Thus were the provinces compassed about with a network of varying conditions, which linked them to Rome by every kind of tie. Even if the old policy of “divide et impera” lay at the bottom of this diversity of legal status, better conditions being held out as the reward of loyalty, devotion, and service to the supreme government, as a means of attaching the influential and ambitious to the Roman interest, yet this provincial organisation was a logical outcome of the political and juridical system developed under the republic.
The Roman government did not aim at uniformity or centralisation. Augustus and his immediate successors merely transferred to their provincial dominions the typical organisation evolved by the senate for the races and communities of Italy, and the relations of the various communities with Rome were ordered according to their conduct and loyalty by contracts and concessions. Every grade of political rank was represented, from the full rights of Roman citizenship in the colonies and municipia to the Italian and Latin law of the emancipated communes and the status of the subject cities, which last were under the jurisdiction of the local governor in all public affairs, whether administrative or judicial. Even these retained a shadow of self-government and independence in the right of electing their civic magistrates, subject to certain restrictions, in the unhindered continuance of religious and communal associations, and the ownership of municipal property.
Thus in all parts of the provinces we come upon evidences of revived prosperity, a well-ordered state of things in legal matters, and a society animated by interests of commerce, industry, and art. Where writers are mute, the splendid monuments of architecture, the remains of temples and public halls, theatres and amphitheatres, baths and aqueducts, bear witness with no uncertain voice.
It was otherwise in the capital and in Italy. Here also the monarchy succeeded to the heritage of the republic, but found a condition of social disorder past remedy. Agrarian distress and conflict, which had been at work since the days of the Gracchi, consumed the vigour, prosperity, and vital spirits of the races of middle and lower Italy. The civil wars with their proscriptions and confiscations, the settlement of brutalised soldiers, unfit for agriculture and the labours of peace, in the most beautiful and fertile regions, the cultivation of the fields by hordes of slaves, and the absorption of large districts into private estates or latifundia, had almost annihilated the free peasant class of earlier times and had filled the peninsula with an alien population, bound to the soil by no ties of affection or association, linked by no natural piety to the paternal roof or the inherited acres. The honest, industrious, and thrifty peasantry of primitive times had vanished, the ownership of the soil had passed, in part, into the hands of the rich, who transformed the arable land into parks and gardens, groves and fish-ponds, for the adornment of their country-seats, or who, from greed of gain, used them as pasture for their flocks and herds, or as vineyards and olive gardens, with a view to the trade in wool, wine, or oil; in part, they had been assigned to veterans as a recompense for military service. In the places where free peasant families had led a quiet life in numerous villages and homesteads, and had cultivated their cornfields with assiduous industry, might now be seen the dungeon-like lodgings of purchased slaves or the half-ruinous dwellings of foreign legionaries, who reluctantly and sullenly applied themselves to unfamiliar labours and cares.
To add to the general wretchedness, numerous robber bands infested the country, and constituted a danger to liberty, life, and property. In the fair and fruitful valley of the Po alone, but recently incorporated into the Roman body politic, prosperity and security prevailed amidst settled conditions, and trade and industry flourished in populous cities. Patavium, Cremona, Placentia, and Parma provided Italy with woollen cloth and carpets, and supplied the army with salt meat.
The state of things in the capital was no more satisfactory. More than half of the inhabitants—estimated at this time at about two millions—belonged to the slave class, and were dispersed in the houses and villas of the wealthy, where they performed the various offices indispensable in a great household. These included not merely the tasks and services which fall to the share of domestics and menials among ourselves, but such functions as in modern times are left to artisans; such as the making of clothes, the preparation of food-stuffs, building, and the manufacture of household utensils. This multitude of slaves ministered to the luxury and ease of the senatorial or knightly families. The number of the latter can at no time have amounted to more than ten thousand, and many of them, in all likelihood, did not possess much more than the fortune required by law—1,200,000 sesterces [£6,912 or $34,560] for a senator, and the third part of this sum for a member of the knightly class.
Statue of Augustus in the Vatican
The whole body of the population then remaining (some 1,200,000 souls) consisted of the free inhabitants of the metropolis, most of whom lived from hand to mouth without any definite means of support. Of these a large proportion were aliens and freedmen. Almost the only occupations open to them were retail trading and traffic in the necessaries of daily life, or posts as subordinate clerks and officials; for most trades and manufactures were carried on by slaves for their masters’ profit, while wholesale trade and financial affairs were almost entirely in the hands of knights and revenue farmers, who frequently took up their abode in the large provincial cities for this purpose. Consequently, great as were the riches which poured into the metropolis every year from all quarters under heaven, there was no well-to-do middle class, the groundwork of every healthy political society; the influx of wealth only increased the luxuries and enjoyments of the aristocratic class, the gulf between the senatorial and knightly nobility and the populace of the capital was nowhere bridged over, nor was there any transition or compromise between the palaces of ostentatious and gormandising luxury and the hovels of the poverty-stricken and starving masses.
The dying republic had suffered under this incongruity, and whatever efforts Augustus might make to mitigate the evil, it was too deep-seated to be radically cured. The number of citizens who had to be maintained by regular donations of provisions from the public storehouses and by charitable gifts amounted to half a million, and yet this aid was but an inadequate makeshift; many of those disqualified to receive it were in no better case. There were thousands of free Romans who had no shelter but the public halls and colonnades of the temples, whose hopes were set upon the luck of the next minute, whose cares did not extend beyond the coming morrow.
The distress was the less capable of remedy because, under the most galling circumstances, the free Roman cherished the proud consciousness that he was a member of the ruling race, and was withheld by his innate pride of nationality and hereditary prejudice from the humble tasks which furnished the alien, the freedman, and the slave with a tolerable livelihood and occasionally with wealth. He felt it less disgraceful to starve or live upon alms and gifts than to labour with his hands; he scorned the physical toils of agriculture and handicraft, and the trouble of serving another; but he had no scruples about begging for his living, and regarded the distributions of corn and the popular entertainments as no more than his due. The free beggar looked haughtily upon the bedizened slave, whose alms he took as he would have taken the fruit of the woodland tree or the draught from a spring. The easy life of the capital attracted needy and indolent persons from all parts of Italy to Rome, the city swarmed with beggars and vagrants, with idlers and proletarians, who all claimed their maintenance from the state.