Chapter 11-2: The Race Change in Western Europe


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Chapter 11-2: The Race Change in Western Europe - Part 2

But how did these eastern peoples get into Italy? Some came by migration, but the vast majority (as the records show) came as slaves. When Rome conquered the east, vast numbers of peoples were captured and brought back to Italy as slaves. The great majority came from the east, particularly Asia Minor and Syria. And, unless one begins to think that these people of servile origin were "inferior" in any way, it must be understood that these people were brought to the west principally by rich land owners to be their doctors, teachers, agriculturists, scientists, professional domestic help (such a chefs, valets, clothing manufacturers, etc.). True, there were also ordinary "day laborers," but even here, these people were almost always from areas where children normally had a basic education in the three "R’s."

And whereas the original Latins of the old stock were interested in military and legal matters (among other things), these new people from the east were the ones who brought them the finer things of life that the Romans were beginning to desire. Since the time of Alexander the Great, these people from the east had grown up within a Hellenistic (Greek) environment as far as society, religion and government were concerned, and they brought their style of living with them into the west. In the main, these people who had come to the west were educated people. Frank continues,

"Therefore, when the urban inscriptions show that seventy per cent of the city slaves and freedmen bear Greek names and that a larger portion of the children who have Latin names have parents of Greek names, this at once implies that the east was the source of most of them, and with that inference Bang’s conclusions entirely agree [Dr. Bang was a professor from Germany]. In his list of slaves that specify their origin as being outside Italy [during the empire], by far the larger portion came from the east, especially from Syria and the provinces of Asia Minor, with some from Egypt and Africa [which for racial classification may be taken with the east]. Some are from Spain and Gaul, but a considerable portion of these came originally from the east. Very few slaves are recorded from the Alpine and Danube provinces, while Germans rarely appear, except among the imperial bodyguard. Bang remarks that Europeans were of greater service to the empire as soldiers than servants. This is largely true, but, as Strach has commented, the more robust European war captives were apt to be chosen for the grueling work in the mines and in industry, and largely they have vanished from the records. Such slaves were probably also the least productive of the class; and this, in turn, helps to explain the strikingly eastern aspect of the new population.

Frank, "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire," pp.700–701

There is another reason why captives from European areas were not found with much representation in Italy. When the Romans took over prosperous Gaul (present day France), with its vast agricultural areas, the captive slaves were kept in that region to farm the land. This was also true for Spain. After all, Italy was being stocked with masses of slaves from the east. To bring Gauls to Italy would bring about redundancies, and who would care for the farms of Gaul and Spain? This is the main reason Dr. Bang found so few western and northern Europeans as slaves in Italy. The east supplied most of the new people to the Roman heartland.

However, can it really be said that these eastern slaves displaced the old Latin stock of Italy? Can we believe that those of servile origin, even though they were brought by the tens of thousands to Italy, could completely take over the country’? It seems, at first glance, almost an impossibility for such a thing to happen. But it did!

As a modern example, I was born in 1932 in Oklahoma. Because the "Dust Bowl" and the Depression which were hitting our area very hard, my parents left Oklahoma in 1935 (along with thousands of others from Arkansas, Missouri and Texas) and went to California. We settled in the San Joaquin valley into a region of the country very different from what we were used to. But within thirty years our people had transformed that area of California (with much of our own standards of society and religious beliefs becoming dominant) that it became known as the "Bible Belt" of California. And now, in the last thirty years, the same region is being changed again with masses of immigrants having come from Mexico to work in the fields and now they are even becoming the business people, etc. The same type of thing happened in ancient times in Rome, Italy and the Western Empire, although it occurred over a longer period of time.

There are many reasons which brought about this change of race in Italy and Western Europe. It was not alone the bringing of these new races. Other factors were happening to the original Latin race as well. It seems that all historical events were working together to make this change of race. Let us get a rundown by Professor Frank,

"There are other questions that enter into the problem of a change of race at Rome, for solution of which it is even more difficult to obtain statistics. For instance, one asks, without hope of a sufficient answer, why the native stock did not better hold its own. Yet there are at hand not a few reasons. We know for instance that when Italy had been devastated by Hannibal and a large part of its population put to the sword, immense bodies of slaves were brought up from the east to fill the void; and that during the second century B.C., when the plantation system with its slave service was coming into vogue, the natives were pushed out of the small farms and many disappeared to the provinces of the ever expanding empire. Thus, during the thirty years before Tiberius Gracchus, the census statistics show no increase. During the first century B.C. the importation of captives and slaves continued, while the free-born citizens were being wasted in the social, Sullan, and civil wars. Augustus affirms that he had half a million citizens under arms, one eighth of Rome’s citizens, and that the most vigorous part. During the early empire, twenty to thirty legions, drawn of course from the best free stock, spent their twenty years of vigor in garrison duty, while the slaves, exempt from such services, lived at home and increased in numbers. In other words, the native stock was supported by less than a normal birth-rate, whereas the stock of foreign extraction had not only a fairly normal birth-rate but a liberal quota of manumissions to its advantage"

Frank, "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire," p. 703

The foregoing comments by Professor Frank are the main problems which influenced the race decline of the Latins in Italy. The main factors were the decimation and emigration of the native stock, while foreigners, especially from Syria, Samaria, the Levant and Asia Minor took their place. Also, records show that the birth-rate of the Latins was very low while that of servile origin was very large (they were encouraged to have children so that more servants could be had). So, the servile population in Italy, during the 1^st century B.C.E., increased rapidly while the native stock, still in the peninsula, diminished to an alarming proportion.

"To this increase in the population the native stock seems not to have contributed much. Decimated by long wars, fought by citizen crimes, which secured to Rome a Mediterranean empire, its ranks were thinned still further by the withdrawal of colonies of citizens to the provinces beyond the sea and by a heavy decline in the birth-rate even among the poorer classes. The native Roman and Italian population steadily dwindled and the gaps were filled by new races."

La Piana, "Foreign Groups in Rome," pp. 188–189

This population decline of the native races was alarming to Caesar and to Augustus. Laws were enacted by those rulers to attempt some reversal of the "race-suicide" (as the historians call it) of the Latin peoples. But their laws were completely thwarted.

"One of the most serious evils with which the imperial government was called upon to contend was the decline in population. Not only had the Italian stock almost disappeared from the towns, but the descendants of freedmen had not been born in sufficient numbers to take its place. Accordingly, while the Lex Papia Poppaea offered privileges to free-born citizens for the possession of three children, it used the whole question of inheritances of freedmen and freedwomen for the encouragement of procreation."

Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, p. 191

In other words, the laws backfired on them. Instead of causing an increase in native Italian stock, it encouraged the procreation of multitudes of ex-slaves who had been freed by magnanimous Romans. The rulers simply could not stem the tide by laws. Everything was against them. The social laws were powerless in their effect.

"The center of the empire had been more exhausted by the civil wars than any of the provinces. The rapid disappearance of the free population had been remarked with astonishment and dismay, at least from the time of the Gracchi. If the numbers actually maintained on the soil of the peninsula had not diminished, it was abundantly certain that the independent native races had given way almost throughout its extent to a constant importation of slaves. The remedies to which Caesar resorted would appear as frivolous as they were arbitrary. ... He prohibited all citizens between the age of twenty and forty from remaining abroad more than three years together, while, as a matter of state policy, he placed more special restrictions upon the movements of the youths of senatorial families. He required also that the owners of herds and flocks, to the maintenance of which large tracts of Italy were exclusively devoted, should employ free labor to the extent of at least one-third of the whole.

"Such laws could only be executed constantly under the vigilant superintendence of a sovereign ruler. They fell in fact into immediate disuse, or rather were never acted upon at all. They served no other purpose at the time but to evince Caesar’s perception of one of the fatal tendencies of the age [i.e. the race change in Italy], to which the eyes of most statesmen of the day were already open."

Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire, vol. 2, pp.395–397

Or, as Professor Duff said referring to the period of the emperor Augustus.

"Even in Augustus’ day the process of easternization had gone too far. The great emperor saw the clouds, but he did not know they had actually burst. His legislation would have been prudent and not a whit excessive a century earlier; but in his time Rome was a cosmopolitan city, and the doom of the Empire was already sealed."

Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, pp.207–208

These laws were enacted too late, and never enforced! Professor Frank shows their failure despite their inaction. His following observations are important to the issue.

"The race went under. The legislation of Augustus and his successors, while aiming at preserving the native stock, was of the myopic kind so usual in social lawmaking, and failing to reckon with the real nature of the problem involved, it utterly missed the mark. By combining epigraphical and literary references, a fairly full history of the noble families can be procured, and this reveals a startling inability of such families to perpetuate themselves. We know, for instance, in Caesar’s day of forty-five patricians, only one of whom is represented by posterity when Hadrian came to power [about 200 years later]. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii, Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of Cornelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patricate, and all but six disappear before Nerva’s reign [about 100 years later]. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in 65 C.E. under Nero, all trace of a half is lost by Nerva’s day, a generation later. And the records are so full that these statistics may be assumed to represent with a fair degree of accuracy the disappearance of the male stock of the families in question. Of course members of the aristocracy were the chief sufferers from the tyranny of the first century, but this havoc was not all wrought by delatores and assassins. The voluntary choice of childlessness accounts largely for the unparalleled condition. This is as far as the records help in this problem, which, despite the silences is probably the most important phase of the whole question of the change of race. Be the causes what they may, the rapid decrease of the old aristocracy and the native stock was clearly concomitant with a twofold increase from below; by a more normal birth-rate of the poor, and constant manumission of slaves."

Frank, "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire," pp. 704–705

To all of this, the remarks of Professor Duff are also very appropriate:

"It may be asked in this connexion what became of the Latin and Italian stock? Reasons may be given for the coming of the foreigners, but at the same time some explanation may be demanded for the disappearance of the native. In the first place there was a marked decline in the birth-rate among the aristocratic families. ... As society grew more pleasure loving, as convention raised artificially the standard of living, the voluntary choice of celibacy and childlessness became a common feature among the upper classes. ... But what of the lower-class Romans of the old stock? They were practically untouched by revolution and tyranny, and the growth of luxury cannot have affected them to the same extent as it did the nobility. Yet even here the native stock declined. The decay of agriculture ... drove numbers of farmers into the towns, where, unwilling to engage in trade, they sank into unemployment and poverty, and where, in their endeavors to maintain a proper standard of living, they were not able to support the cost of rearing children. Many of these free-born Latins were so poor that they often complained that the foreign slaves were much better off than they, and so they were. At the same time many were tempted to emigrate to the colonies across the sea which Julius Caesar and Augustus founded. Many went away to Romanize the provinces, while society was becoming eastern at home. Because slave labor had taken over almost all jobs, the free-born could not compete with them. They had to sell their small farms or businesses and move to the cities. Here they were placed on the doles because of unemployment. They were, at first, encouraged to emigrate to the more prosperous areas of the empire, to Gaul, North Africa and Spain. Hundreds of thousands left Italy and settled in the newly acquired lands. Such a vast number left Italy [leaving it to the easterns] that finally restrictions had to be passed to prevent the complete depopulation of the Latin stock, but as we have seen the laws were never effectively put into force. The migrations increased and Italy was being left to another race. The free-born Italian, anxious for land to till and live upon, displayed the keenest colonization activity."

Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 200–201

There were two major reasons why the native Latin flocked first to the cities and then to foreign lands. The first, as we have mentioned, was slave labor. The small farm owner with a few acres could not compete with the large landowner with hundreds if not thousands of slave laborers. The free-born farmer, by sheer economics, was often forced to sell his small holding to the larger farmer and then to live in the cities and on to the doles. But there is a second important reason why the small farmer and even the village free-born gave up their holdings. This was the desolation that was evident in a good deal of the land in Italy. The Hannibalic and Civil wars had rendered whole sections sterile by the ravages that took place. Vast areas of once fertile soil in Italy were, by the 1^st century B.C.E., desolate wastelands. This was especially true in certain central and southern regions. The central Etruscan area was so desolate that one general returning to Rome, complained of traveling for miles without so much as seeing a village.

"The stock of [Latin] men capable of bearing arms in this [central] district on which Rome’s ability to defend herself had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people had read with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of annals (sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they now stood) respecting the Aequain and Volseian wars. ... Varro complains, the once populous cities, in general stood desolate."

Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. V, p.394

What had happened was disastrous to Italy, at least to the Latin stock. Italian land was in two general states: either vast areas were rendered completely unproductive through desolation and were worth very little in an agricultural sense, or, the areas that were fertile came to be in the hands of large land-owners and farmed by thousands of slaves. There was no place for the free-born. It is no wonder that the poor native Latin looked elsewhere for his fortune. There was little place for him in Italy by the 1^st century B.C.E.

"Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly awful silence [because of desolation]."

Mommsen, The History of Rome, vol. V, p. 395

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