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THE original strength of Rome, like that of China, was that of a superior family-agriculture.
The evidences of the quality of the early agriculture of the "Old Latins" (prisci Latinii ) exist in the traditions of the later Romans, but not in actual history as in China. The traditions, however, have been confirmed by the revelations of modern excavations.
These excavations were carried out by Monsieur R. L. la Blanchère and described by him in the Memoires of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1 893.
Mr. Tenny Frank conveniently summarizes them in his well-known Economic History of Rome, 1927. Monsieur de la Blanchère exposed, he writes, "numerous relics from that remarkable period in Latium, traces of drains, tunnels and dams too little known . . . . By diverting the rain waters from the eroding mountain gullies into underground channels, the farmer not only checked a large part of the ordinary erosion of hillside farms but also saved the space usually sacrificed to the torrent-bed. It would be difficult to find another place where labour had been so lavishly expended to preserve arable land from erosion." In addition to underground channels, there were dams "of finely trimmed masonry . . . largely made of huge blocks weighing half a ton each . . . . It is impossible, after surveying such elaborate undertakings not to conclude that Latium in the sixth century was cultivated with an intensity that has seldom been equalled anywhere."
The soil itself was rich but not deep. It had at one period been enriched by the volcanic ash of more than fifty craters, long extinct, which can be found within twenty-five miles of Rome.
Thus the heroism of Rome began with an heroic agriculture upon a favoured soil, comparable on a small scale to that of the great engineering agriculture of the ancient Peruvians in the inhospitable valleys of the Andes.
Roman literature itself began with writers upon agriculture some four centuries later. These writers, though they constantly praise the virtues and skill of their ancestors, do not include--or such records have been lost--the engineering quality of their cultivation. The elder Pliny repeated the tradition of the populousness and prosperity of Latium of that period, its fifty flourishing villages, and modern excavations of their sites have confirmed his description. The Latin people were so strong and healthy, he asserts, that they had no need of physicians. Their high quality of manhood, exemplified by their military invincibility and their devotion to the soil, left an ineradicable impression upon their descendants; and the decadence of the family-farmers, which was seen in their own times, became the constant lament of the writers and the no less constant but useless endeavours of Roman statesmen to avert it and to restore the traditional virtues.
When, in the early days of her history, Rome fought for Latium, the farmers proved themselves sound warriors. Then began the magic story of her wide dominion. War followed upon war, and it was the military qualities of the intensive farmers in particular that brought about the triumphs of the State. In this they contrasted radically with the Chinese intensive farmers, who were exempted from military duty. In the frequent call to arms, occurred the first departure--no doubt an enforced and unavoidable departure for so small a state--from the primary partnership of the peasants with the soil. The soil suffered from the absence of the able-bodied men; its culture was left to the young and the old, while they were away. War was antagonistic to the soil's fertility.
There came the second Punic War (218-210 B.C.), and the invasion and devastation of Italy by one of the world's greatest commanders, Hannibal of Carthage. When, finally, Hannibal was expelled by the victorious farmers, the Roman senators were faced with a crisis similar to that which faced the early Han emperors and their ministers, after the building of the Great Wall and the abolition of the Tsing Tien system.
Many of the farmers had lost their lives and yet more had seen their farms destroyed in the tragic seventeen years. Was Rome to be restored to the first path of agriculture, that of peasant family farming, or was she to enter upon that of capitalistic farming? The senators or statesmen of Rome had no Tsing Tien system of the Chinese sages, no separation of agriculture from militarism as taught by the Hindu sages, to guide them. They earnestly desired the restoration of the peasant families. But they desired it for military reasons rather than for agricultural reasons. The military value of the farmer-warriors had never shown to greater advantage than against the terrible genius of Hannibal. Its restoration appeared the chief hope for the future to the Roman statesmen faced by immense new military responsibilities. They were committed to dominion and war.
But, great as was their desire for a restoration, it was beyond their grade and will. Rome had grown greatly in wealth and territory through the overthrow of her powerful rival. In the place of the farmer-warriors, who had lost their lives or land in the war, there were numbers of slaves from agricultural countries, to be bought cheaply by men with capital. Moreover, as a fundamental cause overriding all subsidiary ones, was the state of the soil itself. The soil had generally lost the high grade of fertility, which is necessary to small intensive farming; farms were in disorder; many were abandoned. Roman Italy's soil was in short in the same condition as was that of China after the death of the Emperor Chin Chi Huangti, the builder of the Great Wall.
In such cases degraded arable land, no longer yielding sufficient return to repay the labour spent upon it, can, for more immediate profit, be better turned into pasture than be restored to its original condition; it can be more easily aggregated into large estates requiring less intense personal labour and capable of being worked by cheap hired or slave labour. In Italy the slave gangs offered cheap labour in such abundance as to compare with that of modern agricultural machines. Feeding on the land and with the crudest living accommodation, the cost of their maintenance was minimal. Moreover, the success of the Romans in overcoming Carthage had won for her the cornfields of Sicily and those of a considerable part of Northern Africa, so that her urban populations could now be fed from overseas. This released much of the arable land of Italy for the profitable cultivation of the olive and the vine, and for the rearing of sheep, which, in view of the universal practice of wearing woollen clothes, had its especial value. The consequence was that the senators yielded to the pressure of events and allowed or encouraged capitalistic farming to take its course. The aristocratic families came to own nearly all the land, the seizure of which they legalized. "Since the aristocracy had given itself legal permission to buy out the small-holders, and in its new arrogance allowed itself with growing frequency to drive them out, the farms disappeared like rain drops in the sea," are the words of the famous historian, Theodor Mommsen.
The choice resulted in changes, which were to be repeated in more modern times in western peasantries and agriculture. Money, profit, the accumulation of capital and luxury, became the objects of landowning and not the great virtues of the soil and the farmers of few acres; small owners, striving to restore the fertility of their farms, fell into hopeless debt; the position of the moneylenders was reversed.
In the past that position was described by Porcius Cato in the following words: "Our ancestors considered and so ordained their laws that, while the thief should be cast in double damages, the usurer should make fourfold restitution. From this we may judge how much less desirable a citizen they esteemed the banker than the thief. When they sought to commend an honest man, they termed him a good husbandman, good farmer. This they rated the superlative of praise." (De Agricultura, Mr. F. Harrison's translation).
But now the positions were reversed. The moneylenders or bankers were no longer controlled, but grew in importance, as the good farmers, for all their efforts, failed to restore their farms, fell into irredeemable debt, surrendered their farms, and, unable even as labourers to compete with the slaves, added their numbers to the pauper population of the metropolis. Even those, who had been craftsmen and tradesmen, found little work, for they too met with the competition of the slaves, attached to the great families of the rich. So the chief material reason for family life, namely the continued work, generation after generation, upon the family land or at the family craft, was lost, and with it the ancestral virtues, morality and religion also vanished.
"The Equites, the upper middle class, were the great capitalists of the day," writes Lord Tweedsmuir in Julius Caesar, 1932. "They farmed the state rents and taxes, contracted for the armies, made fortunes in the slave trade, and controlled the banks. Usury was one of the main industries of the Roman world." Debt was general, but at the same time under the stimulus of capital and the opportunities which the provinces and trade offered to it, there was a period of immense material progress, comparable to that of the early part of the industrial era of modern times.
Meanwhile, the fate of Rome depended, as the fate of men depends, ultimately upon the fertility of the soil, from which they get their food and the chief raw materials for their manufactures. The story is one of notable advance in the newly conquered provinces, when the engineering skill and agricultural methods of the Romans were applied in place of those of less tutored peasants. Nevertheless, in spite of this, especially from the end of the second Punic war, a gradual loss of soil fertility, spreading outwards centrifugally from Latium and Italy to the provinces, took place. The one exception was Egypt. Egypt owed her fertility to the annual overflow of the Nile. That was beyond the influence of men. It may be conjectured that, together with the exceptional military and federative quality of the Romans, it was this perennial fertility of Egypt that gave to Rome her prolonged ascendancy.
The story of the gradual failure of fertility has been graphically described by Professor V: G. Simkhovitch in the thirty-first volume of the Political Science Quarterly of the Columbia University, 1916, in an article entitled "Rome's Fall Reconsidered."
He begins by collecting and quoting from the great Roman writers who were "quite conscious of Rome's progressive disintegration." The elder Pliny, for example, had no doubt about a chief factor in the degradation: "The large estates, the latifundia, were ruining Rome as well as the provinces." Seneca, one of the richest landowners, gave the same warning. Cicero, at an earlier time, reported the statement of the tribune Phillipus that "the entire commonwealth could not muster two thousand property owners."
Other writers stressed the moral corruption of the times. "What does ruinous time not impair?" wrote Horace, the poet. "The age of our parents, more degenerate than that of our grandfathers, make us even more worthless and we give birth to a still more vicious progeny. The great deeds of the Romans were the deeds of a sturdy farmer race, and these farmers' sons exist no longer." Columella, about A.D. 6o, opposed a general opinion "that the soil, worn out by long cultivation and exhausted, is suffering from old age," and attributed its degradation to the enforced and indifferent labour of the agricultural slaves, and to bad farming generally. To those who saw in frequent wars the cause of the deterioration of the soil, Columella replied that, though fields may be laid waste by an enemy, the fertility of the soil is not taken away or wasted; it remains to respond to good cultivation, when renewed.
The degradation, according to these writers, began first in Latium itstelf, closest to and most able to feed the great metropolis of Rome. Varro noted bad patches and foul or abandoned fields in- Latium, and two centuries later Columella referred to all Latium as a country where the people would have died of starvation, but for its share of Rome's imported corn.
"It seems to me," continues Professor Simkhovitch, after further quotations, "that the progressive exhaustion of Roman soil is completely established . . . . It was a long process and many were its stages."
At first the farm of seven jugera (a jugerurn was 5/8 acre) was sufficient for a family; then, in bad times due to wars and the absence of the farmer-warriors, it was ill-worked, then over worked and overstocked to make up for lost time, when the survivors of the war returned. So deterioration began. Loans did not help. Debt, due to a single bad season, can be paid, but under conditions of progressive soil deterioration, however gradual, debt correspondingly increases until its burden becomes no longer bearable, and the land falls into the hands of the monied classes. This fate fell upon the small, intensive farmers of Rome. It was not due to the lack of agricultural knowledge. "Nothing could be more startling than the Roman knowledge of rational and intensive agriculture." It was not due to debt. The fact that debt began when the failure of the soil's fertility began was symptomatic, not causative.
The spread of the degradation of the soil was centrifugal, from Latium outwards. The Roman armies moved outwards from Latium demanding land; victory gave more land to the farmers; excessive demands again brought exhaustion of fertility; again the armies moved outwards.
In her early days, says the professor, Italy was famous for her wheat; Greece, preceding her in her degradation of the soil, had imported wheat from Italy. Yet, after her seizure of Sicily from the Carthaginians, Italy depended mainly upon Sicilian fields for wheat. Thus the ring of movement in search of food widened outwards.
"Province after province was turned by Rome into a desert, for Rome's exactions naturally compelled greater exploitation of the conquered soil and its more rapid exhaustion. Province after province was conquered by Rome to feed the growing proletariat with its corn and to enrich the prosperous with its loot. The devastations of war abroad and at home helped the process along. The only exception to the rule of spoliation and exhaustion was Egypt, because of the overflow of the Nile. For this reason Egypt played a unique role in the Empire." Egypt was made a special imperial possession. It was carefully guarded. Not even senators or knights could visit it without the permission of the emperor, for, as Tacitus stated, a small force might hold Egypt and "by blocking up the plentiful corn country, reduce all Italy to a famine."
Sardinia, Sicily, Spain, and north-western Africa, as Roman granaries, were, like Italy, involved in the same process of exhaustion. Though the Romans were well aware of the dangers of deforestation to the land, their hills were denuded of their forests. The abandoned land of Latium and Campania turned into malarial swamps; that in north-western Africa and in parts of Asia turned into deserts. It was not war that led to depopulation. After the first increases in the numbers of the people due to the material progress of the Caesarian Empire, depopulation set in and proceeded throughout the longest period of peace Rome ever enjoyed. It was due to the loss of the fertility of the soil.
The "inner decay" of the Empire "was in the last analysis entirely based upon the endless stretches of barren, sterile, and abandoned fields of Italy and its Provinces . . . . Italy's great historians marvelled how sections of Italy, that in their times were almost entirely deserted, could in former days send forth legion after legion of invincible warriors . . . . Egypt was the only province which maintained its population."
It was not the intention of Professor Simkhovitch to advocate a history based only on soil fertility or its loss; still less to ascribe the fall of the western empire of Rome to that sole cause. The causes of that great historical catastrophe were manifold, as also were those that preserved China through the ages from a like fate. No historian would presume to isolate a single cause, nor indeed attempt to surpass or even simplify the last sad chapter of Gibbon's monumental record of Rome's fall. It is sufficient to have shown that both empires suffered periods of disaster; both were subject to invasions and conquests from peoples who originally came from the same great arid belt of Asia; both strove, amongst other means of strength and recovery, for the establishment of an independent family cultivation of the soil.
Rome failed and, before her fall, as a last final effort to gain food for the empire, she bound the agricultural community by law to the soil, and thus left the heritage of serfdom to western Europe. China, on the other hand, recurred again and again to the restoration and strengthening of family farming, and succeeded, after each catastrophe in her history, in regaining her authority and in expelling or absorbing her conquerors.
The Roman Empire was an epoch of such grandeur of achievement and power that it has captured the imagination of men, yet it left desolation in its wake. The Chinese Empire was also one of great, though less dazzling, achievements. At the present time it still survives, though deeply involved in the tragic disturbances of modern civilization, which is forcing it to join up upon the catastrophic second agricultural path.