Wealth, rank and officeholding in Roman Italy : a quantitative study

Abstract

This thesis challenges the conventional understanding of the relationship between wealth, officeholding and socio-political rank in early-imperial Italy. Many previous approaches to the Roman economy employ rank as a proxy for wealth. This study shows the need to distinguish the two. The core of the analysis involves an assessment of the overlap between the members of the three orders (a socio-political category) and the households with sufficient wealth for these ranks (an economic category). I use an econometric model to reconstruct the Italian wealth distribution to estimate the number of these households. Since the heterogeneity of the Italian civitates precludes a straightforward extrapolation from the scarce and biased evidence, I create a tessellated model which consists of the amalgamation of the reconstructed wealth distributions for all the Italian civitates individually. The results imply that the households whose wealth surpassed the requirements to enter the socio-political orders were significantly more numerous than the actual members of these orders. This conclusion has wide ramifications for our understanding of the social demography and political economy of Roman Italy. For example, previous models employing socio-political rank to estimate the number of domestic slaves held by the Italian elite underestimated their number significantly. Furthermore, the number of households with the requisite wealth for political office was considerably higher than the number of actual officeholders. This surplus of households satisfying the census qualifications implies that competition for these offices might have been fierce. Moreover, the surplus constituted the resilience of the timocratic system enabling it to absorb the reverses in the Italian economy during the Early Empire. Accordingly, differences in the size of the surplus at the curial, equestrian and senatorial level reflect the evidence for the shortages of candidates, i.e. the failure of the timocratic system, at these levels. Finally, the surplus at the curial level was not distributed evenly over the Italian communities. In combination with the predominantly localised nature of the economic reverses, this implies that the ‘third-century curial crisis’ must be understood as a drawn-out complex of local failures rather than a sudden universal collapse.