CHAPTER 3
EMPIRE AND INEQUALITY
WHEN ROME BEGAN THE SECOND Punic War, its leading citizens seem to have imagined that they were embarking on a fight that would proceed along many of the same lines as Rome’s first fight with Carthage. This war, too, would be fought first in Sicily and Spain and then in Africa itself. Rome would follow established procedures for recruiting armies, assigning commands, and allocating resources. And, in the end, victory over Carthage could be won without substantial challenges to the basic functioning of Roman government and the long-standing arrangements through which Rome controlled Italy.
By 202 all of these expectations must have seemed absurdly naive. The war had fundamentally and permanently changed the economic, political, and military life of Romans and, as the second century dawned, Romans came increasingly to understand that a state that reconfigured itself to project power across wide distances during a war would never return to its previous form. (The United States would reach a similar realization after World War II.) Not only would Rome need to fill the power vacuums left by the defeats of Carthage and its allies but the internal transformations that enabled Rome to survive Hannibal also could not be easily undone. Still, no one in Rome or the wider Mediterranean could yet imagine how profoundly Rome’s evolution during the Second Punic War would change their world.
The first sign that the Mediterranean had entered a new era came just two years after Carthage’s surrender in 202. The entry of Philip V into Rome’s war with Carthage had, in the end, made little difference to Hannibal’s campaign. Rome quickly built an alliance with the Greek Aetolian League, with the Aetolians conducting most of the fighting against Philip. The war petered out when the Aetolians came to terms with the king, and, for the first time in recent history, an adversary had challenged the Romans only to emerge essentially unpunished.
Although Rome had gained no new territory in Greece or its environs during the conflicts with Philip and Hannibal, the fighting compelled Rome to cultivate relationships with Greek states in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Aetolians, of course, were the Greeks with whom Rome had dealt most closely, but other Greek states had also cooperated closely with the Republic as it struggled to defeat Carthage. Around 213 BC, for example, the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt had helped Rome stave off bankruptcy by sending a large quantity of gold bullion to the Republic that could be minted into distinctive coins. Then, in 208, Ptolemaic ambassadors had tried to mediate an end to Rome’s war with Macedon. And Rome had also developed deep ties with the kingdom of Pergamum in Asia Minor. Not only had Pergamum participated for a time in the war against Philip but it had also facilitated the transfer of the goddess Cybele to Rome as the Republic prepared for the invasion of Africa.1
Rome had withdrawn somewhat from the Greek world after the peace treaty with Philip, but, after the experiences of Pyrrhus’s invasion earlier in the century and Philip’s alliance with Carthage, the Senate was now very much aware of the need to follow Greek developments. And, as the new century dawned, Rome became greatly troubled by an alliance that threatened to overturn the balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean. A series of volcanic eruptions between 210 and 205 BC dramatically affected food production in Ptolemaic Egypt and, in 207 or 206, the kingdom was hit by a serious rebellion that nearly toppled the dynasty. As Egypt seethed, the rest of the Greek world sensed an opportunity. Philip V and Antiochus III, the leader of the Seleucid Greek dynasty based in Syria, reached an alliance through which they would work together to dismember the Ptolemaic kingdom and split the spoils among themselves. Although neither kingdom immediately moved decisively, the threat that such a pact posed to the balance of power across the region could indeed seem frightening to Rome. The threat of an even more powerful Macedonian kingdom seemed particularly serious given that Philip had tried to expand his kingdom to the west by exploiting Rome’s preoccupation with Hannibal in the 210s. Romans could not be faulted for thinking that he might try something similar in the future.2
By 200 BC, alarmed reports from Roman allies in Pergamum, Rhodes, the Aetolian League, and Athens reached the Senate. All of them detailed Philip’s aggressive actions and described the territorial divisions supposedly outlined in his agreement with Antiochus. The Senate voted to declare war on Philip conditionally, with war to be avoided if Philip were to cease his attacks on the Greek states that had complained to Rome. While Philip deliberated, the consul P. Sulpicius Galba was allotted the command against Macedon. Galba had already fought against the forces of Philip during Rome’s earlier conflict with Macedon and had become somewhat familiar with both the region in which the fighting would occur and the tactics of the enemy. Crucially, Galba had also become aware of the riches and honors that he could gain for himself if Rome decided to fully and energetically prosecute this war.3
Though the Senate could propose a course of action, the Republican system required the comitia centuriata to endorse any senatorial recommendation for war. And it was here that Galba and the other members of the Senate hit an unexpected problem. Fatigued by the effort Rome had put in to defeat Hannibal and apparently egged on by a tribune of the plebs who complained that the Senate refused to allow the people to enjoy the fruits of peace, the assembly voted overwhelmingly against a second war with Macedon. “The senate,” a later historian observed, “could not tolerate this behavior.” Individual senators took turns abusing the tribune of the plebs and urging Galba to schedule another public discussion of the issue as a prelude to a second vote.4
Although Galba’s exact words are now lost, the speech that he delivered in this public meeting probably drew powerfully on Romans’ traumatic memories of Hannibal’s recent invasion of Italy. Livy records that Galba pointed out to the populace that Rome would have to fight Philip somewhere, and the wars with Pyrrhus and Hannibal had shown that it was better for Rome to confront adversaries abroad rather than in Italy. Lurking beneath this claim was perhaps also a realization that Rome had failed to impress either Macedon or other Greek states with its conduct of its last war with Philip. Galba may have felt the need to assert Roman power forcefully to avoid another military challenger coming from the east. The assembly seems to have been swayed by Galba’s speech and voted for war, though with the condition that no one who had served in the African campaigns of the Second Punic War would be compelled to serve in the war with Macedon.5
Galba got his war, but the fighting proved much more difficult than he had anticipated. Both Galba and his successor found themselves blocked from advancing into Greece by Philip’s energetic defense of mountain passes. It was not until 198 that Roman forces, under the command of the consul T. Quinctius Flamininus, broke through Philip’s defenses. When Philip sent messengers to try to negotiate a peace, Flamininus found himself in a difficult position. His term in office was nearly over and, though he could conceivably declare the war won if he accepted Philip’s peace offer, he had the chance to gain far greater honors if his command were to be extended. After three days of negotiations, Philip proved willing to grant a number of territorial concessions as a price for peace, but Rome’s Greek allies were unsatisfied with the deal he offered. Philip then proposed that the impasse could be broken if he sent an embassy to appeal directly to the Roman Senate. Before the issue could come before the Senate, however, Flamininus learned that his command against Philip had been extended. Recognizing that Flamininus now had time to decisively defeat Philip and serve as the architect of the peace, Flamininus’s officers sabotaged the senatorial discussion.6
In 197 BC, Flamininus’s Roman legions met Philip’s phalanx on a ridge in Thessaly called Cynoscephalae (literally, the Dog’s Head) where they outmaneuvered the Macedonian forces and put the king to flight. After a second round of negotiations, Philip and the Senate agreed to a treaty by which Philip would pay a massive war indemnity, evacuate all of the territory that he controlled in central and southern Greece, and disband his fleet. In 196, Flamininus used the occasion of the Isthmian Games in Corinth to announce that all Greeks in Greece would be free from all foreign garrisons and tribute payments. The Macedonians would leave, the Romans would not replace their garrisons with Roman troops, and no other Greek kingdom or city-state was to try to fill the vacuum the departure of these great powers would leave. It was then communicated separately to representatives of Antiochus III that the Greek cities of Asia Minor once controlled by either Philip or the Ptolemies were to be free as well.7
Antiochus was unmoved and, in an interview with Roman representatives a few months later, reportedly told the Romans that they had as much business with affairs in Asia as he did with those in Italy. And, in the immediate term, this settled things. Flamininus and the Roman commissioners sent to sort out Greek affairs spent most of 195 and 194 implementing the agreement with Philip before withdrawing their forces. But almost immediately after this withdrawal, Rome began receiving reports from its Greek allies in Asia Minor about Antiochus’s moves to fill the vacuum left by Philip’s humiliation. In 192, Rome’s former allies in the Aetolian League convinced Antiochus to make the much more provocative move of landing a force of ten thousand infantry, five hundred cavalry, and six elephants in Greece, a step that challenged Flamininus’s declaration that Greece should remain free of foreign control.
The troops and elephants alarmed Rome far less than who accompanied them: Antiochus had chosen to challenge the freedom of Greece with an army led by Hannibal. Whatever restraint Rome might have felt about campaigning against a king whose domains stretched from the Aegean to India disappeared once the Senate learned of Hannibal’s presence. This was now a war that Rome was determined to prosecute fully. Once Roman forces landed, Antiochus made a show of fortifying the famous mountain pass at Thermopylae before retreating to Asia, leaving the Aetolians to face the Romans alone. He seemed to imagine that the Romans would again cede Asia as his sphere of influence if he stayed out of Greece.
He was wrong. The consul for the year 190 assigned to confront Antiochus was Lucius Cornelius Scipio, the brother of Scipio Africanus, and Lucius was eager to match his brother’s achievement at Zama with his own resounding victory over Hannibal. Roman forces under Lucius’s command crossed into Asia, turned down a series of peace proposals from Antiochus, and defeated Hannibal, the king, and his full army in 188. Scipio then dictated that peace would depend upon Antiochus evacuating all of western Asia Minor, paying an indemnity of 15,000 talents (fifteen times what Rome had compelled Philip to pay), and surrendering Hannibal. If he complied, Antiochus could keep his throne and control over the rest of his territory. The territory he and his allies ceded would fall under the control of four regional powers: the Achaean League of Greek cities, the Macedonian kingdom of Philip (which had ingratiated itself to Rome by allowing Scipio’s army to pass through its territory safely), the kingdom of Pergamum, and the Republic of Rhodes. After an additional year of campaigning in Greece and Asia Minor by the Romans, the consuls for the next year compelled the Aetolians to become subject allies of the Republic. Rome again withdrew from Greece.
This arrangement, through which Rome farmed out the stabilization of Greece and Asia Minor to allies, proved only slightly more enduring than Flamininus’s “freedom of Greece.” Everyone in the Greek world knew that distant Roman power supported these four regional hegemons, but the states were bound in alliance only to Rome and not to each other. This meant that Rome alone would have to guarantee the stability of the system amid the friction resulting from changes in the leadership of those states, challenges to their control of territory, and regional rivalries. These issues had emerged already in the 180s, and Rome’s unwillingness to involve itself forcefully in the politics of the Greek world meant that the system neared collapse as the 170s dawned.8
Philip’s death in 179 further destabilized Greece. After sanctioning the murder of one son with whom the Senate had particularly good relations, Philip passed the Macedonian kingdom to his son Perseus. Perseus in turn began to fill the leadership void that Rome had left. He built up close ties with the cities of southern and central Greece, married a member of the Seleucid royal family, and received honors from Rhodes. Rumors soon reached Rome that Perseus had begun rebuilding the Macedonian military into a force that could again threaten the peace. Rome reacted, however, only when the king of Pergamum came to Rome and, speaking before a closed meeting of the Senate, detailed a series of real and imaginary offenses committed by Perseus.9
Hostilities began in 171 and, surprisingly, Rome suffered a series of defeats in the first two years of the war. When Perseus’s victories combined with the fact that a Roman fleet had sacked a number of allied Greek cities, Rome soon faced a serious crisis. Not only were Greek states rallying to Perseus but also the consuls for the year 169 ran short of enough volunteers to assemble an army willing to go to Greece. The war was won following a decisive battle in 168 that saw the Roman commander Aemilius Paullus defeat Perseus’s phalanx and, not long afterward, capture the king himself.
After Paullus’s victory, Rome again sought to build a structure through which Greeks could govern themselves in a fashion that would enable it to again withdraw from Greece. The kingdom of Macedon was broken up into four republics that were forbidden from cooperating with one another and required to pay taxes to Rome. The Achaean League was compelled to send Rome 1,000 hostages (including the historian Polybius) to guarantee its good behavior, and the Aetolian League saw 550 of its leading citizens massacred as punishment for being a disloyal ally. Even Rhodes, which had only tried to mediate the conflict, saw Rome strip it of all territory on the Asian mainland. And, finally, although the Seleucids had played no direct role in the war, a Roman emissary confronted the king Antiochus IV in 168 while he was attacking the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria in a separate conflict. He presented Antiochus with a senatorial decree ordering him to retreat, drew a circle in the dirt around the king, and told him to decide whether to obey the Roman order before he stepped out of the circle. Antiochus wisely called off the attack.
The punishments that Rome meted out and the political reforms it compelled following the third war with Macedon did not work any better than Rome’s previous two attempts to regulate Greek affairs. Rome was drawn back into Greece yet again in 150 BC when a Macedonian pretender reunified the kingdom and the Achaean League fell into civil war. The Romans responded with fury. The Macedonian pretender was defeated in 148 BC and Macedon was made into a Roman province governed by a Roman governor. It would not fall out of direct Roman control again for more than a millennium. The Achaean situation was suppressed even more brutally. In 146 BC, Roman armies completely destroyed the ancient city of Corinth, looting everything of value and enslaving those of its population who survived before razing its buildings.
Rome did not manage to handle affairs much better in any of the other theaters where fighting occurred during the Second Punic War. It took nearly a decade of intense fighting in the 190s, for instance, for Rome to reestablish its dominance over the territories in Northern Italy that Hannibal’s Gallic allies had overrun. There was then another forty years of regular campaigns before Rome fully established control over Liguria in northwestern Italy.
Resistance to Roman control in Spain lasted even longer and was even more intense. Although it seems that the Senate may have been looking to draw down the Roman presence in Spain after the last Carthaginian forces there had been defeated in 206, obligations to Spanish allies and the possibility of Carthage reestablishing itself on the peninsula prevented this. Military operations continued with such regularity that, by 197 BC, the Senate created two Spanish provinces that would be governed by Roman officials with command of armies. This administrative shift prompted a massive rebellion by Rome’s new Spanish subjects, with fighting that lasted until the early 170s. Conflict broke out again in the 150s with a series of attacks across the provincial frontiers by raiders based in western Spain. These small episodes of violence metastasized into a general revolt when a Roman governor ordered the residents of the city of Segeda to stop building fortifications. As in Greece in the same period, Roman commanders in Spain responded by shifting from a method of control dependent upon cooperation with existing political entities to one in which local resistance was brutally suppressed. Unlike Greek states, however, Rome’s Spanish adversaries regularly resorted to guerilla tactics that prolonged conflicts at terrible cost. It was not until 133 that Romans ended this wave of Spanish resistance with the capture and destruction of the city of Numantia.10
Rome’s most significant failure came in its relationship with Carthage. The peace treaty that Rome signed with Carthage after the Second Punic War proved far more enduring than any of the treaties Rome signed with Greek kingdoms or Spanish groups. Indeed, North Africa was the one place where Roman military disengagement did not quickly lead to a breakdown in order during the second century. Rome mediated conflicts between Carthage and the neighboring kingdom of Numidia in 195, 193, and 181–180 and even refused to listen to Numidian charges that Carthage sought to collaborate with the Macedonian king Perseus during the Third Macedonian War. But as Greek and Spanish events pushed Romans to reassess the larger policy of disengagement from areas where it had once fought, Rome’s attitude toward Carthage began to change as well. By the 150s, the prominent Roman senator Cato took to ending all of the speeches he gave on any topic whatsoever with the phrase “Carthage must be destroyed.”
Rome continued to try to goad Carthage into war, but it was not until the year 149 that Carthage proved unable to endure Roman provocations. A series of border disputes with Numidia in the mid-150s led to a Numidian attack to which Carthage responded militarily without Roman approval. Although completely understandable, Carthage’s actions constituted a violation of the peace treaty with Rome. When Roman commissioners arrived to investigate the situation, Carthage preemptively undertook the public ritual of submission that all defeated Roman adversaries performed even though Carthage had not actually fought Rome. By right, the Roman ambassadors could dictate any conditions they wanted on a defeated adversary, but, when they ordered the seafaring Carthaginians to abandon their coastal city and move inland, Carthage resolved to fight. The war proved far more difficult than the Romans anticipated. Carthage held out until 146 BC (the same year that Rome destroyed Corinth), but, when Roman forces finally stormed Carthage, they took a horrible vengeance on their most formidable historical adversary. The Romans razed the city and enslaved its inhabitants. The general responsible for this victory, Scipio Aemilianus, was the son of the victor over Perseus and the grandson by adoption of the Scipio Africanus who had defeated Hannibal. Even in victory, he was said to have shed tears and publicly lamented the fate of the enemy by reciting a passage from Homer’s Iliad.
Many contemporary observers openly questioned the morality of Rome’s actions in 146 BC. Polybius even saw the destructions of Corinth and Carthage as the culmination of a deeply rooted social degradation that had taken hold in the Republic since its great triumph in the Second Punic War.11 Whatever Rome’s moral trajectory, it is clear that the failure of the Roman system of indirect control of the Mediterranean in the first half of the second century profoundly changed the Republic. The nearly endless warfare of the period had profound demographic and economic consequences that combined to shatter the politics of cooperation and consensus that had long governed Roman political life.
The demographic consequences are perhaps the most surprising. There is no doubt that Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, the attacks of his Gallic allies, and the Roman reconquest of the parts of the Italian peninsula that had defected together killed many Romans and Italians. The activities of these armies also severely damaged the agricultural infrastructure of Central and Southern Italy, a situation best demonstrated by Rome’s repeated appeals for food from allies in Sicily and Egypt in the 210s. Rome’s policy of confiscating large amounts of territory from Italian cities that had defected to Hannibal further disrupted food production on the peninsula. The large numbers of Roman military deaths in the early years of the war, the enslavement of civilians during the years of Roman reconquest of disloyal allies, and the food shortages caused by agricultural disruption caused the number of male citizens registered in Roman censuses to fall from 270,713 in 234–233 BC to 137,108 in the census taken in 209–208.12
Widespread death during war is not unusual. What is remarkable is how quickly the population recovered over the subsequent decades, even as Rome continued to fight in Greece, Spain, and Africa. The nearly constant warfare of the second century killed perhaps as many as 358,000 soldiers.13 Despite these horrific losses, the first census figures that we have following the destruction of Carthage and Corinth count 328,442 male citizens, nearly double the population counted at the height of the war with Hannibal.14 This massive increase in Roman census numbers tracks the broader growth in the overall Italian population in the period. It seems that a few factors combined to make the Italian population so resilient. Although Roman military service was difficult and often took young men away from their families and farms for multiple years, these soldiers tended to be men in their late teens and twenties, who had not yet reached the age at which they would normally marry. Although Roman soldiers came from families that met a basic property qualification, they usually had either older or younger family members who could help with the farm labor. These factors meant that constant warfare neither delayed Italians from marrying at the usual age nor depressed long-term agricultural production. At the same time, Roman families seem to have responded to the number of casualties sustained in war by having more children.
The Republic could absorb this rapidly growing population in the years immediately following the end of the Second Punic War. The new births initially served merely to replace the two hundred thousand or more Italians who had died in the war with Hannibal. As they came of age, these new Italians found lots of economic and agricultural opportunities available to them. The Republic had confiscated large tracts of land following its conquest of the Italian cities that had allied with Hannibal. This land belonged to the Republic, but it was in no one’s interest to allow it to lie fallow; everyone remembered well the food shortages that Italy had endured during Hannibal’s campaigns. To ensure an adequate food supply, Rome allowed Roman citizens and allies to farm this public land in exchange for a rent payment. The booming postwar population also had the option to settle in the colonies that Rome set up following its conquest and pacification of Northern Italy and to farm this newly incorporated Roman territory.
At a certain point, however, the growth in the Italian population outstripped the Republic’s land resources. The problem was not simply that parents were having more children but also, as time passed, that the young men coming of age began to exceed the casualties in war by ever-increasing numbers. In time, these larger families caused a real problem for rural Italians. Inheritance in second-century Italy involved dividing the family property evenly among all sons and, when there were too many living sons, farms would be divided into plots too small to support a family. Some of this excess population could join the colonies set up in Northern Italy, but, once Roman control was firmly established in Italy south of the Alps, the Republic effectively stopped sponsoring colonies. Families were left to deal with the problem of limited land as best they could using their own resources.15
To be sure, rural families were not being reduced to starvation or forced to abandon their lands en masse. In fact, archaeological evidence shows that small farms remained the norm throughout Italy until the massive political upheavals of the 80s BC. There was instead a noticeable decline in relative wealth, as younger rural Italians grew up understanding that they would have less of everything than their parents did. For poor families, this meant perhaps not being able to pay the dowry that a daughter would need to marry. But declining relative wealth did not just affect poor Romans. Even larger, well-established families sometimes found multiple generations living together in a small house as their once-ample wealth was divided across generations. For example, in the middle second century, sixteen members of the prominent Aelii family all lived together on the same small farm. And, crucially for the Roman state, many members of these large rural families saw their land divided into such small parcels that they no longer qualified for military service.16
As the rural population continued to grow, it seems that many young Romans decided to make a fresh start for themselves by moving from the countryside into Italian cities. Cities across the peninsula grew during the second century, but none grew as large or as quickly as the city of Rome itself. The city population grew from around two hundred thousand people at the end of the war with Hannibal to perhaps five hundred thousand by the mid-130s BC.17 Most of this population growth consisted of immigrants. Livy records that, as early as 186 BC, “the city was burdened by a multitude of people born abroad,” by which he means primarily Italians from outside of the capital. Although Livy’s view reeks of xenophobia, chemical analysis of tooth enamel of people buried in cemeteries around Rome confirms the picture he paints. Between 29 percent and 37 percent of these remains bear chemical markers indicating that the person moved to Rome from another location.18
The relative decline in living standards of many Italians that resulted from population growth occurred even as some elite Romans and Italians accumulated unprecedented amounts of wealth. In the early years of the second century, this wealth derived directly from the spoils of Rome’s imperial expansion. There can be no doubt that the wars in Greece and those against Carthage transferred massive amounts of booty back to Rome. Scipio Africanus, for example, brought 123,000 pounds of silver to the treasury following his victory over Hannibal at Zama, and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus brought 43,000 pounds of silver and 2,450 pounds of gold taken from Spain in 200 BC.19 The sums taken in the Macedonian and Syrian wars seem to have dwarfed even these hauls. In addition to precious metals, these wars brought substantial numbers of slaves, including a reported 150,000 captured by Aemilius Paullus in 167 BC worth the equivalent of 141,000 pounds of silver.
Although the early years of Hannibal’s invasion had effectively bankrupted the Republic, two developments made Rome’s medium-term state finances more predictable by the 180s, even as the Republic continued to be almost constantly at war. The war indemnities that Carthage, various Greek states, and Antiochus III all agreed to pay Rome provided a steady revenue stream that collectively nearly matched the amount of plunder brought home by Scipio Africanus following Hannibal’s defeat.20 After Rome transformed Spain and then Macedon and Africa into provinces, the taxes collected from these territories more than replaced the sums brought in by these fixed-term tributes. Unlike tribute payments, tax payments represented a permanent and predictable source of funds.
The development of large-scale precious metal mines in Spain (probably in the 190s) and Macedonia after 158 gave the Roman treasury another significant source of revenue. By the mid-150s, these operations combined to generate more than twice the revenue plundered from Carthage by Scipio in 201. Then, around 157 BC, the Roman state began to exploit a newly discovered source of very pure and easily extracted gold in Northern Italy. So much gold then flooded onto the Italian market that the price of the metal collapsed.21
All of this new revenue led to some important changes in how the Republic operated. After the consul Manlius’s campaign in Asia Minor in 187, the Republic issued a wholesale refund to all citizens who had paid an extra tax to support the army’s expedition. Following the victory over Macedon in 167, Rome entirely stopped collecting taxes on Italian lands held by its citizens. In addition, the scale of silver bullion coming into the treasury catalyzed an evolution of the Roman monetary system from one heavily dependent on relatively large, low-value bronze coinage to one based more prominently on lighter, more valuable silver denarii. The minting of silver denarii, which had been done in relatively small quantities in the 190s and 180s BC, increased so dramatically by the 150s that soldiers began to be paid in silver denarii rather than bronze coins.22
Military expenses accounted for perhaps three-quarters of the entire Roman budget in the first half of the second century, and salaries to troops paid in these silver coins helped to spread some of the wealth generated by Rome’s empire to regular citizens. As the second century progressed, the state also began to pay large sums of money to contractors who performed significant construction, infrastructure, and bureaucratic projects. Once Roman public finances stabilized in the 180s, magistrates began commissioning massive public works. These included a renovation of the city of Rome’s sewer system that cost 6 million denarii, the construction of the Pons Aemilius bridge across the Tiber, an expansion and updating of the city’s ports and trading facilities, and a series of major roads linking cities in Central Italy with colonies in the north of the peninsula.
Then the booty captured from Corinth and Carthage in 146 BC funded the construction of the massive Aqua Marcia. The largest and most expensive infrastructure project of the century, this aqueduct and another constructed twenty years later combined to nearly double the water supply coming to the rapidly growing capital.23
Though state revenues paid for these projects, the Republic lacked any sort of developed bureaucratic or technical corps that could actually execute such complicated tasks. Instead, officers of the Republic outsourced this work to contractors. Contractors handled tax collection in the provinces, mining operations in Spain and Macedon, and the many infrastructure projects undertaken across Italy and the provinces. The censors and other agents of the Roman state awarded these contracts to individuals or syndicates of investors who then subcontracted parts of them to others. Polybius famously wrote that “almost everyone is involved either in the sale of these contracts or in the kinds of business to which they give rise.”24 These contracts brought paid work to the engineers, architects, tax collectors, and manual laborers ultimately employed by subcontractors, it is true, but the Roman elites who bid on the projects made far more money from them. In this way public contracts resembled the division of war plunder among the Republic’s elites. Average Romans certainly benefited from them, but the disproportionate share of this wealth that went to elite Romans made many of them extremely rich.
3.2. The Aqua Marcia in the modern Parco degli Acquedotti (Rome). Photo by Manasi Watts.
By the 150s, the wealthiest Romans had moved beyond generating income from plunder and public contracts alone. These elites generally pursued a widely diversified investment strategy that included agricultural land in Italy, industrial properties, money-lending concerns, and shares of trade syndicates that did things like ship wine to Gaul. Cato the Elder, for example, apparently first invested much of his share of the 4 million denarii worth of precious metal plundered from Spain in 194 in Italian land.25 Although these properties, worked by groups of slaves, were productive, neither the number of slaves nor size of the properties was overwhelming.26 As he grew older, however, Cato developed a more sophisticated sense of which sorts of land investments could generate income in a way that was “safe and secure.” A later biographer wrote that Cato “bought pools, hot springs, places given over to fullers, pitch-works, and land with natural pasturage and forests, all of which brought him a great deal of money.”27 These properties were all sources of different raw materials for industry and therefore offered a stable income. As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships.28 He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.
One feature of Cato’s investments has often been underappreciated. Like a modern home mortgage that is packaged into a bond and resold, a wealthy man like Cato could sell the debt of his investors and then reinvest the proceeds in another venture. As long as the wealthy investor could continue to front the initial capital on a shipping voyage or public contract, he could almost perpetually loan money to other investors looking to buy shares in the venture and then either reinvest the paper profits in a new scheme or use them to buy agricultural or investment property. People with access to capital could then quickly and dramatically increase their wealth if they managed their investments skillfully.29
By the middle of the second century, the combined effects of military conquests and growing financial sophistication began to produce a class of superwealthy Romans. This, in turn, changed elite political competition. The days of Fabricius, in which personal qualities, honors, and family pedigree mattered far more than wealth, were receding. By the end of the third century, ambitious politicians had no doubt that money had become deeply intertwined with the pursuit of public office. This was evident already in the actions of Scipio Africanus following his victory over Hannibal. He awarded each of his thirty-five thousand soldiers 40 denarii (the equivalent to four months’ military pay) and apparently convinced the Senate to award each of them an acre and a quarter of land in Italy as well. Scipio also kept 700,000 denarii worth of property for himself, enough to make him the richest man in Rome at that time. Scipio seems to have understood that this wealth could be used as a tool to further enhance his reputation. He provided lavish games following his return to Rome, and between 205 and 190, he paid for a series of public monuments commemorating his military victories. The most evocative of these was a garish arch with seven gilded statues that Scipio had erected upon the Capitoline Hill in Rome.30
Scipio’s actions sparked an arms race through which elite Romans experimented to find even more powerful ways to use their wealth to build up their public profiles. Soldiers came to expect ever larger bonuses from victorious commanders. When Fulvius Flaccus celebrated a triumphal procession following some minor victories over the Ligurians in 179 BC, his grants to his soldiers exceeded those provided by Scipio following his victory over Hannibal. By 167, after the Third Macedonian War, Aemilius Paullus felt obligated to give his foot soldiers 100 denarii, his centurions 200 denarii, and his equites 300 denarii apiece.31
There were other ostentatious displays of wealth and power. Public spectacles and gladiatorial games put on by magistrates became larger and more impressive. A memorable gladiatorial show in 200 BC had 25 pairs of fighters. By 183, a similarly memorable gladiatorial performance required 120 fighters. Public works also by necessity became larger and more impressive. By the 180s, commanders were not just decorating existing temples with war spoils but building entirely new ones. Even dinner parties and feasts, which were often open to selected members of the public, became far more opulent. By the 180s, public funeral feasts for senators could stretch across multiple days and fill the Forum (Rome’s most important public space) with reclining guests. Not only did these events last longer, they were also so lavish that, in 161 BC, the Senate was forced to issue a law limiting the amount of silver brought out at any individual banquet to one hundred pounds by weight.32
Elite competition extended to private life as well. By the middle of the second century, superwealthy Romans were building sumptuously decorated luxury villas along the seaside in Campania and importing a range of luxury products from the Eastern Mediterranean. Ancient authors remarked on what they called decadence and blamed either the generals who vanquished Antiochus III or those who beat back Perseus of Macedon for introducing such luxuries to Rome. In truth, however, the rapid sophistication of Rome’s economy had simply enabled some people to become far wealthier than their ancestors could ever dream of being. Scipio Africanus, for example, was likely both the richest Roman of his time and the richest Roman who had ever lived at the time of Rome’s victory over Antiochus III in 188. Crassus, the richest Roman a little more than a century later, at one point controlled a fortune worth nearly forty times what Scipio possessed. The natures of their fortunes were as different as their relative sizes. Scipio’s fortune largely consisted of tangible things of value taken from Carthage and Spain that remained in his possession. Crassus’s fortune, by contrast, largely existed on paper and not as physical objects contained in a vault. It was much more liquid than the fortune of Scipio and, because of this, it could be easily invested in ways that would enable it to grow much more rapidly.33
Rapid wealth creation like that experienced by Romans in the first half of the second century can be profoundly destabilizing to a social order that relies upon elite political competition. Some of the families that dominated Republican political life in the third century remained important into the second century, but the scale of military operations, the impressive victories that resulted from them, and the wealth that military success and economic sophistication generated all far surpassed what Rome had ever seen before. The ancestral honors and public offices that a man like Fabricius could proudly claim mattered more than private wealth seemed quaint in this sparkling new Roman world of seaside villas, bronze couches, and overseas conquests. The political structure of the Republic still managed to channel the ambitions of elite Roman men toward offices and honors that only the state could offer. But second-century elites were also becoming increasingly enamored with advertising their wealth and business acumen, areas of achievement over which the Republic had much less control. The Republic’s monopoly on the rewards that leading Romans sought was beginning to loosen. As it did, some of the established families who were falling behind economically became increasingly concerned that they could not compete effectively in this new environment.
As consequential as these divisions within the aristocracy were, the emergence of this class of superwealthy Romans opened an even more dangerous chasm between Roman elites and the ordinary Romans who fought the Republic’s wars. The wars of the second century, the infrastructure projects within Italy, and the growth of industry in both Italian cities and rural estates that required seasonal labor all created jobs for Roman citizens. But, as we saw earlier, population growth within Italy meant that the economic outlook of many Romans in the mid-second century was bleaker than that which faced their parents. Many of the rural Italians who were forced to share small homes and farm small plots of land with members of their extended families were just barely making it. These were the seasonal laborers employed at the olive groves and vineyards of the rich during harvesttime.34 These were also the dockworkers and craftspeople who moved to Rome and other cities to find steady work. They knew that their lots were worse than their parents’. They also saw firsthand how their relative poverty compared to the unprecedented opulence that the richest Romans now enjoyed. The new economy produced great wealth for a few winners, but the frustration of the newly poor and the fear that some of the old elite were losing their grip on power created conditions in which a fierce populist reaction could occur.
The men who governed Rome for much of the half century following Hannibal’s defeat generally avoided cultivating this sort of populism. The Republic remained stable despite massive economic and social changes in large part because of their relative restraint. But the generation of politicians coming of age at the end of the 140s took notice of the growing inequality in Roman and Italian society and, unlike their elders, they did not refrain from exploiting the anxiety it produced as they competed for Rome’s highest offices. Their choices would set the Republic on a very different, very dangerous course.