My eyes landed on the opening page of Simkhovitch's wonderful essay "Rome's Fall Reconsidered". Ha! You thought we were done with Simkhovitch. No such luck.
From page 201:
"Seneca himself was one of the richest land owners of Rome, but as a statesman he gave warning, in public, of what the wealthy landowners did not care to hear in private. Seneca asks: "How far will you extend the bounds of your possessions? A large tract of land, sufficient heretofore for a whole nation, is scarce wide enough for a single lord."
The quote is from Seneca's Letter 89, item #20.
Note that Seneca asks his wealthy bretheren "How far will you extend the bounds of your possessions?" How far will you extend those bounds?
Seneca is asking How much is enough? It wasn't that long ago people were asking the same question about the wealth of the wealthy of our own time.
It
was the wrong question, wrong for our time and wrong for Seneca's
time. The answer, as we should know by now, is: They already have more
than "enough". They are not doing it to get "enough". The are doing it
for personal satisfaction. It is a kind of game, like poker except that our lives depend on the outcome. And, except that the survival of civilization requires that the game be halted.
In the late stage of that game, you only have "enough" when you are the only player left. But by that time the rest of us are all serfs, and civilization is one cold memory.
Later in the Simkhovitch essay, where he is talking about reasons for the concentrated ownership of land, he mentions not only the obvious (the debts of small landholders, and the fact that raising cattle requires more land than growing crops) but also the pleasure wealthy Romans got from accumulating as much as they could:
Wealthy men acquired and accumulated vast domains rather for the pleasure of possession than as a paying investment. [p.219]
It's not just an assertion, either. Simkhovitch has already quoted Pliny the Younger, who was considering the purchase of an "enormous" estate neighboring his own:
I feel tempted to purchase, first, because the conveniences resulting therefrom would be as great as the pleasures it would give me... [p.218]
Pleasures and conveniences; these are his reasons to buy. Remarkably, in the
same quote, Pliny expresses hesitation to purchase because "the
fertility of the land is overtaxed by the lack of capital of the
tenants." Note that the low income expected from this "overtaxed"
property makes Pliny hesitate, but it is not enough to turn him
against the purchase. Even the additional cost of providing slaves for
the tenants is not enough to make him decide against the purchase. It is
not only the quest for wealth that influenced Pliny's decision, but
also the quest for pleasure and personal satisfaction. Perhaps he was asking himself: How will I look in the eyes of my fellow wealth-holders?
It could be a smart move to sacrifice a little income if the purchase
moved Pliny's status up a few notches in the eyes of his wealthy friends.
Pliny's letter is available online. I read it, and found this extra bit on the pleasure of purchasing, instead, an estate at greater distance from his own:
Again, there is something exceedingly pleasant in changing one's air and place, and in the travelling from one estate to another.
Pliny the Younger was a sentimental fool. But then, he could afford to be.
1 comment:
Seneca's question: "How far will you extend the bounds of your possessions?"
`Note the word "you" in that question: How far will YOU extend the bounds?
In other words, it was up to the landowner to decide for himself whether to "extend the bounds" or not. There was no law that set a limit to the accumulation of land. There was no policy that prevented a few wealthy Romans from buying up *all* the land.
That was a mistake. Simkhovitch says "the contemporary witnesses of the decline of Rome had but one explanation of its cause;" that explanation was the latifundia, the great estates, the concentrated ownership of land.
Simkhovitch continues: "but while some emphasized its moral aspect and others its economic, still others ... emphasized the political effect of the economic and moral disintegration of Rome."
Some saw the problem as political, some saw it as economic, and some saw it as moral. But the problem itself, Simkhovitch says, was the concentrated ownership of land.
If the concentrated ownership of land was the problem, then it was a mistake for Rome to have no law and no policy which limited the accumulation of land.
In a land where it was obvious for centuries that more and more land was accumulating in fewer and fewer hands, it was an act of suicide to have no upper limit on land ownership.
Civilizations die by suicide.
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