A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
35.THE COMMON MAN’S LIFE UNDER THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Before we tell of how this Roman empire which was built up in the two centuries B.C., and which flourished in peace and security from the days of Augustus Cæsar onward for two centuries, fell into disorder and was broken up, it may be as well to devote some attention to the life of the ordinary people throughout this great realm. Our history has come down now to within 2000 years of our own time; and the life of the civilized people, both under the Peace of Rome and the Peace of the Han dynasty, was beginning to resemble more and more clearly the life of their civilized successors to-day.
In the western world coined money was now in common use; outside the
priestly world there were many people of independent means who were
neither officials of the government nor priests; people travelled about
more freely than they had ever done before, and there were high roads
and inns for them. Compared with the past, with the time before 500
B.C., life had become much more loose. Before that date civilized men
had been bound to a district or country, had been bound to a tradition
and lived within a very limited horizon; only the nomads traded and
travelled.
But neither the Roman Peace nor the Peace of the Han dynasty meant a
uniform civilization over the large areas they controlled. There were
very great local differences and great contrasts and inequalities of
culture between one district and another, just as there are to-day
under the British Peace in India. The Roman garrisons and colonies
were dotted here and there over this great space, worshipping Roman
gods and speaking the Latin language; but where there had been towns
and cities before the coming of the Romans, they went on, subordinated
indeed but managing their own affairs, and, for a time at least,
worshipping their own gods in their own fashion. Over Greece, Asia
Minor, Egypt and the Hellenized East generally, the Latin language
never prevailed. Greek ruled there invincibly. Saul of Tarsus, who
became the apostle Paul, was a Jew and a Roman citizen; but he spoke
and wrote Greek and not Hebrew. Even at the court of the Parthian
dynasty, which had overthrown the Greek Seleucids in Persia, and was
quite outside the Roman imperial boundaries, Greek was the fashionable
language. In some parts of Spain and in North Africa, the Carthaginian
language also held on for a long time in spite of the destruction of
Carthage. Such a town as Seville, which had been a prosperous city
long before the Roman name had been heard of, kept its Semitic goddess
and preserved its Semitic speech for generations, in spite of a colony
of Roman veterans at Italica a few miles away. Septimius Severus, who
was emperor from 193 to 211 A.D., spoke Carthaginian as his mother
speech. He learnt Latin later as a foreign tongue; and it is recorded
that his sister never learnt Latin and conducted her Roman household in
the Punic language.
A Gladiator (contemporary representation)
In such countries as Gaul and Britain and in provinces like Dacia (now
roughly Roumania) and Pannonia (Hungary south of the Danube), where
there were no pre-existing great cities and temples and cultures, the
Roman empire did however “Latinize.” It civilized these countries for
the first time. It created cities and towns where Latin was from the
first the dominant speech, and where Roman gods were served and Roman
customs and fashions followed. The Roumanian, Italian, French and
Spanish languages, all variations and modifications of Latin, remain to
remind us of this extension of Latin speech and customs. North-west
Africa also became at last largely Latin-speaking. Egypt, Greece and
the rest of the empire to the east were never Latinized. They remained
Egyptian and Greek in culture and spirit. And even in Rome, among
educated men, Greek was learnt as the language of a gentleman and Greek
literature and learning were very, properly preferred to Latin.
In this miscellaneous empire the ways of doing work and business were
naturally also very miscellaneous. The chief industry of the settled
world was still largely agriculture. We have told how in Italy the
sturdy free farmers who were the backbone of the early Roman republic
were replaced by estates worked by slave labour after the Punic wars.
The Greek world had had very various methods of cultivation, from the
Arcadian plan, wherein every free citizen toiled with his own hands, to
Sparta, wherein it was a dishonour to work and where agricultural work
was done by a special slave class, the Helots. But that was ancient
history now, and over most of the Hellenized world the estate system
and slave-gangs had spread. The agricultural slaves were captives who
spoke many different languages so that they could not understand each
other, or they were born slaves; they had no solidarity to resist
oppression, no tradition of rights, no knowledge, for they could not
read nor write. Although they came to form a majority of the country
population they never made a successful insurrection. The insurrection
of Spartacus in the first century B.C. was an insurrection of the
special slaves who were trained for the gladiatorial combats. The
agricultural workers in Italy in the latter days of the Republic and
the early Empire suffered frightful indignities; they would be chained
at night to prevent escape or have half the head shaved to make it
difficult. They had no wives of their own; they could be outraged,
mutilated and killed by their masters. A master could sell his slave
to fight beasts in the arena. If a slave slew his master, all the
slaves in his household and not merely the murderer were crucified. In
some parts of Greece, in Athens notably, the lot of the slave was never
quite so frightful as this, but it was still detestable. To such a
population the barbarian invaders who presently broke through the
defensive line of the legions, came not as enemies but as liberators.
POMPEII
POMPEII
“Note the ruts in roadway worn by chariot wheels.”
The slave system had spread to most industries and to every sort of
work that could be done by gangs. Mines and metallurgical operations,
the rowing of galleys, road-making and big building operations were all
largely slave occupations. And almost all domestic service was
performed by slaves. There were poor free-men and there were freed-men
in the cities and upon the country side, working for themselves or even
working for wages. They were artizans, supervisors and so forth,
workers of a new money- paid class working in competition with slave
workers; but we do not know what proportion they made of the general
population. It probably varied widely in different places and at
different periods. And there were also many modifications of slavery,
from the slavery that was chained at night and driven with whips to the
farm or quarry, to the slave whose master found it advantageous to
leave him to cultivate his patch or work his craft and own his wife
like a free-man, provided he paid in a satisfactory quittance to his
owner.
There were armed slaves. At the opening of the period of the Punic
wars, in 264 B.C., the Etruscan sport of setting slaves to fight for
their lives was revived in Rome. It grew rapidly fashionable; and soon
every great Roman rich man kept a retinue of gladiators, who sometimes
fought in the arena but whose real business it was to act as his
bodyguard of bullies. And also there were learned slaves. The
conquests of the later Republic were among the highly civilized cities
of Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor; and they brought in many highly
educated captives. The tutor of a young Roman of good family was
usually a slave. A rich man would have a Greek slave as librarian, and
slave secretaries and learned men. He would keep his poet as he would
keep a performing dog. In this atmosphere of slavery the traditions of
modern literary criticism were evolved. The slaves still boast and
quarrel in our reviews. There were enterprising people who bought
intelligent boy slaves and had them educated for sale. Slaves were
trained as book copyists, as jewellers, and for endless skilled
callings.
THE COLISEUM, ROME
THE COLISEUM, ROME
_Photo: Underwood & Underwood_
INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM AT IT APPEARS TO-DAY
INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM AT IT APPEARS TO-DAY
But there were very considerable changes in the position of a slave
during the four hundred years between the opening days of conquest
under the republic of rich men and the days of disintegration that
followed the great pestilence. In the second century B.C. war-captives
were abundant, manners gross and brutal; the slave had no rights and
there was scarcely an outrage the reader can imagine that was not
practised upon slaves in those days. But already in the first century
A.D. there was a perceptible improvement in the attitude of the Roman
civilization towards slavery. Captives were not so abundant for one
thing, and slaves were dearer. And slave- owners began to realize that
the profit and comfort they got from their slaves increased with the
self-respect of these unfortunates. But also the moral tone of the
community was rising, and a sense of justice was becoming effective.
The higher mentality of Greece was qualifying the old Roman harshness.
Restrictions upon cruelty were made, a master might no longer sell his
slave to fight beasts, a slave was given property rights in what was
called his _peculium_, slaves were paid wages as an encouragement and
stimulus, a form of slave marriage was recognized. Very many forms of
agriculture do not lend themselves to gang working, or require gang
workers only at certain seasons. In regions where such conditions
prevailed the slave presently became a serf, paying his owner part of
his produce or working for him at certain seasons.
When we begin to realize how essentially this great Latin and
Greek-speaking Roman Empire of the first two centuries A.D. was a slave
state and how small was the minority who had any pride or freedom in
their lives, we lay our hands on the clues to its decay and collapse.
There was little of what we should call family life, few homes of
temperate living and active thought and study; schools and colleges
were few and far between. The free will and the free mind were nowhere
to be found. The great roads, the ruins of splendid buildings, the
tradition of law and power it left for the astonishment of succeeding
generations must not conceal from us that all its outer splendour was
built upon thwarted wills, stifled intelligence, and crippled and
perverted desires. And even the minority who lorded it over that wide
realm of subjugation and of restraint and forced labour were uneasy and
unhappy in their souls; art and literature, science and philosophy,
which are the fruits of free and happy minds, waned in that atmosphere.
There was much copying and imitation, an abundance of artistic
artificers, much slavish pedantry among the servile men of learning,
but the whole Roman empire in four centuries produced nothing to set
beside the bold and noble intellectual activities of the comparatively
little city of Athens during its one century of greatness. Athens
decayed under the Roman sceptre. The science of Alexandria decayed.
The spirit of man, it seemed, was decaying in those days.