The Roman Economy
Unlike the Etruscan city-states to the north, Rome’s lands were blessed with little in the way of metal-bearing deposits. Instead Rome’s primary resources were its fertile agricultural lands and accompanying dense population (F. Tenney, 1927). The ager Romanus, Rome’s sovereign territory, was a patchwork of small villages, farmsteads and fields for grains and pasturage. This, however, did not set Rome apart from its neighbours in central Tyrrhenian Italy or explain Rome’s great power relative to them. Modern scholarship has rightly concluded that what comprised Roman exceptionalism in this regard was the cities’ particular location at an important ford in the Tiber River (Forsythe, 117). Aside from some defensible hills near to the crossing, the ford should be understood as a primary reason why a community existed there at all. The ford in the Tiber added to Rome’s growth by making it from the earliest times a center of regional trade and commerce. On an east-west axis, the via Campania-via Salaria crossed the Tiber at Rome, allowing the city to benefit between the salt-works at the mouth of the Tiber and the peoples of the Apennines further west. In addition to this axis of trade, roads north to the rich Etruscan cities also emanated from the ford, Veii and Caere being the closest way-points, and south through Latium and the Trerus (modern Sacco) valley to the Greek and Etruscan cities in Campania. The rich burials found at the Latin towns of Praeneste (Forsythe, 57) and Castel di Decima (Forsythe, 56), dating from the late 8th century to the early 7th century BC, attest to the rich trade in luxury items that took place in Latium prior even to Rome's urbanization. Thus, the central position of Rome along several regional trade routes provides a good answer to the cities’ large population and its high growth rate relative to its neighbours. From far and wide, Rome then became a magnet for commercial interests, local industry and those wishing to profit from residing in a large and fast-growing community. Perhaps the most well-known example of this is the tradition of Attus Clausus, a Sabine noble, who brought his family and dependants to Rome and became a senator (Livy 2.16). Rome indeed was at 400 BC, as it had always been, a cosmopolitan city of Latins, Sabines and Etruscans, even though its language and culture remained always Latin.
In the late 5th and 4th century BC, however, Rome’s agricultural economy was undergoing some important changes. The dense population of the 6th century BC, an important well-spring of the cities power, had over-farmed the rich but thin soil of the Latin plain, causing harvest yields to plummet (Tenney, 1927). The food shortages and droughts related in the traditions, such as in 392 BC and 384 BC are examples of the serious nature of the situation. With the forests cleared away, run-off from the Alban Mount, the Apennines and the Volscian range gradually washed away the thin loam which grain-roots were unable to hold in place. Possibly before the end of the 5th century BC, much of the exhausted farmlands were going over to sheep and cattle-herding, which could be maintained on such lands and whose new occupants self-fertilized the soil. As Rome’s territories expanded into the Volscian, Auruncian, and Apennine ranges, transhumance, the seasonal moving of flocks between lowlands and highlands to suit the season, became possible, making pastoral enterprises yet more viable. During this period, the slopes ringing the Latin plain also saw a large increase in the practice of viticulture: the growing of olives and grapes, whose strong roots did serve well to hold the precious soil in place. The heavy investments and delayed profits stemming from such agricultural practices as pastoralism and viticulture naturally were easier for the rich local landlords to bear. Through outright purchase, foreclosure on debts, distribution of conquered territory and the monopolization of state lands, the rich landed-nobility of Rome gradually built up their estates, at the expense of the small peasant farmers, who steadily during the 4th century were being called away and enrolled in the legions to fight for the state. This unpleasant situation is no doubt a major underlying factor in many of the internal crises of the Roman state at this time, such as the selling of citizens into nexum, or debt-bondage when their meager plots failed them, the land and over-population problems and the political dissension between the rich patrician nobility and the lower plebeian class. It has been noted that archaic Greece underwent a similar crisis of overpopulation and land exhaustion, which led to wholesale migrations to Italy and Sicily in the 8th century BC. The outlet for the Roman population, by comparison, proved in the end to be conquest and colonization. In this way, the population problem of the Roman state was tackled, to the satisfaction of both peasants and nobility alike, it would seem. One other aspect of the changing economy of the Roman state in the early 4th century was the large increase in chattel slavery. During this period Roman victories brought in immense numbers of foreign slaves. In 346 BC, for example, 4000 Volscian soldiers captured at Satricum were sold by the state, providing a great boon to the treasury, as per Livy (7.27) Slaves were used for a variety of economic functions and became an important commercial trade in the city. With the emancipation of Roman citizens from the chains of nexum in the 40th century BC, foreign slaves became an important labour pool for the rich land-owners. They used slaves to till their fields and tend their flocks, while Roman citizens were freed up for other important state projects such as colonization and war-fighting.