Lets take care of the easy part: what would happen. I think that, if the Romans had a central bank, you'd see a massive development of the Empire, spread out across a wide range of areas and industries. Great fun for us to imagine. With a Central Bank facilitating the flow of capital, there's little limit to what the Romans could do (well, expanding much beyond their historical maximum borders would still be tricky, but you get the point). A Central Bank is also a nice little stabilizing feature of a society - if your elite and merchants have literally bought into the system, they're going to be far more loyal to the system.
So, the hard part: how do we get there? There was actually a relatively recent thread on this topic for Athens:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...anies-in-ancient-athens-were-realized.422341/
And it seems that Xenophon had a similar idea. Great! Culturally, it would make sense that this idea popped up in Athens, rather than far less mercantile-minded Rome (at least, as the Romans liked to think of themselves - in reality, they were no less mercantile, even if they weren't as comfortable with it as the Athenians). However, I think the Roman Empire in particular has one key advantage over Athens and the Roman Republic: The fiscus, the personal treasury of the Emperor.
In one sense, the Principate can be said to operate under the basic principle that the Emperor is simply the guy in charge of the biggest fortune in the Roman world, so he can afford to do whatever he wants. After all, technically, all of Egypt was really just the private country estate of the Emperors for centuries. So, the Emperor had lots of capital, lots of collateral, and could easily (from a financial perspective) set up a bank (run by freedmen, of course) to operate as an Imperial Bank, even without taking into consideration the actual government revenues. And, of course, if the Emperor is involved, you know that nobody is going to stiff the bank.
So, what do you think? Could a particularly innovative, farsighted, or crazy Emperor (the Romans had a few of each!) have done this? Or, to take an entirely different tack, what about the Republic doing something like this? The state had plenty of public land it could use; I just had an idea of the Gracchi using Pergamum as the source of income to start up a bank to fund some project (maybe investing in land reclamation?). Gotta run, but there's loads more to think about!
So, the hard part: how do we get there? There was actually a relatively recent thread on this topic for Athens:
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...anies-in-ancient-athens-were-realized.422341/
And it seems that Xenophon had a similar idea. Great! Culturally, it would make sense that this idea popped up in Athens, rather than far less mercantile-minded Rome (at least, as the Romans liked to think of themselves - in reality, they were no less mercantile, even if they weren't as comfortable with it as the Athenians). However, I think the Roman Empire in particular has one key advantage over Athens and the Roman Republic: The fiscus, the personal treasury of the Emperor.
In one sense, the Principate can be said to operate under the basic principle that the Emperor is simply the guy in charge of the biggest fortune in the Roman world, so he can afford to do whatever he wants. After all, technically, all of Egypt was really just the private country estate of the Emperors for centuries. So, the Emperor had lots of capital, lots of collateral, and could easily (from a financial perspective) set up a bank (run by freedmen, of course) to operate as an Imperial Bank, even without taking into consideration the actual government revenues. And, of course, if the Emperor is involved, you know that nobody is going to stiff the bank.
So, what do you think? Could a particularly innovative, farsighted, or crazy Emperor (the Romans had a few of each!) have done this? Or, to take an entirely different tack, what about the Republic doing something like this? The state had plenty of public land it could use; I just had an idea of the Gracchi using Pergamum as the source of income to start up a bank to fund some project (maybe investing in land reclamation?). Gotta run, but there's loads more to think about!