The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Elevation of the Municipal System
Lastly while the government thus energetically applied itself
to remove the diseased, and to strengthen the sound, elements
of the Italian national life, the newly-regulated municipal system--
which had but recently developed itself out of the crisis
of the Social war in and alongside of the state-economy(76)--was intended
to communicate to the new absolute monarchy the communal life
which was compatible with it, and to impart to the sluggish circulation
of the noblest elements of public life once more a quickened action.
The leading principles in the two municipal ordinances issued in 705
for Cisalpine Gaul and in 709 for Italy,(77) the latter of which remained
the fundamental law for all succeeding times, are apparently, first,
the strict purifying of the urban corporations from all immoral elements,
while yet no trace of political police occurs; secondly, the utmost
restriction of centralization and the utmost freedom of movement
in the communities, to which there was even now reserved the election
of magistrates and an--although limited--civil and criminal jurisdiction.
The general police enactments, such as the restrictions on the right
of association,(78) came, it is true, into operation also here.
Such were the ordinances, by which Caesar attempted to reform
the Italian national economy. It is easy both to show their
insufficiency, seeing that they allowed a multitude of evils
still to exist, and to prove that they operated in various respects
injuriously by imposing restrictions, some of which were
very severely felt, on freedom of dealing. It is still easier
to show that the evils of the Italian national economy generally
were incurable. But in spite of this the practical statesman
will admire the work as well as the master-workman. It was already
no small achievement that, where a man like Sulla, despairing
of remedy, had contented himself with a mere formal reorganization,
the evil was seized in its proper seat and grappled with there;
and we may well conclude that Caesar with his reforms came as near
to the measure of what was possible as it was given to a statesman
and a Roman to come. He could not and did not expect from them
the regeneration of Italy; but he sought on the contrary to attain
this in a very different way, for the right apprehension
of which it is necessary first of all to review the condition
of the provinces as Caesar found them.
Provinces
The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number:
seven European--the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul,
Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily,
Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic--Asia, Bithynia and Pontus,
Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African--Cyrene and Africa.
To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two new
governorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constituting
Illyricum a province by itself.(80)
Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy
In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule
had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy
performances in this line, no second government has ever attained
at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems
no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this
rests not on the Romans alone. Almost everywhere before their day
the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out
of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty
belonging to better times. It was doubtless bad, that every
accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally
in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered
at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management
of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled
transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war
he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g.
when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia
all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege
not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers
to be laid at his feet. It was doubtless bad, that no rule
of morality or of criminal law bound either the Roman administrators
or their retinue, and that violent outrages, rapes, and murders
with or without form of law were of daily occurrence in the provinces.
But these things were at least nothing new; almost everywhere
men had long been accustomed to be treated like slaves,
and it signified little in the long run whether a Carthaginian overseer,
a Syrian satrap, or a Roman proconsul acted as the local tyrant.
Their material well-being, almost the only thing for which
the provincials still cared, was far less disturbed by those occurrences,
which although numerous in proportion to the many tyrants yet affected
merely isolated individuals, than by the financial exactions pressing
heavily on all, which had never previously been prosecuted
with such energy.
The Romans now gave in this domain fearful proof of their old master
of money-matters. We have already endeavoured to describe
the Roman system of provincial oppression in its modest
and rational foundations as well as in its growth and corruption
as a matter of course, the latter went on increasing. The ordinary taxes
became far more oppressive from the inequality of their distribution
and from the preposterous system of levying them than from their
high amount. As to the burden of quartering troops, Roman statesmen
themselves expressed the opinion that a town suffered nearly
to the same extent when a Roman army took up winter quarters
in it as when an enemy took it by storm. While the taxation
in its original character had been an indemnification for the burden
of military defence undertaken by Rome, and the community
paying tribute had thus a right to remain exempt from ordinary service,
garrison-service was now--as is attested e. g. in the case
of Sardinia--for the most part imposed on the provincials,
and even in the ordinary armies, besides other duties, the whole
heavy burden of the cavalry-service was devolved on them.
The extraordinary contributions demanded--such as, the deliveries
of grain for little or no compensation to benefit the proletariate
of the capital; the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast-
defences in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art,
wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in the theatre
and the chase; the military requisitions in case of war--
were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable.
A single instance may show how far things were carried.
During the three years' administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres
the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motuca
from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80;
so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily 59 per cent
of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow
than to cultivate them under such government. And these landholders were,
as their small number itself shows and as is expressly stated, by no means
small farmers, but respectable planters and in great part Roman burgesses!
In the Client-States
In the client-states the forms of taxation were somewhat different,
but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse,
since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came
those of the native courts. In Cappadocia and Egypt the farmer
as well as the king was bankrupt; the former was unable to satisfy
the tax-collector, the latter was unable to satisfy his Roman creditor.
Add to these the exactions, properly so called, not merely
of the governor himself, but also of his "friends," each of whom fancied
that he had as it were a draft on the governor and a title accordingly
to come back from the province a made man. The Roman oligarchy
in this respect completely resembled a gang of robbers,
and followed out the plundering of the provincials in a professional
and business-like manner; capable members of the gang set to work
not too nicely, for they had in fact to share the spoil
with the advocates and the jurymen, and the more they stole,
they did so the more securely. The notion of honour in theft too
was already developed; the big robber looked down on the little,
and the latter on the mere thief, with contempt; any one, who had been
once for a wonder condemned, boasted of the high figure of the sums
which he was proved to have exacted. Such was the behaviour
in the provinces of the successors of those men, who had been
accustomed to bring home nothing from their administration but the thanks
of the subjects and the approbation of their fellow-citizens.
The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces
But still worse, if possible, and still less subject to any control
was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among
the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed
property and the whole commercial and monetary business
in the provinces were concentrated in their hands. The estates
in the transmarine regions, which belonged to Italian grandees,
were exposed to all the misery of management by stewards, and never
saw their owners; excepting possibly the hunting-parks, which occur
as early as this time in Transalpine Gaul with an area amounting
to nearly twenty square miles. Usury flourished as it had never
flourished before. The small landowners in Illyricum, Asia, and Egypt
managed their estates even in Varro's time in great part practically
as the debtor-slaves of their Roman or non-Roman creditors,
just as the plebeians in former days for their patrician lords.
Cases occurred of capital being lent even to urban communities
at four per cent per month. It was no unusual thing for an energetic
and influential man of business to get either the title
of envoy(81) given to him by the senate or that of officer
by the governor, and, if possible, to have men put at his service
for the better prosecution of his affairs; a case is narrated
on credible authority, where one of these honourable martial bankers
on account of a claim against the town of Salamis in Cyprus
kept its municipal council blockaded in the town-house,
until five of the members had died of hunger.
Robberies and Damage by War
To these two modes of oppression, each of which by itself
was intolerable and which were always becoming better arranged to work
into each other's hands, were added the general calamities, for which
the Roman government was also in great part, at least indirectly,
responsible. In the various wars a large amount of capital
was dragged away from the country and a larger amount destroyed
sometimes by the barbarians, sometimes by the Roman armies.
Owing to the worthlessness of the Roman land and maritime police,
brigands and pirates swarmed every where. In Sardinia and the interior
of Asia Minor brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain
it became necessary to fortify all buildings constructed
outside of the city-enclosures with walls and towers. The fearful evil
of piracy has been already described in another connection.(82)
The panaceas of the prohibitive system, with which the Roman governor
was wont to interpose when scarcity of money or dearth occurred,
as under such circumstances they could not fail to do--
the prohibition of the export of gold or grain from the province--
did not mend the matter. The communal affairs were almost everywhere
embarrassed, in addition to the general distress, by local disorders
and frauds of the public officials.
The Conditions of the Provinces Generally
Where such grievances afflicted communities and individuals
not temporarily but for generations with an inevitable, steady,
and yearly-increasing oppression, the best regulated public
or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most
unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations
from the Tagus to the Euphrates. "All the communities," it is said
in a treatise published as early as 684, "are ruined"; the same truth
is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul,
the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still
in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor even towns
like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery
seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which
the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become,
according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves,
weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man
can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal
endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together
from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees
could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer.
Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded
that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece
and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion
put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter
for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.
Caesar and the Provinces
The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person
to inspect his "farms" one after the other; in reality the condition
of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom
of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded
by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency.
The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care
that they might be so healed, and that there should be
no fresh inflictions.
The Caesarian Magistrates
The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled.
The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces
essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control;
those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master,
who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained
a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects
than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships
were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls
and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated
eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces
among the competitors depended solely on him,(83) they were
in reality bestowed by the Imperator. The functions also
of the governors were practically restricted. The superintendence
of the administration of justice and the administrative control
of the communities remained in their hands; but their command
was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants
associated with the governor,(84) and the raising of the taxes
was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially
to imperial officials,(85) so that the governor was thenceforward
surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent
on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military
hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline.
While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if
they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions,
the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak
against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless
control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer
for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch.
The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar
had already in his first consulate made more stringent,
was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces
with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter;
and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge
in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves
and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time
were wont to atone.
Regulation of Burdens
The extraordinary public burdens were reduced to the right proportion
and the actual necessity; the ordinary burdens were materially lessened.
We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation;(86)
the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering
of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa
and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection
of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials.
That Caesar after the example of one of his greatest democratic
predecessors, Sertorius,(87) wished to free the subjects from the burden
of quartering troops and to insist on the soldiers erecting
for themselves permanent encampments resembling towns, cannot indeed
be proved; but he was, at least after he had exchanged the part
of pretender for that of king, not the man to abandon the subject
to the soldier; and it was in keeping with his spirit, when the heirs
of his policy created such military camps, and then converted them
into towns which formed rallying-points for Italian civilization
amidst the barbarian frontier districts.
Influence on the Capitalist System
It was a task far more difficult than the checking of official
irregularities, to deliver the provincials from the oppressive
ascendency of Roman capital. Its power could not be directly broken
without applying means which were still more dangerous than the evil;
the government could for the time being abolish only isolated abuses--
as when Caesar for instance prohibited the employment of the title
of state-envoy for financial purposes--and meet manifest acts of violence
and palpable usury by a sharp application of the general penal laws
and of the laws as to usury, which extended also to the provinces;(88)
but a more radical cure of the evil was only to be expected
from the reviving prosperity of the provincials under a better
administration. Temporary enactments, to relieve the insolvency
of particular provinces, had been issued on several occasions
in recent times. Caesar himself had in 694 when governor
of Further Spain assigned to the creditors two thirds
of the income of their debtors in order to pay themselves
from that source. Lucius Lucullus likewise when governor of Asia Minor
had directly cancelled a portion of the arrears of interest
which had swelled beyond measure, and had for the remaining portion
assigned to the creditors a fourth part of the produce of the lands
of their debtors, as well as a suitable proportion of the profits
accruing to them from house-rents or slave-labour. We are not expressly
informed that Caesar after the civil war instituted similar
general liquidations of debt in the provinces; yet from what
has just been remarked and from what was done in the case of Italy,(89)
it can hardly be doubted that Caesar likewise directed his efforts
towards this object, or at least that it formed part of his plan.
While thus the Imperator, as far as lay within human power,
relieved the provincials from the oppressions of the magistrates
and capitalists of Rome, it might at the same time be with certaint
expected from the government to which he imparted fresh vigour,
that it would scare off the wild border-peoples and disperse
the freebooters by land and sea, as the rising sun chases away
the mist. However the old wounds might still smart, with Caesar
there appeared for the sorely-tortured subjects the dawn
of a more tolerable epoch, the first intelligent and humane government
that had appeared for centuries, and a policy of peace which rested
not on cowardice but on strength. Well might the subjects above all
mourn along with the best Romans by the bier of the great liberator.
The Beginning of the Helleno-Italic State
But this abolition of existing abuses was not the main matter
in Caesar's provincial reform. In the Roman republic, according
to the view of the aristocracy and democracy alike, the provinces
had been nothing but--what they were frequently called--country-estates
of the Roman people, and they were employed and worked out as such.
This view had now passed away. The provinces as such were gradually
to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation
a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one
existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all;
the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander
national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs
of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy. These ideas,
as is well known, were not new. The emigration from Italy
to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries
had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants
themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy. The first
who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds
of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy,
the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies
of Carthage and Narbo. Then the second statesman of genius
produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce
the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish
youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin
and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute
founded by him in Osca. When Caesar entered on the government,
a large Italian population--though, in great part, lacking stability
and concentration--already existed in all the provinces and client-
states. To say nothing of the formally Italian towns in Spain
and southern Gaul, we need only recall the numerous troops of burgesses
raised by Sertorius and Pompeius in Spain, by Caesar in Gaul,
by Juba in Numidia, by the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia,
Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre--ill-tuned doubtless--
on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war
sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations
of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language,
which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine
Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published
shortly after Caesar's death.
On the other hand the interpenetration of the Latin and Hellenic
character was, we might say, as old as Rome. On occasion
of the union of Italy the conquering Latin nation had assimilated
to itself all the other conquered nationalities, excepting only
the Greek, which was received just as it stood without any attempt
at external amalgamation. Wherever the Roman legionary went,
the Greek schoolmaster, no less a conqueror in his own way, followed;
at an early date we find famous teachers of the Greek language
settled on the Guadalquivir, and Greek was as well taught as Latin
in the institute of Osca. The higher Roman culture itself
was in fact nothing else than the proclamation of the great gospel
of Hellenic manners and art in the Italian idiom; against the modest
pretension of the civilizing conquerors to proclaim it first of all
in their own language to the barbarians of the west the Hellene
at least could not loudly protest. Already the Greek every where--
and, most decidedly, just where the national feeling was purest
and strongest, on the frontiers threatened by barbaric denationalization,
e. g. in Massilia, on the north coast of the Black Sea,
and on the Euphrates and Tigris--descried the protector and avenger
of Hellenism in Rome; and in fact the foundation of towns by Pompeius
in the far east resumed after an interruption of centuries
the beneficent work of Alexander.
The idea of an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages
and a single nationality was not new--otherwise it would have been
nothing but a blunder; but the development of it from floating projects
to a firmly-grasped conception, from scattered initial efforts
to the laying of a concentrated foundation, was the work of the third
and greatest of the democratic statesmen of Rome.
The Ruling Nations
The Jews
The first and most essential condition for the political
and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension
of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption
as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian
existing by their side. In a certain sense we might no doubt name
along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them
in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play
no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar. We speak of the Jews.
This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient
as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere
and nowhere powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly
more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those
of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious
and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom
of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects
of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews
scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole Roman empire.
Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews
formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct,
not unlike the "Jews' quarters" of our towns, but with a freer position
and superintended by a "master of the people" as superior judge
and administrator. How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population
was already before Caesar's time, and how closely at the same time
the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown
by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous
for a governor to offend the Jews, in his province, because he might
then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace
of the capital. Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews
was trade; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman
merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese
and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish,
by the side of the Roman, merchants. At this period too we encounter
the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly
Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs. This Judaism,
although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture
of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless
a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things,
which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar
on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct
discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible.
While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism,
did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning
the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews
in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges,
and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman
as well as against the Greek local priests. The two great men
of course did not contemplate placing the Jewish nationality
on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic.
But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora's gift
of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation
of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant
to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready
to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself
up to a certain degree to foreign habits--the Jew was for this
very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built
on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed
with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality.
Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven
of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent
a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity
of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world,
and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.