Ancient Rome’s Benefits Doom Loop

The Roman Empire grew rich off the backs of other nations. There’s no question about that. War and conquest, but also bequests, made Rome the richest state in the ancient world by the second century BC, a time when wealth was all about gold, silver, land and food production, and slaves.

Rome was also lucky. The death of Alexander in 323 BC saw his vast empire fragment into the Hellenistic kingdoms, mainly of Macedonia, the Seleukid kingdom of Syria, and Ptolemaic Egypt. They enervated themselves over decades of inconclusive wars and were easy pickings for Rome. The people who lived there, exhausted by and sick of endless fighting, acquiesced easily into Roman rule. The Eastern Mediterranean grew richer than had ever been thought possible.

Today it’s almost impossible to grasp the scale of slavery and inequality in the Roman Empire. Rome’s defeat of Carthage in the last decade of the third century BC initiated an intensification of war and conquest that brought untold millions into servitude. An unforeseen consequence was that some of Rome’s senatorial elite seized peasant farms while their owners were serving in Rome’s wars of conquest and used slaves to farm them as vast estates. The reforming tribune Tiberius Gracchus was murdered in 133 BC by a mob of senators when he tried to restrict the practice.

Displaced peasants thus added to the hordes heading for Rome in search of work and a better life. The city offered work, places to live and security. There was the prospect of the grain dole, free public entertainment on an unprecedented scale and other handouts. Triumphant generals had booty to disperse and those bent on political careers in the senate had votes to win.

It wasn’t all bad. Slaves could be, and were, freed on a vast scale. Freedmen and women dominated everyday commerce. Their freeborn sons were eligible for political office and could, and did, reach the upper echelons of Roman society.

Nonetheless, grain was the most contentious food issue in Late Republican Rome and continued to be. The ordinary poor in the city were dependent on the grain dole. They were prone to erupt into violence if the supply was disrupted either by pirates, incompetent storage or corrupt officials. In 188 BC grain dealers were fined for hoarding grain in the hope that prices would rise so that they could cash in.

The tribune Gaius Gracchus (brother of the above-mentioned Tiberius) introduced the monthly distribution of grain to each citizen at a fixed price subsidised by the state in 123–122 BC. “Thus, he quickly gained the leadership of the people,” said the Roman historian Appian. The grain dole had become a political weapon.

Four decades later, the dictator Sulla attempted to end grain distribution by repealing the law, but this experiment backfired and the system had to be restored.

Once grain distribution had been taken on as a state obligation, any plan to end it or problems with the supply meant the state was held responsible in the form of anyone deemed to represent the state at that point. Consequently, for example, when grain shortages became intolerable in 75 BC a mob chased the consuls to the house of one of them (Gaius Aurelius Cotta).

By 67 BC the grain supply had become seriously disrupted by the uncontrolled Cilician pirate menace, even to the extent that the pirates landed at Ostia to burn ships and steal from the port. The tribune Aulus Gabinius proposed that Pompey be given special powers to tackle the pirates, plying Pompey with moral blackmail and reminding him of his duty to Rome: “for [Rome] you (Pompey) were born, for her you were reared. You must serve her interests, shrinking from no hardship or danger to secure them.”

The suggestion was extremely popular except in the Senate which vacillated, fearing the power it would give Pompey. An outraged mob rushed the Senate, bursting in and attacking the senators which caused them to reconsider their decision. Pompey was put in command and pulled off the job in short order, transforming Rome’s food security.

The senators knew that whoever controlled the grain supply was master of Rome. The beneficiaries of the handouts were increased in 62 BC with the addition of “the poor and landless multitude”, said the historian Plutarch. By 58 BC the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcher had made the grain distribution completely free, a shameless populist gesture that was politically impossible to reverse without risking popular insurrection and made Rome even more dependent on exploiting its provinces.

When Pompey was placed in charge of the grain supply in 57 BC at Cicero’s behest, the Roman historian Dio described him as holding “sway over the entire world then under Roman power”, just as he had when he had cleared the Mediterranean of the Cilician pirates. Cicero had rejected himself as someone able to provide corn in abundance and low prices but recommended Pompey as someone with the qualities capable of doing so. By Caesar’s time the number of people receiving the free grain had risen to 320,000, and he reduced this to 150,000 by holding a census to assess entitlement.

Although a large proportion of the urban masses in Rome were entitled to the monthly corn dole, amounting to 200,000 people 40 years later in Augustus’s time alone, the reality for most ordinary Romans was extreme poverty and hard work. The Romans had successfully created a dependent class who lived off state handouts. Rome discovered that the system had a life of its own and was irreversible without risking mass insurrection.

In 40–39 BC Octavian was stoned by starving rioters in Rome when the grain supply ran low due to the disruption on the seas caused by the civil war, and only just escaped with his life. He had unwisely decided to confront the mob with only a few attendants and had to be saved by his co-triumvir Mark Antony who brought troops in. The incident showed how potentially suicidal it could be for a Roman leader to expose himself to a hungry and angry mob without armed protection.

The annexation of Egypt by Octavian in 30 BC was decisive. Now Rome had control of the greatest breadbasket in antiquity. Huge freighters transported grain to Rome, adding to those that also sailed from Sicily and other places. But the fleets were vulnerable to problems bringing the supplies to shore in Italy.

As Augustus (27 BC–AD 14), Rome’s first emperor, Octavian was more concerned with consolidating the new Roman imperial state than finding a permanent solution to the grain supply problem. In those days nothing less than physical grain would do. The state could not print money, though eventually it would find its own version of doing so.

From Augustus onwards the grain dole was managed by one of the most senior equestrian officers of state, the praefectus annonae (“the prefect of the Annona [grain dole]”). Supplying Rome’s population with the handout became a fundamental service by the state and one that could lead to violence if it was disrupted.

Augustus toyed with the idea of doing away with the dole on the basis that it had led unsurprisingly to a decline in farming in Italy to the detriment of farmers. In other words, the grain dole disincentivised work. He gave up on the idea, realising it was inevitable that a successor would reintroduce the dole for the sake of easy popularity.

The Emperor Claudius (41–54) prioritised building a new port of Rome at Ostia to ensure easier landing of grain supplies from Egypt and Sicily to keep the benefits gravy train on course. He had good reason, as the historian Suetonius recorded:

When there was a scarcity of grain because of long-continued droughts, he was once stopped in the middle of the forum by a mob and so pelted with abuse and at the same time with pieces of bread, that he was barely able to make his escape to the Palace by a back door; and after this experience he resorted to every possible means to bring grain to Rome, even in the winter season.

Nero (54–68), who craved popularity, decided to turn public entertainments into gameshows. Those who turned up discovered that gifts were handed out, such as a thousand birds every day, food, tickets for grain, precious metals and jewellery, slaves, animals and then the jackpot in the form of ships, city blocks with houses and farms. His reign ended in tears in 68 when he was forced into committing suicide.

Providing free food for the population of Rome remained a permanent part of the emperor’s responsibilities and thus a charge on the state. A special type of ticket (tessera frumentaria) was distributed so that those entitled among the masses could present one to collect their share.

In 190, during the reign of Commodus, Rome was hit by a grain shortage that the prefect of the corn dole had the wit to blame on the emperor’s chamberlain Cleander. Cleander set the Praetorian Guard on protesters, but the prefect of Rome ordered the night watch troops to confront the Praetorians. In the confusion, Cleander fled to Commodus while a mob trailed after him screaming for his head. Commodus, who never showed loyalty to his staff, abandoned Cleander and had him executed, after which Cleander’s head was carried round the city on a pole.

The state’s self-ruining obligations continued to increase. Septimius Severus (193–211) later added olive oil to the free handouts, and Aurelian (270–5) was said to have introduced a pork allowance to the population of Rome.

By Aurelian’s time Rome’s silver coinage had become a joke. Hadrian (117–38) had famously called a halt to the Empire’s expansion, cutting off the supply of new booty and tribute to fund the Roman system. The emperors had gradually resorted to reducing the silver content of the denarius coinage, the staple bullion coin used to pay soldiers and store wealth. The state thereby ended up increasingly relying on handing out worthless money to pay its way, causing chronic inflation.

No wonder, then, that the soldier emperor Diocletian (284–305) resolved to reform the Roman world. But his ideas were unsophisticated. To try and control the economy and inflation, Diocletian even famously imposed a ceiling on prices with an edict that listed the maximum cost of all sorts of items, and another that limited wages. Ordinary people were legally obliged to stay in their jobs, and their children were forced to follow them, though that made little difference in practice to what had always been the case.

Some of Diocletian’s measures were unenforceable, despite the threat of execution for infringement. They show how primitive the understanding of economics was that they had even been considered. The edict on prices was quietly forgotten, but bureaucracy and control continued.

The grain dole slowly petered out, despite Justinian’s attempts to keep supplies going in the 550s. Eventually the almost total collapse of the city of Rome’s population to a few thousand (from a million or so in earlier times) saw the system disappear, with the Church and charities taking over responsibility for handouts to those who were left.

This article is entirely about the Roman Empire. However, the author would nevertheless like to make clear that any resemblance in this article to any modern politicians, whether living or dead, their decisions, self-serving vote-seeking, economic ignorance, folly, stupid suggestions and the mess they might have contributed to getting us into, is entirely coincidental.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with many books to his credit, many on the ancient world, especially the Roman Empire. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025).