This pattern of property transfer raises several basic questions. The sums involved were very large. In 62 BCE Cicero had to hand over 3.5 million sesterces for his new house on the Palatine, and there is almost no information about how this kind of payment was organised in practice. It is unlikely that Cicero’s slaves simply wheeled truckloads of cash through the streets under armed guard. The whole transaction points instead either to the use of gold bullion, which would at least have required fewer trucks, or more likely to some system of paper finance or bonds, and so to a relatively
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