knowledge that members of the Roman nobility were taking holiday trips
to country towns, to enjoy the delights which were prohibited at home
and to waste their money on Italian caterers.[86]

The frequency of such legislation, which we shall find renewed once
again before the epoch of the reforms of Sulla[87] seems to prove its
ineffectiveness,[88] and indeed the standard of comfort which it desired
to enjoin was wholly incompatible with the circumstances of the age. The
desire to produce uniformity[89] of standard had always been an end of
Roman as of Greek sumptuary regulation, but what type of uniformity
could be looked for in a community where the extremes of wealth and
poverty were beginning to be so strongly marked, where capital was
accumulating in the hands of the great noble and the great trader and
being wholly withdrawn from those of the free-born peasant and artisan?
The restriction of useless consumption was indeed favourable to the more
productive employment of capital; but we shall soon see that this
productive use, which had as its object the deterioration of land by
pasturage and the purchase of servile labour, was as detrimental to the
free citizen as the most reckless extravagance could have been. There is
no question, however, that both the sumptuary laws and the censorian
ordinances of the period did attempt to attain an economic as well as a
social end; and, however mistaken their methods may have been, they
showed some appreciation of the industrial evils of the time. The
provision of the Fannian law in favour of native wines suggests the
desire to help the small cultivator who had substituted vine-growing for
the cultivation of cereals, and foreshadows the protective legislation
of the Ciceronian period.[90] Much of this legislation, too, was
animated by the "mercantile" theory that a State is impoverished by the
export of the precious metals to foreign lands[91]--a view which found
expression in a definite enactment of an earlier period which had