The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  V. THE TRADERS

  The improvement of government and transport expanded Mediterranean trade to an unprecedented amplitude. At one end of the busy process of exchange were peddlers hawking through the countryside everything from sulphur matches to costly imported silks; wandering auctioneers who served also as town criers and advertised lost goods and runaway slaves; daily markets and periodical fairs; shopkeepers haggling with customers, cheating with false or tipped scales, and keeping a tangential eye for the aedile’s inspectors of weights and measures. A little higher in the commercial hierarchy were shops that manufactured their own merchandise; these were the backbone of both industry and trade. At or near the ports were wholesalers (magnarii) who sold, to retailers or consumers, goods recently brought in from abroad; sometimes the owner or captain of a vessel would sell his cargo directly from the deck.

  For two centuries Italy enjoyed an “unfavorable” balance of trade—cheerfully bought more than she sold. She exported some Arretine pottery, some wine and oil, some metalware, glass, and perfumes from Campania; for the rest her products were kept at home. Meanwhile the wholesalers had agents buying goods for Italy in all parts of the Empire, and foreign merchants had Greek or Syrian drummers touting and placing their goods in Italy. By this double process the delicacies of half the planet came to please the palate, clothe the flesh, and adorn the home of the Roman optimate. “Whoever wishes to see all the goods of the world,” said Aelius Aristides, “must either journey throughout the world or stay in Rome.”43 From Sicily came corn, cattle, hides, wine, wool, fine woodwork, statuary, jewelry; from north Africa corn and oil; from Cyrenaica silphium; from central Africa wild beasts for the arena; from Ethiopia and east Africa ivory, apes, tortoise shell, rare marbles, obsidian, spices, and Negro slaves; from west Africa oil, beasts, citron, wood, pearls, dyes, copper; from Spain fish, cattle, wool, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, cinnabar, wheat, linen, cork, horses, ham, bacon, and the finest olives and olive oil; from Gaul clothing, wine, wheat, timber, vegetables, cattle, poultry, pottery, cheese; from Britain tin, lead, silver, hides, wheat, cattle, slaves, oysters, dogs, pearls, and wooden goods. From Belgium flocks of geese were driven all the way to Italy to supply goose livers for aristocratic bellies. From Germany came amber, slaves, and furs; from the Danube wheat, cattle, iron, silver, and gold; from Greece and the Greek isles cheap silk, linen, wine, oil, honey, timber, marble, emeralds, drugs, artworks, perfumes, diamonds, and gold. From the Black Sea came corn, fish, furs, hides, slaves; from Asia Minor fine linen and woolen fabrics, parchment, wine, Smyrna and other figs, honey, cheese, oysters, carpets, oil, wood; from Syria wine, silk, linen, glass, oil, apples, pears, plums, figs, dates, pomegranates, nuts, nard, balsam, Tyrian purple, and the cedar of Lebanon; from Palmyra textiles, perfumes, drugs; from Arabia incense, gums, aloes, myrrh, laudanum, ginger, cinnamon, and precious stones; from Egypt corn, paper, linen, glass, jewelry, granite, basalt, alabaster, and porphyry. Finished products of a thousand kinds came to Rome and the West from Alexandria, Sidon, Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Rhodes, Miletus, Ephesus, and the other great cities of the East, while the East received raw materials and money from the West.

  In addition to all this there was a substantial import trade from outside the Empire. From Parthia and Persia came gems, rare essences, morocco leather, rugs, wild beasts, and eunuchs. From China—through Parthia, or India, or the Caucasus—came silk, raw or manufactured; the Romans thought it a vegetable product combed from trees and valued it at its weight in gold.44 Much of this silk came to the island of Cos, where it was woven into dresses for the ladies of Rome and other cities; in A.D. 91 the relatively poor state of Messenia had to forbid its women to wear transparent silk dresses at religious initiations; it was with such garments that Cleopatra touched the hearts of Caesar and Antony.45 In return the Chinese imported from the Empire carpets, jewels, amber, metals, dyes, drugs, and glass. Chinese historians speak of an embassy coming by sea to the Emperor Huan-ti in 166 from the Emperor “An-Tun”—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; more probably it was a band of merchants posing as ambassadors. Sixteen Roman coins, dating from Tiberius to Aurelius, have been found in Shansi. From India came pepper, spikenard, and other spices (the same that Columbus would seek), herbs, ivory, ebony, sandalwood, indigo, pearls, sardonyx, onyx, amethyst, carbuncle, diamonds, iron products, cosmetics, textiles, tigers, and elephants. We may judge the extent of this trade, and the Roman hunger for luxuries, by noting that Italy imported more from India than from any other country except Spain.46 From one Egyptian port alone, Strabo avers, 120 ships sailed every year for India and Ceylon.47 In exchange India took a modest quantity of wine, metals, and purple, and the rest—over 100,000,000 sesterces per year—in bullion or coin. A like amount went to Arabia and China, and probably to Spain.48

  This immense trade produced prosperity for two centuries, but its unsound basis ruined Roman economy in the end. Italy made no attempt at equaling imports with exports; she appropriated the mines, and taxed the people, of half a hundred states to provide her with the money to meet her international balances. As the richer veins of the mines gave out, and the zest for exotic luxuries continued, Rome tried to stave off the breakdown of her import system by conquering new mineral regions like Dacia, and by debasing her once incorruptible currency—turning ever less bullion into ever more coin. When the costs of administration and war mounted nearer to the profits of empire, Rome had to pay for goods with goods, and could not. Italy’s dependence upon imported food was her vital weakness; the moment she could not force other countries to send her food and soldiers she was doomed. Meanwhile the provinces recovered not only prosperity but economic initiative: Italian merchants, in this first century A.D., almost disappeared from Eastern ports, while Syrian and Greek traders established themselves at Delos and Puteoli and multiplied in Spain and Gaul. In the leisurely oscillation of history the East was preparing once more to dominate the West.

  VI. THE BANKERS

  How were production and commerce financed? First by the maintenance of a comparatively reliable currency internationally honored. All Roman coins had suffered gradual depreciation since the First Punic War, for the Treasury had found it convenient to pay off governmental war debts by permitting the inflation that naturally comes from the multiplication of money and the diminution of goods. The as, originally a pound of copper, had been reduced to two ounces in 241, one ounce in 202, half an ounce in 87 B.C., and a quarter ounce in A.D. 60. During the final century of the Republic the generals had issued their own coinage, usually in aurei, gold coins, normally worth one hundred sesterces. From this military coinage that of the emperors was descended, and the emperors followed Caesar’s custom of stamping their effigies on their issues as symbols of the state’s guarantee. The sesterce was now made from copper instead of silver and was revalued at four asses.VI Nero lowered the silver content of the denarius to ninety per cent of its former quantity, Trajan to eighty-five per cent, Aurelius to seventy-five, Commodus to seventy, Septimius Severus to fifty. Nero reduced the aureus from one fortieth of a pound of gold to one forty-fifth, Caracalla to one fiftieth. A general rise of prices accompanied these depreciations, but income seems to have risen commensurately until Aurelius; perhaps this controlled inflation was a simple way of relieving debtors at the expense of creditors whose superior ability and opportunity, unchecked, would have concentrated wealth to the point of economic coagulation and political revolution. Despite these changes we must consider the Roman fiscal system one of the most successful and stable in history. For two centuries a single monetary standard was honored throughout the Empire; and with this stable medium investment and trade flourished as never before in the memory of men.

  Consequently bankers were everywhere. They served as money-changers, accepted checking accounts and interest-bearing deposits, issued travelers’ checks and bills of exchange, managed, bought, and sold realty, placed investments and collected debts, and lent money to individuals and partnerships. This banki
ng system had come from Greece and the Greek East, and was mostly in the hands of Greeks and Syrians even in Italy and the West; in Gaul the words for Syrian and banker were synonyms.49 Interest rates, which had sunk to four per cent under the weight of Augustus’ Egyptian spoils, rose to six per cent after his death, and reached their legal maximum of twelve per cent by the age of Constantine.

  The famous “panic” of A.D. 33 illustrates the development and complex interdependence of banks and commerce in the Empire. Augustus had coined and spent money lavishly, on the theory that its increased circulation, low interest rates, and rising prices would stimulate business. They did; but as the process could not go on forever, a reaction set in as early as 10 B.C., when this flush minting ceased. Tiberius rebounded to the opposite theory—that the most economical economy is the best. He severely limited the governmental expenditures, sharply restricted new issues of currency, and hoarded 2,700,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury. The resulting dearth of circulating medium was made worse by the drain of money eastward in exchange for luxuries. Prices fell, interest rates rose, creditors foreclosed on debtors, debtors sued usurers, and moneylending almost ceased. The Senate tried to check the export of capital by requiring a high percentage of every senator’s fortune to be invested in Italian land; senators thereupon called in loans and foreclosed mortgages to raise cash, and the crisis rose. When the senator Publius Spinther notified the bank of Balbus and Ollius that he must withdraw 30,000,000 sesterces to comply with the new law, the firm announced its bankruptcy. At the same time the failure of an Alexandrian firm, Seuthes and Son—due to their loss of three ships laden with costly spices—and the collapse of the great dyeing concern of Malchus at Tyre, led to rumors that the Roman banking house of Maximus and Vibo would be broken by their extensive loans to these firms. When its depositors began a “run” on this bank it shut its doors, and later on that day a larger bank, of the Brothers Pettius, also suspended payment. Almost simultaneously came news that great banking establishments had failed in Lyons, Carthage, Corinth, and Byzantium. One after another the banks of Rome closed. Money could be borrowed only at rates far above the legal limit. Tiberius finally met the crisis by suspending the land-investment act and distributing 100,000,000 sesterces to the banks, to be lent without interest for three years on the security of realty. Private lenders were thereby constrained to lower their interest rates, money came out of hiding, and confidence slowly returned.50

  VII. THE CLASSES

  Nearly everybody in Rome worshiped money with mad pursuit, and all but the bankers denounced it. “How little you know the age you live in,” says a god in Ovid, “if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand!”51—and a century later Juvenal sarcastically hails the sanctissima divitiarum maiestas, “the most holy majesty of wealth.” To the end of the Empire Roman law forbade the Senatorial class to invest in commerce or industry; and though they evaded the prohibition by letting their freedmen invest for them, they despised their proxies and upheld rule by birth as the sole alternative to rule by money, or myths, or the sword. After all the revolutions and the decimations the old class divisions remained, with brand-new titles: members of the Senatorial and equestrian orders, magistrates and officials, were called honestiores, i.e., “men of honors” or offices; all the rest were humiliores, “lowly,” or tenuiores, “weak.” A sense of honor often mingled with the proud gravity of the senator: he served in a succession of public posts without pay and at much personal expense; he administered important functions with a fair degree of competence and integrity; he provided for public games, helped his clients, freed some of his slaves, and shared a part of his fortune with the people through benefactions before or after his death. Because of the obligations his position entailed, he was required to have a million sesterces to enter or remain in the Senatorial class.

  One senator, Gnaeus Lentulus, had 400,000,000 sesterces; but with this exception the greatest fortunes in Rome were those of businessmen who did not disdain to handle money or trade. While reducing the powers of the Senate, the emperors had favored the business class with high office, had protected industry, commerce, and finance, and had based upon equestrian support the security of the Principate against patrician intrigue. Membership in this second order required 400,000 sesterces and specific nomination by the prince. Consequently many men of means belonged to the plebs.

  The plebs was now a motley receptacle of such innominate businessmen, freeborn workers, peasant proprietors, teachers, doctors, artists, and freedmen. The census defined the proletarii not by their occupation but by their offspring (proles); an old Latin treatise called them “plebeians who offer nothing to the state but children.”52 Most of them found employment in the shops, factories, and commerce of the city at an average wage of a denarius (forty cents) a day; this rose in later centuries, but not faster than prices.53 Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs from it only in rapidity; we must expect to find it in every age and under every form of society and government; but rarely has it been so thorough and unsentimental as in ancient Rome. Once all men had been poor, and had not known their poverty; now penury rubbed elbows with wealth, and suffered from consciousness. Absolute destitution, however, was prevented by the dole, the occasional gifts of patrons to clients, and the lordly legacies of rich men like Balbus, who left twenty-five denarii to every citizen of Rome. Class divisions verged upon caste; yet an able man might free himself from slavery, make a fortune, and rise to high office in the service of the prince. The freedman’s son became a fully enfranchised freeman, and his grandson could become a senator; soon a freedman’s grandson, Pertinax, would be emperor.

  During the first century many high offices were filled by freedmen. They often had charge of the imperial finances in the provinces, the waterways of Rome, the mines and quarries and estates of the emperor, and the provisioning of the army camps. Freedmen and slaves, nearly all of Greek or Syrian origin, managed the imperial palaces and held vital positions in the imperial cabinet. Petty industry and trade fell increasingly into the control of freedmen. Some of them became great capitalists or landowners; some accumulated the largest fortunes of their time. Their past had seldom given them moral standards or elevated interests; after their liberation money became the absorbing interest of their lives; they made it without scruple and spent it without taste. Petronius savagely excoriated them in Trimalchio, and Seneca, less bitter, smiled at the new rich who bought books in ornamental sets but never read them.54 Probably these satires were in part the jealous reactions of a caste that saw its ancient prerogatives of exploitation and luxury encroached upon, and could not forgive the men who were rising to share its perquisites and power.

  The success of the freedmen must have given some consoling hope to the class that did most of the manual work in Italy. Beloch estimated the slaves in Rome about 30 B.C. at some 400,000, or nearly half the population; in Italy at 1,500,000. If we may believe the table gossipers of Athenaeus, some Romans had 20,000 slaves.55 A proposal that slaves be required to wear a distinctive dress was voted down in the Senate lest they should realize their numerical strength.56 Galen reckoned the proportion of slaves to freemen at Pergamum about A.D. 170 as one to three—i.e., twenty-five per cent; probably this proportion was not much different in other cities.56a Human prices varied from 330 sesterces for a farm slave to the 700,000 ($105,000) paid by Marcus Scaurus for Daphnis the grammarian;57 the average price was now 4000 sesterces ($400). Eighty per cent of the employees in industry and retail trade were slaves, and most of the manual or clerical work in government was performed by servi publici—“public slaves.” Domestic slaves were of every variety and condition: personal servants, handicraftsmen, tutors, cooks, hairdressers, musicians, copyists, librarians, artists, physicians, philosophers, eunuchs, pretty boys to serve at least as cupbearers, and cripples to provide amusement by their deformities; there was a special market at Rome where one might buy legless, armless, or three-eyed men, giants, dwarfs, or
hermaphrodites.58 Household slaves were sometimes beaten, occasionally killed. Nero’s father killed his freedmen because they refused to drink as much as he wished.59 In an angry passage of his essay on anger Seneca describes the “wooden racks and other instruments of torture, the dungeons and other jails, the fires built around imprisoned bodies in a pit, the hook dragging up the corpses, the many kinds of chains, the varied punishments, the tearing of limbs, the branding of foreheads” ;59a all these, apparently, entered into the life of the agricultural slave. Juvenal describes a lady as having slave after slave thrashed while her hair was being curled,60 and Ovid pictures another mistress jabbing hairpins into her maidservant’s arms;61 but these tales have the earmarks of literary concoctions and must not be taken for history.

  We are in danger of exaggerating the cruelty of the past for the same reason that we magnify the crime and immorality of the present—because cruelty is interesting by its very rarity. By and large the lot of a domestic slave under the Empire was lightened by a growing acceptance into the family, by mutual loyalty, by the pretty custom of owners waiting on the slaves at certain feasts, and by a security and permanence of employment exceptional in modern times. The joys of family life were not denied them, and their tombstones reveal as much tenderness as those of the free. One reads: “His parents have raised this monument to Eucopion, who lived six months and three days; the sweetest and most delightful babe, who, though he could not yet speak, was our greatest happiness.”62 Other epitaphs show the most affectionate relations between masters and slaves: one owner declares that a dead servant was as dear to him as his son; a young noble mourns the death of his nurse; a nurse expresses her grief over a dead charge; a learned lady raises an elegant memorial to her librarian.63 Statius writes a “Poem of Consolation to Flavius Ursus on the Death of a Favorite Slave.”64 It was not unusual for slaves to risk their lives to protect their masters; many voluntarily accompanied them into exile; several gave their lives for them. Some owners freed their slaves and married them; some treated them as friends; Seneca ate with his.65 The refinement of manners and sensitivity, the absence of a color line between master and slave, the tenets of the Stoic philosophy, and the classless faiths coming in from the East had a share in the mitigation of slavery; but the basic factors were the economic advantage of the owner, and the rising cost of slaves. Many slaves were respected as having high cultural abilities—stenographers, research aides, financial secretaries and managers, artists, physicians, grammarians, and philosophers. A slave could in many cases go into business for himself, giving a share of his earnings to his owner and keeping the rest as his peculium, a “little money” peculiarly his own. With such earnings, or by faithful or exceptional service, or by personal attractiveness, a slave could usually achieve freedom in six years.66