

14 Decay of free yeoman-farmers 



for corrupting the city mob and so controlling politics. Many could 

 afford to hold their lands even when it was doubtful whether estates 

 managed by slaves or hirelings were in fact a remunerative investment. 

 If we may believe Cicero, it was financial inability 1 to continue this 

 extravagant policy that drove some men of apparent wealth to favour 

 revolutionary schemes. The old-fashioned farmstead, the villa, was 

 modernized into a luxurious country seat, in which the owner might 

 now and then pass a brief recess, attended by his domestic slaves 

 from Town, and perhaps ostentatiously entertaining a party of 

 fashionable friends. 



We have followed the sinister progress of what I will call the 

 Agricultural Interest, from the 'horny-handed' peasant 2 farmer to the 

 land-proud capitalist. No doubt the picture is a highly coloured one, 

 but in its general outlines we are not entitled to question its truth. 

 Exceptions there certainly were. In hilly parts of Italy a rustic popu- 

 lation 3 of freemen survived, and it was from them that the jobbing 

 gangs of wage-earners of whom we read were drawn. And in the great 

 plain of the Po agricultural conditions remained far more satisfactory 

 than in such districts as Etruria or Lucania, where great estates were 

 common. A genuine farming population seems there to have held 

 most of the land, and rustic slavery appeared in less revolting form. 

 But these exceptions did not avail to stay the decline of rural Italy. 

 True, as the supply of slave-labour gradually shrank in the empire, 

 the working farmer reappeared on the land. But he reappeared as a 

 tenant gradually becoming bound 4 to the soil, worried by the exactions 

 of officials, or liable to a blood-tax in the shape of military service. He 

 was becoming not a free citizen of a free state, but a half-free serf 

 helplessly involved in a great mechanical system. Such a person bore 

 little resemblance to the free farmer working with his own hands for 

 himself on his own land, the rustic figure from whom we started. On 

 the military side, he was, if a soldier, now soldier first and farmer 

 afterwards: on the civic side, he was a mere subject-unit, whose virtues 

 were of no political importance and commanded no respect. In the 

 final stage we find the government recruiting its armies from barbarians 

 and concerned to keep the farmer on the land. So cogent then was 

 the necessity of insuring the supply of food for the empire and its 

 armies. 



At this point we must return to our first question, how far the agri- 

 culture of the Greco-Roman world depended on free or slave labour. It 



1 Cic in Catil n 18. See the chapter on Cicero. 



2 Cf Valerius Maximus vn 5 i. 

 8 For modern Italy see Appendix. 



4 Cf Caesar B C I 34, 56, discussed in the chapter on Varro. 



