200 The fall of the Republic 



own daily needs.' In this there is perhaps some exaggeration, but the 

 picture is probably true in the main. The agrestes may include both 

 small farmers and labourers. But they can hardly have come from 

 great distances, and so were probably not very numerous. The descrip- 

 tion is as loose as passages of the kind were in ancient writers, and are 

 still. The references to rustic slave-gangs, and Catiline's refusal to arm 

 them in support of his rising, have been cited above. 



We now pass into the period in which the last acts of the Roman 

 Republican drama were played and the great senatorial aristocrats, in 

 whose hands was a great share of the best lands in Italy, lost the 

 power to exploit the subject world. Not only by official extortion in 

 provincial governorships, but by money-lending at usurious interest l 

 to client princes or provincial cities, these greedy nobles amassed great 

 sums of money, some of which was employed in political corruption 

 to secure control of government at home. Civil wars and proscriptions 

 now thinned their ranks, and confiscations threw many estates into 

 the market. The fall of Antony in 3 1 BC left Octavian master of the 

 whole empire of Rome, an emperor ruling under republican disguises. 

 Now it was naturally and properly his aim to neutralize the effects of 

 past disorders and remove their causes. He looked back to the tradi- 

 tions of Roman growth and glory, and hoped by using the lessons thus 

 learnt to revive Roman prosperity and find a sound basis for imperial 

 strength. He worked on many lines : that which concerns us here is 

 his policy towards rustic life and agriculture. As he persuaded and 

 pressed the rich to be less selfish 2 and more public-spirited, to spend 

 less on ostentation and the adornment of their mansions and parks, 

 and to contribute liberally to works of public magnificence or utility, 

 a duty now long neglected ; even so he strove to rebuild Italian farm- 

 ing, to make it what it had been of yore, the seed-bed of simple civic 

 and military virtues. But ancient civilization, in the course of its 

 development in the Roman empire, had now gone too far for any ruler, 

 however well-meaning and powerful, to turn the tide. Socially it was 

 too concentrated and urban, economically too individualistic and too 

 dependent on the manipulation of masses of capital. In many directions 

 the policy of the judicious emperor was marvellously successful: but 

 he did not succeed in reviving agriculture on the old traditional footing 

 as a nursery of peasant farmers. He sought to bring back a traditional 

 golden age, and court-poets were willing to assert 3 that the golden 

 age had indeed returned. This was not true. The ever-repeated praises 

 of country life are unreal. Even when sincere, they are the voice of 

 town-bred men, weary of the fuss and follies of urban life, to which 



1 Two notorious instances are Pompey and M Brutus. 



2 Horace Odes II 15, ill 6, etc. 3 Horace Odes iv 5, 15, etc. 



