In recent scholarship, Roman frugality has received less attention than its opposite, luxury. This has not always been the case, as Ingo Gildenhard and Cristiano Viglietti argue in the introduction to an edited volume meant to rebalance the picture. The aim is not to resurrect ancient Rome as a model of exemplary frugality, as which it was discussed from the late Republic until the Enlightenment era, but to understand better the interplay of economic structure, moral values and literary discourse over more than one thousand years of Roman history.
If frugality requires relative equity in distribution, as several contributions to the volume suggest regarding legal limitations on landholding, then the editors seem not to have followed the Roman model. Their introduction runs up to an impressive 126 pages (with bibliography), covering more than a quarter of the volume. That being said, the programmatic introduction might also serve as proof that frugality is not necessarily a virtue. Impressive in scope, learning and ambition, it lays out a framework for rethinking crucial aspects of Roman history, from the distribution of landed wealth during the middle Republic to imperial self-representations and how they relate to notions of frugality. In terms of methodology, the volume represents a concerted effort to reintegrate the study of the three dimensions of society, i.e. economy, politics and culture.
The individual chapters follow a chronological order. Cristiano Viglietti seeks to redefine frugality in early Rome. New archaeological findings attest to significant wealth and economic sophistication, shattering the older view of archaic Rome as frugal by lack of choice. This, Viglietti argues, puts the disappearance of rich grave complexes in Latium at the end of the sixth century b.c.e. into a different perspective. It is not an indicator of economic crisis, but of shifting consumptive habits. The introduction of property classes favoured productive agrarian wealth over conspicuous consumption as a marker of social status. While small landholders were frugal due to lack of choice, they nonetheless shared with the elite a set of values centred on thriftiness and economic independence.
John Rich presents the arguments for seeing Licinius Stolo's law of 367 b.c.e. as limiting both the public and private land a Roman citizen could own. According to Rich, the fallacy that the Licinius law pertained only to public land can be traced to Tiberius Gracchus, who reinterpreted it in 133 to make his own legislation effort more acceptable to big landowners. Rich links this interpretation to the broader theme of the volume by arguing that the fourth-century law grew out of a ‘contemporary ethos of frugality’ (180). In the next chapter, Laure Passet reads Cato the Elder's (in-)famous frugality as a carefully constructed self-representation, designed to compensate for being a homo novus. Such a self-representation, however, was not limited to social climbers, Passet argues. It was also adopted by Scipio Aemilianus and other members of this distinguished family, as anecdotes and the increasingly careless style of their funeral epigrams famously show. Mattia Balbo's chapter returns to the ‘agrarian question’. In his interpretation, Tiberius Gracchus intended to turn pastureland into small farm plots because he was aware that even smallholders now aimed at intensive, market-oriented production. Hence, Tiberius both revived the tradition of distributing plots to citizens and innovatively adopted it to the new economic realities of the second century.
Ingo Gildenhard's chapter on the ‘invention’ of frugality as a Roman virtue introduces a new angle by focusing on the rhetoric of moral discourse in Rome. Gildenhard sets out to topple the well-established scholarly narrative that frugality was an early Roman virtue, eventually abandoned. The lexeme frugalitas is conspicuously absent from the literary record before Cicero, whom Gildenhard dubs as the inventor of frugality. Even Cicero applied the term more fully only in two places, the speeches against Verres, where he contrasts Verres with L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, and the Tusculan Disputations, where he introduces frugalitas as the Latin equivalent of Greek σωφροσύνη. Cicero was not employing the word more generally, Gildenhard argues, because he was aware that being frugi, ‘useful’, was seen as a subaltern virtue associated with slaves and freedmen. The introduction of frugalitas into the canon of Roman virtues was only completed in the literary discourse of the early and high Empire, to the point where Pliny the Younger could represent frugalitas as a new imperial ideal adopted by the emperor himself. Gildenhard's chapter is a reminder of the need to pay attention to the chronological distribution of the words we think express concepts and how they are strategically used by individual authors. At the same time, Gildenhard's case rests in part on his choice of a strictly lexical approach that tends to equate frugality with frugalitas. If we stick to the broader approach, advocated in the introduction and taken by most other contributors, which accepts that different words (e.g. parsimonia) may refer to a shared concept of frugality, Cicero's supposed ‘invention of frugality’ looks less dramatic and less unprecedented, and various continuities in thought and rhetoric emerge.
John Patterson investigates how the experience of social mobility shaped the praise of frugality or blame for excessive austerity during the late Republic and early Empire. As both archaeology and literary anecdotes attest, the Roman elite frequently presented houses and silverware as inherited to display their wealth but avoid accusations of decadence. This performative strategy had the added advantage that it was unavailable to social climbers who only had self-acquired wealth to parade.
In the last chapter, Christopher Berry takes the theme of frugality beyond the confines of classical antiquity. According to Berry, David Hume and Adam Smith discarded the ancient understanding of frugality as denoting either lack of material wealth or its voluntary rejection and reinterpreted it as the virtue of thriftiness in an age of commerce and industry. Luxury, in turn, they considered no longer a moral problem, but a welcome incentive to economic productivity. Hence, Berry rounds up the volume by an invitation to reflect on the historical peculiarities of both ancient and modern attitudes to material wealth and its acquisition.
A volume of such thematic and chronological breadth cannot be expected to cover everything related to its topic. Yet this reviewer would have wished for a fuller engagement with Roman comedy and Christian writings, as the volume itself indicates their importance as sources for attitudes to frugality. Plautus makes three short appearances as a key witness of Roman popular thought (59–60, 196, 250–3). Comedy, however, has much more to say on frugality or, rather, its absence. Besides being an ex negativo source for Roman morality, it is also important for its appraisal of festival days as a break from the frugality of everyday life. Regarding the theological writings of Late Antiquity, it would have been worthwhile to pursue the editor's suggestion that ‘frugality […] chimed well with core aspects of Christian doctrine’ (101), especially since Berry suggests that the Christian endorsement of Stoic frugality was a long-lasting inheritance to post-classical European moral discourse (374–6).
To point out further areas a volume should have discussed, is, of course, another way to say that it has succeeded in opening promising perspectives for future research.
