Victorious wars in their turn provided more slave-captives to pump back into the towns and estates of Italy.
The final outcome was the emergence of slave-worked agrarian properties of a hitherto unknown immensity. Prominent nobles like Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus could own over 200,000 acres in the 1st century B.C. These latifundia represented a new social phenomenon, which transformed the Italian countryside. They did not, of course, necessarily or invariably form consolidated blocks of land, farmed as single units.9 The typical pattern was for the latifundist to possess a large number of medium-sized villa estates, sometimes contiguous but perhaps equally often distributed across the country, designed for optimal surveillance by various bailiffs and agents. Even such dispersed holdings, however, were notably larger than their Greek predecessors, often exceeding 300 acres (500 iugera) in extent; while consolidated estates like the Younger Pliny’s seat in Tuscany might be 3,000 acres or more in size.10 The rise of the Italian latifundia led to a great extension of pastoral ranching, and the inter-cropping of wine and olives with cereal cultivation. The influx of slave-labour was so great that by the late Republic, not only was Italian agriculture recast by it, but trade and industry were overwhelmingly invaded by it too: perhaps 90 per cent of the artisans in Rome itself were of slave origin.11 The nature of the gigantic social upheaval that Roman imperial expansion involved, and the basic motor-force that sustained it, can be seen from the sheer demographic transformation that it wrought. Brunt estimates that in 225 B.C. there were some 4,400,000 free persons in Italy, to 600,000 slaves; by 43 B.C., there were perhaps 4,500,000 free to 3,000,000 slave inhabitants – indeed there may actually have been a net decline in the total size of the free population, while the slave population quintupled.12 Nothing like this had ever been seen in the Ancient World before. The full potential of the slave mode of production was for the first time unfolded by Rome, which organized and took it to a logical conclusion that Greece had never experienced. The predatory militarism of the Roman Republic was its main lever of economic accumulation. War brought lands, tributes and slaves; slaves, tributes and lands supplied the materiél for war.
But the historical significance of the Roman conquests in the Mediterranean basin was, of course, by no means reducible simply to the spectacular fortunes of the senatorial oligarchy. The march of the legions accomplished a change much deeper than this, for the whole history of Antiquity. Roman power integrated the Western Mediterranean and its northern hinterlands into the classical world. This was the decisive achievement of the Republic, which in contrast with its diplomatic caution in the East, from the outset unleashed its annexationist drive essentially in the West. Greek colonial expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has been seen, took the form of a proliferation of urban foundations, first created from above by the Macedonian rulers themselves, then soon imitated from below by the local gentry of the region; and it occurred in a zone with an extremely long prior history of developed civilization, stretching back much further than that of Greece itself. Roman colonial expansion in the Western Mediterranean differed basically in both context and character. Spain and Gaul – later Noricum, Rhaetia and Britain – were remote and primitive lands peopled by Celtic tribal communities – many with no history of contact at all with the classical world. Their integration into it posed problems of an altogether different order from that of the Hellenization of the Near East. For not only were they socially and culturally backward: they also represented interior land-masses of a type that classical Antiquity had hitherto never been able to organize economically. The original matrix of the city-state was the narrow littoral and the sea, and classical Greece had never relinquished it. The Hellenistic epoch had seen the intensive urbanization of the riparian cultures of the Near East, long based on fluvial irrigation and now partly reoriented towards the sea (a modification symbolized by the shift from Memphis to Alexandria). But the desert lay close behind the whole Southern and Eastern coast-line of the Mediterranean, so that the depth of settlement was never very great either in the Levant or North Africa. The Western Mediterranean, however, offered neither a littoral nor an irrigative system to the advancing Roman frontiers. Here, for the first time, classical Antiquity was confronted with great interior land-masses, devoid of previous urban civilization. It was the Roman city-state, that had developed the rural slave-latifundium, that proved capable of mastering them. The river-routes of Spain or Gaul assisted this penetration. But the irresistible impetus which carried the legions to the Tagus, the Loire, the Thames and the Rhine, was that of the slave mode of production fully unleashed on the land, without constrictions or impediments. It was in this epoch that probably the major single advance in the agrarian technology of classical Antiquity was registered: the discovery of the rotary mill for grinding corn, which in its two main forms was first attested in Italy and Spain in the mid 2nd century B.C.,13 concomitant with Roman expansion in the Western Mediterranean, and a sign of its rural dynamism. The successful organization of large-scale agrarian production by slave-labour was the precondition of the permanent conquest and colonization of the great Western and Northern hinterlands. Spain and Gaul remained, with Italy, the Roman provinces most deeply marked by slavery down to the final end of the Empire.14 Greek trade had permeated the East: Latin agriculture ‘opened up’ the West. Naturally, towns were founded by the Romans in the Western Mediterranean too, characteristically built along the banks of navigable rivers. The creation of a slave-worked rural economy itself depended on the implantation of a prosperous network of cities which represented the terminal points for its surplus produce, and its structural principle of articulation and control. Cordoba, Lyon, Amiens, Trier and hundreds of other towns were constructed. Their number never equalled that of the much older and more densely populated Eastern Mediterranean society, but it was far larger than that of the cities founded by Rome in the East.
For Roman expansion into the Hellenistic zone followed a very different course from its pattern in the Celtic backlands of the West. It was for a long time much more hesitant and uncertain, oriented towards blocking interventions to check major disruptions of the existing state system (Philip V, Antiochus III), and creating client realms rather than conquered provinces.15 Thus it was characteristic than even after the rout of the last great Seleucid army at Magnesia in 198, no Eastern territory was annexed for another fifty years; and it was not until 129 B.C. that Pergamum passed peacefully into Roman administration, by the testament of its loyal monarch rather than by a senatorial volition, to become the first Asian province of the Empire. Thereafter, once the immense riches available in the East were fully realized in Rome, and army commanders gained escalating imperial powers abroad, aggression became more rapid and systematic, in the 1st century B.C. But the Republican regimes generally administered the profitable Asian provinces which their generals now seized from their Hellenistic rulers, with a minimum of social change or political interference, professing to have ‘liberated’ them from their royal despots, and contenting themselves with the lush tax returns of the region, There was no widespread introduction of agrarian slavery in the Eastern Mediterranean; the numerous war prisoners enslaved there were shipped westwards for employment in Italy itself. Royal estates were appropriated by Roman administrators and adventurers, but their labour systems were left effectively intact. The main innovation of Roman rule in the East occurred in the Greek cities throughout the region, where property qualifications were now imposed for municipal office – to align them more closely with the oligarchic norms of the Eternal City itself; in practice, this merely gave juridical codification to the de facto power of the local notabilities who dominated these towns already.16 A few specifically Roman urban colonies were created in the East by Caesar and Augustus, to settle Latin proletarians and veterans in Asia. But these left very little mark. Significantly, when a new wave of cities were built under the Principate (above all, in the Antonine epoch), they were essentially Greek foundations, consonant with the previous cultural character of the region. There was never any attempt to Romanize the Eastern provinces; it was the West which underwent the full brunt of Latinization. The language frontier – running from Illyricum to Cyrenaica – demarcated the two basic zones of the new imperial order.
The Roman conquest of the Mediterranean in the last two centuries of the Republic, and the massive expansion of the senatorial economy which it promoted, was accompanied at home by a superstructural development without precedent in the Ancient world. For it was in this period that Roman civil law emerged in all its unity and singularity. Gradually developed from 300 B.C. onwards,
