THE causes of revolution were many, the results were endless, the personalities thrown up by the crisis, from the Gracchi to Augustus, were among the most powerful in history. Never before, and never again till our own time, were such stakes fought for, never was the world drama more intense. The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with these latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promiser, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.
Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare protect.1 Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It was not unusual for 10,000 slaves to be auctioned off at Delos in a single day. In 177, 40,000 Sardinians, in 167, 150,000 Epirotes, were captured by Roman armies and sold as slaves, in the latter case at approximately a dollar a head.2 In the city the lot of the slave was mitigated by humanizing contacts with his master and by hope of emancipation; but on the large farms no human relation interfered with exploitation. There the slave was no longer a member of the household, as in Greece or early Rome; he seldom saw his owner; and the rewards of the overseer depended upon squeezing every possible profit from the chattels entrusted to his lash. The wages of the slave on the great estates were as much food and clothing as would enable him to toil from sunrise to sunset every day—barring occasional holidays—until senility. If he complained or disobeyed, he worked with chains about his ankles and spent the night in an ergastulum—a subterranean dungeon that formed a part of nearly every latifundium. It was a wasteful as well as a brutal system, for it supported hardly a twentieth of the families that once had lived on the same acreage as freemen.
If we remember that at least half these slaves had once been free (for slaves seldom fought in the wars), we can surmise the bitterness of these broken lives, and must marvel at the rarity of their revolts. In 196 the rural slaves and free workers of Etruria rebelled; they were beaten down by Roman legions and, Livy tells us, “many were killed or taken prisoners; others were scourged and crucified.”3 In 185 a like uprising occurred in Apulia; 7000 slaves were captured and condemned to mines.4 In the mines of New Carthage alone 4000 Spaniards worked as slaves. In 139 the “First Servile War” broke out in Sicily. Four hundred slaves accepted the call of Eunus and massacred the free population in the town of Enna; slaves poured from the farms and private dungeons of Sicily and swelled the number of the rebels to 70,000. They occupied Agrigentum, defeated the forces of the Roman praetor, and held nearly all the island till 131, when a consular army penned them into Enna and starved them into surrender. Eunus was taken to Rome, dropped into an underground cell, and allowed to die of hunger and lice.5 In 133 lesser uprisings resulted in the execution of 150 slaves in Rome, 450 in Minturnae, 4000 in Sinuessa. In that year Tiberius Gracchus passed the agrarian law that opened the Roman Revolution.