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The Quantitative Easing (And Fall) of the Roman Empire The Quantitative Easing (and Fall) of the Roman Empire A monetary policy theory of the fall of Rome Money, in a word, is the most universal incitement; iron the most powerful instrument, of human industry; and it is very difficult to conceive by what means a people neither actuated by the one nor seconded by the other could emerge from the grossest barbarism. EDWARD GIBBON1 Joseph Malchow P. Thiel Sovereignty, Technology, and Global Change Winter 2011 4/11/11 1 I. The Inflation Suicide In A.D. 33, Rome, whose still winsome bellicosity gave her trammel over the accumulated metals of most of the known world, suffered an economic recession. M. Cocceius Nerva, a keen but unambitious lawyer, was in that year in the capital city, the seat of his friend the emperor Tiberius. The two enjoyed the society of one another, as it tended to produce counsel on the affairs of state which was unmolested by either jealousy or ambition. Now Nerva had chosen to starve himself to death; there was no one to witness but the emperor. During the slow suicide, Tiberius let soften the veil of the purple, confessing to Nerva that although as a general matter he did not care who died and who lived, his conscience would be gravely disturbed if Nerva pressed through his campaign all the way to death. Tiberious demanded a reason; he received none; there was none that would satisfy. It was in fact “a close acquaintance with the ills of the state” that had fixed Nerva to take his own life “while his honor was still uncompromised and his welfare still unthreatened from without.”2 It was economic ills which motivated the suicide. Nerva was early; it was four hundred years before the Visigoths penetrated the pocked walls and actuated with force the fall of the Roman Empire; yet the awful seed of fragility had been glimpsed by Nerva, and his mental bravery was unequal to his sense of personal legacy. “Nerva could no longer bear to associate with Tiberius, chiefly because [Tiberius] had revived the laws on loan-contracts which Caesar had enacted, [and] this was bound to damage credit and be very upsetting [for the inability of many respected citizens to comply with a sudden request for repayment of what they had borrowed would be exposed.] So he starved himself to death.”3 2 What precisely had Tiberius done, and why should Nerva have destroyed himself over it? Faced with a credit bubble in the Roman Empire and in its denarius—the great silvern coin which with the rise of the empire came to dominate hundreds of lesser Fig. 1 Rome A.D. 305, with mints demarcated economies, and all of global trade—Tiberious consummated a regime of intensely inflationary policy, deploying a collection of monetary and fiscal sleights in an effort to rescue Rome from recession. What Tiberious and his successors did—although they knew neither the science nor indeed the name of economics—tightly resembles what is currently in fashion among politicians of the great liberal western powers, with little to suggest of the policies that either their form or their final, desperate coda will differ appreciably from what Nerva foresaw. Two histories, then, run in a grim parallel; one is complete, ours is in train; and they suggest, when set side by side, that the tempestuous cycle of boom and bust is, so long as men are organized into governments, potentially inevitable. By comparing known data about the Roman currency, we can reconstruct the wild inflation experienced by the Empire (Fig. 3). By observing the rising salaries of the imperial soldiers, we can confirm it (Fig. 4). And by taking anecdotal evidence from the histories coupled with empirical evidence of shipping activity, we can observe the decline of commerce numerically (Fig. 5). To understand why all of this occurred, we piece together a monetary history of Rome. 3 This essay will use what data are available—principally numismatic evidence and the limited economic data contained in the contemporaneous histories—to show that Rome progressed from a free and prosperous economy into one whose military fragility, the immediate cause of its fall, was authored by deliberate policy decisions. These policy decisions resemble a number of modern economic policies now in ascendance. From this cross-centurial observation, the essay concludes that of the possible scenarios for the ending of the boom and bust cycles of great sprawling economies, the most likely is catastrophic failure. The essay finally draws out two distinctions in circumstance between the United States and the Roman Empire; the one, the amity of its neighbors, is dismissed as insignificant; the other, the deep and intergenerational investment in the nation made possible by robust and accessible equity and debt markets, is a potential life-saving difference between the United States and its forerunner in antiquity. II. Rome Under Octavian: Free to Choose, Free to Invest When Gibbon talks of iron and money, and of the Roman people as needing to have been “actuated by the one” and “seconded by the other,” it is striking that he isn’t clear which is which. Was the evolution of the Roman republic actuated by money and backed up by iron and coke? Or was the development of Rome actuated by industry itself and only stabilized by a money system? Gibbon is ultimately convincing that the Romans, who “comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind,” lived fundamentally in a money society. That the gears of Roman industry turned overwhelmingly toward war is a bellicosity that resulted only from a failure to grow through organic means, and a politics that made it easy for the elect to coopt industry to their own ends. 4 It was not always thus. Rome grew from republic to empire in large part by preying upon other nations in the Hellenistic world and across the arc of the Mediterranean. Egypt is the most common example—its Cleopatras and Ptlomies, the two lines of pharaohs who ruled before Rome conquered Egypt, built governments that shuttled people into “vast collectives” where they were treated as cogs; taxes became oppressive; and personal profit was skimmed into government coffers until the great goal of a life became nothing more than survival.4 From citizenries thus dispirited an expansionary Rome won easy victories. Under Octavian, the Roman Empire was a place of wide economic freedom. Indeed Octavian himself, who ascended to the throne in B.C. 27 and remained until A.D. 14, was seen to represent a Roman ideal of personal freedom which was elsewhere falling out of fashion in the rest of the world. When Octavian’s fleet destroyed that of Mark Antony on the Ionian Sea, it was more than a military victory. Antony was vying for control of Rome, yet he had gone outside the borders of the Roman Republic to marry Cleopatra VII, the final pharaoh of ancient Egypt. A constrained and quite foreign statism was therefore represented in the person of Mark Antony; he stood in counterpoise to Octavian, who embodied Rome’s traditional values. In this sense, Octavian’s ascension over Antony was a victory for a liberalized economy and a rejection of the popular statism then seducing much of the Hellinistic world. Beside the principle of laissez faire there was the belief in the old doctrine of private enterprise. The victory of [Octavian, after his accession called] Augustus and of the West meant, then, a repulse of the tendencies towards State capitalism and State socialism which might have come to fruition earlier, had Antony and Cleopatra been victorious, then was thus the case. Apart from…the special circumstances prevailing in the…food- supply, the principle of private enterprise remained supreme.5 It was not merely that Octavian preferred capitalist principles in the abstract; he lived by them. “[H]e himself in the course of the Civil Wars had accumulated, by more or less honest means, an immense private fortune.”6 5 The rule of Octavian and his immediate successors “was a time of almost complete freedom for trade and of splendid opportunities for private initiative.”7 Through this, “the life of the community as a whole blossomed into a greater activity. There was a constant passing to and fro of merchandise and travellers. Throughout the world there was an interpenetration, and a smoothing-out of differences, to an extent undreamed of before.”8 Although Rome was dedicated to growth by plunder, it nevertheless traded honestly with nations it did not seek to conquer. The government used its bullion to purchase textiles in great bulk from India, for example. The first fifty years after the unification under Octavian represents one of the great free trade periods in the history of man. And the private sector successes within the Empire came from all walks of Roman life: “some of them were of senatorial rank, some of equestrian, but a large number were former slaves, freedmen.”9 (It was, one historian notes, “to the Emperor’s advantage to encourage this preoccupation with professional and business matters, since it induced political apathy.”10) Passport regulations were slackened as were import restrictions. And “[a] man of sufficient initiative living in a large town might find even the position of miller and baker, tanner or brick-maker a useful start towards the building-up of an intensive wholesale business.”11 Undergirding the stable and productive early years of the Empire was a sound money system. One of the curiosities of the literature of the ancient world is its thoroughgoing silence on economics.
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