ices which ran along
one side of the Forum, and made it an ancient Wall Street or Lombard
Street.

"Trusts" founded to control prices troubled the Romans, as they trouble
us to-day. There is an amusing reference to one of these trade
combinations as early as the third century before our era in the Captives
of Plautus.[104] The parasite in the play has been using his best quips
and his most effective leads to get an invitation to dinner, but he can't
provoke a smile, to say nothing of extracting an invitation. In a high
state of indignation he threatens to prosecute the men who avoid being his
hosts for entering into an unlawful combination like that of "the oil
dealers in the Velabrum." Incidentally it is a rather interesting
historical coincidence that the pioneer monopoly in Rome, as in our day,
was an oil trust--in the time of Plautus, of course, an olive-oil trust.
In the "Trickster," which was presented in 191 B.C., a character refers to
the mountains of grain which the dealers had in their warehouses.[105] Two
years later the "corner" had become so effective that the government
intervened, and the curule aediles who had charge of the markets imposed a
heavy fine on the grain speculators.[106] The case was apparently
prosecuted under the Laws of the Twelve Tables of 450 B.C., the Magna
Charta of Roman liberty. It would seem, therefore, that combinations in
restraint of trade were formed at a very early date in Rome, and perhaps
Diocletian's attempt in the third century of our era to lower the cost of
living by fixing the prices of all sorts of commodities was aimed in part
at the same evil. As for government ownership, the Roman state made one or
two essays in this field, notably in the case of mines, but with
indifferent success.

Labor was as completely organized as capital.[107] In fact the passion of
the Romans for association shows itself even more clearly here, and it
would be possible to write their industrial history from a study of their
trades-unions. The story of Rome carries the founding of these guilds back
to the early days of the regal period. From the investigations of
Waltzing, Liebenam, and others their history can be made out in
considerable detail. Roman tradition was delightfully systematic in
assigning the founding of one set of institutions to one king and of
another group to another king. Romulus, for instance, is the war king, and
concerns himself with military and political institutions.