usual supplies of agricultural produce from the country; and even Thessalonica, with its fertile territory and abundant pastures, was dependent on foreign importation for relief from famine. The smaller cities, destitute of the same advantages of situation, would naturally be more exposed to depopulation, and sink more rapidly to decay. The roads, after the seizure of the local funds of the Greek cities by Justinian, were allowed to go to ruin, and the transport of provisions by land became difficult. When the Byzantine writers, after the time of Heraclius, mention Greece and the Peloponnesus, it is with feelings of aversion and contempt." Ásia Minor, at the same period, was not in a more prosperous condition. "In Asia Minor," says Finlay, "the decrease of the Greek race had been rapid. This decline, too, must be attributed rather to bad government than to hostile invasions; for from the period of the Persian invasion, in the time of Heraclius, the greater part of that immense country had enjoyed almost a century of uninterrupted peace. The Persian invasions had never been very injurious to the seacoast, where the Greek cities were wealthy and numerous; but the central provinces were entirely ruined. The fact that extensive districts, once populous and wealthy, were already deserts, is proved by the colonies which Justinian II. settled in various parts of the country. Population had disappeared even more rapidly than the agricultural resources of the country."+ But while this was the state of matters in Italy, Asia Minor, and Greece-that is, the heart of the empire-its remoter provinces, Spain, Libya, and Egypt, not only exhibited no symptoms of similar decay, but were, down to the very close of the reigns of the Cæsars, in the highest state of wealth, prosperity, and happiness. Listen to Gibbon on this subject in regard to Spain :-" The situation of Spain, separated on all sides from the enemies of Rome by the sea, the mountains, and intermediate provinces, had secured the long tranquillity of that remote and sequestered country; and we may observe, as a sure symptom of domestic happiness, that in a period of four hundred "FINLAY'S Greece under the Romans, 435, 436. + Ibid., 517. years, Spain furnished very few materials to the history of the Roman empire. The cities of Merida, Cordova, Seville, and Tarragona, were numbered among the most illustrious of the Roman world. The various plenty of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, was improved and manufactured by the skill of an industrious people; and the peculiar advantages of naval stores contributed to support an extensive and profitable trade. Many particulars concerning the fertility of Spain may be found in Huet's Commerce of the Ancients, c. 40.”* The state of Libya was equally characteristic of the highest and most general prosperity, especially in relation to agricultural industry, at the time when Italy and Greece were thus languishing in the last stage of decrepitude and decay. "The long and narrow tract," says Gibbon, "of the African coast was filled, when the Vandals approached its shores, with frequent monuments of Roman art and magnificence ; and the respective degrees of improvement might be accurately measured by the distance from Carthage and the Mediterranean. A simple reflection will impress every thinking mind with the clearest idea of its fertility and cultivation. The country was extremely populous; the inhabitants reserved a liberal supply for their own use; and the annual exportation, particularly of wheat, was so regular and plentiful, that Africa deserved the name of the common granary of Rome and of mankind.” ↑ "When Procopius," says the same author, "first landed in Libya, he admired the populousness of the cities and country, strenuously exercised in the labours of commerce and agriculture."+ Nor was the condition of Egypt less prosperous in the last ages of the Roman empire; nor its circumstances a less striking contrast to the miserable and languishing condition of the Italian and Grecian plains. It is thus described by Mr Finlay, § whose recent work has thrown so much light on the social condition of the inhabitants of the Roman empire in their later days :-"If the accounts of ancient historians can be relied on, the population of Egypt had suffered less from the vicious administration of the Roman empire, and from the Persian invasion, than any other part * GIBBON, C. xxxi. p. 351. Ibid., c. xxxiii. vol. vi. p. 20. Ibid., vol. iv. c. xliii. p. 121. Milman's edition. § Greece under the Romans, 456, 467. of their dominions; for at the time of its conquest by the Romans it contained seven millions and a half of inhabitants, exclusive of Alexandria; and in the last days of the empire it nourished almost as great a number. The Nile spread its fertilising waters over the land; the canals were kept in a state sufficient for irrigation; and the vested capital of Egypt suffered little diminution, whilst war and oppression annihilated the accumulation of ages over the rest of the world. The immense wealth and importance of Alexandria, the only port which Egypt possessed for communicating with the empire, still made it one of the first cities in the universe for riches and population, though its strength had received a severe blow from the Persian conquest."* Sicily was another exception from the general decrepitude and ruin of the Roman empire in the reigns. of the later Cæsars. "In the island of Sicily, the great bulk of the population was Greek, and few portions of the Greek race had succeeded so well in preserving their wealth and property uninjured." + But in the other parts of the empire, to the north of the Mediterranean, the agricultural population was, in the time of Heraclius, absolutely destroyed. "The imperial armies, which in the time of Maurice had waged an active war in Illyria and Thrace, and frequently invaded the territories of the Avars, had melted away during the disorders of the reign of Phocas. The loss was irreparable; for in Europe no agricultural population remained to supply the means of forming a body of local militia, or even a body of irregular troops." So extreme was the misery which generally prevailed, that infanticide was common, and called forth the special animadversion of the laws; § and even in the time of Constantine, the father of one child had become entitled to several important immunities. To such a length had the desolation of Italy gone in the time of Aurelian, that he had formed a design, which was only interrupted by his death, of repeopling Tuscany and the shores of Liguria by colonies of slaves; and the generals of the Emperor Gratian sent troops of prisoners, taken from the * JOSEPHUS, ii. 16. FINLAY, 515. Ibid., 406. S GIBBON, vol. i. chap. 19, p. 442. Milman's edition. DENINA, i. 241. Goths, Huns, Alani, and others, to Parma, Modena, and Reggio, as colonists. In the time of Theodosius the whole rich plain of Lombardy, between Milan and Bologna, had become a wilderness, and the Campagna of Naples was already a desert. It may readily be supposed, that so entire a destruction of the rural population of the Roman empire in the centre of its European provinces, as thus took place under the Emperors, must have been attended with the most fatal effects to their means of defence and national power. The inhabitants of towns, accustomed to sedentary occupations, and habituated to the luxury of baths, the excitement of theatres, the gratuitous distributions of food, could not endure the fatigue, privations, and hardships of the military life. Substitutes were almost universally sought for; and these, amidst the desolation of the country, could be found only in the semibarbarous tribes on the frontier. Thus the defence of the empire came to be intrusted almost entirely to the arms of foreigners, and it was hard to say whether they were most formidable to their friends or foes. Nothing could supply the place of the rural population on the shores of the Mediterranean. The legions gave a master to the Roman world, and the legions were recruited from Gaul, Germany, Britain, and Pannonia. Thus the dominion of the Capitol was really at an end long before it was formally subverted; and Rome had received a master from the barbarians long before the days of Alaric. This continued splendour and population of the towns, amidst the ruin of the country, in the declining periods of the Roman empire, has attracted the particular notice of one of the greatest historians of modern times. "In the midst," says Sismondi, "of the general desolation of the country, the continued existence and splendour of the great towns is not so easily explained; but the same thing is now to be witnessed in Barbary and Turkey, and in the whole Levant. Wherever despotism oppresses insulated man, he seeks refuge from its outrages in crowds. The chief Roman towns, in the first three centuries of the Empire, were in great part peopled by artisans, and freedmen, and slaves; but they contained also a number far greater than in our days of men who, limiting their wants to the mere support of existence, spent their lives in indolence. All that population was alike unarmed, unpatriotic, incapable of defence against a foreign enemy; but as it was collected together, and at hand, it always inspired fear to domestic authority. Accordingly, to keep it quiet, there was established a regular gratuitous distribution of corn in the larger towns, and numerous spectacles in the theatres, the amphitheatres, and the circus, maintained at the public expense. The allowance of corn in Alexandria was fixed at 400,000 quarters; in the great towns in proportion. The carelessness of the future, the love of pleasure and indolence, which have always characterised the inhabitants of great towns, distinguished the Roman provincials even to the latest days of the empire, and in the midst of their greatest calamities. Trêves, the capital of the northern prefecture of Gaul, was not the only city of the empire which was surprised and pillaged by the barbarians, at the moment when its citizens, their heads crowned with garlands, were applauding with enthusiasm the victors in the games of the circus." + The frequent custom of recruiting the legions by means of slaves, in the later period of the empire, which was wholly unknown in the days of the Republic, reveals, in the clearest manner, the weakness to which, in respect of military resources, it had arrived, long before the external symptoms of decay were visible in its fortunes. Even in the time of Marcus Aurelius, the legions which were to combat the Quadi and Marcomanni, on the Danube, were recruited from the servile class. Justinian went so far as to declare, by a public edict, every slave free who had served in the army. "At last the army came to be composed entirely," says Finlay, "of the rudest and most ignorant peasants, of enfranchised slaves, and naturalised barbarians. This increased the repugnance, already sufficiently great, felt by the better class of citizens to enter the military life. The mercenaries formed the most valued and brilliant portions of the army, and it became the fashion to copy and admire the dress and manners of the * PROCOPIUS, Hist. Arcan. chap. 26. + SISMONDI, Chute de l'Empire Romaine, i. 36. NOVELL, 81. |
