Written 106 years ago, but even more relevant today

Two pages from Rome's Fall Reconsidered, a Google Book.

 

"Latfundia" is "big farms" or "large landholdings", super-big and super-large. In those days, land was wealth.

Is it not interesting that he is not presenting us with a list of factors that were leading Rome to its destruction? On the contrary, he points out one predominant factor, the latifundia, the concentration of wealth, ruining both Rome and the provinces...

 

We looked at Melania on 25 Feb:

In AD 404 Melania freed 8000 slaves out of a total of 24,000 on sixty farms, villas or hamlets which she owned in the vicinity of Rome.

Melania had income comparable to the imperial revenues.

That last line struck me when I read it (in the '80s maybe) so that I never forgot it. With my memory. But Seneca blows that out of the water when he says A large tract of land, formerly sufficient for a whole nation, is now barely enough for a single lord!

And Cicero blows Seneca out of the water, quoting a tribune who says there are less than two thousand property owners in the whole of Rome!

 

When Horace asks What does ruinous time not impair? he is asking What is left after the decline of civilization takes its toll?

It's a good question. The answer: Not very much. The fall is rapid. When you hit bottom, however, you can be stuck there for a long time.

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So, which is it? The latifundia, or the corruption? Simkhovitch answers that question on the next page:

In that very same ode Horace tells us why he takes so desperate a view of things. The great deeds of the Romans were the deeds of a sturdy farmer race, of the "mascula proles rusticorum militium, docta versare glebas Sabellis ligonibus" -- and these farmer's sons existed no longer. If they could not maintain themselves on their farms, still worse were the chances for a respectable existence in Rome; there they lost what little they had and became demoralized, dependent paupers.

The two complaints, the two Roman explanations of their own decline and disintegration reduce themselves, therefore, to one single explanation. For it is clear that the latifundia and corruption are but different aspects of the same social phenomenon. If the moral disintegration was due to the disappearance of the self-supporting, self-respecting farmer class, and the inordinate wealth and fantastic luxury of the small upper class, the latifundia were but a real-estate expression of the same phenomenon. The place of innumerable small farms was taken by extraordinarily large estates -- the latifundia.

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Google's Ngram Viewer is a gold mine. I can search for usage of a phrase, then search thru the source books going back to 1800 to find it in use in a Google Book. And a lot of these old Google Books are marked "Full Book Available". And a lot of those old books say things worth repeating.