It is scarcely possible to give a full and balanced account of the economic life of Italy in the last century of the Republic. No uniform, regular statistics were kept of even such elementary factors as production, wages, and prices. In their place, we have a mass of individual instances, often highly detailed, but hard to fit into a coherent picture. Yet certain generalizations can be made. First, it is clear that the conquest of the Mediterranean world brought an enormous increase of wealth to Rome and Italy. Not even the incessant civil wars could make serious inroads on a standard of living that was constantly rising -- for some. For this new wealth was very unevenly distributed. There were fortunes to be made from banking, moneylending, tax farming, war contracts, building, real estate, and the import-export trade. The great wars in Gaul and the East gave booty and gratuities to all who took part, from the commander to the common soldier. The proscriptions offered a quick way to wealth for astute operators on the winning side. So the first century B.C. was marked by the appearance, for the first time in Roman society, of a new class of super-rich, men like Pompey, Crassus, Sulla, and Lucullus. And of course such multimillionaires could only arise from a much larger number of wealthy or merely well-to-do.

For the first time, after about 80 B.C., Rome became familiar with the economics of conspicuous waste. Huge country houses were built -- still called by the old rustic name of "villa" -- in favored places such as Tivoli, the Alban hills, and the fashionable watering places around the Bay of Naples, and there was a boom in real estate like that of Florida in the 1920's. But the owners of these houses would also maintain great palaces in Rome, where, in Cicero's time, there were a hundred town houses finer than anything in the previous century. Precious marbles were brought from all parts of the world for these houses, their ceilings were coffered and inlaid with gold, they had elaborate mosaics and wall paintings and costly furniture. Private libraries were kept, and the masterpieces of Greek sculpture, both copies and originals, were displayed. Large staffs of highly trained and expensive servants were needed to run them, especially for the elaborate banquets which became a fashionable entertainment. On the country estates vast sums were spent on laying out parks and gardens, growing exotic plants and trees, and breeding oysters and other delicacies for the table. Blooded horses, smart carriages, yachts, expensive mistresses with their jewelry, clothes, and cosmetics, helped the Roman playboy to squander his father's wealth. All this may be read in the Latin authors of the time, who never tire of contrasting it with the simplicity of the old ways by which Rome had grown great.

But not all the new wealth of Italy went into extravagance. Much of it was used to try out the new methods in farming and stock breeding; such new experiments brought benefits to Italian agriculture as a whole. Under scientific management, the production of wine and olive oil outstripped that of cereals to become the most lucrative forms of agriculture. In full production, a good vineyard would give an annual return of 18 per cent on capital invested. It was now that vintage wines such as Falernian established their reputation, and Italian wines in general began to dominate the home market and to be in demand for export. The olive and its products were basic to the economy of the Mediterranean world. The cheaper grades of oil were used for lamps, the finer for cooking, in the absence of butter; a great variety of fine olives were eaten raw. It was of great importance that the Italian olive merchants now entered the export market on a large scale. But cereals continued to play an important part. Despite the import of grain from the provinces for the Roman grain dole, it was still necessary to draw on Italian sources. Outside Rome, the needs of the growing population of the Italian towns were met almost wholly by the Italian grain harvest. Etruria was the great grain land, though Apulia and Campania were also important. While much of the labor was done by slaves, there is evidence of free tenants on some of the big estates. But in general these were bad times for the small farmer, tenant, or proprietor in Italy itself; there were still prospects for him in the Po valley and Gallia Narbonensis, but many preferred to leave the land for the cities.

Pedigreed strains of horses, sheep, and cattle were evolved at this time, and the great ranchers of the South grew rich on the increased yield of wool and hides. The huge urban market of Rome encouraged the growth of specialized lines such as beekeeping (in the absence of sugar, honey was the universal sweetener), market gardening, fruit growing (apples, pears, figs, cherries), and the rearing of game birds and poultry. The domestic fowl played little part in this; the hen was valued for its eggs rather than the table. But pigeons, ducks, thrushes (fieldfares), guinea fowl, and peacocks were all reared for the poultry market. The economics of these operations were studied, with careful attention to cost. For example, it was found that thrushes fattened more quickly when they were fed on dates. But the experiment of giving them dates premasticated by slaves turned out badly -- too much was swallowed by the human intermediary! On such small margins do profit and loss depend.

Industry also benefited from the prosperity of Italy and the new markets of the West. Agriculture and war needed the iron of Etruria. At Arretium (the modern Arezzo), this period saw the beginning of the famous pottery industry which was soon to enjoy boom conditions. Earthenware pottery was used as the container for every kind of liquid. Its production may be called the canning industry of the ancient world. The bronze and silverware of Campania were the most flourishing of Italian industries; they combined with a prosperous agriculture to make this the richest part of Italy. Pompeii provides archaeological evidence of this in no uncertain manner. From about 150 B.C. to the Social War, building in Pompeii, public and private, was on a lavish scale. The splendor of the wealthiest Pompeiian houses, from which came the superb wall painting to be seen in Naples Museum, far exceeded anything that had yet been built in Rome. The Social War brought a check to this prosperity, but did not end it; a lesser but substantial amount of building went on until the end of the Republic.