LITMIR.BIZ

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in time of war. In this, it followed the example of Sparta, although its central military control of allied troops was always much greater. But Rome was also able to achieve an ultimate integration of these allies into its own polity which no Greek city had ever envisaged. It was the peculiar social structure of Rome which permitted this. Even the most oligarchic Greek polis of the classical epoch basically rested on a median body of propertied citizens, and precluded extreme economic disparities of wealth and poverty within the city. The political authoritarianism of Sparta – the exemplar of Hellenic oligarchy – did not mean a class polarization within the citizenry: in fact, as we have seen, it was accompanied by marked economic egalitarianism in the classical epoch, probably including allocation of inalienable state holdings to each Spartiate precisely to ensure hoplites against the type of ‘proletarianization’ which overtook them in Rome.⁵ The classical Greek polis, whatever its degree of relative democracy and oligarchy, retained a civic unity rooted in the rural property of its immediate locality: it was for the same reason territorially inelastic – incapable of an extension without loss of identity. The Roman Constitution, by contrast, was not merely oligarchic in form: it was much more deeply aristocratic in content, because behind it lay an economic stratification of Roman society of quite another order. It was this which rendered possible an extension of Republican citizenship outwards to comparable ruling classes in the allied cities of Italy, who were socially akin to the Roman nobility itself, and had benefited from Roman conquests overseas. The Italian cities finally revolted against Rome in 91 B.C., when their demand for the Roman franchise was refused – something no Athenian or Spartan ally had ever requested. Even then, their war aim was a peninsular Italian state with a capital and Senate, in avowed imitation of the unitary Roman order itself, rather than any return to scattered municipal independence.⁶ The Italian rebellion was militarily defeated in the long and bitter struggle of the so-called Social War. But amidst the subsequent turmoil of the Civil Wars between the Marian and Sullan factions within the Republic, the Senate could concede to the basic political programme of the allies, because the character of the Roman governing class and its Constitution facilitated a viable extension of citizenship to the other Italian cities, ruled by an urban gentry similar in character to the Senatorial class itself, with the wealth and leisure to participate in the political system of the Republic, even from a distance. The Italian gentry by no means consummated its political aspirations for central office within the Roman State immediately, and its ulterior ambitions after the grant of citizenship were to be a powerful force for social transformations at a later date. But their civic integration nevertheless represented a decisive step for the future structure of the Roman Empire as a whole. The relative institutional flexibility which it demonstrated gave Rome a signal advantage in its imperial ascent: it meant an avoidance of either of the two poles between which Greek expansion had divided and foundered – premature and impotent closure of the city-state or meteoric royal triumphalism at the expense of it. The political formula of Republican Rome marked a notable advance in comparative efficacy.

      Yet the decisive innovation of Roman expansion was ultimately economic: it was the introduction of the large-scale slave latifundium for the first time in Antiquity. Greek agriculture had, as we have seen, employed slaves widely; but it was itself confined to small areas, with a meagre population, for Greek civilization always remained precariously coastal and insular in character. Moreover, and above all, the slave-tilled farms of Attica or Messenia were usually of very modest size – perhaps an average of some 30 to 60 acres, at most. This rural pattern was, of course, linked to the social structure of the Greek polis, with its absence of huge concentrations of wealth. Hellenistic civilization had, by contrast, witnessed enormous accumulations of landed property in the hands of dynasties and nobles, but no widespread agricultural slavery. It was the Roman Republic which first united large agrarian property with gang-slavery in the countryside on a major scale. The advent of slavery as an organized mode of production inaugurated, as it had in Greece, the classical phase proper of Roman civilization, the apogee of its power and culture. But whereas in Greece it had coincided with the stabilization of small farms and a compact citizen corps, in Rome it was systematized by an urban aristocracy which already enjoyed social and economic dominion over the city. The result was the new rural institution of the extensive slave latifundium. The manpower for the enormous holdings which emerged from the late 3rd century onwards was supplied by the spectacular series of campaigns which won Rome its mastery of the Mediterranean world: the Punic, Macedonian, Jugurthine, Mithridatic and Gallic wars, which poured military captives into Italy to the profit of the Roman ruling class. At the same time, successive ferocious struggles fought on the soil of the peninsula itself – the Hannibalic, Social and Civil Wars – delivered into the grasp of the senatorial oligarchy or its victorious factions large territories expropriated from the defeated victims of these conflicts, especially in Southern Italy.⁷ Moreover, these same external and internal wars dramatically accentuated the decline of the Roman peasantry, which had once formed the robust small-holder base of the city’s social pyramid. Constant warfare involved endless mobilization; the assidui citizenry called to the legions year after year died in thousands under their standards, while those who survived them were unable to maintain their farms at home, which were increasingly absorbed by the nobility. From 200 to 167 B.C., 10 per cent or more of all free Roman adult males were permanently conscripted: this gigantic military effort was only possible because the civilian economy behind it could be manned to such an extent by slave-labour, releasing corresponding manpower reserves for the armies of the Republic.⁸ Victorious wars in their turn provided more slave-captives to pump back into the towns and estates of Italy.

      The final outcome was the emergence of slave-worked agrarian properties of a hitherto unknown immensity. Prominent nobles like Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus could own over 200,000 acres in the 1st century B.C. These latifundia represented a new social phenomenon, which transformed the Italian countryside. They did not, of course, necessarily or invariably form consolidated blocks of land, farmed as single units.⁹ The typical pattern was for the latifundist to possess a large number of medium-sized villa estates, sometimes contiguous but perhaps equally often distributed across the country, designed for optimal surveillance by various bailiffs and agents. Even such dispersed holdings, however, were notably larger than their Greek predecessors, often exceeding 300 acres (500 iugera) in extent; while consolidated estates like the Younger Pliny’s seat in Tuscany might be 3,000 acres or more in size.¹⁰ The rise of the Italian latifundia led to a great extension of pastoral ranching, and the inter-cropping of wine and olives with cereal cultivation. The influx of slave-labour was so great that by the late Republic, not only was Italian agriculture recast by it, but trade and industry were overwhelmingly invaded by it too: perhaps 90 per cent of the artisans in Rome itself were of slave origin.¹¹ The nature of the gigantic social upheaval that Roman imperial expansion involved, and the basic motor-force that sustained it, can be seen from the sheer demographic transformation that it wrought. Brunt estimates that in 225 B.C. there were some 4,400,000 free persons in Italy, to 600,000 slaves; by 43 B.C., there were perhaps 4,500,000 free to 3,000,000 slave inhabitants – indeed there may actually have been a net decline in the total size of the free population, while the slave population quintupled.¹² Nothing like this had ever been seen in the Ancient World before. The full potential of the slave mode of production was for the first time unfolded by Rome, which organized and took it to a logical conclusion that Greece had never experienced. The predatory militarism of the Roman Republic was its main lever of economic accumulation. War brought lands, tributes and slaves; slaves, tributes and lands supplied the materiél for war.

      But the historical significance of the Roman conquests in the Mediterranean basin was, of course, by no means reducible simply to the spectacular fortunes of the senatorial oligarchy. The march of the legions accomplished a change much deeper than this, for the whole history of Antiquity. Roman power integrated the Western Mediterranean and its northern hinterlands into the classical world. This was the decisive achievement of the Republic, which in contrast with its diplomatic caution in the East, from the outset unleashed its annexationist drive essentially in the West. Greek colonial expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has been seen, took the form of a proliferation of urban foundations, first created from above by the Macedonian rulers themselves, then soon imitated from below by the local gentry of the region; and it occurred in a zone with an extremely long prior history of developed civilization, stretching back much further than that of Greece itself.

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