of this period sold from his thyme-garden not larger than an acre in the neighbourhood of Falerii honey to an average annual amount of at least 1 0,000 sesterces
(. £400).
The rivalry of the growers of fruit was carried so far, that in elegant villas the fruit-chamber lined with marble was not unfrequently fitted up at the same time as
(,£100).
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
379
a dining-room, and sometimes fine fruit acquired by pur chase was exhibited there as of home growth. At this period the cherry from Asia Minor and other foreign fruit- trees were first planted in the gardens of Italy. The vegetable gardens, the beds of roses and violets in Latium and Campania, yielded rich produce, and the " market for dainties " (Jorum cupedinis) by the side of the Via Sacra, where fruits, honey, and chaplets were wont to be exposed for sale, played an important part in the life of the capital. Generally the management of estates, worked as they were on the planter-system, had reached in an economic point of view a height scarcely to be surpassed. The valley of Rieti, the region round the Fucine lake, the districts on the Liris and Volturnus, and indeed Central Italy in general, were as respects husbandry in the most flourishing condition ; even certain branches of industry, which were suitable accompaniments of the management of an estate by means of slaves, were taken up by intelligent landlords, and, where the circumstances were favourable, inns, weaving factories, and especially brickworks were constructed on the estate. The Italian producers of wine and oil in
not only supplied the Italian markets, but carried on also in both articles a considerable business of transmarine exportation. A homely professional treatise of this period compares Italy to a great fruit-garden ; and the pictures which a contemporary poet gives of his beautiful native land, where the well-watered meadow, the luxuriant corn-field, the pleasant vine-covered hill are fringed by the dark line of the olive-trees —where the " ornament " of the land, smiling in varied charms, cherishes the loveliest gardens in its bosom and is itself wreathed round by food- producing trees — these descriptions, evidently faithful pictures of the landscape daily presented to the eye of the
poet, transplant us into the most flourishing districts of Tuscany and Terra di Lavoro. The pastoral husbandry,
particular
3to
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
it is true, which for reasons formerly explained was always spreading farther especially in the south and south-east of Italy, was in every respect a retrograde movement ; but it too participated to a certain degree in the general progress of agriculture ; much was done for the improvement of the breeds, e. g. asses for breeding brought 60,000 sesterces (^600), 100,000 (^1000), and even 400,000
(^4000). The solid Italian husbandry obtained at this period, when
Money- dealing.
the general development of intelligence and abundance of capital rendered it fruitful, far more brilliant results than ever the old system of small cultivators could have given ; and was carried even already beyond the bounds of Italy, for the Italian agriculturist turned to account large tracts in the provinces by rearing cattle and even cultivating corn.
In order to show what dimensions money-dealing assumed by the side of this estate-husbandry unnaturally prospering over the ruin of the small farmers, how the Italian merchants vying with the Jews poured themselves into all the provinces and client-states of the empire, and how all capital ultimately flowed to Rome, it will be sufficient, after what has been already said, to point to the single fact that in the money-market of the capital the regular rate of interest at this time was six per cent, and consequently money there was cheaper by a half than it was on an average elsewhere in antiquity.
In consequence of this economic system based both in ite agjj^an and mercantile aspects on masses of capital
and on speculation, there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution of wealth. The often-used and often- abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic ; and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state —that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the
Social dfa- proportion.
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
381
labour of his hands is necessarily vulgar — been recognized
with so terrible a precision as the undoubted
principle all public and private intercourse. 1 A real middle class in our sense of the term there was not, as
indeed no such class can exist in any fully-developed slave- state ; what appears as if it were a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated or to highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere of their activity and to keep aloof from public life. Of the men of business — a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing the man of quality —there were not very many who showed so much judgment A model
1 The following exposition in Cicero's treatise De Officii! 4a) characteristic lam de artificiis et quaestibus, qui liberates habendi, qui sordidi sint, haee fere accepimus, Primum improbantur quaestus, qui in odia hominum incurrunt, ut portitorum, ut feneratorum. Illiberales autem et sordidi quaestus mercenai iorum omnium, quorum operae, non artes emuntur. Est autem in illis ipsa merces auctoramcntum servitutis. Sordidi etiam putandi, qui mercantura mereatoribus quod statim vendant, nihil enim prqficiant, nisi admodum mentiantur. Nee vero est quidquam turpius vanitate. Opificesque omnes in sordida arte versantur; nee enim quidquam ingenuum habere potest offieina. Minimeque artes eae pro- bandae, quae ministrae sunt voluptatum,
"Cetarii, lanii, coqui, fartores, piseatores,"
ut ait Terentius. Addehuc, si placet, unguentarios, saltatores, totumque ludum talarium. Quibus autem artibus aut prudent ia maior inest, aut non mediocris utilitas quaeritur, ut medicina, ut architectura, ut doctrines rerum honestarum, eae sunt lis, quorum ordini conveniunt, honestae. Merca- tura autem, si tenuis est, sordida putanda est; sin magna et copiosa, multa undique apporlans, multaque sine vanitate impertiens, non est admodum vituperanda alque etiam, si satiata quaestu, vel contenta potius ut saepe ex alto in portum, ex ipso port u in agros se possessionesque contuterit, videtur optima iure posse laudari. Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agrieullura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libera dignius. According to this the respectable man must, in strictness, be landowner the trade of merchant becomes him only so far as means to this ultimate end science as a pro fession suitable only for the Greeks and for Romans not belonging to the ruling classes, who by this means may purchase at all events a certain toleration of their personal presence in genteel circles. a thoroughly developed aristocracy of planters, with strong infusion of mercantile
speculation and slight shading of general culture.
underlying
a
a
is
;a It
it
is
it is a
a
;
;
:
;
(i. it
382
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned in the accounts of this period. He acquired an immense fortune partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at the same time he continued to be throughout the simple man of business, did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office or even into monetary transactions with the state, and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal and burdensome luxury of his time—his table, for instance, was maintained at a daily cost of 1oo sesterces (jC1)—contented himself with an easy existence appropri ating to itself the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments of literature and art.
More numerous and more solid were the Italian land holders of the old type. Contemporary literature preserves in the description of Sextus Roscius, who was murdered
II. amidst the proscriptions of 673, the picture of such a rural nobleman (paterfamilias rusticanus) ; his wealth, estimated at 6,000,000 sesterces (^60,000), is mainly invested in his thirteen landed estates ; he attends to the management of it in person systematically and with enthusiasm ; he comes seldom or never to the capital, and, when he does appear there, by his clownish manners he contrasts not less with the polished senator than the innumerable hosts of his uncouth rural slaves with the elegant train of domestic slaves in the capital. Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan culture and the mercantile class at home everywhere and nowhere, these landlords and the "country towns" to which they essentially gave tone (munieipia rusticand) preserved as well the discipline and manners as the pure and noble language of their fathers. The order of landlords was regarded as the
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
383
flower of the nation ; the speculator, who has made his fortune and wishes to appear among the notables of the land, buys an estate and seeks, if not to become himself the squire, at any rate to rear his son with that view. We meet the traces of this class of landlords, wherever a national movement appears in politics, and wherever literature puts forth any fresh growth ; from it the patriotic opposition to the new monarchy drew its best strength ; to it belonged Varro, Lucretius, Catullus ; and nowhere perhaps does the comparative freshness of this landlord-life come more characteristically to light than in the graceful Arpinate introduction to the second book of Cicero's treatise De Legibus—a green oasis amidst the fearful desert
of that equally empty and voluminous writer.
But the cultivated class of merchants and the vigorous
order of landlords were far overgrown by the two classes that gave tone to society—the mass of beggars, and the world of quality proper. We have no statistical figures to indicate precisely the relative proportions of poverty and riches for this epoch ; yet we may here perhaps again recall the expression which a Roman statesman employed some fifty years before (iii. 380) — that the number of families of
The poor,
riches among the Roman burgesses did not amount to 2000. The burgess-body had since then become different ; but clear indications attest that the between poor and rich had remained at least
firmly-established
disproportion
as great The increasing impoverishment of the multitude shows itself only too plainly in their crowding to the corn- largesses and to enlistment in the army ; the corresponding increase of riches is attested expressly by an author of this
when, speaking of the circumstances of the Marian period, he describes an estate of 2,000,000 sesterces (^20,000) as "riches according to the circumstances of that day"; and the statements which we find as to the property of individuals lead to the same conclusion. The
generation,
384
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
very rich Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus promised to twenty thousand soldiers four iugera of land each, out of his own property; the estate of Pompeius amounted to 70,000,000 sesterces (. £700,000); that of Aesopus the actor to 20,000,000 (£200,000); Marcus Crassus, the richest of the rich, possessed at the outset of his career, 7,000,000 (,£70,000), at its close, after lavishing enormous sums on the people, 170,000,000 sesterces (,£1,700,000). The effect of such poverty and such riches was on both sides an economic and moral disorganization outwardly different, but at bottom of the same character. If the common man was saved from starvation only by support from the resources of the state, it was the necessary consequence of this mendicant misery — although it also reciprocally appears as a cause of it—that he addicted himself to the beggar's laziness and to the beggar's good cheer. The Roman plebeian was fonder of gazing in the theatre than of working ; the taverns and brothels were so frequented, that the demagogues found their special account in gaining the possessors of such establishments over to their interests. The gladiatorial games —which revealed, at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization of the ancient world —had become so flourishing that a lucrative business was done in the sale of the programmes for them ; and it was at this time that the horrible innovation was adopted by which the decision as to the life or death of the vanquished became dependent, not on the law of duel or on the pleasure of the victor, but on the caprice of the onlooking public, and according to its signal the victor either spared or transfixed his prostrate antagonist. The trade of fighting had so risen or freedom had so fallen in value, that the intrepidity and the emulation, which were lacking on the battle-fields of this age, were universal in the armies of the arena, and, where the law of the duel
required, every gladiator
allowed himself to be stabbed
chap, x1 THE NEW MONARCHY
385
mutely and without shrinking ; that in fact free men not unfrequently sold themselves to the contractors for board and wages as gladiatorial slaves. The plebeians of the fifth century had also suffered want and famine, but they had not sold their freedom; and still less would the
of that period have lent themselves to pro nounce the equally immoral and illegal contract of such a gladiatorial slave "to let himself be chained, scourged, burnt or killed without opposition, if the laws of the institution should so require" by means of unbecoming juristic subtleties as a contract lawful and actionable.
In the world of quality such things did not occur, but Extra-
TO*Mfl*
jurisconsults
at bottom it was hardly different, and least of all better.
In doing nothing the aristocrat boldly competed with the proletarian; if the latter lounged on the pavement, the former lay in bed till far on in the day. Extravagance prevailed here as unbounded as it was devoid of taste.
It was lavished on politics and on the theatre, of course to the corruption of both ; the consular office was purchased
at an incredible price—in the summer of 700 the first 64. voting - division alone was paid 10,000,000 sesterces (;£1 00,000) —and all the pleasure of the man of culture
in the drama was spoilt by the insane luxury of decoratioa Rents in Rome appear to have been on an average four times as high as in the country-towns ; a house there was once sold for 15,000,000 sesterces (^150,000). The house of Marcus Lepidus (consul in 676) which was at 78. the time of the death of Sulla the finest in Rome, did not rank a generation afterwards even as the hundredth on the
list of Roman palaces. We have already mentioned the extravagance practised in the matter of country-houses;
we find that 4,000,000 sesterces (,£40,000) were
for such a house, which was valued chiefly for its fish-pond ; and the thoroughly fashionable grandee now needed at
least two villas — one in the Sabine or Alban mountains
VOL. V
X58
paid
386
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
near the capital, and a second in the vicinity of the Campanian baths — and in addition if possible a garden immediately outside of the gates of Rome. Still more irrational than these villa - palaces were the palatial sepulchres, several of which still existing at the present day attest what a lofty pile of masonry the rich Roman needed in order that he might die as became his rank. Fanciers of horses and dogs too were not wanting ; 24,000 sesterces (^240) was no uncommon price for a showy horse. They indulged in furniture of fine wood — a table of African cypress-wood cost 1,000,000 sesterces (;£10,000); in dresses of purple stuffs or transparent gauzes accompanied by an elegant adjustment of their folds before the mirror —the orator Hortensius is said to have brought an action of damages against a colleague because he ruffled his dress in a crowd ; in precious stones and pearls, which first at this period took the place of the far more beautiful and more artistic ornaments of gold—it was already utter barbarism, when at the triumph of Pompeius over Mithradates the image of the victor appeared wrought wholly of pearls, and when the sofas and the shelves in the dining-hall were silver-mounted and
even the kitchen-utensils were made of silver. In a similar
the collectors of this period took out the artistic medallions from the old silver cups, to set them anew in vessels of gold. Nor was there any lack of luxury also in travelling. "When the governor travelled," Cicero tells us as to one of the Sicilian governors, " which of course he did not in winter, but only at the beginning of spring — not the spring of the calendar but the beginning of the season of roses —he had himself conveyed, as was the custom with the kings of Bithynia, in a litter with eight bearers, sitting on a cushion of Maltese gauze stuffed with rose-leaves, with one garland on his head and a second twined round his neck, applying to his nose a little smelling bag of fine
spirit
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
387
linen, with minute meshes, filled with roses ; and thus he had himself carried even to his bed-chamber. "
Table UXUI7'
But no sort of luxury flourished so much as the coarsest of all—the luxury of the table. The whole villa arrange- ments and the whole villa life had ultimate reference to dining ; not only had they different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary, or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which, when the bespoken
"Orpheus" appeared in theatrical costume and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated. Such was the care bestowed on decoration ; but amidst all this the reality was by no means forgotten. Not only was the cook a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted as the instructor of his cooks. The roast had been long ago thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters ; now the Italian river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar. Now even at the
popular festivals there were distributed, besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine—Sicilian, Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once ; in the cellar of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of
10,000 jars (at 33 quarts) of foreign wine. It was no wonder that the Italian wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines from the Greek islands. No naturalist could ransack land and sea more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day ransacked them for new culinary dainties. 1 The circum-
1 We have still (Macrobius, 111, 13) the bill of fare of the banquet which Mucius Lentulus Niger gave before 691 on entering on his pontin- 03. cate, and of which the pontifices — Caesar included — the Vestal Virgins,
and some other priests and ladies nearly related to them partook. Before
the dinner proper came sea-hedgehogs ; fresh oysters as many as the guests wished; large mussels; sphondyli ; fieldfares with asi*ragub ,
Debt.
stance of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise. Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory and practice of vice.
It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture, so monotonous in its variety ; and the less so, that the Romans were far from original in this respect, and con fined themselves to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more exaggerated and stupid than their model. Plutos naturally devours his children as well as Kronos ; the competition for all these mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices, than those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate melt away in a short time, and even those, who only for credit's sake joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined. The canvass for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin for houses of distinction ; and nearly the same description applies to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant, doubtless, but expensive
388
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
The princely wealth of that period is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities ; Caesar owed
62. about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces
fattened fowls ; oyster and mussel pasties ; black and white sea-acorns ; sphondyli again ; glycimarides ; sea-nettles ; becaficoes ; roc-ribs ; boar's- ribs ; fowls dressed with flour ; becaficoes ; purple shell-fish of two sorts. The dinner itself consisted of sow's udder ; boar's - head ; fish-pasties ; boar-pasties ; ducks ; boiled teals ; hares ; roasted fowls ; starch-pastry ; Pontic pastry.
These are the college-banquets regarding which Varro (De R. R. iii. a, 16) says that they forced up the prices of all delicacies. Varro in one of his satires enumerates the following as the most notable foreign delicacies : peacocks from Samos ; grouse from Phrygia ; cranes from Melos ; kids from Ambracia ; tunny fishes from Chalcedon ; muraenas from the Straits of Gades ; bleak-fishes (? atelli) from Pessinus ; oysters and scallops fror Tarentum ; sturgeons (? ) from Rhodes ; scarus-fishes from Cilicii nuts from Thasos dates from Egypt acorns from Spain.
pursuits.
;
;
(? )
;
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
389
Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four 6,000,000 sesterces (,£60,000), fourteen years afterwards 40,000,000 (,£400,000); Curio owed 60,000,000 (£600,000); Milo 70,000,000 (,£700,000). That those extravagant habits of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit, is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing of the different competitors for the consulship. Insolvency, instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged by the debtor as much as possible ; instead of selling his property and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo, in which the creditors obtained some what above four per cent of the sums for which they ranked. Amidst this startlingly rapid transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling, nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give and refuse credit. The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times of the social crises of the fifth century ; the nominal landowners held virtually by sufferance of their creditors ; the debtors were either in servile subjection to their creditors, so that the humbler of them appeared like freedmen in the creditor's train and those of higher rank spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord ; or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself, and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid of them by con spiracy and civil war. On these relations was based the power of Crassus ; out of them arose the insurrections — whose motto was " a clear sheet "—of China (iii. 530, iv. 74)
(,£250,000);
Im-
m0 ty"
and still more definitely of Catilina, of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated the Hellenic world 495). That amidst so rotten an economic condition every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case we need hardly mention that the usual phenomena — the disappearance of capital, the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bank ruptcies, and an almost universal insolvency—made their appearance now during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social and Mithradatic wars (iv. 176).
Under such circumstances, as matter of course, morality and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks of society. To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person as well as the common courtesan falsifying of documents and perjuries had become so common that in
popular poet of this age an oath called "the plaster for debts. " Men had forgotten what honesty was person who refused bribe was regarded not as an upright man, but as personal foe. The criminal statistics of all times and countries will hardly furnish parallel to the dreadful picture of crimes—so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural —which the trial of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most respected
families of an Italian country town.
But while at the bottom of the national life the slime
was thus constantly accumulating more and more deleteri- ously and deeply, so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface, overlaid with the varnish of polished
390
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
Friendship.
a
a
a
(ii.
; a
a
is
;
a
;
:;
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
391
manners and universal friendship. All the world inter changed visits ; so that in the houses of quality it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted partly in groups, partly en masse at the close — a distinction which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy, is said to have introduced. The interchange of letters of courtesy was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy ; " friendly " letters flew over land and sea between persons who had neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter is addressed to a corporation. In like manner invitations to dinner, the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials ; even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions to his countless " neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake. Just as in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes of affection which had lost all meaning, and
thus by degrees the"reality came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of friendship," which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.
An equally characteristic feature in the brilliant decay of this period was the emancipation of women. In an economic point of view the women had long since made themselves independent (iii. 133); in the present epoch
Women, /.
. , Y
/
'
/
ljj
£fi f. ' >-
39a
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK V
we even meet with solicitors acting specially for women, who officiously lend their aid to solitary rich ladies in the management of their property and their lawsuits, make an impression on them by their knowledge of business and law, and thereby procure for themselves ampler perquisites and legacies than other loungers on the exchange. But it was not merely from the economic guardianship of father or husband that women felt themselves emancipated. Love -intrigues of all sorts were constantly in progress. The ballet-dancers (mimae) were quite a match for those of the present day in the variety of their pursuits and the skill with which they followed them out ; their prima- donnas, Cytheris and the like, pollute even the pages of history. But their, as it were, licensed trade was very materially injured by the free art of the ladies of aristo cratic circles. Liaisons in the first houses had become so frequent, that only a scandal altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk; a judicial inter ference seemed now almost ridiculous. An unparalleled
61. scandal, such as Publius Clodius produced in 693 at the women's festival in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, although a thousand times worse than the occurrences which fifty years before had led to a series of capital sentences (iv. 207), passed almost without investigation and wholly without punishment. The watering-place season —in April, when political business was suspended
. and the world of quality congregated in Baiae and Puteoli —derived its chief charm from the relations licit and illicit which, along with music and song and elegant breakfasts on board or on shore, enlivened the gondola voyages. There the ladies held absolute sway ; but they were by no means content with this domain which rightfully belonged to them ; they also acted as politicians, appeared in party conferences, and took part with their money and their
intrigues in the wild coterie-doings of the time. Any one
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
393
who beheld these female statesmen performing on the stage of Scipio and Cato and saw at their side the young fop— as with smooth chin, delicate voice, and mincing gait, with headdress and neckerchiefs, frilled robe, and women's sandals he copied the loose courtesan — might well have a horror of the unnatural world, in which the sexes seemed as though they wished to change parts. What ideas as to divorce prevailed in the circles of the aristocracy may be discerned in the conduct of their best and most moral hero Marcus Cato, who did not hesitate to separate from his wife at the request of a friend desirous to marry her, and as little scrupled on the death of this friend to marry the same wife a second time. Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially among the upper classes. While among these marriage had for long been regarded as a burden which people took upon them at the best in the public interest (iii. 118, iv. 186/), we now encounter even in Cato and those who shared Cato's senti ments the maxim to which Polybius a century before traced the decay of Hellas (iii. 265), that it is the duty of a citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget
too many children. Where were the times, when the designation "children-producer" (proletarius) had been a term of honour for the Roman ?
In consequence of such a social condition the Latin Depopula- stock in Italy underwent an alarming diminution, and its tion of
Italy. fair provinces were overspread partly by parasitic immi
grants, partly by sheer desolation. A considerable portion of the population of Italy flocked to foreign lands. Already
the aggregate amount of talent and of working power, which the supply of Italian magistrates and Italian garri sons for the whole domain of the Mediterranean demanded, transcended the resources of the peninsula, especially as the elements thus sent abroad were in great part lost for ever to the natioa For the more that the Roman com-
394
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
munity grew into an empire embracing many nations, the more the governing aristocracy lost the habit of looking on Italy as their exclusive home ; while of the men levied or enlisted for service a considerable portion perished in the many wars, especially in the bloody civil war, and another portion became wholly estranged from their native country by the long period of service, which sometimes lasted for a generation. In like manner with the public service, speculation kept a portion of the landholders and almost the whole body of merchants all their lives or at any rate for a long time out of the country, and the de moralising itinerant life of trading in particular estranged the latter altogether from civic existence in the mother country and from the various conditions of family life. As a •compensation for these, Italy obtained on the one hand the proletariate of slaves and freedmen, on the other hand the craftsmen and traders flocking thither from Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, who nourished chiefly in the
capital and still more in the seaport towns of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium (iv. 194). In the largest and most im portant part of Italy however, there was not even such a substitution of impure elements for pure ; but the popula tion was visibly on the decline. Especially was this true of the pastoral districts such as Apulia, the chosen land of cattle-breeding, which is called by contemporaries the most deserted part of Italy, and of the region around Rome, where the Campagna was annually becoming more desolate under the constant reciprocal action of the retrograde agriculture and the increasing malaria. Labici, Gabii, Bovillae, once cheerful little country towns, were so de cayed, that it was difficult to find representatives of them for the ceremony of the Latin festival. Tusculum, although still one of the most esteemed communities of Latium, consisted almost solely of some genteel families who lived in the capital but retained their native Tusculan franchise,
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
395
and was far inferior in the number of burgesses entitled to vote even to small communities in the interior of Italy. The stock of men capable of arms in this district, on which Rome's ability to defend herself had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people read with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of the annals— sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they stood — respecting the Aequian and Volscian wars. Matters were not so bad everywhere, especially in the other portions of Central Italy and in Campania ; nevertheless, as Varro complains, " the once populous cities of Italy," in general "stood desolate. " —
It is a dreadful picture
rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or ^L—k- soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars
and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully
this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height
to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty
yawned — the more frequently, amidst that changeful world
of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals
tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to
the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds
were externally divided, the more completely they coincided
in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the
germ and core of all nationality —in the like laziness and
the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, parMy with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy ; wher ever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way As rivers glisten in different colours, but a
luxury,
this picture of Italy under the Italy umder
Reforms of Caorc.
common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate- farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a —hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern
world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave ; and not until the dragon- seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.
These evils, under which the national economy of Italy lay prostrate, were in their deepest essence irremediable, and so much of them as still admitted of remedy depended essentially for its amendment on the people and on time ; for the wisest government is as little able as the more skilful physician to give freshness to the corrupt juices of the organism, or to do more in the case of the deeper- rooted evils than to prevent those accidents which obstruct the remedial power of nature in its working. The peaceful energy of the new rule even of itself furnished such a preventive, for by its means some of the worst excrescences were done away, such as the artificial pampering of the proletariate, the impunity of crimes, the purchase of offices, and various others. But the government could do something more than simply abstain from harm. Caesar was not one of those over-wise people who refuse to embank the sea, be cause forsooth no dike can defy some sudden influx of the tide. It is better, if a nation and its economy follow spontaneously the path prescribed by nature ; but, seeing that they had got out of this path, Caesar applied all his
396
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book t
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
to bring back by special intervention the nation to its home and family life, and to reform the national economy by law and decree.
energies
With a view to check the continued absence of the Measures Italians from Italy and to induce the world of quality and a^e^e, the merchants to establish their homes in their native land, from Italy, not only was the term of service for the soldiers shortened,
but men of senatorial rank were altogether prohibited from
taking up their abode out of Italy except when on public
business, while the other Italians of marriageable age (from
the twentieth to the fortieth year) were enjoined not to be
absent from Italy for more than three consecutive years. In
the same spirit Caesar had already in his first consulship on
founding the colony of Capua kept specially in view fathers
who had several children (iv. 508); and now as Imperator he
proposed extraordinary rewards for the fathers of numerous
families, while he at the same time as supreme judge of the
nation treated divorce and adultery with a rigour according
to Roman ideas unparalleled.
397
Nor did he even think it beneath his dignity to issue a detailed law as to luxury —which, among other points, cut down extravagance in building at least in one of its most irrational forms, that of sepulchral monuments; restricted the use of purple robes and pearls to certain times, ages, and classes, and totally prohibited it in grown-up men; fixed a maximum for the expenditure of the table; and directly forbade a number of luxurious dishes. Such ordinances"doubtless were not"new ; but it was a new thing that the master of morals seriously insisted on their observance, superintended the provision-markets by means of paid overseers, and ordered that the tables of men of rank should be examined by his officers and the forbidden dishes on them should be confiscated. It is true that by such theoretical and practical instructions in moderation as the new monarchical police gave to the fashionable world
Measure* for *J
of the famlly-
Laws resPectin«
The debt
hardly more could be accomplished than the compelling luxury to retire somewhat more into concealment ; but, if hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue, under the circumstances of the times even a semblance of propriety established by police measures was a step towards improvement not to be despised.
The measures of Caesar for the better regulation of Italian monetary and agricultural relations were of a graver character and promised greater results. The first question here related to temporary enactments respecting the scarcity of money and the debt-crisis generally. The law called forth by the outcry as to locked-up capital — that no one should have on hand more than 60,000 sesterces (^600) in gold and silver cash —was probably only issued to allay the indignation of the blind public against the usurers; the form of publication, which proceeded on the fiction that this was merely the renewed enforcing of an earlier law that had fallen into oblivion, shows that Caesar was ashamed of this enactment, and it can hardly have passed into actual application. A far more serious question was the treatment of the pending claims for debt, the complete remission of which was vehemently demanded from Caesar by the party which called itself by his name. We have already mentioned, that he did not yield to this demand
398
THli OLD REPUBLIC AND book t
318); but two important concessions were made to 40. the debtors, and that as early as 705.