The Oxford History Of The Classical World

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

male bust representing the Spirit of the Roman People (Genius Populi Romani).


The growing evidence for commerce after the Hannibalic War also makes it unlikely that senators were
totally uninterested in trade. Italian exports were largely in agricultural produce, wine, and to some
extent oil; great landowners may have traded in the name of freedmen, who could legally own big ships
and were still bound to assist their masters, or sold their produce, sometimes still on the tree, to a
merchant, as the elder Cato's agricultural treatise indicates. A gentlemanly distance was thus combined
with profit. Even before Sulla enlarged the Senate (below, p. 462) there was intermarriage with rich non-
senatorial families; and it has been shown that many of the far-flung negotiatores did come from parts of
Italy given Roman citizenship well before the Social War. Certainly after Sulla many new senators had
close relatives involved in business matters, while some probably refused to drop their own old interests;
Cicero tells us in 70 that the Lex Claudia and similar measures were disobeyed, though Caesar may have
reasserted them in 59. The rich also depended on luxuries from the East to sustain an increasingly
sumptuous way of life; works of fine and applied art, rare foods and wines, skilled slaves, spices
transmitted from distant climes.


Senators might lend money at interest; Cato, in the mid second century, did so through a freedman to
finance trading voyages, and later senators made a corner in lending to ambassadors at Rome. It seems
also that in the first century they could or did take shares in the great companies of publicani now
farming some provincial taxes. Finally, in spite of friction between the classes, the system of patronage
will always have meant that many business men could put pressure on individual senators to support
their interests. It is thus hard to maintain that the Senate almost never had an eye to commercial interest,
let alone other types of economic advantage.


Cicero indeed claims that Rome often went to war for her merchants. This is partly true, for example, of
the First Illyrian War, though at that time and place they will in truth have been mostly Italians (trade in
this region is not yet well documented archaeologically); but there was also mistreatment of envoys to
avenge and perhaps appeals to answer. In 187 Rome laid down that Romans and Latins (and possibly
Italians) should be exempt from harbour dues at Ambracia, and this may not have been the isolated
action our sources suggest. The making of Delos a free port in 167 weakened Rhodes and benefited
Roman and Italian traders. And Cicero indicates that some time before 129 Rome forbade Transalpine
peoples (in southern Gaul; attempts to explain the notice away are perverse) to plant vines and olives,
perhaps to protect her own trade in wine and oil. Admittedly this seems a unique measure; and Rome did
not, for example, impose a common coinage over her sphere of influence, unlike Athens.


The one form of trade in which the state took a direct interest was that in corn. The urban plebs must not
starve, the armies must be provisioned. With the increase in population at Rome corn (mainly wheat)
from abroad had to be provided regularly, not just in crises (the rest of Italy still fed itself or even sent
grain to Rome). Sicily annually gave up a tithe of its harvest as tax (and had from 73 to sell another to
Rome at a fixed price if needed). After 146 the corn of Africa became vital. We now know that on one
occasion in the second century a Roman magistrate got the Thessalians, in northern Greece, to bring

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