of informal relationships of contract and exchange between private citizens. Its fundamental orientation lay in economic transactions – purchase, sale, hire, lease, inheritance, security – and their familial concomitants – matrimonial or testamentary. The public relationship of the citizen to the State, and the patriarchal relationship of the head of the family to his dependants, were marginal to the central development of legal theory and practice; the first was considered too mutable to be subject to systematic jurisprudence, while the second covered most of the inferior domain of crime.17 The real thrust of Republican jurisprudence was concerned with neither of these: it was not public or criminal law, but civil law governing suits between disputing parties over property, that formed the peculiar province of its remarkable advance. The development of a general legal theory as such was wholly new in Antiquity. It was the creation, not of State functionaries or of practising lawyers, but of specialized and aristocratic jurists who remained outside the process of litigation itself, furnishing opinions to the judiciary in actual court-cases only on questions of legal principle rather than matters of fact. Republican jurists, who had no official status, evolved a series of abstract ‘contractual figures’ applicable to the analysis of particular acts of commercial and social intercourse. Their intellectual bent was analytic rather than systematic, but the cumulative result of their work was the appearance, for the first time in history, of an organized body of civil jurisprudence as such. The economic growth of commodity exchange in Italy attendant on the construction of the Roman imperial system, founded on the extensive use of slavery, thus found its juridical reflection in the creation of an unexampled commercial law in the later Republic. The great, decisive accomplishment of the new Roman law was thus, appropriately enough, its invention of the concept of ‘absolute property’ – dominium ex jure Quiritium.18 No prior legal system had ever known the notion of an unqualified private property: ownership in Greece, Persia or Egypt had always been ‘relative’, in other words conditional on superior or collateral rights of other authorities and parties, or obligations to them. It was Roman jurisprudence that for the first time emancipated private ownership from any extrinsic qualifications or restraints, by developing the novel distinction between mere ‘possession’ – factual control of goods, and ‘property’ – full legal title to them. The Roman law of property, of which an extremely substantial sector was naturally devoted to ownership of slaves, represented the pristine conceptual distillation of the commercialized production and exchange of commodities within an enlarged State system, which Republican imperialism had made possible. Just as Greek civilization had been the first to disengage the absolute pole of ‘liberty’ from the political continuum of relative conditions and rights that had always prevailed before it, so Roman civilization was the first to separate the pure colour of ‘property’ from the economic spectrum of opaque and indeterminate possession that had typically preceded it. Quiritary ownership, the legal consummation of the extensive slave economy of Rome, was a momentous arrival, destined to outlive the world and age that had given birth to it.
The Republic had won Rome its Empire: it was rendered anachronistic by its own victories. The oligarchy of a single city could not hold the Mediterranean together in a unitary polity – it had been outgrown by the very scale of its success. The final century of Republican conquest, which took the legions to the Euphrates and the Channel, was accompanied by spiralling social tensions within Roman society itself – the direct outcome of the very triumphs that were being regularly won abroad. Peasant agitation for land had been stifled by the suppression of the Cracchi. But it now reappeared in new and menacing forms, within the army itself. Constant conscription had steadily weakened and reduced the whole small-holder class as such: but its economic aspirations lived on and now found expression in the mounting pressures from the time of Marius onwards for allocations of land to discharged veterans – the bitter survivors of the military duties that lay so heavily on the Roman peasantry. The senatorial aristocracy profited enormously from the financial sacking of the Mediterranean that succeeded progressive annexations by Rome, making boundless fortunes in tribute, extortion, land and slaves: but it was utterly unwilling to provide even a modicum of compensation to the soldiery whose fighting yielded these unheard-of gains to it. Legionaries were meanly paid and brusquely dismissed, without any solatium for long periods of service in which they not only risked their lives but often lost their property at home too. To have paid them bounties on discharge would have meant taxing the possessing classes, however slightly, and this the ruling aristocracy refused to consider. The result was to create an inherent tendency within the later Republican armies to a deflection of military loyalty away from the State, towards successful generals who could guarantee their soldiers plunder or donatives by their personal power. The bond between legionary and commander came increasingly to resemble that between patron and client in civilian life: from the epoch of Marius and Sulla onwards, soldiers looked to their generals for economic rehabilitation, and generals used their soldiers for political advancement. Armies came to be instruments of popular commanders, and wars started to become private ventures of ambitious consuls: Pompey in Bithynia, Crassus in Parthia, Caesar in Gaul, determined their own strategic plans of conquest or aggression.19 The factional rivalries which had traditionally rent municipal politics were consequently transferred onto a military stage, much vaster than the narrow confines of Rome itself. The inevitable result was to be the outbreak of full-scale civil wars.
At the same time, if peasant distress was the subsoil of the military turbulence and disorder of the late Republic, the plight of the urban masses acutely sharpened the crisis of senatorial power. With the extension of the Empire, the capital city of Rome itself increased uncontrollably in size. Growing rural drift from the land was combined with massive imports of slaves, to produce a vast metropolis. By the time of Caesar, Rome probably contained a population of some 750,000 – surpassing even the largest cities of the Hellenistic world. Hunger, disease and poverty squeezed the crowded slums of the capital, filled with artisans, labourers and petty-shopkeepers, whether slave, manumitted or freeborn.20 The urban mob had been skilfully mobilized by noble manoeuvres against agrarian reformers in the 2nd century – an operation repeated once again with the abandonment of Catiline by the Roman plebs, which succumbed in time-honoured fashion to oligarchic propaganda against an ‘incendiary’ enemy of the State, to whom only Etrurian small-holders remained faithful to the end. But this was the last such episode. Thereafter, the Roman proletariat seems to have broken away irreversibly from senatorial tutelage; its mood became increasingly threatening and hostile to the traditional political order in the closing years of the Republic. Given the virtual absence of any solid or serious police force in a teeming city of three-quarters of a million inhabitants, the immediate mass pressure which urban riots could bring to bear in crises of the Republic was considerable. Orchestrated by the tribune Clodius, who armed sections of the city’s poor in the 50’s, the urban proletariat obtained a free grain dole for the first time in 53 B.C. – henceforward a permanent fact of Roman political life: the number of its recipients had risen to 320,000 by 46 B.C. Moreover, it was popular clamour that gave Pompey the extraordinary army commands which set in motion the final military disintegration of the senatorial state; popular enthusiasm for Caesar that rendered him so menacing to the aristocracy a decade later; and popular welcome that ensured him his triumphal reception in Rome after the crossing of the Rubicon. After Caesar’s death, it was once again the popular uproar in the streets of Rome at the absence of his heir that forced the Senate to plead for Augustus’s acceptance of renewed consular and dictatorial powers in 22–19 B.C., the definitive entombment of the Republic.
Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally of all, the self-protective immobilism and haphazard misgovernment of the Roman nobility in the conduct of its rule over the provinces rendered it increasingly unfit to manage a cosmopolitan empire. Its exclusive privileges were incompatible with any progressive unification of its overseas conquests. The provinces as such were still helpless to put up any serious resistance to its rapacious egoism. But Italy itself, the first province to achieve formal civic parity after a violent rebellion in the previous generation, was not. The Italian gentry had won juridical integration into the Roman community, but had not hitherto broken into the inner circle of senatorial office and power. With the eruption of the final round of civil wars between the Triumvirs, its opportunity for decisive political intervention had come. The provincial gentry of Italy flocked to Augustus, self-proclaimed defender of its traditions and prerogatives
