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THIS paper describes the role of debt in the early republican economy, and especially debt's relationship to the shifting balance of land and labor following the conquest of Veii in 396 в.с.1 My point of departure is a little noticed pattern in the annalist record which alerts us to changing pressures on agricultural production at that time. Reports of famine, common in the fifth century, cease for almost a century after 383 в.с. By contrast, a series of laws relating to debt appear in close succession following the first attested proposal of a lex de aere alieno in 376 в.с. and its passage a decade later.2 The decline of one phenomenon will not have caused the other's appearance in any direct manner, but the pattern nonetheless demands attention because both food shortage and debt reflect aspects of the Roman agricultural economy: famine is a straightforward indicator of the insufficiency of production, while lending in this period involved the exchange of various forms of capital or labor needed for agriculture, or of agricultural produce itself.3
How then are we to understand an economy that attained levels of production sufficient to end regular famine, but not to secure farmers against debt? Lo Cascio (2009: 23), in one of the few studies attentive to this question, concludes that what happened was the gradual lessening of Malthusian pressures in the early fourth century в.с. That is, the conquest of Veii alleviated the problem of Romans' access to land, but only somewhat, since the ager Veientanus did not resolve continuing problems signaled by the persistence of debt.4 However, the change in symptoms suggests that what afflicted the early republican economy was more complex, and the shift from an indicator of insufficient production (famine) to one of unequal distribution (debt) is especially revealing. Thus, I argue that the annalist record reflects a situation after the conquest of Veii in which Roman landholding expanded, but in which the distribution of the factors of production remained widely, perhaps increasingly, uneven. Roman landholders mediated such inequality through exchanges of credit and debt. Moreover, the imbalance in the fourth century economy pertained not only to landholding, but also to labor. Through institutions such as nexum, a form of debt-bondage, labor constituted a central component of...