There was not in Roman life—and perhaps there would not be in a healthy economy—so geographical a division between agriculture and industry as in our modern states. The ancient rural home—cottage, villa, or estate—was literally a manufactory, where the hands of men carried on a dozen vital industries, and the skill of women filled the house and its environs with a score of wholesome arts. There the woods were turned into shelter, fuel, and furniture, cattle were slain and dressed, grain was milled and baked, oil and wine were pressed, food was prepared and preserved, wool and flax were cleaned and woven; sometimes clay was fired into vessels, bricks, and tiles, and metal was beaten into tools; life there had an educative fullness and variety that come to few of us in our time of wider movement and narrowing specialties. Nor was this diversity of occupation the sign of a poor and primitive economy; the wealthiest households were the most self-sufficient, and prided themselves on making the largest part of what they needed. A family was an organization of economic helpmates engaged in the united agriculture and industry of a home.
When an artisan undertook to do a certain task for several families, and set up his shop at some center within reach of them all, village economy supplemented, but did not supersede, domestic industry. So the miller took and ground the grain of many fields; later he baked the bread, and finally he delivered it. Forty bakeries were unearthed at Pompeii, and at Rome the pastrymakers were a separate guild. There were likewise contractors who bought an olive crop on the trees and gathered the fruit;11 most estates, however, continued to process their own oil and bake their own bread. The clothing of peasants and philosophers was homespun, but the well-to-do wore garments that, though woven at home, were carded, cleaned, bleached, and cut in a fullery. Some delicate woolen fabrics were woven in factories; and such flax as was not made into sails or nets was turned by factories into linen garments for women and handkerchiefs for men.12 In its next stage the cloth might be sent to a dyer, who not only colored it but impressed upon it such delicate designs as we find on the costumes in Pompeian murals. Tanning of leather had also reached the factory stage, but shoemakers were usually individual craftsmen, making shoes to order; some were specialists who made only fancy slippers for feminine feet.
The extractive industries were manned almost wholly by slaves or criminals. The gold and silver mines of Dacia, Gaul, and Spain, the lead and tin of Spain and Britain, the copper of Cyprus and Portugal, the sulphur of Sicily, the salt beds of Italy, the iron of Elba, the marble of Luna, Hymettus, and Paros, the porphyry of Egypt, and in general all subsoil natural resources, were owned by the state, were operated by it or on lease from it, and provided a main source of the national revenue; the gold of Spain alone yielded Vespasian $44,000,000 a year.13 The quest for minerals was a chief source of imperialist conquest; the mineral wealth of Britain, says Tacitus, was “the prize of victory” in Claudius’ campaign.14 Wood and charcoal were the chief fuels. Petroleum was known in Commagene, Babylonia, and Parthia,15 and the defenders of Samosata threw it in flaming torches upon Lucullus’ troops; but there is no sign of its commercial use as a fuel.I Coal was found in the Peloponnesus and northern Italy, but was used chiefly by smiths.16 The art of carburizing iron into steel had now spread from Egypt throughout the Empire. Most ironworkers, coppersmiths, goldsmiths, and silversmiths had a single forge and worked with one or two apprentices. At Capua, Minturnae, Puteoli, Aquileia, Como, and elsewhere several forges and smelters were united in factories; those at Capua were apparently large-scale capitalist enterprises externally financed.
The building trades were well organized and specialized. Dendrophoroi (“tree-bearers”) cut and delivered the wood, fabri lignarii (“woodworkers”) made houses and furniture, caementarii mixed the cement, structores laid the foundations, arcuarii built the arches, parietarii raised the walls, tectores applied plaster, albarii whitewashed it, artifices plumbarii inserted the plumbing—usually with pipes of lead (plumbum), and marmorii paved marble floors; we may imagine the jurisdictional disputes. Bricks and tiles were provided by potteries, many of which had reached the factory stage. Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius owned such factories and made fortunes from them.17 The kilns of Arretium, Mutina, Puteoli, Surrentum, and Pollentia supplied the ordinary tableware of all the European and African provinces as well as Italy. This wholesale production laid no claim to artistic excellence; the emphasis was now frankly on quantity; and the terra sigillata (“signed earthenware”) that now crowded the Italian market was distinctly inferior to the earlier product of Arretium. Outstanding work, as we shall see, was done in glass.
The factory production of glass, brick, tiles, pottery, and metalware does not warrant us in ascribing an industrial capitalism to ancient Italy. Rome itself had only two large factories—a paper mill and a dyeing establishment;18 probably neither metals nor fuels were at hand in quantity, and the profits of politics seemed more honorable than the proceeds of industry. In the factories of central Italy almost all the workers, and some of the managers, were slaves; in those of north Italy there was a greater proportion of freemen. Slaves were still sufficiently available to discourage the development of machinery; listless slave labor, with small stake in the product, was not likely to make inventions; some labor-saving devices were rejected because they might have caused technological unemployment; and the purchasing power of the people was too low to stimulate or support mechanized production.19 There were of course many simple machines, common to Italy, Egypt, and the Greek world: screw presses, screw pumps, water wheels, animal-driven grain mills, spinning wheels, looms, the crane and pulley, the revolving mold for pottery. . . . But Italian life was now (A.D. 96) as highly industrialized as life was ever to be until the nineteenth century. It would hardly go further on the basis of slavery and a high concentration of wealth. Roman law contracepted large organizations by requiring every sharer in an industrial undertaking to be a legally responsible partner; it forbade “limited liability” companies and allowed joint-stock corporations only for the performance of governmental contracts. Since similar restrictions affected banks, these could seldom provide capital for large-scale enterprise. At no time would the industrial development of Rome or Italy equal that of Alexandria or the Hellenistic East.