Rome: An Empire's Story (16 page)

Beyond the family extended webs of patronage, that complex of relationships that connected powerful Romans to their freeborn clients of various kinds. Patronage meant exchanges of favours and respect between people of different status or standing.
³
It included the senior senator offering support to a younger one, the landowner helping out a poorer neighbour, and the backing provided by a patron of the arts for poets: it faded out into the social dimensions of the legally enforceable dependence of ex-slaves, tenants, and debtors. The powerful could offer their social subordinates allowances,
loans of capital, or positions as managers of businesses and the occasional meal. Relationships of this kind were in principle inheritable, and some lesser families probably did remain in the orbit of larger ones for a few generations. The returns might be financial or presented as political support— although it was impolite to mention it—and urban clients also provided an entourage on formal occasions. To their grander friends—younger senators on the make,
equestrians
, and members of municipal aristocracies—the powerful could make connections, and perhaps obtain for them through their brokerage magistracies, priesthoods, social promotions, and the like. Friends also felt an obligation to help the widows and orphaned children of their connections. Orators offered free representation in the courts for their greater and lesser friends, and
literati
read and listened to each other’s compositions. For these services, the return was gratitude, and the reputation of a man who honoured his social obligations, his
officia
.

Patronage offered many models and metaphors for imperial rule. Provincial communities who wished to prosecute governors for corruption needed to first find a senator who would represent them as
patronus
: some were honoured for the service by Greek cities.
⁴
Roman generals on occasion became the protectors of foreign communities, first in Italy and then overseas.
⁵
Some bonds endured for a surprisingly long time. When Cicero was consul, in 63
BC
, a group of conspirators tried to get the support of the Gallic Allobroges: they were not persuaded and exposed the plot, but did so by approaching Cicero through a minor senator named Fabius Sanga, whose ancestor had originally defeated them in the 120s. The language of patronage could be applied to relations between entire peoples and the Roman state as a whole. During the late Republic various foreign peoples and kings were formally hailed as ‘friends and allies’ of the Roman people.
⁶
No one in Rome would have understood this as a relationship between equals. All the same the relationship carried a real sense of mutual obligations. When Rome was divided against itself, these relationships might draw in foreigners. Sallust opens his account of the war against the Numidian prince Jugurtha with Scipio Aemilanus advising his young ally to seek the friendship of the Roman people as a whole, not of individual Romans.
⁷
The civil wars of the 40s and 30s
BC
were fought mainly outside Italy, and involved tribes and kings from all around the empire: Cleopatra in Egypt, Herod in Judaea, Juba of Mauretania were among those trying to guess future winners in Roman politics. That problem only resolved itself with the end of political pluralism. The emperor became the ultimate source of all benefits, senatorial patrons
increasingly acted as brokers connecting their clients to imperial largess, and Augustus boasted in his autobiography how distant German tribes had sent envoys seeking his friendship and that of the Roman people.
⁸

Slavery and the Roman Economy

Slavery and the family acquired more and more functions as Roman power expanded over the last centuries
BC
. Nowhere is this clearer than in the management of the public and private proceeds of empire.

Perhaps most original was the development of legal devices to enable these institutions to be used more effectively to manage economic activity.
⁹
A good example is provided by the
peculium
, an amount of property that an individual might use, despite the fact that the ultimate owner was the head of the household. Families needed all their adult members to be able to operate as effective economic agents: a
peculium
allowed a son to run a farm, or to buy and sell goods without constant reference to his father. By allowing some slaves a
peculium
they could act as commercial agents and farm managers or could run shops or tenements. It became common for some slaves to retain money they earned with the intention of eventually buying their freedom from their owners: the sum would allow the master to replace the slave, and he retained the services of a freedman. Augustus allowed soldiers a
peculium
, a practical measure given some would spend decades at a great distance from their fathers. From the early second century
BC
, a law of agency, the
lex institoria
, supplemented these arrangements. Roman property owners were able to appoint free, freed, or even slave agents (
institores
) who could enter into contracts and incur liabilities on their behalf. Something of this kind was vital once some Romans had business interests and estates in several provinces, or might be engaged in long-distance trade or contracts to provision distant Roman armies. Yet another example, also from the early second century, is the development of partnerships (
societates
), originally a device to allow heirs to manage an inheritance jointly, but now adapted to allow a number of parties to pool their assets and share the profits and losses of common enterprises. This was especially useful as the potential scale of economic activities increased: the Elder Cato is said to have joined in a partnership of fifty to fund a commercial voyage.
¹⁰
The greatest public contracts of the late Republic—the collection of five years of public revenues from the province of Asia is the most famous example—demanded huge
financial guarantees. Partnership was vital to enterprises of this sort. Other empires faced similar problems but dealt with them in different ways. Early modern Europe developed the joint-stock company as a means of pooling capital and risk. Rome strengthened and employed the institutions of the family and slavery.

The economic sphere in which we can best track change is agriculture. It is not clear how early some Romans started to acquire multiple properties up and down the peninsula: for the fourth and third centuries there is much more evidence of colonial and other settlement. Archaeological evidence for villa building and an increased concern with surplus production is scarce in many parts of Italy before the late second century
BC
. Literary accounts of tranquil rural retreats begin even later. But around 160
BC
, Cato the Elder wrote a treatise
On Farming
, which borrowed from earlier Greek manuals on farming, yet was adapted to Roman needs. It includes, for example, lists of the Italian towns in which the best items of various kinds of equipment can be purchased. At its heart is a thoroughly Roman model of slavery. Cato’s prescriptions suit a moderate-sized farm practising a mixed agriculture based on the most common Italian crops. It produced a little of everything to supply the needs of the servile workforce, the farm manager, and the owner, but was also designed to produce a surplus for the market.

The market for agricultural produce was a growing one in the second century
BC
. Powering this was urbanization. The city of Rome probably already had more than 100,000 inhabitants. It was expanding rapidly as a result of the public spending organized by the censors, and perhaps too because colonization had stopped at the end of the 170s. After the destruction of Corinth in 146
BC
it had also became the central commercial hub of the western Mediterranean. As the proportion of the population who did not live on the land grew, so did the demand for foodstuffs. Importing from a distance was expensive and risky: Rome would resort to this eventually, as the city approached a million souls in the reign of Augustus. But for now there was a simpler solution. The confiscation of land from disloyal allies after the Hannibalic war had increased the amount of public property, and wars of overseas conquest had enriched some at least of the landowning classes. Some of this wealth they used to purchase farms, some of it to invest in them. Slaves, in the period of overseas expansion, offered a cheap workforce. Capital-intensive agriculture became a way that short-term windfalls of booty could be transformed into ventures that would make money in the long term. That was the logic to which Cato responded. There was, in fact,
a widespread and consistent interest in ways of improving the value of farmland. Varro produced a longer treatise on agriculture in the early 30s
BC
, and by the time Columella and Pliny were writing in the later first century
AD
they could evidently draw on a library of agronomical works. At the heart of all of them was slave labour.
¹¹

Cato wrote for landowners who were planting vineyards, equipping their farms with mills and presses, building storage facilities, purchasing iron farming equipment and, to use it, slaves. The farm he envisaged was run by a manager with a permanent staff of a couple of dozen slaves, supplemented when needed, as for the vintage, by the casual labour of free peasants or townsfolk.
¹²
Slaves offered a core workforce that could be worked exceptionally hard, the sick and old could be easily disposed of, no idle mouths need be tolerated, and the workforce could be increased or decreased in size easily enough. Slaves were not subject to military levies. Cato’s recommendations have horrified many for the banality of their cruelty. The production of grain and wine were the key market-oriented enterprises. Landowners also exploited non-agricultural resources on their estates, such as clay-pits and woodland. Clay-pits were vital for making the pottery container
amphorae
in which wine and oil were exported and the vats called
dolia
used for storage. The city of Rome was greedy for bricks and tiles. Some properties could supply timber and firewood. Farms close to Rome developed irrigated fruit and vegetable gardening, the raising of fowl, bee keeping, and even the cultivation of game of various kinds.
¹³
Property owners also invested in transport infrastructure, they built markets for fresh produce, and rented out shops to their clients along the frontages of their homes. At all stages of this economic growth the propertied classes led the way. No new commercial classes emerged, as the capital came from the social elites and they entrusted the management of these enterprises to their clients, freed-men, and slaves.
¹⁴

Roman landowners needed farm bailiffs, building managers, shopkeepers, and supervisors of small workshops, trusted representatives to collect rent from urban and rural tenants, to conduct business in distant ports, and to manage the complex bookkeeping on each estate and of the household as a whole. Those who dealt with contracts or had to report or else receive written instructions had to be literate. Landowners depended on numerate individuals to manage what must have been complex flows of cash, to record and chase arrears, and to check the returns on loans. They used slave and ex-slave secretaries, some of whom travelled with them wherever they went,
assisting in their official business as well as their private affairs. Slaves and freedmen provided for all this.
¹⁵

Why slaves? Roman society had no equivalent of the educated but relatively poor urban classes who supplied Victorian entrepreneurs with their waged clerical assistants. The citizen army produced no retired officers with the kind of generalized administrative experience depended on today in many sectors of business and government. Nor did the freeborn have access to anything like the social and commercial institutions that today allow those with talent and energy to develop career paths to positions of increasing responsibility. Slaves, on the other hand, were malleable. Some were highly educated, indeed most Roman education took place within aristocratic households. Owned for long periods they could be trained and disciplined to suit their masters’ needs. Most slaves were completely detached from the societies in which they had grown up, or else they were ‘home-bred’: neither group had any real hope of achieving better conditions except with their owners’ support. Besides, slaves were utterly dependent on their masters.
¹⁶
The sanctions for disobedience or dishonesty were horrifying. It was in principle illegal to kill a slave, deliberately at least, although who would bring a case against a master? But slaves might be routinely confined, beaten, even tortured, and there were many lesser sanctions. Cato recommended access to slave women be used as an incentive. Some slaves were allowed to start families, but their partner and children could be sold at a master’s whim. Slaves might hope for softer jobs and their eventual freedom, but they could be reassigned to hard labour if the master preferred. Was there a connection too between the Romans’ increasingly autocratic treatment of the enemies and their habitual command over their slaves? It is difficult to test such a thesis, but reading Cato on his slaves it is difficult to forget him ending every public speech he made at the end of his life with the words
Delenda est Carthago
, ‘and Carthage must be destroyed’.

Cato’s ideal farm would have looked tiny to later generations. Purpose-built villas with slave quarters appear in the last century
BC
, often equipped with luxurious residential quarters. A great mansion excavated at Settefinestre in Tuscany provides a vivid model. An entire urban mansion, secluded garden included, has been transplanted into the countryside and bolted onto a working farm. When the master was present, he would arrive with servile attendants to look after his every need and desire. Meanwhile a very different category of slaves worked his vineyards, his fields, his mills, and his potteries. Most agricultural slaves were not made to work in chains—hardly practical in most circumstances—but many were branded or wore collars. Even worse were the conditions of the slaves that worked in the mines. And Apuleius, in his novel the
Golden Ass
, provides a horrific description of a grain-mill where slaves ground grain by turning a horizontally mounted wheel in unbearable heat.