Closely connected with this was the immeasurable field of enterprise.  The system of transacting business through mediate agency pervaded the whole dealings of Rome.  The state took the lead by letting all its more complicated revenues and all contracts for furnishing supplies and executing buildings to capitalists, or associations of capitalists, for a fixed sum to be given or received.  But private persons also uniformly contracted for whatever admitted of being done by contract—­for buildings, for the ingathering of the harvest,(15) and even for the partition of an inheritance among the heirs or the winding up of a bankrupt estate; in which case the contractor—­usually a banker—­received the whole assets, and engaged on the other hand to settle the liabilities in full or up to a certain percentage and to pay the balance as the circumstances required.

Commerce
Manufacturing Industry

The prominence of transmarine commerce at an early period in the Roman national economy has already been adverted to in its proper place.  The further stimulus, which it received during the present period, is attested by the increased importance of the Italian customs-duties in the Roman financial system.(16) In addition to the causes of this increase in the importance of transmarine commerce which need no further explanation, it was artificially promoted by the privileged position which the ruling Italian nation assumed in the provinces, and by the exemption from customs-dues which was probably even now in many of the client-states conceded by treaty to the Romans and Latins.

On the other hand, industry remained comparatively undeveloped.  Trades were no doubt indispensable, and there appear indications that to a certain extent they were concentrated in Rome; Cato, for instance, advises the Campanian landowner to purchase the slaves’ clothing and shoes, the ploughs, vats, and locks, which he may require, in Rome.  From the great consumption of woollen stuffs the manufacture of cloth must undoubtedly have been extensive and lucrative.(17) But no endeavours were apparently made to transplant to Italy any such professional industry as existed in Egypt and Syria, or even merely to carry it on abroad with Italian capital.  Flax indeed was cultivated in Italy and purple dye was prepared there, but the latter branch of industry at least belonged essentially to the Greek Tarentum, and probably the import of Egyptian linen and Milesian or Tyrian purple even now preponderated everywhere over the native manufacture.

Under this category, however, falls to some extent the leasing or purchase by Roman capitalists of landed estates beyond Italy, with a view to carry on the cultivation of grain and the rearing of cattle on a great scale.  This species of speculation, which afterwards developed to proportions so enormous, probably began particularly in Sicily, within the period now before us; seeing that the commercial restrictions imposed on the Siceliots,(18) if not introduced for the very purpose, must have at least tended to give to the Roman speculators, who were exempt from such restrictions, a sort of monopoly of the profits derivable from land.