the constraints and inhibitions imposed by the political life and its values. The two brothers, Seneca and Mela, were prominent respectively in the senatorial and
equestrian orders of later Julio-Claudian Rome, the latter expressing what Tacitus called a 'perverse ambition' in choosing to enrich himself by holding imperial
procuratorships. Possibly the brothers were even cleverer than Tacitus acknowledged, in vesting their interests equally in the two great enterprises, politics and
commerce. Cassius Dio alleged that among the causes of the revolt of Boudicca was Seneca's calling-in of loans of 40,000,000 sesterces he had made to the Britons,
with an eye to the high interest rates he might extract. If true, or even plausible, it is an intriguing suggestion, not only of a senator indulging in speculative finance,
but also, we may suspect, of the high costs to the leading men of the new province of their own Romanization. Buildings to construct and furnish, mosaicists to
commission, statuary and luxury goods to import from all over (the early palace at Fishbourne gives an indication); there was a lot to pay for and not much money
yet in the province.
The importance of trade, manufacture, and commerce in the actual conditions of life in the Roman provinces is as obvious as that of agriculture, which provided
their economic base and of which they were very often the direct expression. So much is clear from many sources: from one of the most important inscriptions of
any period of Roman history, the Edict of Maximum Prices by Diocletian in A.D. 301; from the patterns of ostentatious expenditure manifest in the great consuming
cities of the Empire; from the incidence of discovered shipwrecks, rising to a peak in the late-republican and early-imperial periods; not least, from the illustration
on large numbers of grave reliefs, especially from the western provinces, of a wide variety of trading, commercial, and generally professional enterprises, in which
those commemorated evidently took pride and found respect (they would not otherwise have been shown on their tombstones). Viewed in another perspective, there
are the various trades and occupations, more than a hundred of them, named on the inscriptions of a small town in south-east Asia Minor; and no less than 250 in the
slice of life represented by a fourth-century manual of astrology. Why should we ever wish to apply to such modestly successful petits bourgeois a social attitude to
trade, commerce, and manual labour formulated by the philosophers, and repeated by the rhetoricians, of a different social class-men freed by position, unearned
income, and the labour of others from the need to contemplate the normal facts of economic life?
Yet it remains true that it was in the hands of the traditional aristocratic, rather than of the trading or commercial, interest that the physical maintenance and political
conduct of the cities of the Roman Empire rested and also, therefore, much of what appears to us as its achievement. By generosity and munificence, these local
aristocracies built their cities, sustained their physical amenities, patronized their literary culture by supporting municipal chairs of grammar and rhetoric, and
provided their entertainments. They constructed aqueducts, porticoes, temples, theatres, built and provided the heating for public baths, kept the streets clean and lit
at night. They maintained peace in the surrounding countryside, provided distributions of oil, grain, and cash and, at a personal expense recorded on many a
commemorative inscription, employed professional gladiators and charioteers, acrobats and jugglers, singers and musicians, and imported exotic beasts to be hunted
down in public shows for the general enjoyment. In return they were acclaimed by grateful multitudes as 'benefactors', 'providers', and 'patrons' of their cities in
demonstrations of goodwill which ensured the continued influence of their families.