The New Deal in Old Rome

CHAPTER XI

PRELUDE TO CRISIS

THE GREAT age of Rome lasted well into the third century. In spite of defects, a great age it had been. How the Empire seemed to a contemporary is told by the Christian writer Tertullian about A.D. 200:

“Surely a glance at the world shows that it is daily being more cultivated and better peopled than before. All places are now accessible, well known, open to commerce. Delightful farms have now blotted out every trace of the dreadful wastes; cultivated fields have supplanted woods; flocks and herds have driven out wild beasts; sandy spots are sown; rocks and stones have been cleared away; bogs have been drained. Large towns now occupy lands hardly tenanted before by cottages. Islands are no longer dreaded [as the abode of pirates]; houses, people, civil rule, civilization are everywhere.”

Yet the Roman world that seemed so fair carried within it the seeds of decay. The benign rule of the “five good emperors “degenerated into military despotisms. Then came fifty years of chaos in which one gangster ruler followed another in rapid succession. “In this tempest of anarchy during the third century,” Professor Breasted writes, “the civilization of the ancient world suffered final collapse.” From the anarchy at the end of the century emerged the totalitarian state of Diocletian, Constantine, and their successors. This was successful only in protecting remnants of culture for another hundred years. Then the Western world, already barbarized except in spots, was submerged under repeated waves of ignorance in the barbarian invasions.

Before following the course of government intervention in business in this period, culminating in the Price-and-Wage Act of Diocletian, at the beginning of the fourth century, we must return to the golden years of the Empire. In these years forces were at work that prepared the way for the debacle, just as in the lush 1920’s in the United States we now recognize factors that led into the great depression.

The autocracy itself, inescapable as it may have been, gradually had a stifling effect upon the human spirit. The Republican tradition was so strong that for many years liberty was only intermittently suppressed. In the latter part of the Republican era Catullus wrote a scurrilous attack upon Cæsar. The great man did not send his critic to a concentration camp. He invited him to call and talk it over. But a century and a half later an emperor had two authors of biographies put to death for cynical references to the government, which were interpreted as treasonable.

Under pressure the outlook and attitude of the people gradually changed. The servility of the Senate under Tiberius, as described by Tacitus, is in painful contrast to the dignity and character of that body when it was building the Empire. “O men, ready for slavery! “the disgusted Emperor once exclaimed.

After the first century there were only a few great writers. Livy thought that society had been demoralized by wealth, and the elder Pliny agreed that the lack of intellectual interests was due to the worship of money. But Tacitus wrote that “genius died by the same blow that ended public liberty.” A similar view is presented by an anonymous author of the period. In his treatise, On the Sublime, this writer suggests that wealth, leading to indolence and a taste for luxurious living, accounts partly for the decline in Roman literature. But he puts this further explanation in the mouth of a philosopher: “In these days we seem to be schooled from childhood in utter servility; swaddled, I might say, from the tender infancy of our minds in servile ways and practice. We never drink from the fairest and most fertile source of literature, which is freedom, and therefore we show a genius for nothing but flattery.” This comment might have been written about conditions in the great modern dictatorships.

Perhaps the explanation given by contemporaries was too simple. The failure in literature may have reflected not merely loss of liberty but a mood of weariness from other causes. Under the enlightened rulers of the second century the pressure was relaxed. Tacitus tells us of the relief he felt in being able to write freely. But with the extreme paternalism of the government, the people had lost their old energy. The pleasant era that so appealed to Gibbon was not a heroic age in Rome.

As the autocracy became pervasive, it undertook, in the interest of efficiency, local as well as Imperial government. The natural leaders of the cities lost initiative and public spirit. “The chief object of economic activity,” writes Professor Rostovtzeff, “was to secure for the individual or his family a placid and inactive life on a safe, if moderate, income.”

Rome always had been overpractical. It never had shown the curiosity of the Greek world. “The incuriousness of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers,” says H. G. Wells, “was more massive even than their architecture.” There were no technical improvements in industry after the early part of the second century. A French historian, Eugène Albertini, remarks that Roman tools were poor. In quarries, mines, and construction work the toil of men was required to make up for the inadequacy of tools and the lack of explosives. In trucking and hauling the failure to devise a practical harness and to use horseshoes made draught animals ineffective. The Roman collar pressed on the horse’s windpipe and partly disabled him. Slaves had to supply the muscular effort that could not be obtained from horses. One of the reasons why the Romans did not develop heavy cavalry lay in their failure to invent such a simple device as the stirrup. This essential feature of horse equipment came eventually to western Europe from the horsemen of the south Russian plains.

In spite of the widespread prosperity of the upper classes that attended the Augustan peace, disquieting symptoms gradually appeared. Within a half-century after Augustus’s death economic progress slowed down and finally stopped. In the latter part of the period every serious border war brought the Empire to the verge of ruin, and there were no accumulated reserves to meet the crisis of the next century. Temporary lifts had been given by the spoils of conquests. But Victor Chapot remarks with some reason that “the state became permanently insolvent on the day when all conquest ceased and all plunder with it; the last great spoil was taken by Trajan in Dacia “early in the second century.

It is worth while to examine the factors that blocked progress in both industry and agriculture. Rome was an agricultural state that for a time seemed likely to develop large-scale industries. The process never got far. Industrialization in Italy encountered several major obstacles. Public sentiment was opposed to the corporate form of doing business. The law permitted joint-stock companies to handle government contracts. It forbade the organizing of private corporations. Personal responsibility and personal liability were favoured by the Romans. One result was that banking was maintained on a relatively small scale. There were rich individuals in the banking business, but the big banking corporations that were needed to finance large-scale business activity were not allowed to develop. The same handicap was imposed on Roman industry and trade. The trust-busting spirit had unforeseen consequences.

Furthermore, industry had to make its way in a society dominated by a landed aristocracy. Under the Republic the “best people “thought it beneath them to engage in industry, although frequently they became silent partners of freedmen or business men in industrial or commercial enterprises. There was a strong hangover of this feeling, although under Augustus a change had come. Professions once frowned upon were now open to gentlemen. Indeed, in the next century Rome found in Marcus Aurelius an emperor who had inherited extensive brickworks from his mother in a business that had been established by his great-great-grandfather, Domitius Afer. It must be admitted, however, that brick-making had always been fairly respectable. After Marcus reached the throne the bricks from his Domitian works were stamped “Aug N.” — “Our Augustus.” If contractors of the second century after Christ were anything like those of the twentieth, they probably figured they would get along better with the city inspectors if they used the “Aug N.” bricks.

Slavery was a brake on progress. Of industrial workmen it is estimated that eighty to eighty-five per cent were slaves or ex-slaves. The abundance of slaves checked the demand for free labour and for labour-saving devices. In modern industry the ingenious mechanic is responsible for many improvements in the machine which he operates. This incentive is lacking in the slave workman.

Professor Frank suggests an illustration. Italian ironworks failed to get into mass production at a time when a great advance seemed within reach, for lack of a simple device. “The invention of a valve in the bellows used in iron furnaces to create a continuous blast, an improvement that any intelligent and interested free workman might have conceived, would have revolutionized the iron industry by making smelting and casting possible on a large scale.”

Progress requires competent industrial leadership as well as intelligent and industrious workmen. Here again Roman society proved deficient. For various reasons growing out of the Empire’s social evolution industry did not attract able men. “Roman history,” writes Professor Frank, “does not point to a single effective leader trained in business.”

Finally, industrial development faced a failing farm market just at a time when it had to meet strong competition from new industries in the provinces. As we shall see in a moment, the Italian farm market for manufactured goods began to shrink with the disappearance of the independent small farmers and the consolidation of small farms into large estates. At the same time the export trade was hard hit by provincial competition. Fortis lamps from northern Italy, of which I spoke in a previous chapter, were replaced in the Gallic, German, and British markets by Fortis lamps made in Gaul. Carthage factories took the African market. The red pottery of Arretium was imitated in southern Gaul and later in Germany. Sales of Italian glassware were restricted when Cologne took up its manufacture. The demand for luxury goods fell off because the wealthy found they could have these produced by slaves in their own households. “Commerce decayed because customers disappeared.”

The question of what happened to Italian farming has evoked endless discussion. In the later years of the Republic and the earlier years of the Empire many demobilized soldiers had been settled on small farms. The free Italian farmer was a competent man. He practised crop rotation and summer fallowing, and used alfalfa, clover, and beans, as well as manure, to enrich his soil. Americans living in the farm belt would be interested in the enthusiasm for alfalfa of Columella, who wrote a treatise on farming in the middle of the first century. But that the farm industry in important areas — not everywhere — was in serious trouble in the second century there is no doubt. There is constant complaint from contemporary writers that the soil is not producing as much as in the old days.

The theory of a long period of deficient rainfall has been advanced. It is not supported by evidence. A clue to one phase of the trouble is found in the comment of the elder Pliny that big estates ruined Italy. Rich men from the provinces moved to Rome in large numbers under the Empire, as rich Frenchmen always have moved to Paris. Their favourite investment was in large estates, operated at first by slaves, later by tenant farmers. The most extensive use of slave labour, it is true, was in the latter part of the Republican era, in the age of Cicero. Under the Augustan peace the supply of war captives sold into slavery was sharply curtailed and by the middle of the first century it was being recognized that slave labour was uneconomic. What happened to the big slave-operated estates may be inferred from what happened on the pre-war cotton plantations of our Southern states. Frederick Law Olmsted made several journeys on horseback through the slave states between 1850 and 1857. In his book The Cotton Kingdom he stresses the inefficiency of slave labour. He speaks of the listlessness of the slaves, of “their dogged action, the stupid plodding machine-like manner in which they worked.” In his Seaboard Slave States Olmsted says he was told it would be impossible to furnish the slaves with good tools; “they would not last out a day in a Virginia cornfield.” Mules, he says, were used instead of horses because horses “cannot bear the treatment they must always get from negroes.” Under such conditions the fertility of the big Southern plantations was exhausted.

The slaves on Italian farms, often working in chains, were undoubtedly as inefficient as those seen by Olmsted. No wonder the estates produced badly and the soil deteriorated. As for the free tenant farmers who were replacing the slave gangs in the latter part of the first century, they were under the familiar compulsion to “mine the soil” in order to make quick returns. The same situation exists in America today. The report of the National Emergency Council on Economic Conditions of the South speaks of the ruin of millions of acres of once fertile land by tenant farmers. Many of them, it says, “have little interest in preserving soil they do not own.” It is true the small Roman farmer did not disappear and the broad farm belt of northern Italy, especially the valley of the Po, remained fertile. The modern traveller who crosses from Rome to Venice in the spring is impressed by the luxuriant growth of crops. There is no evidence of soil deterioration here after twenty-five hundred years of cultivation.

But Italian farming generally was hit by the agricultural development of the provinces, just as industry had been hit by their industrial development. Farm products were among the important exports of Italy, and the export market suffered from provincial competition. So the government was forced to adopt the extraordinary measures to help agriculture that already have been mentioned. By A.D. 200 there were many abandoned farms in key regions of the Empire that had escaped the notice of Tertullian.

Early in the second century, when agriculture and industry were both in difficulty, the government began what a writer in the Cambridge Ancient History calls “an orgy of spending.” The civil service was expanded and made more expensive by being reorganized on a salary basis. Large sums were put into public buildings. Some of these were erected by wealthy citizens and local municipalities, others by the Imperial government. The Emperor Hadrian’s biographer says there was hardly a city in the Empire that was not beautified by this generous ruler. A few years ago I happened to be in Athens when the new water system designed by American engineers was about to be put in operation. It replaced the system begun by Hadrian eighteen hundred years ago and finished by his successor.

The name of Hadrian is familiar to visitors to Rome because it is identified with the impressive architecture of the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the bridge leading to it, and that elaborate town known as Hadrian’s Villa, whose ruins still stand at Tivoli, a few miles outside the city. These remains are evidence of the work of a great builder. Because Hadrian really began the spending orgy, it is interesting to observe what sort of man he was. Born in Spain of an old Italian family which had migrated to that province, he was consumed with interests even more diversified than those of Julius Cæsar. He was a competent soldier and a great administrator. He thought himself an architect, art critic, painter, musician, and man of letters. A broken collar-bone testified to his devotion to hunting, as did a scar on the face that induced him to grow a beard, so that thereafter beards were the mode in Roman society. He was an inveterate traveller, largely because he desired personal knowledge of the Empire for reasons of public policy; partly because of inborn curiosity. “He wished to see with his own eyes,” his biographer wrote, “everything he had read about.” He could build the great military wall in Britain and in tourist fashion climb Mount Etna to see a sunrise.

The outlying lands needed his attention. The wars of his ambitious predecessor, Trajan, under whom Roman rule reached its farthest limits, had overextended the Empire. Hadrian hauled down the flag in regions that were too difficult to hold, and provided adequate frontier defences, with especial attention to the discipline and efficiency of his troops. Wisely he depended chiefly on the spirit of the army rather than on any Maginot line. His address to the First Pannonian squadron after an inspection shows his attention to details. “Your javelin-throwing,” he said, “was accurate and good. Your spear-throwing, too, was in many cases excellent, and the jumping was neat and lively. I should certainly have pointed out to you anything in which you fell short if I had noticed it — for example, if you had shown a tendency to overshoot your targets.”

He seems to have realized that something was the matter with industry and commerce. As no new lands were being added to the Empire to bring more customers within the free-trade area, he attempted to stimulate the home market by founding new cities and encouraging public improvements in the old. It was in these domestic policies that his passion for beauty and order carried him into expenditures that weakened the economic structure of Rome.

Public education profited from his munificence, and his love of art made his elaborate Tivoli villa a sort of world museum where he reproduced famous buildings that had pleased him on his travels, and accumulated pieces of sculpture. In cultural matters he had the amateurishness of the last German Kaiser, and like Wilhelm he did not recognize his limitations. When he sent his design for a temple to an architect, the professional was candid in his criticisms. The statues, he wrote, were out of proportion. “If the goddesses wish to rise and leave the temple they will not be able.” And he caustically added: “You don’t understand these matters.” A scholar with whom the Emperor disputed the meaning of a word did not have the architect’s nerve to stand up to him. The learned man’s friends remonstrated. “The lord of thirty legions,” he replied, “must be allowed to know his stuff.” While a Greek historian wrote that “Hadrian was a pleasant man to meet and he possessed a certain charm,” we can understand the comment of a contemporary: “I felt great reverence for him but I was not bold enough to entertain affection for him.”

In his last illness, which was long and distressing, the Imperial artist wrote some half-mocking, half-wistful lines of verse that have been preserved through the centuries. Their human appeal is shown by the many translations that have been made into several languages; so many that it was possible to publish a book of them in England more than seventeen hundred years after the author’s death under the title: The Dying Hadrians Address to His Soul. His stanza is so timeless it might have come from the twentieth century as readily as from the second. An unrhymed translation might run:

Dear soul of mine, so gay, so restless,

Long my body’s guest and comrade,

To what far land art thou departing,

Pale land, barren, sunless?

All left behind, thy jests and laughter!

In the sweep of his great practical and cultural interests he might well be called Hadrian the Magnificent. But such magnificence as his the ancient world could not afford. In his lavish spending at home and abroad he set an example that was widely followed. It has been suggested that throughout the Empire the cities themselves began to spend a disproportionate part of their revenues on such amenities as games, theatres, baths, and banquets. Idlers were attracted by the dole, which many cities copied from Rome. The idle poor together with the idle rich were maintained by the hard-working masses. For the rich were not producers. They notoriously lived on sweated incomes from farms and shops. “The creation of new cities,” Professor Rostovtzeff says, “meant the creation of new hives of drones.” The cities with their large unproductive spending became a heavy drain on the farming country upon which they had to depend for support.

As the spoils of conquest were exhausted, there were no reserves to draw upon. “Overspending,” writes Professor Adcock, “so weakened the financial and economic resources of the Empire that the crises that were to come in the third century were in part the price that the world had to pay for the gilding of the Golden Age of the Antonines.”

Under Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-Emperor, whose heart has been described as stronger than his head, the state came close to bankruptcy. When it was called upon to defend the Danubian frontiers, the treasury was exhausted and the Emperor was forced to sell the crown treasures at public auction. To the appeal of his soldiers for more pay he replied: “Anything that you receive over and above your regular pay must be exacted from the blood of your parents and relatives.”

In this brief survey of conditions leading to the fatal third century, one further aspect of Roman life remains to be considered. A large element in the population failed to share in the prosperity of the Golden Age. Its bitterness was reflected in the disastrous political and economic events that followed. A wretched proletariat lived in the slums of Rome. For those who worked, wages were kept close to the subsistence level by slave competition. Strikes would have been futile. There were plenty of slaves who could have taken the strikers’ places. In all Roman history I have found only seven strikes recorded – two of them sit-down strikes. The actual words “sit down “are used in a papyrus record of Roman Egypt in the second century after Christ. Labour trouble had developed in an alabaster quarry. The foreman had assigned a gang to a difficult part of the quarry. He reports to a superior that they refused to be transferred. “Some of the men,” he writes, “came to me and said: ‘We are going out to our old place and sit down until you bring us word’ ” — presumably of the rescinding of the order. The threat was successful. The foreman recalled the men who had been assigned to the more favourable location, and the original gang went back to work.

In Italy the only recorded labour trouble was in the Roman mint in the latter part of the third century after Christ. The Emperor Aurelian had found evidence of graft in the issuing of sub-standard coins and had closed the mint. The workmen fortified themselves in the building in accordance with the familiar modern practice in sit-down strikes. The Emperor had to send troops to drive them out. In the fighting that followed, several thousand men were killed. But large numbers of the submerged class stolidly accepted their lot. For those who could not or would not find work the government made what provision it felt necessary. They got at least a living from the dole. There were free entertainments, including the brutal gladiatorial combats, and the extensive public baths furnished the facilities of modern athletic clubs for a nominal fee. This lazy living had its appeal. An ungrammatical scrawl of a street artist in Tim gad has been preserved: “’unting [that is, watching beast hunts], bathing, and gaming, these is the life!” Doubtless, says the English historian, M. Cary, these words “summed up the philosophy of many a townsman of the Roman Empire.”

But the hard and insanitary living-conditions and extensive undernourishment took their toll. Tombstone inscriptions show the abnormal number of workers who died young. There is evidence of savage hatred of the well-to-do. This appears in the biting attacks of the satirists, especially Juvenal, upon the smart set in Rome. “In Juvenal,” Sir Samuel Dill writes, “a great sunken class, whom we hardly know otherwise than from the inscriptions on their tombs, finds a powerful voice and a terrible avenger.” He denounces ill treatment of provincials, cruelty shown to slaves, lust for revenge, and immorality in a society that seemed to value only material success. Like other satirists he exaggerates, and he adores unwarranted generalizations. Juvenal was a fuzzy thinker. He hated the “new woman “of his day. He is just as severe with the women who attend public meetings, discuss the poets at dinner, are careful in their diction, and wear stylish high-heeled shoes, as he is with those who order their slaves flogged while they are in the beauty parlour, or even have them crucified. But, with all necessary allowances, the picture he draws of high society is terribly sordid. To be sure, the frivolous rich at whom his shafts are generally directed were only a fraction of the population. But riches were associated with slave-driving and tax-extortion. Embittered men living in crowded tenements were not likely to discriminate.

From another part of the Empire comes confirmatory evidence of class hatred. The authentic voice of the proletariat speaks in some of the early Christian writings. When these are read with the social background in mind, the bitterness of the poor toward the rich is appallingly evident. In the Gospel of St. Luke the rich man is sent to hell and the poor man to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man is condemned not because he is wicked but because he is rich. Abraham calls to him: “Remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and thou are tormented.” The author of the Epistle of St. James, writing to the Twelve Tribes of the Dispersion in the second century, strikes at the ruthless money-lenders and tax-collectors. He reminds the poor that “rich men oppress you and draw you before the judgment seats,” and comes out with this blast: “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. . . . Your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as though it were fire.”

By the end of the second century of peace the Empire had developed problems which it did not understand and for whose solution it had no technique.