Private Property In Ancient Rome

Whereas Greek thinkers debated ethics and morals, the role of the good life, and the nature of the universe, Romans deliberated more about the nature of government and the role of the state. This focus reflects their pragmatic attitudes and their possession of a huge empire.

In thefollowing passage, Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the leading Roman politicians from the 60s to the 40s bce, discusses how any man who holds public office in the Roman state has a duty to defend the state’s main function. That man who undertakes responsibility for public office in the state must make it his first priority to see that every person can continue to hold what is his and that no inroads are made into the goods or property of private persons by the state. It was a bad policy when Philippus, when he was tribune of the plebs [about 104 bce], proposed an agrarian reform law.

When his law was defeated, he took the defeat well and was moderate in his response. In the debates themselves, however, he tried to curry popular favor and acted in a bad way when he said, “In our community there are not more than two thousand men who have real property. ”That speech ought to be condemned outright for attempting to advocate equality of property holdings. What policy could be more dangerous? It was for this very reason—that each person should be able to keep his own property—that states and local governments were founded. Although it was by the leadership of nature herself that men gathered together in communities, it was for the hope of keeping their own property that they sought the protection of states. Some men want to become known as popular politicians and for this reason they engage in making revolutionaryProposals about land, with the result that owners are driven from their homes and money lent out by creditors is simply given free to the borrowers with no need for repayment. Such men are shaking the very foundations of the state.

First of all, they are destroying that goodwill and sense of trust which can no longer exist when money is simply taken from some people and given to others [by the state]. And then they take away fairness, which is totally destroyed if each person is not permitted to keep what is his own. For, as I have already said, it is the peculiar function of the state and of local government to make sure that each person should be able to keep his own things freely and without any worry.