2io Soldiery. Peasantry 



simply mobilizing free peasants for a campaign. The strength of the 

 armies lay in military skill, not in numbers. Long service and special 

 training made them uniformly professional, and provision was duly 

 made for regular conditions of retirement. The Italian peasant-farmers, 

 much fewer than of yore, and no longer all potential soldiers, were left 

 to become simply professional farmers. That agriculture nevertheless 

 did not really prosper was due to causes beyond their control; but 

 that they, both tenant coloni and any remaining small owners, should 

 tend to become a purely peasant class was inevitable. Augustus may 

 have wished to rebuild Italian agriculture on a sound foundation of the 

 peasant-elements, but circumstances were too contrary for the successful 

 prosecution of any such design. Meanwhile the marked differentiation 1 

 of soldier and farmer, and the settlement of veterans on allotments of 

 land, mainly in frontier Provinces, was proceeding. Analogies from the 

 East, particularly from Egypt, where such arrangements 2 were traditional, 

 can hardly have been ignored. In ancient Egypt the division of military 

 and farming classes had been so marked as to present the appearance of 

 a caste-system. But this was not peculiar to Egypt. It was in full vigour 

 in ancient India, where it impressed 3 Greek observers, to whom the general 

 absence of slaves, there as in Egypt, seemed one of its notable phenomena. 

 I do not venture to suggest that Roman emperors set themselves 

 deliberately to substitute a fixed attachment of working farmers to the 

 soil for a failing system of rustic slave-labour. But it is not likely that, 

 as labour-problems from time to time arose, the well-known Oriental 

 solutions were without some influence on their policy. We must not 

 forget that Greek thinkers had long ago approved the plan of strict 

 differentiation of functions in ideal states, and that such notions, popu- 

 larized in Latin, were common property in educated circles. Tradition 4 

 even pointed to the existence of some such differentiation in primitive 

 Rome. Therefore, when we find under the later Empire a rigid system 

 of castes and gilds, and the coloni attached to the soil with stern 

 penalties to hinder movement, we must not view the situation with 

 modern eyes. The restraint, that to us seems a cruel numbing of forces 

 vital to human progress, would come as no great shock to the world of 



1 Tacitus ann xiv 27 records the failure of Nero's colonization of veterans singly in 

 Italy, who mostly returned to the scenes of their service. He strangely regrets the abandon- 

 ment of the old plan of settling them in whole legions. It is to be remembered that in the 

 later Empire the army was more and more recruited from the barbarians. 



2 The 777 /cX^ouxifiJ, assigned in K\ijpoi to soldiers. 



3 See Herodotus II 165-7, cf 141, Strabo xv i 40 (p 704), 34 (p 701), 54 (p 710), 

 cf Diodorus II 40-1, Arrian Indica 10 8, 9. The references to slave-traffic in the Periplus 

 marts Erythraei do not really imply existence of a slave-system in India. See Rapson 

 Ancient India p 97. Much of interest in Sir J D Rees, The real India, on the Land-system 

 etc. In The early history of India by V A Smith the existence of slavery in India is 

 maintained. 4 See Dionysius n 28, cf 8, 9. 



