Vir Economicus

The situation of the Roman Republic in 82.bc

In 82.bc Lucius Cornelius Sulla defeats the marii and liberates Rome.
This being the last in a series of coups, wars, invasions and civil insurrections going back several decades, and in OTL marked the beginning of the fall of Roma and the*mos maiorum.
Sulla, being the last great republican and arguably the greatest roman ever, has taken drastic steeps to save the republic. But the list of problems is long.


Rome's finances are in chaos. There are twenty-seven legions to discharge, find land for, pay out. The men who supported the lawless regimes of Marius, Cinna and Carbo have to be sought out and shown that they cannot escape just punishment.
The laws of Rome are antiquated, particularly with regard to her courts and her governors of provinces. Her civil servants are disorganized and prey to both lethargy and cupidity. So much treasure, money and bullion were robbed from the temples and the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus and the sybil books are cinder. Sicily, Africa and Spain are still under rebel control and in the east Mithridates VI is still a treat.

Her Sulla allows us to change things from otl. My main interest is formation of some form of bank and stock company, but changes her allows for much much more.

Any thoughts, comments or ideas?
 
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Not really, as there were banks and companys in otl.
The publicani more or less ran their opperation as stock companys, but whit several important differences from more modern ones. (Nam socii mei socius meus socius non est. For my partner’s partner is not my partner.)

As for banking, we find temple banks, especially in the easter part of the Mediterranean. Ptolemaic Egypt stands out her, but there are other like the temple of Aleskapois at Delos.
Argentarii in Rome received deposits and made loans.

The difference is that Rome lacked informal and external sources of capital and credit intermediation.


Basically they lacked high volums of anonymous credit.
 
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PART I.
NOVEMBER until DECEMBER
Year of the Consulship of Marius and Carbo ,
672 A.U.C (82 B.C.)


Sick to death of civil wars, of economic depression and far too many legions marching endlessly up and down Italy, the Centuriate Assembly voted in a law
which appointed Lucius Cornelius Sulla the Dictator for an unspecified period of time. Tabled at contio on the sixth day of November, the lex Valeria dictator
legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae passed into law on the twenty-third day of November.
It contained no specifics beyond the time span; as it bestowed virtually unlimited powers upon Sulla and also rendered him
unanswerable for a single one of his actions.

On the twenty-third day of November, Sulla's dictatorship was formally ratified,
and passed into law.

Whatever Sulla wanted to enact or do, he could!



On the Kalends of December, Sulla called a meeting of the Senate, the first such since his ratification as Dictator, in accordance with the lex Caecilia Didia.

His leges Corneliae covering proscription regulations and activities were exhaustive. The bulk of them, however, appeared over a period of a mere two
days very early in December.

Every contingency had been taken into account. All property in a proscribed man's family was now the property of the State, and could not be transferred into the name of some scion innocent oftransgression; no will of a man proscribed was valid, no heir named in it could inherit; the proscribed man could legally be slain by any man or woman who saw him, be he or she free, or freed, or still slave; the reward for murder or apprehension of a proscribed man was two talents of silver, to be paid by the
Treasury from confiscated property and entered in the public account books; a slave claiming the reward was to be freed, a freedman transferred into a rural
tribe; the sons and grandsons of the proscribed were debarred from holding curule office and forbidden to repurchase confiscated estates, or come into
possession of them by any other means; the sons and grandsons of those already dead would suffer in the same way as the sons and grandsons of those
listed while still living. The last law of this batch, promulgated on the fifth day of December, declared that the whole process of proscription would cease on the
first day of the next June. Six months hence

Sulla's chief lictor pind up on the wall of the rostra the first list of proscribe, in the number of forty senators and sixty-five knights.
The names of Gaius Norbanus and Scipio Asiagenus, Carbo and Young Mariu, Carrinas, Censorinus and Brutus Damasippus headed it. Most of the senators were already dead.

The lists, however, were basically intended to inform Rome whose estates were confiscate; they did not say who was already dead, who still alive.
The second list went up on the rostra the very next day, to the number of two hundred knights. And a third list went up the day after that, publishing a further group of two hundred and fifteen knights. Sulla had finished with the Senate; his real target was the Ordo Equester.

Thus did Sulla usher in his Dictatorship, by demonstrating that only he was master of Rome.

sulla-1-sized.jpg
 
Interesting; so Sulla uses his proscriptive lists more constructively.

One request: can you make the font a little bigger, it's hard to read. Keep it up though, this is inventive stuff.
 
Among other things yes, i am also toying with the idea of leaving Caesar on the lists or keeping him as Flamen Dialis. The taboos would make a caree impossible.

There are three things Caesar hated: things that got in his way, the old elite, and taboos. They didn't stop him from marching on Rome, they won't stop him from advancing his career here. Best to kill him off and let Pompey have the cudos he deserved.
 
There are three things Caesar hated: things that got in his way, the old elite, and taboos. They didn't stop him from marching on Rome, they won't stop him from advancing his career here. Best to kill him off and let Pompey have the cudos he deserved.

I am unsure if even Caesar could manage to climb as Flamen Dialis, still we dont know if he actually was flamen, so keeping him on the list (as he was otl) is a easy way to get him out of the picture.
And Pompeius adulescentulus carnifex will get what he deserves.
 
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PART II.
DECEMBER until JANUAR
Year of the Consulship of Decula and Dolabella,
673 A.U.C (81 B.C.)


Things, decided Lucius Cornelius Sulla early in December, were going very
nicely. the amount of money and property confiscated from the proscribed was soaring. It was money and property, of course, which had directed Sulla's footsteps down this particular path; from somewhere had to come the vast sums Rome would need in order to become financially solvent again. Under more normal circumstances it would have come out of the coffers of the provinces, but given the situations in the east and the fact that Quintus Sertorius had managed to create enough trouble in both the Spains to curtail Spanish incomes, the provinces could not be squeezed of additional revenues for some time to come.

Therefore Rome and Italy would have to yield up the money-yet the burden could not be thrust upon the ordinary people, nor upon those who had conclusively demonstrated their loyalty to Sulla's cause. Sulla had never loved the Ordo Equester-the ninety-one Centuries of the First Class who comprised the knight-businessmen, but especially the eighteen Centuries of senior knights who were entitled to the Public Horse. Among them were many who had waxed fat under the administration of Marius, of Cinna, of Carbo; and these were the men Sulla resolved would pay the bill for Rome's economic recovery. A perfect solution! Not only would the Treasury fill up; it would also eliminate the enemies of the republic.

It was religion, however, which chiefly occupied Sulla's mind.
So before he turned his energies toward rectifying Rome's creaky institutions and laws, he must first purify Rome's aether, stabilize her godly forces and allow them to flow properly. How could Rome expect good fortune when a man could be so lost as to what was fitting that he could stand and screem out her secret name?1
How could Rome expect to prosper when men plundered her temples and murdered her priests? In the burning of the temples there was an implicit message, as any good citizen would know.

To the Greeks, their gods were essentially human beings owning superhuman powers; they could not conceive a being more complex than a man.
So Zeus, who was king of their pantheon, functioned like a Roman Consul, powerful but not omnipotent-and handed out jobs to the other gods, who took delight in tricking him, blackmailing him, and behaving a bit like tribunes of the plebs.

A proper Roman, knew the gods were far less tangible than the Greeks would have them: they weren't humanoid and they didn't have eyes in their heads or hold conversations, nor did they wield superhuman powers, nor go through the integration and differentiation of thought processes akin to a man's.
A Roman knew that the gods were specific forces which moved specific events or controlled other forces inferior to themselves. They fed on life-forces, they needed order and method in the living world as much as they did in their own, because order and method in the living world helped maintain order and method in the world of forces.

There were forces pervaded storage cupboards and barns and silos and cellars, -they were called Penates. There were forces that kept ships sailing and crossroads together and a sense of purpose among inanimate objects- they were called Lares.
There was a force that gave a few men luck and good fortune, but gave most men less, and a few men nothing-it was called Fortuna.
And the force called Jupiter Optimus Maximus was the sum total of allother forces, the connective tissue which bound them all together in a way logical to forces, if mysterious to men.
It was clear that Rome was losing contact with her gods, her forces.
Why else had the Temples burned down?2
Men were forgetting the secrets, the strict formulae and patterns which channeled godly forces

And it had been given to Sulla to halt the chaos, correct the present drift toward utter disorder. If he did not, then doors supposed to be shut would fly open, and doors supposed to be open would slam shut.

The next day Sulla published the first of his laws aimed at regulating the State religion by fixing them to the rostra and the wall of the Regia:
it turned out to be a list of the men who were now members of the various priestly colleges, major and minor. Fifteen of each, divided between patricians and plebeians (with the plebeians in the majority) and the invalidation of the lex Domitia de sacerdotiis.3

The day after, he published an addendum containing only two name. The name of the new Pontifex Maximus; Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius.
And one new name for the proscription list, a man of Patricain status.The (now former) flamen Dialis, the young man Gaius Julius Caesar.4

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1) Amor, see:kissingheart:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus
2) In otl only the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus burned, TTL the temple of Ops, the god of Romes public wealth, burned down as well. This is the actual POD
3) The law the stipulated that Priest weare elected. Sulla law also increases the number of priest.
4) We really dont know if Ceasar was flamen Dialis, we do know that Gaius Marius and Cinna talked about apointing him, and we do know that Sulla striped him off a priesthood in OTL. Her the worse temple fire, and the fact that Ceasar, who was married to Cinna daughter, and a nephew of Gaius Marius is enough that he is kept on the lists. Neither he nor his wife are Roman citizens anymor and thus cant be the flaminat.
 
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