LITMIR.BIZ

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basically in both context and character. Spain and Gaul – later Noricum, Rhaetia and Britain – were remote and primitive lands peopled by Celtic tribal communities – many with no history of contact at all with the classical world. Their integration into it posed problems of an altogether different order from that of the Hellenization of the Near East. For not only were they socially and culturally backward: they also represented interior land-masses of a type that classical Antiquity had hitherto never been able to organize economically. The original matrix of the city-state was the narrow littoral and the sea, and classical Greece had never relinquished it. The Hellenistic epoch had seen the intensive urbanization of the riparian cultures of the Near East, long based on fluvial irrigation and now partly reoriented towards the sea (a modification symbolized by the shift from Memphis to Alexandria). But the desert lay close behind the whole Southern and Eastern coast-line of the Mediterranean, so that the depth of settlement was never very great either in the Levant or North Africa. The Western Mediterranean, however, offered neither a littoral nor an irrigative system to the advancing Roman frontiers. Here, for the first time, classical Antiquity was confronted with great interior land-masses, devoid of previous urban civilization. It was the Roman city-state, that had developed the rural slave-latifundium, that proved capable of mastering them. The river-routes of Spain or Gaul assisted this penetration. But the irresistible impetus which carried the legions to the Tagus, the Loire, the Thames and the Rhine, was that of the slave mode of production fully unleashed on the land, without constrictions or impediments. It was in this epoch that probably the major single advance in the agrarian technology of classical Antiquity was registered: the discovery of the rotary mill for grinding corn, which in its two main forms was first attested in Italy and Spain in the mid 2nd century B.C.,¹³ concomitant with Roman expansion in the Western Mediterranean, and a sign of its rural dynamism. The successful organization of large-scale agrarian production by slave-labour was the precondition of the permanent conquest and colonization of the great Western and Northern hinterlands. Spain and Gaul remained, with Italy, the Roman provinces most deeply marked by slavery down to the final end of the Empire.¹⁴ Greek trade had permeated the East: Latin agriculture ‘opened up’ the West. Naturally, towns were founded by the Romans in the Western Mediterranean too, characteristically built along the banks of navigable rivers. The creation of a slave-worked rural economy itself depended on the implantation of a prosperous network of cities which represented the terminal points for its surplus produce, and its structural principle of articulation and control. Cordoba, Lyon, Amiens, Trier and hundreds of other towns were constructed. Their number never equalled that of the much older and more densely populated Eastern Mediterranean society, but it was far larger than that of the cities founded by Rome in the East.

      For Roman expansion into the Hellenistic zone followed a very different course from its pattern in the Celtic backlands of the West. It was for a long time much more hesitant and uncertain, oriented towards blocking interventions to check major disruptions of the existing state system (Philip V, Antiochus III), and creating client realms rather than conquered provinces.¹⁵ Thus it was characteristic than even after the rout of the last great Seleucid army at Magnesia in 198, no Eastern territory was annexed for another fifty years; and it was not until 129 B.C. that Pergamum passed peacefully into Roman administration, by the testament of its loyal monarch rather than by a senatorial volition, to become the first Asian province of the Empire. Thereafter, once the immense riches available in the East were fully realized in Rome, and army commanders gained escalating imperial powers abroad, aggression became more rapid and systematic, in the 1st century B.C. But the Republican regimes generally administered the profitable Asian provinces which their generals now seized from their Hellenistic rulers, with a minimum of social change or political interference, professing to have ‘liberated’ them from their royal despots, and contenting themselves with the lush tax returns of the region, There was no widespread introduction of agrarian slavery in the Eastern Mediterranean; the numerous war prisoners enslaved there were shipped westwards for employment in Italy itself. Royal estates were appropriated by Roman administrators and adventurers, but their labour systems were left effectively intact. The main innovation of Roman rule in the East occurred in the Greek cities throughout the region, where property qualifications were now imposed for municipal office – to align them more closely with the oligarchic norms of the Eternal City itself; in practice, this merely gave juridical codification to the de facto power of the local notabilities who dominated these towns already.¹⁶ A few specifically Roman urban colonies were created in the East by Caesar and Augustus, to settle Latin proletarians and veterans in Asia. But these left very little mark. Significantly, when a new wave of cities were built under the Principate (above all, in the Antonine epoch), they were essentially Greek foundations, consonant with the previous cultural character of the region. There was never any attempt to Romanize the Eastern provinces; it was the West which underwent the full brunt of Latinization. The language frontier – running from Illyricum to Cyrenaica – demarcated the two basic zones of the new imperial order.

      The Roman conquest of the Mediterranean in the last two centuries of the Republic, and the massive expansion of the senatorial economy which it promoted, was accompanied at home by a superstructural development without precedent in the Ancient world. For it was in this period that Roman civil law emerged in all its unity and singularity. Gradually developed from 300 B.C. onwards, the Roman legal system became essentially concerned with regulation of informal relationships of contract and exchange between private citizens. Its fundamental orientation lay in economic transactions – purchase, sale, hire, lease, inheritance, security – and their familial concomitants – matrimonial or testamentary. The public relationship of the citizen to the State, and the patriarchal relationship of the head of the family to his dependants, were marginal to the central development of legal theory and practice; the first was considered too mutable to be subject to systematic jurisprudence, while the second covered most of the inferior domain of crime.¹⁷ The real thrust of Republican jurisprudence was concerned with neither of these: it was not public or criminal law, but civil law governing suits between disputing parties over property, that formed the peculiar province of its remarkable advance. The development of a general legal theory as such was wholly new in Antiquity. It was the creation, not of State functionaries or of practising lawyers, but of specialized and aristocratic jurists who remained outside the process of litigation itself, furnishing opinions to the judiciary in actual court-cases only on questions of legal principle rather than matters of fact. Republican jurists, who had no official status, evolved a series of abstract ‘contractual figures’ applicable to the analysis of particular acts of commercial and social intercourse. Their intellectual bent was analytic rather than systematic, but the cumulative result of their work was the appearance, for the first time in history, of an organized body of civil jurisprudence as such. The economic growth of commodity exchange in Italy attendant on the construction of the Roman imperial system, founded on the extensive use of slavery, thus found its juridical reflection in the creation of an unexampled commercial law in the later Republic. The great, decisive accomplishment of the new Roman law was thus, appropriately enough, its invention of the concept of ‘absolute property’ – dominium ex jure Quiritium.¹⁸ No prior legal system had ever known the notion of an unqualified private property: ownership in Greece, Persia or Egypt had always been ‘relative’, in other words conditional on superior or collateral rights of other authorities and parties, or obligations to them. It was Roman jurisprudence that for the first time emancipated private ownership from any extrinsic qualifications or restraints, by developing the novel distinction between mere ‘possession’ – factual control of goods, and ‘property’ – full legal title to them. The Roman law of property, of which an extremely substantial sector was naturally devoted to ownership of slaves, represented the pristine conceptual distillation of the commercialized production and exchange of commodities within an enlarged State system, which Republican imperialism had made possible. Just as Greek civilization had been the first to disengage the absolute pole of ‘liberty’ from the political continuum of relative conditions and rights that had always prevailed before it, so Roman civilization was the first to separate the pure colour of ‘property’ from the economic spectrum of opaque and indeterminate possession that had typically preceded it. Quiritary ownership, the legal consummation of the extensive slave economy of Rome, was a momentous arrival, destined to outlive the world and age that had given birth to it.

      The Republic had won Rome

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