A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate by A. H. J. (Abel Hendy Jones) Greenidge
page 45 of 712 (06%)
page 45 of 712 (06%)
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But, whatever the effects of the metallic prizes of the great campaigns, these prizes could neither have benefited the members of the nobility as a whole nor, in the days of comparative peace which had followed the long epoch of war with wealthy powers, could they be contemplated as a permanent source of future capital or income. When the representative of the official caste looked round for modes of fruitful investment which might increase his revenues, his chances at first sight appeared to be limited by legal restrictions which expressed the supposed principles of his class. A Clodian law enacted at the beginning of the Second Punic War had provided that no senator or senator's son should own a ship of a burden greater than three hundred amphorae. The intention of the measure was to prohibit members of the governing class from taking part in foreign trade, as carriers, as manufacturers, or as participants in the great business of the contract for corn which placed provincial grain on the Roman market; and the ships of small tonnage which they were allowed to retain were intended to furnish them merely with the power of transporting to a convenient market the produce of their own estates in Italy.[103] The restriction was not imposed in a self-regarding spirit; it was odious to the nobility, and, as it was supported by Flaminius, must have been popular with the masses, who were blind to the fact that the restriction of a senator's energies to agriculture would be infinitely more disastrous to the well-being of the average citizen than the expenditure of those energies in trade. The restriction may have received the support of the growing merchant class, who were perhaps pleased to be rid of the competition of powerful rivals, and it certainly served, externally at least, to mark the distinction between the man of large industrial enterprises and the man whose official rank was supported by landed wealth--a distinction which, in the shape of the contrast drawn between knights and senators, appears at every turn in |
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