The History of Rome, Book II - Theodor Mommsen
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Sacerdotal System
In the sacerdotal system no comprehensive changes, so far as we know,
took place. The more stringent enactments, that were made about 465
regarding the collection of the process-fines destined to defray the
cost of public worship, point to an increase in the ritual budget of
the state--a necessary result of the increase in the number of its
gods and its temples. It has already been mentioned as one of the evil
effects of the dissensions between the orders that an illegitimate
influence began to be conceded to the colleges of men of lore, and
that they were employed for the annulling of political acts(19)--a
course by which on the one hand the faith of the people was shaken,
and on the other hand the priests were permitted to exercise a very
injurious influence on public affairs.
Military System--
Manipular Legion--
Entrenchment of Camp--
Cavalry--
Officers--
Military Discipline--
Training and Classes of Soldiers--
Military Value of the Manipular Legion
A complete revolution occurred during this epoch in the military
system. The primitive Graeco-Italian military organization, which was
probably based, like the Homeric, on the selection of the most
distinguished and effective warriors--who ordinarily fought on
horseback--to form a special vanguard, had in the later regal period
been superseded by the -legio--the old Dorian phalanx of hoplites,
probably eight file deep.(20) This phalanx thenceforth undertook the
chief burden of the battle, while the cavalry were stationed on the
flanks, and, mounted or dismounted according to circumstances, were
chiefly employed as a reserve. From this arrangement there were
developed nearly at the same time the phalanx of -sarrissae-in
Macedonia and the manipular arrangement in Italy, the former formed by
closing and deepening, the latter by breaking up and multiplying, the
ranks, in the first instance by the division of the old -legio- of
8400 into two -legiones- of 4200 men each. The old Doric phalanx had
been wholly adapted to close combat with the sword and especially with
the spear, and only an accessory and subordinate position in the order
of battle was assigned to missile weapons. In the manipular legion the
thrusting-lance was confined to the third division, and instead of it
the first two were furnished with a new and peculiar Italian missile
weapon, the -pilum- a square or round piece of wood, four and a half
feet long, with a triangular or quadrangular iron point--which had
been originally perhaps invented for the defence of the ramparts of
the camp, but was soon transferred from the rear to the front ranks,
and was hurled by the advancing line into the ranks of the enemy at a
distance of from ten to twenty paces. At the same time the sword
acquired far greater importance than the short knife of the phalangite
could ever have had; for the volley of javelins was intended in the
first instance merely to prepare the way for an attack sword in hand.
While, moreover, the phalanx had, as if it were a single mighty lance,
to be hurled at once upon the enemy, in the new Italian legion the
smaller units, which existed also in the phalanx system but were in
the order of battle firmly and indissolubly united, were tactically
separated from each other. Not merely was the close square divided, as
we have said, into two equally strong halves, but each of these was
separated in the direction of its depth into the three divisions of
the -hastati-, - principes-, and -triarii-, each of a moderate depth
probably amounting in ordinary cases to only four files; and was
broken up along the front into ten bands (-manipuli-), in such a way
that between every two divisions and every two maniples there was left
a perceptible interval. It was a mere continuation of the same process
of individualizing, by which the collective mode of fighting was
discouraged even in the diminished tactical unit and the single combat
became prominent, as is evident from the (already mentioned) decisive
part played by hand-to-hand encounters and combats with the sword. The
system of entrenching the camp underwent also a peculiar development.
The place where the army encamped, even were it only for a single
night, was invariably provided with a regular circumvallation and as
it were converted into a fortress. Little change took place on the
other hand in the cavalry, which in the manipular legion retained the
secondary part which it had occupied by the side of the phalanx. The
system of officering the army also continued in the main unchanged;
only now over each of the two legions of the regular army there were
set just as many war-tribunes as had hitherto commanded the whole
army, and the number of staff-officers was thus doubled. It was at
this period probably that the clear line of demarcation became
established between the subaltern officers, who as common soldiers had
to gain their place at the head of the maniples by the sword and
passed by regular promotion from the lower to the higher maniples, and
the military tribunes placed at the head of whole legions--six to
each--in whose case there was no regular promotion, and for whom men
of the better class were usually taken. In this respect it must have
become a matter of importance that, while previously the subaltern
as well as the staff-officers had been uniformly nominated by the
general, after 392 some of the latter posts were filled up through
election by the burgesses.(21) Lastly, the old, fearfully strict,
military discipline remained unaltered. Still, as formerly, the
general was at liberty to behead any man serving in his camp, and to
scourge with rods the staff-officer as well as the common soldier;
nor were such punishments inflicted merely on account of common
crimes, but also when an officer had allowed himself to deviate from
the orders which he had received, or when a division had allowed
itself to be surprised or had fled from the field of battle. On the
other hand, the new military organization necessitated a far more
serious and prolonged military training than the previous phalanx
system, in which the solidity of the mass kept even the inexperienced
in their ranks. If nevertheless no special soldier-class sprang up,
but on the contrary the army still remained, as before, a burgess
army, this object was chiefly attained by abandoning the former mode
of ranking the soldiers according to property(22) and arranging them
according to length of service. The Roman recruit now entered among
the light-armed "skirmishers" (-rorarii-), who fought outside of the
line and especially with stone slings, and he advanced from this step
by step to the first and then to the second division, till at length
the soldiers of long service and experience were associated together
in the corps of the -triarii-, which was numerically the weakest but
imparted its tone and spirit to the whole army.
The excellence of this military organization, which became the primary
cause of the superior political position of the Roman community,
chiefly depended on the three great military principles of maintaining
a reserve, of combining the close and distant modes of fighting, and
of combining the offensive and the defensive. The system of a reserve
was already foreshadowed in the earlier employment of the cavalry,
but it was now completely developed by the partition of the army into
three divisions and the reservation of the flower of the veterans for
the last and decisive shock. While the Hellenic phalanx had developed
the close, and the Oriental squadrons of horse armed with bows and
light missile spears the distant, modes of fighting respectively, the
Roman combination of the heavy javelin with the sword produced results
similar, as has justly been remarked, to those attained in modern
warfare by the introduction of bayonet-muskets; the volley of javelins
prepared the way for the sword encounter, exactly in the same way as a
volley of musketry now precedes a charge with the bayonet. Lastly,
the elaborate system of encampment allowed the Romans to combine the
advantages of defensive and offensive war and to decline or give
battle according to circumstances, and in the latter case to fight
under the ramparts of their camp just as under the walls of a
fortress--the Roman, says a Roman proverb, conquers by sitting still.
Origin of the Manipular Legion
That this new military organization was in the main a Roman, or at any
rate Italian, remodelling and improvement of the old Hellenic tactics
of the phalanx, is plain. If some germs of the system of reserve and
of the individualizing of the smaller subdivisions of the army are
found to occur among the later Greek strategists, especially Xenophon,
this only shows that they felt the defectiveness of the old system,
but were not well able to obviate it. The manipular legion appears
fully developed in the war with Pyrrhus; when and under what
circumstances it arose, whether at once or gradually, can no
longer be ascertained. The first tactical system which the Romans
encountered, fundamentally different from the earlier Italo-Hellenic
system, was the Celtic sword-phalanx. It is not impossible that the
subdivision of the army and the intervals between the maniples in
front were arranged with a view to resist, as they did resist, its
first and only dangerous charge; and it accords with this hypothesis
that Marcus Furius Camillus, the most celebrated Roman general of the
Gallic epoch, is presented in various detached notices as the reformer
of the Roman military system. The further traditions associated with
the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are neither sufficiently accredited, nor
can they with certainty be duly arranged;(23) although it is in itself
probable that the prolonged Samnite mountain warfare exercised a
lasting influence on the individual development of the Roman soldier,
and that the struggle with one of the first masters of the art of war,
belonging to the school of the great Alexander, effected an
improvement in the technical features of the Roman military system.
National Economy--
The Farmers--
Farming of Estates
In the national economy agriculture was, and continued to be, the
social and political basis both of the Roman community and of the new
Italian state. The common assembly and the army consisted of Roman
farmers; what as soldiers they had acquired by the sword, they secured
as colonists by the plough. The insolvency of the middle class of
landholders gave rise to the formidable internal crises of the third
and fourth centuries, amidst which it seemed as if the young republic
could not but be destroyed. The revival of the Latin farmer-class,
which was produced during the fifth century partly by the large
assignations of land and incorporations, partly by the fall in the
rate of interest and the increase of the Roman population, was at once
the effect and the cause of the mighty development of Roman power.
The acute soldier's eye of Pyrrhus justly discerned the cause of the
political and military ascendency of the Romans in the flourishing
condition of the Roman farms. But the rise also of husbandry on a
large scale among the Romans appears to fall within this period.
In earlier times indeed there existed landed estates of--at least
comparatively--large size; but their management was not farming on a
large scale, it was simply a husbandry of numerous small parcels.(24)
On the other hand the enactment in the law of 387, not incompatible
indeed with the earlier mode of management but yet far more
appropriate to the later, viz. that the landholder should be bound
to employ along with his slaves a proportional number of free
persons,(25) may well be regarded as the oldest trace of the later
centralized farming of estates;(26) and it deserves notice that even
here at its first emergence it essentially rests on slave-holding. How
it arose, must remain an undecided point; possibly the Carthaginian
plantations in Sicily served as models to the oldest Roman
landholders, and perhaps even the appearance of wheat in husbandry
by the side of spelt,(27) which Varro places about the period of the
decemvirs, was connected with that altered style of management. Still
less can we ascertain how far this method of husbandry had already
during this period spread; but the history of the wars with Hannibal
leaves no doubt that it cannot yet have become the rule, nor can it
have yet absorbed the Italian farmer class. Where it did come into
vogue, however, it annihilated the older clientship based on the
-precarium-; just as the modern system of large farms has been formed
in great part by the suppression of petty holdings and the conversion
of hides into farm-fields. It admits of no doubt that the restriction
of this agricultural clientship very materially contributed towards
the distress of the class of small cultivators.
Inland Intercourse in Italy
Respecting the internal intercourse of the Italians with each other
our written authorities are silent; coins alone furnish some
information. We have already mentioned(28) that in Italy, with the
exception of the Greek cities and of the Etruscan Populonia, there was
no coinage during the first three centuries of Rome, and that cattle
in the first instance, and subsequently copper by weight, served as
the medium of exchange. Within the present epoch occurred the
transition on the part of the Italians from the system of barter to
that of money; and in their money they were naturally led at first to
Greek models. The circumstances of central Italy led however to the
adoption of copper instead of silver as the metal for their coinage,
and the unit of coinage was primarily based on the previous unit of
value, the copper pound; hence they cast their coins instead of
stamping them, for no die would have sufficed for pieces so large and
heavy. Yet there seems from the first to have been a fixed ratio for
the relative value of copper and silver (250:1), and with reference to
that ratio the copper coinage seems to have been issued; so that, for
example, in Rome the large copper piece, the -as-, was equal in value
to a scruple (1/288 of a pound) of silver. It is a circumstance
historically more remarkable, that coining in Italy most probably
originated in Rome, and in fact with the decemvirs, who found in the
Solonian legislation a pattern for the regulation of their coinage;
and that from Rome it spread over a number of Latin, Etruscan,
Umbrian, and east-Italian communities, --a clear proof of the superior
position which Rome from the beginning of the fourth century held in
Italy. As all these communities subsisted side by side in formal
independence, legally the monetary standard was entirely local, and
the territory of every city had its own monetary system. Nevertheless
the standards of copper coinage in central and northern Italy may be
comprehended in three groups, within which the coins in common
intercourse seem to have been treated as homogeneous. These groups
are, first, the coins of the cities of Etruria lying north of the
Ciminian Forest and those of Umbria; secondly, the coins of Rome and
Latium; and lastly, those of the eastern seaboard. We have already
observed that the Roman coins held a certain ratio to silver by
weight; on the other hand we find those of the east coast of Italy
placed in a definite proportional relation to the silver coins which
were current from an early period in southern Italy, and the standard
of which was adopted by the Italian immigrants, such as the Bruttians,
Lucanians, and Nolans, by the Latin colonies in that quarter, such as
Cales and Suessa, and even by the Romans themselves for their
possessions in Lower Italy. Accordingly the inland traffic of Italy
must have been divided into corresponding provinces, which dealt with
one another like foreign nations.
In transmarine commerce the relations we have previously described(29)
between Sicily and Latium, Etruria and Attica, the Adriatic and
Tarentum, continued to subsist during the epoch before us or rather,
strictly speaking, belonged to it; for although facts of this class,
which as a rule are mentioned without a date, have been placed
together for the purpose of presenting a general view under the first
period, the statements made apply equally to the present. The clearest
evidence in this respect is, of course, that of the coins. As the
striking of Etruscan silver money after an Attic standard(30) and the
penetrating of Italian and especially of Latin copper into Sicily(31)
testify to the two former routes of traffic, so the equivalence, which
we have just mentioned, between the silver money of Magna Graecia and
the copper coinage of Picenum and Apulia, forms, with numerous other
indications, an evidence of the active traffic which the Greeks of
Lower Italy, the Tarentines in particular, held with the east Italian
seaboard. The commerce again, which was at an earlier period perhaps
still more active, between the Latins and the Campanian Greeks seems
to have been disturbed by the Sabellian immigration, and to have been
of no great moment during the first hundred and fifty years of the
republic. The refusal of the Samnites in Capua and Cumae to supply
the Romans with grain in the famine of 343 may be regarded as an
indication of the altered relations which subsisted between Latium and
Campania, till at the commencement of the fifth century the Roman arms
restored and gave increased impetus to the old intercourse.
Touching on details, we may be allowed to mention, as one of the few
dated facts in the history of Roman commerce, the notice drawn from
the annals of Ardea, that in 454 the first barber came from Sicily to
Ardea; and to dwell for a moment on the painted pottery which was sent
chiefly from Attica, but also from Corcyra and Sicily, to Lucania,
Campania, and Etruria, to serve there for the decoration of tombs--a
traffic, as to the circumstances of which we are accidentally better
informed than as to any other article of transmarine commerce. The
commencement of this import trade probably falls about the period of
the expulsion of the Tarquins; for the vases of the oldest style,
which are of very rare occurrence in Italy, were probably painted in
the second half of the third century of the city, while those of the
chaste style, occurring in greater numbers, belong to the first half,
those of the most finished beauty to the second half, of the fourth
century; and the immense quantities of the other vases, often marked
by showiness and size but seldom by excellence in workmanship, must be
assigned as a whole to the following century. It was from the Hellenes
undoubtedly that the Italians derived this custom of embellishing
tombs; but while the moderate means and fine discernment of the Greeks
confined the practice in their case within narrow limits, it was
stretched in Italy by barbaric opulence and barbaric extravagance
far beyond its original and proper bounds. It is a significant
circumstance, however, that in Italy this extravagance meets us only
in the lands that had a Hellenic semi-culture. Any one who can read
such records will perceive in the cemeteries of Etruria and Campania
--the mines whence our museums have been replenished--a significant
commentary on the accounts of the ancients as to the Etruscan and
Campanian semi-culture choked amidst wealth and arrogance.(32)
The homely Samnite character on the other hand remained at all times
a stranger to this foolish luxury; the absence of Greek pottery from
the tombs exhibits, quite as palpably as the absence of a Samnite
coinage, the slight development of commercial intercourse and of urban
life in this region. It is still more worthy of remark that Latium
also, although not less near to the Greeks than Etruria and Campania,
and in closest intercourse with them, almost wholly refrained from
such sepulchral decorations. It is more than probable--especially on
account of the altogether different character of the tombs in the
unique Praeneste--that in this result we have to recognize the
influence of the stern Roman morality or--if the expression be
preferred--of the rigid Roman police. Closely connected with this
subject are the already-mentioned interdicts, which the law of the
Twelve Tables fulminated against purple bier-cloths and gold ornaments
placed beside the dead; and the banishment of all silver plate,
excepting the salt-cellar and sacrificial ladle, from the Roman
household, so far at least as sumptuary laws and the terror of
censorial censure could banish it: even in architecture we shall again
encounter the same spirit of hostility to luxury whether noble or
ignoble. Although, however, in consequence of these influences Rome
probably preserved a certain outward simplicity longer than Capua and
Volsinii, her commerce and trade--on which, in fact, along with
agriculture her prosperity from the beginning rested--must not be
regarded as having been inconsiderable, or as having less sensibly
experienced the influence of her new commanding position.
Capital in Rome
No urban middle class in the proper sense of that term, no body of
independent tradesmen and merchants, was ever developed in Rome. The
cause of this was--in addition to the disproportionate centralization
of capital which occurred at an early period--mainly the employment of
slave labour. It was usual in antiquity, and was in fact a necessary
consequence of slavery, that the minor trades in towns were very
frequently carried on by slaves, whom their master established as
artisans or merchants; or by freedmen, in whose case the master not
only frequently furnished the capital, but also regularly stipulated
for a share, often the half, of the profits. Retail trading and
dealing in Rome were undoubtedly constantly on the increase; and
there are proofs that the trades which minister to the luxury of
great cities began to be concentrated in Rome--the Ficoroni casket
for instance was designed in the fifth century of the city by a
Praenestine artist and was sold to Praeneste, but was nevertheless
manufactured in Rome.(33) But as the net proceeds even of retail
business flowed for the most part into the coffers of the great
houses, no industrial and commercial middle-class arose to an extent
corresponding to that increase. As little were the great merchants and
great manufacturers marked off as a distinct class from the great
landlords. On the one hand, the latter were from ancient times(34)
simultaneously traders and capitalists, and combined in their hands
lending on security, trafficking on a great scale, the undertaking
of contracts, and the executing of works for the state. On the other
hand, from the emphatic moral importance which in the Roman
commonwealth attached to the possession of land, and from its
constituting the sole basis of political privileges--a basis which was
infringed for the first time only towards the close of this epoch
(35)--it was undoubtedly at this period already usual for the
fortunate speculator to invest part of his capital in land. It is
clear enough also from the political privileges given to freedmen
possessing freeholds,(36) that the Roman statesmen sought in this way
to diminish the dangerous class of the rich who had no land.
Development of Rome as A Great City
But while neither an opulent urban middle class nor a strictly close
body of capitalists grew up in Rome, it was constantly acquiring more
and more the character of a great city. This is plainly indicated by
the increasing number of slaves crowded together in the capital (as
attested by the very serious slave conspiracy of 335), and still more
by the increasing multitude of freedmen, which was gradually becoming
inconvenient and dangerous, as we may safely infer from the
considerable tax imposed on manumissions in 397(37) and from the
limitation of the political rights of freedmen in 450.(38) For not
only was it implied in the circumstances that the great majority of
the persons manumitted had to devote themselves to trade or commerce,
but manumission itself among the Romans was, as we have already said,
less an act of liberality than an industrial speculation, the master
often finding it more for his interest to share the profits of the
trade or commerce of the freedman than to assert his title to
the whole proceeds of the labour of his slave. The increase of
manumissions must therefore have necessarily kept pace with the
increase of the commercial and industrial activity of the Romans.
Urban Police
A similar indication of the rising importance of urban life in Rome is
presented by the great development of the urban police. To this period
probably belong in great measure the enactments under which the
four aediles divided the city into four police districts, and made
provision for the discharge of their equally important and difficult
functions--for the efficient repair of the network of drains small and
large by which Rome was pervaded, as well as of the public buildings
and places; for the proper cleansing and paving of the streets; for
obviating the nuisances of ruinous buildings, dangerous animals, or
foul smells; for the removing of waggons from the highway except
during the hours of evening and night, and generally for the keeping
open of the communication; for the uninterrupted supply of the market
of the capital with good and cheap grain; for the destruction of
unwholesome articles, and the suppression of false weights and
measures; and for the special oversight of baths, taverns, and
houses of bad fame.