The New Deal in Old Rome

CHAPTER VIII

THE REPUBLIC COULDN’T STAND PROSPERITY

IT was under the Republic that Rome marched farthest, although its expansion continued into the second century after Christ. When Cæsar came into power the little settlement of shepherds on the Tiber had extended its dominion around the basin of the Mediterranean and over western Europe from Gibraltar to the Rhine. A tremendous job it had been. “It was such a toil,” wrote Virgil, “to found the Roman race.”

This vast achievement that affected the whole future of the Western world had been carried out under the direction of a city that had gradually grown from a village to a great cosmopolitan centre. In the last years of the Republic, Rome was not yet the magnificent city it was to become under the Empire. But for the rich it was a centre of luxurious living. They had great mansions on the hills. A rich aristocratic demagogue paid $740,000 for his estate on the Palatine. Much of the value probably was in the land, which had become expensive with the growth of the city. Cæsar later paid $5,000,000 for land which he bought for the expansion of the Forum. It was fashionable to have country estates as well as town houses. Besides his establishment on the Palatine, Cicero had eight country villas to which he liked to retire from the bustling life of the city. The lovely bay of Naples, two days’ journey from Rome, was a favourite resort. Its shores were studded with villas. The living in the great houses was on an extravagant scale. Anyone with the slightest pretensions to social standing must have at least ten slaves, and a well-to-do family might have two hundred. A skilful cook cost five thousand dollars.

The absence of modern transportation facilities caused a concentration of population. The poor lived in wretchedly built flats which often were swept by destructive fires. One of the big business men of the capital became notorious for the way in which he took advantage of the frequent fires for making money. At this time there was no fire department in Rome. When there was a fire he would appear on the scene with a large staff of trained slaves. He would find the owners of the burning building and of buildings that were threatened, and make them distress offers which they were glad to accept. Then his private firemen would go to work to save the property.

Rentals for quarters in the slum districts were cheap. Young Sulla, who was to be heard from later, paid $12.50 a month for his flat. The man who lived in the flat above him paid $8.50. We read of one bachelor in comfortable circumstances who paid $125 a month for his apartment. The poor, of course, had the dole, public baths open at a nominal fee, and the elaborate entertainments of races, wild beast hunts on a temporary platform built in the Forum, and the brutal gladiatorial combats. These last were a survival from the primitive religion of the Etruscans, Rome’s immediate neighbours to the north. After a nobleman’s death his retainers and slaves killed each other in fights at his funeral so he would have a proper escort in the lower world. The combats introduced into Rome in the middle of the third century B.C. were regarded as exciting spectacles, no more shocking to the spectators than a modern bull fight.

In the Roman world, trade followed the flag and Roman bankers and brokers were established in the provinces wherever business was to be transacted. Offices were set up in the Forum. Bankers accepted checquing accounts as well as accounts bearing interest. They were prepared to furnish bills of exchange and letters of credit. Luxuries imported from the provinces met the interest on foreign investments or were paid for out of the spoils of conquest.

Rome had been demoralized by its own success. Problems arising from the extension of slavery, the concentration of wealth, the farm problem in Italy, and the unemployment problem in the capital were threatening to wreck the Republic. Sudden wealth had gone to men’s heads. We often see the effect in America today. The new rich frequently become arrogant. Their children as often are both snobbish and worthless. It was so in Rome of the first century. Cicero wrote that moral sense was depraved by wealth. As for the unemployed who flocked to the big city, their character was weakened by idleness. The Gracchus brothers saw clearly the evils. Tiberius tried to deal with the farm problem. When he failed, Gaius attempted to organize a democratic party as an instrument of public service. But the popular Assembly proved no more competent than the decadent Senate to govern a city that, in turn, governed a vast empire. The wretchedly poor people, who constituted the majority of the voters, were largely for sale. It is hard, as Benjamin Franklin observed, for an empty sack to stand upright.

The business crowd, whose political manoeuvring was traced in the last chapter, was naturally concerned with Imperial defence. It was this group that, against the protests of an unwilling and stupid aristocracy, forced the elevation of the competent son of a small Italian farmer to the supreme command. Marius has been described as “a peasant of genius, slow-witted, inelastic, a good soldier but a blundering politician.” Organizing and drilling his volunteer army, he threw back invaders from the north so effectively that it was five hundred years before Rome was again threatened.

With no aptitude for political life, he might have retired at the end of the war, but he was forced into politics to make sure that his soldiers received the rewards he had promised them. As he had sprung from the people and had won his command over the opposition of the senatorial machine, he naturally became the leader of the democratic, or Popular, party. In this position he was surrounded by cleverer men who knew exactly what they wanted. They professed allegiance to the program of Gaius Gracchus. But they lacked the character and the ability of that great leader. Their turbulent regime alienated the powerful business group that naturally wanted law and order in Rome. It turned to the senatorial machine, and the coalition persuaded Marius to use his troops to crush his former friends.

Meanwhile, as Gracchus had foreseen, the Italian cities grew increasingly restive because of the denial to them of the advantage of Roman citizenship. When a conservative reformer, who had become their champion, was assassinated, the discontent flamed into revolt. In the violent civil war that followed, a brilliant young aristocrat, a former lieutenant of Marius’s, demonstrated again his military ability. Sulla, whose cheap bachelor quarters have been mentioned, came of a distinguished though impoverished family. His success as a soldier led to his election as consul. Another war had broken out in the East, and the Senate awarded him the Asiatic command. Marius was jealous of the younger man and a violent conflict followed in which civil government virtually disappeared in the clash of armed forces. Here was set the evil precedent of the purge of the opponents of the regime in power that was followed in the modern dictatorships. In Sulla’s absence Marius took delirious vengeance on his aristocratic enemies. After the death of Marius, Sulla returned with his legions from his Asiatic assignment and carried out a massacre that left a lasting stigma on his memory.

The new dictator was a Tory aristocrat, genial and gay in his lighter moods, but ruthless in carrying out his policies. His biographer describes his blue eyes, keen and glaring, made the more forbidding by his complexion, white, covered with red blotches — “like a mulberry sprinkled with meal,” a verse-writer said. His anger was directed chiefly at the rich business men who had backed Marius. In spite of his energy he longed to retire from public life and become a gentleman sportsman. It has been surmised that his purge had a double purpose. He wanted to get rid of every individual who might be a menace to him in his retirement, and he was determined to collect enough money from the estates of those he proscribed to give satisfactory rewards to his soldiers. The story of the hunting down of those on his death list, as recorded by later writers, makes sickening reading.

In one of the fragments of his autobiography that has been preserved he gave his principle of action. “All my most happy resolutions,” he wrote, “have been the result, not of reasoning, but of momentary inspiration.” Statesmanship was hardly to be expected from such a source. A natural reactionary, he planned to revise the Constitution and set up a conservative government free from the menace of popular control. He did this and then retired. Upon his tombstone he had engraved an epitaph that set forth the rest of his philosophy of life. It ran: “No friend has ever served, no enemy has ever wronged me whom I have not repaid in full.”

The Sullan Constitution gave the senatorial machine its last chance. It lacked the old capacity to make the machine work. Besides, the careers of Marius and Sulla had demonstrated that the control of the government had passed to any able army commander who was ambitious enough to seize it. Such a man had been developing in this disturbed period in a rising young politician. Julius Cæsar, whose aunt, Julia, was the wife of Marius, founded his career on a famous remark of his uncle’s. “The law,” Marius had said, “speaks too softly to be heard amid the din of arms.” This appealed to the realism of his brilliant nephew. In view of the record, he must have seen that he could not go far in politics without an army at his command. Meanwhile it was necessary to get popular support. All his affiliations were with the Marian Popular party. In the reaction against the excesses of Sulla, it was coming back to power and Cæsar naturally identified himself with it, although there is no reason to suppose he had the slightest confidence in any government dominated by the Assembly.

Cæsar was a dashing young aristocrat. His biographer describes him as tall and good-looking, with keen black eyes. He was fastidious in his dress and he hated growing bald. He used to comb his hair forward to cover the bald spot, and later he greatly valued the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath which the Senate voted him, because it hid his baldness. He combined a superb intelligence with the born executive’s quickness of decision and action. Cicero thought him a most effective speaker and he became a popular idol. His soldiers, whom he called “comrades,” adored him. The spell he cast upon men was shown at the time when, as a young man, he was captured and held prisoner by pirates. Although his life was in danger for a month before he was ransomed, he used to joke with his captors. When he wanted to sleep he would send word to them with supreme nonchalance not to make so much noise. Occasionally he would call the pirates together to hear him recite verses he had written. Those that seemed bored he would denounce as illiterate barbarians and he would threaten to come back and crucify them. They took it as good clean fun. But after his release he kept his word. He got together some armed men on ships, surprised the pirates, and put them all to death.

The sort of exuberant conversation that charmed his friends, as well as the pirates, is illustrated in a remark he made when deeply in debt. He needed, he said, something more than a million dollars “in order to have nothing at all.” The young man’s debts were the talk of the town. But they were not the usual debts of the young spendthrifts of the time. They represented a coolly calculating investment in politics. When he was appointed Governor of Farther Spain he was so deeply involved that his creditors threatened to seize his baggage and refused to let him depart until he had arranged with his rich backer, Crassus, to satisfy them. In Spain he recouped himself from the proceeds of campaigns which resulted in confiscations and the sale of captives — all part of the unhappy game of conquest.

Cæsar returned from Spain to be elected consul. He was getting on in the world. He had a colleague, Bibulus, theoretically with equal authority. But where Macgregor sat, there was the head of the table. Bibulus was stubborn and stupid. Jokers began to sign legal documents : “Done in the consulship of Julius and Cæsar.” In furtherance of his political ambition Cæsar had made an alliance with his former angel, Crassus, and with Pompey, now Rome’s most distinguished general. Pompey had been disappointed in not being able to persuade the Senate to provide proper compensation for his veterans in the form of land allotments. He had too much respect for the Constitution to summon his ex-service men to intimidate the Senate, or perhaps he lacked the nerve until the new consul bucked him up. Cæsar had no scruples in meeting what he regarded as unscrupulous opposition and he had all the courage in the world. What followed is interesting not merely for what it shows of Cæsar’s tendencies, but also for its disclosure of a Roman filibuster in operation. The record is confused, but it seems to have been essentially this:

Cæsar proposed a bill for the purchase of land to be distributed among Pompey’s veterans and the urban poor. The conservatives in the Senate did not especially object to the provisions of the measure. They did object, however, to any bill that might increase the popularity of Cæsar, whom they distrusted. Unwilling to reject the bill outright, they resorted to a filibuster. In the United States Senate a group of senators occasionally bands together to talk a bill to death. The Roman senators attempted to do the same thing to the land bill. They discussed the bill at such length that Caasar found it impossible to bring it to a vote. However, in Rome the Senate’s consent was not necessary to a law, and Cæsar finally took his bill direct to the Assembly, disregarding the Senate. In the Assembly Bibulus met the bill with a flat veto and constitutionally this should have ended the matter. Cæsar, however, had few constitutional scruples and he met obstruction with violence. Bibulus was driven from the Forum by the mob, which probably included many of Pompey’s veterans. Then the bill was illegally passed. In theory the Senate had the right to declare it null and void, but prudence was so plainly the better part of valour that no action was taken.

After this experience the obstructionists took advantage of an old religious custom. If one of the magistrates announced that he had observed an unfavourable omen, the Assembly was automatically adjourned. The omens had long since come to be used for political purposes. Bibulus had failed to stop Cæsar’s land bill, but he had made its passage illegal. He was resolved to do the same for all other measures of Cæsar or his friends, but he did not care to face the mob again. So he shut himself up in his house and announced unfavourable omens on every day on which the Assembly could meet. At the moment the Senate was too frightened to do anything, but Bibulus doubtless hoped that its courage would revive in the future.

Having won the first round, Cæsar went rapidly ahead with his program, and a second land law was soon brought before the Assembly. There was still a considerable tract of public land in Campania which had survived the Gracchan legislation. Cæsar proposed to distribute this among the ex-service men and the fathers of families with at least three children. This was passed with no organized opposition. In the interim Cæsar had been voted a provincial governorship that carried with it authority to recruit three legions. He got busy at once. Frank Burr Marsh suggests that the fact that Cæsar’s troops were camped outside the city may have had something to do with the fading of opposition to the second bill.

Then, animated by what one of his contemporaries called his “inbred decency,” Cæsar drove through a law intended to end abuses in provincial administration. At the same time he won the support of a big tax corporation which had overbid the possibilities of tax-collections and was asking for relief. He induced the Assembly to remit one third of the sum the syndicate had contracted to pay and advised it to be more careful in its bidding in the future.

During his consulship he had obtained the provincial command just referred to. It included northern Italy and the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Southern Gaul was afterward added. The command was for five years. Later this period was extended. Now his career was opening. It is needless to assume that Cæsar at this time had planned his future. He was a magnificent opportunist who would have sympathized with Theodore Roosevelt in saying: “I know what I want to do now, and I know what I want to do next, but after that I don’t know.” Cæsar appreciated the fact that the Roman Republic was only a shell; that it was at the mercy of any general at the head of an army that was loyal to him; that the Gallic command gave him the chance to create such an army. As a young magistrate on official duties in the West he had come in contact with the Gauls and may have learned of the divisions among them which made their conquest possible. Whether he appreciated the importance to the Empire of the province he was to conquer can be only surmised. His famous Memoirs, through which the American student is introduced to Latin literature, are so objectively written that they give no clue to what was in his mind. In any event, in a long series of brilliant campaigns he laid the foundations of modern France and proved himself among the great captains of history.

Up to the last decades of the Republic the Roman world had been primarily a Mediterranean empire and civilization. Spain, indeed, had been taken over after the defeat of Carthage. But until the time of Cæsar, it has been said, Europe had not come into existence. The peoples of what are now France and southern Germany had been ignored by Roman statesmen except on those rare occasions when they had become a military menace and it was necessary to drive them back. But Julius Cæsar, as a recent writer, Christopher Dawson, puts it, by his personal initiative and military genius “dragged western Europe out of its barbaric isolation and united it with the civilized society of the Mediterranean world.” His legacy has lasted to the present age.

During his long absence from Rome on these campaigns his enemies were busy. The aristocrats, now in alliance with the wealthy business men, regarded him as a dangerous radical. They feared a new Grac-chan reform program if the successful commander were allowed to come back in an official capacity. He might propose a redistribution of wealth, the wiping out of mortgages, the cancellation of debts. As the time drew near when he proposed to return and run again for consul, the Senate ordered him to disband his troops and declared martial law. Cæsar knew better than to trust himself undefended in a capital controlled by his enemies. He responded to the senatorial edict by crossing the Rubicon, the little stream a few miles south of Ravenna that separated the province under his command from Italy proper. He had with him a brigade of five thousand men. Four days later the news reached Rome, to the dismay of the dominant plutocracy. Pompey, the general upon whom the Senate had depended, had broken with Cæsar. His boast was that he had only to stamp his foot and all Italy would flock to his standard. To the dismay of the senators, the foot-stamping failed to work. Instead word came that the Italian towns were going over to his rival. Pompey fled to Greece with such troops as he could gather and a large number of raw recruits. In Greece he was later defeated by Cæsar. Escaping to Egypt, he was treacherously killed as he was landing from the boat.

In the financial panic that followed the news of the Rubicon there was a collapse in real-estate values and a flight of capital. The Appian Way was blocked by wealthy refugees, taking all their movable property with them. They had misjudged their man. Cæsar wanted prosperity for Rome and for the Empire. In the few months that he had for work in the capital in the intervals allowed him by civil and foreign wars, he showed himself a statesman wijth an Imperial outlook, of the Gracchan breed. He began a drastic reform of provincial administration and the extension of Roman citizenship to the provinces. At home he met the crisis, not by confiscation, but by liberal bankruptcy laws. Debtors were allowed to turn in their property to their creditors at its pre-war value, with deduction for interest already paid. This amounted to scaling down debts by about twenty-five per cent.

To prevent hoarding, stop the export of capital to the provinces, and at the same time bolster the real-estate market, Cæsar limited holdings of cash to three thousand dollars and decreed that investors put at least two thirds of their funds into Italian real estate. I already have referred to his reducing the relief rolls from 320,000 to 150,000, and settling 80,000 veterans and urban poor in towns in the provinces. To help provide work on the farms he enacted a law under which one third of all ranch hands must be freemen. Further to relieve unemployment and at the same time to stimulate trade, he planned to improve the harbour of Ostia and to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. There also was a proposal to drain the Pontine marshes and Lake Fucinus in order to add to the farm land of Italy.

“His aims,” says an English historian, Rice Holmes, “were to reconcile partisans and induce them to cooperate with him for the common weal, to improve the machinery of government, to ameliorate social conditions, to minimize crime, to purify the administration of justice, to invigorate the moral tone of the rich, to stimulate manufacture and trade, to execute public works, to promote self-education, to introduce municipal reform, to remove the evils of provincial taxation, and to make the provincials feel they shared in the greatness of Rome.”

Cæsar had grown with responsibility. The daring young political demagogue had developed into a statesman with a world conception for the Empire. He was familiar with the mismanagement of Italy and the provinces by the influence of pressure groups upon the government of the Republic. From his actions we may infer his reorganization plans. There was to be a strong central government combined with a large measure of local autonomy built on self-governing cities. He believed he was the only disinterested man in Rome with the vision and ability to provide such a central government. This had to take the shape of a military autocracy supervising an expert civil service. Without such a powerful central authority there would be nothing to prevent a continuance of civil wars.

In this great program he never was able to obtain the co-operation of the influential old families who still cherished the dream of an aristocratic republic such as had built the Empire. The senators were proud of their dignity and position. They might have submitted sullenly to becoming rubber stamps of a dictator. But when they saw him flooding the Senate with new men they rebelled.

Cæsar was the first great Roman internationalist. His plans indicated a purpose to extend Roman citizenship throughout the provinces. Apparently it was his desire to make the Senate representative of the Empire. He began adding to it, not only rising new men from Italy, outside of the old families. He even brought “semi-barbarous Gauls,” as the senators called them, into the exclusive circle. He was increasing the number of magistrates who eventually would become members of the Senate and thus be elevated to the nobility. The House of Lords was being swamped with new peers. It was intolerable!

In contrast to Sulla, Cæsar had shown mercy to his enemies. The Senate was crowded with them. “You never forget anything,” said Cicero to Cæsar, “except injuries.” These personal opponents were reinforced by honest conservatives who believed under the ethical standards of the day that they were justified in killing a tyrant. That Cæsar had become an autocrat no one could doubt. That he had exercised his power tyranically was untrue. As a preliminary to carrying out his larger plans of Imperial organization he had made himself supreme in Rome. His command of the legions was the basis of his authority. Using the familiar forms, he had had himself repeatedly elected consul. He was given the tribunician power. This carried certain privileges, including personal inviolability. Finally he was made dictator. The dictatorship was an ancient Roman office, but it was conferred only for an emergency not exceeding six months. Cæsar was made dictator for life. With these powers he had become the uncrowned absolute monarch of Rome and the Empire. He was in charge of finances, public works, and civil and criminal jursdiction. He supervised municipal administration. He was commander of all land and sea forces.

His accumulation of personal authority made it easy to organize a coalition of opponents to get rid of him. More than sixty conspirators joined the plot. Assassination cut short the career of the greatest genius Rome so far had produced.

His genius had not saved him from blunders. In his last years Cæsar did not show his customary keen and balanced judgment in dealing with complex problems. His fine gift of lucid thought that no emergency could confuse was blurred by his long series of triumphs. It is often the fate of great men to fall victims to their own success. Events so long have marched at their command that they expect the march to continue. They forget that events marched only because the road had been cleared by rigorous planning, by taking account of human moods and motives, by careful timing. At the end Cæsar misjudged the temper and the power of the Roman oligarchy. In enlarging the Senate he made it a mob of unworkable size. He flouted the ancient sentiment against monarchy. Impatiently he drove for the ends which he believed essential, without realizing the necessity of carrying public opinion with him. Léon Homo, French historian, has grounds for the remark that “with his own hands Cæsar made the conspiracy that killed him.”

I have said that the failure of the Republic was due to the creation of the new army that no longer was subject to the civil authorities. It is difficult to believe that this situation would have developed without the deterioration in character of leaders and people that resulted from the get-rich-quick era. At the top of the social scale were the snobbish and incompetent aristocrats, at the bottom were the slaves, former slaves, and people permanently on relief. Republican Rome was overwhelmed by the glittering prosperity that had abruptly swept over it.