Ideological Flexibility

This chapter considers the elite perspective on socioeconomic life in the middle Republic through the eyes of two key figures, Cato and Ennius. Cato’s commitment to thrift left him more open to the virtues of commerce than Cicero and others would later be. Greed was not the overriding concern it would later become either, but more attention was paid to how money was spent, which he and others sought to control through sumptuary laws. In his epic Annals, Ennius likewise shows a more open, flexible conception of forms of exchange. He elevates gift giving as an aristocratic practice but associates it with a foreigner, the Greek general Pyrrhus, rather than a Roman, unlike later epic poets. And he does not hesitate to use common words for commercial activity. Ennius therefore takes a less schematized view of gift and gain than later epic poets would, reflecting his era’s more flexibile understanding of exchange.

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