History of Rome from the Earliest Times down to 476 AD | Page 6

citizenship,
the government had only been able to carry out its project of pushing
these half-independent settlements into the heart of Italy by threatening
with a pecuniary penalty the soldier who preferred his rights as a
citizen to the benefits which he might receive as an emigrant.[6] Now
that the great wars had brought their dubious but at least potential
profits to every member of the Roman community, and the gulf
between the full citizens and the members of the allied communities
was ever widening, it was more than doubtful whether a member of the
former class, however desperate his plight, would readily condescend
to enroll himself amongst the latter. But, even apart from these
considerations, it must have seemed very questionable to any one, who
held the traditional view that colonisation should subserve the purposes
of the State, whether the landless citizen of the time could be trusted to
fulfil his duties as an emigrant. As early as the year 186 the consul
Spurius Postumius, while making a judicial tour in Italy, had found to
his surprise that colonies on both the Italian coasts, Sipontum on the
Upper, and Buxentum on the Lower Sea, had been abandoned by their
inhabitants: and a new levy had to be set on foot to replace the faithless
emigrants who had vanished into space.[7] As time went on the risk of
such desertion became greater, partly from the growing difficulty of
maintaining an adequate living on the land, partly from the fact that the
more energetic spirits, on whom alone the hopes of permanent
settlement could depend, found a readier avenue to wealth and a more
tempting sphere for the exercise of manly qualities in the attractions of
a campaign that seemed to promise plunder and glory, especially when
these prizes were accompanied by no exorbitant amount of suffering or
toil. Thus when it had become known that Scipio Africanus would
accompany his brother in the expedition against Antiochus, five
thousand veterans, both citizens and allies, who had served their full
time under the command of the former, offered their voluntary services
to the departing consul,[8] and nineteen' years later the experience
which had been gained of the wealth that might be reaped from a
campaign in Macedonia and Asia drew many willing recruits to the
legions which were to be engaged in the struggle with Perseus.[9] The

semi-professional soldier was in fact springing up, the man of a spirit
adventurous and restless such as did not promise contentment with the
small interests and small rewards of life in an Italian outpost. But, if the
days of formal colonisation were over, why might not the concurrent
system be adopted of dividing conquered lands amongst poorer citizens
without the establishment of a new political settlement or any strict
limitation of the number of the recipients? This 'viritane' assignation
had always run parallel to that which assumed the form of colonisation;
it merely required the existence of land capable of distribution, and the
allotments granted might be considered merely a means of affording
relief to the poorer members of existing municipalities. The system was
supposed to have existed from the times of the Kings; it was believed
to have formed the basis of the first agrarian law, that of Spurius
Cassius in 486;[10] it had been employed after the conquest of the
Volscians in the fourth century and that of the Sabines in the third;[11]
it had animated the agrarian legislation of Flaminius when in 232 he
romanised the ager Gallicus south of Ariminum without planting a
single colony in this region;[12] and a date preceding the Gracchan
legislation by only forty years had seen the resumption of the method,
when some Gallic and Ligurian land, held to be the spoil of war and
declared to be unoccupied, had been parcelled out into allotments, of
ten jugera to Roman citizens and of three to members of the Latin
name.[13] But to the government of the period with which we are
concerned the continued pursuance of such a course, if it suggested
itself at all, appealed in the light of a policy that was unfamiliar,
difficult and objectionable. It is probable that this method of
assignment, even in its later phases, had been tinctured with the belief
that, like the colony, it secured a system of military control over the
occupied district: and that the purely social object of land-distribution,
if it had been advanced at all, was considered to be characteristic rather
of the demagogue than the statesman. From a strategic point of view
such a measure was unnecessary; from an economic, it assumed, not
only a craving for allotments amongst the poorer class, of which there
was perhaps little evidence, but a belief, which must have been held to
be sanguine in the extreme, that