Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic / Edition 1

by Nathan Rosenstein

Overview

Historians have long asserted that during and after the Hannibalic War, the Roman Republic's need to conscript men for long-term military service helped bring about the demise of Italy's small farms and that the misery of impoverished citizens then became fuel for the social and political conflagrations of the late republic. Nathan Rosenstein challenges this claim, showing how Rome reconciled the needs of war and agriculture throughout the middle republic.

The key, Rosenstein argues, lies in recognizing the critical role of family formation. By analyzing models of families' needs for agricultural labor over their life cycles, he shows that families often had a surplus of manpower to meet the demands of military conscription. Did, then, Roman imperialism play any role in the social crisis of the later second century B.C.? Rosenstein argues that Roman warfare had critical demographic consequences that have gone unrecognized by previous historians: heavy military mortality paradoxically helped sustain a dramatic increase in the birthrate, ultimately leading to overpopulation and landlessness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469611075
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Series:	Studies in the History of Greece and Rome
Edition description:	1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nathan Rosenstein is professor of history at The Ohio State University. He is author of Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic and coeditor of War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica.

Read an Excerpt

Rome at War

Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic

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By Nathan Rosenstein

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2004 The University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8078-2839-4

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Chapter One

Agriculture in Italy from Hannibal to Tiberius Gracchus

Limits on aristocratic competition for honor, glory, wealth, and power protected the corporate interests of Rome's governing class as well as the well-being of the people it ruled during most of the middle and late republic. What was remarkable about the republican system was the fact that the elite had to impose these controls upon itself, unlike monarchies in which the interests of a ruler always set firm boundaries to his or her subjects' self-aggrandizement. By and large, the aristocracy's efforts were successful. Limits allowed aristocratic rivalry to help Rome win an empire and yet enjoy stable government until quite late in the game. But in one respect this process might appear to have fallen seriously short-indeed, no attempt to insist on a limit seems evident at all-and that was in the republic's propensity to go to war. Warfare and conquest constituted the paramount arena for the display of aristocratic virtus and the acquisition of prestige as well as the more tangible benefit of great wealth. Generals and others who served the republic by defending its interests and enlarging its imperium garnered laus and fama and laid the basis for a lasting auctoritas and often higher office. The aristocracy had an interest, therefore, in going to war often in order to provide its members with opportunities to advance themselves in the contention for eminence. But in allowing these competitive drives to be played out year after year in increasingly distant theaters of war, the aristocracy gradually undermined first the social and economic, then the military, and finally the civic foundations of the republic. Or so many historians aver. For nearly every scholar who has sought to explain the social and political turmoil of the Roman Republic's last hundred years has traced its origins to the impact of the city's second-century wars on Italy's small farmers-the men who manned the legions and furnished the army's allied contingents-when the city's demands for soldiers began to conflict fundamentally with the needs of husbandry.

Prior to 200 B.C. (or perhaps the Hannibalic War-opinions differ), conventional wisdom holds that war and agriculture blended together seamlessly. Campaigns were short, conducted close to home, and fought mainly in the summers when the crop cycle left farmers with little to do in their fields. The arrival of autumn brought an end to the fighting. Soldiers were mustered out of their legions and returned home to plant and cultivate the next year's crops until the following spring when military duty would again call them from their plows. All that changed with the wars of the late third and second centuries, however. Armies fighting abroad could not be discharged in the fall and then reconstituted at winter's end. Logistical and strategic imperatives dictated keeping them overseas year-round. Smallholders therefore lacked regular opportunities to return to their land before their terms of service expired or the war ended, and as a result their farms lacked the labor necessary to work them. Starvation threatened the families left behind; debts accumulated; and when (or, indeed, if) the men returned, they often could not pay them off owing to the years of fallow and neglect that had rendered their fields incapable of being easily returned to productivity. Families therefore sold or abandoned their lands or had them foreclosed. P. A. Brunt in his seminal article, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution," starkly illustrated their degradation:

The pathetic story Valerius Maximus (iv.4.6) tells of the consul Regulus will be remembered. During his absence for a year in Africa the steward of his farm of seven iugera had died; his hired man had run away with the farm stock, and his wife and children were in danger of starvation. Such must have been the fate, not of a consul and a noble in the third century, but of many a peasant in the second and first centuries. Thus even when the legionary was a man of some property, army service would soon reduce him to the same economic level as his proletarian comrades.

At the same time, dramatic changes elsewhere in the agricultural economy were completing the ruin of Italy's smallholders, developments that, ironically, the victories these same men were winning overseas had set in motion. Many members of Rome's and Italy's upper classes had grown rich from the spoils of war and the profits made in the course of the republic's conquests during the first half of the second century, particularly in the Hellenistic East. Lacking other outlets for their newly acquired capital, they began to invest it in the land that military service was forcing small farmers to relinquish. But, instead of establishing these men as tenants on their estates, wealthy proprietors preferred to work them with servile labor, of which not coincidentally the captives that Rome's armies had taken were furnishing an abundant supply for Italy's slave markets. And from the same conquests came the wealth that enabled potential investors to buy them. In addition, the kinds of estates being created in this way constituted a new and very different sort of agricultural enterprise in Italy. Termed "plantation agriculture" or the "slave mode of production," farms of this type were much larger, run almost entirely with slave labor, and geared primarily toward producing cash crops like wine, oil, grain, and livestock for Italy's burgeoning urban markets and the republic's armies.

Consequently, pressures built on small farms from two directions following the Hannibalic War. The burdens of conquering an empire began to cause many of them to become no longer economically viable, while those that held out faced increasing challenges in the form of competition from the new, slave-staffed estates. In some cases, the availability of a purchaser induced smallholders in difficulties to sell out. Elsewhere, large landowners drove out their weaker neighbors and occupied their holdings or else simply absorbed whatever land became vacant when smallholders departed or died. Even when small farmers fought to remain on their land, their inability to hold their own in the marketplace against the greater efficiencies of large-scale production, slave labor, and cheap grain imported from abroad led many to abandon an unequal struggle. Some may have drifted into the cities where they became the consumers for whom the slaves now toiling on their land grew food, but most remained in the countryside as a desperately poor, landless proletariat. To these men (and women) reformers, beginning with Tiberius Gracchus, appealed for support to pass land reform and other measures while the Roman senate generally fought to block any remediation of their ills. Ultimately, however, the patres' intransigence or impotence in finding a solution to the problem of landlessness was requited by the overthrow of their rule. The poor, disappointed in their hopes of legislative relief and, after Marius's reforms, enrolled in the legions, came to constitute the armies of Rome. With these men behind them, the great generals of the late republic, first Marius and Sulla, then Pompey and Caesar, and finally Antony and Octavian, were able to challenge the collective control of their peers and in the end erect a monarchy on the ruins of the republic. Seen from this perspective, then, the aristocracy's refusal to impose limits on the competition that animated its relentless drive to conquer during the second century exposed the citizens and allies who fought these wars to their corrosive effects at home. That failure, in turn, furnished the instruments that eroded and finally destroyed the ruling class's ability in the late republic to contain the ambitions of its most powerful members and so guard its most vital interest, its own continued supremacy at Rome. Again, Brunt strikingly summarizes the communis opinio:

The fundamental cause of regression [in the size of Italy's free population] was in my view the impoverishment of the mass of Italians by continuous wars. It is hard to overestimate the fearful burden that conscription imposed on the Italian people with little remission for 200 years, the loss of lives, the disruption of families, the abandonment of lands; in the end Italy suffered as much or more than the provinces which her soldiers and officials without mercy pillaged. But the upper classes profited, and used their profits to import hordes of slaves. The competition of slave labour completed the economic ruin of the majority of Italians, and made them politically the pliant instruments of unscrupulous leaders whose rivalries were to subject all the "rerum dominos" to one man.

Although this reconstruction is internally consistent, supported by ancient literary evidence, and explanatory of much that caused the fall of the Roman Republic, doubters have increasingly questioned whether the growth of vast, slave-run estates in fact led to a crisis among smallholders during the early and middle decades of the second century. As early as 1970 Frederiksen placed the problem on an entirely new footing when he observed that although the archaeological record for the Italian countryside in the second and first centuries B.C. ought to reflect some trace of this massive decline in the number of small farms and their replacement by large estates worked by slaves, surveys of the remains of rural habitations in this period have strikingly failed to detect evidence that would confirm this hypothesis. Instead, the surveys have uncovered a complex situation that resists blanket characterization and cautions against monocausal explanations for declines where these occurred. Although evidence for small farmsteads is scarce in some areas, it abounds in others and may therefore indicate that independent farmers continued to work these holdings. On the other hand, few villas of the type associated with the new plantation agriculture appear in the literary or archaeological record before the mid-second century at the earliest. Evidence for their existence only becomes widespread more than a half century subsequently, in the age of Sulla.

Testimony on viticulture and the large-scale commercial production of wine fully accords with this sequence of development. These activities represent the slave mode of production par excellence as it existed in ancient Italy, but their great efflorescence now seems clearly to begin no earlier than the last third or so of the second century. The Dressel Type 1 amphoras that carried the bulk of this wine to market only appear after this date, and the enormous numbers of these vessels in the archaeological record clearly reflect a massive increase in the production of Italian wine that began only in the final decades of the second century. The commercial manufacture of wine in Italy was certainly not unknown earlier, but this dates back well into the third century. The post-Hannibalic era marks no watershed in this regard. Equally important, very little evidence suggests that Rome's political elite took much interest in such activities at this time. Testimony for senatorial involvement in wine production does not become common before the Julio-Claudian period. In other words, those with the greatest access to the wealth the republic derived from its second-century conquests showed little inclination to put it to work to exploit the new economic opportunities that this type of agricultural enterprise would have afforded. Instead, most wine making and marketing seem to have remained, as they long had, in the hands of small and medium-sized producers, the local elites of the Roman municipia and allied towns. Archaeological investigations have similarly shown that the Second Punic War did not represent a turning point in the agricultural history of southern Etruria and Latium. Here in the suburbium of Rome itself, a variety of physical evidence appears to indicate that the countryside had lost nearly the whole of its population of smallholders by the early second century, a process that began well before Hannibal's invasion. The result was not their replacement by estates staffed by gangs of slaves, however, but rather desolation. The absence of any sign that plantation agriculture was taking root in the outskirts of Rome at this date is particularly striking because this region, if any, ought to have seen its rapid development in view of the growing market for its products that the metropolis represented.

The continuities that the archaeological record suggests characterized Italy's agrarian economy in the period between the outbreak of the Hannibalic War and Tiberius Gracchus's tribunate find confirmation in other sorts of evidence as well. The lex Claudia of circa 218 clearly indicates that the republic's upper classes were involved in the production of crops for the market prior to that date, and on many if not most of their farms they undoubtedly employed slave labor. The Elder Cato, we are told, as a young man worked alongside his slaves in the fields. By the time of the Second Punic War, the republic's servile population was numerous enough to permit the senate to raise two emergency legions of slave volunteers following Cannae, press 20,000 to 30,000 more into service to row its warships, and yet still leave enough in the fields to contribute substantially to raising the food the city's war effort required. But a substantial slave population was no recent development. The best explanation for the abolition of debt bondage at the close of the fourth century that ended the Struggle of the Orders is the hypothesis that chattel slavery came to substitute for a dependent labor force made up of Roman citizens on the estates of the rich. The mass enslavements that occurred in the wake of the republic's victories in the early second century therefore did not create a "slave society" at Rome; one already existed. Even Cato's De Agricultura, which is sometimes claimed as evidence for the introduction of a new type of slave-based agriculture in the second century, may better be understood as an ideological rather than an economic signpost. Its publication probably represented more an effort by its author to position himself within contemporary cultural debates than an attempt to teach his contemporaries about new ways of making money.

(Continues...)

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What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Represents a much needed re-evaluation of the impact of Roman warfare on agriculture and the Roman 'peasant class' during the third and second centuries B.C.—Journal of Roman Studies

An important book, packed with big ideas. . . . Challenges many long-held assumptions. . . . A ground-breaking book, which deserves to be read carefully by anyone who is interested in the history of the middle Republic.—International Journal of the Classical Tradition

Contributes greatly to our understanding of one of the more important issues in Republican history.—Historian

Radical and thought-provoking.—Scholia Reviews

This is a fine book. Rosenstein brings a welcome new approach to the difficult question of how war and agriculture, two of the most prevalent practices of the ancient Roman world, interacted. . . . Salubrious and compelling.—Bryn Mawr Classical Review

In this important new book, Nathen Rosenstein offers a comprehensive challenge to the traditional historiographical explanation of the economic and political crisis in the Gracchan era. . . . Well-written and accessible. . . . [Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic] should inspire debate and discussion on one of the most important problems in Roman history.—New England Classical Journal

Rosenstein offers a radically new interpretation of the impact of military service on the peasant economy. Its stimulating insights and sophisticated modelling make this work a major contribution to the debate on one of the most crucial issues of Roman Republican history.—John Rich, University of Nottingham

Editorial Reviews

"An important book, packed with big ideas. . . . Challenges many long-held assumptions. . . . A ground-breaking book, which deserves to be read carefully by anyone who is interested in the history of the middle Republic."
-- "International Journal of the Classical Tradition"

"Contributes greatly to our understanding of one of the more important issues in Republican history."
-- "Historian"

"Represents a much needed re-evaluation of the impact of Roman warfare on agriculture and the Roman 'peasant class' during the third and second centuries B.C."
-- "Journal of Roman Studies"

Rosenstein offers a radically new interpretation of the impact of military service on the peasant economy. Its stimulating insights and sophisticated modelling make this work a major contribution to the debate on one of the most crucial issues of Roman Republican history.(John Rich, University of Nottingham)

From the Publisher