THE AUGUSTAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XIII

THE ECONOMIC UNIFICATION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION: INDUSTRY, TRADE, AND COMMERCE

I

THE GENERAL EFFECT OF THE CHANGE FROM THE REPUBLIC: A WORLD AT PEACE

IN industry, trade, commerce, and the economic unification of the Mediterranean region, as in other fields, the Principate meant the coming of a new age. The Republic had, it is true, especially towards its close, done much to prepare the way. A capitalistic spirit of enterprise was not wanting, and from the beginning of the third century b.c. grew steadily stronger. Italian merchants worked in the Levant, and became increasingly numerous in Delos; they pressed also into Gaul and Germany, and sought to extend their activities to Britain. Indeed the conditions prerequisite to an extensive trade, and consequently to an industry working for export, were satisfied. There was a steady rise in demand: the rich Romans, whose wealth was derived from their landed property, from war-contracts and the profits of booty, from the exploitation of the provinces through administration, taxation, the practice of usury among the provincials and so on, wanted the merchandise which the world had to offer. And, through the creation of the Imperium, this world had become a very comprehensive one, more closely bound together than Alexander’s empire. Roman proconsuls made improvements in the road system everywhere; Servilius Isauricus and Pompey gave security to commerce, at least for a time, through their wars with the pirates; the economic life of the Roman East, of Italy, and already, to some extent, of the West also, reached a respectable height.

Yet everywhere there remained barriers and obstacles. They were inherent in the very structure of society. The Romans were in origin a warlike peasantry that needed land and gained it by conquest; subsequently, in the course of their great military successes, and through the imperialism which these fostered, they became more accustomed to political domination and political exploitation of other nationalities and peoples. The capitalism which ensued developed, accordingly, along agrarian lines, or else went hand in hand with political oppression. Cato furnishes an instance of the first process, the nobiles and knights, who exploited the provincials, of the second. These openings, however, were in themselves very great, and apart from them the Roman capitalist, generally speaking, confined himself to the extraordinarily lucrative field of activity which his connection with politics more or less offered him, namely to speculation (negotiation). In consequence, industrial and commercial enterprise was generally left to that part of the population which was not Roman, but preponderatingly Greek, in origin. This element contained both Italian Greeks, who had later become Roman citizens, and also those who had come as aliens from the Greek Orient, or even as slaves, subsequently to gain their freedom and to constitute an evergrowing section of society. Under these circumstances a truly energetic economic policy is found only in the spheres of agriculture and politics. Thus the interests of the great land­owners, who formed the ruling aristocracy, were protected by the ban imposed from time to time on the production of wine and oil in the provinces; and the interests of the knights as tax- farmers and speculators played an important part in the expansion of the Empire. Nothing is heard, however, of a corresponding policy which might have directly favoured industry and trade. The trader was welcome because he advanced Roman prestige and pacification, and hence exerted a political influence. Use, moreover, was made of these middlemen, who brought merchandise, food-supplies and luxuries, from distant sources, and it was observed with pleasure that in Italy itself business activity and production were increasing. But that was all: the aristocracy, in which the power was vested, in reality took very little notice of the business men, whom it disdained; they were merely treated with tolerance, in Italy as in the provinces. The suggestion that from the second century onwards a ‘Roman commercial spirit’ can be observed is mistaken; the equation of imports with booty came almost as naturally to a Mummius and his successors as to the overlords of Homeric times. A policy of protective tariffs, such as the Ptolemies practised, was wholly lacking. There is no trace of an attempt to secure a favourable balance of trade for Italy, and such an attempt is not to be expected, since the voice of the interested parties went unheard.

But the worst obstacle to a full development of trade and industry was the general political situation. In the closing years of the Republic, though the economic area was, indeed, large, it was in a state of unrest. A worldwide economic system, however, cannot develop when it is constantly disturbed through political discontent and interference by the State in production and in the give-and-take of trade. It was precisely such difficulties that had dislocated the economic life of the Greeks in the classical age, and equally in Hellenistic times, when they were constantly preparing armaments against each other and against Rome. With Rome’s violent entry on the scene, such convulsions had certainly not become rarer; the reverse was true, since during the time of the Civil Wars the scale of events had actually increased. Italy had suffered much through the lasting social upheavals—in consequence of which Capua alone, during the years when Pompey and Caesar were in power, had received some twenty thousand new colonists—and was bleeding from many wounds. Far deeper were the wounds inflicted on those provinces which had been dragged into Mithridates’ war of liberation, and which, thereafter, debased to fields for exploitation by Roman generals striving for power, had often come to the very brink of the abyss. Campaigns, fresh piratical raids, devastations, debt and impoverishment, disturbances and revolutions—all played their part, with especial effect in the East: in Greece, the Islands, and Asia Minor, and to some extent also in Syria and Egypt. To a greater or less degree, varying with the locality, they choked the economic life which was spontaneously beginning to develop. An atmosphere of instability and uncertainty clung to the whole period until the close of the Civil Wars.

A fundamental change took place after Augustus had given to the world the pax Romana and the quies Italiae and had thus created an economic area characterized by an extent and peacefulness such as mankind had not previously seen. His aim was to create a corporate unity from the whole of the civilized part of the globe. The road system had been steadily developed, and was kept in excellent order. It permitted the rapid passage to and fro of armies, and of troops for police purposes, and the dissemination of news with the aid of the State postal-service.

Hence it constituted a guarantee of peace and order. On the Mediterranean the plague of piracy had vanished; Roman flotillas where necessary guarded the inland water-ways, and garrisons protected all frontier districts where danger could possibly threaten. These outward manifestations were matched by inward peace and security. It resulted from a policy which understood how to leave unaltered all that could possibly be preserved, and to steer clear of a radicalism which would inevitably evoke distrust. The feeling of happiness, which sounds in so many voices of the times, both from Italy and the provinces, is an additional proof of Augustus’ sureness of touch, and of his cleverness in appreciating the importance of incalculable factors. This applies not only to his purely political measures, but also to those for the regulation of social and economic life. Once the Empire was consolidated there was, with few exceptions, no interference in the ownership of property. The time of the leges agrariae was past. The distinctions marked out by the old social order were retained. No alteration was made in Italy’s predominant position in relation to the provinces, and, if the provincials had an equal share with Italy in the blessings of the new age, this was due not to any marked change in their legal standing, but largely to the removal of oppression.

There was also the least possible interference in the internal affairs of the provinces. Much though the imperial government desired and encouraged the advance of civilization and the transition of savage hill-tribes to agriculture and stable economic activity (if only because this must conduce to pacification and prosperity, and, in part, to better administration and increased revenue), yet, over the Empire as a whole, it did not contemplate any artificial romanization and urbanization. In general, in this sphere also, Augustus was at pains to make no sweeping change, to provide the framework, merely, and the milieu through which things might develop of their own accord. Naturally this did not prohibit the occasional planting of colonies in the East as in the West—in Asia Minor, Syria, Spain, and elsewhere—with a view to greater security, or as a means of settling veterans on the land. In the Mauretanian settlements it is, indeed, possible that the idea of spreading civilization may have been a primary motive, but this was not the normal policy. If we disregard the effect of political pacification and subjection, the means by which the romanization of the West was accomplished were that the pro­vinces of themselves admitted the superior Roman culture, and that Roman civilians and veterans of their own free will migrated into new and rising districts, there to seek their fortunes and to settle.

Still more important in this connection is the fact that the existing organization of labour and of economic life was not subjected to disturbance. Caesar might summarily transplant Roman freedom to Corinth, to create a new trading colony; he might refound Carthage, with, perhaps, the same end in view; he could interfere with the rights of the employer by his decree that one-third of the labourers on a farm must be free; he could, in fact, manifest in various ways a disposition towards control which might easily have strengthened into a system of State socialism. But there is no trace of similar tendencies under Augustus and his immediate successors. The old economic principle of laissez faire, laissez aller was left unchanged; indeed certain limitations of the principle, which the aristocratic regime had introduced, were removed, in so far as the one-sided policy which favoured the interests of the large-scale agricultural producers was abolished. Free competition was to prevail throughout the Empire, and free trade. It is not inconsistent with this that the imperial government, long before Nerva’s alimentary legislation, took suitable measures for the protection of agriculture; and if it later attempted to influence the kinds of agricultural produce grown (cultivation of corn or production of oil and wine), this must be regarded as an emergency measure, connected with the general problem of an adequate food-supply, a matter to which an alert government had always to give heed.

Beside the principle of laissez faire there was the belief in the old doctrine of private enterprise. The victory of Augustus and of the West meant, then, a repulse of the tendencies towards State capitalism and State socialism which might have come to fruition earlier, had Antony and Cleopatra been victorious, than was thus the case. Apart from the exceptional conditions in the imperial domains, and in the mines, which counted as part of them, and apart from the special circumstances prevailing in the corn-trade which resulted from the conception of food-supply, the principle of private enterprise remained supreme. The armament industry itself was privately owned during the Augustan age and even later, and it is symptomatic that even in Egypt, although it was administered on the model of one of the gfeat imperial estates, considerable areas of landed property were liberated from State ownership, and that the highly developed Hellenistic system of monopolies was weakened through the  substitution by the government of the licence-system, thereby making room for Western ideas. It was all the easier for Augustus to refrain from developments along oriental lines, and to abide by the fundamental principles of the West, because he himself in the course of the Civil Wars had accumulated, by more or less honest means, an immense private fortune, and had become a leading individual capitalist, and because it accorded far better with the subtle cleverness of his policy to pose as a private benefactor to the State, and not as its exploiter.

II.

THE QUICKENING OF ECONOMIC LIFE

All these circumstances, the size of the Empire, the removal of disturbances and upheavals, to which must be added the maintenance of a sound and stable currency, could not but act as an exceptional stimulus in the whole field of economic life. The roads not only served for military, police, and postal purposes, but enabled traders, on their two- or four-wheeled carts, to penetrate with their wares deep into the interior: from Aquileia through the Alps to Linz, or by Siscia and Poetovio to Carnuntum; from Milan by Bregenz to Augsburg, or from Turin to Lyons and beyond to the shores of the English Channel, or to Mainz and Cologne; from Ephesus via Tralles and Laodicea to Apamea on the Maeander, and so on. Indeed certain roads, such as those in the Spanish mining districts, may perhaps have done more to satisfy economic than military needs. The security in the Mediterranean and on the rivers must have stimulated commerce in the same way: it was possible to reckon on being in Rome some eighteen days after leaving Alexandria, or, under favourable conditions, to be in Puteoli a mere nine days later; from Gades to Ostia took seven days; from Egypt to Crete three days and nights.

Such were the circumstances which indirectly encouraged re­vival; to these must be added what may rather be called direct influences. This applies, above all, to the general advancement of the bourgeoisie, a policy which is to be connected with Augustus’ desire to create a new social stratum on which his new State was to be based. Since he was obliged to reduce the power of the old nobiles, and since for him the proletariate did not come into the question, there remained only the middle class. This social stratum was mainly composed of the soldiery and their descendants, or derived from other branches of the citizen-farmer class—Roman, Greek, or sometimes non-Greek in origin—; a considerable percentage consisted of freedmen, mostly of Greek nationality, who had a flair for business and had become wealthy, a type brilliantly ridiculed by Petronius; and the knights also, being recruited largely from the municipal aristocracy, which in its turn drew on the bourgeoisie, are to be counted in this class. It was, then, the active business section of the community, deeply interested in industry and trade, which now grew in importance, or, at least, was not as formerly pushed into the background. It was, indeed, to the Emperor’s advantage to encourage this preoccupation with professional and business matters, since it induced political apathy (as the tyrants of former ages had well understood), or alternatively a limitation of interest to parochial politics, which amounted to the same thing. Even the imperial officials were really salaried civil servants, and the imperial soldiery earned its living through its professional services. The gap which had formerly separated the homo politicus and the homo oeconomicus became steadily smaller, and the centre of gravity was shifted increasingly towards a sound business activity. The big capitalist interests, the Knights, turned more and more from the speculative contracts for tax-farming, which had declined, to industrial and mercantile enterprises; the negotiator changed from a speculator to a business man. Professions formerly frowned upon now became open to gentlemen, a change in standards for which modern history can furnish many parallels. This rise in the repute of trade and industry, which coincided with the closing of some of the more questionable opportunities for money-making, could not but be a great stimulus to industrialization and commercialization.

There was yet a further factor. The State had the greatest interest in trade, not only because of its policy of promoting the welfare of the people in general, and of encouraging the bourgeoisie in particular, but also on account of the revenue involved. Exploitation had always been a force in Roman policy in the past, and it was partly, at least, with this in view that she extended her power over provinces with fertile soil, or rich deposits of precious metals. But trade also was a field for exploitation, and of this the Romans were as fully aware as the early Corinthians, or the Ptolemies, or the rulers of Petra, Axum, or Saba. Customs duties, chiefly, but also harbour dues, enabled the State to appropriate its share of the revenues accruing from trade, and at the same time it could afford to finance the making and upkeep of harbours which, from the State’s standpoint also, were necessary. This explains the direct promotion and encouragement of trade by the Caesars, the building not only of roads but also of harbour-works, with moles, quays, and lighthouses, the construction of canals, the consideration of the project of piercing the isthmus of Corinth, and the relaxation of passport regulations. It explains also the establishment of international relations, such as those with Maroboduus, or, during Claudius’ time, with the king of Ceylon, and the possible creation of a kind of consulate, such as that in Palmyra, for the protection of merchants. The emperors showed the keenest interest in the exploration of new trading areas, whether it was a question of the silk route through Bactria to Zeugma, of Aethiopia, or of the northern amber­producing region. Maps and the description of trade routes were needed; and the imperial government constantly held a protecting hand over ventures which aimed at supplying this need. Augustus’ famous attempts, for example, to advance to­wards Arabia had that motive. Though not too fortunate, the expedition of Aelius Gallus succeeded at least in so far as it won strategically vital trading posts for Rome, and established a Roman protectorate over the passage of the Red Sea, thereby safeguarding the interests of those engaged in trade to the South­east, among whom the Alexandrines were predominant. Indeed we hear that from that time onwards the trade with India had increased to an exceptional degree. The emperors were active in seeking to gain a control of trade, while weakening such control where it lay in foreign hands, Parthia being a case in point; and they even took steps to erect their own customs stations, wherever possible, under the protection of Roman soldiery, as at Leuke Kome in the Red Sea. Pliny’s biting epigram that campaigns had been undertaken in order that Roman ladies and gentlemen might have a better choice of perfumes is, of course, a deliberate exaggeration, but an element of historical truth is latent in it all the same.

These conditions, which promoted the general development of economic life, must also have added momentum to particular tendencies which are innate in all systems of capitalism, tendencies towards expanding the enterprises, and increasing the efficiency of the working organization, in order to achieve a more intensive output with mass export, where possible, as the goal of production. A highly capitalistic striving after profits, and a readiness to speculate had long existed; even in ancient times men knew that the occidental understands better than the oriental how to make use of the resources at his disposal; and improvements in technique, as in glass-blowing or dyeing, proved them right. New markets for exports had been opened, and were constantly being added. The standard of living was rising not only in Italy and in Alexandria; the demand for luxuries had sometimes reached fantastic heights, and extended in part to the middle and lower classes. ‘Every peasant’s wife of the country beyond the Po wears amber trinkets,’ we are told, and ‘every servant girl has a silver mirror’. There were also changes in fashion: now metal, now glass drinking cups were in use; the favoured shades of purple might be first violet, then red; in Claudius’ time it was essential to have marble panels and mosaics in the bedroom in order to be up-to-date, and so on. There was an immense rise in consumption, quite apart from the vast demands of the standing army.

The comparative ease with which raw supplies could be imported loosened even more than before the ties which had been apt to bind industry to the locality where its materials were to be found. This, of course, does not apply to the clay for making bricks and pottery, or to vitreous sand, but it is very often applicable in the case of drugs and spices. As the element of risk in commerce lessened the transport rates naturally became lower, and, as the customs dues within the Empire were commonly reasonable (there existed, it is true, duties payable on the provincial frontiers and for transit, but no protective taxes), the freight charges, especially on goods sent by sea, were not so high as to stifle production. Producers and exporters alike were thus able to base their calculations on a margin of profit, and could contemplate the mass production of certain articles. We find large-scale capitalistic concerns in the most varied branches: in the production alike of raw supplies and of finished goods—in the pottery, metal, glass, and paper industries, and perhaps also to some extent in textiles (though here we must think also of a domestic system with manu­facturers), and in the provision trade; we find them engaged in the supplying of articles for mass export, but also in mass production to satisfy the local demand. A man of sufficient initiative living in a large town might find even the position of miller and baker, tanner or brick-maker a useful start towards the building-up of an intensive wholesale business. The dimensions attained, on occasion, are very notable: we are told of works with many hundreds of employees; and the great farms producing oil, wine, and fruit, are, in the last instance, nothing but agricultural manufactories.

The workers in the large-scale concerns, whether agricultural or industrial, are mostly slaves; the managers, too, are drawn, in general, from the slave class. Only in regions where the lower class of the free population was almost as dependent, and received almost as low wages as slave labour elsewhere—in Egypt, that is, or in districts inhabited by Celts (even, to some extent, in Celtic north Italy)—was this semi-free population used for mass production. Otherwise, the free workers constitute merely a supplementary labour force, for occasional (seasonal) employment; they were drawn on when it was not worth while spending business capital on a slave, who would then have to be permanently supported, when, in fact, the temporarily higher expense of hiring a free workman proved, in the long run, more profitable.

The concentration of many workers under one management naturally brought with it a certain degree of specialization of labour; in the pottery industry, for instance, the processes of modelling, throwing, firing, and painting, were assigned to dif­ferent craftsmen, and a similar differentiation of sifting the grain, grinding, kneading, rolling, and baking, occurred in the great bakeries. The manufacture of part of an article is also known.

The metal mountings for the furniture made in Pompeii came from Capua, particularly beautiful feet for triclinia from Delos. Candelabra were constructed from two parts, the lower of which had been made in Tarentum, the upper in Aegina.

Although the incitement to achieve an output still more in excess of immediate needs, and to develop local varieties into specialities produced on a large scale, must have existed almost everywhere, yet there were admittedly great variations in the speed, degree, and individual characteristics of the process; it could hardly have been otherwise, seeing that these factors were dependent on considerations of economic geography and of history. In some places all that was needed was to continue a process already far advanced; in others it was possible to reweave the fabric with the old threads, torn though it were; elsewhere a first beginning must be made.

III.

THE OUTPUT OF ITALY

The country which was the most advanced in this respect was undoubtedly Italy. To rich natural resources, and a central position, she could add all the advantages resulting from victory. The wounds which the two decades before Actium must have inflicted have left no visible scars in the archaeological remains of Pompeii. Italy could without difficulty have become self-supporting, had this been the goal in view, as is time and again stressed by the moralists, whose cherished dream it was. The potential corn-growing area was sufficient to satisfy the demand, and corn was, in point of fact, grown, not only by peasant proprietors, but also on the big estates, more especially in the North. There was an abundance of fish and meat, fruit and cheese, wood and stone, some iron at least, and these commodities were interchanged within Italy, either on shipboard along the coast, or else making use of the rivers, the Po, Ombrone, Tiber, Arno, and so on.

More important, however, are those products which were not intended for the home market. The reason why the demand for corn was no longer covered by the supply is that agricultural production was still, to a large extent, organized on highly capitalistic lines, the export of wine and oil on a large scale being the end in view, so that full use was made of the advance achieved in the last century b.c. The villas rusticae in the neighbourhood of Pompeii, with their wine and oil presses, their storehouses and forwarding departments, their slaves’ dormitories, and their buildings for the masters or directors, make this clear; for Falernian wine was not only retailed in local taverns, or sent by sea to Rome and other places in Italy; inscriptions on the amphorae show that the lands of the Danube, Roman Germany, and Britain, and, to some extent, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, were also supplied with Campanian wines and oils. To this must be added the large-scale consumption of the army. Such production was not limited, however, to central Italy; the South also had a share in it, and the North exported westwards and northwards its own as well as Campanian brands; Venetian wine and oil crossed to Illyria. Far to the East, in distant Alexandria, and even beyond, in Axum and northern India there was a demand for Italian wine. We are told that in the southern Po valley the wine was matured in immense vats—bigger than houses; and Pliny proudly announces that two-thirds of the world output in choice wines derives from Italy. The Italian wine trade must, then, have been highly remunerative, and the estimated profit of twenty per cent, is, perhaps, not far wrong.

Export industry did not lag behind agriculture here. Nothing sheds a clearer light on the enterprise of the Italian, who still modelled his activities on Greek economic conceptions, than to stroll through the streets of the business section at Pompeii, with their industrial establishments, artisans’ quarters, and combined workshops and stores, and, at the same time, to observe with the insight of a Rostovtzeff the frescoes and pictured amoretti in the houses of the rich business men. Here again we are less interested in what the cobblers, tailors, potters, bakers, and other tradesmen produced to satisfy the local demand, than in what might be exported (even though it is the result of individual craftsmanship) as some sort of speciality. We cannot say whether the products of the goldsmiths’ workshops of Campania, Rome and Aquileia, were exported in bulk; but the amber industry in Aquileia, which made necklaces, small bottles, boxes, and similar articles from German amber, besides distributing this popular luxury locally and reaching the markets of Rome and Pompeii, exported it also to the Dalmatian coast, to Africa, to Belgium and even as far as Egypt. Cloth-weaving and other branches of the textile industry flourished in Campania, Tarentum, Brundisium, and also in the vicinity of the Po, where sheep­breeding sometimes furnished the raw material. The Cloth Hall at Pompeii shows that the drapery trade had reached a high degree of development, and Pompeii’s architectural history testifies to an increasing expansion, although, admittedly, we have here no certain evidence of export to very distant markets. Nevertheless there was a lively commerce within Italy, not only in fine wares, such as Paduan carpets and the Paduan garments which were transported to Rome, but also in the Ligurian and Insubrian coarse wool, ‘from which most of the clothing for the Italian slaves is made.’ Pompeian furniture, too, which apparently got as far as Rome, will have supplied the needs of a somewhat small trading area.

The situation is very different in the Italian precious metals, pottery, and glass industries, which certainly manufactured for large-scale export to distant markets. Wholesale firms in Capua arid Tarentum produced silverware, specimens of which have been recovered in Denmark. Vessels of copper and of bronze were made in Capua, Puteoli, Aquileia, and north-west Italy. The Capuan art-foundries, the names of whose owners are still known to us, were huge concerns, working on a methodical system with specialized labour, which distributed their wares throughout Italy, and beyond to Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia, Finland, and southern and north-eastern Russia. The large-scale manufacture of pottery likewise had its home in Campania, Capua, Puteoli, and Cumae, and farther afield still in Italy, for example in Adria (where a particularly durable ware was made), in Rhegium, and in the valley of the Po. Above all Arretium’s pottery, with its red glaze, enjoyed a world-wide reputation. Throughout the Empire save the South-east this famous table-ware was in every-day use in many houses; it constituted, in fact, a genuine article of mass consumption, and in the remains we possess there constantly recur the trade marks of the Perennii, of Ateius, Cornelius, Calidius Strigo or some other owner of the workshops at Arretium. These are the manufactories mentioned above in which there were mixing vats with a capacity of ten thousand gallons.

Unfortunately it is not certain whether it was the raw material or the finished article that was exported. Similar conditions prevailed in the glass industry. Strabo’s mention of epoch-making inventions, made, according to him, at Rome—perhaps by a Greek from Sidon or Alexandria—and of a consequent simplification in the production of glass, is probably to be taken in conjunction with Pliny, and to be understood as a reference to the substitution of the technique of glass-blowing for the use of moulds. A result of this was the reduction of prices to a chalcus (about a halfpenny) per cup and saucer, so that developments in technique in this way exercised a decisive influence on the formation of a world market. In Campania also, where the river Volturnus provided suitable beds of sand, glass of a brilliant colour and with patterned reliefs was made. Conditions equally favourable for production existed in Aquileia, so that here too an industry manufacturing glass on the largest scale for export could develop. Campanian glass was distributed widely throughout the Empire, and also, like copper and the bronze wares, is encountered in south Russia, in north Germany, and in the Scandinavian countries.

About the iron industry (weapons, knives, agricultural implements, and so on, and articles of sheet iron) opinions differ. The question is whether the exports under consideration were organized on a small scale, and consist in specialities, produced by individual craftsmen, or were meant for a world-wide export, and are products of large-scale manufacturing concerns. The description in Diodorus looks more like occasional labour, dependent on the arrival of an excess of raw materials, more like a capitalistic system with homework and ‘manufacturer’ than a stable and permanent organization of ‘manufactory’; indeed, it would almost seem as if the same traders (emporoi) who brought the crude iron from Elba later carried the finished articles through the world. It is, then, in the writer’s opinion, more prudent not to draw too striking a picture of huge iron works, with specialized labour, roaring with activity. However, that there was an iron industry, which exported its products, cannot be denied: its centres were in Campania, and again, above all, at Aquileia, where crude iron from Noricum was worked into articles of iron and steel, and may even have been re-exported to Dalmatia and the lands of the Danube.

Another problem which as yet defies solution is concerned with the manufacture of terracotta lamps. In this connection a special importance attaches to the workshops of Fortis at Mutina, who lived in the time of Augustus. His lamps are found in quantities in all parts of the Empire, notably in Gaul, Roman Germany, the Danubian provinces and Britain. If these all derive from Mutina, then we have before us a firm with truly worldwide connections—and this view is widely adopted. A different theory is that casts were made in the provinces copying the Fortis type of lamp and his trade-mark. If in any way, certainty here can only be achieved through chemical analysis of the materials employed; but even if we are dealing with imitations, it remains probable that the specimens which served as models came from the original firm into the regions concerned.

This catalogue, to which perhaps might have been added the Pompeian manufacture of attar of roses (so finely illustrated by a fresco in the house of the Vettii), and of fish-sauce (garum), may suffice to show how generally not only agricultural, but also industrial centres of production on a large scale were to be found in Italy. Campania, Etruria, and the north of Italy were pioneers in this, and conclusive evidence can be drawn from the plan of Pompeii for the advance of industrial development. The proof lies in the buildings for industrial purposes and no less in those connected with trade. It was trade which made it possible to obtain raw materials, so far as they were not to be found in the immediate vicinity, either from Italy itself, or from abroad. It is, however, not only imports of raw materials which throw light on production, but equally what we learn about activity in exports. Reference has already been made to the wine-trade of Campania. The style of decoration in the houses of the Pompeian aristocracy in this age, which points to the influence of Alexandria, indicates that the wholesale merchants of Pompeii themselves visited the East, and, incidentally, formed their tastes there. And yet Pompeii (the port for Nola, Nuceria, and Acerrae) was a place of secondary importance, and lagged far behind the centres of the export trade, Puteoli, or Aquileia, ‘the Puteoli of the North,’ as it has been called. Finally, the wealth of the producing and exporting classes is itself a proof of their business success. Its reality is attested by the splendid remains found at Aquileia and Pompeii, and is reflected by the growing sump­tuousness in architecture, which, for the middle of the first cen­tury a.d., finds expression in the Fourth Style at Pompeii.

The long list given by the authorities of luxuries imported into Italy tells the same tale. Many of these, it is true, went to the world’s capital, Rome, which, although producing articles extensively for local use, was still, in the last instance, a city consuming more than it could itself supply; but enough remained over, and this surplus found its way to exporting cities of the type of Aquileia, Padua, Capua or Pompeii. Moreover, the increase in the population of the large cities reacted on the organization of business whose concern was with local production. Large-scale mills and bakeries, such as are mentioned above, of a type which existed in Rome as early as the first century b.c., can be recog­nized in Pompeii also (their owners being Popidius Priscus and Paquius Proculus), and the same is true of large-scale tanneries and brick-yards. Italy may have had an unfavourable balance of trade, as might be expected in view of the vast consumption of the dominant nation, which derived a greater revenue from taxation than did the provincials; and Strabo gives explicit testimony of the disparity between Italy and Egypt in this con­nection, when he says that Alexandrine ships are heavily laden when they sail to Puteoli, whereas they carry little on the return voyage. But, firstly, Egypt possessed an unusually flourishing active trade, and, secondly, the main stream of Italian export flowed not to the East, but to the West and North, so that the greater part of Italian imports could, in reality, be paid for in goods and not solely in cash, that is not solely with the aid of wealth drawn from mines which were won by conquest, or from the purse of the provincials.

IV.

THE OUTPUT OF EASTERN LANDS

From Italy we turn to a brief survey of the economic value of the various provinces of Rome under the early Principate. It is more convenient to begin with the regions that had known civilization for centuries, and here pride of place is claimed by Egypt. Strabo declares that Egypt, which had suffered an economic decline under the later Ptolemies—and the debasement of the coinage reinforces the verdict of a man who had himself seen the country in the retinue of the governor Aelius Gallus—was again placed on its feet through systematic reclamation of the land. Trade, and with it the industries exporting their products, was revived by the re-establishment of openings for export. The surplus of corn was vast, far greater even than that which a past-master of economic policy, Ptolemy Philadelphus, had squeezed from the land. Twenty million modii went each year to Rome, and this sufficed to supply the needs of the city for a space of four months. Wine and oil served, in general, only to satisfy local demands; but grape juice, which was prepared in Diospolis (Thebes), was exported, together with some corn, to the South-east. There was a demand for Egyptian stone: Syenite, basalt and granite, marble, porphyry, and serpentine, were transported from Syene, Memphis, and the Mons Claudianus (on the shore of the Red Sea) to Italy, and beyond, to the West and North-west even as far as Belgium. Even sand was exported to remote distances, that from Coptos being used in sawing marble, while Nile-sand was used for the wrestling­schools in Rome. The jewel-mines of upper Egypt produced emeralds, topazes, amethysts, onyxes, and similar gems. Herbs and drugs for ointments, for medicinal purposes, or as dyes, of which an exhaustive account is given by Pliny, also came from Egypt. Egyptian alum ranked as the best; while soda was especially plentiful in the soda-lakes near Momemphis in the Delta.

A far greater rdle, however, was played in the world-market by the products of the Egyptian and especially the Alexandrine workshops. Industrial activity, once so intense under the Ptolemaic system of State capitalism, surmounted the temporary depression, and revived with twice its former energy. In principle, it is true, the Caesars avoided the policy, which a narrow mercantilism might have prompted, of crushing the competition of other producers within the Empire; the numerous monopolies had, as we saw, been given a less oppressive form, thus stimulating the initiative of those engaged in business ventures whether on a large or small scale. This did not, however, prevent the emperor, who was himself here acting, to some extent, as head of a large-scale industrial undertaking, from taking an ener­getic share in the competition for markets.

In the large-scale export of commodities, whose inner organization is unfortunately not clearly known to us, the papyrus industry holds a commanding position, for Egypt here possessed a world­monopoly so complete that the greatest embarrassment resulted, when, as in the reign of Tiberius, the Egyptian papyrus-harvest failed. But the inhabitants of the Delta, where the papyrus-plant grew, were aware of the advantages of their position, and kept the price high; hence they did not hesitate to cut down a proportion of the plants (though this may well have happened only when there was a notably abundant harvest), actuated by the same motives as recently caused the Brazilians to dump their coffee in the sea. Like the manufacture of papyrus, the glass industry was very ancient, thanks to the beds of vitreous sand in the country, of whose existence Strabo learnt from the Alexandrine glass-workers themselves. Expensive many-hued glasses were put on the market, but cheap articles as well, small bottles, glass paste, sham pearls, and glass imitations of murrena vases. Axum and the coast of Somaliland, India and even China bought these products, and the Empire preferred Alexandrine glass, or at least glass of the Egyptian type, and the discovery of the glass-blowing technique must have helped, here as in Italy, to increase the output. The textile trade, also, although apparently organized on a basis of individual craftsmanship, worked for mass export. Barbarian clothing was made specially for Axum, the Sabaeans, and the natives of the Somaliland coast, while a particular type of ready-made sleeved garment was worked up at Arsinoe (near Suez). To these we must add the original Egyptian fine linens, which found purchasers in the Empire and India alike, and fabrics, woven out of Indian cotton and Chinese silk, which were highly prized in the West. Alexandrine metal-ware and metal utensils (especially of silver, which had to be imported for the purpose) competed with the Campanian, and were widely distributed throughout the world. They, too, reached as far as India; and specimens have been found in south Russia. Products of the jeweller’s art, and ivory articles, round off the list, and, last but not least, the famous scented essences, perfumes, and ointments, subtly blended from native and foreign ingredients and embodying much medical lore, but also much quackery, which were made into a remunerative item of Mediterranean trade. Thus Alexandria was not only in the first rank as a focus for the transit trade—of this aspect more will be said later—but also a maritime centre of industry and export on a very large scale,

From early times Syria was a vigorous rival of Egypt, not only because of her transit trade, which, incidentally, brought raw materials, such as crude silk and drugs, into the land in bulk, but mainly because of her highly developed industry, which regained its former eminence through the establishment of settled conditions. Her soil was naturally fertile and had been rendered still more productive through the development of artificial irrigation, so that it too played its part in supplying the needs of foreign customers. The wine drunk in Alexandria came mostly from Syrian Laodicea, and the lords of Axum and the Indians knew its quality. Even in Rome it sometimes appeared, for variety, on the table, together with olives from Damascus. Syrian fruit preserves, dried plums and figs, dates from Jericho, truffles from Jerusalem, and onions from Askalon, were a special delicacy. The output in precious stones was less than the Egyptian; on the other hand, there was an abundance of spices and drugs, among which we may make especial mention of the balsam from Jericho, which was unique, and of the asphalt from the Dead Sea, which was used in Egypt for embalming the dead.

All this, however, came second to the textile industry of Tyre and Sidon, of Berytus, Laodicea and Byblus, stimulated as it was by the purple-dyeing trade. Trimalchio’s treasurer wears Tyrian woollens as a matter of course. The linen woven from local raw materials was distributed throughout the whole world and competed with the Egyptian product. Syrian silks satisfied much of the demands of fashionable society, which existed everywhere. The purple murex, dredged up off the Phoenician coast, con­stituted the raw material from which the loveliest purple in the world was derived, and then was either exported direct, or used to dye Syrian fabrics. Dyeing was carried on in countless works, especially at Tyre ‘as a result of which the city, while becoming a most unpleasant place to live in, at the same time grew rich.’ The importance of Syrian glass is shown by the legend that glass was originally invented by Sidonians. Glass bearing a Syrian stamp is found in the distant West, penetrating as far as the Rhine, and also in the graves of south Russia, together with the Campanian product. Finally, Syria had also a high reputation in the perfume industry; the best cyperus-oil, for instance, was prepared in Sidon. The number of important and wealthy commercial cities was even greater here than in Egypt, since in Syria the centralization was less thorough; and, although from the earliest times pride of place had been taken by wholesale trading operations, thanks to the old Phoenician heritage, yet the manufacture of exports, a branch of more recent growth, could claim an honourable position in contemporary world production.

Asia Minor (including the adjacent islands) resembles Syria in this respect. Here too the coastal inhabitants had long been merchants, an activity to which the unique economic geography of the country—its position making it a bridge, thrust far forward between East and West—was still a significant contributory factor. As in Syria, trade gave rise to the utilization of the country’s rich resources for export purposes, the chief difference being that the tendency towards subdivision into a conglomeration of moderate-sized productive centres, in which old Greek cities frequently survived, was still stronger in Asia Minor. Inscriptions and remains, and the texts of Strabo and Dio of Prusa enable us to discern the gradual regeneration, which was even more marked in the industrial than in the agricultural sphere. Corn was not exported by Asia Minor, as the country could barely satisfy its own needs, but vast quantities of excellent wine and oil were sent abroad, which sufficed to cover the demand of the East and North-east; some wine went also to Italy, in return for which Italian wine would be exported to Asia Minor. Further articles of export are raisin-wine, dried figs—transported in boxes—pure honey, first-class truffles, dried funguses, used for medicinal purposes, cheese (from the Salon plain in Bithynia), tunnyfish—which were caught at Pharnaceia, Sinope, and Byzan­tium, and then salted down—, oysters from Ephesus, and shell­fish from the Troad. There was also wood, which grew plentifully throughout Asia Minor, both ship-timber and that of finer grain, such as boxwood; copper, especially from Cyprus, which supplied even the Indian market, silver, lead, and iron; the widest variety of precious and semi-precious stones, ranging from diamonds and emeralds to onyxes, all in great demand among the Roman jewellers; all kinds of transparent rock crystal, such as the Cappadocian mica, which was split into sheets before being exported to serve as window panes; a bright-hued marble which was quarried in bulk at Synnada, and brought as far as Rome; drugs, including dyes such as ‘Sinopian earth’ (red chalk), various medicinal wares, and Lycian funguses.

All this, however, was overshadowed by the magnificent textile industry, Asia Minor’s special pride and craft from time immemorial. Here she was fully able to hold her own against Syrian and Egyptian competition. Now, however, Laodicea instead of Miletus took the lead. Once again the connection with the dyeing industry made itself felt. The method was to employ vegetable dyes, as at Hierapolis, or else purple-dye, supplied by the purple fisheries of the Anatolian coast, as at Thyatira. Immense quantities of coloured fabrics and clothing crossed the sea, mostly of a high quality, for Milesian wool had always been an esteemed article, commanding as ready a sale as the pedigree Milesian sheep themselves. Anatolian cloths were stocked by the fashion-houses of Pompeii, Anatolian carpets and woolly blankets were known everywhere. The Coan silks, though coarser in texture than the genuine Chinese product, nevertheless were very popular. Two kinds were brought out: delicate fabrics for women’s wear, the raw material for which was derived from the Assyrian silk-worm farms, and a coarser fabric for men’s attire, which was made from the cocoons of the local Coan silkworm. Linen from Colchis also was exported far afield, and in Italy rough coats of Cilician goats’ hair were prized.

The regions adjacent to the West, which lay in the same longitude as the Greek homeland, showed a greatly reduced economic activity in comparison with the countries we have named, and with their own earlier history. Cyrene, it is true, yet retained some of her importance in the African trade, and her agriculture was still flourishing, but she had forfeited her position as a centre of production and export since the famous and valuable aromatic herb called Silphium had become extinct. Only one or two other drugs come under consideration in this connection, among them a good white dye, the paraetonium, which, like the Cretan product, was used in Rome. Greece, always a poor country, had sunk still lower during the Hellenistic age and under the Roman Republic, and the opening years of the imperial regime could bring little change. Together with the Greek islands she exported as in the past wine and oil with which the East was supplied, and honey from Hymettus and the islands; rare marbles, sometimes quarried far below the earth’s surface and often sent to Italy to adorn rich men’s palaces; emeralds from Taygetus; mussel-pearls from Acarnania; various drugs, including Melian alum and a series of dyes, such as Attic and Achaean ochre, and Laconian purple. Among industrial products art-bronzes, made in Corinth, Aegina, and Delos, brought a high price at Rome; very fine linen for women’s wear was made in the vicinity of Elis and at Patrae, by women weavers; perfumes in Boeotia. But the general impression left by such writers as Strabo and Dio of Prusa, by Plutarch also and later by Apuleius, is not very different from the picture painted by a Polybius. Better conditions prevailed in Macedonia alone. For whereas in Greece proper the silver-mines at Laurium, which had once been so productive, were exhausted, the mines on Pangaeum remained ‘gold-mines’ indeed. Diamonds also were found there, and a valuable by-product of the mines was the Macedonian chrysocolla, a pigment of a rich green hue. Finally the timber of the Macedonian pine retained its former reputation.

V.

THE OUTPUT OF WESTERN LANDS

The blessings of the imperial regime made themselves still more clearly felt in the West than in the East. There it was often a question simply of removing debris so that life could spring into being again; in the West there was almost a new creation, and in districts on the outskirts of the Empire culture and more advanced forms of economic life arose as distant responses to stimuli emanating from the older centres of Gallia Narbonensis, Baetica, Africa, and the northern border of Italy.

The three islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica call for notice first. Sicily sustained her old reputation as ‘Rome’s storehouse,’ for with the exception of a few products, which are consumed in the land itself, everything is brought to Rome. This includes not only agricultural produce, but also cattle, hides, wool, and sinjilar commodities. Among agricultural produce, the first place was taken by corn in Sicily as in Sardinia; the cattle may have been drawn for the most part from the great ranches of which Horace speaks. The volcanic soil near Etna furnished the fiery wine it does today. From Sicily came also honey, and from Corsica wax, while Agrigentum supplied cheese made from goats’ milk. Some further specialities are blocks of stone, and jewels (emeralds); vitriol from Lipari, and Sicilian sulphur, which was produced in bulk, and was used everywhere by vine­growers; among drugs, the excellent Sicilian saffron, which went to Rome, alum, Sardinian chalk for use as fuller’s earth, and so on.

We now turn to consider, in Gaul, the first of those regions radiating cultural influences, in which the growing diffusion of civilization is realized. Strabo expressly tells us how in Gallia Narbonensis the inhabitants had abandoned their war­like practices for agriculture and urban life. The land was fertile, and invited a more intensive cultivation. In the southern belt, which extended northwards about as far as Lugdunum (Lyons), the growth of vine and olive was now successfully resumed, and not only supplied the rest of Gaul, but also Ireland and even Italy, as amphorae-fragments at Rome prove. Vines, olives, and figs, did not thrive in the North, but this was all the more reason for growing corn, of a good quality and in such quantity that part of the Roman annona could be provided from it. Equally flourishing was stock-farming, both in Gallia Narbonensis, and in the Three Gauls; from the surplus products, hides, pickled meats, hams, sausages, and cheese, were supplied to the wholesale trade, which then brought them to Italy. The carrots which Tiberius ordered each year from the vicinity of Dusseldorf, and the geese which in Pliny’s time were driven in flocks all the weary way from Belgium to Italy for their goose­liver, are doubtless instances of expensive delicacies, though Pliny remarks that the carrot had become a fashionable vegetable since Tiberius. On the south coast of France fishing had brought in its train establishments utilizing the catch at Forum Julii and Antipolis where the simpler sorts of garum were prepared. The corals of the Stoechades, the pinewood from the Jura and Vosges mountains, and drugs such as Gallic nard, vegetable purple-dye, and Rhenish cassia, were probably the concern of local trade only, and similarly it is difficult to determine to what extent the mineral treasures were exported. In Strabo’s time, it is true, there was an abundance of gold, especially in the Soujh; he says of the Tarbellian mines (in Aquitania) that they are the best in the whole world. There was also silver, copper, lead, and tin, and an abundance of iron, especially on the lower Loire and in the valley of the Sambre, as is proved by the many traces of iron-workings discovered there. In all probability, however, the metal-bearing regions of Spain, Britain, and Noricum con­stituted too strong a competition for the crude metal to be ex­ported on a large scale. But in the land itself the working-up of metal was carried on extensively. Caesar notices this iron-working in Gaul; the art of the local gold- and silver-smiths was known beyond the Gallic frontiers; and if the Aucissa-fibulae (which date from the first half of the first century a.d., and are spread over an area comprising Gaul, Britain, Italy, the Tyrol, and Asia Minor, and even extending to the Don and the Caucasus), were Gallic products, we should be dealing with a leading article of wholesale export.

In any case, Gallic industry shows other instances of the tendency to expand and to dominate the market. The textile industry, at whose disposal local agriculture placed an embarrassing quantity of raw materials—good crude wool, and flax—proceeded to build up its production of the woolly coats, which were a feature of the country, with a view to supplying distant markets, a policy which met with response in Italy and Rome. Bolsters and quilts stuffed with flax counted as Gallic inventions; and the weaving of linen was so widespread— Galliae universae vela texant—that this was a direct source of Gaul’s importance. Most interesting, however, are the conclusions to be derived from the evidence of pottery. Through finds in the Roman forts of west Germany, we can trace accurately from decade to decade the progressive emancipation during the first half of the first century a.d. from domination by imported Italian terra-sigillata. Originating perhaps in branch settlements of Arretine firms, there gradually developed at the end of the Augustan age great manufiictories (as for instance that of a certain Mommo) in the La Graufesenque district of southern Gaul. Then, after the middle of the century, follow those in central Gaul, situated at Lezoux. Production was still intended, in the first instance, for the local Gallic and German market; but ultimately the wares were distributed farther afield, to Britain and the Danubian provinces, and even to Italy, as is shown by a consignment which reached Pompeii from Gaul via Rome, but remained unopened as a result of the catastrophe in 79. In the glass industry analogous conditions prevailed. The first Gallic glass-blowing works arose apparently at Lugdunum in the middle of the first century of our era. At a later stage, however, this branch too of Gallic industry, especially after its centre had been transferred to Cologne, competed successfully with Syrian, Alexandrine, and Italian glass.

Though this development and the climax of Gallic civilization generally lie outside the period we are considering, the impulse everywhere dates from the opening years of the imperial regime. Centres of production and export sprang into being, which took over the conduct of trade not only with the South, via the ports of Gallia Narbonensis (chiefly Narbo and Massilia), but also with the North, for which Lugdunum constituted the local point. A prosperity ensued which became proverbial. In a.d. 64 Lugdunum sent four million sesterces to Rome as a contribution towards repairing the ravages of fire in the capital. To make his countrymen see the madness of a revolution, Agrippa II in a.d. 66 asks them whether they fancy themselves richer than the Gauls, a people who, according to his description, have all the means of production in their own land, and flood almost the whole world with their merchandise. The imported luxuries, the numerous foreigners who brought them, the sumptuous architecture and art, the highly developed local handicrafts and the local trade, of which we learn from the inscriptions in the twelfth volume of the Corpus of Inscriptions—all this shows that Agrippa did not exaggerate too greatly.

Britain, though wealthy, stands in marked contrast to Gaul. It is the opening period of British culture; hence besides animals and foodstuffs only raw materials, and not products made up from them, served as objects of trade. In exchange, articles characteristic of a higher plane of living, such as wine, oil, bronze utensils, pottery, glassware, and so on, were brought by foreign traders. Strabo gives a kind of statement of trading returns: ‘exports comprised corn, cattle, gold, silver, and iron... and also hides, slaves, and very good hounds.’ If to this list we add tin and lead, the two chief articles of export, it gives the essentials. The omission is due solely to the fact that Strabo, following a recurrent misconception of the ancient world, groups together those regions of the West which export tin, and applies to them the mythical collective term of ‘Tin islands,’ which he conceives to be situated off the coast of Spain. Diodorus, however, who elsewhere adopts a similar localization to that of Strabo (the common source of both writers being Posidonius), knows, perhaps from Timaeus, that there were rich tin deposits in Cornwall. Finally, Pliny³ and many inscriptions testify to the exceptionally plentiful and easily accessible veins of lead.

The second great radiating centre was ancient Spain, comprising southern Spain, and the eastern coastal region, which had long since attracted the attention of the Massiliotes and Phoenicians. This remote peninsula, favoured by the climate, with a fertile soil, and abounding in precious metals, was associated in men’s minds with age-old legends of infinite wealth. This was especially true of Baetica; the Fields of the Blessed were perhaps thought to be here, and the story ran that even horses fed from silver mangers. Yet here too the full and rational utilization of the natural riches of the country as a whole first came about through the policy of pacification and unhampered development pursued during the early years of the Empire, and we must bear the effects of this policy in mind in order to understand Pliny’s remark that after Italy and India Spain is the most productive region in the world. Some part in this more intensive utilization was, it is true, played by Italians. There were colonists and veterans, who had been transplanted to Spain, partly by Caesar (and before him), but chiefly later by Augustus, as a means of pacification and settlement. Further, there were Italians who migrated into the province of their own initiative, as early as the first century b.c. and whose example was now followed by many others—all of which contributed to the romanization and urbanization of this area  Yet the natives were the core, and among its members the Phoenicians, especially those of Gades, were outstanding as enterprising business men; from their ranks also most of those engaged in the export trade were drawn. In density of population and in prosperity an exceptionally advanced stage had here been reached; Strabo calls Gades the second city of the Empire, the number of its capitalists (knights) being equalled in Patavium only.

According to a list given by the same author, the chief articles of export from Baetica were wax and honey, pitch, dyes (kermes and minium), and especially quantities of corn, wine, and excel­lent oil, products which were already exported in the closing years of the Republic. Whether the ban imposed upon Gallic oil- and wine-production  had been later extended to all the western provinces, and whether it was the lifting of this ban that made possible the renewal of intensive cultivation of vine and olive is a question that cannot be answered either for Africa or Spain. At any rate Spanish wine and oil were welcome in Italy and Rome, as the numerous sherds of vessels and jars from the ‘Monte Testaccio’ at Rome show. Spanish wine came also from other centres, from Tarraco, for instance, and the Balearic Islands. Baetican artichokes were a special luxury for epicures. But greater importance in the economic system as a whole attaches to the immense quantity of jars and pots full of pickled fish and garum-sauce which were daily shipped overseas by the great fishing concerns. For here we are dealing with genuine large-scale enterprises, in which whole companies (socii) were involved, and which yielded a substantial profit.

A still more lucrative economic system than that of the coastal regions prevailed in the mountainous area comprising the Sierra Morena and Gallaecia, where the numerous mines were located. These were mostly State-owned, but individual capitalists, often from Italy, dealt with the contracting and exploiting. Mining plant with a high standard of technical development, or a system of washings for alluvial gold, was used to recover the metal. Thus gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, and iron were put on the world market in huge quantities. The yearly yield of gold in Asturia (the site of the richest gold-field), Gallaecia, and Lusitania, amounted, according to Pliny, to twenty thousand pounds. The figures for the silver-mines near New Carthage, which in Polybius’ time had a circuit of forty-six miles and in which forty thousand workers were employed, came at that time to no less than twenty- five thousand drachmae daily, implying a yearly output of more than eight and a half thousand kilograms (=8’5 tons); and there are no grounds for assuming that production had declined. Single lead-mines were let at a yearly rent of two million denarii. Lead and tin penetrated as far as India. The iron, of which there was an abundant outcrop in Cantabria, was converted into steel, in places where the water supply favoured this process, as in the Ebro valley, and, moreover, worked up into finished articles, it seems, at Dianium; it was exported principally to Italy, a country notoriously deficient in iron. But this does not exhaust the list of Spain’s exports: there were dyes (other than those from Baetica mentioned above): cinnabar, scarlet, azure, black, and copper-green; esparto-grass from the region to the north of Carthago Nova, ‘which was used for cordwaining and was ex­ported to all parts, especially to Italy’; linen yarns in quantity from Zoela (Gallaecia), fine linen fabrics from Emporiae, Tarraco, and Saetabis, places which set the standard of quality for the European manufacture of these materials; and beautiful woollens from Salacia. There was thus an abundance of wares to be sent out into the world by the Spanish export-firms of the interior, and more especially of the countless maritime cities of the South, though they also occur at New Carthage and elsewhere. Producers and exporters grew ever wealthier through this trade, and from decade to decade the number of citizens in the hundreds of Spanish cities went on increasing.

The special position of Africa was based to a far greater extent than was the case with Spain on her grain, and on the corn-trade deriving from it, which was under State control. The fertility of the soil is often praised. It would seem that crops sometimes flourished there under a kind of terraced cultivation: palms, fruit trees bearing olives, figs, and pomegranates, vines, and corn—all prospered at different levels on the same terrain—and in the lowest region, when the corn was over, leguminous plants and cabbages could be cultivated in the same year. The wheat, it was maintained, gave between one and a half and four times as heavy a yield as the best Sicilian, Baetican or Egyptian product. After Thapsus, Caesar announced that Rome would in future receive each year two hundred thousand Attic medimni of corn, and three million litrae of oil from Africa; oil, therefore, ranked second as an article of taxation, and hence of wholesale export. In view of the imperial government’s constructive policy, which was everywhere in operation, it is a priori probable that the pioneer work of Gaius Gracchus and of Caesar was extended and that production was stimulated. But it is also directly deducible from the account of the African export trade to Puteoli and Ostia in the Augustan age, which would seem to have been even more vigorous than that from southern Spain. Its volume, moreover, can be at least approximately determined. The remains from Ostia and the ‘Monte Testaccio’ afford confirmatory evidence for the close of our period; foreign immigration and the balancing list of imports (raw materials and finished articles) make the circle complete. In addition to corn and oil, articles of export on a somewhat larger scale such as garum from Leptis, and the African dyes, especially purple, may be noticed. The rest must be regarded as specialities of secondary importance only: African figs, which feature in Trimalchio’s housekeeping, cucumbers, truffles, and Numidian fowls; marble from Numidia; wax, cumin, and medicinal wares and so on. On the other hand, there was next to no export of wine, with the exception of a little grape juice, which came into fashion through Tiberius.

From Mauretania, a land which, with the aid of colonies, began to make headway from the time of Augustus, and which, in the West, was naturally influenced by Spain, came oil from Tubusuctu, wild beasts for the games, the famous citron-wood  for fine tables and also citron-tables themselves, precious stones, pearls, and ivory, doubtless also Gaetulian purple—the manufacture of which together with purple dyeing had been developed by Juba II—asphalt, and copper. Juba’s new foundation of lol Caesarea grew into a splendid royal residence, and at the same time into a busy port and lively centre of local industry and of export, so that here, as in the other colonies, the traditions of Phoenician Carthage were actively maintained.

To complete our survey of the productive countries of the world-empire there remains only the newest sector in the circle of civilization, namely the Danubian lands, to which we append the barely cultivable country of Illyria. Admittedly the primary motive that underlay the pushing forward of the frontier to the North, was the desire to obtain an advance area of strategic importance; yet the mineral wealth of the Alpine lands, and the iron- and gold-fields of Noricum had long been known, so that here again, as so often, occupation and exploitation joined hands. Iron came to Italy in the crude state, and also, to some extent, after manufacture. Horace praises Norican swords, and Trimalchio gives his cook a Norican knife, much to his guests’ admiration and astonishment. At Noreia (Steiermark) in addition to the iron-works there was gold, both alluvial and mined. Further, gold- and silver-mines are mentioned in remote Dalmatia, while semi-precious stones were found at Virunum. All this went, mostly as raw materials, to Aquileia, to balance the mass export of agricultural and manufactured products from that town. Here, too, there were specialities: a certain amount of Raetian and Illyrian wine, Illyrian oil, excellent cheese from the Alps and Dalmatia, pickled fish from the Illyrian inland lakes (east of Epidamnus), fish-liver furnished by the mustelae of Lake Constance, and by Pliny’s time Dalmatian muria was making a name.

But there is no need of an exhaustive list: it is sufficient for our purpose to have demonstrated that in every region there existed, in more or less advanced forms, production in excess of immediate local needs for export. Sometimes the production was primary, as in Africa, Spain or Britain, sometimes the result of several processes, as in Italy, Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor or Gaul. But all had their place in the world market.

VI.

THE RANGE AND METHODS OF COMMERCE

All these varied products of the Empire, apart from those which, as taxes in kind, stood directly at the disposal of the State, went to swell the stream of trade: an increase in production necessarily involved an increase in trade, and probably also in the forms of commercial organization. Trading cities received a new stimulus, not only the great ports, such as Alexandria, the centre of the world’s trade, Puteoli, Aquileia, and (after Claudius’ time) Ostia, Narbo, Massilia, Gades, Tyre, and Ephesus, but also river ports and inland cities such as Rome, Antioch, Corduba, Lugdunum, and Damascus. To these centres of the first importance we must add a vast number ranking lower: Pompeii, Brundisium, and the cities of the Po valley, in Italy; Coptos, Myos Hormos, Aradus, Berytus, and Seleuceia, in the East; the two Carthages, Arausio, Nemausus, in the West; and countless more. Businesses dealing with the export, import, and transit trades here came to their full development: for the import trade the chief business centres were Rome and Ostia, for the transit trade the great commercial cities of the East, and also Aquileia. The harbours could cope with the highest demands made upon them.

Naturally the peddler still hawked his wares, as before, and many tradesmen made their rounds in the old-fashioned way, buying their wares from the producers themselves, or at markets and fairs, loading them on ships, on mule-back, or on waggons, and transporting them to some other district, where they set them out and sold them. Such was in all probability the way in which C. Gracchus, the outlaw’s son, who, in Tiberius’ time, travelled to and fro between Africa and Sicily, eked out a humble existence. Trimalchio is another case in point: he suddenly determines to embark on a trading venture, builds ships, buys wine and other commodities at a low rate, and makes at random a journey to Rome, to dispose of them at a high price. He too is not far removed from an itinerant tradesman, for if he fails to get rid of his wares at Rome, he, or else his representatives, must travel farther afield with them.

Yet alongside this primitive economic form there were higher developments: export and import firms, with great warehouses, which did not solely depend on chance sale or chance supply, but maintained steady business connections; and trading concerns, or producing and trading companies, which had their agencies, at various centres, such as Puteoli, Rome, Ostia, and Alexandria, and at countless other points within and without the Empire. The discoveries at Ostia give us a vivid picture of this development, though the bureaux there in the vicinity of the theatre belonged not only to traders, but also, in part, to ship­owners and shipping companies. For traders and shipowners, whose vessels plied the seas and rivers, were not always the same people. The more specialized differentiation that existed between trading and shipping operations is illustrated with exemplary clearness in the navicularii, who saw to the transport of the annona on behalf of the State. In conjunction with this transport, a system operating with a certain regularity along more or less fixed trade-routes came into being, which made possible at least a secondary carrying trade, and a passenger service, and permitted merchants with a reasonably small quantity of wares to use the travel facilities. The tonnage of the vessels, in spite of variations in individual instances, was quite large, in some cases—we must remember that sailing ships only are in question—really remarkable and suggestive of the advance the carrying trade may have made. The ship on which the Apostle Paul was brought to Rome, had 276, that of Josephus about 600 persons on board. The general aim was to build as big ships as possible. ‘Scitis, magna navis magnam fortitudinem habet,’ says Trimalchio. ‘The biggest (and most numerous) trading vessels’ were owned in Strabo’s time by the inhabitants of Gades; travellers to India and Arabia also sailed in ‘large ships.’ The vessel in which Gaius caused an Egyptian obelisk to be transported to Rome, which was ballasted with a hundred and twenty thousand modii (more than a hundred thousand litres) of lentils, could take a cargo of 1335 tons, and her length was almost as great as that of the left side of the newer harbour at Ostia. Her capacity must, then, have exceeded a thousand tons register. We may well regard Trimalchio’s ships as having been equally large.

Thus throughout the length and breadth of the Empire, there developed an extraordinary life and activity, and a commercial intercourse with foreign countries, which may well have sometimes been comparable with the Leipzig Fair a century ago. Foreign tradesmen were encountered in all parts. Numerous inscriptions still testify to this—in Rome, Ostia, and Puteoli, just as in Delos, Narbo, Brigetio (Pressburg), where the slave of a tax-farmer set up an inscription to the genius commercii et negotiantium, or otherwhere. Italians travelled in the West and East, and they also stayed as settlers: two Calpurnii in Puteoli are the subjects of an honorary inscription from mercatores, qui Alexandria! Asiai Syriai negotiantur, which implies connections with the East; in Tiberius’ time Roman negotiatores strolled about the streets of Gythium; a conventus Avium Romanorum qui in Asia negotiantur existed in a.d. 43/4 at Ephesus; there must have been many merchants from Pompeii in Alexandria during the first century a.d.; and many Romans were to be found in Petra and in Palmyra.

Still more numerous than the occidentals in the East, were the orientals of Greek and semi-Greek origin in the West. Anatolians, Syrians, Alexandrines, and even Palmyrenes, travelled in large numbers with their carpets, silks, fruits, glass, cosmetics, spices, and other merchandise, not only in the cities of the East, but also of Italy, and beyond in Gaul, on the Rhine, in the Alpine lands, in Britain, and in Spain; and glib-tongued as they were they disposed of their wares at such a profit that the Italians were more and more thrust into the background even in their native land by the Levantines. Only the Carthaginians, and the southern Spaniards of Phoenician stock, held their own with the peoples to which they were linked by age-old ties of kinship. Thus at the focal points of economic life traders of every nationality and clime mingled in kaleidoscopic confusion. Naturally the leading merchants themselves did least travelling, though even they from time to time must have accompanied their wares and looked after their agencies. ‘Most of the population of Gades is constantly at sea,’ says Strabo, so some portion of her five hundred knights must have been abroad; and the leader of a trade expedition to the Baltic coast of Germany to fetch amber, was a Roman knight. But these merchant princes were exceptions, not the rule. In general the independent tradesmen, who travelled with their wares, will have belonged to the middle class, and the same is true of the agents and supercargoes, who maintained the connection of the larger trading firms with the outside world. The travelling buyers, who visited the manufacturing firms, the commercial travellers and agents of these firms, and the branch officials employed as local managers (typified in the negotiant vestiarius civis Gallus in Pola), if they showed any distinguishing marks of class, are more likely to have borne the brand of slavery than the angustus clavus. With all this coming and going commercial intercourse became progressively livelier. The hotels in the large cities must have flourished: even in sequestered places (such as Berenike Trogodytike) accommodation was to be found, and there were hostelries at the caravan stations.

An exchange of information about market openings and values had been customary in earlier times. In Rome and elsewhere the traders met regularly, and it was in answer to such a demand that special exchange buildings were erected, as those behind the theatre at Ostia, or near Trajan’s Forum at Rome. Only the banking system remained comparatively undeveloped. Exchange counters on a small scale were, indeed, to be found everywhere, extensive money-lending businesses were carried on, and there had been signs of a tendency towards more complicated monetary transactions. The reason, however, for the retarded development of banking is to be found in the fact that apart from those instances in which the State was helpful—in the contract for the imperial domains, for example, or for tax-farming, or for the transport of corn—Roman financiers never achieved the organization of a syndicate, which might have broken down the simple system of guilds, companies or personal partnership. Consequently, despite the money-lending operations of a Seneca, said to involve millions, the foundation of large banking institutions, whose capital should not be personally owned, never came to be attempted.

Yet even without systematized banking the existence of commercial intercourse on a large scale was fully established; it may be conveniently divided into three categories: inter-district, inter­territorial, and international, and the second category, inter­territorial trade, was of paramount importance for the unification of the Empire. Inter-district trade was, of course, in existence everywhere. How true this was of Italy has already been shown and Pliny never tires of repeating his demonstration that Italy is essentially self-supporting. Papyri show there was a similar linking of the Egyptian land divisions with one another and with the great centre of Alexandria, the centre of wholesale buying and selling, and Strabo tells the same tale about both Gaul and Noricum.

Even connection with foreign countries was but the continu­ation of old traditions: the great innovations were a further extension of the trading radius, and an increasingly direct contact with the demands and products of even remote lands. In this way the chain of middlemen could in part be eliminated, or at least diminished, customs barriers circumvented, prices lowered, and marketing possibilities increased. In all this the emperors played a great part: Claudius and Nero seem to have followed the model of Augustus. Strabo tells of the chain of middlemen controlling the overland trade from southern Arabia through Syria to Mesopotamia, and from Pliny we learn how high an expenditure it involved: a camel-load of incense over the stage from Thomna (in southern Arabia) to Gaza incurred charges amounting to 688 denarii for transport, customs, and bakshish, not counting the customs dues of the Roman Empire. It is a safe assumption that the route by water from Kane or Muza to Berenice Trogodytike or Myos Hormos, and thence to Coptos and down the Nile to Alexandria, was much cheaper. Hippalus’ discovery in the first century b.c. of the regularity of the monsoons in the Arabian Gulf came gradually to be fully utilized, and in three stages a progressively shorter passage to India was found, until finally, at the time of Nero, trade took the direct overseas route to Muziris—a journey of forty days from Ocelis. Plainly the leaders in these enterprises to the South and South-east were the Alexandrian traders, and they drew upon three regions: eastern Africa (including Aethiopia, Axum and the coast of Somaliland), Arabia and India, and China. But whereas they were in direct touch with Arabia and India, the vagueness of the Graeco-Roman ideas about China shows that connections were only indirect, and that their merchandise took complicated routes. It might come through eastern Turkestan and Bactria, and by Taxila down to the mouth of the Indus, and so by the Red Sea, or—by ways along which Arabian and Indian wares, too, were transported—crossing Arabia from Gerrha to Petra, or up the Euphrates to Ctesiphon and across the desert to Palmyra and Damascus. But the Romans had no desire to enrich Parthia by trade, and there are indications that in order to avoid the transcontinental highway through Parthia, they encouraged the use of a more northerly route, from Maracanda (Samarkand) by the Oxus and the Caspian and across the Caucasus to the Black Sea.

Such were the main routes between Rome and the South-east, along which western products could be sent, mainly metals, a certain amount, of wine, and cheap Egyptian manufactures such as textiles, glass, ornaments and perfumes. The cargo from the South-east was varied and luxurious: gold and silver, steel, precious and semi-precious stones, fine woods, ivory, ostrich­feathers, tortoise-shell, pearls, and spices and, above all, drugs of every kind, and textiles, whether Chinese silks or Indian cotton and calico, whether raw materials or manufactured fabrics. Even this brief list shows that trade must have been carried on with great intensity. India’s yearly quota of exports into the Empire, after the establishment of direct communication along the short route, was estimated to amount to a minimum export value of 1,500,000 sesterces (with a retail value of 150,000,000 sesterces). From the Roman standpoint India took second place among producing regions, outstripping Spain, and surpassed by Italy alone. On the other hand India, China, and Arabia, together, are stated, ‘after careful computation,’ to take the sum of 100,000,000 sesterces annually from the Empire. This admittedly sounds as if the account was liquidated wholly in money payments, and Pliny’s references to India and Arabia do, in fact, point in this direction. But his moralizing lamentations, which are not always consistent, seem exaggerated, and it is hard to believe that the ‘great fleets’ which Strabo records as sailing to India went eastwards with empty holds. It is nevertheless true that the Romans did not hesitate, when a luxury import was in question—and it is with such, on the whole, that we are dealing—to make inroads on the Empire’s stock of precious metals, and to barter Indian diamonds, for example, for Roman denarii. The numerous Roman coins found in India, mostly minted in Tiberius’ reign, and the fact that the king of Ceylon could get possession of various issues, prove that this was so. The truth, then, probably lies midway between the two extremes. For the rest, in the numerous trading centres and ports of the South-east, some of which had made the most up-to-date provision for commerce (including a pilot service), we encounter not only Arabs and Indians, but also Greeks and other occidental merchants, corresponding to the Arabian trading agencies at Coptos, and the Arabs and Indians, who could doubtless be seen before the time of Dio of Prusa in the streets of Alexandria.

While doubt may exist whether there was a favourable or unfavourable balance of trade with the South-east, direct interchange of wares with the North is much more certain, thanks to archaeological finds. In return for wine, oil, and manufactured articles, south Russia still provided corn, salted fish, furs, hides, and slaves, while from north-east Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic, in return for Italian manufactures (especially from Capua), came slaves, furs, and especially amber. The routes to south Russia ran via Panticapaeum and Tanais (on the Don), or farther to the East via Dioscurias and Phasis; while the Baltic region could be reached by the all-sea passage from northern Gaul, or from the Black Sea up the Dnieper, or again from Aquileia through Carnuntum and Bohemia. For though in the Augustan age Roman merchants had not penetrated beyond the Elbe, by Nero’s time they had become bolder, as the Roman knight sent to get amber proved by his expedition.

Thus the trading connections of the Empire extended far beyond its own frontiers to the regions on the margin of the oikoumene, often but dimly known. But although all parts of the world helped to supply Trimalchio’s table, and although Italian apothecaries needed ingredients mostly of non-European origin to blend their ointments, vital necessities were not, on the whole, imported from abroad. The rich could manage with fewer emeralds on their fingers or pearls in their ear-rings. In the inter­territorial exchange of trade within the Empire, however, we are not, in general, dealing with such deliciae, and hence this was ultimately more important than international trade. The system of commercial communication, by land and sea, within the Empire, which was operating with growing efficiency created a milieu most favourable to such an exchange of trade. It linked up in the eastern frontier districts with the ends of the old highways of world trade—it developed the transverse route, con­necting Asia Minor and Egypt, with great success, and in the western frontier districts, in the Alpine and Danubian lands, in Gaul, on the Rhine, and in Spain, it sometimes opened up wholly new arteries of commerce.

Thus in the stream of trade those wares which were produced for known markets in nearer or remoter areas, or were handed over for unknown markets to itinerant vendors, brought in return from near and far not only foreign wares but also imports from within the Empire, including products of primary production—food-supplies and raw materials—and also of finishing processes. We may be certain that the primary production of the Empire was sufficient for its needs. Although Strabo is explicit on this point only for Europe, the inclusion in our consideration of those parts of Africa and Asia which belonged to the Empire only makes this sufficiency more pronounced. The production of corn and crops in each country was generally adequate to solve the problem of its food supply. Greece and Italy were exceptional: Greece, because here even after the drop in the numbers of the population in Hellenistic times the old difficulties in providing a sufficient supply still prevailed; Italy, because the inhabitants were unwining to cultivate corn, although there was no lack of opportunities. The deficiency was supplied by the lands of the Empire with a surplus of corn. Greece need not have drawn on a foreign country, the Crimea, for Egypt was exporting corn to lands  outside the Empire. As for other food-supplies, we have seen that the most varied products of the most varied countries were imported to the great consuming centres such as Italy.

The imports of raw materials present a more complicated problem. Here, if we concentrate on what was typical, three main classes of territory can be discerned. First came stretches of land which were more or less self-sufficing in raw materials, and which also generally worked up these materials themselves into articles for home consumption or export. The most representative example of this type was Gaul, especially in later times; her leading position was directly due to the fact that she had at her disposal large natural means of production. The occasional import of Corinthian carbuncle or Egyptian syenite is not an exception, for there had always been a brisk interchange of such specialized raw materials. The second class comprises countries with a deficiency, which, while themselves possessing quantities of raw materials, needed still more, partly because a densely concentrated population with high demands meant a large consumption, and also because their technical skill was so high that it was possible to satisfy the needs not only of the land itself, but of others also, and to manufacture articles from foreign as well as native raw materials. Such was the situation in the leading industrial countries of Italy, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, and this explains their heavy import of metals, stone, wood, hides, raw materials for textiles and cordwaining, ingredients for ointments, and so on. The eastern industrial areas, however, occupied an exceptional position, in as much as they—more than the western—received a good part of their raw materials not from within the Empire but from foreign countries. As a complement to the highly industrial regions we have the third division, comprising the lands specifically limited to the production of raw materials, which did not themselves absorb in manufacture the greater part of their surplus output. The reason for this might be that the raw materials were present in such abundance that the available supplies of civilized labour were fully occupied in the process merely of tapping these riches, or, alternatively, in disposing of them. Such was the state of affairs in many parts of Spain, and doubtless also in Sicily; it is significant that in the Spanish branch of the textile trade the processing of wool was at times dropped in favour of exporting the raw material. Another important reason for supplying raw materials (including human beings) lay in a lack of technical experience. This applies not only to a great number of Orientals, whose limitations in this respect are explicitly stressed by our authorities, but also to a whole series of members of the Empire: the Dalmatians, the inhabitants of the Alpine and Danubian lands, the Britons, and the natives of Central Spain and Central Asia Minor. Here Italians, Greeks, or Graeco-Orientals, were often the first to discover the existence of new raw materials, to recognize their value, or to bring supplies of them into circulation. We call to mind the Roman gold-miners in Noricum, and the ‘mercatores, qui ulteriora Aethiopiae scrutantur.’

Lands producing raw materials were the complement of industrial countries in so far as the former drew on the latter’s output of manufactured wares, and especially on articles of mass consumption, comprising the products of industry and of industrialized agriculture, such as pottery, lamps, glass and metal ware, wine and oil. Admittedly, the import of such mass-produced articles was not limited to industrially backward regions. Egyptian paper and oriental glass are found in Italy, occidental lamps in Corinth, Italian ware in Gaul, and, later, Gallic ware in Italy. There is an interchange of wines from Italy, Greece, and southern Spain and also of oils from Italy with those of Gaul, Spain and Africa. The reason for this is partly that certain large-scale industries enjoyed a more or less complete monopoly (as did the Egyptian papyrus industry), and partly that the idea of exchanging individual specialities was already exerting an influence. How attractive to try Coan wine for once as a change from the good Falernian usually drunk, or to sample Spanish, Gallic, even Dalmatian garum as a sauce in place of that familiar Pompeian! In the same way there was a trade in other manufactured specialities (particularly luxuries): in choice foods, textiles, dyes, per­fumes, articles of bronze and silver, or similar goods.

There was, then, a specialization of labour over a wide area, and strong ties bound the various parts of the Empire together, and linked the Empire with the outside world. The whole orbis terrarum seemed united into one trading area by the bonds of commerce and import, and ‘even the most obscure product was brought into the sphere of world consumption.’ The constantly recurring emphasis on the ideal of self-sufficiency shows that its practical realization was unknown, that everywhere, but above all at those centres which were the focal points of civilization in its highest form—at Rome, Pompeii, Ostia, Aquileia, Alexandria, Antioch, and elsewhere—what actually prevailed was the most colourful range and variety of imports imaginable. The geographical disposition of raw materials in one place, and skilled workmanship in another (a contrast which was sharply marked in some instances), in itself determined the creation of this interlocking system, whereby the one found its counterpart in the other.

Admittedly this simultaneity set a limit to the possibilities of development. The incorporation of backward peoples in the Empire must inevitably have exposed them to civilizing influences and led them to the conception of utilizing their raw materials themselves for production. We hear of travelling industrial experts, and of the establishment of branches and industrial settlements. Industries could be transplanted as well as plants and domestic animals; the glass industry moved from Syria and Alexandria to the West, the ceramic industry from Arretium to Gaul. This acted as a decentralizing factor, and so reduced the radius of activity of the old large-scale industries. Other influences were also at work which hastened this development instead of retarding it. One of these was the system of com­mercial intercommunication. Relatively speaking this was highly developed, but judged by absolute standards it was still primitive. A journey by land, and, above all, a voyage by sea, was still exposed to numerous dangers. Overseas trade was on the whole a risky business, and freight charges still remained high, or at least fluctuating. Secondly there was no possibility of obtaining compensation for the effects of decentralization, through a reduc­tion of running costs. Machines, in our sense of the word, were unknown. The slave market actually began to run dry in consequence of the pax Romana. Finally, economic activity, in spite of all the advances under the imperial regime, had never wholly lost its characteristic insecurity. This was due to two facts: first, credit facilities for productive enterprises, which might have tided them over times of crisis, were either non-existent, or else but weakly developed; secondly, personal capital only, not joint- stock capital, was sunk in business. Tendencies towards State socialism on oriental lines, that were gaining ground by the middle of the century, and for which the outflow of the reserves of precious metal from the Empire may have been one of the causes, brought no improvement in the situation.

In fine, the basic structure of economic life—as in classical Greek antiquity—tended ultimately to rest on the old founda­tions of agriculture, skilled craftsmanship—perhaps on a large scale (involving many trained hands)—or speculation. The safest capital investment is still always real estate (it is only necessary to remember Trimalchio’s profits from speculation); then, as before, the inclination to income from rent is marked. Hence large-scale industry, for all its positive achievements, some of which are amazing enough, did not develop into a truly typical form of economic activity, but, if we disregard the Alexandrine paper industry, remained limited to particular branches (the ceramic, metallurgic, glass, and perhaps the garum industries), branches which were based on the possession of a certain technique, on the exercise of a certain artistic skill, and, apart from these, at best on the special enterprise of individual industrialists, instead of on the impulse, inherent in a definite working method, towards the attainment of a progressively greater efficiency—a development which is only found with the coming of ‘factories.’

Within the boundaries, however, which the ancient world set itself, and which it did not transgress, the early Principate marks a rise to the highest point that was ever to be reached. An economic system flowers in which the sap of life flows strong. In the conflict of forces, competing rivals measure each other’s strength, and do not shrink from imitation and forgery of each other’s products. In the North-west, Italian and Gallic, in the North-east, Alexandrine and Campanian industries strive with each other for the prize. Some branches of local production are, it is true, crushed out of existence by the presence of the monopolist large-scale industries. Common table ware cannot be made in Pompeii because the mass import from Etruria, or even from Puteoli, chokes the local output. But other institutions working to satisfy local needs, and organized on a broader basis than the normal artisans’ or small tradesmen’s businesses, struggle into being, as is shown by the example of the Roman and Pompeian large-scale bakeries. Municipal centres, implying a concentrated demand, grew up on all sides. The wealth of the cities, and luxury in private and public life, steadily increased, in Italy as, above all, in the provinces (Greece being again an exception), though their golden age, in the West at any rate, still lay in the future. Through this multiplication of the individual centres, the life of the com­munity as a whole blossomed into a greater activity. There was a constant passing to and fro of merchandise and travellers. ‘ Miscentur sapores, miscentur vero et terrae caelique tractus.’ Throughout the world there was an interpenetration, and a smoothing-out of differences, to an extent undreamed of before. The nationalistic Roman moralists lamented ‘vincendo victi sumus; paremus externis.’ They advocated a rejection of capitalism and luxury, and a return to self-sufficiency and agriculture. Yet if we contemplate the facts from the standpoint of the Empire, our verdict must be that, in spite of all the dangers that an exaggerated capitalism has latent in it, industry, trade and commerce accomplished the task, which Augustus set them, the task of welding the Empire into a unity, thereby rendering possible its survival for centuries to come.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SOCIAL POLICY OF AUGUSTUS