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Why was Simon Magus and his Gnostic teachings so readily accepted in Rome? Why did the ancient cool tempered and secular minded Romans come to accept an Oriental and emotional religious teaching, which was seemingly so foreign to their nature? All the textbooks observe this tremendous change of attitude and temperament in the Roman people between the 3rd century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D., but few of them treat the question at any length. It just doesn’t occur to them to find the answer. However, the major historians now realize what caused this change in temperament! To be truthful, there was hardly a temperament change (or at best only a slight one). It wasn’t the temperament that changed — it was the race! Simon Magus, in going to Rome, came amongst his own type of people — they were basically Chaldeans, Syrians, Phoenicians, and Samaritans, with only a very small Latin minority. Italy, by the first century of our era, was in reality, Shemitic country. The evidence to support the truth of this assertion is beyond reproof. The knowledge of this change of race not only helps us in explaining why the Roman populace accepted Simon Magus, but even more importantly IT HISTORICALLY CONFIRS BIBLICAL PROPHECIES! The Bible states that the Babylon of prophecy is modern Rome. Many people accept this Biblical indication merely as a symbol, but it is far from being a symbol, it is literal — actual! Old Babylon was destroyed; the Chaldeans left Mesopotamia; the land turned into a desert — but where did these Babylonians go? The records of history show them today, primarily, in Italy! It is thus important to us that we have this evidence before us. The evidence is not only interesting from a historical point of view, but it shows that Bible prophecy is again proved to be right after all! This article is intended to place the basic facts of this race change at our disposal. The evidence comes from some of the world’s most recognized historians — men who have devoted their whole lives to the study of Roman History. They have been quoted at length in order that no one could possibly charge an “out-of-context” evaluation on the material. It is hoped that the longer quotes (which I feel are important) will not prove too laborious reading — they are necessary for the student of history. The first portion of this paper, concerning this race change, is mainly centered around the work of Professor T. Frank of John Hopkins University. He is the recognized authority on the economic history of ancient Rome. He was the author and editor of the five-volume Economic History of Rome, and the author of many other books on ancient Roman history. His contributions to the various classical journals were frequent and always looked for with anticipation by historians around the world. As a matter of interest, the authoritative Cambridge Ancient History and the Oxford History of Rome by Cory, as well as Professor Boak in America, freely quote from his various works. Much of the material in this paper is founded on Professor Frank’s researches, and because of that (for the benefit of those not having studied much Roman History), I have felt it necessary to mention his qualifications. Mention also must be made of Professor Duff of Oxford University whose book, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, represents a substantiation of Professor Frank’s work. Truly, there is no lack of authority for the conclusions reached in this paper, for they are not merely personal conclusions, but those of world-recognized historians.
Astounding as it may seem, it can be stated with the greatest of confidence that a fundamental change of race occurred in the Italian peninsula between the 3rd century B. C. and the 3rd century A. D. The records of history are beyond reproof in showing the truth of this change. What we find is Chaldean, Syrian and Phoenician stock replacing the basic Latin races in Italy. A little amalgamation of Latins and these immigrant Shemites did take place, but the Latin element was so weak when the mixing began, that, in Italy, the remnant of the Latin race was completely submerged by these incoming Shemites. And by the end of the Empire, Italy had become a Shemitic country. When the Bible speaks of Babylonians and Tyrians being the Romans of prophecy — the Romans of our day — it means it! The very descendants of those ancient Babylonians and Tyrians are now found in Italy. And, even secular history puts them there! Is this difficult to believe? Then let us notice the evidence from history. In this article, we will quote at length what the most imminent historians have to say on this subject. And, the only conclusion we can possibly come to is that a change of race did take place in Italy and that Shemites from the East took over the country. First, we will quote from the foremost historian on the economic history of Rome before his death in 1939, Professor T. Frank. His monumental five-volume work on Roman Economics and Social Life is the recognized authority on the subject. He, probably more than any other person, has studied at length the native Roman records, epigraphical information and archaeological finds relative to his subject. The Cambridge Ancient History consistently refers to his works. Now, let us notice what Professor Frank says about the race question in the American Historical Review, vol. 21, July 1916, p. 689. The information he records is illuminating.
There is one surprise that the historian usually experiences upon his first visit to Rome. It may be the Galleria Lapidaria of the Vatican or at the Lateran Museum, but, if not elsewhere, it can hardly escape him upon his first walk up the Appian Way. As he stops to decipher the names upon the old tombs that line the road, hoping to chance upon one familiar to him from his Cicero or Livy, he finds prenomen and nomen promising enough, but the cognomina all seem awry. L. Lucretius Pamphilus, A. Aemilius Alexa, M. Clodius Philostosgas do not smack of freshman Latin. And he will not readily find in the Roman writers now extant an answer to the questions that these inscriptions invariably raise. Do these names imply that the Roman stock was completely changed after Cicero’s day, and was the satirist (Juvenal) recording a fact when he wailed that the Tiber had captured the waters of the Syrian Orontes? If so, are these foreigners ordinary immigrants, or did Rome become a nation of ex-slaves and their offspring?
Unfortunately, most of the sociological and political data of the empire are provided by satirists. When Tacitus informs us that in Nero’s day a great many of Rome’s senators and knights were descendants of slaves and that the native stock had dwindled to surprisingly small proportions, we are not sure whether we are not to take it as an exaggerated thrust by an indignant Roman of the old stock. . . . . To discover some new light upon these fundamental questions of Roman history, I have tried to gather such fragmentary data as the corpus of inscriptions might afford. This evidence is never decisive in its purport, and it is always, by the very nature of the material, partial in its scope, but at any rate it may help us to interpret our literary sources to some extent. IT HAS AT LEAST CONVINCED ME THAT JUVENAL AND TACITUS WERE NOT EXAGGERATING. It is probable that when these men wrote a very small percentage of the free plebians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent. By far the larger part — PERHAPS NINETY PERCENT — had Oriental blood in their veins (pp. 689, 690).
What Professor Frank did, besides referring to literary sources, was to study the epigraphical information on the various tombs and monuments in Rome and throughout Italy. He studied over 13,900 different names and found that about three quarters bore names of foreign derivation. The vast majority had Greek cognomina — not Latin at all.
For reasons which will presently appear I have accepted the Greek cognomen as a true indication of recent foreign extraction, and, since citizens of native stock did not as a rule unite in marriage with liberti, a Greek cognomen in a child or one parent is sufficient of status (i.e., was foreign) (p. 691).
On the other hand, the question has been raised whether a man with a Greek cognomen must invariably be of foreign stock. Could it not be that Greek names became so popular that, like Biblical and classical names today, they were accepted by the Romans of native stock? In the last days of the empire this may have been the case; but the inscriptions prove that the Greek cognomen was not in good repute. I have tested this matter by classifying all the instances in the 13,900 inscriptions where the names of both father and son appear. From this it appears that fathers with Greek names are very prone to give Latin names to their children, whereas the reverse is not true (pp. 692, 693).
Clearly the Greek name was considered as a sign of dubious origin among the Roman plebians, and the freedman family that rose to any social ambitions made short shift of it. For these reasons, therefore, I consider that the presence of a Greek name in the immediate family is good evidence that the subject of the inscription is of servile or foreign stock. The conclusion of our pro’s and con’s must be that nearly ninety per cent of the Roman-born folk represented in the above mentioned sepulcharal inscriptions are of foreign extraction.
Who are these Romans of the NEW type and whence do they come? How many are immigrants, and how many are of servile extraction? Of what race are they? (p. 693).
Professor Frank will answer these questions! Information on this matter cannot come from epigraphical material, it must come from literary sources — from eyewitnesses. In this we are not left without evidence. In fact, there is quite a lot of information on who these foreigners were. These “Romans” bore Greek names. This is enough to show that the majority came from the East — from Greece and the Hellenistic world. However, from literary evidence we can gain a better insight into the exact locality from whence most came into Italy. Juvenal, speaking of the Roman population speaks about these people with Greek names. He says most epithetically: “These dregs call themselves Greeks but how small a portion is from Greece; the River Orontes has long flowed into the Tiber” (III, 62). Juvenal, then, tells us that very few of these people were actually Greek. They were from the Hellenistic world — to be exact, from the Levant. How did these Orientals 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 of slaves came from the East — particularly Asia Minor and Syria!
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 (Dr. Bang of Germany) entirely agree. In his list of slaves that specify their origin as being outside Italy (during the empire), by far the larger portion came from the Orient, especially FROM SYRIA and the provinces of ASIA MINOR, with some from Egypt and Africa (which for racial classification may be taken with the Orient). 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 ORIENTAL aspect of the new population (pp. 700,701).
There is another reason why European captives were not found with much representation in Italy. When the Romans took over prosperous Gaul, with its vast agricultural areas, the captive slaves were kept in the areas to farm the land. This is also true for Spain, After all, Italy was being stocked with masses of Oriental slaves, 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 very few western and northern Europeans as slaves in Italy. The East supplied most to the fatherland. However, can it really be said that these Eastern slaves displaced the old Latin stock of Italy? Can we believe that slaves, 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! There are many reasons which brought about the change of race. It was not alone the bringing of these new races. Other factors were happening to the original Latin race as well. Let us get a rundown of them by Professor Frank.
There are other questions that enter into the PROBLEM OF CHANGE — OF RACE AT ROME, for the 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 in 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 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 birthrate, whereas the stock of foreign extraction had not only a fairly normal birthrate but a liberal quota of manumissions to its advantage (p. 703).
The foregoing are the main problems which affected the race decay of the Latins in Italy. The main points were the decimation and emigration of the native stock, while foreigners, especially from Syria and Asia Minor, took their place. Also, records show the birthrate of the Latins was very low while that of slaves was very large (slaves were encouraged to have children so that more servants could be had). So, the slave population in Italy, during the first century B.C., increased rapidly while the native stock, who were 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 birthrate 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 During the First Centuries of the Empire, The Harvard Theological Review, vol. XX, pp. 188, 189).
This population decline of the native races was alarming to Caesar and to Augustus. Laws were enacted by these 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 freeborn citizens for the possession of three children, it used the whole question of inheritances of freedmen and freedwomen for the encouragement of procreation (A. M. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, Oxford Univ. Press 1928, 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. Caesar simply could not stem the tide by laws — everything was against him.
The centre 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 labour to the extent of at least one-third of the whole. Such laws could only be executed constantly under the vigilant superintendance 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. race deterioration in Italy), to which the eyes of most statesmen of the day were already open (Merivale, The Romans Under the Empire, vol. 2. pp. 395, 396. 397).
Or, as Professor Duff says: “Even in Augustus’ day the process of Orientalization had gone too far. The great emperor saw the clouds, but he did not know they had actually burst. His legislation would have been a 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” (Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 207, 208). These laws were enacted too late, and never enforced! Professor Frank shows, despite their inaction.
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. The Aemilsi, Fabii, Claudii. Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of Comelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patricate, and all but six disappear before Nerva’s reign. Of the families of nearly four hundred senators recorded in 65 A. D. 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 the constant manumission of slaves (pp. 704, 705).
To all of this, the remarks of Professor Duff will not be unappropriate:
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 birthrate among the aristocratic families. . . . As society grew more pleasureloving, 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 endeavours to maintain a high 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 Orientalized at home. Because slave labour 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 Orientals — 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 keenist colonization activity (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 labourers. The free-born farmer, by sheer economics, was often forced to sell his small holding to the larger farmer and then go to live in the cities and onto the doles. But there is a second important reason why the small farmers and even the village free-born, gave up their holdings — this was the desolation of 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 first century B.C., 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 Volscian 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 hardly anything agriculturally, or, the areas that were fertile came to be in the hands of large rich land-owners and farmed by thousands of slaves. There was no place for the freemen. It is no wonder that the poor native Latin looked elsewhere for his fortune — there was little place for him in Italy by the first century B.C.
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) (ibid., p. 395).
Huge masses of Latins left Italy for Spain and Gaul. This desire for the Roman of free-birth to go to other areas of the empire, is mentioned by Seneca. He shows how the Italian looked for every opportunity to leave his native country:
This people (the Romans), how many colonies has it sent to every province! Wherever the Roman conquers, there he dwells. With a view to this change of country, volunteers would gladly ascribe their name, and even the old man, leaving his home would follow the colonists overseas (Helvia on Consolation, VII, 7).
Or, as Mommsen continues:
The Latin stock of Italy underwent an alarming diminution, and its fair provinces were overspread partly by parasitic immigrants, partly by sheer desolation. A considerable portion of the population of Italy flocked to foreign lands. Already the aggregate amount of talent and of working power, which the supply of Italian magistrates and Italian garrisons for the whole domain of the Mediterranean demanded, transcended the resources of the peninsula, especially as the elements thus sent abroad were in great part lost for ever to the nation (ibid., p. 393).
And what is equally important to explain the loss of Latin stock, the thousands of soldiers in foreign countries (Augustus had over 100,000 in foreign garrisons alone), when retiring from their service careers, more often than not chose for their pension-lands, territory outside of Italy. Merivale shows that by the first century D. C. “there were no tracts of land of public domain left within the Alps for the state to distribute in public grants” (ibid. p. 395). The veterans had to take provincial areas, especially those in Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, as their demobilization pay. This was not objected to by the veterans because Italy just wasn’t productive enough to live on, especially if the holding was small. The veteran normally chose the immediate area in which he had been stationed for his twenty some years service. Let us remember that the garrisoned soldier often had his family with him — it was not unlike the armed forces today in this regard. However, when the Caesars finally awoke to the disastrous effect that this draining of the Latin population was having to the native hold on Italy, the process of the unwitting de-Latinization of Italy had gone so far that it became impossible to do anything about it. Of course, the state tried to reverse the situation. Lands were even bought up in Italy and many veterans were forced to take up residence in their homeland. But this even backfired! The veterans, yearning for the better provincial areas, soon sold their lands to the large landowners and went back to the new provinces. In fact, all the legislation regarding the strengthening of the Latin stock in the home country came to nothing. “They (the laws) fell in fact into immediate disuse, or rather were never acted upon at all” (Merivale, vol. II, p.397). In summing up, Professor Duff gives us a keen insight on what was happening in Italy and why the Latin race went under with a new stock taking its place:
Among all the causes of the change of race (apart from manumission) war was the most important. The armies of the late Republic and civil wars had consisted largely of Italians, who, if they were not killed off, were at least deprived of domestic life during their prime. Meanwhile the freedmen, usually excluded from the army, and the freedman’s descendant, never a keen soldier, were allowed an uninterrupted family life and produced offspring with greater freedom. Moreover, after his twenty years’ service, it was frequently the case that the legionary never returned home, but joined his fellow veterans to found a colony in the province where he had served.
The Roman thus gave away to the Easterner in Italy, while he made a place for himself in the provinces (Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, pp. 201, 202).
What a strange situation! By the first century B.C., Italy found itself stocked with slaves (Merivale says at least two-thirds were of servile origin at this time), and the natives were constantly leaving the country. And, of those free-born who remained in Italy, the thought of propagation was not taken seriously while the slaves were producing many times the offspring. It can easily be seen how this slave population — the vast majority were from Asia Minor and Syria — replaced the old stock. On top of this, there was a strong movement in the first century B.C. of freeing slaves — letting them take over the activities of the former free-born who had left or was leaving the country. The rate of emancipation was so high that laws were finally enacted to curtail the practice. For what was happening? Simply this: thousands of slaves were becoming freedmen and by virtue of this, they became the new Roman citizens. The emancipations or manumissions were not done a corner, but were becoming the fashion of the day by the beginning of our era. When a slave owner died, he often freed every slave in his household — and some households had upwards of several thousand. These ex-slaves — now freedmen and consequently Roman citizens — were the most energetic of peoples in Italy. They were the ones, who as slaves, had done the business, the teaching, the doctoring, the farming, the building, etc., while the rich Roman did nothing but amuse himself and the poverty stricken free-born was shifting for himself, more often than not on the dole and idle. Now, that thousands of these slaves were gaining their freedom, they continued their trading and business activities. They became the energetic stock of Italy. The Cambridge Ancient History says:
With thoughtful citizens, partly owing to the Stoic doctrine of the fraternity of man, humaner views gradually spread and made for amelioration in the lot of servitude, and for so much readiness in masters to liberate slaves that Augustus, recognizing the serious infiltration of alien blood into the body politic, introduced restrictions on manumission. Yet this proved but a slight check, and Tacitus records a significant remark that ‘if freedmen were marked off as a separate grade, then the scanty number of free-born would be evident.’ This shows how very few native free-born were left in Italy by our era. This freemen were now freedmen — ex-slaves or their descendants. They were taking over the complete population. The rise of successful freedmen to riches made a social change of the utmost moment, and the wealth amassed by a Narcissus or a Pallas gives point to Martial’s use of ‘wealthy freedmen’ as something proverbial (vol. VI, pp. 755, 756).
The ex-slaves, now freedmen, who really made names for themselves were generally from Syrian or Eastern extraction.
It seems unquestionable that the slaves from the eastern provinces were numerically preponderant in Rome, and — what is still more important — that they played a more important part in Roman life. . . . The large population of slaves gave rise to a numerous class of foreign origin, the liberti or freedmen, which came to play an important part in the life of the city. Rome’s policy of manumitting slaves was very liberal and the grant of freedom and citizenship made it possible for them to become merged in the citizen body of Rome. Former slaves and sons of slaves spread into trades and crafts that required civil standing, and in Cicero’s day it was these people who already constituted the larger element of the plebian classes (La Piana, Foreign Groups in Rome, pp. 190, 191).
These freedmen from the East began to take over almost all of the active enterprises which govern society and commerce as a whole. By the first century, freedmen were beginning to be so powerful — their number far out did any Latin stock that remained — that even top governmental posts were coming their way. |