Beginning at about the birth of Cicero, the tendency of the empire's socioeconomic development over five centuries can be compressed into three words: fewer have more. That story would make a good book—and a big one.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, March 15, 2025
Fewer Have More
Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022), Roman Social Relations. 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (1974; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 38: