Chapter 10 — The Plebs Urbana

CHAPTER X The Plebs Urbana

The direction that industrial development takes depends in large measure upon the amount and nature of the available labor and the condition of the society from which it comes. Our Southern states secured Negro slaves because they could be profitably employed in the hot toil of tobacco and cotton lands; but once the masses of slaves were there, they practically conditioned the further economic development of the South for decades.

Before undertaking a closer study of the industrial innovations of the Ciceronian period, it will therefore be pertinent to analyze some of the social changes taking place in Rome’s lower strata. It is generally recognized that the independent householders of Latin stock had materially decreased in number after the Second Punic War and that their place was filled by slaves and the offspring of slaves. How far this process had gone during the Republic, we shall attempt to discover.

When Cicero was canvassing for the consulship in 64, his brother wrote him an interesting pamphlet on practical electioneering methods, in which he reminded him that “Roma est civitas ex nationum conventu constituta,” and that a candidate must be careful of his behavior toward his slaves and freedmen, for these had no little power in influencing the vote of the populace.[1] It is in the light of such chance remarks that one may comprehend the stormy riots and bloodshed so frequently mentioned during the last days of the Republic, and the power of popular leaders like Clodius, who gained such strength through his patronage of labor guilds that neither Caesar nor Pompey dared interfere with him. How Rome’s body of citizens had come to be a “conglomerate of all nations” is, however, not so readily explained, since, after all, citizenship had not yet been given to any people outside Italy. The evidence that we now have seems to indicate that immigration played a relatively small role in this change, but that the transmutation of stock was due to the growth of a class that had risen from slavery.

[1] De Petitione Cons. 54 and 39.

The wars of Rome were, of course, largely instrumental in destroying Italy’s native stock.[2] The Second Punic War alone, with such disasters as Lake Trasimene and Cannae, accounted for a loss of perhaps a third of Rome’s citizens. The succeeding wars in Greece, Asia, and Spain, and against the Cimbri and the Allies, were severe enough to keep down the manhood of Italy. What cost more than actual casualties during this period was the constant retention of about twenty percent of the young men of marriageable age in military service, so that the chances of family life decreased to that extent. On the other hand, during the period when the best of the native stock was being drafted for service, slaves and freedmen lived securely at home, constantly multiplying in number.

[2] See Park, The Plebs Urbana in Cicero’s Day.

The fact that after the Second Punic War the areas of vacated lands were being occupied by ranches and plantations manned by slaves contributed to the same result. Indeed, as Appian dryly remarks, the landlords preferred slaves to free labor, since free men were liable to military service, while slaves were left alone and could therefore be depended upon.[3] His words are: “The landlords used slaves as laborers and herdsmen, fearing that if they used free men these would be drawn into the army. The ownership of slaves itself brought great gain from the multitude of their children, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus the powerful ones became enormously rich and the race of slaves multiplied, while the Italian people dwindled in numbers and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes, and service in the army. If they had any respite from these evils, they passed their time in idleness, because the land was held by the rich, who employed slaves instead of freemen.” The redundancy of Appian’s phrases does no more than justice to the deluge of evils that he describes.

[3] Bell. Civ. I. 7.

The new generation that grew up, excluded from opportunities to acquire land in Italy, drifted into the backwaters of urban slums or emigrated to the new provinces that were constantly being opened,[4] and such men were to a great extent lost to Rome’s body of citizens. For forty years after the Second Punic War, despite a constant manumission of slaves, there was only a slight annual increase of 1.3 percent in the citizens’ rolls; and thereafter, for thirty years—a period during which Rome added Macedonia, Africa, and Asia to the Empire—there was an annual decrease of one-fourth of one percent.

[4] The Roman governors found enough Roman citizens resident in such provinces as Spain, Asia, and Africa to levy a legion of them in time of need: see, for example, Cic. Ad Att. V, 18, 2; Caesar, Bell. Civ. III, 4, 3; Bell. Alex. XXXIV, 5. Cf. Kornemann, art. Conventus, Pauly-Wissowa.

A complete statement of the causes of decline in population would necessitate a discussion of the Malthusian law, the social evil, birth control, and much else, and for these problems we have, of course, only a few data. Some considerations, however, may be indicated in passing. There is the striking fact, which all readers of Rome’s literature quickly notice, that of the many families for which we have fairly good records in literary notices, few contained more than two or three children. This fact accords with evidence provided by the thousands of tombstone inscriptions recording the names of parents and their children. Confirmation comes also from speeches like that of Metellus inveighing against race suicide; from the legislation of so many emperors who tried, by tax exemptions or censorial compulsion, to induce or compel the citizens to consider the political necessity of a sound and increasing progeny; and finally from the blunt statements of historians who record the lamentations of the poor, saying that they were reduced to childlessness because they were unable in their poverty to rear their children.[6] For the Empire, during which we have fairly full records of the more distinguished families, we are enabled even to reach definite statistics[7] regarding the amazingly rapid decline of the old stock.

For instance, of the forty-five patricians in the Senate in Caesar’s day, only one is represented by posterity in Hadrian’s day. The famous Aemilii, Fabii, Claudii, Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of the Cornelii, had disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patriciate, and all but six of them vanished before Nerva’s reign. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in A.D. 65 under Nero, all trace of half is lost a generation later, and not a few of those surviving lived on only through the adoption of children. Of course, members of the aristocracy suffered severely under the political tyranny of that century, but most of this result is, after all, directly traceable to voluntary childlessness.

[5] Beloch, Bevölkerung der Griechisch-Römischen Welt, 347, gives the census list, with some revision, as follows:

203 B.C. — 214,000 193 B.C. — 243,000 173 B.C. — 269,000 168 B.C. — 312,000 163 B.C. — 337,000 153 B.C. — 324,000 141 B.C. — 327,000 131 B.C. — 318,000 125 B.C. — 394,000

[6] Appian, B.C. I. 10, applying to the time of Tiberius Gracchus.

[7] Stech, Klio, Beiheft X.

It should not be too hastily assumed that this was accomplished by means of the old Indo-Germanic practice of expositio. This custom was not as prevalent at Rome as might be inferred from Plautus, whose plots are almost wholly Greek in origin. It may well be that in early Latium the period of overpopulation had brought such economic hardship as to reintroduce and excuse a practice that many branches of the race had sloughed off when emerging from barbarism. But Roman law never permitted the exposing of any normal male child, and a count of the children, male and female, recorded upon tombstones reveals that their numbers were nearly equal and that, therefore, female children were reared as were males.[8] That the custom was not completely discountenanced, however, helps us to comprehend how public opinion could early blink at the fact that Roman families were shunning the burden of parenthood.

[8] The detailed study of the inscriptions here employed may be found in the American Historical Review, 1916, 689–708.

Of much greater importance than expositio are certain social conditions of the time. After the Punic War, the old religion—which had once encouraged large families by stressing the supreme importance of ancestor worship to the continued happiness of the parent in the afterlife—counted for little among the upper classes. Moreover, a society in which young men spent their prime in the army and returned as experienced men of the world to enter domestic life was apt to have unrestricted patience with the canker of prostitution. Finally, it must be remembered that Rome and Greece were the only two nations before the nineteenth century in which many individuals attained a condition of pampered ease, rational self-control, and sophisticated freedom from instinct-born folkways, which played havoc, as these things now do, with the devices of natural evolution.

That the native stock dwindled is clear from all the evidence. The question of what took its place is pertinent. Immigration accounts for a very small part. Labor in Cicero’s day was so largely servile that this element, which today moves most freely in response to economic needs, was then moved and controlled by capital in the form of slaves. The free man was generally too poor to shift for himself. Furthermore, neither Italian lands, which required capital for development, nor the city of Rome, which had no industries not in servile hands, could attract the foreign workman. To live in semi-idleness at Rome upon the grain provided by the state required the status of citizenship, and this a foreigner could seldom acquire.

South Italian Greeks who received citizenship after the Social War were practically the only non-Romans who could avail themselves of this, and, as we shall see, they apparently scattered into the provinces to act as middlemen between Roman capitalists and the Greek-speaking East. In the early Empire, for which inscriptions provide much information, we find at Rome exceedingly few names that bear the regular forms of nomenclature of non-Romans. The small shopkeepers[9] and traders of Rome prove to be largely non-Italian, but an examination of their names shows that they are freedmen rather than free immigrants. Only in some of the learned professions[10] and arts—in medicine, teaching, painting, and architecture, for instance—and in some occupations that required versatility and cunning, like those of low comedians and acrobats, do inscriptions and letters record a few foreigners; but even in these they had to compete with intelligent freedmen who had been given specialized training by their masters for purposes of profit.

[9] Pârvan, Die Nationalität der Kaufleute.

[10] Juvenal, III, 76:

“While every land—daily pours Its starving myriads forth, hither they come To fatten on the genial toil of Rome, Minions, then lords of every princely dome, Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician, Ropedancer, conjurer, fiddler and physician.”

One might infer from Juvenal’s lines that these were free immigrants, and of course the casual observer had no way of knowing, but the inscriptions prove that men of this class were frequently slaves and freedmen. At Rome, slaves could not be recognized as such. When a senator once proposed that slaves be given distinctive dress, the Senate defeated the measure, fearing that the slaves might become dangerous if they came to realize their great number. Seneca, De Clem. I, 24. Cf. Tac. Ann. 4, 27.

Slaves were, of course, available in great numbers. The more docile ones were supplied by the Greek markets, where the Greeks in their economic decline sold their unprofitable chattels and presently began to breed and train new generations of slaves when they found the demands of the West worth supplying. Throughout that vast area of misruled Asia Minor, where petty provinces kept up constant warfare, hordes of captives and kidnapped children of the various Oriental races were brought to the block by traders and pirates. Strabo[11] remarks that on the slave market of Delos ten thousand slaves per day were frequently sold.

[11] Strabo, XIV, 3, 2; Diod. 36, 3.

Rome’s generals also brought in vast numbers of captives, many of them savage warriors who could be used only in heavy labor, under close watch or in chains. The glut of Sardinian captives[12] became proverbial. A hundred and fifty thousand Epirotes were brought in by one raid. Pontus provided large numbers of captives in the campaigns of Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey. When Carthage fell, a large part of its population was sold into captivity. The Cimbri taken by Marius, assigned naturally to heavy work on plantations, made up the backbone of Spartacus’ army a few years later. And so the dismal story goes.

[12] War captives. See Koeser, De Captivis Rom.; Livy, XLI, 26; XLV, 34; Appian, Lib. 130; Mithrad. 61 and 78; Livy, Per. 68.

Such were the laborers on the land and in the industries of Cicero’s time. And these were generally permanent accretions, for Rome’s extremely liberal policy of manumitting slaves and granting them citizenship with freedom made it possible for the conglomerate stock to liberate itself with unusual ease and to merge into the citizen body of Rome. Thus slaves not only supplied the demand for labor, but the sons of slaves spread into the trades and crafts that required civil standing; and in Cicero’s day it was these people who already constituted the larger element of the plebeian classes.[13] To reach more definite data on the proportion of this new stock in Rome’s population is difficult, since no ancient author chose to give the complete census figures then available. The best that can now be done is to draw upon such facts as may be derived from Roman inscriptions, keeping well in mind that these inscriptions come largely from the Empire and that some reduction must be made for any inferences applied to the late Republic.

[13] See Chapter XVI. Even the laws of the early Empire designed to restrict manumission were seldom enforced. Indeed, no one was interested in enforcing them. The Lex Salpensana proves that owners could legally manumit practically without limit. C.I.L. II, 1963.

As is well known, the voluminous Corpus of Latin Inscriptions contains in its sixth volume the full text of all the sepulchral inscriptions of Rome—more than twenty thousand—and it may fairly be assumed that these, numerous as they are, record a representative list of Roman names of average type for the first three centuries of the Empire. Now a Roman tombstone may reveal many secrets. The name alone is often eloquent. In its official form it shows whether the bearer is a slave, an ex-slave, or citizen-born. In the case of the citizen-born, the cognomen, if foreign, seems to betray ignoble or at least non-Roman ancestry. The stone is also liable, when it records the names of parents, children, or relatives, to disclose useful information regarding the status of the family and hence, by inference, of the individual.

Furthermore, the Roman, proud of any petty office he had held, was sure to record the honor, and such offices and occupations to some extent make known the holder’s class and rank. In a word, a careful study of the numerous sepulchral inscriptions can furnish important data for estimating the character of Rome’s population.

There has been some doubt as to whether the foreign cognomen is a safe criterion for judging the bearer’s origin. If, however, one considers the inscriptions in which both parents and children are named, one finds that the second generation was remarkably fond of changing a foreign-sounding cognomen into one of respectably native appearance.[14] Martial, of course, commented upon this, as upon all else, and his epigram on the Syrian barber Cinnamus, who transformed himself into Cinna, a name of unsuspected purity, has had many a congener in recent numbers of Punch and Life. This process of Romanizing names and choosing distinctly Roman cognomina for children is so very pronounced that we may safely infer that foreign names had no good repute even among the lowly. When the latter occur, they may be taken as proof that the ancestral tree had its roots in foreign soil. And when the name is Greek, as a very large proportion of slave and freedmen names actually are, we may also infer that the bearer came from, or at least by way of, that part of the slave-producing world in which Greek was the language of commerce—that is, Asia Minor and Syria.[15]

[14] American Historical Review, 1916, p. 693, for the full evidence.

[15] The evidence is collected in Bang, Die Herkunft der Römischen Sklaven, Röm. Mitt. 1910 and 1912.

By using all the criteria just enumerated and applying them to lists of persons who actually resided[16] at Rome with their families, and not to mere transients, and by including in the list the Latin slave names—like Salvius, Hilarus, and Apparatus—that were avoided by freeborn citizens, we reach the surprising conclusion that nearly ninety percent of the population permanently resident at Rome during the Empire bore the taint of foreign extraction.

[16] See American Historical Review, loc. cit. I have included children of ten years or less, who presumably were born at Rome, but of other slaves and freedmen only such as revealed a near personal relationship with some resident of Rome.

The question then arises whether it was possible for this foreign and servile population to multiply and merge into the civil population of Rome. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the assumption has prevailed that in the city, at least, work in aristocratic households was so exacting that slaves could seldom have been allowed the privilege of family life, and that the masters could not afford the cost or the waste of service involved in rearing slave children. This assumption, however, proves to be erroneous. The sixth volume of the Corpus of Inscriptions fortunately records names taken from the extensive burial grounds and urn depositories of several aristocratic households, and these prove that slaves, even in such well-organized establishments, usually married and were well-nigh as prolific in offspring[17] as the average Roman of free station.

Livia’s dressmaker married her butler; Octavia’s hairdresser was the wife of her keeper of the plate; Statilius’ messenger courted the spinning maid; and so the lists run. To be sure, the percentages of offspring are not as large as in average Roman families, but when we consider that the slave child often failed, for reasons of expense, to receive the honor of an inscription, and furthermore that such children were often perforce separated from their parents and therefore not recorded with them, the general conclusion just hazarded will not seem an overstatement.

[17] American Historical Review, 1916, 697–698.

That slaves usually married and had goodly families, not only in the country, as Varro and Appian[18] both remark, but also in urban households, is then evident. A concomitant fact important for our purpose is that the Romans were exceedingly liberal in the practice of manumitting slaves, so that this stock soon became an integral part of the citizenry. The facts about manumission are so easily accessible in the works of Friedländer, Dill, and others that we need not attempt to describe them here. The processes are well known. Frugal and ambitious slaves, particularly the quick-witted Orientals, could save enough in a few years to buy their freedom. Many were given freedom because of good service; many were established in some petty business upon a percentage of profits and hence earned their liberty; and very many were set at liberty by their masters’ testaments. Such freedmen would usually labor to win the liberty of their wives and children, if that had not already been secured, and thus there was always a horde of freedmen whose children possessed full civil liberty, who assumed Roman names, dress, and manners, and who were ready to found new houses that might someday vie in splendor with the nobility of ancient days.

[18] Varro, R.R. II, 1, 26; II, 6, 9; X, 6; Appian, B.C. I, 7; Columella, I, 8, 18; Hor. Epod. II, 65; Livy, XXII, 11, 8; Nepos, Atticus, 13, 4. Somewhat to our surprise, the laws that were invented for the encouragement of large families favored freedmen and freedwomen as well as the native stock. By the Lex Aelia Sentia, a freedwoman of “Junian” standing could become a full citizen by giving birth to a child, and a freedwoman who had four children was released from the guardianship of her patron. Gaius, I, 29, and III, 44.

Nor is it to be inferred that the picture we have given of a wholly changed race was true of the city alone. Tacitus speaks only of the metropolis as the “cesspool of the world,” and indeed Rome was naturally more affected than the rest of Italy. But no region of the West really escaped the process of change. Not only do the other important cities of Italy, like Beneventum, Milan, and Patavium, reveal a strikingly large proportion of non-Italian names in their cemeteries, but the very core of central Italy, from which the hardiest soldiers were once drawn, seems to have become largely foreign. A careful reading of the inscriptions of the Marsi and Vestini will allay the most obstinate doubts on this point. In a word, the whole of Italy, as well as the Romanized portions of Gaul and Spain, was during the Empire dominated in blood by the East.

And it is accurate to say “the East.” An analysis of the given names of the slaves and freedmen of Rome reveals that seventy percent are Greek; the indices of the same class for Latium outside Rome give sixty-four percent Greek. Even Cisalpine Gaul, the region where one would expect few Oriental slaves and numerous Northern ones, proves to yield forty-six percent Greek names. And it must not be forgotten that many freedmen of Eastern extraction had already acquired pride enough to hide their condition by substituting Latin for Greek cognomina, so that our percentages do not by any means overstate conditions.

It will probably always remain a problem why the Oriental stock continued predominant when, in fact, the Gallic, German, and Dacian wars furnished so very many captives for the block at Rome. The explanation doubtless involves, to some extent, practices well understood at Rome but that happened not to be recorded. Perhaps slave capture and kidnapping persisted in the East during the Empire to an extent that has not been surmised. Perhaps the expanding economic prosperity of the West drew away the surplus slaves of a decaying East, and perhaps also Eastern trade encouraged the rearing of slaves for the Western market as one of the regular products for export.

As for the Northern war captive, we may surmise why his race soon vanished. A chance remark of Caesar,[19] for instance, reveals the fact that Cimbric war captives were the mainstay of the slave revolt under Spartacus. Those revolters were, of course, wiped out in the hopeless contest. And this may give us a clue to further surmise. The Gallic and Germanic war captives were hardly suited to the household duties that provided the best opportunities for survival. Rude and strong, they were probably sent to the roughest service in the mines and in the galleys. There they worked themselves to an early death, knowing nothing of wife and offspring and caring for nothing but possible revenge and improbable escape.[20] Their course was soon run. That inscriptions say little of them is not to be wondered at. Such, we must assume, were in part the conditions and practices that eliminated the Northern captive and encouraged the multiplication of the Oriental. At any rate, the testimony of the inscriptions that the latter overwhelmed Rome cannot be disputed.

[19] Bell. Gall. I, 40, 5.

[20] Strack, Historische Zeitschrift, CXII, 9.

It would be interesting to know how far the social transmutation we have tried to follow accounts for the fundamental changes in the Empire. Was not absolutism inevitable when the Italian, who had so equably combined liberty with law, gave way to impulsive and passionate races[21] that had never known self-government? Did the emotional and mystical religions of the East spread westward and capture the Roman Empire as the Orientals who lived by faith and intuition displaced the rationalistic Occidental? Did the literature of the later day lose its originality because a new people came to copy its forms without comprehending its spirit? Did Rome’s capacity to govern fail because the people of iron will, indefatigable purpose, and prudent vision who had built the state bequeathed its government to men of softer fiber? Such questions lead far afield, but the questions themselves indicate the direction that historians may expect to take in accounting for some of the economic changes of the Empire.

[21] In Pro Flacco, 17, Cicero characterizes with much amusing exaggeration the ingenita levitas et erudita vanitas of the Asiatic Greeks, making the striking statement that “whenever our political assemblies are thrown into confusion, it is usually people of this race that have caused it.”

CHAPTER X The Plebs Urbana

The direction of industrial development depends largely on the amount and kind of labor available and on the condition of the society from which that labor comes. The Southern States of the United States acquired Black slaves because they could be employed profitably in the hot labor of tobacco and cotton fields. But once large numbers of slaves were present, they effectively shaped the South’s further economic development for decades.

Before examining more closely the industrial innovations of Cicero’s period, it is therefore appropriate to analyze some of the social changes taking place in Rome’s lower classes. It is generally recognized that the number of independent householders of Latin stock had materially declined after the Second Punic War and that their place was filled by slaves and the descendants of slaves. We shall try to discover how far this process had advanced during the Republic.

When Cicero was canvassing for the consulship in 64 B.C., his brother wrote him an interesting pamphlet on practical electioneering methods. In it, he reminded Cicero that “Roma est civitas ex nationum conventu constituta,” and that a candidate must be careful in his behavior toward his slaves and freedmen, because they had considerable power to influence the popular vote.¹

¹ De Petitione Cons. 54 and 39.

Such passing remarks help us understand the violent riots and bloodshed so frequently mentioned during the Republic’s final years. They also help explain the power of popular leaders such as Clodius, who gained so much strength through his patronage of labor guilds that neither Caesar nor Pompey dared interfere with him. It is not so easy, however, to explain how Rome’s citizen body had become a “conglomerate of all nations,” since citizenship had not yet been granted to any people outside Italy. The evidence now available seems to indicate that immigration played a relatively small role in this change. Instead, the transformation of the population was caused by the growth of a class that had risen out of slavery.

Rome’s wars were, of course, largely responsible for destroying Italy’s native stock.² The Second Punic War alone, with disasters such as Lake Trasimene and Cannae, may have cost Rome one-third of its citizens. The later wars in Greece, Asia, and Spain, and those against the Cimbri and the Allies, were severe enough to keep Italy’s adult male population low. Even more costly than the actual casualties during this period was the continual retention in military service of about twenty percent of the young men of marriageable age. Their opportunities to establish families were reduced accordingly. Meanwhile, while the best of the native stock was being drafted for service, slaves and freedmen lived securely at home and continually increased in number.

² See Park, The Plebs Urbana in Cicero’s Day.

The fact that, after the Second Punic War, areas of abandoned land were being occupied by ranches and plantations worked by slaves contributed to the same result. Indeed, as Appian³ dryly remarks, landlords preferred slaves to free labor because free men were liable for military service, while slaves were left alone and could therefore be relied upon. His words are:

“The landlords used slaves as laborers and herdsmen because they feared that, if they employed free men, these men would be drawn into the army. The ownership of slaves itself brought great profit from the large number of their children, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus the powerful became enormously rich, and the slave population multiplied, while the Italian people declined in numbers and strength because they were oppressed by poverty, taxes, and military service. If they received any relief from these evils, they spent their time in idleness, because the land was held by the rich, who employed slaves instead of free men.”

The repetition in Appian’s language does no more than justice to the flood of evils he describes.

The new generation that grew up without opportunities to acquire land in Italy drifted into the backwaters of urban slums or emigrated to the new provinces that were continually being opened.⁴ To a great extent, such men were lost to Rome’s citizen body. For forty years⁵ after the Second Punic War, despite the continual manumission of slaves, the citizen rolls increased by only 1.3 percent annually. During the following thirty years—a period in which Rome added Macedonia, Africa, and Asia to the Empire—the citizen population declined annually by one-quarter of one percent.

³ Bell. Civ. I. 7.

⁴ Roman governors found enough Roman citizens living in provinces such as Spain, Asia, and Africa to levy a legion from among them in time of need. See, for example, Cic. Ad Att. V, 18, 2; Caesar, Bell. Civ. III, 4, 3; Bell. Alex. XXXIV, 5. Cf. Kornemann, art. Conventus, Pauly-Wissowa.

⁵ Beloch, Bevölkerung der Griech.-Röm. Welt, 347, gives the census list, with some revisions, as follows:

203 B.C. — 214,000 193 B.C. — 243,000 173 B.C. — 269,000 168 B.C. — 312,000 163 B.C. — 337,000 153 B.C. — 324,000 141 B.C. — 327,000 131 B.C. — 318,000 125 B.C. — 394,000

A complete account of the causes of population decline would require a discussion of the Malthusian law, prostitution, birth control, and much else. For these problems, of course, we have very little evidence. Some considerations may nevertheless be mentioned in passing.

There is one striking fact that readers of Roman literature quickly notice: among the many families for which literary references provide fairly good records, few contained more than two or three children. This agrees with the evidence provided by thousands of tombstone inscriptions recording the names of parents and their children. Confirmation also comes from speeches such as that of Metellus, who denounced what was called “race suicide”; from the legislation of many emperors, who tried through tax exemptions or censorial compulsion to induce or compel citizens to recognize the political necessity of producing healthy and increasing numbers of descendants; and finally from the blunt statements of historians. These historians record the complaints of the poor, who said that they were reduced to childlessness because their poverty made them unable to rear children.⁶

For the Empire, a period for which we possess fairly complete records of the more distinguished families, we can even arrive at definite statistics⁷ concerning the astonishingly rapid decline of the old stock. For example, of the forty-five patricians in the Senate in Caesar’s time, only one was represented by descendants in Hadrian’s time. The famous Aemilii, Fabii, Claudii, Manlii, Valerii, and all the others, except the Cornelii, had disappeared. Augustus and Claudius elevated twenty-five families to the patriciate, and all but six vanished before Nerva’s reign. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in A.D. 65 under Nero, all trace of half was lost a generation later. Not a few of those that survived continued only through the adoption of children. Members of the aristocracy, of course, suffered severely under the political tyranny of that century. Nevertheless, most of this result can ultimately be traced directly to voluntary childlessness.

⁶ Appian, B.C. I. 10, referring to the time of Tiberius Gracchus.

⁷ Stech, Klio, Beiheft X.

It should not be assumed too quickly that this decline was caused by the old Indo-Germanic practice of expositio, or child exposure. This custom was not as common in Rome as one might infer from Plautus, whose plots were almost entirely Greek in origin. It may well be that, in early Latium, a period of overpopulation had produced enough economic hardship to revive and excuse a practice that many branches of the race had abandoned when emerging from barbarism.

Roman law, however, never permitted the exposure of any normal male child. Moreover, a count of the male and female children recorded on tombstones shows that the numbers were nearly equal and that female children were therefore reared just as male children were.⁸ The fact that the custom was not completely condemned nevertheless helps us understand how public opinion could, at an early date, overlook the fact that Roman families were avoiding the burden of parenthood.

⁸ The detailed study of the inscriptions used here may be found in the American Historical Review, 1916, 689–708.

Certain social conditions of the time were much more important than expositio. After the Punic War, the old religion had little influence among the upper classes. That religion had once encouraged large families by emphasizing the supreme importance of ancestor worship to the parent’s continued happiness in the afterlife. Moreover, a society in which young men spent their prime years in the army and returned as experienced men of the world to begin domestic life was likely to tolerate the destructive influence of prostitution without restraint.

Finally, it must be remembered that Rome and Greece were the only two nations before the nineteenth century in which many individuals attained a condition of pampered ease, rational self-control, and sophisticated freedom from instinctive traditional customs. These conditions interfered with the mechanisms of natural evolution, just as they do now.

All the evidence makes it clear that the native stock declined. The relevant question is what took its place. Immigration accounts for only a very small part of the change. In Cicero’s time, labor was so largely servile that the group which today moves most freely in response to economic needs was then moved and controlled by capital in the form of slaves. Free men were generally too poor to move on their own initiative.

Furthermore, neither Italian lands, which required capital for development, nor the city of Rome, whose industries were in servile hands, could attract foreign workers. Living in partial idleness at Rome on grain supplied by the state required citizenship, and a foreigner could seldom acquire that status. The South Italian Greeks who received citizenship after the Social War were practically the only non-Romans who could take advantage of this opportunity. As we shall see, they apparently dispersed into the provinces to act as intermediaries between Roman capitalists and the Greek-speaking East.

For the early Empire, about which inscriptions provide much information, we find at Rome very few names that follow the regular naming conventions of non-Romans. Rome’s small shopkeepers⁹ and traders prove to have been largely non-Italian, but an examination of their names shows that they were freedmen rather than free immigrants. Inscriptions and letters record a few foreigners only in some learned professions¹⁰ and arts—for example, medicine, teaching, painting, and architecture—and in certain occupations requiring versatility and cunning, such as those of low comedians and acrobats. Even in these fields, however, foreigners had to compete with intelligent freedmen whom their masters had given specialized training for profit.

⁹ Pârvan, Die Nationalität der Kaufleute.

¹⁰ Juvenal, III, 76:

“While every land—daily pours Its starving myriads forth, hither they come To fatten on the genial toil of Rome, Minions, then lords of every princely dome, Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician, Ropedancer, conjurer, fiddler and physician.”

One might infer from Juvenal’s lines that these people were free immigrants. The casual observer, of course, had no way of knowing, but the inscriptions prove that men of this class were frequently slaves and freedmen. At Rome, slaves could not be recognized as such. When a senator once proposed that slaves should be given distinctive clothing, the Senate rejected the measure because it feared that the slaves might become dangerous if they came to realize how numerous they were. Seneca, De Clem. I, 24. Cf. Tac. Ann. 4, 27.

Slaves were, of course, available in great numbers. The more docile ones were supplied by the Greek markets, where the Greeks, during their economic decline, sold their unprofitable human property. Later, as they found it worthwhile to supply the demands of the West, they began to breed and train new generations of slaves for sale.

Throughout the vast and misgoverned region of Asia Minor, where petty states maintained continual warfare, traders and pirates brought hordes of captives and kidnapped children from various Eastern peoples to the auction block. Strabo¹¹ remarks that the slave market at Delos frequently sold ten thousand slaves in a single day.

¹¹ Strabo, XIV, 3, 2; Diod. 36, 3.

Rome’s generals also brought in vast numbers of captives. Many were savage warriors who could be used only for heavy labor under close supervision or in chains. The flood of Sardinian captives¹² became proverbial. One raid brought in 150,000 Epirotes. Pontus supplied large numbers of captives during the campaigns of Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey. When Carthage fell, a large part of its population was sold into captivity. The Cimbri captured by Marius were naturally assigned to heavy plantation labor, and a few years later they formed the backbone of Spartacus’s army. So the grim story continues.

Such were the laborers on the land and in the industries of Cicero’s time. They generally became permanent additions to the population, because Rome’s extremely liberal policy of manumitting slaves and granting them citizenship along with freedom made it unusually easy for this mixed population to free itself and merge into Rome’s citizen body. Slaves therefore not only met the demand for labor; the sons of slaves also spread into the trades and crafts that required civil standing. By Cicero’s time, these people already formed the larger part of the plebeian classes.¹³

It is difficult to obtain more definite evidence about the proportion of this new stock in Rome’s population, because no ancient author chose to provide the complete census figures then available. The best that can now be done is to use such facts as can be derived from Roman inscriptions, while remembering that these inscriptions come largely from the Empire and that any conclusions applied to the late Republic must therefore be adjusted downward.

¹² War captives. See Koeser, De Captivis Rom.; Livy, XLI, 26; XLV, 34; Appian, Lib. 130; Mithrad. 61 and 78; Livy, Per. 68.

¹³ See Chapter XVI. Even the laws of the early Empire intended to restrict manumission were seldom enforced. Indeed, no one had an interest in enforcing them. The Lex Salpensana proves that owners could legally manumit slaves almost without limit. C.I.L. II. 1963, face.

As is well known, the extensive Corpus of Latin Inscriptions contains in its sixth volume the complete texts of all the sepulchral inscriptions from Rome—more than twenty thousand. It may reasonably be assumed that, numerous as they are, these inscriptions record a representative collection of typical Roman names from the first three centuries of the Empire.

A Roman tombstone can reveal many secrets. The name alone is often informative. In its official form, it shows whether the person was a slave, a former slave, or a citizen by birth. In the case of a native-born citizen, a foreign cognomen seems to reveal humble or at least non-Roman ancestry. When the stone records the names of parents, children, or other relatives, it may also provide useful information about the status of the family and therefore, by inference, of the individual.

Furthermore, Romans were proud of every minor office they had held and were certain to record the honor. Such offices and occupations reveal, to some extent, the holder’s class and rank. In short, careful study of the numerous sepulchral inscriptions can provide important evidence for estimating the character of Rome’s population.

There has been some doubt about whether a foreign cognomen is a reliable basis for judging its bearer’s origin. If, however, one examines inscriptions in which both parents and children are named, one finds that members of the second generation were remarkably fond of replacing foreign-sounding cognomina with names of respectably native appearance.¹⁴ Martial, who naturally commented on this as he did on everything else, wrote an epigram about the Syrian barber Cinnamus, who transformed himself into Cinna, a name of unquestioned purity. He has had many counterparts in recent issues of Punch and Life.

This process of Romanizing names and choosing distinctly Roman cognomina for children is so pronounced that we may safely infer that foreign names had a poor reputation even among the lower classes. When such names occur, they may be accepted as evidence that the family tree had its roots in foreign soil. When the name is Greek—as a very large proportion of the names of slaves and freedmen actually are—we may also infer that the bearer came from, or at least passed through, the part of the slave-producing world in which Greek was the language of commerce: Asia Minor and Syria.¹⁵

¹⁴ See Am. Hist. Rev. 1916, p. 693, for the full evidence.

¹⁵ The evidence is collected in Bang, Die Herkunft der Röm. Sklaven, Röm. Mitt. 1910 and 1912.

If we use all the criteria just listed and apply them to people who actually lived¹⁶ at Rome with their families, rather than to temporary visitors, and if we include Latin slave names such as Salvius, Hilarus, and Apparatus, which native-born citizens avoided, we reach the surprising conclusion that nearly ninety percent of the population permanently resident at Rome during the Empire bore the mark of foreign ancestry.

¹⁶ See Am. Hist. Rev., loc. cit. I have included children aged ten or younger, who were presumably born at Rome. Among other slaves and freedmen, however, I have included only those who revealed a close personal relationship with some resident of Rome.

The question then arises whether this foreign and servile population was able to reproduce and merge into Rome’s civil population. In the absence of contrary evidence, it has generally been assumed that, in the city at least, work in aristocratic households was so demanding that slaves could seldom have been permitted family life. It has also been assumed that masters could not afford either the expense or the loss of service involved in rearing slave children.

This assumption, however, proves to be wrong. The sixth volume of the Corpus of Inscriptions fortunately records names taken from the extensive burial grounds and urn repositories of several aristocratic households. These records show that slaves, even in such well-organized establishments, usually married and produced almost as many children¹⁷ as the average free Roman.

Livia’s dressmaker married her butler; Octavia’s hairdresser was the wife of her keeper of the plate; Statilius’s messenger courted the spinning maid; and so the lists continue. To be sure, the recorded proportion of children is not as high as in average Roman families. But slave children often did not receive the honor of an inscription because of the cost. Furthermore, such children were often forcibly separated from their parents and therefore were not recorded with them. When these facts are considered, the general conclusion just suggested will not seem exaggerated.

¹⁷ Am. Hist. Rev. 1916, 697–698.

It is therefore clear that slaves generally married and had sizable families, not only in the countryside, as Varro and Appian¹⁸ both remark, but also in urban households. A related fact important to our purpose is that the Romans were extremely liberal in manumitting slaves, so that this population soon became an integral part of the citizen body.

The facts concerning manumission are so readily available in the works of Friedländer, Dill, and others that we need not attempt to describe them here. The processes are well known. Thrifty and ambitious slaves, especially quick-witted Easterners, could save enough money within a few years to purchase their freedom. Many were freed in reward for good service. Many were established in small businesses in return for a share of the profits and thus earned their liberty. Very many were freed through their masters’ wills.

Such freedmen usually worked to secure the liberty of their wives and children, if it had not already been obtained. There was therefore always a large population of freedmen whose children possessed full civil liberty and who adopted Roman names, clothing, and manners. They were ready to establish new families that might one day rival in splendor the nobility of ancient times.

¹⁸ Varro, R.R. II, 1, 26; II, 6, 9; X, 6; Appian, B.C. I, 7; Columella, I, 8, 18; Hor. Epod. II, 65; Livy, XXII, 11, 8; Nepos, Atticus, 13, 4. Somewhat surprisingly, the laws devised to encourage large families favored freedmen and freedwomen as well as the native population. Under the Lex Aelia Sentia, a freedwoman of “Junian” status could become a full citizen by giving birth to a child, and a freedwoman who had four children was released from the guardianship of her patron. Gaius, I, 29, and III, 44.

Nor should it be inferred that the picture presented here of a completely transformed population applied only to the city. Tacitus speaks only of the metropolis as the “cesspool of the world,” and Rome was naturally affected more than the rest of Italy. But no region of the West entirely escaped the process of change.

Other important Italian cities, such as Beneventum, Milan, and Patavium, reveal a strikingly large proportion of non-Italian names in their cemeteries. Even the heart of central Italy, from which the hardiest soldiers had once been drawn, seems to have become largely foreign. A careful reading of the inscriptions of the Marsi and Vestini will overcome the most persistent doubts on this point. In short, during the Empire, the blood of the East predominated throughout Italy, as well as in the Romanized parts of Gaul and Spain.

It is accurate to say “the East.” An analysis of the given names of Rome’s slaves and freedmen shows that seventy percent are Greek. The indices for members of the same class in Latium outside Rome show sixty-four percent Greek names. Even Cisalpine Gaul—a region where one might expect few Eastern slaves and many Northern ones—produces forty-six percent Greek names. It must also be remembered that many freedmen of Eastern origin had already acquired enough pride to conceal their background by replacing Greek cognomina with Latin ones. Our percentages therefore do not in any way exaggerate the situation.

It will probably always remain a mystery why the Eastern population continued to predominate when the Gallic, German, and Dacian wars supplied so many captives for the slave markets at Rome. The explanation probably involves practices that were well understood in Rome but happened not to be recorded.

Perhaps slave capture and kidnapping continued in the East during the Empire to a greater extent than has been supposed. Perhaps the growing economic prosperity of the West drew surplus slaves from a declining East. Perhaps Eastern trade also encouraged the breeding of slaves for Western markets as one of the regular products for export.

As for Northern prisoners of war, we may be able to guess why their populations soon disappeared. A passing remark by Caesar,¹⁹ for example, reveals that Cimbric war captives formed the main strength of the slave revolt under Spartacus. Those rebels were, of course, destroyed in their hopeless struggle. This may provide a clue for further conjecture.

Gallic and Germanic war captives were poorly suited to the household duties that offered the best opportunities for survival. Rough and strong, they were probably sent to the harshest service in the mines and on the galleys. There they worked themselves to an early death, knowing nothing of wives or children and caring for nothing except possible revenge and an unlikely escape.²⁰ Their lives were soon over. It is not surprising that inscriptions say little about them.

We must assume that these were, at least in part, the conditions and practices that eliminated Northern captives while encouraging the reproduction of Easterners. At any rate, the testimony of the inscriptions—that Easterners overwhelmed Rome—cannot be disputed.

¹⁹ Bell. Gall. I, 40, 5.

²⁰ Stride, Hist. Zeitschrift, CXII, 9.

It would be interesting to know how far the social transformation we have attempted to trace explains the fundamental changes within the Empire. Was absolutism not inevitable when the Italians, who had combined liberty with law so evenly, gave way to impulsive and passionate peoples²¹ who had never known self-government?

Did the emotional and mystical religions of the East spread westward and capture the Roman Empire because Easterners, who lived by faith and intuition, displaced the rationalistic people of the West? Did later literature lose its originality because a new population copied its forms without understanding its spirit? Did Rome’s capacity to govern fail because the people of iron will, tireless purpose, and prudent vision who had built the state bequeathed its government to people of softer character?

Such questions take us far from our subject. But the questions themselves indicate the direction historians may be expected to take when explaining some of the Empire’s economic changes.

²¹ In Pro Flacco, 17, Cicero describes, with much amusing exaggeration, the ingenita levitas et erudita vanitas of the Asiatic Greeks. He makes the striking statement that “whenever our political assemblies are thrown into confusion, it is usually people of this race who have caused it.”