A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (10 page)

The social upheavals and class tensions which characterised the rise of Greek civilisation during these two or three centuries are the background to the great achievements of Greek literature, science and philosophy. It was a period in which people found themselves forced to question old certainties. The power of the poetry ascribed to Homer (in reality, oral sagas written down for the first time in about 700 BC) came from the depiction of people struggling to come to terms with their destiny in a period of social flux. The tragic tension in the plays of Aeschylus came from the way characters could not resolve the clash between rival moral codes, reflecting old and new ways of ordering society. The rival schools of classical Greek philosophy arose as thinkers sought to find a new objective basis for arriving at truth, the goals of human life and rules for human behaviour. ‘Sophists’ and ‘sceptics’ came to the conclusion that all that was possible was to knock down each argument in turn. Plato argued that the destruction of each succeeding argument by another (a process known as ‘dialectic’) led to the conclusion that truth must depend upon a realm outside direct human experience, accessible only to a philosophic elite, who should run society in a totalitarian fashion. Aristotle, after studying under Plato, reacted against this by putting the stress upon positive empirical knowledge of the existing physical and social world, which he saw as constituted out of four basic ‘elements’ (water, fire, air and earth). Democritus in the 5th century BC and Epicurus at the end of the 4th century BC developed a materialist view of the world as constituted out of indivisible atoms.

The Greek city states, unencumbered by the gross bureaucracies of the Mesopotamian, Assyrian and Persian empires, were able to show a greater dynamism and to command the active allegiance of a much greater proportion of their populations when it came to war. This explains the ability of combined Greek states to hold back invading armies early in the 5th century BC. And 150 years later it was to enable an army built by the Greek-influenced kingdom of Macedonia in the north to establish its power briefly over not only the Greek city states but also, under Alexander the Great, the two historic empires of Egypt and the Middle East. Alexander’s empire fell apart after his death, but Greek-speaking dynasties continued to reign over rival Middle Eastern and Egyptian empires. Greek advances in science and philosophy, which had grown out of the achievements of the old civilisations in these regions, now made further advances within them. It was in the Greek-Egyptian city of Alexandria that the Greek school of science, mathematics and philosophy reached its next peak. Around 300 BC Euclid formulated the basic theorems of geometry. Soon afterwards Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of the Earth as 24,000 miles. Around 150 BC Hypharcus began to work out trigonometric means of calcuating distances, and arrived at a relatively accurate result for the distance of the moon from the Earth. Claudius Ptolemy built on Hyparchus’s ideas 300 years later and developed a model of motion of the planets and stars. Although showing them as moving round the Earth, it enabled reasonably accurate calculations to be made of their paths. Overall, Alexandrian science and mathematics made an important contribution to further advances in India, China and, from the 7th to the 12th centuries AD, in the Arab world. However, its findings were virtually unknown in Europe for more than 1,000 years.

Meanwhile, the remnants of Alexander’s empire around the Mediterranean were soon absorbed into a new empire, that built by the rulers of Rome.

‘The glory that was Rome’ is a refrain which finds its echo in most Western accounts of world history. The rise of Rome is portrayed as the high point of the ancient civilisations, its eventual decline as a historic tragedy. So one of the great works of the European Enlightenment, Edward Gibbons’
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
begins, ‘In the 2nd century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth…The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury’.
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From one angle Roman civilisation was impressive. A small town in Italy rose to rule the whole Mediterranean area—Egypt north of Aswan, all of Europe south of the Danube and Rhine, Asia Minor and Syria, and Africa north of the Sahara. The western part of its empire lasted some 600 years, the eastern part 1,600. Everywhere the rulers of the empire oversaw the construction of public buildings and temples, stadiums and aqueducts, public baths and paved roads, leaving a legacy that was to impress subsequent generations.

Yet the civilisation of the empire as such added very little to humanity’s ability to make a livelihood or to our accumulated stock of scientific knowledge or cultural endeavour. It was not characterised by innovation in the same way as early Mesopotamia and Egypt, classical Greece or the last half millennium BC in India and China. Ste Croix goes so far as to insist that, apart from ‘two or three contributions in the realm of technology’, the Romans only surpassed their Greek predecessors in two fields: first, in the practice of ruling, of creating structures capable of holding together a great empire; second, in the theory of ‘civil law’, concerned with the regulation of property and inheritance (as opposed to Roman criminal law, which remained arbitrary and oppressive).
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This is an exaggeration. Certainly, Roman engineering and architecture is impressive, with its viaducts, amphitheatres, temples and roads. But in most fields the main impact of the Roman Empire was to spread across central and western Europe the earlier advances made in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece. It added very little to them. What is more, the very basis on which the empire was built ensured its eventual collapse, leaving nothing in the west but the memory of the achievements it had borrowed from elsewhere.

The earliest period of Rome in many ways resembles that of the Greek city states, from which it adopted and adapted its alphabet. At first, it was probably a society of agriculturists organised through lineages rather than a state (even in historical times its population was grouped into ‘gens’, supposed lineages, and ‘tribes’) out of which a hereditary ruling class (the ‘Patrician Order’) developed. It was strategically placed on the last crossing on the River Tiber before the sea, through which north-south and east-west trade routes passed. Income from trade (probably from charges on passing traders) added sufficiently to the surplus from agriculture to enable a village of muddaubed wooden huts to develop into a prosperous town by the late 6th century BC, ‘with houses of wood and brick, monumental temples, a well-engineered sewage system and imports of the finest Attic vases’.
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For a period Rome was under the domination of the Etruscan state to its north—a literate society whose non-Indo-European language possibly originated somewhere north of the Black Sea. The Romans threw out the Etruscans at the end of the 6th century (in 509 BC according to Roman tradition), established a republic and embarked on a long process of military expansion. This passed through various phases over the next 400 years: a league with various other Latin-speaking cities; the incorporation of these into the Roman republic; the conquest of the rest of central Italy; a series of wars with Carthage for control over southern Italy and the former Phoenician colony in north Africa; the conquest of northern Italy and Greece; and, finally, the occupation of all of Europe north to the Rhine and Danube, and the annexation of the former Greek empires in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt.

Each stage of this expansion was spearheaded by infantry conscripted from the independent landed peasantry—at first from those farming land within the border of the city of Rome, and then also from those with land in other Italian cities who had been granted Roman citizenship. But if the peasantry bore the brunt of the fighting, it did not control the army or gain from the victories. For unlike Athens, Rome was in no sense a democracy.

The republic and the class wars

The constitution of the early republic gave a monopoly of power to a hereditary elite of ‘Patrician’ families. The Senate, the consuls chosen each year to implement policy, the judges, the
quaestor
administrators and the
praetors
responsible for law and order were all Patricians. There was an assembly, which had the nominal right to elect magistrates and decide on questions of war and peace. But 98 of its 193 votes went to the highest class, and the delegates from the ‘Plebeian’ small peasants had no say if these were unanimous in their view, while the propertyless Romans, known as the
proletarii
, had only one vote between them.

The leading families used their political control to increase their already substantial landholdings at the expense of the peasantry, pushing them into debt, taking their land and relying on the judges to find in favour of the Patricians. What is more, as commanders of the armed forces, they ensured they took the lion’s share of conquered land after each military victory. The bitterness caused by such behaviour boiled over into two great waves of class struggle.

The first began only 15 years after the founding of the republic.

The Roman historian Sallust gave a graphic account of how the class divide drove the lower orders to rebel:

Sallust was writing more than 400 years after the event, and some modern historians doubt the accuracy of his account. But there were certainly recurrent struggles for more than a century against arbitrary treatment by Patrician officials. ‘Secession’—sitting down
en masse
and refusing to serve in the army—seems to have been the favourite tactic and to have won the Plebeians their own elected representatives, ‘tribunes’, to protect them against oppression from the magistrates.
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The tribunes provided such protection by literally stepping between the magistrates and their intended victims,
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knowing that the Plebeians had sworn a collective oath to lynch anyone who touched a tribune.
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They ‘stood to the official state magistrates almost as shop stewards to company directors,’ according to Ste Croix,
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and over time became an integral part of the constitution with the power to arrest and imprison state officials. A last great struggle in 287 BC, a result of debts afflicting half the population, ended the formal powers of the Patricians and opened all offices up to Plebeians.
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Later Roman writers like Dionysus and Halicarnassus were to praise the ‘moderation shown in the struggle of the orders, which contrasted with the revolutionary bloodshed familiar to Greek cities’.
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But the Plebeians did not gain nearly as much from the victory as the lower classes sometimes did in Greece, and Rome did not become an Athens-type democracy. As Brunt points out, only a thin layer of well to do Plebeians gained anything substantial with the lifting of the bar on them holding office.
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The ‘greater measure of democratic control’ supposedly granted to the mass of Plebeians ‘was to prove to be an illusion’:

This was not to be the last time in history that the interests of well to do leaders of a struggle were to prove very different from those of their followers.

One factor which persuaded the poor to acquiesce in this arrangement was the conquest of new lands by the republic. Some of the poorer peasants were settled in the new territory, relieving their plight for a time. But the wars of conquest were soon to cause the condition of most peasants to deteriorate even further. Most of the loot from conquest went to the rich: ‘Very large sums flowed into private hands in Italy from abroad…The great bulk went to men of the upper and middle classes’.
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Much of it went on luxury consumption, but some went into further expanding the landholdings of the rich, so raising the price of land and encouraging moneylenders to dispossess indebted peasants. At the same time, increasing numbers of peasants were being driven into debt, since long spells of conscription in the legions prevented them from cultivating their land to pay rents and taxes.

Sallust wrote of the early 1st century BC:

But this was not all. The wars also produced a massive new labour force for the rich to exploit, as captives were enslaved. After the third Macedonian War, for example, 150,000 prisoners were sold as slaves.
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Big landowners could buy slaves cheaply and use them to cultivate their
latifundia
estates at low cost—thus ‘Cato’s slaves received a tunic and a blanket every year and ate no meat’.
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It was much more expensive to employ a landless Roman peasant with a family to raise, so those who lost their land found it difficult to get anything other than temporary, seasonal work.

The slave population grew massively until, by the 1st century BC, there were two million slaves—compared with a free population of 3.25 million. The bare figures understate the importance of slavery to the economy, since the bulk of the slaves were adults, while the free population included many children. What is more, at any point in time one in eight adult male citizens would be in the armed forces.
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If slaves became a major, possibly
the
major, labour force in the republic, this did not mean the mass of citizens benefited from their presence. Slave labour led to the impoverishment of free labour, as shown by the way the numbers of the free population stagnated or even fell as the Roman state went from strength to strength. Brunt relates how ‘the poor could not afford to marry and, if married, to raise children. Families were limited by abortion and infanticide, if not by contraception’.
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Many children abandoned by poor parents would end up in the slave markets: ‘The impoverishment of so many Italians was itself a function of the huge importations of slaves’.
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A H M Jones came to the same conclusion: ‘The vast import of slaves increased the destitution the Italian peasantry’.
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Such class polarisation bred a new wave of civil conflicts—a wave much bloodier than the previous clashes between Plebeians and Patricians.

Tiberius Gracchus won a tribuneship in 133 BC. He was an aristocrat worried by the increased poverty of the mass of peasants, and was motivated partly by concern for the military security of the republic. He could see that the peasant backbone of the Roman army was slowly being destroyed by the influx of slaves, while a formidable slave revolt in Sicily had highlighted the dangers in this way of organising agriculture: ‘Though he spoke with great emotion and probably with sincerity about the plight of the poor who had fought for their country, the interest of the state was probably uppermost in his mind; it was to this that he subordinated the interests of his own class’.
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Nevertheless, his programme excited the poorer peasants and infuriated the major part of the rich senatorial class. It involved distributing large areas of public land farmed by the big landowners to the poor. The rural poor flooded into Rome to back his proposal, covering the walls of the city with placards and ensuring it was passed by the republic’s assembly. The senators were horrified. They waited until the peasants had left Rome for the harvest and then took action. A body of senators insisted Tiberius was ‘betraying the constitution’ and clubbed him to death. His followers were executed.
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The repression did not stop the seething discontent among the poor farmers, and history repeated itself ten years later. Tiberius’s brother Gaius was elected tribune and dominated Roman politics for the next three years, with support from the peasantry and some backing from a layer of the new rich, the
equites
. The consul (supreme magistrate) Optimus distributed arms to the Senate’s supporters and used 3,000 mercenaries from Crete to murder Gaius and execute up to 3,000 of his supporters.
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Such were the glorious, ‘civilised’ traditions of the Roman Senate.

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.
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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.