The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    mencement of this period a reforming tribune asserted, with some exaggeration, it was believed, that there were not two thousand citizens possessing property.*7 Some forms of money-making, such as farming the state’s revenues, were a monopoly of the class of the equites, the old Roman horsemen or knights having degenerated into financiers. Permanent in- vestment was mostly in land, in which, in fact, men of sena- torial rank had to hold most of their property. Whole villages, and even small towns, belonged to one landlord. Columella speaks of estates, like districts, that could not be ridden around on horseback (presumably in a single ride), and were worked by droves of slaves or given over to pasture and game pre- serves.28 By the time of the early emperors Pliny tells us that half the province of Africa, comprising the modern Algeria and Tunis, had come into possession of six great families.®® For more than a century before the founding of the empire this concentration of wealth had been going on, accomplished by a great deal of fraud and even violence, but no doubt also by a great deal of honest diligence and sagacity. The flagrant con- trast between the idle rich and the toiling poor led to its in- evitable result, of contempt on the one side for the other, and on the other of hatred of the former. And when the people came into power under their representative the emperor, their hatred had effect. Reading in Tacitus of the spying system upon the rich and the seizure of their persons and confiscation of their property, we wonder how the Roman people could en- dure such evils. The truth is, the Roman populace delighted in them, and gloated over the discomfiture of their top-sawyers — at the expropriation of those who had (presumably in their opinion) expropriated them. Even the wealthy, as a class, were apathetic, except those who feared their turn might come next. As fortunes were made mostly by good luck, why should they not be lost by bad luck? But when the danger spread, and the senatorial party wished, at the death of Caligula, to re-establish the republic, that is, to restore their own power, the people would have none of it, but clamoured for an em- 87 Cicero, De Officits, II. xxi, 73. 88 De Re Rustica, I. 3. 39 Nat. Hist. XVIII. vii, (or vi.) 3. On the immensity of estates cf. Seneca, Ep. 87 §6, 89 §§18-21, Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, IT. 40.