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burden and meant that many discharged soldiers returned to find their families had been unable to maintain their farms. During the second century BC many Romans believed the class of farmer soldiers who were the backbone of the legions was shrinking under the pressure of excessively long periods of service. Inevitably, this only made the problem worse, as a dwindling number of men found themselves more often called up by the state, and even more fell into ruin. Once a duty willingly – often enthusiastically – accepted, military service changed into a crushing burden. 5
    Overseas expansion brought massive profits, but the benefits were not evenly shared. Magistrates who led an army to victory grew fabulously rich on the spoils of war, especially if the enemy was one of the wealthy states from the Greek world. Apart from plunder, hundreds of thousands of people were taken prisoner and sold as slaves. The generals took the lion’s share of the money, but there were also considerable opportunities for private companies who handled the sales. The Republic possessed almost no bureaucracy. Magistrates sent to govern a province did so with a tiny staff, supplemented by their private household. Taxes were collected by private companies who bid for the contract to perform the tax. They were called the
publicani –
hence the publicans of the Authorised Bible – because they undertook public contracts. Their interest was in making money and thus they had to collect more from the provincials than they passed on to the Republic. There were other business opportunities in the empire, and simply being Roman and connected with the new great power was a huge advantage. 6
    Wealth flooded back to Italy and the gap between the rich and poor widened. Senators were not supposed to indulge in business ventures apart from landholding, although many covertly ignored this rule. Many of the fortunes made overseas were used to buy up grand rural estates, worked by a force of slave labourers. Slaves became cheap as the captives of frequent wars flooded the market. As importantly, they could not be called up for military service unlike labourers or tenants who were citizens. There were good steady profits to be made from farming, and sometimes conditions created even greater opportunities. It was always easier for the owners of big estates to exploit such situations. During the late second and first centuries there was an almost insatiable demand for Italian wine from the communities in Gaul. It is estimated that some 40 million wine amphorae from Italy were sent north of the Alps in the first century BC alone. 7
    Times were good for the wealthy and the big landowners, but difficult for the small-scale farmer. In 133 BC an ambitious senator named Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus claimed that:
    The wild beasts that roam over Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in, but the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else.… they fight and die to protect the luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own. 8
    Gracchus exaggerated – this speech was part of a successful electoral campaign, and men seeking office in any age rarely understate their case. Some farmers survived and even did well in the new conditions, but significant numbers failed. The minimum property qualification for military service had to be lowered several times in the course of the second century to find sufficient recruits. Ultimately, the tradition of men of property fighting in the army ended. By the first century the legions were recruited mainly from the poor, for whom military service provided a steady income and even a career.
FIRST AND BEST
    Roman public life was fiercely competitive. There were more junior magistracies than senior posts, and so simple arithmetic meant that it was harder to attain the consulship. Many senators never