Key ideas: Analysis of the social and economic changes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike most history books about the military and political systems of the Roman Empire, Rostovtzeff's book focuses on the economic life of the empire.
[With the expansion of the Roman Empire,] the influx of money, slaves, goods of different kinds, and cattle from the provinces stimulated the economic life of Italy. The capital which was now concentrated in the hands of Roman citizens and of residents in Italian cities remained partly in the provinces, but mostly came to Italy.
The majority of the new rich acquired their fortunes through speculation. After gaining wealth, they wanted to find for it the safest possible investment, which would guarantee them a quiet and pleasant life in familiar surroundings. The safest investment which would secure an idle and pleasant life in the cities was landed property, the next best was money-lending and investment in Italian industry.
The state encouraged the new capitalists to invest their money, above all, in the large areas of arable and pasture land which lay waste, especially in North and South Italy, after the horrors of the Gallic and Punic wars. There were no peasants available for settlement on the waste lands. [But], there were large masses of slaves and there was a group of men willing to use them for the cultivation of the land.
The Roman senate gave these men every facility to restore the shattered economic life of Italy either by letting to them large tracts of land [...] or by allowing them to occupy the land informally with the obligation to pay to the state part of the produce of the land thus reclaimed.
That was the reason why in the second century b.c. a rapid concentration of landed property was steadily taking place.
The landowners were either members of the senatorial and equestrian classes in Rome or the most energetic, shrewd, and thrifty of the residents in the Italian towns. These men never intended to take up residence on the farms and work the land with their own hands. From the very beginning they were landowners, not farmers...
[These developments in 2 BC] had far-reaching consequences for the political, social, and economic life of the country... There arose now all over Italy not only an influential class business men, but a really well-todo city bourgeoisie.
This new city bourgeoisie took no active part in the political life of the state. The leading position was still held by the Roman aristocracy. The bourgeoisie was too busy in organizing its economic life, and in building up the cities.
They generally invested their money in Italian lands, which were chiefly cultivated as vineyards and olivegroves or used as pasture lands
They also invested their money in vine and olive land in Greece and Asia Minor. Hence they supported the policy of the senate in the East... They were therefore staunch supporters of the government when it took the first steps on the path of imperialism.
The investment of large capital in vine and olive land increased the value of land and induced many a peasant to sell his holding and either to settle in the cities or emigrate to the East.
The peasant population in the districts which were suitable for planting with vines and olive-trees, or for cattle-breeding on capitalistic lines, gradually decreased.
The never-ending wars [...] weakened the economic strength of the Italian peasants. [As a result,] capital got hold of large tracts of land, and a large part of the peasant population was transformed from landowners into tenants, tilling the estates of Roman and municipal capitalists.
With the decrease of the peasant population and the increase of the numbers of slaves and of tenants, and with the accumulation of capital, particularly in the city of Rome, the Roman commonwealth was threatened by grave dangers.
The traditional Roman aristocratic regime, based on a peasant army, gradually degenerated into an oligarchy of opulent noble families, while the military strength of Italy, based on the Italian peasantry, dwindled.
We have to remember that only landowners were obliged to serve in the Roman army—another reason, by the way, why peasants who were overburdened with military service should sell their lands to large proprietors and remain on them in the capacity of tenants. [As a result.] the Roman army and its social composition gradually underwent a radical alteration. After the reform initiated by Marius it was no longer a militia of Italian peasants but a more or less professional longservice army of proletarians and poor peasants.
The cities of Italy were inhabited by a well-to-do bourgeoisie. Most of them were landowners; some were owners of houses, let at rent, and of various shops; some carried on money-lending and banking operations. The largest and the richest city was Rome. Rome grew feverishly during the second and the first century b.c.
Business was daily transacted at the exchange, near the temple of Castor in the large public place of Rome, the Forum. Here crowds of men bought and sold shares and bonds of tax-farming companies, various goods for cash and on credit, farms and estates in Italy and in the provinces, houses and shops in Rome and elsewhere, ships and storehouses, slaves and cattle.
In the less central parts of Rome masses of unemployed or half-idle proletarians lived in large tenement houses willing, for a living, to sell their votes and their fists to anybody who had money enough to pay for them... The proletarian of today was a landowner of yesterday, a soldier or a business agent, an artisan or a menial workman of tomorrow.
If the Roman citizens who had won the war for Augustus were to remain the ruling class in the Empire, they had to fulfil their the duty of defending the state from enemies and of protecting their own power within the Empire.
The army had to be permanent, and had to be an army of professionals: no militia could defend the frontiers of the Roman state
If the army was to be a long-service army of professionals, it could not, as a rule, be levied compulsorily. Men levied compulsorily would never make good professional soldiers, ready to devote their lives to the service.
This being so, the army must be adequately paid, and the service must be as attractive as possible.
Thus the expense of the army was a very heavy burden on the finances of the state.
[Under Augustus.] the army was almost completely quiet and did not attempt to take any part in political life. [The reason is that] Military service, especially in the first years of Augustus’ reign, was comparatively remunerative and not very perilous. tive and not very perilous. Meritorious service meant advancement... Common soldiers were sure to receive at the close of their service a parcel of land or a good bounty sufficient to build up a home and family...
Many people were now willing to join the ranks. Moreover, the army did not now consist exclusively of Italian-bom men... [But] the army reflected the mood of the population. Moreover, Roman citizens had learned from time immemorial to obey the state.
Competition was now a purely economic rivalry...
With this competition neither the Roman state nor the emperor interfered. They left economic life to its own development. The only handicap to trade within the Empire was the customs duties levied on the borders of each province, and these duties were not very high.
The amount of the taxes paid by Roman citizens on inheritances, for instance, and on the manumission of slaves (both 5 per cent.) [Taxation in general was low] Apart from taxation, we can hardly discover any measure of an economic character taken by the government.
The period of Augustus and of his immediate successors was a time of almost complete freedom for trade and of splendid opportunities for private initiative... Everything was left to private management.
Roman citizens who lived in Rome cared little for political rights... but they insisted on their right, acquired during the civil war, to be fed and amused by the government.
None of the emperors, not even Caesar or Augustus, dared to encroach on this sacred right of the Roman proletariate.
They limited themselves to reducing and fixing the numbers of the participants in the distribution of corn and to organizing an efficient system of distribution. They fixed also the number of days on which the population of Rome was entitled to a good spectacle in the theatres, circuses, and amphitheatres.
But they never attacked the institution itself... They preferred to keep the population of Rome in good humour.
By such devices the population was kept in good temper and the ‘public opinion’ of the city of Rome was ‘organized’.
The expense of organizing public opinion, added to that of maintaining the city of Rome in good condition, was no doubt enormous.
More than half a century had elapsed between the death of Augustus and the accession of Vespasian.
The attitude of the emperors towards economic life, their economic policy, or their lack of one, remained the same as in the days of Augustus.
A policy of laissez-faire prevailed.
[But] there was the gradual resurrection of economic life in the provinces... [Especially] in the East.
The Western provinces, too, especially Gaul, Spain, and Africa, resumed their economic activity. One of the signs of their revival was the rapid growth of town life. From the economic point of view urbanization meant the formation of a city bourgeoisie.
Another phenomenon of the same type was the gradual migration of industry to the provinces.
Italy did not at first feel the results of this slow economic emancipation of the provinces.
But a certain uneasiness began to show itself.
[But] the Italian landowners did not want to supervise the management of their farms personally. [Why?] The real reason, which was well understood by the landowners that the conditions of the market grew worse and worse every day with the economic development of the Western provinces.
Northern Italy did not feel the changed conditions as much as did the centre and the south of the peninsula.
Hand in hand with this change went the growing concentration of landed property in the hands of a few rich owners... The middle-sized estates were gradually undermined by the conditions of the market and were readily sold to big capitalists, [who] to simplify the management, preferred to let their land to tenants and to produce chiefly corn.
Italy was therefore gradually becoming a corn-land again.
The rich citizens were ready to help and gave money freely for everything that was needed by the city: we may say that most of the beautiful public buildings in the cities of East and West were their gifts.
In time of famine the same men liberally furnished money to feed the starving population. In normal times they spent large sums in enhancing the splendour of municipal games or in giving games and contests on their own account.
Very often, too, they gave doles to the people, both rich and poor, in the form of money or food and wine.
Some of these gifts took the form of foundations, large sums of money being provided to be invested.
It is amazing to see what enormous sums were given by wealthy citizens, especially in the Greek East...
The second century was an age of rich or well-to-do men distributed all over the Empire
Commerce, and especially foreign and inter-provincial maritime commerce, provided the main sources of wealth in the Roman Empire in the first two centuries a.d. Most of the nouveaux riches owed their money to it.
Another source of wealth was industry. Goods which were produced by local industries, especially such as could not be reproduced and imitated elsewhere, were widely distributed over the Empire.
The most important feature in the development of industry is its rapid decentralization... Every province of the Empire and every provincial district endeavoured as far as possible to compete with the imported goods by replacing them with cheap local imitations.
The central government did nothing to protect Italian industry... Everybody was free to imitate, and even to counterfeit, the products of a rival.
Decentralization of industry stopped the growth of industrial capitalism in Italy, and it was now stunting the growth of large industrial concerns in the provinces.
Local shops of petty artisans competed successfully in many fields with larger capitalistic organizations.
At the same time as industrial activity was becoming decentralized, the goods produced were gradually simplified and standardized, whether they were produced in large factories or in small shops.
It is, however, somewhat surprising to find how thoroughly disastrous Trajan’s wars were for the Roman Empire in general.
Trajan himself was too busy and too much occupied with his military enterprises to realize fully that his expeditions were destroying the vital forces of the Empire.
The dread symptom of this decay was the depopulation of the peninsula and the concurrent decline of Italian agriculture..
Trajan forbade emigration from Italy and settled Roman veterans in the immediate vicinity of Rome; he forced senators to acquire land in the mother country;
It was not enough to stop emigration from Italy and so to create artificially a large mass of workless proletarians. Work and homes had to be provided for them.
The ruin of the cities meant the ruin of the state, as they were responsible for the payment of the taxes due from their residents and from the inhabitants of the territories attached to them.
When Trajan died on his way back from Mesopotamia to Rome, the position of the Empire was extremely critical... The perilous situation of the Empire explains the policy of Trajan’s successor, Hadrian...
Hadrian was the first to realize that [...] it was the frailty of the foundations, especially the economic foundation, on which the whole fabric of the Empire rested. The Empire was not civilized enough, that is to say, its economic life was not progressive enough, to bear the heavy burden of maintaining itself as a single political unit.
The process of urbanization produced a division of the population of the Empire into two great classes—the rulers and the ruled, the privileged bourgeoisie and the working classes, the landowners and the peasants, the shopowners and the slaves.
The larger the number of cities created, the deeper became the gulf between the two classes. Every increase in the numbers of the privileged class meant heavier work for the unprivileged.
The main type of city resident came more and more to be the man who lived on his income, which was derived from landed property or from shops. The driving force in economic life was now the middlemen, mostly slaves and freed men, who stood between the owners and the labourers.
This division of the population into two classes was not felt as a serious evil so long as the Empire was undergoing expansion and there were constant accessions of territory in which urban life could be developed and the position of rulers granted to the most energetic elements of the population. In course of time, however, the process of expansion came to an end...
The existence of two castes, one ever more oppressed, the other ever more idle and indulging in the easy life of men of means, lay like an incubus on the Empire and arrested economic progress. All the efforts of the emperors to raise the lower classes into a working and active middle class were futile...
The general productivity of the Empire constantly decreased... No partial measures could counter this progressive decay...
Groups of war captives were planted on the depopulated lands. Measures were taken to make the cities responsible for waste land. Flight from one’s place of residence was regarded as a crime. It was all in vain.
The process of decline could not be arrested by such devices: the productivity of the Empire steadily fell, and the government found itself forced to resort with increasing energy to violence and compulsion.