I

THE ROMANS DEGENERATING

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a dangerous monopoly was being established not merely through the enormous advantages inseparable from Roman influence, but by the jealous destruction of all those commercial centres, which might have rivalled Rome by reason of favoured situation or old traditions of trade.

But far more serious was the patent fact, that neither the Roman people nor their rulers had received any education to fit them for an imperial policy. Administrative ability there was in plenty, just as there had been tactical knowledge to win battles without any strategy to plan campaigns. Higher education was confined to the 'Scipionic circle.' Hence it resulted that not only did the common people degenerate rapidly into a vulgar mob, pursuing solely its material pleasures, but the dominant classes, when vast opportunities of wealth and power were thrown into their hands, did not resist even for a generation the seductions of the world and the flesh, and became steeped in such luxury and vice as the Greeks had not reached in a decadence of centuries. Polybius and Diodorus1 speak of these things in terms almost identical. They mention the rapid rise in the prices of luxuries at Rome, how a jar of wine came to cost 100 drachmæ, a jar of Euxine sardines 400, a good slave-cook 4 talents,2 and worse ministrants to worse pleasures higher still. Both authors do not indeed omit to point out, that the great traditions of Roman dignity and virtue still survived. Diodorus quotes a number of instances of righteous Roman governors, and Polybius in an earlier generation speaks of the Scipios as the recognised models of civic excellence. But we feel that these good men were rare exceptions, and that the apparent peace of the Roman

1 Frag. lib. xxxvi.

2 Nearly £1000. Drachmæ may be counted as modern francs for convenience' sake, though slightly less in silver weight.

world was a delusive calm, to be interrupted, if not from without, at least by violent eruptions from within. For injustice and oppression have never yet failed to bring upon themselves their due rewards.

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So it was that the completed conquest which Polybius saw, and which appeared to be a final settlement of the world, brought no contentment into the hearts of men. For while the position of the few, of the dominant class at Rome, was magnified beyond their wildest expectations, the condition of the many was not only made worse, but even became wholly intolerable. This is the key to those disturbances in the Roman world, which could not indeed shake off the yoke, but which showed the internal sores with which the mighty commonwealth was affected.

The first symptom was the slave war which broke out in Sicily very few years after the so-called pacification of the world by the ruin of Carthage and of Corinth in 146 B.C. I have endeavoured in a special monograph to explain the causes and character of this outbreak,2 and will therefore content myself with here giving the results.

It was always remarked, whenever an invasion discloses to us the condition of the territory of Carthage, that nothing was more wonderful than the fertility of the farms and homesteads in that favoured land. Its natural gifts were so enhanced by intelligent cultivation that the Italians at once saw and confessed their inferiority, and upon the fall of Carthage we hear that the Senate, probably after some delay, ordered the translation of the received handbook on agri

1 I have given his evidence in detail in the last chapter of my Greek Life and Thought, which brings the subject up to the period treated in this book.

2 In Hermathena for 1890.

I

MAGO ON AGRICULTURE

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culture long current in that state, which referred all the wisdom and experience of centuries to the authorship of the ancient Mago, the reputed founder of Punic greatness, not only in the arts of war, but also in those of peace.1 Of this treatise we possess only stray quotations, in Varro's handbook and elsewhere,2 mostly on the management of cattle and the farmyard, though we know from Cicero that it was a very voluminous work, as indeed is proved by the publication of two separate compendiums in later days. But there is one sentence, with which the book opened, that shows how far different was the spirit of the Punic farmer from his Roman imitator, and how useless the attempt to graft the African figs, which excited Cato's envy, upon the Italian thistles. 'A man who wants to farm,' said Mago, 'has no business with a town house. If he has one, let him sell it; if he be more attached to town life, what does he want with a country seat.' 13 What advice to give to a Roman patrician, even such as Cato, with his thrifty husbandry! To abandon Rome was to abandon the world, and to retire into the disgrace and the oblivion of exile.

A further attempt was made, apparently in connection with the colonising efforts of Caius Gracchus, to instruct

1 See the personality of this Mago discussed in Hermathena, No. xvi. Our evidence for this act of the Senate is Pliny, H. N. xviii. 5, the opening chapters of Columella and Varro (de Re Rustica, i. I, 10), whom I will quote: 'All the [Greek] writers hitherto cited are surpassed in reputation by Mago the Carthaginian, who wrote in Punic, and embraced the scattered subjects of agriculture in twenty-eight books [translated into Latin, adds Pliny, by D. Silanus, and others skilled in Punic], which Cassius Dionysius of Utica translated in twenty books, and sent to the prætor Sextius, in which he inserted many things from Greek authors, and omitted eight books of Mago. Diophanes of Bithynia contracted these twenty into six, and dedicated them to king Dejotarus.'

2 I have transcribed the list of fragments, op. cit. p. 30. 3 Columella, i. 1, 18.

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the more cultivated settlers-for Gracchus did not send out the mere refuse of the people-by a Greek compendium, which contracted the twenty-eight books of the original into twenty. The third version, in still briefer form, was made for the use of that king Dejotarus whom Cicero mentions 2 as a most diligent farmer and grower of cattle, and shows that even in the long-civilised Asia Minor the Punic prescriptions were valued.

But quite apart from this fruitless theoretical measure to reform and improve the farming of the ever-increasing Roman domains was the practical imitation of the Punic habit of growing great tracts of wheat with the aid of slave labour. In the climate of North Africa nothing paid a higher interest; but in the absence of all modern machinery the cultivation of wheat required many hands, and, therefore, capital with a command of many slaves. This was the enterprise which the Romans sought to transfer to Sicily, where the land and climate permitted some hope of rivalling the waving crops of Africa. The capture of Carthage, like all such conquests in ancient days, threw an enormous number of slaves into the market, or rather there was an immense market of them immediately after the storming of the place. Not only all the slaves of the Carthaginians but the masters themselves were bought in gangs by Roman and Sicilian speculators, and carried off to till the plains of Sicily. Thus the great slave population of Carthage, mostly kidnapped or captured in eastern lands, and speaking the Greek tongue, was transferred to new masters, another soil, perhaps harsher conditions, and with no hope of liberty.

This was the vast multitude which revolted about the

1 See the arguments for this theory in my article, op. cit. p. 164. 2 Pro rege Deiot. § 27—diligentissimus agricola et pecuarius.

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CONTRASTS IN THE SLAVE WARS

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year 140 B.C., assumed the style and title of a Syrian state, made one of their number, who professed miraculous prophetic powers, their king, and met the Roman power in the open field.1 If they had been assisted by the pirates, who began to infest all the seas in consequence of the Roman conquest, the result would have been very serious. But, as I have elsewhere shown, the pirates were themselves great slave dealers, and were the last people to spoil their own trade by playing the Romans false in this particular.2 What is specially to be noted about the insurrection is its Hellenistic character. The majority of these people had been subjects of the Seleucids, and this was the type of society and of government which they naturally endeavoured to set up. The state assumed by the insurgent king was a Hellenistic state. He had his peers and his household, his jester and his cook, his baker and his shampooer.3

Though the second slave war came a generation later (10399 B.C.), it may be well to treat it in connection with the first, so far as it serves to illustrate how the Greek elements are now being absorbed into the Roman world. After the struggle with Jugurtha had shown how corrupt the Roman oligarchy had already become, there supervened the desperate crisis of the

1 Our authority for these disturbances is the thirty-fourth book of Diodorus, preserved in copious excerpts by Photius. The first leader was Eunus, a Syrian of Apamea, whose wife was of the same city. He took the royal name of Antiochus, called his wife queen, and his followers Syrians. The other prominent leaders were Achæus (called by Diodorus an Achæan, but perhaps taking his name from Achæus's royal house in Asia Minor) and Cleon, a Cilician, Cf. the details in Hermathena, xvi. 169.

2 Hermathena, xvi. 178.

3 Diod. frag. xxxiv. sub. fin.— ἐξειλκύσθη ἅμα τεττάρων, μαγείρου καὶ ἀρτοποιοῦ καὶ τοῦ τρίβοντος αὐτὸν ἐν τῷ λουτρῷ καὶ τετάρτου τοῦ παρὰ τοὺς πότους εἰωθότος ψυχαγωγεῖν αὐτόν. It is curious that Diodorus does not give the official titles; or is it Photius that paraphrases them?