~44 min read • Updated Mar 25, 2026
The Farmers and Agriculture in Imperial Rome
Columella, author of the classic work De Rustica, wrote in A.D. 56. Like Quintilian, Martial, and Seneca, he came from Spain. He owned several estates in Italy and lived in Rome.
He observed that the best lands lay under villas and the estates of the rich; next came lands devoted to olives and vines, while only poorer soils were given to grain. We have entrusted the care of the soil to the meanest of slaves, and they cultivate it like barbarians.
Free Italians, instead of hardening themselves by working the land, were degenerating in the cities. We use our hands for the circus and the theater rather than for the plow and the vine.
Columella loved the soil and believed that training it was closer to reason than urban literary education. Agriculture is blood kin to wisdom. To encourage a return to the land he adorned his book with elegant Latin, and when he reached the subject of gardens and flowers he turned to enthusiastic verse.
Pliny the Elder lamented prematurely: Vast estates have ruined Italy. Similar complaints appear in Lucan, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal. Seneca described slave-worked cattle ranches as larger than kingdoms.
Some estates were so vast that their owners could not ride around them in a day. Pliny mentions one with 4,117 slaves, 7,200 oxen, and 257,000 other animals.
The distribution of land by the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus had increased small holdings, but many were abandoned during wars and absorbed by the wealthy. When imperial administration reduced the plunder of provinces, much noble wealth was spent on purchasing and improving large farms.
The latifundia system spread because cattle, oil, and wine yielded more profit than grain and vegetables, and large estates under single management proved more efficient. By the late first century these advantages were undermined by rising slave prices and their slow, uncreative labor. The gradual conversion of slaves into serfs began.
Because peace reduced the supply of captives, some large owners divided estates into small plots and leased them to free tenants who paid rent in kind or labor. Most state lands were cultivated this way. Pliny the Younger’s large estates were managed similarly, and he described his tenants as healthy, strong, good-natured, and talkative — much like Italian peasants today.
Farming methods remained basically those practiced for centuries. The plow, hoe, mattock, pick, winnowing fan, sickle, and shovel had changed little in three thousand years. Grain was ground in mills powered by water or animals. Archimedean screws and water wheels lifted water from depths or directed it into irrigation channels.
Soil was protected by crop rotation and manured with animal dung, lucerne, clover, rye, or beans. Seed selection had advanced greatly. Careful cultivation around Rome and in the Po valley produced three or sometimes four crops a year. One sowing of lucerne yielded four to six crops for ten years.
All common vegetables were grown, some in greenhouses for winter sale. Fruit and nut trees multiplied because Roman generals, merchants, and slaves brought new varieties: peach from Persia, apricot from Armenia, cherry from Pontus, grape from Syria, plum from Damascus, and others from Asia Minor, Greece, and Africa.
Intelligent growers grafted plum on poplar and cherry on elm. Pliny named twenty-nine varieties of fig grown in Italy. Columella declared: Through the zeal of our farmers Italy has learned to cultivate the fruits of almost the whole world.
Olive groves were plentiful, but vineyards covered the slopes with special beauty. Italy produced fifty famous wines. Rome alone consumed about 25,000,000 gallons a year — roughly two liters per person per week, slave or free.
Most wine was produced by capitalist organizations with capital sent from Rome. Much was exported, teaching wine-drinking to beer countries like Germany and Gaul. In the first century vineyards spread to Spain, Gaul, and Africa. Italian growers lost colonial markets and overfilled domestic ones, causing one of the few “overproduction” crises in Italian history.
Domitian tried to relieve the situation by encouraging grain and ordering the destruction of half the provincial vineyards, but the edicts provoked protest and were not enforced. In the second century wines from Gaul and oils from Spain and the East gradually displaced Italian products, and Italy’s economic decline began.
The Artisans and Industry
The sharp geographical division between farming and industry seen in modern advanced countries did not exist in Rome. The ancient rural house — whether hut, villa, or estate — was a true factory where men practiced more than ten vital crafts and women’s skill filled the home and surroundings with twenty kinds of arts.
Wood became shelter, fuel, and furniture; cattle were slaughtered and skinned; grain was milled and baked into bread; oil and wine were pressed; food was prepared; wool and flax were cleaned and woven; sometimes clay was fired into pots, bricks, and tiles; metals were hammered into tools.
Life there had an instructive variety and completeness that few enjoy today with greater movement and finer division of labor. This diversity was not a sign of primitive poverty. The richer the house, the less it needed from outside and the more it prided itself on supplying its own needs. The family was an economic partnership engaged in the single industry and agriculture of the household.
When a craftsman took over a specific task for several families and opened a shop accessible to all, he completed rather than replaced the economy of village families. The miller ground grain for several farms, later baked bread, and finally distributed it. Forty bakeries have been excavated at Pompeii, and in Rome pastry cooks formed a separate guild.
There were contractors who bought olive crops in advance. Yet most estates pressed their own oil and baked their own bread. Peasant and philosopher clothing was woven at home, but the rich wore garments washed, whitened, and cut in fulling mills, though the cloth might have been home-woven. Some fine woolens were factory-made, and fibers not used for sails or nets became women’s dresses and men’s handkerchiefs in workshops.
Cloth might then go to the dyer, who not only colored it but added delicate patterns like those seen on garments in Pompeian wall paintings. Tanning had reached the factory stage, but shoemakers usually worked alone making custom shoes. Some specialized in delicate women’s slippers.
Mining was generally carried on by slaves or convicts. Gold and silver mines in Dacia, Gaul, and Spain, lead and tin in Spain and Britain, copper in Cyprus and Portugal, sulfur in Sicily, salt in Italy, iron on Elba, marble from Luna, Hymettus, and Paros — all underground resources belonged to the state and were exploited by the state or leased from it, forming a major source of revenue.
Spanish gold alone brought Vespasian 44,000,000 dollars a year. The search for ore was one of the chief motives for colonial conquest. Tacitus says the mineral wealth of Britain was the “prize of victory” in Claudius’s war.
Wood and charcoal were the main fuels. Petroleum was known in Commagene, Babylon, and Parthia, but there is no evidence it was used commercially as fuel. Coal was found in the Peloponnese and northern Italy but used mainly by blacksmiths.
The art of adding carbon to iron and making steel had spread from Egypt throughout the empire. Most blacksmiths, coppersmiths, goldsmiths, and silversmiths had a single forge and worked with one or two apprentices. In Capua, Minturnae, Puteoli, Aquileia, Como, and elsewhere several forges and refining plants operated together in factories. Those at Capua appear to have been large capitalist enterprises with outside investment.
House building was well organized and specialized. Timber haulers felled and delivered trees; carpenters built houses and furniture; mortar mixers prepared mortar; masons laid foundations; arch builders raised arches; wall layers raised walls; plasterers applied plaster; whitewashers finished walls; plumbers installed pipes (often lead); and marble workers paved floors with marble.
Bricks and tiles came from kilns that had often reached factory scale. Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius owned such kilns and grew rich from them. Kilns at Arretium, Mutina, Puteoli, Surrentum, and Pollentia supplied ordinary tableware throughout the European and African provinces and Italy itself. This mass-produced ware had little artistic merit; quantity was the main concern.
Figured pottery, which had captured Italian markets, was noticeably inferior to earlier Arretine products. Glassmaking, however, had achieved remarkable work.
The existence of factories for glass, brick, tile, and pottery and metalware does not justify calling ancient Italy capitalist in the industrial sense. Rome itself had only two large factories — one for paper and one for dyeing. Probably neither sufficient metal nor fuel was available, and profits from politics seemed greater than from industry.
In central Italian factories almost all workers and some managers were slaves. In northern Italy the proportion of free men was higher. Slaves were still so numerous that they left little room for the development of machines; careless slave labor and limited competition in production did not encourage invention. Some devices intended to save labor were rejected because they might cause unemployment, and popular purchasing power was too low to encourage or even support mechanical production.
Of course several simple machines were in common use in Greece, Egypt, and Italy: the screw press, Archimedean screw, water wheel, animal-driven mill, spinning wheel, loom, crane, large winch, and potter’s wheel. Yet Italian life in A.D. 96 had reached the highest degree of industrialization possible before the nineteenth century. Slavery and extreme concentration of wealth made further industrialization difficult. Roman law prevented large industrial combinations by requiring every shareholder in an industrial company to be legally a responsible partner. Limited-liability companies were forbidden, and partnerships were allowed only for state contracts. Banks were also restricted and could rarely supply capital for large undertakings. At no time could Roman or Italian industrial development equal that of Alexandria or the Hellenistic East.
Transportation and Carriers
From Caesar to Commodus wheeled traffic was forbidden in Rome during daylight hours. People walked or were carried in litters and sedan chairs by slaves. For longer distances they rode horseback, in carts, or horse-drawn carriages. Public coaches averaged about sixty miles a day.
In one case Caesar covered 800 miles in eight days by carriage. Couriers carrying news of Nero’s death to Galba in Spain traveled 333 miles in thirty-six hours. Tiberius, traveling day and night, covered 620 miles in three days to reach his dying brother.
The state post, with vehicles or horses ready at all hours, covered 100 miles a day. Augustus created it on the Persian model because it was essential for administering the empire. It was called the public post because it served public business or the common interest, carrying official correspondence. Private individuals rarely used it, and only with special permission by means of a diploma.
Sometimes a faster means was used — signaling by fire from point to point. By this primitive telegraph the arrival of grain ships at Puteoli was quickly reported to anxious Rome. Non-official letters were carried by special couriers, merchants, or traveling friends. Evidence exists of private companies that delivered mail.
News moved across western and southern Europe in Caesar’s time at the same speed as before the railway. Letters Caesar sent from Britain to Cicero in Rome in 54 B.C. took twenty-nine days. In 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, took thirty days.
Communication and transport relied heavily on the consular roads. These roads were the sensitive antennae of Roman law, the limbs through which Rome’s will became the will of the entire domain. They created a commercial revolution in the ancient world comparable in kind to the railway revolution of the nineteenth century.
Until steam transport appeared, European roads in the Middle Ages and modern times did not equal the roads of the empire under the Antonines. Italy alone had 372 main roads and 12,000 miles of paved highway; the empire had 52,000 miles of paved highways and an extensive network of secondary roads.
Highways ran from the Alps to Lyon, Bordeaux, Paris, Reims, Rouen, and Boulogne. Others reached Vienna, Mainz, Augsburg, Cologne, Utrecht, and Leiden. From Aquileia a road ran along the Adriatic to connect with the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica.
Massive bridges replaced the ferries that once carried travelers across countless streams. Milestones marked distances every Roman mile (about 1,600 meters); 4,000 of them survive. At intervals benches were placed for weary travelers. Every ten miles there was a station with fresh horses for hire. Every thirty miles there was an inn that also served as shop, tavern, and brothel.
Major stopping points were towns, which usually had good inns, some belonging to and managed by municipal governments. Most innkeepers, when opportunity offered, fleeced travelers, and other robbers, despite military posts, made the roads unsafe at night.
Travel guides could be bought showing roads, stations, and distances. The wealthy, avoiding inns, traveled with their own equipment and slaves and slept in their carriages under guard or in the houses of friends or officials along the way.
Despite all these difficulties, travel was probably more widespread in Nero’s time than at any period before our own. Seneca says: Many people travel to distant lands to see what they have heard about. Plutarch speaks of “earth measurers” who spend the best part of their lives in inns and on ships.
Educated Romans traveled in groups to Greece, Egypt, and Greek Asia, carved their names on historic ruins, and sought healing waters or climates. They were thrilled by collections of art in temples, studied with philosophers, rhetoricians, or famous physicians, and used Pausanias instead of Baedeker as a travel guide.
These long journeys usually involved travel on one or more merchant ships that plied hundreds of trade routes across the Mediterranean. Juvenal says: Look at the harbors and the seas, crowded with great ships that outnumber the people on land.
Rome’s rival ports — Puteoli, Portus, and Ostia — bustled with shipbuilding, caulking, loading ballast sand, unloading and weighing grain sacks, towing large ships to shore with tugs, and diving for goods that had fallen overboard. Twenty-five grain boats a day, five days a week, moved upstream against the Tiber current. Adding transport of building stone, metals, oil, wine, and thousands of other goods gives a picture of a river filled with trade, noisy with loading machinery, crowded with dock workers, porters, ship agents, merchants, brokers, and clerks.
Ships moved by sail and had one or more rows of oars; they were on average larger than earlier vessels. Athenaeus describes a grain ship 420 feet long with a mast 57 feet high, but this was exceptional. Some ships had three decks; some carried 250 tons, a few up to 1,000 tons. Josephus mentions a ship with capacity for 600 passengers and crew. Another carried a lighthouse as tall as the one in Central Park, New York, together with 200 sailors, 1,300 passengers, 93,000 bushels of wheat, and quantities of cloth, pepper, paper, and glass.
Nevertheless, as St. Paul discovered, sea travel away from the coast was still dangerous. Between November and March only a few ships ventured across the Mediterranean, and in midsummer sailing eastward was almost impossible because of the annual forty-day etesian winds. Night sailing increased, and every major harbor had a lighthouse. The danger of pirates in the Mediterranean had almost vanished.
To eliminate piracy and starve rebels, Augustus, in addition to small squadrons at ten other points, stationed two major battle fleets at Ravenna on the Adriatic and at Misenum in the Bay of Naples. The “great splendor of the Roman peace” is shown by the fact that for two centuries little was heard of these fleets.
Sailing times and days were highly uncertain, depending on weather and commercial convenience. Fares were low — for example two drachmas (about $1.20) from Athens to Alexandria — but passengers brought their own food and probably slept on deck. Speed was also low and varied with the wind; the average was about six knots. The Adriatic could be crossed in one day, or, like Cicero, one might take three weeks from Patrae to Brundisium.
A fast ship might cover 230 nautical miles in twenty-four hours. With favorable wind one could reach Alexandria from Sicily in six days or Gades to Ostia similarly; four days from Utica to Rome. The longest and most dangerous voyages were the six-month trips from Aden in Arabia to India, because monsoons forced ships to keep close to pirate-infested shores.
Sometime before A.D. 50 an Alexandrian captain named Hippalus discovered the regular monsoon winds, mapped them, and showed that in certain seasons one could sail directly across the Indian Ocean without danger. This discovery was almost as important for that sea as Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic. Thereafter ships from Egyptian Red Sea ports reached India in forty days.
Around A.D. 80 another anonymous Alexandrian captain wrote the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a handbook for merchants trading along the east coast of Africa and with India. Meanwhile other navigators had found Atlantic routes to Gaul, Britain, Germany, and even Scandinavia and Russia. Never before, as far as human memory reached, had the sea carried so many ships, cargoes, and men.
The Engineers
The ships and roads that carried goods, the bridges that joined the roads, the harbors and quays that admitted ships, the aqueducts that brought pure water to Rome, and the sewers that carried off rural marshes and urban waste were all the work of Roman, Greek, and Syrian engineers directing large gangs of free, military, and slave labor.
Heavy loads or stones were lifted by pulleys on cranes or vertical masts worked like a well wheel by human or animal power. For the unreliable Tiber, embankments with three stepped retaining walls were built so that when the water fell the muddy bed would not be exposed.
The multi-basin harbor at Ostia was dredged for Claudius, Nero, and Trajan; smaller harbors were opened at Marseilles, Puteoli, Misenum, Carthage, Brundisium, and Ravenna; and the greatest harbor, Alexandria, was reopened. Lake Fucinus was drained and its bed reclaimed for agriculture by tunneling through solid rock. The marshes of Campania were dried enough to become habitable; the existence of several expensive palace ruins in the area proves it.
These engineers completed the great public buildings by which Caesar and the emperors relieved unemployment and beautified Rome.
The consular roads were among the simplest works of these engineers. Compared with modern highways, they were 16 to 24 feet wide, but near Rome part of the width was taken by sidewalks paved with rectangular slabs.
They sacrificed initial economy for permanent economy: they built expensive bridges over countless streams, long arched and vaulted brick and stone bridges over marshes, climbed hills without cutting or filling, and advanced along mountain slopes or high ridges protected by strong retaining walls.
Paving materials varied with local resources. Usually a sub-base of sand 4 to 6 inches thick or bitumen 1 inch thick was laid. Upon this came four layers: first the statumen, 12 inches of stone and mortar or clay; second the rudus, 10 inches of rammed concrete; third the nucleus, 12 to 18 inches of spread and rolled concrete; and fourth the summa crusta, irregular pieces of flint or volcanic lava 12 to 36 inches across and 8 to 12 inches thick. The upper surface was smoothed and joints so well fitted that they were hardly visible.
Sometimes the surface was concrete; on less important roads it might be gravel. In Britain the surface was flint set in concrete over a gravel base. The deep foundation meant little attention was paid to drainage. Overall these were the most durable roads known to history. Many are still in use, though their steep gradients, designed for pack mules and light carts, have made them unsuitable for modern vehicles.
The bridges that joined these roads are supreme examples of science and industry working together. The Romans inherited hydraulic engineering principles from Ptolemaic Egypt and applied them on an unprecedented scale; the methods they transmitted have remained unchanged to our time.
They perfected underwater foundations and piers. Two concentric cylinders of thick timbers were sunk, the timbers tightly boarded, water pumped out, the river bed exposed and covered with stone or lime, and the pier built upon this foundation. Eight bridges crossed the Tiber at Rome. Some were so old they had become sacred, like the Pons Sublicius on which no metal might be used; others were so well built that the Pons Fabricius is still usable today.
The arch in architecture as the Roman arch began here and became the bridge over hundreds of thousands of streams in the white man’s world.
Pliny thought the aqueducts were the greatest achievement of the Romans. If anyone considers the abundant water skillfully brought to the city for so many public and private uses, if he notices the lofty aqueducts required to maintain gradient and level, and sees the mountains that had to be pierced and the valleys that had to be filled, he will admit that nothing more wonderful exists on the whole earth.
Fourteen aqueducts from distant springs, with a total length of about 265 miles, brought nearly 300,000,000 gallons of water daily to Rome through channels and over magnificent arches; the amount per person equaled that supplied in any modern progressive city.
These structures were not flawless; lead pipes leaked and required constant repair. By the end of the western empire all aqueducts had fallen out of use. Yet when we remember that they supplied water to houses, tenements, palaces, fountains, gardens, public gardens, and public baths where thousands bathed simultaneously, with enough left for artificial lakes for naval shows, we gradually realize that, despite a government of terror and corruption, Rome was the best-administered capital in the ancient world and one of the best-equipped cities in all history.
At the head of the water administration in the late first century stood Sextus Julius Frontinus, whose books have made him the most famous Roman engineer. Before this post he had been praetor and governor of Britain and had held several consulships. Like modern British statesmen he found time both to govern and to write.
He published a book on military science, the last part of which survives as Strategemata, and left personal notes on the water supply of Rome as De Aquis Urbis Romae. He describes the corruption and fraud he found when he took office — how palaces and brothels secretly tapped the main pipes with such greed that Rome once ran dry — and explains his determined reforms. Like Pliny he concludes: Who would dare compare these vast aqueducts with the useless pyramids or the famous but profitless works of the Greeks?
Here we meet a Roman who is frankly utilitarian and has little regard for beauty unless it is accompanied by utility. We can understand his words and agree that a city needs clean water before it can have a Parthenon. In these unartistic books we discover that even in the age of despots there were still Romans of the old type — able, complete men and faithful administrators who enabled the empire to progress despite bad government and who opened the way to the golden age of the principate.
The Merchants and Traders
Improved government and transport raised Mediterranean commerce to unprecedented greatness. At one end were peddlers carrying everything from sulfur matches to expensive foreign silks across the country; itinerant auctioneers who also acted as town criers announcing lost goods and runaway slaves; daily markets and periodic fairs; shopkeepers who haggled with buyers, cheated with false or tipped scales, and watched the inspectors of weights and measures out of the corner of their eye; and one step higher, shops that sold goods of their own manufacture. These were the backbone of industry and trade.
In or near the ports were wholesalers who sold goods newly arrived from abroad to retailers or customers; sometimes the owner or captain of a merchant ship sold his cargo directly from the deck.
For two centuries Italy had an “unfavorable” balance of trade — it bought more than it sold and was happy. Campania exported pottery, wine, oil, metalware, glass, and perfumes; other Italian products stayed inside the country. Meanwhile wholesalers everywhere in the empire had agents buying goods for Italy, and foreign merchants, Greek or Syrian traveling salesmen, had representatives in Italy seeking customers for them.
Through this double flow the luxuries of half the world came to Rome to please the taste, clothe the bodies, and adorn the houses of the first-class Romans. Aelius Aristides says: Whoever wishes to see all the goods of the world should either travel over the whole world or stay in Rome.
From Sicily came grain, cattle, leather, wine, wool, fine inlays, statues, and jewels; from North Africa, grain and oil; from Cyrenaica, silphium; from central Africa, wild beasts for the gladiatorial arena; from Ethiopia and East Africa, ivory, ebony, tortoise shell, rare marble, obsidian, spices, and black slaves; from West Africa, oil, dates, lemons, timber, pearls, dyes, and copper; from Spain, fish, cattle, wool, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, cinnabar, wheat, white cloth, cork, horses, pork, and the best olives and olive oil; from Gaul, clothing, wine, wheat, timber, vegetables, cattle, poultry, pottery, and cheese; from Britain, tin, lead, silver, leather, wheat, cattle, slaves, oysters, dogs, pearls, and wooden articles; from Belgium, flocks of geese were driven on foot to Italy to provide foie gras for aristocratic tables. From Germany came amber, slaves, and furs; from the Danube valley, wheat, cattle, iron, silver, and gold; from Greece and its islands, cheap silk, white cloth, wine, oil, honey, timber, marble, emeralds, drugs, works of art, perfumes, diamonds, and gold. From the Black Sea region came grain, fish, furs, leather, and slaves; from Asia Minor, fine linen and woolen cloth, parchment, wine, Smyrna figs and other figs, honey, cheese, oysters, carpets, oil, and timber; from Syria, wine, silk, linen cloth, glass, oil, apples, pears, plums, figs, dates, pomegranates, walnuts, balsam, Tyrian purple, and Lebanese cedar; from Palmyra, textiles, perfumes, and drugs; from Arabia, frankincense, myrrh, aloes, ladanum, ginger, cinnamon, and precious stones; from Egypt, grain, paper, white cloth, glass, jewels, granite, basalt, white marble, and emery. Thousands of manufactured articles from Alexandria, Sidon, Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Rhodes, Ephesus, and other great eastern cities came to Rome and the West, while raw materials and money flowed from West to East.
In addition there was noticeable import trade with lands outside the empire. From Parthia and Iran came jewels, rare dyes, Morocco leather, carpets, wild beasts, and eunuchs. From China — via Parthia, India, or the Caucasus — came cultivated or raw silk. Romans thought silk was a vegetable product taken from trees and paid its weight in gold. Much of it went to the island of Cos, where it was woven into garments for Roman ladies and other cities. In A.D. 91 the relatively poor province of Messenia had to forbid women from wearing transparent silk dresses in religious ceremonies. Cleopatra had dazzled Caesar and Antony with such garments. In return the Chinese imported carpets, jewels, amber, metals, dyes, drugs, and glass from the empire. Chinese historians speak of envoys who came by sea in A.D. 166 from the emperor “An-tun” — Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. It is more likely that they were merchants who presented themselves as ambassadors. Sixteen Roman coins struck from Tiberius to Marcus Aurelius have been found in Shansi.
From India came pepper, spikenard, and other spices (the same spices Columbus later sought), medicinal plants, ivory, ebony, sandalwood, lapis lazuli, pearls, agate, wool, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, ironware, cosmetics, textiles, tigers, and elephants. The extent of this trade and the Roman passion for luxuries can be gauged from the fact that Italy imported more from India than from any country except Spain. Strabo says 1,200 ships sailed every year from one Egyptian port to India and Ceylon. India received in return a little wine, metals, and purple, and for the rest — more than 100,000,000 sesterces a year — bullion or coin. A similar sum went to Arabia, China, and probably Spain.
This vast trade brought prosperity for two centuries, but its unsound basis ultimately ruined the Roman economy. Italy made no attempt to balance imports with exports; it seized the mines of a hundred provinces and taxed the people to obtain the money needed for its international balance. As the richest veins were exhausted and the love of foreign luxuries continued, Rome tried two remedies for bankruptcy: the conquest of new mining regions such as Dacia, and the debasement of the once sound currency — using less bullion and striking more coins. When the cost of administration and war approached the empire’s revenue, Rome was forced to pay in goods instead of money and failed. Italy’s dependence on imported food was a vital weakness; the moment it lost the power to compel other countries to send food and soldiers, its doom was sealed.
Meanwhile the provinces had not only recovered prosperity but regained economic initiative. Italian merchants almost disappeared from eastern ports in the first century, while Syrian and Greek merchants flourished at Delos and Puteoli and multiplied in Spain and Gaul. In the oscillating movement of history, the East was once more preparing to dominate the West.
The Bankers
How were the costs of production and trade paid? First by a relatively reliable coinage valid throughout the world. All Roman coins had gradually lost value since the First Punic War because the treasury had found it easy to pay state debts by permitting the inflationary expansion of money and contraction of goods.
The weight of the as, originally 453 grams of copper, had fallen to 56.6 grams in 241 B.C., 28.3 grams in 202, 14.2 grams in 87 B.C., and 7.1 grams in A.D. 60. In the last century of the Republic generals struck gold coins in their own name, usually worth one hundred sesterces. Imperial coins bearing the emperors’ portraits descended from these. Emperors followed Caesar’s practice of stamping their image on coins as a state guarantee.
The sesterce, formerly silver, was now struck in bronze and worth four asses. Nero reduced the silver content of the denarius to ninety percent of its former amount, Trajan to eighty-five, Marcus Aurelius to seventy-five, Commodus to seventy, and Septimius Severus to fifty. Nero reduced the weight of the gold coin from one-fortieth to one-forty-fifth of a pound of gold, Caracalla to one-fiftieth. Debasement was always accompanied by rising prices. Yet income apparently rose in proportion until the time of Marcus Aurelius.
This inflation may have been a painless way of relieving debtors at the expense of creditors who, if left unchecked, would have concentrated wealth to the point of economic stagnation and political revolution. Despite these changes, the Roman monetary system must be counted among the most stable and successful in history. For two centuries a single monetary standard was valid throughout the empire, and through this stability capital and trade flourished as never before in human memory.
Consequently bankers were everywhere: they performed exchange, accepted current and savings accounts with interest, issued traveler’s checks and bills of exchange, managed and bought and sold estates, invested capital, collected debts, and lent money to individuals or companies. This banking system came from Greece and the Greek East; even in Italy and the West it was mostly in the hands of Greeks and Syrians. In Gaul the words Syrian and banker were synonymous.
The interest rate, which had fallen to four percent after Augustus’s plunder of Egypt, rose to six percent after his death and reached the legal maximum of twelve percent by the time of Constantine.
The famous panic of A.D. 33 vividly illustrates the complex interdependence of banks and trade throughout the empire. Augustus had generously coined and spent money in the belief that rapid circulation, low interest, and rising prices would encourage trade. The encouragement worked, but since the process could not continue forever, the hasty coinage was stopped before 10 B.C. A reaction soon followed.
Tiberius went to the opposite extreme — he believed the most economical policy was the best. He sharply curtailed government expenditure, suddenly forbade new coinage, and hoarded 2,700,000,000 sesterces in the treasury. The resulting shortage of exchange was worsened by the flow of money eastward to pay for luxuries. Prices fell, interest rates rose, creditors pressed debtors, debtors pursued usurers, and lending almost ceased.
The Senate tried to stop the export of capital by requiring every senator to convert a large part of his fortune into Italian land. Senators therefore called in their loans and seized mortgaged or conditional estates to raise cash, and a crisis began. When Senator Publius Spinther informed the bank of Balbus and Ollius that he must withdraw 30,000,000 sesterces to obey the new law, the firm declared bankruptcy. At the same time the failure of Seuthes and Sons in Alexandria through the loss of three ships carrying expensive spices, and the collapse of the great dyeing firm of Malchus in Tyre, spread the rumor that the large Roman bank of Maximus and Vibo would fail because of heavy claims on these three firms. Depositors rushed to withdraw funds, the bank closed its doors, and later the same day the larger bank of the Petii brothers refused payment. Almost simultaneously news arrived that major banks in Lyon, Carthage, Corinth, and Byzantium had failed. Roman banks closed one after another. Money could be borrowed only at rates far above the legal limit.
Tiberius finally suspended the compulsory land-purchase law and distributed 100,000,000 sesterces for three years without interest, secured by land, among the banks. Lenders were forced to lower rates; money came out of hiding, and confidence gradually returned.
The Social Classes
Almost everyone in Rome worshiped money with insane eagerness, yet everyone except bankers spoke ill of it. Ovid put into the mouth of a god the words: If you think honey is sweeter than cash in hand, how little you know the age you live in. A century later Juvenal sneered at the “sacred majesty of wealth.”
Roman law until the end of the empire prevented senators from investing their capital in trade or industry; though senators evaded this by having their freedmen put their money to work, they hated their agents and recognized government by birth as the only legitimate successor to government by money, belief, or the sword.
After all revolutions and losses, the old class divisions survived at least in titles. Senators and knights, magistrates and officials were generally called “honorable,” whether the honor was innate or acquired by office; others were generally “humble” or “plebeian.” The sense of honor was often mixed with the dignified pride of the senator: he served in several unpaid public offices at personal loss, administered important duties with reasonable competence and integrity, provided public entertainments and gladiatorial sports, helped his clients, freed some of his slaves, and shared part of his wealth through charity, both during life and after death.
Because of senatorial obligations every senator was required to possess one million sesterces to qualify or remain in the order. One senator, Gnaeus Lentulus, had 400,000,000 sesterces. But except for him the greatest fortunes in Rome belonged to merchants who did not shrink from trade.
While the emperors reduced the powers of the Senate they showed favor to the commercial class by granting high offices, protected industry, trade, and finance, and based the security of the empire against senatorial conspiracies on the strength of the knights. Membership in the equestrian order required 400,000 sesterces and nomination by the emperor himself. As a result many wealthy men remained among the common people.
The plebs were now a melting pot of un-nominated merchants, freeborn workers, peasant proprietors, teachers, physicians, artists, and freedmen. The census defined the proletariat by number of children rather than occupation. An old Latin treatise calls them: the common people who contribute nothing to the country except children.
Most of them worked in shops, factories, and city trades at a daily wage of one denarius (about forty American cents in 1942 values); this rate rose in later centuries but not as fast as prices. Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs only in speed. One must expect it in every age and every type of society and government, but it has seldom been practiced with the cruelty and intensity of ancient Rome.
Once all were poor and unaware of their poverty; now poverty rubbed shoulders with wealth and suffered from awareness of it. Yet utter degradation was prevented by charity, occasional gifts from patrons to clients, and generous bequests such as that of Balbus, who left twenty-five denarii to every Roman citizen.
Class divisions stopped short of hereditary castes; yet any able individual could rise from slavery, amass wealth, and reach high office in the emperor’s service. The son of a freedman was a free man with full rights, and his grandson could become a senator. Before long the grandson of a freedman named Pertinax even became emperor.
In the first century many important offices were held by freedmen. They were often entrusted with the emperor’s finances in the provinces, the aqueducts of Rome, mines, quarries, imperial estates, and the supply of army camps. Freedmen and slaves, mostly of Greek or Syrian origin, administered the imperial palaces and held sensitive posts in the emperor’s cabinet. Small industries and trade fell increasingly under freedmen’s supervision. Some became great capitalists and large landowners. A few gathered the greatest fortunes of their time.
Their past had rarely endowed them with high interests or moral standards; after manumission money became the chief and often the only interest of their lives. They acquired it without scruple and spent it without taste. Petronius in his portrait of Trimalchio has mercilessly flayed them, and Seneca with less violence smiles at the nouveaux riches who bought finely bound books for decoration and never read them. These sneers were probably in part the jealous reaction of a class that saw its ancient rights to exploitation and luxury being violated and could not forgive those who rose to share in income and power.
The success of freedmen should logically have given hope to the class that performed most of the manual labor in Rome. Bloch estimated about 30 B.C. that there were 400,000 slaves in the city of Rome — almost half the population — and 1,500,000 in Italy. If we can believe Athenaeus, some Romans owned 20,000 slaves.
A proposal in the Senate that slaves wear distinctive clothing was rejected lest they realize their numerical strength. Galen around A.D. 170 gave the ratio of slaves to free men in Pergamum as one to three — twenty-five percent. The proportion was probably similar in other cities. The price of a human being ranged from 330 sesterces for a farm slave to 700,000 sesterces ($105,000) that Marcus Scaurus paid for Daphnis, a grammar teacher. The average price at this time was 4,000 sesterces ($400). Eighty percent of workers in industry and retail trade were slaves, and most manual, clerical, and government work was done by “imperial slaves.”
Domestic slaves performed varied tasks: personal attendant, craftsman, tutor, cook, barber, musician, copyist, librarian, artist, physician, philosopher, eunuch, witness (at least a cupbearer), and even the deformed who provided amusement by their defects. In Rome there was a special market where one could buy slaves without feet or hands, three-eyed men, giants, dwarfs, or hermaphrodites.
Domestic slaves were sometimes beaten and occasionally killed. Nero’s father killed freedmen because they would not drink as much as he wished. Seneca, in his essay on anger, describes instruments of wooden torture and other tools of torment, dungeons, fires kindled around prisoners, hooks that dragged corpses, various chains and punishments, tearing of limbs, and branding of foreheads; these seem to have been part of life on the farms. Juvenal describes a lady who, while having her hair curled, ordered her slaves to be repeatedly flogged. Ovid describes another who stuck her hairpin into her maid’s arm; but these stories show literary flair and should not be taken as literal history.
We are in danger of exaggerating the cruelty of the past just as we multiply the crime and immorality of the present — because the rarer a form of oppression, the more interesting it is. Gradually the lot of domestic slaves improved in the imperial period because they were increasingly accepted into families, mutual affection developed, some masters performed services for their slaves, and employment was more secure than today. Slaves were not deprived of family life, and tombstones of slaves show the same tenderness expressed toward free persons.
One stone reads: Father and mother raised this stone to Eucopion who lived six months and three days, the sweetest and most delightful of children; though he never spoke, he was our greatest happiness. Other epitaphs show the most affectionate relations between master and slave: a master declares he loved his deceased attendant like a son; a young noble mourns his nurse; a nurse laments the child entrusted to her; a learned woman erects a delicate memorial to her librarian. Statius wrote a consolatory poem for Flavius Ursus on the death of his beloved slave.
It was not uncommon for slaves to risk their lives to save their masters; many willingly accompanied masters into exile, and some sacrificed their lives for them. Some owners freed and married their slaves or concubines; others treated slaves as friends. Seneca dined with his slave. The softening of morals and sensibility, the absence of racial color distinction between master and slave, Stoic principles, and classless eastern cults all contributed to the mitigation of slavery; but the main factors were economic self-interest in treating slaves well and the rising price of slaves.
Many slaves were respected for their high cultural abilities — shorthand writers, research assistants, secretaries, financial managers, artists, physicians, grammar teachers, and philosophers. In many cases slaves could trade on their own account, give part of the income to the master, and keep the rest as pocket money. Usually within six years a slave could buy freedom through such earnings, honest or exceptional service, or personal charm.
The condition of workers and even slaves was somewhat improved by the creation of collegia or workers’ associations. By the time history records them, many such collegia had appeared, each devoted to a specific trade: separate guilds of trumpeters, horn players, clarion players, flute players, bagpipers, and others.
A collegium usually imitated the municipalities of Italy: it generally had a hierarchy of officers and one or more patron deities for whom it built a temple and held an annual festival. Like cities, these guilds asked rich men and women for support, and they accepted, paying for processions, meeting halls, and tombs in return for honors.
If we equate these trade associations with modern labor unions we err; they are better seen as Christian brotherhoods with their endless honorary offices and titles, fraternal sociability, and simple mutual aid. The wealthy often encouraged the formation of these guilds and left bequests to them in their wills. In the collegium all men were “brothers” and all women “sisters.” In some, slaves sat in council with freeborn men. Every “distinguished member” was assured a splendid memorial when he died.
In the last century of the Republic demagogues of various factions discovered that many collegia could be persuaded to vote as a block for a chosen candidate; thus the trade associations became political tools of patricians, plutocrats, and radicals, and the corruption they fostered helped destroy Roman democracy. Caesar outlawed them, but they revived. Augustus dissolved all except a few useful ones. Trajan outlawed them all again. Marcus Aurelius tolerated their existence.
It was clear that throughout this period, whether legally or illegally, they continued to function. In the end they became the channel through which Christianity penetrated and mastered the life of the people.
Economy and the State
To what extent did the imperial government try to supervise economic life? It attempted to revive peasant ownership and largely failed; here the more enlightened emperors were wiser than the Senate, for the owners of vast estates dominated the Senate. Domitian tried to encourage grain growing in Italy but failed; consequently Italy lived in constant fear of famine.
Vespasian forced the Senate to accept him as emperor by controlling Egypt, then the chief source of grain for Italy. Septimius Severus did the same by seizing North Africa. The government had to guarantee the import and distribution of grain and therefore controlled it. It granted privileges to merchants who brought grain to Italy; Claudius guaranteed compensation for their losses and Nero exempted their ships from property tax. Delay or shipwreck of the grain fleet was the only thing that could rouse the Roman populace to revolution.
Roman economy was a kind of free trade moderated by state ownership of natural resources — mines, quarries, fisheries, salt deposits, and vast tracts of arable land. Legions made their own bricks and tiles for their buildings and were often used in construction, especially in the provinces. The manufacture of weapons and war machines was probably confined to state factories; the same type of state factories known in the third century may have existed in the first.
Public buildings were usually let by strict government supervision to private contractors so that work was well done and corruption and waste minimized. Around A.D. 80 free labor was increasingly performed by the emperor’s freedmen and state slaves. At all times, reduction of unemployment seems to have been one purpose of the government in undertaking these works.
Trade was not heavily burdened. A one percent sales tax and light customs duties, sometimes tolls for crossing bridges or passing through cities, were the only restrictions. Market officials, under excellent regulations, supervised retail trade. But if we can believe one angry character created by Petronius, these officials were no better than their counterparts in other ages: They conspire with the bakers and other rascals of the same sort … and the capitalists always have their mouths open.
Finance was affected by government interference in coinage and by the competition of the treasury, which was apparently the largest banker in the empire; it took farmers’ produce as security and lent to them at interest, and for city dwellers it accepted their furniture as pledge.
Trade benefited from war, which opened new sources and markets and brought trade routes under control. Thus Gallus’s expedition to Arabia secured access to India against Arab and Parthian competition. Pliny complained that the purpose of campaigns was to give Roman ladies and gentlemen freer choice in perfumes.
One should not exaggerate the wealth of ancient Rome. The annual revenue of the government under Vespasian was 1,500,000,000 sesterces (about $150,000,000) — less than one-fifth of the budget of New York City in our time. The means of accumulating great fortunes through mass production was unknown or known but ignored, and it had not created the great taxable industries and commerce of the present.
The Roman government spent less on its navy and nothing on a national debt; it lived within its income, not on loans. Because industry was largely domestic, its products did not pass through many hands and multiple taxes on the way to the consumer as they do today. People produced more for their own locality and less for unseen markets. They used their bodies more, worked longer hours but with less intensity, and did not suffer from the lack of a thousand luxuries they never dreamed of.
They could not compete with our wealth even in their least productive years; but they enjoyed a happiness that the Mediterranean nations had not known before and, on the whole, have not seen since; and this was the peak of material progress in the ancient world.
Written & researched by Dr. Shahin Siami