The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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The Budget of Income
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(41) in the former, by the town of Ilion
in the latter way. Still greater was the number of those whose
proportion of tribute was lowered; the communities 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 wholly 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 pounds)--
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 lucrative
Italian harbour-tolls abolished in the recent times of anarchy
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 pounds) and the price paid
by the purchasers of the property of Pompeius to 70,000,000 sesterces
(700,000 pounds). 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 purchase-money with rigour
even from his most faithful adherents, e. g. from Marcus Antonius.
The Budget of Expenditure
In the expenditure a diminution was in the first place obtained
by the considerable restriction of the largesses of grain.
The distribution of corn to the poor of the capital which was retained,
as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar
for the Roman baths, were at least 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 augmentation
of the standing army, partly by the raising of the pay of the legionary
from 480 sesterces (5 pounds) to 900 (9 pounds) annually.
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,(42) but was not introduced as a permanent innovation
on that account. The former pay of 1 1/3 sesterces (3 1/4 pence)
per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had
an altogether different value from that which it had in the Rome
of Caesar's day; it could only have been retained down to a period
when the common day-labourer in the capital earned by the labour
of his hands daily on an average 3 sesterces (7 1/2 pence),
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 a serious reform in the military system, and to the getting rid
of those irregular gains of the soldier which formed a burden
mostly on the provincials, was an increase suitable to the times
in the regular pay; and the fixing of it at 2 1/2 sesterces (6 1/2 pence)
may be regarded as an equitable step, while the great burden
thereby imposed on the treasury was a necessary, and in its consequences
a beneficial, course.
Of the amount of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar
had to undertake or voluntarily undertook, it is difficult
to form a conception. The wars themselves consumed enormous sums;
and sums perhaps not less 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 participation in the civil war
20,000 sesterces (200 pounds), every burgess of the multitude
in the capital for his non-participation in it 300 sesterces
(3 pounds) 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 afterwards, in the capital was reckoned
at 160,000,000 sesterces (1,600,000 pounds). 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 and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together
8,000,000 pounds)--a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash
in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic.(43)
Social Condition of the Nation
But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnishing
the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution,
an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult 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.
The Capital
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 subordinate community. There the upper classes
speedily withdraw 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 fluctuating
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 preeminently
applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house
merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted
into imperial 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.
The Populace There
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 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 de jure or simply de facto released from slavery--
a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves
and not yet fully burgesses, 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.
Relations of the Oligarchy to the Populace
Moreover, the government not only did nothing to counteract
this corruption of the population of the capital, but even encouraged it
for the benefit of their selfish policy. The judicious rule of law,
which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offence
from dwelling in the capita, was not carried into effect
by the negligent police. The police-supervision--so urgently required--
of association on the part of the rabble was at first neglected,
and afterwards(44) even declared punishable as a 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 the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo,
of Flora(45) 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.(46) Lastly, the distribution 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 seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded. The system
of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, 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 unfrequently 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 outward 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,(47) 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 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's Treatment of Matters in the Capital
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 give to it
once more a specifically Italian character have 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 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 performed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other
languages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish.
Diminution of the Proletariate
But, if Caesar accepted with the full consciousness of what he was doing
the fundamental character of the capital such as he found it,
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;
it 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 a 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
a source of small but honourable 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, if not wholly stopped,(48) at least very materially
restricted 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 comprehensive 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 emigration. 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(49) were charged
with the special supervision of the contractors and of the market
of the capital.
The Club System Restricted
The club system was checked, more effectually than was possible
through prohibitive laws, by the change of the constitution;
inasmuch as with the republic and the republican elections and tribunals
the corruption and violence of the electioneering and judicial
-collegia---and generally the political 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.
Street Police
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 stringent; 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 enactments 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.
Buildings of the Capital
Lastly, building in the capital, and the provision
connected 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 mismanagement 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 predecessors;
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,
temples and other splendid structures, but he relieved the marketplace
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
originating 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 anointing of the body--a measure
of cleanliness and sanitary policy which, according
to the ancient dietetics based substantially on bathing and anointing,
was highly judicious.
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 magnificent bazaar, for a theatre
to rival that of Pompeius, for a 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 constructing 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
artificial 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 indeed 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 perhaps
of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the 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 municipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely,
at once for the capital and for the other urban communities. We may add
that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character
as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities
of the imperial period. The republican 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 nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection
with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.