LITMIR.BIZ

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its own victories. The oligarchy of a single city could not hold the Mediterranean together in a unitary polity – it had been outgrown by the very scale of its success. The final century of Republican conquest, which took the legions to the Euphrates and the Channel, was accompanied by spiralling social tensions within Roman society itself – the direct outcome of the very triumphs that were being regularly won abroad. Peasant agitation for land had been stifled by the suppression of the Cracchi. But it now reappeared in new and menacing forms, within the army itself. Constant conscription had steadily weakened and reduced the whole small-holder class as such: but its economic aspirations lived on and now found expression in the mounting pressures from the time of Marius onwards for allocations of land to discharged veterans – the bitter survivors of the military duties that lay so heavily on the Roman peasantry. The senatorial aristocracy profited enormously from the financial sacking of the Mediterranean that succeeded progressive annexations by Rome, making boundless fortunes in tribute, extortion, land and slaves: but it was utterly unwilling to provide even a modicum of compensation to the soldiery whose fighting yielded these unheard-of gains to it. Legionaries were meanly paid and brusquely dismissed, without any solatium for long periods of service in which they not only risked their lives but often lost their property at home too. To have paid them bounties on discharge would have meant taxing the possessing classes, however slightly, and this the ruling aristocracy refused to consider. The result was to create an inherent tendency within the later Republican armies to a deflection of military loyalty away from the State, towards successful generals who could guarantee their soldiers plunder or donatives by their personal power. The bond between legionary and commander came increasingly to resemble that between patron and client in civilian life: from the epoch of Marius and Sulla onwards, soldiers looked to their generals for economic rehabilitation, and generals used their soldiers for political advancement. Armies came to be instruments of popular commanders, and wars started to become private ventures of ambitious consuls: Pompey in Bithynia, Crassus in Parthia, Caesar in Gaul, determined their own strategic plans of conquest or aggression.¹⁹ The factional rivalries which had traditionally rent municipal politics were consequently transferred onto a military stage, much vaster than the narrow confines of Rome itself. The inevitable result was to be the outbreak of full-scale civil wars.

      At the same time, if peasant distress was the subsoil of the military turbulence and disorder of the late Republic, the plight of the urban masses acutely sharpened the crisis of senatorial power. With the extension of the Empire, the capital city of Rome itself increased uncontrollably in size. Growing rural drift from the land was combined with massive imports of slaves, to produce a vast metropolis. By the time of Caesar, Rome probably contained a population of some 750,000 – surpassing even the largest cities of the Hellenistic world. Hunger, disease and poverty squeezed the crowded slums of the capital, filled with artisans, labourers and petty-shopkeepers, whether slave, manumitted or freeborn.²⁰ The urban mob had been skilfully mobilized by noble manoeuvres against agrarian reformers in the 2nd century – an operation repeated once again with the abandonment of Catiline by the Roman plebs, which succumbed in time-honoured fashion to oligarchic propaganda against an ‘incendiary’ enemy of the State, to whom only Etrurian small-holders remained faithful to the end. But this was the last such episode. Thereafter, the Roman proletariat seems to have broken away irreversibly from senatorial tutelage; its mood became increasingly threatening and hostile to the traditional political order in the closing years of the Republic. Given the virtual absence of any solid or serious police force in a teeming city of three-quarters of a million inhabitants, the immediate mass pressure which urban riots could bring to bear in crises of the Republic was considerable. Orchestrated by the tribune Clodius, who armed sections of the city’s poor in the 50’s, the urban proletariat obtained a free grain dole for the first time in 53 B.C. – henceforward a permanent fact of Roman political life: the number of its recipients had risen to 320,000 by 46 B.C. Moreover, it was popular clamour that gave Pompey the extraordinary army commands which set in motion the final military disintegration of the senatorial state; popular enthusiasm for Caesar that rendered him so menacing to the aristocracy a decade later; and popular welcome that ensured him his triumphal reception in Rome after the crossing of the Rubicon. After Caesar’s death, it was once again the popular uproar in the streets of Rome at the absence of his heir that forced the Senate to plead for Augustus’s acceptance of renewed consular and dictatorial powers in 22–19 B.C., the definitive entombment of the Republic.

      Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally of all, the self-protective immobilism and haphazard misgovernment of the Roman nobility in the conduct of its rule over the provinces rendered it increasingly unfit to manage a cosmopolitan empire. Its exclusive privileges were incompatible with any progressive unification of its overseas conquests. The provinces as such were still helpless to put up any serious resistance to its rapacious egoism. But Italy itself, the first province to achieve formal civic parity after a violent rebellion in the previous generation, was not. The Italian gentry had won juridical integration into the Roman community, but had not hitherto broken into the inner circle of senatorial office and power. With the eruption of the final round of civil wars between the Triumvirs, its opportunity for decisive political intervention had come. The provincial gentry of Italy flocked to Augustus, self-proclaimed defender of its traditions and prerogatives against the ominous and outlandish orientalism of Marcus Antonius and his camp.²¹ It was their adhesion to his cause, with the famous oath of allegiance sworn by ‘tota Italia’ in 32, which ensured the victory of Actium. It is significant that each of the three civil wars which determined the fate of the Republic followed the same geographical pattern: they were all won by the side which controlled the West, and lost by the party based on the East, despite its much greater wealth and resources. Pharsala, Philippi and Actium were all fought out in Greece, the advance-post of the defeated hemisphere. The dynamic centre of the Roman imperial system was shown once again to be in the Western Mediterranean. But whereas Caesar’s original territorial base had been the barbarian provinces of Gaul, Octavian forged his political bloc in Italy itself – and his victory proved in consequence less praetorian and more lasting.

      The new Augustus garnered supreme power by uniting behind him the multiple forces of discontent and disintegration within the later Republic. He was able to rally the desperate urban plebs and weary peasant conscripts against a small and hated governing elite, whose opulent conservatism exposed it to ever greater popular contumely: and above all, he relied on the Italian provincial gentry who now sought their share of office and honour in the system which they had helped to build up. A stable, universal monarchy emerged from Actium, because it alone could transcend the narrow municipalism of the senatorial oligarchy in Rome. The Macedonian monarchy had been suddenly superimposed on a vast, alien continent and had failed to produce a unified ruling class to govern it post facto, despite Alexander’s possible awareness that this was the central structural problem it faced. The Roman monarchy of Augustus, by contrast, punctually arrived when its hour struck, neither too early nor too late: the critical passage from city-state to universal empire – the familiar cyclical transition of classical Antiquity – was accomplished with signal success under the Principate.

      The most dangerous tensions of the later Republic were now lowered by a series of astute policies, designed to restabilize the whole Roman social order. First and foremost, Augustus provided allotments of land for the thousands of soldiers demobilized after the civil wars, financing many of them out of his personal fortune. These grants – like those of Sulla before them – were probably mostly at the expense of other small-holders, who were evicted to make room for home-coming veterans, and hence did little to improve the social situation of the peasantry as a whole or alter the general pattern of agrarian property in Italy;²² but they did effectively pacify the demands of the critical minority of the peasant class in arms, the key section of the rural population. Pay on active service had already been doubled by Caesar, an increase maintained under the Principate. More important still, from A.D. 6 onwards, veterans received regular cash bounties on discharge, worth thirteen years’ wages, which were paid out of a specially created military treasury financed by modest sales and inheritance taxes on the propertied classes of Italy. Such measures had been resisted to the death by the senatorial oligarchy, to their undoing: with the inauguration of the new system, discipline and loyalty returned to the army, which was trimmed from 50 to 28 legions, and converted into a permanent, professional force.²³ The result was to make

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