False Economy - Alan Beattie [23]
Rome was the center of what was then the most powerful civilization in history. But as a city, it revealed all too clearly the flaws in the realm that it ran. The Roman empire was essentially a system of military conquest that supported itself by extorting taxes from the vanquished. In time it turned into a vast, armed rent-collecting machine vulnerable to overreach, greed, decadence, and collapse.
In the years 130—50 B.C., as the Roman republic moved toward becoming an empire, it extended into Gaul and farther into eastern Asia, and even made a trial run of invading Britain. Rome was becoming bigger and richer through ruthless organization rather than through superior economic or trade technology. It was not its role as a trading center that was chiefly responsible for the expansion of the imperial city. All conquered land became the property of the city of Rome: all roads led there. Essentially, a single city could extract rent from half the civilized world.
And that is precisely what Rome became—a parasitic city of rentiers, bureaucrats, and hangers-on—as much as a center of commerce and industry. Between 130 and 50 B.C., Rome's population expanded at a truly astonishing rate, from 375,000 to around a million. It became twice as large as any city before in human history. No city would again reach one million inhabitants until London during the Industrial Revolution, eighteen centuries later.
Any imperial capital was bound to grow, but not at the speed and to the extent that Rome did. Its growth owed much to political expedience. At this stage of history, the most credible threats to the authority of Roman rule came from centers close to the city. It was less vulnerable in the far-flung fringes of its possessions than it was in the middle. Near home its authority was repeatedly challenged by Italian rebels, who forced it to extend Roman citizenship to all Italians.
A tradition of giving grain direct to the inhabitants of Rome was thus extended to a large number of nominally Roman citizens. Insofar as warfare made the Italian hinterland increasingly unsafe, and as the city government in Rome was not about to set up an elaborate series of soup kitchens throughout Italy, the grain was distributed only to those who came to Rome to receive it.
Any Reaganite economist from a Washington think tank would have predicted precisely the result: hordes of idle Romans hanging around the city, demanding welfare. By 46 B.C., some 320,000 people, nearly a third of Rome's population, were receiving grain. Unemployment and underemployment were rife, and the city became horrendously overcrowded. Thousands of citizens loafing around with nothing to do also became restless and peevish. To keep them from causing trouble, the Roman authorities built vastly expensive stadia and staged gladiator and animal fights. At their height, they were running more than one set of games a week: imagine a city today volunteering to stage a continuous and indefinite Olympics.
From this comes the well-known expression for the bribes paid to placate a fretful populace, "bread and circuses." The largesse was paid for by the conquered provinces, which had no such ability to threaten the rulers, and from whom tax was extorted by the occupying Roman armies. (The provinces also provided most of the gladiators and the animals.) The hinterland was taxed to subsidize the city; the periphery was exploited to pay for the center. There was no mileage in hanging around Londinium, expecting free bread for life and a season ticket for the lion-versus-rhino fights on Saturdays.
When the political imperatives diminished and the policies changed, so did the