The Evolution of States Part 9

There is no record that in the contracts between the treasury and the companies of _publicani_ any stipulation was ever made as to their employing free labour, or in any way considering the special needs of the populations among whom they acted.[187] Thus a mere cheapening of bread could do nothing to aid free labour as against capitalism using slaves. On the contrary, such aids would tend irresistibly to multiply the host of idlers and broken men who flocked to Rome from all its provinces, on the trail of the plunder. Industrial life in Rome was for most of them impossible, even were they that way inclined;[188] and the unceasing inward flow would have been a constant source of public danger had the mult.i.tude not been somehow pacified. The method of free or subsidised distribution of grain,[189] however, was so easy a way of keeping Rome quiet, in the period of rapidly spreading conquest and mounting tribute, that in spite of the resistance of the moneyed cla.s.ses[190] it was adhered to. Sulla naturally checked the practice, but still it was revived; and Caesar, after his triumph in Africa, found the incredible number of 320,000 citizens in receipt of regular doles of cheapened or gratis corn. He in turn, though he had been concerned in extending it,[191] took strong measures to check the corrosion, reducing the roll to 150,000;[192] but even that was in effect a confession that the problem was past solution by the policy, so energetically followed by him, of re-colonising in Italy, Corinth, Carthage, Spain, and Gaul.

And if Caesar sought to limit the gifts of bread, he seems to have outgone his predecessors in his provision of the other element in the popular ideal--the circus; his shows being bloodier as well as vaster than those of earlier days.[193] A public thus treated to sport must needs have cheap food as well.

Of this policy, the economic result was to carry still further the depression of Italian agriculture. The corn supplied at low rates or given away by the administration was of course bought or taken in the cheapest markets--those of Sardinia and Sicily, Egypt, Africa, and Gaul--and importation once begun would be carried to the utmost lengths of commercialism. Italian farms, especially those at a distance from the capital,[194] could not compete with the provinces save by still further subst.i.tuting large slave-tilled farms for small holdings, and grinding still harder the face of the slave. When finally Augustus,[195]

definitely establishing the system of lowered prices and doles, subsidised the trade in the produce of conquered Egypt to feed his populace, and thus still further promoted the importation of the cheapest foreign grain, the agriculture of a large part of Italy, and even of parts of some provinces, was practically destroyed.

It has been argued by M'Culloch (_Treatises and Essays: History of Commerce_, 2nd ed. p. 287, _note_) that it is impossible that the mere importation of the corn required to feed the populace--say a million quarters or more--could have ruined the agriculture of Italy. This expresses a misconception of what took place. The doles were not universal, and the emperors naturally preferred to limit themselves as far as possible to paying premiums for the importation and cheap sale of corn. (Cp. Suetonius, _Claudius_, c.

19, and the Digest, iii, 4, 1; xiv, i, 1, 20; xlvii, ix, 3, 8; l, v, 3, etc.) All of the conquered provinces, practically, had to pay a t.i.the of their produce; and where corn was specially cheap it would be likely to come to Rome in that form. (Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _econ. polit. des Romains_, ii, 424 _sq._) Many of the patrician families, besides, owned great estates in Africa, and they would receive their revenues in produce. Egyptian, Sardinian, Sicilian, and African corn could thus easily undersell Italian for ordinary consumption. For the rest, the produce of Egypt would be a means of special revenue to the emperor. Cp. M'Culloch's own statement, p. 291.

Prof. Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. ii, App. A) has independently (but in agreement with Weber and Salvioli) carried M'Culloch's thesis further, and has opposed the view that the "compet.i.tion" of Sicilian and African wheat "was the cause of the agricultural depression from which Italy began to suffer in 150 B.C." His own theory is the singular one that the "depression" was caused by "the increased cost of living" arising out of luxurious habits! This untenable and indeed unintelligible conclusion he ostensibly reaches by a series of arguments that are alternately incoherent and rotatory, of propositions some of which are reb.u.t.ted by himself, and of a.s.sumptions that are plainly astray. The dispute may be condensed thus:--

(1) "In antiquity," the Professor begins, "each district consumed its own wheat"; yet he goes on to mention that in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Attica was "obliged to import, even in good seasons, between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000 bushels." This contradiction he appears to think is saved by the addendum that "the amount in question is a very small one, compared with the figures of modern commerce." Naturally it is, Athens being a small State compared with those of to-day. But the contradiction stands unresolved. And it follows that larger towns, not placed in fruitful "districts," would have proportionally larger imports.

(2) "Moreover," writes the Professor, "while the industrial countries of to-day seek so far as possible to check the import of cereals by protective duties, Athens used every expedient of war and diplomacy to render the supply of imported corn both regular and abundant." It is startling to find a professor of history, a sociological historian, unaware that Britain, Belgium, and Holland have no import duties on corn. (The most exclusive State in that matter is Portugal, which, with no pretensions to be an industrial State, prohibits corn imports altogether.)

(3) More plausibly, Prof. Ferrero argues that the policy of Athens proves that "corn was not easily transported for sale beyond the local market." But the efforts of the Athenians "to obtain the mastery of the Black Sea, and especially of the Bosphorus, _in order to capture the corn trade for themselves_, or to entrust it, on their own conditions, to whom they pleased," proves that the difficulties of transport were mainly those set up by hostile States or pirates, and that--as the Professor admits--the fertile Crimea, with its spa.r.s.e population, yielded an easy surplus for export.

(4) All this, however, is only partially relevant to the question of the supplies of Rome from Sicily, Sardinia, Africa, and Spain in the second century B.C. Did such supplies come, or did they not? As the Professor admits, they were "vital" to the Roman military policy; and "she had immense granaries at her disposal whenever she required them." But such sources of supply meant a certain large normal production; and this would enter Italy in time of peace. If it was purposely maintained in view of the needs of war-time, so much the more surely would it undersell Italian wheat, raised on a less fruitful soil. In no other way could Sicily and Africa yield either annual tribute to Rome or rents to Roman owners of land in those countries. The first effect of the importation would be to add the pressure of lowered prices to the discouragement already offered to private cultivators by the inducements of loot in war, fleecings in administration of newly conquered countries, commerce, and usury. Of this discouragement the sequel would be the attempt to run by slave labour the large estates in which the old farms were merged. But slave labour is apt to be bad labour, and agriculture could not thereby be restored.

(5) The thesis that agriculture was _depressed_ by high cost of living (= high prices for agricultural products) it is not easy to treat with seriousness. The simple fact is that sea-carriage to Rome from Sicily, Spain, and Africa must have been cheaper than land carriage from most parts of Italy to the capital. As Prof.

Ferrero notes, food prices in the valley of the Po were very low--obviously because cost of carriage either to Rome or to the southern seaports deterred export.

(6) Prof. Ferrero's fallacy is capped by his proposition that "the economic crisis from which Italy has been suffering during the last twenty years is due to the increased cost of living occasioned by the introduction, from 1848 onwards, of the industrial civilisation of England and France into an old agricultural society." The confusion here defies a.n.a.lysis. Suffice it to say that the high cost of living in modern Italy is due to tariffs and high taxation.

Sugar is dear there not because Italians consume it luxuriously--they do not and cannot--but because a particularly unintelligent policy of Protection causes them to pay for beetroot sugar produced in a country ill-suited to the growth of beetroot.

Living costs more in Germany, France, and the United States than in Britain, not because those countries have only recently become "luxurious," but because they heavily tax imports. Costs of living in Rome certainly rose as Romans raised their standards of consumption; but their importation of corn from conquered provinces kept food prices lower than they would have been otherwise; and Italian agriculture was largely abandoned in favour of easier ways of making money.

Prof. Ferrero supplies a partial confutation of his economic theory by his own account (i, 311) of how, in the time of Pompey, "once more the precious metals were _cheap and abundant_" after a time of scarcity, and the decadent slave system of agriculture was superseded by new forms of production. (See above, p. 79, _note_.) But abundant bullion means high prices for produce, which the Professor has declared to be a cause of depression! As to the new production, the process certainly cannot have taken place with the rapidity which his description suggests. "The hideous slave-shelters or compounds [_ergastula_], with their gangs of forced labourers, vanished from the scene, together with the huge desolate tracts of pasture where they had spent their days [?], to be replaced by vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, now planted in all parts of the peninsula, ... estates on which the new slave immigrants contentedly cultivated the vine or the olive, or bred animals for the stable or transport, under the direction of a Greek or Oriental bailiff; ... pleasant cottages of landlords, who farmed their own holdings with the help of a few slaves." All this cannot have happened in the time of Pompey. But in any case, inasmuch as bullion was rife, prices in general must have been high, yet without "depression"; and the new demand for wine and olives, in the terms of the case, made their cultivation remunerative. But "huge pastures" cannot have been "replaced" by vineyards and olive-groves; and Italian agriculture did not in imperial times become again the thing it had been.

It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196]

the _latifundia_, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin the provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces, notably Sicily, undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged compet.i.tion of Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African provinces, undersold the produce of most of the other regions, and would have done so equally had their agriculture remained in the hands of small farmers. The _latifundia_ were themselves effects of the policy of conquest and annexation. The theory that "those large pastoral estates, and that slave-cultivation, which had so powerful and so deleterious an influence over Italian husbandry and population, may be princ.i.p.ally ascribed to the confiscations and the military colonies of Sulla and his successors," is clearly wide of the mark.

So M'Culloch, _Treatises and Essays: Colonial System of the Ancients_, p. 426. No doubt agriculture went rapidly from bad to worse in the convulsions of Sulla's rule, when whole territories pa.s.sed into the hands of his partisans. These would be bent on the use of slave labour, and would take to the forms of production which gave them the best money return. On the other hand, in an age of chronic confiscation of whole areas, steady men were not likely to be attracted to the land. See Prof. Pelham's _Outlines_, p. 213; Dureau de la Malle, _econ. polit. des Romains_, vol. ii, liv. iii, ch. 22.

Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time of Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage, where they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to have hurt agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the other hand, the Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to restore a free farming population. In Italy the disease was older than Sulla. When Tiberius Gracchus was pa.s.sing through Etruria on his way from Spain, fifty years before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free labourers, but only slaves in chains.[199] The true account of the matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their compet.i.tion could not have come to pa.s.s as it did; for any imports in that case would have had to be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing adequate to export. It was the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the appropriation of conquered territory as estates by the n.o.bles,[200] that upset the economic balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or free food--which was extended to other large Italian cities--but because corn was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the tribute came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came in bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on farming at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula was thus finally a mere sh.e.l.l, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more and more strictly fact.i.tious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire, as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the upper cla.s.ses had done; and though their popular measures must have exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]

We may perhaps better understand the case by supposing a certain economic development to take place in England in the distant future. At present we remain, as we are likely long to remain, economically advantaged or beneficed for manufacture by our coalfields, which are unequalled in Europe, though Germany, through the invention which made her phosphoric iron workable, has a larger store of the chief industrial metal. In return for our coal and manufactures and our shipping services, we import foods and goods that otherwise we could not pay for; and the additional revenue from British investments in foreign debts and enterprises further swells the food and raw material import, thus depressing to a considerable extent _our_ agriculture under a system of large farms. When in the course of centuries the coalfields are exhausted, unless it should be found that the winds and tides can be made to yield electric power cheaply enough, our manufacturing population will probably dwindle. Either the United States will supersede us with their stores of coal, or--if, as may well be, their stores are already exhausted by a vaster exploitation--China may take the lead. The chief advantage left us would be the skill and efficiency of our industrial population--an important but incalculable factor.[205]

A "return to the land," if not achieved beforehand, might in that case be a.s.sumed to be inevitable; but should Australian, Indian, and North and South American wheat-production continue (as it may or may not) to have the same relative advantages of soil, our remaining city populations would continue to buy foreign corn; and the land might still be largely turned to pasture. That remaining city population, roughly speaking, would in the terms of the case consist of (_a_) those persons drawing incomes from foreign investments; (_b_) those workmen, tradesmen, and professional people who could still be successfully employed in manufactures, or whom the interest-drawing cla.s.ses employed to do their necessary home-work, as the Romans perforce employed to the last many workmen and doctors and scribes, slave or free; (_c_) those who might earn incomes by seafaring; and (_d_) the official cla.s.s--necessarily reduced, like every other. Until the incomes from foreign investments had in some measure disappeared, the country could not gravitate down to an economically stable recommencement in agriculture.

We need not consider curiously whether things would or will happen in exactly this way: the actual presumption is that before coal is exhausted the whole social structure will be modified; and it is conceivable that the idle cla.s.s may have been eliminated. But we are supposing a less progressive evolution for ill.u.s.tration's sake. Suffice it that such a development would be in a measure economically a.n.a.logous to what took place in ancient Rome. If the upper-cla.s.s population of such a hypothetical future in England, instead of receiving only dividends from foreign stocks and pensions from the revenue of India, were able to extort an absolute tribute from India and other dominions, the parallel would be so much the closer. What held together the Roman Empire so long was, on the one hand, the developed military and juridical organisation with its maintaining revenue, and on the other hand the absence of any competent antagonist. Could a Mithridates or an Alexander have arisen during the reign of one of the worse emperors, he might more easily have overrun the Roman world than Rome did Carthage.

As it was, all the civilised parts of the Empire shared its political anaemia; and indeed the comparative comfort of the Roman peace, with all its burden of taxation, was in many of the provinces a sufficient though precarious ground for not returning to the old life of chronic warfare, at least for men who had lost the spirit of reasoned political self-a.s.sertion.

Under good emperors, the system worked imposingly enough; and Mommsen, echoing Gibbon, not unwarrantably bids us ask ourselves whether the south of Europe has ever since been better governed than it was under the Antonines.[206] The purely piratical plunder carried on by governors under the Republic was now, no doubt, in large measure restricted. But, to say nothing of the state of character and intellect, the economic evisceration was proceeding steadily alike under good emperors and bad, and the Stoic jurists did but frame good laws for a worm-eaten society.

So long as the seat of empire remained at Rome, drawing the tribute thither, the imperial system would give an air of solidity to Italian life; but when the Roman population itself grew cosmopolitanised in all its cla.s.ses, taking in all the races of the Empire, the provinces were in the terms of the case as Roman as the capital; and there was no special reason, save the principle of concentration, why the later emperors should reside there. Where of old the provincial governors had extorted from their subjects fortunes for themselves, to be spent in Rome like the public tribute, they would now tend to act as permanent dwellers in their districts.[207] Once the palace was set up elsewhere, the accessories of administration inevitably followed; and the transference of official and other population would partly balance the restriction of food supply caused by the deflection of Egyptian corn-tribute to Constantinople--a loss that had to be made good by a drain on Libya and Carthage.[208] But when under Valentinian and Valens the Empire came to be definitely divided, the western section, whose main source of revenue was the African province, speedily fell into financial straits. Valentinian had on his hands in the ten years of his reign three costly wars--one to recover Britain, one to repel the Alemanni from Gaul, one to recover Africa from Firmus; and it was apparently the drain on revenue thus set up, aggravated by an African famine,[209] that drove Gratian on his accession to the step of confiscating the revenues of the pagan cults.[210] So great was the State's need that even the pagan Eugenius could not restore the pagan revenues. Thenceforth the financial decay headed the military; and we shall perhaps not be wrong in saying that the growth of medieval Italy, the new and better-rooted life which was to make possible the Renaissance, obscurely began when Italy, stripped of Gaul and Spain and Africa, and cut off from the East, which held Egypt, was deprived of its unearned income, and the populace had in part to turn for fresh life to agriculture and industry. The flight of the propertied families at each successive sack of Rome by Goth and Vandal must have left freedom to many, and room for new enterprise to the more capable, though in some districts there seems to have been absolute depopulation. And while Italy thus fell upon a wholesomer poverty,[211] the provinces would be less impoverished.

Some of the ruin, indeed, has not been remedied to this day. Part of the curse of conquest was the extension of the malarious area of Italian soil, always considerable. The three temples to the G.o.ddess Fever in Rome were the recognition of a standing scourge, made active by every overflow of the Tiber; and pestilent areas were common throughout the land. But when the great plain of Latium was well peopled, the feverous area was in constant process of reduction by agriculture and drainage; and the inhabitants had become in large part immune to infection.[212]

In the early, the "Social" and the later civil wars it was devastated and depopulated to such an extent that Pliny[213] could enumerate fifty-three utterly eliminated stocks or "peoples," and could cite the record of thirty-three towns which had stood where now were the Pontine marshes.[214] As early as 340 B.C. the land round Rome was counted unhealthy, so that veterans were loth to settle on it;[215] but population went back instead of forward. It is thus true that the malaria of the Campagna and other districts was an ancient trouble;[216]

but it was the perpetual march of conquest, for ever sending forth to more attractive soils the stocks who might have re-peopled and recovered it, that made that and so much more of Italy fixedly pestilential down to modern times. Thus the paralysis of Italian production by conquest was a twofold process, direct and indirect.

In ancient as in later times, doubtless, attempts were made to bring back to human habitation the stricken deserts that stained Italy like a leprosy. Thus Caesar sought early to repeople Campania from the idle populace of Rome.[217] But to maintain steady cultivation in unhealthy regions there was needed an immune stock, and that was reproducible only by the old way of savage, self-preserving persistence on the part of hardy and primitive rustics working their own land. The new imported stocks, slave or free, wilted away before the scourge of fever; and the "principle of population," weakened in the spring, failed to surmount the resistance of Nature. Under the early Empire the labour needed for the culture of the Campagna had to be brought in annually from distant districts; and when the invading Goths in the fifth century devastated the whole area there was no energy left to recover it.

[The theories once current as to ancient knowledge of prophylactics in the shape of perfumes and the habitual use of woollen clothing may be dismissed as fanciful. The rational conclusion is that the early races developed a relative immunity, which was possessed neither by the eastern stocks imported in the period of conquest nor by the later invading Teutons. It is noteworthy, however, that at all times the dwellers in the tainted areas learned something of the necessary hygiene. See Dureau de la Malle, as cited. His investigation is interesting as showing how, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, long before Pasteur, biology had reached the perception that fevers come of an organic infection. It was doubtless such knowledge that led the Romans to burn their dead.]

There remains the question, What is the precise economic statement of the final collapse? It is easy to figure that in terms of _(a)_ increasing barbarian enterprise, stimulated by the personal experience of the many barbarians who served the Empire, and of _(b)_ increasing moral weakness on the part of the whole administrative system. And doubtless this change in the balance of military energy was decisive.

When utter weaklings sat by heredity in the imperial chair, at best contemptuously tolerated by their alien officers, the end was necessarily near. The most incurable disease of empire was just empire; ages of parasitism had made the Roman ruling cla.s.s incapable of energetic action; and the autocracy had long withheld from citizens the use of arms. But the long subsistence of the Eastern Empire as contrasted with the Western proves that not only had the barbarians an easier task against Italy in terms of its easiness of invasion, but the defence was there relatively weaker in terms of lack of resources. This lack has been wholly or partly explained by quite a number of writers[218] as a result of a failure in the whole supply of the precious metals--a proposition which may be understood of either a falling-off in the yield of the mines or a general withdrawal of bullion from the Empire. It is difficult to see how either explanation can stand. There was already an immense amount of bullion in the Empire, and a general withdrawal could take place only by way of export to the barbarian east in return for commodities.[219] But the eastern provinces of the Empire were still in themselves abundantly productive, and after the fall of Rome they continued to exhibit industrial solvency. No doubt the plunder of Rome by Alaric (409-10) greatly crippled the west, and the loss of Gaul and Spain was worse; but while the Empire retained Africa it had a source of real revenue. The beginning of the end, or rather the virtual end, came with the conquest of the African province by the Vandals (430-40). In 455 came the sack of Rome by the Vandals, whereafter there remains only a shadow of the Roman Empire, till Odoaker, dismissing Augustulus, makes himself king of Italy.

As for the falling-off in the yield of the Spanish mines, to which some writers seem to attribute the whole collapse, it could only mean that the Roman Government at length realised what had been as true before and has been as true since, that _all_ gold-mining, save in the case of the richest and easiest mines, separately considered, or of groups of mines which have been acquired at less cost than went to find and open them, is carried on at a loss as against the standing compet.i.tion of the great ma.s.s of precious metal above-ground at any moment, the output of unknown barbarian toil and infinite slave labour, begun long before the age of written history.[220] When it was reluctantly realised that the cost of working either the gold or the silver mines was greater to the State than their product,[221] they would be abandoned; though under a free government private speculators would have been found ready to risk more money in reopening them immediately. As a matter of fact, the Spanish mines were actually worked by the Saracens in the Middle Ages, and have been since. The Romans had made the natural blunder of greed in taking all gold and silver mines into the hands of the State,[222] where speculative private enterprise would have gone on working them at a loss, and so adding--vainly enough--to the total bullion in circulation, on which the State could levy its taxes. Even as it was, when they were losing nothing, but rather checking loss, by abandoning the mines, a falling-off in revenue from one source could have been made good by taxation if the fiscal system had remained unimpaired, and if the former income of Italy had not been affected by other causes than a stoppage of mining output.

If the mere cessation of public gold-mining were the cause of a general weakening of the imperial power, and by consequence the cause of the collapse in Italy, it ought equally to have affected the Eastern Empire, which we know to have possessed a normal sufficiency of bullion all through the Dark and Middle Ages, though it had no mines left.[223] The fact is that, when Valentinian and Valens divided the Empire between them, the former chose the western half because he shared the delusion that the Spanish mines were a greater source of real wealth than the fruitful provinces of the east. Those could always procure the bullion they required, because they had produce to exchange for it. Gold mines even of average fertility could have availed no more; and if Italy had remained agriculturally productive she could have sustained herself without any mines.

Dr. Cunningham, in his study of the economic conditions of the declining Empire, appears to lay undue stress on the factor of scarcity of bullion, and does not duly recognise the difference of progression between the case of Italy and that of the east. "The Roman Empire," he writes (p. 187, _note_), lacked both treasure and capital, "and _it perished_." When? The eastern seat of the Empire survived the western by a thousand years. "It seems highly improbable," he argues again (p. 185), "that the drain of silver to the east, which continued during the Middle Ages, was suspended at any period of the history of the Empire." But such a drain (which means a depletion) cannot go on for twelve hundred years; and it was certainly not a drain of silver to the east that ruined the Byzantine Empire. Finlay's dictum (i, 52) that the debas.e.m.e.nt of the currency between Caracalla and Gallienus "annihilated a great part of the trading capital in the Roman Empire and rendered it impossible to carry on commercial transactions, not only with foreign countries but even with distant provinces," is another erroneous theorem.

It seems clear that the Italian collapse occurred as it did because, after the fall of the three great possessions, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, there was left only the central State, made impotent by long parasitism to meet the growing barbarian pressure. Italy in the transition period can have yielded very little revenue, though Rome had for the barbarians plenty of h.o.a.rded plunder; and the country had long ceased to yield good troops. Gaul itself had been monstrously taxed; and it must have been no less a prudent than a benevolent motive that led Julian to reduce to 2,000,000 the revenue of 7,000,000 extorted by Constantine and Constantius.[224] The greater the depression in the sources of income, and the greater the costs of the frontier wars, the harder became the pressure of the fiscal system, till the burdens laid on the upper citizens who formed the curia[225] put them out of all heart for patriotic action, and drove many to flight, to slavery, or the cloister.

Towards the end, indeed, there was set up a rapid process of economic change which subst.i.tuted for slaves a cla.s.s of serfs, _coloni_, _adscript.i.tii_, and so on, who though tied to the land paid a rent for it and could keep any surplus; but under this system agriculture was thus far no more a source of revenue than before. Latterly the very wine of Italy grew worthless, and its olives decayed;[226] so that in once fruitful Campania, "the orchard of the south," Honorius in the year 395 had to strike from the fiscal registers, as worthless, more than three hundred thousand acres of land[227]--an eighth of the whole province.

After the ruinous invasions of Rhadagast and Alaric, fresh remissions of taxation had to be given, so that as the danger neared the defence weakened.[228] In the east, again, there was no impulse to succour the falling west; and indeed there was not the ability. The fiscal power of the Emperor was inelastic; his revenues, extorted by cruel pressure, needed careful husbanding; his own world needed all his attention; and the eastern upper cla.s.s of clerics and officials were not the people to strain themselves for the mere military retention of Britain or Gaul or Italy, as Rome would have done in the republican period, or as the emperors would have done before the period of decentralisation. For the rich agricultural provinces of Africa they did strive with success when Belisarius overthrew the Vandals; and in that age, when Italy had once more become revenue-yielding through the revival of her agriculture, it was worth the while of the east to reconquer Italy also; but the old spirit of resolute dominion and aggression was gone. Armies could still be enrolled and generalled if there was pay for them; but the pay failed, not because bullion was lacking, but because the will and power to supply and apply it in the old fashion was lacking. The new age, after Theodosius, looked at these matters in a different light--the light of commercial self-interest and Christian or eastern disregard for Roman tradition and prestige. The new religion, Christianity, was a direct solvent of imperial patriotism in the old sense, transferring as it did the concern of serious men from this world to the next, and from political theory to theological. In Italy, besides, the priesthood could count on making rather more docile Christians of the invaders than it had done of the previous inhabitants; so that Christian Rome, once overrun, must needs remain so.

[Finlay (ed. cited i, 294) suggests that "probably the knowledge which the Emperor Justin and his cabinet must have possessed of the impossibility of deriving any revenue from the agricultural districts of Italy offers the simplest explanation of the indifference manifested at Constantinople to the Lombard invasion."

But he had already noted (p. 236, _note_) that a great revival of agriculture took place in the reign of Theodoric. Then it could only be through the exhaustion of the subsequent wars that Italy was incapable of yielding a revenue. The true explanation of Justin's inaction is probably not indifference but impotence, the Empire's resources being then drained.

After the invasion of the Lombards the clergy and Senate of Rome had to send a large sum in bullion to induce the Emperor Maurice to listen to their prayers for help. Still the help could not be given, though, save in the case of the coast towns (see below, p.

188), tribute was paid to Byzantium till the final breach between Rome and Leo the Iconoclast. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 114.)

Guizot (_Histoire de la Civilisation en France_, 13e ed. i, 75, 76) notes the fundamental difference in the att.i.tude of the Church under the old and eastern emperors and under the Teutonic rule.

Symonds (_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and his having treated it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul at once gained an ascendency over the Frankish kings, and the popes would probably have done as well with resident emperors as with absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian monarch against another--a plan not open to the patriarch of Constantinople.]

That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them generals who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system, inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise the economic and other sociological causation of the process.

It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element ... by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the "great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was, had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 160: The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application of the principle, however, does not carry us far.]

[Footnote 161: Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it (_Western Civilisation_, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof.

Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?]

[Footnote 162: Cp. Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, i, 26, following Von Ihering.]

[Footnote 163: Macaulay, _Lays of Ancient Rome_, pref. to _Virginia_.

Cp. Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 80-81.]

[Footnote 164: Cp. Dureau de la Malle, _econ. polit. des Romains_, vol.

ii, liv. iv, ch. 9.]

[Footnote 165: Cp. Cicero, _De Officiis_, i, 42.]

[Footnote 166: Mommsen, B. i, ch. v. Eng. tr. i, 80.]

[Footnote 167: Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xviii, 3]