The Impact of the Roman Republican Army

PART ONE THE IMPACT OF THE ROMAN REPUBLICAN ARMY Luuk De Ligt - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:05:09AM via free access ROMAN MANPOWER RESOURCES AND THE PROLETARIANIZATION OF THE ROMAN ARMY IN THE SECOND CENTURY BC Luuk De Ligt Demographic developments In his account of the run-up to the passing of the lex Sempronia agraria of 133 bc Appian repeatedly underlines the military and demographic rationale of the Gracchan land reforms. In chapter 8, for instance, he describes Tiberius Gracchus as making a powerful speech in which the people of Italy (Italiotai) were characterized as excellent ghters but also as declining into poverty and depopulation. Similarly, Tiberius Gracchus is said to have defended his proposal by rhetorically asking whether a citizen was not always a better man than a slave, and a soldier more useful than a non-soldier. The same demographic and military theme is found also in Appian’s description of the undoing of the Gracchan reform programme, as a result of which ‘the numbers of both citizens and soldiers diminished still more’.1 At rst sight the census gures for the period 163–130 bc seem to tell a similar story: whereas the censors of 164/3 bc were able to register some 337,000 adult male citizens, the census gure for 130 bc is only 319,000. Although a decrease of less than 20,000 in more than three decades may not seem huge, the general trend for these years is in sharp contrast to the steep increase indicated by the census gures for the rst 35 years of the second century bc. Given the existence of these seemingly converging data, it comes as no surprise that many ancient historians have subscribed to Appian’s view that Tiberius Gracchus’ aim was to resolve a manpower shortage, although the exact nature and seriousness of this demographic and military crisis is disputed. One popular theory is that of Brunt, who thinks that the number of citizens stabilized rather than declined 1 Appian, Bella Civilia 1.8, 1.11 and 1.27. Author and editors owe thanks to Simon Northwood for checking the English of this paper. Luuk De Ligt - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:05:09AM via free access 4 luuk de ligt during the mid-second century bc. In his view, the perceived decline in the number of assidui that seems to have worried Tiberius Grac- chus need not imply a corresponding decrease in the number of adult male citizens.2 In many reconstructions the existence of a manpower crisis is deduced not only from Appian’s description but also from a reduction of the threshold for membership of the fth class of the comitia centuriata that is usually dated to 141 or 140 bc. Further support seems to be pro- vided by a fragment of a speech in which Quintus Metellus, one of the censors of 131/0 bc, urged the Roman people to marry ‘for the purpose of begetting children’.3 It seems to follow that concerns over a slow contraction of the citizen body loomed large in the minds of some prominent politicians of the Gracchan age. One of the few to dispute this widely accepted reconstruction has been John Rich, who pointed out that the slight demographic decline of the mid-second century bc must be set against a much faster decline in the average number of legions that were annually elded after the successful conclusion of the Third Macedonian War.4 According to Rich, we must conclude that the Gracchan land reforms were not meant to deal with an acute recruitment problem. More probably, the Gracchi were guided by a much more vague concern over a slow contraction of the free Italian population, whose quantitative fate was in marked contrast to that of the proliferating foreign slaves employed on the estates of the elite. In my view, this challenge to the traditional interpretation is convincing to the extent that it has become dif\ cult to explain the Gracchan land reforms as an attempt to alleviate an immediate shortage of citizens eligible for the call-up. On the other hand, it seems possible still to argue that Tiberius Gracchus acted on the assumption that the steady expansion of rural slavery was bound to undermine Roman manpower resources in the long term. In any case, it cannot be denied that the military theme was an essential part of the rhetoric used by Tiberius Gracchus in order to defend his proposals. 2 P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower (reissued with a postscript, Oxford 1987), 76–79 and 140. 3 Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.6. 4 J. Rich, ‘The supposed Roman manpower shortage of the later second century bc’, Historia 32 (1983), 287–331. Luuk De Ligt - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:05:09AM via free access the proletarianization of the roman army 5 This takes us back to the demographic model on which most recent reconstructions of the background to the Gracchan land reforms are based. As we just have seen, the traditional interpretation of these reforms in terms of a manpower crisis is based on the idea that the Roman citizen body ceased to grow and perhaps even started to decline from the late 160s bc onwards. But can we really be sure that this widely shared assumption is correct? As is generally known, the relatively low census gures for the period 160–130 bc are followed by much higher \ gures for the years 124 and 114 bc. If we are to believe these gures, the censors of 124 bc were able to register some 395,000 adult male citizens, around 75,000 more than had been registered six years earlier. These data are clearly incompatible with the theory that the Roman citizen body was in continual decline from the late 160s bc onwards. If we accept the census gure for 124 bc as approximately accu- rate (as I think we should), the number of Roman citizens grew from roughly 337,000 in 163 bc to about 395,000 in 124 bc, that is by some 17 percent in the course of four decades.5 Even though a signi cant proportion of this increase can be accounted for by assuming that the city of Rome became much larger during this period, these gures suggest that the number of country-dwelling citizens also increased. There is, however, no evidence for any corresponding increase in the amount of land cultivated by Roman citizens during the central decades of the second century bc. In this context it should be remembered that the wave of colonial foundations and viritane assignations had petered out towards the end of the 170s bc. At the same time both the literary sources and a variety of archaeological data suggest that the second century bc witnessed a proliferation of slave-run villae. The only possible outcome of these processes was a decrease in per capita wealth for the country-dwelling population and an increase in the number of rural proletarians. 5 My interpreatation of the census gures differs from that offered by Lo Cascio in a series of recent publications. See e.g. E. Lo Cascio, ‘The size of the Roman population: Beloch and the meaning of the Roman census gures’, Journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994), 23–40, and id., ‘The population of Roman Italy in town and country’, in J. Bintliff and K. Sbonias, eds., Reconstructing Past Population in Mediterranean Europe (3000 BC –AD 1800) (Oxford 1999), 161–171. For a brief discussion of some of the weaknesses of Lo Cascio’s model see W. Scheidel, Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire. Explorations in Ancient Demography (Ann Arbot 1996), 167–168, and L. de Ligt, ‘Poverty and demography: the case of the Gracchan land reforms’, Mnemosyne 57 (2004), 731. This is a topic to which I shall return in future publications. Luuk De Ligt - 9789047430391 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:05:09AM via free access 6 luuk de ligt Since the censors tended to register proletarii less ef\ ciently than assidui,6 this scenario provides us with a convincing explanation for the downward trend in the census gures from 163 bc onwards.7 As citizens became poorer, the proportion of under-registration increased. At the same time the idea that the mid-second century witnessed an increase in rural poverty caused by continuing population growth explains why rural proletarians loom so large among the supporters of the Gracchi and why access to public land became such a prominent item on the political agenda. Rural proletarians in the second century BC Before taking a closer look at the census gures of 124 and 114 bc, I want to focus on a question that receives surprisingly little attention in the existing literature: if the amount of land owned by Roman peasants was continually declining from the 160s bc onwards, how did these people manage to gain access to agricultural produce or monetary income suf\ cient to keep themselves and their families alive? One possible answer is intensi cation. Faced with a decrease in the size of their farms, peasants may have spent more hours in the elds. There is comparative evidence to suggest that peasants are prepared to expend a huge amount of labour cultivating the land and that out- put per hectare could be increased signi cantly in this way.8 On the other hand, the same comparative evidence suggests that even with hyper-intensive methods of cultivation there is a limit to what can be squeezed from a given plot of land.

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