The New Deal in Old Rome

CHAPTER V

THE GET-RICH-QUICK ERA

THE ITALIAN peninsula is a natural political unit. The unification so painfully won in the earlier half of the Republic lasted, with interruptions, for a thousand years. It finally dissolved in the anarchy that followed the death of Charlemagne. Not until more than a thousand years later, in the nineteenth century, was Cavour able to start the movement that made Italy again a nation.

With the unification of the peninsula under Roman rule the Republic took its place among the world powers. Its larger interests inevitably came into conflict with the interests of other great nations. The result was a series of wars that made Rome supreme in the Mediterranean world. But war and the opening of new lands brought their problems. These were complicated by the vastly increased use of money that only a short time before had been introduced into the Roman economy. It was a get-rich-quick era. The New Deal experiments of the next two centuries — resettlement administration, work relief, the ever normal granary, poor relief, anti-hoarding measures, the scaling down of debts — were responses to the many social and economic ailments that such an era produces.

The most significant of these foreign conflicts was the second war with Carthage. In its importance and far-reaching effects it is comparable to a modern world war.

It was deliberately brought on by the restless military genius of the Carthaginian Hannibal as a war of revenge. His father had been defeated and humiliated in the first war between Rome and Carthage. The son was determined to avenge his memory. Here, again, we have a blazing instance of pacifistic common sense overridden by jingoism. Hannibal had begun military operations in Spain, and Rome had sent a delegation to the Carthaginian Senate to protest. There Senator Hanno alone supported the Roman position. Hannibal, he said, had a spirit that could not rest. “You have sent to the Spanish army,” he continued, “a young man who is consumed with a passion for power. He believes the only way to reach it is to live surrounded by armed legions and perpetually to stir up fresh wars.” Now he was undertaking a war in violation of Rome’s treaty rights that was likely to end in disaster for Carthage. When Hanno sat down, no senator rose to second him. He was regarded as pro-Roman and ignored.

In the first part of the long war that followed, everything went Hannibal’s way. He won a series of brilliant victories. The tactics of Cannæ are still studied in military schools. When the Carthaginian Senate was rejoicing over a successful campaign, a leader of the war party recalled the original warnings of Hanno and asked him whether he still disapproved the war. The old senator did not weaken. In reply he pointed out that in spite of the victories Rome was still far from beaten. He urged that advantage be taken of the existing favourable situation to negotiate peace. Otherwise he feared the worst. “But very few,” says Livy, “were influenced by Hanno’s speech.” The war dragged on and the superior resources of Rome finally crushed Carthage. Livy’s account might have been profitable reading for some of the modern militarists.

With the military aspects of the protracted struggle between Rome and the greatest military genius of the age we are not here concerned. Until the end Hannibal outmatched every general sent against him. But like England, accustomed to losing every battle except the last, the Republic doggedly muddled through. The conquest of Carthage, 202 B.C., left Rome mistress of the whole Mediterranean basin. Within the next two generations “the peasants of the Tiber” had come to dominate most of the land bordering on the sea, and in less than another century they had filled in the gaps and added Gaul.

On the eve of her first important foreign war, 264 B.C., Rome controlled an area about the size of that of the combined states of Ohio and Kentucky. Before the end of the first century B.C. its domain would have covered the entire United States east of the Mississippi. A brilliant English historian compares the expansion of Rome with that of the British Empire, which is said to have developed in a fit of absent-mindedness. Not quite in a fit of absentmindedness, says Mr. Fisher, but “half reluctantly and of no set plan.” Successive stages of conquest were forced by the necessity of quenching turbulence upon the frontiers. Undoubtedly the purpose of protecting conquered territory animated both Rome and Britain. After the exhausting conflict with Carthage the people loathed the idea of war with the shortlived intensity of twentieth-century Europeans. It was with the greatest difficulty that the Senate was able to persuade them to honour the blank cheques Rome had signed for its allies in the East and to consolidate the gains in the West. For a considerable time the problem of administering conquered territories appalled the ruling class. Not enough capable administrators were to be found in the senatorial aristocracy, and the nobles of the second century had become as reluctant to admit new men to their charmed circle as the British peers of the nineteenth century were to allow the House of Lords to be packed with new members.

On the side of further expansion, however, was the powerful motive of prestige and later of profits. Any Roman senator would have understood the former German Emperor’s insistence that his government be consulted on every matter of international interest and Hitler’s belief that Germany had the divine right to impose its rule upon the world. So it was the mission of Rome to bring order, law, and justice to backward or frivolous nations.

But the thought of profits was increasingly present. Under the later Republic certain rich provinces were regarded as fair loot for the influential classes. A consul expected the governorship of a province as a reward so he could reimburse himself for the heavy expenses of the campaign. Cicero cleared $110,000 as Governor of Cilicia by perfectly legal methods and, like Lord Clive in India, was astonished at his own moderation. Any conquest was expected to yield a rich booty in captives, who were sold as slaves. A profitable commerce developed within the Empire and later a cynical observer, the elder Pliny, wrote that campaigns had been undertaken in order that Roman ladies and gentlemen might have a better choice of perfumes. Evidently there was constant pressure at home for bringing additional territory under Roman control. Resisting this, as has previously been suggested, was strong conservative opposition to the policy of expansion. After a survey of the evidence Professor Frank writes in his Roman Imperialism, that the Roman people “stumbled on f alteringly and unwittingly into ever increasing dominion.” Julius Cæsar, who conquered what is now France in the middle of the first century B.C., he regards as “the first candid imperialist of Rome.”

A turbulent century and a half followed the momentous struggle with Carthage. In this period the Tiber peasants scaled the dizzy heights and saw the kingdoms of this world spread at their feet. On the whole, the Empire, especially after the central government had organized decent administration under Augustus and his successors, was a great civilizing influence. But under the corrupting stress of war the Romans became a hard and ruthless people. An atrocious affair is reported in a perfectly matter-of-fact way by Livy. After the conquest of Macedonia early in the second century B.C., the commanding general organized a punitive raid with such perfection of detail that at a set time on one day seventy towns were plundered and their inhabitants were sold into slavery. It was not until a century of peace had done its civilizing work that a voice of protest was lifted by Plutarch. He figured that each soldier received a trifle more than two dollars as his share of the booty. “So that men could only shudder,” he wrote, “at the issue of a war when the wealth of a whole nation thus divided turned to so little advantage and profit to each man.”

In the same spirit his disillusioned contemporary, Tacitus, writing of the conquest of Britain, puts in the mouth of a Scottish chieftain a tremendous indictment of commercialized imperialism. “Vain hope,” he says to his followers, whom he has rallied against the legions, “vain hope to evade the Romans’ clutches by obsequious submission. The whole world is to them a prey. They have ransacked the continents, and now they must search the seas. If their foe be rich, they are ravenous for gold; if he be poor, for glory; and neither East nor West can sate an appetite, unique in this, that plenty or dearth is alike to them a lure. Empire is the name they give to a policy of plunder, bloodshed, and rapine; and when they have created a desert they call it ‘peace.’”

In the era of rapid expansion power and wealth flooded into Rome. But the governing class had not yet learned how to use power, and unearned wealth is demoralizing. When it includes slave labour it is devastating. Rome’s was not a wholesome and balanced prosperity that comes from the production of new goods and services. It was chiefly a parasitic prosperity based on the consumption of the accumulated savings of the East and the exploitation of slave labour in mines and on farms.

“For Rome,” Paul Louis, a French economist, writes, “humanity laboured, toiled in the mines, wrested fine pearls from the sea, netted the purple fish which supplied the precious dye, wove the wool of Asia Minor, blew the glass of Egypt, smelted Thracian iron and Cyprian copper. For Rome, gangs of slaves threshed grain in the plains of Palermo, upon the plateaus of Numidia, along the damp banks of the Nile; for Rome, ships ploughed the seas from India and even from China and the Somali coast to the misty littoral of the Veneti and to the Cimbric peninsula.”

From the standpoint of the outlying regions, however, it should be remembered that the people had been exploited under their native rulers, and that Rome gave them order and a larger measure of justice than had previously been theirs. In Sicily, for instance, under Roman rule taxes actually were reduced. Later Rome made increasing contributions to the welfare of its possessions outside of Italy. The city, it has been said, “exported brains.” The capital itself was perhaps the greater sufferer in the period of expansion, although no one would have admitted this at the time. Only a comparatively small class benefited from the conquests, and society was more and more sharply divided into what the great German historian Mommsen calls “the world of beggars and the world of the rich.” The bitter fruits of this division were to ripen in the next century.

Contact with the older civilizations of the East, and especially with that of Greece, had a deep effect both materially and spiritually. “Captive Greece,” Horace wrote, “took captive her fierce conqueror.” The rough farmer-soldiers learned what luxury was at a time when the spoils of conquest and the money-making opportunities of the new lands enabled them to pay for it. The swift rise of the standards of living of the more fortunate is indicated by a Roman of the first century B.C. who wrote of his boyhood as a forgotten age. “For me, when a boy,” he said, “there sufficed a single rough coat and a single undergarment, the coarsest of shoes, a horse without a saddle. I had no daily warm bath and but seldom a river-dip.”

In Rome of the second century B.C., as in other nations later, the contact of the ideas of a lower culture with those of a higher produced mixed results. Under the influence of Greece the interests of the Romans were enriched and their horizon widened. But the impact of Greek philosophy and rationalism upon men who were not mentally prepared to give up traditional beliefs was often demoralizing. Polybius, a sympathetic Greek observer of the Roman scene, wrote that a powerful influence in holding the Roman commonwealth together was fear of the gods. This, he said, was carried to extraordinary lengths and he believed it was deliberately used by the upper classes “as a check upon the common people.” Therefore he looked with apprehension upon the evidence of growing scepticism that he saw around him. The moderns, he insisted, were “most foolish”in banishing belief in the “terror of hell.”

One other disturbing ferment of the second century must be mentioned. This was the greatly increased use of money. The coinage of money was a comparatively new invention for Rome. A half-century before the final unification of Italy the capital had reached a stage in its economic development when it no longer could do business with the primitive coinage of which the unit was a chunk of bronze weighing a pound. As someone has said, with this money a housewife’s journey to market must have been as fatiguing as her return. Coined money had been invented in the eastern Mediterranean world perhaps seven hundred years before Christ. It had been circulating for two hundred years in the Greek cities of southern Italy before the growing demands of trade brought it to Rome. It was not until 269 B.C. that a mint for the coinage of silver was set up in the temple of Juno Moneta on the Capitoline hill. “Moneta” soon came to mean “mint” and then was connected with the coins produced by the mint to give us our words “money” and “monetary.”

But even the bronze coinage that was used before Rome began issuing silver invited the disturbances of funny money that have been with the world in all ages. A tradition of the first century after Christ was that during the first great war of Rome with Carthage three hundred years earlier, the resources of the commonwealth were inadequate to meet its expenditures, and by a reduction of five-sixths in the weight of the bronze coins the public debt was virtually cancelled. This statement is extravagant. But when Hannibal was threatening Rome in the second war with Carthage near the end of the third century B.C., the difficulty of financing the war and especially of meeting the soldier’s pay led to a financial crisis. By vote of the Assembly the bronze coin was halved in weight and the silver coin, the denarius, worth something less than the English shilling, was cut fourteen per cent. Gradually, however, the currency was stabilized and for several centuries Rome provided the world with a sound monetary system which enabled trade to develop on a satisfactory basis. Wild inflation did not appear until the anarchy of the third century of our era.

With the rapid expansion after the second war with Carthage, money came into general use with growing velocity of circulation. The whole Roman economy was upset. The United States knows what it is to have a great new credit machine run wild, as bank credits ran wild to produce the boom years of the 1920’s. But America had had experience with credit inflation during the war, from which it might have learned. Rome’s experience had been slight. People flocked to borrow the convenient new money for speculation. In the barter economy under which Italian farmers had largely operated, there was strong inducement for the farmer to live on his land. With money available it was possible for him to receive a cash income while living in Rome. Wealthy men in the capital could buy up distressed farms at a bargain, sell them at a profit, or operate them in large tracts with slave labour. With banking offices springing up in the Forum there always was a temptation to adventuresome men to go in debt in order to make a killing in the new lands that were being opened up. Working men constantly were attracted away from Rome by the prospect of cheap land in Italy and the provinces. With both capital and labour absorbed elsewhere, industry did not develop at this time as an attractive field for investment. As the Empire grew, it failed to solve the problem of a balanced farm-industry economy.

Speculators had their chance also in the jumpy and uncertain prices resulting from a primitive monetary system. There were no reserve banks and the value of money, and consequently prices, would be affected by the arrival of silver from the Spanish mines or loot from the provinces. By the second century B.C. Rome was rocking with the results of its wild discovery. Money, command of the Mediterranean, plunder from the provinces, slavery, and contact with the luxuries and philosophies of the East were to combine to transform Roman character as well as to create a new world.