“None [of the persons desirous to contract on the occasion of letting] shall withdraw, for the sake of causing the gathering and pressing of the olives to be let at a dearer rate; except when [the joint bidder] immediately names [the other bidder] as his partner.  If this rule shall appear to have been infringed, all the partners [of the company with which the contract has been concluded] shall, if desired by the landlord or the overseer appointed by him, take an oath [that they have not conspired in this way to prevent competition].  If they do not take the oath, the stipulated price is not to be paid.”  It is tacitly assumed that the contract is taken by a company, not by an individual capitalist.

27.  III.  XIII.  Religious Economy

28.  Livy (xxi. 63; comp.  Cic.  Verr. v. 18, 45) mentions only the enactment as to the sea-going vessels; but Asconius (in Or. in toga cand. p. 94, Orell.) and Dio. (lv. 10, 5) state that the senator was also forbidden by law to undertake state-contracts (-redemptiones-); and, as according to Livy “all speculation was considered unseemly for a senator,” the Claudian law probably reached further than he states.

29.  Cato, like every other Roman, invested a part of his means in the breeding of cattle, and in commercial and other undertakings.  But it was not his habit directly to violate the laws; he neither speculated in state-leases—­which as a senator he was not allowed to do—­nor practised usury.  It is an injustice to charge him with a practice in the latter respect at variance with his theory; the -fenus nauticum-, in which he certainly engaged, was not a branch of usury prohibited by the law; it really formed an essential part of the business of chartering and freighting vessels.

CHAPTER XIII

Faith and Manners

Roman Austerity and Roman Pride

Life in the case of the Roman was spent under conditions of austere restraint, and, the nobler he was, the less he was a free man.  All-powerful custom restricted him to a narrow range of thought and action; and to have led a serious and strict or, to use the characteristic Latin expressions, a sad and severe life, was his glory.  No one had more and no one had less to do than to keep his household in good order and manfully bear his part of counsel and action in public affairs.  But, while the individual had neither the wish nor the power to be aught else than a member of the community, the glory and the might of that community were felt by every individual burgess as a personal possession to be transmitted along with his name and his homestead to his posterity; and thus, as one generation after another was laid in the tomb and each in succession added its fresh contribution to the stock of ancient honours, the collective sense of dignity in the noble families of Rome swelled into that mighty civic pride, the like of which the earth has never seen again, and the traces