occurred in the Republic, despite constant agitation and turbulence over the question in the final epoch of its existence. The political dominance of the nobility blocked all efforts to reverse the relentless social polarization of property on the land. The result was a steady erosion of the modest farmer class that had provided the backbone of the Greek polis. The Roman equivalent of the hoplite category – men who could equip themselves with armour and weaponry necessary for infantry service in the legions – were the assidui or ‘those settled on the land’, who possessed the necessary property qualification to bear their own arms. Below them were the proletarii, propertyless citizens, whose service to the State was merely to rear children (proles). The increasing monopolization of land by the aristocracy was thus translated into a steady decline in the numbers of the assidui, and an inexorable increase in the size of the proletarii class. Moreover, Roman military expansionism also tended to thin the ranks of the assidui who provided the conscripts and casualties for the armies with which it was conducted. The result was that by the end of the 3rd century B.C., the proletarii were probably already an absolute majority of citizens, and had to be themselves called up to deal with the emergency of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy; while the property qualification for the assidui was twice reduced, until in the next century it had sunk below a subsistence minimum on the land.3
Small-holders never disappeared generally or completely in Italy; but they were increasingly driven into the more remote and precarious recesses of the country, in marshy or mountainous regions unappealing to engrossing landowners. The structure of the Roman polity in the Republican epoch thus came to diverge sharply from any Greek precedent. For while the countryside became chequered with large noble domains, the city conversely became populated with a proletarianized mass, deprived of land or any other property. Once fully urbanized, this large and desperate underclass lost any will to return to a small-holder condition, and could often be manipulated by aristocratic cliques against projects for agrarian reform backed by the assidui farmers.4 Its strategic position in the capital of an expanding empire ultimately obliged the Roman ruling class to pacify its immediate material interests with public grain distributions. These were, in effect, a cheap substitute for the land distribution which never occurred: a passive and consumer proletariat was preferable to a recalcitrant and producer peasantry, for the senatorial oligarchy which controlled the Republic.
It is now possible to consider the implications of this configuration for the specific course of Roman expansionism. For the growth of Roman civic power was consequently distinguished from Greek examples in two fundamental respects, both related directly to the internal structure of the city. Firstly, Rome proved able to widen its own political system to include the Italian cities it subjugated in the course of its peninsular expansion. From the start, it had – unlike Athens – exacted troops for its armies, not money for its treasury, from its allies; thereby lightening the burden of its domination in peace, and binding them solidly to it in time of war. In this, it followed the example of Sparta, although its central military control of allied troops was always much greater. But Rome was also able to achieve an ultimate integration of these allies into its own polity which no Greek city had ever envisaged. It was the peculiar social structure of Rome which permitted this. Even the most oligarchic Greek polis of the classical epoch basically rested on a median body of propertied citizens, and precluded extreme economic disparities of wealth and poverty within the city. The political authoritarianism of Sparta – the exemplar of Hellenic oligarchy – did not mean a class polarization within the citizenry: in fact, as we have seen, it was accompanied by marked economic egalitarianism in the classical epoch, probably including allocation of inalienable state holdings to each Spartiate precisely to ensure hoplites against the type of ‘proletarianization’ which overtook them in Rome.5 The classical Greek polis, whatever its degree of relative democracy and oligarchy, retained a civic unity rooted in the rural property of its immediate locality: it was for the same reason territorially inelastic – incapable of an extension without loss of identity. The Roman Constitution, by contrast, was not merely oligarchic in form: it was much more deeply aristocratic in content, because behind it lay an economic stratification of Roman society of quite another order. It was this which rendered possible an extension of Republican citizenship outwards to comparable ruling classes in the allied cities of Italy, who were socially akin to the Roman nobility itself, and had benefited from Roman conquests overseas. The Italian cities finally revolted against Rome in 91 B.C., when their demand for the Roman franchise was refused – something no Athenian or Spartan ally had ever requested. Even then, their war aim was a peninsular Italian state with a capital and Senate, in avowed imitation of the unitary Roman order itself, rather than any return to scattered municipal independence.6 The Italian rebellion was militarily defeated in the long and bitter struggle of the so-called Social War. But amidst the subsequent turmoil of the Civil Wars between the Marian and Sullan factions within the Republic, the Senate could concede to the basic political programme of the allies, because the character of the Roman governing class and its Constitution facilitated a viable extension of citizenship to the other Italian cities, ruled by an urban gentry similar in character to the Senatorial class itself, with the wealth and leisure to participate in the political system of the Republic, even from a distance. The Italian gentry by no means consummated its political aspirations for central office within the Roman State immediately, and its ulterior ambitions after the grant of citizenship were to be a powerful force for social transformations at a later date. But their civic integration nevertheless represented a decisive step for the future structure of the Roman Empire as a whole. The relative institutional flexibility which it demonstrated gave Rome a signal advantage in its imperial ascent: it meant an avoidance of either of the two poles between which Greek expansion had divided and foundered – premature and impotent closure of the city-state or meteoric royal triumphalism at the expense of it. The political formula of Republican Rome marked a notable advance in comparative efficacy.
Yet the decisive innovation of Roman expansion was ultimately economic: it was the introduction of the large-scale slave latifundium for the first time in Antiquity. Greek agriculture had, as we have seen, employed slaves widely; but it was itself confined to small areas, with a meagre population, for Greek civilization always remained precariously coastal and insular in character. Moreover, and above all, the slave-tilled farms of Attica or Messenia were usually of very modest size – perhaps an average of some 30 to 60 acres, at most. This rural pattern was, of course, linked to the social structure of the Greek polis, with its absence of huge concentrations of wealth. Hellenistic civilization had, by contrast, witnessed enormous accumulations of landed property in the hands of dynasties and nobles, but no widespread agricultural slavery. It was the Roman Republic which first united large agrarian property with gang-slavery in the countryside on a major scale. The advent of slavery as an organized mode of production inaugurated, as it had in Greece, the classical phase proper of Roman civilization, the apogee of its power and culture. But whereas in Greece it had coincided with the stabilization of small farms and a compact citizen corps, in Rome it was systematized by an urban aristocracy which already enjoyed social and economic dominion over the city. The result was the new rural institution of the extensive slave latifundium. The manpower for the enormous holdings which emerged from the late 3rd century onwards was supplied by the spectacular series of campaigns which won Rome its mastery of the Mediterranean world: the Punic, Macedonian, Jugurthine, Mithridatic and Gallic wars, which poured military captives into Italy to the profit of the Roman ruling class. At the same time, successive ferocious struggles fought on the soil of the peninsula itself – the Hannibalic, Social and Civil Wars – delivered into the grasp of the senatorial oligarchy or its victorious factions large territories expropriated from the defeated victims of these conflicts, especially in Southern Italy.7 Moreover, these same external and internal wars dramatically accentuated the decline of the Roman peasantry, which had once formed the robust small-holder base of the city’s social pyramid. Constant warfare involved endless mobilization; the assidui citizenry called to the legions year after year died in thousands under their standards, while those who survived them were unable to maintain their farms at home, which were increasingly absorbed by the nobility. From 200 to 167 B.C., 10 per cent or more of all free Roman adult males were permanently conscripted: this gigantic military effort was only possible because the civilian economy behind it could be manned to such an extent by slave-labour, releasing corresponding manpower reserves for
