AN UNDERDEVELOPED ECONOMY 73sons of freedmen could enter a city council and hold magistracies and
priesthoods on the basis of their father’s wealth and generosity. The source
of their wealth is not generally specifi ed on these inscriptions, which are
intended to be honorifi c; nor is the form in which it was invested.
Finally, in pre- industrial societies the prevailing value system is that of a
landed aristocracy. A prosperous merchant class, the source of whose wealth
was not land, and whose success rested on enterprise and skill rather than
traditional precepts and modes of behaviour, provides a potential threat to
aristocratic values. But successful merchants fall easy prey to the dominant
ideology: they buy or marry their way into the aristocracy and seek political
offi ce. Only the rise of a class of industrial owners, who possess social
prestige and economic power independently as profi t- makers and employers
of labour, endangers the traditional social order.
In ancient Rome there was no prospect of the emergence of such a class.
Moreover, economic realities, in particular the limitations of the market,
virtually ruled out the possibility of the formation of a competing social
hierarchy based on commercial wealth. Nevertheless, the landed aristocracy
perceived a threat to their supremacy in the growth of commerce that
followed Republican Rome’s expansion beyond Italy. It is this which explains
the reactionary and defensive tone colouring Roman social attitudes from
the early second century BC , when Latin literature begins. Treatises on
agriculture and morality defend landowning as the safest occupation (the
least likely therefore to impoverish the aristocracy and weaken its position)
and as the most honourable (the most conducive to the lifestyle appropriate
for the senator), and manifest hostility in differing degrees to trade as a
source of income. The theme surfaces in Cato’s On Agriculture of the mid-
second century BC , and is taken up more than a century later in Cicero’s On
Moral Duties and then, more cursorily, in Varro’s On Farming. It is not a
purely Republican phenomenon; Columella in the mid- fi rst century AD
affi rms in stronger terms than any preceding writer the superiority of
agriculture over trade.
The limitations of an analysis of the kind we have just attempted are
obvious. The search for points of similarity between societies, when coupled
with the tendency to pass over differences both between and within societies,
produces a picture of any particular society that is grossly oversimplifi ed.
The arguments are set at a high level of generality. Thus, for example, the
supremacy of agriculture over other forms of investment and income has
been established, but only at a very general level. A sceptic might question
whether it is in fact possible to offer a more penetrating analysis of the role
of agriculture, and of its importance in relation to other sections of the
economy, on the basis of the existing, non- quantitative, evidence. A
discussion of some recent contributions to the debate on this central issue
will enable us to evaluate the various ways employed by ancient historians
(optimists rather than pessimists by inclination, with few exceptions) to
circumvent this problem.