The History of Rome, Book III - Theodor Mommsen
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6. Mago, or his translator (in Varro, R. R., i. 17, 3), advises that
slaves should not be bred, but should be purchased not under 22 years
of age; and Cato must have had a similar course in view, as the
personal staff of his model farm clearly shows, although he does not
exactly say so. Cato (2) expressly counsels the sale of old and
diseased slaves. The slave-breeding described by Columella (I. I.
Italian History), under which female slaves who had three sons were
exempted from labour, and the mothers of four sons were even
manumitted, was doubtless an independent speculation rather than a
part of the regular management of the estate--similar to the trade
pursued by Cato himself of purchasing slaves to be trained and sold
again (Plutarch, Cat. Mai. 21). The characteristic taxation mentioned
in this same passage probably has reference to the body of servants
properly so called (-familia urbana-).
7. In this restricted sense the chaining of slaves, and even of the
sons of the family (Dionys. ii. 26), was very old; and accordingly
chained field-labourers are mentioned by Cato as exceptions, to whom,
as they could not themselves grind, bread had to be supplied instead
of grain (56). Even in the times of the empire the chaining of slaves
uniformly presents itself as a punishment inflicted definitively by
the master, provisionally by the steward (Colum. i. 8; Gai. i. 13;
Ulp. i. ii). If, notwithstanding, the tillage of the fields by means
of chained slaves appeared in subsequent times as a distinct system,
and the labourers' prison (-ergastulum-)--an underground cellar with
window-aperatures numerous but narrow and not to be reached from the
ground by the hand (Colum. i. 6)--became a necessary part of the farm-
buildings, this state of matters was occasioned by the fact that the
position of the rural serfs was harder than that of other slaves and
therefore those slaves were chiefly taken for it, who had, or seemed
to have, committed some offence. That cruel masters, moreover,
applied the chains without any occasion to do so, we do not mean to
deny, and it is clearly indicated by the circumstance that the law-
books do not decree the penalties applicable to slave transgressors
against those in chains, but prescribe the punishment of the half-
chained. It was precisely the same with branding; it was meant to be,
strictly, a punishment; but the whole flock was probably marked
(Diodor. xxxv. 5; Bernays, --Phokytides--, p. xxxi.).
8. Cato does not expressly say this as to the vintage, but Varro does
so (I. II. Relation of the Latins to the Umbro-Samnites), and it is
implied in the nature of the case. It would have been economically an
error to fix the number of the slaves on a property by the standard of
the labours of harvest; and least of all, had such been the case,
would the grapes have been sold on the tree, which yet was frequently
done (Cato, 147).
9. Columella (ii. 12, 9) reckons to the year on an average 45 rainy
days and holidays; with which accords the statement of Tertullian (De
Idolol. 14), that the number of the heathen festival days did not come
up to the fifty days of the Christian festal season from Easter to
Whitsunday. To these fell to be added the time of rest in the middle
of winter after the completion of the autumnal bowing, which Columella
estimates at thirty days. Within this time, doubtless, the moveable
"festival of seed-sowing" (-feriae sementivae-; comp. i. 210 and Ovid.
Fast, i. 661) uniformly occurred. This month of rest must not be
confounded with the holidays for holding courts in the season of the
harvest (Plin. Ep. viii. 21, 2, et al.) and vintage.
10. III. I. The Carthaginian Dominion in Africa
11. The medium price of grain in the capital may be assumed at least
for the seventh and eighth centuries of Rome at one -denarius- for the
Roman -modius-, or 2 shillings 8 pence per bushel of wheat, for which
there is now paid (according to the average of the prices in the
provinces of Brandenburg and Pomerania from 1816 to 1841) about 3
shillings 5 pence. Whether this not very considerable difference
between the Roman and the modern prices depends on a rise in the value
of corn or on a fall in the value of silver, can hardly be decided.
It is very doubtful, perhaps, whether in the Rome of this and of later
times the prices of corn really fluctuated more than is the case in
modern times. If we compare prices like those quoted above, of 4
pence and 5 pence for the bushel and a half, with those of the worst
times of war-dearth and famine--such as in the second Punic war when
the same quantity rose to 9 shillings 7 pence (1 -medimnus- = 15 --
drachmae--; Polyb. ix. 44), in the civil war to 19 shillings 2 pence
(1 -modius- = 5 -denarii-; Cic. Verr. iii. 92, 214), in the great
dearth under Augustus, even to 21 shillings 3 pence (5 -modii- =27 1/2
-denarii-; Euseb. Chron. p. Chr. 7, Scal.)--the difference is indeed
immense; but such extreme cases are but little instructive, and might
in either direction be found recurring under the like conditions at
the present day.
12. II. VIII. Farming of Estates
13. Accordingly Cato calls the two estates, which he describes,
summarily "olive-plantation" (-olivetum-) and "vineyard" (-vinea-),
although not wine and oil merely, but grain also and other products
were cultivated there. If indeed the 800 -culei-, for which the
possessor of the vineyard is directed to provide himself with casks
(11), formed the maximum of a year's vintage, the whole of the 100
-jugera- must have been planted with vines, because a produce of 8
-culei- per -jugerum- was almost unprecedented (Colum. iii. 3); but
Varro (i. 22) understood, and evidently with reason, the statement to
apply to the case of the possessor of a vineyard who found it
necessary to make the new vintage before he had sold the old.
14. That the Roman landlord made on an average 6 per cent from his
capital, may be inferred from Columella, iii. 3, 9. We have a more
precise estimate of the expense and produce only in the case of the
vine yard, for which Columella gives the following calculation of
the cost per -jugerum-:
Price of the ground 1000 sesterces.
Price of the slaves who work it 1143
(proportion to-jugerum-)
Vines and stakes 2000
Loss of interest during the first two years 497
----
Total 4640 sesterces= 47 pounds.
He calculates the produce as at any rate 60 -amphorae-, worth at least
900 sesterces (9 pounds), which would thus represent a return of 17
per cent. But this is somewhat illusory, as, apart from bad harvests,
the cost of gathering in the produce (III. XII. Spirit of the System),
and the expenses of the maintenance of the vines, stakes, and slaves,
are omitted from the estimate.
The gross produce of meadow, pasture, and forest is estimated by the
same agricultural writer as, at most, 100 sesterces per -jugerum-, and
that of corn land as less rather than more: in fact, the average
return of 25 -modii- of wheat per -jugerum- gives, according to the
average price in the capital of 1 -denarius- per -modius-, not more
than 100 sesterces for the gross proceeds, and at the seat of
production the price must have been still lower. Varro (iii. 2)
reckons as a good ordinary gross return for a larger estate 150
sesterces per -jugerum-. Estimates of the corresponding expense have
not reached us: as a matter of course, the management in this instance
cost much less than in that of a vineyard.
All these statements, moreover, date from a century or more after
Gate's death. From him we have only the general statement that the
breeding of cattle yielded a better return than agriculture (ap.
Cicero, De Off. ii. 25, 89; Colum. vi. praef. 4, comp. ii. 16, 2;
Plin. H. N. xviii. 5, 30; Plutarch, Cato, 21); which of course is not
meant to imply that it was everywhere advisable to convert arable land
into pasture, but is to be understood relatively as signifying that
the capital invested in the rearing of flocks and herds on mountain
pastures and other suitable pasture-land yielded, as compared with
capital invested in cultivating Suitable corn land, a higher interest.
Perhaps the circumstance has been also taken into account in the
calculation, that the want of energy and intelligence in the landlord
operates far less injuriously in the case of pasture-land than in the
highly-developed culture of the vine and olive. On an arable estate,
according to Cato, the returns of the soil stood as follows in a
descending series:--1, vineyard; 2, vegetable garden; 3, osier copse,
which yielded a large return in consequence of the culture of the
vine; 4, olive plantation; 5, meadow yielding hay; 6, corn fields;
7, copse; 8, wood for felling; 9, oak forest for forage to the cattle;
all of which nine elements enter into the scheme of husbandry for
Cato's model estates.
The higher net return of the culture of the vine as compared with that
of corn is attested also by the fact, that under the award pronounced
in the arbitration between the city of Genua and the villages
tributary to it in 637 the city received a sixth of wine, and a
twentieth of grain, as quitrent.
15. III. XII. Spirit of the System
16. III. XI. As to the Management of the Finances
17. The industrial importance of the Roman cloth-making is evident
from the remarkable part which is played by the fullers in Roman
comedy. The profitable nature of the fullers' pits is attested by
Cato (ap. Plutarch, Cat 21).
18. III. III. Organization of the Provinces
19. III. III. Property
20. III. VII. The State of Culture in Spain
21. III. I. Comparison between Carthage and Rome
22. III. VI. Pressure of the War
23. There were in the treasury 17,410 Roman pounds of gold, 22,070
pounds of uncoined, and 18,230 pounds of coined, silver. The legal
ratio of gold to silver was: 1 pound of gold = 4000 sesterces, or 1:
11.91.
24. On this was based the actionable character of contracts of
buying, hiring, and partnership, and, in general, the whole system
of non-formal actionable contracts.
25. The chief passage as to this point is the fragment of Cato in
Gellius, xiv. 2. In the case of the -obligatio litteris- also,
i. e. a claim based solely on the entry of a debt in the account-book
of the creditor, this legal regard paid to the personal credibility of
the party, even where his testimony in his own cause is concerned,
affords the key of explanation; and hence it happened that in later
times, when this mercantile repute had vanished from Roman life, the
-obligatio litteris-, while not exactly abolished, fell of itself into
desuetude.
26. In the remarkable model contract given by Cato (141) for the
letting of the olive harvest, there is the following paragraph:--
"None [of the persons desirous to contract on the occasion of letting]
shall withdraw, for the sake of causing the gathering and pressing of
the olives to be let at a dearer rate; except when [the joint bidder]
immediately names [the other bidder] as his partner. If this rule
shall appear to have been infringed, all the partners [of the company
with which the contract has been concluded] shall, if desired by the
landlord or the overseer appointed by him, take an oath [that they
have not conspired in this way to prevent competition]. If they do
not take the oath, the stipulated price is not to be paid." It is
tacitly assumed that the contract is taken by a company, not by an
individual capitalist.
27. III. XIII. Religious Economy
28. Livy (xxi. 63; comp. Cic. Verr. v. 18, 45) mentions only the
enactment as to the sea-going vessels; but Asconius (in Or. in toga
cand. p. 94, Orell.) and Dio. (lv. 10, 5) state that the senator was
also forbidden by law to undertake state-contracts (-redemptiones-);
and, as according to Livy "all speculation was considered unseemly for
a senator," the Claudian law probably reached further than he states.
29. Cato, like every other Roman, invested a part of his means in the
breeding of cattle, and in commercial and other undertakings. But it
was not his habit directly to violate the laws; he neither speculated
in state-leases--which as a senator he was not allowed to do--nor
practised usury. It is an injustice to charge him with a practice in
the latter respect at variance with his theory; the -fenus nauticum-,
in which he certainly engaged, was not a branch of usury prohibited by
the law; it really formed an essential part of the business of
chartering and freighting vessels.
Chapter XIII
Faith and Manners
Roman Austerity and Roman Pride
Life in the case of the Roman was spent under conditions of austere
restraint, and, the nobler he was, the less he was a free man.
All-powerful custom restricted him to a narrow range of thought
and action; and to have led a serious and strict or, to use the
characteristic Latin expressions, a sad and severe life, was his
glory. No one had more and no one had less to do than to keep his
household in good order and manfully bear his part of counsel and
action in public affairs. But, while the individual had neither the
wish nor the power to be aught else than a member of the community,
the glory and the might of that community were felt by every
individual burgess as a personal possession to be transmitted along
with his name and his homestead to his posterity; and thus, as one
generation after another was laid in the tomb and each in succession
added its fresh contribution to the stock of ancient honours, the
collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into
that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen
again, and the traces of which, as strange as they are grand, seem to
us, wherever we meet them, to belong as it were to another world. It
was one of the characteristic peculiarities of this powerful sense of
citizenship, that it was, while not suppressed, yet compelled by the
rigid simplicity and equality that prevailed among the citizens to
remain locked up within the breast during life, and was only allowed
to find expression after death; but then it was displayed in the
funeral rites of the man of distinction so conspicuously and
intensely, that this ceremonial is better fitted than any other
phenomenon of Roman life to give to us who live in later times a
glimpse of that wonderful spirit of the Romans.
A Roman Funeral
It was a singular procession, at which the burgesses were invited to
be present by the summons of the public crier: "Yonder warrior is
dead; whoever can, let him come to escort Lucius Aemilius; he is borne
forth from his house." It was opened by bands of wailing women,
musicians, and dancers; one of the latter was dressed out and
furnished with a mask after the likeness of the deceased, and by
gesture doubtless and action recalled once more to the multitude the
appearance of the well-known man. Then followed the grandest and most
peculiar part of the solemnity--the procession of ancestors--before
which all the rest of the pageant so faded in comparison, that men of
rank of the true Roman type enjoined their heirs to restrict the
funeral ceremony to that procession alone. We have already mentioned
that the face-masks of those ancestors who had filled the curule
aedileship or any higher ordinary magistracy, wrought in wax and
painted--modelled as far as possible after life, but not wanting even
for the earlier ages up to and beyond the time of the kings--were wont
to be placed in wooden niches along the walls of the family hall, and
were regarded as the chief ornament of the house. When a death
occurred in the family, suitable persons, chiefly actors, were dressed
up with these face-masks and the corresponding official costume to
take part in the funeral ceremony, so that the ancestors--each in the
principal dress worn by him in his lifetime, the triumphator in his
gold-embroidered, the censor in his purple, and the consul in his
purple-bordered, robe, with their lictors and the other insignia of
office--all in chariots gave the final escort to the dead. On the
bier overspread with massive purple and gold-embroidered coverlets and
fine linen cloths lay the deceased himself, likewise in the full
costume of the highest office which he had filled, and surrounded by
the armour of the enemies whom he had slain and by the chaplets which
in jest or earnest he had won. Behind the bier came the mourners, all
dressed in black and without ornament, the sons of the deceased with
their heads veiled, the daughters without veil, the relatives and
clansmen, the friends, the clients and freedmen. Thus the procession
passed on to the Forum. There the corpse was placed in an erect
position; the ancestors descended from their chariots and seated
themselves in the curule chairs; and the son or nearest gentile
kinsman of the deceased ascended the rostra, in order to announce to
the assembled multitude in simple recital the names and deeds of each
of the men sitting in a circle around him and, last of all, those of
him who had recently died.
This may be called a barbarous custom, and a nation of artistic
feelings would certainly not have tolerated the continuance of this
odd resurrection of the dead down to an epoch of fully-developed
civilization; but even Greeks who were very dispassionate and but
little disposed to reverence, such as Polybius, were greatly impressed
by the naive pomp of this funeral ceremony. It was a conception
essentially in keeping with the grave solemnity, the uniform movement,
and the proud dignity of Roman life, that departed generations should
continue to walk, as it were, corporeally among the living, and that,
when a burgess weary of labours and of honours was gathered to his
fathers, these fathers themselves should appear in the Forum to
receive him among their number.
The New Hellenism
But the Romans had now reached a crisis of transition. Now that the
power of Rome was no longer confined to Italy but had spread far and
wide to the east and to the west, the days of the old home life of
Italy were over, and a Hellenizing civilization came in its room. It
is true that Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever
since it had a history at all. We have formerly shown how the
youthful Greece and the youthful Italy--both of them with a certain
measure of simplicity and originality--gave and received intellectual
impulses; and how at a later period Rome endeavoured after a more
external manner to appropriate to practical use the language and
inventions of the Greeks. But the Hellenism of the Romans of the
present period was, in its causes as well as its consequences,
something essentially new. The Romans began to feel the need of a
richer intellectual life, and to be startled as it were at their own
utter want of mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts,
such as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses of
their own productiveness to avail themselves of the miserable French
culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no surprise that the
Italian nation now flung itself with fervid zeal on the glorious
treasures as well as on the dissolute filth of the intellectual
development of Hellas. But it was an impulse still more profound and
deep-rooted, which carried the Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic
vortex. Hellenic civilization still doubtless called itself by that
name, but it was Hellenic no longer; it was, in fact, humanistic and
cosmopolitan. It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of
different nations into one whole completely in the field of intellect,
and to a certain extent also in that of politics; and, now when the
same task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she took over Hellenism
along with the rest of the inheritance of Alexander the Great.
Hellenism therefore was no longer a mere stimulus or accessory
influence; it penetrated the Italian nation to the very core. Of
course, the vigorous home life of Italy strove against the foreign
element. It was only after a most vehement struggle that the Italian
farmer abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as
in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic frock,
so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a tendency which
opposed the influence of Greece on principle, in a fashion altogether
foreign to the earlier centuries, and in doing so fell pretty
frequently into downright follies and absurdities.
Hellenism in Politics
No department of human action or thought remained unaffected by this
struggle between the old fashion and the new. Even political
relations were largely influenced by it The whimsical project of
emancipating the Hellenes, the well deserved failure of which has
already been described, the kindred, likewise Hellenic, idea of a
common interest of republics in opposition to kings, and the desire of
propagating Hellenic polity at the expense of eastern despotism--the
two principles that helped to regulate, for instance, the treatment of
Macedonia--were fixed ideas of the new school, just as dread of the
Carthaginians was the fixed idea of the old; and, if Cato pushed the
latter to a ridiculous excess, Philhellenism now and then indulged in
extravagances at least quite as foolish. For example, the conqueror
of king Antiochus not only had a statue of him self in Greek costume
erected on the Capitol, but also, instead of calling himself in good
Latin -Asiaticus-, assumed the unmeaning and anomalous, but yet
magnificent and almost Greek, surname of --Asiagenus--.(1) A more
important consequence of this attitude of the ruling nation towards
Hellenism was, that the process of Latinizing gained ground everywhere
in Italy except where it encountered the Hellenes. The cities of the
Greeks in Italy, so far as the war had not destroyed them, remained
Greek. Apulia, about which, it is true, the Romans gave themselves
little concern, appears at this very epoch to have been thoroughly
pervaded by Hellenism, and the local civilization there seems to have
attained the level of the decaying Hellenic culture by its side.
Tradition is silent on the matter; but the numerous coins of cities,
uniformly furnished with Greek inscriptions, and the manufacture of
painted clay-vases after the Greek style, which was carried on in that
part of Italy alone with more ambition and gaudiness than taste, show
that Apulia had completely adopted Greek habits and Greek art.
But the real struggle between Hellenism and its national antagonists
during the present period was carried on in the field of faith, of
manners, and of art and literature; and we must not omit to attempt
some delineation of this great strife of principles, however difficult
it may be to present a summary view of the myriad forms and aspects
which the conflict assumed.
The National Religion and Unbelief
The extent to which the old simple faith still retained a living hold
on the Italians is shown very clearly by the admiration or
astonishment which this problem of Italian piety excited among the
contemporary Greeks. On occasion of the quarrel with the Aetolians it
was reported of the Roman commander-in-chief that during battle he was
solely occupied in praying and sacrificing like a priest; whereas
Polybius with his somewhat stale moralizing calls the attention of his
countrymen to the political usefulness of this piety, and admonishes
them that a state cannot consist of wise men alone, and that such
ceremonies are very convenient for the sake of the multitude.
Religious Economy
But if Italy still possessed--what had long been a mere antiquarian
curiosity in Hellas--a national religion, it was already visibly
beginning to be ossified into theology. The torpor creeping over
faith is nowhere perhaps so distinctly apparent as in the alterations
in the economy of divine service and of the priesthood. The public
service of the gods became not only more tedious, but above all more
and more costly. In 558 there was added to the three old colleges of
the augurs, pontifices, and keepers of oracles, a fourth consisting of
three "banquet-masters" (-tres viri epulones-), solely for the
important purpose of superintending the banquets of the gods. The
priests, as well as the gods, were in fairness entitled to feast; new
institutions, however, were not needed with that view, as every
college applied itself with zeal and devotion to its convivial
affairs. The clerical banquets were accompanied by the claim of
clerical immunities. The priests even in times of grave embarrassment
claimed the right of exemption from public burdens, and only after
very troublesome controversy submitted to make payment of the taxes in
arrear (558). To the individual, as well as to the community, piety
became a more and more costly article. The custom of instituting
endowments, and generally of undertaking permanent pecuniary
obligations, for religious objects prevailed among the Romans in a
manner similar to that of its prevalence in Roman Catholic countries
at the present day. These endowments--particularly after they came to
be regarded by the supreme spiritual and at the same time the supreme
juristic authority in the state, the pontifices, as a real burden
devolving -de jure- on every heir or other person acquiring the
estate--began to form an extremely oppressive charge on property;
"inheritance without sacrificial obligation" was a proverbial saying
among the Romans somewhat similar to our "rose without a thorn." The
dedication of a tenth of their substance became so common, that twice
every month a public entertainment was given from the proceeds in the
Forum Boarium at Rome. With the Oriental worship of the Mother of the
Gods there was imported to Rome among other pious nuisances the
practice, annually recurring on certain fixed days, of demanding
penny-collections from house to house (-stipem cogere-). Lastly, the
subordinate class of priests and soothsayers, as was reasonable,
rendered no service without being paid for it; and beyond doubt the
Roman dramatist sketched from life, when in the curtain-conversation
between husband and wife he represents the account for pious services
as ranking with the accounts for the cook, the nurse, and other
customary presents:--