148 The story criticized 



the public prosecution and condemnation to a heavy fine that awaited 

 him at the end of his term of office. Suffice it that the story is in 

 general confirmed 1 by Livy, and that the hero of it seems to have been 

 remembered in Roman tradition as a classic instance of self-willed 

 audacity and disregard of the conventions that were the soul of Roman 

 public life. So far as the labour is concerned, it seems to me that what 

 was objected to in the consul's conduct was the use of his military 

 supreme power (imperium) for his own private profit. He treated a 

 fatigue-party as a farm labour-gang. Freemen might work on their 

 own land side by side with their slaves : they might work for wa^es 

 on another man's land side by side with his slaves. Any objection they 

 might feel would be due to the unwelcome pressure of economic 

 necessity. But to be called out for military service (and in most cases 

 from their own farms), and then set to farm-labour on another man's 

 land under military discipline, was too much. We must bear in mind 

 that a Roman army of the early Republic was not composed of pauper 

 adventurers who preferred a life of danger with hopes of loot and licence 

 to hard monotonous toil. The very poor were not called out, and the 

 ranks were filled with citizens who had at least some property to lose. 

 Therefore it might easily happen that a soldier set to rough manual 

 labour by Postumius had to do for him the service that was being done 

 at home for himself by a wage-earner or a slave. He was a soldier 

 because he was a free citizen; he was being employed in place of a 

 slave because he was a soldier under martial law. In no free republic 

 could such a wrong be tolerated. The words of the epitome of Livy 

 state the case with sufficient precision. L Postumius consularis, quoniam 

 cum exercitui praeesset opera militum in agro suo usus erat, damnatus 

 est. It is remarkable that, among the other epitomators and collectors 

 of anecdotes who drew from the store of Livy, not one, not even Valerius 

 Maximus, records this story. To Livy it must have seemed important^ 

 or he would not have laid enough stress on it to attract the attention 

 of the writer of the epitome. So too the detailed version of Dionysius, 

 probably drawn from the same authority as that of Livy, struck the 

 fancy of a maker of extracts and caused his text to be preserved to us. 

 It surely descends, like many other of the old stories, in a line of 

 Plebeian tradition, and is recorded as an illustration of the survival of 

 Patrician insolence in a headstrong consul after the two Orders had 

 been politically equalized by the Licinian laws. 



Beside these fragments of evidence there are in the later Roman 

 literature many passages in which writers directly assert that their 

 forefathers lived a life of simple frugality and worked with their own 

 hands on their own little farms. But as evidence the value of such 



1 Liv epit XI. 



