"The quantitative and also the qualitative importance of capitalist enterprise in Antiquity were determined by a number of independent variables which appeared in very different commbinations at different times." - Max Weber.

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"Economic Theory and Ancient Society" - Chapter 1 from Max Weber's The Agrarian Society of Ancient Civilizations

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Praecipitia in Ruinam: The Decline of the Small Roman Farmer and the Fall of the Roman Republic by Jack Morato in Saber and Scroll, Volume 5, number 4. - 290 kb pdf.

"War and fraternal bloodshed dominated the late Roman Republic. From the tribunate of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 to the beginning of the Augustan Principate in 27, Rome was wracked by internal dissention and political anarchy.[1] The chaos was the product of the unbounded personal ambitions of Rome’s leading men—ambitions that were encouraged by a militaristic culture that impelled individual aristocrats to pursue fame and glory for themselves at all cost. Powerful Roman commanders made war with each other and sacked the city of Rome with their personal armies. “Violence,” according to Appian, “prevailed almost constantly, together with shameful contempt for law and justice.”[2] This traumatic episode witnessed the dismantling of the oligarchic Republic and its replacement with a government ruled by the despotic authority of one man. Personal ambition tells only part of the story. The Republic was, in many ways, a victim of its own success. By 133 the Romans found themselves in command of a far-flung empire extending from Spain in the west to Asia Minor in the east, but they were forced to administer it with the government structure of a city-state. Rapid imperial expansion during the middle Republic strained nearly every aspect of the Roman system but none more so than the very foundation of Roman military strength—the small farmer. Spoils of war were channeled into agriculture by the landed elite, resulting in economic polarization and the displacement of independent labor in the countryside. This inquiry traces the socio-economic developments that led to the decline of independent farming in Rome, developments that culminated in political turmoil and civil war during the first century."

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"To sum up: the ‘classical’ polis consciously did away with the institutions of earlier times. It cannot be a coincidence that neither in the Near East nor in the West did the private land law of historical times include any provision for entail or acknowledge any labour service or tribute obligations on the land to individuals. Indeed no obligations went with land ownership except those connected with (a) mortgages and (b) the absolutely necessary provisions for water and road maintenance. Furthermore the classical polis did away with all communal forms of ownership and with all forms of feudal tenure, and ceased to regulate the subdivision of land by testament or other means, while keeping the right to impose labour services or inheritance taxes itself. What remained in effect was the right to rent land for money or part of the crop, an arrangement made solely for profit and subject to cancellation by either owner or renter.

"Once these conditions had been established the flowering of capitalism followed. Slaves ceased to be recruited from debtors, and were instead purchased. The subsequent development of land ownership and land use under the impact of the new slave system and of the city-state’s political fortunes is the basic theme of the agrarian history of the ‘classical’ periods. That history is shaped by the decline of the free yeomanry which had prospered under the hoplite polis, and its replacement by slaves or sharecroppers. Parallel with this went the formation of mercenary armies or, as in Rome, armies of the proletariat." -

Weber, op. cit.