The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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The Finances in the Revolution
The financial condition of Rome of course assumed a far worse
aspect, when the storms of revolution set in. The new and, even in
a mere financial point of view, extremely oppressive burden imposed
upon the state by the obligation under which Gaius Gracchus placed
it to furnish corn at nominal rates to the burgesses of the
capital, was certainly counterbalanced at first by the newly-opened
sources of income in the province of Asia. Nevertheless the public
buildings seem from that time to have almost come to a standstill.
While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed
from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were
numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of
any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645. It must remain
a moot point whether this was the effect of the largesses of grain
or, as is perhaps more probable, the consequence of the system of
increased savings, such as befitted a government which became daily
more and more a rigid oligarchy, and such as is indicated by the
statement that the Roman reserve reached its highest point in 663.
The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination
with the five years' deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the
first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected
after the Hannibalic war: they failed to sustain it. Nothing
perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the
circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth
year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under
taxation, that the reserve was touched;(22) whereas the Social war
was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this
was expended after two campaigns to the last penny, they preferred
to sell by auction the public sites in the capital(23) and to seize
the treasures of the temples(24) rather than levy a tax on the
burgesses. The storm however, severe as it was, passed over;
Sulla, at the expense doubtless of enormous economic sacrifices
imposed on the subjects and Italian revolutionists in particular,
restored order to the finances and, by abolishing the largesses of
corn and retaining although in a reduced form the Asiatic revenues,
secured for the commonwealth a satisfactory economic condition, at
least in the sense of the ordinary expenditure remaining far below
the ordinary income.
Private Economics
Agriculture
In the private economics of this period hardly any new feature
emerges; the advantages and disadvantages formerly set forth as
incident to the social circumstances of Italy(25) were not altered,
but merely farther and more distinctly developed. In agriculture
we have already seen that the growing power of Roman capital was
gradually absorbing the intermediate and small landed estates in
Italy as well as in the provinces, as the sun sucks up the drops of
rain. The government not only looked on without preventing, but
even promoted this injurious division of the soil by particular
measures, especially by prohibiting the production of wine and oil
beyond the Alps with a view to favour the great Italian landlords
and merchants.(26) It is true that both the opposition and the
section of the conservatives that entered into ideas of reform
worked energetically to counteract the evil; the two Gracchi, by
carrying out the distribution of almost the whole domain land, gave
to the state 80,000 new Italian farmers; Sulla, by settling 120,000
colonists in Italy, filled up at least in part the gaps which the
revolution and he himself had made in the ranks of the Italian
yeomen. But, when a vessel is emptying itself by constant efflux,
the evil is to be remedied not by pouring in even considerable
quantities, but only by the establishment of a constant influx--
a remedy which was on various occasions attempted, but not with
success. In the provinces, not even the smallest effort was made
to save the farmer class there from being bought out by the Roman
speculators; the provincials, forsooth, were merely men, and not a
party. The consequence was, that even the rents of the soil beyond
Italy flowed more and more to Rome. Moreover the plantation-
system, which about the middle of this epoch had already gained
the ascendant even in particular districts of Italy, such as Etruria,
had, through the co-operation of an energetic and methodical
management and abundant pecuniary resources, attained to a state
of high prosperity after its kind. The production of Italian wine
in particular, which was artificially promoted partly by the opening
of forced markets in a portion of the provinces, partly by the
prohibition of foreign wines in Italy as expressed for instance
in the sumptuary law of 593, attained very considerable results:
the Aminean and Falernian wine began to be named by the side of the
Thasian and Chian, and the "Opimian wine" of 633, the Roman vintage
"Eleven," was long remembered after the last jar was exhausted.
Trades
Of trades and manufactur es there is nothing to be said, except
that the Italian nation in this respect persevered in an inaction
bordering on barbarism. They destroyed the Corinthian factories,
the depositories of so many valuable industrial traditions--not
however that they might establish similar factories for themselves,
but that they might buy up at extravagant prices such Corinthian
vases of earthenware or copper and similar "antique works" as were
preserved in Greek houses. The trades that were still somewhat
prosperous, such as those connected with building, were productive
of hardly any benefit for the commonwealth, because here too the
system of employing slaves in every more considerable undertaking
intervened: in the construction of the Marcian aqueduct, for
instance, the government concluded contracts for building and
materials simultaneously with 3000 master-tradesmen, each of whom
then performed the work contracted for with his band of slaves.
Money-Dealing and Commerce
The most brilliant, or rather the only brilliant, side of Roman
private economics was money-dealing and commerce. First of all
stood the leasing of the domains and of the taxes, through which a
large, perhaps the larger, part of the income of the Roman state
flowed into the pockets of the Roman capitalists. The money-
dealings, moreover, throughout the range of the Roman state were
monopolized by the Romans; every penny circulated in Gaul, it is
said in a writing issued soon after the end of this period, passes
through the books of the Roman merchants, and so it was doubtless
everywhere. The co-operation of rude economic conditions and of
the unscrupulous employment of Rome's political ascendency for the
benefit of the private interests of every wealthy Roman rendered a
usurious system of interest universal, as is shown for example by
the treatment of the war-tax imposed by Sulla on the province of
Asia in 670, which the Roman capitalists advanced; it swelled with
paid and unpaid interest within fourteen years to sixfold its
original amount. The communities had to sell their public buildings,
their works of art and jewels, parents had to sell their grown-up
children, in order to meet the claims of the Roman creditor: it
was no rare occurrence for the debtor to be not merely subjected
to moral torture, but directly placed upon the rack. To these
sources of gain fell to be added the wholesale traffic. The exports
and imports of Italy were very considerable. The former consisted
chiefly of wine and oil, with which Italy and Greece almost
exclusively--for the production of wine in the Massiliot and
Turdetanian territories can at that time have been but small--
supplied the whole region of the Mediterranean; Italian wine was
sent in considerable quantities to the Balearic islands and
Celtiberia, to Africa, which was merely a corn and pasture country,
to Narbo and into the interior of Gaul. Still more considerable
was the import to Italy, where at that time all luxury was
concentrated, and whither most articles of luxury for food, drink,
or clothing, ornaments, books, household furniture, works of art
were imported by sea. The traffic in slaves, above all, received
through the ever-increasing demand of the Roman merchants an
impetus to which no parallel had been known in the region of the
Mediterranean, and which stood in the closest connection with the
flourishing of piracy. All lands and all nations were laid under
contribution for slaves, but the places where they were chiefly
captured were Syria and the interior of Asia Minor.(27)
Ostia
Puteoli
In Italy the transmarine imports were chiefly concentrated in
the two great emporia on the Tyrrhene sea, Ostia and Puteoli.
The grain destined for the capital was brought to Ostia, which
was far from having a good roadstead, but, as being the nearest
port to Rome, was the most appropriate mart for less valuable wares;
whereas the traffic in luxuries with the east was directed mainly
to Puteoli, which recommended itself by its good harbour for ships
with valuable cargoes, and presented to merchants a market in its
immediate neighbourhood little inferior to that of the capital--
the district of Baiae, which came to be more and more filled with
villas. For a long time this latter traffic was conducted through
Corinth and after its destruction through Delos, and in this sense
accordingly Puteoli is called by Lucilius the Italian "Little Delos";
but after the catastrophe which befel Delos in the Mithradatic war,(28)
and from which it never recovered, the Puteolans entered into direct
commercial connections with Syria and Alexandria, and their city became
more and more decidedly the first seat of transmarine commerce in Italy.
But it was not merely the gain which was made by the Italian exports
and imports, that fell mainly to the Italians; at Narbo they competed
in the Celtic trade with the Massiliots, and in general it admits of
no doubt that the Roman merchants to be met with everywhere, floating
or settled, took to themselves the best share of all speculations.
Capitalist Oligarchy
Putting together these phenomena, we recognize as the most prominent
feature in the private economy of this epoch the financial oligarchy
of Roman capitalists standing alongside of, and on a par with,
the political oligarchy. In their hands were united the rents
of the soil of almost all Italy and of the best portions of
the provincial territory, the proceeds at usury of the capital
monopolized by them, the commercial gain from the whole empire,
and lastly, a very considerable part of the Roman state-revenue
in the form of profits accruing from the lease of that revenue.
The daily-increasing accumulation of capital is evident in the rise
of the average rate of wealth: 3,000,000 sesterces (30,000 pounds)
was now a moderate senatorial, 2,000,000 (20,000 pounds) was a decent
equestrian fortune; the property of the wealthiest man of the
Gracchan age, Publius Crassus consul in 623 was estimated at
100,000,000 sesterces (1,000,000 pounds). It is no wonder,
that this capitalist order exercised a preponderant influence
on external policy; that it destroyed out of commercial rivalry
Carthage and Corinth(29) as the Etruscans had formerly destroyed
Alalia and the Syracusans Caere; that it in spite of the senate
upheld the colony of Narbo.(30) It is likewise no wonder, that
this capitalist oligarchy engaged in earnest and often victorious
competition with the oligarchy of the nobles in internal politics.
But it is also no wonder, that ruined men of wealth put themselves
at the head of bands of revolted slaves,(31) and rudely reminded
the public that the transition is easy from the haunts of
fashionable debauchery to the robber's cave. It is no wonder,
that that financial tower of Babel, with its foundation not purely
economic but borrowed from the political ascendency of Rome,
tottered at every serious political crisis nearly in the same
way as our very similar fabric of a paper currency. The great
financial crisis, which in consequence of the Italo-Asiatic
commotions of 664 f. set in upon the Roman capitalist-class,
the bankruptcy of the state and of private persons, the general
depreciation of landed property and of partnership-shares, can no
longer be traced out in detail; but their general nature and their
importance are placed beyond doubt by their results--the murder of
the praetor by a band of creditors,(32) the attempt to eject from
the senate all the senators not free of debt,(33) the renewal of
the maximum of interest by Sulla,(34) the cancelling of 75 per cent
of all debts by the revolutionary party.(35) The consequence of
this system was naturally general impoverishment and depopulation
in the provinces, whereas the parasitic population of migratory
or temporarily settled Italians was everywhere on the increase.
In Asia Minor 80,000 men of Italian origin are said to have perished
in one day.(36) How numerous they were in Delos, is evident from
the tombstones still extant on the island and from the statement
that 20,000 foreigners, mostly Italian merchants, were put to death
there by command of Mithradates.(37) In Africa the Italians were
so many, that even the Numidian town of Cirta could be defended
mainly by them against Jugurtha.(38) Gaul too, it is said, was
filled with Roman merchants; in the case of Spain alone--perhaps
not accidentally--no statements of this sort are found. In Italy
itself, on the other hand, the condition of the free population
at this epoch had on the whole beyond doubt retrograded. To this
result certainly the civil wars essentially contributed, which,
according to statements of a general kind and but littletrustworthy,
are alleged to have swept away from 100,000 to 150,000 of the Roman
burgesses and 300,000 of the Italian population generally; but still
worse was the effect of the economic ruin of the middle class, and of
the boundless extent of the mercantile emigration which induced a great
portion of the Italian youth to spend their most vigorous years abroad.
A compensation of very dubious value was afforded by the free
parasitic Helleno-Oriental population, which sojourned in the
capital as diplomatic agents for kings or communities, as physicians,
schoolmasters, priests, servants, parasites, and in the myriad
employments of sharpers and swindlers, or, as traders and
mariners, frequented especially Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.
Still more hazardous was the disproportionate increase of the
multitude of slaves in the peninsula. The Italian burgesses by
the census of 684 numbered 910,000 men capable of bearing arms, to
which number, in order to obtain the amount of the free population
in the peninsula, those accidentally passed over in the census,
the Latins in the district between the Alps and the Po, and the
foreigners domiciled in Italy, have to be added, while the Roman
burgesses domiciled abroad are to be deducted. It will therefore
be scarcely possible to estimate the free population of the
peninsula at more than from 6 to 7 millions. If its whole
population at this time was equal to that of the present day, we
should have to assume accordingly a mass of slaves amounting to 13
or 14 millions. It needs however no such fallacious calculations
to render the dangerous tension of this state of things apparent;
this is loudly enough attested by the partial servile insurrections,
and by the appeal which from the beginning of the revolutions was
at the close of every outbreak addressed to the slaves to take
up arms against their masters and to fight out their liberty.
If we conceive of England with its lords, its squires, and
above all its City, but with its freeholders and lessees converted
into proletarians, and its labourers and sailors converted into slaves,
we shall gain an approximate image of the population of the Italian
peninsula in those days.
The economic relations of this epoch are clearly mirrored to
us even now in the Roman monetary system. Its treatment shows
throughout the sagacious merchant. For long gold and silver stood
side by side as general means of payment on such a footing that,
while for the purpose of general cash-balances a fixed ratio of
value was legally laid down between the two metals,(39) the giving
one metal for the other was not, as a rule, optional, but payment
was to be in gold or silver according to the tenor of the bond.
In this way the great evils were avoided, that are otherwise
inevitably associated with the setting up of two precious metals;
the severe gold crises--as about 600, for instance, when in
consequence of the discovery of the Tauriscan gold-seams(40) gold
as compared with silver fell at once in Italy about 33 1/3 per
cent--exercised at least no direct influence on the silver money
and retail transactions. The nature of the case implied that,
the more transmarine traffic extended, gold the more decidedly
rose from the second place to the first; and that it did so, is
confirmed by the statements as to the balances in the treasury and
as to its transactions; but the government was not thereby induced
to introduce gold into the coinage. The coining of gold attempted
in the exigency of the Hannibalic war(41) had been long allowed
to fall into abeyance; the few gold pieces which Sulla struck as
regent were scarcely more than pieces coined for the occasion
of his triumphal presents. Silver still as before circulated
exclusively as actual money; gold, whether it, as was usual,
circulated in bars or bore the stamp of a foreign or possibly even
of an inland mint, was taken solely by weight. Nevertheless gold
and silver were on a par as means of exchange, and the fraudulent
alloying of gold was treated in law, like the issuing of spurious
silver money, as a monetary offence. They thus obtained the
immense advantage of precluding, in the case of the most important
medium of payment, even the possibility of monetary fraud and
monetary adulteration. Otherwise the coinage was as copious as it
was of exemplary purity. After the silver piece had been reduced
in the Hannibalic war from 1/72 (42) to 1/84 of a pound,(43) it
retained for more than three centuries quite the same weight
and the same quality; no alloying took place. The copper money
became about the beginning of this period quite restricted to
small change, and ceased to be employed as formerly in large
transactions; for this reason the -as- was no longer coined after
perhaps the beginning of the seventh century, and the copper
coinage was confined to the smaller values of a -semis- (1/4 pence)
and under, which could not well be represented in silver.
The sorts of coins were arranged according to a simple principle,
and in the then smallest coin of the ordinary issue--the -quadrans-
(1/8 pence)--carried down to the limit of appreciable value.
It was a monetary system, which, for the judicious principles
on which it was based and for the iron rigour with which they
were applied, stands alone in antiquity and has been but rarely
paralleled even in modern times.
Yet it had also its weak point. According to a custom, common
in all antiquity, but which reached its highest development at
Carthage,(44) the Roman government issued along with the good
silver -denarii- also -denarii- of copper plated with silver, which
had to be accepted like the former and were just a token-money
analogous to our paper currency, with compulsory circulation and
recourse on the public chest, inasmuch as it also was not entitled
to reject the plated pieces. This was no more an official
adulteration of the coinage than our manufacture of paper-money,
for they practised the thing quite openly; Marcus Drusus proposed
in 663, with the view of gaining the means for his largesses of
grain, the sending forth of one plated -denarius- for every seven
silver ones issuing fresh from the mint; nevertheless this measure
not only offered a dangerous handle to private forgery, but
designedly left the public uncertain whether it was receiving
silver or token money, and to what total amount the latter was
in circulation. In the embarrassed period of the civil war and
of the great financial crisis they seem to have so unduly availed
themselves of plating, that a monetary crisis accompanied the
financial one, and the quantity of spurious and really worthless
pieces rendered dealings extremely insecure. Accordingly during
the Cinnan government an enactment was passed by the praetors and
tribunes, primarily by Marcus Marius Gratidianus,(45) for redeeming
all the token-money by silver, and for that purpose an assay-office
was established. How far the calling-in was accomplished,
tradition has not told us; the coining of token-money itself
continued to subsist.
As to the provinces, in accordance with the setting aside of gold
money on principle, the coining of gold was nowhere permitted, not
even in the client-states; so that a gold coinage at this period
occurs only where Rome had nothing at all to say, especially among
the Celts to the north of the Cevennes and among the states in
revolt against Rome; the Italians, for instance, as well as
Mithradates Eupator struck gold coins. The government seems to
have made efforts to bring the coinage of silver also more and more
into its hands, particularly in the west. In Africa and Sardinia
the Carthaginian gold and silver money may have remained in
circulation even after the fall of the Carthaginian state; but
no coinage of precious metals took place there after either the
Carthaginian or the Roman standard, and certainly very soon after
the Romans took possession, the -denarius- introduced from Italy
acquired the predominance in the transactions of the two countries.
In Spain and Sicily, which came earlier to the Romans and
experienced altogether a milder treatment, silver was no doubt
coined under the Roman rule, and indeed in the former country the
silver coinage was first called into existence by the Romans and
based on the Roman standard;(46) but there exist good grounds for
the supposition, that even in these two countries, at least from
the beginning of the seventh century, the provincial and urban
mints were obliged to restrict their issues to copper small money.
Only in Narbonese Gaul the right of coining silver could not be
withdrawn from the old-allied and considerable free city of
Massilia; and the same was presumably true of the Greek cities in
Illyria, Apollonia and Dyrrhachium. But the privilege of these
communities to coin money was restricted indirectly by the fact,
that the three-quarter -denarius-, which by ordinance of the Roman
government was coined both at Massilia and in Illyria, and which
had been under the name of -victoriatus- received into the Roman
monetary system,(47) was about the middle of the seventh century
set aside in the latter; the effect of which necessarily was, that
the Massiliot and Illyrian currency was driven out of Upper Italy
and only remained in circulation, over and above its native field,
perhaps in the regions of the Alps and the Danube. Such progress
had thus been made already in this epoch, that the standard of the
-denarius- exclusively prevailed in the whole western division of
the Roman state; for Italy, Sicily--of which it is as respects the
beginning of the next period expressly attested, that no other
silver money circulated there but the -denarius---Sardinia, Africa,
used exclusively Roman silver money, and the provincial silver
still current in Spain as well as the silver money of the Massiliots
and Illyrians were at least struck after the standard of the -denarius-.
It was otherwise in the east. Here, where the number of the states
coining money from olden times and the quantity of native coin in
circulation were very considerable, the -denarius- did not make its
way into wider acceptance, although it was perhaps declared a legal
tender. On the contrary either the previous monetary standard
continued in use, as in Macedonia for instance, which still as
a province--although partially adding the names of the Roman
magistrates to that of the country--struck its Attic -tetradrachmae-
and certainly employed in substance no other money; or a peculiar
money-standard corresponding to the circumstances was introduced
under Roman authority, as on the institution of the province of Asia,
when a new -stater-, the -cistophorus- as it was called, was prescribed
by the Roman government and was thenceforth struck by the district-
capitals there under Roman superintendence. This essential diversity
between the Occidental and Oriental systems of currency came to be
of the greatest historical importance: the Romanizing of the subject
lands found one of its mightiest levers in the adoption of Roman money,
and it was not through mere accident that what we have designated at
this epoch as the field of the -denarius- became afterwards the Latin,
while the field of the -drachma- became afterwards the Greek, half
of the empire. Still at the present day the former field substantially
represents the sum of Romanic culture, whereas the latter has
severed itself from European civilization.