Army and society

In Marius' defense, it's not like he had a choice if he wanted to have enough manpower to facea million fucking germs trying to cross the Alps while being at war in Spain and North Africa at the same time.
The 120-100BC was fucking rough on the legions, they basically got wiped out every other battle due to amateurish generalship. For all the talk the second punic war gets, the cimbric and jugurthine wars were just as ruinous in terms of lives lost.

Exactly and the number of soldier farmers had been decimated by the influx of slaves and the absence of said farmers during war.

This is an interesting topic. I've recently read this book (amazon.com/Rome-War-Families-Republic-Studies/dp/1469611074, bookzz.org/book/845469/0590f3) in which the author analyzes causalities numbers, roman marriage traditions, agricultural practices and archeological data, and concludes that this traditional interpretation doesn't work. He argues that 1) Long absence of a man wasn't fatal to his family, since basic productivity was high enough for a woman with children to feed themselves from the land even without help of neighbors and grandparents.
2) Most Roman men married around 30, and most served in the legions from 17 up until 27, meaning the average solder had no family to take care of yet.
3) Society as a whole developed strategies to deal with huge loses of 3th century, like women marriage age and restriction on infanticide, and these strategies continued to work in the 2nd century, resulting in the rising number of citizens.
4) There is no archeological data to support the widespread latifundium until late in the 1st century.

In the end, his idea is, the crisis of the late 2nd century was caused no by depopulation, but by overpopulation with limited lands available, resulting in impoverishment of Roman farmers, that made him unsuitable for service.

Overall, I personally think this is an interesting and quite plausible interpretation.

It wasn't so much the slaves (back then, smallhold agriculture was mostly sustenance and little more; latifunds didn't really directly compete against smallholders, since they focused on high value products like mules, olives, wine, etc.) as the foreign service times: no smallholder can keep away 6-10 years from home and hope to find his fields still well worked and productive waiting for him.
In that sense, the problem with Marius' reforms was that they were never effectively completed like he allegedly intended: the senate never allowed for the soldier settlements to start under their auspices, so Marius was forced to do it by his own authority, thereby binding the armies to the land-giving general rather than the republic.
After all professional armies obviously cannot be necessarily bad (most modern countries have them), it's just a question of being able to bind power to positions rather than individuals. By and large the marian reforms failed in that regard, and Pompey, Anthony and most emperors only made the situation worse. Sulla and Octavian actually tried to improve the situation.

>1) Long absence of a man wasn't fatal to his family, since basic productivity was high enough for a woman with children to feed themselves from the land even without help of neighbors and grandparents.
>2) Most Roman men married around 30, and most served in the legions from 17 up until 27, meaning the average solder had no family to take care of yet.
You do realize these two points together are fatal right? If a man is unmarried while he serves, it means there's nobody home to take care of his fields for him.

His father, brothers, or even sisters' families would take care of it. I mean, if they there in their 20s, then their fathers were in their 50s, i.e. young enough to work the land.

That really interesting and I am very interested in picking up that book now. Not trying to contradict anything but there was one thing that I noticed. It was overall population that was an issue but that the population became poorer.
Yeah the changing of loyalty from state to general was serious problem but I don't know if instituting a state run resettlement policy would fix the problem

> It was overall population that was an issue but that the population became poorer.
Yeah, and over-extraction of limited land resources looks like a plausible explanation.
> instituting a state run resettlement policy would fix the problem
Romans actually had it going since 4th century, sending citizen and latin colonies all around Italy, and it worked quite well, they stopped it only when they run out of enemies in Italy to take land from.

I guess the issue is how great is the loss of productively effected the ability of these farmera to sustain themselves. This includes times of famines and plague. Also, how much more.inviting will the citities seem when you are barely getting by on your poor farm.

>I guess the issue is how great is the loss of productively effected the ability of these farmera to sustain themselves.
Yes, and book has a chapter about it, and it looks like it wasn't that bad. Also you have to remember what adult men themselves consume more food than women and children, so productivity removed was somehow compensated by lower needs.

Interesting I will definitely try and read this. I also had a thought in my head that was tangentially related. I wonder how often the large estates would break up into smaller farms versus how easy it was for small farmers to be bought up by local lard farmers. It might not have even been something that was forced by the army it could have just been that long term economic trend was towards large farms.

>I wonder how often the large estates would break up into smaller farms
Almost exclusively in case of proscriptions. If the government doesn't do it to spread the land to the soldiers and proles, it basically doesn't happen.
>how easy it was for small farmers to be bought up by local lard farmers
Extremely easy. A few bad years (and there are quite a few examples of 2-5 years droughts and famines in the late republic period),or a local slave uprising, or assorted banditry, or fuck else meant bankruptcy for smallholders, and an easy acquisition by landowners.
It was indeed an economic trend, but that doesn't mean the government shouldn't try to stop it. Latifundism created a shitload of problems for the peninsula, from extreme dependency on food imports (all fertile land used for cash crops), to overflowing of landless farmers into cities, weighing heavily on the state financed annona and mostly unemployed because unskilled labour (and often skilled too) was taken by slaves who mostly weren't paid (skilled and household slaves often were, but latifunds used the ergastula system which was basically field niggery) and so contributed a lot less to the economy than a peasant doing the same job would.

Yeah the issue is when the primary power in your government is the large landowners and maybe the city poor because of their ability to form mobs. So the small farmers are left without any ability to influence.

>So the small farmers are left without any ability to influence.
And let's not forget that the only people who get to vote are those physically present in Rome during voting days. Smallholders ain't gonna trouble themselves with the journey unless they've got other reasons to go to the Urbs.
That said, agrarian reforms did happen on a semi regular basis, especially during the empire, because it just was that much of an issue for the state, between paying the armies, food imports, and chastising political enemies.

Governments of antiquity never understood economics and could never be expected to.

At best you could draw hazy concern about all of the land concentrating into hands of the wealthy senators like Pliny the Elder did, but depending on one's personal proscriptions, this may not have been seen as a 'bad thing'. The first century BC saw the encroaching influence of Hellenic thoughtstreams into Roman high society, inc. arguments for aristocracy like Plato's Republic. To foresee the long-term economic impact of wealth inequality or soil degradation from cash crops or reliance on foodstuffs from North Africa or the slave market or the urban poor would have required disciplines that didn't exist to the ancients and wouldn't exist for millennia.

Well that was the benefit of the Empire. The emporers were not beholden to senate.

>reliance on foodstuffs from North Africa
No look I get the rest, but the romans did very well understand how problematic the issue of feeding Italy was. That's not economics, that's geostrategy, a subject we know was highly studied all the way back to the earliest empires. Herodotus for example speaks of geostrategical issues in the wars between Egypt and Persia.
Just consider the second triumvirate: the whole issue with Sextus Pompey was his control of the sea routes to Rome, preventing grain imports and causing massive famines. Anthony does the same a few years later and the civil war of 44BC happens.

Sulla did? He was as guilty as anyone of using his soldiers loyalty to him before all others to achieve his aims.

Agrarian reform only really started when the problem became too great to ignore... and even then, the Senate reacted with violence toward the Gracchis and Marcus Livius Drusus.

Sulla was a very peculiar man. He spent his whole dictatorship trying to ensure what he did could never be repeated, and the republic would continue on with the power firmly in the hands of the senate.
Within 10 years of his death most of his reforms were repealed tho, unlike Augustus he failed to make sure that his work would survive him. Cicero talks of this a lot (Sulla, not Augustus), likely because the new tribunal system greatly changed how lawyers needed to act, and he was part of the generation that first could exploit the changes to uproot the old giants like Hortensius.

An important thing to remember about the soldiery is that they were tried in their own courts, and their jurisprudence was not as even-handed as ours; i.e. a military tribunal could seldom be expected to hand down harsh punishment against soldiers guilty of a drunken carouse in which they beat the innkeeper half to death, raped his wife and daughter, then burned the place to the ground. They had a lot of latitude to forgive this kind of thing and they did. This no doubt only got worse as the empire dragged on and soldiers were both harder to find and much more needed to defend the frontiers.

Especially in the border regions where there is going to be a strong presence of legions, limitaneis, and unwashed foreign auxiliaries, this is going to create a lot of friction over time. One of the reasons, I suspsect, the borders slowly became more and more insecure.

Very interesting, I'll have to look for a book or two on Sulla. One of the great figures of the age I've not studied much about.