Free Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland Page A

debtor might be offered loans at ruinous rates and then, once he had been leeched of everything he owned, enslaved. Far distant in Rome, what did the shareholders of the great corporations care for the suffering they imposed? Cities were no longer sacked, they were bled to death instead.
    Ostensibly, Rome’s subjects did have some recourse against the depredations of their tormentors. The taxation system may have been privatised, but the province’s administration remained in the hands of the senatorial elite – the class still most imbued with the ideals of the Republic. These ideals obliged governors to provide their subjects with the benefits of peace and justice. In reality, so lucrative were the bribes on offer that even the sternest principles had the habit of eroding into dust. Roman probity fast became a sick joke. To the wretched provincials, there appeared little difference between
publicani
and the senators sent to govern them. Both had their snouts in the same loot-filled trough.
    As a spectacle of greed, the rape of Pergamum was certainly blatant. The vast sway of the Republic’s power, won in the cause of the honour of Rome, stood nakedly revealed as a licence to makemoney. The resulting goldrush was soon a stampede. Highways originally built as instruments of war now served to bring the taxman faster to his victim; pack-animals straining beneath the weight of tribute clopped along the roads behind the legionaries. Across the Mediterranean, increasingly a Roman lake, shipping sailed for Italy, crammed with the fruits of colonial extortion. The arteries of empire were hardening with gold, and the more they hardened, so the more gold Rome squeezed out.
    As her grip tightened, so the very appearance of her provinces began to alter, as though giant fingers were gouging deep into the landscape. In the East great cities were ransacked for treasure – but in the West it was the earth. The result was mining on a scale not to be witnessed again until the Industrial Revolution. Nowhere was the devastation more spectacular than in Spain. Observer after observer bore stunned witness to what they saw. Even in far off Judaea, people ‘had heard what the Romans had done in the country of Spain, for the winning of the silver and the gold which is there’. 7
    The mines that Rome had annexed from Carthage more than a century previously had been handed over to the
publicani
, who had proceeded to exploit them with their customary gusto. A single network of tunnels might spread for more than a hundred square miles, and provide upwards of forty thousand slaves with a living death. Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas-clouds were never far behind.
    Initially, large areas of Spain had been regarded as too remote and dangerous to exploit, the haunt of tribesmen so irredeemably savage that they believed banditry to be an honourable profession,and used urine to brush their teeth. * By the last years of the second century BC , however, all except the north of the peninsula had been opened up for business. † Huge new mines were sunk across central and south-western Spain. Measurements of lead in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers, which show a staggering increase in concentration during this period, bear witness to the volumes of poisonous smoke they belched out. 8 The ore being smelted was silver: it has been estimated that for every ton of silver extracted over ten thousand tons of rock had to be quarried. It has also been estimated that by the early first century BC , the Roman mint was using fifty tons of silver each year. 9
    As in Asia, so in Spain, the huge scale of such operations could not have been achieved without collusion between the public and private sectors.