War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

Whereas in fourth century B.C. the majority of Roman citizens were in the “middle class”—they owned enough land to feed themselves and their families—two centuries later few of such free smallholders remained. The upper and lower classes of the Roman society had drifted apart. At the bottom were the vast multitudes of slaves, freedmen, and proletarians; at the top, all wealth and power was concentrated in the hands of a small group of aristocrats. Inequality was further exacerbated by the Roman institution of slavery. Millions of slaves, captured during the wars of conquest, flooded Italy during the second century B.C. Because slaves had no human rights, and legally could hold no property (in practice, some masters allowed them to accumulate funds to buy themselves out of slavery), their presence in massive numbers made the Roman society during the late Republic even more unequal than is usual in pre-industrial states. One of the most striking developments in the second century B.C. was the growth of both the numbers and wealth of the Roman elites. The scale of senatorial fortunes grew at an astronomical rate. One of the foremost members of the Roman aristocracy, L. Aemilius Paullus, who put an end to the kingdom of Macedon in 167, left a fortune of a measly 1.44 million sesterces upon death. A century later, the fortune of the famous orator Cicero was 13 million sesterces. And Cicero was a “new man.” (He was born in a provincial town and was the first of his clan to enter...