BUSINESS

INTRODUCTION

In the pre-industrial ancient world, there were, effectively, no such things as ‘jobs’, with terms of employment, annual holidays and wages. For virtually everyone, bar the rich, soldiers (while soldiering) and city-dwellers, survival meant never-ending working on the land, day in, day out, year in, year out, in order to eat (see here–here). It was, literally, life or death. Popular morality rammed home the point. Aesop contrasted the ant, who worked to prepare for the winter, with the grasshopper, who sang the summer away and paid the price.

Industrial manufacture on the scale we understand it barely existed. There is something of an exception with the large-scale production of pottery which we hear about in Gaul. A red-gloss pottery produced at Arretium in Italy suddenly became extremely popular. So pottery production was set up in Lyon, southern Gaul and North Africa, all of it stamped ‘Arretine’. That said, it was not all produced in one gigantic factory, but spread among local potteries, none employing more than about twenty people.

But that was unusual. Business in the ancient world meant trade, farming, moneylending and winning state contracts. At one end of the scale, trade consisted of town markets and local trade, with farmers large and small buying and selling their goods and services. At the other end, it meant what is today called Monte Testaccio, ‘The Hill of Pots’. This consists of the now broken amphorae (clay storage jars) – they could be used only once – which brought olive oil from southern Spain to Rome. It has been estimated that some 4 billion kilograms (4.5 million tons) of olive oil were imported in the first two centuries AD. About 2 million tons of grain were imported annually, and about 1.8 million hectolitres of wine (40 million gallons).

Further, as the Roman Empire expanded, its trade expanded too. No fewer than 120 ships made the Red Sea–India run in the 20s BC; in 25 BC an Indian embassy visited the emperor Augustus in Spain. We know of a Syrian trader, Barates, working and marrying in South Shields, 4,000 miles from home, serving the army that guarded Hadrian’s Wall. We hear of one Alexandros making a journey to Sri Lanka and the South China Sea, perhaps Hanoi and Java. Roman goods have been found in Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Vietnam, though that does not prove that Romans traded there, only that people who traded with Romans traded there.

As for the aristocrats, their wealth lay in their huge estates and the gigantic profits they could make from working them efficiently with slave labour. This not only generated the cash they needed to climb the greasy pole of power, but – if the estate was properly looked after – it brought prestige and social status too.

All this trade was greatly facilitated by cash: the economy was ‘monetarized’, though naturally barter and payment in kind continued. But since Rome had no economic policy and understood little about money supply and its effects, shortages of coins occurred. When Vitellius launched his bid to become emperor in AD 69, the historian Suetonius tells us:

So short of money was his household that it is generally agreed that he had no money at all for the journey to Germany, and had to rent a garret for his wife and children whom he was leaving behind in Rome, and let out his own house for the remaining part of the year. He also took the pearl ear-ring from his mother’s very ear to pawn it for the expenses of the journey. Nor could he get away from the crowd of creditors who waylaid him (and who included the people of Sinuessa and Formiae, whose public revenues he had illegally seized), until he threatened them with prosecution for personal insult, on the grounds that an ex-slave who was claiming a particularly large sum had kicked him…

The jurist Gaius understood the problem:

We know how the prices, particularly of wine, oil and grain, vary from community to community and region to region. It may seem that money has one and the same value everywhere; but in some places it can be found more easily and at a low level of interest, while in others it is more difficult to come by and at a substantial rate of interest.

But this problem was offset by the existence of basic systems of credit, moneylending and banking, both at the modest local, everyday level and on the very large scale too. This came about when groups of very wealthy people (equites and senators, the latter using third parties) got together to set up trade deals of the sort described for olive oil and wine above, and to bid for major state projects such as building roads and aqueducts and collecting taxes.

The role of the negotiator was important here. They set up deals and financed them. They played a major part, for example, in supplying the Roman armies with arms, food and equipment. Some started to specialize: we hear of negotiatores in wine and olive oil. But there is another point here. The wealthy did not want the hassle of doing ‘business’ all day long, let alone the risk of getting it wrong and losing their wealth. So it often paid them to hand everything over to negotiatores, for an agreed price. On one occasion, Pliny the Younger sold them the rights to pick and sell his grape harvest while it was still on the vine ‘and prospects seemed good’. But the harvest failed, threatening them with ruin. Far from leaving them in the lurch, however, Pliny established a complex system of rebates to those who had put the money up.

A monument from Rome’s port of Ostia illustrates just what involvement in the world of business meant to one man, Gnaeus Sentius Felix. It was set up by his son and described what he had done for Ostia. As well as serving as town mayor and treasurer he was:

senior official of the guild of superintendents of sea-going ships, co-opted without payment into the guild of the Adriatic sea shippers… He was patron of the… bankers, of the wine-dealers from the city of Rome, of the corn-measurers, and of the corporation of the rowers, and of the ferryboat-men… and of the citizens from the forum and the public weigh-house, and of the freedmen, of the public slaves, and of the oil-dealers, and of the young cabmen, and of the guild of the catchers and sellers of fish.

However much landowning aristocrats tended to sneer at commerce, people such as Felix were at the heart of the extraordinary prosperity that Rome brought to its empire.

BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS

The Latin socius meant ‘ally, comrade, companion’. This derives from Latin sequor, ‘I follow, accompany’ (our ‘sequence’, etc.). The Latin for a business partnership or consortium was societas (our ‘society’, ‘social’): a body of people united by a common purpose, especially in business (or crime).

We hear of Cato the Elder, famous for his ascetic lifestyle, being attacked for engaging in shipping finance, putting together a societas of fifty partners and ships and – through a third party – taking a share in it and reaping the profits:

He used to loan money in the most criticised of ways, that is in shipping, as follows. He required his many borrowers to form an association. When there were fifty partners and as many ships, he took one share in the company through his front-man and freedman, Quintio. Quintio dealt with the business and accompanied the ships on their voyages. In this way the risk did not fall on Cato entirely, but only a small part of it, and the profits were large.

MARINE DANGERS

Sailing the high seas (Latin mare, → ‘marine’) was indeed a risky business. The shipping season was basically March to September. People sailed by day, stopping over by night, though trading vessels did navigate by the stars if necessary (navigo, ‘I drive [ago], by ship [navis]’, our ‘navy’). They did not venture far from the coast either (Latin costa, ‘rib, side’), in case of a storm. The steersman was a gubernator (from which our ‘governor’, ‘government’); gubernator derives from Greek for ‘steersman’, kubernêtês (κυβερνητης), whence too ‘cybernetics’, the study of control systems.

THE SHIP OF STATE

The image of the ‘ship of state’, with a great leader at the helm (or not), was a common one in the ancient world. Horace began a poem which turns out to refer to the ship of state as follows:

O ship! Will new waves carry you out to sea
Again? What are you doing? Make boldly

For the harbour [portus]. Don’t you see how

Your side is stripped of oars,

Your mast is crippled by the swift sou’wester,
The yardarms [antennae] are groaning…

(trans. David West)

Portus, ‘harbour’ + the prefix ob, ‘towards’, lies at the root of our ‘opportune’: your boat has come safely into harbour, laden with goods for sale. Yardarms were the horizontal ‘arms’ or spas fixed onto the mast of a sailing ship, from which the sails were hung.*

PUBLICANS (AND SINNERS)

One important societas consisted of publicani (publicanus meant ‘state-authorized’). These were in fact private-sector businessmen who bid for state contracts, e.g. to build an aqueduct, work a mine, provide supplies to the legions, collect harbour dues and so on.

The most famous example is probably that of the publicani gathering taxes in the province of Asia (modern Turkey). Rome calculated how much tax it needed to gather from a province – in this case, one-tenth of agricultural produce. Societates would then be invited to bid to collect that sum. The winners paid the whole sum up front as a ‘loan’ to the state treasury, and so received interest on it from the state (though only when the work had been completed). The aim of the publicani, however, was to collect more than the state required, generating pure profit on top of the interest. That was where the big financial gains lay. It was for this reason that the Bible connected these ‘publicans’ with ‘sinners’, because of the reputation they gained for ruthlessly exploiting their position.

Publicans these days run public (drinking) houses, or pubs, so called because they are licensed to sell alcohol to the public. They first came to be called publicans instead of ‘pub landlords’ in Victorian times.

NO PEACE FOR THE BUSY

The leisured lifestyle of the wealthy, living off the products of their extensive holdings in land and property, was only for the very few. Such people looked down on those working for a living (see the attack on Cato for ‘working’, here), but there was no such feeling among the workers about a job: for them it was a matter of life or death, and the more flexible and multi-skilled they were, the better.

While the rich enjoyed their otium (‘leisure’), the workers were denied it: all they had was negotium (‘not-leisure’), which meant ‘business, pains, difficulty, trouble’, and businessmen, engaged in commercial activity, were negotiatores (→ ‘negotiate’). By the first century BC, Roman traders and dealers were all over the Empire. Cicero talks of Gaul being stuffed with negotiatores, wielding their account books and providing the coin with which to do business.

HARD COIN

There was a temple to Moneta in Rome where money was coined. Our ‘money’ derives from it. Romans also used moneta to mean the die stamp. Since coins were actually worth their weight, there was a temptation to debase them in hard times. Pliny the Elder said that Marc Antony ‘mixed the silver denarius with iron, forgers put bronze in moneta, others reduced the weight of a coin’.

Our ‘coin’, again, derives from the technicality of its production. The Latin cuneus meant ‘wedge’, and the die which stamped the coins was wedge-shaped. ‘Coin’ derives from cuneus. Given the importance of the weight of ancient coins, it is no surprise that weight features in the names of our coins too – our ‘pound’ derives from the Latin pond- stem, meaning ‘weight’ (our ‘ponderous’, etc.).

We keep coins in purses. This derives, via Late Latin, from Greek bursa (βυρσα), ‘ox hide’, and gives us ‘bursar’, ‘purser’, and the French bourse, ‘stock exchange’.

MONEY

The Latin for ‘money’ was pecunia (→ ‘pecuniary’, ‘impecunious’), based on pecu, ‘flock, herd, farm animals’. Basically it meant ‘wealth, possessions’, and only in time came to mean ‘cash’ (from Latin capsa, ‘box, container’, where cash should be kept). Filthy lucre derives from Latin lucrum, ‘material gain’, and the slang ‘spondulicks’ possibly from Greek sphondulos (σφονδυλος), ‘vertebra’, slang (apparently) for a stock of coins.

Land was the primary source of wealth in the ancient world: you could grow crops on it (arable farming – aro, ‘I plough’), feed animals off it (pastoral – pastor, ‘shepherd’) or dig minerals out of it. There were plenty of businesses in the ancient world, most small and some relatively so. But industry, capitalism and stock markets as we know them did not exist, nor did investment for long-term capital growth. Incidentally, ‘invest’ may derive from a fourteenth-century Italian usage of the Latin investio, ‘I clothe’, in the sense of giving one’s capital a new form.

Note that ‘mineral’ and ‘mine’ (the other source of wealth) are connected, but neither term is classical. The Latin for a ‘mine’ was metallum (our ‘metal’), from the Greek metallon (μεταλλον). This derives from the verb metallô (μεταλλω), ‘I search out, investigate’. And ‘investigate’derives from Latin vestigium, ‘footprint’, in which you follow.

DISCREDITABLE

Private moneylending was widespread, with credit depending on money supply. But there was little state regulation of money-lenders. So it is not surprising that our ‘credit’ (creditum, ‘something lent’, i.e. a loan or a debt) derives from Latin credo, ‘I trust, have confidence in’.

But because of the attitudes of the rich towards work, lending to all and sundry rather than your own friends and acquaintances was always rather frowned upon. The story is told of Cato the Elder, asked about the best way to exploit one’s property. He replied, ‘Raising livestock successfully.’ And the second best way? ‘Raising livestock quite successfully.’ And the third? ‘Raising livestock unsuccessfully.’ The fourth? ‘Crops.’ Asked ‘What about moneylending?’, he replied: ‘What about murder?’

DEBT

The Latin debeo (debit-) give us our ‘debt’ and ‘debit’. Its root meaning was ‘I am under an obligation to pay/give/do something for someone else’. So it spanned the meanings ‘I owe’ (e.g. of money) and ‘I ought’ (e.g. of moral obligation) – in the same way English does, e.g. ‘I owe it to you, so I ought to do it.’ ‘Owe, ought’ derive from a Germanic stem.

LENDING AND ECONOMICS

Romans had no sense that lending was a good, productive thing in itself. Indeed, Latin did not have a verb meaning precisely ‘to lend’. Instead, Romans talked of giving money mutuus – ‘reciprocally, belonging to each other’, source of our ‘mutual’.

That word derived from muto, ‘I give and receive’. So it was made quite clear in the words used that this was a quid pro quo* (literally ‘what for what’, or ‘tit for tat’), with firm obligations on both sides. Credit crunches were not uncommon (especially if people started hoarding coins rather than circulating them), when interest rates could shoot up; if you lent to people whose credit rating was poor, the same would happen.

In fact, ‘economic activity’ and ‘growth’ in our sense did not figure actively in Roman thinking. Latin oeconomicus derived directly from the Greek oikonomikos (οἰκονομικος) and meant ‘relating to household (oikos) management (nomos)’. That was about as far as economic thinking went.

INTEREST

Our old-fashioned term for (usually an exorbitant rate of) interest, ‘usury’, derives from usura, ‘a sum paid for the use of money provided by someone else’ (Latin utor [us-], ‘I use’).

But dodgy deals were rife. In 193 BC, interest rates between Romans were restricted. So Romans who had lent money to other Romans would contact a friendly non-Roman socius (see here) and make him the lender. This was just a technical matter of transferring the loan from his loan book to the socius’s loan book, so that it was now under the socius’s name. Being non-Roman, the socius could charge any interest rate he liked. Result: he and his Roman chum both made a handsome profit. ‘Profit’ and ‘proficient’ both derive from Latin proficio (profect-), ‘I make headway, gain results, increase in size or extent’.

As a result, debt was increasing at an intolerable rate. Eventually, the Roman authorities got wise to this fraus, a Latin term which combined the ideas both of hurt and deception (our ‘fraud’). So they fixed a day when all socii had to declare loans made to Roman citizens. When it was discovered just how gigantic the sum was, the Romans passed a law that socii could lend to Romans only on the same terms as Romans could. So that little ‘offshore’ scam was halted.

BRUTAL BRUTUS

In 88 BC, anyone lending in Italy could not charge more than 12 per cent per annum. So lenders looked to lend abroad, when they could charge whatever they liked. Many lenders, as well as lending their own money, borrowed yet more money in Rome at 12 per cent and then lent it out at 17 per cent. This is known as ‘gearing up’ and is common practice still. Cicero talked of the rich ‘sending out their ex-slaves [freedmen] to lend to and pillage the provinces’.

Brutus (one of Caesar’s assassins) was one such. In 50 BC, he was lending money to the poverty-stricken people of Salamis, a town in Cyprus, and charging an interest rate of 48 per cent a year! Cicero, the provincial governor of that year, refused to collect it because he had imposed a fixed rate of 12 per cent. But Brutus persuaded the Senate to force Cicero to do so. That, incidentally, was how Cicero found out that it was Brutus who was lending the money: very often the great and good liked to hide their moneylending operations behind a third party, e.g. one of their slaves or freedmen.

Such high rates of interest raised serious questions of solvency. The Latin solvo (solut-) meant ‘I loosen, release, untie’ and by extension ‘destroy the binding force of ’, e.g. a marriage or any other contract. So in Rome, if you managed to release yourself from debt, you would have been untied from the contract – solutus – and so found the ‘solution’ to your problem. Today, being ‘solvent’ means ‘able to pay what you owe’.

Our term ‘interest’ derives from Latin interest, ‘it is advantageous, beneficial’, which in the Middle Ages (via French) came to refer to a legal claim, or right.

BONUSES

Whether bonuses are a good thing or not, ‘bonus’ itself derives from the Latin for ‘good’ – bonus, with its adverbial form bene, ‘well’. Bonus in Latin had a wide range of meanings, none specifically financial but still reflecting what makes a ‘bonus’ desirable, e.g. ‘satisfying to the appetites, senses’, ‘good of its kind, effective’, and ‘morally good’, so justifying it. ‘Bonus’ was probably stock exchange slang (1773), though grammatically inept: bonus meant ‘good person’. Bonum, the neuter form, ‘good thing’, would have been preferable.

MONOPOLIES

‘Monopoly’ is a relatively rare example of a Greek word, turned into Latin, which does exactly what it says on the tin in the Greek, Roman and modern worlds. Greek monopôlion (μονοπωλιον), Latinized to monopolium, derived from Greek monos, ‘sole, only’ + pôleô, ‘I offer for sale’, and meant ‘[right of] monopoly’. A Greek historian described how the Sicilian island of Lipari became fabulously wealthy, and one reason was because it had a monopôlion in alum, a form of iron sulphate widely used in dyeing and medicine. The Roman emperor Tiberius took a great interest in regulating business, ‘laying before the Senate matters for consultation on taxes and monopolies’.

Apparently, there was also a monopoly on the use of hedgehog skins in the carding of woollen stuffs, which people tried to exploit or get round. Pliny the Elder said: ‘There is no subject on which the Senate has more frequently passed decrees, and there is not one of the emperors who has not received from the provinces complaints respecting it.’ Bizarre to us, but not in the light of a world where every one of roughly fifty million inhabitants of the Roman Empire wore clothing made from wool. They stood to gain from maintaining a grip on one of the processes.

CAPITAL

For us ‘capital’ can be anything from an exclamation meaning ‘Excellent!’ to a capital letter or city or punishment. In business terms, ‘capital’ means ‘store of money’. ‘Capitalism’ is all about private people (not the state) setting up businesses or providing services in order to make money (capital), either to keep it, or to make even more of it by putting it back into expanding and developing the business. Indeed, ‘capital’ is also the source of our ‘cattle’, once the main indicator of a person’s wealth.

All these meanings derive from Latin caput (capit-), ‘head (of a person, animals, etc.), summit or top, leader, matter of importance’. Apparently the financial connection was made around AD 1200: it referred to the sum of money loaned out (the main, or ‘capital’, part), as opposed to the interest one had to pay to borrow it.

FOMENTING REVOLUTION

Capitalism was not a feature of the Roman economy, nor was private business per se (‘in itself ’) of political concern. No one was out to overthrow it, let alone to ‘ferment revolution’, as a left-wing politician recently wanted to do. What he meant was ‘foment revolution’, Latin fomentum. This meant ‘soothing application, poultice, dressing’, or ‘remedy’. It derived from foveo, ‘I warm, nurture, support’, and that is what the politician was so keen to do: nurture capitalism’s overthrow. Fermento in Latin meant what it does for us: ‘I cause x to ferment’, by turning sugar to alcohol, for example.

Revolutio was not in fact a classical Latin word at all, but it does derive from one, revolvo (revolut-), ‘I roll something back to where it came from’ (on volumen, see here), ‘I bring round again’ (of the seasons, etc.). So a revolutio would change nothing: it would merely take you back to the beginning. That, presumably, would mean the Bolshevik revolution (1917).

BILLS AND BULLS

‘We are worth no more than bullae’, said Petronius – ‘bubbles’. Little did he know… for bulla is the origin of our ‘bill’. It meant not just a bubble but also a ‘boss, knob, stud’ for ornamental purposes. In later Latin it was used of an official document carrying a raised, knob-like wax seal (→ papal ‘bulls’, a letter with a lead seal attached to it). Over time it became applied to official papers demanding money; and (via French) ‘bulls’ became ‘bills’.

Bulla is also the source of ‘bullet’ (via French boule, a small ball), and ‘bulletin’, a small official document.

ACCOUNTS AND CONTRACTS

An ‘account’ in Latin was the plural of that catch-all word tabula (see here) – tabulae. Accounts could be fiddled then as now (for ‘calculations’, see here). Cicero told of an estate bought for the woman Caesennia by her dodgy agent Aebutius. He said that no evidence of the transaction was available – no, said Cicero, because Aebutius had stolen her account books, and kept in his own possession the moneylender’s account book, in which the price on the debit side had been duly carried over to the credit side!

Meanwhile, a contract was a locatio. This came from loco, ‘I put in a given position’ (→ our ‘location’), but also ‘I give out a contract for work’. Cicero again reports that Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, fiddled things so that ‘large sums of money were paid over personally to him, that had been falsely entered into the books as paid in connection with locationes that never existed’.

* ‘Horizontal’ is from Greek horizô [ὁριζω], ‘I mark out a boundary’; in the case of our ‘horizon’, between earth and sky.

* The derivation of ‘quid’ = £ is unknown.