Political anarchy accelerated economic disintegration, and economic decline promoted political decay; each was the cause and effect of the other. Roman statesmanship had never found a healthy economic life for Italy; and perhaps the narrow plains of the peninsula have never provided an adequate base for the soaring aims of the Italian state. The production of cereals was discouraged by the competition of cheap grains from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, and the great vineyards were losing their markets to provincial wines. Farmers complained that high taxes consumed their precarious profits and left them too little to keep the drainage and irrigation canals in repair; the canals filled up, the marshes spread, and malaria weakened the population of the Campagna and Rome. Large tracts of fertile land had been withdrawn from cultivation for residential estates. The absentee owners of the latifundia exploited labor and the soil to the limit of tolerance, and absolved themselves by philanthropies in the towns; urban architecture and games profited while the countryside grew desolate. Many peasant proprietors and free rural workers abandoned the farms for the cities, leaving Italian agriculture for the most part to latifundia manned by listless slaves. But the latifundia themselves were ruined by the Pax Romana, the dearth of wars of conquest in the first and second centuries, and the consequent fall in the supply, and rise in the cost, of slaves. Compelled to lure free labor back to the land, the great landlords divided their holdings into units which they leased to coloni, “cultivators”; they required from these tenants a small money rent or a tenth of the produce, and a period of unpaid labor in the owner’s villa or on his private domain. In many cases landlords found it profitable to emancipate their slaves and change them into coloni. In the third century the owners, harassed by invasion and revolution in the cities, took more and more to living in their villas; these were fortified into castles, and were gradually transformed into medieval châteaux. III
The lack of slaves strengthened for a time the position of free labor in industry as well as in agriculture. But while the resources of the rich were consumed by war and government, the poverty of the poor did not decrease.22 Wages were from six to eleven, prices some thirty-three, per cent of comparative wages and prices in the United States of the early twentieth century.23 The class struggle was becoming more violent, for the army, recruited from the provincial poor, often joined in the attack upon wealth, and felt that its services to the state justified confiscatory taxation for donatives, or more direct pillaging of the well to do.24 Industry suffered as commerce declined. The export trade of Italy fell as the provinces graduated from customers to competitors; barbarian raids and piracy made trade routes as unsafe as before Pompey; depreciated currencies and uncertain prices discouraged long-term enterprise. The extension of the frontier having ceased, Italy could no longer prosper by supplying or exploiting an expanding realm. Once Italy had collected the bullion of conquered lands and grown rich on the robbery; now money was migrating to the more industrialized Hellenistic provinces, and Italy grew poorer while the rising wealth of Asia Minor forced the replacement of Rome with an Eastern capital. Italian industry was thrown back upon its domestic market, and found the people too poor to buy the goods they could make.25 Internal commerce was hampered by brigands, rising taxes, and the deterioration of roads through lack of slaves. The villas became more self-sufficient in industry, and barter competed with money trade. Large-scale production gave way year by year to small shops supplying chiefly a local demand.
Financial difficulties entered. The precious metals were running low: the gold mines of Thrace and the silver mines of Spain had reduced their yield, and Dacia, with its gold, would soon be surrendered by Aurelian. Much gold and silver had been consumed in art and ornament. Faced with this dearth when war was almost continuous, the emperors from Septimius Severus onward repeatedly debased the currency to pay for state expenses and military supplies. Under Nero the alloy in the denarius was ten per cent, under Commodus thirty, under Septimius fifty. Caracalla replaced it with the antoniniamis, containing fifty per cent silver; by 260 its silver content had sunk to five per cent.26 The government mints issued unprecedented quantities of cheap coin; in many instances the state compelled the acceptance of these at their face value instead of their actual worth, while it insisted that taxes should be paid in goods or gold.27 Prices rose rapidly; in Palestine they increased one thousand per cent between the first and third centuries;28 in Egypt inflation ran out of control, so that a measure of wheat that had cost eight drachmas in the first century cost 120,000 drachmas at the end of the third.29 Other provinces suffered much less; but in most of them inflation ruined a large part of the middle class, nullified trust funds and charitable foundations, rendered all business discouragingly precarious, and destroyed a considerable portion of the trading and investment capital upon which the economic life of the Empire depended.
The emperors after Pertinax were not displeased by this attrition of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. They felt the hostility of the Senatorial class and the great merchants to their alien origin, their martial despotism, and their exactions; the war of Senate and emperor, interrupted from Nerva to Aurelius, was renewed; and by donatives, public works, and doles, the rulers deliberately based their powers upon the favor of the army, the proletariat, and the peasantry.
The Empire suffered only less than Italy. Carthage and north Africa, farthest from the invaders, flourished; but Egypt decayed under destructive factionalism, Caracalla’s massacre, Zenobia’s conquest, high taxes, listless forced labor, and Rome’s annual exaction of grain. Asia Minor and Syria had borne invasion and pillaging, but their ancient and patient industries had survived all tribulations. Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace had been devastated by the barbarians, and Byzantium had not recovered from Septimius’ siege. As war brought Roman garrisons and supplies to the German frontier new cities rose along the rivers—Vienna, Karlsburg, Strasbourg, Mainz. Gaul had been disordered and discouraged by German attacks; sixty of her cities had been sacked; most of her towns and cities were shrinking within new walls, and were abandoning the broad straight streets of Roman design for the more easily defended irregular alleys of early antiquity and the Middle Ages. In Britain, too, the cities were becoming smaller, the villas larger;30 class war and high taxation had destroyed wealth or driven it into rural concealment. The Empire had begun with urbanization and civilization; it was ending in reruralization and barbarism.