rominence assigned to capital in
the Roman economy, the evils inseparable from a pure capitalist system
could not fail to appear.

Civil equality, which had already received a fatal wound through the
rise of the ruling order of lords, suffered an equally severe blow in
consequence of the line of social demarcation becoming more and more
distinctly drawn between the rich and the poor. Nothing more
effectually promoted this separation in a downward direction than the
already-mentioned rule--apparently a matter of indifference, but in
reality involving the utmost arrogance and insolence on the part of
the capitalists--that it was disgraceful to take money for work; a
wall of partition was thus raised not merely between the common day-
labourer or artisan and the respectable landlord or manufacturer, but
also between the soldier or subaltern and the military tribune, and
between the clerk or messenger and the magistrate. In an upward
direction a similar barrier was raised by the Claudian law suggested
by Gaius Flaminius (shortly before 536), which prohibited senators
and senators' sons from possessing sea-going vessels except for the
transport of the produce of their estates, and probably also from
participating in public contracts--forbidding them generally from
carrying on whatever the Romans included under the head of
"speculation" (-quaestus-).(28) It is true that this enactment was
not called for by the senators; it was on the contrary a work of the
democratic opposition, which perhaps desired in the first instance
merely to prevent the evil of members of the governing class
personally entering into dealings with the government. It may be,
moreover, that the capitalists in this instance, as so often
afterwards, made common cause with the democratic party, and seized
the opportunity of diminishing competition by the exclusion of the
senators. The former object was, of course, only very imperfectly
attained, for the system of partnership opened up to the senators
ample facilities for continuing to speculate in secret; but this
decree of the people drew a legal line of demarcation between those
men of quality who did not speculate at all or at any rate not openly
and those who did, and it placed alongside of the aristocracy which
was primarily political an aristocracy which was purely moneyed--the
equestrian order, as it was afterwards called, whose rivalries with
the senatorial order fill the history of the followi