The needs of these poorer classes in respect of food and drink were very small; it was only the vast number of them that made the supply difficult for the population in acient Rome. The Italians, like the Greeks, were then as now almost entirely vegetarians; cattle and sheep were used for the production of cheese, leather, and wool or for sacrifices to the gods; the only animal commonly eaten, until luxury came in with increasing wealth, was the pig, and grain and vegetables were the staple food of the poor man, both in town and country. Among the lesser poems ascribed to Virgil there is one, the Moretum, which gives a charming picture of the food−supply of the small cultivator in the country. He rises very early, gropes his way to the hearth, and stirs the embers into flame: then takes from his meal−bin a supply of grain for three days and proceeds to grind it in a hand−mill, knead it with water, shape it into round cakes divided into four parts like a “hot−cross bun,” and, with the help of his one female slave, to bake these in the embers. He has no sides of smoked bacon, says the poet, hanging from his roof, but only a cheese, so to add to his meal he goes into his garden and gathers thence a number of various herbs and vegetables, which he then makes into the hotch−potch, or pot−au−feu which gives the name to the poem.
This bit of delicate genre−painting, which is as good in its way as anything in Crabbe's homely poems, has indeed nothing to tell us of life in an insula at Rome; but it may serve to show what was the ordinary food of the Italian of that day. The absence of the sides of bacon is interesting. No doubt the Roman took meat when he could get it; but to have to subsist on it, even for a short time, was painful to him, and more than once Caesar remarks on the endurance of his soldiers in submitting to eat meat when corn was not to be had.
The corn which was at this time the staple food of the Romans of the city was wheat, and wheat of a good kind; in primitive times it had been an inferior species called far, which survived in Cicero's day only in the form of cakes offered to the gods in religious ceremonies. The wheat was not brought from Italy or even from Latium; what each Italian community then grew was not more than supplied its own inhabitants, and the same was the case with the country villas of the rich, and the huge sheep−farms worked by slaves. By far the greater part of Italy is mountainous, and not well suited to the production of corn on a large scale; and for long past other causes had combined to limit what production there was.
Transport too, whether by road or river, was full of difficulty, while on the other hand a glance at the map will show that the voyage for corn−ships between Rome and Sicily, Sardinia, or the province of Africa (the former dominion of Carthage), was both short and easy—far shorter and easier than the voyage from Cisalpine Gaul or even from Apulia, where the peninsula was richest in good corn−land. So we are not surprised to find that, according to tradition, which is fully borne out by more certain evidence,[54] corn had been brought to Rome from Sicily as early as 492 B.C. to relieve a famine, or that since Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa had become Roman provinces, their vast productive capacity was utilised to feed the great city.
Nor indeed need we be surprised to find that the State has taken over the task of feeding the Roman population, and of feeding it cheaply, if only we are accustomed to think, not merely to read, about life in the city at this period. Nothing is more difficult for the ordinary reader of ancient history than to realise the difficulty of feeding large masses of human beings, whether crowded in towns or soldiers in the field. Our means of transport are now so easily and rapidly set in action and maintained, that it would need a war with some great sea−power to convince us that London or Glasgow might, under certain untoward circumstances, be starved; and as our attention has never been drawn to the details of food−supply, we do not readily see why there should have been any such difficulty at Rome as to call for the intervention of the State.
Perhaps the best way to realise the problem is to reflect that every adult inhabitant needed about four and a half pecks of corn per month, or some three pounds a day; so that if the population of Rome be taken at half a million in Cicero's time, a million and a half pounds would be demanded as the daily consumption of the people.I have already said that in the last three centuries B.C. there was a universal tendency to leave the country for the towns; and we now know that many other cities besides Rome not only felt the same difficulty, but actually used the same remedy—State importation of cheap corn. Even comparatively small cities like Dyrrhachium and Apollonia in Epirus, as Caesar tells us while narrating his own difficulty in feeding his army there, used for the most part imported corn. And we must remember that while some of the greatest cities on the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria and Antioch, were within easy reach of vast corn−fields, this was not the case with Rome. Either she must organise her corn−supply on a secure basis, or get rid of her swarms of poor inhabitants; the latter alternative might have been possible if she had been willing to let them starve, but probably in no other way. To attempt to put them out upon the land again was hopeless; they knew nothing of agriculture, and were unused to manual labour.
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