by Chris Harman
The Roman poor revered the Gracchus brothers as martyrs, making daily offerings at their graves, and both Tiberius and Gaius do seem to have been motivated by genuine feelings for the sufferings of the masses. 72 But their programme was essentially aimed at strengthening the Roman state and enhancing its ability to exploit the rest of the empire. They seem to have half-grasped that slavery, while enriching the big landowners, was weakening the base of the economy. However, their answer was certainly not to appeal to the slaves to free themselves and restricted the role of the poor peasants to that of a pressure group within the existing constitutional setup. It did not even have much to offer the urban poor of Rome. As result, the Senate had only to bide its time and could then dispose of the brothers in the bloodiest manner.
The murder of Gaius Gracchus subdued the poor. But it did not deal with their class bitterness, which played a decisive role in shaping the history of the first century BC, and in the transformation of the Roman republic into the Roman Empire. This was a period in which different factions within the ruling class engaged in bloody manoeuvres to gain control of political power and of the wealth from the conquered territories. The resentments of the poor on the one side, and the class excesses of the senatorial elite on the other, provided them with weapons to use against each other. Sallust, who lived through the period, described it as a time of ‘frequent riots, party strife and eventually civil war … during which a few powerful men … were attempting to rule masquerading as champions of the Senate or the people’. 73
In 108 BC Marius became consul, with the backing of the equites . According to Sallust, he was ‘the darling of all the artisans and rustics whose hands furnished their only wealth’. 74 An attempt to push through a land distribution bill led to bitter fighting: ‘Violence rose to a new level … All the respectable elements in society appeared in arms with their retainers’, 75 and lynched Saturninus, an ally abandoned by Marius. Two decades later it was the turn of Sulpicius, another ally of Marius, to control Rome briefly and to be killed after an army led by Sulla occupied the city on behalf of the great senatorial families. When the army withdrew another ally of Marius, Cinna, retook it and controlled Italy for two years. ‘The forum ran with blood’ as he sought to bend the Senate to his will. But for all his promises, he ‘paid little attention to popular rights’ and did nothing about the increasing poverty of the masses. 76 Sulla was able to return with the support of the nobility, Cinna was killed by his own soldiers, and a reign of terror was inflicted on all those who had put up resistance. Even the dissidents among the rich suffered as Sulla posted lists of ‘proscriptions’ – individuals whose killing merited a financial reward – including 40 senators and 1,600 equites . 77 Finally, in 64 BC Cataline, a former Sulla henchman facing bankruptcy, tried to restore his fortunes by raising the standard of popular revolt. He paraded in public with a motley throng of Sulla veterans and peasants. This time it was the consul (and writer) Cicero who took decisive and bloody action to preserve the existing order, organising a select band of wealthy youth to arrest and execute Cataline’s leading supporters.
Cataline’s rebellion was the last based on a call to the poor peasants to take up arms. But the bitterness against the rich persisted. Indeed, it began to infect the poor of the city. Their conditions of life were atrocious and their livelihoods insecure. They lived in tenements 60 to 70 feet high, squeezed together in a density seven or eight times that of a modern Western city, their homes in constant danger of collapsing or catching fire, and with no water and no access to the sewers. Many could only look forward to seasonal labouring work in the docks in the summer and faced near-starvation in the winter. 78 The very misery of their condition had prevented them joining the disaffected peasants in the past. Often they depended on the bribes handed out by rich senators and had taken the Senate’s side in riots. Now, however, they began to back politicians or ambitious generals who promised them subsidised corn. Violence became common in the decade after Cataline’s defeat. Mobs burned down the Senate house and killed the rich in the street in 52 BC after the murder of a politician, Clodius, who had given the poor free grain.
This was the background against which Julius Caesar marched his army across the Italian border and took power in 49 BC. The senatorial rich lost the ability to run the empire, not to the poor, but to a rich general from an aristocratic family who had killed or enslaved a million people in his conquest of Gaul.
The years of the great social conflicts between Roman citizens also witnessed the biggest slave revolt in the whole of the ancient world, the uprising led by Spartacus.
Rome had already known more slave revolts than Greece, probably because the slaves were concentrated on a much greater scale. Sicily was swept by a slave revolt in 138–132 BC, for example. It involved tens of thousands of slaves – partly herders and partly agricultural slaves – but they ‘received some support from the local free population who were delighted to see the suffering of the rich’. 79 Indeed, while the slaves tried to keep order on farms they hoped to cultivate for themselves, the free population engaged in looting. The pattern was repeated in 104–101 BC.
The revolt of Spartacus was on a bigger scale than these and threatened the very centre of the Roman Empire. It began in 73 BC with the escape of 74 gladiators. Over time they were joined by up to 70,000 slaves who beat off successive Roman armies and marched from one end of the Italian peninsula to the other. At one point they threatened Rome and defeated an army led by the consuls. But instead of trying to take the city, Spartacus marched to the southern-most point of Italy, in the hope of crossing to Sicily. His forces were betrayed by pirates who had promised them boats, and they were then penned in by a Roman army which sought to stop them moving north again. Part of the slave army managed to break out of the trap, but suffered a devastating defeat. Spartacus was killed, though his body was never found, 80 and 6,000 of his followers were crucified. 81 Roman writers claimed 100,000 slaves died in the crushing of the revolt. 82
The revolts in ancient Rome inspired champions of the oppressed for two millennia. The Gracchus brothers were hailed as an example by the extreme left in the French Revolution of 1789–94. Karl Marx described Spartacus as his favourite historical figure, and the German revolutionaries led by Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 called themselves the Spartakusbund.
But neither the peasant revolts nor the slave rebellions succeeded in breaking the hold of the great landowners over the Roman Empire, and the reason lay in the character of the rebellious classes themselves.
The peasants could protest, and even rise up, against the extortions of the rich. They could flock to rich leaders who seemed to have some programme for reform of the state. But they could not arrive at a political programme of their own which went beyond the call for land redistribution and annulment of debts to suggest a reorganisation of society in its entirety. For the surplus they produced was too little to maintain a civilisation on the scale of Rome. That surplus had to come either from the slave system or from the pillage of empire. The dream of a return to a peasant-based past was natural, but it was unrealisable.
The urban masses were equally incapable of taking the lead in a revolutionary reorganisation of society. They were even less central to production than the small peasants. The most impoverished were dependent on casual labour. Others were artisans in luxury trades, whose livelihoods depended on supplying the needs of the rich. There were many slaves in Rome. But their conditions were often more favourable than those in agriculture, and many could hope to join the high proportion of the capital’s population who were free if they were attentive enough to their owners.
Finally, although the rural slaves were central to production, they found it all but impossible to go beyond heroic rebellion to formulate ideas of a different sort of society. They came from everywhere in the Mediterranean and spoke a mass of different languages. Denied the chance to have families, they also had little chance to pass traditions of resistance from one generation to another. Th
e way they were united in production – chained under the whip of a slave master – provided no model of how to reorganise society on a different basis. Instead, their dreams were of establishing new kingdoms or, like Spartacus, of escaping from the Roman Empire to freedom somewhere else. Why Spartacus threw away the opportunity to try to seize Rome is one of the great mysteries of history. Part of the explanation may be that he could not conceive of reorganising Roman society and did not want to end up merely running the old order.
The empire: stagnation and collapse
The riots, revolts, rebellions and civil wars did not lead to a revolutionary reorganisation of society, but they did radically change the political superstructure by which the landed rich dominated the rest of society. The Senate came to depend on generals and their armies to maintain the poor in their place. But the strongest general was then able to dominate the Senate. The civil wars over social questions ended, only to be replaced by civil wars between generals: Marius and Cinna against Sulla; Pompey against Julius Caesar; after Caesar’s death, Brutus and Cassius against Mark Antony and Octavian (Caesar’s nephew); and, finally, Octavian against Mark Antony.
Eventually, the rich – old and new alike – felt that allowing Octavian (now called Augustus) to establish a de facto monarchy was the only way to re-establish political stability. Augustus was able to use the memory of the decades of social conflict for his own ends. He offered security to the rich while posing as the friend of Rome’s urban poor by providing them with cheap, or even free, corn – paid for from a small fraction of the vast tribute that flowed in from the conquered lands.
The emperors, concerned not to provoke open rebellion in the provinces, did clamp down on the worst forms of personal profiteering by the senatorial elite. They also resorted to occasional acts of terror against independent-minded members of the old landed families, while lavishing wealth and prestige on members of their own entourage.
The older senatorial families saw this as a barbarous assault on traditional values. The names of Nero and Caligula have been associated ever since with random terror and irrational violence, and there is a long tradition of opponents of arbitrary, dictatorial rule seeing the senators who opposed Caesar and Augustus as great defenders of human freedom against tyranny. The early leaders of the French Revolution draped themselves in togas and saw themselves as taking up the heritage of Brutus. Yet the imperial power did no more than unleash against a few members of the aristocracy the barbarity it had traditionally shown to conquered peoples, slaves and rebellious members of the Roman lower classes. Aristocratic talk of libertas , as Ronald Syme points out, amounted to a ‘defence of the existing order by individuals … in enjoyment of power and wealth’. 83
The poor certainly did not see the senators as standing for freedom. Josephus, writing in the middle of the first century AD, reported that while the rich resented the emperors as ‘tyrants’ and their rule as ‘subjection’, the poor regarded them as restraining the ‘rapacity’ of the Senate. 84 The poor may have been misled by the demagogy and cheap corn of Caesar and his successors. But they had good reason to hate the senatorial class. After all, this class had butchered anyone who had stood up, however hesitatingly, for their rights. Cicero, often regarded as an exemplar of the civil virtues of the senatorial class, had organised such murders and referred to Rome’s poor as ‘dirt and filth’, ‘the starving contemptible rabble’, ‘the dregs of the city’ and, when they showed any radical tendencies, ‘the wicked’. 85
For all their rhetoric about ‘liberty’, the rich could not manage without an emperor to keep the empire intact and the lower classes in their place. After Augustus, the rich would sometimes connive to overthrow an individual emperor. But their alternative was not a new republic, only a different emperor. 86 Indeed, the rich prospered during the first two centuries of rule by emperors even more than they had in the past. This period (sometimes called the ‘Principate’ by historians to distinguish it from the ‘later Roman Empire’) saw a great influx of luxury goods such as silk, spices and gems from the east, the spread of large estates throughout Italy and into some provinces, and huge rent flows to the senatorial class. 87
The wealth was not restricted to the Roman rich. The provincial rich were able to share in it, increasingly becoming integrated into a single imperial ruling class: ‘The provincial communities were far more prosperous than under the republic’, 88 although ‘it is doubtful if the peasantry of the provinces shared in the increased wealth of the empire’, since they paid the same rate of tax as the rich landowners. 89 Out of the new-found security and increased wealth of the provincial rich there developed an empire-wide culture, based on shared religious cults (including emperor worship), ceremonial games, languages (Latin in the west, Greek in the east) and literature. This was the period in which cities were rebuilt on a lavish scale from one end of the empire to the other, with
temples for the worship of the gods, theatres, stadia and amphitheatres, gymnasia and baths, markets, aqueducts and fountains, besides basilicas for the administration of justice and council chambers and offices for the magistrates. Cities took great pride in their buildings and vied with one another in architectural splendour, laying out magnificent paved streets, lined with colonnades and adorned with triumphal arches. 90
In later centuries people would look back on this as the ‘golden age’ of the empire. Gibbon writes:
If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed between the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [from AD 98 to 180]. 91
Yet the stability imposed from above rested, as had the republic before it, on the pillaging of the peasantry and the subjection of the slaves. It may have regularised such practices, but it had not eliminated them. The picture of life in the empire provided by the second-century satirical novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius is very different to Gibbon’s. It describes the conditions of slaves working for a baker:
Their skin was striped all over with livid scourge-scars; their wealed backs were crusted rather than clothed with patchwork rags; some had no more covering than a bit of apron and every shirt was so tattered that the body was visible through the rents. Their brows were branded, their heads were half shaved, irons clanked on their feet, their faces were sallow and ugly. 92
Apuleius tells how a ‘wealthy and powerful … landlord … was never called to account’ by the law for the way in which he harassed a poor neighbour – slaughtering his cattle, stealing his oxen, flattening his corn and employing a gang of thugs to throw him off his land. 93
The world Apuleius satirised was not one of prosperity and joy, but one of insecurity, injustice, torture, robbery and murder. For all the civilised veneer, the emperor’s might was symbolised by the ‘games’ at the Coliseum, where gladiators butchered each other and prisoners were torn apart by animals.
The empire might have been stable, but major problems at the base of society were unresolved. The economy was overwhelmingly rural, although the ruling class and its civilisation were centred on the cities: ‘Trade and manufactures played a very limited role in the economy … The basic industry was agriculture, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the empire were peasants and the wealth of the upper classes was, in the main, derived from rent.’ Agricultural output produced 20 times as much revenue as trade and industry. 94
There were a few cities in which trade or manufactures played a predominant role. This was true of Alexandria, through which passed Egyptian grain on its way to Italy and luxury goods coming from Arabia and India by sea. Here some industries did grow substantially – glass making, weaving and the manufacture of papyrus – and some merchants acquired great wealth. 95 But most cities were centres of administration and ruling-class consumption, not trade and industry. The roads constructed for military purposes were unsuited to transporting heavy loads – unlike the canals and roads b
uilt in China at the time – and so moving goods by land was extremely slow and costly. A 300-mile journey doubled the cost of wheat, for example. Long-distance trade was restricted to the most expensive luxury goods, and inland cities depended for the great bulk of their provisions on the surrounding land and their own craftsmen based in small workshops.
The cities were parasitic on the rural economy rather than a source of innovation that increased productivity. The great landowners who lived in the cities looked to increase their incomes by squeezing the cultivators harder rather than by investing in new tools and land improvements. The slave gangs who worked most of the land in some regions, especially in Italy, had no incentive and little opportunity to engage in more productive methods, although occasionally they could bring knowledge of the more advanced techniques used in one part of the empire to another. The incentive for peasant proprietors working the land was hardly any stronger, since any increase in production was likely to be taken from them in rents to the landowner or taxes to the state. So although there was some advance in production methods, it was very limited. Labour-saving innovations were put to use very slowly. The water wheel, first mentioned in 25 BC, was scarcely used for two centuries because donkey mills, or even human-drawn mills, fitted more easily the use of slave labour 96 – a considerable contrast to the proliferation of water mills in China during the same period.
All the time, the economic strength of the empire was being undermined by the very factor which had been so important initially – the massive level of slavery. The flow of new slaves began to dry up as the wars of conquest which had brought the empire into being came to an end, and slaves became expensive. Landowners had to worry more about the lives of their ‘property’. Some turned to breeding a new generation of slaves. But this meant worrying about providing for ‘unproductive’ mothers and children, which undercut the huge cost advantage slaves had once had over free labour. Others found it was cheaper and easier to let their land at high rents as smallholdings to tenants who would not require supervision and who would bear the costs of maintaining their families. In this way, slavery began to decline in importance.
