“Well, better luck next time. Marcus Porcius, I may soon need your help on a matter pertaining to my activities as aedile.”
His perpetual frown deepened. “You have seldom sought my help in the past,” he said. “Never, now that I think of it. Why now?”
“Because my usual sources of support have turned their backs on me, and for once I think you will approve of what I am doing.”
“That would indeed be a prodigy,” he said, with his usual, heavy sarcasm. “I am listening.”
So I told him of my investigation and where it had led me. His expression did not change throughout the recital, but I knew that he was absorbing every word and would be able to repeat them verbatim ten years hence. He had a rare fixity of concentration. When I was finished, he gave a curt nod.
“This is most worthy,” he said. “You have a genuine devotion to duty, Decius Caecilius, despite your deplorable frivolity. I especially disapprove of your emphasis on theatrical performances in your upcoming Games. Such alien entertainments render the people weak and passive. You need more combats and animal hunts and executions. Those are the things that strengthen and harden the citizens. And awnings are a totally unnecessary luxury. Let them endure a few hours of sunlight; it will do them good. And another thing—” and so on and on. You had to put up with this sort of thing from Cato if you wanted his aid. Wait, I thought, until he hears about my seat cushions. Finally, he got back to the business at hand.
“I think it has been far too long since anyone has taken action against the whole pack of greedy, money-grubbing builders. I don’t recall a serious campaign against them since Sulla. He fined them, drove them from the City, and executed a few as an example. That is what we need now.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, “but you realize that it means crossing some of the most important men in the Senate as well as the richest of the equites?“
“What of that?” he snarled. “Anyone, however highborn or powerful, who puts riches above the public weal should be cast from the Tarpeian Rock, then dragged on a hook through the streets and down the Tiber steps and cast into the river, preferably still breathing through the whole ordeal. That’s how we used to deal with traitors! And traitors they are, Decius! It is bad enough that wealthy freedmen have gained so much power, but now they have corrupted their betters as well. Since our earliest days, filthy commerce has been forbidden to the nobility. Using money to make money is an abomination! Some avaricious sophist came up with the dodge that stone, clay, and timber come from the land and therefore owners of estates may traffic in them legitimately as products of virtuous agriculture.”
This was a typical rant from Cato. As usual, he blamed all corruption on foreigners and the lower classes. His own class had been pure, pristine, and above it all before they were tempted by those whom the gods adored less.
My own interpretation of our social history differs somewhat from Cato’s. Dispensing with pleasing myths like the story of the Trojan prince Aeneas, according to myth the son of Venus, and his son, Julus, from whom Caesar traces his ancestry, it goes somewhat as follows:
About seven hundred years ago, a pack of bandits arrived in central Italy, led by two brothers named Romulus and Remus. They despoiled the nearby peoples of land and women and set up their own little bandit state. At some point, Romulus established a fine old Roman tradition by murdering his brother. Had it been the other way around, I suppose we might now be living in a city named Reme.
After a period of rule by kings, some of them Etruscan, our ancestors established the Republic. The pack of families who controlled everything called themselves patricians, and they owned all the land that was worth anything. Since they were nothing but wealthy farmers, they decreed that only wealthy farmers had any claim to honor and respectability. Money from any source save farming was tainted, since it was a kind of money they never got.
The lesser people were the plebeians, who got here a little too late to claim the better land, all that having gone to the first pack of bandits and passed on to their descendants. The plebeians had the virtue of numbers, and the patricians needed them if there was to be an army; and the rest of Roman history has been a struggle between the classes for power. These plebeians wanted to own land and be respectable, too; and some of them, my own family among them, managed the feat. It is a rule that good land is already claimed, so the only way to get some of it was to take it away from somebody else, and that was how we got started on the path to empire.
There was one exception to this wealth-from-landequals-honor rule: Loot taken in war was also honorable. This consisted of anything the people you killed left lying about, plus the people themselves, if they were still breathing and capable of work. If you captured the wealthier ones, you could sell them back to their families. Crudely put, besides farming, the only honorable ways to make money were theft, slaving, and ransom.