086 - Wealth and Class

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Hello and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 86, Wealth and Class. Things have changed considerably since the last time we surveyed the broad outlines of Roman life, episode 28 taking stock for those of you keeping score at home. Back then, the Romans had just emerged into a world in which they had conquered Greece and annihilated the last vestiges of Carthage. As you'll recall, this total victory over all meaningful rivals for power was a turning point in the transition from republic to empire. Bereft of any unifying external threat, ambitious politicians began to describe their domestic political enemies in the same us-versus-them, life-or-death terms that they had once reserved for foreign enemies like the Samnites or the Carthaginians. At first, this manifested merely as a more violent extension of the old class struggle between patrician and pleb, as with the careers of the Gracchi brothers. But soon, the once solidly unified aristocracy began to turn on itself and Marius and Sulla, then Caesar and Octavian, tore the old republic asunder and created in its place a new imperial order, a semi-divine military dictatorship that ruled the Mediterranean from its seat on the Palatine Hill.

We now find ourselves then on the opposite side of that evolutionary curve. Back in episode 28, we were setting the stage for the fall of the republic. Today, we are observing the result of that all-important social and political transformation. By the middle of the second century, the republic was not just a thing of the past, it was a thing barely remembered. And more than that, it was a thing no longer even actively pined for. The Romans, in a word, had changed. The political power they undisputedly wielded, the wealth that poured into their public treasuries, the new ideas, religions, and philosophies that had been ingested from Greece and the Near East had all conspired to fundamentally alter the Roman character.

Whether it was even in its own time an unattainable ideal is a question for another time, but the Romans of the republic had supposedly been all about simple homes, strong families, steadfast piety, and above all, an impassive devotion to the public good. The Romans of the empire, though, as pointed out even by contemporary critics like Juvenal, had become a society of self-indulgent sloths whose lives revolved around ostentatious displays of wealth, petty gossip, and the next round of games. At least, that was true of the upper classes. The lower and middle classes, who had once been free-holding farmers, the very root of republican virtue, were now either oppressed tenants on sprawling aristocratic estates or else unemployed and crammed into Rome living what could barely be called lives on the public dole.

And this is all to say nothing of the legions. Once comprised entirely of citizen farmer-soldiers, the Roman legions had not only lost their amateur status, they were now not even Roman legions anymore. Aside from a few officers, the standing army that defended the frontiers of the empire was, by the second century, made up entirely of provincials. Lured into service because soldiering was basically the only real means of upward social mobility left in most corners of the empire, the men who served in the army lived and retired and died in the provinces within which they served. By this point, the only thing dividing legionary from auxiliary was training, equipment, and pay.

The only Italians who even contemplated service in the legions were the poorest of the poor looking for a way out of their wretched poverty and ambitious aristocrats who were looking to pad their resumes with a year or two of military experience before settling into their comfortable public careers. But even here, the number of Italian nobles who went down that road was dwindling by the day. Most of the ambitious aristocrats left these days were themselves provincials, albeit rich provincials, who were, like Trajan or Hadrian, looking to gain entrance into the imperial power structure. The Roman Romans were, for the most part, content to let others do the heavy lifting for them while they frittered away their aimless lives and sent the wealth of an empire their forefathers had won for them down the drain of their vomitoriums.

Am I getting carried away? Okay, I'm getting carried away a little bit, but only in that vomitoriums, as we popularly conceive of them, didn't really exist in ancient Rome.

To set the stage, then, for the next evolutionary step of the empire, from Augustus' Principate to Diocletian's Dominant, I'm going to spend the next couple of episodes exploring how the empire, its citizens, subjects, culture and economy were constituted during the age of the Antonines. Hopefully, then, we'll all have a much richer understanding of how and why imperial Rome stagnated, calcified, and then almost broke apart completely less than a century later. Plus, all of this stuff is just intrinsically interesting.

As was the case throughout Roman history, the most important thing to understand about the empire is that it was defined by gross inequality, inequality on a scale that would make Ayn Rand blush. To put it mathematically, the Roman economic classes were divided on a logarithmic rather than an arithmetic scale. To describe it accurately, you basically start with a vast horde of poor citizens and go up from there. Ten times richer than the poor was a group ten times smaller that could be defined as lower middle class, though the only obvious benefit of their higher annual income was that they did not qualify for any state welfare and thus wound up struggling just as mightily as the poor to stay afloat. Ten times richer than this lower middle class was a much smaller group who we might consider upper middle class, wealthy enough to live a comfortable life and qualify for equestrian status, but nonetheless politically and economically dwarfed by the exponentially larger treasuries of the senatorial class.

The minimum annual wealth requirement for admission into the senatorial order was one million sesterces, orders of magnitude from the 20,000 sesterces it took to simply exist on a daily basis, but at first glance not much more than the 400,000 it took to qualify as an equestrian. But at second glance there was, as Pliny the Younger pointed out, a vast gulf amongst the senators themselves. Pliny reckoned himself worth somewhere around 20 million sesterces and he explicitly denied that he was a quote rich man. The richest of the rich, the men who would actually describe themselves as such, were a handful of senators worth a hundred million sesterces or more. In the hands of these men lay the real power of Rome.

To put this all another way, it has been calculated that during the reign of Trajan only 150,000 of the 1.2 million people living in Rome lived free and independent of public charity, and of those only a few dozen could hope to wield any economic or political influence. The rest were trapped between the teeming masses and super elite. On the one hand comfortable in their bourgeois lifestyles, on the other politically impotent. But of course above them all was the emperor, whose fortune dwarfed the richest of the rich, a fact delighted in by the middle class, whose feelings of impotence were somewhat mitigated by the fact that even the super rich themselves controlled what amounted to an imperial rounding error.

By the second century, the combined weight of imperial holdings and personally inherited fortunes, allowed an emperor to act with the impunity that defined his position. Some of this fortune was ruthlessly obtained. Nero, for example, confiscated the six largest estates in the province of Africa, making him and his successors the de facto landlords of practically the whole of North Africa. Some, extracted in hard driven business arrangements, for example, imperial leases to mine in Spain, were obtained with the proviso that half the output went into the imperial treasury, and some was simply obtained personally by the emperor and withheld from the state books, as with Trajan's Dacian treasure trove and Augustus' personal claim on Egypt. This incalculable imperial fortune was, as they say, the real power behind the throne. We often speak of the emperor's authority resting mostly on the backs of the legions he controlled, but of course their loyalty was secured only by an increasingly generous series of pay increases, donatives, and bonuses. In the end, it was the privy purse more than the sword and shield that secured the emperor's power.

So when it comes to drawing a graph of the social and economic classes in Antonine Rome, the line runs barely above zero most of the way, before sharply spiking up through the equestrians and senators on its way to the emperor, whose singular position approached infinity.

Running alongside the economic class structure of free citizens were the slaves who served them all. Slavery had always been, and would always be, the bedrock upon which Roman economic life was built, and the age of the Antonines was no different. Though, as I said last week, the Romans had been trending towards more humane policies, slavery was never going to be a picnic for anyone. A few educated slaves attached to very wealthy houses lived comfortable lives and wielded very real power and influence, but the vast majority of those in bondage worked the massive estates owned by the aristocracy, or were sent to the mines, a virtual death sentence. In between these two extremes, slaves served families and businessmen of every social and economic class as cooks, maids, nurses, barbers, secretaries, messengers, accountants, stable hands, really any job beneath the dignity of a free citizen, which turned out to be most of them.

It is very difficult to estimate how many slaves lived in the empire at any given time, but working with the same population figure of 1.2 million or so for Rome, about 400,000 of those were probably slaves, making the ratio of free to slave something like 2 to 1, which, as you can imagine, left the Romans in constant fear of a great slave revolt, a distressingly plausible scenario that led to more than one sleepless night.

New slaves were created in one of three ways. By far the largest segment were prisoners of war, men, women, and children caught up in the nets of the legions following their latest conquest. When I've said in the past that after this or that battle, the Romans went plundering and carried off anything that wasn't nailed down, that included the people themselves. Slave trading was a lucrative business, and a soldier could often hope to turn a better profit selling off a family he had held at sword point than he could their shiny valuables. And when I said that there were civilian camp followers who traveled along with the legions on campaign, slave traders were right there front and center, ready to take the captives off the soldiers' hands in exchange for cash.

The second method of enslavement came from a law dating back to Romulus himself that allowed a father to sell his children into slavery. Obviously, by the days of the empire this was a practice long out of fashion, but it was there and in desperate times did still happen. The last method was to be born of a female slave. Though this happened more often than the sale of free children, slave populations were not known to be prolific breeders, both by the circumstances of their captivity, which often precluded romance, but also because if a man and woman could find the time and opportunity to engage in romance, damning their unborn children to slavery was a moral hurdle that they were often unable to clear. Better to wait it out and see if one or the both of them could attain their freedom before bringing children into the world.

This meant that slave stocks in the age of the Antonines, while immense, were dwindling. While the Third Jewish War helped, Trajan was really the last emperor to pump up the supply, and he was a generation in the grave when Antoninus took over. Hence, it would seem, laws designed to protect the well-being of the existing slave population, so necessary to how the economy functioned.

Throughout Roman history, slaves were seen not just as useful tools, but also as living status symbols for their masters. This is why, amongst the wealthiest families at least, the division of labor amongst slaves was taken to absurd extremes. One slave was designated to help a master with his daily dressing, another assigned to handle formal occasions, another for military uniforms, a fourth for dress military uniforms. One slave to deliver dinner plates, another to take them away. One slave to open the door to guests, another to escort them inside, a third to sit them down. The point was not that all of these tasks couldn't be performed by a single slave, but rather, look at how many slaves I have. In a culture that never really went in for fancy furniture, or dishes, or art, and even the largest homes in the city were of modest size due to space constraints, the abundance of slaves was the one visible way to show off wealth. This absurd and ego-driven labor redundancy was mocked endlessly, but wealthy families were nonetheless forced to worry about a dangerous slave gap opening up that might render them socially inferior to their neighbor.

At the lower end of the social spectrum, the labor redundancy was not as evident, but still, a middle-class man would be embarrassed to show himself in public without at least a handful of slaves surrounding him, and Juvenal remarked that if a defendant showed up for trial and his lawyer arrived with fewer than eight slaves in tow, he could be pretty well assured that he was going to lose the case. Basically, the modern equivalent of a polyester-clad shyster arriving to take on an Armani-clad corporate lawyer.

The slaves owned and paraded around by their masters were treated with varying degrees of respect and gentleness, but by the second century, treatment generally skewed towards that of a well-liked pet in the city and a respected pack animal in the country. Masters who kicked and beat their slaves, or did not take care of them when they were sick, were as much reviled as a rotten pet owner is today. The greatest love a master could show for his slave, though, was not to give him or her a soft bed and good food, it was to set them free.

Manumission, as the freeing of slaves was called, became by the second century a practice much in vogue. Unlike modern slavery, where freed slaves were a microscopic exception to the rule of lifetime bondage, Roman slaves could reasonably hope that if they served their masters well, that at some point they would be set free. Beyond the spontaneous freedom that was often declared by masters on special circumstances, or as the patriarch near death, many slaves were allowed to earn and save money during their time in service, with the aim of eventually purchasing their freedom. During Augustus' time, the freeing of slaves started to become a badge of honor among the upper classes, leading to a generosity arms race that needed to be closed by the emperor before every slave in the empire was freed. So Augustus set limits both on the minimum age a slave could be free, 30, and how many slaves a master could free at one time, 100 per 500 slaves. But the freeing of slaves remained common practice, leading to the rise of a new class of citizen who I have mentioned often on during the show, the freedmen.

The freedmen enjoyed limited rights within the empire, and was never mistaken for a full citizen, but for the most part, aside from the casual sneers directed their way for their servile origins, freedmen could reasonably hope to become fully functional and often prominent members of society. When the freedman was released from his formal bondage, though, it did not free him from obligation to his former master. The old rules of client and patron still defined Roman daily life, which we'll get to a bit later. And a freedman naturally became the faithful client of his old master, further adding to that master's prestige.

During the Republic, freedmen were restricted in what they could be and do once they were free. But by the reign of Claudius, most of those restrictions had been lifted, and Claudius himself set a precedent by stocking the imperial bureaucracy with educated ex-slaves who had the capacity to perform the mundane tasks of empire without the haughty disdain for clerical grunt work shown by free citizens. But once free Romans realized how much power such clerical grunt work afforded these lowly ex-slaves, they began to agitate for reform, and Domitian seized the opportunity to staff his bureaucracy with men of equestrian status, not only to turn out the freedmen who had run the show previously and become experts at political graft, but also to command the loyalty of the equestrians, who had been marginalized by the wealth of the Senate on the one hand and the outsized influence of the freedmen on the other. The Antonine emperors continued to follow Domitian's precedent, favoring equestrians over freedmen when it came to staffing. But despite this political setback, freedmen as a whole could still expect to compete on an equal footing economically with the freeborn and establish comfortable lives for themselves. And, as I alluded earlier, a freedman's children were born free citizens, rendering any future prejudice moot.

The economic activity that Romans and freedmen and provincials and slaves collectively engaged and competed in naturally varied from place to place, but it mostly divided into two main realms, city work and country work. To take the latter first, country work meant farming. By the second century, the existence of the freeholding small farmer was largely a thing of the past, though, and peasants mostly wound up living as tenant farmers on large aristocratic estates. But, of course, the massive influx of slave labor pushed many of the free families out of the country and into the city, an economic problem we'll deal with in a second that would plague the empire until its final days.

The farms of the classical world, like farms of today, were said to either produce the food that fed the empire or the cash crops that made it wealthy. The basic staple crops were wheat, millet, and barley, and together they formed the foundation of the grain and cereal-based Roman diet. The basic cash crops were olives and grapes, used mostly for oil and wine, respectively. These latter two were not only sold domestically, but were also practically the only valuable exports the empire could muster to counteract the effects of what many considered a dangerously unbalanced trade deficit with the rest of the world. When we get into a more detailed description of the provinces, we'll refine a bit what came from where and why, so for now I'm just going to leave it that though the political foundations of Rome was no longer the noble citizen-farmer, the vast majority of families living in the empire were still engaged in agricultural work of some kind or another. Just like peasants of all ages, they lived within sight of where they had been born and died within sight of the plot of land they worked their whole lives. Visiting one of the empire's major urban centers, let alone Rome itself, was a ludicrous fantasy.

But as ludicrous a thought as it was for most, the cities of the empire still teemed with the energy of millions. The various occupations of urban Romans were as varied as they were in any city today. Importers, wholesalers, retailers, bankers, cooks, innkeepers, masons, druggists, potters, tanners, jewelers, teachers, and actors, all lived side by side and wheeled and dealed daily to get ahead, hedge against the future, jump at any opportunity, or make up for a loss. But of course, these gainfully employed citizens, ranging from the hand-to-mouth lower middle class to the relatively wealthy equestrian merchants, were far outnumbered by the mass of often unemployed wretches who lived on public assistance.

The emperors tried to keep these poor masses quiet and peaceful, with free grain and free games, which the poor gobbled up readily. But they also tried to provide honest work to keep them occupied, one of the major rationales behind the building explosions that transformed Rome between the reigns of Domitian and Hadrian. Despite the public assistance, life was hard at the bottom of the ladder. The grain dole, important as it was, couldn't sustain a poor family, as it was only calculated to feed free men, not their wives and children. The lower middle class didn't even receive this minimal subsidy, and were thus left to fend for themselves, their meager scrapings somehow making them too rich for public compassion. Even members of the better-off equestrian class often found themselves running a persistent household budget deficit just to stay afloat.

These gaping financial holes had to be filled by someone, and so it was left to the patron, he of the ancient patron-client model of social kinship that had defined Roman society for centuries, to do the filling. That relationship had once been an overt quid pro quo of political support in exchange for favors and support in times of need, much like the machine politics of nineteenth-century America. But following the collapse of the Republic, and with it the need for voters, it had evolved into a sort of second-track form of public assistance. Every morning, clients would come knocking at the door of their patrons. The patrons would welcome them in, and turn over a few coins to honor the respect the clients paid them. In time, the once informal surprise gifts became formalized and expected, and the annual income of just about everyone in the city began to rye heavily on patronage. Clients were further able to cultivate more than one patron at a time, and the most active among them would bounce from house to house each morning, pocketing a few coins here and there, until they had amassed a tidy sum that would keep them going for the rest of the day, until they woke up the next morning and repeated the ritual all over again. If this was considered poor form, it was only in passing, as everyone seemed to be doing everything they could to stay alive in an economic climate that was unpredictable and harsh even in the best of times. Besides, the only people who had any money were the super-rich anyway, and so when they gave, you had to grab.

Though wealth and class in Antonine Rome were not permanent states, and no one, not even slaves, couldn't at least hope for a better life, in practice there was very little in the way of upward mobility. The rich had gotten massively richer, and they tended to keep their wealth in the family. Every generation a few clever merchants would rise, and a few bumbling heirs would fall. But for the most part, the rich stayed rich, the poor stayed poor, and everyone else just kind of floated along in the middle, wondering how long they could avoid the poor house themselves.

While the so-called five good emperors are to be commended for revising and extending the alimentary system, and perpetuating the grain doles, and stepping in to personally underwrite emergency relief when disaster struck, when you really think about it, they were actually downright miserly. They personally controlled something like half of the empire's GDP, and all they had for the poverty-stricken masses was an inadequate supply of grain, some construction jobs, and the promise that if their tenement building caught fire, that the emperor would cover their burial expenses? You don't have to be a fire-breathing Marxist to find problems with that, or to think twice about the moral underpinnings of a society that was quite content to live with a Gini coefficient approaching one.

Next week, though, we'll get into what all of these people did when they weren't simply trying to survive. How they educated their young, what they did for fun, how they worshipped their gods, and what gods, or god, they worshipped. This last bit is of critical importance, because the age of the Antonines was a transitional period when the old state-sponsored polytheism of Jupiter and Juno and Minerva and Apollo were in decline, and the new Oriental mystery religions were on the rise. The old religions were lately seen as little more than a series of empty rituals, while the new Eastern religions promised adherents a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the universe and man's place within it. It was during these years that the cult of the Jewish carpenter really began its exponential growth phase that would eventually lead to its envelopment of the entire Mediterranean world.

Transcription by ESO. Translation by —