The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
and vine-and olive-growers, would as a rule be foreigners, "non-citizens," having no political rights; and their calling was from the first held in low esteem by the richer natives, were it only because in comparison it was always apt to involve some overreaching of the agriculturist,[165] which as between man and man could be seen to be a bad thing by moralists who had no scruples about usury and enslavement for debt. And as the scope of the State increased from age to age, the patrician class found ready to its hand means of enrichment which yielded more return with much less trouble than was involved in commerce. The prejudice against trade was no bar to brigandage.
On the other hand, the first practical problem of all communities, taxation, was intelligently faced by the Roman aristocracy from the outset. The payment of the tributum or occasional special tax for military purposes was a condition of the citizen franchise, and so far the patricians were all burdened where the unenfranchised plebeians were not. But this contribution "was looked upon as a forced loan, and was repaid when the times improved."[166] And there were other compensations. The use of the public pastures (which seem at one time to have been the sole source of the State's revenue[167]), and the cultivation of public land, were operations which could be so conducted as to pay the individual without paying the State. It is clear that frauds in this connection were at all times common: the tithes and rents due on the ager publicus were evaded, and the land itself appropriated wherever possible by the more powerful, though still called public property.[168] "The poorer plebeian, therefore, always strove to have conquered lands divided, and not kept as ager publicus; while the landless men who got allotments at a distance were inclined to regard their migration as an almost equal grievance. If the rich men, they argued, had not monopolised the public pastures with their herds, and treated the lands which they leased at a nominal rental as their own, there would have been enough land at home to divide among those who had been ruined while serving their country in arms."[169]
But as the sphere of conquest widened, another economic phase supervened. Where newly conquered territory was too distant to tempt any save the poorest citizens, or to be directly utilised by the rich, it could still be made ager publicus and rented to its own inhabitants; and the collection of this and other exactions from subject provinces gradually grew to be a main source of Roman wealth. For the mere cattle-looting of the early days there was substituted the systematic extortion of tribute. "In antiquity conquest meant essentially the power to impose a tribute upon the conquered";[170] and "until the time of Augustus the Romans had maintained their armies by seizing and squandering the accumulated [bullion] capital hoarded by all the nations of the world."[171] Meanwhile the upper classes were directly or indirectly supported by the annual tribute which from the time of the conquest of Greece was drawn solely from the provinces. Paulus Emilius brought from the sack of Hellas so enormous a treasure in bullion, as well as in objects of art, that the exaction of the tributum from Roman citizens, however rich, was felt to have become irrational; and henceforth, until Augustus re-imposed taxation to pay his troops, Italy sponged undisguisedly on the rest of the Empire.[172] Cæsar's expeditions were simply quests for plunder and revenue; and the reason for his speedy retreat from Britain, for which there have been framed so many superfluous explanations, is plainly given in the letter of Cicero in which he tells of the news sent him from Britain by his brother—"no hope of plunder."[173] But the supreme need was a regular annual tribute, preferably in bullion, but welcome as corn. On the one hand the exacted revenue supported the military and the bureaucracy; on the other hand, the business of collecting taxes and tribute was farmed out in the hands of companies of publicani, mainly formed of the so-called knights, the equites of the early days; in whose hands rich senators, in defiance of legal prohibition, placed capital sums for investment,[174] as they had previously used foreigners, who were free to take usury where a Roman was not. Of such money-makers Gallia Provincia was already full in the days of Cicero.[175] Roman administration was thus a matter of financially exploiting the Empire in the interest of the Roman moneyed classes;[176] and the ruthless skill with which the possibilities of the situation were developed is perhaps even now not fully realised. The Roman financier could secure a tribute upon tribute by lending to a subject city or State the money demanded of it by the government, and charge as much interest on the loan as the borrowers could well pay. We know that the notoriously conscientious Brutus, of sacred memory, thus lent, or backed a friend who lent, money to tribute-payers at 48 per cent., or at least demanded 48 per cent. on his loans, and sought to use the power of the executive to extort the usury.[177]
All this, we are to remember, went on without any furtherance of total domestic wealth-production. When corn-growing fell off, irrecoverably depressed by the unearned import from the richer soils of tributary provinces, there was a transference, partly economic, partly luxurious, of agricultural labour to vine-and olive-culture, and a wholesale turning of arable land to pasture. Some export of wine and olives followed, though the rich Romans tended to drink the wines of Greece. But Italy had ceased to be self-supporting. The produce she imported was far in excess of her power of export;[178] so that in sheer factitiousness the revenue of Rome is without parallel in history. Modern England, which has grown rich by burning up its coal in manufacture or selling it outright, but in the process has acquired a share in the national and municipal debts of all other countries—England is stable in comparison. While it lasts, the coal educes manufactures, which also earn imports and constitute loans. So with the recent exploitation of German iron; though in that case there has been much of sheer national waste in the wholesale export of iron at "dumping" prices in times of trade depression. But the history of Rome was a progressive paralysis of Italian production; and the one way in which the administration can be said to have counteracted the process—as apart from the spontaneous resort to vine-and olive-culture and to slave manufactures—was by forcing more-or-less unprofitable mining for gold and silver wherever any could be got, thus giving what stimulus can be given to demand by the mere placing of fresh bullion on the market. Roman civilisation was thus irrevocably directed to an illusory end, with inevitably fatal results. Bullion had come to standfor public wealth, and wars were made for mines as well as for tribute, Spain in particular being prized for her mining resources. As a necessary sequence, therefore, copper money was ousted by silver (B.C. 269), and silver finally, after a long transition period, by gold, about the time of Severus.[179] The silver had been repeatedly debased when the treasury was in difficulties;[180] and in the later days of the Empire it seems to have been base beyond all historic parallel,[181] though a large revenue was extorted till the end. Between revenue and tax-farming profits and the yield of the mines, the Roman moneyed class must indeed have spent a good deal, so long as the tributaries were not exhausted. But their economic demand was mainly for—(a) foods, spices, wines, cloths, gems, marbles, and wares produced by the more prosperous provinces; (b) expensive forms of food, fish, and fowl, raised chiefly on the estates run by their own class; (c) some wares of home production; and (d) services[182] from artists, architects, master craftsmen, slaves, mimes, parasites, and meretrices, whose economic demand in turn would as far as possible go in the same