The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson

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СКАЧАТЬ to the plough on his own croft. Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to the "two yokes" being "hardly enough to raise a roof on or to make a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on behalf of plebeians to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-client plebeians then had no share in the land of the gentes or clans, being themselves in large part dispossessed by conquest.

      Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after the lands of the large landholders, not the original private holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the gens (Geschlecht) or commune (Gauverband)." But on the previous page Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the gentes, but communally (genossenschaftlich) by unions of equal freemen." If these, then, were the curiæ (the Mark, says Meyer in this connection, did not belong to the gentes), they did not include the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen (ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the gentes or clans—a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides (i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten, ii, 245, cited by Schwegler.)

      On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?" "I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue." [Epistle Dedicatory to Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Civil Society (translation of De Cive), 1651. Cp. Goldwin Smith, The United States, 1893, p. 23.]

The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes" in the earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the patricians were "a class of occupying landholders rather than proprietary landowners."[24] The "public land" was literally so, save in so far as the patricians would have the ampler (and often untaxed or low-rented) use of it for their much larger herds;[25] or, it may be, for cultivation by their clients or slaves. Heredia, however, were saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the dispossession and enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on that pressure of population on means of subsistence which underlies all economic history.

Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors, probably highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves, but leave the mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for which they pay tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26] And thus far they live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]

Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were mainly in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and artisans and aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling caste occupied, potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the two or three fortified hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They were certainly not the founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had been occupied by Latins and Sabines respectively long before the time traditionally assigned to the "founding" of Rome; and there were communities there before them. Modern excavators trace many successive strata of civilisation before that which we call the Roman; and the probability is that the Romans of history, like the kindred Sabines, conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred race, whose place and possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had presumably grown weak for self-defence by reason of some such disintegrating economic evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors themselves. Such a disintegration may well have taken place in the case of Alba Longa, of which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But before Alba Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which perhaps outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman period until the last century of the Republic.

      This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson (History of the Roman Republic, 1783, ch. i, note; perhaps following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the nature of the remains of the great cloacæ, which he held could not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's Remains of Ancient Rome, 1892, i, 104–107; and Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, § 1. Cp. Merivale, General History of Rome, pp. 9–11; Burton, Etruscan Bologna, 1876, pp. 170–74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great cloacæ to the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the other hand, confidently decides that the cloaca maxima belongs to the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined, so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the habitation of countless generations" (Survey of Greek Civ. 1897, p. 28).

      § 2

There had in fact been a "decline and fall of Rome" before the Rome we know began to be. Relatively to their predecessors, the early Romans were even as the northerners who in a later age were to capture historic Rome—vigorous barbarians beginning a new era on a footing of fraternity in conquest; and the condition of their early success as State-builders seems to have been precisely the joining of several tribe-groups in a real federation,[33] securing local peace as between the hill-holders. It has been said that Rome grew up without any known aid from men of political genius such as Solon.[34] But men of genius have counted for something in all stages of upward human evolution. The guiders of early Rome are lost in a cloud of myth and fable; but some man or men of civic faculty there must have been to shape tendency, though doubtless a main factor in the early union was the simple collocation of the hills first fortified. Granting that Servius Tullius is a mythical king, the elaborate constitution assigned to him stood for some planning by able men, and has several main points in common with that given to Athens by Solon.

      Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan, there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important factor of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with; and the conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and share in all the civic offices, represented some such source of recuperation to the Roman aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of England after the Norman Conquest. If we add the probable factor of an Etruscan element, Rome is to be conceived as standing for a ruling class of more various faculty than was to be found in any of the rival communities singly. The progressive absorption of the most enterprising of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception to the rule of Italic life as to that of other СКАЧАТЬ