The New Deal in Old Rome

CHAPTER XII

THE TOTALITARIAN STATE

THE DEADENING autocracy, the stagnation of industry and agriculture, and the class bitterness described in the preceding pages constitute the background for the social and economic events in the third century which culminated in the totalitarian state. These events centred in fifty years of military anarchy which wrought the unconscious revenge of the poor. But their revenge tore down their own lives as well as the lives of those they hated, and involved the civilization of the ancient world in ruin.

“The Roman army,” a commentator says, “both made and unmade the Roman Empire.” It was not the same army. Under the wise reorganization of Augustus the army was made a school for citizenship. Enlistment in the legions opened the way to a civil career. The recruits represented a cross-section of the middle class from the most Romanized parts of the Empire. They were saturated with the Roman tradition. While on frontier duty they often were employed on public works. At the end of their service they received land or a bonus equivalent to thirteen years’ pay and became respected business men or farmers in the communities where they settled. For generations the army was a civilizing agency.

But the time came when Italy and Gaul no longer could furnish recruits. The population had decreased or the men had become too soft. It became necessary to draw soldiers and officers from the less civilized regions. They took seriously their obligation to defend the frontiers. Repeatedly rude but energetic non-Italian emperors swept barbarian intruders out of the Mediterranean world. But the ignorant provincial soldiers had no feeling for Roman institutions. In the third century they finally realized they were the strongest force in the state. The successive military dictatorships that followed were not consciously dictatorships of the proletariat. But they were dictatorships of proletarian generals of proletarian armies. A great empire was ruled by a series of rough top-sergeants. “Make the soldiers rich,” was the admonition of the dying Emperor Septimius Severus to his sons, “and do not trouble about the rest.” The obvious sources of enrichment were ruinous taxes and plunder.

By modern standards, ordinary taxes had been low throughout the second century. There is indirect evidence of the comparative poverty of the ancient world in the reluctance of the emperors to sanction increases. But in the third century, to meet the military expenses, the demands of the soldiers, and the extravagances of the emperors, there were frequent confiscations of property and periodic exactions from the rich. In addition heavy burdens were imposed on provincial towns in the shape of compulsory services. The inhabitants were forced to provide food, lodging, and transport for the troops. Discipline was relaxed and the soldiers were allowed to loot the districts through which they passed. While farms as well as cities were plundered, the chief sufferers, of course, were the well-to-do. Business was interrupted, the rich and the middle class were impoverished, and the poverty of the poor was increased. A few wealthy owners of large estates were strong enough or influential enough to escape the heavy tax-exactions. Their immunity increased the burden on the rest. Graphic evidence of the shrinking of the cities throughout the Empire has been uncovered by the spade of the modern excavator.

A sidelight on the tax question is furnished by a Roman historian of the fourth century, Ammianus. Gaul, as usual, was being invaded by the Germans. The Emperor sent a relative, a brilliant young fellow named Julian, afterwards known as Julian the Apostate, to take charge of the province. It was a tough assignment, but Julian made good. There was universal complaint about taxes. His assistant assured him in the customary way that existing taxes were not enough to meet expenses, and that more sources of taxation must be found. But Julian had studied the question and had the figures before him. He insisted that with proper governmental economies the taxes already levied would produce a surplus. The assistant, a real bureaucrat, was not so easily repulsed. Shortly afterwards he appeared with an edict drawn up for the Governor to sign, imposing the new taxes on which he had set his heart. Julian scandalized the entire civil service by throwing the edict unread into the wastebasket. At once reports went back to the Emperor that this brash young Governor was an “insufferable nanny-goat,” “an ape in purple.” But later when the jealous Emperor tried to weaken Julian by withdrawing some of his troops for service in the East, the young commander-Governor proved so popular that over his protests his soldiers proclaimed him Emperor and eventually he reached the throne.

Julian was exceptional in his devotion to economy. The expenses of running the Empire continued to increase. As taxes failed to produce the needed revenue, the government resorted to devaluation of the currency. The denarius under Augustus was worth twenty cents, about the value of the old French franc. In two hundred years it had fallen to five cents. The fifty years of military anarchy brought it to half a cent. Prices shot up as they did in twentieth-century inflations in Europe.

Records are meagre, but we know that in the Roman province of Egypt wheat went to fifteen thousand times its pre-inflation price. In the simpler economic structure of the time inflation was not so disastrous as in the complex modern world. But flighty prices combined with the general disorder and heavy tax-exactions to undermine the middle class, which was the backbone of the Empire.

A pall settled over the population. People felt they were being swept downward by forces beyond their power to control. In the face of overwhelming evils they were helpless. Despairing of the present life, they turned to the other-world cults of the Orient. “The worship of Isis,” writes Dean Inge, “was organized in a manner very like that of the Catholic church. There was a kind of Pope, with priests, monks, singers, and acolytes. . . . The priests were tonsured and wore white linen vestments.” And Mr. Fisher adds: “Before Rome became Christian it had become clerical, a city of temples and images, of priests and religious processions, of cynic philosophers in cowls and coarse woollen gowns like the begging friars of the Middle Ages, of astrologers and magicians, such as always thrive amid public misfortunes.” In this preoccupation over a future life public affairs were ignored. “The greatest political events,” in the words of Professor Lot, “passed over the heads of the people like black or golden clouds. Later they were to watch even the ruin of the Empire and the coming of the barbarians with indifference.”

Late in the third century after Christ the anarchy was ended by an energetic and able soldier and administrator. Diocletian, with army backing, became dictator, reorganized the administration, and stabilized the currency on what he believed was a sound basis. Unfortunately, like some modern rulers facing a similar problem, he overvalued his new monetary unit. Prices promptly responded with another violent rise. Diocletian recognized the suffering that resulted, but naturally did not understand the cause. The trouble, he thought, lay in greedy profiteering. In 301 he issued his famous edict setting maximum prices and wages. After denouncing the profiteers in the preamble, he announced maximum prices for between seven and eight hundred articles and types of work and service.

In its technical descriptions the edict reads like a modern tariff act. There is millet ground and millet unground; olive oil first quality and olive oil second quality; goose artificially fed and goose not artificially fed; cabbages best and cabbages small; washed Tarentine wool and washed Laodicean wool. Maximum salaries are included for barbers, wagon-makers, elementary teachers, teachers of Latin and Greek, and many others.

The act had teeth. The penalty for evasion was death. The Emperor had so expanded the civil service that a contemporary wrote, with disgusted exaggeration, that half of the men of the Empire were on the government pay-roll. There were plenty of inspectors. But this early attempt at price-fixing failed. It is recorded that business men closed their shops, that many articles of commerce disappeared, and that food riots resulted. A dozen years later we read the obituary of the act: “For merest trifles blood was shed and, out of fear, nothing was offered for sale and the scarcity grew much worse until, after the death of many persons, the law was repealed from mere necessity.”

The attempt of Diocletian and his successors to save an empire that was crumbling resulted in complete regimentation under a totalitarian state. In the reign of Marcus Aurelius many villages and towns had been virtually wiped out by a great plague, probably a malignant type of smallpox, that had swept the Empire from Persia to the Rhine. On a diminished population with greatly impaired resources taxes were increased to support the enlarged army and the vast bureaucracy. Heavy contributions of grain were exacted from farmers to feed the soldiers and the population of the large cities. There were land taxes, property taxes, occupation taxes, poll taxes. It has been said of this period that “the penalty of wealth seemed to be ruin.” The heart was taken out of the enterprising men. Finally the burden became so intolerable that to escape the Imperial levies tenants fled from the farms and business men and workmen from their occupations. The government intervened and bound the tenants to the soil — the beginning of serfdom — and the business men and workmen to their occupations and trades. Private enterprise was crushed and the state was forced to take over many kinds of business to keep the machine running.

As oppression by the central authority increased, many Romans in the frontier provinces escaped from its heavy hand to find refuge among the Germans and even the Huns. It is recorded that a refugee with the Huns told a Roman ambassador that “he considered his new life with the Huns better than his old life among the Romans.” To the poor, it was said, the enemy was kinder than the tax-collector.

To repeople the lands devastated by the plague in the latter part of the second century, Marcus Aurelius had “settled an infinite number of barbarians on Roman soil.” By the fifth century the country was still further depopulated by the governmental oppression. At this time, under the whip of hunger, began what German historians have called “the wandering of the nations “in western Asia and northern Europe. This put pressure upon the barbarian neighbours of the Empire and they moved in on the lands from which the stricken inhabitants had fled. “As the Roman Empire gradually crumbled like a dilapidated house,” J. W. Thompson writes, “the Germans filled the ruined provinces, which were as rooms in the vast edifice, and dwelt in them side by side with the native populace. The Romans grew more barbarized. The Germans became more civilized.” But culture was overwhelmed by ignorance.

For our purposes the rest of the story is soon told. Under Diocletian, Rome had ceased to be the seat of government. His headquarters were at Nicomedia, a few miles southeast of the present Istanbul. Only once after he became Emperor did he visit Rome, and that was the year before his retirement, when he constructed the great baths whose ruins still impress us. Early in the fourth century Constantine built a new city on the site of the ancient Byzantium and in 330 he transferred the capital to “the new Rome which is Constantinople,” as its official title ran. This was in a fine strategic position between the European and the Asiatic fronts. Latin remained the court language and the country was still regarded as one Roman Empire, but with increasing emphasis on “the eastern parts,” and “the western parts.” Just before the close of the century the Western Empire was formally divided from the Eastern. In 476 the last of the Roman line, Romulus Augustulus, “laid down his Imperial dignity and the court of Constantinople was informed there was no longer an emperor of the West.”

The city of Rome was never the capital of the Western Empire. An emperor went there to celebrate a triumph in 404 of our era. It was the third time in a century that Rome had entertained a sovereign. The Imperial court moved first to Milan and then to Ravenna, at that time a sea-coast town on the Adriatic, protected from attack by lagoons and marshes; now six miles inland. Ravenna was regarded as the capital of Italy until the middle of the eighth century.

In spite of the general intellectual stagnation, except in the new Christian theology, commerce still continued throughout the Mediterranean basin until it was interrupted by the conquests of Islam. By the beginning of the eighth century most of the western Mediterranean was dominated by Saracens. Italy and western Europe were now Christian and the great sea was controlled by their Moslem enemies. The Christians, a Mohammedan writer boasted, “can no longer float a plank on it.” The economic equilibrium that had survived the Germanic invasions was destroyed. With the disappearance of the merchants, the urban life which they maintained went down in collapse. Roman cities continued to exist, but only as ecclesiastical centres. There was general impoverishment. Western Europe sank back into a purely agricultural state. Movable wealth no longer existed. No central government could raise and pay for an army for its defence. Soldiers were recruited from the dependants of the great landlords. The feudal system of the Middle Ages, it has been said, represented the disintegration of public authority and its assumption by men who, because of their great estates, felt themselves independent. That system embodied the effects on the political structure of the return of society to a simple rural civilization.

As for Rome itself, at the end of the anarchy of the third century the great buildings still stood and splendid new ones were being added. Roman art began and ended with architecture. But when Constantine built a massive arch by the Colosseum to commemorate his victories, he could find no sculptors to decorate it. The pieces of fine sculpture that were used were taken from the arch of Trajan. Creative work in literature as well as the arts had ceased. The city’s old life had been engulfed in the ignorance of a polyglot population. The spoken language had become a patois. In the fifth century, a historian says, the people spoke Latin, but what Latin!

“Rome partly succeeded in Romanizing the Mediterranean world,” writes Professor Lot, “but only the upper classes had the Roman mentality.” In the old city still lived some of the new rich who had managed to take advantage of the disorders to make fortunes through speculation or political influence. The society in which they moved, as described by a contemporary writer Ammianus was extravagant and ostentatious, but wholly without culture. These people showed none of the energy and courage that in earlier days had more than offset the faults of the old aristocracy. A crowd of soft and stupid economic royalists and a listless proletariat were left to maintain the great tradition in the ancient capital, while powerful feudal landlords dominated the countryside. Early Roman history has been described as the history of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. At the end “there were not Romans left to do the work of Rome.”